Category: Books

Books: ‘A Spectre, Haunting’ by China Mieville.

I have conflicting attitudes towards communists and communism. On the one hand, the sight of a YCL sticker in the gents of a Leeds bar last year prompted a warm glow of affection. It wasn’t something I’d ever expected to see in this day and age. It seemed so out of time. On the other hand actually seeing the YCL at a teachers’ strike demo a few months ago with their hammer and sickle flags brought out the feelings of contempt I usually reserve for the SWP and the right wing of the Labour Party. Clearly I prefer my communists in the past rather than the present.

I think it’s reasonable to be sceptical that the change we need can be brought about by anything declaring itself communist. The taint is there to stay. However, I can totally understand why people became communists in the 1920s and 1930s in the light of escalating poverty and mainstream politicians’ indifference to do anything about it. A century later and we’re in much the same position. With that in mind I recently listened to the audiobook of China Mieville’s A Spectre, Haunting. It’s a commentary on Marx & Engels’ The Communist Manifesto. Fiercely argued and compassionate it’s a powerful defence of the text and a good antidote to cynicism.

The last section is a reworking of Engels’ The Principles of Communism and I’m going to quote it at length here because I found it profoundly moving and it made me cry on the walk to work.

Early on Mieville asserts what it means to be on the left in this day and age. “It is to say that we deserve better, and that betterness is not impossible.” He then outlines a symptom of modern capitalism – the ruling of the US Supreme Court that “Nestlé has no responsibility, no guilt, for the use of child slavery in its supply chain.” This is not because the company were unaware of these circumstances but that they’re not responsible because it’s beyond the jurisdiction of the court. Nestlé has, “authority from the highest court in the most powerful state in human history to outsource slavery.” Mieville goes on:

“Welcome to capitalism. No, before you say that thats a terrible anomaly, or a questionable ruling, or a regrettable side effect of a flawed but otherwise decent system, or anything, ask yourself, how many such does it take before you can diagnose a fundamental dynamic? A way of things? Welcome to capitalism, where in the heart of ‘civilisation’ outsourced child slavery is acceptable. To be a communist is to say not just that this is a world of systematic barbarism and cruelty, not just that this is what it is to always prioritise profits over people, but that the system that does this is strong, and adaptable, and seeps into every area of our political and economic and cultural and psychic lives, and so whatever bulwarks and defences and counter-attacks we make against it, as we have done and will again, they will always be embattled, strained, constrained, rowed back, pushing against the fundamental tide of a society in which the vast majority of people are expendable for the profits controlled and sought by a very few. To be on the right is, at base, to say at very minimum that nothing can change, nothing can be done, systematically, to alter that system – if not that such a system is desirable, and that it’s more important that some have the power to control the world, even if that means others in vast numbers suffering and being without power. To be on the Right is even, increasingly, to say that that suffering is a good in itself And for all that there are those who’ve made their peace with power or enjoyed the cruelty of the moment, this isnt, moralistically, to separate people into Good and Bad. Capitalism implicates us all. We can’t live outside of it we can’t think outside of it. No wonder the circuses that increasingly take the place of bread appeal, even against our own better angels. But the system isn’t seamless, and we can all change our minds, and the world. None of us is born a communist, any more than we’re born capitalists, or sadists. And is it any wonder that for whatever knowable and unknowable reasons individual minds change, they change en masse when history changes? How many times has the utter impossibility of change been proved, only for change to rock the world and throw up everything we thought we knew? Open up a glimmer to a life worth living, is it not possible, likely, that millions of people who now see no prospect of any fight ever making this a habitable world, who’ve been encouraged by our rulers to believe absolutely that the sum total of their input in the grand decisions of history is at best ten to fifteen crosses on a ballot paper for parties they don’t control and which betray them at every turn, might suddenly decide that in fact the fight is worth it, not only in principle, but because it might, just possibly, win? And those who don’t? Who, in the face of a prospective crack in history, push back and fight for this regime? They won’t be the enemies of the communists, then, they’ll be the enemies of humanity, a humanity changing and liberating itself, and that’s no licence for cruelty or spite, but it’s legitimate to struggle as hard as you must against the enemies of a better world. Yes, we know that even many who love us are bewildered by our ‘unrealism’, our la-la land dreamwork, our utopian foolishness, in striving for wha we strive for: but can you understand how unrealistic their beliefs are to us? Their wager that this system, this carnival of predatory rapacity, will ever be fit to live in? Their sad certainty that we can do no better?”

The final part of this section asks how people could achieve a better world. It around this point I started to well up.

“By the elimination of private property and its replacement by community of property. By rupture. Yes, we will change the existing state of things. Not ‘we’ communists: ‘we’ all of us who come to believe through the slow accretion of tiny victories and of defeats, too, by experiencing the solidarity of others directed at us and ours at them; we who change our minds when the blared lie that ‘Nothing can ever be different is heard for the lie it is, whether or not difference follows; we who reach the tipping point where this unliveable disempowering tawdry ugly violent murderous world can no longer be lived; we who don’t believe the barked insistence that the best targets for the exhausted rage that follows are black people or brown people or Jews or Muslims or queers or trans people or migrants or children in cages; we who for whatever reasons don’t succumb to or who recover from the sadism that is inculcated and encouraged by this same system that endlessly hoses down true sentiment with caustic sentimentality; we who come to believe not only that we deserve better, but that there is a chance, a chance that we can build that betterness. Yes. Yes we will change the existing state of things. Not we will in the sense of it is inevitable but in the sense of it is not impossible, in the sense that it is necessary, that it is utterly worth the wager and the fight. In the sense that living with that Yes smouldering at the core of you, next to, as, ultimately stronger than the also smouldering No of necessary hate, is the only way to come close to existing, to living as a human, in so foul and monstrous and in- and anti-human a system. Yes. Yes we will change the existing state of things.”

Apologies to those YCL members at the demo. I have huge issues with the (several) iterations of the British Communist Party but if you see yourself in Mieville’s words here then we’re not so far apart.

Books: ‘The Romance of American Communism’ by Vivian Gornick.

“The idea that market crashes can act as catalysts for revolutionary change has a long history on the far left, most notably in the Bolshevik theory that hyperinflation, by destroying the value of money, takes the masses one step closer to the destruction of capitalism itself. This theory explains why a certain breed of sectarian leftist is forever calculating the exact conditions under which capitalism will reach “the crisis,” much as evangelical Christians calibrate signs of the coming Rapture.”

Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine,

The quote above, taken from Naomi Klein’s critique of neoliberal economics, explains at least one of the reasons I am not a Marxist-Leninist. Just like the Rapture, the worker’s revolution isn’t coming any time soon. Though I seem to be getting more left wing as I get older I just cannot bring myself to pin my hopes on the conditions being just right to overthrow capitalism. No matter how bad things get – and they are bad – most people would rather vote against their own interests than take to the streets with the belief that there’s a world to win.

Of course, that’s not the only reason to not become a communist in 2022. After Stalin’s Soviet Union and Mao’s China no party featuring the word ‘communist’ in its title is ever going to win popular appeal. The shadow those and other monstrous regimes cast is too great. In his memoir, ‘Party Animals: My Family and Other Communists’ David Aaronovitch describes people, like my own grandparents and great grandparents, who had friends and family members who were victims of Stalinism. Even without that personal loss, Aaronovitch offers up plenty of occasions where tearing up their membership cards would have been the only correct response.

“So, if not then, why not 1939 and the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Party’s headstand? Or 1948 and the Tito split…Or 1952 and the execution of Otto Sling, whose children had played with the children of Party leaders? Or 1953 and the anti-Semitic Doctors’ Plot? Why not after the Khrushchev speech, but before Hungary? In the mid 1970s Vivian Gornick, researching for her book on American Communism, interviewed a former Party member whom she named ‘Max Bitterman’. She noted the old man’s ‘scorn for and hatred for anyone who had left the Party either thirty seconds earlier or thirty seconds later than he had. Those who left before him were morally deficient and those who left after were intellectually impaired.” (page 265)

This resonates. People stayed committed communists even when confronted by the evidence that the Soviet Union was far from what they imagined. In Bob Stewart’s case, his son in law – a Russian economist was arrested as a counter revolutionary in 1938 and executed in 1941. The full details only came out in 1956 after Khrushchev’s speech at a time when Bob was living with his daughter Annie, her second husband and their young family. The impact of these revelations was picked up by tapped telephones and bugged offices but that doesn’t even begin to cover how they dealt with this trauma in the eighteen years before it all came out. Bob remained a committed communist for the rest of his days as did his sons, Bill and Rab. Annie, understandably, left the CPGB -possibly some time in 1957. She eventually joined the Conservative Party in the mid 1970s.

I find the question of why some people stayed and some people left fascinating. It is almost unanswerable. However, Vivian Gornick gets closer than most. The Romance of American Communism, republished by Verso in a beautiful edition in 2020 is by far the best book I have read on the subject and I’ve been pushing it onto people ever since I first encountered it. The book, which first appeared in 1977, is an oral history compiled from interviews with some of the American citizens who committed thenselves to the cause in the mid twentieth century. Gornick herself knew her subject well. She was bought up in a jewish working class family in New York. When she broke with the party she threw herself into second wave feminism. The gradual disillusionment she felt with that prompted her to think again about why people became communists. She embarked on a series of conversations with members and ex members and produced one of the first books in the post 1956 era not to regard communists as mindless, unthinking automatons.

Gornick herself is slightly mystified that the book has begun to attract a new audience. She’s been quick to criticise her style as too florid and her approach too judgmental. These are fair points to make however they do a disservice to a book that’s characterised by a marked sense of empathy towards its subjects . Though most of the people interviewed were drawn to communism due effects of the Great Depression and the threat of fascism in the 1930s the marks their experiences of being card carrying members left on them are myriad. Lives are enhanced, lives are ruined. There is nostalgia and there is regret.

A central question Gornick poses is why it ‘romance’ and not ‘tragedy’ that features in the title of the book. Each successive interviewee outlining the extent to which they fell head over heels with party life and felt driven by the Romantic ideals to change the world for the common good. However, when it comes to the reasons why they either stayed or left in the light of Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin, they all struggle to find the words. There is no one simple answer.

Recently my family settled down to watch Kenneth Branagh’s much ridiculed but nonetheless sumptuously enjoyable remake of ‘Death on the Nile’. There is one brief moment where Branagh’s Poirot, his moustache filling up almost the entire screen, berates an outspoken and ludicrous communist heiress for her belief in ‘economic fairy tales’. It is a telling moment. The great rationalist detective pointing out hypocrisy but also choosing a side. That of the great wealth and power that has placed him there amongst these glamorous people, in these luxurious surroundings, precisely at that moment in order to satisfy his performative vanity. On the evidence it might be hard hard to argue with Poirot’s observation but, of course, capitalism is also an ‘economic fairytale’ and one that is better at hiding the misery and exploitation it creates. To bring us back to where we began – Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine – the economic system we live in is appalling. Food banks exist in our wealthy country. They have become normalised. They are now asking for food that doesn’t need to be heated up as so many of their clients cannot afford their energy bills. Will this rising cost of living bring about a crisis in capitalism and usher in revolutionary change? Unlikely. However, like it or not, if we are ever to be free of it or, at least, remedy the inequality in our society, we will need people who display the same Romantic ideals as those portrayed in Gornick’s book. You can, of course interpret the world in different ways but at least these figures, admirable and flawed in turn, understood that the point was to change it.

Alan Stewart.

Books: ‘Enemy Within’ by Francis Beckett.

If they were asked to recognise the name of Luke Akehurst most sensible people of voting age in the United Kingdom would struggle. How I envy them their Eden-like innocence. Unfortunately for me, I’m one of those people who, without wanting to, seems to possess a perverse desire to keep abreast of every single development of the infighting within the Labour Party forevermore. It is not good for your health. For those of you don’t know Akehurst, he is a figure on the right wing of the party who sits on its NEC whose responsibilities seem to be chiefly to boil the piss of everyone to the left of Liz Kendall. He’s the secretary of a group called ‘Labour to Win’ which is ironic given that his extreme factionalism is likely to steer the party to an even greater electoral disaster than the one Jeremy Corbyn delivered in 2019.

Why even mention the man at all? Distressingly, it’s because earlier this year I found myself in the frankly uncomfortable position of being in agreement with him. Ruined my day to be honest. To elaborate, he had been asked what his problem with the hard left was. Among his reasons was the following:

“…silly exaggerated left rhetoric drives voters away from Labour.”

He’s right. If you’re on the left there are words you’ll use and love. Words such as ‘comrade’, ‘solidarity’ and ‘class struggle’. The problem is, most people who don’t view themselves as left wing- and that’s most voters in the country- loathe this type of thing. The workers of the world may have nothing to lose but their chains but they won’t vote for you in the United Kingdom if your language is couched in socialist tradition. Polling showed many of the policies of Corbyn’s Labour were popular but in no way would many people want to associate themselves with a group whose idea of a good time is a hearty chorus of ‘The Red Flag’.

Where myself and Mr Akehurst differ however is that while I do think ‘left language’ is ill advised when courting the floating voter I think the actual concepts of comradeship, solidarity and class struggle are important for a democratic socialist party. I’m not sure the Secretary of Labour to Win could stretch to that.

At this point you’d be forgiven for wondering what all this has to do with Francis Beckett’s book ‘Enemy Within- The Rise and Fall of the British Communist Party.’ In the first Covid-19 lockdown when I started this project I needed a single volume history of the CPGB to help make sense of all the security files and letters I was poring over. I immediately went for ‘A Centenary For Socialism-Britain’s Communist Party 1920-2020’ which was published by the current version of the party to coincide with its anniversary celebrations. It would be an understatement to say I found it hard going. Having to wade through sentences such as, “Lenin gave added expression to this paradigm of oppression by nations and national colonialism as part of the general struggle of the working class and working people against imperialism” and the general uncritical, almost hagiographic approach to its subject was alienating and exhausting. Perhaps I’m being unfair. After all, it’s hard to write about the CPGB without this kind of language and to be fair the companion volume , ‘Red Lives – Communists and the Struggle for Socialism’ is superb.

After this disappointment my brother recommended Beckett’s book which first came out in 1995 shortly after the CPGB wound up earlier that decade. The contrast was stark. Beckett seems to have achieved the impossible – a book about the far left which is also a pleasure to read. Sympathetic where it’s justified – Harry Pollitt’s activities during the Spanish Civil War and critical when needed – the CPGB’s inability to be independent of Moscow. It is engagingly written throughout and shot through with a dry wit. The history of the CPGB is labyrinth subject but Beckett helps you understand why people were drawn to the Party while also exploring the tragedy at the heart of it. Having read little else other than books on communism over the last couple of years I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend this book alongside Raphael Samuel’s ‘The Lost World of British Communism’ as necessary starting points.

Below is an extract from the book describing Bob Stewart at the conference where the Communist Party of Great Britain was formed in 1920.

There was the first stirring of a debate which was to cause a lot of trouble over the next seventy-one years. Did the CP stand for armed revolution or not? One excited delegate proclaimed ‘the historic and revolutionary value of a gun in the hands of a man of the working class’, only to be magisterially rebuked by Bob Stewart of Dundee: ‘A great many people talk about guns who would run away when they saw one. I am more interested in folks having brains in their heads.’ Bob Stewart had spent several years in prison for opposing the First World War, and knew more about hardship and violence than most. He led the smallest and oddest of the groups which formed the CP, the Socialist Prohibition Fellowship. After the main resolution was carried, the stout sincere man with a sober moustache walked solemnly to the platform to ask the new Party to come out in favour of suppressing the manufacture of alcoholic drinks. Few thought much of the idea, but they liked Bob Stewart, so they referred it to the executive for action. In seventy-one years no action was ever taken.

Yet banning the demon drink struck a chord with many Communists. Many hard, poverty-stricken lives were tolerable only through a haze of beer. Three Scottish founder-Communists, Stewart, Jack Murphy and Willie Gallacher, remembered their deprived childhoods being blighted further by drunken fathers. They not only abstained all their lives, but saw abstaining from alcohol as part of their socialism.

(Francis Beckett, Enemy Within, Merlin 1998 pages 14-15)

Alan Stewart.

Books: ‘Common People’ by Alison Light

When I started looking into my family’s past I quickly realised I knew rather less than I thought I did. Consequently, I’ve read nothing but communist history for the past eighteenth months – each successive book (most of them red and with the obligatory hammer and sickle on the cover)- pushing me forward into new directions and new avenues to explore. A lot of the reading has been deathly but some of it has been a joy. Finding out that The Daily Worker used to carry a cartoon strip for children featuring the character of ‘Micky Mongrel the Class Conscious Dog’ for example, was a particular highlight.

“Child communist readers were treated to seeing ‘Micky’ in a variety of activist roles, whether ‘whitewashing’ communist political slogans, leafleting, picketing outside the dog biscuit factory, or fighting a range of class enemies that included the boss ‘Bertram the bulldog’, the reformist Labour leader ‘Lionel lapdog’, or the headmaster ‘Mr Mastiff’, who just happened to be very fond of wielding the cane.”

(Thomas Linehan, Communism in Britain 1920-39: From the Cradle to the Grave, MUP 2007- page 36)

I’ve found that you need to come across gems like this to keep you going when you’ve come across the phrase ‘dialectical materialism’ for the umpteenth time. However, although an understanding and knowledge of communism is vital to this project, it is first and foremost, a work of family history. In this respect, Alison Light’s Common People has proved to be an important and inspirational text. Light’s name cropped up a few times in the research I was doing. She’d edited Raphael Samuel’s posthumous ‘The Lost World of British Communism’ and provided a foreword for Yvonne Kapp’s autobiography and so that’s how I first came to this book which focuses on her own family story and reflects on the process of immersing yourself in the past. Prompted by the death of her father, it is her investigation into her ancestors starting with her grandparents. Beautifully written throughout it becomes a memorable evocation of the lives of working people over the last two centuries.

There are two moments I’d like to draw attention to and quote at length. Here’s the first:

“Secrets and lies are a staple ingredient of family history. Every family has its skeletons in the closet, its black sheep, the children born the wrong side of the blanket, the fortune swindled, the prison sentence hidden. The stories of poorer people and migrants are especially likely to unravel or be full of loose ends: disappearing husbands and wives, children left behind or brought up by relatives, relationships that were never officially registered, trails that go cold. As a ‘family detective’ the family historian expects to track down the facts about a person, follow the plot of a life and unveil the truth behind familial myths. In the record offices in Britain I got used to hearing other researchers relaying their family legends. In the cloakrooms or lobbies, over paper cups of vile instant coffee from the machines, another fevered searcher, high on an archive hit, would buttonhole me like the Ancient Mariner, and I would listen, slightly glazed to yet another astonishing revelation that meant so much to the teller and next to nothing to me.”

(Alison Light, Common People, Penguin 2015- page 128)

I recognise myself as the buttonholing researcher here- far too many times I’ve done the same thing over the last year and so I’d like to get my apologies in early. On this blog I hope the material we uncover will be of interest to as many people as possible but both my brother and I are aware that it could just be us two that find all this endlessly fascinating. However, if that is the case it’s still enough. The way each new discovery resonates and shifts our perspective is reward enough. As Light observes:

“Family historians are always stumbling over uncanny coincidences. Magical thinking is part of our stock in trade. The place once unbeknownst to us, or which we passed heedlessly every day, suddenly becomes luminous with significance, uniting disparate people and random moments, making them radiate and rhyme. Since family history moves in a psychological dimension, it is always plangent, resonating with loss, and coincidences are like ley lines mysteriously transforming the map of time. Such discoveries find pattern and meaning in what otherwise threatens to be mere accident, but they also seem to offer evidence of commonality. Family history knows that everyone- and everything- is ultimately, and intimately, connected. And there is truth in this.”

(Page 249)

My hope is that the articles we post here will ‘offer evidence of commonality’. That what is particular to our family history will resonate with others. After all, everyone and everything is connected.

Alan Stewart.