Geoff Brown - A People's History of the Anti Nazi League (1977-1981)

In 1968 Enoch Powell made an odious speech in which he predicted "rivers of blood" if immigration to Britain was not halted. In the aftermath of the speech racist attacks grew dramatically. One of the chief beneficiaries of this was a small Nazi organisation called the National Front. After Powell they grew quickly. One NF organiser remembered:

Powell's speeches gave our membership and morale a tremendous boost. Before Powell spoke we were getting only cranks and perverts. After his speechs we started to attract, in a secret sort of way, the right-wing members of the Tory organisations.

The NF quickly began to establish itself. Its methods of operating were to target minorities, particularly black and Asian people and communities. But also to hold provocative and headline grabbing violent events. They stormed left events, protested at politicians and held intimidating marches through black and Asian areas. By the early and mid-1970s racist violence and attacks, including murders, were common. The NF could mobilise hundreds and often thousands to its ranks.

In opposition to this, as Geoff Brown's excellent history shows, a myriad of anti-racist groups began to organise. Some of these were liberal and soft, refusing to challenge the fascists and hoping to demonstrate that love might overcome hate. Others were more confrontational and still others saw oppressed communities fighting back to defend themselves. By 1976 the anti-racist movement was ready to go on the offensive. Increasingly militant anti-racists, often led by socialists and communists, were able to confront the fascists. Often this meant taking on the far-right and their friends in the police. In May 1976

two students Dinesh Choudhri from India and Ribhi Alhadidi from Jordan, were fattally stabbed by white youths while making their way to an East London restaurant. A fortnight later, a young engineering student Gurdip Singh Chaggar was murdered by two white teenagers in Southall, West London. Sick of racist and police violence and of their elders' passivity towards it, Southall's young Asians came out en masse. Some demanded 'Blood for blood', attacking white passers-by and stoning cars. When police made arrests among those leaving a meeting... hundreds marchesd without hesitation to the police station and sat down. Surrounded by a sea of protesters, the police got community leaders to pressure those arrested to come out of the police station with promise they wouldn't be charged.

It was on the back of such resistance that the Anti Nazi League was born, but perhaps the key event was the Battle of Lewisham which saw thousands of protesters smash a NF march off the streets. The event was a turning point. One anti-racist socialist activist remembered a NF member at his workplace in Salford taunting him before the protest. After Lewisham the NF member took down his posters and eventually left the fascist group.

Lewisham was a turning point, but it was definitely not the end. The launch of the Anti Nazi League saw the Socialist Workers' Party, together with left-Labour MPs, leading trade union figures and cultural icons come together in a loose leadership that was able to give a national shape to an anti-fascist response.

Brown's account of this process is fascinating. It demonstrates two things. Firstly that principled anti-fascism was key to the ANL - exposing the Nazis as Nazis, helped to discredit their violence. Secondly uniting people around these policies, while allowing participants to retain their individual politics created the space that would enable local groups to flourish. In fact what is remarkable about the ANL through this period is precisely how much it was organised from below. Thousands upon thousands joined, and local initiative was key. Brown repeatedly makes the point that it was local organisation, often, but not always, led by SWP members that created the space for anti-fascism to break free. There are many different examples of this. Take an example from the railways:

These [Anti Nazi League] bdages proliferated around King's Cross. It was really good because it connected you to people you didn't know. In the depot of 500 drivers, I knew them all but there were probabl another 500, maybe 600 guards and another 500 station staff so you couldn't know everybody. But once you saw someone wearing one of those badges, suddenly you hit it off and black workers in particular realised there were more anti-racists than racists around.

The ANL created a space where the NF could be marginalised. But it took more than just badges. The local groups were able to build networks that could, in turn, mobilise hundreds and thousands. Countless meetings, protests, pickets and counter-demonstrations helped to physically stop the Nazis. This often required self defence, but it was sheer numbers that undermined the Nazis and made it difficult for them to carry on.

Brown's book is remarkable for being a genuine "people's history". It is filled with memories, recollections, interviews and press cuttings. Readers get a real sense of how the movement built and how participants were shaped by it. A generation of radicals learnt their organising skills in the ANL and often generalised into wider arenas. Brown highlights, for instance, how the LGBT+ movement in the 1970s gained renewed energy from the anti-Nazi fight as did movements against sexism. Some of this deeply moving. Gurinder Chadha, the renowned film director who made Bend it like Beckham was at first Rock Against Racism carnival. She recalled being unconfident to go on the march, so waited near the park and hearing the approaching demonstration stood on a box to see:

When I looked down the street, what I saw changed my life forever. From that moment I became the political filmmaker I am today, hundreds and hundreds of people marching side-by-side in the display of exuberance, defiance and most importantl, victory. I couldn't believe my eyes, these were white, English people - many with long hair like the rockers I could never relate to - marching, chanting to help me and my family find our place in our adopted homeland.

Rock Against Racism was a key part of the anti-fascist struggle. It help shutdown the cultural spaces the Nazis were trying to take as their own. But it also made it easier for thousands of young people to become active politically. There were other off-shoots. One of the most fascinating chapters of Brown's book is on SKAN - School Kids Against the Nazis. A remarkable organisation that, with very little adult input, was able to shape politics in schools and among young people in fascinating ways. Starting with the fight against racism, it quickly took up issues like corporal punishment.

Brown's book is a brilliant read. One of its great strength is that it is not London focused, but tells us the stories of how the ANL organised across the country, not least in Greater Manchester where Brown was organising. But it is more than just a nice bit of history. It is a political manual for building a mass movement against racism. Brown, a long standing SWP member, is clearly proud of the role of the organisation and that of people like himself. Quite rightly. But he is also proud of the political clarity that made the ANL both possible and successful. The book doesn't hector in its politics - there are sections that look at historical struggles and take up theoretical discussions. But these are part of a wider story, and the real political lessons are in the reports of the hundreds of people that are interviewed and quoted in the book. Using the method of the United Front, the SWP was able to relate to wider forces and change British politics. The NF were smashed.

Today the far-right in Britain and around the world seems to be unstoppable. Yet if Geoff Brown's book teaches us anything, they are very much stoppable. Doing that requires mobilising the anti-racist majority in society, and particularly turning out the workers' and their organisations who bring numbers and collective power. Everyone who wants to see the end of the far-right in the 21st century should read this superb book. It is very much one for our time, and Geoff Brown has done our movement and our history a remarkable service.

Related Reviews

Hirsch - In the Shadow of Enoch Powell: Race, Locality & Resistance
Richardson (ed) - Say it Loud! Marxism and the Fight Against Racism
Aspden - The Hounding of David Oluwale
Dresser - Black and White on the Buses: The 1963 Colour Bar Dispute in Bristol

John Rose - Revolutions Thwarted: Poland, South Africa, Iran, Brazil and the legacies of Communism

John Rose, who died recently, was a veteran socialist of the 1968 generation. I reviewed his excellent book The Myths of Zionism many years ago on this 'blog and like many socialists I learnt much from his pamphlet Israel: The Hijack State. In the 2010s Rose began working on a project to critically examine the revolutionary socialist ideas that had been so central to his activist life. In the introduction to this book he writes that he was motivated to examine a fundamental question, "why was the Marxist left in such a precarious state, especially when the proverbial crisis of capitalism... was so serious?" He decided to put his "1968 assumptions" to an "independent test" by studying three failed revolutionary upheavals (a fourth was later added). 

These studies, on Poland in the early 1980s, Iran in 1979, Brazil in the 1980s and 1990s and South Africa at the end of Apartheid, were all examples of mass workers action that had the potential to spill over into working class revolution. With the possible exception of Iran, which saw workers' councils in a small number of highly organised areas of workers' strength, none of them did. Comparing these events, with the high points of revolutionary activity in the early 20th century, form the main purpose of the book. Despite the book originating in a Phd study Rose writes not out of pure academic interest, but with the ambition of revolutionary emancipation. It is a remarkable work.

The book opens, however, not with 20th century revolution, but with 1848 and The Communist Manifesto, "one of modernity's greatest historical documents". The Manifesto, writes Rose, "provides strategic and tactical guidelines for accomplishing the ultimate goal of a classless society". Rose traces the development after 1848, not just of revolutionary ideas, but also of organisation. Crucially, he notes that while Marx and Engels did not fully develop their thoughts on revolutionary organisation, others did. Gramsci, for instance, noted how his revolutionary newspaper in 1918-1920 "worked to develop certain forms of new intellectualism"... individuals whose strength was not simply "eloquence" but "in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organiser". Such individuals were, Gramsci writes, "elites of intellectuals of a new type who arise directly from the masses through remaining in contact with them".

While Rose fully explores other aspects of revolutionary thought, particularly Marx and Engels' key concept that the emancipation of the working class will "be the act of the working class" themselves. The importance of revolutionary worker "intellectuals" remains central to his argument. It was individuals like these, Rose concludes, who made the Russian Revolution: "Lenin's purposive workers: worker leaders, 'genuine heroes... with a passionate drive toward knowledge and toward socialism' [Lars Lih]" Why is this important? That, in essence, is the argument of the second part of the book.

In examining the four "thwarted" revolutions of Iran, Poland, South Africa and Brazil, Rose explores two things. Firstly the ongoing relevance of the Marxist approach to social change. The moments when mass action by workers begins to spill over into the demand for "self management" a slogan that Rose describes as one of 1968's greatest slogans. This self-management is evident in a number of examples. Rose quotes from his interview with one of the Solidarity activists from Poland who describes a key moment in the strike wave:

There was a nuclear bomb shelter in the basement. I used this shelter because I was formally leader of a trade union... I organised a strike committee for this March mobilisation for all offices, all workshops around the old market. I even prepared food for three months. So I had everything prepared for these strikes... It was a classical dual power situation. There was still a state with military apparatus and police... But the real power, day by day, went to workers' factory councils.... we organised a plebiscite in the biggest factories in Wroclaw about who has the power to choose the director, manger, the Party or workers' councils? And in every factory we won this plebiscite.

If that was the situation in Poland, in some parts of the Iranian Revolution power went even further. One account, quoted by Rose says:

The oil industry is virtually controlled by dozens of independent workers' komitehs, committees, which, though loyal to the central government, are nevertheless participating in all the decisions related to production and marketing... the komitehs have unquestionably demonstrated that they can run the oilfields and the refineries without the top rank Iranian managers and without the expertise of some 800 foreign technicians.

But as Rose shows at crucial points in all four of these risings the left failed the test. This was, it must be stressed, not just about whether or not the left supported workers' action or retreated at the wrong point (a particular issue in Poland), but also whether or not key questions such as oppression were taken seriously. In Iran, for instance, the left failed to support women's fight for their rights, seeing it as a distraction. Comparing the German Revolution of 1919 with Iran in 1979 Rose writes:

The German communists in 1919 had one tremendous advantage over their Iranian counterparts... Both shared the experience of taking part in revolutionary upheavals, toppling tyrannies, as a result of decisive collective workers' action. Both shared the experience of witnessing and participating in very advanced experimental forms, though at different stages of development, of organised workers attempting to establish democratic forms of workers' control of production... But the German left had at least secured elementary democratic and constitutional rights, which allowed the German Communist and the independent workers' movement time to recover from the defeat.

He continues, that the 

tragedy of the Iranian left is that not only was this decisive advantage denied to them; the Iranian left itself has to share some of the responsibility for this failure. The struggle for popular democracy, including the defence of women's rights and the independent press in 1979 was just as important as defending the workers' shoras and the new regime's anti-imperialist stance. 

But the left was unable to engage in the sort of tactical twists and turns that Lenin's Bolsheviks used throughout 1917 to consolidate their position in the minds of the masses. The problem was politics, or the lack of political clarity. In Iran, Rose argues that "the Stalinist mind-set not only ruled out such essential tactical and strategic flexibility, it altogether downplayed the importance of the struggle for popular democracy". Those leading the movements, in all four case studies, too often shared a political allegiance or set of ideas that saw mass struggle as secondary. It was always their downfall.

But it wasn't simply the lack of a clear political line, or a distortion of strategy. It was also the failure of the sort of revolutionary organisation with large numbers of Gramsci's intellectual activists within the working class. Activists who could think about strategy and fight for mass action, at the same time as building an independent movement. That's not to say that individuals like this did not exist. Rose interviews several of them, and he notes that the best of these "the regimes most feared because of their widespread influence" and they tried to silence them. But he concludes, for Iran:

The problem of how to revitalise that vision [of socialism] in the shadow of Soviet Communism and its Iranian apologists was never resolved. The same applied in Poland, South Africa and Brazil. It also meant that the nascent worker intellectuals were unable fully to develop their political abilities.

It is a problem that contemporary socialist organisation must grapple with. Indeed Joseph Choonara has recently written a piece on how revolutionary parties can develop cadre. While the International Socialist Tradition, of whom John Rose was part, have rightly always understood the problem of the Stalinist politics of the State Capitalist regimes and the Communist Parties who acted in their name, Revolutions Thwarted demonstrates how lasting and extensive that influence was. Rose concludes:

This... underestimates the impact of the collapse of Soviet Communism and the growing doubts about its viability that preceded it. Criticisms of the Soviet Union... easily flowed over into a demoralising sense that the original socialist revolution in Russia 1917 was itself flawed... the independent workers' movements in the four countries... were... dogged by the experience of Soviet Communism and lacked confidence to develop sustainable ideological responses which would revitalise a communist project centred on their own self-activity.

The conclusion can only be to build the sort of intellectually dynamics, revolutionary socialist organisation that was lacking in these movements in Polish, Brazilian, Iranian and South African history. The sort of organisation that John Rose dedicated his life to building. Revolutions Thwarted is, in many ways, one of the most important books to come out of the International Socialist tradition in the last ten years. Its a book that reasserts the core politics of classical Marxism, puts workers' self emancipation at its heart, and is not afraid to be self-critical and honest. Its one that a generation of socialists ought to read to arm us for the struggles to come.

Related Reviews

Rose - The Myths of Zionism
Molyneux - Marxism and the Party
Cliff - State Capitalism in Russia

Mike Davis - Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the imagination of disaster

I started to read Ecology of Fear in the aftermath of the recent LA uprising. In part that was because one of the first great such urban risings I remember was when, around the time I became an active socialist, LA rose up in 1992. What is it about the city that makes it such a place of resistance, and a place hated by the US right? Mike Davis' classic book has the answers. 

For Davis, Los Angeles is a city whose location in time and space places it at the epicentre of disaster, and that disaster is made worse by the history of the city, and the history of America. It is a city of gross inequality, racism and cheap labour, and a city smack squarely at the epicentre of disaster. This is why it is, as he systematically documents, a city that has been destroyed in film, literature and comic book hundreds of times, and why that destruction is often covered with a veneer of white supremacy and genocide. It it is so called "natural" disaster that takes up the first chapters, the threat from earthquake, tornado and firestorm, then Davis systematically shows how those disasters are amplified by the reality of capitalist LA:

Megacities like Los Angeles will never simply collapse and disappear. Rather they will stagger on, with higher body counts and gretaer distress, through a chain of more frequent and destructive encounters with disasters of all sorts; while vital parts of the region's high-tech and tourist economies eventually emigrate to safer ground, together with hundreds of thousands of its more affluent residents. Aficionados of complexity theory will marvel at the "nonlinear resonances" of unnatural disaster and social breakdown as Southern California's golden age is superseded forever by a chaotic new world of strange attractors.

While we have long known that "natural" disasters hit poor and marginalised communities first and hardest, Davis' eloquent writing reminds us of how it is the fissures and fractures in capitalist society that creates this reality. 

In the provocatively titled chapter, The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, Davis discusses the war that wildfires and their particular threat to the City, arise from a juxtaposition of location and capitalist planning. Putting profits before people meant making decisions that simultaneously worsened the risk of disaster, and turned the city into an unhealthy and concentrated urban area:

The 1930 fire should have provoked a historic debate on the wisdom of opening Malibu to further development. Only a few months before... Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr - the nation's foremost landscape architect and designer of the California state park system - had come out in favour of public ownership of at least 10,000 acres of the most scenic beach and mountain areas... Despite a further series of fires in 1935, 1936 and 1938 which destroyed almost four hundred homes... public officials stubbornly disregarded the wisdom of Olmsted's proposal.

Almost a century later the homes of this land, now the preserve of the rich and famous, burn over and over again.

The interaction between nature, society and capitalist interests is the great theme of this book, and it's Davis' genius that ensures that the reader never forgets the human cost. But also places the very real story of exploitation and oppression within that wider narrative. Here are the stories of immigrant workers, paid starvation wages, victims of the poorest housing in the most dangerous areas, fighting and organising to improve things, and the callous politicians, city officals and greedy landlords opposing them. But it is also a city bedeviled by official racism and a far-right confident to organise within the space:

According to the Los Angeles Count Commission on Human Relations, attacks on blacks increased 50 percent from 1995 to 1966. Los Angeles became the nation's capital of racisl (539 crimes) and sexual orienation (338 crimes) violence... The commission's annual report also noted that racially motivated crimes had been clearly clustered in older suburban areas... as well as in the economically troubled Antelope Valley. Although the human relations commissioners cautioned that the report "does not say it has become open season on African Americans," the dramatic surge in attacks on blacks suggested otherwise.

While LA has a special place in Mike Davis' heart, the interaction of racism, class, nature and capitalism described in Ecology of Fear could stand in for any number of urban US environments. The history helps us understand the roots of the LA rebellions of 1992 and 2025, and the further resistance. As well as the hatred that the US elite have for the city and its population. It is the book that explains the real background to today's ICE raids and racism, and Trump's military occupation of the city.

Long before many others had even stopped to think about the interaction of these forces in the urban environment, Mike Davis was writing about how global warming would exacerbate the tensions of capitalism. But it is his love of the city, its people and his superb dialectical politics that make this book one to come back to time and again. Its renewed my desire to read his other works on California and US radical history - that's probably the best endorsement the book could have.

Related Reviews

Davis - The Monster Enters
Davis - Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World
Davis - Planet of Slums
Davis - The Monster at Our Door

Olivier de Schutter - The Poverty of Growth

There are a now a plethora of books and articles about degrowth from a left and liberal point of view that show how capitalism's insatiable drive for growth delivers inequality, poverty and environmental injustice. Some of these books are very good, extending the critique of growth into a critique of capitalism itself and arguing for an alternative society. Others pretend that capitalism can exist without growth, or somehow imagine a gradual shift to a non-growth society without any clear vision of how this could happen. 

Surprisingly this short book had its origins in a meeting between the author and Pope Francis in 2022 where Olivier De Schutter was challenged to "identify certain levels that could be used to eradicate" global poverty. His solutions, that make up this book, place the book firmly in the second type of book about growth - its an attempt to square the circle.

This becomes clear from the preface. de Schutter writes:

Poverty and inequalities should not be seen as an inevitable consequence of the progress of capitalism that we should tolerate before trying to remedy their impacts: they should be seen, instead, as a symptom of an economy that has become ill-suited to the aim of a shared and sustainable prosperity. We must now move from an extractive and predatory economy to a non-violent economy, from an economy that responds to the demand expressed by the superior purchasting power of the rich to one that caters to the basic needds of the poor... etc

The idea that there was a period when capitalism was not ill-suited to providing a shared and sustainable society is laughable. Exploitation and oppression are inbuilt into a system where growth, based on the accumulation of capital, is not an adjunct to modern neoliberal economics, but a central part of how the system functions. 

Central to de Schutter's analysis and critique here is not a systematic exploration of the capitalism's exploitation, nor the centrality of accumulation, rather its a vision of capitalism as a system of supply and demand. It makes for a weak analysis both of systemic problems and solutions. Take this annoying sentence: "We all know of people around us who travel by air to exotic holiday destrinations because they drive a hybrid car during the year."

We no, we don't ALL know such people, and even if we did, this tells us nothing about how the system functions. Its a surface level reflection of the way production is geared under capitalism. 

The best parts of this book are those that expose the inequality and exploitation, and sheer destructiveness of the modern economy. It is also interesting that de Schutter begins by saying that it is the "world of work" where we need to start shifting this. He paints a charming liberal picture of a world with less work, equal pay, more rest time and workplace democracy. But there's no real attempt to discuss how we, as workers, could win that world. How do we challenge the right and the far-right? How do we take on the capitalist state which exists to perpetuate the status quo and the interests of the system? Is it enough to vote for more progressive parties? And what do you do when those parties go back on their plans and expand the fossil fuel economy in the interest of capitalism. De Schutter has not strategy and no agency of change. Which is why it is so sad that writers like him ignore the work of Karl Marx - not for pedantic ideological reasons, but because Marx's analysis of accumulation led him to identify the working class as the gravediggers of the system.

Tragically this makes this particular work of growth and poverty indisinguishable from a dozen other similar books, and fails to build on the more radical work of the best degrowthers such as Jason Hickel. I'd look elsewhere. My own article here offers some thoughts.

Related Reviews

Kallis, Paulson, D'Alisa & Demaria - The Case for Degrowth
Hickel - Less is More: How Degrowth will save the World
Saito - Slow Down: How degrowth Communism can save the Earth
Pilling - The Growth Delusion

Philip Marfleet - Palestine, Imperialism and the Struggle for Freedom

As the genocide in Gaza continues, millions of people around the world are trying to understand the reason for Israel's continued assault on the Palestinians. If my personal experience is anything to go by, there can be few workplaces, coffee shops or trade union meetings were there have not been discussions about the causes of the occupation and the possibilities of peace. So the publication of Philip Marfleet's new book Palestine, Imperialism and the Struggle for Freedom should be welcomed because it seeks to explain the current conflict in the context of a century of "colonial occupation, displacements and dispossession". Crucially, and unusually for even left-wing books on the subject, Marfleet's book puts Palestinian action and resistance at the heart of the history.

Marfleet begins with the Zionist "vision" of a "public project for colonisation by Zionist settlers". He writes:

As the Ottoman Empire went into rapid decline Britain became the focus of Zionists' attention. Now the movement's leading figure was Chaim Weizmann, who was convinced that it must win support from within the British ruling class on the baiss that a Jewish state could serve the best interests of Britain's emprie. Weizmann was able to deal directly with members of the British government. During the First World War, as Britain advanced on German-Ottoman forces in Palesinte, he lobbied decision-makes in London, allying with the most aggressive imperial stategists - ministers who sought to extend British control across the Middle East.

These close historic links between Zionism, colonialism and imperialist interests are crucial to explain the modern actions of the Israeli state and the close relationship it has with Western powers. Marfleet shows how the Zionist state that was created in 1948 did not invent repression of the Palestinian people, instead it "learnt from the British". He writes:

Britain's ideologues of empire and those who administered it colonial territories were not only racial supremacists but also designed and implemented policies that involved savage represion. As Zionist settlement in Palestine accelerated, Britain was crushing resistance in neighbouring Egypt and Iraq. 

In Egypt in 1919, a rebellion involved "members of all the country's ethno-religious communities: significantly, Jews joined Muslims and Christians in the uprising". But the British "colonial regime used all means against the movement". Thousands were killed.

The point here is that there is no automatic divide between the religious peoples of the region. In fact, as Marfleet shows, Jews, Muslims and Christians lived side-by-side for centuries. One of the lessons the British taught the emerging Israeli state was how to divide and rule.

But it is the resistance of the Palestinians that is central to Marfleet's account. This began long before the creation of the Israeli state in 1948. In 1936 there was a massive revolutionary movement in Palestine. This history is seldom told, and much of it was new to me. It is one of the most fascinating parts of Marfleet's book. This revolution was incredible. Zionist militias were violently assaulting Palestinian villages, British colonial rulers were oppression and restricting Palestinian freedoms and resistance exploded. Marfleet places the revolution in the context of a developing industrial capitalist economy:

Change accelerated during the 1920s as Britain established the Mandate regime and Jewish settlement intensified. More and more peasants were forced from the land but - as Britain favoured industrial and infrastructural defvelopment for the Jewish sector and Jewish organisations impements the policy of Hebrew labour - many were rapidly impoverished.... by 1936 the majority of workers in Jaffa, a key industrial centre, were living below subsistence level. Industrial workers, semi-proletarians of the countryside, the peasants and the urban poor not only faced a European power and an emerging colonial-settler regime but also the reality of immiseration. It was in these circumstance that the uprising 'spread like wildfire, gripping the cities and country alike and giving rise to an unprecedeted armed insurrection'.

Space precludes any further summary of Marfleet's account of this extraordinary rebellion. But here we see one of the first examples of a theme which Marfleet returns to time and again - the way that Palestinian resistance sparks rebellion elsewhere. The 1936 "Palestinian intifada also stimulated solidarity across the Arab region. In Egypt there were demonstrations of support and the Muslim Broptherhood declared backing for the uprising".

Marfleet tells how the establishment of the Israeli state required the systematic displacement and violent oppression of the Palestinian people, as well as confrontations with the Arab states. In doing this Israel became a crucial ally of Western Imperialism, particularly of the US, post World War II. 

Importantly Marfleet shows how the failure of the leaders of the Arab world to build real solidarity with the Palestinians, and the limitations of the Palestinian leadership which became focused on the creation of a Palestinian state, undermined the wider struggle for freedom. But while Marfleet is rightly critical of some of the Palestinian leadership, he also notes how the cause of Palestinian oppression remains the Israeli state. He quotes Martin Shaw, a "pioneer figure in Genocide Studies" who said in 2010:

We should view Israel's destruction of large parts of Arab society in Palestine in 1948 not simply through the perspective of settler-colonial genocide, but as an extension of the exclusivist nationalism which had recently brought about extensive genocidal violence in the European war. 

This is, tragically, an ongoing process. Marfleet quotes from the genocide historian Mark Levene's work in 2024:

The target of Israel's offensive could not realistically be Hamas, said Levene, for the organisation 'will redeploy from underneath the rubble at will'. Referencing the pioneering work of Rafael Lemkin, [Levene] saw Israel's war as 'a conscious, wilful effort to destroy the integrity of a society'. Levene concluded: 'The charge of genocide is legitimate.'

But as Marfleet shows this genocide arises out of global imperialist interests and the nature of the settler-colonial state. It means that the solution, in terms of peace in the region, cannot be one with two states side by side, but rather a single state were people of all faiths, Jews, Muslims, Christians and none, live together. This has been the case in the past and could be in the future. The importance of Palestinian resistance is thus in part their ability to inspire and shape to mobilise and encourage resistance elsewhere in the world. In particular that of the massive working classes of the region. These, Marfleet argues are the force that can fundamentally transform the region. 

Palestine, Imperialism and the Struggle for Freedom is thus a book that stands out from among many other books about the history of the region, because it has an emancipatory vision of the struggle to liberate Palestine. It locates Israeli's oppression of Palestine in a historical process and argues that struggle from below is the force that stop it.

Marfleet is a long standing socialist and has written and studied the Middle East for many years. An earlier book of his on the 1987 Intifada became a crucial text for a generation of socialists. This new book ought to play the same role for new generations of radicals.

Related Reviews

El-Mahdi & Marfleet - Egypt: The Moment of Change
Sand - The Invention of the Jewish People
Masalha - Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History
Molavi - Environmental Warfare in Gaza
Pappe - Ten Myths About Israel
Gluckstein & Stone - The Radical Jewish Tradition: Revolutionaries, resistance fighters & firebrands
Hamouchene & Sandwell (eds) - Dismantling Green Colonialism: Energy and Climate Justice in the Arab Region

Nigel Harris & John Palmer (eds) World Crisis: Essays in Revolutionary Socialism

That World Crisis exists at all seems remarkable from this standpoint. Published in 1971 by a well known mainstream publisher, it is essentially a theoretical statement of the politics of the then, very small, International Socialists group. The IS was to become the Socialist Worker's Party, having grown significantly during and after the 1968 rebellion. But it was nontheless still a relatively small organisation. More importantly its socialist politics were minority one - even if they were thought through and clear. The rejection of the State Capitalism of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc by the IS put them at odds with almost all the radical left at the time. For this book to come out seems quite extraordinary.

Over fifty years after World Crisis was published how does it stand up? Is it worth reading? I would argue that it is worth reading, and that it has much to offer beyond just historical curisosity for those interested in the history of the British left and the origins of the SWP. While some chapters are necessarily dated, there are others that are fascinating and retain their use today.

In the introduction Jim Higgins and John Palmer restate some orthodox Marxist ideas. The main reason for this is to highlight how much of the left, under the pressure of the existence of the Soviet Union, had abandoned central tenets of Marx's concept of workers' self-emancipation. They write:

And implicit in the struggle of a group of workers against a single employer is the struggle of all labour aginst all capital. The rise of working-class parties based on trade unions, directly or indirectly, is not accidental. Nor is it an accident that in times of fierce economic struggle workers are more receptive to political ideas. It is because of these structural and necessary features of capitalism that Marxists have identified the working class as the revolutionary class par excellence; not because it has some mystical quality of goodness, but because the nature of capitalist production and the relations within it make it so. 

Writing this in 1971 is also a polemic directed at new layers of radicals, aiming to win them to a Marxist view that places working class self-activity at the heart of organisation. This book certainly does this. But the book also asks, what is changing in the world. The opening chapter is "A Day in the Life of the 'Fifties" by Peter Sedgwick and is an amusing, and insightful look at a demonstration "against German rearmament" in Parliament square. The protest is attacked by the police, and Sedgwick uses it as a way to contrast the staid life of the old left: "Almost without exception all the elements which came togehter so hopefully on that late day in January [1955], a decade and a half ago, have been probed, stripped, revealed as nothing by the merciless challenge of the years." Later however Sedgewick notes that at the time of writing workers were less likely to be on the streets, and protests are more often by groups of middle-class radicals in their "brief hour of rebellion". The workers he points out "cannot graduate... but its consciousness is slower to ignite tha that of the Instant Left." Written in a time before student life became something that masses of workers engaged in, this comes across as somewhat sectarian, especially in the aftermath of 1968. But there is a point. The workers did need to link up and develop their struggles. The limitations of this in Britain in 1968 was the weakeness of the whole movement.

Chapter two is somewhat depressingly called "The Decline of the Welfare State". Reading it one is tempted to shout out to the author Jim Kincaid, "you ain't seen nothing yet!". But Kincaid does trace the way that attacks on welfare are rooted in a capitalist approach to the economy. It's must have been a depressing read then. Now it feels like fortune telling. But Marxism as a tool is nothing if insightful, and some of the chapters here give a real sense of debates to come. Here, for instance, is Nigel Harris pointing out that capitalist development does not benefit everyone, and early discussion of topics that would become central to degrowth theory in the 21st century:

But 'growth' may not mean 'development'. The statistics may show a rising national income, even a rising average income per head, at the same time as unemployment is increasing, there is no change int he distribution of the occupied population between agricultural and non-agricultural employment and in the distribution of non-agricultural employment between manufactuing and other sectors. In human terms nothing very much may have happened, and things for the majority may even have got worse.

Paul Foot's chapter on the origins and limitations of the Labour Party is fascinating, beginning as it does with the early betrayals. Written at a time when Labour still had mass membership and considered itself a socialist organisation it is clearly a polemic designed to arm readers for individuals breaking from Labour. But it has some fascinating material that readers today who want to argue against a Parliamentary Road to Socialism will find useful. Similarly Chris Harman's brilliant essay traces the limitations of these countries as "socialist" and puts a clear argument for the importance of State Capitalism as a theory. Its importance, as Harman writes, is in clarifying the left's politics:

A clear analysis of these regimes is a necessary precondition for renewed growth of the Left in the West. Only a theory which centres on the basic problem for the rulers of these countries - that of accumulating capital - and sees this as forcing them into collision with each other and with the working class can comprehend the forms their rule takes and the policies they pursue at each historical point.

Such an analysis proved important for both building a new revolutionary left in the 1970s and developing a critique of the limitations of Stalinist parties in the same period. It also helped ensure that the SWP survived the collapse of State Capitalism in 1989. Characteristically, Tony Cliff's chapter "The Class Struggle in Britain" is an argument about what socialists should do. A couple of things stand out. One is his comment that "a declining interest in the traditional reformist organisations (the Labour Party, Communist Party, etc) does not mean the overcoming of reformist ideology." This is true, though while Cliff probably overestimated the declining interest, he was right that even when this comes, it does not necessarily mean reformism is also dispensed with. However one part of his chapter could very well be written today for socialists in Britain:

The weakness of revolutionaries in Britain at present is quite obvious. Small in number, often isolated because of their social composition - white collar and student - from the main sections of the working class, split into a number of groups, and above all lacking experience in leading mass struggles. But these weaknesses can be overcome. Readiness to learn, readiness to experiment systematically, above all readiness to try and translate the general theories into practical activities - this is what is necessary. In a complex and rapidly changing situation, readiness to move from simple tasks to more difficult ones, above all readiness to overcome one's own mistakes is crucial.

For some socialists reading World Crisis would be an act of navel gazing. Dreaming of past battles. I'm not sure of the value of that. But the clarity of the theory its authors have, their determination to root this theory in struggles, and learn and develop the theory offers much. Some of the chapters are reminders of central revolutionary ideas. Michael Kidron's article on Imperialism and the permanent arms economy is perhaps the most useful in this regard. Foot's chapter on Labour and Harman's on East Europe also offer insights and ideas that remain useful. But standing out all of them display a Marxist method essential to furthering the basis of our theory today. As Cliff reminds us:

The greatest defect of revolutionaries who have been isolated for years from the mass movement is their inclination to make a virtue out of necessity, and concentrate on theories to the exclusion of practice, forgetting that above all the duty of a revolutionary is to raise theory to the level of practice.

Related Reviews

Birchall - Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time
Harman - The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After
Harman - Selected Writings
Harman - Class Struggles in Eastern Europe 1945-83

George Edwards - From Crow-Scaring to Westminster

George Edwards was born in rural Norfolk in 1850, the child in a "miserable" cottage of "two bedrooms, in which had to sleep father, mother and six children." At the time his father's wage "had been reduced to 7s. per week". Such poverty, and the appalling working and living conditions that were imposed on agricultural workers at the time, shaped Edwards' life and thought. His father had been a soldier, and an agricultural worker, thgouh his exemplary service bore him no long term benefit. Having protested against unemployment with others in the parish of Marsham, George Edward's father found himself unable to get work.

The punishment for organising against unemployment, low wages and poverty were severe, and as Edwards relates throughout his autobiography the only way to successfully do this was through trade union organising. There were two great periods in Britain of agricultural trade unionism. Edwards was part of the first, which saw the leadership of Joseph Arch and a wave of strikes that shifted the bosses massively. But he was central to the second, and by then was an established trade union leader, and on occasion, paid official. 

As the title of the book demonstrates, Edwards very much saw his most important trajectory as being from the poor beginnings to Parliament. A similar path was trodden by Arch, and both of them - the first and second agricultural workers to become MPs, fell easily into the trap of finding in Parliament the establishment recognition they craved. Arch, is must be said, comes out of it far better than Edwards. Both of them however, end up blaming the workers who cheered them on for their failures. Edwards, however, is far more of a cynic than Arch, the latter of whom retained faith in workers' struggle till the end of his life.

Edwards, by contrast, despises workers' struggle. For him it was the last choice representing failure of negotiations. At one point, in describing the battles of the 1910s, Edwards rights, "I was... determined that I would do everything that was humanly possible to prevent a strike of this magnitude". He continues:

I can't explain it, but I always had, I took a leading part in the trade union movement, the greatest horror of a strike, and would go to almost any length to prevent it, so much so that many of my friends used to say that I went too far in my peace-loving methods.... I have made many mistakes, but that is not one of them.

Edwards' revulsion of strikes stems, in part, from the position he found himself in, as a local trade union leader with an economic interest in avoiding actions that challenged the union. But also from his own weak politics. Edwards' came from a Methodist background. His socialism was not that of Marx and Engels. It was that of the pulpit and Christian socialism. An avid reader, taught to read by his beloved wife, Edwards lists many of obscure books that inspired him. Few of them would be recognisable to socialists today. His politics lacked an understanding of class and power, even though he sided with the lower classes - he is clearly unable to see that struggle is the only way to challenge the entrenched reality of capitalism. Reformism for Edwards flows from his faith and his politics.

That said when battles did happen, Edwards took his side - both on the pickets and in the union. The Norfolk union was built through hundreds of meetings, arguments and discussions. Edwards' training as a Methodist preacher served him sell here. One cannot fail to recognise that it was Edwards' hard labour (and thousands of miles of cycling) that built the trade union, and it was he who was punished by the union itself when the St Faith's strike of 1911 was sold out so that there would be no struggle to distract from the General Election. Edwards' discussion of this period in his book is in part a settling of accounts. The tiresome reproduction of motions aside, it is clear that Edwards' at least held on to a principled defence of the strikers' right to continue and their democratic decisions. Edwards was right. Fifty percent of the strikers did not get taken back, despite the union leadership's compromise.

Nonetheless historian Reg Groves is no doubt right when he wrote of Edwards:

George Edwards tells the stroy from the standpoint of one who was an active worker for the Liberal Party. He saw the growth of the union rather in terms of his own development, of his own slow passage from mesmbership of the Liberal Party to membership of the Labour Party. His opinions change little, if at all: he aw things much at the end of his life as he had done in the early days, and he remained for a long time coparatively indifferent to the changing opinions of the workers themselves, who were hearing and responding to the message of socialism.

Much of the latter half of the book is taken up with somewhat tiresome anecdotes and reprints of speeches and motions that detail the struggles inside the union as the movement went into decline. Then Edwards' election campaigns see reprints and extended quotes from favourable news reports and speeches. As a result there is very little of interest to those interested in rural history or agricultural trade unionism. The book becomes more and more about Edwards, and less and less about the conditions around him. In fact, it is noticeable, that even when describing strikes and protests that he was central too, Edwards is rarely speaks about the struggles, or those struggling. Despite the huge scale of the trade union movement at times, there's little flavour here of the strikes or the movement itself. It makes for a dry read.

One other thing that comes through is how Edwards' loyalty to the British state manifests itself against his better principles. The worst example of this is how he becomes a cheerleader and recruiter for the First World War. The horrors of those battles means he becomes determined to ensure those who returned get treated decently. But he never wavers from the idea that it was right for thousands of agricultural workers' to be sacrificed in the trenches for British capitalism. No doubt this approach is why he had such a fine time in Parliament.

Tiresome and dry though this book is, it confirms on almost every page the essential limitations of socialism without class struggle. Most readers will find in it an interesting insight into the way that Methodism and reformism found in themselves appropriate partners in the British Labour movement. It helps illuminate the way that British Labourism was born tied to the coattails of Imperialism, and how it has failed ever since to break. If you can suffer through the terrible Methodist hymns you might find something of interest. 

Related Reviews

Arch - From Ploughtail to Parliament: An Autobiography
Horn - Joseph Arch
Ashby - Joseph Ashby of Tysoe: 1859-1919
McCombs - The Ascott Martyrs
Groves - Sharpen the Sickle! The History of the Farm Workers' Union

Leon Trotsky - The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany

The recent election results in Germany should have left everyone on the left thinking about the rise of fascism and how it can be averted. While the situation is not the same as the 1930s, emboldened by the second election of Donald Trump there is nonetheless a terrifying rise in confidence for far-right and the fascist movements globally, especially in Europe. 

In the 1930s the Russian revolutionary Marxist Leon Trotsky led a battle within the international Communist movement over the direction of the Communist Parties. This battle was principly over revolutionary strategy and at the heart of his argument was the question of Germany. Germany had a big Commuist Party, and a recent revolutioanry experience. It also had a mass Nazi party, and discussions over tactics to challenge and defeat Hitler were key to the differing visions of Trotsky and the Stalinist left. Trotsky was isolated within the Communist movement, exiled from Russia, he relied on newspapers and letters from small numbers of supporters, who kept him informed. Nonetheless, despite his isolation, he kept up a steady stream of letters, articles, pamphlets and polemics that desperately urged a shift in the course of the German Communist Party (KPD) to enable it to defeat fascism.

The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany is a collection of these writing by Trotsky published by Pathfinder with an introduction from the Belgium Marxist Ernest Mandel. There is a wealth of material here, though readers without some knowledge of the period and the Communist Left, as well as Trotsky's isolation from the revolutionary movement could do well to read some background material. This is in part because Mandel's introduction and some of the introductionary material in this edition is either too brief, or, in the case of Mandel, aimed at a different audience of the 1960s when fascism was not an immediate threat.

The articles represent a number of different approaches of Trotsky to the immediate tasks of the left. The first is understanding the nature of fascism in the 1930s, the second tactics to defeat it, and finally, understanding fascism in the context of Marxist ideas of "bonapartism". There is, out of necessity, repetition. But there are some important conclusions worth noting. Firstly Trotsky's analysis of fascism as a counter-revolutionary force:

Fascism is a product of two conditions: a sharp social crisis on the one hand; the revolutioanry weakness of the German proletariat on the other. The weakness of the proletariat is in turn made up of two leements: the particularly historical role of the Social Democracy, this still powerful capitalist agency in the ranks of the proletariat, and the inability of the centrist leadership of the Communist Party to unite the workers under the banner of the revolution.

Trostky here is clearly writing of fascism in the 1930s, in a period of prolonged economic turmoil and an era when there was an urgent desire of the capitalist class to see the workers' movement blunted and weakened. Its not strictly true today, as fascism has grown in slightly different circumstances. Nonetheless Trotsky's repeated point that "fascism would actually fall to pieces if the CP were able to unite the working class, transforming it into a powerful revolutionary magnet for all the oppressed masses of the people" holds true. What does also remain true today is the way that fascist forces and the far-right in general are growing in the context of general despair at the way mainstream parties have failed to deliver anything for ordinary people. It is also true that in many parts of the world the left, an the trade union leadership have failed to lead the stort of struggles that could win gains for working people and begin to rebuild the movements that can challenge facism. 

Trotsky rages against the analysis of the KPD and the Communist International under Stalin that sees imminient failure for Hitler after each successive election. Trotsky's writings become increasingly desperate and you can feel his frustration at missed opportunities by the KPD fail to undermine the Nazis. The election results, with the Nazis share of the vote declining slightly, that that of the KPD increasing lead to ridculously optimistic positions. In the same piece that was the source of the quotes above, Germany, the Key to the International Situation, Trotsky writes a brilliant piece of analysis that is directly relevent to today. He points out that in the fight to stop fascism "votes are not decisive" the struggle is key:

The main strength of the fascists is their strength in numbers. Yes, they have received many votes. But in the social struggle, votes are not decisive. The main army of fascism still consists of the petty ourgeoisie and the new middle class: the small artisans and shopkeepers of the cities, the petty officials, the employees, the technical personnel, the intelligentsia, the impoverished peasantry. On the scales of election statistics a thousand fascist votes weigh as much as a thousand Commnuist votes. But on the scales of the revolutionary struggle a throusand workers in a one big factory represent a force a hundred times greater than a thousand petty officials, clerks, their wives and their mother-in-law. The great bulk of the fsascists consists of human dust.

How to mobilise this force? The KPD was convinced that it simply needed to declare itself the inheritors of the Russian Revolution and win people to abstract ideas of socialism. Their "third period", in which they labelled the Social Democrats, "social fascists", was designed to tell workers that reformists were the same as Nazis and draw people to the genuine socialists. It had the opposite effect. It prevented the left from uniting over a common programme of stopping the Nazis. The millions of voters for the KPD and the Social Democrats could have been a power to stop Hitler, but were wasted because of the KPD's sectarianism, a sectarianism that as Trotsky repeatedly points out, came directly from Stalin in Moscow.

Some of the most powerful, and tragic parts of this collection are the sections when Trotsky seeks to win people to this vision of a United Front. He draws on his experiences in the Russian Revolution, particularly that during the attempted Kornilov Coup, as well as the early experiences of the Communist International which drew out these ideas for how revolutionaries could relate to workers in a non-revolutionary period. Some of these arguments are surprisingly practical, and provide some of the most interesting and useful parts of the book for today's socialist movement. For instance, in For a Workers' United Front Against Fascism Trotsky writes:

Election agreements, parliamentary compromises concluded between the revolutionary party and the Social Democracy serve, as a rule, to the advanage of the SOcial Democracy. Practical agreements for mass action, for purposes of struggle, are always useful to the revolutionary party... No common platform with the Social Democracy, or with the leaders of the German trade unions, no common publications, banners, placards! March separately, but strike together! Agree only how to strike, whome to strike, and when to strike! Such an agreement can be conluded even with the devil himself, with his grandmother and event with Noske and Grzesinsky. One one condition, not to bind one's hands.

Predicitably, Trotsky's enemies seized on the last polemical idea to unite with the enemies of the workers, to defeat the immideate threat. Their criticisms ignored the body of the argument - a clear strategy to defeat fascism through unity of action by the left and a united workers movement. Trotsky also polemicises against those in the Communist movement who attack Trotskyism, and points out the hypocrisy and the failings. But Trotsky has no mass movement to win the argument and the German working class is defeated. The final chapters in this collection show Trotsky drawing his conclusion that the Communist International has failed and that a new International is needed. 

One surprising thing about this book is that Trotsky doesn't analyse fascism mcuh in terms of its racism and antisemitism. He is mostly concerned with the tactical needs of the movement, and fascism as a force that has "raised itself to power on thew backs of the petty bourgeoisie, which it turned into a battering ram against the organisations of the working class and the institutions of democracy".

He continues, "but fascism in power is least of all the rule of the petty bourgeoisie. On the contrary, it is the most ruthless dictatorship of monopoly capital". But Trotsky is well aware that fascism is a reactionary ideology based on "darkness, ignorance and savagery". Writing as he does from 1930 onward he doesn't need to highlight its antisemitism and racism - it is everywhere evident. He does point out that:

Everything that should have been eliminated from the national oranism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.

But while it is true that fascism was the rule of monopoly capital. The Nazis did demand their blood payment and that's what led to the Holocaust and the murder of six million Jewish people as well as four million others, plus a global war that killed millions more. Trotsky did not live to see that, though he had a clear understanding that Hitler in power would lead to mass murder. It is, however, a bit unforgiveable that Mandel's introduction doesn't in attempt analyse in any way the Holocaust and events after the Nazis came to power. It is a strange omission on any level.

While much of this book is a polemic by Trotsky at a crisis moment for the European working class, there is much here of interest and importance to the revolutionary left today, trying to build against the growth of the far-right and understanding the role of figures like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage. Trotsky's writings cannot be directly applied to 2024. This sort of crude Marxism that takes positions from the past and superimposes them on the present was exactly what he was attacking Stalin for. But that doesn't mean that Trotsky's analysis is dated or irrelevant. Far from it. It'd encourage socialists today to read, or re-read these essays, and think about "how to strike, whome to strike, and when to strike".

Related Reviews

Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution
Trotsky - 1905
Trotsky - On Britain
Trotsky - An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe
Cliff - Trotsky 1: Towards October
Cliff - Trotsky 2: Sword of the Revolution
Cliff - Trotsky 3: Fighting the Rising Stalinist Bureaucracy
Dunn & Hugo Radice (eds) - 100 Years of Permanent Revolution: Results & Prospects

Brett Christophers - The Price is Wrong: Why capitalism won't save the planet

This deep dive into the problems with and limitations of the capitalist energy system is a powerful argument against the free market's role in making renewable energy and sustainable energy systems a reality. My review of The Price is Wrong for the Climate and Capitalism journal is here.

You can also read my 2019 review of Brett Christophers The New Enclosure on the privatisation of land.

Richard Grunberger - Red Rising in Bavaria

The Munich, or Bavarian, Revolution is an often neglected part of the amazing German revolutionary wave that took place at the end of 1918 and into 1919. The German Revolution was important for two reasons. Firstly it effectively ended the slaughter of World War One as sailors, soldiers and working people struck, marched and created workers councils. Secondly, it extended a hand of solidarity and hope to the people of Revolutionary Russia, briefly opening up the hope that the Soviet Republic would not remain isolated. The revolutionaries of Munich certainly understood this second aspect of their struggle. But what was the nature of the Munich rising itself?

Richard Grunberger's account of these events "Red Rising" is a readable, if problematic account. It was, as he abley describes, in 1919 that the counter-revolutionary Freikorps began their fascist reigns of terror. Practising for events under Hitler. The "Reds" in Munich executed 10 hostages. It was probably a tactical error, and certainly not one supported by the majority of rebels. But the counter-revolutionaries outnumbered this slaughter ten to one. Over one thousand revolutionaries, participants, by-standers and completely innocent people were killed in the orgy of violence that suppressed the revolution.

Unfortunately there is very little here about the revolution from the bottom up. Grunberger is more interested in the individuals who led, or put themselves at the head of the movement itself. He is fascinated more with their individual eccentric behaviours than with trying to understand the real dynamics of the movement. Kurt Eisner, the Prime Minister of the Bavarian Republic in the initial phases of the revolution, who was assassinated in February by the right-wing, seems to have been a volatile and unusual character. Franz Mehring, the leading German Marxist and biographer of Marx, described Eisner as an "aesthetic dilettante". It's probably an accurate depiction. 

Eisner's weakness was to try and find a way between bolshevism and Social Democracy. His quest for a revolution without Bolshevism meant he failed to see the threat from the right, or their handmaidens in the SPD. But he was not alone in this. Those that followed frequently made the same mistake. The most able leader seems to have been Eugen Leviné. Leviné did not allow the fledgling Communist Party to inistially support the rising, saying, according to Grunberger, "We can only take part in a republic of councils if it is proclaimed by the councils - and if the majority of them are communists". It seems a sensible policy - focusing on revolutionary movements from below, not the arbitary declaration of a Council Republic from above. Leviné's eventual participation was a recognition that once the battle was engaged Communists could not abstain. Though for Grunberger it's more of a reversal of position rather than an act of principle from a position of enormous weakness.

There are some real political weaknesses with the book. But there are stylistic problems too. Grunberger's descriptions of people are sometimes very off. The SPD leftist Erhard Auer is described as a "huge man with large hands" for no apparent reason.

Despite it's limitations there are some real glimpses into moments of working class power and bravery during the Munich Revolution. For those who only know the name Dachau because of the later concentration camp there, remember the workers of the town who fought the fascists there long before the Nazis came to power:

In the fighting that follow Red troops advanced into Dachau... At a cricial moment in thebattle workmen and women from the Dachau ordnance factory disconcerted the defenders by wading into the melee and shouting amidst the hail of bullets, "Don't shoot at your brothers!" When the White hesitated before firing on civilisans, the Red attacks pressed home their advantage, diarmed some of the enemy and drove the rest northwards from the town.

Similarly, Grunberger quotes from an eyewitness to an early meeting in the revolution, when a worker cuts through the rarefied debates of professors including Max Weber:

The crowd was so tightly packed that the waitresses 'ate' their way through it like woodworms. One was barely aware of the alcohol and tobacco fumes or human perspiration, because it was so important that the things that mattered could be said. Suddenly a pale young workman mounted the rostrum and said simply "Have you, or you, made an armstice offer? Yet we ought to do it - not the gentlemen in office. Let us seize a radio station and let us ordinary folk address the ordinary folk on the other side - right away there'll be peace." As he said this a problem occurred to him, and with a touching gesture in the direction of Max Weber's fellow academics o nthe platform, the young man continued: "Here these Herren Professoren, they know French! They'll know how to say it the way we mean it."

Sadly there is too little such flavour of "ordinary folk" in the book. It is these people and their hopes that made the German Revolution, and sadly this book doesn't deliver enough of this. That said, for a subject that is badly neglected in the literature of the Revolution, it is a decent overview. Socialists should read it to be reminded of the need to build revolutionary organisation ahead of the crucial battles. Otherwise we are, as Leviné famously said at his trial, "Communists are all dead men on leave".

Related Reviews

Broué - The German Revolution 1917-1923
Hippe - And Red is the Colour of Our Flag
Fernbach (ed) - In the Steps of Rosa Luxemburg: Selected Writings of Paul Levi
Pelz - A People's History of the German Revolution

Alex Callinicos - Trotskyism

Published in 1990 by the Open University this book on Trotskyism seems a surprisingly choice for academic publishing. The author, Alex Callinicos, is a long standing Marxist and Trotskyist activist in the British Socialist Workers' Party. This then, is not a frustrating academic study, but one that starts from the point of view that despite its seemingly small scale, the Trotskyist movement is both important and significant, as well as being a valid revolutionary position. Readers will be pleased not to have to wade through some ivory tower denunciation of Leon Trotsky, the Russian Revolution, or indeed revolutionary politics in general.

Callinicos begins his study of Trotskyism by placing it in the context of Leon Trotsky's life and revolutionary work. Trotsky was a leading figure in the Russian Revolution, an experienced revolutionary activist and a Marxist author. The key question for Trotsky, and his followers, was the nature of the Soviet Union in the era after the rise of Stalin (and by implication the defeat of Trotsky). Trotsky's argument that the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers state shaped both theory and practice. In the aftermath of Trotsky's death and the expansion of the Soviet Union's sphere of influence into Europe this posed a question for the movement. How to reconcile this with the central tenet of Marxism, which Trotsky himself had fought for to the end - that socialism was about workers' self-emancipation. As Callinicos says:

The post-war transformaton of Eastern Europe by the USSR in its own likeness presented Trotsky's heirs with the following dilemma: to abandon his identification of the overthrow of capitalism with state ownership of the means of production or to revise the classical Marxist conception of socialist revoution as 'the self-conscious indpedent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. 'Orthodox Trotskyism', as [US Trotskyist James P.] Cannon was the first to call it, consisted in taking the second horn of this dilemma.

Attempting to grapple with the implications of this led to a process of disagreement and then division among the revolutionary movement. As Callinicos notes one of the features of the Trotskyist movement is its tendency to split, but he argues that this arises out of the nature of the movement's politics. About the early post-war decades he writes:

This process of fragementation... should not conceal the fact that the parties ot the various disputes shared certain crucial assumptions, in particular the belief that the USSR, CHina and Eastern Europe had broken with capitalism and begun, albeit in a bureaucratically deformed manner, the transition to socialism. These assumption give orthodox Trotskyism certain essential features which underline, and help explain, its infinite sectarian differences.

But, "by seeking to preserve the letter of Trotsky's theory, [orthodox Trotskism] deprived the latter of much of its substance". History would repeatedly demonstrate that the USSR, China and Eastern Europe were not socialist, and certainly didn't act in the interests of the working class. This in itself was enough to derail many individuals and groups. More problematic was the problems it caused for understanding "the agency of socialist revolution". For some Trotskyists, Callinicos argued, the contradictions led them to abandon revolution, with Marxism and Trotskyism becoming a realm of academic debate or historical books. Isaac Deutscher being a prime example of this problem.

For other Trotskyists the failure to be clear on the historic role of the working class led to them championing other movements, or other non-working class revolutions as being the alternative. Still other Trotskyists moved to the right and became their own enemies. A minority of Trotskyists however took the brave path of trying to take the core revolutionary ideas of Trotsky and reintegrate them with a new analysis of the Soviet Union. First and foremost among these, for both myself and Callinicos, was Tony Cliff's approach which culminated in his theory of State Capitalism. Cliff's break with orthodox Trotskyism began after doubt was cast on Trotsky's idea of the USSR as a degenerated workers' state. It was able to develop and flourish because Cliff held onto that central Marxist idea of workers' self-emancipation. The rest is, Trotskyist history.

Callinicos' book remains an interesting and important study of the movement. It is, nonetheless, a product of its time. Today Trotskyism is in many senses weaker than in 1990. Written in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the hope for a renewed revolutionary politics untainted by Stalinism remains in these pages. But the development of the organisations that could lead that has been stunted. In part this is because of the lack of working class struggle during the intervening years. Its hard to orientate a political organisation on the working class if that class is only fighting intermitently. Nonetheless there are some signs of life, and the clarity of Trotskyist analysis remains far superior to that of other left, and Stalinist groups. That said one of the key ideas of Trotsky - that of the United Front - which remains a crucial tactic even during periods when there are limited workers' struggles, does not feature much in the book. Perhaps this is a reflection of the period, but it is perhaps something that contemporary readers will find missing.

Callinicos points out in his introduction that the book is coloured by his own knowledge and experience, which means that there are areas of the Trotskyist movement (in Asia and South America for instance) that aren't covered in enough detail. However this short book remains of great interest and, with its central discussion on Trotsky's legacy and what it means for revolutionaries, I has a lot to offer comrades today.

Related Reviews

Draper - Socialism from Below
Callinicos - Imperialism and Global Political Economy

Callinicos - Making History

Callinicos and Simons: The Great Strike: The Miners' Strike of 1984-5 and its Lessons

McGarr & Callinicos - Marxism and the Great French Revolution
Callinicos - The New Age of Catastrophe

Sarah Glynn & John Clarke - Climate Change is a Class Issue

In January 2024, the World Economic Forum predicted that by 2050 climate change will cause 14.5 million deaths and $12.5 trillion in damage. In addition there will be billions of people injured, made sick, and displaced by floods, heatwaves and weather crises of all types. The vast majority of these people will be poor - both in the Global South and the developed world. A significant number of them will be working people.

The centrality of workers, and the working class, to the question of climate change and its impacts is frequently ignored or downplayed. It is important then, that some writers and activists take the question of class seriously in their analyses of the environment threat. Here in the UK I, for instance, with many other trade union and climate activists have participated in the Million Climate Job reports which discuss the role of trade unions in creating sustainable jobs and the fight for a climate service to manage a Just Transition.

Activists Sarah Glynn and John Clarke's important new book places the question of class, specifically the working class, central to its manifesto for an alternative strategy to the climate crisis. In its introduction they emphasise how workers, and their class, are not privileged in their discussion because of their increased likelihood of being victims, nor the disproportionate impact of their lives on the environment compared to the wealthy, but "because the system that exploits the planet to destruction is the same that depends on class exploitation: the system that sees everything in
terms of profit – which is what capitalism is."

As an exploited class, whose labour is central to the production process that powers capitalism, workers have the most powerful position in society when it comes to winning and enacting change. 

This change, the authors argue, must be revolutionary. Capitalism has proven itself unable to enact real change. It is not able to confront the centrality of fossil fuels and the short-termism inherent to production driven by competitive accumulation. The authors write:

Survival demands revolutionary change to the economy, and the backbone of the economy is its  workers. When workers take action together, including planned and strategic withdrawal of their labour, they have the power to make continuation with existing practices impossible: the power to force change. They also have knowledge and skills that can be turned towards creating a different way of doing things.

This is a crucial understanding. Workers' power is not just in their ability to stop the economy. But also in their ability to conceive and construct alternatives to the status quo. Indeed I would go further. The struggles of workers, even the shortest strike, prefigure a new way of organising society as they demonstrate the ability of workers' to control and organise their own way. The heights of revolution, as I have written elsewhere, show this a million times more as workers create new institutions of workers' power to lead their struggles and organise their world.

Drawing on recent work by John Bellamy Foster, the authors suggest a strategy to go forward:

Foster’s book puts forward the notion of an initial ‘ecodemocratic phase’ in the struggle that would  ‘demand a world of sustainable human development.’ This would then go over to a ‘more decisive,  ecosocialist phase of the revolutionary struggle’. Taking this perspective as a starting point, we can consider how we might organise and what our goals might be as the scale and intensity of the climate disaster intensifies.

They continue:

We must develop and apply the forms of mass action that can lead to the curtailing of emissions and the transition to renewable energy sources. In this regard, we are hardly starting from nowhere because a  vital struggle for climate justice is already well and truly underway.

This is, obviously true. Socialists have frequently been caricatured, and often for good reason, as suggesting that humanity must "wait for the revolution" before solving environmental crisis. As Glynn and Clarke point out, there are crucial immediate struggles to be fought over mitigation and to reduce emissions. These must be fought for. But the danger I think is that we see to great a delineation between the two "phases" as suggested by Foster. The first will likely flow over into the second, and indeed contain elements of the second as the struggle ebbs and flows. Building workers' power organizationally and economically is a process, not a defined series of steps.

In addition the struggles that workers will need to engage in, may not be just over climate issues. Workers' fighting to defend climate refugees from state racism, striking to defend jobs (even in fossil fuel industries) or protesting against austerity are engaging in a struggle that will increase their confidence to resist and fight over wider and bigger issues - including climate justice.

The importance of Glynn and Clarke's analysis is, however, to argue that workers are the agency of change: "Workers are not victims needing protection, as portrayed in some writing about the ‘green transition’. They are subjects who can and must play a proactive role in building a genuinely sustainable future." This is an analysis lost on too many in the environmental movement who when faced with the power of the capitalist state lack an understanding of the force to challenge that.

This brings me to a couple of minor criticisms of Climate Change is a Class Issue. While the authors' depict a democratic and sustainable post-capitalist future I felt the book lacked any link between the struggles of today, and the revolutionary overturn of society. A couple of paragraphs that linked struggle today, with the process of workers' struggle creating revolutionary institutions that form the basis of a socialist society that can enact the fundamental changes needed would have been helpful. A couple of lines on the state as a barrier to this transition and workers' power as the strength to challenge it would have been helpful.

I also thought the authors' formulation of nature as being "exploited" by capitalism unhelpful. For Marxists "exploitation" has as specific meaning, that refers to the way that workers under capitalism sell their labour power to enable the bosses to extract surplus value. This is not the way capitalist production relates to nature. The authors argue, "Capitalism exploits nature in the same way that  capitalism exploits the working class. How both are treated depends only on their potential to make money."

It is true that natural resources are embedded within the capitalist production process, but this is only in as much as they are tied to the capital-worker relationship. This is not Marxist nit-picking, but important if we are to understand precisely why workers do have the power to overthrow capitalism.

These minor criticisms aside, I cannot help but agree with the authors' conclusion:

The class struggle that we take up must be based on an active solidarity for survival and the goal of a  rational and just society. In the face of the existential crisis that we are now confronting, there is simply no other way forward.

Activists in the socialist, trade union and environmental movement would do well to get hold of a copy of this short book and read and discuss it. It's freely available for download at the authors' website here.

Related Reviews

Foster - Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution
Saito - Slow Down: How degrowth Communism can save the Earth
Malm - Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the 21st Century
Malm - How to Blow Up a Pipeline