In 2012, seeing their salaries slashed by over half, the Association of Greek Archaeologists launched an international appeal against massive government cuts and to stop the targeted, professional looting of archaeological sites and museums. Here in the UK, Neil emailed the Greece Solidarity Campaign (GSC) saying he really ‘ought to do something.’ In his self-effacing way, Neil explained that he had ‘quite a high profile’ in archaeology, knew Greece well, and had just had a book out on the Ancient Greek Olympics. He sent a list of ideas for what the campaign could do but stated that he did not ‘do Facebook’ so I would have to connect him with the Greek archaeologists some other way.

Neil’s intervention was remarkable – he quickly had an event called Archaeologists Against Austerity: Solidarity with Greece arranged at UCL’s Institute of Archaeology, plus further events at Bristol University and in Newcastle which allowed archaeologists Despina Koutsoumba and Fotis Georgiadis to come to the UK, speak at these events and make headlines in Greece.

Neil’s good friends in archaeology supported the tour, some of the establishment boycotted the events as they were unhappy at the politics. The best bit was holding a protest inside the British Museum, with Despina and Neil holding up a banner saying Can’t Pay Won’t Pay – Solidarity With Greece, and demanding the return of the Parthenon Marbles.

Here is Neil at his best explaining the living breathing significance of these stolen revolutionary treasures:

“History is sanitized. The role of the people in making their own history, the idea that it’s people organising themselves to bring about revolutionary change is not something that our rulers want us to celebrate and talk about. So what happens is that the objects are ripped out of their original contexts and treated like art objects which you approach in a hushed awe in an environment like this.”

This ‘People’s History’ approach was reflected in a recent letter Neil published in support of the ‘ritual killing’ of the Colston statue by Black Lives Matter protesters, a cause which for Neil represented huge power and hope. Neil was deeply committed towards making the world a better place. He once wrote to me:

‘BTW I became a revolutionary on the Grunwick picket-line in 1977. A group of Asian women sacked for joining a trade union by a sweatshop boss, and hundreds of police mobilised to smash a way through the mass picket to get busloads of scabs into the factory. That was when this innocent grammar-school boy from Tunbridge Wells began to grow up!’

Neil was also heavily involved in organising a South Africa disinvestment campaign on his campus in the late 70s, and then worked for two years in the head office of the Anti-Apartheid Movement. He was also instrumental in creating the No Glory In War commemorative WWI campaign with Stop The War Coalition and Jan Woolf. You can read more about his political work here.

Anyone who met Neil knew he was whip smart with an extraordinary intellect and capacity for writing brilliant books including the extraordinary A Radical History Of The World. I was suitably intimidated when I wrote to Neil in his role as series editor at Pluto Press to ask him to take a look at a book idea I’d had. He was immediately warm, kind and encouraging: “If this is your first such venture and you are unsure about all this book publishing stuff, very happy to talk on the phone.”

Neil gave me the courage to write Stitched Up – The Anti-Capitalist Book Of Fashion and to do it to the best of my ability. He was an intellectual safety net who I could explore Marxist theory with and who expected me to be smart and inquisitive, to read extensively and push ideas forward. In the acknowledgements I wrote: ‘To Neil Faulkner for polishing this book from a rough diamond to something I wanted everyone to read. For patience, guidance, and letting me phone you at all hours to discuss topics from Chanel to use-value.’ (Last time I phoned him to discuss something random and fashion related was to get his thoughts for this article on Klarna and debt schemes. Once again, his answers to my questions made everything click into place.) When the book launched, I was so proud to share a platform with Neil, he was warm with the audience and also very funny – though sadly he did not wear one of his definitive waistcoats to the event.

I saw Neil’s ability to inspire confidence in people extend through the work of the Brick Lane Debates a political group whose aim was to mix politics with culture and attract wide audiences to discuss and act on crucial topics of the day. The group was mostly in their twenties and thirties and we punched well above our weight and ahead of the times – holding large symposia in East London – Changing The Climate, We Should All Be Feminists, and I Can’t Breathe. Neil provided energy and intellectual vigour to the creation of this work.

Last night, having learned of Neil’s passing, I sat in candle light with a friend who I met through Brick Lane Debates and we talked about Neil. About his brilliant public speaking, his compassion and insight into a truly remarkable range of subjects. My friends talked about a formative event called Capitalism 101 which we ran at Housmans Bookshop – Neil would talk about capitalism and how it intersected with an issue in society, helping people to join the dots before everyone split into discussion groups. My friend remembered in great detail the Capitalism 101 on workplace mental health (long before it was de rigour to talk about mindfulness) where people felt comfortable enough to talk about the extreme levels of anxiety and stress they were being subjected to at work and how Neil prompted people to understand that this was not something we should accept as an individual problem but how we should see it as part of capitalism which must be pushed back on and dismantled.

We then got to talking about the This Changes Everything conference at Friends Meeting House – it was based on Naomi Klein’s book of the same name and over video link she told the packed audience it was the most exciting thing to ever happen in her life as a writer. It was an urgent call to action on climate change, pre-dating XR. It is one of my biggest regrets that the Left still has not managed to build an anti-capitalist movement on the climate. Neil was instrumental to creating This Changes Everything and as anyone who has had the pleasure of working with him on a political project will know he brought bucket loads of organisational energy and ideas, giving the project a serious political backbone. In a world where much of the organised Left has traditionally dismissed climate change as ‘not a priority’ or even more stupidly ‘a middle class problem,’ Neil understood it as THE defining global issue of capitalism and for that directional leadership I will always be truly grateful.

Having spoken to people and scrolled through Twitter to see people publicly mourning Neil’s loss, one word comes up time and again: Mentor. Looking up the dictionary definition of mentor brought me to tears once again – ‘someone who teaches or gives help and advice to a less experienced and often younger person.’ Neil’s heart was so big, his patience so endless, his capacity for both learning and imparting knowledge so wide, and his revolutionary spirit so strong. What gives me comfort is to look around at the people he mentored and see them doing remarkable things – whether with Anti-Capitalist Resistance which he co-founded, the climate movement, social justice campaigns, Momentum, trade unions, and of course archaeology. People leading in their field, keeping revolutionary flames burning, fighting for justice, and being better kinder people. Neil’s impact lives on far beyond his tragic, untimely and utterly unfair death at just 64. In grief I believe all we can do is make his work live on through our actions.

I will never stop missing Neil. I am crushed by the certainty that I will never know another like him. His intellect and insight were one thing, but equal irreplaceable is the joyful, funny, brave human being who always signed his emails to us with these words –

Love Neil.

Manolis with the Greece Solidarity UK delegation 2012On the evening of Monday 30 March 2020, around 9 pm, one could hear people clapping their hands in many Greek neighborhoods. The clapping was followed by old partisans’s songs from the Resistance and in particular one called ‘Heroes’. In its lyrics one can find this line: ‘Heroes with twelve lives’.
If there was a person, that lived these ‘twelve lives’, this was Manolis Glezos, and the people clapping their hands in their balconies and shouting his name and playing old partisan songs were doing it to honor him, because today he passed away at the age of 98.
When Glezos was only 19 he made history, because along with his comrade Lakis Santas on the night of May 30/31 1941, just a few weeks after the Germans had entered occupied Athens, they brought down the Nazi flag from the Acropolis.
But this was just the beginning of eight decades dedicated to struggle. Active in the Resistance as a young communist, he would be arrested first by the Germans, later by the Italians and also by the Greek collaborators. His younger brother, Nicos, was executed by the Germans on May 1944. Glezos would always show the small note that his brother managed to write and throw out of the truck that was carrying him to the place of executions.
Manolis Glezos himself would be later condemned to death twice during the Civil War, but in 1950 his death sentences were commuted to life imprisonment. He would be liberated on 1954 only to be arrested again on 1958 on espionage charges and jailed until 1962 despite the international protests against the prosecution for such a symbol of the antifascist Resistance. After the 1967 Colonel’s coup he would be again arrested.
After the fall of the dictatorship he would not join any of the two Communist Parties that had emerged from the 1968 split and tried to revive EDA (United Democratic Left) which was the legal expression of the Left during the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1980s EDA cooperated with PASOK (and Glezos would be twice elected to parliament) but he would distance himself from PASOK. For some time he would be the elected president of his village in the island of Naxos, where he would try to experiment with forms of direct democracy. Active on the Left, in the 2000s he would participate in SYRIZA, being elected again to Parliament in 2012 and the European Parliament on 2014. When SYRIZA capitulated after the referendum, he distanced himself from SYRIZA and in the September 2015 election, he was a candidate with Popular Unity.
During all this time he would always be active in various movements. From the movement to demand German reparations to local struggles and movements of international solidarity. A prolific writer he would dedicate a large part of his energy to defending the history of the Resistance (writing a monumental two-tome history entitled ‘National Resistance 1940-1945), always available to speak at meetings at schools etc. He was also present in demonstrations and protests. On March 2010, during one of the first mass rallies against austerity riot police sprayed him with tear gas with the Minister of Public Order being forced to condemn such practices. During the mass movement of the Squares he was also there speaking to crowds.

During the trial of Golden Dawn he was also there, reminding of the continuity of antifascist struggle.
However, just referring to Glezos’s political trajectory cannot explain the place he had in the collective thinking of many generations. Glezos was never just a ‘living symbol’. He was more like living history, history in the making, history in the present. One is really impressed to see how many people, of many different generations, actually had personal memories of meeting Glezos in one moment or the other.
It is as if he represented the continuity of a spirit of struggle, the red line of commitment, courage and sacrifice, from the Resistance and the Civil War to contemporary movements.
And whatever disagreements one might had with Glezos on one issue or the other, he was living proof of the ‘new humanity’ that the Communist movement had envisaged and projected: always committed but also open-minded, eager to experiment, insisting on the broadening of democracy, trying to avoid dogmatism and bureaucratic mentality.

Manolis Glezos pays tribute to the dead of the 1973 Students’ Uprising at the Polytechnic University in downtown Athens.

It is not that he represented a particular line or program. He represented a spirit of struggle and resistance in a society that in the past ten years went from insurrection and hope to capitulation and defeat. A spirit of resistance and struggle most needed now.
Because of the restrictions imposed of the pandemic Glezos’s funeral will not be a mass demonstration as we would have wished. But tonight’s salute to the ‘last partisan’ made evident the place he has in our collective memory, feeling and thinking.

Panagiotis Sotiris

Friends and family of Jeremy Hardy gathered to celebrate his life on Monday 13th May at the Battersea Arts Centre. This piece was published on Jeremy Hardy’s website.

They included Jeremy Corbyn, who spoke of a friendship stretching back to the the 1980s. “Jeremy was one who always gave his all to any campaign,” he said. He was followed by John McDonnell, who spoke of working with Jeremy on the campaigns to free the Birmingham Six and Guildford Four. “I loved the man,” he said, before explaining that he was then leaving early to continue Brexit negotiations with the government.

At times, Jeremy’s voice came recorded, from speakers. Another time, it came, breathtakingly, from Rory Bremner, with whom he once shared a house. “I used to live in Rory’s attic,” he said, in Jeremy’s voice. “That’s why he looks so young.” Harry Enfield played tribute in full Loadsamoney character, remembering Jeremy on Radio 4, which “is like TalkSport, but shit”. Julian Clary recalled him “being scathing about the Tories in a cardigan”.

Mark Steel spoke of being called by an obituarist after Jeremy died, and being asked, “was he political at all?” and his regret that he hadn’t retorted that Jeremy was the chairman of his local Conservative Association. Jack Dee, like many, recalled Jeremy’s mischief, and his habit of flicking ahead in the pages of flipcharts in rented conference suits, to leave, for the unwary, a sketch of a penis.

Former colleagues spoke in awe of his comic ability and delightful rage. Her favourite moments of the News Quiz, said Sandi Toksvig, was “when Jeremy went off on one, and I would take off my glasses and sit back, knowing that there were ten unbroadcastable minutes ahead of us”. He also, she revealed, heckled her at her own wedding, shouting out, “it should have been me!” According to Andy Hamilton, “it is an honour to be here, and it is also pretty inconvenient, which is what Jeremy would have wanted.” John Naismith, who produced Jeremy in I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, made the room collapse simply by reading out some of Jeremy’s messages in his inbox.

Victoria Coren spoke of Jeremy’s friendship with her father, Alan, and of how he sourced a yarmulke for his funeral, and wore it, even though nobody else had one, because it was in a churchyard. Younger comics, such as Francesca Martinez and Seann Walsh spoke of his mentorship; of meeting him as fans and of him flatly refusing to accept that dynamic and turning them into friends instead. Jeremy’s sisters, Serena and Joy, described him as a child, with Jack Dee reading extracts of the already hilarious letters he was writing to them as a thirteen-yearold. “On Monday,” he wrote, “nothing happened.” There was music, including a haunting Shipbuilding from Charlotte Church and performances from Loinnir McAliskey and She Drew The Gun. Kathryn Williams performed a song called Prospero, written for Jeremy.

As ever, Jeremy’s comedy was intertwined with his constant, compassionate politics. Hugo Rifkind talked of his ability to transcend tribalism, as an antidote to the divisiveness of the Twitter age. “He perceived suffering,” explained Emma Thompson, “and was somehow unable to bear it.” Maxine Peak and Saffron Burrows spoke of all spoke of his activism, and its invigorating, contagious, empowering effect. Leila Sansour, with whom he made Jeremy Hardy vs The Israeli Army, spoke of his passion for Palestine. Juliet Stevenson urged the audience to be more like Jeremy was, introducing Jawad and Ahmad Amiri, two refugees from Afghanistan, whom Jeremy and his wife Katie Barlow helped and befriended. “I did not know Jeremy was famous,” said Jawad. “When I found out, he denied it.”

The day ended with Katie [Jeremy’s wife] herself, reading a letter to Jeremy, talking of the loss felt by her, and by Jeremy’s daughter Betty, and by the outpouring of public grief after his death. “You became Saint Jeremy,” said Katie. “I’d been living with a saint, albeit one that said ‘c***’ a lot.” There followed footage of their wedding, and of Betty’s, both in the weeks before Jeremy died.

There was all this, and much more. “There’s this very fashionable idea that when you die it’s supposed to be a celebration and joyous and everybody laughing,” Jeremy once said, “but I want people’s lives torn apart when I go. I want to be embalmed and brought out when we have guests.” His own passing has featured the first and second of these, if not the third. He lives on in the minds and hearts of those who loved him, who numbered hundreds in that hall, and millions everywhere else.

There is a BBC Radio 4 tribute to Jeremy Hardy on May 16 & 23. Details here.

Source: The Independent

It was impossible to meet him for an hour without absorbing his compassion, intellect and humanity… or without collapsing into hysterical giggling.

Jeremy travelled a few miles from his native Farnham to study politics at university in Southampton, and upon leaving began writing for the BBC Radio 4 sketch show Week Ending, in 1983. He often explained that despite this, he did have experience of manual labour, having spent one day as a car park attendant.

Two trends drifted within his orbit, to shape the rest of his life. A “cabaret” circuit developed, firstly around London, in which comics would perform their own material, usually on a bill with jugglers, magicians and acts of a truly bewildering nature.

At the same time a largely youthful campaigning culture grew, in opposition to the values of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party. Jeremy briefly joined the Labour Party, and remained active in the movements of that time, such as those in opposition to apartheid, and supporting the miners’ strike.

Jeremy made an immediate impact on the new comedy scene, partly because his jokes were so crisply crafted. He was a vegetarian, he said “because meat is murder, though I see fish as justifiable homicide”.

More importantly he looked so at ease on stage. Wearing a cardigan and acting out his “lower middle class” upbringing, he was instantly comfortable, even at venues such as the notorious Tunnel Club in Bermondsey, where acts were regularly sent on their way under a barrage of flying bottles.

Jeremy always succeeded at the most chaotic of clubs with the roughest of crowds, maybe because he never looked down on any part of them.

In 1986 he was offered his first regular TV slot, as a boom operator offering wistful opinions on And Now, Something Else, with Rory Bremner.

This made him a star booking for some comedy clubs, but he shortly made the decision to stop performing at the clubs, despite the guaranteed audience and income, and instead perform his own show. Now he had space to craft the most eloquent of rants on every issue, no matter how trivial, no matter how profound.

About middle-class parents he said: “They give their kids names like ‘Hosepipe’ and ‘Ottawa’, and say ‘their problem is they’re so bright, that’s why they get such low marks at school, because they’re bored, and they’re not getting stretched because of the other children, that’s why they set fire to them’.”

In 1988 he won the Perrier Award at the Edinburgh Festival, and three years later he was voted top comedy club performer at the British Comedy Awards.

This growing popularity and prestige took place as he followed an unorthodox route for someone acquiring fame. Instead of networking with influential agents and producers, he became a key figure in campaigns for prisoners who had been wrongly convicted, such as the Guildford Four and the Birmingham Six.

Many performers take part in fundraising benefits for causes and charities, but Jeremy would consult lawyers, assist and befriend the wrongly imprisoned, and coordinate the routine of a campaign. He became a patron of Medical Aid for Palestine, and helped several organisations for refugees. It is fitting that he adopted his daughter Betty from a Romanian orphanage, and first met his wife Katie while making a film about Palestine.

In the 1990s he became a regular guest on Radio 4’s Newsquiz, on which his genial, mischievous, charming vitriol became the highlight of the show.

Impersonating the modern “world” traveller, he said: “We found this wonderful little place off the beaten track, not in any guidebook, a fantastic village that only appears every two hundred years. Lovely people, tiny, no bigger than your thumb, poor but unhappy. We were invited into someone’s house and they spoke no English and we ate their hallucinogenic insects and had sex with them and stayed for 10 years and it all came to £10 a head.”

It is often asked if comedians are the same off-stage as on-stage, and in Jeremy’s case he was, but more so. He displayed an outrageous sense of mischief that would confound the modern habit of declaring a joke “offensive” by taking it out of context.

At the memorial for his close friend Linda Smith, a fairly pompous celebrant asked us each to take a flower, and “cast it into the sea, taking the moment, as we do so, to pause, and – think of Linda”. To this, Jeremy said: “Thanks for that advice, as I was going to take that moment to think of General Franco.”

In his forties, Jeremy became a regular guest on I’m Sorry, I Haven’t a Clue, that displayed him at his most impish, and he acquired a cult following for his compellingly diabolical singing. In particular, his attempt to sing the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah”, to the tune of “When I’m Cleaning Windows”, in a George Formby voice was gloriously ridiculous.

But he loved the standup above all else. He told me several times: “When I’m alone, backstage, in the moments before doing my own show, I feel I truly am me.” And he consistently attracted large audiences, over a 30-year period, despite hardly ever being on television.

Those on the right, who rejected him because of his political stance, misunderstood him in the same way as those on the left who admired him because of his political stance.

Maybe his appeal was that he represented a humble riposte to pomposity. Wherever that pomposity came from, he would sever it mercilessly. He wasn’t funny, then political, then funny again. He was funny and political, a clown and a commentator, all at once.

And this made him, for those of us lucky enough to know him, the most amazing friend, because it was impossible to meet him for an hour without absorbing his compassion, intellect and humanity, but above all it was impossible to meet him for an hour without collapsing into hysterical giggling.

Three days ago, clinging to the last gasps of life, he contemplated appearing at this year’s Glastonbury Festival, where he regularly attracts crowds of thousands. “I could do it”, he said, “But I’d be like Stephen Hawking, only not as funny.”

The outrage of his death at the age of 57, is that the world has been robbed of decades of wonderful jokes. And millions of people, whether they knew him personally or as a figure in a cardigan in front of a microphone, have lost a wonderful friend.

Ubiquitous political activism

In the words of journalist Alex Macdonald, “The death of Jeremy Hardy marks the passing of one of the few genuinely funny and radical comedians (Middle East Eye 1 February 2019). He was ubiquitous on demonstrations against war, austerity, and in support of striking workers.”

One of his greatest political passions was Palestine, and in 2003 he was the subject of a documentary,  Jeremy Hardy vs the Israeli Army, in which he travelled to the West Bank as part of the International Solidarity Movement to be a human shield.

Jeremy Hardy and Tony Blair

Jeremy Hardy said of of Tony Blair, when interviewed by Middle East Eye, at the 2016 demonstration marking the release of the Chilcot report into the Iraq War: “I think he’s insane, I think he’s a fanatic, I think he’s a narcissist.”

Jeremy Hardy and Boris Johnson

In September 2016, Jeremy Hardy compered the launch of a book by his close friend, the poet and actor Heathcote Williams, titled Brexit Boris: From Mayor to Nightmare. “He hates Boris Johnson in a way that everyone should,” said Jeremy. “It’s prose, but it could only have been written by a poet, and it would utterly destroy Boris Johnson, if he had the attention span to read more than a couple of paragraphs.”

Jeremy Corbyn on the death of his friend Jeremy Hardy

“Jeremy Hardy was a dear, lifelong friend. He always gave his all for everyone else and the campaigns for social justice. You made us all smile. You made us all think. Rest in peace, Jeremy.”

In his many public performances in this country and around the world, he shifted English poetry from correctness and formality towards inclusiveness and political passion.

Mitchell’s original plays and stage adaptations, performed on mainstream national stages and fringe venues, on boats and in nature, add up to a musical, epic and comic form of theatre, a poet’s drama worthy of Aristophanes and Lorca. Across the spectrum of his prolific output, through wars, oppressions and deceptive victories, he remained a beacon of hope in darkening times.

He was a natural pacifist, a playful, deeply serious peacemonger and an instinctive democrat. “Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people,” he wrote in the preface to his first volume, Poems (1964). For all his strong convictions, he abhorred solemnity. From Red Pepper, a small leftwing magazine, he gleefully accepted a nomination as “shadow Poet Laureate”, and demolished royalty, cultural fashions and pretensions in monthly satirical sallies.

He was born in north London “near Hampstead Heath”, which he loved like an extra limb for the rest of his life, walking it daily with his dog Daisy, “the dog of peace”. His mother Kathleen was a nursery school teacher, his father Jock a research chemist, who underwent the agony of the first world war, an experience which helped to plant in Adrian a hatred of war.

He went through his own childhood version of hell in a school full of bullies, whose playground he characterised as “the killing ground”. His next school, Greenways, was idyllic, and there he staged his first play at the age of nine, and went on writing and performing plays, with his friend Gordon Snell. His schooling was completed as a boarder at Dauntsey’s in Wiltshire.

He did his national service in the RAF – “it confirmed my natural pacifism” – then went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he became editor of the student weekly Isis. He wrote poems in the disciplined forms of the Movement, won prizes, published a pamphlet. Equipped for journalism, he joined The Oxford Mail in 1955 and then the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary, until 1963. Later he became a television critic and wrote about pop music; the Sunday Times fired him for reviewing Peter Watkins’ embargoed anti-nuclear film The War Game.

But he had set his sights on becoming a writer and, with a small legacy from his mother, left journalism, and wrote a television play and his first novel If You See Me Comin’ (1962), a bluesy, chilling account of an execution in a glum provincial city. Like all of his portrayals of injustice, it is coloured by a barely suppressed sense of terror.

Meanwhile he was reading his poems in the burgeoning British movement of performed poetry. I met him in 1962 at one such reading, for Arnold Wesker’s Centre 42 arts festivals for working- class audiences. He leapt on stage in a many coloured coat like a Blakean challenger and a rock’n’roll hero. He had fine music-hall timing, and a gravity under all the quickfire jokes and patter. He began to bring out a steady flow of poetry volumes, from Out Loud (1968) to Tell Me Lies (it will be published next year) – 15 books of free, syncopated, carnivalesque poems about love, war, children, politicians, pleasure, music. ‘He breathed in air/He breathed out light/ Charlie Parker was my delight.’

With their zany Ralph Steadman covers, these books quickened the reader’s imagination. Opening a new one was like an invitation to a party where the dancing never stopped. “He has the innocence of his own experience,” said Ted Hughes; “the British Mayakovsky,” said Kenneth Tynan; “the kind of tenderness sometimes to be found between animals,” wrote John Berger.

To Whom It May Concern, a riveting poem against bombs and cenotaphs and the Vietnam war, with which he stirred a capacity audience in Mike Horovitz’s pioneering Poetry Olympics at the Albert Hall in 1965, has lasted through the too many wars since: a durable counting-rhyme to a rhythm and blues beat.

The 1960s brought two life-changing events for Mitchell. He met the actor Celia Hewitt, working for Tynan on ITV’s arts programme Tempo. She was his partner for the last 47 years. He also met Jeremy Brooks, literary manager of the Royal Shakespeare Company. He showed his lyrics to Peter Brook, who was looking for someone to adapt a literal translation of Peter Weiss’s play The Marat/Sade. Brook jumped, and Adrian worked to the bone to meet a rehearsal deadline and make a glittering, dark text for this 1964 kaleidoscopic play about revolution on the street and in the head.

The encounter with Brook was an upheaval, and Adrian went on to join Brook’s team for the collectively authored US (1966), about the Vietnam war, created out of 14 weeks rehearsal and no pre-existing script. His song lyrics, including Tell Me Lies About Vietnam already famous in the anti-war movement, sharpened the ironies of the show; his involvement in heated group debates about the direction of the show was critical, gentle and firm. My own favourite as a team member was Barry Bondhus, a talking blues about a father who dumped human excrement into army filing cabinets. It showed a love of Adrian’s true America, the land of Whitman, Guthrie and Ginsberg, which marked him out from simplistic anti-Americanism.

From a play about Blake, Tyger, (1971) for Olivier’s National Theatre, a time-travelling musical about a visionary 18th-century poet in today’s fallen times, with music by long-term collaborator Mike Westbrook, to a version of Pushkin’s Boris Godunov for the RSC (due next year) Adrian wrote more than 30 plays, operas, children’s plays, classic adaptations. Some were for major companies, many more for the alternative British theatre, from regional playhouses to site-specific groups such as John Fox’s Welfare State. The Liverpool Everyman in its heyday staged his Mind Your Head, a phantasmagorical bus journey. His Pied Piper ran at the National for three years, and his The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe became a perennial favourite at the RSC. He made a Beatrix Potter trilogy for the Unicorn Theatre for Children, adapted Spanish classics and Gogol’s The Government Inspector for the National, and wrote songs for Peter Hall’s version of Orwell’s Animal Farm. In 2006, for the Woodcraft Folk Global Peace Village, he staged The Fear Engine in a vast field, a panorama of threatening world politics for a cast of hundreds of young people.

The musical nature of Adrian’s imagination led him to work with a cavalcade of composers and performers: Andy Roberts, Richard Peaslee, Steve McNeff, Dominic Muldowney, Andrew Dixon and Stephen Warbeck. His influence radiated widely, not least to generations of teachers, who used his poems with children in schools.

Last week he rang me. He sounded better than during his last three months of illness. “Can I read you this poem?” he asked. He did. It was a celebration. Next night he died. But this poem (below), and the poems and the plays and the politics – he went to Faslane on the anti-Trident demonstration and got arrested – will last. He is survived by Celia, two sons, three daughters and nine grandchildren.

Adrian Mitchell, poet, playwright and performer, born 24 October 1932; died 20 December 2008

My Literary Career So Far

As I prowled through Parentheses
I met an Robin and a Owl
My Grammarboots they thrilled
like bees
My Vowelhat did gladly growl
Tis my delight each Friedegg Night
To chomp a Verbal Sandwich
Scots Consonants light up my Pants
And marinade my Heart in Language
Alphabet Soup was all my joy!
From Dreadfast up to Winnertime
I swam, a naked Pushkinboy
Up wodka vaterfalls of rhyme
And reached the summit of Blue Howl
To find a shining Suit of Words
And joined an Robin and a Owl
In good Duke Ellington’s Band of Birds

Adrian Mitchell sang, chanted, whispered and shouted his poems, urging us to love life and fight against oppression.

Michael Rosen wrote these words on hearing that Adrian Mitchell had died.

Adrian was a socialist and a pacifist who believed, like William Blake, that everything human was “holy”. That’s to say he celebrated a love of life with the same fervour that he attacked those who crushed life.

He did this through his poetry, his plays, his song lyrics and his own performances. Through this huge body of work, he was able to raise the spirits of his audiences, in turn exciting, inspiring, saddening and enthusing them.

His output ranged across poems and plays for the youngest children, anthologies he edited, to political satires, adaptations and translations of classic literature, to blues and jazz lyrics.

As a teenager, I watched him performing his poem To whom it may concern from the plinth at Trafalgar Square in London. I was used to reading poetry to myself in my bedroom, or at best, hearing it on the radio. But here was a poetry that responded to political events of the moment and talked to a movement of hundreds and thousands.

Many years later, as Adrian adapted the last lines of the poem: “Tell me lies about Vietnam …” to include Iraq and Afghanistan, he explained to his audience at Marxism 2006 that the poem had started out as an expression of what he called “compassion fatigue”. He couldn’t bear to hear of yet more wars.

Alongside such explicitly political work – and his collection For Beauty Douglas is one of the truly great volumes of political poetry written in English – he revelled in language itself.

He would point out how society crushes the inventiveness and play in children, and he created poetry for children that is full of wordplay, mystery, absurdity and music.

Very recently, I received through the post a sample of a forthcoming book for children based on the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. To attempt it was so typical of him: he takes this set of earthy, erotic, subtle narratives and observations of change and has created a staggering cornucopia of poetry available for all.

I hate it that Adrian has died. There are more than 50 years of revolutionary literature that he has given us. He has sung, chanted, whispered and shouted his poems in every kind of place imaginable, urging us to love our lives, love our minds and bodies and to fight against tyranny, oppression and exploitation.

When he heard the news that Victor Jara, the Chilean poet, singer-songwriter had been tortured and killed by Pinochet’s thugs, he wrote a beautiful and wonderful poem that was both a celebration and lamentation.

To think of the poem as I write this is to think of Adrian, a brother and father to hundreds of us. Goodbye dear friend and dear teacher. Many of us loved you.

Source: New Statesman

Rosa Luxemburg was killed in Berlin on 15 February 1919, her mutilated body was thrown into a Berlin canal. In 2015, John Berger wrote this letter to her.

You often come out of a page I’m reading – and sometimes out of a page I’m trying to write – come out to join me with a toss of your head and a smile. No single page and none of the prison cells they repeatedly put you in could ever contain you.

I want to send you something. Before it was given to me, this object was in the town of Zamosc in south-east Poland. In the town where you were born and your father was a timber merchant. But the link with you is not as simple as that.

The object belonged to a Polish friend of mine called Janine. She lived alone, not in the elegant main square as you did during the first two years of your life, but in a very small suburban house on the outskirts of the town.

Janine’s house and her tiny garden were full of potted plants. There were even potted plants on the floor of her bedroom. And she liked nothing better when she had a visitor than to point out, with her elderly working woman’s fingers, the special particularity of each one of her plants. Her plants kept her company. She gossiped and joked with them.

Although I don’t speak Polish, the European country I perhaps feel most at home in is Poland. I share with the people something like their order of priorities. Most of them are not intrigued by Power because they have lived through every conceivable kind of power-shit. They are experts at finding a way round obstacles. They continually invent ploys for getting by. They respect secrets. They have long memories. They make sorrel soup from wild sorrel. They want to be cheerful.

You say something similar in one of your angry letters from prison. Self-pity always made you angry and you were replying to a moaning letter from a friend. “To be a human being,” you say, “is the main thing above all else. And that means to be firm and clear and cheerful, yes, cheerful in spite of everything and anything, because howling is the business of the weak. To be a human being means to joyfully toss your entire life in the giant scales of fate if it must be so, and at the same time to rejoice in the brightness of every day and the beauty of every cloud.”

In Poland during recent years a new trade has developed and anyone who practises it is called a stacz, which means “taking the place”. One pays a man or a woman to join a queue and after a very long while (most queues are very long), when the stacz is near to the head of the queue, one takes his or her place. The queues may be for food, a kitchen utensil, some kind of licence, a government stamp on a document, sugar, rubber boots . . .

They invent many ploys for getting by.

In the early 1970s, my friend Janine decided to take a train to Moscow, as several of her neighbours had done. It was not an easy decision to take. Only a year or two before in 1970 there had been the massacre of Dzank and other seaports, where hundreds of shipbuilding workers on strike had been shot down by Polish soldiers and police under orders from Moscow.

You foresaw it, Rosa, the dangers implicit in the Bolshevik manner of arguing with all reasoning, you already foresaw it in 1918 in your commentary on the Russian Revolution. “Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party – though they are quite numerous – is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of the one who thinks differently. Not because of any fanatical concept of justice, but because all that is instructive, wholesome and purifying in political freedom depends on this essential characteristic, and its effectiveness vanishes when ‘freedom’ becomes a special privilege.”

Janine took the train to Moscow to buy gold. Gold cost there a third of what it did in Poland. Leaving the Belorussky Station behind her, she eventually found the backstreet where the prescribed jewellers had rings to sell. There was already a long queue of other “foreign” women waiting to buy. For the sake of law and order each woman had a number chalked on the palm of her hand which indicated her place in the line. A cop was there to chalk the numbers. When Janine eventually reached the counter with her prepared roubles she bought three gold rings.

On her way back to the station she caught sight of the object I want to send to you, Rosa. It cost only 60 kopeks. She bought it on the spur of the moment. It tickled her fancy. It would chat with her potted plants.

She had to wait a long while in the station for the train back. You knew, Rosa, these Russians stations that become encampments of long-waiting passengers. Janine slipped one of her rings on to the fourth finger of her left hand, and the other two she hid in more intimate places. When the train arrived and she climbed up into it, a soldier offered her a corner seat as she sighed with relief; she would be able to sleep. At the frontier she had no problems.

In Zamosc she sold the rings for twice the sum she had paid for them, and they were still considerably cheaper than any which could be bought in a Polish shop. Janine, after deducting her rail fare, had made a little windfall.

The object I want to send you she placed on her kitchen windowsill.

The goal of an encyclopaedia is to assemble all the knowledge scattered on the surface of the earth, to demonstrate the general system to the people with whom we live, and to transmit it to the people who will come after us, so that the works of centuries past is not useless to the centuries which follow, that our descendants by becoming more learned, may become more virtuous and happier . . .

Diderot is explaining in 1750 the encyclopaedia he has just helped to create.

The object on the windowsill has something encyclopaedic about it. It’s a thin cardboard box, the size of a quarto sheet of paper. Printed on its lid is a coloured engraving of a collared flycatcher, and underneath it two words in Cyrillic Russian: SONG BIRDS.

Open the lid. Inside are three rows of matchboxes, with six boxes to each row. And each box has a label with a coloured engraving of a different songbird. Eighteen different songsters. And below each engraving in very small print the name of the bird in Russian. You who wrote furiously in Russian, Polish and German would have been able to read them. I can’t: I have to guess from my vague memories of sporadic birdwatching.

The satisfaction of identifying a live bird as it flies over, or disappears into a hedgerow, is a strange one, isn’t it? It involves a weird, momentary intimacy, as if at that moment of recognition one addresses the bird – despite the din and confusions of countless other events – one addresses it by its very own particular nickname. Wagtail! Wagtail!

Of the eighteen birds on the labels, I perhaps recognise five.

The boxes are full of matches with green striking heads. Sixty in each box. The same as seconds in a minute and minutes in an hour. Each one a potential flame.

“The modern proletarian class,” you wrote, “doesn’t carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory; the modern worker’s struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight.”

On the lid of the cardboard box there is a short explanatory note addressed to matchbox-label collectors (phillumenists, as they are called) in the USSR of the 1970s.

The note gives the following information: in evolutionary terms birds preceded animals, in the world today there are an estimated 5,000 species of birds, in the Soviet Union there are 400 species of songbirds, in general it is the male birds who sing, songbirds have specially developed vocal chords at the bottom of their throats, they usually nest in bushes or trees or on the ground, they are an aid to cereal agriculture because they eat and thus eliminate hordes of insects, recently in the remotest areas of the Soviet Union three new species of singing sparrows have been identified.

Janine kept the box on her kitchen windowsill. It gave her pleasure and in the winter it reminded her of birds singing.

When you were imprisoned for vehemently opposing the First World War, you listened to a blue titmouse “who always stayed close to my window, came with the others to be fed, and diligently sang its funny little song, tsee-tsee-bay, but it sounded like the mischievous teasing of a child. It always made me laugh and I would answer with the same call. Then the bird vanished with the others at the beginning of this month, no doubt nesting elsewhere. I had seen and heard nothing of it for weeks. Yesterday its well-known notes came suddenly from the other side of the wall which separates our courtyard from another part of the prison; but it was considerably altered, for the bird called three times in brief succession, tsee-tsee-bay, tsee-tsee-bay, tsee-tsee-bay, and then all was still. It went to my heart, for there was so much conveyed by this hasty call from the distance – a whole history of bird life.”

After several weeks Janine decided to put the box in her cupboard under the stairs. She thought of this cupboard as a kind of shelter, the nearest she had to a cellar, and in it she kept what she called her reserve. The reserve consisted of a tin of salt, a tin of cooking sugar, a larger tin of flour, a little sack of kasha and matches. Most Polish housewives kept such a reserve as a means of minimal survival for the day when suddenly the shops, during some national crisis, would have nothing on their shelves.

The next such crisis would be in 1980. Again it began in Dzank, where workers went on strike in protest against the rising food prices and their action gave birth to the national movement of Solidarnosc, which brought down the government.

“The modern proletarian class,” you wrote a lifetime earlier, “doesn’t carry out its struggle according to a plan set out in some book or theory: the modern workers’ struggle is a part of history, a part of social progress, and in the middle of history, in the middle of progress, in the middle of the fight, we learn how we must fight.”

When Janine died in 2010, her son Witek found the box in the cupboard under the stairs and he brought it to Paris, where he was working as a plumber and builder. He brought it to give it to me. We are old friends. Out friendship began by playing cards together evening after evening. We played a Russian and Polish game called Imbecile. In this game the first player to lose all his or her cards is the winner. Witek guessed that the box would set me wondering.

One of the birds in the second row of matchboxes I recognise as a linnet, with his pink breast and his two white streaks on his tail. Tsooeet! Tsooeet! . . . often several of them sing in chorus from the top of a bush.

“The one who has done the most to restore me to reason is a small friend whose image I am sending enclosed. This comrade with the jauntily held beak, steeply rising forehead and eye of a know-it-all is called Hypolais hypolais, or in everyday language the arbour bird or also the garden mocker.” You are imprisoned in Poznan in 1917 and you continue your letter like this:

This bird is quite an oddball. He doesn’t sing just one song or one melody like other birds, but he is a public speaker by the grace of God, he holds forth, making his speeches to the garden, and does so with a very loud voice full of dramatic excitement, leaping transitions, and passages of heightened pathos. He brings up the most impossible questions, then hurries to answer them himself, with nonsense, making the most daring assertions, heatedly refuting views that no one has stated, charges through wide open doors, then suddenly exclaims in triumph: “Didn’t I say so? Didn’t I say so?” Immediately after that he solemnly warns everyone who’s willing or not willing to listen: “You’ll see! You’ll see!” (He has the clever habit of repeating each witty remark twice.)

The linnet’s box, Rosa, is full of matches.

“The masses,” you wrote in 1900, “are in reality their own leader, dialectically creating their own development procedure . . .”

How to send this collection of matchboxes to you? The thugs who killed you, threw your mutilated body into a Berlin
canal. It was found in the stagnant water three months later. Some doubted whether it was your corpse.

I can send it to you by writing, in this dark time, these pages.

“I was, I am, I will be,” you said. You live in your example for us, Rosa. And here it is, I’m sending it to your example.

Listening to Harry speak is like walking through a living gate to the past, a gate that carries a warning above it. What happens when the gate closes?

This article by Elizabeth Renzetti was published in Globe and Mail five days before Harry died. It is a fitting tribute to the man who inspired so many in his final years to act on his cry, “Don’t let my past be your future”.

His music dealt with working life, migration and racism and celebrated musical eclecticism, which of course was lost on racists.

There are no adequate words to describe that gig, but it was thrown out into the audience by Rachid’s musical talent and presence. Rock the Casbah almost brought the house down as an early present to Crossrail and his Ya Rayah removed the last bricks.

Born in 1958 near the port city of Oran in Algeria, at the height of the war of independence, slaughter stalked his country. Many readers will have read Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth and /or seen Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers.

His father moved the family to France when Rachid was ten, where he became, in his son’s words, ‘a modern slave’; working in a Lyon textile factory.

This was not a happy time for North Africans in France. The Algerian war was a recent memory and the right-wing were agitating for the return of their north Arican colony. Only a few years before the family’s arrival in Lyon, Maurice Papon, Paris police chief and a senior policeman in Nazi-occupied France, organised the killing ot between 100 and 300 Algerian demonstrators, many of them thrown into the Seine.

The precariousness of the North African experience in France continues to this day with the racism and deprivation haunting the big city banlieues.

At age seventeen Rachid worked in a power station, was a house painter, dishwasher and encylopaedia salesman. As for many living at the sharp end of life, music was the passport to a better world and Rachid started performing a mixture of Algerian rai music, rap, salsa and funk.

He formed Carte de Séjour (Residency Permit) inspired by the Clash and Linton Kwesi Johnson. His lyrics dealt with working life and racism and, of course, celebrated a musical eclecticism which was lost on racists. It was certainly lost on the French music establishment who, for many years, ignored the Maghreb musicians in France who were offering an excitement which embraced their ‘host’ country, even when it rejected them.

Rachid dealt with all this with humour. The French Right were infuriated when he released his version of Charles Tenet’s sentimental Douce France, with drums and bass pulsing to a punk rhythm.

Recognition was ponderous and arrived on the slow train. After a few years running a nightclub, Les Refoulés (The Rejects) he broke out into the mainstream in the 80s, with albums produced by Steve Hillage, the former guitarist for Gong. Collecting around him musicians performing on oud, drums, buzugs, sintirs and ribabs alongside western lead and bass guitars he released Ya Rayah, followed by Migra, performed by Santana and then Rock el Casbah, a collaboration with Mick Jones, and later with Brian Eno.

In 2007 he and David Albarn staged Africa Express at Glastonbury where they were joined by Baaba Maal and K’naan. Their intent was to encourage African and Western musical collaborations. He went on to play at many other Africa Express events and Albarn said that Taha “was at the heart of what we did”.

In 2013 he released Zoom. Produced by Justin Adams, it included Brian Eno, Mick Jones and a North African treatment of Elvis Presley’s Now or Never.

He recorded a new album earlier this year, as yet untitled, but due for release in 2019.

Rachid called his music ‘rock ‘n rai’ or, as he liked to joke, ‘It’s all ‘Rai Cooder.’ But for me, Rachid’s genre is best summed up, again in his words, as ‘Western music read from right to left.’

Was Rachid a ‘political artist.’ Over to him. “To be called a political artist is almost to be insulted, but yes I am a political artist. I’m a working class artist. There’s not many of us left.”

My favourite album is the 2005 Tekitoi. As always he has a verbal explanation for this work. He said the album condemned, “liars, thieves, humiliators, killers, oppressors, traitors, the envious, the rotters, the diggers, propagandists, destroyers, slavers, Get rid of them! Ask them for an explanation!”

David Albarn described him as “a beautiful person, very naughty, impish and with bright eyes and generous with his time. I just loved him and always enjoyed performing with him.”

His UK manager, Rikki Stein told me, “He was an angel – our angel.”

When he sang in 2017 on Goran Bregović album Three Letters From Sarajevo, Bregović said, “You thought he will not survive, he’ll die before the second verse.” I felt this about him when we met all those years before. Perhaps we are lucky he survived so long!

Rachid Taha suffered from a disease diagnosed in 1987 where the lower part of the brain pushes down into the spinal canal. “I’m tired of people thinking I’m a drunk on stage. These are the symptoms of Arnold Chiari disease. I’m stumbling because I’m losing my balance. I’m wavering.”

The stumbling along with the music came to an end on 12 September 2018 when he died in his sleep of a heart attack.

So sad you are longer here, Rachid, with your words, humour and music. But like all great music it will not have died with you. Orkod Fe Salam.

Rachid Taha: Voilà, Voilà

In 1993, Rachid Taha released his anti-racism anthem Voilà, Voilà, which he recorded again for his 2012 album Zoom, with a number of guests, including Brian Eno, Mick Jones (The Clash) and Eic Cantona.

Rachid Taha and 123 Soleils

In 1998, Rachi Taha performed with Khaled and Faudel at the legendary 123 Soleils concert. The live album/DVD was hugely successful, selling over two million copies.

Rachid Taha: Ecoute moi camarade

Source: The National

Uri Avnery, a self-confessed former “Jewish terrorist” who went on to become Israel’s best-known peace activist, died in Tel Aviv on 20 August 2018, following a stroke. He was 94.

As one of Israel’s founding generation, Avnery was able to gain the ear of prime ministers, even while he spent decades editing an anti-establishment magazine that was a thorn in their side.

He came to wider attention in 1982 as the first Israeli to meet Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation. At the time, Arafat and the PLO were reviled in Israel and much of the west as terrorists.

Famously, Avnery smuggled himself past the Israeli army’s siege lines around Beirut to reach Arafat. The pair were reported to have maintained close ties until the Palestinian leader’s much speculated upon death in 2004.

Avnery founded Israel’s only significant – if small – peace movement, Gush Shalom, in 1993.

He and his followers tried to build political pressure in Israel and abroad, seeking to convert the lipservice paid to a two-state solution in the Oslo peace process into a concrete Palestinian state.

A harsh critic of Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right government until the end, Avnery filed his final weekly column two weeks ago, lambasting Israel’s new Nation-State Basic Law as “semi-fascist”.

For Israel’s currently besieged peace bloc, Avnery’s passing is a significant blow.

Despite tributes from Israeli opposition politicians on Monday, his voice had long ago become marginalised at home. He was the last major public figure still visibly fighting to bring about a two-state solution.

His unyielding positions in support of an Oslo-style peace had begun to appear to many on the Israeli right and left as obsolete, especially after Donald Trump’s ascendancy to the White House. Since then, Israel has barely veiled its intention to annex parts of the West Bank, destroying any hope of a Palestinian state.

Avnery publicly rejected a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on a shared, single state for Israelis and Palestinians.

He also opposed a general boycott of Israel, as advocated by the growing international BDS movement. Gush Shalom, however, did support boycotts restricted to the settlements.

Avnery arrived in what was then British-ruled Palestine in 1933, aged 10, emigrating with his family from Germany as the Nazis rose to power.

At 15, he was an young recruit to the Irgun, an underground Jewish militia the British classified as a terrorist organisation. But increasingly disenchanted with its attacks on Palestinian civilians, he quit a few years later.

Avnery fought with the Haganah – later to become the Israel Defence Forces – during the 1948 war that founded a Jewish state on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland. In later books and articles, he referred to his unit’s role in committing war crimes against Palestinians in the Negev region, in modern Israel’s south.

During the fighting, he was seriously wounded. His dispatches from the battlefront, later compiled as a book, briefly made him a national hero.

But his popularity soon waned. In his memoir, he described his convalescence as a period of dramatic change in his thinking: “The war totally convinced me there is a Palestinian people, and that peace must be forged first and foremost with them.”

It was then, he added, that he became a committed advocate for a Palestinian state.

Through the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Avnery was best known for publishing his weekly magazine “Haolam Hazeh”, (This World). Its mix of ground-breaking investigations, political muckraking and dissident opinion made him many enemies in the ruling Labour party.

The head of Israel’s domestic intelligence service of the time described Avnery as “Government Enemy No 1”. The magazine’s offices were bombed several times, and Avnery was seriously assaulted. The publication only closed when Avnery started Gush Shalom. The movement on Monday described him as “a far-seeing visionary who pointed to a way which others failed to see”.

Though a dissident figure, Avnery had been popular enough on the left to launch a separate political career, winning seats in Israel’s parliament in the 1965, 1969 and 1977 elections.

When he made a speech in the parliament to relinquish his seat in 1981, he caused an uproar by being the first legislator to wave the Palestinian and Israeli flags alongside each other.

But it was in 1982 that he established a reputation outside Israel. He was smuggled into Beirut to meet Arafat, as Israeli forces encircled the city in an effort to remove the PLO from Lebanon.

It later emerged that Israeli soldiers had been tracking Avnery in a bid to locate Arafat’s hideout and assassinate him. Avnery’s Palestinian escorts managed to elude them.

In his columns, Avnery often credited himself with using the trust he built with Arafat over the next few years to persuade the Palestinian leader to change the PLO’s political direction.

In 1988 Arafat renounced a long-standing Palestinian commitment to a single secular democratic state in historic Palestine, and formally accepted the idea of partitioning the territory into two states.

It was a concession that paved the way to the Oslo accords, signed between Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin on the White House lawn in 1993.

That same year Avnery founded Gush Shalom, or “peace bloc”, to build on that momentum as Arafat and the PLO were allowed to return to parts of the occupied territories from which Israel had withdrawn.

As well as believing in the right of Palestinians to freedom, Avnery argued strongly that Israel’s Jewish demographic majority would be under threat unless it separated from the large Palestinian population in the occupied territories.

There were suspicions that some of Arafat’s more misguided assumptions about Israeli society – especially regarding the strength of the peace bloc and the public’s receptivity to the Oslo process – were informed by Avnery.

When the peace process effectively collapsed with the failure of the Camp David summit in 2000 and the eruption of a Palestinian uprising, Avnery again found his message of reconciliation out of favour in Israel.

But in his late seventies, he found a new international audience, as his translated columns were disseminated online.

Avnery hoped through his writings to resurrect what was left of his political legacy. But more often his columns were sought out for the light he could shed on current controversies, drawing on insights gained from his knowledge of historical episodes now largely overlooked.

At the height of the second intifada, Avnery and Gush Shalom were often alongside Palestinians protesting against abuses by the Israeli military or the settlers. They also demonstrated to stop Israel’s building of a “separation barrier” that subsequently ate up large chunks of Palestinian land in the West Bank.

In 2003, Avnery joined Arafat in his besieged presidential compound in Ramallah, serving as a “human shield” – to foil an expected Israeli assassination attempt. After Arafat died in mysterious circumstances a year later, Avnery was among those arguing that Israel was behind his poisoning.

His last column explored one of his enduring concerns: Israel’s identity as a Jewish state. It was provoked by the recent passage of the Nation-State Basic Law, which confers on Jews around the world privileges in Israel that are denied to the country’s large minority of Palestinian citizens.

For many years Avnery had been among those warning that Israel could not be a democracy if it did not treat all citizens as equal, but instead allocated key rights based on differing Jewish and Arab nationalities.

In 2013 he and other Israelis appealed to the supreme court to recognise for the first time an Israeli nationality shared by all citizens. The judges rejected their arguments.

Source: The Nation

She absorbed and inherited an unapologetic blackness, a militant dignity, and the devotion to using her talent to further the cause of black freedom.

That voice, so full of history and power, defined popular singing and set the standard for any who would aspire to her standing. She is, indeed, The Queen.

Shaped and refined in Detroit’s New Bethel Baptist Church, where her father, the legendary C.L. Franklin, reigned in the pulpit, she absorbed his rhythms and cadences as well as those of the black musical royalty who graced the sanctuary and visited the Franklin home: Dinah Washington, Mahalia Jackson, and Clara Ward among them. She also absorbed and inherited their political sensibilities as well: an unapologetic blackness, a militant dignity, and the devotion to using their talent to further the cause of black freedom.

At the height of her fame in 1970, Franklin supported philosopher and revolutionary Angela Davis, a member of the Communist Party who had been accused of purchasing firearms used in the takeover of a court room in Marin County, California, and who was charged with conspiracy, kidnapping, and murder. Franklin told Jet magazine that she wanted to post Davis’s bond, “whether it’s $100,000 or $250,000.” Franklin’s father, himself a longtime civil-rights advocate, a confidante and surrogate for Martin Luther King Jr., discouraged her from doing so. Franklin asserted, “Well, I respect him, of course, but I’m going to stick by my beliefs. Angela Davis must go free. Black people will be free.”

She explained that her support for Davis had nothing to do with Communism, “but because she’s a black woman and she wants freedom for black people.” Franklin noted that she had the money to post bond because she’d earned it from black people. She therefore wanted to use it “in ways that will help our people.” Ultimately, she was unable to post the bond because she was out of the country at the time. Instead, it was paid by Rodger McAfee, a progressive, white California farmer.

Davis, who has never met Franklin in person, told me yesterday that the singer was among her most prominent supporters. “Beyond the promise of financial support, the fact that she championed the cause of my freedom had a profound impact on the campaign,” Davis said, “Especially because her statement inferred that people should not fear being associated with a communist, rather they should be concerned about justice…. Her bold public call for justice in my case helped in a major way to consolidate the international campaign for my freedom.”

By 1970, when she expressed her support of Davis, Franklin had established herself with a string of hits including “I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You,” “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man,” “Respect,” “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” “Chain of Fools,” “Ain’t No Way,” and “Think.” She was an international superstar, having received both critical acclaim and commercial success. Born just two years apart, Davis and Franklin represented the brilliance, militancy, and defiant beauty of their generation of black women. Franklin had no concern of losing her audience or future opportunities because of her support for a radical freedom fighter. She was protected by the times and her own sense of integrity and truth.

This is what we hear in Aretha’s voice. Truth. It is a voice that contains the spiritual and the field holler, the blues moan, gospel shout, and jazz improvisation. It is neither timid nor coy. It is sensually grounded and spiritually transcendent and completely lacking in contradiction. She excels at any form she tries, including opera. Aretha’s voice is America at its best. It also transcends national boundaries, invoking the West African cultures that gave birth to diasporic musical practices; it appeals to a global audience who appreciates her sound.

Franklin was the featured singer at Barack Obama’s first inauguration. Significantly, she did not sing “The Star Spangled Banner,” with its brash militarism. No, she sang “My Country ’Tis of Thee,” her voice soaring above the crowd on that historic day, reminding us of who we were and who we are capable of becoming.

She claimed this nation for those of us who have experienced its underside—Native Americans, black Americans, Latinos, workers of all races, and the poor. That’s the nation of which she sang. She did so with blue notes, gospel flourishes, and operatic leaps. As such, she offered us a vision of a valiant history of struggle and aspirations for a future that we might build, a future as glorious and free as that magnificent voice. Even had she never articulated a commitment to struggles for civil rights and black freedom, through her artistry she contributed greatly to larger political and social movements.

Speaking of Franklin’s legacy, Davis reminds us that the political contributions of artists like Franklin need not be “measured by political interventions in the conventional sense.” She goes on to say, “Her creative work helped to shape and deepen a collective consciousness anchored in a yearning for freedom.”

One can hardly imagine a world without her voice. And, now, we have lost her. Just when we would need her most. At this time in history, our country is sinking deeper and deeper into the morass of racial hatred, gender violence, and untampered greed and corruption. Mendacity rules from the very top of our government, posing a danger to our democracy that has global, indeed planetary consequences.

But we must stand tall against these forces, knowing that we had Aretha, we heard her, and thanks to the body of work she leaves behind, we can hear her still. More now than ever, we are in need of the truth and power of that voice. May we aspire to its integrity, beauty, power, and glory. May we be inspired by that woman, who stuck by her beliefs, and demanded respect for herself and her people with boldness and soul.

Source: mikemarqusee.co.uk

What seemed to drive him, was the idea that it makes no sense to have fun in this world, if you’re not prepared to insist that fun should be equally available to all of humanity.

Usually described as ‘writer and activist’, for Mike this phrase was nonsense, as each activity was meaningless unless they combined with and enhanced the other.

His life as a glorious mix of disparate cultures began on his first day, born in New York in 1953 to white Jewish parents, who became civil rights activists travelling to Mississippi to oppose segregation, and one day he came home from school to find Martin Luther King in the living room.

His attitudes were shaped partly by a youth spent in 1960s New York, when defiance of authority moulded every corner of culture. So as well as organising campaigns for civil rights and against the Vietnam War, he was embroiled in the battle for fun. He was captivated by the music, poetry and occasional spliff of the times, and developed a special affection for sport.

All aspects of this background landed with him, when he came to live in England in the nineteen-seventies. He joined the Labour Party, becoming a prominent supporter of Tony Benn, and more fundamentally became obsessed with cricket.

One product of this fusion was a book that helped to transform sports writing, Anyone but England, an account of the game that lauded its beauty while raging against the snobbery and racism that had spewed from those who’d controlled it throughout its history.

This was a blasphemy that must have burst a million arteries amongst those in charge of English cricket. Books about cricket were supposed to depict glorious summers and splendid figures and never stoop to ask grubby questions such as why the MCC supported apartheid, or why the odd England captain admired Hitler, because this was cricket. Anyone but England was cricket’s equivalent of a scientific breakthrough that smashes all previous laws. And he was American! The impertinence!

The book was shortlisted for the William Hill Sportsbook of the Year Award, and praised around the world by figures such as Pakistan captain Imran Khan. But its greatest effect was in enabling thousands of cricket fans, who’d always felt uneasy about English cricket’s imperial image, to proclaim a corner of their peculiar game.

For Mike, cricket was probably the ideal spectator sport, because it allowed time to dwell. A day watching cricket with him was an extraordinary education, as he’d discuss which province in India the batsman came from, then the role that region played in winning independence, its architecture, the poetry the batsman read, then why all this contributed to the reason he got out to spin bowling.

His next book on sport analysed the figure that did most to unite the defiant culture of his youth in both sport and politics. Redemption Song – Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties ricochets between Vietnam, Alabama and knocking people out, each strand shaping the others, culminating in the thrilling scene in which Ali stands in a military office, refusing to cross a yellow line as his name is called out to be drafted into the army, declaring “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong.”

He employed a similar combination of admiration and enquiry for Chimes of Freedom, on Bob Dylan’s influence on the sixties. Then he confronted an institution arguably even more challenging than the cricket authorities; the state of Israel. ‘The Story of an Anti-Zionist Jew’ flashes between a personal account, and a history of the Middle-East that manages to embrace the prophet Amos.

It begins with his shock as a schoolboy at a Jewish Sunday School, when a young soldier who’s fought for Israel in the 1967 war is introduced to the class.

“He told us the Arabs are ignorant people, who go to toilet in the street. I’d heard this language before, from bigoted white Southerners towards blacks. I raised my hand and said this seemed to me, well, racist. Angrily the teacher turned to me and said there would be no discourtesy to guests in the classroom.”

This incident began a lifelong tussle with Zionism, never as raw as when he was accused of being a ‘self-hating Jew’ for opposing the ethics of the Israeli regime. He enjoyed quoting the Jewish son of a friend who was accused of this, and replied “No you misunderstand, it’s you I hate you bastard.”

Throughout each project he played prominent roles in campaigns such as Stop the War, and in local groups opposing cuts in his area of Hackney.

In 2000 he left Labour, assessing the radical change he supported was unlikely to be advanced by an organisation led by Tony Blair.

His partnership with Liz Davies, who he’d met when they were both in the Labour Party, was much more impregnable, and the constant pride they exuded for each other was almost implausibly heartening.

In 2007 he was told he had multiple myeloma, a cancer diagnosis that created a new subject for enquiry. Amongst the articles he wrote on his illness was one called The Bedrock of Autonomy, describing the multitude of characters that led to his treatment being possible, written while on an IV drip. It includes “all who contribute to the intricate ballet of a functioning hospital, the Irish physician Frances Rynd who invented the hollow needle, those who built and sustained the NHS… the drip flowing into my vein is drawn from a river with innumerable tributaries.”

One of his most frustrating times was when he was in a ward for 3 days with only one other patient, who appeared to have no interest in any subject at all. Eventually this chap noticed a headline in the newspaper about the Chinese army shooting at Tibetan monks and said “That’s terrible.” Mike thought ‘at last I’ve got something to discuss with this bloke’, until the other patient said “I mean, you can’t just let monks run all over the place like that.”

Despite this, throughout his illness Mike continued to write, speak about and be fascinated by William Blake, Kevin Pietersen, Indian poetry, the campaign against the Bedroom Tax, ways to confront UKIP and the corporate nature of the Indian Premier League, and how they all collide with and impact upon each other.

And he could convey his thoughts in a manner so inspiring they could make you thump the table and yell in public.

Because what seemed to drive him above all, was the idea that it makes no sense to have fun in this world, if you’re not prepared to insist that fun should be equally available to all of humanity. But there isn’t much point in contending for a fairer world, unless in the process you’re not prepared to have an enormous amount of fun

Source: Morning Star

Jeremy Corbyn MP remembers his friend Mike Marqusee, prolific writer and tireless activist who couldn’t stomach Tony Blair and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A fascinating and complex man, Mike was never afraid to deal with difficult questions, be they personal or political, or both.

He wrote frequently about cancer from the standpoint of his own experience and of total support and admiration for the NHS and the treatment he received.

Notably, he became irritated when people would tell him he was “brave,” in fighting cancer. He pithily put it in a Guardian article: “This is a front line, it is impossible to flee from.”

Mike as ever used his own experience to make the political point that as a naturalised British person born in the US he received excellent health treatment which in the US would have bankrupted him and his family, or left him with an xunpayable and ongoing debt.

He loathed and hated the free-market economics and immorality and hypocrisy of the US healthcare system.

Mark Steel & Jeremy Corbyn at funeral of Mike Marqusee, 20/02/2015

I first met Mike as a Labour Party member in Haringey when he was a youth worker in Holloway, north London. He was an inspiration to the disparate group of youth who enjoyed zany evenings with Mike at the former Highbury Roundhouse.

Indeed, only a month ago, as I was cycling home on a wet and cold night, a woman stopped me and asked how Mike was, because she had heard he was not well and went on to talk about the positive influence he had made on her life even though she gave him a hard time as a youth some 30 years ago.

He was a very effective member of the Labour Party, particularly in Islington North, and a great friend and support to me on many occasions. He couldn’t stomach new Labour, Blair and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

He was politically active all of his life on the left, and never saw things through a sectarian prism.

His writings are what we have and they are amazing and prolific. His great work, jointly with Richard Heffernan, Defeats from the Jaws of Victory was a brilliant analysis of the 1992 election campaign and Labour’s constant retreat ideologically from the Tories.

Mike loved sport, poetry, politics and history, and had the rare ability to be a “sport nut” in his own words and at the same time be objective about the commercial interests and dishonesty of sport.

His love for cricket and India and Pakistan, partly because of their love for the game, enabled him to explore the colonial heritage of cricket in the great tradition of CLR James.

Mike’s Anyone But England, with its lovely subheading Cricket and the National Malaise, dealt in detail with not only the history of the game but also the class-ridden nature of the cricket establishment and the often dubious financing of so-called professional cricketers, in the way the game was supposedly an amateur sport.

Mike wrote an amazing book about Muhammad  Ali, titled Redemption Song, which he described as Ali in the spirit of the 1960s. In it he managed to weave together both Ali’s boxing career, the politics of the time, his victories, later his imprisonment and opposition to the Vietnam war and then an amazing comeback to become the all-American icon of the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

He wrote many other books and one he was very proud of was Chimes of Freedom — about the politics of Bob Dylan’s art — in which he deftly wove together Dylan’s exploration and growth as a musician in the early 1960s with the civil rights movement in the US and including the killing of James Meredith, Martin Luther King and many others, and the inspiration that Dylan’s music gave to the anti-war movement.

Published by Verso Books

Mike also wrote in his deeply honest book If I Am Not For Myself about life growing up in the US as a young Jewish boy, his strong opposition to the Vietnam war, which had a big effect on him, and describing his anti-zionist Jewish attitudes — all a fascinating description of how his own politics were formed. Mike was a strong supporter of the rights and justice for all Palestinian people.

When he wrote he would become totally absorbed in the subject. His studies of William Blake for example have showed a depth and breadth of knowledge of English history, poetry and the mysticism Blake encompassed, and the huge political influence he’s had on the lives of many people.

He loved poetry deeply and wrote great poetry himself.

Mike should be respected for his selfless devotions to the cause of socialism and justice, his understanding of the power of culture and sport, and the way in which he illustrated how colonialism and racism has so brutally disfigured the lives of so many people.

In the few hours after his death, messages were already on social media — all over the world — from people who had been inspired by his work and his infectious activism.

Mike’s progressive family were an important influence on him. His partner and the love of his life lawyer Liz Davies, former chair of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers, gave amazing support and inspiration to him, and our deepest sympathies must go to Liz.

Socialists need to always remember that an understanding of culture and history is as essential as any understanding of economics as vehicles for social change.

Source: Counterfire

Siva’s understanding of race, class and imperialism, and of humanity in general, will continue to inspire resistance to injustice and hope for socialism.

In the mid-eighties, during the demonization of radicals in general as the ‘Looney Left’, there were enough caricatures of anti-racism in particular flowing about that, as a teenager, new to London and the UK, I heard of Siva himself as some sort of self-important and threatening eminence. Not long afterwards, I was lucky enough to meet the man. The contrast between the generous, witty, and wise human reality and the slander could not have been greater. This was, if it were ever needed, a lesson in how figures on the left, and particularly an unapologetic black voicedenouncing racial injustice, are routinely denigrated in order to dismiss the importance of the cause.

The summary story Siva himself told of his life began as a boy in a Tamil village in Sri Lanka, then as a man coming to London in the midst of the ‘race riots’ of 1958 (racist riots, that is to say). His concerns were always to link the experiences of Empire and neo-imperialism to the nature of politics in the first world. The many peoples exploited and oppressed historically and in the present by imperial nations like Britain meant that for Siva ‘Black’ was a ‘political colour’ which ought to produce solidarities against the racist structures of capitalism.

Siva’s legacy is a rich one, which his many writings will continue to make accessible to a wide audience (see for example the essay collections, A Different Hunger, 1982, Communities of Resistance, 1990, and Catching History on the Wing, 2008). Siva’s writing encompassed a huge range of subjects, from economic analysis to the consideration of cultural figures, but of course the threads of race and imperialism tie them all together. His was an activist’s perspective, demanding that, as he said, we should think in order to do, not think in order to think. Yet his writing was hardly utilitarian in nature. Siva’s poetic inclination was evident in all his polemical and analytical writing, so it was no surprise when the novel on which he worked for many years, When Memory Dies, was published, it proved to be a triumph of sensibility and craft, a deeply realised historical portrait of racism and violence, but also of solidarities and hope, in Sri Lanka.

Siva was most widely known for his writings on racism and black history in Britain, and his and the IRR’s analysis of ‘institutional racism’ reached its widest recognition with the inclusion of a version, at least, of the concept in the Macpherson Report of 1999. Like so many examples of left-analysis, it might well be thought that this was more honoured in the breach than the observance, but it was an important moment in the recognition of the nature of racism in Britain. The point is not so much the existence of personal prejudice, but the social and state structures which create a racially unequal society.

He was thus a critic of ‘racism awareness training’ of the 1980s as it personalised the problem, and reduced a question of structural inequality requiring real changes to the economic structure of society, and to the nature of the state in Britain, to a question of individual psychology. It removed responsibility for racism from the state and society to the individual level. Thus he once explained that he did notwant white British people to feel guilt, but rather to experience shame for the racism of the British state and its history. Guilt, he elaborated, was something that was internalised and lead to paralysis at best. Shame, in contrast, was an outward looking emotion that could motivate someone to demand change and social justice in the outside world, and would not waste energy in internalised agonies. He explained all this in far more graceful and captivating terms than I am able to reproduce here, but I hope the wisdom of it is apparent.

Siva’s analysis of race was crucially bound up with class and imperialist structures, and resisted being reduced to the personalised or individualised. I recall him observing that the phrase of the 1960s, the ‘personal is political’ should be understood in the sense that the ‘political is personal’. When politicians make inflammatory comments about immigrants or about race, then the political becomes very personal to the victims of the racist violence which inevitably follows.

In the early 1990s he became an outspoken critic of the postmodernist turn of radical politics, in a trenchant and brilliant piece on the so-called ‘New Times’ analysis (‘All that melts into air is solid: the hokum of New Times’, Race and Class, vol. 31, 1990, pp.1-30). This tendency that emerged from the decaying Communist Party was a precursor of the Blairites, and indeed in many real senses prepared the ground for them amongst part of the left. Siva’s critique was therefore timely and incisive. Siva always recognised the subjective side of political struggle, once writing that there ‘is no set-back in history except that we make it so’ (A Different Hunger, p.68). However, here he clarified its limits, and demonstrated the continuing importance of the key elements of Marxist analysis to an analysis of capitalism and racism in the so-called new times of the 1990s.

Siva’s argument was clearly borne out as the years passed. Siva’s vision of solidarity against the structures of racism and capitalism, both among the masses within the imperial ‘core’ and within all the countries on the sharp end of imperialist violence and exploitation, has lost none of its urgency across the years. Siva’s understanding of race, class and imperialism, and of humanity in general, will continue to inspire resistance to injustice and hope for socialism.

Hugh Masekela, trumpeter, bandleader, composer, lyricist and freedom fighter, died on 23 January 2018. This article is extracted from the obituary by Horace Campbell, originally published by Counterpunch.

Hugh Masekela’s autobiography Still Grazing: The Musical Journey provides   a clear statement of his internationalism and his commitment to the rights of oppressed peoples whether in Watts, California 1965, in Nigeria with Feli Ransome Kuti or in the jazz centers of the world with greats such as Dizzy Gillespie . It was the struggles of the working poor that fired him up and the song ‘Stimela’ that was released in 1994 remains one of the better tributes to the solidarity of mine workers all over Southern Africa. In a period when the chauvinism of the current political leaders of government in South Africa rendered them silent on the xenophobia that has swept the society, Masekela used this song at numerous concerts and performances to remind the working peoples that the tasks of emancipation were incomplete.

During the era of apartheid repression and collaboration between the US government and the racist regime in South Africa, Masekela remained in the vanguard of the movement and made numerous songs to defy the barbarism of racist capitalism. When the South African government had launched its Total Strategy to destroy the liberation movements, Masekela released the  song  “Bring Him Back Home”.  In the period of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, the racists had decided that Nelson Mandela would die in jail and that the liberation movements would be crushed. The song calling for the release of Mandela pushed forward the sanctions campaign and the Free Mandela campaigns at a crucial moment in the history of the anti-apartheid struggles.

By 1989 after the military defeat of the South African armed forces at Cuito Cuanavale,  Masekela relocated to South Africa  in 1990 and immersed himself into the lively jazz scene that had sustained the spirits of the peoples all through the terrorism of apartheid. As a member and strong supporter of the Cultural Reclamation Forum, a group of progressive literary, visual and musical artists and cultural workers based in Johannesburg, Masekela’s voice gave guidance and inspiration to many discussions and specific programs held to provide focus during the turbulent period of new state construction.

The sentiments and ideas of freedom that he promoted were on full display when Masekela acted as a node for the progressive artists and musicians who had come forward  for the African Union concert held at the Sandton Convention Centre in Johannesburg on 9^th July, 2002, The cultural artists brought the songs of peace before a large audience (live and via radio, television and internet). A group going by the name of Joyous Celebration brought together the voices of all races in South Africa to provide inspirational music for the ongoing struggles to transcend the heritage of apartheid in South Africa and by extension, global apartheid. The artist Lagbaja from Nigeria echoed the cries for peace and justice. Performing in a mask, this artist declared that his face would not be shown in a performance until all of the ordinary workers in Africa have justice. In the Yoruba language (Nigeria), Lagbaja means variously somebody, anybody, everybody and nobody in particular. It is a specific reference to the loss of identity of African peoples and Lagbaja sang on behalf of the faceless Africans in all parts of the world.

Another singer, Letta Mbulu, brought out the songs of peace and love of African women. Functioning as a cultural artist and as the UNICEF representative in Southern Africa she served a representative for peace and unity and seeks to mobilize oppressed women as the powerful forces of peace. Oliver Mtukudzi, the Zimbabwean singer, is a musician and lyricist singing songs of liberation since 1977. Fifteen years ago he worked with Masekela  as cultural artists opposing the brutality and repression of the Zimbabwean government. In his rendition of the song, “What are we going to do?,” one African activist noted that this call was the twenty first century rendition of Lenin’s, What is to be Done?

The power of this call for new politics and new mobilization was reflected in the reality that  the cultural artists were using all of the communications media of the twenty first century to speak in all of the languages calling for peace. While singing in Shona and Ndebele (languages of Zimbabwe), Tuku (as Mtukudzi is called) was communicating to the young and the old and asserting the claim that the cultural artists was offering a different kind of leadership.

This message was underlined by the anchor of the evening – Hugh Masekela. It was in this setting that Masekela brought together his tremendous international experience as trumpeter, bandleader, composer and lyricist. On this occasion, Masekela understood that he was now reaching another generation different from the era of John Coltrane and Janis Joplin. He did not disappoint.

At the launch of the African Union Masakela was at the forefront of composing the theme song for this continental representative organization. The song that underlined the depth of the feeling of the mass of the people of Africa was the song entitled, “Everything Must Change.” This was a song calling on all of the old leaders such as Eyadema of Togo, Moi of Kenya and Mugabe of Zimbabwe to step down. Masekela drew attention to the destructiveness of the militarists such as Jonas Savimbi and the militarists in Liberia and called on the African youths to struggle for peace.

The songs “Change” and “Stimela” sent a clear message to leaders such as Thabo Mbeki who had become an apologist for ‘nationalists’ such as Mugabe. Whether it was in Ghana, New York or Johannesburg, freedom lovers will this week join in the celebration of the contribution of Hugh Masekela

Rest well freedom fighter your music will continue to inspire those who have never surrendered.

RIP Hugh Masekela (4 April 1939 – 23 January 2018). The full obituary by Horace Campbell is available on Counterpunch…

Hugh Masekela: Stimela

Miriam Makeba & Hugh Masekela: Soweto Blues

Source: The Telegraph

Metzger launched the auto destructive art movement in protest at rising consumerism, proliferation of capitalism, and building of nuclear weapons.

Gustav Metzger, Historic Photograph No.1: Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto 1943

One of Metzger’s best known works involved throwing acid over nylon sheets in central London, causing them to disintegrate within 20 minutes. “The important thing about burning a hole in that sheet,” Metzger later said, “was that it opened up a new view across the Thames of St Paul’s cathedral. Auto-destructive art was never merely destructive. Destroy a canvas and you create shapes.”

In his 1959 manifesto on auto-destructive art, Metzger wrote: “Self-destructive painting, sculpture, and construction is a total unity of idea, site, form, colour, method, and timing of the disintegrative process.”

The Who guitarist Pete Townshend, who studied with Metzger, was an advocate of the movement and believed his trashing of guitars on stage was an act of auto-destructive art. During the Sixties, some of Metzger’s projections were featured at The Who concerts.

The Who guitarist Pete Townshend, who studied with Metzger, believed his trashing of guitars on stage was an act of auto-destructive art.

In 1966, Metzger organised the Destruction in Art Symposium in London. During the event, one artist, John Latham, set fire to a stack of books in front of the British Museum.

Metzger was born in 1926 in Germany to Polish-Jewish parents. He arrived as a refugee in Britain in 1939 via the Kindertransport, which helped 10,000 children flee the Nazis. His parents were killed in Germany in 1943. “Facing up to the Nazis and the powers of the Nazi state coloured my life as an artist,” he said in an interview in 2012.

“When I saw the Nazis march, I saw machine-like people and the power of the Nazi state,” Metzger once said. “Auto-destructive art is to do with rejecting power.”

Metzger, who studied art in Cambridge, London, Antwerp, and Oxford, spent his life doing just that and was once arrested for civil disobedience during a protest against the building of nuclear weapons. Between 1977 and 1980, Metzger went on strike and refused to create any work at all.

Gustav Metzger practicing for a public demonstration of Auto-destructive art using acid on nylon

Even much later in life, Metzger continued to attack what he perceived as the negative impact of capitalism and consumerism. In 2007, he founded the Reduce Air Flights initiative, in response to the globalisation of the art market. Artists were encouraged not to fly to art fairs in order to promote and sell their work.

One of Metzger’s most famous works is Flailing Trees, which was exhibited at the Serpentine Gallery in 2009. It consists of 15 upturned willow trees embedded in concrete and is meant to illustrate the devastating effect of global warming. “Artists have a special part to play in opposing extinction,” he said, “if only on a theoretical, intellectual basis.”

In 2004, a cleaner at Tate Britain mistakenly threw out one of Metzger’s artworks, mistaking it for a bag of rubbish. It was later retrieved but Metzger felt that the work was ruined and replaced it with a fresh bag of rubbish.

A spokesperson for Tate Britain said at the time: “An artwork by Gustav Metzger in Tate Britain’s Art and the Sixties exhibition is made up of several elements, one of which is a rubbish bag included by the artist as an integral part of the installation. The bag was accidentally removed and damaged but was subsequently replaced. ”

Gustav Metzger: Manifesto Auto-Destructive Art (1960)

Man In Regent Street is auto-destructive.
Rockets, nuclear weapons, are auto-destructive.
Auto-destructive art.
The drop drop dropping of HH bombs.
Not interested in ruins, (the picturesque)
Auto-destructive art re-enacts the obsession with destruction, the pummeling to which individuals and masses are subjected.
Auto-destructive art demonstrates man’s power to accelerate disintegrative processes of nature and to order them.
Auto-destructive art mirrors the compulsive perfectionism of arms manufacture – polishing to destruction point.
Auto-destructive art is the transformation of technology into public art. The immense productive capacity, the chaos of capitalism and of Soviet communism, the co-existence of surplus and starvation; the increasing stock-piling of nuclear weapons – more than enough to destroy technological societies; the disintegrative effect of machinery and of life in vast built-up areas on the person,…
Auto-destructive art is art which contains within itself an agent which automatically leads to its destruction within a period of time not to exceed twenty years. Other forms of auto-destructive art involve manual manipulation. There are forms of auto-destructive art where the artist has a tight control over the nature and timing of the disintegrative process, and there are other forms where the artist’s control is slight.

Materials and techniques used in creating auto-destructive art include: Acid, Adhesives, Ballistics, Canvas, Clay, Combustion, Compression, Concrete, Corrosion, Cybernetics, Drop, Elasticity, Electricity, Electrolysis, Feed-Back, Glass, Heat, Human Energy, Ice, Jet, Light, Load, Mass-production, Metal, Motion Picture, Natural Forces, Nuclear Energy, Paint, Paper, Photography, Plaster, Plastics, Pressure, Radiation, Sand, Solar Energy, Sound, Steam, Stress, Terra-cotta, Vibration, Water, Welding, Wire, Wood.

Gustav Metzger: Auto-Destructive Art Machine Art Auto-Creative Art (1961)

Each visible fact absolutely expresses its reality.
Certain machine produced forms are the most perfect forms of our period.
In the evenings some of the finest works of art produced now are dumped on the streets of Soho.
Auto creative art is art of change, growth movement.
Auto-destructive art and auto creative art aim at the integration of art with the advances of science and technology. The immediate objective is the creation, with the aid of computers, of works of art whose movements are programmed and include “self-regulation”. The spectator, by means of electronic devices can have a direct bearing on the action of these works.
Auto-destructive art is an attack on capitalist values and the drive to nuclear annihilation.

Source: Counterfire

The radicalism of John Berger, who has died aged 90, was wholly reliable and outspoken and he will be an inspiration for generations to come.

He wrote a series of books about the lives of peasants and migrant workers, including the photo documentary with Jean Mohr called A Seventh Man, which should be required reading in schools around Europe today. The opening note to the reader prophetically suggests that ‘to outline the experience of the migrant worker and to relate this to what surrounds him – both physically and historically – is to grasp more survey the political reality of the world at this moment. The subject is Europe. The meaning is global. Its theme is unfreedom’.

Despite his supreme distance from intellectual fads or fashions, he directed probably the most important experiment in the documentary form ever made for British TV. The four-part series Ways of Seeing was a mind-blowing assault on the elitist, sexist assumptions of the capitalist cultural establishment. It managed to be both iconoclastic and deeply insightful at the same time by insisting on locating art and artist both in their historical moment and the relations of artistic production. Strong stuff for the BBC.

He followed it up with a stream of essays and books on art and culture that have proved perhaps more than any other body of work in the English language the enormous importance that creatively handled Marxism has for the appreciation of art and culture. Some of the best of them have recently been published in two excellent Verso volumes, Portraits and Landscapes.

Ever sensitive to individual artists’ dilemmas and achievements and at the same time enraged by the barriers to self-expression produced by a society based on profit rather than need, he was the wise alter ego of every artist struggling to bear witness to a more and more degraded world. His book The Success and Failure of Picasso and the recently republished essay The Moment of Cubism together constitute one of the most convincing accounts of the potential and the limits of artistic liberation.

Because he perceived culture as the active interplay between human creativity and stubborn, given reality, again and again his essays shed light on both the artists’ work and their world. This on the Romantics:

Romanticism represented and acted out the full predicament of those who created the goddess of Liberty, put a flag in her hands and followed her only to find that she led them into an ambush: the ambush of reality. It is this predicament which explains the two faces of romanticism: its exploratory adventurousness and its morbid self-indulgence.

He tended to radicalise with time. Looking back in 1979 to an essay he wrote in 1968 about the importance of a political approach to art, he admitted that in some respects he might have become more tolerant:

But on the central issue I would be even more intransigent. I now believe there is an absolute incompatibility between art and private property, or between art and state property – unless the state is a plebeian democracy. Property must be destroyed before imagination can develop further.

His radicalism was wholly reliable and outspoken. Awarded the Booker Prize in 1972 for his novel G, on air he denounced the slave-derived wealth of the Booker family and donated half the prize money to the British chapter of the Black Panther Party. It is said that he was accompanied to the ceremony by a member of the Black Panther Party who urged him to ‘keep it cool’.

Subsequent writing on philosophy, the Palestinian struggle, the depredations of neoliberalism, on looking at photography and much, much more, adds to a rich archive of humanist Marxism that will be an inspiration for generations to come. Berger’s work demands recognition as a major achievement of modern culture.

The BBC film John Berger: The Art of Looking, made on the occasion of his 90th birthday, captures poignantly his inspirational work and life. Watch here…

John Berger, author and visionary critic died on 2 January 2017, aged 90. His inspirational work and life is captured poignantly in this BBC film.

The actor Simon McBurney, close friend of John Berger, posted this tweet following his death:
Listener, grinder of lenses, poet, painter, seer. My Guide. Philosopher. Friend. John Berger left us this morning. Now you are everywhere.

Source: Jacobin

Fidel Castro was a towering champion of the oppressed, but we shouldn’t ignore the limits of the socialism he helped build.

Before the revolution, Cuba symbolized colonialism at its most pernicious. Its war of liberation from Spain was appropriated by the United States, whose government claimed that victory as its own and rewrote the newly independent country’s constitution to ensure its dominance.

Cuba’s sugar was taken by the imperialist interests that maintained its subservient status. Its culture — the voice of slaves who refused to be silent — was emptied of its content and offered to tourists for their consumption.

All that ended on January 1, 1959. A United States confident of its global dominance was challenged by a small Caribbean island. And every occupied country, every suppressed national liberation movement, stood up and celebrated. The giant, it seemed, had clay feet after all.

Again and again, Fidel Castro refused to surrender to threat or blackmail — it is that refusal that explains the blind fury and wrath of his enemies. Republican and Democrat administrations sustained the siege of Cuba for six decades, ranting in disbelief at their own ineffectiveness.

It was, of course, collective resistance that foiled the 1961 US-backed invasion at the Bay of Pigs. The 1962 Missile Crisis, however, showed the leadership in Havana that Soviet support was conditional, and that Cuba was a small actor in a global power game. Distancing itself briefly from Moscow, that was the moment when the country moved into its most radical phase, joining with the liberation struggles of the Third World in a common front that stretched from Latin America to Vietnam. That was the moment when Cuba inspired and symbolized the rising of the oppressed — expressed in the image of Che Guevara.

Guevara’s death in Bolivia in October 1967, however, was a crossroads for the revolution. In Peru, Guatemala, and Venezuela, too, the attempt to repeat the Cuban experience had failed with disastrous consequences. Fidel, always concerned first and foremost with the survival of a Cuba under vicious siege and trapped by its economic limitations, drew back from the guerrilla strategy.

A year later, the failure of the 1969 sugar harvest to produce 10 million tons (as was inevitable) marked an ending. Within a year, Cuba fell fully and definitively into the Soviet embrace, and publicly identified with its Third World strategy of alliances and compromise. When Fidel went to Chile, the future supporters of Pinochet took to the streets to bang their pots in protest; yet he was there to congratulate Allende on his election victory and the progress of his parliamentary road to socialism.

After the Bay of Pigs invasion, Castro declared that the revolution was socialist. Though Fidel himself came from a radical nationalist background, his announcement was a recognition of both Cuba’s economic dependence on the Soviet Union and of the central role the soon-to-be-refounded Communist Party would play in its future.

In this context, socialism was understood to mean a strong centralized state along Soviet lines. This coincided with both Castro’s and Guevara’s views of how revolutions are won — by the actions of small and dedicated groups of cadre acting on behalf of the mass movement.

When the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, Castro supported the action, confirming once again Cuba’s dependence on the Soviet Union and the nature of the new state in the wake of Che’s death. But in Southern Africa, the country asserted its own, bolder, foreign policy.

During the seventies, the role of Cuban forces were key to defeating right-wing insurgencies and sustained Castro’s anti-imperialist reputation. There is little doubt their actions hastened the end of apartheid. Yet in the Horn of Africa, Cuban troops defended governments allied with Soviet regional interests that brutally repressed internal liberation movements.

Fidel was never a pliant subordinate. He used his extraordinary charisma and clout to fire occasional warning shots towards Moscow, on the one hand, and to reinforce his personal control of the state on the other. The survivors of the guerrilla force that landed from the “Granma” in 1956 and brought down the Batista dictatorship remained, for the most part, at the center of power for the five decades that followed.

The socialism that Castro espoused had little resemblance to Marx’s “self-emancipation of the working class.” It was a socialism with a command structure much like that of the guerrilla army in which Fidel was commander-in-chief. What held it together was both Fidel’s incontestable authority and the unrelenting hostility of the United States, which not only tried to murder him hundreds of times but was willing to starve the Cuban people into submission.

Under these tough conditions, the system that the revolutionaries built left real gains. Most celebrated of these were efficient and universal systems of health and education. Beyond that, daily life was hard, even before the withdrawal of Soviet aid and the “special period” that followed, which brought the island to the brink of disaster.

It was collective solidarity and sacrifice alone that held back collapse then. Yet there was already serious discontent expressed in absenteeism, in workplace resistance, in the disillusionment of African veterans, for example, as many hopes of the revolution proved illusory. While there was basic social provision, there was little in the way of consumer goods and dissent was treated harshly, whatever its form.

The extreme concentration of power (the leading organs of the state were run by a couple of dozen “historic” leaders under Fidel’s control) at the top of the pyramid stifled any possibility for socialist democracy. Political institutions were centrally controlled at every level; local organs, like the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, maintained vigilance against dissent. On occasions when discontent grew too noisy, thousands of Cubans were dispatched to Miami amid clamorous marches denouncing the departed as “scum.”

It was relatively simple to dismiss the calls for democracy from internal critics as imperialist propaganda, rather than a legitimate claim by working people that a socialism worthy of its name should transform them into the subjects of their own history. Public information was available only in the impenetrable form of the state newspaper Granma, and state institutions at every level were little more than channels for the communication of the leadership’s decisions.

An opaque bureaucracy, accountable to itself alone, with privileged access to goods and services, became increasingly corrupt in the context of an economy reduced to its minimal provisions. Castro’s occasional calls for “rectification” removed some problem individuals but left the system intact.

Yet Cuba survived, due in good part to Fidel’s sharp political instincts and his willingness to find allies wherever he could in the wake of the fall of Eastern Europe. But though “pink tide” leaders celebrated Fidel’s legacy, as the twenty-first century dawned, new anticapitalist movements, with their emphasis on democracy and participation, had little to learn from Cuba.

The reality was, after all, that the island had featured a highly authoritarian interpretation of socialism that could allow (at one time) the repression of gay people, the denial of criticism, and the emergence of the regime that now prevails in Cuba, where a small group of bureaucrats and military commanders manage and control the economy. They will be the beneficiaries of Cuba’s reentry into the world market, not the majority of Cubans.

Fidel, who fell ill in 2006, said relatively little from then on. His death will be mourned across the Third World, because Cuba for so long represented a possibility of liberation from imperial oppression. Its very survival inspired hope. And yet the state that Castro built is a reminder any socialism worth its name needs a deep and radical democracy.