“the devil and mr casement” – talk by jordan goodman, 23/01/2010

SHS PUBLIC MEETING
Author and Historian Jordan Goodman speaks on “The Devil and Mr Casement: A Crime Against Humanity”

Saturday 23rd January 2010 at 2pm Marchmont Community Centre, 62 Marchmont St, London WC1 (Near Russell Square Tube).

In September 1910, Roger Casement arrived in the Amazon to investigate reports of widespread human rights abuses committed by a British registered company in the vast forests stretching along the Putumayo River. There, the Peruvian entrepreneur Julio César Arana ran an area the size of Belgium as his own private fiefdom, operating a systematic programme of torture, exploitation and mass murder against his employees.

Casement sought to expose the international collaboration that allowed these appalling atrocities to take place, tracing links all the way to the heart of the City of London and Stock Exchange.

Jordan Goodman, former honorary research fellow at the Wellcome Trust, will describe this courageous expose of British imperialism by the future Irish revolutionary Roger Casement.

The talk will be followed by discussion. All welcome. The meeting is supported by Verso, the publishers of Jordan Goodman’s new book, “The Devil and Mr Casement”

Jonathan Carritt on Bill Carritt and Communist Party electoral strategy

I found an election poster in a cupboard recently. My father, Gabriel “Bill” Carritt, was flown home from the battle for Mandalay to take part in the 1945 general election. He had been in Burma since 1944 serving with the Welch Regiment, 19th Indian “Dagger” Division of the XIV “forgotten” Army.

He stood as the Communist Party candidate in the Westminster Abbey constituency and got 17.6% of the vote. He had contested the same constituency in a by-election in May 1939 as the candidate of a united front of Labour, Communist, Liberal and anti-Chamberlain Conservatives, campaigning on the single issue of collective security against appeasement and winning 33% of the vote. This by-election aroused national interest with even a couple of anti-Chamberlain ministers (probably including Churchill) secretly funding the campaign.

Jonathan Carritt, Chiswick

This kind of support may seem unlikely but at that time my father was secretary of the League of Nations Union Youth Movement and at some point in 1939 Churchill had invited the leaders of various British youth movements to lunch at Claridges to discuss opposition to fascism, collective security and the possibility of a united campaign. Those attending included John Gollan of  the YCL, Ted Willis, leader of the Labour League of Youth, Garner Evans of the Young Liberals, Gordan Cree, secretary of the Guild of Cooperative Youth, Timberlake representing the League of Nations Union Student Movement,  my father from the LNUYM, Mary Owen, a leftwinger from the YWCA, a representative of the YMCA and one from the Student Christian Movement. Churchill asked each guest in turn to speak on how to proceed in the current situation. The only one to be confrontational was Ted Willis. As a result of this meeting, money or a campaign was made available through Duncan Sandys, Churchill’s son-in-law.

In the local elections which were held later in 1945 my father, my mother Dr Joan Carritt and Joyce Allergant were all  elected as Communist councillors for the City of Westminster. They served until 1949 when they lost out to the growing Cold War hysteria. The figures quoted are taken from “Parliamentary Elections and the British Communist Party, a historical analysis 1920-1978″. Date of publication is given as June 1978. The author is not named but comments, criticisms and corrections were invited to “C. Ravden, 1 Bushberry Road, London E9″. This booklet is itself of some interest. It was produced “as one branch’s effort to raise money for the National Fund and as an attempt to look analytically at the party’s parliamentary elections. Hopefully it will help party members judge the electoral fight as well as providing a few pages of party history.”

Throughout the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s there was constant questioning of the wisdom of devoting a high proportion of the Communist Party’s resources and effort to contesting parliamentary elections in a first- past-the-post system. The sub-heading of the booklet “£68,000 well spent?” perhaps indicates that this was a particular branch’s way of diplomatically expressing its reservations. £68,000 was, it claimed, the amount handed to the Exchequer by the Communist Party in lost deposits at parliamentary elections. “It is also roughly the amount collected each year for the CP’s National Fund. it….amounts to little more than a £1,000 for each year of the party’s existence. However, it is a lot of money to spend without care.”

Correspondence: Tom Bailey

60 Years On – The Legacy of Mao Zedong

Sixty years ago the Chinese Communist Party came to power, creating the People’s Republic of China, with Mao Zedong proclaiming “The Chinese People have stood up”. The 60 years of rule by the CCP have seen great triumphs and achievements for the people of China, as well as great tragedy and loss; the biggest of which being the Great Leap Forward.

The attempt at the great tasks and goals of the Great Leap nevertheless should be viewed in their historical context. The 1950s had been a decade of many victories for China, with successes in the growth of industry, collectivisation of farms, increased grain yields, and the defeat of US troops in the Korean War. What had seemed impossible had become possible under the new collective system.

Unfortunately the same was not true for the Great Leap Forward, “catching up with Britain” overnight was not possible. However, the impact of the weather in causing the famine and failure of the Great Leap Forward should not be forgotten. For example, in June 1958, a rainstorm with a precipitation of 249mm caused over 20 rivers to overflow and wrecked nearly 70 dams and reservoirs. In June the following year there was also freak weather conditions in some parts of the country as heavy rain caused considerable damage to crops. In July 1960, a hurricane ravaged the whole county ruining nearly much of the harvest.

Although the famine caused an unacceptable number of deaths, and this should not be ignored, the number of deaths should be put in perspective. The crude death rate in China in 1958 was 11.98 deaths per 1000. The famine then caused this rate to rise to 14.59 in 1959 then peaking at 25.43 in 1960, then declining to 14.24 in 1961. The great rise in death rates is surely a stain on the CCP’s record and on Mao’s too; however, it should be noted that in 1936 the crude death rate per 1000 was 28 – a number that not even the worst year of the Great Leap Forward famine reached.

Although in 1936 the Nationalist government was in a civil war with the Communist guerillas, as Minqi Li notes in his The Rise of China, the Nationalist Government, “Probably only surveyed and reported data from areas under its own control, which were comparatively peaceful and better-off”. Even so, in 1960 a normal year in India, a country that won its independence at a similar time as the PRC, yet had not been ravaged by as much war and civil war as China, the crude death rate was 24.6 per 1000, only 0.8 lower.

Lessons from the Diggers

SHS meeting on 19 November 2009: report by David Morgan

The Socialist History Society did Gerrard Winstanley proud when it hosted its celebratory anniversary meeting on 19th November; not only did the event fill the room at Conway Hall to capacity, with standing room only, the calibre of both the platform contributions and the discussion that followed made Winstanley and his ideas truly come alive again.

It emerged clearly that there is still a very keen interest today in the ambitious, highly original and subversive arguments first articulated by Winstanley four hundred years ago during the turmoil of the “English Revolution” when the Digger leader patiently reasoned in pamphlet after pamphlet for a new society where all members of the community would be free from exploitation one from another.

Debating in a Biblical language and using Biblical texts as supporting evidence for his revolutionary arguments because there was no other body of ideas around at the time, Gerrard Winstanley represents one of the first voices from the working population of this country, indeed any country, to put forward a plausible and sustained programme for what the speakers, Professors Ann Hughes and Tom Corns, both described as a “Socialist” form of social organisation.

He uncompromisingly challenged lordship, kingship, private ownership of land, the commercial system of “buying and selling”, living off unearned income and hired labour. No real matter that some assert that his ideas were more akin to anarchism and that in the days of Christopher Hill and A L Morton, who did so much to rescue the “True Levellers” for an earlier generation with their books like “The World Turned Upside Down” and “The World of the Ranters”, Winstanley would more likely have been regarded as a “forerunner of Communism”; or that he has even been hailed as a pioneer of the green movement; no, the really important fact is that people are keenly reading and debating Winstanley with all the passion as if he were writing about today. People, including the scholars who have now produced his complete works published by Oxford University Press, are taking him entirely seriously as an original philosopher who could more than hold his own when debating with the mighty and the privileged.

The meeting started with a highly spirited written contribution from Professor David Loewenstein, of Wisconsin, one of the joint editors of the new Winstanley edition, who for obvious reasons could not be present in London for the occasion. His message (see below) was read out by SHS Secretary David Morgan, who chaired the meeting. There is no need to explain Loewenstein’s arguments except to say that they proved extremely effective in setting the mood of wholehearted enthusiasm and full engagement with the ideas of a 17th Century toiler of the field. Loewenstein’s two fellow editors were the meeting’s distinguished speakers.

Professor Corns then delivered the first of two short talks, on the heretical ideas of Winstanley setting the development of his thought within the context of the growth of dissent during the revolutionary years. Professor Corns looked in detail at how Winstanley’s ideas, although rooted in his time in many ways, also diverged from his contemporaries in their materialism and secularism. His plan to start digging on the common land was on the face of it a simple gesture, but it was closely rooted in a highly original system of thought that he had been developing which was based on an egalitarian reading of the Christian teaching.

Corns explained Winstanley’s contention that his ideas came to him “in a trance” not as some spiritual awakening but as a metaphorical explanation by the writer of the fact that he had been able to use his reasoning to develop some compelling new ideas. It is not without relevance that Winstanley was prone to describing god as “the great creator reason” for it was through the power of reason rising up in all men and women that his new egalitarian commonwealth would be established. Similarly, when Winstanley speaks of Christ, he uses the term as a symbol of the benevolent power that resides within each individual on earth.

Professor Corns was followed by Professor Ann Hughes who spoke about the Diggers and the history of the English revolution. She explained the decision to set up the Digger communities in 1648 as born by a degree of desperation; the years 1648-49 saw one of the worst winters for years, starvation and business failures were grim realities that poorer people like Winstanley had to contend with. Winstanley had sided with the Republican cause and supported the execution of Charles I but he came to realise that it was not enough to dispose of one monarch; what needed removing was “kingly power” which he interpreted much more widely than the institution of kingship. It was every kind of human behaviour that led one person to rule over another, Professor Hughes explained.

In his second contribution, Professor Corns, a leading literary critic, subjected Winstanley’s prose and poetry to a close reading in order to establish him as one of the most original writers of his time. By doing so, the professor suggested that Winstanley could be read alongside Milton, Marvell and Bunyan as a key figure in the English literary tradition of radicalism and dissent.

The Socialist History Society can be extremely proud that it had organised the only meeting in London to mark the 400th anniversary of Gerrard Winstanley’s birth.

David Loewenstein

Making Winstanley Respectable

David Loewenstein, Professor of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison, prepared this message for the Socialist History Society’s meeting on 19th November. It was read out at the meeting and drew much applause.

I think it’s truly wonderful that the Socialist History Society has chosen to honour Gerrard Winstanley with this meeting. He remains the foremost radical socialist English thinker and activist of the early modern period and one of the significant radical social thinkers of any time. He’s also an English prose writer of exceptional power, vividness, and distinctiveness.

I regret deeply than I cannot be there to celebrate with you and with my outstanding fellow editors of the new edition of Winstanley’s works, Thomas Corns and Ann Hughes. Winstanley famously proclaimed that “if thou dost not act, though dost nothing”. For me “acting” during 2009 has necessarily been of a very limited academic sort: seeing the new massive 1000-page edition of Winstanley through the press. This new Oxford edition will, paradoxically, make Gerrard Winstanley respectable. For the first time his works will appear in a fully annotated edition published by a significant academic press.

But the point, of course, is that Winstanley the Digger and great visionary was not “respectable.” No other writer in the English language wrote so moving about class conflict and class inequalities. Few English radical writers have analyzed with such acuteness the abuses of institutions of political, religious, and economic power. Few English writers have dared to envision, with such conviction, a world completely transformed in political, religious, and economic terms—a world that would be a “common treasury” for all. We sadly still live in a world of great social inequality. My county, the United States, the wealthiest nation in the world, now has some 49 million people without adequate food (as reported recently in The New York Times); we have 47 million people with no health insurance at all; we enlarge and invest in a huge military machine, while neglecting our most basic social institutions and services—the institutions and services which help ordinary citizens. We live in a world where religion too often fuels culture wars, where Muslims and Christians engage in stereotyping, demonisation and mutual recrimination. It is a world where the major institutions and organisations of one of the great religions – Judaism (my religion) – align themselves with a state that mistreats and brutalises another people. Persecution and intolerance are not things of the past.

No, Winstanley is not “respectable” and for that we should treasure him all the more: he challenged and questioned orthodoxies and he challenged and questioned all kinds of institutions of power—ecclesiastical, political, and economic. And he did so in some of the most memorable prose in the English language. We need his deep mistrust of institutions of power and his insights into the multifarious ways that they can damage and constrain the lives of ordinary people. We also need his visionary idealism – his belief that the world can change and be a better place for all people – and his conviction that we must take concrete action to match our writings and words.

As Wordsworth famously addressed Milton, so I would address Winstanley: “thou should’st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee.” Here I would make only one crucial modification: Winstanley, it is “the world [that] hath need of thee.”

leads on Clara Zetkin?

Hi Folks.

I’m researching Clara Zetkin’s reception and influence in British politics (1886-1933), and would be pleased to learn of any references to her (positive or negative) in any biographies, memoirs, diaries, correspondence, etc., of British figures.

She was involved with the Second and Third Internationals, and founded the International Socialist Women’s Movement; she communicated with the SDF, the BSP, the Women’s Labour League and the ILP, and was in contact with Eleanor Marx-Aveling, Dora Montefiore, Margaret MacDonald, Fenner Brockway, J. T. Murphy, Margaret Bondfield, Marion Phillips and Mary Longman, amongst others. I’d be interested in references to Zetkin’s contact with these people and groups – but more crucially any additional contacts with Britons (or emigres living in Britain, such as Friedrich Engels, Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, etc.).

Anything – no matter how minor – would be a great help. Email me on H_G_W_(at)hotmail.com with your leads. Ta.

Dr John S. Partington
Reading, UK

Nina Fishman (1946-2009)

Obituary in the Guardian of this ‘historian, political activist and outstanding character of the British left’ by Donald Sassoon – condolences from Socialist History News to Nina Fishman’s friends and family

With the death of the political historian and activist Nina Fishman, who has died of cancer aged 63, the British left has lost one of its most outstanding and original personalities. Born in San Francisco, Nina was a genuine “red baby”. Her father, Leslie, an academic economist, was a member of the Communist party of the US. Hounded out of the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1940s, he took refuge at Idaho State College and, later, at the University of Colorado, in Boulder. Nina attended junior school in Boulder and then Boulder high school (interrupted for a year, in 1962, when she and her family came to Britain with her father who had a visiting fellowship at the University of Cambridge ). It was in Boulder that Nina gave her first public performance – as Macduff’s son in Macbeth at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in 1959. Three years later, at the age of 16, she moved centre-stage as Juliet.

The family moved to Britain permanently in 1967. Leslie taught at Warwick University and then became a professor at Keele University, in Staffordshire. Nina had preceded them by starting an economics degree at Sussex University, then regarded as a hotbed of radicalism. She graduated in 1968 with a third-class degree, unsurprisingly given that she spent most of her final year on the picket-line supporting the striking building workers at the Barbican development in the City of London. By then, she knew that history would be her abiding intellectual passion. She started a history degree, part-time, at Birkbeck College. This time she got a first.

She stayed on to write a doctoral thesis under Eric Hobsbawm, which after many years became The British Communist party and the Trade Unions, 1933-45 (1994). The central concept of this work was that of “revolutionary pragmatism”. Against those who regarded British communists as mere Moscow stooges, Nina argued that the majority of party cadres and leaders pursued a balancing act. In the grand sphere of international politics they remained loyal followers of the Soviet Union, which they regarded as the centre of world revolution; in the more earthly world of day-to-day struggles the party’s strategy was determined by “life itself” – a favourite phrase of Nina’s that she used to describe the ideological pragmatism of Harry Pollitt, general secretary of the Communist party of Great Britain, and his colleagues. The British communists, she explained, believed there would be a revolution when life itself would bring about a revolutionary situation. In the meantime, reformism was the thing. No wonder Eduard Bernstein, the founder of evolutionary socialism, supplanted Vladimir Lenin as her hero.

For Nina, the trade union leader who best epitomised “life itself” was Arthur Horner and she devoted the last decade of her life to writing his biography (to be published in 2010). Horner, a lifelong communist, was the architect of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), which he led from 1946 to 1959. He championed the establishment of the social democratic settlement after the second world war – an outstanding exemplar, in Nina’s view, of revolutionary pragmatism – and he was one of the saner people within the hierarchy of the NUM, she would add with a smile.

In 1980, she taught shop stewards at the Harrow College of Higher Education, where she met Phil MacManus, with whom she shared the rest of her life. The college subsequently merged with the Polytechnic of Central London, and ultimately became the University of Westminster, an institution Nina always referred to as Regent Street Poly. She became professor of industrial and labour history in 2004. In 2007, she took early retirement and moved to Wales, where she held the post of honorary research professor in the history department at Swansea University.

Nina was far from being an ivory tower historian. She was always active in every day politics, first in a rather eccentric quasi-Stalinist group, the British and Irish Communist Organisation, which took a decidedly anti-nationalist stance on the Irish question, and, later, in a host of causes and battles.

Three causes stand out: the first was workers’ control. She urged the British unions to accept a version of the German system of co-determination (Mitbestimmung) and supported the Bullock report (1975), against the opposition of many on the left. This was part of her wider vision of a modern union movement that would abandon its intransigent defence of free collective bargaining and become a partner of government in setting overall economic targets, including wages. The second cause was electoral reform. She created Tactical Voting 1987 and then supported selflessly the Electoral Reform Society, accepting, pragmatically, the findings of the 1998 Jenkins commission, which advocated a modified version of the alternative top-up system. The third cause, and the most important, was social Europe. In the mid-1970s she started Case, the Campaign for a Socialist Europe, one of the many groups that came into being thanks to her uncanny organisational skills and her strong will. She strove to instil in the British Labour movement a European perspective, wishing to deprovincialise it and present European integration as a great opportunity rather than a threat.

One could argue that all three endeavours ended in setbacks. The unions are now a shadow of what they used to be. Electoral reform is now revived only when Labour is in opposition or about to lose, and Britain is, more than ever, an impenitent laggard in all European matters. But Nina was a fighter. She was never defeated, she never moaned or whinged. When she felt something needed to be done, she organised everyone, storming into meetings and, sometimes even before bothering to remove her cycling paraphernalia, would intervene authoritatively, speaking clearly and logically and (very) loudly.

No cause was too small. When she heard (from me) that there was a rather good biography of Palmiro Togliatti, the leader of the Italian Communist party, she lobbied the Italian publisher, hassled the author to cut it down to translatable size, and when she realised that the publisher was in difficulty because of the high cost, organised a “Dining for Togliatti” event to gather funds. Saddened to learn of the death of Hugo Young, the political commentator of the Guardian, she drummed up support for the annual Hugo Young Memorial Lecture.

She was prodigal with encouragement and advice to younger scholars, promoting with unstoppable energies the cause of labour history, serving on the editorial board of Labour History Review, the editorial board of Representation, the executive committee of the Society for the Study of Labour, the committee of the Socialist History Society, and the editorial advisory committee of Socialist History. She was also a trustee of the Aneurin Bevan Foundation and of the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust.

But there was another side to Nina. For all her commitment to the British labour movement, she eschewed its puritanism. Though not a champagne socialist, she liked a glass of champagne, a bottle of fine wine, good food and above all music, especially opera. She would get a box at the English National Opera or tickets for Glyndebourne, raid her favourite Soho delicatessen and share her goodies with her friends during the interval. She would come to London regularly from Swansea to attend chamber music and lieder recitals at the Wigmore Hall. I was her lucky “Wig” companion and will miss her sorely.

She organised a supper club with challenging guest speakers. And she would go everywhere with her trusted bicycle, which she had made for herself with the £250 she won in a Time Out competition in the 1970s with an essay on Gandhi – a considerable sum at the time. She still had the same bike 30 years later – a remarkable bike, no doubt, for a remarkable woman.

Nina had no children and is survived by Phil.

• Nina Fishman, political historian and activist, born 26 May 1946, died 5 December 2009

Chris Harman on ‘Time, tide and class struggle’

[[The profound contribution made by Chris Harman (1942-2009), who tragically passed away earlier this month, to the struggle for international socialism over the course of his life can be seen from the huge number of tributes that have appeared online since his passing. As an important Marxist theorist and activist, Chris Harman was much more than simply a socialist historian - and the totality of his contributions across the current fragmented academic disciplines of the social sciences have been discussed in many of the obituaries that have appeared. Nonetheless, as this blog is called Socialist History News, it is perhaps worth noting his contribution to socialist history, which ranged widely, from detailed discussions of the origins of capitalism, to the 'Lost Revolution' in Germany 1918-23 to his outstanding study of '1968 and After' in The Fire Last Time. Two important theoretical essays were collected in a volume called Marxism and History. It would be an injustice to try and do justice in a blog post to his full contribution to socialist history, so instead I think it will be appropriate to simply reprint a short 1999 article from Socialist Review on 'Time, tide and class struggle', written shortly after the publication of his masterful A People's History of the World.]]

We have all been brought up on myths about the ’superiority’ of the west. These assume that there has been a single line of civilisation going back to Greece and Rome, involving over the last 2,000 years a ‘Judaeo-Christian inheritance’ which has been more ‘civilised’, more innovative or more ‘humane’ than that to be found in the rest of the world. The notion of a continuous tradition, supposedly responsible for the rise of industrial capitalism in Europe, is still to be found today, for instance in David Landes’s influential book The Wealth and Poverty of Nations and in Ellen Meiskins Wood’s Peasants, Citizens and Slaves. Even some people who reject any notion of the ’superiority’ of the west accept the myth of continuity, but in a mirror image way. Edward Said’s Orientalism, for instance, sees a single, iniquitous culture of contempt for the rest of the world as characterising European thought from the time of Aeschylus (5th century BC) through the rise of Christianity and the Crusades up to modern imperialism.

In fact, history has not developed like that at all. A thousand years ago north west Europe was one of the most backward parts of the world. It was made up of Iron Age societies with very few towns and no real cities. Homes and even castles were made of wood coated in mud, clustered together in villages separated by forests, wasteland or marshes. There were no proper roads between them, and any travel over land was along rough tracks, on foot, by mule, or sometimes on horseback. Most lords were as unable to read and write as the vast mass of peasants they exploited. What passed as literature was produced in monasteries, and mainly involved the copying by hand of old religious texts. Insofar as there was a ‘Graeco-Roman inheritance’ in Europe, it amounted to a handful of texts in Latin which might be read, at any point in time, by an even smaller number of monks.

There was a huge contrast with this state of affairs if you looked eastwards to the Arab lands and China, or westwards to Central and South America. The biggest cities in the world were undoubtedly in China, followed by places like Baghdad and Cairo. Even 800 years earlier, when Rome was at its prime, Teotihuacan (outside present day Mexico City) was as big as Rome, while in the 14th century Vijayanagar in southern India was bigger than Paris or London.

Merchant caravans made long overland journeys from northern China through Samarkand and Bukhara to northern India, Tehran, Baghdad and Constantinople. One set of sea routes connected southern China with southern India, the Persian Gulf, the Red Sea, down the eastern coast of Africa to Zanzibar, and beyond. Another maintained regular contact between Egypt, present day Algeria and Morocco, right up into an Islamic civilisation in Spain that was to last more than 700 years.

The great mass of the population still lived in the often vast areas between the cities, working as peasants scratching the land to provide for a livelihood for themselves and paying rents and taxes to ruling classes. But within the cities there developed a level of literacy, artistic culture, and scientific and technical advance way beyond that even dreamt of in Europe. It was within the Indian and then the Arab civilisations of the first millennium that people pioneered our present numerical system, discovered the use of zero, advanced the calculation of pi, estimated the size of earth (more accurately than Columbus did five centuries later), and continued and enriched the philosophical traditions established in Greece and Greek Alexandria at a time when knowledge of these was minimal in Europe. China in these centuries was already deploying many thousands of water mills and manufacturing cast iron and steel in bulk, and went on to witness the invention of paper, gunpowder, the first clockwork clocks and the mass printing of books five centuries before Europe, as well as the development of shipbuilding and navigating techniques (the compass, for instance) that allowed long distance ocean voyages.

How did such developments occur? And why were parts of Europe in the next millennium able to catch up, overtake and eventually conquer the heartlands of the older civilisations? There are currently fashionable explanations which see things in terms of the different ‘cultural’ features of the different civilisations. This runs through, for instance, David Landes’s account, and has been the rationale for the BBC’s series on the millennium. But this does not explain where the different cultures came from. It does not explain why Hinduism, rather than, say, Buddhism, came to dominate the Indian Middle Ages, why Confucianism defeated rival ideological systems in China, or why medieval Islam differed in important ways from Islam at the time of the 7th century.

The different ‘cultures’ were, in fact, the product of historical development, not its cause. And they were not separated off from each other. We can trace the spread across Eurasia and Africa (and, separately, across the Americas) of the great innovations which increased the ability of human beings to make a livelihood and transformed the societies they lived in. So wheat first domesticated in the Middle East made its way to the Atlantic coast of Europe, north Africa and the Pacific coast of China; rice from southern China reached west India; iron spread out from Asia minor to the whole of Eurasia over a 1,500 year period; steelmaking from west Africa diffused down into the centre and east of the continent over a similar time span; the camel domesticated in Asia about 1000 BC opened the way to commerce through the Sahara and to the transformation of Arabia in Mohammed’s time; horse harnesses from central Asia and gunpowder, compasses and paper from China were essential prerequisites for the development of late medieval Europe.

Civilisation and exploitation

Each culture arose as a transitory facet of a single process of world history (or possibly of two similar processes, one in the ‘old world’ and one in the ‘new world’, until they clashed in the time of Columbus and Cortes). At different times and in different parts of the world the development of human control over nature was accompanied by the concentration of wealth into the hands of ruling classes, and with this the growth of ‘civilisation’ in the full meaning of the term–the growth of towns, the use of writing, the establishment of full time groups of traders and artisans, the rise of organised religion. Humanity’s level of material production was such that without an exploiting minority squeezing wealth out of the toiling majority there could he no concentration of the resources needed for civilisation to take off. This is why the successive civilisations and accompanying cultures to be found in Africa, Asia, Europe and North and South America were all based on such exploitation.

But in every case a ruling class whose initial rise was associated with advances in the creation of wealth later became an impediment to further advance. Typically, civilisation expanded up to a certain point, but then began to go into reverse as the level of exploitation by the ruling class made it difficult for the mass of people to produce the things needed to keep society going. So the first great civilisations of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, Egypt, Crete and mainland Greece had all experienced ‘Dark Ages’ of greater or lesser severity by 1400 BC. There followed the rise in the first millennium BC of the classical Greek, Roman, Indian and Chinese civilisations. But these in turn ran into great problems by AD500. Europe fell back into its ‘Dark Age’, with virtually no industry, trade or literacy. In India trade and the towns declined, artisan production deprived of markets retreated into virtually self contained village units, where it became organised by castes, and literacy became a virtual monopoly of Brahmans and entangled with superstition. It was at this point that Hinduism finally ousted Buddhism as the dominant religion and the fully formed caste system took root. China did not experience a relapse on anything like the same scale, but the empire fragmented in the 3rd century AD, and there was a 200 year gap before there was a revival of trade, urban life and learning.

In the Middle East and Mediterranean region the advance of civilisation was associated, for the best part of half a millennium, with the rise of a new religion, Islam. In the towns of the Arabian peninsula a new trading class had emerged, unencumbered by old parasitic classes. The prophet Mohammed had provided it with a worldview which enabled it to defeat the decaying empires around it and establish a new empire which encouraged trade, artisan industries and urban life. Literature, science, art and philosophy flourished here as nowhere else for several centuries, developing traditions established in ancient India, Egypt, Greece and Rome, and passing them on to subsequent civilisations.

The rise of the parasites
By 1000 BC the Islamic Empire was decaying at its heart. Mesopotamia had known the most fruitful agriculture anywhere in the world for some thousands of years, based upon a network of canals linking the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. The Islamic rulers had initially cleared and refurbished canals neglected by their predecessors. After three centuries, however, the Islamic ruling classes too had become bloated and parasitic, willing to ravage the countryside in order to provide for their own luxury consumption. The land around the old Islamic capital, Baghdad, became barren and desolate, and the Islamic world was torn apart by revolts and civil wars. Islamic culture, now centred in cities like Cairo, Cordoba in Spain, Bukhara in central Asia and Timbuktu in west Africa, remained in advance of any in Europe for some time, but had lost its old dynamism.

The revived Chinese civilisation was still very dynamic in 1000AD. Under the Sung Empire, there was a growth of trade and industry such as humanity had never known and was not to know again until after the European Renaissance of the 16th century. Indeed, without the advance of Sung China, the Renaissance–and the rise of capitalism which it heralded–would have been impossible. But by 1200AD Chinese civilisation too was beginning to be stifled by the sheer opulence of a parasitic ruling class. A Turkic people established a rival empire, the Chin, over northern China, leaving the Sung dynasty with the south alone until, in the 13th century, both were conquered by a former herding people, the Mongols.

The same centuries saw the Mongols tear into the vestiges of the Islamic Empire in Iran and Mesopotamia and ravage northern India and eastern Europe. The name of their leader, Genghis Khan, has become a byword for wanton savagery. Yet they too were the product of circumstances, not a cause. Living and herding on the edges of great civilisations, they could learn from them, especially when it came to military weaponry, and then use their learning to great effect against the bloated ruling classes of neighbouring states. Nor was the effect of the Mongol rampage from one end of Eurasia to the other wholly negative. It helped transmit knowledge of techniques developed in the civilisations of the east to the lands of the west.

The Mongols were not the only people whose past ‘backwardness’ left them unencumbered by the parasitic baggage. A new chain of civilisations flourished in this period in Africa, stretching below the Sahara from the Nile westwards across the continent and putting the past advances of the Islamic civilisations to new uses. And in western Europe advances in agriculture learned from the east combined with a new way of organising exploitation, serfdom, to produce a couple of centuries of rapidly growing food output. This soon produced, in turn, traders, towns and urban classes capable of taking up the industrial as well as the agricultural practices of the older civilisations. By the 13th century cathedrals were being built where there had not even been stone houses 380 years before, and pioneering intellectuals were making the long trek to Toledo in Spain to get access to the writings of Islamic philosophers and mathematicians, along with Arabic translations of Greek and Latin classics.

Even then, however, Europe was still far short of leading the rest of the world. In the 16th century its technology was only at about the same level as that of the Mogul Indian Empire, of the Ottoman Empire that had arisen in Asia minor to conquer the Middle East and most of eastern Europe, of the Islamic states along the Niger in Africa, and of the Min Empire that ruled China. If it eventually overtook these to carve out world empires it was because its past backwardness made it easier for its merchant and artisan classes to transform the whole of society in their own image. They had the advantage over their Chinese, Arab and Indian equivalents of arriving late in the game of world history. Even so, it took more than 300 years of political, ideological and economic struggle before they could enjoy full success.

Stop Press – Talat Ahmed meeting cancelled

We regret to announce that we have had to postpone the meeting on Indian writers addressed by Talat Ahmed which was scheduled to take place on 25 November. We hope to reschedule it for the new year. The SHS would also like to convey its sincere condolences to Talat Ahmed on the recent untimely death of her partner, Chris Harman.

Women, War and Resistance in Iraq

Report of SHS public meeting by David Morgan

Iraqi-born Haifa Zangana has long been known as a courageous and independent voice against the foreign occupation of her country. She has used her considerable talents as an activist and as a writer to make people aware of the unendurable suffering inflicted on the Iraqi people over decades of war, oppression, economic sanctions and occupation.

Haifa is justly and widely admired for her tenacity and outspokenness, qualities which were much in evidence when she spoke to the Socialist History Society on 16 September. The SHS organised the meeting at the Bishopsgate Institute in cooperation with Women for an Independent and Unified Iraq with Haifa speaking on the theme of “Iraqi Women’s Role in the Anti-colonial Resistance”. Khatchatur Pilikian, a SHS committee member who was also born in Iraq, chaired the meeting (we have taken the opportunity to include his spirited opening address in this newsletter).

A passionate advocate of the full participation of women in Iraqi and Muslim societies, Haifa chose the occasion to celebrate the role of women in the building of a modern Iraq, whose secular society and social gains for women she described as the most progressive in the Middle East in the sixties and seventies. Latterly, successive wars and the ongoing occupation of the country have proved a disaster for women in particular despite the fact that the American occupiers used the promotion of women’s rights as one of their main justifications for the US-led military intervention in 2003.

While passionate and angry about the terrible treatment of the Iraqi people today, Haifa was careful to situate the current resistance within the history of Iraq since the creation of the modern state in the 1920s. She cited numerous examples of heroic individuals and described the participation of women in progressive organisations such as the once highly influential Communist Party of Iraq. By means of this evidence, too often neglected by commentators on contemporary Iraq, she demonstrated that Iraqi women have had a long history of political activism and social participation throughout the 20th century and even before.

In Haifa’s perspective, the Iraqi women’s movement undeniably played an integral part in the construction of the modern identity of Iraq as a progressive secular state, an identity that she understands must continually be remembered and defended against the negative images of dictatorship and ethnic divisions that too often prevail today. The role of Iraqi intellectuals, many of whom were Marxists, had been crucial to the development of the progressive national movement including the women’s movement, she argued. As regards the Marxist influence in Iraq, Haifa told the meeting that the first Marxist study group was established in 1924, publishing the short-lived journal, As-Sahifa. Meanwhile, the first Iraqi women’s magazine, Layla, appeared in October 1923. A particular important role had been played by poets given that poetry in both its written and oral forms has traditionally had a special public place as a genre in Iraqi society. As an example, the woman poet Um Nazir, was a pioneer in calling for women’s liberation in Iraq as well as in the fight against colonial occupation and injustice.

Women had taken part in the struggle against colonial domination under British rule and were in the forefront of the fight for national unity, social justice and legal equality. The gains made by women’s struggles had eventually led to Iraqi women becoming among the most liberated in the region and their country’s social policies among the most progressive in the world. A key event was the 1958 Revolution, when Iraqi people for the first time won control of their own lives. Haifa saw this moment as one of jubilation for Iraqis, women especially, because the revolution ushered in a new constitution that established important legal rights for women. International Women’s Day on 8 March was celebrated as a public holiday as was International Workers’ Day on 1 May. The great tragedy of modern Iraq is that wars, conflict and outside intervention have led to a situation where the Iraqi people have lost many of the social gains that they once enjoyed. It is vitally important for Iraqis to remember their history in order to show that there is nothing inevitable about their present plight. Haifa Zangana provided an illuminating talk with much food for thought and a lively discussion followed.

For anyone who was unable to attend the meeting, many of the themes that she dealt with are treated in much more detail in her recent book, City of Widows: An Iraqi Woman’s Account of War and Resistance (Seven Stories Press, 2007).

Welcome address to Haifa Zangana

by Khatchatur Pilikian

I met Haifa for the first time in November 2006, at a Conference in the Friends House, Euston. In her end-of-Conference talk, she exposed the hypocritical nature of most of the so-named Non Governmental Organisations, NGOs, engaged in occupied Iraq. Her detailed analysis of the NGOs functioning, as she thought, as an “integral part of the US strategy in Iraq,” brought her to conclude that the NGOs “represent US colonial policy rather than the interests of Iraqi men and women.” The two quotations above are from Haifa’s latest book, The City of Widows, which includes her analysis of the mission of NGOs in Iraq.

Jumping the queue, I should mention that Haifa is scheduled to be in New York on Sept 22, to launch a new edition of her first book, Dreaming of Baghdad, for the Feminist Press NY. In the next couple of months, before the end of the year 2009, she will be presenting papers on the evolving role of colonial feminists in occupied Iraq, first on October 4-7, in Beirut, at Arab Feminisms: A Critical Perspective, then on December 9-12, in The Hague, Netherlands, at the Institute of Social Studies.

Haifa’s courage of her convictions reminds me of the phenomenal grandeur of miniature art in general, and in particular of the images of Sumerian, the ancient Iraqi-Mesopotamian art of the cylinder seals. Miniscule images notwithstanding, they essentially have monumental and impressive presence. As you all can witness, Haifa Zangana is a tiny little woman, but she has a monumental personality and an impressive talent to tell what really is happening in the Middle East, especially in Iraq, and particularly what is happening to the Iraqi women. But most fascinatingly, Haifa also tells us what the Iraqi women used to make happen to the Iraqi society and to their feminist, humane aspirations. They  waged, for decades, impressive anticolonial resistance for independence and persistent struggles for genuine democracy, not the latter-day imperialism’s camouflaged, nay deranged version of it that reflects the servile ethics of by-gone colonialism. As John Milton, the revolutionary republican poet, once declared in his Apology of 1648: “they who have put out the peoples eyes, reproach them of their blindness”. And yet, Haifa tells us how good the Iraqi women have seen and continue to see and grasp the reality, both the causes and the effects of their tragedy. Moreover, they continue to act upon it, thus refuting the masquerading of that reality by the occupying powers and their local junta, both still adamant to oblige their Grand Master’s dictating roar.

Once upon a time, well fifteen hundred years before the original Odyssey was written down by Homer, the king of Uruk in Sumeria, named Gilgamesh, “went on a long journey” and “brought us a tale of the days before the flood,” and, finally, he  “engraved on a stone the whole story. ” (N.K.Saunders. The Epic of Gilgamash. Prologue. Penguin Books 1972) That most archaic odyssey also tells us about a haunting predicament worth ‘lending our ears’ to, especially in our own turbulent times. Ishtar, the Queen of Heaven, asks the Heavenly father of Gods, Anu, the following: “Fill Gilgamesh, I say, with arrogance to his destruction.” Ishtar’s plea kindled a paradox, as she herself was arrogance incarnate. Ishtar knew herself well. Unlike Gilgamesh, her safety was secured by her ‘divine immortality’.

How true this quinto-millenial wisdom of Sumeria sounds today. Uttered in the land now an occupied Iraq, the arrogance of the most powerful military power the world has ever witnessed, is doing, it seems, its utmost to destroy itself, after having decimated the heritage of the land and its culture, annihilated over a million of its population and left behind nearly a million displaced children and close to five million Iraqi refugees roaming around both in neighbouring countries and in their own homeland too. And all, because of the occupying power’s “addiction to oil,” as confessed, not long time ago, by the arrogant, supreme commander of its awesome military conglomerate, the pre-Obama US President, now in the dustbin of history, so decreed by US voters. Arrogance is indeed a Hara-kiri power. Ishtar is proving to be right.

The City of Widows of 2009 is the odyssey not only of its author Haifa Zangana, but also and essentially of the Iraqi women and their resistance to the unjust war and occupation, not devoid of a graceful yet taciturn eulogy to their resilience and tenacity for survival. Perhaps tinged with wishful thinking, I could also read in between the lines, a compassionate, warning advice to the occupying powers to stop their indulgence in the brutal Hara-kiri arrogance. Would they ever believe they are not divinely immortal, unlike Ishtar? Inshallah! Otherwise, Bertold Brecht’s theatrical aphorism will continue to pinch our alter ego: “If sharks ruled the world they would teach the little fish that it is a great honour to swim into the mouth of a shark.” Let us welcome Haifa to tell us her tale.

discussion on 1989

A discussion has been underway in the pages of the SHS newsletter about the significance of the fall of the communist governments in the USSR and Eastern Europe 20 years ago. The contributions to which Tom Bailey is responding (see below) can be viewed here.

 

THEY WERE SOCIALIST

- Tom Bailey

I disagree with Mike Squires’ claim that the Eastern European states were not Socialist. Yes, there were major faults and shortcomings in these socialist countries, but fundamentally, they were still Socialist. Capitalist restoration in these countries should be seen dialectically, as a process. These countries took many quantitative steps towards capitalism, I believe, after the death of Joseph Stalin. Aside from negating 30 years of Socialism by denouncing Stalin, a number of ‘reforms’ were implemented. Most notable is Khrushchev’s “State of the whole people” and the “Party of the whole people”, replacing the “Dictatorship of the Proletariat”, effectively ending the class struggle against bourgeois influence and ideas.

Another notable reform was the economic reforms of 1965, or the ‘Kosygin Reform’, making enterprise profit the guiding principle in investment decisions by planners, rather than putting politics into action. However, these were not qualitative changes. As Stalin explained in Historical and Dialectical Materialism: “Contrary to metaphysics, dialectics does not regard the process of development as a simple process of growth, where quantitative changes do not lead to qualitative changes, but as a development which passes from insignificant and imperceptible quantitative changes to open’ fundamental changes’ to qualitative changes; a development in which the qualitative changes occur not gradually, but rapidly and abruptly, taking the form of a leap from one state to another; they occur not accidentally but as the natural result of an accumulation of imperceptible and gradual quantitative changes.”

The “insignificant and imperceptible quantitative changes” being the post-Stalin reforms, and the “fundamental changes” being the events of 1989-1991. Concerning the class character of 1989-1991, yes the working class was the primary force on the streets demanding change; but what change were they demanding? In 1990, in the referendum asking people whether they wanted to dissolve the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the overwhelming majority, 76% said “No”. In May 1991, an American poll found 54% of Russians wished to keep Socialism, 27% wished for a mixed economy and only 20% wanted a free market economy (Monthly Review 12/94). A similar poll, reported in the New York Times (12/1/89) found that 47% of Czechoslovakians wished for their economy to remain state controlled, 43% wanted a mix and 3% wanted majority private ownership.

It would appear, the working class in the socialist countries did not take to the streets demanding an end to Socialism. Rather, the protests, discontent and apathy to capitalist restoration was due to issues such as party corruption, comparatively low living standards and shortages in goods (exacerbated by market reforms in the late 80s). This popular discontent was exploited by a new bourgeois class, arising from within the Party and the explosion of the black market (in the case of the USSR) under Brezhnev. The roots of the black market are a result of policies such as Khrushchev’s mechanical levelling of wages, decreasing motivation (as “bourgeois right” was still existent), creating shortages. This problem was made worse by the large increases in wages, despite nothing to buy with them from the formal economy.

The extent of this problem can be seen in 1969 when Soviet citizens would save 70% of their income (Bahman Azad – Heroic Struggle, Bitter Defeat). A shortage of goods available, combined with large amounts of unspendable income created the conditions for a black market. This black market created a class whose interests lay in private property and free markets. It was this class and their intellectual and political representatives, many of who were in their respective Communist parties, that led the movements of 1989-91 and made the qualitative leap to Capitalism. I was born only one month before the lowering of the Hammer and Sickle in Moscow, so I do not know what affect this must have had on Communists and other progressive people over the world, but I can only imagine it was a disaster.