It has become a truism that we live in the most dangerous phase of imperialism. Rosa Luxemburg’s assessment that the future we face is either that of ‘socialism or barbarism’ no longer fully expresses the depth of the interlocking crises facing humanity. As the Hungarian Marxist Istvan Meszaros wrote in 2003: ‘if I had to modify Rosa’s words it would be ‘barbarism if we are lucky. …the extermination of humanity is the ultimate concomitant of capital’s destructive course of development.’

The world situation has deteriorated even since Meszaros wrote those words: America’s longest ever military engagement continues in Afghanistan; the Middle East is further destabilised through US invasion and war in Iraq which cost the lives of 100,000s; the dismemberment of Libya; the wholesale destruction of Syria, and the creation of millions of refugees. The climate crisis is severe and worsening and is even at this point doing irreversible damage to the planet. This year we have extensive wild fires in the US, the melting of the permafrost in Alaska and Siberia which is accelerating climate change, the decline in sea ice in the Arctic and from where frozen methane deposits have started to be released, the Greenland ice sheet has melted beyond the point of no return and much of the Amazon rainforest has been transformed into savannah.

On top of these crises we can add continued economic stagnation and decay, particularly in the capitalist West, and the emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic which will deepen global economic problems. The radical socialist and revolutionary left is generally in retreat having largely been eclipsed by the emergence and rise of reactionary and far-right forces although there are exceptions to this rule such as the recent MAS victory in Bolivia. The most acute symptom of the present conjuncture in international relations is the emerging cold war between an economically declining US empire, struggling to deal with the pandemic, and a rising China. Our understanding and engagement with this new cold war will be crucial not only for the future of humanity but for the political future of the radical socialist left internationally.

Richard Smith’s new book China’s Engine of Environmental Collapse has been hailed by Michael Löwy as brilliant and strikingly original, saying, ‘This is an important book! It is the first Marxist attempt to describe, explain and critically analyse the Chinese model of (hyper) development, and its disastrous ecological consequences – for the Chinese people as well as for the whole planet.’

Smith’s central thesis is that the model of Chinese economic development – which he understands as a fusion of capitalism and bureaucratic-collectivism – is the main driver of the environmental destruction of the planet. He says ‘the marriage of capitalism and Stalinist-Maoist bureaucratic-collectivism has created a diabolically ruinous hybrid economic system that is ravaging China’s environment, destroying the health of its people, driving the country to ecological collapse, and threatening the whole planet.’

Smith considers this ‘diabolical’ system far more destructive than what he calls ‘normal capitalism’, however those seeking a Marxist explanation for the system’s origins, development and future prospects may be disappointed. There is no class analysis of Chinese society or of the Chinese state. In his concern to expose the destructive nature of the Chinese economic and political system, he fuses his narrative with many of the cold war tropes which dominate neo-liberal thought about Chinese society.

When the US under Nixon and Kissinger opened up relations with China in the 1970s it seemed inconceivable that China could ever threaten US economic power. At that time the Chinese economy was one twentieth the size of the US economy and hundreds of millions of its people lived in abject poverty. The West assumed that as China modernised it would undergo political transformation into a form of bourgeois democracy and that the essential pre-requisite for such a transformation would be the privatisation of Chinese state-owned industries accompanied by the free flow of capital transfers and a political system along US lines. The failure to follow that path would relegate China to a relative economic backwater unable to escape the so-called middle-income trap. As the supply of cheap labour from the countryside dried up it would find itself powerless to advance economically and to enter the high-value added markets of more developed economies. These assumptions have proved to be incorrect.

Central to this is the idea that the Chinese economy would also be unable to innovate successfully and advance technologically unless it adopted the Western political model. In his book Smith accepts this view arguing that China has been unable to produce any counterparts to the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Elon Musk because intellectual property rights – themselves a deeply flawed concept – are not guaranteed in China. He asks ‘What rational capitalist would risk investing millions today when all their Intellectual Property could be stolen tomorrow?’ And he goes on to say, ‘Chinese billionaire capitalists like Alibaba’s Jack Ma or Huawei’s Ren Zhengfei are big and rich only because their companies are cosseted, state-funded, state-protected monopolies not because they’re great innovators’. Smith’s argument is that because of the structure of China’s economic and political system the country is forced to steal IP from the technologically innovative West. But again this has proved not to be the case.

In reality China has transformed into a global technology leader and the US is targeting the most successful Chinese companies. The Trump administration is exploring restrictions on Jack Ma’s Ant Group over concerns that its digital payments platform would come to dominate the US market. It has expressed similar concerns over ByteDance’s TikTok company to which tens of millions of young people in the States have signed up. Huawei Technologies has been in Trump’s sights for a long time now because it is way ahead in 5G technology.

Smith’s argument ignores the fact that for much of its history China was more advanced than the West in science and technology. There is a considerable debate as to how and why the industrial revolution took place in Britain in the late 18^th century but there is general agreement that the West drew on previous developments in Chinese science and technology. The concept of intellectual property rights does not derive from a socialist world view. Socialists understand developments in science and technology to be part of the common treasury of humanity. As the biologist and sinologist Joseph Needham wrote, ‘Modern science is composed of contributions from the peoples of the Old World, and each contribution has flowed continuously into it, whether from Greek and Roman antiquity, or from the Arabic world or from the cultures of China and of India.’ Moreover, billionaires from either the US or from China whose wealth has soared during the pandemic derive their riches not from technological innovation but as a result of the nature of the global economic system.

The assumption that China would never rival the United States while the Communist Party remained in power underpinned US policy towards China from the late 1970s onwards. That belief began to unravel following the 2007/8 financial crisis when the Chinese economy played the key role in stabilising the global economy. Its direct control over production and the banking system enabled it, by 2014, to overtake the US economy in purchasing power parity, becoming the second largest economy in the world. The Chinese economic system is qualitatively different from that of the US, as Marxist economist Michael Roberts points out, ‘the capitalist mode of production does not dominate in China’. A 2012 World Bank report on China explained, the successful economic growth in China is based on bureaucratic state planning and government control of investment. Smith while accepting that state planning is central to China’s economic rise, argues that state control is a negative factor and argues that it leads to unrestrained growth. It is the size and nature of that growth which poses the greatest risk to humanity, and which is the primary driving forces in the world behind climate collapse, eco-suicide and the Sixth Extinction.

Smith presents US President Donald Trump as a far-sighted and tactically astute leader. Thus, he says,‘Trump is the first, and so far the only, Western leader to have publicly called out the Party’s criminal operations for what they are’.Trump believes that China has only prospered because it has stolen technology and intellectual property from Western companies. Smith goes on, ‘Trump’s first round of tariffs blind-sided the Party leadership’. He says ‘some [Chinese citizens] are whispering that ‘only Trump can save China’, and quotes the Lehman Brothers economist Zhu Ning, ‘the trade war is a good thing. It gives us hope when we are hopeless’. Smith notes that Trump has withdrawn from the Paris Agreement – which was the result of the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference but he believes that Trump’s ability to damage the environment and climate is limited whereas China’s is unconstrained. In reality Trump has not been that constrained, he has scrapped climate regulations in the US, rolled back clean water rules and loosened pollution standards while encouraging new fossil fuel development.

It’s a one-sided world-view which sees China as ‘bullying and threatening the US’ and ‘seizing the South China Sea’, but which mentions neither Obama’s Pivot to Asia nor the huge US military build up in the South China Sea and which has no analysis of the struggle for hegemony between a US in decline and a China on the rise. The new cold war between China and the US is a product of this. Both wings of the US ruling class are determined to halt China’s rise through a hybrid strategy of political, ideological, technological and financial interventions and through stepping up military pressure.

The style of the book often rests on overheated journalese and the inflamed rhetoric obscures the valuable points Smith makes about environmental pollution and climate change. The book fails to analyse or explain its central conclusions. For example, Smith writes in his concluding chapter ‘The Next Chinese Revolution’ that ‘one way or another the Chinese Communist Party is headed for the dustbin of history’. He says ‘many in China yearn for a transition to a capitalist democracy like in Taiwan or the US. Who wouldn’t?’. Smith  places his hopes for the region on a united front for democracy led by Taiwan and Hong Kong, where he says residents enjoy the freedoms of ‘western capitalist democracies’. However it is unclear how Smith sees this transition to democracy taking place much beyond him saying ‘the East German Stalinists never saw it coming either’.

Smith, I think, overestimates the antipathy to the Chinese Communist Party among the general population. The Party continues to enjoy a reservoir of legitimacy which in part derives from its revolutionary history and in part from the economic advances within contemporary Chinese society.

Prior to 1949 China was overwhelmingly a feudal society with huge levels of poverty, a semi-colony subject to brutal imperialist exploitation. The revolution of 1949 ended more than a century of political humiliation for China at the hands of Japan and the West. Following China’s defeat in the Opium Wars of the 1840s and 50s, the major European powers compelled it to grant them favourable tariffs, trade concessions and territory, including Hong Kong. China was further weakened by military defeat by Japan in 1895. Lenin wrote, ‘The European governments have already started to partition China. They are not doing it openly, but stealthily like thieves. They have begun to rob China as they would a corpse.’

In the revolutionary uprisings of 1925-7, the Communist International dominated by Stalin insisted that the Communist Party, formed in 1921, subordinate itself politically to Chiang Kai-shek and the bourgeois nationalist Kuomintang movement. In 1927 Chiang Kai-shek slaughtered tens of thousands of Communist Party-led workers in Shanghai, Canton and other cities. For the next decade the Kuomintang sought to completely destroy the CCP. Mao Zedong argued that in order to survive, the Communist Party would need to adapt its Marxism to the concrete conditions in China at the time, saying, ‘if a Chinese Marxist talks of Marxism apart from its Chinese peculiarities, this Marxism is merely an empty abstraction.’ Unlike the conditions in which the Bolshevik party operated in Russia in 1917, the CCP was forced out of the cities and eventually, operating in a very different Chinese context, built popular and socially progressive bases in the countryside while adopting the tactics of guerilla warfare.

Mao Zedong at Yan’an

In 1937 the Japanese invaded and occupied China. Japan was eventually defeated in a war that lasted until 1945 and which cost the lives of between 12 and 15 million Chinese. The civil war then resumed with the Communist Party finally defeating the Kuomintang in 1949 when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was proclaimed. The deep roots of the CCP in Chinese society are located in this history. The party united the country in a war of national liberation thus ending colonial exploitation in China and it also destroyed the landlord class and freed the peasantry through an agrarian revolution. The land was redistributed and marriage reform was introduced which undermined the patriarchal basis of Chinese society. Women were given equal shares of confiscated land and access to divorce. As the US journalist Jack Belden write at the time, ‘in the women of China the communists possessed, almost ready made, one of the greatest masses of disinherited human beings the world has ever seen. And because they found the key to the heart of these women, they also found one of the keys to victory.’

One of the other keys to victory was winning over the urban proletariat. The majority of big factories lay under the control of colonial countries in concession ports and cities. Winning power in the cities was linked with the national liberation struggle. The Communist Party defeated both the nationalists and the colonialist forces in the cities. In the areas where the Kuomintang had been in power the CCP revived the labour unions, doubled wages and improved working conditions while dealing with collaborators and instituting popular elections.

After the revolution the PRC turned to the Soviet Union as its closest ally and economic partner. During the 1950s, China received extensive support in its industrialisation process with expertise, equipment and the building of factories. By the late 1950s political relations had deteriorated as Mao developed his outspoken critique of Soviet policies, including that of ‘peaceful coexistence’, and by 1961 the CCP had declared that the Soviet Union had become a ‘revisionist’ power. With the withdrawal of Soviet economic support, Mao had turned increasingly to Chinese-reliant programmes, such as the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, to develop the economy; he also introduced political initiatives like the Hundred Flowers movement of the 1950s, and the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, designed to open up debate and counter developing bureaucratisation. Such initiatives, while designed to address real problems through the mobilisation of the people, often led to catastrophic and terrible outcomes; they were unable to provide the basis for the scale of production needed to lift China out of poverty.

In 1978 the economic reforms of Deng Xiaoping opened China to limited foreign investment and a developing relationship with the global market; within a generation China has emerged as a great economic power and creating the most powerful working class on the planet.

Smith’s book is strongest in detailing the terrible environmental toll that China’s economic rise has taken on the country but weakest in its explanatory power. He fails to take account of China as a developing country. So he states that China became the ‘toxic waste dump of the world’ without understanding that this is the common fate of developing countries to be the dumping ground for waste from the industrialised West. China has now banned the import of toxic waste but many other Asian and African countries are forced to continue to accept such shipments. He ascribes blame to China for what is actually the result of economic relationships in a grossly unequal world.

Marxist analysis is lacking in his consideration of the CCP and its leadership. He draws his colourful inspiration from Western popular culture, from the Godfather films and the television series Game of Thrones. Xi Jinping is presented as a sociopathic Don Corleone figure constantly seeking ways of wiping out his competitors. ‘ Xi is trying hard but he can’t lock the whole population up in psychiatric hospitals and concentration camps’.

Smith’s analysis of the Chinese political system in his chapter ‘Guanxi and the Game of Thrones’ is primarily based on the work and writings of the neo-liberal economist Minxin Pei who is referred to throughout. Pei sees the party as a gangster type operation saying, ‘if your patrons do not protect you you’re toast…’ This understanding seems to have impressed Smith who has developed an entirely cynical view of the importance of Guanxi, the Chinese social and cultural concept in which personal relationships are considered as important as laws and written agreements. Pei himself has been wrongly predicting the end of CCP rule since the early 1990s.

Smith describes the Party ‘ruling class’ as ‘the gang of 90 million cadres led by a ‘few hundred top crime families’. He writes ‘life in the Party is not so different from life in the Mafia’; the ruling elite are engaged in a continuous warfare over the ‘loot’ and there have been several attempts to bump off Xi Jinping. Undoubtedly there is corruption within the CCP and at the highest levels and there is huge wealth inequality in China, in part driven by the city /countryside divide. This merits serious Marxist analysis but we are not getting this from Smith. He contends that the corruption and Mafioso practices which he understands to be central to the system are driven by the insecurity in property relations. It is not clear to me whether he is implying that capitalist property relations are preferable to state ownership. Thus he says that in the West ‘the security of property is completely formalised with the rule of law and independent courts, judiciary, and police to back it up’. Whereas in China ‘the state owns the land, natural resources, most of the economy, its offshore investments, foreign exchange holdings and the Party owns the state collectively’. Smith’s contention is that not only is the party deeply corrupt but that this extends to Chinese society as a whole. He presents a very bleak picture of a society in which he contends that the kidnapping of women and children are significant industries.

There are regular attempts to eradicate corruption within the system in China, and Xi Jinping instigated an anti-corruption campaign in 2012, the largest in the party’s history. However Smith argues such campaigns are largely ineffective and even when corruption among the ruling elite is uncovered those prosecuted are sent to prisons which are more like luxurious holiday homes. Smith says ‘many punished officials bounce back, like child molesters in the Catholic Church’. Later in the book he accuses XI Jinping of waging a campaign of terrorism against the elite under cover of the anti-corruption campaign and says that Xi’s policies have forced many wealthier Chinese to emigrate. Thus he says, ‘Mandarin is almost a second language in my neighbourhood of Chelsea in Manhattan’.

Smith maIntains that the corruption extends to the youth who ‘have been so seduced by capitalism and consumerism they have become cynical and indifferent towards politics, human rights and the environment, and insouciant toward the CCP lies and repression’.

In his view the entire society is cynical, amoral and nihilistic. China he says is ‘completely corrupt’: from the education system to the legal system and to the health service. Patients are treated in fake hospitals by fake doctors. China is busy building ‘hundreds of ghost cities’, roads and bridges that go nowhere, leading to massive pollution of its rivers, land and people and destroying much of the rainforest through its demand for hardwood. Smith contends that food produced in China is so contaminated by pollution that much of it is not fit to eat, in some cases rat meat is substituted for pork. Smith says that China has been forced to purchase Western food producers in order to provide its population with safe food. It’s unfortunate that the example Smith gives is that of Smithfield Foods, the largest pork producer in the US whose production and food methods have a poor safety record and an even worse history of environmental pollution.

The contradictions within Smith’s narrative are many. His deep negativity about Chinese society and his determination to show that nothing is positive overwhelms his necessary message about the destruction of the natural environment which is the dominant issue of our age.

One central contradiction relates to the position of Chinese workers in society. On the one hand Smith argues that the working class is kept in conditions of near slavery by ‘the most powerful police state in history’ but on the other he concedes that wages are rising significantly. He explains that the working class has managed to raise the level of wages through widespread strike activity. Smith says the government faces hundreds of workers’ protests including strikes across the country every day and therefore has no choice except to initiate policies to eradicate unemployment, ‘the government cannot afford to have masses of unhappy unemployed workers milling about.’

The Chinese government does lays enormous stress on raising and sustaining levels of employment. However for Smith it is this priority that the state places on keeping its population in employment that is one of the central drivers of environmental damage. The state focus on full employment leads to overproduction and the creation of ‘ghost factories’ resulting in what Smith says are ‘horrendous consequences for global resource exhaustion and CO2 emissions’. According to Smith the introduction of market incentives into the economy has only worsened China’s environmental problems. But he argues that this is because the market reforms did not go far enough because the CCP refused to enact what Smith calls ‘real reform’. Such reforms he says would need the Party to ‘abandon central planning, privatise state industries, and fully commoditize the economy.’

Although Smith declares that Chinese youth have been corrupted by consumerism, he details the emergence of the hugely important Marxist-led student movement in Peking University which linked up with Marxist student societies in other universities in China. This student movement sought to support the widespread labour struggles taking place, particularly that of the workers at the Jasic Technology company in Shenzhen. Workers at Jasic sought to form a trade union to fight for better conditions and higher wages. The company fired the workers leading to protests from other factory workers in Shenzhen, actively supported by Marxist student groups. The student leaders, Qiu Zhanxuan, Zhan Zhenzhen, Shen Mengyu and Yue Xin, were arrested and placed in detention.

Shen Mengyu

The Chinese state is well aware of the powerful resonance of the combination of students and workers. The Communist Party was formed out of the student struggles of the May 4^th movement in 1919 and seventy years later the powerful movement of students and workers in Tiananmen Square so threatened the party that the army was brought in to suppress the movement.

Smith’s account of Chinese development is sometimes infused with a very dismissive and somewhat ignorant appreciation of Chinese culture. He makes some powerful points about the extinction of rare flora and fauna and China’s role in this trade but then he expands his point to take aim at Chinese traditional medicine as a whole calling it ‘superstitious quackery’. He goes on to say that, ‘Many assumed that China’s obsession with traditional medicine would wane as the country modernised’. However, many important developments in modern medical science have come from the integration of the contributions from Chinese preventive medicine developed over thousands of years. To give one example – in 1967 Ho Chi Minh asked the Chinese for help in curing the malaria which was wiping out the North Vietnamese troops on the Ho Chi Minh trail. The leading Chinese scientist at the time, Nobel laureate Tu Youyou, developed a cure from a 1600 year old traditional Chinese medical recipe. Her work not only helped win the war in Vietnam but went on to save the lives of millions of people in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Smith seems to be objecting to Chinese economic growth per se. Its ‘hyper-industrialisation’ compels China to ‘drive CO2 emissions off the chart’. Although records show that US per capita CO2 emissions are double those of China, he says, ‘no other nation has wrecked its environment so quickly and on such a scale’. Smith argues that this is as a result of the specific nature of the Chinese economic and political system. For Smith, China’s inability to protect its environment lies with state central planning and the absence of the profit motive. Under ‘normal’ capitalism a decline in profits will lead to a decline in production and a limit to growth. For Smith this is a necessary and essential step to save the planet, taken together with capitalist democracies allowing a freedom to organise which enables environmental organisations to impose some restraint on pollution. This is not possible in China because the economy does not follow the Western capitalist path. He says ‘These statist ruling class priorities give China’s hybrid bureaucratic collectivist capitalist system a different logic and rationality, and different drivers, contradictions and tendencies from capitalism elsewhere.’

How we understand China and the Chinese state will be crucial to the political struggles of the coming period. The conclusions that Smith draws from what seems to me to be a correct assessment of the nature of the Chinese economic system ie – state central planning, control of the banking system, the dominance within the economy of the state owned enterprises – are mistaken. In his understanding it is the state-controlled elements of the economy which are uniquely damaging and are the central drivers of the environmental destruction of the planet. Thus he shifts the necessary focus for struggle away from capitalism as a global system.

No country in the world has ever grown so fast in such a short historical period as China. For Marxists who consider China to be a capitalist social formation this should open some theoretical questions. How under capitalism has such a massive development of the productive forces taken place? Smith’s contention that this is a new economic formation distinct from normal capitalism but more dangerous to humanity’s continued existence, also poses some questions for us about the nature and necessity of economic growth. Smith appears to be arguing that it is  economic growth in itself which poses the central problem for humanity and that the protection of the planet and our future on it requires us to produce and consume less. This may be a possible strategy for sections of the population in the more advanced capitalist economies but it will not work for the impoverished billions in the Global South who understandably seek a better standard of living.

Smith is right to point out the inefficiencies of bureaucratic state planning in China which often creates wasteful building programmes, overproduction and what he calls other ‘market irrationalities’. As we saw in the Soviet Union, one of the main failures of state central planning is precisely that production targets are set by the bureaucracy to fit artificial requirements rather than realising production for use, which would require democratic control over production. A conscious plan cannot be imposed from above but must be the product of fundamental ordering and organisation of production and society by the workers themselves. This is how Marx understood it: communism as the necessary expression of an association of free and equal producers. However, restating the ideal does not in itself solve the problem of transition just as the mere declaration that workers in China need ‘the next revolution’ does not bring such an event closer to reality. The ‘free development of individualities’ necessitates the highest development of the productive forces. What we are witnessing in China is a historic transformation unprecedented in human history in which a country coming from an extremely low level of development will within the next immediate period, become the dominant economic power in the world.

Two of the main targets that China’s government sets, the maintenance of employment and the eradication of rural poverty, are not to be lightly dismissed. And neither of them will be fulfilled should China follow the path advocated by Minxin Pei and others, that China must become a genuine market-orientated economy. The solution to the problems of wasteful production does not lie in dissolving these state-owned enterprises nor in privatising the banking system. It is control over these essential economic drivers that will enable the Chinese people to help solve many of the environmental problems facing China and the world. In September, Xi Jinping told the United Nations General Assembly that ‘China aims to have CO₂ emissions peak before 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality before 2060’. This is quite a commitment for a developing country and will only be possible if China does not follow the capitalist path of development.

Despite repressive and authoritarian elements within the political system in China, the CCP maintains support because of the development of the productive forces and the consequent improvements in people’s cultural and material life. Infant mortality has declined sharply and life expectancy has nearly doubled over the last 60 years from 43 years in 1960 to 77 today. According to the World Bank, 850 million Chinese people have been lifted out of extreme poverty over the last 40 years. This would not have been achieved had the CCP followed the path advocated in the West and fully introduced the capitalist mode of production. We saw how disastrous that path was with the dissolution of the Soviet Union whose transition to capitalism destroyed its economy and impoverished its people. The transition to the market economy in the 1990s caused a dramatic increase in mortality, shortened life expectancy, and led to depopulation.

The central narrative within Smith’s book dovetails far too neatly with the dominant Western imperialist view of China. Smith wants to see China transition to democracy but his arguments echo almost exactly those of US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. As Pompeo put it in his speech on Communist China and the Free World’s Future, ‘China [has]ripped off our prized intellectual property and trade secrets costing millions of jobs across America. It sucked supply chains away from America, and then added a widget made of slave labor. China is increasingly authoritarian at home, and more aggressive in its hostility to freedom everywhere else’. Both Smith and Pompeo’s account of China’s economic success as resulting from bullying, cheating and stealing ignores the fact that all industrialising nations borrow from other more advanced ones. The US itself borrowed from German and UK companies to fuel its own rise. Michael Löwy’s writings on combined and uneven development would illuminate the economic advances taking place in China more accurately than the gangster analysis from Smith.

Smith’s book, written before the pandemic took hold, is damning about the inefficiency and corruption of the Chinese health care system. He says that medical practice in China is hyper-marketised and inefficent, but it is important to recognise the huge expansion in healthcare that has taken place in recent years with the building of thousands of new hospitals and health clinics and that health insurance coverage now exists for practically all of the population. It is the pandemic and the response to it that has revealed the strengths of the Chinese system. China has a population of 1.4 billion people and yet has suffered fewer than 5,000 deaths from Covid-19. Its public health response has been incredibly effective and the work of the new national co-ordinating system has shown the strengths of the active mobilisation of the party’s ninety million members. The World Bank estimates that more than one hundred million people globally will be thrown back into extreme poverty as a result of the pandemic. It says this will be the worst setback in a generation. None of these millions will be in China. In fact the Chinese economy will be the only major economy to grow this year.

The Chinese state regime is repressive and may well become more so as the enormous working class in China becomes conscious of its own power and moves to assert its own interests. Overcoming the authoritarian centralisation of the Chinese state by creating democratic forms of social involvement and control without destroying the necessary productive foundations for a socialist society must surely be a crucial theoretical and practical undertaking in the coming period. Smith’s argument, that it is the nature of the Chinese economic system that has ‘turned China into the leading driver of planetary collapse’, fails to recognise that defending and strengthening those elements within the Chinese system which are counter-posed to capitalism will provide the basis for the solution of the environmental problems the world faces. Smith says that ‘the solution for China, and for the rest of the world, is ecosocialist democracy not capitalist democracy’ which few would argue with but we are left with a magical aspiration rather than a concrete analysis of material society. What are the transitional forms of political power that will actively contribute to a socialist transformation of China. This is the central  problem that needs to be addressed. The CCP was forced, following the chaos and brutalisation of the Cultural Revolution, to reorganise the economy and overcome the ever-present problem of the underdevelopment of the productive forces. This ‘solution’ whereby the state retained central control of the economy and of the political sphere but allowed significant capitalist development brings in its wake its own contradictions despite the enormous productive power that it has unleashed.

How these struggles will unfold in China we cannot yet know but the determination of many of the Western left to ignore the complexity of post-revolutionary China by labelling China, on the basis of surface appearances, as a capitalist and imperialist state formation will only give us the illusion of a real solution. The slogan that some advance as we enter the New Cold War is ‘Neither Washington nor Beijing’ – a reprise of ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow’ adopted by some in the time of the Soviet Union. Both are wrong and lead to mistaken political perspectives. As does the belief that China represents a new form of capitalism, thus negating the progressive advances of the Chinese Revolution. It presents humanity with a desolate future.

There are those on the left that make a comparison between China’s Belt and Road initiative with the imperialist role played by the European countries in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries but these comparisons seem to me to be superficial. They ignore the massive military intervention which accompanied European and US imperialism and which we have seen repeated in the Middle East in the very recent period. Yanis Varoufakis, the former finance minister in Greece, sees it rather differently. He tells a more benign story about Chinese state investment in Greece saying the Chinese state was prepared to invest over a long period and he ensured that they guaranteed labour rights, collective bargaining and profit sharing. There are no doubt many problems associated with corruption, debt and contracts between sovereign nations, and the Belt and Road is an infrastructure development with investments made in 70 countries mainly in the Global South. It is a qualitatively different strategy from the economic and political enslavement of colonialism and imperialism and for countries in the Global South it is an alternative route to capital investment.

China has managed to avoid the fate of the Soviet Union; it has navigated a different course by integrating within the global economy in a way that the Soviet Union never was. It is an economic peer of the United States and by 2040 its economy is projected to be twice the size of the US economy. Unlike the Soviet Union it has never tried to compete militarily with the US which would have drained away the resources necessary for economic development. China has avoided military action while the US has been engaged in almost permanent wars over the last twenty years and the danger is that the US has China in its sights for the next one – a crucial factor that Smith doesn’t really explore.

The political situation between the US and China is now deteriorating rapidly. The US has unleashed a human rights offensive over Hong Kong, Taiwan and Xinjiang with the goal of isolating China internationally and destabilising the CCP internally. The US aims to pressure China to dismantle state ownership and privatise the non-capitalist sectors of the Chinese economy. It hopes to strengthen those social forces in China that also seek that outcome. But its primary objective is to halt China’s rise and maintain its position as the dominant global power.

The US plans in the coming year the largest military expenditure in its history. It will spend over $700 billion in 2021, much of it on the expansion of its military capabilities in the South China Sea. The Trump administration plans to sell three new advanced weapons systems to Taiwan as part of its strategy of isolating China, involving new regional alliances with India, Japan and Australia. The world finds itself at its most dangerous moment as the US seeks to restore its dominance over the world economy with the real possibility of armed conflict with China.

Smith ends his book by saying that the CCP has ‘held back China’s masses for seven decades’ and that the party has created the worst ever environmental crisis. He paraphrases Mao’s victory speech in 1949 saying, ‘It’s time the Chinese people stood up again. The fate of their nation and the fate of the planet depend greatly on them’.

I’m not convinced he is taking aim at the right target.

 Mike Phipps reviews Keenie Meenie: The British Mercenaries Who Got Away with War Crimes, by Phil Miller, published by Pluto Press

This is a shocking book. It opens with an account of a massacre in 1985 in northern Sri Lanka. The Sri Lankan army’s dirty war against the Tamil population was in full swing. In the incident described, helicopters landed and government troops burned down houses and killed civilians. One of the pilots who watched the scene was a tall white man. Three decades later, declassified documents suggest he was a mercenary working for a British company, Keenie Meenie Services – KMS.

Such companies began to multiply in the era of decolonisation in the decades after World War Two. They took on the work that British state forces could no longer undertake worldwide and became the breeding ground for Britain’s vast private security industry. KMS was one of these companies, small at first, but using its connections inside the Foreign Office and other parts of the state administration to great effect.

Some of the new mercenary outfits that sprang up were brutal even by the military standards of the time. There was a public outcry when the commander of one of these ordered the massacre of 14 men under his command who wanted to quit an operation in Angola. The then Labour prime minister set up an enquiry, but the attitude of many government officials was pragmatic and supportive about the deployment of mercenaries. Many were keen to distinguish between the cowboys and the more respectable outfits like KMS, which did a large amount of ‘security work’ in the Middle East and elsewhere for the Foreign Office.

It was a considerable step up from guarding British embassies to providing direct military training in countries like Sri Lanka, where the UK authorities did not wish to appear involved. Recently declassified documents suggest the UK government was not entirely happy about KMS training elite Sri Lankan military units, because they frequently went on the rampage, but initially did nothing to stop it happening.

KMS trained Sri Lanka’s Special Task Force from 1984 on. At this time, the Task Force’s activities attracted fear and loathing across Tamil areas, due to its large number of disappearances of young Tamil men, its widespread use of torture, of collective punishments, rape, looting and summary execution of children. These atrocities were committed on a systematic basis by the Task Force, trained by KMS, who were seemingly implicated in war crimes. Furthermore, local embassy personnel observed: “KMS have been drawn yet further into direct control of and participation in operations.” Yet the logic of privatisation meant that no British government personnel took any responsibility for what was happening.

By 1986, the Sri Lankan government admitted using air strikes on built-up areas. The impact of these was indiscriminate. “By now,” notes Miller, “Whitehall went as far as accepting internally that it was ‘probable’ KMS pilots had ‘taken charge’ of helicopter attacks.” Yet rather than suspend the passports of KMS members, which would have severely curtailed their ability to function, the government soft-pedalled. KMS operatives later confirmed that they had flown combat missions in which civilians were targeted on a large scale. In Miller’s assessment, their role was indispensable: without it, “it is highly likely the Sri Lankan army would have had to abandon the north, effectively giving the Tamils a de facto state of their own.”

There is further evidence if British complicity in these crimes. Despite a ‘fact-finding’ mission to Sri Lanka by the then Home Secretary, the UK government believed it was safe to send back Tamil refugees applying for asylum here.

KMS personnel were also involved in the covert US-led plans to destabilise the democratically elected government of Nicaragua, allegedly detonating bombs in the capital in 1985. This became public in the Congressional investigation into the Iran-contra affair in 1987, where the US had unlawfully financed the contra war against Nicaragua from funds raised by illegally selling arms to Iran. After this exposure, KS rebranded itself under a new name and began working in the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan.

Miller, formerly a researcher at Corporate Watch, has done a meticulous job in piecing together this story, scouring government files at the National Archives, once they were released to the public after a thirty year time lag – even then, heavily redacted. He also tracked down and interviewed some of the participants who had harrowing stories to tell: one spoke of the indiscriminate slaughter of Tamil civilians and compared what was going on in Sri Lanka to the Holocaust.

The main events covered here happened over thirty years ago. But the UK’s private military security business remains in robust health. New Labour squandered an opportunity to regulate it in 2002, when the then Foreign Secretary David Miliband proposed that mercenaries should merely sign up to a voluntary code of conduct. Then came the Iraq war where the industry boomed. Today it is worth up to £275 billion a year and the UK government itself is a significant client.

first published on Labour Hub

The coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has slammed into the global system with almost the same impact we might expect from an asteroid strike. All aspects of economic, cultural and political activity on the planet have been devastated and disrupted in ways that seemed unimaginable just a few months ago. Almost half a million human lives around the world have been extinguished already and the danger is far from over. Aside from the immediate biological threat of the virus, probably its most fundamental effect has been to stall the already faltering recovery of the capitalist system after the crash of 2008. The developed economies have been forced to take measures such as compulsory lockdowns, massive fiscal subsidies and draconian border controls on a scale that has never been seen before in peacetime.

The symbiotic economic relationship between the two titans of the global system, China and the US, had been pivotal to that recovery, as far as it had progressed in the pre-outbreak period. In 2018 however, U.S. President Donald Trump radically changed gears by initiating a trade war against Beijing. The political fall-out of the pandemic on the global stage is now further eroding diplomatic relations as a war of words has erupted between the two superpowers over which should shoulder the burden of responsibility for the crisis. Trump has accused Beijing of covering up the initial outbreak and has repeatedly referred to it as a ‘Chinese virus’. In response, Beijing’s Foreign Ministry accuses the U.S. president of seeking to deflect attention from the disastrous failures of his own administration’s domestic management of the virus. The potential for a war of words to spill over into military confrontation cannot be ruled out.

Jude Woodward’s study of the development of US-China diplomacy predates the corona crisis but still provides many useful clues as to how this renewed period of tension in their relationship might play out in the months and years to come. She usefully reminds us that although Trump’s foreign policy has been characterised by frequent bursts of crass Sinophobia, the fear and paranoia among the U.S. elite about their greatest rival really began to take shape under the administration of his predecessor. In 2010, Obama announced a ‘pivot’ of 60% of U.S. military power away from the Middle East and towards the Pacific (250). This strategic shift was the culmination of a decade or so of mounting consternation among Washington foreign policy commentators that Beijing’s stunning economic performance in the post-Mao era was creating the first credible challenge to U.S. global hegemony since the fall of the Berlin Wall. Propagandists on the U.S. side couched this redeployment in terms of ensuring equilibrium in terms of a balance of power, but Woodward shrewdly identifies the real agenda: ‘On the economic front these demands include opening up China’s markets on terms favourable to the West, privatisation of key industries, revaluing the RMB, deregulating its capital account and not developing production in areas of more advanced technology that would directly compete with the West’ (16). In other words, the U.S. is acting in the classic manner of imperialist powers of previous eras such as Britain and France at the turn of the twentieth century, seeking to thwart the emergence of a rival. The furore today over Huawei’s input to the 5G network in North America and Europe is another expression of this completive mentality escalating among the big powers. Woodward also notes that if such an economic strangulation were to succeed, another dividend for the U.S. would be the reduced ability of Beijing to offer material and moral support to recalcitrant states such as Venezuela and Iran that have noticeably managed to resist the will of Washington thus far in the twenty-first century.

Trump’s sabre-rattling belligerence is often presented by liberal analysts as out of character with the generally benign nature of the U.S. state as it has evolved over two centuries or so. Woodward’s observation that the intensified pressure on China in this century actually commenced under Obama is just one valuable corrective to this narrative of ‘American exceptionalism’. The author’s overview of the history of U.S. foreign policy neatly dismembers the myth of the country as a uniquely normative power, only committed to the diffusion of values such as freedom, democracy and pluralism, rather than acting out of a form of self-interest we take for granted from other powers. From ‘the megalomania of Manifest Destiny’ to the straightjackets of the IMF and the World Bank (both equipped with U.S. vetoes), Washington has carved a subtler version of the template of empire, but an empire nonetheless. Woodward explains that ‘its tactics in pursuit of its ultimately Brobdingnagian global project ranged from active to passive persuasion. And such arguments allowed the construction of a myth of the U.S. as a reluctant superpower, an anti-colonial state, when it was in fact pervasively seeking to coercively influence greater and greater spheres of the world’ (61).

Woodward describes how American analysts of international relations have tried to theorise the putative challenge from China. One of the most discussed models of the state of the global chessboard is Graham Allison’s ‘Thucydides Trap’. Taking a cue from the classic history of the Peloponnesian War by the eponymous Greek historian in the fifth century BCE, Allison posits that history is full of cases of rising powers encroaching on the hegemony of established powers, often triggering conflict regardless of the efforts of diplomats at the time to broker peace. Allison presents the U.S. as the modern equivalent of Sparta as the established power and Xi’s China as the counterpart of Athens, an ascending economic and military rival. Woodward is justifiably sceptical of this transhistorical and fatalistic perspective on the causes of war: ‘Ancient Greece was not at all similar to the world that faces the U.S. and China today, particularly economically. In a world where economic growth was insignificant…war to seize assets created by others, enslave populations or steal land was a rational route to enrichment’ (64). She notes the Chinese president himself has commented on the limited value of the ‘Thucydides Trap’ as a paradigm for understanding the contemporary world.

An alternative approach to China within U.S. foreign policy circles is the liberal notion of complex interdependence. Theorists such as Joseph Nye argue that the established role of American firms such as Apple, Walmart and General Motors inside the Chinese economy, in addition to Beijing controlling over a $1 trillion of U.S. debt, means the two superpowers are mutually dependent to an extent that precludes the possibility of inter-state military conflict. Woodward cautions that similar arguments ruling out the prospect of conflict between Britain and Germany were common in the years before 1914. The author contends that great power rivalry operates on multiple levels including the political and the military, and that an exclusive focus on the economic by liberal theorists such as Nye is unduly optimistic. She suggests Trump’s alternative strategy of confronting China could equally attract the support of aggressively protectionist elements of the U.S. financial elite: ‘According to such a perspective pre-emptively halting the rise of China is vital to protect the interests of global capital and will have a longer term pay-off for U.S. domestic industry by preventing China reaching the point of competing at U.S. levels of productively and technology’ (68).

Another valuable corrective to the standard Western narrative provided by Woodward is that China’s historical evolution as a great power has been characterised by a conspicuous lack of global ambitions; while in contrast, the U.S. has been remorselessly following an agenda of global hegemony since its initial emergence as a regional power at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The author recalls the ‘Five Principles of Peaceful Existence’ as espoused by Zhou Enlai who presided over Chinese foreign policy in the 1970s (46). Similarly a decade later, the country’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping spoke of pursuing a policy based on the motto: ‘hide strength, bide our time’ (47). Even further back in time, the Ming dynasty in the 1400s had spurned the opportunity for global expansion created by the voyages into the Indian Ocean by Admiral Zheng He (70). Woodward contends that the historic concern of Chinese rulers throughout the ages has been to prioritise the country’s vast land borders and not to divert resources to any expansionist agenda. The current leadership in Beijing, under Xi Jinping, is also committed to this essentially conservative global outlook, according to Woodward: ‘This perspective is not against any other country including the US. On the contrary, it is premised on the idea that relations between states can be organised to their mutual benefit and that the way to secure peace and stability is precisely to build on such win-win relations’ (256).

The only weakness in Woodward’s otherwise excellent overview of the global chessboard is a tendency to take at face value statements of benign intent by the current Chinese leadership. Ultimately, China today has become thoroughly integrated into the operations of global economy and as such, is bound by the logic of the system in the same way as every other capitalist state, now or in the past. Xi may be genuine in his desire to avoid confrontation with the U.S. but the laws of motion of world capitalism, as Lenin and Bukharin argued many decades ago, ultimately operate outside the remit of politicians and twice already in the last century we have seen where that logic can lead. She also tends to dismiss legitimate struggles against the Chinese state such as those in Hong Kong and Xinjiang as little more than manifestations of CIA sponsored subversion (16).

Sadly, Jude Woodward has recently passed away. With this volume, however, she has bequeathed a valuable tool to help navigate the perils of the unfolding global crisis. In her memory, we should strive to enact the closing message of her last book: ‘in the end, the sword cannot win against the desire of human beings to go forward and improve their lives if they can see a way to do so’ (257)

Jude Woodward was an Editorial Board member of Transform journal.

The US vs China: Asia’s New Cold War?
Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2017, 304 pp.,

You can buy the book here

This article was previously published on Monthly Review online

“Ki-taek: They are rich but still nice

Chung-sook, Ki-taek’s wife: They are nice because they are rich

Chung-sook, Ki-taek’s wife: If I had all this I would be kinder”

This is a film for our dark times. Director, Bong Joon-ho, looks behind the shiny Samsung phones and Hyundai cars of the South Korean economic miracle and unmasks the reality of capitalist class relations. He shows how they affect people’s choices and actions. On different levels it is a black comedy, a ghost story and even a bit of a horror film. It manages to engage the audience with a plot that rips along with a great mid-way twist and with characters that seem real and human. At the same time, as the young son says several times in the movie, it’s all about the metaphors. What interests Bong Joon-ho is the huge inequality in Korean society. He creates a lively, enjoyable cuckoo in the nest story but infuses it with some explosive messages.

The story is straightforward. A poor working class family living in a basement in urban South Korea gradually insinuates itself into the life and, more importantly, the domestic economy of a rich upper class one. A friend of the son suggests he takes over the English tutoring role of the rich daughter. Once hired, he manages to get his sister to take over the ‘art therapy’ of the daughter’s young brother. They use a certain creativity and intelligence to achieve this but add a dose of ruthlessness in getting the rich family’s driver and live-in maid sacked and replaced by their own father and mother. The family had to deny its very existence to carry out these roles, an inspired symbolic example of how our very identity is alienated by this system.

Throughout you get a very physical, visual expression of the gulf between working class and upper middle class living standards. The contrast between the squalor of the basement with people pissing on their windows and the superb architect designed house in the upper quarters could not be clearer. This upper/lower spatial division has been repeated in many dystopian stories with the proles living underground. Most urban centres throughout the world have this very clear physical division between the classes.

A recurrent reference in the film is made to how the rich identify the poor with an unpleasant smell. The businessman in the back of the car talks about the smell of people in the subway and the driver begins to try and smell himself. George Orwell made some similar comments when he wrote ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’.

“It may not greatly matter if the average middle-class person is brought up to believe that the working classes are ignorant, lazy, drunken, boorish, and dishonest; it is when he is brought
up to believe that they are dirty that the harm is done. And in my childhood we were brought up to believe that they were dirty” (Chapter 8)

The smartness, adaptability and abilities of the poor family contrast with the naiveté and vacuity of the rich family further reinforcing the idea that the system does not reward intelligence. But the director does not romanticise working people. The story shows a vicious fight for survival between working people, scrabbling to monopolise the benefits of working for the rich household. There is a great riff in the film on the idea of having a plan. The poor family keeps coming back to that discussion when they find themselves in a crisis. For a while their plans work effectively then their guard falls and they are unmasked. The father comes out with a great line that sums up to some degree the state of things today for working people in many countries. He says – in response to his son asking what the plan is –

‘You know what kind of plan never fails? No plan. No plan at all. You know why? Because life cannot be planned. Look around you. Did you think these people made a plan to sleep in the sports hall with you? But here we are now, sleeping together on the floor. So, there’s no need for a plan. You can’t go wrong with no plans. We don’t need to make a plan for anything. It doesn’t matter what will happen next. Even if the country gets destroyed or sold out, nobody cares. Got it?’

The protagonist role, the collective solidarity and organisation of working people is everywhere in crisis today.

The father’s frustrations at the impasse ends in a bloody denouement in the midst of an expensively organised birthday party for the young son while classical opera is being sung and canapes consumed.

The film reminded me of some of the progressive Italian black comedies of the 1970s by Scola, Monicelli and others such as Brutti, Sporchi et Cattivi (Down and Dirty) with Nino Manfredi or Scopone Scientifico (The Scientific Cardplayer) with Bette Davies directed by Comencini. Films that worked as popular comedies but which had a serious, anti-capitalist point to make. Some of the best Ealing comedies of the 1950s also had this quality, such as the Man in the White Suit (with Alec Guinness). Korean cinema has been making some great films – Burning (2018) was tremendous.

What is striking is the way cinema more easily than some other art forms – through subtitles – can make different cultural realities accessible. Some people have commented that in any case the direction is so adept that the film can be followed visually most of the time without needing the dialogue. The best films always have that visual quality that keeps scenes in your mind long after you have seen it. A good example here is the slapstick antics of the poor family having to escape the house when the rich family come back unexpectedly.

Deservedly winning the top prize at Cannes, this film merits recognition at the Oscars which would be poetic justice in Trump’s America today. Bong Joon-ho brilliantly makes us think about whom the worst parasites are, the rich family or the poor one.

Source: The Guardian

Rosa Luxemburg’s letters bring to life a humane socialist whose ideas still resonate today

Edwardian England, with its rituals of roast beef and empire, was grimly inimical to social change, yet Lenin sought refuge there in the early 1900s while on the run from the tsarist police. In London he took his protege Trotsky round the Jewish heartlands off Brick Lane. The Whitechapel backstreets had long served as an asylum for international socialists and dreamers of every stripe.

Rosa Luxemburg, the Polish-born internationalist, found the Whitechapel district “dark and dirty” on her arrival in 1907. The 36-year-old had come to London from Berlin to attend a congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour party (soon to become the Soviet Communist party). Among the delegates were Lenin, Trotsky and a walrus-moustached future apparatchik called Stalin.

Revolution was in the air. Stalin, then little known outside his native Georgia, had settled in a Whitechapel Road boarding house. His landlord, a poor Jew, spoke Russian. The area, with its obscure exuberance of life, fascinated Luxemburg. It was a sanctuary for Ashkenazi Jews who had escaped the pogroms in 1880s Russia. Their side-locks, kaftans and Yiddish would have struck Luxemburg as backward tribal marks.

Like Trotsky, Luxemburg was an example of Europe’s new, secularised Jew. Her father, a Warsaw timber trader, considered himself assimilated within the Catholic majority. Luxemburg herself regarded her Jewishness as an irrelevance. She cared little for the derision and sorrows heaped on her co-religionists in Russian territories. “What do you want with this theme of the ‘special suffering of the Jews’?” she upbraided her friend Mathilde Wurm in 1917. “I am just as much concerned by the poor blacks of Africa.”

Yet, to judge by this absorbing new collection of her letters, she was inevitably shaped by Judaism and its fierce moral parables of deliverance and survival. The self-ironical humour and love of learning of her “forefathers” were characteristics that Luxemburg saw in herself. Written in German, Polish, French and Russian in the years 1891-1919, the letters radiate erudition (as well as an occasionally acid tongue). During her imprisonment in Berlin for anti-militarist beliefs she read Goethe and Cervantes, and marvelled at the “bantering hobgoblin mood of A Midsummer Night’s Dream“. The letters are also fraught with punctilious descriptions of nature, from honey bees to the “dwarf-sized yarrow plants” blooming in the prison yard.

Like many secular Jews, Luxemburg applauded the 1917 uprising against the Romanov monarchy. “The events in Russia are of amazing grandeur and tragedy,” she wrote to a social democrat friend from her cell. At the same time she was appalled by the prospect of Bolshevik mob rule and condemned the violence unleashed by Lenin and Trotsky against counter-revolutionaries. The Bolshevik use of terror was, in Luxemburg’s pacifist view, an expression of political “weakness” and the trapdoor disappearance of innocents disconcerted her greatly.

In January 1919, against her better judgment, she lent her support to the communist uprising in Berlin. Hoping to repeat the success of the October revolution, the left-wing Spartacist League (of which Luxemburg was a founder) was brutally crushed by proto-Hitlerite Freikorps. Luxemburg was clubbed to death by nationalists and her body dumped in the Landwehr Canal, between what would later be west and east Berlin. She was 47. “The old slut is swimming now,” somebody remarked. No one stood trial for the murder of “Red Rosa”.

In the 30s, her name was blackened further by Stalin, who scorned the apparently bourgeois cult of “Luxemburgism”. Her reputation was allowed to revive only after 1956, when Khrushchev publicly denounced Stalin. Her most famous slogan – “Freedom is also the freedom of those who think differently” – was adopted by student protestors in East Germany in 1988, a year before the Berlin Wall came down. That same year, Margarethe von Trotta’s soberly elegiac film, Rosa Luxemburg, was released.

If anything, Luxemburg’s insistence on social justice seems more pertinent now with the world financial crisis. Her main theoretical work, The Accumulation of Capital, sought to counter the lure of the market. A deep-dyed democrat, Luxemburg hated what she called the “German mentality” and reputation for officiousness, and saw her role as somehow Russifying Germany. Punctilious in answering her letters, she fired off hundreds of missives to friends, lovers and colleagues, some of them very lengthy. Her need to write was clearly overwhelming and she wrote as though she was thinking aloud, the words pouring out. “God forgive me this prose poem of wretched quality!” she apologises to a journalist friend in 1898.

In her personal life, Luxemburg displayed a middle-class fastidiousness at odds with her combative politics. The sight of women on bicycles she found “aesthetically displeasing” and she flinched from displays of too much leg. A soapbox “fighter” rather than a soulless statistician, she championed the cause of Polish and German coal miners, shoemakers, tailors, party workers. Socialism for her was above all a comradely ideology that sought to address inequalities. Notably, these letters reflect personal anxieties of betrayal (“The jibber-jabber of our wavering friends”) and political danger. Speaking to audiences of up to 5,000 people, she was vulnerable to the assassin’s bullet.

Published to coincide with the 140th anniversary of Luxemburg’s birth in March 1871, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg come as near as anything to the way this extraordinary woman talked with loved ones and friends. Perhaps for the first time in English, Rosa Luxemburg emerges whole from the shadows of Stalinism and previous biographers. This is a wonderfully compelling record, both poignant and timely.

The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg

Edited by Georg Adler, Peter Hudis, and Annelies Laschitza
Translated by George Shriver

Published by Verso

A rich tapestry – yes for football fans – but also for anyone interested in how decades of social, political and cultural change and upheaval shaped Merseyside.

At one level it’s an evocative and always entertaining story charting the lives of two Liverpool families against the backdrop of intense football rivalries. The city is home to two of the biggest and most successful teams in English football: Liverpool – the Reds, and Everton – the Blues. The two central characters are Jimmy, who supports the Blues, and Tommy, who favours the Reds. The derby matches between the two clubs have produced some of the most famous occasions in England’s football history. And they give the novel its narrative spine.

But Liverpool as a city is much bigger than the fate of its football teams, and the fervour generated among the supporters. As Bill Shankly, the legendary Liverpool club manager, famously said:

“Some people believe football is a matter of life and death. I am very disappointed with that attitude. I can assure you it is much, much more important than that.”

By which he meant, it’s more than a game in which 22 players kick a ball around a grass pitch. It’s a communal and collective experience, which embraces players and supporters.

This is reflected in another of Shankly’s widely quoted remarks, this time when talking about what socialism meant to him:

“The socialism I believe in isn’t really politics. It is a way of living. It is humanity. I believe the only way to live and to be truly successful is by collective effort, with everyone working for each other, everyone helping each other, and everyone having a share of the rewards at the end of the day. That might be asking a lot, but it’s the way I see football and the way I see life.”

It’s a sentiment affirmed in the words of the novel’s narrator Tommy:

“Football is about belonging; it’s about shared stories and common purposes. You keep going through the bleak times because in the end these are your people, whether they’re on the pitch or in the stands. You win together, and you lose together.”

Stanley Park Story is ostensibly about the Merseyside derby matches between Liverpool and Everton, told through the lives and loves, the emotional highs and lows, of two familes – of joys shared and tragedies suffered, a story of friendships made, broken and restored.

But entwined in that story, as reflected in its main characters, is the politcal, social and cultural history over the past half century, and how this impacted on the people of Liverpool and reverberated far beyond.

So, while Stanley Park is a hugely engaging novel, it is also a documentary of the times in which the story takes place. And so rich is the setting that on finishing the book, I almost wished it had an index. From the Ford factory strikes to rent stikes, from the 1978-79 “winter of discontent” to Margaret Thatcher’s vindictive hatred of the city, from the Militant Liverpool council to support for the 1984-85 miners strike, from the traumas of Heysel and Hillsborough to the city-wide boycott of the Sun, from the Beatles to Echo and the Bunnymen. As Tommy remarks:

“All those individual battles, going on peace marches, demonstrating and striking, they were all necessary and important. We wanted to live without fear, to be free from poverty wages and slum housing so that we could enjoy our lives. We wanted to listen to music, play and watch football and travel the world with our teams.”

Anyone who knows Jeff Goulding from his widely published writing, whether on football, politics, or the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn, will need no persuading of his eloquence and style. Anyone else is in for a treat. In Stanley Park Story, he has created a rich tapestry – yes for football fans – but also for anyone interested in how decades of social and political change and upheaval “shaped Merseyside into a strongly working-class region, with a socialist outlook”.

Highly recommended.

Stanley Park Story – Life Love, and the Merseyside Derby is published by Pitch Publishing.

One of the all-time greatest actors speaking the provocative and profound words of one of the all-time greatest playwrights and political agitators.

Sir Mark Rylance is recognized as one of today’s finest actors, both in theatre and film. In 2016 he won the Oscar for best supporting actor in the film Bridge of Spies.

Harold Pinter was also a fine actor, but is best known as one of the most important writers of the 20th century, not least for his hugely influential plays.

The performance was part of a season of Pinter plays, which runs to February 2019, in celebration of Pinter’s literary legacy and to commemorate the tenth anniversary of his passing.  Artistic Director for the season,  Jamie Lloyd, said: “This is sure to be a powerful evening; one of the all-time greatest actors speaking the provocative and profound words of one of the all-time greatest playwrights and political agitators. The Nobel Lecture concerns the quest for truth in art and the scarcity of truth in politics. These performances couldn’t be more timely.”

And how right he was.

As well as in their professional lives, Mark Rylance and Harold Pinter were linked by their political activism, particularly in their opposition to injustice and war. Unsurprisingly, this led both to a close involvement with the Stop the War movement (STW), which was founded nearly two decades ago in response to the war in Afghanistan, and is one of the most significant mass movements in British history.

Pinter was a regular contributor to Stop the War events, speaking on demonstrations at which he often read a poem he had written especially for the occasion.

Mark Rylance says the STW demonstration on 15 February 2003, when two million came onto London’s streets in protest against the Iraq war, was “one of the most profound moments of my life”. Rylance is today a STW patron, regularly appearing at its events. His two performaces of Pinter’s Nobel lecture were also fundraising events for Stop the War.

Harold Pinter was seriously ill in 2005 with advanced cancer and other health issues, so was unable to travel to Norway to make his acceptance speech in person, delivering it instead on film from his wheelchair. It was – despite Pinter’s obvious physical discomfort and his seriously weakened voice – an electric performance, in which his anger at the injustices of the world were given powerful expression, in a speech which stands in its importance as one of the great radical speeches since the end of World War Two.

Mark Rylance’s performance brilliantly caught the rhythms and intonation of Pinter’s own voice, and the intensity of his outrage over the momentous crimes against humanity that went unrestrained and unpunished – particularly those committed in the name of US foreign policy.

He moved purposefully round the stage, savouring every sentence of Pinter’s text, the theme of which centred on truth, and how it is portrayed both in literature and in the world generally. Pinter opened his speech with this statement:

In 1958 I wrote the following: ‘There are no hard distinctions between what is real and what is unreal, nor between what is true and what is false. A thing is not necessarily either true or false; it can be both true and false.’

I believe that these assertions still make sense and do still apply to the exploration of reality through art. So as a writer I stand by them but as a citizen I cannot. As a citizen I must ask: What is true? What is false?

Truth is forever elusive in drama, says Pinter. But truth is also elusive in political language, due to how it is filtered through the media, and because

… the majority of politicians, on the evidence available to us, are interested not in truth but in power and in the maintenance of that power. To maintain that power it is essential that people remain in ignorance, that they live in ignorance of the truth, even the truth of their own lives. What surrounds us therefore is a vast tapestry of lies, upon which we feed.

Behind this “vast tapestry of lies”, says Pinter, lies a reality in which “the United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War”, from Nicaragua to Greece, from Indonesia to Chile.

This is in addition to US wars in Korea and Vietnam and – in Pinter’s final years – Afghanistan and Iraq, which, he says, “was a bandit act, an act of blatant state terrorism, demonstrating absolute contempt for the concept of international law”. Pointing his finger at George W Bush and Tony Blair, Pinter asks, “How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought.”

And since Pinter’s death, we have had the invasion of Libya, the catastrophic subversion by the US and its allies in Syria and countless other interventions.

Was all this mass slaughter and destruction attributable to American foreign policy? asks Pinter. “The answer is yes,” he says. “But you wouldn’t know it”. Adding in a now much quoted passage:

It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.

This was a theme taken up by the audience in the Q&A which followed the performance, in which Mark Rylance was joined by two founder members of Stop the War, Lindsey German and Chris Nineham.

One of the first quesions raised from the audience was whether the root cause of endless war we experience today was the result of human nature, rather than a consequence of US foreign policy, as Pinter argues. To which Chris Nineham replied that people are not ‘naturally’ predisposed to be aggressive and uncaring; look at people’s daily lives and we see that it is collaboration and unselfishness which are the main characteristics. Lindsey German added that how people act depends on the social context in which they live: there are many examples of societies in which war and conflict are not the predominant values, as they are today, particularly in the world as dominated by US imperialism.

The musician Dave Randall asked about Jeremy Corbyn, who has inspired a movement for justice and peace which grew directly out of the anti-war movement. Corbyn was for many years the chair of Stop the War before his leadership transformed the Labour Party into the biggest political party in Europe. How could he be supported?

Mark Rylance replied that it is in collective action that we can best support a politician like Corbyn. But Harold Pinter had also given an answer to this question in his summing up at the end of his Nobel speech:

I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact mandatory.  

The final question from the audience asked the panel why we are so powerless when there are so many of us, and why is it that those in power, who are so few in number, are not scared of the vast majority.

To which another audience member replied: But they are scared, which is why they do everything they can to vilify and smear someone like Jeremy Corbyn, who has inspired a mass movement committed to the causes of peace and social justice, and looks like he is on the brink of forming a government based on those values.

It is a reply that Harold Pinter would have welcomed.

This was a very special evening to be long treasured by all who were there, and it is hard to imagine another actor who could have captured both the spirit and meaning of Pinter’s words with the clarity and emotional force that Mark Rylance gave to them.

Mark Rylance interviewed on BBC Andrew Marr programme

They dismissed not just her and her message. They went on to label her a terrorist despite having zero grounds for doing this.

Today Maya goes by the stage name, MIA. In a new documentary, Matangi / Maya / M.I.A, we learn about all the Mayas: the rapper, global pop star, visual artist, activist, mum and immigrant.

Maya was raised in Sri Lanka and India with her two siblings, her mother and her father, a Tamil activist. During the civil war, Maya, her mum and siblings were forced to become refugees and fled to London.

As a teen, Maya documented her life on a London council estate, her family and anyone willing to talk to her video camera. A key theme emerges early in the film: You can’t talk about the struggle without talking about the struggle. Director Steve Loveridge’s mix of candid family discussions with the pop star’s relentless challenging of the media and the music industry, creates a lucid illustration of what has made Maya/MIA controversial as an artist.

Of the many controversies surrounding MIA, her biggest affront has been her existence as a Tamil voice in Western media who insists on talking about the Tamil struggle.

Her popularity increased. As it did, the war in Sri Lanka escalated further and further, to the point where massive loss of life was imminent. She worked her platform at every opportunity – on national TV, at the Grammys, in her music videos – to speak about the plight of Tamils in Sri Lanka.

Literally everyone dismissed her message that the mass murder of Tamil civilians was nearing the point of genocide. The media turned a blind eye to Sri Lanka’s war crimes, choosing to spill more ink on the demonisation of MIA. They dismissed not just her and her message. They went on to label her a terrorist despite having zero grounds for doing this.

The film doesn’t go so far as to question Britain’s role in the Sri Lankan civil war. The conflict followed 132 years of British colonial rule, in which British Ceylon replaced the Sinhalese monarchy. British colonialism worsened divisions between the high-caste Sinhalese majority and Tamil minority. After Sri Lanka gained independence in 1948, Sinhala legally became the official language of Sri Lanka, followed by anti-Tamil riots and land grabs of Tamil homelands.

MIA continues to advocate against the mistreatment and abuse of Sri Lankan Tamils, refugees and migrants. No one else has been doing this, suggests Radheyan Simonpillai of Now Toronto: ‘Name a popular musician who addresses refugee concerns – Syrian or Mexican, for example – in their songs. You end up right back at M.I.A.’

Ironically, Toronto-based critic Simonpillai forgets to mention K’Naan. Somali-Canadian rapper, K’Naan, settled in Toronto at age 13 with his mother and two siblings after fleeing civil war in Somalia. K’Naan became ‘Somalia’s loudest musical voice in the Western Hemisphere.’ However, he cut off his foray into pop stardom after being told to water down his lyrics: ‘I come with all the baggage of Somalia – of my grandfather’s poetry, of pounding rhythms, of the war, of being an immigrant, of being an artist, of needing to explain a few things.’

Yet both artists grew up on a US tradition of rap that bases a good part of its rhymes on the fight against oppression, violence and poverty. There’s a double standard here, because a refugee rapper in London or Toronto speaking about civil war in Sri Lanka or Somalia, and Tupac Shakur speaking about gang war in Los Angeles are the same.

‘If you come from the struggle, how the fuck do you talk about the struggle without talking about the struggle?’ Zoom out and MIA answers her own question in a striking passage from the film:

“The kid in a village in Coromandel where we shot the Bird Flu video, and the kid in Liberia playing on that playground is exactly the same. And they have nursery rhymes and they play games. They have an opinion about what kind of hairstyle they want and what t-shirt they’re going to put on in the morning. And they have dreams. And they have … an idea of what they want to be.”

People have always migrated. Children have always dreamed about what they want to be. And artists have always expressed themselves. When refugee children become artists, you better believe they will talk about the struggle.

Matangi / Maya / M.I.A is out now in the UK, and opens on 28 September in the US and on 5 October in Canada. For more locations, check: www.miadocumentary.com

Matangi / Maya / M.I.A Official Trailer

Borders. Video directed by MIA

MIA – P.O.W.A

Source: Medium

Where is today’s serious work of Western literature dealing with the plight of Palestinians, asylum seekers, migrants, the struggles of the poor and dispossessed?

Modern literature lacks the epic works that encompass and define the times in which we live, capturing that elusive but necessary timelessness symptomatic of the profundity that is required of a classic.

Perhaps Don Delilio’s Underworld (1997) is the closest there has been to claiming that mantle over the past thirty years or so, but since then there has been little to get excited about amid the plethora of vacuous tripe proffered by the mainstream; which in the main consists of novels written by middle class people for other middle class people, wherein the most common issues being grappled with are unsatisfying sex lives and the colour of the wallpaper in the drawing room of the second house in the country.

Where is the serious work of Western literature that deals or has dealt with the plight of the Palestinians, asylum seekers, migrants, the struggles of the poor and dispossessed in the 21st century? Having just re-read Victor Hugo’s magisterial Les Miserables this absence becomes even more evident, not to mention stark.

The themes encapsulated in Hugo’s 1862 magnum opus –redemption, love, justice, crime and punishment, morality, human solidarity — unfold during the course of a story that begins at the end of Napoleon’s climactic ‘100 days’. As a quick reminder, they begin with the Corsican general’s arrival back in Paris from exile on 20 March 1815, and end with the restoration of King Louis XVIII on 8 July 1815 in the wake of his historic defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. The story ends in 1832 after the short-lived ‘June Rebellion’, when French republicans rose up against the monarchy of Louis Phillipe in Paris and were quashed.

The central narrative of the novel revolves around the Herculean efforts of escaped convict Jean Valjean to avoid the clutches of his nemesis the fanatical Inspector Javert, who is obsessed with apprehending and putting him back in prison.

Jean Valjean is a tragic hero of Aristotelian dimension, whose exploits both inspire and humble with the surfeit of courage and compassion that define them. Engaged in an elemental struggle to maintain his humanity in the face of dramatic episodes of cruelty, tragedy, and injustice, Valjean’s story reveals the disjuncture that exists between the law and morality in societies in which obscene levels of wealth and ostentation rest on foundations of extreme poverty and human despair.

His personal journey takes him from the depths of this despair as a convict to the heights of social status and comfort as a wealthy businessman-turned mayor of a small provincial town. This is before he is plunged back down to the depths when sent back to prison after revealing his true identity in order to prevent another man being imprisoned in his place, having been mistaken for him.

Thereafter he once again escapes and ultimately finds happiness as guardian of the infant Cosette, rescuing her from the cruelty of the Thernardiers into whose care the child was placed by her suffering mother Fantine in return for money.

Space of course prohibits the unpacking of the novel in its entirety, but it contains some of the most heartrending and gripping scenes ever to appear in a work of historical fiction. Unlike many such novels in which the story unfolds in and around actual historical events, the characters created by Hugo are equal to those events rather than dwarfed by them, as they are for example in Gustave Flaubert’s Salambo, set in Carthage during the epoch of the Barcas.

Hugo’s rendering of the Battle of Waterloo, which takes up nineteen chapters of the book alone, are deserving of their own category of excellence. Indeed this section of the novel is so immersive that upon reading it you find yourself compelled to source more material about the battle, especially the legendary charge of the French Cuirassiers over the sunken road against the massed squares of the British infantry at the battle’s climax. It is a section that invites comparison with other great historical works in which major battles have been depicted; Tolstoy’s War and Peace perhaps the most obvious example in this regard.

The great Russian novelist’s depiction of the Battle of Borodino similarly humanises one of the most important military encounters of the Napoleonic Wars. In parenthesis, Hemingway cited Tolstoy’s treatment of the battle as inspiration when writing the battle scenes in his A Farewell to Arms. Another historical novel regularly praised for its battle scenes is Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, which follows the exploits of the story’s protagonist, Private Henry Fleming, as a soldier with the fictional 304th New York Regiment during the US Civil War. The interesting thing about Crane is that he wrote his classic novel and its battle scenes never having personally tasted combat or life in the military.

The only work of modern fiction that sits on a par with the aforementioned works when it comes to graphically and effectively describing the fear, tension, courage, and brutality of war is Sebastian Faulks’ Birdsong; in particular the tunnel scenes under the trenches with Jack Firebrace, which are unforgettable.

This being said, Les Miserables eclipses them all when Hugo moves beyond the novel’s battle scenes. The main characters of War and Peace, for example, are members of the Russian nobility and leave you cold with their bourgeois conceits, while in The Red Badge of Courage Crane only skims the surface when it comes to the Civil War, focusing instead on the personal exploits of one particular soldier and in the process missing the opportunity to unpick the social evil and abomination of slavery that lay at the conflict’s heart.

When it comes to A Farewell To Arms, meanwhile, mawkish sentimentality runs in parallel with some of the most poetic prose every written in the English language. It’s for this reason that I beg to assert the superiority of Hemingway’s other classic war novel — For Whom the Bell Tolls — out of the two.

Some of the many truly wonderful scenes depicted in Hugo’s novel, apart from the Battle of Waterloo, involve the previously mentioned rescue of Cosette from the cruel treatment of the Thernardiers by Jean Valjean; the breathtaking suspense of Valjean’s escape with Cosette from Javert through the streets of Paris, culminating in them taking refuge in a convent; the courageous defence of the barricade against Royalist troops during the June Rebellion, where a group of idealistic and defiant young Republicans hold out until every one of them, apart from Marius, is killed.

Then, immediately after the barricade falls, we have Valjean’s heroic rescue of the wounded Marius, carrying him on his back through the sewers of Paris in order to evade capture. In this particular section of the novel, the power of Hugo’s prose confirms that great works of fiction often eclipse works of philosophy when it comes to penetrating and making sense of the human condition.

In comparison to other classic works of literature that explore the human condition in periods of great social and political upheaval, Les Miserables is up there with Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook; Emile Zola’s Germinal; and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. As for Dickens, the English novelist could not in my opinion lace Victor Hugo’s authorial boots — not with his penchant for substituting caricatures for living breathing characters and the irritating paternalism that undergirds his treatment of the poor and recurring theme of social injustice.

Venezuela’s deceased former president, Hugo Chavez, credited Les Miserables with turning him into a socialist and it’s easy to see why. Even Homer’s Iliad pales in comparison when it comes to the epic sweep of the novel and exploits of its central character, Jean Valjean. In fact I feel emboldened to assert that it would be impossible to come up with a more courageous, noble and heroic character in a work of literature.

Explaining his motivation for writing the novel, Hugo said,

“I don’t know whether it will be read by everyone, but it is meant for everyone. It addresses England as well as Spain, Italy as well as France, Germany as well as Ireland, the republics that harbour slaves as well as empires that have serfs. Social problems go beyond frontiers. Humankind’s wounds, those huge sores that litter the world, do not stop at the blue and red lines drawn on maps. Wherever men go in ignorance or despair, wherever women sell themselves for bread, wherever children lack a book to learn from or a warm hearth, Les Miserables knocks at the door and says: ‘open up, I am here for you’.”

Literature as a beacon of hope and testament to the power of the human spirit in the face of injustice and adversity has never been more nobly or powerfully articulated.

Winston Churchill: Great Britain’s Greatest Beast

Those keen on heroes
Often find they’ve feet of clay.
Here’s one example:

Someone who fought two world wars,
England’s greatest Englishman,
A national treasure
Who rivals the Crown Jewels.
Winston Leonard Spencer-Churchill.

Churchill had a school-friend
Called Aubrey Herbert
Who, in 1915, wrote in his diary,
“Winston’s name fills
Everyone with rage.
Roman emperors killed slaves to
Make themselves popular,
He is killing free men
To make himself famous.”

Churchill enjoyed war.

“A curse should rest on me,” Churchill said,
“Because I love this war. I know
It’s smashing and shattering
The lives of thousands
Every moment and yet I can’t help it.
I enjoy every second.”

He wrote this during World War One –
The war to end all wars –
Whose unfinished business
Led to World War Two.
The so-called ‘Good war.’

In World War One,
Keen to acquire oil
From Mesopotamia
For British shipping,
Churchill was happy
To drop poison gas bombs on
Iraqi tribesmen
Who were objecting
To wells dug in their desert
To fuel Britain’s war;
To fuel the ships
That Churchill had decided would run
Better on oil than on coal.

“I don’t understand
This squeamishness about the use
Of gas”, Churchill would say.
“I am strongly in favor of using poison gas
Against uncivilized tribes.”

Because these “uncivilized tribes”
Were holding up his plans
They had to die.
He implied they might be honoured
To die in a civilized cause –
Their being so uncivilized.

Little Englanders,
As Orwell called petty-minded patriots,
Become apoplectic when faced
With the notion that Churchill’s views
And those of Hitler overlap
Both in relation to the use of gas,
And in the elimination
Of “inferior races”.

“I do not admit,” Churchill said
“That any great wrong has been done
To the Red Indians
Of America,
Or the black people of Australia
By the fact that a
Stronger race,
A higher grade race has come in
And taken its place”

Churchill said this in 1937 –
And in the twenties and thirties
He’d often let slip
How much he admired both Hitler
And Mussolini. Fascism
Was no problem for him.
It was the way to counteract
“The virus of Leninism.”

After Hitler came to power, Churchill proclaimed that
“If our country were defeated, I hope we should find
A champion as indomitable [as Hitler] To restore our courage and lead us back to our place
Among the nations.”
And to Mussolini, whom he addressed
In Rome on 20 January 1927, he declared:
“I could not help being charmed, like so many other people have been, by Signor Mussolini’s gentle and simple bearing and by his calm, detached poise in spite of so many burdens and dangers. If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism.
I will, however, say a word on an international aspect of fascism. Externally, your movement has rendered service to the whole world.”

The Jews, by contrast, Churchill regarded
As a “sinister confederacy… for the overthrow of civilization”
In his book ‘Great Contemporaries,’
Published in 1937, Churchill describes Hitler
As “a highly competent, cool, well-informed functionary
With an agreeable manner.”
In the same book he savagely attacks Leon Trotsky.
‘What was wrong with Trotsky?’ He asked rhetorically.
“He was still a Jew.” Churchill replied,
“Nothing could get over that.”

In peace, Churchill called troops
To shoot striking miners dead
At Tonypandy,
So he’s not much loved
By the Welsh.
Nor by the Irish,
In April 1904 he said,
“I remain of the opinion
That a separate parliament for Ireland
Would be dangerous and impractical.”
Nor by the Indians:
He worshipped the Raj,
And he told General Smuts
That he should have killed Gandhi,
When Smuts had the chance.

“I hate Indians.
They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
Churchill played a part
In the Bengal famine by
Raising rice prices.
The population
Was thus reduced and the poor
Were less burdensome.
Seven million died.
Churchill refused to send aid
As they’d “breed like rabbits”.

He and Bomber Harris,
Firebombed innocent lives
In Dresden, calling it
“Terror-bombing”. –
They were pleased at their discovery
Of a new kind of war,
Namely to kill civilians deliberately –
To demoralize the enemy.
(They burned five hundred thousand)
For the sake of it.

Churchill had asked for “suggestions
How to blaze 600,000 refugees”,
And then he ordered the firebombing of Dresden
As a “vicious payback” for the German bombing
Of Coventry (which Churchill himself had allowed to burn
Rather than reveal his access to the German codes).

Later he’d ask himself, with a perverse pride,
Against a background of burning bodies,
‘Are we beasts?”

He was addicted to war.

His first experience of it
Was in Afghanistan.
On September 12, 1897 his camp came under sniper fire.
Churchill was having dinner
With a Major-General Sir Bindon Blood
When “a bullet hummed by overhead”.

The incident strengthened Churchill’s view
That a local Pashtun tribe, the Mohmands,
Needed to be dealt with.
“After today we begin to burn villages. Every one.
And all who resist will be killed without quarter.
The Mohmands need a lesson,
And there is no doubt we are a very cruel people.”
Such action was vital, Churchill argued,
Because the Pashtuns “recognise superiority of race”.

Churchill considered he’d failed
In World War One,
After he’d sent thousands
To their deaths at Gallipoli, to no purpose,
And at the Dardanelles, to no purpose,
He was then sacked.
Consequently he spent years
Licking his wounds
And seeking out an opportunity
For a return march.

In ‘Human Smoke’ Nicholson Baker
Shows how complicit Churchill was
In provoking World War Two:
He bombed Berlin
And then he kept asking de Gaulle
‘Why haven’t they bombed us yet?’
He’d relish the London Blitz
Just because it now warranted
A great crack at the enemy,
Not because he cared tuppence
About defeating fascism.

He enjoyed war.

He enjoyed stabbing dervishes in the neck
At the battle of Omdurman, and he said so.
“I hate nobody except Hitler — but, that is professional.”
In other words there was no great difference of opinion
He just wanted to fight Hitler, or anyone.

He wanted to kill Germans ,
He wanted to kill Sudanese dervishes,
He wanted to kill Afghanis
He wanted to kill Arabs,
And he wanted to kill Brits if necessary
So long as he could claim victory
And hear the roar of a crowd’s approval.
As if war was a game –
A blood, sweat and tears game
Not a game of right and wrong.

He cared nothing for the Jews whose genocide
The war would arguably accelerate
Churchill just got off on war.
His moral compass was set
Towards self-glorification,
Even if it required fabrication.

“In time of war,” Churchill said, “when truth is so precious, “it must be attended by a bodyguard of lies”
And every imaginable lie has attended his life.
A life fetishized by Tory devotees
Who speak in hushed tones
When they mention the name of their unholy fascist
Who worshipped force, the deadlier the better.

Churchill said, “I like a man who grins when he fights.”
But his magniloquent language and the great claims
Made for him conceal a squalid truth,
That he’d loved war ever since he was a child
When he’d studied the Blenheim Palace tapestries
In which his ancestor, Marlborough,
Was depicted slaughtering 30,000 Frenchmen
And plundering Bavaria
All because of an obscure squabble
Over the Spanish succession.

An unhappy boy in a Palace,
Abandoned by a nymphomaniac mother
Ignored by a syphilitic father,
And silenced by a speech defect,
Would sit in a long corridor transfixed,
Hypnotized by massacres
And would then spend his later life looking for battles
To shine in, however many bodies he left in his wake.
The Toryboy’s household god
Who once said “Politics is almost as exciting as war“
In other words a man excited by the deaths of millions.

Towards the end of his life
Something of his own enormity
Must have visited him,
For he’d curse what he’d call
The “black dog of depression”
Which was only relieved by
Alcoholic self-medication –
Pickling a brain whose troubled thoughts
Could, in the end, only be subdued by a stroke;
The oh so good man
Who fought his oh so good war.

By way of rebranding him,
Churchill’s dark, brooding statue
In Parliament Square
Has had a green turf strip
Surreally crown its bronze head
Like a Mohican hair-cut,
And red paint spills out of its mouth
To symbolize the advocacy
Of bloodletting
By this uncivilized brute
In the wars he so loved
And so effusively praised.

This is America isn’t a wake-up call, because nothing is. Not the killer cops, not the mass shootings of children by other children, not the incipient fascism in the White House. Nothing.

Source: Medium (see more by Kianya Harrison here)

By the seventies I had lost contact with Heathcote but become a supporter of the animal rights campaign, which was already trying to save the whale. I remember being part of a delegation to the Japanese Embassy where, as we stood on the steps with our placards demanding to be heard, the spokesperson sent out to deal with us said in answer to our pleas: “But you eat cows. Where is the difference?” Only the vegetarians among us could reply: “No, we don’t.”

Clearly at that time we weren’t successful at getting this particular message across, though we did do better with the anti-fur campaign! It was left to Heathcote’s Whale Nation to make the definitive case ten years later.

It takes time to produce and publish a heavily illustrated book like this, so Heathcote must have been at work on it while the great whaling debate was going on and before the worldwide ban came into force. What Whale Nation does is to make the moral leap acceptable to the public without anthropomorphising its subject. The whales sing, play, make love, while remaining essentially themselves. Their mammalian likeness to us is made clear without any Disney overtones. There is for me only one slightly dodgy moment when Heathcote speaks of the whale’s ‘smile’. In this unsentimentalised portrait of a whole biological order, in stunning photographs as well as verse, he casts doubt on the whole business of meat production and the carnivorous society.

Part of the appeal of the animals he depicts lies in their sheer beauty and freedom in their habitat. In his account we see what we are destroying. With domesticated animals, made docile by centuries of industrialisation, it’s easy to be unaware of their individuality or that we are animals like them. Heathcote’s whales fulfil Darwin’s point about “endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful”.

Even before we understood their close relation to us, we humans had been fascinated by these great creatures: Jonah and the whale, the Old English riddles, the poem Whale, whaling songs and shanties, and above all Moby Dick, where the hero is not the hunting-obsessed human but his magnificent prey, the great white whale made all the more iconic by the very fact of his whiteness.

Heathcote deals very cleverly with the hunting aspect of his subject. Where Ahab’s pursuit of Moby Dick is a mad but personal crusade, a desire to exercise power over and exorcise a mighty, superhuman energy, and where whalers among Indigenous people, or 19th-century sailors under sail in vulnerable wooden hulls and small boats, could be smashed to smithereens with one great flick of a whale’s muscular tail, and where the humans are vulnerable flesh and blood like their prey, Heathcote’s factory ships are chillingly distant, almost invisible. There is no contest. The whale is as helpless as a lamb in the abattoir, prey to the captive bolt, the pithing rod. Exploding harpoons, mechanical grapples, metal drums of rotating knives – at least nothing is wasted except a life. It is the very enormity of the whale’s death that Whale Nation describes that churns the stomach, after the sounds of its singing, its play among the waves. Not struggle but slaughter.

We had hunted it almost to extinction. During World War II it appeared in British butchers’ shops as an off-ration alternative along with offal, sheep’s heads, brains and tongues. A survivor questioned on radio recently remembered it as “grey and gooey”. He was, I’m sure, thinking of snoek, meant to be the austerity alternative to cod. I remember whale meat as a bit tough and stringy with a slight fishy flavour but perfectly edible. Heathcote’s brilliant book succeeded in making the ban on hunting these mighty sea mammals palatable, so that today the whale nation is thriving – but only at the price of eternal vigilance.

Video: Whale Nation

Read by Roy Hutchins, who has since become a longtime producer and presenter of Williams’ work, right up to his last performed major work, Song, performed in at the Brighton Festival in Spring 2017, just months before Williams’ death.

Extracts from the Poem

Extracts from the book-length poem Whale Nation by Heathcote Williams – a poem that honours the beauty, intelligence and majesty of the largest mammal on Earth.

From space, the planet is blue.
From space, the planet is the territory
Not of humans, but of the whale.
Blue seas cover seven-tenths of the of the earth’s surface,
And are the domain of the largest brain ever created,
With a fifty-million-year-old smile.
Ancient, unknown mammals left the land
In search of food or sanctuary,
And walked into the water.
Their arms and hands changed into water-wings;
Their tails turned into boomerang-shaped tail-flukes,
Enabling them to fly, almost weightless, through the oceans;
Their hind-legs disappeared, buried deep within their flanks.
Free from land-based pressures:
Free from droughts, earthquakes, ice-ages, volcanoes, famine,
Larger brains evolved, ten times as old as man’s…
Other creatures, with a larger cerebral cortex…
…
Whale families, whale tribes,
All have different songs:
An acoustic picture-language,
Spirited pulses relayed through water
At five times the speed sounds travels through air,
Varied enough to express complex emotions,
Cultural details,
History,
News,
A sense of the unknown.
A lone Humpback may put on a solo concert lasting for days.
Within a Humpback’s half-hour song
There are a hundred million bytes.
A million changes of frequency,
And a million tonal twists…
An Odyssey, as information-packed as Homer’s,
Can be told in thirty minutes;
Fifty-million-year-old sagas of continuous whale mind:
Accounts of the forces of nature;
The minutiae of a shared consciousness;
Whale dreams;
The accumulated knowledge of the past;
Rumours of ancestors, the Archaeoceti,
With life-spans of two and three hundred years;
Memories of loss;
Memories of ideal love;
Memories of meetings…

Heathcote’s intuitions and intentions had a habit of getting into the bloodstream of our culture after he himself came up with new ones.

First published in The London Magazine.

Pinter pointed Heathcote towards drama. Together with Stoppard’s Arcadia, Heathcote Williams’s AC/DC gave me my most exciting theatrical nights. I attended both plays several times.

This great poet is a dramatist also therefore. And an actor and a film star. And a sculptor, draftsman and painter. And a Sixties apostle of love. And for nearly twenty years (or so he told me) an apostle of celibacy. And an editor and publisher. And a conjurer, a juggler, a fire-eater. And a man that swam with an Irish dolphin, who befriended him. And a companion, father and grandfather. And a cross-generational inspiration. My son named his son after Heathcote but old Heathcote (as we never thought him but called him to distinguish the two) was always and throughout a poet.

Heathcote’s intuitions and intentions had a habit of getting into the bloodstream of our culture after he himself came up with new ones. Four book length poems about the way we threaten the natural world, our very dwelling, sold thousands of copies and were widely translated. As a reviewer, I was teased a bit by the literati for describing the most famous of these, Whale Nation, as ‘the most moving long poem in English since The Waste Land and a thread to help us out of the maze Eliot found there.’ A winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, William Golding, and the Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, rescued me with equally passionate praise. So did the public. The book sold over 100,000 copies in hard back.

Heathcote’s writing was informed by his distinct and beautiful speaking voice. Today, young actors tend to enjamb — run together — Shakespeare’s iambic lines in order to bring them as close as possible to the ordinary speech of our times. There are passages in the plays where it may be sensible to do this. But the Comedies were to that time musicals and dance shows also and the great Tragedies and the late Comedies are operatic. You mustn’t mumble an aria or turn it into recitative. The late Derek Jarman made an astonishing film of The Tempest with Heathcote as Prospero. Seek it out at all costs. It is a model of how to capture the Shakespearian beat. It is the model.

Ours has been an age, too, when what most people want from poetry is post-Romantic: everyday emotional experience, personal experience, originally and memorably crafted. Heathcote would have none of this. He is a neo-classical poet. A public poet. An orator and entertainer. You could command attention, silence even, by reciting his poems through a megaphone in Hyde Park. He writes in the tradition of Dryden and Swift and Pope. He has been compared to Shelley. This works politically and for his anarchic energy. But the writing is a lot less misty, the wit closer to Byron’s. He cunningly adapted the rhetoric of tabloid journalism and both deepened and undermined it. He took ‘bad’ poetry, like the doggerel rhymes of William McGonigall, and put them to high satirical purpose. He is famous as an anarchic, counter-cultural writer. He is also a learned one and a formidable technician. In the original Beyond the Fringe the late Dudley Moore scored Colonel Bogey — you know the tune — as a Beethoven piano sonata. Heathcote could write a serious poem in a rude style or a rude poem in a serious style. But he was never a parodist. His unique and lovely voice commands all that he does.

There are signs that ‘me first’ perceptions are on the wane. Younger poets are intrigued by the public discourse of rap and reggae. Like Bob Dylan, Heathcote has always been a forerunner. Now, up there on Parnassus, I imagine the first person to shake Heathcote’s hand will be Alexander Pope. And then Byron and John Gay and Gay’s twentieth century disciple Berthold Brecht. And make no mistake. Uncle Tom Eliot, Old Possum himself, will be there in the queue; apologising, perhaps, for not having gone on with his near-the-knuckle Sweeney poems. And given Heathcote’s polemical force, Kipling is also in line. It is always the First Eleven that comes to mind when Heathcote’s work is mentionned.

As founding editor of The International Times, Heathcote was an inspirational anarchist. He was the Lloyd George, the Clement Attlee of squatting. He squatted himself for nearly 18 years, at Port Eliot, the Cornish stately home of his friend Peregrine St Germans — incidentally, head of T. S. Eliot’s family in the male line. He wrote his big books at Port. He made occasional raids on Peregrine’s log baskets to carve magic sculptures of old, unread, unreadable vellum-bound books. He raided, too, Peregrine’s vast nineteenth century billiard table to carve flawless netsuke from the billiard balls. I have a pear with a piece eaten out of it by a small, exquisitely carved wasp. On my desk it is still burrowing away, like Heathcote with the language, in the fruit.

In spite of his at times vitriolic writing (Donald Trump and Boris Johnson have recently been given a going over), Heathcote was a kindly, solicitous, beautifully mannered man, so long as you were not, like Pope’s dunces, considered a threat to civilisation. We were friends for more than fifty years and I honour and mourn him. He introduced me to his friend and admirer William Burroughs, the Hieronymus Bosch of modern literature. In life, Burroughs was a polite, tied-and-suited cove. He talked and dressed like a retired agent of the CIA. At school, I was a bit older than Heathcote and as it were a prefect. I once stopped him in the street, as I was supposed to, to rebuke him for wearing the wrong waistcoat or collar, or no waistcoat or collar, or some such public school flummery. Heathcote looked like a small, cross Dylan Thomas. I told him so. We got chatting about Thomas. I also discovered that Heathcote was the only other boy I’d met who had heard of Jackson Pollock; quite something, before the London Exhibition of 1956. The encounter put an end to my career as a disciplinarian.

Heathcote nearly put an end to my political career as well. When appointed to my first ministry of consequence in 1979, I arrived the first morning, eager-beaver like, before the civil servants. I saw a pile of welcoming mail, urgent cases etc, on the Principal Private Secretary’s desk. I didn’t have the nerve to open the envelopes before he processed them. But I did notice a familiar, large, distinct Italianate hand on a big envelope. I hid it away, took it home. It was a beautifully executed and altogether recognisable ink drawing of a Bacchanalian orgy involving the entire British establishment: royals, corgis, the lot. The composition owed something to Poussin. Months later I told Heathcote mine might have been the briefest ministerial appointment in history. ‘That would have made you a better person,’ he said. ‘An even better one,’ he added kindly. A gentlemanly anarchist. A great writer. An unforgettable man. And so funny. Only a few days ago, my wife Neiti received an email. ‘I am bed-blocking the NHS,’ Heathcote said ‘but will soon be out.’ How sadly true.

May God, who is not, after all, uncreative but the personification or source of creation, and His representative, a peaceable anarchist if ever there was one, rest and keep Heathcote Williams and comfort Diana and Lily and China and Charlie and all who mourn him and whose lives were lit for so long by his brilliance. And St Barnabas too, here in Jericho. And the lost revolutionaries of the Fourteenth of July.

This is a longer version of a tribute given by Grey Gowrie to Heathcote Williams at St Barnabos Church, Oxford on 14 July 2017. Heathcote Williams’ book Brexit Boris: From Mayor to Nightmare is published by Public Reading Rooms.

Slave to Fashion is the latest book by Safia Minney, and is made up of interviews and micro-documentaries with the men, women and children caught in slavery, making the clothes sold on our high streets, in Europe and the developing world. She is interviewed by Tansy Hoskins, author of Stitched Up: The Anti-Capitalist Book of Fashion.

What made you want to write this book?

When I founded ethical clothing brand People Tree over 20 years ago, I was shocked at how inhumane the fashion industry is and how little people know about how their clothes are made. I regularly visited and supported labour unions to learn about conventional fashion business and how Fair Trade fashion needed to be different. We developed the first Fair Trade standards for fair trade, organic cotton growing and garment manufacture.

When the British government Included supply chains in the Modern Slavery Act at the end of 2015, it suddenly meant that companies with a £36mn sales turn over or more, would have to report on what they were doing to eradicate slavery in their supply chains. I was really excited! This is a window of opportunity and has the potential to create a level playing field where fashion companies make clothes with respect to workers and the environment. It could mean the end to poverty wages and paying bribes to avoid paying fines for ignoring human rights & labour & environmental law abuses.

It’s shocking that criminal gangs and brokers use poverty and lack of power to force women and children into further vulnerability and slavery. Over the years I commonly heard the stories from women forced into servitude, ‘sold’ by their families and forced to accept the sexual advances by their male bosses and silenced by the fear of their children going hungry.

Fair Trade companies have proven partnership with their suppliers work and they have built systems of transparency and accountability. The Modern Slavery Act gives us a chance to move all businesses and Boards to do business to legal norms and deliver human rights for their workers, social equity and hopefully realign our economic systems within our planets limited resources.

Who was the audience you had in mind when you were writing it?

I hope Slave to Fashion will be easy to understand by anybody keen to learn more about fair trade, social justice, ethical fashion and new economics. I really wish that Fair Trade was taught in Geography as it was 10 years ago in most schools … good economics is everyone’s responsibility.

Three workers in a Bangladesh knitwear factory: Millat, aged 15, earns $38 a month. Nodi, 14, earns $66 a month. Mossaraf, 16, earns $44 a month

“Slave” is a very emotive and politically charged word, how have you defined slavery in the book?

Slave is an emotionally charged word and it is political too. It needs to be, slavery and exploitation is abhorrent. Slavery in my book means bonded, forced and child labour. It also covers human trafficking.

This book is full of interviews that will shock even people engaged in labour rights campaigns, were you shocked by what you found and are there any particular stories that have stayed with you?

The stories of people I met writing this book have all stayed with me. In particular the story of Seema in Delhi, India who faced regular sexual advances by her boss and who faced the choice of being assaulted or moving factory and losing all her employment benefits. Also the lovely children of 14 who make clothes for Europe and Japan who are happy to work but need the tea breaks, shorter working hours and a living wage. If only they had the right to belong to a union that would help protect them.

You have gone to great lengths to get first hand testimony from garment workers and bring much needed exposure to marginalised women’s voices. How important is this to you and why?
We hear too little from the workers themselves about what they want and need and what’s needed to empower people and communities. I wanted readers to hear from the people themselves. I founded the first ethical fashion brand to prove that another way of doing business is possible and I’m a campaigner.

Social dialogue and collaboration is key to holding businesses accountable and the ETI and other institutions are helping create a new way of doing business that In many ways copies the Fair Trade model. Today we also have tech companies to help unions and their members to get the word out and expose companies with Slavery and exploitation in their supply chains and help build strong local NGOs to enforce local laws. There are great campaigning organisations like CCC & I think we need to be more conscious as consumers. We need to be the voice of the voice less.

Protest by NGWF, the largest national trade union in Bangla Desh.

Why have you picked freedom of association and the living wage as the two things that most need to happen in the fashion industry? How can people support these aims?

After years of working in Bangladesh, India and other developing countries I think that working to pay a Living wages and Freedom of Association is the only way to bring workers the chance for a decent life, social justice and an equitable economy. These will eradicate slavery and the worst kinds of exploitation in fashion supply chains.

It also means that local associations can do what is needed to improve law enforcement locally. That’s important. Shoppers can buy from ethical brands, they can look out for labels that price this like WFTO, and they can ask their favourite brands what they are doing to eradicate modern slavery. They can write to their local MP too and ask for an ethical fashion manifesto. Baroness Lola Young is working on this now and the ethical fashion movement will support her.

In contrast to the subject mattered , Slave To Fashion is a beautiful looking book, that feels like a piece of art. What can you reveal about the design process? What can people taking on the fashion industry gain from great design?

I’ve never found that shocking topics are digestible or that they hold with a new audience unless they feel comfortable with the tool of communication. I’m glad of the format and graphics of STF make the subject matter easy to read. Hopefully that will stir the heart and make people promote awareness and act.

When I started People Tree in Japan 25 years ago,  I knew if the product wasn’t of quality and beauty, people wouldn’t keep buying it. And to make Fair Trade work it relies on equal partnership and sustained trade. Making beautiful product respects the artisan and telling the story of slavery needs to respect the people caught in it.

I understand you had an interesting path to funding this project – what were the pros and cons of crowdfunding and would you recommend it?

Using Kickstarter to raise money to fund the research, photography and production of the book was brilliant. 500 people supported it and raised £38k. The project didn’t cover my work, but that’s OK – like all the best projects – it was a labour of LOVE!

Safia Minney is a pioneer in ethical business. She is the founder of Fair Trade and sustainable fashion label, People Tree. Slave to Fashion is published by New Internationalist Books.

I read Brexit Boris: From Mayor to Nightmare by Heathcote Williams in one sitting. It was the first cold evening of early November and our cat was agitated by the sound of fireworks. My agitation was brought on by this book. I had to turn the heating down because I was starting to shake in anger.

How had so many been taken in by this tousel-hared (deliberate misspelling) bully. A man who sends his enemies emails with the words, ‘fuck off and die.’ A man who conspired with an old ‘Bully Them’ buddy to enable an act of serious physical assault.

Williams has said, ‘There’s a German word for people like Johnson: Backpfeifengesicht. It means ‘a face that needs to be punched’. I don’t want to get that close to him, but after finishing this book I would willingly get close enough to throw it at him.

Douglas Adams in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe wrote ‘It is a well-known fact that those people who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.’ Boris is certainly that, but also a throwback to an earlier age of imperialism and racism we thought might be gone, if not for good, on its way out.

For Boris, migrants ‘leech, bludge and scrounge off taxpayers,’ Ugandans are descibed as ‘piccaninnies’, Chinese workers as ‘puffing coolies’, Nelson Mandela moving Africa towards a ‘tyranny of black majority rule’.

Nearer to home Liverpudlians have ‘an excessive predilection for welfarism’. Bundled off by his party leader to apologise he ungraciously sulked that his trip was ‘Operation Scouse-Grovel’.

To his hatred of ‘the other’ may be added his love for those like himself and his family who have wealth and privilege. ‘We should,’ he said, ‘be humbly thanking the super-rich, not bashing them. They are victims just like the homeless … They are a put upon minority … like Irish travellers.’

By your enemies know your enemies. Conrad Black, neo-conservative past owner of the Daily Telegraph described Boris as, ‘Ineffably duplicitous’. Ex-Tory MP Jerry Hayes suggested ‘Boris has a morality which would make an Algerian brothel owner blush.’ Right-wing historian, Max Hastings, has said that ‘Boris is a gold medal egomaniac. I would not trust him with my wife nor – from painful experience – with my wallet,’ while ex-Tory MP Matthew Parris, has said Boris has ‘creeping ambition in a jester’s cap’.

There is nothing jester about Boris and his politics. Williams suggests that the man is not even against the EU, but used the Brexit campaign as a means to get to No 10. Having failed in this he left it to others to clear up his mess and, in the words of Lord Heseltine, ‘He’s like a general who leads his army to the sound of guns and at the sight of the battlefield abandons the field. I have never seen so contemptible and irresponsible a situation.’

Meanwhile on that battlefield others have been left wounded and some dead.

In the aftermath of the Boris-inspired Brexit vote the Daily Mirror reported: ‘Racist and xenophobic abuse, attacks and hate crimes are being reported all over the country.’ In Polly Toynbee’s view: ‘racist graffiti and abuse was given a new license by Boris Johnson, who adopted Nigel Farage’s anti-immigrant tactics.’

Williams descibes UKIP as a kind of Waitrose version of the BNP. Boris is more like a Fortnum and Mason’s version.

This man is now our Foreign Secretary! As Williams tells us, ‘The most indiscreet man in public life is now also in charge of M16 and GCHQ: a man with no moral compass is in charge of a senior department of military intelligence.’

Mind you was it ever different? Perhaps like the Trump presidential candidacy in the USA, and despite the man’s efforts to hide his real identity with his deliberate bumbling dishevelment, Boris is not the joker in the pack after all. He is the man who exposes the unmasked face of all the Kings, Queens and Princes.

Brexit Boris is illustrated by some of the UK’s top cartoonists, including Steve Bell, Gerald Scarfe and Ralph Steadman.

David Wilson is author of Left Field: The Memoir of a Lifelong Activist, which you can buy here…

Brexit Boris: From Mayor to Nightmare

Uncovered here are the lies, the sackings, the betrayals, the racist insults, the brush with criminality, that should have got Boris Johnson disbarred from ever being considered for high office.

Now in its second edition, available from Public Reading Rooms:
Price: £8 post free

Source: Morning Star

A new book, Human Cargo by Matthew Crampton, gives a sobering historical context with its subtitle Stories and Songs of Emigration, Slavery and Transportation setting out the author’s stall.

In an age when David Cameron can throw around racist jibes about “a bunch of migrants,” the stress here is on the “human” part of the title — telling the stories of displaced people from the Highland clearances to the transatlantic slave trade, the pressganged, transportees and those forced from their native lands by poverty and war.

Crampton, an author and historian, is also an accomplished folk singer and this book is a companion piece to a stage show combining first and second-hand accounts with songs of the times. As he writes in his introduction, the few first-hand accounts from past centuries are all from men who survived the horrors and led successful lives.

Folk songs are a way we can “listen opaquely” to the others, a voice for the voiceless thousands who starved or drowned or died of disease or beatings as human cargo. The voices here range from shanties to broadsheet ballads to a popular Italian song about the dangers awaiting those who took passage to the US.

Among the dozens of song lyrics, Crampton has dug up some little-heard gems that throw light on his subject from all sorts of unusual angles. To name just two, The Flying Cloud is the confessional ballad of a slaver on the gallows, while Dean Cadalan Samhach is a Gaelic lullaby sung by exiles in the Carolinas.

Crampton draws a straight line from the abuses of the 18th and 19th century to those of today. We learn first-hand, from the freed African slave Olaudah Equiano, of the crowded, lethally filthy conditions of the slave ships.

Slave or free, conditions weren’t so different for the poor Scots, Irish and others who paid for passage to the New World. They were lied to by shipping agents such as the notorious William Tapscott, crammed into pens unfit to house pigs, and forced into near-slavery in the Americas.

We move straight from Tapscott to the present-day human smugglers charging refugees thousands of pounds for passage across the Med, stacked like cargo in tiny rustbucket vessels, covered in vomit and excrement and in constant peril of drowning.

If the songs have changed then the motives behind all this human movement remain constant — war, land clearances, sex slavery, exploitation and profit.

The author has a keen eye for the telling insight and one incident speaks volumes. In 1781, the Zong, an incompetently run British slave ship, missed its destination in Jamaica and began running out of water. To save the crew and some of its cargo, its captain decided to throw dozens of the slaves overboard, alive, into shark-infested waters. As soon as the slaughter was done, heavy rain began — filling the water barrels and rendering the massacre pointless. The ship’s owners, instead of facing trial for murder, sued the insurers for compensation.

As you can imagine, this is often a dark and harrowing read. But it’s a vital one to help understand the timeless reasons people have been driven from their homes — and others have been driven to profit from them.

Human Cargo by Matthew Crampton is published by Muddler Books, price £9.99. More details and to buy.

Matthew Crampton talks about his book Human Cargo

Book Launch 27 March with Diane Abbott MP: Free Movement and Beyond:
Register for your place (free)…

Source: Morning Star

True to form, his latest album Another Day contains a collection of songs inspired by the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party and it’s a great antidote to the narrative spun by the corporate media.

One Strong Voice is a powerful tribute to the memory of Tony Benn, while There Will Be Pain was written in response to the welfare cuts introduced by the coalition government and The Way the Rainbow is Made is a denunciation of the role organised religion has played in stoking wars and bigotry.

While those themes should in themselves be enough to appeal to Morning Star readers, the real standout number has to be The Paper Song.

Each verse refers to readers of all the right-wing newspapers and the lies they spin but Ashley doesn’t let any aficionado of the Guardian, with its hostility to Corbyn, off the hook.

“He thinks it guards the lefties, but it’s never guarded those. It’s guarding the establishment, but it’s wearing rebel clothes,” Ashley sings. And, yes, the Morning Star does get mentioned as the only one that’s true with: “Every one except the Morning Star should have a Public Health Warning: ‘This paper carries poison every day’.”

Definitely an inspiring album for Star readers and it’s one to recommend to any misguided friends who think the Guardian represents an alternative worldview to the Daily Mail or Telegraph.

Available here: Amazon…
For a signed copy via PayPal, direct from Steve Ashley, email:
[email protected] for Information

VIDEO: Another Day

More reviews of Steve Ashley…

Another such slogan reads: “With the State there is no freedom, freedom exists when there is no State.” This is the Utopian Lenin, who dared the Party to “DREAM”. The Lenin who saw those democratic organisations originating in workplaces and districts – i.e the Soviets  –  as abolishing the State and the Party!

Yet there is no doubt that for the Left, Lenin poses a problem, a century after that moment when he and the Bolsheviks unleashed the process of revolution. For many that first slogan was to be re-formulated as Party hacks + forced industrialisation = totalitarianism. That this latter form is one we associate with Stalinism leads one to ask-  was it already inherent in bolshevism?” That question I leave hanging.

But there is no doubt that Bolshevism in power under Lenin was the – perhaps inadvertent- midwife for some fifteen years of a culture that can be called revolutionary. This was revolutionary not in the sense of a Heartfield attacking  capitalism and fascism, i.e. a critical revolutionary art, but a celebratory art form.

Here I want to celebrate some of those achievements, and in so doing offer for thought the notion of a culture which rethought that very notion as it existed in the West, i.e. a practise both high and autonomous. This will reveal an idea closer to the anthropological reading, i.e. one that contains- dialectically- the idea of the ‘high,’ and also embraces forms of the’ low’. Let us say a culture that can embrace abstract art and the newspaper, or even a sweet wrapper. Not only that, but a culture which has at its centre a commitment to a certain politics: the politics of socialism.

Such simplification of course hides some problematic facts. The Left, then as now, loves factionalism. So alongside those who enthused about the newspaper were those convinced that the future of literature lay in the remodelled 19th century novel. Alongside those embracing the multi-reproducible image of the photograph, were those advocating a19th century realism in paint. This might be further reduced to a tussle between those believing (as did Lenin) that the culture appropriate to the USSR was to draw its lessons from that of the bourgeoisie, albeit with a ‘social’ slant. And those on the other hand who were  committed to a wholesale dislodgement of the Academy and its bourgeois support. It is basically with the latter that I am concerned.

My first object is a drawing by Yuri Annenkov for a mass festival of 1920 (1). It celebrates the moment three years earlier when troops and Bolshevik supporters “ Stormed the Winter Palace.” That moment “(iconic” is the right word here) when the Bolsheviks deposed Karensky and the Provisional Government.

1. Annenkov “Design for a mass pageant”

1a. Storming the Winter Palace

The photograph 1a shows the actual re-enactment, sometimes published as the real thing.

Annenkov was one of those who found the new order to be not as sympathetic as he would have liked, and left the USSR for Paris.

02 El Lissitsky: New Man

My second illustration is by El Lissitsky: it’s the figure of the “New Man” (2), one of the characters in an electro-spectacular production of a theatrical piece called “Victory Over the Sun’ This is dated 1923. The first production of the play seems to have been rather makeshift. On stage in 1913 characters moved around in geometrical outfits designed by Kasimir Malevich.  Makeshift or not, it’s known to art history as the first manifestation of the elements of Malevich’s Suprematism, i.e. a non-figurative art based on geometric forms. Such abstract art was soon to become prolific in Russia. Its relevance to Lissitzky is twofold. Firstly he saw the need to project this theatrical piece into the mechanolatric world seemingly envisioned with the advent of the new post 1917 situation. Secondly it records his new position in the role of educator.

After the revolution many academicians, previously scandalised by Malevich and a host of other non-figurative artiists, left for the West. In their wake the avant-garde moved in. Malevich established an art school in Vitebsk, and Lissitsky became one of its staff. The institute was called Unovis, i.e. project for a new art. Soon one was to see their abstract art adding a dynamic character to the streets of Vitebsk and its buses. We hear of students walking half way across Russia to join the community.

Lissitsky’s figure has become emblematic: here is the New Man of the Revolution. Mechanised, electrified, the red star in his eyes, his pace taking him into the future. As a project of course it could not be realised, Russian technology famously ”lagged behind that of the West”, not that the West could have fulfilled Lissitsky’s plan.

Like so much it remains a wonderful image of the Utopian.(Though some might find such a Utopia scary).  Lissitsky’s move from this rarefied zone was to turn to the photgraph, a new means of production first taken up by “artists” in the USSR.

03 Kozlinsky: Poster

My third object is a poster by Kozlinsky, (3) celebrating the Paris Commune. The text reads “The dead of the Paris Commune have risen up under the Red Banner of the Soviets.” Such posters produced for the Russian Telegraph Agency were known as Rosta windows.

They were produced using stencils – aiming for some kind of mass distribution. We refer to that whole phenomenon as Agit-Prop. If some of this lacked sophistication, it certainly did not lack a powerful charge. Many pieces remain inspiring.

The way the figure fills the space, the flag bursting out of the frame ( like Delacroix’s famous Revolution) is one tie to history.

But what we might also note is this appeal to history; an appeal, and vindication of the role of the Communards of 1871, their retribution. It is also an indication of the new State calling up its ancestry, celebrating its intellectual heritage.  Naturally there were to be monuments to Marx and Engels, but also to Rosa Luxemburg. Invoked too were the visionaries and poets from Goethe, Schiller and Heine, to anarchists – Bakunin, Kropotkin and Fourier. All found their way on to new or detourned monuments. Even famous assassins were invoked. I find this extraordinary. It is to the credit of the Soviets that this happened. And that it took place in the time of Civil War and Foreign intervention.

04. Adolf Strakov poster

My next object is a poster by Adolf Strakov (4). Its message reads 8^th March. Women’s Emancipation Day. 8^th March 1917 saw a strike by Russian women, a strike of four days, for Bread and Peace. It initiated the fall of the Tsar and the inauguration of the (short-lived) Provisional Government. It has since been internationalised. The USSR was definitely in the forefront of this move.

As Lewin writes –“Mironov is right to insist that ‘no other country in the world has experienced such a high level of female participation in the world of work and culture.’ (Though as he also writes ‘this was not the case with regard to the Party hierarchy.’)

This image, which prefigures that of Kozlinsky, has the same diagonals, (here chimneys – many women entered factories at this time) and the same red flag. The woman depicted also looks ahead to the future. She is both strong and beautiful, her working clothes somehow having an air of  the future called up by sci-fi images. Again, simplicity equals dynamism and power, and the poster equals mass distribution.

05. Gustav Klucis lino-cut

The fifth object is a lino-cut by Gustav Klucis;  (5). This is a project (unbuilt) for a street kiosk. Again the concern is the mass media as it existed then. There is a screen at the top for projected images, and below we have racks for newspapers. Lenin had foreseen the need for the new media – particularly radio and film; and Klucis was an undoubted Leninist. We have a collage from him of Lenin striding across the world with an electricity pylon tucked under his arm. In fact Klucis left us a whole portfolio of Marxist/Lenininst works. As for electricity that too was high on Lenin;s priorities, witness my opening sentence.

Although the kiosk was a wooden structure it has all the hallmarks of Modernism, a geometric foundation laid bare, the whole being energised by diagonals and its simplicity making for rapid reproduction.

Klucis was a true believer. In the 1930s he moved to photomontage – some of his most famous images showing Stalin. It did him no good; in 1935 we are in the counter-revolution and Klucis is one of the many – the millions – to disappear.

06. Rodchenko poster

My next item is a poster by Rodchenko. (6) These things I have chosen might seem to have something repetitive about them, But we are dealing with a country that recognises itself as ‘backward’ in relation to the West; a country with 60% illiteracy, and a group of artists anxious to serve the State, and communicate with the masses.

Whether Rodchenko’s poster did that, we do not know. What we do know is that it has become an icon of graphic design, reproduced endlessly, appropriated, altered and enjoying an afterlife he could never have considered.

The woman is Lily Brik, mistress of the great poet of the Revolution – Mayakovsky  He of the slogan  ‘The squares are our palettes, the street our brushes’

What Rodchenko ( co worker with Mayakovsky on hundreds of Rosta posters) has Lily declare, in that wonderful image of abstract design become megaphone, is ‘Books on all kinds of knowledge’; published by Lengiz – a State publishing house.

This dream of a mass, a people, that is both literate and educated is one we still live and struggle with. The failure of that dream in the West being all too obvious. ”The ruling ideas of the time are those of the ruling class” as Marx only too clearly put it.

07 Shaiket photograph

Next up is a photograph by Shaiket (7) It shows peasants welcoming – almost as believers at communion  -the coming of electricity. As mentioned, Lenin envisioned  this modern wonder throughout the country . And he had tapped into a great reservoir of hope. With the advent of such moments as that shown in Shaiket’s photograph we have to note a profusion of names entering the Soviet style of nomenclature – Electrifikatsia, Dinamo, Industriya  Others names  included Barrikada, Octyabrina- and  Avantgarda.

In this penetration into the Russian ‘byt’, everyday life, we have further evidence that this was an extraordinary period.

08 Dziga Vertov film

Next we have a still from ‘Man with a Movie Camera’, (8) a film made by Dziga Vertov in 1929. To me this has always seemed the greatest cultural artefact of the Russian revolution. Ostensibly the film is a documentary, following everyday life in the USSR, from getting up to going to bed. One has to say “ostensibly” because this is also a movie celebrating movie making. And it has been voted the greatest documentary ever.

We see people going to work, milling through the streets but we also see Kaufmann – the cameraman filming them. He is then montaged on top of his camera, shown chasing his subject on a motor cycle, turning the camera’s crank. We see him capture episodes, and follow these to the editing room where we see the shots being cut, spliced together or discarded. We also see an audience come to view the film, with us watching them…. In the final five minutes the whole thing is repeated at vertiginous speed. It’s an assault on our senses. We need those earlier moments, at the beach, in the club as periods of calm to remember

In the first account I read of it in 1965 Jay Leyda spoke of ‘reeling out of the cinema.’ I saw it with Richard Hamilton – his comment ‘Everyone should see that movie – once.’ But in its desire to record ‘life slap up’ and to subject that to the potentialities of the cinematic apparatus it gives us a definite sense of what the Soviet utopia might have been.

09 Varvara Stepanova poster

At (9) we have a poster by Varvara Stepanova. As Lewin mentioned, women definitely moved into some positions of power. She married Rodchenko, and like him became a ‘designer’: of stage sets, books, clothing, and, as here, posters. She should be here in her own right as one of the Russian ‘Amazons ‘ of the avant-garde’. But she features here, not only as a photo-montagiste, but as one documenting a specific moment; the fulfilment of the first five year plan.

These plans, inaugurated by Stalin, under the rubric ‘keeping up with the West’, mark a seismic change in the cultural life of the USSR, though this is not yet evident in Stepanova’s rather jolly image.

By the date of its production we are entering the’ counter-revolution’. Soon those Bolsheviks responsible for the literacy project, the light hand and willingness to contemplate and practise various cultural styles are being rounded up, tried, and disappeared.

‘Socialism in one country’ might sound pragmatic; in practise it was another horrific variant of totalitarianism. Stalin ruined the very notion of socialism; whether he was later denounced or not , that stain remains.

In 1919 the (yet again) one-time abstract artist Vladimir Tatlin designed a ‘Monument to the Third International’. This monument was to be a building – one to house the delegates coming to the Third International, while they pondered how to spread the revolution. Higher than the Eiffel Tower, and straddling the Neva, it became for many years THE symbol of the new cultural ambitions of those who supported the Socialist regime. Gigantic and electronically and technologically astounding, its internal buildings revolving within a great spiral, it was perhaps the iconic image of the revolution.

10. Vladimir Tatlin glider

Twelve years later he gives us a glider or ornithopter (10), a flying machine taking its inspiration from nature, from his study of birds – cranes in particular.  This is no longer part of the mechanolatry of the early years of the Revolution. It has no motor, it’s a piece of craftsmanship. It is difficult to see it as serving the State. But, what it does have is beauty, a word Tatlin uses very emphatically, a word not usually bandied  about by the avant-garde of the twenties. I’ve always seen it as a symbol of the desire to escape, as well as part of the wonderful dream of flying, and as such its poignancy is not easily forgotten. My illustration is of a reconstruction from 1969 for a five year old child

It, with the other objects mentioned here, leads me to cherish these few years of fervour, of sheer inventiveness, commitment, and energy.

This is the centenary of the revolution, vilified and now buried in all but a few outposts. One of which, paradoxically, is the Royal Academy, right next to Burlington Arcade. Making  good now by showing us some of these artefacts. It’s just a pity we can’t relive the atmosphere on the streets of Leningrad or Vitebsk from one hundred years ago.

Still, in these baleful days we must be grateful for small mercies.

Source:  Hastings Independent

What makes this acerbic hatchet job such an especially delightful bowl of schadenfreude is its deadly accuracy. Every regrettable Boris quote such as the wildly racist “Left to their own devices, the natives would rely on nothing but the instant carbohydrate gratification of the plantain” or his description of the uber-rich as “a put-upon minority like Irish travellers and the homeless” is surgically researched and annotated by source, location and time, along with every swivel-eyed career move in Johnson’s mendacious ascent of the greasy pole.

The question of course is; how did this bumptious, over privileged hooligan, (whose mindless cruelty reached a sort of apotheosis at Oxford’s exclusive Bullingdon Club, where the entertainment might occasionally consist of stoning a caged fox to death with champagne bottles during a gluttonous banquet), gain any political credence whatsoever?

How did this duplicitous overgrown schoolboy manage to establish himself as a floppy-haired national treasure, a mayor of London, and finally, via some shockingly two-faced Brexit jockeying and a brief but unsuccessful attempt at becoming Prime Minister, become foreign secretary?

Williams charts his life, and that of his equally unscrupulous father, with terrifying precision, and riven as it is with hair-raising descriptions of violent cronies like fraudster and PG Wodehousesoundalike Darius Guppy, is not a pretty story.

In my opinion, the sooner this magnificent account of political flimflammery is filmed or televised the sooner Johnson’s ersatz star will burn up and plummet to earth, and the better it will be for all of us.

There is a wonderful quote from Pulp Fiction which sums up the fat fornicator perfectly; “Just because you are a character doesn’t mean you have character”, but my favourite has to be this: “There’s a German word for people like Johnson: Backpfeifengesicht. It means a face that needs to be punched. Read this book!

Brexit Boris: From Mayor to Nightmare, by Heathcote Williams, now in its second edition, is available from Public Reading Rooms.

Price: £8 post free

Note: American Porn, Heathcote Williams’ poetic dissection of that other oddly coiffured star of the new age of permanent adolescence, Donald Trump, has been released by Thin Man Press. Read more…