Seán Mitchell - Struggle or Starve: Working-Class Unity in Belfast's 1932 Outdoor Relief Riots

By chance I began reading Struggle or Starve on the same weekend that, for the first time in nearly three decades, the Orange Order tried to march along Garvaghy Road in Portadown in the north of Ireland. This sectarian intimidation is supposed to arrive out of the irreconcilable differences between Protestant and Catholic, and only the Irish state can possibility prevent catastrophe. But there is a different, and forgotten, history of working class unity in Ireland that demonstrates sectarian divisions are not inevitable. Seán Mitchell's excellent Struggle or Starve looks at one forgotten episode in this struggle.

The north of Ireland was hit hard by the Great Depression of the 1930s. In Belfast the biggest industry, the shipyards, built and sold almost no ships as global trade collapsed. Poverty was enormous. Tens of thousands relied on megre rations and payment from work in kind to survive. Relief for the poor was overseen by the reactionary, sectarian and deeply conservative Board of Guardians who managed the workhouses. Their bigoted politics and their belief that the poor were only poor because they were lazy added insult to injury.

In this climate few were prepared to resist. But a small group of Communists organised in Revolutionary Workers' Groups (RWGs) decided to get organised and through the summer of 1932 they led a mass, militant protest movement that spilled out into the wider working class. What made the movement particularly dangerous to the authorities and the Board of Guardians was that it drew Protestant and Catholic workers into united action. There are some remarkable accounts. Workers from different sides of the supposedly sectarian divide stood side by side, marching together through each others communities and celebrating what united them. They took militant action together - fighting the police, breaking into meetings of the Guardians and organising a strike of workers of relief projects. 

The RWGs conscious efforts to build unity did not necessarily meet with approval at the top, as the following quote shows, but it did lead to unity from below:

There was a strong turnout from Protestant areas on the march. This was not however, reflected in the music played on the day. Catholic bands, including St John's Accordion Band, St. Kelvin's Accordion Band and St Malachy's Pipe Band, accompanied the march. Orange bands were invited too, including the Prince of Wales Band, the Northern Belfast Pipe Band, the North Pipes and Brass Band, the Willowfield Brass and Reed Band and the Ballymacarrett Flute band, though it was announced from the platform that they had failed to turn up. Women too joined the march in large numbers... Over a thousand strong they marched behind one of the textile banners, singing and cheering.

As the protest movement's repression saw it explode into rioting, unity developed further. Mitchell quotes one eyewitness:

On the Shankill Road crowds of growling men lounged around waiting. Suddenly a big red-faced woman with a black shawl thrown over her shoulders, wisps of hair hanging from her eyes appeared from nowhere. She shouted, "They are kicking the shite out of the peelers up the Falls. Are you going to let them down?" That seemed to be a flashpoint for the riot. Thee people started to burn a watchman's hut that had been used in an ODR [Out Door Relief] scheme.

The repression was enormous, but the police lost control of Belfast's working class areas - both Catholic and Protestant. The Guardians had to back down and massive, though not complete, concessions were made. The 1932 ODR riots showed the potential for working class unity, as did a subsequent rail strike which took place across Ireland and saw participation of both Catholic and Protestant strikers in the north.

While the struggle inspiringly demonstrates the potential for unity of workers in struggle, it did not lead to any lasting unity. Sectarianism was consciously reintroduced to break down the unity. The protestant leadership, closely working with the British authorities, introduced all sorts of methods - including protestant only trade unionism, to undermine unity. Mitchell explores why this was able to happen.

This emphasis on the remarkable achievements of the ODR agitation does not mean that the trajectory of events in the aftermath of the ODR riots is unimportant, however. Any serious analysis of the period will have to acknowledge that while the ODR campaign displayed the potential for working-class unity, it also revealed the power and persistence of communal division. Why was this the case? 

Part of the  problem, as Mitchell explores was that sections of the Nationalist movement bought into the idea that Protestant workers were bought off by the system and their interests lay with the Protestant ruling class. Mitchell shows that this was not true - after all both Catholic and Protestant workers starved in the Depression. He goes on:

The Communist agitation of 1932 was successful because it built a movement capable of convincing large numbers of working-class people that heir lot was better served struggling together across the traditional divide. But this agitation was never combined with a political challenge to sectarian notions - including the vicious anti-Catholicism common within Orangeism... loyalist forces were able to re-articulate class concerns and direct the frustrations of Protestant workers in a sectarian direction.

The left had caught the moment in 1932. But it was too small to seriously develop the struggles after the ODR victory. The RWGs were isolated from the rail strike without roots in those workplaces. But they also had a political flaw. The Communists assumed that a single period was "enough to wipe out sectarianism" they did nothing to "steel the unemployment movement, or even their own cadre, for a political fight with sectarianism".

Mitchell points out that while struggle does undermine division, but "the process of becoming that [struggle] creates will not progress uninterrupted". Sectarianism retreated, but did not disappear. That would require both further struggle and a conscious attempt by the left to challenge it. As Mitchell says, "For anti-sectarian socialist ideas to grow they must become organised, to become a 'material force,' as Marx argued." The RWGs failure to do this, and to try and build its networks to fight on economic and political fronts left it vulnerable. But the RWG was also being shaped by other forces - including the Third Period Stalinism coming out of Moscow. The RWGs eventually played a role in the formation of the Irish Communist Party. Its leading figures playing central roles in ongoing struggles. But the Irish Communist Party itself capitulated to Nationalism, by eventually breaking with the revolutionary demand for a Workers' Republic. 

These conclusions are important today. Firstly, and most immediately at the time of writing, there is a need to remind ourselves of the potential for Unity between Catholic and Protestant in the north of Ireland. That may seem distant today, but Mitchell points out that just a couple of months before they built barricades together in August 1932, Catholic and Protestant workers were rioting against each other. Longer term though we must remember that it is not enough to have economic struggle to overcome division, racism and oppression. This is perhaps the most pertinent of lessons. Too many on the left in Britain today, when faced by the rise of the right, argue that what we need is struggle over housing, wages, education and health. That struggle is enough. But we also need to wage a political struggle against racism, oppression and division. The two cannot be separated.

Struggle or Starve is a brilliant and inspiring book. It reminds us of our power and the possibilities opened up by that power. I highly recommend reading it. 

Related Reviews

Mitchell - A Rebel's Guide to James Connolly
Kee - The Bold Fenian Men
Kee - The Most Distressful Country

Héctor Puente Sierra - Revolution & Counter Revolution in the Spanish Civil War

In 1936 a revolutionary movement swept the Spanish state. After the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the German Revolution of 1918/1919 it was one of the most important workers' revolutions in history. It saw a powerful working class movement take control of cities, towns and the countryside, running it in the interest of the producers and expelling the capitalist class. George Orwell famously said that his arrival in Barcelona was the first time he had see a city were "workers were in the saddle". But Orwell's experiences must not blind us to the depth of workers' control that was seen in 1936.

Héctor Puente Sierra's new book is published for the ninetieth anniversary of the Spanish Revolution. His book is first, and foremost, a celebration of the potential for organised workers to defeat capitalism and build a society based on mass participatory democracy. Delightfully he quotes a Communist railway worker in Catalonia:

It was incredible, the proof in practice of what one knows in theory... All one's doubts are suddenly stripped away... Suddenly you feel their creative power; you can't imagine how rapidly the masses are capable of organising themselves. The forms they invent go far beyond anything you've dreamt of, read in books.

An anarchist leader wrote:

The Antifascist Militias Committee was recognised as the only effective power in Catalonia... It was everything, supervised everything, the transformation of the peacetime industries into war industries, propaganda, relations with the government in Madrid, help for all the fighting centres, relations with Morocco, the cultivation of available land, health... and a thousand and one problems of every kind... The Antifascist Militias Committee was simultaneously a ministry of war, a ministry of the interior, and a ministry of foreign affairs.

In the countryside poor peasants "sponsored and favoured collectivisation", while richer peasants were "more sceptical". But interestingly "the first harvest under the collectivised system would show a 20 percent increase over the year before". This was not because the system was more efficient, but because it was a agriculture run by, and for, the poor peasantry.

Sierra doesn't limit his account simply to the gains of the Revolution. The Revolution itself was a spontaneous response to the threat from the far-right to the Spanish "Popular Front" government. Understanding how this arose requires an understanding of the growth of the Spanish left, its various forms (communist, anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist and so on) but more importantly the late and uneven development of Spanish capitalism. By the 1930s Spain was experiencing the tensions caused by the contradictions of advance industrial capitalism in some regions, and backward agrarian capitalism elsewhere. The class struggles that arose from this, as well as the need for the capitalist class to throw off any restriction on their ability to accumulate capital, fuelled a contradictory push for development - one that was both attractive to Spain's capitalist interests (and their friends abroad) but also antagonised sections of Spain's rulers. 

Spain's powerful workers movement was part of this. It's general political affiliation was to the Popular Front, but it was also self confident and developed enough to fight for its own interests when needed. When the right rose up in a military coup against the Popular Front government the Spanish working class responded by creating a situation of dual power across much of the country. While this quickly became a war to stop Franco and his military forces it was, at every stage, a political battle.

These tensions are brilliantly explained by Sierra, no more so than in his discussion about the influence of Stalin and Russia, and the debates from other sections on the left about how to win. Sierra argues that the nature of the Soviet Union was now very much a State Capitalist society, and foreign affairs were subordinated - not to the development of revolutionary forces against capital - but to the protection of Soviet national interests. Throughout the latter half of 1936 and into 1937 Russian support for the Republic, militarily and politically, was coloured by this factor. Those who argued otherwise were denounced as opponents of Russia, Trotskyists and fascists - somehow simultaneously people who supported the Republic and revolution and supported Franco.

While Franco's forces used the most appalling violence against the revolution - from massacres to systematic rape and destruction, Sierra also notes the problems caused by Stalinist strategies. In Madrid, over two thousand supporters of the military coup were imprisoned by the Republicans. These were "summarily shot". Sierra writes that

The indiscriminate massacres of prisoners flowed from the Stalinists' efforts to centralise all decisions to do with public orders into their hands. It also signalled the import of the brutal methods associated with the Soviet secret services into republican politics.

This also saw those Marxists forces that did not support the Stalinist strategy, or the Soviet Union, starved of resources, isolated, repressed and murdered. The most important of these organisations, the POUM, is studied in detail by Sierra, not least because its strategy and tactics offer perhaps the most useful way of learning the lessons of 1936 today.

The POUM argued that the way to win the Civil War was to extend the revolution - to give full rein to workers' power across the country and to develop mass participation in the war. This would have seen the encouragement of workers' and peasants' participation in government, locally and nationally and would have also seen revolutionary methods extended to areas that mainstream politicians were terrified of going. This would have meant further challenges to capitalist interests and, perhaps of most importance tactically, support for the independence of Spanish colonies. 

One of Franco's most significant bases was the Army of Africa, principal made up of troops from Morocco. Offering freedom to Morocco would have potentially split that army apart. Yet the bourgeois participants in the Popular Front government and representatives of Stalin's Communist International opposed this. Their attempts to keep on board the soft right and placate the capitalists of Britain, France and America, doomed the Republic and the revolution.

Two final parts of Sierra's analysis must be discussed. The first is his analysis of the POUM. The POUM was a Marxist organisation that had some of its roots in Trotsky's opposition to Stalin. On the eve of the revolution they were a relatively small organisation of a few thousand members. Sierra says they "had shown promising signs in the years leading up to the revolution that they could build the kind of mass revolutionary force... that had been sorely missed in decades of struggle." Sierra's analysis of how the POUM used the united front tactic is particularly relevant today. But the POUM made a series of tactical errors, but as the "revolutionary situation" developed, their mistakes became "magnified and had fateful ramifications". At crucial moments the POUM were unable to capitalise on events, or placed themselves in positions, that made it hard to winning mass numbers to a revolutionary position. This was particularly true of their attempts to engage and win over anarchist and anarcho-syndicalist workers whose leaders had failed to advance the revolution.

While Sierra is critical of the POUM, his anger is aimed at their main opponents on the Republican side. The betrayals of the Communist Party have been mentioned. But those anarchists today who continue to celebrate the Spanish Revolution as a great moment in anarchist history ought to read Sierra. While his criticism of the anarchists who ended up joining governments are well documented on the Trotskyist left, I was more interested in how Sierra draws out the implications of anarchist theory for revolutionary periods. For instance, anarchist belief that money was something that could simply be abolished might seem like a theoretical discussion that could be safely ignored. But, Sierra points out, it meant that anarchist revolutionaries simply ignored banks and then found that they were unable to run the economy in a transitional revolutionary period.

The final point to make concerns Sierra's discussion of fascism in Spain. Sierra concludes, I think rightly, that Franco's regime was not a fascist one. Again this is not an abstract point, but has implications both for how the War was fought, and for what came after. Sierra rightly acknowledges the centrality of mass fascist organisations like the Falange to Franco's victory - and the scale of the crimes they committed. But he argues this was only one part of a coalition, which Franco tamed in order to protect his new regieme. Franco, Sierra says, walked a "tightrope" between the Third Reich and the Western powers. But most of the forces that made up Franco's coalition were opposed to closer ties to the fascist powers, especially as WW2 loomed. After the war, and the military defeat of fascism in Europe, it was the Catholic Church that "would play the greater role in defining the new Francoist state".

Revolution & Counter Revolution in the Spanish Civil War is an impressive book. It takes one of the most complex periods of working class history, places it in its context and develops a series of interacting analyses of the different forces and interests to explain a sometimes complex history. It celebrates the power of the workers, and the gains of the left. But it is always critical of the mistakes and strategic errors made by different forces. 

Another strength of the book is that it never patronises it's audience. Not all readers will be familiar with the arguments and concepts that Sierra uses. So it's good that he backs up some of the more theoretical arguments with reference to other revolutionaries such as Marx, Lenin and Trotsky. In addition, Sierra is approaching these debates from a different direction to others on the left. Orthodox Trotskyists have tended to be critical of the POUM because of some of their tactical disagreements with Leon Trotsky himself. Similarly Sierra is highly critical of the Communist Parties and the Stalinised Communist International of the 1930s for their mistakes then. So it's good that Sierra also roots his arguments in the ideas of those from the revolutionary left who historically have been critical of orthodox Trotskyism and Stalin's Communists.

Today, the Spanish Revolution probably does not get the attention on the British left that it deserves. The mass movement that erupted in 1936 offers us a glimpse of workers' power. But it also offers use much to learn from. Héctor Puente Sierra's book is thus an important contribution to the development of a new revolutionary movement rooted in the belief in workers' self emancipation.

Related Reviews

Gonzalez & Barekat - Arms and the People
Cliff - Trotsky 1927-1940: The Darker the Night the Brighter the Star
Newsinger - A Rebel's Guide to Orwell

Leon Trotsky - Fascism, Stalinism & the United Front

In the early 1930s, as fascism in Germany grew from strength to strength, the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky wrote a series of pamphlets and articles to explain the nature of fascism and to argue for a working class strategy that could defeat it. These articles, several of the most important of which are collected here, remain some of the best studies of German fascism and Hitler's rise to power. They remain crucial reads today for those trying to understand contemporary fascism - not because the situation is identical, but because Trotsky's method is to place the far-right into the political and economic context.

That said, the essays collected here, contain a great deal of insight, strategy and tactics, that can help us understand how to defeat the far-right and fascism today. Key to this, as Trotsky understood in the 1930s, was mobilising the largest number of workers in militant and mass opposition to the fascists. This required the use of the United Front tactic, a strategy developed in the revolutionary circumstances of 1917 by the Bolsheviks, and adopted by the early Communist International. It required the revolutionary left to build a strategic alliance with forces and workers' organisations to the right of them in order to shape a mass movement. The potential, as Trotsky repeatedly notes, was there but the principle barrier to such unity was the ultra-left position of the German Communist Party (KPD). The KPD argued, following the lead of the now Stalinised Comintern, that the Social Democrats were no better than the fascists. Indeed, at times they made it clear they thought that the Social Democrats and the millions of German workers' who supported and voted for them were worse than the Nazis.

This positioning was tragic. It cut the revolutionary left off from wider workers' forces. This fundamentally weakened the anti-fascist movement and it also undermined the ability of the KPD to build the revolutionary left. Throughout these essays there is a growing sense of urgency from Trotsky as he desperately argues for a different course. 

In 1930 he writes:

If the Communist Party is the party of revolutionary hope, then fascism, as a mass movement, is the party of counter-revolutionary despair. When revolutionary hope embraces the whole proletarian mass, it inevitably pulls behind it on the road of revolution considerable and growing sections of the petty bourgeoisie. 

But the opposite is also true. Trotsky continues:

The election revealed... counter-revolutionary despair embraced the petty bourgeois mass with such a force that it drew behind it many sections of the proletariat. 

Later he points out that:

those workers who remain with Social Democracy, as well as those who voted this time for the National Socialists, did do not out of simple ignorance, not because they awakened only yesterday, not because they have as yet had no chance to know what the Communist Party is, but because they have no faith, on the basis of their own experience in the recent years.

The mistakes of the KPD in the revolutionary era of the early 1920s were one thing, but a bigger problem was the wrong-headed approach to the Social Democrats. One problem of course, was the failure to build unity also undermined the ability of the KPD to build the sort of struggles that could have undermined some of the political and economic base of the Nazi's support.

The belief that the SPD were as bad as the fascists meant that the KPD wasn't able to launch the sort of industrial strategy that could have raised the confidence of the working class and transformed the situation. In his 1932 article, The Only Road, Trotsky points out that it is precisely the chaos of capitalism itself that is leading the capitalists towards seeing fascism as a solution. That requires a clearer revolutionary strategy from the KPD, one that was sorely lacking:

If the economic evils of our epoch, in the last analysis, result from the fact that the productive forces of humanity are incompatible with private ownership of the means of production as well as with national boundaries, German capitalism is goring through the severest convulsions just because it is the most modern, most advanced, and most dynamic capitalism on the continent of Europe.

He continues a few pages later:

The petty bourgeoisie must acquire faith in the ability of the proletariat to lead society onto a new road. The proletariat can inspire this faith only by its strength, by the firmness of its actions, by a skilful offensive against the enemy, by the success of its revolutionary policy.

The barrier to this was, in the first instance, the fact that the Soviet Union's isolation meant that country was no longer led by revolutionaries, but by a "national-opportunistic bureaucracy, which does not believe in world revolution". This is the "misfortune" for the whole proletariat.

Many of these essays are available elsewhere, and some of them have been collected in different collections. One thing that stands out from this edition from Bookmarks in Britain is a very useful framing essay by Steve Wright, and contextual introductions to each year by Chris Harman. This new edition of Fascism, Stalinism and the United Front also benefits from an excellent essay by British socialist and anti-fascist organiser Samira Ali, who brings Trotsky's analysis of fascism up to date. As she says, these articles "endure because of their theoretical clarity and their strategic questions remain profoundly contemporary". 

In Britain we live in the most dangerous times since Trotsky was writing. If the specifics of fascist organisations today are different, as Samira Ali says, we "return to Trotsky['s writings]... not because they offer a ready-made template for understanding fascism today, but because they provide something more important than historical analogy. They provide a method: analyse fascism concretely, identify the forces that can stop it, and argue for forms of working class unity before the decisive moment has passed."

As such this book is one for our dangerous times.

Related Reviews

Trotsky - The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany
Trotsky - The History of the Russian Revolution
Zetkin - Fighting Fascism: How to struggle and how to win

Jakub S. Beneš - The Last Peasant War: Violence and Revolution in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe

From the end of World War One through to the 1950s Eastern Europe's peasant societies were engaged in a new continuous "Peasant War". It is a struggle that is rarely acknowledged, except perhaps by those looking to understand the dynamics between workers and peasants during the Russian Revolution. Those who do study these events tend to seem the separately, as struggles around particular events, rather than as part of a longer continuity. The peasant struggles that began as mutinies and rebellions against the War, then morphed into radical nationalist struggles as European nations and empires crumbled at the end of the War, became battles over land and power in the inter-war years.

Jakub S. Beneš' The Last Peasant War is an excellent read that emphasises the continuity and change of these movements, while sympathetically treating the peasant as an object of history. I have been asked to write a fuller review of this book for another publication, and I will link that here when it becomes available.

Bryan D. Palmer - Capitalism & Colonialism: The Making of Modern Canada 1890-1960

Volume two of Bryan D. Palmer's trilogy on the history of Canada begins where the previous book left off. But, as Palmer immediately notes, Canada on the cusp of the twentieth century "was remarkably different than the disparate collection of British North American colonies" that had come out of the 17th century. Canada was now a fully fledged capitalist nation, with economic crises to prove it, and part of a global capitalist economy. Capitalism was "most assiduously cultivated in the open yeaes of the twentieth century" writes Palmer. The country "took off" economically in the period before 1914 and by every aspect of measurement the economy was growing. New technologies were introduced, whole new industries appeared, and class relations were "reconfigured".

The opening chapters explore this growth in different sectors. This was a period of class struggle from below and above, and one of consolidation of the economy. Palmer writes:

The layers of colonialism in which Canada was richly enveloped grew increasingly complicated, with capital imports rising to £100 million annually in 1911-1913. British capital supplied three-quarters of this influx... securing the loyalty of the Canadian chartered banks"... On the eve of the First World War, 60 per cent of Canada's government debt was held abroad, and servicing this borrowing consumed one-quarter of the country's export earnings.

At the same time the Canadian government was continuing and expanding its colonial control at home. New laws oppressed Indigenous people still further, and "Ottawa also worked diligently to extend the domination of the Dominion into the last frontier of capitalist exansion, an enclve of the preservation of Indigenous ways of life: the resource-rch North." Finally, "francophone Quebec" was further subordinated within the Confederation. There were also significant examples of workers' resistance and organisation in this period. But the key line of development was the increased centralisation and consolidation of capital.

While there were significant economic differences through the Canadian regions, there was a general growth in large corporations such as steel manufacturing, coal and industrial farming. But the wealth from these accrued to a small minority of the population. Hard work by miners, industrial workers and farmers drove capital accumulation, but they were not its main beneficiaries. Take farming. Palmer explains that on the prairies:

It was wheat... that proved the major engine of capital accumulation... the single most important crop enticing homesteaders. They settled on some ninety-nine million acres of land between 1870 and 1927, successfully patenting 58.2 million acres by 1930. Settlers bought more land than they acquired for free through federally overseen pre-emptions, with fifty million acres purchased from the railways, Hudson's Bayt Company and other agents... These lands, traditionally the territory of various First Nations, sustained the wheat economy of the Canadian west. Harvests of the prairies proved a juggernaut of capital formation for the railways and their beneficiaries, the monopolistic grain elevator owners who controlled the sales and distribution of what. Powerful interests like these bled farmers dry.

Such growth required massive numbers of workers. Between 1901 and 1931 Canada's population nearly doubled. Urban centres like Toronto and Vancouver grew at astonishing rates. The immigrants who came arrived from enormously different areas, and experienced appalling racism.

The prejudice and poverty faced by these recent arrivals disfigured Canada, the intolerance they confronted paralleling the marginalisation and discriminatory treatment accorded the country's original colonised peoples. Confederation's economic margins now included First Nations, Métis, Inuit, Québécois, the labouring poor, the immigrant masses, most Maritimers and wage-earning women, whose pay in the 1920s averaged 54-60 per cent that of males.

These immigrants had arrived hopeful of owning and farming land. The Canadian government "extolled the virues of European peasants as the kind of human material best suited to the settlement of the West" but most lacked the experience and resources and instead usually "ended up as itinerant harvesers... peripatetic railroad navvies...miners; or the lowest-paid labourers in industrial factories." 

There was, inevitably, a racist dimension too. These immigrants "became the racialised 'other', scapegoated in the social construction of a Canada htat had to be constantly remade in the image of a British Dominion championed as 'White, forever'."

One of the great strengths of Palmer's histories of Canada is his subtle exploration of the relationship between capital and colonisation. Thus he traces the impacts of capitalism's expansion on the First Nations, Métis and Innuit peoples and its impact on the workers. The growth of new industry, followed by the industrial decline and depopulation of the Maritimes or the expansion of capital and resource extraction into the North and the displacement and genocidal policies against the Innuit. These are handled with care and thought, and never once does Palmer dimminish the horror of what happened to First Nations, the oppressed and exploited. Canada's colonism wasn't just internally. It was central to expansion of the British Empire into the global south: "Sugar refineries in Canada, for instance, were at the centre of capital's expansion in the 1890-1914 years". Imports of sugar from Asia transformed the people and economies of places like Fiji. These were now part of the "sphere of influence" that Canadian capital cultivated. Canadian banks were at the forefront of expansion into South America and the Carribean. 

The middle part of the book covers the Great Depression and the horror experienced by working people in the 1930s, it also covers a great period of resistance. Massive strikes, in particular in the "year of rebellion" 1937, saw millions of workers fighting back over pay and conditions. This also saw an expression electorally with the growth of the Communist Party and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. Palmer traces the evolution of these groups, and their intersection, well. For those on the Canadian left this is probably a well trod path. For most of us outside of Canada it will be very new material. 

Canadian capitalism did not recover until World War Two. Palmer accurately describes this as "capital's saviour". But production of food, weapons and ammunition drove the Canadian economy to new heights, bringing new opportunities for women workers'. Economically it was also transformative. US capitalism spent "nearly $12 billion" in Canada during the war, which "helped keep the wartime domestic economy huming and further solidified the Dominion's integratin into a new continentalism, driven by rising American demand". Uranium mining in Canada also meant the country, and its government, became closely linked to the US atomic bomb programme. Coming out of the War the Canadian government needed to implement a Welfare State - much like in Britain, fear of further workers' rebellion fuelled the belief in reforms to buy off the potential threat. But it is striking to learn that so racist was the Canadian state that the original plans for Welfare did not even feature the poorest Canadian people - the First Nations.

By the end of the period, "obvious voices of anti-capitalism" and anti-colonialism were "quieted" and "in retreat". the left was weaker and the post-war consensous seemed to have gained for the trade union movement "much of what it had long sought to attain". But the 1960s were to be a "decade of tumultuous change and oppositional turmoil" and would see Indigenous movements, those of the oppressed and organised workers, and the left, grow and pose radical challenges. But, argues Palmer, these changes were all rooted in a the longer trajectory of colonialism and capitalism boom and slump across Canada.

This book tells a wonderful, if frustrating, story. In the face of a vicious, settler, state power, working and Indigenous people were sacrified to the interests of capital. Resistance was almost continuous. But with the exception of the period after World War One and the later 1930s, rebellion did not fundamentally challenge capital. Palmer tells the story of the few brave radicals who led that fight, and more emerges in the final period in the third volume. But this reader felt that there were too many missed opportunities for radical resistance.

I enjoyed volume two almost as much as Palmer's first volume. I was surprised at the ommission of two things. One was any mention of the experience of Canadian troops during World War One. I had expected that the slaughter in the trenches would have had a political impact back home, but this was not discussed. Secondly I was surprised that there was little discussion of far-right and Nazi politics in Canada in the 1930s. Was there such a movement like much of the rest of the world? Was there anti-fascist resistance? These omissions aside, Palmer's sweeping history is excellent.

Related Reviews

Palmer - Colonialism & Capitalism: Canada's Origins 1500-1890
Palmer - Capitalism, Colonialism & Crises: The Remaking of Modern Canada 1960-2025

Hossam El-Hamalawy - Counter-Revolution in Egypt: Sisi's new republic

The Egyptian Revolution of 2011, was perhaps the important event of the 'Arab Spring'. It was a seminal moment for me, and a generation of activists who saw Revolution on the TV and social media on a nightly basis. I, like many other activists, followed events closely. The fall of the dictator Hosni Mubarak was a joyous day.

Hossam El-Hamalawy was an activist, socialist and journalist during those days. This, his analysis of the Egyptian state's evolution and the change and continuity it experienced during and after the Revolution is based on close study of events and documents, including leaked papers, and interviews. Some of it, including references to the imprisonment of activists and events during the Revolution is based on his own experiences.

Friedrich Engels' described the state as a collection of "special bodies of armed men" whose position seeks to defend the status quo, and expand capital's interests. This is nowhere more clear than in Egypt. In the decades before the Revolution the Egypt state had a huge, and overlapping, network of organisations, police, army, informers, spies and agents who watched, punished and restricted anyone expressing dissent. This included trade unionists, socialists, human rights campaigners and Muslim activists who questioned or challenged the existing setup. At the same time, Mubarak was a master at using the state against itself to prevent any threat to his position- giving its leading figures overlapping mandates, turning favourites against each other, bolstering one organisation against another, carefully manipulating the system to protect his position.

In February 2011 the Egyptian military deposed Mubarak. They did this under pressure from below and to try and limit the revolution. El-Hamalawy argues that we cannot see this event as part of a disguised plot by the generals to give themselves power through a coup even thoug this is what happened in July 2013 when Sisi took power from th elected President Morsi. El-Hamalawy argues:

While it is impossible to know every general's thinking, informed accounts suggest the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces aimed for a quick end to the uprising, a return to normality and troop withdrawl. One general explained the priority was to 'restrain the unrelenting revolutionary impulse, so that it does not smite the state's military, security, and economic apparatuses.

Crucially, says El-Hamalawy, "the generals were eager to transfer power to an elected [civilian] government as long as their interests were protected." This is further confirmed by a US State Department report that said the Army preferred "after the Mubarak experience" a situation like in Turkey, were "the army mainstains its status... but stays in its barracks under a democratic order"and is the "guarantor of democracy".

No doubt the military wanted a say in events. But they were not, at that stage, trying to dominate. What changed? Here the importance is the old saying that "Revolution is not an event, but a process". Morsi, who replaced Mubarak, was unable to hold back or end the Revolution. In fact, as El-Hamalawy says, his election became a focus for further radical demands. 

The coup that Sisi led in 2013 was a response to the ongoing revolution, not the revolution per se. But it was, from the generals point of view, a necessary one. El-Hamalawy writes that "by the Spring of 2013, the country had become ungovernable". Industrial disputes were escalating and the capitalist class were "abandoning" Morsi after ongoing "mass protests". It was, a classic moment when the working classes were no longer willing to be governed in the older way, and the ruling classes were unable to govern in the old way.

Post coup Egypt demonstrates a strengthening of the state in both its size and its scope. The military is more powerful, and has managed to displace other forces such as the police as the chief instrument of control. The military have also extended their roots further into Egyptian society. Military capitalism, writes El-Hamalawy, "expanded massively in scale and scope after the coup":

From about $300 million in the early 1980s, the post-coup military's civilian involvement - via debt-financed projects run directly by the army or in partnership with local and international capial - rose to $200 billion over five years... this equalled two-thirds of GDP. Civilian employment in such ventures also grew from about two million in December 2016 to five million by September 2019.

He continues:

The repressive apparatus generals, with the military at the centre, have become predatory elites who sometimes cooperate with the civilian bourgeoisie but also seize their capital by force. 

Repression, punishment and violence against dissenters has reached new levels. The Egyptian state is building some of the largest prisons on the planet, and modelling them on US prisons. Sisi's government has placed itself at the heart of every Egyptian cultural and political institution - from soap operas to mosque sermons. It is difficult to be optimistic about the situation in Egypt in the short term, though El-Hamalawy finds evidence for the "slow revival of dissent" and occasional strikes and protests. More importantly he notes that Eygptian society is also under enormous strain - not least from the global context of Trump and Israel's War on Iran and genocide against the politicians. These tensions are reflected within the state itself and El-Hamalawy notes that "cracks in authoritarian security coalitions rarely stay small".

Any hope we have for a renewed mass struggle will lie in the growth of confidence from below and the breaking open of disagreement within the state. For those studying Egypt Hossam El-Hamalawy's book is a must read. Despite at times the detail being a little overwhelming the book gives a clear picture of the way that Sisi's current government rests on a seemingly powerful, but inherently unstable, state-machine. There's much here on the specifics of Egypt. But the analysis will be useful for everyone trying to understand tensions in other states globally.

Related Reviews

Shenker - The Egyptians: A Radical Story
Alexander & Bassiouny - Bread, Freedom, Social Justice: Workers & the Egyptian Revolution
Alexander - 'Revolution is the Choice of the People': Crisis & Revolt in the Middle East & North Africa
El-Mahdi & Marfleet - Egypt: The Moment of Change
Ayeb & Bush - Food Insecurity & Revolution in the Middle East & North Africa

John Foot - Blood and Power: The rise and fall of Italian fascism

The rise of global far-right and fascist parties and movements is something of great concern to working people. It is, perhaps, the most dangerous time that the left has faced since the 1930s. While fascists and right-wingers have evolved and changed, as this penetrating article by Richard Donnelly shows, their core purpose remains intact. They aim for the complete destruction of democratic structures and the left, while using radical, right-wing, rhetoric to gain support through a critique of the system.

In organising to stop the right activists should learn from the past. Two strands of fascism dominated European politics. One of these was Hitler's Nazis in Germany. The other was Mussolini's fascists in Italy. The latter is not discussed as often as the former, so John Foot's Blood and Power is an important read.  Foot begins:

Italy invented fascism. Out of the chaos of the First World War, in which nearly 600,00 Italian soldiers lost their lives, a new movement emerged which preached hatred for politicians and love for the fatherland. Fascists embraced violence, both in their language and on their streets.

The violence was needed. In the early 1920s the myriad of local fascist leaders out of whome Mussolini was to emerge was the sole leader faced a powerful foe - the working class movement and mass socialist organisations. As Foot says, the fascists were "overshadowed" by a "socialism uprising" at the end of World War One. One cannot downplay the scale or significance of the Italian workers' movement in this phase. The opening chapters of Foot's book are a sweeping, but powerful and inspiring account of a working class in open and confident confrontation with the state.

While Italian fascism was nationalist and racist, and later embraced antisemitism, it's core ideology was one of counter-revolution and patriotism. It was the perceived threat (even after the struggle had receded) from the workers' movement that gave Mussolini's fascists a chance to organise and a ideology to coalesce around. Italian fascism cannot be understood without seeing the centrality of counter-revolutionary politics. In 1914, for instance, the northern Italian city of Ravenna had been the centre of a major workers' revolt against World War One. The story itself is inspiring. But in July 1922 it was the scene of a brutal counter-revolutionary strike by the fascists:

Thousands of armed blackshirts descended on the city... The 'march on Ravenna' was carried out like a military invasion. It took place out in the open, during the day, and was accompanised by a selective purge - the victims being socialists, republicans and trade unionists... At least nine people were killed in Ravenna alone... but the attacks ranged across a vast area.

By the summer in Ravenna and Cremona, Ferrara, Bologna and countless other places, the fascists squads were in control, and "the state, police prefects, army and carrabinieri were all reduced to the role of onlookers, and often took sides, providing logistical assistance to the violent gangs".

The speed at which fascist gangs did defeat democracy and the left is breathtaking. In city after city, town after town, village after village fascist gangs smashed, murdered and broke local and regional organisations of trade unions and socialists, democratic organisations and elected bodies. It was systematic. One thing that should be recognised by all activists today, is that democratic organisation in any form - whether it was local councils or national government, was in no way a barrier to the fascists. Their deployment of extreme violence at the slightest provocation (and usually with no provocation at all) saw democratic institutions fall almost instantly. It seems incredible, but democracy as a set of ideas and institutions could not (and often did not try) to stop fascism. Foot writes:

Local democratic institutions fell, one by one, to fascist pressure. Forty [fascist] councillors had been elected to the provincial administration of Cremona... in May 1922. But this formal, democratic procedure was completely ignored by the local fascists. They did not recognise elections. In that same month, local fascist leader... Roberto Farinacci, insisted that he be allowed to speak as the 'forty-first councillor'. Farinacci had not even been a candidate in the elections... When asked who had elected him, he replied, 'I elected mysefl'. It was the last meeting of that provincial council.

He concludes "Election results and democracy had come up against fascist violence and the latter had won".

This begs the question, could the fascists have been stopped. There's no doubt that the left could and done so. Tom Behan's remarkable book The Resistable Rise of Mussolini shows how this happed in one location. The key was left unity and militant mass mobilisation. Certainly there was resistance and the fascists were held back temporarily in places. But there was not enough. One problem was clearly that the left (in a broad sense) did not understand that everyone was threatened. Too many liberals and moderates thought the fascists were only targetting the revolutionary left, but "moderates were often targeted in the same way, and with even more violence, than those on the far left". Tragically, in a number of key cases, such as when the fascists took out the left stronghold Bologna in November 1920, the leader of the radical left, the Mayor Ercole Bucco, backed down from armed defence, despite having a massive majority in the city. Foot concludes:

Bucco's actions that night also seemed to confirm the overall historical judgement on maximalism. They talked the talk, but were incapable of organising a real revolution. Local fascists on the other hand, were emboldened. 

Time and again the left was to fail. In January 1921 the Socialist Party left split, and the Italian Communist Party walked out. Foot regards this as a mistake. He says that "at a time of mass fascist violence directed against socialists, the main political organisations... divided into two, weakened any sense of opposition or even defence". This was, of course, a dangerous time. The trick would have been if the Communist Party had been able to respond in a way that would have built left unity in an anti-fascist alliance while maintaining independence. This failed to happen, and probably it was too late after January 1921. Had the CP prepared the ground by organising like this, the split could have been much more productive in terms of anti-fascist mobilisations. I was reminded of Clara Zetkin's analysis of fascism in Italy:

Fascism... is not at all the revenge of the bourgeoisie against the militant uprising of the proletariat. In historical terms, viewed objectively, fascism arrives much more as punishment because the proletariat has not carried and driven forward the revolution that began in Russia.  

At the start of this review I mentioned the ideology of Italian fascism. It is notable that while the fascists were appalling racists, many Jewish people were members. Mussolini's alliance with Hitler and his adoption of a vicious antisemitism shocked them. Italian fascism was not more benign than in Germany. Jewish people were hounded, murdered, arrested and lost everything. Many were sent to Concentration Camps, particularly later in the war. Foot's analysis of fascism in power is an important counter to those today who argue that Mussolini was not as vicious. The Italian fascist state was a violent, repressive and murderous entity - and its violence extended into Africa with the occupation of Ethiopia.

Nonetheless fascism in Italy was weak. It seemed extremely powerful, but the contradictions of economic and imperilaist policies undermined its position. By the time it had entered the war, the longer anti-fascist and anti-war traditions of the working class were beginning to make themselves felt. When Mussolini's regime eventually fell, it was a surprisingly quick series of events. This period, and the subsequent German take over of Italy, is well told by Foot.

Foot's book concludes with an analysis of Italian fascism in the context of contemporary Italian politics. It is clear that the failure of the Italian state to properly come to terms with, or confront, the legacy of Italian fascism - including its failure to prosecute or challenge many of its key figures - has left a belief that Mussolini's time was "wonderful". Foot's expose reminds us that it was for a few people - those who were frightened by the rise of a powerful workers' movement. But the reality for millions was the opposite. 

It is an excellent (and extremely readable) account of a period of history we ought to study more. I would have liked more accounts of anti-fascist resistance and further analysis of how the left could have stopped fascism. Nonetheless this is a very useful read.

Related Reviews

Zetkin - Fighting Fascism: How to struggle and how to win
Paxton - The Anatomy of Fascism
Trotsky - The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany
Sparrow - Fascists Among Us: Online hate and the Christchurch Massacre

Charlie Kimber & Judy Cox - Revisiting the General Strike of 1926: When workers were ready to dare

On day in May 1926 when my grandfather was on his way home from school in Plymouth, he was astounded to see a tram tipped over by a crowd of people. It was such a vivid moment in his youth that in his nineties he could still recall it. It was his only recollection of the British General Strike, but it stuck with him even though it was the closest he ever got to the trade union movement. 

This new book, written for the hundredth anniversary of the General Strike, has many such events in it. But I mention it as an opening to this review because it demonstrates one of the themes of Charlie Kimber and Judy Cox's important new book. May 1926 was a period of brutal class war, and the strikers were prepared to escalate and fight for victory. Responsibility for their defeat lay in the hands of the trade union leadership, not in their lack of courage.

This important corrective is needed because the General Strike has traditionally been remembered, outside of the radical left, as a time less of class struggle and more of classes rubbing shoulders. I remember being taught at school about strikers playing football with policemen. How surprised I would have been to hear that strikers derailed The Flying Scotsman the emblematic train of the time. My grandfather would have been less surprised. The authors give us a more examples:

On Wednesday 5 May, there were violent clashes between strikers and scabs in Poplar and Canning Town and around the Blackwall Tunnel [all in London] and cars were shashed and set alight. Newspapers reported that strikers 'tried to impede the progress of cars and motor buses', scabs driving buses had to run to escape violence and 'organised gangs' of strikers were baton-charged by the police. In Hammersmith seven buses were wrecked and fascists attacked strikers... A magistrate in Hammersmith declared, 'Women will be treated the same as men. They often inflame men's passions'.

Such reports demonstrate that this was no mere strike marked by peaceful picketing and protest. Rather, as the authors say:

In 1926, working class people made a huge leap of politics and of imagination by hurling themselves into the struggle. They did not know if they would win or not - but they were determined to try and assert the power of their class.

The General Strike was not an isolated event. It grew out of a long period of radicalism, which saw the British working class, like its comrades elsewhere, flexing its muscles and trying out its power. The run up to World War One and the immediate aftermath had seen strikes and revolutions across Europe. Britain had not been immune from that. 1919 had been a year of near revolution. 1926 saw the big battalions of the British working class taking action to defend their collective interests. The problem was that most workers had illusions in their trade union leaders. As the authors explain:

Trade union leaders and the full-time employees of the unions constitute a separate social stratum with their own set of interests distinct from workers on the one hand and the bosses who oversee and enforce their exploitation on the other. They become negotiators between workers and bosses instead of class fighters looking to end exploitation altogether... This makes them pull back from leading strikes in the militant direction which could lead to victory.

In 1926 the trade union leaders in Britain did everything they could to limit radicalism and undermine the strike. They were terrified of it getting out of hand. The worst of the leaders (including those in the Labour Party) made sure that the British ruling class knew that they were not under threat. Despite these flawed leaders, British workers demonstrated their desire to fight for real change. The authors write

Overall, strikers and other trade unionists set up some 300 Councils of Action during the strike. Some began to take over the local administration of society, the basis of elementary and temporary "dual power". It is in this sense that they gave a glimpse (no more than that) of workers' councils and soviets.

Workers "contested the way the TUC leaders had tried to constrain and narrow them politically". 

Even the best books on the General Strike can downplay the role of women in the struggle. Revisiting the General Strike on the other hand explores the centrality of women to the struggle usually as active supporters (as the Hammersmith magistrate mentioned earlier demonstrated). The authors quote one local strike newspaper, "We would like to pay special tribute to the brave, enthusiastic and effective co-operation that has been given by the wives and other women relatives of the strikers."

But this support wasn't just passive, it was active in the sense that women took part in protests, meetings and pickets. By the time the strike ended and the miners' were locked out, women had to play a new crucial role in sustaining their communities. Soup kitchens and communal kitchens were set up, and women played a central role in making these work, which "added greatly to the solidarity of the whole community". The strike, and the lock out, also transformed things in the mining areas one commentator noted "there were concerts in every street, and the sense of fellowship in the community was more marked than at any other time."

Women were also central to "mass community mobilisations against scabbing in the South Wales coalfields", and many were arrested and fined. 

The authors rightly describe the end of the strike as its "murder". The sell-out came as an enormous shock to strikers, most of whom were experiencing near total solidarity and an escalating number of workers' taking action. The trade union leaders turned off the dispute with vague promises from the government of no victimisation. The anger from below however was contained because there wasn't any political force capable of urging the workers on and taking control out of the hands of the leadership. The potential for that however is described by one of the most fascinating aspects to this book. These are the collection of dozens of telegrams from across the country and the trade union movement protesting the end of the strike. The authors have done an amazing job to get these into print for popular readers as they definitely demonstrate a different story to the one that will be made in May 2026 when various trade union leaders celebrate the anniversary. Let's quote a few:

Custom House: 14 May, Demand resumption of General Strike to safeguard positions of men who responded to the strike call.

Stafford: 13 May, Report extreme dissatisfaction with strike ending here

Hampstead: 14 May, There is a growing feeling locally that your leadership together with our standard of life is at stake

The telegrams once again demonstrate the key argument of Kimber and Cox - the strike showed of workers' growing confidence, their desire to fight for real change and a growing frustration with the established leadership. These were "Days of Hope". But they also were days when the British working class could have moved to a new level of struggle. Tragically the only significant socialist organisation at the time, the British Communist Party, had an incorrect understanding of the trade union leadership and despite its militants being the most frequently victimsed it had disarmed the movement by putting faith in the left trade union bureaucracy.

The book ends with two important final parts. The first is a study of the cultural impact of the Strike, particularly its influence on literature. Having never read Lady Chatterley's Lover I was intrigued to find that DH Lawrence had been inspired by the strike to include it in all three drafts, with growing levels of radicalism. But I was disappointed that the authors didn't mention my favourite example of the Strike in literature - its part in Goodbye Mr Chips (and it's imitator To Serve Them All My Days). The private schoolboys scab on the strike, but Chips surprises them with his sympathy for the workers. As the authors say the strike "shaped the work of the writers who lived through it. For some, it was a terrible reminder of the power of the working class struggle to uproot society. For others, it was a movement of inspiration and possibility).

Finally the book is aimed at a new, and emerging socialist movement. The book is not just a retelling of the history but an attempt to educate workers in the meaning of struggle and the lessons of the period. The inclusion of a glossary of keywords that are much forgotten today - pickets, rank and file organisation, solidarity - shows that the book is a tool to sharpen the struggle today. Read and use this excellent book and the anniversary of the General Strike to renew our fight against capitalism.

Related Reviews

Hinton & Richard Hyman - Trade Unions and Revolution: The Industrial Politics of the early British Communist Party
Cliff & Gluckstein - Marxism and Trade Union Struggle: The General Strike of 1926
Newsinger - Them and Us: Fighting the Class War 1910-1939
Darlington - Labour Revolt in Britain 1910-1914

Paul Frölich - Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg was one of the most remarkable revolutionaries to emerge from the European socialist milieu in the late 19th century. There is a tendency on the left to discuss Luxemburg in the context of things that she wrote or did that were wrong. I've been to many meetings which bemoan her failure to "launch a revolutionary party" early, rather than staying part of the German Social Democratic Party, hence dooming the German Revolution. These are, of course, crude criticisms even if they do have some basis. Nonetheless it is important that we say, as Lenin did:

'Eagles may at times fly lower than hens but hens can never rise to the height of eagles'. Rosa Luxemburg was mistaken on the question of the independence of Poland; she was mistaken in 1903 in her appraisal of Menshevism; she was mistaken on the theory of accumulation of capital; she was mistaken in July 1914, when, together with Plekhanov, Vandervelde, Kautsky and others she advocated unity between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks; she was mistaken in what she wrote in prison in 1918 (She corrected most of these mistakes at the end of 1918 and the beginning of 1919 when she was released). But inspite of her mistakes she was and remains for us an eagle. And not only will Communists all over the world cherish her memory, but her biography and her complete works will serve as useful manuals for training many generations of communists all over the world.

Paul Frölich's biography of Luxemburg was one of the very first to be written, and was published in unusal circumstances just before World War Two. In fact the English translation became a huge best seller as part of the Left Book Club during the War. It is very much a political biography that places her ideas in the context of her political activty and her organisational context. The Lenin quote above matters not just because of his list of criticisms, or indeed his celebration of Luxemburg's work - but his acknowledgement that her ideas changed in the context of struggle. Indeed part of the celebration of her work that Lenin mentions was impossible because the archive that Frölich built up was trapped by Stalin during WWII and kept from the movement.

What shines through is Luxemburg's understanding of political theory and strategy, based always on working class power. For instance, in the great debate within the German left about how the left should organise and the role of parliamentary activity, Frölich says that Luxemburg 

did not insist merely on agitation: the task of a socialist parliamentarian also consisted in taking part in the positive legislative work, whenever possible with practical success-a task which would become increasingly difficult with the strengthening of the party’s representation in parliament. The task could be correctly fulfilled only if Social Democracy retained an awareness of its role as an oppositional party and, at the same time, found the golden mean between sectarian negation and bourgeois parliamentarism-always remembering that its real strength lay outside parliament, in the proletarian masses. Above all, however, it had to give up without reservation the illusion that a working-class party could overpower a capitalist state by a majority vote in parliament, i.e. solely by parliamentary means.

Nonetheless it is clear that the context of Luxemburg's main area of work - the German socialist movement - did have its impact on her throught. Frölich's book is very much a celebration of Luxemburg's work and life - but he isn't uncritical. But in one area he does acknowledge mistakes - her debate with Lenin over the question of political organisation.

This first disagreement between her and Lenin-even if all the various background factors are taken into consideration-nevertheless revealed characteristic differences between these two great leader personalities. Luxemburg underestimated the power of organisation, particularly when the reins of leadership were in the hands of her opponents. She relied all too believingly on the pressure of the revolutionary masses to make any corrections in party policy. Lenin’s total political view prior to 1917 shows traces of unmistakably Blanquist influences and an exaggerated voluntarism, though he quickly overcame it when faced with concrete situations. To overstate the point, it can be said that Rosa concerned herself more with the historical process as a whole and derived her political decisions from it, while Lenin’s eye was more concentrated on the final aim and sought the means to bring it about. For her the decisive element was the mass; for him it was the party, which he wanted to forge into the spearhead of the whole movement.

This is a much better approach than the "she didn't set up a revolutionary party" argument. Not least because it is clear that Luxemburg did always fight for revolutionary organisation, and I was reminded that the Polish group she led played such a role in the crucial war years and during the 1917 revolutionary period.

Perhaps the most interesting discussion of Luxemburg's "mistakes" are in her work on the accumulation of capital. Here again there's a tendency for some reviewers simply to say that she was wrong. Yet in doing so they miss Luxemburg's real attempt to grapple with the limits of Marx's own work on accumulation (born out of his abstraction of the economy from reality in order to clarify his argument) and the fact that she was one of the first to link accumulation to imperialist expansion. She was also, it should be said, someone who was very clear about the role of imperialism in the destruction of indigenous peoples. Her theory here may not be fully developed, but it is a very real attempt to place a Marxist critique of capitalism into a global context. 

Luxemburg's work also included two other great pieces of work that developed revolutionary politics to adapt to new eras. Her Reform or Revolution and The Mass Strike both remain indispensible booklets for socialists in the 21st centutry as we grapple with the interactions between social movements, capital and political organisation. The Mass Strike in particular will no doubt be read again and again as workers engage in mass struggles over austerity and politics. The "Gen X" revolts spring to mind.

But it is in the last four years of her life that Rosa Luxemburg comes into her own. Her fight to shape a new revolutionary era out of the ruins of the betrayal of the German socialist movement at the start of World War One and then her attempts to learn from and extend the revolutionary epoch after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Here Frölich engages with her criticisms of the Russian Revolution and the policies of the Bolsheviks, particular towards the National and Agrarian questions. He acknowledges her errors, while placing them in context. Not least the fact that Luxemburg was in prison and had limited access to the movement at times. Nonetheless we see how Luxemburg is constantly striving to develop the movement, and with the outbreak of the German Revolution we she how her politics place her far ahead of almost all her comrades. Her clarity of ideas in December 1918 and January 1919 with the counter-revolution flexing its muscles is poignant given her murder by them in early January.

There is no doubt that the loss of Luxemburg robbed the German working class of one of its most able leaders. Frölich's book is one of the best introductions to her life and politics, but it is also an incredible celebration of working class power and the vision of socialism from below that Luxemburg strived for her whole life. If at times it feels a little hagiographic this is, perhaps, to be expected given that Frölich is writing in the darkest period for humanity as Hitler has won and Stalin's politics is stamping over the revolutionary tradition that Paul Frölich's subject stood for. 

Related Reviews

Gietinger - The Murder of Rosa Luxemburg
Luxemburg - Reform or Revolution
Luxemburg - The Mass Strike
Campbell - A Rebel's Guide to Rosa Luxemburg

Karl Marx - Herr Vogt: A Spy in the Workers' Movement

Herr Vogt is a strange and difficult book, even for dedicated followers of Karl Marx. It is a detailed, dare I say, obsessive, response to libelous attacks on Marx and his comrades by Carl Vogt, a German philosopher, politican and scientist. Usually, when referred to in books about Marx authors lament that Marx took time out from writing far more important work to respond to attacks that today might be irrelevant and forgotten. Indeed, like Eugen Dühring who was the target of Engels' work Anti-Dühring, it's entirely possible that Vogt would mostly be forgotton today if Marx had not decided to refute his slander. But the book is not an easy read. The problem was well described by Franz Mehring, one of Marx's biographers who wrote in 1918:

It is the only one of Marx’s independent works which has never been reprinted: and there are probably very few copies still extant. First of all, it is very long, amounting to 192 closely printed pages (Marx declared that in ordinary print it would be twice as long), and secondly, it would require detailed commentary to make all the references in it clear to the present-day reader. For the most part this would not be worthwhile, because much of the matter with which Marx deals was forced on him by his opponent and relates to affairs which have long since been completely forgotten and rightly so. In reading the book one involuntarily experiences a sense of discomfort to hear Marx defending himself against slanderous attacks which did not touch him even remotely.

Today the book has been reprinted and is available online. But the other problems remain. The reader may struggle with several things - firstly the people, groups and events that Marx references in his sometimes meandering demolition of Vogt's allegations. The second is that Marx's often refers to individuals, especially Vogt himself, in slang, insults or with literary references. "Falstaff" is a frequent example. If anything the one thing modern readers will learn from the book is that Marx had an enormous grasp of poetry and literarture and was not adverse to quoting or paraphrasing such to make a point.

In one example Marx describes the skunk in detail, referring to its "horrible offensive" smell. He then describes Vogt as a "naturalised citizen of the 'Animal Kingdom'" who, "in the manner of the skunk", "sprayed" allegations against his enemies. In this particular case the allegation is that Marx and his comrades were "live off the sweat of the workers". Its an attack that clearly, and rightly, enrages Marx and he marshals several letters from supporters, including the editors of the New York Tribune who point out his paid work and his sacrifices for the workers' movement. In Herr Vogt, this is frequently Marx's approach. He refutes and allegation and summons letters from mutiple acquaintances, enemies and supporters to prove his point and refute the slander.

What was Vogt's purpose in his attack on Marx? Clearly it was to discredit Marx and those around him arguing for revolutionary politics. Why did Vogt do this? Marx asks:"Is Karl Vogt paid to be an agent?" Marx doesn't really know for definite: "Who knows whether Plon-Plon has not promised his Falstaff the post of Commander of the Mouse Tower in the Rhine at Bingen". But Marx notes:

In any case, rumour has it, I know, that there is a more prosaic explanation of things. Thus 'with the turn in the situation since 1859' there is said to heave been a turn in the conditions of the 'jolly companion' (who had, a short time previously, been joint chief of a joint stock company in great difficulties and involved in criminal investigations.

But more importantly for Marx he shows that Vogt represents a particular strand of thought among politicans who, during the 1848 revolutions and after sided with Louis Bonaparte. Marx makes sure to demonstrate how Vogt was wrong during the revolution and after and how his "patrons" were keen to abandon principles and side with Bonaparte against democrats, revolutionaries and so on. Much of this material is obscure and hard to follow because Marx is, in his classic method, making his argument by building up to a big picture. Those who want to know more about Marx's thinking about key moments in European history after 1848 might find material here to get their teeth into. Most of us will find it somewhat obscure.

Of more interest is the insights we get into the lives of radical emigrants and refugees and Marx's own circles. Some of the letters have real gems. Charles Dana, editor of the NY Tribune is full of praise for Marx's work, but says "in questions relating to both Czarism and Bonapartism, I have sometimes thought that you manifested too much interest and too great anxiety for the unity and independence of Germany". But he goes on, that Marx has "always manifested the most cordial interest in the welfare and progress of the labouring classes."

In the 1982 edition of Herr Vogt that I have the translator argues that after 120 years (now 160 or so) since first publication, the book remains "a model of the analysis, investigation and exposure of the agents of bourgeois reaction." I, it must be said, remain unconvinced. It is a deep polemic, and there's plenty of Marx in it. But it must have been obscure - even at the time, and typically Marx lost money on the book. Readers wanting to dive in are recommended to read the chapters in Mehring's book which explain the context to the convoluted arguments and persons mentioned. Mehring concludes that Marx should never have got involved:

When the trouble with Vogt began Marx’s friend Imandt wrote: “I shouldn’t like to have to write about the affair and I shall be surprised if you can bring yourself to thrust your hand into such a muckheap,” and similar advice came to hand from Russian and Hungarian friends. To-day one almost feels inclined to wish that he had taken it. The deplorable business won him a number of new friends and, in particular, it caused him to resume friendly relations with the Workers Educational League, which immediately supported him vigorously. On the other hand it tended to hamper the great work of his life rather than further it, despite, or rather just because of, the valuable sacrifice in strength and time which it demanded without offering any commensurate gain, and at the same time it caused him serious domestic difficulties.

On the other hand, as the recent "Spy Cops" investigation has demonstrated, spies in the movement and those seeking to discredit radicals and revolutionaries remain a problem. While Marx's response to Vogt may not be his most important or accessible work. It is, nonetheless, a demonstration of how seriously Marx took his revolutionary activity and how keen he was to defend himself against counter-revolutionary critics.

Related Reviews

Mehring - Karl Marx: The Story of his Life
Marx - Value, Price and Profit
Marx - The Civil War in France
Liebknecht - Karl Marx: Biographical Memoirs

Clara Zetkin - Fighting Fascism: How to struggle and how to win

Editors Mike Taber and John Riddell open their introduction to this short but incredibly useful collection by writing "seldom has there been a word more bandied about, yet less understood, than fascism". That's certainly true. As the right and far-right gain confidence around the globe understanding who and what fascists are and represent is crucial for the left in order to defeat them. We can learn a great deal from those who fought fascism in the 1920s and 1930s, and this short collection of pieces by Clara Zetkin is a superb introduction.

Zetkin deserves a brief introduction. She was a leading figure in the German Communist Party who had been active since the 1870s. A close friend and collaborator with Rosa Luxembourg in the SPD, she was particularly active around the women's movement. Opposed to the First World War and a principled anti-imperialist she joined the Spartakist League and became a leading figure in the KPD. She was an elected member of the German Reichstag, and as this collection makes clear, she fought hard for a United Front of Communists and non-Communists against the Nazis - using Parliament as a platform. When the Nazis came to power she went into exile in the Soviet Union and died in 1933.

The importance of a brief outline of Zetkin's life is to illustrate an important fact - she was part of the Communist movement in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, through the defeat of the German Revolution and into the period of Stalin's counter-revolution against the Russian revolution. Through this time she was part of debates on fighting fascism at the Communist International, and the first, most important documents in this collection are actually reports made to that body.

The first thing to say is how prescient these are. Writing in 1923 she is able to immediate discern what is unique about fascism through her analysis of Mussolini in Italy. Her explanation is important for contemporary analysis. She says:

At first, the prevailing view was that fascism was nothing more than violent bourgeois terror, and its character and effects were thought to be similar to those of the Horthy regime in Hungary. Yet even though fascism and the Horthy regime employ the same bloody, terrorist methods, which bear down on the proletariat in the same way, the historical essence of the two phenomena is entirely different.

Rather,

Fascism... is not at all the revenge of hte bourgeoisie against the militant uprising of the proletariat. In historical terms, viewed objectively, fascism arrives much more as punishment because the proletariat has not carried and driven forward the revolution that began in Russia. 

Then:

[Communists] view fascism as an expression of the decay and disintegration of the capitalist economy and as a symptom of the bourgeois state's dissolution. We can combat fascism only if we grasp that it rouses and sweeps along broad social masses who have lost the earlier security of their existence and with it, often, their belief in social order. 

Having then outlined some of the "thousands  seeking new possibilities for survival", she explains that its not enough to see the growth of fascism "solely as a result of such economic pressures alone". It is, she repeats, the "halting pace of world revolution resulting from betrayal by the reformist leaders of the workers' movement". The failure of these figures to carry forward the struggle and offer an alternativge vision or "global change" to the embattled middle classes allowed them to find solace and hope in the fascist movement. Fascism she says "became an asylum for all the politically homeless, the socially uprooted, the destitute and disillusioned". But it's her analysis of the dynamics that make the book so useful. She predicts, for instance, that the fascist leadership (as Hitler's Nazis did) would "flirt with the revolutionary proletariat, even though they may not have any personal sympathy for it". This is why they called themselves "National Socialists" rather than for any sympathy for socialism.

Having explored what fascism is, and what it is like in government (in Italy) Zetkin talks about how the left can defeat it - challenging the suffering that people are experiencing and challenge the fascists themselves. Crucial is a United Front of workers from whatever position. As she says:

But proletarian struggle and self-defense against fascism requires a proletarian united front. Fascism does not ask if the worker in the factory has a soul painted in the white and blue colors of Bavaria; or is inspired by the black, red, and gold colors of the bourgeois republic; or by the red banner with a hammer and sickle. It does not ask whether the worker wants to restore the Wittelsbach dynasty [of Bavaria], is an enthusiastic fan of Ebert, or would prefer to see our friend Brandler as president of the German Soviet Republic. All that matters to fascism is that they encounter a class-conscious proletarian, and then they club him to the ground. That is why workers must come together for struggle without distinctions of party or trade-union affiliation.

With the rise of Stalin, and "third period" thought, the Communist International broke with the principled position of United Front strategy and instead labelled the reformists as being the same as the fascists. The editors of this volume explore how this affected Zetkin - she was essentially isolated and ignored, though the Stalinists weren't able to destroy here. Zetkin did, it is true, pull some of her criticisms of Stalin and the direction of the in order to maintain her ability to play a role in the Comintern and the KPD. Nonetheless she did manage to keep arguing for a United Front, most memorably and movingly in a speech to the German Reichstag, while being heckled by fascists and Nazis, in 1932. Extracts from this remarkable speech are reproduced here, with a framing introduction by editor John Riddell,. Riddel explains the context. Zetkin was almost blind and so frail she had two KPD members carry her to the platform. She started by saying

Our most urgent task today is to form a united front of all working people in order to turn back fascism. All the differences that divide and shackle us - whether founded on political, trade-union, religious or ideological outlooks - must give way before this imperious historical necessity.

Tragically the Stalinised KPD was no longer a force willing to construct such a united front and many thousands of Communists would pay the price with their lives in the Nazi concentration camps. Zetkin had not been able to win the necessary argument in the face of Stalin's forces inside the Comintern. But she had never lost hope. She finished:

The united front must embrace all those who are dependent on wages or salaries or otherwise must pay tribute to capitalism, for it is they who both sustain capitalism and are its victims. I am opening this session of the Reichstag in fulfillment of my duty as honoary chair and in the hope that despite my present infirmities I may yet have the good fortune to open, as honarary chair, the first congress of workers' councils of a Soviet Germany.

This collection of essays, brilliantly edited by John Riddell and Mike Taber, is a crucial tool to understand and organise against fascism today. But it is also a tribute to a brave and principled socialist who fought her whole life for the liberation of humanity. Everyone should read it.

Related Reviews

Trotsky - The First Five Years of the Communist International (Vol. I)
Trotsky - The First Five Years of the Communist International (Vol. II)
Trotsky - The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany
Paxton - The Anatomy of Fascism
Guerin - Fascism and Big Business
Sparrow - Fascists Among Us: Online hate and the Christchurch Massacre
Wendling - Alt Right: From 4chan to the White House