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New Interventions

Volume 11, no 1, Winter 2002-03


Current Business Israel, the royal family, women in Afghanistan, weapons inspection USA, a topical song Arthur Trusscott, Dangerous Times The approach of the Second Gulf War Mike Jones, The Trial of Slobodan Miloevi A modern show trial Louis Proyect, McCarthy Rides Again The row over the Israel divestment campaign in the USA Ur Shalonsky, Zionist Ideology, Non-Jews and Israel The consequences of Israels criteria for citizenship Roni Ben Efrat, Sowing the Whirlwind US foreign policy, Israel and the Second Gulf War Paul Flewers, The Evil of Banality Martin Amis discovers Josef Stalin Chris Gray, Bertolt Brecht and the Necessary Angel The poetry of Bertolt Brecht Ian Birchall, Morris, Bax and Babeuf How William Morris and Belfort Bax viewed the French revolutionary Poetry Corner Building Up and Tearing England Down A tribute to Brian Behan Dave Renton, Anti-Fascist Theory Before Fascism Lenins analysis of the Russian Black Hundreds Reviews Victor Serge, Mussolini, Lenin, David Irving, Globalisation Letters New Labour and the business world 2 8 11 15 19 24 31 38 46 54 55 64 77

Current Business
Sharons Final Solution? VARIOUS informed commentators both within and outwith Israel have declared that the launch of the war against Iraq will be accompanied by a move by the Israeli government to expel the Palestinians from the Occupied Territories into Arab countries. Some consider that this will involve all the Palestinians, whilst others claim that the inhabitants of the West Bank will be expelled, and those in the Gaza Strip will remain penned in a ghetto. Others besides have envisaged a slightly less drastic plan involving the forced move of the West Bank Palestinians into the Gaza Strip. Ariel Sharons vendetta against Yasser Arafat only makes sense if expulsion or ghettoisation is his objective. The Israeli policy of destroying the parastatal institutions of the Palestinian Authority and undermining Arafats authority is intended to smash the Palestinians political leadership, and to prevent the advent of a Palestinian state alongside Israel, thus dashing the hopes of the Israelis and Palestinians, and others outwith the area, who recommend a two-state solution to the crisis. The parallel policy of continual low-level oppression, the checkpoints with their endless queues, the day-to-day harassment and the destruction of the agricultural infrastructure, is aimed at demoralising the general Palestinian public. A by-product of this scheme, of course, is that many of the more militant Palestinians will turn to the extreme Islamicists, whose aim is to destroy Israel in a mighty pogrom. Sharon is willing to gamble on this. Indeed, this fits in with his general plan, as suicide bombs play directly into his hands by enabling him to portray the Palestinians as a terrorist people a trick greatly aided by the post-11 September atmosphere and thus deserving of everything the Israeli state throws at them. By continuing with suicide bombings, the Palestinians are falling into Sharons trap, and will pay heavily for it. Sharon recently beat Binyamin Netanyahu for leadership of Likud, an obscene competition centred on who would smite the Palestinians the more if he won, and their party continues to govern Israel. With hardening attitudes on both sides, with continuing Israeli state oppression, and with Palestinian resistance taking outright terroristic forms, the chances of a just solution of the Palestinian question seems a long way away. There has been a considerable amount of solidarity work in Britain in respect of the Palestinians, but this issue raises many problems and pitfalls into which the left can fall. Unlike, say, anti-apartheid work, where there was not in existence a reactionary campaign against white South Africans indeed, right-wingers were often known for their sense of identity with the practitioners of racial separation solidarity work in respect of the Palestinians (and the Arab world in general) has to be carried out in such a way that criticism of Israeli policies makes no concessions to those who hold racist attitudes towards Jews. Although Zionists have customarily written off all criticisms of Israel as anti-Semitic, care has to be taken that our campaigning does not allow any means by which it can be hijacked by genuine antiSemites, which these days mean not so much the marginal forces of the far right, but
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the much more prevalent forces of extreme Islam. Leaving aside the sacking of two Israeli academics from the editorial board of a Manchester-based language journal last summer an act of criminal stupidity when one takes their actual attitude towards the Palestinian question into account the call for a boycott of the Israeli academic sector is a mistake, as it gives the impression that all Israeli academics are hard-line Zionists, whereas it is amongst their ranks that some of the firmest opponents of current Israeli policies can be found, and a blanket boycott only serves to isolate them. Similarly, the call to boycott all Israeli goods has an unpleasant echo of the boycott Jewish shops calls of the 1930s, and would be welcomed by anti-Semites today. There is good reason to boycott Israeli academic apologists for Zionist oppression, and to boycott goods manufactured by Israeli settlers in the Occupied Territories. This will be harder to organise in that it would require much more research, but it would be a better course of action. The lefts campaigning for justice for the Palestinians has to be conducted with clean hands, and there is evidence that we have some way to go before we can demonstrate this. On the one hand, opportunism has led some left-wingers, particularly the largest left-wing group, the Socialist Workers Party, to downplay the problem of extreme Islamic elements using demonstrations to promote racist attitudes towards Jews although the worst placards were removed from marchers on the huge demonstration in September, Jew-baiting slogans were nonetheless chanted in Arabic presumably on the grounds that getting any old Muslim organisation involved would swell the size of protests (I cant imagine even the most opportunist elements on the left are expecting to recruit from amongst the Luton Talibanistas). On the other hand, it is quite unacceptable on the part of some other left-wingers (in particular, the Alliance for Workers Liberty) to conflate such opportunism and the call for a single secular democratic state for IsraelPalestine with anti-Semitism. This is nasty name calling, and not a serious discussion of the problems involved in this matter. Arthur Trusscott A Right Royal Fiasco FISH, so the old Russian proverb goes, rot from the head. This adage certainly seems to be borne out by the current state of the British royal family and the Conservative Party. Just a year ago, the Tories were confident that the replacement of the buffoonish William Hague by the no-nonsense Ian Duncan Smith would turn around their failing fortunes, and only a few months back royalists were cock-ahoop at the huge crowds at the Queen Mothers funeral and the Queens Jubilee celebrations. Now, Duncan Smith faces public challenges from within his own ranks, and we have been regaled by the royal what the butler stole courtroom farce. Neither institution has been able to overcome its difficulties, and both face an uncertain future. For over a century, the royal family has symbolised the relative class peace of British society. The rehabilitation of Queen Victoria from the ignominy of being laughed at in the mid-nineteenth century to being the serene and respected head of the British Empire, garnering support from all social classes, was a master-stroke of the British ruling class, and was a reflection of the manner in which the turbulent class relations of the mid-century had quietened down. And yet, in todays situation of minimal class conflict, the last decade or so has seen the royal family lose much

credibility as it staggers from one crisis to another. Why has this occurred? The legitimacy of the royal family has not been undermined by a republican campaign; far from it, the call for the abolition of the monarchy a basic socialist demand has been very much neglected on the left. Its declining legitimacy is much more the result of the unravelling of the long-running social consensus during the Thatcher era and in its aftermath. Thatcherism decried the reality of society, declaring that there were only families and the nation. What it really offered was get-rich-quick schemes, self-centredness and a vulgar programme of bread and circuses. With nothing else to believe in, it is not surprising that a whole range of beliefs and codes started to fray, including the once strong belief in the monarchy. For all the Thatcherites emphasis on the family and the nation, the downplaying of society could only lead to a loosening of family bonds, the idea of the nation as some kind of family started to fray as well, and one can hardly be surprised that such a famously dysfunctional family as the Windsors would start to disintegrate internally and suffer a decline in legitimacy and credibility. What Queen Elizabeth II represents is the last of the consensual monarchs, the last one for whom there was, and still to a fair extent remains, a broad base of respect. Whether Charles becomes king when his mum dies, or whether he steps down to let his elder son take the job, matters little. The British monarchy is unlikely to disappear in the foreseeable future, but it will never be the same. The crowds wont turn out for the next monarch. Meanwhile, the Conservative Party is increasingly becoming an irrelevant laughing stock. In essence, the Tories face the same problems that we have pointed out before. New Labour has pinched their basic policies, and New Labours and the Tories economic and social programmes are different only in detail. The Tories are fatally split over Europe, and the majoritys anti-Europe position has helped to alienate them from their traditional big-business base. They know that they are unable to win a general election by appealing to the hang em and whip em brigade, as people in Britain are generally more tolerant and less bigoted than 20 or 30 years ago, and New Labours disgraceful racist stance on refugees means that they cannot capitalise on this topic. However, an open shift towards enlightened policies will lose votes from their right-wing constituency, and will not gain them much support, as they are the stock-in-trade of New Labour and the Liberal Democrats, and any major shift in this direction by the Tories will be seen as disingenuous. The slide in the fortunes of these formerly powerful British institutions has not been the result of an upsurge of progressive sentiments. Rather, they are the result of social disintegration and political decay. No socialist will regret the decline of a relic from the feudal period and the traditional party of the British ruling class, but we must not forget that the very same trends that have caused this have also been responsible for the decay of such positive factors as working-class collectivism and for the rise in political apathy and outright anti-political sentiments, none of which helps us to build a socialist movement. Paul Flewers Women in Afghanistan ONE of the more depressing, if to be expected, sights during the war against Afghanistan was the way that the big powers attempted with some success, it must be said to gain support for their war amongst radical circles by pointing to

the Talibans appalling attitude towards women. Cherie Blair was only one of this infamous chorus. Their voices have fallen somewhat silent since the new government came to power, and thats not surprising. Its worth citing Rasil Basu, who was appointed in the mid-1980s by the United Nations as a senior advisor to the Afghan government for womens development, on how enlightened the new Afghan regime is on this subject. Under the Soviet occupation, women made enormous strides; illiteracy declined from 98 to 75 per cent, and they were granted equal rights with men in civil law and in the Constitution. Although unjust patriarchal relations still prevailed in the workplace and in the family with women occupying lower level sex-type jobs the strides they took in education and employment were very impressive. She adds: In Kabul I saw great advances in womens education and employment. Women were in evidence in industry, factories, government offices, professions and the media. However: But as far back as 1988, I could see the early warning signals as well. Even before the first Soviet troop withdrawal, shabanamas, or handbills, warned of reprisals against women who left their homes. Followers of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar started throwing acid on women who dared to venture into the streets of Kabul in trousers, or skirts, or short-sleeved shirts. Ironically, the US favoured the three fundamentalist resistance groups of freedom fighters headed by Hekmatyar, Khalis and Rabbani over the more moderate mujahideen groups. Saudi Arabian and American arms and ammunition gave the fundamentalists a vital edge over the moderates. The regime soon started to backtrack on womens rights, with a restrictive dress code being introduced, and coeducation abolished. Women were dismissed from state sector jobs. However, what followed was worse than the most dire predictions: The overthrow of the Najibullah government in 1992 led to fighting among warring fundamentalist groups for territorial control. Massive artillery attacks killed and wounded thousands of civilians, especially women and children. Afghan womens rights were violated with impunity as the constitution was suspended by the mujahideen groups who seized power in Kabul. The ruling warlords ignored the legal system, dismantled the judicial structure, assumed judicial functions for themselves in several provinces, and for the Islamic clergy or local shuras (councils of elders) in others. Trials were arbitrary and punishments were barbaric like stoning to death and public lashings of everyone including women. Amnesty Internationals report for the period April 1992February 1995 lists horrendous crimes against women. Rape by armed guards of the various warring factions was condoned by their leaders; it was viewed as a way of intimidating vanquished populations, and of rewarding soldiers. Fear of rape drove women to suicide, and fathers to kill their daughters to spare them the degradation. Scores of women were abducted and detained, sexually abused, and sold into prostitution. Most girls were victimised and tortured because they belonged to different religious

and ethnic groups. In addition to physical abuse, women were stripped of their fundamental rights of association, freedom of speech, of employment, and movement. The Supreme Court of the Islamic State in 1994, issued an Ordinance on Womens Veil which decreed that women should wear a veil to cover the whole body, forbidding them to leave their homes not because they are women but for fear of sedition. This in a nutshell is the past record of the groups that form the Northern Alliance. Their warlords looked upon women as spoils of war the very same warlords, who are now strutting around Kabul, with the support of the so-called civilised Western world under US leadership. Further comment is superfluous. Cheney Longville Weapons Inspection USA! NEWS of a fascinating project has just come my way. The Canada-based group Rooting Out Evil has issued this appeal. Attention Peace-Loving Citizens of the World! Join us in challenging rogue states run by military fanatics who produce and conceal weapons of mass destruction. Rooting Out Evil is sending a weapons inspection team to the United States to inspect the chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons produced and concealed by the Bush regime. Rooting Out Evil wants you to join them, in person or in spirit. Become an Honorary Weapons Inspector and support our mission into the USA! You dont have to join us at the border to be a Rooting Out Evil weapons inspector. Simply contact them, and be counted as one of the thousands no, make that millions of world citizens who say no to chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons. In the new year, Rooting Out Evil will be sending a team of volunteer weapons inspectors into that greatest of rogue nations, the United States of America. We have selected the US as our first priority based on criteria provided by the Bush administration. According to those criteria, the most dangerous states are those run by leaders who have massive stockpiles of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons; ignore due process at the United Nations; refuse to sign and honour international treaties; and have come to power through illegitimate means. The current US administration fulfils all these criteria. And so, again following Bushs guidelines, Rooting Out Evil is demanding that his administration allow immediate and unfettered access to international weapons inspectors to search out their caches of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. If they refuse to comply, we will assemble as many volunteer weapons inspectors as possible at a major border crossing between the US and Canada and attempt to cross into the US on a mission of peace. We will be greeted on the US side by Americans who favour true global cooperation, an end to weapons of mass destruction, and a regime change in the US at the next election.

For more information, contact Rooting Out Evil at info@rootingoutevil.org, or visit the website at www.rootingoutevil.org. Charlton Marshall A Topical Song Thanks to Tony Whelan; sung to the tune of If Youre Happy And You Know It Clap Your Hands If we cannot find Osama, bomb Iraq. If the markets hurt your Mama, bomb Iraq. If the terrorists are Saudi And the bank takes back your Audi And the TV shows are bawdy, Bomb Iraq. If the corporate scandals growin, bomb Iraq. And your ties to them are showin, bomb Iraq. If the smoking gun aint smokin We dont care, and were not jokin. That Saddam will soon be croakin, Bomb Iraq. Even if we have no allies, bomb Iraq. From the sand dunes to the valleys, bomb Iraq. So to hell with the inspections; Lets look tough for the elections, Close your mind and take directions, Bomb Iraq. While the globe is slowly warming, bomb Iraq. Yay! the clouds of war are storming, bomb Iraq. If the ozone hole is growing, Some things we prefer not knowing. (Though our ignorance is showing), Bomb Iraq. So heres one for dear old daddy, bomb Iraq, From his favourite little laddy, bomb Iraq. Saying no would look like treason. Its the Hussein hunting season. Even if we have no reason, Bomb Iraq.

Arthur Trusscott

Dangerous Times
American Imperialism, the Second Gulf War and the New World Order
THE rejection just before Christmas by the US and British governments of the Iraqi regimes massive dossier on its armament holdings is tantamount to a declaration of war against Iraq. Apart from the fact that Baghdad was faced with the difficult task of proving a negative, that it does not have weapons of mass destruction, it was obvious from the start that whatever it said would be rejected out of hand by Washington and London. Indeed, British and US official spokesmen doubted the veracity of the report almost before they had the time to read through its preliminaries, let alone its full 12 000 or so pages. War, as Jack Straw insists, may not be inevitable, but short of a sudden coup in Baghdad or the unlikely sight of a total and humiliating climb-down by Saddam Hussein that sees him retire from office, I cannot see how it can be avoided. The fact is that George W Bush and his team want a war, and they will do all within their power to provoke one. Their entire programme has been to make increasing demands upon Baghdad in such a way that would hopefully eventually lead it to stand firm and thus face a US attack. Even though Baghdad has bowed and permitted full-scale intrusive inspection by the United Nations, some provocation or another can easily be arranged to give Washington the excuse to intervene militarily. It is almost certain that should the UN inspectors currently combing industrial and military installations for indications of forbidden weaponry draw a blank, Washington will make some discovery that will suffice as a casus belli. Bush & Co want a war with Iraq, as it is a central factor in their broader programme of the reassertion of US imperialism. Even before the final implosion of the Soviet Union, the US ruling class recognised that it was the sole superpower, and the terminal decline and subsequent demise of its Stalinist rival has given it the opportunity to engage in a project of establishing global hegemony. In one sense, the choosing of Iraq as the fall guy setting it up in 1990 over the question of its longrunning territorial claims with Kuwait was strange, as the brutal Baathist regime had generally been a good ally of the Western powers, had repressed the left and kept uppity minorities down with a firm hand. On the other, Iraq is in a strategically important and potentially unstable area, and has massive tapped and untapped oil resources, and thus is in a key position in the broader US plan. To inveigle a regional power into a United Nations-approved war with a broad US-led coalition was a neat trick, as it afforded the world to see what would happen to a nation if it defied the USA overwhelming military opposition and/or punitive sanctions. The fact that Iraq attacked another country enabled the USA to rally support through the United Nations, and the fact that the Baath regime is particularly repressive was handy in mobilising liberal sentiments behind the war against Iraq and its subsequent quarantining. The winning of UN approval meant that no nation would openly defy

the US-led vendetta against Iraq, and, as we have seen, not one has effectively opposed the sanctions and continuing US/British aerial attacks, or stood up against Bush Juniors moves beyond the occasional voice of concern that did not translate into a no vote or veto wielded on the Security Council. Moving on from the first Gulf War and the continued actions against Iraq, there have been other indications of the direction of US foreign policy. The US military interventions in the former Yugoslavia, including the triggering of the war against Serbia through making demands that it knew Belgrade would not accept, show that the USA was seeing if it could get away with bombing countries without UN approval and through its domination of Nato, and establishing a military presence in the area. The war against Afghanistan a year ago not only repeated the exercise, but demonstrated its ability to badger nations into permitting it to establish US bases on their territory, and to force the world into accepting its demands for regime changes. The forthcoming war against Iraq will be a deeper and broader application of these principles. Apart from killing some 3000 mainly ordinary working people, wrecking some prime real estate and altering the New York skyline, and giving credibility to a US President formerly seen as personally stupid and corruptly elected, the attacks of 11 September 2001 have in a brutal manner pushed international relations forward by around a decade. The end of the bipolar world of the Cold War immediately led to the rise of unilateralist sentiments within the US ruling class, and this process has been tremendously accelerated by the actions of Al Qaedas suicide pilots. The fact that the USA is currently governed by a rabid right-wing gang who are particularly gung-ho about asserting US imperial interests should not detract from the fact that any US government, be it Democrat or less fervid Republican, would act in a similar manner. Whilst Bushs direct approach does not meet with the full approval of the US ruling class as a whole, as hawks of earlier generations, including such incendiaries as Henry Kissinger, have warned that Bushs plans could unleash problems that would be very hard to solve, they are not opposed in principle to what Bush is proposing, as they are all for increasing the assertion of US power around the world. It is Bushs methods that are in question, not his basic plan, as they do include a fairly large element of risk, as we shall see below. Central to Bushs programme of assertion of US interests is the much-vaunted concept of an Axis of Evil, an improbable bloc of states containing Iraq, Iran and North Korea as its core members as if these disparate states actually represent a genuine grouping and a wider and not always well-defined gaggle of other states as lesser brethren that can be enrolled or dropped according to Washingtons needs. This is a clear indication that once Iraq is dealt with, somewhere else will be lined up for similar treatment. From this, it is equally clear that the cruel nature of the Iraqi regime, or its possession (or, in reality, non-possession) of weapons of mass destruction are not the issue, and are only a means of gathering support from gullible politicians and cynical opinion-formers. In the immediate instance, the campaign against Iraq is an attempt by the US ruling class to assert its hegemony over the Middle East and over the immense riches offered by Iraqs oil resources, not merely in the Gulf region, but also in the largely Kurdish north. A puppet government in Baghdad, imposed and maintained by a strong US military presence, will make for a better guarantee of US interests in the area than weak regimes like the House of Saud (indeed, the US ruling class appears

to be turning against this old ally, and a base in Iraq will help the USA better to monitor and influence events in Riyadh). In the longer run, it is the start of a broader campaign to assert US power on a global basis. We are entering the era of a world dominated by one superpower, the USA, which, despite its economic weaknesses, has immeasurably more firepower than any other country in the world, and is intent in imposing itself on the world. To the concern of certain elements within Britains top brass and mandarins who are concerned about the consequences of Washingtons motives, Tony Blair has been an absolutely rock-solid supporter of Bush. The idea put around that he has played a moderating role is quite misleading. What he has done has been to render his US mentors gung-ho approach a little less abrasive and a little more subtle. By insisting that Bush works through the UN, rather than blasting off straightaway on his own, he has helped the USA to inveigle the UN Security Council into accepting the need for military action against Iraq, and has thereby neatly undercut those who tried to head off the USA by insisting that any action against Iraq must be conducted through the UN. Blair has also outsmarted those in Britain who tried to block support for the war by appealing to the UN. Blair has played a very sneaky role, and has been very successful, as such countries as Russia, France and China, which are opposed to a US assault on Iraq but which are equally unwilling openly to take a forceful stand against the USA (as this would almost certainly badly disrupt the UN, which they are not currently willing to chance), are left whining that the UN Security Council resolution that will enable the USA to go ahead did not really legitimise that. Blairs clever footwork has enabled Washington effectively to hijack the UN, as the resolution enables it to go ahead with an assault irrespective of complaints and protests, and opponents on the Security Council of a US attack on Iraq are thereby hamstrung. The fall-out from this war might be far-reaching. It is possible, as Bush & Co no doubt hope, that the Iraqi regime will collapse quickly, a puppet regime will be set up under an occupying army, and nothing much will occur elsewhere. However, there are factors that have to be considered. The Baghdad regime may not collapse that rapidly, and fighting may be heavy. None of the Arab states, including many that are generally close to the USA, have been happy about Bushs plans. Those bordering Iraq are concerned that they could be drawn into the conflict. Pro-Western Arab rulers will face militant protests that could undermine them. Unrest is certain throughout the Arab and Islamic world. The Kurds in the north of Iraq and the Shias in the south will almost certainly assert themselves. They will not wish to be governed by a Baghdad administration of any description, and, after the fiasco in 1991 when Bush Senior encouraged them to rebel then left them in the lurch, will not readily put their trust in Bush Junior this time around. The Turkish regime will not look kindly upon Iraqi Kurds establishing a de facto independent area, as this would give ideas to the hard-pressed Kurds in Turkey. The Iranian regime will also be concerned about a rise of Kurdish national sentiments, but will probably seek to take advantage of the collapse of Baghdads authority in the south of Iraq. This, then, is the New World Order. We have an arrogant, aggressive US ruling class bent upon exerting its influence across the globe, engaged in a necessarily open-ended struggle against terrorism that will inevitably provoke resistance both fair and foul, and thus will as a matter of course spur the USA into deeper and more frequent interventions. The Cold War can be seen as an interregnum, an atypical interlude in which the general trend of imperialism to stretch out and dominate the

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world was limited to some extent by the existence of the Soviet Union. Those days are gone, Russia is now a broken reed, and there is no power that can challenge the USA for the time being. However, on a longer time-scale, the extension of US hegemony in the Middle East will clash with European ambitions in the region, which is why, Blair apart, there is little enthusiasm for Bushs crusade. Further extensions of US power will intensify this process. The concerns emanating from within British state and business organisations and objections openly voiced in governmental circles in Germany and France are an indication of the worries of the ruling classes in Europe. Although the rulers of Europe will not take these differences to an open break with the USA at the moment which is why they still accept, at least in public, the absurd notion of Iraq posing a threat to the Middle East and the world at large there cannot be any doubt that they are aware of future tensions between the interests of US and European imperialism. This leaves Blair in a potentially difficult position. He must feel that British interests are best served by acting as Washingtons drummer-boy, hoping that Britain will be able to profit from the USAs quest for global hegemony. Growing tensions between the USA and Europe will force the British ruling class to make a choice will Britain be an integral part of a closer-knit Europe, or will it hang on to Washingtons coat-tails? We are entering dangerous times, not so much because of US military adventures in the Middle East and elsewhere, much less because of the threat of Al Qaeda death squads infiltrating Western cities, but because the basis is being laid, under the seemingly unstoppable drive of the US ruling class for global dominance, for the revival of classic inter-imperialist rivalries in this instance, Europe versus America. And history has shown that it is such rivalries that lay at the root of truly huge wars.

Mike Jones

The Trial of Slobodan Miloevi


AT the time of writing, the show trial of ex-President Miloevi of the rump Yugoslavia is suspended due to the heart condition and exhaustion of the defendant. However, its worth making some comment on what has taken place so far. As we pointed out in New Interventions, Volume 10, no 4, Nato set up the Hague Tribunal, and, as its then spokesman Jamie Shea admitted, it had largely financed it (George Soros and the Rockefeller family chipped in, too), the aim being to provide a post factum justification for its illegal aggression that during its 79-day bombing campaign resulted in various war crimes. Miloevi is the fall guy, the patsy, who will be proved guilty of being responsible for all the blood-letting during the break-up of the second attempt to unite the South Slavs in one state. Needless to say, the tribunal has refused to investigate any of Natos actions, even the bombing of the Serbian TV and radio building, which Amnesty International described as a war crime. And as we pointed out, it decided to take no action on the dossier of alleged war crimes carried out by the Croatian forces during its summer 1995 offensive against the Krajina Serbs. It has been accused by Amnesty

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of an anti-Serbian bias and of making politically driven decisions. As various journalists, among them Martin Bell, who reported from Bosnia for the BBC, and legal experts, pointed out before the Miloevi trial, it lacks independence, as the judges and prosecution are part of the same team. As the defendant Miloevi has not been granted proper access to legal advisors, and in spite of not recognising the court, he is defending himself. From what one sees on TV or reads in the press when the trial is deemed newsworthy, it appears that Miloevi is attempting to undermine the prosecution by both arguing against the particular accusation, and drawing out the underlying reason or cause. The so-called judge, Richard May, keeps preventing him from pressing or developing his case. When the prosecution regarding Kosovo was over by then the defendant was also charged regarding Bosnia-Hercegovina and Croatia, as the prosecution realised that its case was going to be unproven it was accepted in the media that Miloevi had bettered all his accusers, and that no evidence to convict him had been presented. Paddy Ashdown, the ex-Liberal Democrat leader, made quite an interesting appearance for the prosecution. He had been a keen proponent of military intervention in Yugoslavia during the break-up of the country, and he had made numerous visits. Miloevi drew attention to Ashdowns many visits, and with a smile on his face asked him why the leader of a small political party in Britain was so involved in Yugoslav affairs. He presumably knew of Ashdowns links to British intelligence, and claimed that Ashdowns visit to the area in 1998 was as part of a plot by the West regarding Yugoslavia. Ashdown was used in an attempt to show that Miloevi knew of the repression and deportation of Kosovan Albanians, as he had met him in September 1998 and told him of atrocities committed by Serb forces, and handed over a letter from Tony Blair telling him to put an end to human rights abuses. After denying the existence of such deeds, Miloevi claimed, once Ashdown said that he had seen them, that it might be so but he had no control over these matters. Ashdown avoided responding to questions from Miloevi on Natos aggression, and he was backed by Judge May when the defendant complained. When Miloevi said that the deportation of Kosovan Albanians was the fault of the UK/KLA during 1998-99, Ashdown agreed that it had been active at that time, and added: I specifically said that I did not question the right of the Yugoslav forces to take action against terrorism. To Miloevis response of So what is the problem then?, Ashdown replied: The force that was used was excessive and contrary to international law. It was indiscriminate and punitive. You may say, Mr Miloevi, that it was necessary to shoot cattle, break the stoves in those houses, urinate on those houses, as part of a military campaign targeting an enemy. He concluded that this was part of a indiscriminate scorched-earth policy (see the report by Adam Sage in The Times, 16 March 2002). Adam Sage, in the above-quoted article, saw Ashdown as getting the better of Miloevi, who tried repeatedly to force an admission from Lord Ashdown that Kosovan terrorism had started the conflict, whereas Ashdown used his long experience of the House of Commons to resist, that is, to engage in the art of avoiding a reply. Other commentators thought Ashdown was made to look a fool; be that as it may, he did admit that Yugoslav forces were faced with terrorism and had the right to take action, but the force used was excessive, indiscriminate, punitive and contrary to international law, presumably regarding human rights. In the parliamentary debate on Kosovo of 19 April 1999, Tony Benn made the

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point that Robin Cook told us in January that the UK had killed more Serbs than the Serbs had Albanians, and Donald Anderson, a supporter of the war, stated: We should remember that, before Raak, the UK had killed more civilians than the Serbs and there is the memory of Krajina. (Hansard, 19 April 1999) Of course, the Raak Massacre was faked, as we long ago pointed out, and as can be deduced from the investigation by the Finnish team of forensic scientists led by Mrs Helena Ranta, on which Jim Riddle reported in New Interventions, Volume 10, no 4, although apologists for Natos war still speak of it as genuine. And we also pointed out that US career diplomat William Walker, at the time heading the OSCE mission in Kosovo, discovered the massacre which ended the mission and led to the fake negotiations at Rambouillet. Walker admitted during a TV documentary that Mrs Albright had sent him to Kosovo following the Nato war. Walker had previously been involved with Ollie Norths Contragate activities arming the contras in Nicaragua, and was US Ambassador to El Salvador at the peak of activity of the death-squads. The UK began by attacking Serbian policemen, but during 1998 extended their targets to civilians. These were met with heavy-handed reprisals. Villages inhabited by certain Albanian clans that supported the UK received treatment that could be described in the words of Lord Ashdown: indiscriminate and punitive. But by September the UK was facing defeat, Nato threatened to bomb Yugoslavia, and Ashdown visited and met Miloevi. Richard Holbrooke met Miloevi in October and negotiated a deal; the OSCE sent its observers, the Yugoslav Army pulled back, and the violence was drastically reduced. Meanwhile the UK moved back into the positions vacated by the Yugoslav forces and were reinforced. Then on 15 January the Raak Massacre emerged. But as we note from the Kosovo debate of 19 April 1999, until the faked massacre, according to Robin Cook, the UK had killed more civilians than the Serbian security forces. The war against Yugoslavia for which the Clinton government had planned was set in motion once the Miloevi government rejected the demands set out in the annex to the Rambouillet Accord that were designed deliberately as a provocation. And it was directed against a government taking action against terrorism, in Ashdowns words, whose forces had killed fewer civilians than the terrorists, as Cook told parliament, until 15 January, and as the Raak massacre has been exposed as a fake, presumably up until Natos war began. The UK began life in the mid-1990s as the product of a number of StalinoMaoist groups, the main one being the LPK (the Peoples Movement of Kosovo). In Germany, it was under observation by the intelligence service due to its collecting of monies among the Albanian diaspora which were sent to the UK to finance terrorism. We know this from the annual report published for 1997. Here in Britain, we dont have the benefit of the spooks publishing an annual report of their activities, but it is probable that other European intelligence services were also watching the LPK, as various police forces saw it as being heavily involved in drugsmuggling, human trafficking, etc. In this period, the UK grew quite rapidly, the hard core of a few hundred Enver Hoxha followers were joined by a variety of political strands as the Tirana regime disintegrated and arms became available, as well as the increase in violent confrontations in Kosovo which produced thousands of refugees and the necessary change of mood. But another factor was the assistance and training given to the UK by US (CIA and DIA) and German (BND) intelligence agencies, which had been underway since the mid-1990s, and became public in both

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countries during the Nato war, as both worked to break up Yugoslavia and weaken Serbia in the Balkans. So although the Kosovan Albanians had genuine grievances, so the Yugoslav authorities had the right within international law to take action against terrorism; this they did in a heavy-handed and brutal fashion, but while certain European governments and institutions were attempting to mediate and resolve the conflict, others along with the USA were actively engaged in whipping it up, to launch themselves later into a humanitarian war. What was the cost of this war in human life? Undoubtedly, large numbers of Kosovan Albanians had fled their homes before Natos bombing began. Ashdown spoke of 300 000 at the tribunal. Yugoslav forces would respond to UK attacks by swooping on the village, or the geographical area from whence they came, and, as Albanian society is still clan-based, they would focus on the clan in question inhabiting the village or area, hence large numbers either fled or were driven out (some refugees interviewed on TV in refugee camps claimed that the UK had told them to flee, but how much of that went on seems not to have been investigated). The Nato bombing, and reprisals by some Serbian units, then tripled the refugee flow. Although this was a traumatic experience, most refugees survived to return, or went into exile. The BBC2 TV documentary of 17 October 1999 looking at the war gave Yugoslav figures as 2000 civilians and 600 soldiers killed. An article in The Times on 22 June 2002 on the gaoling of the boss of Serbian RTS TV for failing to evacuate the 16 employees killed by the Nato bombing, refers to the European Court of Human Rights dismissing the case of the families of the 16 against Nato, on the grounds that Yugoslavia was not a member of the Council of Europe, it also mentions the Hague Tribunal refusing to charge Nato for its bombing campaigns which reportedly caused more than 1500 civilian deaths owing to lack of evidence. The latest figures suggested for Kosovan Albanian deaths, following investigations by teams of forensic scientists into claims of mass graves, were between 2000 and 3000. Nato, British and US government spokesmen had talked of tens and hundreds of thousands of missing Albanians during the war. Many of those buried were said to be done so according to Muslim custom, so had perhaps died in battle or a natural death. It began to look as if the total of dead on both sides was equal. Later, bodies of Albanians were discovered in refrigerated trucks driven to Serbia. Since then nothing more has been said on the subject. Given the status of Kosovo just as with Bosnia as a hub of criminality, as Misha Glenny put it in The Times on 16 March 2002, of which the EU has become increasingly concerned, the fact that UK people, again with US assistance, began a similar murderous campaign in Macedonia, that some of its leading commanders have at last been arrested for criminal activity and, lately, war-crimes, the attacks upon non-Albanian national minorities and their expulsion from Kosovo, one must question the claim of Blair et al that this humanitarian war was a success, and ask whether further negotiations, mediation, etc, by the OSCE and others wouldnt have been preferable. If allowed, Miloevi could prove his case and put those who were behind the violence in Kosovo in the dock those pulling the strings. Time will tell whether he will be allowed to, as he now has to face charges concerning Bosnia-Hercegovina and Croatia, in spite of his having signed the Dayton Peace Accords. Miloevi is bound to raise this and go into his dealings with assorted statesmen from the international community, as well as the dossier of Croatian war crimes that the

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tribunal compiled but decided to take no action upon. It could all turn into a very embarrassing affair. Anyway it should be very interesting if the tribunal does ever finish dealing with these matters. Perhaps it will somehow find a way out of the potential embarrassment. At present the international community, in the shape of Bush and Blair, is busy fabricating the justification for another humanitarian war, those who were duped over Kosovo might rethink their support for imperialism and its local proxies at that time.

Louis Proyect

McCarthy Rides Again


Israel Divestment Activists are Charged with Anti-Semitism
DESPITE intense efforts to isolate Arab and Islamic peoples post-11 September, the Palestinian solidarity movement in the United States is now stronger than ever. But with every stride forward, powerful voices in the academy have tried to tarnish this movement as anti-Semitic. On 20 April 2002, tens of thousands of Arab-Americans marched side-by-side with progressives of all nationalities and religions, including many young Jews, in an anti-war demonstration called by Ramsey Clarks Answer coalition. According to the Washington Post, they chanted Free, Free Palestine, Stop the Occupation Now and We are all Palestinians Today. Capitalising on the success of this and similar local actions, a new movement is developing on college campuses for divestment from Israel. Modelled on the campaign against apartheid South Africa, it has met stiff resistance from college officials who support the state of Israel. In a statement of 7 November 2002 that appeared on the universitys website, Columbia President Lee C Bollinger termed a petition grotesque and offensive that had been circulated by campus divestment activists in which comparisons were made between Israel and apartheid South Africa. In April and May 2001, demonstrations at the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco State raised the spectre of anti-Semitism for the first time. At Berkeley, 1500 demonstrators led by Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) demanded that the school divest itself of stock in corporations that do business with Israel. Among the protesters was SJP and International Socialist Organization member Snehal Shingavi, an instructor at the university who teaches The Politics and Poetics of Palestinian Resistance. The course came under close scrutiny after Zionists learned that Shingavi urged conservative thinkers to avoid his course. They shamelessly labelled this as an attempt to exclude Jews. In an article in the New York Times on 16 May on the controversy, a clumsy amalgam was made between student protests, Shingavis course and anti-Semitism:

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Local Jewish groups consider the Berkeley course an example of what they see as a rising wave of anti-Israel sentiment and sometimes antiSemitism emerging from local campuses. In the last few months, two Orthodox Jews were beaten in Berkeley, and a cinderblock was thrown through the front window of the Jewish Hillel cultural center. The article did not mention that Shingavi himself is Jewish. At neighbouring San Francisco State, pro-Palestinian demonstrators confronted a Zionist rally on 7 May. Shortly after the event, Laurie Zoloth, the director of the Jewish studies programme at SF State, sent out a widely distributed e-mail that claimed that the demonstrators yelled out Hitler did not finish the job and other such taunts. Some Palestinian students claim that the verbal assault was a response to racist epithets directed at them. Unfortunately a leaflet distributed by the Muslim Student Association (MSA) on 8 April did contain an offensive image that Zionist activists seized upon. In the upper right-hand corner appeared a picture of a baby with the caption, Palestinian Children Meat Slaughtered According to Jewish Rites Under American License. Eventually, the MSA disavowed the leaflet and apologised to the campus community. While one should never make any concessions to anti-Semitic prejudice by Arab or Muslim students, it is important to take note of the steady stream of racist stereotyping on US television, radio and newspapers where jokes about towel-heads and camel jockeys occur daily. If such epithets were directed at them on the day of the rally, it is understandable but not excusable that they would respond in kind. In October, the Second National Conference of the Palestinian Solidarity Movement was held at the University of Michigan to plan strategy for a campaign to get American colleges to sell stocks they hold in companies that do business in Israel. Students from more than 70 colleges held workshops and listened to lectures on how to win support for a divestment campaign. Michigan graduate student and conference organiser Amenah I Ibrahim told the Chronicle of Higher Education on 25 October: Even though its still mostly Muslim and Arab students here, theyre starting to organise solely for this one particular issue. Thats a huge thing. These arent subcommittees anymore. These are whole student organisations. When asked at a news conference why Israel was being singled out in the divestment campaign, Ohio State University philosophy professor Joseph Levine responded that the criticism implied in the question is baseless. If you say you cant target one cause because there are all these others, its just a recipe for passivity, he said, and added that its not an embarrassment for Jews to target Israel. Jewish students stood outside the doors of the Palestinian Solidarity conference all day Saturday holding signs that read This Conference Supports Suicide Bombing and This is an Anti-Semitic Hate Conference, and chanting phrases such as Shame for inciting violence and Shame for supporting the killing of university students. Ora R Wise, a Jewish Ohio State junior and conference organiser, told the Chronicle: We categorically reject the accusations of anti-Semitism that are being tossed around as part of a desperate effort to discredit the movement. As Jews fighting for Palestinian liberation, we are struggling for Jewish
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emancipation from the reactionary, narrow, uncritical mentalities of those Jews who make it impossible. Notwithstanding these false charges of anti-Semitism, the one true persecution taking shape on college campuses seems directed more at the critics of Israel than her defenders a phenomenon Malcolm X once described as turning the victim into the criminal. A new kind of McCarthyism is taking shape, with pro-Palestinian professors and students suffering various forms of attacks, ranging from e-mail harassment to the threat of job loss. In order to facilitate these attacks, it is necessary to attach the label anti-Semitic to the victim since this charge has the effect of putting those labelled outside the realm of acceptable discourse. From his perch at Harvard University, President Lawrence Summers fired the opening salvo against campus critics of Israel on 17 September 2002. With the kind of talent for false amalgam that many such figures have mastered, Summers told those assembled for morning prayers at Memorial Church that anti-Semitism is on the march: There have been synagogue burnings, physical assaults on Jews, or the painting of swastikas on Jewish memorials in every country in Europe. Observers in many countries have pointed to the worst outbreak of attacks against the Jews since the Second World War. Summers has a long record of hostility to oppressed nationalities. Before taking the Harvard job, Summers served as chief economist for the World Bank, where he raised the rather Swiftian notion that justice could be served by encouraging polluters to set up factories in less developed countries, where their job-creating beneficence would be appreciated by the wheezing masses. He also made news by hauling esteemed African American professor Cornel West into his office and browbeating him for lack of scholarly production. After this public humiliation, the aggrieved West took a job at Princeton. On 7 October, Summers name appeared along with more than 300 other college presidents in a full-page ad in the form of a petition organised by the American Jewish Congress against the growing threat of anti-Semitism on campus. Without citing any specific incidents, the ad warned ominously about Jewish students receiving death threats. It also referred to property connected to Jewish organisations being defaced or destroyed. Posters and websites allegedly displaying libellous information or images were also cited. In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on 4 October, we learn about one incident the only mentioned in the entire article that prompted Columbia University Teachers College Arthur Levine to sign the petition. He claims that he discovered a graffiti on a mens-room wall that said: Lets kill the Jews. According to Levine: The best way Ive found to gauge the climate of a university is to look at the walls of its mens rooms. While I am no expert on the subject of graffiti, as a long-time user of the mens rooms at Teachers College, where I have occupied an office for about 10 years, I can assure the readers of New Interventions that no such graffiti exists. This should come as no surprise since the average student, who tends to be young and female, is training to be a kindergarten teacher rather than an antiSemitic militant. An article in the Chronicle on 18 October reported that some college presidents refused to sign the ad because it failed to mention threats made against Muslim and Arab students. Don M Randel, President of the University of Chicago told the

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journal: We are all virulently opposed to anti-Semitism, but some of what is going on is that that very proper sentiment is being politicised. James O Freedman, the former President of Dartmouth College, who was one of the petitions original circulators, admitted that he had received letters from a dozen college presidents who had refused to sign. Their complaint was that the ad was not broad enough. Although the ad was clever enough not to mention the state of Israel, the American Jewish Congress is quite open about what motivated it to circulate the petition. They understood that the ad would be widely perceived as a cudgel against campus critics of Israel, even if the question of Zionism remained beyond the margins. AJC official and ad initiator Kenneth Stern is quite explicit about the need to conflate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. In an article titled Why Campus AntiIsrael Activity Flunks Bigotry 101, he states, How many times have you heard Im not anti-Semitic, Im just anti-Zionist? But to be anti-Zionist is by definition to be anti-Semitic. If this august body of college presidents serves as soft cop to the developing Palestine solidarity movement, long-time anti-communist Daniel Pipes has stepped forward to volunteer his services as hard cop. At his www.campus-watch.org website, he maintains dossiers on pro-Palestinian professors, from well-known figures like Edward Said to junior professors like Berkeleys Snehal Shingavi. Fortunately, the American academy is in no mood to be cowed the way it was in the 1950s. Over 100 academics stepped forward to denounce these tactics of intimidation. Judith Butler, a comparative literature professor at Berkeley whose name is normally synonymous with incomprehensible post-modernist prose, spoke plainly and bluntly this time on behalf of the group. She wrote to Pipes, saying: I have recently learned that your organization is compiling dossiers on professors at US academic institutions who oppose the Israeli occupation and its brutality, actively support Palestinian rights for self-determination as well as a more informed and intelligent view of Islam than is currently represented in the US media. I would be enormously honored to be counted among those who actively hold these positions and would like to be included in the list of those who are struggling for justice. This has not been the first time in which charges of anti-Semitism have been used demagogically against progressives in the United States. During the 1980s and 1990s, liberals would argue that the Jew-baiting remarks of Nation of Islams Louis Farrakhan proved that anti-Semitism was a widespread problem in the black community. While one can easily accept that characters like Louis Farrakhan had animosity towards the Jews as a people, the truth is that blacks were less anti-Semitic on average than any other ethnic group in the USA. When there have been conflicts between Jews and blacks, it has been mostly around unequal power relationships rather than tribalism. The most widely publicised clash between Jews and blacks occurred in the Crown Heights neighbourhood in Brooklyn when African-American David Dinkins was mayor and after a car driven by a Hasidic Jew ran down a black child. Commentators attempting to dig beneath the surface often agreed that the Hasidic Jews enjoyed the lions share of subsidised housing and other benefits. In addition, Jewish liberals and neo-conservatives have often fought against affirmative action on the grounds that it was a kind of reverse discrimination. When
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you mix together these sorts of grievances, which are fundamentally rooted in class rather than ethnicity, with a tendency on the part of black progressives to identify politically with the Palestinian people, there is naturally a tendency for Zionist ideologues and Jewish rightists virtually the same constituency to libel their opponents as anti-Semitic. The new student movement against the Zionist state is now running into the same propaganda machine, which has simply shifted its emphasis. Whether it will be successful is another story altogether. In the 1960s, most Jewish youth who marched against the war in Vietnam, but who resisted becoming full-fledged revolutionaries, continued to believe in the myths of a progressive Israel. They were of an age when memories of the Holocaust were far more vivid and when institutions like the kibbutz were far more credible. That is no longer the case. Perhaps the Zionist establishment in the USA has much more to contend with than they ever could have dreamed if the example of the aforementioned Ora R Wise is at all typical. On 1 December, the Columbus Dispatch revealed that her father was Rabbi Irvin Wise, who heads Adath Israel Congregation, a Conservative synagogue in Cincinnati. She told the newspaper: My parents have always supported my activism, but when it comes to this they cant come with me on this one. Furthermore, she has not forsaken the Judaism she was raised in: We have such a rich, rich Jewish life together, but I cant share about 90 per cent of what Im doing in my own life. With such students serving as the backbone of the emerging divestment movement, it is no wonder that no effort is being spared to defame and destroy it. Web resources Columbia President William Bollingers statement on divestment from Israel: http://www.columbia.edu /cu/president/israel.html Harvard President Lawrence Summers statement on campus anti-Semitism: http://www.president. harvard.edu/speeches/2002/morningprayers.html American Jewish Congress: http://www.ajc.org/ San Francisco State website material on Palestinian protests: http://www.sfsu.edu/~news/sfsuresp.htm Students Allied for Freedom and Equality website: http://www.studentsallied.com/home.html Daniel Pipes website: http://www.campus-watch.org/

Ur Shlonsky

Zionist Ideology, Non-Jews and Israel


ISRAEL Shahak once remarked that for at least the last 200 years, Jews have demanded equal rights in every country in which they have lived with the

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remarkable exception of Israel, the Jewish state.1 Israel has always founded its institutions on the denial of equality to non-Jews. From the beginning, a good half a century before 1948 when the state of Israel was established, Zionist ideology has held as a fundamental principle to a strict opposition to equality for non-Jews. The principle of inequality for non-Jews requires, first of all, that the relevant population groups be defined. It is therefore not surprising that the dichotomy of Jew/non-Jew cuts across nearly all the social, demographic, juridical and cultural institutions of Israeli life. Consider, as an instructive example, how the requirement of this opposition affects the tables of vital statistics in the Israeli Annual Statistical Abstract.2 Vital statistics include demographic information on such matters as population growth, the regional distribution of the population, immigration, household size, etc. The figures are, in general, cross-classified by familiar parameters such as sex and age. However, the cross-classification into religious categories in virtually every table is quite striking.3 Every modern country is, of course, concerned with demographic data, and every country has a national statistical office that collects data on births, deaths, immigration, etc. What is unique in the case of Israel, however, is the omnipresence of religious categories.4 In 1995, the Israeli statistical bureau introduced the parameter population group, a category with two values: Jews and Others and Arabs. The former includes Jews, non-Arab Christians (many immigrants from the former Soviet Union fall into this sub-category) and those unclassified by religion, and the latter includes Moslems, Arab Christians and Druze. Careful reading of the definitions that come along with these categories reveals the emergence, for the first time in Israeli history, of an ethnic definition of Jews (Arabs were always defined ethnically).5 We find a troubling parallel between the Israeli preoccupation with demographic data on ethnicity and religion and that of Rwanda before the ethnic cleansing of 1994, as described by Alison Des Forges. Des Forges argues that the existence of relatively precise data on the demographic distribution of Tutsis was a

1. 2. 3.

4. 5.

Israel Shahak, Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years, Pluto Press, 1994. Statistical Abstract of Israel, 2000. Religious affiliation is an imposed status in Israel and never a matter of personal choice. All identity cards issued to residents include a religious affiliation (called nationality), which is extremely difficult to challenge legally. Judaism differs from Islam or Christianity, however, in that it is also a racial category, like skin colour, although, unlike skin colour, its transmission is not genetic but metaphysical. Compare the classification categories used in the United Kingdom (including Northern Ireland) census, Population and Vital Statistics by Area of Usual Residence in the United Kingdom, 2000. Starting with the 1995 Census, due to the arrival of many immigrants not listed as Jews in the Ministry of the Interior, the definitions of religion and population group were altered in the population estimates tables. The Christian group was divided in two Arab Christians and Other Christians, according to several criteria: locality of residence, nationality and country of birth. An Arab Christian is defined as anyone living in an Arab Locality or anyone who lives in another locality, but is listed as having an Arab nationality in the Ministry of the Interior. If these details were missing, whoever was born in an Arab country or in Israel, but to a father born in an Arab country, was included in the Arab Christians group. The rest of the Christians are defined as Other Christians (not Arabs). Another group presented separately since 1995 is the group unclassified by religion in the Ministry of the Interior. The persons in this group are usually family members of Jewish immigrants, as is usually the case with other Christians.

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factor that facilitated the most rapid genocide in modern history.6 One is also led to think of the Wannsee protocols, recently studied by William Selzer.7 These minutes of the infamous Nazi conference held in Berlin in January 1942, brought to light during the postwar Nuremberg trials, contained a table detailing the number of Jews in each of the 35 European countries. The table was accompanied by detailed explanations on the impact that differences between each countrys definition of Jew would have on the count. What is the purpose of counterposing Jew to non-Jew? In the first place, it serves as the basis of a broad discriminatory legislation. For instance, the Israeli Land Authority, which is the executive organ of the Jewish National Fund, forbids the sale of land under its control (92 per cent of Israels land belong to the Jewish National Fund) to non-Jews. Constraints of the same order are imposed on nonJewish access to water for agriculture, and to eligibility for government financial assistance. In effect, a large part of the latter are granted solely to citizens who have performed their military service, or to those who would have performed it had they not been exempt as Orthodox Jews.8 In addition, when it comes to naturalisation, Israel practises the jus sanguinus, where blood or ethnicity is the defining elements. Thus, automatic Israeli citizenship is granted to Jews and Other Christians (see note 5), but not to non-Jews. It is precisely this non-territorial concept of citizenship that underpinned the exclusion of Jews in pre-modern Europe. By its very nature, wrote the commentator Aharon Barnea in Haaretz on 11 April 1991, such a version of nationality engenders intolerance toward foreigners, giving rise to the idea that religious or ethnic groups living in such a country cannot be integrated into the spirit or the constitutive substance of the country, even if their ancestors lived there for centuries. Barnea concludes his expos by stating that the character of the state of Israel which wishes to be democratic on the one hand, and on the other hand to be the state of the Jewish people gives rise to a contradiction which can only end in calamity.9 The principal and explicit aim of the Zionist programme and practice is to increase the number of Jews in Eretz Israel and shrink the number of non-Jews, that is, the Arabs living there. The idea of expelling the Palestinians, called transfer in
6. 7. 8. Alison Des Forges, No Witness Shall Survive: The Genocide in Rwanda, Human Rights Watch, International Federation of Leagues of Rights of Man, Karthala, 1999. William Seltzer, Population Statistics, the Holocaust and the Nuremberg Trials, Population and Development Review, Volume 24, no 3, 1998. A recent example of apartheid-style discrimination can be found in a Zionist Council proposal to cut the National Insurance Institutes child allowances, starting from the fifth child, in order to limit the birth rate. Lili Galili comments in her A Jewish Demographic State: As it is clear to everyone that the ultra-Orthodox who have large families will find some arrangement, especially in the age of the demographic struggle, this is obviously an attempt to limit the birth rate in the Arab sector. (Haaretz, 28 June 2002) Galili writes: The new interest in demography touches the core of the states being its definition as a Jewish state. For the first time in the history of public discourse here, even the most devout leftists are being required to confront their inner truth. It is no longer possible to seek refuge in banal statements like there is no contradiction between a Jewish and a democratic state, or in hollow slogans about coexistence. Anyone who clings to the concept of a Jewish state cannot ignore the demographic figures laid out in black and white in dozens of publications on the subject. The character of the state, its identity card, now depends on the definitions derived from these figures. The fact that the vast majority of Jewish citizens cling to the definition of Israel as a Jewish state leaves no way out. (Haaretz, 28 June 2002)

9.

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Israeli political language, has been woven into Zionist discourse from its early beginnings. Recently, however, it has fully entered public debate. There is a hardcore or aggressive version of transfer, like that of ex-Minister Avigdor Lieberman. In the tradition of Orthodox Rabbi Meir Kahane, Lieberman proposed the physical expulsion of the Palestinians beyond the frontiers of Greater Israel, stretching from Jordan to the Mediterranean, if they refuse to sign a loyalty oath to Israel as a Jewish state. Then there is a soft-core version called voluntary transfer proposed by the recently-assassinated Rehavam Zeevi. Finally, one comes across Minister Efi Eitams transfer under necessity. Questioned on his conception of the voluntary transfer of the Palestinians, Minister of Tourism Rabbi Benny Eylon compared the voluntary aspect of transfer with that of a Jewish husband who refuses to grant a divorce to his wife. Since the rabbinical court doesnt have the authority to untie a marriage without the husbands consent, the religious authority must use force: excommunicate the obstinate husband, beat him, and imprison him until he voluntarily repudiates his wife. Thats the way to make the Palestinians leave voluntarily, he explained. The programme of the Likud-Labor government presently in power is to carry the Zionist enterprise to its conclusion by transforming all of Eretz Israel into a Jewish state with a minimum of non-Jewish inhabitants. The public debate centres on what minimum means, in left Labor Party-dominated research institutions, the consensus is that a proportion of eight to two in the favour of Jews is something we can live with. The consensual view of the political majority in Israel and that of the Sharon government was summarised succinctly by Israeli peace activist Uri Avneri: The 1948 war isnt over: only 78 per cent of Palestine has been liberated. In effect, Shahak reminds us, the term used in Hebrew isnt liberate mechuxrar but redeem. The Hebrew word for redemption is geula. It is borrowed from Jewish theology where it refers to redemption of the individual soul and of the Jewish people, which will be achieved with the arrival of the Messiah, once Jews govern the entire world. According to Zionist doctrine, redemption of the land simply means that if a morsel of land is possessed collectively or individually by Jews, it is redeemed. The 1948 war left 22 per cent of the land in non-Jewish hands, and the nations essential task now is to redeem that part of Eretz Israel. A window of opportunity recently opened. Russia and Europe have effectively been eliminated as world powers, and the single remaining power, America, provides Israel with virtually unlimited political, economic and military support. It can be safely assumed according to Israeli analysts, that this support will continue even if some extreme measures are deployed. Besides, experience shows that even if some American government circles are occasionally troubled by Israeli actions, they end up keeping quiet. This seems to be a fairly precise evaluation of American policy. Three conditions must be satisfied in order to guarantee the success of Israels programme. The Palestinian resistance must be broken. Public support must be ensured, and the active participation by at least a section of Israeli society needs to be counted on operationally. International criticism must be silenced. In regard to the first condition, Avneri identifies four means. Continuous military operations. The entire army must be involved in

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operations targeting the whole of Palestinian society. No distinction should be made between the movements and the political parties. Hamas, Fatah, etc, should all be equally attacked. The civilian population must be terrorised, assuring maximum destruction of property and cultural treasures. Massive expulsions like in 1948 can only be carried out under exceptional conditions, that is to say, war. Action should therefore be taken to destabilise the regimes and societies of the region, to create conditions for a much wider war. In parallel, the daily life of the Palestinians must be rendered unbearable: they should be locked up in the cities and towns, prevented from exercising normal economic life, cut off from workplaces, schools and hospitals. This will encourage immigration, and will weaken the resistance to future expulsions. The Palestinian political class must be eliminated, by direct assassinations, by detentions, or by expulsions. Finally, it is necessary to continue and expand the settlement activity and redemption of land. After all, was it not Nobel Prize winner Yitzhak Rabin, who proclaimed that every Jew has an inalienable right to live anywhere in Eretz Israel? It is patently clear that such sociocide can only increase the terrorists motivation for launching suicide attacks. These should be encouraged. Terrorism poses no threat to the Israeli state, its army or its institutions, and constitutes an investment with high returns. Arbitrary violence against civil society sows immense panic, feeds fear and hatred of the Arabs. It forms a central ingredient in the construction of an image of Israelis and Jews as persecuted victims. We are besieged. Were again fighting a battle of life and death, proclaims Avi Shavit in an article in Haaretz.10 In short, the human bombs in the cafes and buses assure ever broader and deeper support for a project of ethnic cleansing. Israeli civil society is authorised and encouraged to use force that becomes justified as a means of self-defence. All the elements are put in place for what Des Forges, in another context, called the genocidal campaign. Further, continued kamikaze actions and the media coverage that they elicit furnish a central element in the struggle to rally world public opinion to the Zionist cause. Finally, let us consider the Israeli strategy for facing up to the indignation its programme provokes in the West. One of the principal weapons of the Zionist movement for silencing growing criticism consists of mobilising the Jewish communities. In this context it becomes necessary to utilise, and in the long run to encourage, the hatred of Jews in Europe and elsewhere in order to create Jewish solidarity with the Zionist project. And so the self-proclaimed leadership of these communities has as an essential task: to convey and sustain a Jewish identity centred on total identification with Israel, and to denigrate and marginalise all other forms of Jewish identity. One might quote in this regard the recent words of Alfred Donath, President of the Swiss Federation of Jewish communities: The only real ally of Israel is the Jewish people. We must sustain it and its democratically elected leaders, whoever they may be, with their qualities and their faults, their firmness and their errors, their bravery and their faux pas. Whether we agree with their politics or whether we do not understand all the decisions of government. Today it is indecent to mingle
10. Put an End to the Oslo Ecstasy!, Le Courrier International, 19 October 2000.

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our voices with those of its detractors.11 The official Jewish community thus marginalises and casts aside an entire tradition of a European minority, very involved in the construction of the culture of modern secular Europe at least since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, a universalistic, working-class, socialist tradition but also a language, a literature and a community network which was at the same time both European and Jewish. A leader of the Neturei Karta community, ultra-orthodox but anti-Zionist, Rabbi Leibele Weisfisch, who died about 10 years ago, once said to me: Nazism destroyed Judaism physically, Zionism destroyed it spiritually. By calling on all Jews to form a bloc behind Israel, by identifying the whole Diaspora with the Jewish state and all Jews with Zionism, the Zionists add to the never totally defeated classic anti-Semitism a new anti-Semitism, carefully constructed and nourished by the amalgam of Jew Zionist. As Daniel Bensad says so well: After having been the socialism of imbeciles, anti-Semitism could become the anti-imperialism of imbeciles.

Roni Ben Efrat

Sowing the Whirlwind


Israel, America and the Coming War
From Challenge, no 76, November-December 2002. Challenge is a bi-monthly leftist magazine focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict within a global context. Published in Jaffa by Arabs and Jews, it features political analysis, investigative reporting, interviews, eye-witness reports, gender studies arts, and more. *** PRESIDENT George W Bush gets wall-to-wall support in Israel for his impending war against Iraq. Left and right exalt him. The press beats the drum. Doves on the Palestinian issue become hawks on the question of Iraq. Among the wider Israeli public, 40 per cent support a nuclear response if Iraq uses chemical or biological weapons against them, even if these pose no real threat to the existence of the state. Israelis line up obediently to get their gas masks. The benefits of war seem so obvious that not a single discussion has taken place in either the Knesset or the Cabinet. When war comes, the country most likely to feel the wrath of Iraq will be Israel. Yet Israelis support Bushs war even more than Americans do. This fact stands out all the more when we note that in the rest of the world, including America, the topic occasions heated debate. German Chancellor Gerhard Schrder won re-election because of his staunch stand against the war on Iraq. At the time of this writing, in the UN Security Council, France and Russia threaten to veto an American resolution that would authorise an immediate war if Iraq impedes the weapons inspectors. Half of the American population supports the war, but that is a drop of 17 per
11. See www.commentaires.com/documents/Pages/discdonath.htm.

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cent since June. On 26 October, a coalition called Answer organised 150 000 Americans in a march against the war. In London on 28 September, 350 000 protested. (According to the Guardian, only a third of the British support the war.) In Italy, 1.5 million demonstrated against the pro-war stance (and the economic policies) of the Berlusconi government. What about Israels opposition? One hears not a peep. Yossi Sarid, its parliamentary leader, gave a speech on 14 October at the opening of the Knessets winter session. He said nothing of either Iraq or the Palestinians. He confined his talk to the poverty in Israel. He spoke of a boy who received lunch at school. The teacher noticed a lump in his pocket, and it turned out to be a chicken drumstick, which the boy was saving for his mother. This is surely a legitimate story, but Sarid omitted the context: Israels deepening social disaster is largely a result of its worsening political entanglement, both with the Palestinians and with the wider Arab world. The war against Iraq will entangle it further. A Messianic Junta Israel is traditionally pro-American. This is nothing new. Israelis must ask themselves, however, whether the Bush Administration deserves the same fidelity as its predecessors. The answer is a resounding No!. The world stands today before a new-old phenomenon, whose ramifications extend far beyond the American-Iraqi conflict. After dubious elections, the White House has been taken over by a rightwing junta, buttressed by 70 million Christian fundamentalists who link their destiny to Zion. This messianic concept finds its secular match in the interpretation of history held by the people surrounding Bush: Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and their subordinates, Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Perle. In the Reagan era, as these people see it, a Republican administration defeated the evil empire, leaving America as the only superpower. Bush Senior exploited the new situation, mounting a successful world-wide offensive against Iraq. Then came a falling off. Because of economic trifles, Americans elected Bill Clinton. Instead of leading the nation towards its manifest destiny as world ruler, Clinton sought peace dividends. The countrys defences went to seed. At last, however, the Reagan-Bush team is back. It will lead the US to global hegemony. This notion is inscribed in a lengthy document entitled Rebuilding Americas Defenses. It was published in September 2000, prior to the American presidential election, by a conservative group that calls itself The Project for the New American Century. Its authors say: In broad terms, we saw the project as building upon the defense strategy outlined by the Cheney Defense Department in the waning days of the Bush Administration. The Defense Policy Guidance (DPG) drafted in the early months of 1992 provided a blueprint for maintaining US preeminence, precluding the rise of a great power rival, and shaping the international security order in line with American principles and interests. Rebuilding Americas Defenses has been the basis for the foreign and defence policy of George W Bush. Its main thrust is an expansion of American military might, such that the US will remain unchallenged as the worlds sole superpower. To that end, it holds, America must increase defence spending, develop nuclear power and resume

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nuclear testing. It advocates cancellation of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, which Clinton signed. Its influence was already apparent during the first year of the new Bush Administration, which blocked international arms control treaties. Rebuilding Americas Defenses was written before the attacks of 11 September 2001. These gave a new urgency to Americas drive for global control, as reflected in a more recent document, The National Security Strategy of the United States, published by the Bush Administration on 20 September 2002. The new National Security document contains what has come to be known as the Bush Doctrine: The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology. America must prove its determination to act. Our immediate focus will be those terrorist organizations of global reach and any terrorist or state sponsor of terrorism which attempts to gain or use weapons of mass destruction While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of selfdefense by acting pre-emptively. And later: For centuries, international law recognized that nations need not suffer an attack before they can lawfully take action to defend themselves against forces that present an imminent danger of attack We must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of todays adversaries. The consequence is clear: Americans will not be safe until their Uncle Sam becomes the worlds Big Brother. In the New York Review of Books on 26 September, Frances Fitzgerald points out that the senior Bush, unlike his son, knew his way around in foreign affairs. Among George Seniors top advisors, Defense Secretary Cheney was a hawkish minority of one. In the new White House, the junior Bush depends completely on his advisors. Here VP Cheney is joined by his old friend and mentor, right-winger Donald Rumsfeld, who took Paul Wolfowitz, co-author of the DPG, as his deputy. To the latters former Pentagon position, Rumsfeld appointed Douglas Feith, a favourite of Richard Perle, who was a leading hawk in the Reagan Administration. (Perle today advises the Pentagon.) Thus the war-mongering minority from the time of the elder Bush is today the main advisory group around his ignorant son. *** There is an Israeli connection. In 1996, according to Fitzgerald, Perle and Feith wrote a document advising Benjamin Netanyahu, Israels new prime minister, to make a clean break with the Oslo peace process and renew direct Israeli control over the West Bank and Gaza. When Netanyahu declined to accept this counsel, Feith published it in a piece of his own. The price in blood would be high, he wrote, but it would be a necessary form of detoxification the only way out of Oslos web. This advice from Perle and Feith should interest Oslo supporters on Israels left who back the war against Iraq in the fond belief that after his victory, while imposing new order in the Middle East, Bush will compel Israel to withdraw from the Occupied Territories. The fact is, however: the same advisors who today lead the way

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to Baghdad fervently advocate a permanent Israeli conquest of the West Bank and Gaza. *** Rebuilding Americas Defenses goes a long way towards solving the mystery as to why Bush Junior is so keen on fighting Iraq: Indeed, the United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence [sic] in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein. The American bases are not in the Gulf, then, in order to protect the neighbours of Saddam Hussein. From an American perspective, the value of such bases would endure even should Saddam pass from the scene. Over the long term, Iran may well prove as large a threat to US interests in the Gulf as Iraq has. And even should US-Iranian relations improve, retaining forward-based forces in the region would still be an essential element in US security strategy given the longstanding American interests in the region. We should not, then, expect to see a strong connection between the findings of the arms inspectors and Bushs decision to deploy for war. The candour of this document is unusual, but what it reveals is frightening. In its quest to dominate, America is ready to go it alone, dragging us all towards chaos. No less alarming is the reaction in Israel, where the vast majority ingests with relish all the messianic cant about a war between Good and Evil. The Cheerleaders The role of Israels press in war-mongering accounts for the fact that no alternative discussion is taking place. Even liberal Haaretz, which prides itself on its reputation as the newspaper of the thinking person, entitled its main editorial on 11 September 2002 Confronting the Axis of Evil. Without qualification, this piece connects the disaster that befell America with the coming war against Iraq: And so, a year later, the US is preparing to attack Iraq within the context of the same war-to-the-finish [milhemet hurmah, a biblical expression, applied here to the war against terrorism RBE]. For the challenge, and the war, are not limited to the enclaves of the terrorist organisations, ramified and dangerous though they be. The ambitious goal that President Bush has set for himself, and rightly so, is to smash the same force of evil that toppled the Twin Towers in New York and, in its various permutations, has foisted war upon the life of the whole free world. After mentioning Pearl Harbor, the editorial goes on: America understood [in 1941] that the war was not just with Japan, but with the entire axis of evil of that time. The lucidity of that moment, the determination, the sacrifice and the leadership displayed by America in those years are what saved our civilisation.
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While Haaretz rewrote history, Yediot Aharonot was not to be left behind. In three of its main editorials (which the Yediot editors sign), Sever Plotzker lashed out against opponents of the war throughout the world. Here is an example, on 14 October: By this time it must be clear to all: the fascistic, homicidal, terrorist Islam, nourished by fanatic religious inspiration but also by the support of dictatorial regimes like Saddam Husseins, constitutes a direct threat to the peace, prosperity and progress of the entire civilised world Demonstrators opposing the war against Saddam Hussein must finally understand that they, in effect, are demonstrating for the terrorist attack in Bali, for the attack in Tel Aviv, for the attack in Helsinki and for the attack that will strike in their own backyards. This crusader, be it noted, is a former editor of al-Hamishmar, a socialist daily that closed as a result of privatisation. The days leading up to the war with Iraq will go down in history if anyone is still here to write it as among the shallower moments of Israels press. Israel Waits for the Day After Behind the blind Israeli adulation for America lies a worldview. The Gulf War of 1991 snuffed out what was left of the first Intifada, together with the Palestinian national movement as expressed in the historical PLO. Many Palestinian guerrillas became technocrats. Those who continued in uniform did so in the Palestinian Authority, under the supervision of the CIA. In the Oslo years (1993-2000), however, as conditions in the Territories worsened, bitterness grew in the Palestinian street against both Israel and the PA. The explosion finally occurred in the form of a second Intifada, which quickly spun out of control. Today, both the left and the right in Israel believe that a new defeat for Saddam Hussein will have an effect like that of the first, subduing the new Intifada. There are two further wrinkles in this theory. The simpler sees the military campaign to topple Saddam Hussein in tandem with Israels project of toppling Yasser Arafat. The second, more serious assessment comes from figures in Israels military intelligence. They believe that Israel can cope by itself with Palestinian terrorism, but that in order to reach a political solution, there is need for a major strategic change in the Middle East. Such change must come from outside. Only America can bend the region in accordance with Israels geopolitical needs. This position is often voiced in the press. For example: Since we have been asked [by Bush RBE] to keep clear of the Iraqi issue, the governments real task must be to concentrate on the advantage to be reaped the day after. (Yael Gvirtz, Editorial, Yediot Aharonot, 7 October) Aluf Benn alludes to the same position in Haaretz on 10 October: One can also read the Israeli message thus: the crisis in Iraq provides a good opportunity to give the Palestinians the coup de grce, which will end the Intifada and improve Israels opening position in the negotiations that will get underway after the removal of Saddam. Since Israel wants to eat the grapes, it wont argue with the watchman. In his recent visit to the US, Sharon promised to behave in such a way as to help Bush market himself in the Arab world, while Bush helped Sharon to market himself in

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international business and banking circles, at a time when Israels credit rating is under scrutiny. Dangerous Expectations The hope that the installation of a puppet regime in Iraq will pave the way for a corresponding puppet regime in the Occupied Territories is without foundation. Attempts to change or destabilise regimes have long been part of American policy. Far from succeeding, they have led to the very chaos (in South-East Asia, in Latin America, in the Middle East) of which the Bush Administration now complains. Israel has met with similar failure in its own attempts to appoint Arab leaders. Here are two examples. The Lebanon Adventure: In 1982, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, Menahem Begin was Israels PM. Ariel Sharon, then Defense Minister, undertook a grandiose campaign to change the political map of the Middle East, beginning with Lebanon. The idea was to eliminate the PLO as a force in that country, so that the Christian militia leader Bashir Gemayal could take control and get the Lebanese Parliament to elect him president. Gemayal was then supposed to repay his debt to Israel by making peace. Moreover, having defeated Arafat in Lebanon, Israel would be free to exert its will in the demoralised West Bank and Gaza. According to historian Howard Sachar, Sharon also intended to unseat King Hussein, turn Jordan into the Palestinian state, and annex the Occupied Territories (Howard M Sachar, A History of Israel, Volume 2, New York, 1987, p172). In fact, Sharons army did oust the PLO from Beirut, and Bashir Gemayal was elected President on 23 August. A few weeks later he was assassinated. Chaos erupted. Sharon instructed his chief-of-staff to restore order and allow the Christian Phalangists into the Palestinian refugee camps. The result was the massacres in Sabra and Shatila. At this point, the Americans returned to Lebanon, also with the aim of restoring order but a suicide attack killed 241 marines in October 1983. The Americans pulled out, and Israels army scurried south. What remained of Sharons sweeping plan was a narrow security zone beyond Israels northern border. This zone, in turn, cost hundreds of Israeli and thousands of Lebanese lives, until PM Ehud Barak vacated it two years ago. Lebanon did not become the Christian democracy of which Begin, Sharon and (at one point) Ronald Reagan had dreamed. Israels invasion resulted, indeed, in the ousting of the PLO, but also in death and destruction, in the fragmenting of its own society, in its lasting discredit throughout the world, in the rise of the Hezbollah, and in the birth of a new guerrilla tactic: suicide bombing. The Oslo Adventure: After the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon, the main centre of Palestinian resistance shifted to the Occupied Territories. The result was the first Intifada in 1987. Israel responded with a more sophisticated kind of Occupation. In the 1970s and 1980s, it had tried without success to install collaborators as leaders (the so-called Village Leagues). The new idea was to transform the PLO itself into a subcontractor of Israeli control. The combination of Israels policies and those of its creature, the corrupt Palestinian Authority, led to the chaos of Intifada II. The Labor Party, which had placed all its chips on Oslo, has found itself since October 2000 sans partner, sans agenda. Having lost all that distinguished it, Labor joined the Likud, ostensibly in an attempt to put out the fire. (After 20 months, the partnership has broken.) The Intifada also sent Israels economy into a nosedive, making it once again an

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American charity case. This time around, though, America itself is immersed in an economic crisis. William Greider writes in The Nation on 13 September 2002: The US economys net foreign indebtedness the accumulation of two decades of running larger and larger trade deficits will reach nearly 25 per cent of US GDP this year, or roughly $2.5 trillion. Fifteen years ago, it was zeroThe specter of Americas deepening weakness seems counterintuitive to what people see and experience in a time of apparent continuing prosperity But the quicksand is real. We are already in up to our knees. The US of Gulf War II will be different from that of Gulf War I. Ten years ago, hope abounded in Wall Street that the markets of the world would open before American corporations; the dividends of the Soviet collapse would be theirs for the reaping. Instead, the crumbling Twin Towers have shaken America. Where the war with Iraq is concerned, Europe defies her, the Third World defies her, anyone in his right mind defies her. Washington, in turn, feels betrayed. Despite the fall of communism, peace and prosperity have failed to arrive. Only little Israel stands firmly by her side, government and people alike. After two years of suicide bombings, Israelis are resolute in their determination not to see the fact that rage breeds chaos. Now they are ready, right and left, to support a crusade whose result will be an exponential increase in that rage. Those who sow the wind will reap the whirlwind. But those who sow the whirlwind what will they reap? *** The combination of military power and economic crisis is dangerous. It tempts the mighty to solve economic problems by military means. This is the mixture that not long ago engendered Fascism. It brought a holocaust upon humanity. We are again at such an intersection. The question is not Can the world live with Saddam Hussein?; the question is rather Can the world live with George W Bush?. The disappearance of the socialist camp is felt today more than ever. Those who stopped Hitler were not chiefly (with due respect to Haaretz) the Americans, but the Soviets at Stalingrad. The Soviets prevented America from invading Cuba. They mitigated poverty throughout the world. With the Soviet collapse, the worlds working class and the forces of peace have undergone a major setback. They have paid a grievous price because the socialist endeavour went awry. The Soviet Union failed because its leaders excluded the people from decision-making. They failed to build socialism in the only way it can be built: democratically. They failed, in short, to keep up the spirit of the revolution. We should view this experiment, however, not as the last of its kind, but as the first. A mass movement has arisen, in recent years, against globalisation. Much hope has been placed in it, but in the face of impending war, it does not rise to the occasion. A key reason for this failure is the movements abhorrence of political parties. Eschewing permanent organisations, it cannot establish itself as an alternative to the existing global order. It cannot seize power and initiate policy change. In the present circumstances, when the other side is organised in corporations, parties and regimes, protests that merely react to events are a luxury we can ill afford. We cannot count on Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schrder, who took part just a

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few years ago in the attack on Yugoslavia. Nor can we count on Vladimir Putin, who has his own ambitions. The immediate need is indeed reactive: to put a stop to White House megalomania. In the long run, though, we must deny the capitalists the means of dragging us into war. We must organise our protest around a socialist agenda.

Paul Flewers

The Evil of Banality


Martin Amis Discovers Josef Stalin
THE late comedian Tony Hancock would sometimes ponder on the ways of the cosmos, then ask his pals if it was all a joke. This hackneyed phrase, his biographer tells us, was declared as if the lad himself was making a revolutionary suggestion. Now whilst it seems a long way from 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam, all those years ago to the rarefied world of British literature of today which the novelist Martin Amis inhabits, history does have a way of repeating itself. The problem with artistic johnnies is that rather too many of them have a tendency noisily to vouchsafe something which they believe to be earth-shatteringly original, whereas all they have actually uttered is a commonplace banality. This has recently been proved in an almost chemically pure fashion by Mr Amis in his latest book, Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million (Jonathan Cape, London, 2002). Amis, so it seems, has just discovered that the Josef Stalin whom his father Kingsley once worshipped was in fact not a nice man at all. Why has Amis waited until now to unleash his brilliant discovery upon an unsuspecting public? He has had plenty of time to do this before. Its been nearly 50 years since Amis pre mutated from a Stalin-worshipper into a conservative saloonbar bore or, in Richard Ingrams immortal words, a drink-sodden old bigot who hung around with Sovietologists like Robert Conquest (who, it must be said, does have the distinct advantage of knowing what he is talking about), so one would have expected Amis fils to have grown up with some idea of what Uncle Joe was about. He rabbits on in the books conclusion about his dad, and provides a moving account of the death of his sister this latter bit, by the way, is the only place where the tone of forced indignation that pervades this book is replaced by a sense of genuine human feeling but these diversions pointedly fail to shed light upon his reasons for lumbering upon us at this particular juncture a long and shop-worn compendium of the sins of Bolshevism. Perhaps the muse just grabbed our Martin one fine day for no particular purpose. I dont know, but whatever the reason for his unexpected foray into the field of history, what Amis has produced is an utterly unoriginal work, nothing absolutely nothing of which hasnt been written before. Many of the ideas expressed in it are tired retreads of the hoary old saws of anti-communism that were in common circulation long before his birth. Most of the details are lifted straight from the juiciest bits of the works of Conquest, Solzhenitsyn, Richard Pipes and Dmitri Volkogonov, or paraphrased at the least. He blithely retails Volkogonovs

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comments about Stalins Foundations of Leninism that stripped of quotations the book would contain little more than punctuation marks (p118) without recognising that the same could be said about his own work. We shall see that not a few of Amis criticisms, or his citing of others criticisms, apply with some accuracy to himself. Kicking an Open Door Amis is kicking at an open door; indeed, a door that has long fallen off its hinges and now lies forgotten and decaying in the corner. Who, beyond the tiny gaggle of disturbed individuals of the Stalin Society, holds an unblemished view of the Stalin period? Amis does set his sights wider than Stalin, and he aims a few blows at Bolshevism in general, and at Trotsky in particular, not least in the petulant rant at his pal Christopher Hitchens, a thoroughly peevish piece that descends into billingsgate, which is pretty rich from someone who condemns Lenin for his foulmouthed tantrums. But once again, hes kicking at an open door, as similar condemnations of the Bolsheviks appeared practically before the cannon on the Aurora had the chance to cool down, and have been published on a regular basis ever since. And although Amis kick at Hitchens offended the latters amour propre, this too is wasted energy, as the latter is hurtling so rapidly from any commitment to socialism disappointed at the failure of the working class so far to transform society, he now looks to the corrupt war-monger George W Bush to save the world that his pals intended boot in the backside is effectively a back-handed compliment that I imagine Hitchens will be able to appreciate when he finally lines up with his ghastly little brother, Tory Boy Peter. Exactly who Amis aims to influence is hard to tell, considering that the more literary-minded left-wingers to whom Ive spoken have long passed considering Amis a writer of any significance and worthy of their attention, and those of us who view Bolshevism as a positive factor in world politics have sparred with far more profound and serious critics than this featherweight, so hes hardly going to make us think again. Weve had our run-ins with various organ-grinders, so were not going to be scared off by the monkey. If anyone claims to have been converted by Amis book to the cause of anti-communism, such a declaration will almost certainly be met with brays of ill-mannered laughter than with solemn words of approbation. I suspect that most of those who buy, or used to buy, his novels are not exactly the sort of folk who would be greatly interested in the subject matter of Koba the Dread, and those who are would know where to go for the serious commentators works. Seeing that Koba the Dread sports a bibliography of sorts, an index and references (well, a scattering of references), and that many quotations in the book are peppered with unnecessary and ugly interpolated letters, words and phrases, it is possible that Amis is aiming at the academic market, or at least trying to produce a work that hopefully could be placed in the history section of bookshops. Nevertheless, despite the declining standards in Britains higher education sector, it is most unlikely that this book will get on the reading lists of history courses at the most bedraggled polytechnic, let alone at more prestigious establishments, which, despite all the obstructions placed in their way these days, still expect some intellectual rigour on the part of both staff and students. Or is it that Amis is trying, consciously or otherwise, to follow his dad? He is now more-or-less the same age as Amis pre when the latter renounced his allegiance to Stalinism. Although Amis fils declares that he was always some sort of congenital

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anti-communist, and it is true that he only dabbled with left-wing politics, perhaps there is the vague but worrying thought in his head that had he been around during the 1930s he too would have boarded the pro-Soviet bandwagon. He is, after all, very similar in pedigree to the many bright young things of the Red Decade who bowed their head reverently at the mention of Stalins name, and then spent much of their later life loudly renouncing and denouncing their youthful follies. To follow suit at this point in time is a bit strange, particularly when you didnt fall for the original problem in the first place, but writing Koba the Dread could, I guess, act as an insurance against what might have been. The sheer lack of originality of this book is not its worst aspect, nor is the gross name-dropping Solzhenitsyn, Conquest, Tibor Szamuely, indeed all four Szamuelys just happened to be staying at his dads place the unbelievably selfcentred and self-obsessed nature of the author produces passages that are truly grotesque. One evening, our Martin found his little kiddie howling. Instead of stuffing a dummy in its gob like many parents do, he started to cogitate whilst waiting for the nanny to arrive, and said to his wife on her return: The sound she was making would not have been out of place in the deepest cellars of the Butyrki Prison in Moscow during the Great Terror. (Do people really speak like this?) And so in chez Amis the poor little dear became known as Butyrki, along with its diminutives Butyrklet, the Butyrkster, the Butyrkstress, and so on (pp259-60). This really is the chattering classes at close range. Some of Amis attempts at creating a dramatic impact are self-defeating because they are so laughably incorrect: Everybody knows of Auschwitz and Belsen. Nobody knows of Vorkuta and Solovetsky. Everybody knows of Himmler and Eichmann. Nobody knows of Yezhov and Dzerzhinsky. Everybody knows of the six million of the Holocaust. Nobody knows of the six million of the Terror-Famine. (p257) Comment is superfluous. Amis as Historian Some of Amis comments are puerile, such as his attachment of great significance to the manner in which Bolsheviks often ended salutations in letters with an exclamation mark (p245), or the fact that Lenin had trouble pronouncing the letter r (p251). Another diversion, his mocking of Lenins grim determination to overcome the effects of his strokes (pp26-7), is just plain unsavoury. His description of the battle of Kursk as meshuggah (p210) a Yiddish word meaning bonkers is singularly inapt for this truly gargantuan clash that shifted the balance against the Third Reich on the Eastern Front. Amis makes much of Stalins fear of flying, having him fume that despite his great powers, he was still subject to the uncontrollable physics of weather and aviation (pp205-6). The fact that many people, even today, share this phobia, and that Stalins unease may also have been related to his awareness of the rather parlous state of Soviet aviation, does not seem to have occurred to our author. For a man who entitled a collection of his essays The War Against Clich, Amis book is particularly noteworthy for its piling up of one moth-eaten clich after another. So we can read about Lenins studied amorality and flirtatious nihilism

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(p33), that he was a double-quick decamper when trouble arose (p204) not true; when hit by two bullets by a would-be assassin in 1918, he showed great selfpossession amidst general panic that the October Revolution was a coup dtat (p32), that Bolshevism was hypocritical and litist (pp237-8), that Marxism denies any importance to personality in the historical process (pp137, 181) and makes wholly unrealistic demands on human nature (p85), that communists are fired by self-hatred and life-hatred (p255), and so on. Do we really have to have all this dragged out one more weary time? Not surprisingly, Koba the Dread induces a strong sense of dja vu. Amis equates Stalinism with Hitlerism, and produces his conclusions in a 12-point thesis (pp82ff). How original: such comparisons were made at the time, and usually with considerably more eloquence and imagination, by a wide variety of observers one need only recall Franz Borkenaus The Totalitarian Enemy, William Chamberlins A False Utopia: Collectivism in Theory and Practice, Max Eastmans Stalins Russia and the Crisis in Socialism, Eugene Lyons Stalin: Czar of all the Russians, Frederick Voigts Unto Caesar and Leonard Woolfs Barbarians at the Gate with Eastman doing better by providing a 22-point checklist to this effect. Needless to say, Amis uses another old trick, most recently employed by the infamous Black Book of Communism, abstracting Hitlerism from capitalism, and thus while Bolshevism and Stalinism are viewed as one indivisible entity, capitalism is carefully absolved from any responsibility for the Nazi horror. There are plenty of mistakes in this book, some minor, some more significant, but all pointing towards a cavalier attitude towards historical accuracy, and some towards a clear indication of outright political distortion. It is quite incorrect to declare that there was no suggestion in the 1930s that the [Ukrainian] famine was terroristic (p7). The US journalist William Chamberlin visited the stricken areas in the autumn of 1933, and subsequently stated that famine had been deliberately employed as an instrument of national policy, as the last means of breaking the resistance of the peasantry to the new system of collective farming (Russia Through Coloured Glasses, Fortnightly Review, October 1934). Chamberlin, it should be noted, was no penny-a-liner or dilettante dabbler like Amis, but was possibly the most seasoned observer of the Soviet scene of the interwar period. It is quite incorrect to lump HG Wells in with Shaw and the Webbs as extravagant dupes (p21), as, notwithstanding his comments on Stalin cited (without source) by Amis, he never found his brave new world in the Soviet Union. His Russia in the Shadows of 1920 was very critical of the Soviet regime. Twelve years later, he did not think that the West had much to learn from the Soviet leaders with their fundamental blunderings: They still believe, he snorted, that they can teach our Western world everything that is necessary for the salvation of mankind. (After Democracy: Addresses and Papers on the Present World Situation, London, 1932, p179) Seven years on from then, he declared that nothing had changed in Russia since the revolution; a lot of people had been liquidated, a lot of others had replaced them, and Russia was returning to its starting point, a patriotic absolutism of doubtful efficiency and vague, incalculable aims. The population had escaped from the Tsar only to end up two decades later worshipping Stalin and his quasi-divine autocracy (World Order, Fortnightly, November 1939). Hardly the words of an extravagant dupe. It is quite incorrect to assert that it has always been possible to joke about the

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Soviet Union, just as it has never been possible to joke about Nazi Germany (p12). Chaplins The Great Dictator comes to mind, not to mention Mel Brooks The Producers with its Springtime for Hitler routine, Spike Milligans Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall, and, of course, the hilarious Lambeth Walk that a British government film team put together during the war, cleverly cutting, repeating and reversing footage of Hitler and the Wehrmacht so that they dance to the tune of the Cockney song (and which took the mick so well out of its subject that the British Foreign Office objected to its showing in postwar Germany lest it offend the Bundeswehr). Perhaps these were a little too low-brow for our highly cultured author to have noticed them. Other assertions are exaggerations to the point of outright inaccuracy. Its wrong to say that the world, on the whole accepted indignant Soviet denials of famine, enserfment of the peasantry, and slave labour (p7), just as it is wrong to aver that the overwhelming majority of intellectuals everywhere accepted the Stalinist line (p8). Amis seems to think that the pro-Soviet lobby the Stalinists and the fellow-travellers dominated the intellectual scene during the 1930s. This is quite untrue in Britain, and almost certainly the same in other countries as well. Here, there was a strong anti-communist lobby that maintained a hefty verbal barrage against the Soviet Union as a whole, and between them and the pro-Soviet lobby there was a polyglot array of moderate conservatives, liberals and moderate social democrats who looked with varying degrees of curiosity or enthusiasm at certain aspects of the Soviet Union, usually the economic and welfare measures, whilst sharply criticising its repression and political norms. Without wishing to overlook or downplay the importance of the incessant propaganda during the Stalin era, it is wrong to view Stalins popularity as wholly a matter of manipulation (p213). Like it or not, despite the appalling hardships of the early 1930s and the horrors of collectivisation and the Terror, there was considerable opportunity for social advancement in the Soviet Union during the period of the initial Five Year Plans. Vast numbers of Soviet citizens went through crash education schemes, the illiterate learning to read and write, the literate gaining skills. Peasants became factory workers, factory workers became technicians and managers. Despite the desperately hard times, the regime, personified in Stalin, did gain the legitimacy of many millions of people. Political purpose rather than ignorance seems to lay behind some inaccuracies. By talking of the Bolsheviks annual invasions of Ukraine during the Civil War, Amis aims, through the device of overlooking the fact that the Bolsheviks enjoyed considerable support in many Ukrainian urban centres, to present Bolshevism as an alien, Russian imperialist, interloper. Similar intent is clear in Amis description of the abortive Hungarian Revolution of 1919 as having been exported by the Soviet regime (p17). Although the Hungarian communists took their inspiration from the example of the October Revolution, and Moscow gave limited assistance to them, the revolution in Hungary was very much a part of the wave of radicalism that swept across Europe in the aftermath of the First World War. It is incorrect to impute anti-Semitic sentiments behind the attempt in the early 1920s to encourage Soviet Jews to move from the Pale to settlements in the Crimea. It was not an attempt at ghettoisation, as Amis avers (p217), but a plan, largely the idea of the Jewish section of the Soviet Communist Party, the Yevsektsia, and supported by the Soviet government, to help Soviet Jews to put behind them the stifling atmosphere of the Pale for a productive and fruitful life in modern agrarian

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settlements. Contrary to what Amis says, the same feelings inspired the establishment of the Jewish autonomous region of Birozbidzhan. Amis conflation of these attempts to overcome the legacy of Tsarist bigotry with the anti-Semitism subsequently espoused by Stalins regime is both ignorant and repulsive. It is plainly untrue that Lenin outlawed the trade unions (p238). Search closely but youll not find any statement like unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader in Lenins State and Revolution (p114). What Amis is citing almost certainly at second-hand, like so much of his quoting of Soviet leaders is a mangling of Lenins subsequent work The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government, which talks of unquestioning subordination to a single will note: no mention of the Soviet leader being absolutely necessary for the success of processes organised on the pattern of large-scale machine industry. With the lack of originality that marks this wretched work, Amis imitates so many critics of Lenin in dishonestly using this quote to promote the idea of a direct line from Lenin to Stalin and the Gulag, and I say dishonestly because Lenin continues: The more resolutely we now have to stand for a ruthlessly firm government, for the dictatorship of individuals in definite processes of work, in definite aspects of purely executive functions, the more varied must be the forms and methods of control from below in order to counteract every shadow of a possibility of distorting the principles of Soviet government, in order repeatedly and tirelessly to weed out bureaucracy. That, of course, puts the matter in a different light. It would, of course, be pointless to point this out to Amis, as Bolshevism was totalitarian from the start. You see, the dictatorship of the proletariat, or, as he puts it, rule by yobs (p23) note our sophisticated authors revolting snobbery was only academically entertained by the Bolsheviks. So none of Lenins writings of 1917, including State and Revolution the real text, not Amis falsifications that investigated the phenomenon of workers control, the relationship between centralised national leadership and popular control over the work process, and other related matters, meant anything. It is noteworthy that Amis shows no indication of having read in the many yards of books he allegedly consulted on the Soviet Union any of the works by Alexander Rabinowitch, Diane Koenker, Steve Smith, David Mandel and many others that detail the close relationship between the Bolsheviks and the Russian working class during 1917, and which give the totalitarian schools conspiratorial view of Bolshevism a sound drubbing. Having, as we have seen, written off Marxism as contravening human nature, anything that doesnt show Bolshevism as dishonest, manipulative and authoritarian, a direct line from What Is To Be Done? to Vorkuta and Magadan, isnt worth looking at. Some of the books Amis has plundered are certainly worth reading. Conquests The Great Terror and The Harvest of Sorrow are definitely worthwhile, as are Robert Tuckers two volumes on Stalin, Stalin as Revolutionary and Stalin in Power. However much one may disagree with his general outlook, Solzhenitsyns works also deserve perusing. Others, on the other hand, are dire, amongst which are Richard Pipes The Russian Revolution 1899-1919 and Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, 1919-1924, and that overrated diatribe by renegade French Maoists, The Black Book of Communism (see my review of it in Revolutionary History, Volume 8, no 1, 2001). The sheer arrogance of Amis is most sharply exposed when he proudly declares that he has not read Isaac Deutschers mythopoeic Trotsky trilogy he
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just manages to stop short of saying that he will not read it preferring instead Volkogonovs account of the man. Volkogonov, as readers of this magazine may know, was a Soviet army political instructor who became a glasnost historian under Gorbachev and a born-again Cold Warrior historian under Yeltsin. As I demonstrated in this magazine (Volume 8, no 1, Summer 1997), his biography of Trotsky, whilst not quite so poisonous as his one of Lenin (which I also reviewed, Volume 7, no 3, Autumn 1996), is basically a Cold War hatchet job, replete with many major distortions and even more minor mistakes. That Amis prefers this lamentable book to Deutschers magisterial work says more about him than his convoluted and pretentious prose could ever do. The Uncommitted Polemicist What makes Amis run? We have established that he gives no credible reason for writing this book. There is precious little which sheds light upon his actual outlook. Yet Soviet studies is a discipline which almost demands some sort of assertion of political outlook if not actual commitment on the part of the author, maybe not of one involved in investigating some obscure detail of Soviet society, but certainly of one producing a polemic like Koba the Dread. We have seen his snobbish rejection of socialism the yobs in charge and he also aims a baffled sneer at his fathers sense of sadness at the loss of a positive vision the brotherhood of man, the just city when he broke from Stalinism (p273). Like with many of his generation, it seems that Amis pres adherence to Stalinism was based upon honourable intentions. It also seems that such worthy sentiments, however much they were distorted by Stalinism, never entered Amis fils head; the idea of just city is a silly fabrication, not worthy of serious thought. Certainly, our Martin gives it no serious thought, and what he actually stands for and believes in remain a mystery. For socialists today, the just city is as worthy a vision as it has ever been. Contrary to what Martin Amis and his mentors claim, the Bolsheviks were honest in their intention to create a new world. For Lenin, Trotsky and the others yes, even Stalin the October Revolution was just the start of a process of world revolution that would usher in not merely the just city but the just world, a world free of exploitation and war, a world in which human potential could be realised to the full. Bolshevism in power was as Lenin made clear on many occasions a holding operation, gripping onto power in enormously difficult conditions, pending the workers seizures of power in more advanced countries. Isolated in a backward country, there was no way that the forces of communism could survive in the Soviet Union. In his rise to supreme power, Stalin personified the defeat of Bolshevism, the strangling of communism, the counter-revolution. The negation of Bolshevism in the name of Bolshevism: this has not been understood by many people of considerable erudition. We should not be surprised that the likes of Amis, with his collection of tired clichs and his repetition of threadbare received wisdom, is quite unable to grasp this basic historical truth. Tragedy and Farce Whilst the development of the division of labour has been a necessary part of humanitys rise into modern civilisation, theres nothing wrong with people trying to do something new, to embark upon some exciting project that will hopefully stimulate the mind, bring pleasure to the participant, and add to the totality of human knowledge. However, the attempt to go beyond ones customary activities does not necessarily lead to success. Its good to know ones limitations. I am not a
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literary critic, and so I will not deign to comment upon Mr Amis literary product. It may be brilliant, it may be utter rubbish, it may be something in between. I do not know, so I will not offer an opinion. But although I am only a very minor historian, I know enough to recognise that in the field of historical studies he is utterly bankrupt. The only reason this atrocious book was published was because of his reputation as a littratteur. Fame has its rewards, I guess. There is nothing wrong with experimentation, but one should keep the results carefully under wraps until one can get an idea of their validity. To return to Tony Hancock, the poor bloke continually tried to find out what made things tick, and his continual attempts to investigate his own character led him to cast aside most of that which made his classic wireless and television shows so brilliantly funny, leaving him as an empty husk increasingly dependent upon large quantities of hard liquor and various other dangerous consumables. Ultimately, as we know, he ended up in a pit of despair, dying by his own hand. His terrible end was very much the result of his quest to go beyond his skills. Now, I very much doubt that our Marts probing of Uncle Joe will lead to a similar fate, and I would not wish that upon him. Nonetheless, this book is proof that he too is a victim of the quest that destroyed Hancock. Yes, history does repeat itself in the time-honoured manner. Hancocks final act was a tragedy, Amis latest escapade is a farce.

Chris Gray

Bertolt Brecht and the Necessary Angel


THE great Roman poet Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-68 BCE), known to the Englishspeaking world as Horace, wrote: Aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae aut simul et iucunda et idonea dicere vitae. Poets aim either to benefit, or to delight, or to utter words at once both pleasing and helpful to life. It is nonetheless unquestionably true that the greatest poetry is not merely pleasing, but produces a kind of frisson, as a result an ability to engage our emotions in a fashion one can only call magical. This uncanny ability is what gives poetry whatever power it may have over human affairs. Poetry does not aim at saying just anything in any old way: if it did, it would not play the part in human life which it does, as a repository of gnomic wisdom, of phrases which come to mind in characterising certain situations that we come across, or of illumination in general. (Perhaps the greatest gift possessed by a poet is the ability to see connections between what at first glance seem entirely disparate phenomena.) There is clearly a basic approach here that marks off poetry from prose in a wholly different way from the superficial distinction put forward by Jeremy Bentham Poetry rhymes, but

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prose doesnt. a distinction inapplicable even in his own day, as witness Shakespeares blank verse. The real distinction was grasped by Ezra Pound, whose knowledge of European languages led him to propose the equation dichten (German: to compose or write poetry) = condensare. (Both these verbs mean to thicken.) Pound here puts his finger on an essential feature of poetic writing, the way in which images and concepts are pushed up against each other, sometimes so close that you can almost hear the sound of wounds inflicted, or see the sparks fly. The Irish poet Michael Longley is another practitioner who has understood the gap which tends to separate prose writing from poetry: If prose is a river, poetry is a fountain. But what is the point of this particular linguistic strategy? Obviously, the aim is to create a memorable utterance. But how does it happen that a poets words become lodged in the memory, evoking satisfaction, admiration or even, in some cases, breathless astonishment or physical excitement? What distinguishes great poetry from that which is merely competent? In order to set about answering these questions, it is advantageous to begin from the superb essay by Lorca entitled Juega y teoria del duende (Theory and Function of the Duende), of which an English version appears in Federico Garca Lorca: Selected Poems, translated by Merryn Williams, Bloodaxe Books, 1992, pp22030). Lorcas subject here is indicated by Goethes remark about the violin virtuoso Paganini, whom he described as having a mysterious power which everyone feels and which no philosopher can explain. Lorca identifies the source of this power as el duende (literally: imp, goblin, demon) a being invoked by Spaniards when they wish to praise certain artistic achievements or damn others: It has the duende means It is great art. Lorca writes: Every man Nietzsche would say, every artist climbs each stair in the tower of his own perfection at the cost of his struggle with a duende not with an angel, as some say, or with a muse. We must make this fundamental distinction to get to the root of the work. The angel guides and gives gifts like St Raphael, defends and saves like St Michael, forewarns like St Gabriel. The angel is radiant, but he flies over mens heads, above us, he pours out his grace while man effortlessly achieves his work, his sympathy or his dance. The angel of the road to Damascus and the one who came through the opening of the little balcony at Assisi commands us and we cannot resist his light, because he waves his steely wings in the ambit of those who are predestined. The muse dictates and, sometimes, inspires The poets of the muse hear voices and do not know their origin, but they are from the muse, who inspires them and sometimes makes a meal of them. So it was with Apollinaire, a great poet destroyed by the horrible muse with whom he was painted by the divine, angelic Rousseau. The muse awakens the intellect, brings pillared landscapes and a false flavour of laurel. Intellect is often the enemy of poetry because it imitates too much, because it raises the poet to a sharp-edged throne and makes him forget he might soon be eaten by ants, or a great arsenic lobster might fall on his head

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Angel and muse come from outside; the angel gives light and the muse gives shape The duende, though, must be awakened in the deepest dwellings of blood. We must push away the angel and kick out the muse The real struggle is with the duende But there is no map, no formula to seek the duende The coming of the duende always presupposes a deep change in all the old forms. It gives a sense of freshness, totally unknown before, with a quality of the newly-created rose, of miracle. It succeeds in producing an almost religious fervour. (Lorca, op cit, pp222-4) It is well-nigh impossible to disagree with any of this, and yet I have the feeling that Lorca, with typical Andalusian intensity, exaggerates the value of what one might call the more sensational aspects of poetry. I had the same sort of feeling some years ago on reading Robert Graves book The White Goddess, where he draws a distinction between Dionysian and Apollonian poetry. Yes, thats fine, I thought, the muse poet achieves that mysterious frisson that the Apollonian poet, oriented towards public affairs, cannot achieve. And yet Popes Ode on Solitude (based loosely on the Horatian ode which begins Beatus ille qui procul negotiis) contrives to produce such a feeling of well-being in me that I feel impelled to try to live in the way the poet outlines and Pope is counted a classical rather than a romantic poet. And what about Miltons On the Late Massacre in Piedmont? Lorcas essay poses or, rather, re-poses sharply the question of the position, within the European twentieth century tradition, of Bertolt Brecht. Here, ostensibly, is a poet whose practice clashed violently with all the canons laid down not only by Lorca but also by the likes of Ezra Pound, TS Eliot and almost everyone else involved in canon-laying operations. And yet Brecht is indisputably a poet and not a bad one at that. But how good was he? And how should we judge him? It is a basic principle of criticism that one should try to evaluate a work of art on the basis of the artists intentions, and should not demand of artists that they produce some other completely different work unless the situation is so bad that such is the only solution. As VS Pritchett put it: Always praise the good of its kind. We have to start, then, with some appreciation of what Brecht was trying to do, which can be arrived at, I think, if we consider various typical poems, such as to cite what I would regard as the earliest representative example the poem Song von der Ware (in English, Businessmans Song of the Commodity). This piece appears in the play Die Massnahme (The Measures Taken), which dates from 1930. I give here the translation in full. Businessmans Song of the Commodity Rice is growing down the river. In the provinces upstream, people need rice. If we keep the rice in storage, Rice will be dearer for them. Those who tow the rice boats will earn even less of it. Then the rice will be cheaper for me. What after all is rice?

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Do I know what rice is? Do I know who knows that? I dont know what rice is, I know only its price. When winter comes on, people need clothes. Then it is time to buy in cotton And keep it off the market. When the cold comes on, clothes will be dearer for them. There is too much cotton around. What after all is cotton? Do I know what cotton is? I dont know what cotton is, I know only its price. A man needs too much food, Which makes men dearer for me. To make food, men are needed. Those who cook make eating cheaper, but Those who eat make it cheaper for me. There are too many men around. What after all is man? Do I know what a man is? Do I know who knows that? I dont know what a man is, I know only his price. Brecht seems here to want to present certain notions of economic theory in a reasonably simple and accessible form, and to indicate a philosophical moral. The train of economic thought seems on occasion a bit disjointed: the references to overproduction in stanzas two and three appear sudden and unrehearsed, so to speak, as if Brecht wanted to cram as much information in as possible; also in order to grasp the import of Brechts remarks about food in the third stanza some prior acquaintance with the ideas of Capital seems requisite. However, the major point, that the capitalist entrepreneur is indifferent to and ignorant of the real virtues of his commodities, and hence, ultimately, of human nature too, comes across well: Brecht seems to have learnt early on the old Jesuit lesson, Repetitio est mater studiorum Repetition is the mother of study. An even clearer example of Brechts poetical purposes can be seen in a short poem written in 1934, entitled Der Bauer kummert sich um seinen Acker (English translation: The Farmers Concern): The farmers concern is with his field. He looks after his cattle, pays taxes, Produces children, to save himself labourers and Depends on the price of milk. The townspeople speak of love for the soil, Of healthy peasant stock, And call farmers the backbone of the nation. The townspeople speak of love for the soil, Of healthy peasant stock,

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And call farmers the backbone of the nation. The farmers concern is with his field, He looks after his cattle, pays taxes, Produces children, to save himself labourers and Depends on the price of milk. Here we have a sharp distinction drawn between the farmers own view of their activity, which is a severely practical one, and the standard urban view. The language is, once more, matter-of-fact, and repetition is used to drive the point home. It is as if Brecht is saying to us Look, Im not interested in high-flown language or ideological clich least of all where agriculture is involved. It does the farmer no good to be put on a pedestal: he operates under a set of precise constraints, and I have told you what they are. One might want to question the usefulness of the chiasmus formed by the structure of the poem (that is, the sequence rural view urban view urban view rural view), but the effect is surely vitiated if we take away the second stanza altogether, since in that case the townspeople could be seen as endorsing the farmers own view of themselves, whereas Brechts point is that the sentimental townies really know nothing of the practical struggles that farmers are engaged in, and hence indulge themselves in a piece of romantic self-deception which is of no use either to the farmers or to themselves. The language helps to make the point. No variety of poetic utterance and it is poetic utterance, despite the simplicity could be further removed from mainstream romanticism: it is didactic in the best possible sense of that term. This is a poetry of morality, of the kind introduced into the troubadour tradition by Peire Cardenal, who set out his ideal as follows: Mon chantar vueil retraire al comunal De totas gens, e si.l deinhon auzir, Ni lentendon ni.l sabon devezir, Cascuns poira trair lo ben del mal. I want to recite my song to all peoples in common, and if they deign to hear it and understand it and can construe it, each will be able to distinguish good from evil. The Athenian dramatist Aiskhylos (Aeschylus) said that his plays were slices from the great banquets of Homer: in the same way Brecht could have said that many of his poems were dishes for which Karl Marx had previously written the recipe. Naturally, if you cant stand Marx, you are unlikely to appreciate Brecht either. It must be said, however, that Brecht succeeded in grasping Marxs main ideas very well better, in some respects, than a number of those who in his day claimed to follow Marx. In support of this contention, I give you the little poem Lob des Lernens (In Praise of Learning), addressed to the common human individual, with its insistence that You must take over the leadership. Here are the final two verses: Learn, man in the asylum! Learn, man in prison! Learn, wife in the kitchen! Learn, man of sixty! Seek out the school, you who are homeless! Sharpen your wits, you who shiver! Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.

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You must take over the leadership. Dont be afraid of asking, brother! Dont be won over, see for yourself. What you dont know yourself, You dont know. Add up the reckoning. Its you who must pay it. Put your finger on each item, ask: how did this get here? You must take over the leadership. Anyone inclined to question whether the aspiration expressed here is that of Marx himself should consult Hal Drapers volumes Karl Marxs Theory of Revolution and his pamphlet The Two Souls of Socialism. Our response to Brecht is inevitably, in part, political, because for Brecht politics was absolutely central and unavoidable. Having opted for Marxism, Brecht naturally applied himself to the task of putting forward the Marxist case in verse, thereby causing double offence in some quarters: for some people it is bad enough that a poet should be a Marxist, it is even worse if the poet attempts to use poetry in order to advance the Marxist cause. But is such conduct really so heinous? One would not reasonably expect a Christian poet to refrain from expressing a Christian point of view, or a Jew a Jewish one, or a Muslim a Muslim one: why then is a Marxist poet debarred from such a course? It is to Brechts credit that he is not insensitive to political responses that are at variance with Marxism, and I think that some of his best work can be seen in those pieces where he confronts what he considers as inadequate initiatives in the political field. For example there is the poem entitled Die Nachtlager (A Bed for the Night). Here Brecht reports that he has heard that in New York it is winter, 1931 a person stands regularly at the corner of 26th Street and Broadway and asks for help from passers-by in order to provide homeless people with a nights lodging. The key section of the poem is the second stanza, where Brecht says: It wont change the world, Relations between people will not improve, It wont shorten the age of exploitation, But some men have a bed for the night, The wind is kept from off them for one night, The snow meant for them falls on the road. Brecht thus acknowledges that this charitable action is beneficial, its limitations notwithstanding. Characteristically, he repeats the point in the final section of the poem: Dont put down the book on reading this. Some people have a bed for the night, The wind is kept from off them for one night, The snow meant for them falls on the road. But it wont change the world, Relations between people will not improve, It wont shorten the age of exploitation.

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It seems to me that if one views capitalism as a system based upon exploitation then it is impossible to quarrel with Brechts judgement here. Meanwhile, on a technical level, we can see how the repetition heightens the antitheses set up by the poet. It is all done very neatly and economically one might indeed describe Brecht as the Matisse of poetry. Similar considerations apply in the case of the Song of the Patch and the Overcoat (Das Lied vom Flicken und vom Rock), in which Brecht attacks what Marxists call reformism, the attempt to bring about political changes that benefit the masses while leaving the fundamentals of capitalism unchanged. This poem also dates from 1931. Song of the Patch and the Overcoat Whenever our overcoat is ragged you come running up and say: this cant continue, you must be helped in every possible manner. And, full of zeal, you run off to the bosses while we who freeze are waiting. And you come back and in triumph show us what you have won for us: a little patch. Fine, thats a patch all right but where is the whole coat? Whenever we cry aloud from hunger you come running up and say: this cant continue, you must be helped in every possible manner. And, full of zeal, you run to the bosses while we who starve are waiting. And you come back and in triumph show us what you have won for us, a crust of bread. Fine, thats a crust of bread, but where is the whole loaf? We need much more than patches, we need the whole overcoat, too; we need much more than a crust of bread, we need the loaf itself. We need much more than a job, we need the whole factory and the coal and the ore and power in the state. Fine, thats what we need, but what do you offer us? Once again, there you have it, in a nutshell. Brechts truly wonderful gift for succinct statement reaches its climax, I would argue, in a short poem written in 1939 entitled Die das Fleisch wegnehmen vom

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Tisch (Those Who Remove the Meat from the Table). Those who remove the Meat from the Table Teach contentment. Those for whom the taxes are destined Demand sacrifice. Those who eat their fill speak to the hungry Of wonderful times to come. Those who lead the country into the abyss Call ruling too difficult For ordinary men. The same barbed economy can be seen in one of Brechts last compositions, his comment on the East German uprising of 1953: The Solution After the rising of the seventeenth of June The Secretary of the Writers Union Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee In which you could read that the People Had lost the Governments confidence And could only regain it By working harder. Would it in that case Not be simpler if the Government Were to dissolve the People And elect another? Having (all too briefly) gone over some of Brechts more successful short poems, I feel I can now hazard an assessment of the man as a poet. No one, I think, would say that Brecht was one of the supremely great poets in world literature, but, in spite of that, his was a noteworthy achievement. He excels in the concise, almost clinical analysis of social experience, and, as a result, has much to teach us if we are prepared to read him without prejudice. His use of repetition and antithesis opened up a new road in poetry this despite the hazards and pitfalls inherent in it. Later poets have wisely been chary of excessive imitation of his style, but I can think of three pieces directly inspired by his work, namely Dannie Abses Odd, Rita Ann Higgins Tommys Wife and the following piece by yours truly on certain Northern Ireland politicians in the 1970s: Statement after Chequers Talks (1971) They are in favour of civil rights provided privilege endures. They are in favour of social and economic progress provided they skim the cream of it. They condemn violence but send in the snatch squads. They are opposed to restraints on democracy but intern and intern and intern. To come back to the penetrating analysis offered by Lorca in his essay, it is my contention that the angel is in some respects unavoidable. The angel gives light yes, without question, and we need a torch to illumine the darker corners of human

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existence; the angel commands us again, indisputably, since it is impossible to view the world completely afresh without reference to tradition and without ideology (a system of beliefs and choices). Hence it is very difficult to follow Lorcas advice and push away the angel. Even so, Lorcas advice is good advice: it is necessary to keep the angel at bay in order to create space that may afford access to the duende. As always in human affairs, the ideal is one of balance and of clarity of meaning. One can demand certain efforts from the reader, but should the reader really be expected to wade through seven pages of notes to The Waste Land? Brecht apparently kept a toy donkey on his desk; around its neck he hung a placard, which read Even I must understand it. In this he was operating, as I have said, within the time-honoured tradition of European poetry. Mon chantar vueil retraire al comunal De totas gens, e si.l deinhon auzir, Ni lentendon, ni.l sabon devezir, Cascuns poira trair lo ben del mal, Que cobeitatz a tant sazit en brieu Lo mon que no.i cor dregz, ni temon Dieu, Ni no.i trobom merce, ni chauzimen, Ni vergoinha, ab lo plus de la gen. I want to recite my song to all peoples in common, and if they deign to hear it and can construe it, each will be able to distinguish good from evil. Now, greed has in short so seized the world that rights writ runs not there, and they fear not God. Nor does one find there pity, indulgence, or modesty, in the majority of people. Further reading Lorca Selected Poems (translated by Merryn Williams, Bloodaxe Books, 1992). Brecht Selected Poems (translated by HR Hays, Grove Press, New York, 1959); Gesammelte Gedichte (four volumes, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1976). AR Press (ed), Anthology of Troubadour Lyric Poetry (Edinburgh University Press, 1971, see especially on Peire Cardeneal, pp279-305). Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht (translated by Anna Bostock, New Left Books, 1973).

Ian Birchall

Morris, Bax and Babeuf


THE year of 1996 saw not only the centenary of Morris death, but also the bicentenary of Babeufs Conspiracy of the Equals, arguably the first revolutionary socialist organisation in history. But there is more than a coincidence of dates linking two great pioneers of socialist thought and practice; there is an interesting and, as far as I know, little discussed connection between the two men. Sometime before his death, Morris gave his friend and comrade Ernest Belfort

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Bax a copy of Victor Advielles two-volume Histoire de Gracchus Babeuf et du babouvisme; it bore the inscription: Given to E Belfort Bax from William Morris on condition that the said Bax writes a clear account of the Babeuf episode. (The volume later found its way into the possession of GDH Cole.)1 That Morris should have made the request is in itself somewhat surprising; on Baxs own testimony comparatively few men of average education in the present day have ever heard of Babeuf.2 Only one book had appeared in English on the subject Bronterre OBriens translation of Buonarrotis History of Babeufs Conspiracy for Equality. Nor was Advielles book exactly a best-seller. The author was a civil servant and amateur local historian who published the book at his own expense; just 300 copies were printed. We can only speculate how one found its way into Morris hands. Bax did not carry out Morris request until 15 years after his friends death, but in 1911 Grant Richards published his The Last Episode of the French Revolution Being a History of Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals. This too had a quality of rarity about it; it was one of only three book-length studies of Babeuf published in English in the twentieth century.3 Why did Morris show such interest in Babeuf? At first sight, there would seem to be little in common between the Oxford-educated intellectual and the autodidact from Picardy who never went to school (though in News from Nowhere Morris looked forward to the total abolition of schools). In fact, Morris correspondence and political writings reveal little interest in Babeuf or indeed in any aspect of the French Revolution. I have found just two references to Babeuf in Morris political writings. The first comes in a lecture entitled The Hopes of Civilisation, delivered to the Hammersmith Branch of the Socialist League on 14 June 1885. Explaining the class nature of the French Revolution, Morris explains that: The leaders of the French Revolution, even amidst the fears, suspicions, and slaughter of the Terror, upheld the rights of property so called, though a new pioneer or prophet appeared in France, analogous in some respects to the Levellers of Cromwells time, but, as might be expected, far more advanced and reasonable than they were. Gracchus Babeuf and his fellows were treated as criminals, and died or suffered the torture of prison for attempting to put into practice those words which the Republic still carried on its banners, and Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality were interpreted in a middle-class, or if you please a Jesuitical sense, as the rewards of success for those who could struggle into an exclusive class4 Between May 1886 and May 1888, Commonweal published, in 25 instalments, a series entitled Socialism from the Root Up, written jointly by Morris and Bax (later
1. GDH Cole, Socialist Thought: The Forerunners 1789-1850, London, 1953, p20; see also Baxs account in Reminiscences and Reflexions of a Mid and Late Victorian, London, 1918, p162. The book in question is Victor Advielles two-volume Histoire de Gracchus Babeuf et du babouvisme, Paris, 1884; reprinted Paris, 1990. E Belfort Bax, The Last Episode of the French Revolution, London, 1911, p246. The other two are D Thomson, The Babeuf Plot, London, 1947; RB Rose, Gracchus Babeuf, Stanford, 1978. Political Writings of William Morris (ed AL Morton), London, 1984, p167.

2. 3. 4.

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published in book form as Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome, London, 1893). This contains an account of the French Revolution in Chapter 8, and here too Babeuf gets a brief name-check: One event only there remains to be mentioned; the attempt of Baboeuf [sic] and his followers to get a proletarian republic recognised; it has been called an insurrection, but it never came to that, being crushed while it was yet only the beginning of a propaganda. Baboeuf [sic] and his followers were brought to trial in April 1796 [sic]. He and Darthes [sic] were condemned to death, but killed themselves before the sentence could be carried out. Ten others were condemned to prison and exile; and so ended the first Socialist propaganda.5 Four sentences only, and within them three errors of spelling or date; this does not betoken any great knowledge of Babeuf on the part of either man (in fact Bax, as the expert on French history, very probably wrote this passage). Yet Morris clearly did feel some sort of affinity with Babeuf, and there are indeed important points of comparison between the quality of socialism advocated by the two men. Firstly, and crucially, both belong to the tradition of what Hal Draper called socialism from below as opposed to socialism from above.6 As an authentic Marxist, Morris believed that the emancipation of the working classes must be carried out by the working classes themselves, or as he memorably put it: By us, and not for us, must be their motto.7 We find exactly the same spirit in a document issued to the agents (full-time organisers) of Babeufs conspiracy: Make the people understand that they will never do anything great, that they will never make revolutions for themselves, for their true happiness, except when there are no rulers involved in any way in their movement: they must not be so distrustful of their own resources, and convince themselves that they, the people, are sufficient to be able to carry out a great undertaking.8 Secondly, Morris may have been attracted by Babeufs particular location in relation to the Utopian tradition. As Bax put it, if, in his theoretical scheme, Babeuf was the first of the utopian Socialists, he also forestalled in his notion of the necessity of taking possession of the political power, one of the foremost principles of the modern Socialist movement.9 The greatness of Morris is that he draws on the full power of the utopian critique of capitalism, but always links it to the need for practical organisation in the continuing class struggle. Babeuf, in an earlier phase of history, had drawn on the
5. 6. William Morris, Political Writings (ed N Salmon), Bristol, 1994, p538. H Draper, The Two Souls of Socialism, International Socialism, no 11 (1962), reprinted from Anvil. Draper does not discuss Babeuf or Morris in his article, but, interestingly, traces the distinction of the two traditions back to a comment made by Bax in his Peasants War in Germany of 1899. Daily Chronicle, 10 November 1893, in William Morris, News from Nowhere and Selected Writings and Designs (ed A Briggs), Harmondsworth, 1984, p145. Copie des pices saisies, Paris, 1797, I 203. Political Writings of William Morris (ed AL Morton), p193.

7. 8. 9.

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utopian communism of eighteenth-century France, but had striven to translate it into practical intervention in the revolutionary process. Morris could not help but have a fellow-feeling for him. Thirdly, Morris would undoubtedly have a sense of recognition in seeing the quality of socialism at which Babeuf aimed. Morris, in The Society of the Future, urged both the extinction of asceticism and the extinction of luxury.10 This is precisely the spirit of Babeuf, who fulminated against the needless luxury enjoyed by the Directory, yet believed that strict equality did not mean the sharing of misery, but rather the extension of jouissance (enjoyment) and abondance (plenty) to all. Morris would surely have appreciated his insistence that the republican is not the man of eternity, he is the man of time; his paradise is this earth, he wants to enjoy freedom and happiness there, and to enjoy them while he is there, without waiting.11 Indeed the standard term used by Babeuf for his desired society (the word socialism not yet being in currency) was bonheur commun common happiness.12 So there is some reason to believe that Morris, on the basis of however limited information, saw Babeuf as a kindred spirit. And if he wished to see a book on Babeuf to provide enlightenment for himself and for the whole socialist movement, then Belfort Bax was the obvious choice of author. Bax was deeply influenced by the Paris Commune and by French history generally;13 his first important political article, written before he became a Marxist, was a passionate defence of Marat. 14 He went on to write two books on his hero Marat, as well as an outline history of the French Revolution.15 Bax made no major original contribution to the understanding of the French Revolution, but he was a powerful polemical writer, capable of both savagery and enthusiasm, and ever ready to draw modern parallels with historical characters and events. Apart from his talents as a populariser, there were two aspects of his work which undoubtedly must have appealed to Morris. Firstly, Bax was quite clear as to the middle-class or bourgeois character of the French Revolution, even in its most radical, Jacobin phase. The earlier British advocate of Babeuf, Bronterre OBrien, had idolised Robespierre and made little or no distinction between Jacobinism and socialism.16 For Bax Robespierre was a pedantic Rousseauite prig, and he argued: The fact is, Robespierre was a petit bourgeois, a Philistine to the backbone, who desired a Republic of petit-bourgeois virtues, with himself at the head, and was prepared to wade through a sea of blood for the

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

EB Bax, The Story of the French Revolution, London, 1907, p105. Journal de la libert de la presse, no 5, p2. Bax translates bonheur commun as universal well-being and common welfare, thus rather losing the point (The Last Episode, pp124, 146). See J Cowley, The Victorian Encounter with Marx, London, 1992, pp13-19, 34-5. Gentlemans Magazine, November 1877. Jean Paul Marat, London, 1880; The Story of the French Revolution, London, 1890; Jean-Paul Marat, London, 1900. See JB OBrien, The Life and Character of Maximilian Robespierre, London, 1838; JB OBrien, A Dissertation and Elegy on the Life and Death of the Immortal Maximilian Robespierre, London, 1859.

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accomplishment of his end.17 On this point, Bax is much clearer than many later historians influenced by the traditions of French republicanism and the Popular Front. Secondly, Bax was quite clear and unhesitating on the question of violence. (Though many of his latter-day admirers might like to forget it, Morris, in News from Nowhere and elsewhere, was a firm advocate of revolutionary violence.) In referring to Marats support for the September massacres, he points out that the massacre of the Communards in 1871 was a far worse atrocity; and in citing Marats call to the people to take justice into their own hands against the monopolisers he insists: It should be remembered by those who shudder at the words of Marat, that at this very period, and for long after, the common law of England caused dozens of human beings to be hanged every week, for trivial offences, such as stealing a loaf of bread; and yet the supporters of these laws are not execrated as monsters, but are merely described as unnecessarily severe in their views of justice.18 Yet Bax seems to have lacked enthusiasm for the task assigned to him by Morris. It was to be 15 years after Morris death before the book on Babeuf appeared. After all it was Marat, and not Babeuf, who had been Baxs hero as a young man, Marat whom he had described as one of the most heroic and, as a natural consequence, one of the most calumniated champions the Proletariat has ever had.19 There had been no reference to Babeuf in the first book on Marat, and by the time Bax came to study Babeuf in depth, he was no longer so prone to hero-worship. Indeed, there is an interesting indication that Bax long delayed even embarking on his study of Babeuf. The fifth edition of The Story of the French Revolution was published in 1907, and contained prefaces referring to correction of errors made for the second (1892) and third (1902) editions. The brief account of Babeuf in this volume20 reveals little knowledge of the subject; strikingly, Bax throughout spells his name Baboeuf. Yet the fact that the correct spelling of the name is Babeuf, not Baboeuf, is pointed out on page 2 of the first volume of Advielles work. So some 11 years after Morris death, Bax had apparently not yet opened the book that was to provide the basis of his account. The Bax who finally settled his accounts with Babeuf in 1911 was in many ways a different man from the comrade in whom Morris had invested his hopes. Bax had played an important role in helping Morris to develop as a Marxist, and his greater familiarity with economic and historical matters had provided a useful complement to Morris. But contrary to the claim sometimes suggested that Bax was the better Marxist of the two,21 Bax without the complement of Morris aesthetic and moral passion showed signs of degenerating into the mechanical and fatalistic Marxism characteristic of the Second International. A number of factors may be identified as contributing to this the belief that imperialism had given a new lease of life to capitalism, the growing admiration for the increasingly reformist German Social
17. 18. 19. 20. 21. The Story of the French Revolution (1907 edition), pp80, v. Jean Paul Marat (revised edition 1882), pp62, 79. Jean Paul Marat (1882), p iii. The Story of the French Revolution (1907), pp 103-5. For example, Al Richardsons review of Cowley, Revolutionary History, Volume 5 no 3, 1994, pp228-30.

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Democracy, and, perhaps worst of all, his increasingly strident anti-feminism.22 This last was a particularly blatant example of vulgar materialism; women were allegedly not fit to vote because their brains were smaller than mens, as a direct result of the fact that the whole female organism is subservient to the functions of child-bearing and lactation.23 By 1914, his friend Archibald Robertson believed he had lost much of his revolutionary zeal, and the sorry story ends with his support for his own side in the war in 1914, following the example of all too many socialists.24 This is not to say that The Last Episode of the French Revolution is a poor or inadequate book. It makes a significant contribution to the understanding of Babeufs place in the Revolution, certainly as far as English readers are concerned. Unlike Buonarroti and his translator OBrien, Bax looks at Babeuf in a clear Marxist perspective. He draws out sharply the differentiation between Babeuf and Robespierre: It was, moreover, not true that the distinctive feature in the doctrine of Babeuf, its communistic character, was to be found in any of the writings and speeches of Robespierre and his partisans. Robespierre, St Just, and the rest were jealous upholders of the rights of private property. Their ideal was a Republic of the small middle class, with the citizens possessed each of moderate means, sober, frugal, laborious, misery and want unknown, and an accumulation of wealth beyond a certain limit discouraged. This was the Rousseauite ideal of the period. Thus, though not possessed of a high originality, Babeuf certainly does himself injustice in professing to regard himself as a mere follower of Robespierre or any of the earlier leaders That the communistic idea was not original with Babeuf we have already shown in an earlier chapter of the present work. He undoubtedly derived it from the writings of Mably and Morelly. What was original in Babeuf was his attempt to place it as the immediate goal of the society of his time, to be directly realised by political methods. Babeuf was the first to conceive of communism in any shape as a politically realisable ideal in the immediate or near future25 In thus sharply distinguishing Babeuf from even the most radical wing of the bourgeois revolution, and in stressing his effort to transcend utopianism by practical organisation, Bax brings out the major historical significance of Babeuf indeed, the arguments he adduces would justify a far more vigorous claim of originality than he himself is prepared to make. Moreover, his account presents full English translations of several of the key documents of the conspiracy. Bax thus enhanced the understanding of Babeuf, and although in many ways his book has been outdated by more recent scholarship, it is still very much worth reading. Yet it is hard to avoid feeling that Bax did not quite write the book that Morris had hoped for. Although Bax sees the originality of Babeufs thought, he is often grudging about admitting its significance, for example by putting too much emphasis on his debt to Rousseau. There is sometimes a rather patronising attempt
22. 23. 24. 25. See Cowley, especially pp45, 74, 84, 98. EB Bax, The Fraud of Feminism, London, 1913, pp31-2. See Cowley, pp111-12, 118-20. The Last Episode, pp250-1.

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to measure Babeufs inadequacy against the superior standards of Modern Socialism: The theory of the Equals, as that of their successors, the Utopian Socialists of the earlier nineteenth century, was a scheme of social reconstruction. Today, in the earlier twentieth century, we have done with schemes. Modern Socialism has no scheme: it has certain principles, and certain tactics and methods of action for the furtherance and carrying out of those principles, but as to the precise construction of the detail of life in the society of the future it ventures no prophecy.26 Would it be too fanciful to see the above as a mild snub, not only to Babeuf, but also to the author of News from Nowhere? The rather lukewarm tone is characteristic of the book, and contrasts markedly with the volume on Marat published over 30 years earlier. Bax understood the importance of Babeuf, but he never loved him as he loved Marat. At the beginning of the book,27 Bax lists his main sources. These include the works of Advielle and Buonarroti, as well as a study from a conservative standpoint published in 1849 by Edouard Fleury, brother of the novelist Champfleury. Advielles work was significant in including much new material on Babeufs early life, as well as reproducing some of his pre-1789 correspondence and his speech at the Vendme trial. But Advielle had little knowledge of socialist thought, and saw Babeuf as no more than a manifestation of Christian humanitarianism. In addition, Bax consulted the documents seized at the time of Babeufs arrest, and files of Le Tribun du peuple and other papers published by Babeuf. All this provided substantial documentary backing. Yet it is noteworthy that the two decades before the publication of The Last Episode had seen a widespread interest in Babeuf in the international socialist movement. Jaurs, Gabriel Deville, Victor Mric, Albert Thomas and Kropotkin (whom Bax knew well) had all made a contribution to the understanding of Babeuf from the perspective of modern socialism. (Jaurs Histoire socialiste was to provide a major impetus to the academic study of Babeuf by Aulard, Mathiez and Lefebvre.28) Yet there is no echo of this in Baxs work; if he had done his duty to his dead friend by consulting the major sources, there is no evidence of any enthusiasm for engaging in contemporary debate. Thus Bax does not use his material to full advantage. Although he consulted the documents confiscated at Babeufs arrest and published by the authorities for the trial,29 he does not draw out the extraordinary picture they provide of the day-to-day activities of the conspiracy during its brief existence the work of the agents, distribution of leaflets, flyposting, compiling of lists of contacts, the constant sensitivity to the mood of the population, the effort to combine open agitation with necessary clandestinity. If he had done so he might have seen some fascinating parallels with the Socialist League. Certainly he would not have been so confident about seeing Blanquis conspiratorial organisation as the direct successor to Babeuf.30
26. 27. 28. 29. 30. Ibid, p135. Ibid, p7. There is a favourable reference to Jaurs history in Reminiscences and Reflexions..., p130. See note 8 above. The Last Episode, pp259-60.

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It is not significant that Bax makes a number of factual errors, for example about the date of Babeufs release from prison in 1794 (where he follows Advielle), or even in his claim that the last issue of Le Tribun du peuple came before the closing of the Panthon club (although no 41 of Le Tribun, which he lists among his sources, refers to the closure). Rather more irritating is his assertion that the cages in which Babeuf and his associates were transported to Vendme for trial were followed by others containing wives and children, including Madame Babeuf.31 As Advielle makes quite clear, Madame Babeuf and her child went on foot from Paris to Vendme.32 What Bax in his anti-feminist zeal cannot bring himself to mention is that the cage in fact contained female prisoners. Nowhere does Bax mention that the defendants at Vendme included five women, some of whom had played a significant role in the conspiracy, notably Sophie Lapierre, who courageously defied the legitimacy of the court and led the prisoners in song in defiance of the judge. All the women were in fact acquitted, on the instructions of the judge a fact which Bax might have mentioned, if only to confirm his prejudice that the courts were more lenient to women than to men.33 He did however find space for a one-and-a-half-page-long digression about the evils of modern feminism, even though it bore no relation to his subject. Bax missed one other opportunity of linking babouvisme to the spirit of Morris. He quotes in full the famous Manifesto of the Equals (drafted by Sylvain Marchal) and explains that the Secret Directory had not published it because they objected to the sentence: Perish, if it must be, all the arts, provided real equality be left us! 34 But he fails to note that, in its insistence on the overriding necessity for socialist transformation, this phrase has an echo in Morris letter to the Manchester Examiner of 14 March 1883: popular art has no chance of a healthy life, or, indeed, of a life at all, till we are on the way to fill up this terrible gulf between riches and poverty. Doubtless many things will go to filling it up, and if art must be one of those things, let it go.35 Words that should be remorselessly hurled in the faces of those who claim Morris wallpaper was more important than his socialism. Yet whatever reservations there may be about Baxs book, we can only be grateful that Morris urged him to write it. However limited Morris actual knowledge of Babeuf may have been, he clearly had an intuition that here was a libertarian revolutionary socialist who belonged to the same tradition as himself. Since Baxs time, our understanding of Babeuf has been greatly enhanced, notably by the work of Maurice Dommanget and Victor Dalin. We now have much knowledge and many documents that were unavailable to Morris and Bax; these merely serve to confirm the importance of Babeuf as a key figure in the revolutionary socialist tradition. In the reconstruction of a socialist movement free from the distortions and corruption of Stalinism and Social Democracy, the re31. 32. 33. 34. 35. Ibid, p190. Advielle, I 228. He even accused Winston Churchill of excessive leniency towards the suffragettes (The Fraud of Feminism, p115). The Last Episode, pp109, 113. News from Nowhere, etc (ed A Briggs), p139.

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appropriation of both Babeuf and Morris will have a vital role to play. Ian Birchall is a member of the Socialist Workers Party and has written a book on Babeuf, The Spectre of Babeuf, Macmillans, 1997, ISBN 0-333-68301-3.

Poetry Corner
As a tribute to Brian Behan, who died on 2 November, here is one of his poems.

Building Up and Tearing England Down


Oh, I won a heros name with McAlpine and Costain With Fitzpatrick, Murphy, Ash and the Wimpeys gang Ive been often on the road on me way to draw the dole When theres nothing left to do for Johnny Laing And I used to think that God made the mixer, pick and hod So a Paddy might know hell above the ground Ive had gangers big and tough tell me tear that hole out rough! When youre building up and tearing England down In a tunnel underground a young Limerick man was found He was built into the new Victoria line When the bonus gang had passed sticking from the concrete cast Was the face of little Charlie Joe Divine And the ganger man McGurk said Big Paddy ates the work When the gas main blew and he flew off the ground Oh they swore hed send down slack, Ill not be there until Im back Keep on building up and tearing England down I was on the shuttering jam on the day that Jack McCann Got the better of his stammer in a week He fell from the shuttering jam and that poor old stuttering man He was never ever more inclined to speak And I saw old Balls McColl from a big flyover fall Into a concrete mixer spinning round Though it wasnt his intent he got a fine head of cement When he was building up and tearing England down I remember Carrier Jack with his hod upon his back How he swore one day hed set the world on fire Well his face theyve never seen since his shovel it cut clean To the middle of the big high-tension wire Oh the more like Robin Hood he rode through Cricklewood Or dance around the pubs in Camden Town Oh but let no man proclaim sure old Jack could die in vain When hes building up and tearing England down So come all you navvies bold, do not think that English gold
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Is just waiting to be taken from each sod Oh the likes of you and me will never get the OBE Or a knighthood for good service to the hod Its the concrete master race that would keep you in your place And a ganger man to kick you to the ground If you ever try to take part of what the bosses make When youre building up and tearing England down

Dave Renton

Anti-Fascist Theory Before Fascism?


Lenin on the Black Hundreds
WHAT was Vladimir Lenins attitude towards fascism? From mid-1921, the leader of the Russian Revolution was an invalid, the victim of several strokes, and was thus in no position to comment critically on the rise of Mussolinis fascist gangs. Consequently, Lenins observations on Italian fascism were restricted to a few brief comments in letters, and a line or two in one pamphlet, A Letter to the German Communists, in 1921.1 By contrast, he devoted a great deal of time to the study of an early Russian reactionary movement, the so-called Black Hundreds. This movement is mentioned around 200 times in Lenins Collected Works. For comparison, this movement is discussed about as often as the Labour aristocracy, Lenins explanation of Western Labourism, which is often described as one of his original contributions to Marxist theory. Most of Lenins comments on the Black Hundreds were published during 1906-11, the years of reaction following the partial defeat of the 1905 Revolution, while Lenins last published comments on this movement were written in July 1917, in the run-up to the October Revolution. This article will compare Lenins analysis of the Black Hundreds to the later debates which took place within the Marxist theory of fascism. In doing so, the article will shed light on the nature of the Russian organisation, and also on the generic Marxist theory of fascism. Before coming to the heart of this article, it is worth saying something more about the Black Hundreds themselves. They were reactionary and anti-Semitic groups formed in Russia during and after the 1905 Revolution. Particularly active between 1906 and 1914, they conducted pogroms against the Jews, and physical attacks against revolutionaries. Supporting the principles of the regime, including Orthodoxy and Russian nationalism, the Black Hundreds received the support of the Tsar and the autocracy, sometimes openly and sometimes tacitly. The following manifesto was published in Russkoye Znamya, the movements paper published by AI Dubrovin:
1. VI Lenin, A Letter to the German Communists, VI Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 32, pp51223.

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The Union of the Russian People, which on 3 June 1907, was accorded the honour of being called upon from the height of the Tsars throne to be its reliable bulwark, and to serve as an example of law and order to all and in everything, proclaims that the will of the Tsar can only be exercised: (1) if the Tsars autocratic power, which is indissolubly and vitally bound up with the Russian Orthodox church, canonically established, manifests itself in full measure; (2) if the Russian nationality is dominant not only in the inner gubernias, but also in the border regions; (3) if there is a Duma, composed exclusively of Russians, as the main assistant of the monarch in his work for building up the state; (4) if the principles of the Union of the Russian People with regard to the Jews are fully observed; and (5) if all officials who are opposed to the Tsars autocratic power are removed from government service.2 The aims which emerge from this statement were typical of the movement as a whole. The Black Hundreds were a campaign of the regime, which employed a language of racism and Russian nationalism. Their goals were the goals of the fascist parties of the 1930s, translated into the different social conditions of Russia in 190617. Lenin on the Black Hundreds What was Lenins opinion of the Black Hundreds? The first point to make is that the author was not writing an academic treatise, but urgent political advice aimed at the mass of Russian workers who had risen in 1905. Compared to the standards of academic sociology, you might say that Lenins use of the term was variable and imprecise, certainly he used the word to refer to different parties at different times. Often Lenin would identify the Black Hundreds as a political party. At times, he would restrict to the title to just one organisation, the Union of the Russian People. At other times, Lenin would also lump in with this party the other political forces to which it was closely aligned. So in an election manifesto, published in 1906 in the newspaper Proletary, Lenin identified the Black Hundreds as consisting of the Union of the Russian People, the Party of Law and Order, the Union of the Seventeenth of October, the Commercial and Industrial Party and the Party of Peaceful Renovation.3 Elsewhere, Lenin added another party, the Council of the United Nobility, to this list. In other places, Lenin described the Black Hundreds as the gangs which carried out racist attacks (the Russian word is pogrom), on the advice of these politicians. So an article published in 1905 on massacres at Nizhni-Novgorod and Balashov blames the Black Hundreds for these pogroms.4 Elsewhere, Lenin used the term Black Hundred to describe a certain political style. In a pamphlet published in 1905, Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers Deputies, Lenin described the sham Duma being offered by the court as no more than a Black Hundred Government.5 Although Lenin was perhaps vague about which precise movements should be seen as part of the Black Hundred campaign, whenever he wrote of the Black
2. 3. 4. 5. Quoted in VI Lenin, Political Parties in Russia, Collected Works, Volume 18, pp44-55. VI Lenin, Whom to Elect to the State Duma, Collected Works, Volume 11, pp326-31. VI Lenin, The Black Hundreds and the Organisation of an Uprising, Collected Works, Volume 9, pp200-4. VI Lenin, Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers Deputies, Collected Works, Volume 10, pp1728.

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Hundreds he did so to attack what he saw as a bitter enemy of the Russian revolution. Following the Tsars October Manifesto of 1905, which accepted limited self-government, pogroms were organised in Odessa and Kiev. Lenin responded with The Dnouement is at Hand, a bitter attack on the racist gangs who had terrorised the Jewish people living in these towns: Simultaneously with its Manifesto on the Constitution, the autocracy has begun to take steps to preclude a constitution. The Black Hundreds have got down to work in a way Russia has never seen before. Reports of massacres, pogroms and acts of unparalleled brutality are pouring in from all parts of the country. The white terror is rampant. Wherever they can, the police are inciting and organising the dregs of capitalist society for pillage and violence, plying the scum of the urban population with liquor, staging anti-Jewish pogroms, exhorting to violence against students and rebels, and helping in giving a lesson to Zemstvo members.6 Several themes from this passage were typical of Lenins work. The writer revealed his absolute contempt for the Black Hundreds, he also identified the gangs as part of the regime, and finally he described these attacks as an offensive aimed not just against Jews, nor just against them and the socialist allies of the Jews, but also against the moderate forces of the revolution, including the liberals in the local government (Zemstvo) movement. Lenin consistently described the Black Hundreds as part of the regimes turn to terror following the end of the urban revolution in 1905. In one article from 1906, he describes the Black Hundred pogrom as the retaliatory form of struggle adopted by the autocracy.7 The Tsarist clique was isolated and aware of its unpopularity. Determined to drive wedges between different sections of the revolutionary camp, the regime encouraged mob racism, believing that this would separate the bourgeoisie (with its love of order), from the more militant working class. Consequently, Lenin blamed tramps, rowdies and hawkers who had been taken into government service for the pogroms. In this way, the author made clear his belief that ordinary Russians did not support the massacres.8 At times, Lenin was graphic in his description of police complicity in the racist terror. This was his account of police responses to pogroms, written for the newspaper Vyperod in 1906: The police [force] organises the pogrom beforehand. The police instigates it: leaflets are printed in government offices calling for a massacre of the Jews. When the pogrom begins, the police is inactive. The troops quietly look on at the exploits of the Black Hundreds. But later this very police goes through the farce of prosecution and trial of the pogromists. The investigations and trials conducted by the officials of the old authority always end in the same way: the cases drag on, none of the pogromists are found guilty, sometimes even the battered and mutilated Jews and intellectuals are dragged before the courts, months pass and the old,

6. 7. 8.

VI Lenin, The Dnouement is at Hand, Collected Works, Volume 9, pp447-54. VI Lenin, Guerrilla Warfare, Collected Works, Volume 11, pp213-23. VI Lenin, The Black Hundreds and the Organisation of an Uprising, Collected Works, Volume 9, pp200-4.

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but ever new story is forgotten until the next pogrom.9 To a modern ear, this reads as a powerful description of state collusion with racism, as a critique of what we might call today institutional racism. Certainly the victims of these attacks could expect no justice from the Russian courts. What was the class basis of this pre-fascist movement? Generally, Lenin tended to identify the Black Hundreds with the landlords, as a variety of feudal reaction against capitalism: The Black Hundreds defend the present tsarist government, they stand for the landlords, for the government officials, for the power of the police, for military courts, for pogroms The Black Hundreds defend the interests of the feudal landlords. No land for the peasants.10 At times, however, Lenin would describe the Black Hundreds in a more dynamic way, in terms of the totality of class relations existing in Russia at this time. This analysis can be seen in a piece called Stolypin and the Revolution, which Lenin wrote for the paper Sotsial-Demokrat on the event of Prime Minister Stolypins death in 1911. In this article, he described the various twists and turns in policy of the arch-hangman Stolypin in terms of the general crisis of legitimacy experienced by Tsarism after 1905: Stolypins political biography is the faithful reflection and expression of the conditions facing the tsarist monarchy. Stolypin could only act as he did in the situation in which the revolution placed the monarchy. The monarchy could not act in any other way when it became quite clear that the vast, the overwhelming majority of the population had already realised that its interests could not be reconciled with the preservation of the landowning class, and was striving to abolish that class. Why, then, was Stolypin killed? Stolypin disappeared from the scene at the very moment when the BlackHundred monarchy had taken everything that could be of use to it from the counter-revolutionary sentiments of the whole Russian bourgeoisie.11 Implied in this passage is a definition of the period as a whole. The regime turned to reforms after 1905 when revolutionary sentiments were still strong, and out of a need to restore its popularity. Once the revolution had subsided, then the state turned back to the old feudal and absolutist ways of behaviour, the Black Hundred monarchy. Here Lenins analysis of the Black Hundred phenomena was less concerned with the specific distinctions between one party and another, but rather with the general conditions which enabled this style of reactionary politics to grow. There are two further points which are worth making in this section. Firstly, Lenin argued that the regimes Black Hundred strategy lacked even the support of the cowardly Russian bourgeoisie: It is common knowledge that these parties lack a foothold of any real importance not only among the working class and the
9. 10. 11. VI Lenin, The Reaction is Taking to Arms, Collected Works, Volume 10, pp508-13. VI Lenin, Whom to Elect to the State Duma, Collected Works, Volume 11, pp326-31. VI Lenin, Stolypin and the Revolution, Collected Works, Volume 17, pp247-56.

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peasantry, but even among wide sections of the bourgeoisie.12 From this analysis, it followed that the moment of reaction could not last. Capitalism was the coming system of the day, and the Tsarist desire to hold back the new economic system was doomed to failure. In the long run, the choice would not be between Tsarism and capitalism, it would be between capitalism and a socialist order which could progress beyond it. Secondly, Lenin insisted that where Black Hundred gangs were organised they should be opposed, not merely with moral force propaganda, but with physical force as well. At the high-point of the 1905 Revolution, with both revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries under arms, Lenin advocated armed self-defence: Revolutionary army groups must at once find out who organises the Black Hundreds and where and how they are organised, and then, without confining themselves to propaganda, they must act with armed force.13 In such towns as Ekaterinoslav, where Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and members of the Jewish Bund collaborated in this work, Lenin did everything he could to publicise the results of their united front work.14 The Marxist Theory of Fascism Before coming to any conclusions as to the significance of these articles which Lenin wrote on the Black Hundreds, it is worth comparing his comments to the later debate among European Marxists on the origins and nature of fascism. Lenins originality cannot be estimated simply on the basis of his own work, it can only be tested when he is compared to other Marxists of his generation and beyond. The debate about fascism was largely conducted in Italy and Germany, and relatively few Russian Marxists took part. As the vast bulk of Lenins works were not yet translated or widely available, few of the writers had access to his articles, and as far as I can tell not one of the major participants referred to them. Consequently, this was not a situation in which later Marxists were copying Lenin or if they were, they did not choose the most obvious point to begin. The classic text for these debates is Dave Beethams Marxists in Face of Fascism, a compendium of anti-fascist texts from the 1920s and 1930s.15 Beetham argues that both in Italy and then Germany, there were three major positions in the debate. The first (or left) theory of fascism tended to be argued by Communists, especially after the left turn in the Communist International in 1929. In this theory, fascism was simply an instrument in the hands of the capitalist ruling class. Fascism was about using violent coercion to smash the workers movement. At the 1922 Congress of the Italian Communist Party, fascism was defined as a function of bourgeois society, and a violent action by a section of the bourgeoisie. In the left theory, fascism tended to be defined according to the aims of the fascist ideology, which were described as profoundly reactionary. Fascism was about establishing the
12. 13. 14. 15. VI Lenin, The Platform of the Reformists and the Platform of the Revolutionary SocialDemocrats, Collected Works, Volume 18, pp378-86. VI Lenin, Tasks of Revolutionary Army Contingents, Collected Works, Volume 10, pp420-4. VI Lenin, The Black Hundreds and the Organisation of an Uprising, Collected Works, Volume 9, pp200-4. D Beetham, Marxists in Face of Fascism: Writings on Fascism from the Inter-War Period, Manchester, 1983; also D Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice, London, 1999, pp54-76.

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secure class rule of the bourgeoisie, and it was about smashing the working class. Those were its consequences, and they were all that Marxists needed to know. After the defeat of the Italian left, the left position was discredited, before being revived by Stalin at the time of his 1929 left turn. All over Europe, communist parties were instructed to turn their fire on the social fascists in the social democratic parties. In this context, a theory of fascism which stressed only the consequences of fascism could be misused to explain that as all bourgeois parties were anti-communist, so all non-communist parties were the same. The left theory of fascism was used to justify the communists suicidal hostility to German social democracy in the period leading up to Hitlers accession to power in 1933. There were elements of the left definition also in the official communist theory of fascism promulgated at the 1935 Congress of the International, where fascism was described as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinist and most imperialist elements of finance capital.16 The second (or right) theory of fascism was the property of the socialist parties, both before and after 1929. While the left theory tended to emphasise the aims and goals of fascism, the right theory concentrated instead on fascism as a style of political mobilisation. Those who argued the right theory generally emphasised the size of the fascist mass movement, its popular character, its use of propaganda to win a large audience, and its autonomy from capitalist interests. In Italy, Giovanni Zibordi made the point that fascism could not be simply an instrument of capitalist interests. Fascism was too powerful to be anyones tool: what kind of power would it [fascism] have and what prospect of success, if it were indeed only the bourgeoisie enjoying advantage and privileges that it rightly fears it will see destroyed by a socialist regime? What if, in its anti-socialist offensive, it did not make use, both directly and indirectly, of the collaboration, the approval, the tolerance of classes and strata, which have nothing to do with the bourgeoisie in the socioeconomic sense of the word, but which oppose socialism from an accumulation of suspicions, prejudices, misunderstandings and outraged sentiments?17 Emphasising the spontaneous, popular and revolutionary character of fascism, social democracy was no better placed than communism to understand the rise of this new hostile force. Rudolf Hilferding, one of the German champions of the right theory, expressed the passivity that was typical of his generations: Were the Prussian Junkers, so long accustomed to power and the high echelons of the bureaucracy and military, to abandon the field voluntarily to a plebeian mass movement?18 As with the left theory, the right theory also went out of favour in the mid-1920s, before reviving as the 1930s went on. The third (or dialectical) theory of fascism was the product of a generation of dissident Marxists, activists outside the control of both the Socialist and Communist Internationals. Such figures include August Thalheimer, Ignazio Silone, Antonio Gramsci and Leon Trotsky. In terms of their theory, these writers synthesised the left
16. 17. 18. Quoted in Beetham, op cit, pp96-9; the 1935 definition is quoted in M Kitchen, Fascism, London, 1976, p7. Quoted in Beetham, op cit, pp88-96. Quoted in ibid, pp259-63.

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and the right Marxist approaches, stressing both the reactionary goals of fascism and the strength of the fascist popular movement. According to these writers, fascism was a specific form of mass reactionary politics. Fascism aimed to crush workingclass organisations, but it was able to do this precisely because it was an independent political force, employing a language which combined socialist and nationalist terms, which appeared revolutionary and obtained mass support. One of the distinguishing features of this third theory was the claim that fascism was contradictory. The alliance between the fascist goals and the fascist movement was unstable this explained why fascism could grow so fast at times of crisis, but was generally unable to dominate politics at moments of class peace. If fascism was a movement shaped by both mass support and reactionary goals, then there was a conflict at the heart of the movement. Karl Radek was one writer who described this fascist contradiction especially well: It is precisely fascisms strength that forms the basis for its downfall. Being a petit-bourgeois party, it has a broad attacking front, but being a petit-bourgeois party, it cannot carry out the policy of Italian capital without producing revolt in its own camp.19 In the debate amongst the supporters of these three theories, the issue at stake was as much one of method as of content. For both the left and the right theories of fascism, the key task was to identify which classes gave fascism its greatest support. If the social base of fascism was to be found in the bourgeoisie, then the left theory would be correct. If fascism was based on the popular classes, the workers and the peasantry, then the right theory would be closer to the truth. For the supporters of the dialectical theory, in contrast, the key task was to understand the contradictions which fascism expressed. How did fascism work what made it change and develop over time? This dialectical approach towards social theory has been summarised very neatly in Anthony Giddens much more recent description of the classical Marxist method: Dont look for the functions and social practices they fulfil, look for the contradictions they embody.20 I have described these three theories as a progression, as if the first one had grown up, and then a second, and then a third. Reality was of course more complex, each of these theories had its champions at the time of Mussolinis or Hitlers seizures of power. Indeed, none of the Marxists who supported these rival arguments would admit responsibility for the defeats. Although it seems to me that the third Marxist theory of fascism was more accurate in that it came closer to explaining the dynamic at the heart of the fascist movement it would be false to pretend that there was a consensus in support of this theory among either Marxist or non-Marxist scholars. My point in referring to these debates is rather to give a sense of the arguments in the 1920s and the 1930s, when reactionary movements on the verge of a successful seizure of power. In the USA in the 1940s, communist opponents of fascism were often described as premature anti-fascists. Their crime was opposing fascism in Spain before the US state swung round. In a different way, Lenin can be seen as an early Marxist theorist of fascism. His analysis of the Black Hundreds attempted to explain a parallel reactionary movement. Which theory,
19. 20. Quoted in ibid, pp99-102; for the fascist contradiction, see Renton, op cit, pp104-5. A Giddens, Central Problems in Social Theory, London, 1979, p131. I am grateful to Dave Pinnock for this reference.

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then, was closest to that used by Lenin in the 1900s? Lenin on Fascism From what I have written so far, it might follow that Lenins analysis should be seen as the ancestor of the left theory of fascism. Certainly, Lenin tended to describe the Black Hundred movement as the consequence of the Tsarist regime. A product, an instrument, a puppet of the regime, these are the sort of metaphors which would convey the relationship that Lenin described. Certainly, this was the approach of each of the articles I have mentioned so far, and it was also the theme of another of his pieces, The Reaction is Taking to Arms, from Vyperod in 1906. In this article, Lenin quoted from a telegram sent by Tsirin, a delegate in the Duma for the town of Byelostock: A deliberately-organised anti-Jewish pogrom has started Vigorous agitation for the pogrom has been carried out for the past two weeks. In the streets, particularly at night, leaflets were distributed calling for the massacre, not only of Jews, but also of intellectuals. The police simply turned a blind eye to this. What was Lenins conclusion? The government has taken to arms against the people.21 Alongside such left articles, there were other pieces in which Lenin described the autonomous nature of the Black Hundred movement. One article, The Black Hundreds, was written for the paper Pravda Truda in 1913. Here, Lenin emphasised the support which many Russian peasants did give to the Black Hundred movement: There is in our Black-Hundred movement one exceedingly original and exceedingly important feature that has not been the subject of sufficient attention. That feature is ignorant peasant democracy, democracy of the crudest type, but also extremely deep-seated. How could reactionaries support peasant democracy? Because of the continuing existence of a partial democracy in Russia, so every political party, even of the extreme right, has to seek some sort of link with the people: The extreme rights constitute the party of the landowners. They cannot, however, confine themselves to links with the landowners alone. They have to conceal those links and pretend that they are defending the interests of the entire people, that they stand for the good old, stable way of rural life. They have to appeal to the most deep-rooted prejudices of the most backward peasants, they have to play on this ignorance.22 In effect, the Black Hundreds ideology was partially shaped by the aspirations of ordinary Russian peasants. Even this reactionary and profoundly anti-democratic movement could not grow without adapting itself to the democratic order of things. In the earlier discussion of the third or dialectical Marxist theory of fascism, I made the point that many of these authors have described a fascist contradiction.
21. 22. VI Lenin, The Reaction is Taking to Arms, Collected Works, Volume 10, pp508-13. VI Lenin, The Black Hundreds, Collected Works, Volume 19, pp390-1.

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Their argument was that the reactionary ideology of fascism and the fascist mass movement pulled in hostile directions. According to such authors as Gramsci and Trotsky, this contradiction was expressed in a profound fascist ambivalence towards ordinary people. As long as fascism was a movement, it would promise Italian or German workers and peasants the earth. Yet once fascism was a regime, these promises dried up, and the fascists promises were exposed as hollow myth. It is revealing that in his article The Black Hundreds, Lenin describes a similar ambivalence felt by the Russian reactionaries towards the Russian peasant class. He gives the example of Bishop Nikon, forced to give up his work for the Black Hundreds in the Russian Duma, because of a series of speeches in which he attacked the Tsarist regime for failing to deliver the land and bread which it had promised. Rather than describing this expulsion as a one-off, Lenin maintained that the treatment of Bishop Nikon was symptomatic of a class instability within the Black Hundred coalition: Now and again the voice of the real peasant life, peasant democracy, breaks through all the Black Hundred mustiness and clich. Then the Rights are compelled to get rid of this inconvenient peasant democrat. In the conclusion of his article, Lenin went on to describe what he saw as the results of this process: Bishop Nikon realises that his Black Hundred views are being undermined by the real state of affairs; they are being destroyed by what he observes in the Duma and in the attitude of the authorities, etc. Bishop Nikon, however, cannot understand the reason for all of this or is afraid to understand it. But reality will win through, and out of ten in any village who think as Bishop Nikon does, nine will, in the long run, most likely prove less obtuse in mastering the lessons of life than the bishop.23 The reactionary synthesis between a landowners ideology and a peasant movement could last in the short term, but in the long term it was unable to deliver what the peasants actually desired. Life itself, and the process of peasant class struggle would point in a different direction towards a worker-peasant democracy, in which the landowners had no part to play. Conclusion The purpose of this article has been to compare Lenins understanding of the Black Hundred movement to various Marxist analyses of fascism generated in interwar Europe. At times, Lenins approach was similar to that of the left theorists of fascism, while at other times he was closer to the dialectical theory. Insofar as there are differences between Lenins approach and the dialectical theory, these could be put down to the different method of different writers, or to the different periods which they lived through. Earlier in this piece, I suggested that the goals of the Black Hundreds were the same as the goals of the fascist parties, but translated into the different social conditions of Russia in 1906-17. The rider is significant. In this earlier and different social situation, capitalism was much weaker and the remnants of feudal society continued to dominate, certainly within the leading institutions of the
23. Ibid.

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Russian state. In this situation, it would not be surprising if the reactionary content of the Black Hundred movement was stronger than the reactionary aspect of interwar fascism, and conversely it would make sense if the popular or revolutionary aspect was less. Given the different social context in which he was writing, the similarity between Lenins analysis and the method of the dialectical school is striking. Lenin raised the same questions and treated them in much the same way as the later writers. It is astonishing how close he was to the dialectical theory. It has been said of the German lefts that they neglected the practical lessons learned by the Italian communists in their defeat at the hands of Mussolini. In this sense, the German Communist Party took Marxist theory backwards to an understanding that was surpassed by 1922. This article would go further in its criticism. Stalins imposition of the theory of social fascism was a step backwards to a theoretical stage which preceded even the work of Lenin. As well as being a tragedy for the German left, it was also a defeat for human understanding.

Reviews
Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The Course Is Set On Hope, Verso, 2001
SUSAN Weissman has done a magnificent job in placing before us the main outlines of Victor Serges life. The book provides a much more rounded view of Serges contribution to the struggle for socialism in the twentieth century than we have had up to now. Particularly useful is the extensive bibliography, which affords the reader the opportunity to pursue Serges views on any particular subject of interest. Here I wish only to concentrate on a limited number of issues; as to the rest, please judge for yourselves. Serges criticisms of Bolshevik policy in the early years of the revolution are known from his memoirs. Susan Weissman reminds us that, inter alia, he was opposed to the New Economic Policy that was proclaimed following the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1921. As she explains In Serges view economic recovery could have been achieved without a return to the market by freeing the state-strangled cooperatives to initiative from below in the form of associations which would take over the management of different branches of the economy. Using shoemaking as an example, Serge explained that there was a shortage of both shoes and leather, yet the rural areas had plenty of leather. In Serges vision, the unfettered shoemakers cooperatives could easily have obtained the necessary leather and made the shoes if left to themselves. They would likely charge high prices for these shoes, but less than the exorbitant prices encountered on the black market. The state would regulate price and could assist this form of workers control by exercising a downward pressure on prices. (p49) This conception is interesting in view of the fact that one of Lenins last writings is entitled On Cooperation (see Lenin, Collected Works, Volume 33).
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Serges involvement with political developments in Germany in the early 1920s is given extensive treatment. There are some thought-provoking remarks on the Kapp Putsch of 1920, which was defeated by a general strike, following which (some say) the workers parties (that is, primarily the SPD) could easily have seized power and embarked upon the socialist revolution. Weissman goes further: The Kapp Putsch presented a moment of choice for the KPD. The leadership of the party vacillated first opposing the strike and then reversing its stand. The revolutionaries had missed a rare opportunity to attempt to take power following the general strike. (p55) It is not clear whether Serge took this line: the context of this observation suggests that the judgement is Weissmans rather than Serges. Similar considerations apply as regards the following remarks on the year 1923: The Comintern analysis of the German situation had been outstripped by events. Conditions in October were not as favourable as they had been in July; the social crisis was less acute, and the stabilisation of the mark had eased the situation. (p60) However, a passage a bit further on does seem to reflect Serges views: Serge argued in his article in Clart that the disease of bureaucratisation had its hand in the inept bungling of the German fiasco. The KPD had not only allowed all initiative to come from Moscow but had remained passive while a revolutionary situation developed under their noses Accepting a date for the insurrection in this situation was a further indication of the bureaucratic isolation from reality which defeated them in the end. (p62) Naturally the book also deals with the struggle in the Russian Communist Party following Lenins withdrawal from active politics in the years of 1922-24. Here Serge makes it clear that the Oppositions desire to confine its activities to protest within the party ranks was a mistake (see page 96). As Weissman says: Confining the battle to the party ranks left the masses of workers with no arena for political activity. Caught in the dilemma of trying to promote democracy while remaining loyal to an organisation that prohibited opposition, the Left Opposition undermined its own struggle. (p81) Weissmans treatment of the subsequent relations between Trotsky and Serge in exile in the 1930s is to be particularly commended for its thoroughness and sensitivity. She quotes a fragmentary comment by Trotsky on Serge found among Trotskys papers in Mexico, apparently written around 1939, which clearly goes beyond the bounds of propriety (see pages 235-6), and observes: It was as if all his frustrations at being physically prevented from playing a leading role in the struggle in the USSR and Europe were vented in his literary tantrums against comrades like Serge. His own son, Lev Lyovich Sedov, a frequent subject of Trotskys anger, recognized the deleterious effects of this kind of outburst: I think that all Dads deficiencies have not
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diminished as he grew older, but under the influence of his isolation, very difficult, unprecedentedly difficult, gotten worse. His lack of tolerance, hot temper, inconsistency, even rudeness, his desire to humiliate, offend and even destroy have increased. It is not personal, it is a method and hardly good in organisation of work. (p236) I believe this irascibility and exaggerated amour propre of Trotskys is an important factor to be taken into account if we are to understand the failure of the international Left Opposition and the subsequent trajectory of the Fourth International. Iain Gairioch

RJB Bosworth, Mussolini, Arnold, 2002


BOSWORTHS Mussolini is the first scholarly biography of the Duce to appear in the English language for 20 years. Given the dire intellectual climate of our times, many readers of this journal will be mightily relieved to know that the new portrait offered to us is an anti-fascist one, albeit one that differs in a number of respects from that offered by Denis Mack Smiths Mussolini (1981). Whilst Bosworths Mussolini is not a monumental undertaking on the scale of Kershaws two-volume Hitler, or even Prestons Franco, it is nonetheless a substantial work 428 pages of text and 91 pages of notes and is bound to affect the way that the Italian dictator is perceived in Anglophone countries. As yet, it has had far less attention than it deserves, perhaps because the Australian author rejects the dominant English caricature of Mussolini as a clown, without in any way rehabilitating him as a hero (rehabilitation may be the only sort of revisionism to which the more journalistic reviewers or literary editors, who now regard second-rate comic novelists as the leading authorities on twentieth-century dictators, readily react). Unfortunately, Bosworth is far less likely to change the terms of the debate in Italy itself, where Renzo de Felices 6000-page biography of Mussolini (Turin, 19651997) a rambling and badly-written work far more frequently cited than read, which Mack Smith witheringly and correctly branded A Monument to the Duce in 1976 has become the received version in the academy, and the growing rightwing hegemony over both popular culture and the bulk of the mainstream newspapers means that anti-fascist accounts are increasingly dismissed as at best old-fashioned and at worst the product of communist propaganda. In short, although it is very probable that Bosworths book will be translated into Italian, for there is bound to be a market for a shorter and more readable alternative to De Felices soporific magnum opus, the chances of such a translation giving rise to the kind of mass-media spectacle once generated by the gladiatorial De FeliceMack Smith contests seem low. Bosworths first book, Italy, the Least of the Great Powers: Italian Foreign Policy Before the First World War (Cambridge, 1979) which to British eyes would have seemed relatively uncontroversial, a thoroughly researched but in most respects old-fashioned work of diplomatic history of the kind one might expect from a pupil of Harry Hinsley gave rise to a storm in Italy, with the prominent conservative historian Rosario Romeo accusing the Australian interloper of being an Italy hater, but Bosworth has never gained the notoriety of a Mack Smith amongst Italians unconnected with the foreign policy establishment, and in any event De Felices death means that any Italian debate would be insufficiently personalised to have any real popular appeal. Mussolini is Bosworths first venture into biography; his previous works have

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been concerned with diplomatic history, the history of Italian emigration, or historiography, particularly the historiography of Italian fascism. This background has meant that he places rather less emphasis on the role of the individual in history than many of his predecessors in the role of Mussolinis biographer, whether academics like Mack Smith, equally renowned for his biographies of Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour, or popular writers like Christopher Hibbert or Jasper Ridley, for whom historical biography is the craft by which they earn a living, and Mussolini a subject like any other. Nonetheless, the bulk of the book is a chronological narrative, and it contains enough information on Mussolini to satisfy most readers, even if it probably gives rather more of the general context than the majority of biographies. Despite what some might see as excessive digressions on Italian social history in the early chapters, the degree of structuralism in Bosworths approach should not be exaggerated. Indeed, in some respects Bosworth is far less austere than Mack Smith, who took his self-imposed brief of a political biography focussing on the public life of one man (Mack Smith, 1981, p xiii) reasonably literally, even if Bosworth usually relegates the more salacious gossip to the end-notes, from which we learn that a biographer reckons that Mussolini had sexual relations with 162 different women but that Ciano exceeded this total in seven years as Foreign Minister (p430), that the ghosted memoirs of Mussolinis batman claimed that the Duce had his way with a different women every day, but that he usually only spent two or three minutes in the act (p466), and that his final and most notorious mistress Claretta Petacci had a big bust (p483), whereas in the text Bosworth confines himself to quoting a hostile female observer who admitted she had beautiful legs (p278). Before engaging in a discussion of the works many merits and the extent to which Bosworths views converge or diverge from those of other scholars, it seems reasonable to begin by expressing mild irritation with two aspects of Bosworths biographical technique. The first of my reservations contains the structure of the work as a whole. The central narrative of the book starts with a chapter entitled The Furies and Benito Mussolini, 1944-1945 (pp13-55), before going back to the more obvious starting-point, Mussolinis birth in 1883, in the second chapter. Whilst this was obviously intended as a means of attracting the readers attention, I am not at all convinced that such an attempt to borrow a technique from film works in the context of a lengthy linear narrative by the time readers finally reach the latter pages of the book they are bound to feel that there is an odd gap between Chapter 17, which explains the circumstances of Mussolinis rescue by the Germans, and Chapter 18, which begins with the fate of his body after his execution. Since Bosworths picture of Mussolinis role in the Second World War rests on the notion of a physical and mental decline after 1940, which accelerated after 1943 turning him into a dead man walking (p403), it would have been far more logical, and aesthetically satisfying, to follow the descending parabola to its conclusion rather than to indulge in gimmickry reminiscent of the post-modernists with whom Bosworth is usually so impatient. Secondly, whilst Bosworth has every right to speculate about paths not taken at a number of turning-points in Mussolinis life, we might perhaps have been spared a few purple passages in which Bosworth imagines precisely what Mussolini was thinking in a particular situation. A rather detached semi-structuralist historiographically-informed approach cannot really be combined with the melodramatic flourishes of the Christopher Hibbert school of popular biography without it grating on the reader.

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Bosworths Mussolini is not the comic figure which Mack Smiths Mussolini is to some extent, even if the Mussolini of the Englishmans full-scale biography is less comic than the central figure in his earlier Mussolinis Roman Empire (1976). On balance, Bosworth is probably right to take Mussolini rather more seriously; the central problem with Mack Smiths emphasis on the Duces absurdities was that it made it very difficult to understand how such a man had stayed in power for 20 years. Moreover, the conventional English picture of Mussolini as a clown, of which Mack Smiths biography was a rather more nuanced variation (even if it was subsequently vulgarised by reviewers like the erstwhile Sun columnist Professor John Vincent who, when reviewing Mack Smith for one broadsheet, described Mussolini as The Emperor of Ice Cream), did rest on crude anti-Italian stereotypes, as Bosworth points out. Nonetheless, there are dangers in excessive political correctness; Italian popular culture of the 1920s and 1930s was aware of the comic side of Fascist pomposity, and workers in Turin and elsewhere reacted to Fascist slogans and songs by parodying them, so it always strikes me as dangerous to lose sight of the comic side of all our rulers, Fascist or non-Fascist (and, contrary to the claims of the extraordinarily ill-informed Martin Amis, Hitler too was turned into a comic figure, most notably in Chaplins Great Dictator). In another respect, there is an overlap, in that both of these major Englishlanguage biographies see Mussolini as a talented actor, even if Bosworth relates this capacity for self-dramatisation to notions of constructing charisma which were not quite as popular in historiography 20 years ago Mussolinis charisma gets 28 references in Bosworths index. As Bosworth is clearly aware, Mussolinis obsession with his own image (he might be seen as the politician who invented the photo opportunity as Bosworth remarks: Already in the 1920s one observer suggested that Mussolini had become the most photographed man in history [p211]), and with spin seems far less eccentric these days than it once did. In many respects, Mussolini can be seen as ahead of his time, as the precursor of the politicians of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Obsessions with appearing young and virile are much more common among present-day premiers and presidents than they were in the age of Neville Chamberlain and Franklin D Roosevelt. Mussolinis decision to shave his head once his hair turned white and started to recede may have seemed evidence of extraordinary vanity in the 1930s, but arguably showed more dignity than could be found in the attempts by Reagan and, more recently, Berlusconi to defy the ageing process with hair dye. Similarly, Mussolinis desire to control the media of his time is paralleled by similar cravings on the part of New Labour figures like Peter Mandelson and Alistair Campbell, even if Mussolini had slightly better luck in silencing his critics, partly because a party press officer like Cesare Rossi could organise the physical elimination of a persistent nuisance like Matteotti, instead of having to confine himself to the merely verbal intimidation now permitted to sources close to the Prime Minister. Bosworth is at times rather more reluctant than Mack Smith to place in the foreground the violent side of Mussolini. Mack Smiths Mussolini is portrayed as to some extent a criminal, just as he is seen as to some extent an actor and a clown. Bosworth shies away from Mussolinis early propensity to violence, despite pointing out that as editor of Il Popolo dItalia in 1919 he was always armed (p123) and giving more details about his duelling in the 1914-22 period than Mack Smith does. Bosworth is forced to acknowledge that during a petty squabble among the pupils, Mussolini, still short of his eleventh birthday, pulled a knife and stabbed a class-

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mate in the hand (p52). Bosworth calls this incident, and Mussolinis subsequent expulsion from the school, the stuff of Fascist, Anti-Fascist and sensationalist biographical account (p52), and in his eagerness to play it down comes up with the following, unintentionally comic, sentence: The problem with drawing too definite a conclusion about his time at Faenza is that when Mussolini transferred to the state school at Forlimpopoli he became something of a model pupil (despite some trouble occasioned by another stabbing incident). (p52) A page later, Bosworth, normally eager to pose as the down-to-earth Australian, puncturing the pretensions of pompous British or American authors, seems to sound like a parody of a liberal social worker, calling Mussolini at times violent (as was the society around him) (p53), as if the relatively peaceful village of Predappio were the equivalent of Corleone. Whilst any rational commentator is bound to agree with Bosworth that Mussolini, for all his brutality, was not in the same league as Hitler, it seems perverse to deny that he had a violent streak which manifested itself from boyhood onwards, and which cannot be ascribed to social conditions or circumstances such as the First World War, which may have brutalised many young rank-and-file Fascists. Although Bosworths argument that Mussolini was not inevitably destined to become a Fascist dictator (and had no long-term plan to become one) is a sensible and convincing one, Mussolinis undeniable potential to succeed as a politician or journalist of either a socialist or a more conventional bourgeois type was fatally undermined by his violent inclinations, which made him emotionally incapable of accepting what amounted to a pacifist line on the First World War, or of restraining his anger at Matteotti (in the circumstances of 1924, ordering Matteottis death did not have the political rationality of ordering the death of the Rosselli brothers in 1937). On the Matteotti murder, Bosworth pronounces that Canalis detail is impressive, but perhaps the case against Mussolini remains not-proven (p196), and he is even somewhat reluctant to link Mussolini, as opposed to Ciano, with the murder of the Rosselli brothers, concluding that some witnesses have denied Mussolini was directly involved, though it is hard to absolve him from some responsibility (p318). It has often been argued that Mussolini could have survived the Second World War, with the backing of Pius XII and the Americans, had he emulated Francos neutrality and not taken Italy into the war on the German side in 1940. The one man alone argument, most starkly made by Winston Churchill, fits the picture of a man drawn to violence and risk (as Bosworth points out, Mussolinis fascination with driving fast cars and piloting his own planes meant that he was lucky to survive a car crash in October 1919 and a plane crash in March 1921), but Bosworth disagrees, arguing: There is every reason, in other words, to think that, in the special circumstances of mid-June 1940, Mussolini had made a decision from which few demurred. (p370) Nonetheless, Bosworth does not take seriously the claim by Mussolini, who did not share his German counterparts love of dogs, that I am like a cat, sensible and prudent (p353), seeing, like many a biographer before him, Mussolinis growing fascination with Hitler after 30 January 1933 as the prime reason why the Furies came for the Duce in 1943-45 (p264). Space does not permit detailed discussion of Bosworths radical disagreements with MacGregor Knoxs recent work on Mussolinis foreign policy; suffice it to say that the Australian sees the Duce as an opportunist, not the ideologically-driven fanatic of the Americans darker vision. In conclusion, despite my minor reservations about some points of detail, I would wholeheartedly recommend this instructive and very entertaining life of a

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dictator to anybody interested in the history of the twentieth century, and I am gratified that a more affordable paperback edition is now available. Tobias Abse

Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography, Macmillan, 2000 James D White, Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution, Palgrave, 2001
LIKE it or not, written history cannot be neutral, and biographies are usually the result of the biographers like or dislike for the subject of their work. Robert Services Lenin belongs to the latter type, and the very first general impression one gets after reading it is that the biographer politically hates the founder of Russian Bolshevism. Service makes this clear from the beginning. To him, Lenin was a human timebomb (p8), had greater passion for destruction than love for the proletariat (p8), and eliminated concern for ethics (p9). Such malevolent assessments are reiterated throughout ad nauseam, and the whole of his book is permeated by such bourgeois one-sided moralism and a deeply-rooted anti-communist sentiment. Despite its richness of information on Lenins intimate life, including overdetailed references to his family life and to his state of health, the books gives the readers no opportunity correctly to grasp the meaning of Lenins political actions insofar as most of the negative facets of his activity as a politician are pulled out of their historical context and treated as absolute mistakes or crimes without taking into account the general framework in which they occurred and the concrete events that caused them to occur. For instance, Service hardly mentions the attempt on 6 July 1918 at an antiBolshevik coup dtat by the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, who tried to seize power in Moscow. Service fails to tell that the green light for the coup attempt was given by Yakov Blumkins killing of the German ambassador in Moscow, Count von Mirbach, which marked the highest point of the Left SRs campaign against the Bolsheviks foreign policy as manifested in the signing of the Brest-Litovsk treaty. By the way, it was precisely the clash between the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs which marked the inception of the civil war something to which Service completely neglects to point. Service fails to establish any links whatsoever between the attempt on Lenins life on 30 August 1918 and the unleashing of mass terror. The woman who tried to kill Lenin on that day was Fanja (Dora) Kaplan, whose name and political affiliation (she was a member of the Socialist Revolutionaries) go unnoticed in Services book. Furthermore, the actual political character of the civil war as a wide-range military intervention through which Russian reaction and world capitalism tried to restore capitalism (and Tsarism) in Russia is totally obscured as well. This is but one example of Services method, which consists of treating related historical occurrences as separate, unconnected events, and in looking at these very same events in an impressionistic way, that is, without considering their political reasons and content. And the same simplistic approach is also applied to the more abstract level of political theory. Thus Service clearly shows his inability to understand such trifles as Lenins original conception of the revolutionary party and the true reasons for the Bolshevik-Menshevik split of 1903, which he falsely presents as a clash between Yuli Martov, who wanted a party with members who had scope to express themselves independently of the central leadership, and Lenin himself, for whom the need was for leadership, leadership and more leadership

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(p155). He neglects the theoretical origins and the enormous practical impact of Lenins April Theses of 1917 (pp263, 269); he fails to deal with Lenins attempt to build a political bloc with Trotsky on the eve of the Twelfth Congress of the Communist Party in April 1923 in order to defeat Stalin and to call a halt to the impending bureaucratic degeneration of the party and state apparatus. The list of Services misunderstandings, mistakes and omissions could easily be extended. But what is worse is that Services weaknesses in historical-political methodology are supplemented by a conscious attempt not only at obscuring but also at removing altogether some unpleasant facts from history. And the facts I am referring to are unpleasant for the current crusade undertaken by the world bourgeoisie with its plethora of politicians, journalists and academicians against genuine communism, that is, against the idea that humanity can be freed from all forms of exploitation and oppression through a socialist revolution which does away with all types of exploiters and oppressors. Thus Service remarks in passing that Lenin sanctioned violence against all those who had politically resisted the Reds as they moved into Azerbaijan, Armenia and Georgia (p434), but he completely neglects that the underlying reason for the Red Armys suppression of the Menshevik government in Georgia in February 1921 was that the Georgian Mensheviks who were chauvinistically oppressing various national minorities living in their territory, including the Azeris and the Armenians had run a virulent campaign of arrests against Georgian Bolsheviks despite the legalisation of a Georgian communist party in May 1920; thus, in dealing with the Kronstadt uprising of February 1921, Service does not utter a word about either such trifles as the political programme of the rebels or the attempts by the Whites and some foreign powers to take advantage of the uprising to foster their anti-Bolshevik plans. This has been proved by Paul Avrich, whose fine book on Kronstadt from 1970 appears to be unknown to him. Services previous three-volume work on Lenin (Lenin: A Political Life, Macmillan, 1985, 1991 and 1995) already showed his poor understanding of political theory, and this has subsequently been emphasised by James D White, the author of another recent book on the same subject. In his less ponderous work Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution, White points out that Service is less convincing when trying to explain intellectual developments (p199), and reduces the theoretical aspects of his subject to a minimum and concentrates on describing the circumstances of Lenins life (p199). While declaring from the start that his book does not intend to be a complete biography of Lenin, White endeavours to deal with Lenin in an honest way, giving a priority to his political ideas in theory and practice rather than to personal, family and medical aspects or to selectively chosen, unconnected events. After a survey on the development of Marxism in Russia, White takes the reader through Lenins most important theoretical and practical gains: from his analysis of the development of capitalism in Russia to his fight for the building of a revolutionary party, from his struggle against imperialist war to his understanding of imperialism, from his role as the main leader of the October Revolution to his actions as the chief representative of the Soviet regime. His attitude to Lenins Bolshevik policy is sometimes hostile, for example, on Kronstadt (p169), but always in a measured way. Whites major shortcoming appears to be his treatment of the Lenin Legend (pp178-202), which is a defective and incomplete presentation of the different interpretations of Lenins life and activities offered by various schools of

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thought. Paolo Casciola

RJ Evans, Telling Lies about Hitler: The Holocaust, History and the David Irving Trial, Verso, 2002
RICHARD Evans was an expert witness for the defence in the libel action brought by David Irving against Deborah Lipstadt. In her book, Denying the Holocaust (Penguin, 1994), Lipstadt had named Irving as a Holocaust denier. Irving sued, and took the action to the High Court. In April 2000, the judge ruled against the action, branding Irving a Holocaust denier and a falsifier of history. Richard Evans book, Telling Lies about Hitler, is made up of two sections. The middle is a condensed version of Evans 740-page witness report. If this is the substance, then it must be placed in context, and the beginning and final chapters serve that role. The last chapters include an account of how Irving responded to the evidence in court. At first Irving was denying everything, then he sought to filibuster, seizing on the most inconsequential points, while neglecting the main ones. Ultimately, Irving was forced to accept the claim (which mattered most to Evans) that he had consistently lied, falsifying documents, in order to try and shield Adolf Hitler from responsibility for the Holocaust. The examples of deceit which Evans gives include mistranslating the sentence SS leaders must stay to the Jews must stay in a document which did not mention the killings or claiming that a stop order placed on one train-load of Jews being sent from Berlin to Riga proved that Hitler opposed all killings from the start. Evans demonstrates that such deliberate mistakes are legion in Irvings work, serving always to legitimise the regime. Some of the most angry pages of this book are those in which Evans criticises those journalists who were arrogant enough to interview Irving, and to think that they could knock him down without doing even the most basic research and therefore allowed this fraud to outwit them. Similar criticisms are also applied to a number of right-wing historians, operating on the cusp of journalism and the historical profession, who made the same mistake, Conor Cruise OBrien, Stuart Nicholson, John Erickson, Donald Cameron Watt and John Keegan. All of them wrote as if Irving was one of us, and Lipstadt was not. Throughout this book, Richard Evans adopts the patient, deliberate tone of a man with an overwhelming case who asks only for the time to be heard. It becomes clear from his account that the defeat of David Irving in court was also a victory. It was a triumph for the accurate memory of the Holocaust, against people who wanted to use the action to throw doubt on one of the most important events in twentieth-century history. It was also a success for the standards of professionalism, accuracy and rigour in the historical field. This impressive book deserves the widest possible readership. David Renton This review first appeared in the Autumn 2002 issue of the Newsletter of the London Socialist Historians Group.

Robert Biel, The New Imperialism: Crisis and Contradictions in North-South Relations, Zed Books, 2000
THIS book is everything that HardtNegris Empire is not. Starting with the premise that there is such a thing as imperialism as opposed to some nebulous concept of

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Empire Biel supplies the kind of data to support his argument that is ostentatiously missing from HardtNegri. And he ends with an embrace of local, pre-capitalist initiatives that are disdained by HardtNegri, who favour a kind of homogenising and benign globalisation that appears to critics as a left-wing version of Thomas Friedmans Lexus and the Olive Tree. For those Marxists rooted in grass-roots activism, it might come as a surprise that some of their academic brethren either deny the phenomenon of imperialism or worse welcome its existence through a kind of neo-Kautskyist self-deception. The late Bill Warren was the most notable example. Starting out with an undialectical appreciation of the Communist Manifesto, they assume that because Marx wrote that the bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society, it is necessary to stand with the bourgeoisie against every local initiative that would impede this process. Between the multinational corporation seeking to modernise agriculture in Mexico in order to step up the export of flowers or lettuce, for example, and the Mayan peasant seeking to preserve traditional corn-based subsistence farming, they might choose the former. Although widely regarded nowadays as being overstated, Warrens ideas still reverberate in the academy. As late as 1995, you could still read such nonsense in the Fall 1995 issue of Science and Society special issue on Lenin as John Willoughbys Evaluating the Leninist Theory of Imperialism. From this we discover that the Third World suffers not from capitalist penetration, but just the opposite: Lenins original argument appeared to link exploitation to stagnation the implication being that a country could only develop by breaking out completely of capital accumulation circuits. Samir Amin has drawn precisely this conclusion, but an examination of the data suggest that those Third World countries most enmeshed in capital circuits are also the most dynamic. It is a common joke in development circles that most poor nations would love to be exploited by an infusion of capital from the North. More seriously, most of those countries that have either purposefully isolated themselves from the world economy or been isolated by imperial action have suffered disastrously. Space does not permit an elaboration of this point. Nevertheless, radical economists are increasingly realising that it is not true that global capital accumulation must coerce the Third World into a position of permanent economic backwardness. On the level of the abstract theory of capital expansion and exploitation, it is not possible to argue for the inevitable necessity of the North-South divide. With little apparent interest in staying current with academic fashion, Robert Biel openly describes himself as in the dependency theory tradition. This school emerged in the 1950s as a result of trying to apply Baran and Sweezys views on monopoly capital to the Third World. Andr Gunder Franks phrase the development of underdevelopment captured this approach succinctly. Most of the dependency theorists, including Frank, have long since mutated into world systems theorists. This is a very high level, almost Olympian, understanding of world history that posits rise and falls of hegemonic powers in almost a Viconian sense. Attempts to get off the merry-go-round of history, such as the Cuban revolution, are derided as exercises in futility.
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For Biel, world capitalism can only have one set of winners: The conditions for the form of development which entrenches poverty are international. The dependency perspective (which is a radical critique of mainstream development theory) highlights these conditions by introducing a dangerous idea: it is not just that there is one group of countries in the world which happens to be poor. The two are organically linked; that is to say, one part is poor because the other is rich. The relationship is partly historical for colonialism and the slave trade helped to build up capitalism, and this provided the conditions for later forms of dependency but the link between development and underdevelopment is also a process that continues today. As Amin pointed out, in what is perhaps the most single idea of dependency theory, the tendency to pauperisation the acute poverty that is both the basis and product of capital accumulation, and thus of growth was transplanted to the periphery. As one would hope and expect, any book with the title The New Imperialism would be charged with the duty of updating both Lenin and dependency theory to the current global setting. Arguments that Lenin is not current might have some basis as long as one assumes that his pamphlet of 1916 was etched in granite rather than written with pen and paper. Biel makes it clear that Lenin is not a deity: Todays capitalism, dominated as it is by currency speculation, the futures market, and so on, has become parasitic in ways that Lenin could scarcely have imagined, strongly confirming his argument that these are characteristics of mature capitalism, which it will never shake off. In this sense it is still correct to see imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism. But despite this, it is important to recognise that imperialism can still undergo large-scale change as it acquires new regimes of accumulation that allow it to be parasitic in new ways. Starting from this premise, Biels study supplies all the data that shows the new parasitic forms of imperialism. This entails, among other things, a close look at ecological imperialism. It also involves a thorough and devastating refutation of the Asian tiger miracle. For the South, among the most serious ecological problems is soil fertility. In Africa today, where possibly tens of millions face famine, the West offers genetically modified crops as a panacea. When African leaders question such aid, they are regarded as foolishly unscientific. Producing cheap food in environmentally sustainable conditions must be a sine qua non for Africa and the rest of the South. Biel supplies some rather enlightening statistics. Using the ratio between the caloric content of crops and the calories used up in the process of producing them, traditional crops such as cassava can produce output/input relationships like 60:1. But the industrial agricultural model being foisted on the South comes nowhere near this ratio. In fact, in the US food industry, which is heavily dependent on huge energy inputs from fertiliser, fuel for machinery, processing, canning, transportation, refrigeration, cooking, etc, the calorific output/ratio in 1940 was only 1:5. By 1970 it had deteriorated to 1:10. Used as a substitute for organic inputs, chemical fertilisers epitomise the law of

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diminishing returns. Holland currently uses 660 pounds per acre. Japan consumes more fertiliser than all of Latin America! When touting the benefits of the Green Revolution, modernisation ideologists tend to sweep such costs under the rug. Biel observes, Resources such as phosphates or oil are drawn in at an insubstantial cost (neither reflecting the full value of the rents, nor that of the labour used to extract them) to make agriculture seem more efficient. Another example, which relates to the meat industry, can be described as protein imperialism. Biel writes: Animals consume 10 times as much plant protein as they produce meat protein (in the case of beef, 21 times). Grain converted to meat loses 7590 per cent of its calories and 6590 percent of its protein. According to FAO figures for 1978, animal feed accounted for 36 per cent of the total world consumption of cereals and for 61 per cent of the world consumption of maize. The total cereal deficit of the Sahel countries during the famine of 1973 was one million tonnes, which was only 0.25 per cent of the amount of grain fed to animals in the industrial countries in the same year. A significant amount of animal feed takes the form of high-quality protein imported from the South (fish meal, oilseeds, etc). Comparing this to the HardtNegri view of the meat industry below, which is somewhat lacking in the ecological department, one has to wonder why Empire became a runaway best-seller. One supposes that it is a confirmation of PT Barnum in some perverse fashion. In Hardt and Negri, the proletariat has become the global multitude. I keep thinking of fast-food workers in McDonalds all over the world, says Hardt, who wear a badge saying Service with a Smile. But there are stirrings within this multitude, says Hardt, that reach beyond its smiling servitude to Empire (Guardian, 15 July 2001). With the smouldering rubble of capitalist development all around the world from Buenos Aires to Istanbul, it is a little bit more difficult nowadays to argue the Bill Warren line. The last gasp of modernisation theory, either directly from the horses mouth like Paul ONeill or from like-minded academic Marxists with their own peculiar Kautskyist spin, is centred on the Asian tiger model. Taking the bull by the horns, Biel demonstrates both the exceptional nature of this model and why it has ultimately failed even on its own terms. His analysis of the limitations of the Asian tigers or NICs (newly industrialising countries) is contained in Chapter 10 and is worth considering in some detail. During the initial flush of enthusiasm over the NICs, a kind of escalator stageism was put forward. South Korea was at the top, and others such as Indonesia and Malaysia were on their way up. As they vacated their spots on the escalator, other less developed countries would take their place. The implicit view was that South Korea would eventually be as prosperous as the USA, with all the aspiring tigers, either in Asia or even in Africa, on their way up. What was missing in this rosy scenario was the element of indebtedness accrued by countries like South Korea. Seen in retrospect, it is now obvious that internal borrowing in South Korea was heavily reliant on external capital. Biel points out: Domestic banks felt free to loan money because they knew that external funds would cover the gap. It has become clear that the peripheral economies are selfexpanding only in so far as they absorb finance from outside. In late 1997, South
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Korea was discovered to have an external debt of US$110 billion, which served as backing for an internal debt accrued by all Korean companies that amount to a staggering US$323 billion. Another weakness of the Asian tiger model was that they lacked real technological autonomy. Biel writes: Reprisals against Asian exports sharply increased in Europe in the period 1985-88 and a computer price war, launched by the big American companies in 1991, led to a wave of bankruptcies in Korea and Taiwan. The Korean company that won the top award in 1990 for computer exports went bust in the following year! Like the current collapse of the US stock market, the prolonged rise of the Asian tiger economies can be attributed to speculative mania. Credit flowed into the region so long as a high return could be insured. Once that prospect disappeared, the bubble burst. Biel points out that it is estimated that by the late 1990s only 2.5 per cent of foreign exchange transactions in the region had anything to do with the real economy (buying commodities or goods, investing, etc). By contrast, over 80 per cent of capital in 1975 flowed into the real economy. As Biel proposed in the early part of his book, the conditions for the form of development which entrenches poverty are international. The ways in which dependency are manifested come in various sizes and shapes, but they all leave the peripheral country worse off. With respect to the Asian tigers, the coup de gras came wrapped in currency manipulations. Pegged as they were to the US dollar, devalued NIC currencies have made it possible for Western multinationals to buy local companies at bargain basement prices. If Hardt and Negri are all too eager to repudiate localised struggles that can easily devolve into a kind of primordialism that fixes and romanticises social relations and identities, Biel shows both a deep compassion for the peasant villagers inevitably drawn into such a struggle and provides insights into why their primordialism might have a rational basis in the need for survival. The implicit assumption in HardtNegri, Bill Warren, John Willoughby and others is that pre-capitalist farming somehow needs to be swept away like cobwebs. At first blush, hostility toward fixed and romanticised social relations would seem to be a core belief of Karl Marx, if you take the Communist Manifesto seriously if not altogether dialectically: The bourgeoisie has subjected the country to the rule of the towns. It has created enormous cities, has greatly increased the urban population as compared with the rural, and has thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. However, there is much evidence that there is less idiocy in rural life than meets the eye, at least when it comes to producing food, the necessity of life. Biel points out: It is being recognised more and more by the public that ordinary people can possess scientific knowledge of enormous importance. Besides reflecting genuine admiration for grassroots initiatives, this shows that many specialists believe that mainstream agricultural development will come to a dead end if it does not take on board some of this traditional

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knowledge. Part of what is needed, people say, is a reassessment of ancient practices, for example the use of ridging systems in agriculture. In pre-colonial America these enabled marginal land to be cultivated very effectively, while in Africa the area of contemporary Tanzania conventionally considered to have been barren and stagnant prior to colonialism possessed, in fact, a thriving system that, using a mixture of contour-following ridges laced with diagonal up-and-down ridges, permitted land on steep hills to be farmed. But even more important than historical reassessment is to look carefully at contemporary practices. All traditional systems have elements of sustainable agriculture that can be seen in the balance between livestock and the cultivation of crops that return nutrients to the soil, the use of mixed cropping instead of monoculture, and so on. Biel does not call for a return to the past. He is especially adamant that women must enjoy equal rights with men. But there must be a willingness on the part of the revolutionary movement to root itself in the peasant-based and urban informal sector that is drawing a line of blood against imperialism today. While this might not coincide immediately with the traditional battalions of organised labour, it is where the fight is being conducted on the sharpest terms. In order to participate successfully in struggles of what Biel calls unofficial society, it will be necessary to approach it with a kind of respect that Marxism has not always lived up to. Fortunately, there can be exceptions to the rule, as he points out in the concluding sentences of his book: Lenin, in his last years, argued strongly for the independent organisations of workers within the socialist state. This has interesting implications for the grassroots movements. While any movement to establish an alternative power will necessarily draw its strength from the new grassroots struggles, it is also clear that the social movements will have to maintain a distinct identity. What is needed is some new relationship between official and non-official society on a different basis. In the longer term, the relationship of pre-eminence would be reversed, with the nonofficial world dominant, but in the immediate term the relationship would keep the state machine in check. In general, the point is for the raw material of future socio-economic development to emerge from the base. The source of new ideas and new practices must be mass initiatives, the real social movements. And this must continue under a new social order. Louis Proyect

Letters
New Labour and Big Business Dear Editor The Labour Party website declares that Labour is a democratic socialist party. Of

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course, we all know differently. But its interesting to click into the About Labour section, go down to Labour links and click into that and then into the link called Businesses. The total wording of the Businesses section is this: Labour Means Business The Conservative Party claimed to be the party of business. But during the last Tory Government a business went bust on average every three minutes of every working day. And I have lost count of the number of business-people who have told me that Tory Ministers just stopped listening to them, or even returning their phone calls. Labours first priority in Government has been to make sure that we do not return to the cycle of boom and bust that has been so disastrous to businesses in the past. Instead, we are providing the macro-economic stability that enables British businesses of all sizes to grow and prosper. Labours approach to business is based on a clear understanding of what is required to help businesses succeed. It is business, not government, which creates lasting prosperity. Our job is not to tell people how to run their businesses, but to do what we can to create the right conditions in which business can thrive and opportunities for all can flourish. If we can get the business environment right, more businesses will be able to start up and survive in an increasingly competitive global market. It is a source of real pride to me that Labours approach to the business community has been so transformed in recent years. Far from being in conflict, the Labour Party and the business community are now increasingly effective partners. We used to think that you had to choose between creating a fairer society and promoting a dynamic economy. But in todays knowledgedriven economy, the policies we need for social inclusion creating opportunities for all are also the policies we need for economic success. If Britain is to be a fairer and more prosperous society, then we must have successful businesses to generate wealth and jobs. This is signed by Patricia Hewitt, Labours industry and transport minister. Hewitt used to be some kind of lefty, one of the leading lights in the National Council for Civil Liberties. But she seems to have managed to go along with Labours many attacks on civil liberties. Underneath her gushy declaration about how Labour has a more serious commitment to business than the Tories are links to Labours Business Liaison Unit, Labours policies for business, their 2001 business manifesto and their 2001 small business manifesto. Whatever all this is and in my view the British Labour Party is much more a liberal-capitalist party (and not that liberal, except in the neo-liberal sense) than any kind of workers party it is clearly not anything recognisable as classical social democracy. Even Eduard Bernstein would shudder at this bourgeois drivel. Philip Ferguson

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