My Life as a Revolutionist - Part Three
When an existing leadership of a political organisation is lopped off, it either disintegrates or falls into the hands of radical young Turks. The British found this to their cost in 1971 when they introduced internment against the IRA. Something similar happened to Ballymena branch of Militant when Ken left for England (about 1987 maybe?). Suddenly new young blood took over. We had learned to associate ridiculously long lead-offs, even by Militant standards, with revolutionary seriousness, so these remained. But other than this, there was suddenly a new élan and enthusiasm. This spiralled as young people joined the branch, some of a fairly defiantly non-conformist nature very unlike the normal proletarian stolidity of Militant generally.

Off in the 'sticks', far from Belfast, we had a great deal of autonomy from the Belfast 'Centre'. We only really heard from two 'full-time' comrades from the centre. (Full-timers were those who, whilst seeking work, committed themselves more or less whole-heartedly to running Militant. They were invested with huge authority in the Organisation. The full-time ‘apparatus’ had much in common with a priesthood. Their sacrifice of time and money, often taken to competitive extremes, was held up as the very model of revolutionary selflessness They had a stifling moral authority).

Benny, who hailed from Ballymena originally, would come down periodically to dispense an engagingly cynical good cheer. He was amused at our youthful enthusiasms, but remained indulgently avuncular. He remembered well his own youthful anarchist inclinations. Benny was considered to be a 'technical' full-timer, working mainly on the Militant newspaper, and was not part of the inner circle of 'theorists'. A very fine classical guitarist, he was unusually bohemian. He inclined towards witty deflation, at least when not loyally asserting the 'line' in contributions to political discussion.

We also heard fairly regularly, by phone, from Ciaran, the full-timer who handled the organisation's finances (most of which went on paying the expenses of full-timers). Ciaran was equally perceived as being something of an administrative full-timer, not quite one of the inner circle. He was interested in the sayings and doings of other ultra-left organisations, a hobby much deprecated as 'sectology' by the leadership. For a small coterie including myself his semi-samizdat circulation of ultra-left publications became, over time, an attractive source of pluralism in the ideologically unadventurous marxism of Militant. Ciaran, who always called his interlocutors 'squire', affected a gruff, no-nonsense manner. But he had an interest in and concern for we young uns otherwise not conspicuous from the leadership.

Generally, however, we were left alone. Heated arguments would rage in branch meetings, with ultra-leftism often ripping wild. I was very much on the conservative wing, and fiercely loyal to the national leadership. Passions often ran high, and I remember one unfortunate member, on his way out, who had his door kicked in so that some leaflet-making equipment could be recovered. This was hardly commendable, of course, but there was a high energy and urgency about everything we did that made people sit up and notice. The good people of Ballymena noticed us, most scoffed, many were quietly impressed, a few - but a fair amount by national standard - joined us or were openly sympathetic.

Experimentation in activity was constant. The best I remember was a picket on the Northern Bank in Ballymena, closely connected with Willie-John McBride (he was a manger I think). McBride was a local Rugby hero, an International in his time, who became associated with a rebel rugby tour of South Africa that defied sporting sanctions. The picket split opinion down the middle in Ballymena in a way that made our intervention seem genuinely controversial and exciting.

We were always trying new ways to spread our revealed truth. I wrote and photocopied a pamphlet on socialism specifically for my school. It included a hand-drawn title page, complete with school crest. (This no doubt ground-breaking, publication had the smallest of circulations). We would leaflet shopping centres, school buses, even workplaces, a rather risky enterprise in loyalist Ballymena. Our techniques were haphazard and amateurish. One leaflet condemned 'Aparthied', causing much hilarity amongst the unconverted; one poster announced a 'Pubic Meeting'. Every Thursday I would literally sprint from school to try to sell papers at the bus-station where all out of town school students converged. The authorities were anxious not to have politics seep into school, and one amused teacher was put in charge of keeping an eye on me.

I don't wish to overstate our impact, though we made Militant very well-known locally. And I shudder to think about our ultra-left politics. But our members were real characters, and for an earnest teenager (who didn't drink, smoke or have any facility at chatting up the opposite sex) it was exciting and genuinely stimulating. However, I always saw Belfast, where resided the leadership we were literally in awe of, as the place to be. Even before leaving for Uni I increasingly made my way to the 'centre' at weekends. I'll talk about this next time.

[There is a load of material about the internal life of Militant, or the Socialist Party, these days – about which now I have no direct knowledge – at Irish Indymedia:
http://www.indymedia.ie/newswire.php?story_id=60690&search;_text=tourish

There you can find some comments on these memoirs, plus a lot more.]

My Life as a Revolutionist - Part Two
Though the circumstances of Northern Ireland produced in me a inchoate dislike of the 'establishment' - in this case Britain and the US - I did not make my own way to revolutionary socialism. Most of all, as was often observed in future years, I had no real feeling of 'class anger', or much passion at all really. I did, in Spanish anarchist style, once try to burn a church down in a drunken iconoclastic rage. Unwilling to break and enter, I put a fluttering lighter to the granite clad exterior. Somehow, perhaps protected by God, the temple resisted my assault unscathed, for which I'm very grateful.

Intellectually, in so far as I can construct it in retrospect, I found 'meta-narratives' and systematising theories very attractive. I liked the idea of big analyses that made sense of the world.

Certainly the Miners' Strike had a huge impact on me. I still remember a televised scene of a picket line when some police charged protesting miners off screen. Some other strikers wordlessly mouthed their outrage, pointing to the brutality taking place before their eyes, but the camera slowly panned the opposite direction.

Militant was a family concern, with all my older brothers being members (my sisters were immune and fairly apolitical). One of them acted as my political tutor. I used to accompany him as he shotgun hunted crows and other vermin in Portglenone Forest, where I grew up. These were tremendously exciting and stimulating excursions for a fourteen year old. I suppose it led me to identify socialist politics with worldly wisdom and adulthood, the way other kids found listening to their older brothers' Ska collections a rite of passage.

I was fairly resistant to 'recruitment' (as it was always called in the Organisation). It was a slow process as, no doubt, I was fairly silly. It was doubly laborious as inductees, at least in the outer reaches of rural County Antrim, were only slowly introduced to the reality of Militant as a secret revolutionary cadre, rather than a mere Tendency (see yesterday's entry). There was a marvellous frisson that came with the idea of a secret organisation. As its esoteric mysteries were progressively revealed, one felt an elevation as if through Masonic orders. The Organisation was presented as a world-historic elite, a band of 'comrades'. (This is how we always referred to members. It was never a personal greeting - 'hello Comrade so-and-so' - but an imprimatur for the elect. 'So-and-so is a Comrade', one of us).

Revolution, it was explained would explode at any time. Much was made of the nominal membership of Militant in Britain - 8000, or the same number of Bolsheviks as in February 1917. In the turmoil to come, one might fall on the barricades, one would face repression. It was heady stuff. A Northern Ireland twist was the approaching Anglo-Irish Agreement. Militant was predicting that this would produce a 'carnival of reaction' that could endanger us all. Fear only challenged my youthful strivings for audacity.

'Normal' politics - which I though of as essentially British politics (Northern Ireland struck me as atypical and, in a weird way, somewhat distant - I grew up far from the centres of disturbance and my sheltered upbringing meant that I was in no traumatising way a 'child of the Troubles') - seemed irredeemably dull. If one were to plunge in politics, it had to be to change the world. Anything else seemed not worth the bother.

But, as I've said, I was fairly passionless, and was most attracted to the idea of coherent and logical explanation for, and alternative to, the world as it is. When I was formally recruited (no oaths - one simply agreed a 'sub', i.e. a weekly money contribution, all that was necessary to maintain one's membership, if not reputation, within the Organisation) I insisted that this was a step that I could, if I ever saw fit, reverse. Of course I was honestly be given that assurance. Members were always allowed to leave unmolested though, revealingly, such an eventuality was almost always explained by 'demoralisation', not disagreeing or disillusionment. It was explained that an upturn in class struggle would reactivate the bulk of lapsed comrades. (I'm sure now that I would find myself strenuously opposed to Militant / the Socialist Party in the unlikely event that it ever challenged for power.)

The local branch was in the medium sized (small by British standards) town of Ballymena. There were about ten members, a good proportion being Mulhollands. Our local 'theoretical leader' then was an older bloke (mid-30s maybe) called Ken. He seemed very real world, working in a local industry and living in his own house. Most of the rest of us were school students (we never used the demeaning 'pupils') or unemployed. He had what seemed then to be an encyclopaedic knowledge, and owned a large collection of books. Ken had the enviable ability to take any, I mean any, issue, and immediately come up withy the correct 'marxist' position on it. The 'closed system' of Militant ideology, was perfect for this. It was a mode of irrefutable logic in the Popperian sense, and very seductive.

A meeting would begin with a political 'lead-off', on historical or current issues or a matter of theory. These lead-offs were extraordinary in retrospect, often lasting over an hour. The discussion, as we were in awe of Ken, were truncated affairs dominated by his ‘contribution’. Then we would discuss activity (where to leaflet or poster, the possibility of organising a public meeting), the paper (we would do 'estate sales', a dreary trudge around working class housing, street sales and personal sales to sympathisers; we rarely sold more than 30 to 40 in a month) and finance.

One day Ken, without warning, upped stakes and left for England, never to be heard of again. This hit us all very hard. At the centre (Belfast) he was not merely ‘reduced’ from the ranks (a sort of honourable discharge for those who were 'demoralised' and no longer paying subs) but actually expelled, I seem to remember. As Ken was a cadre of high standing (though he had always shied off activity) his ‘betrayal’ was a great shock to us. In fact, his departure inaugurated the glory days of Militant in Ballymena, of which more next time.

My Life as a Revolutionist - Part One
From 1986 to, oh I'm not sure, about 1995 or so, I was a member of Militant (later Militant Labour, later again the Socialist Party) in Northern Ireland. This was a small group of about 99 nominal members when I joined ( '99 Red Baloons' as a music savvy wit dubbed us). We were a Trotskyist group dedicated to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism. We would nationalise the top 200 monopolies (a slogan strangely immune to the impact of deregulation and competition legislation) under democratic workers' control. This latter meant that enterprises would be run one third by the shop-floor, one third by government nominees and one third by the wider trade union movement. It was never detailed (I think) how this would dovetail with the 'overall plan of production', also our aim.

We were content to operate through the democratic process, but assumed that a socialist government would be stymied by the establishment in the manner of Allende's Chilean Government (we seemed to assume that Allende's 30% or so of the vote was sufficient mandate for revolution). Thus parliament would pass an 'Enabling Law' (originally Cripps' idea, I seem to remember) to side step the constitution. This would be backed up by a workers' militia etc.

We accepted the notion of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', i.e. that this class should have a disproportionate political weight during the revolutionary transition. This was held not to contradict democratic norms in advanced capitalist countries as the proletariat were in the majority. Our proletariat were those who lived primarily by selling their labour. (I remember some dissident ideas I once spouted were rejected as irredeemably petit bourgeois as I was a student. My accuser was a 'wage-earning' consultant doctor!) However, we did counsel banning 'bourgeois' parties in China, in the event of 'political revolution' there, for fear of the peasant majority swamping the proletariat. We also critically supported the violence of Romanian miners against petit-bourgeois students in the aftermath of the revolution there, though the miners were mobilised by old commie apparatchiks.

As you can see, our adherence to democracy was a bit shaky. This was even more evident in our unstinting praise for Lenin / Trotsky. The Russian Revolution was held to have degenerated only from about 1924, long after the faintest whiff of proletarian autonomy, never-mind representative democracy, had been snuffed out. Even then we characterised communists countries as 'deformed workers' states' that required not social revolution, but political revolution, an objectively easier task. We hated Stalinism but concurred with some of Trotsky's more repulsive conclusions drawn from his characterisation of Stalinism, such as his support for the Soviet Union in the war against Finland in 1940. 'Capitalist restoration' was seen as virtually impossible

We never gave any verbal support to the IRA, as did other ultra-left organisations like the SWP. We called for the trade union movement to organise both a labour party and a 'workers' self-defence force' as the way forward in Northern Ireland. When I joined, our aim was a Socialist United Ireland. This was seen as the only way to overcome the sectarian divide in the province. It was never specified whether it would be the socialist movement or a socialist government that would break the back of sectarian division.

In Britain we denied that we existed as a separate organisation (we did, revelation fans) and claimed to be the Marxist tendency in the British Labour Party. This 'entrist' tactic gained considerable success, and from about 1984 to 1986 we controlled Liverpool Labour council.

There was no Labour Party worthy of the name in Northern Ireland, but nevertheless we denied our true identity and operated through a front organisation called The Labour and Trade Union Group (L&TUG;). This was a faction dating from the early 1970s of the long defunct Northern Ireland Labour Party. In reality, the L&TUG; had no independent existence. Formally our secret organisation was called the Irish Section of the Committee for a Workers' International (the Northern Ireland section had no formal status). Most knew us as Militant. We normally referred to ourselves as 'the Organisation' (as members of the old Fenians also called themselves).

We were a very 'workerist' organisation. Of all the ultra-left groups, we were easily the most working class in membership. Our leader, Peter Hadden, was (and is) a very clever political commentator and tactician, but there was only a very superficial hold on Marxist theory in the Organisation. Generally or 'perspectives' were based upon impending capitalist crisis (for which we chucked together the gloomiest predictions we could scour from the 'serious bourgeois press') and a radicalisation of the working class. As one document put it, 'The 1980s: Socialism or Barbarism'. Revolution was confidently predicted in 'five, ten or fifteen years time'. I was concerned when I joined (aged 15 I think) that I would be too young to be able to properly participate in the revolution.

This is an account of my time in Militant. Autobiography is an inherently egotistical enterprise, so I want to emphasise my essentially middle-ranking position. This relied upon my zealotry more than anything: I had no leadership qualities, and I spoke very poorly in debates. My impact on the Organisation was deservedly minor.

Sorry about the rather dreary presentation so far. I need to set the scene. This account from here on in will be mostly anecdotal, though I will avoid metaphorical 'kiss and tell'. The members of Militant generally were a good bunch who, I should stress, had no desire to impose tyrannies or whatever. Particularly in the context of Northern Ireland, they were a benign, if ineffectual bunch.

Tomorrow I speak about my early days in Ballymena Militant - the most productive and fun time I had in the Organisation.

45 Minutes
I paid a fair amount of attention to the run up to the war. Nevertheless, I have no recollection that WMD being deployable in 45 minutes was ever a real issue. Certainly no pro-war people I know paid much attention, nor did anti-war people waste much effort in trying to cast doubt on it.

The issue, it seems to me, was this. Iraq had signed up to comprehensive arms limitation after '92, but consistently evaded its commitments. This was even at the cost of enduring UN sanctions, presumably in the (justified) hope that the embargo would fragment. Iraq never co-operated with UN inspection teams. The closest it came was in the run-up to Gulf War III (III if we include the Iran-Iraq conflict). But this was due to the real and immediate threat of an Anglo-American invasion. An invasion task-force could not be held in readiness indefinitely, so it made sense for Iraq to spin out the process.

It seems clear that, in fact, Iraq disarmanant was almost total, but nevertheless, Iraq failed to be completely open and co-operative with the UN. Why? Perhaps it was some vanity trip on Saddam's part. More likely, concealment was in pursuit of a medium term aim on Saddam's part to re-initiate a WMD programme. Nukes seemed the most likely end point. (After Desert Storm, Saddam bemoaned invading Kuwait before he had them).

The open casus bellum was that Saddam was defying, even if only in detail, UN demands for disarming. This implied another casus bellum, suspicion of Saddam's motives and aims. The unofficial ambition of US / UK was to detroy a repugant regime. The hope was that they could create a reasonably pliant regime in the region that, nevertheless, would act as a democratic beacon undermining the corrupt old mainstays of western influence, particularly Saudi Arabia, not to mention Iran & Syria. It is a reversal of the old tradition of bringing down radical democratic (or at least populist / nationalist) regimes by sponsoring a coup.

The 45 minute issue is a bizarre diversion from all of this.

Here is another e-mail from Michael Fisher, a catheder AND activist marxist based at Greenwich Uni in London. Have a look at his links:

"Some interesting (but relentlessly Marxist) web-links:

http://www.cepremap.ens.fr/~levy/index.htm

A website containing pdf files (in French and English) of articles by two leading French Marxist economists. Good (and reasonably accessible) stuff on the economics and politics of neoliberalism.

http://www.eco.utexas.edu/facstaff/Cleaver/

The website of top American Marxist academic and activist Harry Cleaver. Fierce advocate of 1970s Italian-inspired "autonomist Marxism." See the "hypertext documents" link.

http://www.commoner.org.uk/

Interesting site with a mix of papers and articles from non-aligned Marxists. Some good stuff on the politics of money, debt and the social disciplines of neoliberalism from a range of decidedly non-
Leninist/Trotskyist/Stalinist perspectives."

E-Moiders
With the David Kelly inquiry demonstrating the intererst of that new form of historical evidence, the e-mail, it seems like a good time to re-produce an e-correspondence I had in 2000. All the good, gossipy material has, I'm afraid, been removed to protect the innocent.

Richard Michaelis:

‘The Pity of War’ [by Niall Ferguson]

He's knowledgeable and entertaining but his successive premises are not that new. You were right to suggest that the first chapters were the best but even they merely articulate, albeit more entertainingly and lesser AJP Taylorishly, what has been argued for 30 years. To his central point that by fighting, which she needn't have done, Britain turned the conflict into a World War. This thesis rests on the assumption that an allyless Britain could have negotiated with a rampant Germany which had left Britain powerless on land in Europe and once again threatened at sea by the acquisition of cash and colonies. Though Ferguson is perhaps right to castigate Grey's double-facednss, does he not see that this was a strategic risk Britain could not afford to take? Who is going to gamble on negotiating with someone even more powerful than they are at the time?

Another detail bugged me: He trots out the classic anti-Fischer argument, that the war aims Fischer based his argument upon were delineated after the beginning of the conflict and Britain's entry and suggests that historians have not paid enough attention to the distinction between pre- and post-beginning war aims. Correct me if I'm wrong but I seem to recall that Fischer's main critics ALL made this point in the 60s and 70s (see Joll's collection of essays on the causes of the 1WW).

[On Ferguson’s point that the German had a superior kill ratio for most of the war] - it will always look appalling for the allies if you include Eastern Europe. The fact is the Germans lost in the West where they were almost always on the defensive and the allies could afford to lose plenty more men). Nor is he convincing on Germany's defeat being caused by mass surrender, but that is another story.

Me:

I read Ferguson's ‘Pity of War’ last year and concur mainly with your points. He seems to argue that a German dominated Europe would have been less of a blow to British power - sea based as it was - than the actual mutual exhaustion of all sides to the benefit of the United States. Particularly as the Great War proved to be only stage one of the 'thirty year crisis'.

Ferguson seems to think that a German dominated Europe would have evolved quite rapidly towards tolerable democracy, as this is the usual price to be paid for victory in a war of mass mobilisation. He avoids fleshing this rather important argument out however. Would a German victory have created an early version of the EU, with Britain, retaining its empire, able to go its merry way, or would it have established a tyrannical Napoleonic hegemony destabilising to the democracies of Britain and even the States? In short, was World War One the Treaty of Rome with guns or World War Two writ small?

I'm half convinced by Ferguson on this, but would need to read much more. There's an interestingly critical review and response from Ferguson on the Historical Institute's website. (I'd find it & give the address but - what a surprise - all the MCR computers are down but for the e-mail on the Mac). [It is at http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/paper/ferguson.htm]

Ferguson’s kill ratio, surrender theory and death instinct are diverting but progressively less convincing and on narrow evidential bases. The surrender evidence is incredibly impressionistic. As the book goes it gets increasingly grating in its iconoclasm.



Richard:

I'm not really sure about the wisdom of predicating history books on a what-if argument, the sense in which Ferguson's anti-British conclusion rests on a series of unverifiable assumptions about Germany. The most important of which: had she won a rapid victory, which she might well have done without the BEF, Germany would not necessarily have needed to reform internally or be at all placatory towards the British who, it is important to add, had not really ingratiated themselves with the Bosh over the previous twenty years. I also find his use of evidence a bit dodgy: e.g., basing arguments in or around flippant remarks made by Lloyd George in parliament isn't terribly convincing.

Anyhow you'll be pleased to hear that among the less useless items in my christmas stocking I found the notorious ‘Livre Noir du Communisme’, the shocker French academia produced in honour of Furet a year ago (he had the good sense to die before having to write the intro). A very dull and unintelligent Fox's Book of Bolshie Victims-Martyrs writ large, i.e. Russia, Comintern, China, South East Asia, Cuba, Afghanistan 1917-1990, all in 1,200 pages without any trace of argument or, it being French & dead serious, any amusing individual examples. So far, and again more out of boredom than expectation, I've managed to plough through 200 pages and approximately half a million murders, mostly of SRs, Mensheviks, Bourgeois, Kulaks and assorted Greens, usually at the behest of V.I. [Lenin] and good old Felix Dzerzhinsky] though even your man [Trotsky] comes out rather poorly. It seems to me that the Bolsheviks were not particularly competent, they were simply much more competent than anyone else. What is really galling, to me, is the knowledge that they would all go through it again in the 30s and again, worse still, in the 40s. It says something for Stalin that he was able to hold CCCP together in 41-42 despite the Communists' abysmal record.


Me:

Given the actual result of the First World War (Communism, Fascism, Nazism, World War Two, Iron Curtain, China, etc), it is reasonable to wonder whether had Britain stayed out of the First World War, in which it had no vital interest (but for the vague, self-defined concept of balance of power), and allowed Germany to achieve a hegemony over the continent inevitably its due anyway, it would not have been better. Counter-factuals are dangerous, but if one looks at the span of 1815 to2000 in European history, the catastrophic thirty years of 1914 – 45 appear as the aberration, and its hard to avoid asking whether it was inevitable. Britain in the Great War seems to have been following a well-established cynical, imperial ploy. Britain has a long record of conducting wars at something of a distance, exercising a geopolitics in which the lives of foreign nationals, usually not consulted, are expended in British interests.

This would be as morally reprehensible as Ferguson implies but for the important proviso that Britain was (a) capitalist and (b) liberal and evolving towards democracy. Thus, arguably, the interests of Britain (latterly the English speaking world) have been for a historical epoch the interests of humanity. In marxist cosmology the proletariat is the universal class that liberates humanity in liberating itself. It thus has the right to exact a price from an unwilling world to assert its 'dictatorship' (thus Communism's 'Black Book'). As often with Marxist teleology there's a truth that warps and comes out the other side: Anglo-liberal-capitalism has been the world liberator, but it strode to triumph through rivers of blood.
This, at best, is Britain's defence for involvement in the Great War.
However, I'm not sure that standing aloof, as it did in 1870 - 1, wouldn't have served the cause better.

As for communism I'm not really impressed by grim stories of massacre, famine and blood chilling quotations in isolation. The approach reminds me of the ‘War of the Century’ programme [Germany versus USSR] in which one outrage is set against the other and a moral equivalence implied. It’s a dangerous game – in WWII, in its own interests, Britain conducted a war with Germany, after the fall of France, and it knew it could not win without embroiling other powers. Its whole strategy was to maintain hostilities in the hope that Germany would over-extend itself. Thus it refused to acknowledge defeat in 1941 and attempt to bring the war to a close (if it really felt humanitarian it could have threatened a resumption of hostilities in the event of further German expansion - essentially the 'Cold War' option). Britain knew that maintaining a state of war until other powers were pulled in would not only involve gargantuan causalities amongst populations for whom Britain was a far away country of which they knew nothing, but that it would also permit the Nazis to murderously radicalise their racial policies. Even the military holding policy pursued by Britain was enough for it to sap its Imperial responsibilities, at terrible cost in Bengal. Moreover military practice employed included terror bombing of civilians and starvation blockades, practices canvassed included blanket gassing to depopulate entire swathes of land.

This is a stark prosecution case, over which I would not wholeheartedly stand (would peace in '41 have restrained Hitler from further military adventures?, moral responsibility for Japanese and German imperialism and racial subjugation / extermination lies squarely with those powers and perhaps required short-term extirpation even at the cost of 60 million lives), but it indicates the relative ease with which indictments may be constructed in the face of mega-deaths, particularly given the sentimentality of our times. Triumphant cold war historians, in collapsing Leninism into Stalinism, do something similar with still less justification.

Lenin's regime was ruthless, but ruthless in war rather than in social engineering as with Stalin and Mao. The original sin of Lenin (and Trotsky) was to capture a country they knew, even by their own theory, could not be held and built as a socialist society, in the hope that a state articulating, if not practising, communist ideology, would precipitate a German and European revolution. It was an extraordinary act of adventurism and, as such (despite the genuine lack of popular enthusiasm for 'liberal democracy' as represented by the Constituent Assembly), was never grounded in any concept of domestic popular legitimacy. It was an act of faith in the future. When this future failed to arrive on schedule, the Bolsheviks, who had positively rejected the notion of a democratic or even narrowly proletarian mandate for this opportunist stage of the world revolution, felt justified in securing their piratical acquisition by the suppression of the basic norms of civil society for so long as was necessary. Being the judge and jury of its own legitimacy, their was nothing to prevent the slippage of Lenin's reign of the philosopher-kings into Stalin's crazed attempt to batter the Russian population into Homo Sovieticus. However, the attempt to project this megalomaniac project back to Lenin, on the basis of the horrors and crimes of war communism - a fundamentally different project - strikes me, as I have said, as an error.


Richard:

I'm not certain I agree with your acquittal of V.I. War Communism, for sure, but the Civil War as a realistic contest didn't last much over a year (late 18 - early 20) whereas there does appear to be a seamlessness about the régime's intransigent ferocity with any opposition, particularly that of a germane nature (e.g., the SRs etc..). That said I do agree that there is a world of difference between the Crisis of Survival 17-24 and the Self-Inflicted disasters of 27 onwards, though again there are important continuities - particularly the extensive incompetence of the various procedures, cf. the famine, unless of course it was deliberate.

Anyhow, I skipped forward last night, leaving the Kulaks of 1st, 2nd and 3rd category to their unenviable fates and read up on the Comintern. Interesting on the sequels of the struggles with the Trotskyites in the 40s - did you know that these continued well into the Nazi death camps, more or less under the (complicit) noses of the Germans, i.e., the Commies often took over menial bureaucratic tasks and sent their enemies to the worst jobs etc... Even the French Communist resistance liberated 4 Ts in 1943 only to execute them, having forced them to write the usual confessions. Another good section is on the exchanges of internal enemies between Russia and Nazi
Germany. Apparently these began long before the Non-Aggression pact and to some extent at least laid the mutually confident basis for it. Nice eh.

Enough history - though I intuitively disagree [with you], because I don't believe governments have as much room for manoeuvre as you suggest and because there are absolute differences between the utterly defeated, post-1945 Federal German hegemony over Europe and the various pre-1945 experiments, I must meditate your counter-factuals.

Me:

It’s amazing how paranoid the Soviet Union was about Trotskyism. The Cold War revisionists were keen to represent the communist elite as non-ideological and driven by geo-political imperatives, but politburo minutes from as late as the 1970s, released after the fall, show entire meetings consumed by discussions on the Trotskyist threat. Nevertheless, the repression of communist alternatives to Stalin and his global replicants tend to receive disproportionate attention (The Great Terror). By far and away the greatest casualties were inflicted on unsuspecting populations caught up in communism's penchant for gigantism, whether it be collectivisation, total war, the Great Leap Forward or Year Zero.

Richard:

I've finished with the Soviets and have no desire to plough through North Korea's many detestable crimes. In the end I found the book entertaining but absolutely pointless - typical knee-jerk French rightism a.k.a. look at what they did & what our 'intellectuals' ignored. An interesting aside: the scleroticisation of the Gulag by 1953 - compelling the vast amnesties & apparent liberalisation which followed Our Leader's timely demise, it simply wasn't working at all anymore, whereas it may have done in the past. Another aside: The pervasiveness of anti-semitism (anti-cosmopolitanism) in Soviet Circles throughout the period, leading, of course, to the Doctors [Plot] but also informing a whole swathe of internal and external operations throughout & regardless of the holocaust. Was Stalin planning a final holocaust by incompetence (i.e., send them to the chinese border without food and water) when he died? The papers have not yet been released but it seems plausible.
Anything to make the party more popular with the locals.

I've now completely finished with the Reds (I'd missed a chapter on Terrorism). The tome leaves me with a terrible feeling of impurit. I feel that I have been a voyeur of myriad tragedies, worse perhaps than the holocaust because so many prominent victims had actually believed in the system at some time or other. Though I was aware of the details, the article on the Spanish Civil War is galling, particularly the fate of the Spaniards and Spanish children exiled to Russia, not to mention the POUM and the Anarchists. In fact the only issue the book fails to address is how Stalin and his compeers managed to do all this and remain in power, surely a more interesting question than accurately trying to enumerate how many Polish officers were killed a day at Katyn (bus loads of 30 every ten minutes, if you are interested).

Me:

These accounts of mass death are always weird to read. One feels the need to listen when victims bear witness, on the other hand it very quickly becomes apparent that a skim over megadeath from the comfort of a 21st century living room does virtually nothing to stir genuine empathy with the victims. Such is the horror, true empathy would mean madness. Instead, as you say, a certain voyeuristic griminess steals over. Perhaps memorialisation is a function of art and literature rather than history.

Proletarian conciousness
I've mentioned the historical experience of communism as a factor in the demise of socialist consciousness amongst the working class. In fact, I think it's more profound than this.

Marx argued that certain classes, due to the concrete conditions of their lifestyles, particularly their relationship to the means of production, were impelled towards certain social demands. Peasants, for example, might live for generations in a society that accepted landlordism as ordained by god, but they were impelled, nevertheless, towards a consciousness that demanded the abolition of landlordism. Individuals demand security, and control of one’s conditions for existence and prosperity is the best guarantor of security. The notion of owning the land they worked had a magnetic pull on all peasants. Similarly, artisans desired control of their workshops and a moral regulation of the market. The bourgeoisie demanded control of their workers, capital and a law-bound, stable, free market.

Marx noted that the conditions of existence for the proletariat were necessarily collective. Their labour was socialised, i.e. meaningless unless pooled. The proletariat were incapable of individual subsistence - unlike artisans or peasants they could not personally own the means of survival. In socialised capitalist labour, individual workers contribute to the production process, but the division of labour makes each individual contribution meaningless in itself. Operating a single lathe, heaving cole, signing chits, answering phones or whatever cannot in themselves provide the means for living. The proletarian does not produce the requirements of individual existence directly (i. e. food), as does a peasant, not even indirectly, as does an artisan or a bourgeois, as the product of his labour has no marketable use-value, it is only useful as a partial input to a chain of production. Only the end-product, the fruit of many inputs, has a marketable value.

A peasant can theoretically support himself and his family with his plot of land. He can imagine self-sufficiency and his psychological desire for security finds expression in an ideal vision of complete control over his means of subsistence. The peasant, stripped of "false consciousness" always wishes to be a proprietor. The proletarian cannot imagine similar circumstances for himself. There is no point fighting for control of his segment of the production process. What advantage could there be in owning privately one's section of the conveyer-belt? In isolation, it will produce neither food, nor marketable products.

Thus, for Marx, the proletariat is impelled to desire personal security through collective ownership of the entire, integrated production process. The human instinct for control of oneself and one's immediate environment, which for previous classes meant essentially a drive towards perfecting private control of the means of personal subsistence and wealth creation, for the proletariat is converted to a desire for collective control and ownership of the means of production. This is why the proletariat is the universal class, impelled towards some form of socialism or communism.

But Marx did not consider an alternative realisation of the human instinct for security in the proletariat born of capitalism. The proletarian, with equal or superior reason, might seek security through control of the means of consumption, rather than of production. Proletarian consciousness is not analogous to the artisan's desire to own securely his own tools and workshop, rather it is analogous to the artisan's desire to control the market for the goods he produces. The proletarian seeks not collective ownership of the socialised labour process, which after all must be a weak form of psychological personal security as it is excessively dependent on the goodwill of one's fellow 'owners' of collectivised production. Rather, the proletarian seeks a personal grip on the means of consumption, i.e. money, in particular wages. The consciousness of the proletarian is quite as egoistic as that of the peasant - he desires the security of a guaranteed pot of money, and the confidence that this can be relied upon indefinitely. This does not a capitalist entrepreneur make (capitalism is dependent not upon security, but risk), nor does it rule out class-consciousness and class struggle (collective struggle might well, at historical junctions, be the best guarantor of individual proletarian's pot of money), but it does mean that the proletariat's imagined ideal is not collective ownership. It is not socialism. The rise of socialist ideologies was not a consequence of the decline of false consciousness. The explanation must be sought elsewhere.

Apologising on behalf of dead peasants
With the fear os socialist revolution now dissipated, the US has moved from being a status-quo to a revolutionary power, intent of spreading liberal democracy (& free markets). It can do this because of the its overwhelming military might. Ironically, it is a might that cannot be deployed against liberal democracies, without risking enormous cognitive dissonance in a nation moulded around ideology rather than ethnicity. The US has relatively little capacity for mobilising its citizenry around 'my country, right or wrong', as the US concept of 'country' is synonomous with a certain concept of right. Monbiot fears a unipolar world, but the US is different from Old World powers. In proportion to the success of its strategy to spread liberal democacry (which it sees, rightly in this epoch, as conducive to the economic globalisation of which it is the primary benefitter) its tactical ability to intervene militarily is steadily reduced. US aggression against sovereign states mandated by a fairly free citizenry would provoke tremendous domestic crisis in the US. US democracy is the greatest brake on US imperialism.

More on this later. I just want to comment now on Edwin Moore's letter in yesterday's TLS. He bemoans the failure of the Irish (catholic) nation to apologise to the 100 or so protestant victims of the Wexford rebellion in 1798. Generally, all this business about apologising for past iniquities is bunkum. But if it makes sense at all, apologies are due for unredeemed debts. The Irish peasants of 1798 surely over-redeemed with the savage provocation and retaliation meted out to them in the 1790s (some 30,000 dead). If Moore believes more is due, perhaps their immiseration under landlordism and the apocylyse of the Famine might serve as sufficient purgation. The leaders of 98 seem to have got their's also, from execution to rotting in Van Damien's land. Irish protestants, the unfortunate victims, at least had the consolation of disproportionate domination guaranteed by Britain for over 100 years after '98, just as in the 100 years before. Each death is a tragedy, each murder a crime, but surely some differentiation can be made between the violence of the oppressed and the oppresser? And while some debts are liberally repaid in suffering and blood, others weigh lightly, it seems, on the scales of Mr Edwin Moore.

No more Permanent Revolution
A turning point in US policy can now be dated to the fall of the Marcos regime in the Phillipines in 1986. Marcos had been a client of US power, and the natural instict of the US would have been to support him for fear of a democratic revolution spiralling off into communism.

US power, in this respect, honoured the spirit of Trotsky's theory of Permanent Revolution. Trotsky had argued that the bourgoisie no longer had the will to lead national democratic revolutions. The working class had developed to such a point that any bourgois revolution ran the risk of mobilising this working class which would then press on beyond the limits of liberal demands to assert their own class interests. As early as 1848, the bourgoisie truckled to reaction rather than risk red revolution. Trotsky argued, therefore, that in backward countries the working class would inherit the leading role in democratic revolutions, but it naturally would strain to go beyond this towards socialist revolution. Even if the country in question was too backward to sustain socialism, a nominally socialist revolutionary regime would act as a detonator for revolutions in advanced capitalist countries.

In 1986, however, the putative Neocons in the US administration took the risk on a liberal-democratic revolution in the Phillipines consolidating rather than radicalising. This, indeed, happened. It seemed that a number of factors - notably the historical experience of communism and the relative efficacy of globalised capitalism - had worn away the attraction of socialist revolution for the working class. Popular revolution no longer strained to transcend liberal-democratic revolution. This assumption was triumphantly vindicated by the revolutionary collapse of the communist regimes in 1989 and the tremendous ideological hegemony of liberal-democracy and consumer led capitalism in the newly liberated ex-communist states.

A new world order had dawned.

More tomorrow.

Is the US imperialist?
The Left's attitude to the war in Iraq seems to have ben a bastardised version of
Leninist anti-imperialism. Marx was not opposed to war, even if conducted by quite
reactionary regimes, if their net effect would be liberationist. The particular motives
of the war-making state were always a secondary consideration. Marx supported
revolutionary war by the German and French bourgeois revolutionaries of 1848 in
support of Poland so as to break the reactionary power of Russia. More strikingly,
he supported Prussia against France in 1870, as a German victory would speed the
consolidation of a relatively progressive German national state. He switched
positions once Louis Napoleon abdicated, to support the French republic against
Germany.

For Lenin, Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism made such a case sensitive
approach invalid. Imperialism was a world system, and local wars of liberation were
necessarily implicated in globally systemic wars of imperialist re-partition of power
and resources. (Despite what undergrads think, this Leninist definition of
imperialism has more in common with what we understand now as Globalisation than
C19 colonialism).

Moreover, by the early C20th, Lenin believed, socialist revolution
was on the agenda as the potential alternative to imperialism. Even backward
countries, themselves far from ripe for socialism, could erupt in revolution and in
doing so spark international revolution across a globe which was indeed ripe.
Imperialsm, Lenin argued, was in fact likely to break at its weakest link, and
moreover to do so in conditions of inter-imperialist war. Indeed, he felt
vindicated by Russia 1917, and the subsequent revolutionary wave across Europe.

Any inter-capitalist war was inevitably an expression of systemic imperialist crisis,
and one could not tactically support liberationationist or defensive wars without,
willy nilly, strategically bolstering one or other globe-girdling reactionary capitalist
power-block. The particular rights and wrongs of specific wars (eg the natural right
of France to defend itself in 1914 or whatever) were irrelevant in the face of the
inevitable transformation of any war into an inter-imperialist show-down between
global alliances.

The big difference now, of course, is that one could not argue that socialism exists
as a real alternative to capitalism, either globally or even locally. It is no longer
plausible to argue, as Lenin did, that inter-imperialist war should be converted to
social civil war (ie socialist revolution). It is true that local wars, no matter how
justified in themselves, can accrue to imperialist power. George Monbiot
sees a particular threat in US global hegemony and seems to see salvation only in
European re-assertion (in a Leninist sense, one dormant imperialism should
reassert itself to clip the wings of the rampant US). But if global capitalism is not
historically exhausted and ripe for overthrow, it cannot be considered, by definition,
as absolutely reactionary. The alternative is not US hegemony and decaying
capitalism versus global revolution socialism. Capitalism is the only game in town.

Should this mean a return to the Marxist position that wars should be considered
on a case by case basis to determine their relative contribtion to human liberation?

I'll return to this theme tomorrow.

Ed Maloney
Here are some comments I sent in a e-mail a while ago regarding Ed Maloney's 'Secret History of the IRA'.

Maloney's book is very good but very curious. His extremely teleological approach relies upon the Fr Alec Reid communication - supposedly his Master Gerry Adam's voice - to the southern gov in 1987. Most annoyingly, he does not reproduce in its entirety this supposed Rosetta stone of the peace process. I'm very sceptical that Adam's gladly accepted the 'consent' principle this early, & then spent the next ten years manipulating the IRA, Stalin-like, into like acceptance. Maloney implies Adams is a super-Stakeknife, sabotaging the Ecskund, having the Tyrone brigade wiped out, authorising human-bombs the better to discredit armed struggle, calling off a campaign of mega-bombs in the city of London, etc. It all reads to me like a rejectionist's paranoid fantasy. What lacks is the dialectic between republicans, the sovereign governments and, most obviously, unionism.

I think a combination of initially rhetorical shifts undertaken by republicans, designed to discomfit unionism, and a skilful wielding of the blame game by the governments, progressively closed down republican space. Certainly Adams et al saw an end-game to the armed struggle in the 1980s, but the expected price for this was always shifting. Crucial is Adams' understanding that a political settlement was coming anyway, & that the provos had to cash in their chips. It is significant that in April 1991 Adams said that if agreement was reached in the Brooke talks, it "might be successful in defeating Sinn Fein and the IRA for years".