Seminar: “Loyalties: An Interdisciplinary Seminar on British Communism”

Loyalties: An Interdisciplinary Seminar on British Communism.

 

The question of dual or contested loyalties has been a constant theme in the history of British communism. Much of existing research has centred on the political allegiances of communists who have occupied positions of influence in the military, or have been involved in espionage. Research in this field has been enriched by the availability of MI5 files, Soviet archives and personal memoir.  However, the question of the loyalties of British communists has a much wider scope and significance, encompassing the dilemmas of intellectuals, changing personal and political identities and the balance between trade union activism and political priorities. In the background have often been tensions between the freedom of the artist and writer and their political commitments, the internationalist and anti-fascist allegiances in the context of war and pacifism, and the effects of the Cold War on work and family life.

Given the breadth of the loyalties question, this one day seminar, funded by The Open University’s Centre for Citizenship, Identities and Governance, was conceived with the idea of pushing out the boundaries of research to bring together historians, political scientists, intelligence experts and those working on biographical studies and life-writing. The seminar is intended to be a starting-point for further research and will focus initially on three main areas:

War, intelligence and espionage

British communists and Spain in the 1930s

Writers, intellectuals, artists.

The emphasis will be on short 10-15 minute contributions to maximise the time available. In addition to these three themes the two plenaries at the beginning and end of the day are intended to discuss further research opportunities.

Date: Friday 18 November. 9.30-16.00

Venue, Kellogg College, 62 Banbury Road, Oxford OX2 6PN

For further details and to register please contact Dr Geoff Andrews:  geoff.andrews@open.ac.uk

 

Call for Papers – Wars of Position: Marxism and Civil Society

Call for Papers

Wars of Position: Marxism and Civil Society

International Conference, Manchester, UK, 8-10 June 2017

Key-note speakers

Jodi Dean, Professor of Political Science, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, New York.  Author of books including Crowds and Party (2016), The Communist Horizon (2011), Democracy and other Neoliberal Fantasies (2009)

Stathis Kouvelakis, Reader in Political Theory, King’s College, London and former member of Syriza’s Central Committee.  Author of Philosophy and Revolution: From Kant to Marx (2003)

Kevin Morgan, Professor of Politics and Contemporary History, University of Manchester.  Author of books including Bolshevism, Syndicalism and the General Strike: The Lost Internationalist World of A.A. Purcell (2013), Labour Legends and Russian Gold (2006), The Webbs and Soviet Communism (2006).

 

‘In Russia’, wrote Antonio Gramsci, ‘the State was everything’ and ‘civil society primordial’; in the highly-developed West, civil society formed ‘permanent fortifications’ which the revolutionary party would have to occupy and transform in order to take and hold power.

No Marxist parties in the West made a revolution.  Historical analysis of their failure has been abundant, but insufficiently attentive to parties’ approaches to civil society in Gramsci’s sense (i.e. social practices and institutions outside the government, judiciary and repressive state apparatus).  This international and interdisciplinary conference is at once historically grounded and attuned to contemporary debates on the Left.  It brings together: analysis of the theory and practice of twentieth-century Marxist parties in relation to civil society; analysis of contemporary Left formations’ approaches to civil society; analysis of the ‘idea’ of communism today and the relevance or obsolescence of ‘the party’ as an organizational form in the twenty-first century.

Proposals are invited for twenty-minute papers and panels of three papers.  Abstracts (250 words) should be emailed to warsofposition2017@manchester.ac.uk by 1/12/16.  Conference interpreters may be available for delegates who wish to present in languages other than English (please e-mail the organisers).  The conference will take place in Manchester’s People’s History Museum, an institution committed to archiving and chronicling the history of radical politics; some panels will discuss the challenges faced by such institutions today.  Papers for the conference might address, but are not restricted to:

• History, civil society and the ‘idea of Communism’ debate (Badiou, Žižek, Dean et al)
• Civil society and political strategy in recent / contemporary Left formations (e.g. Podemos, Syriza, Five Star Movement, Die Linke, Parti de gauche)
• Theoretical debates in the Marxist tradition on ‘civil society’ (Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg, Gramsci, Lukács, Althusser, Marcuse, Poulantzas et al)
• The struggle for ‘proletarian culture’ in the 1920s and after
• Communism, the nation and the Popular Fronts in the 1930s and 1940s
• New Lefts and communism
• ‘Anti-revisionism’ and cultural revolution
• Eurocommunism and civil society
• ‘Post-Marxism’
• Marxism, gender and the family
• Marxist parties and intellectuals/ education / science / religion / writing history/ the media / the family
• Marxism and the arts / the avant-garde / popular culture
• Marxist parties and their cultural institutions, publishing houses, publications and counter-hegemonic events

 

The conference is part of the AHRC-funded project, Wars of Position: Communism and Civil Society led by Dr Ben Harker at the University of Manchester:

http://www.alc.manchester.ac.uk/english/research/projects/wars-of-position/

It is run in collaboration with the People’s History Museum and the journal Twentieth Century Communism.  The organisers intend to publish an edited collection based around the conference proceedings.

Teaching Russian Revolutionary History in the Centenary and Beyond: Sources, Approaches, Events

Teaching Russian Revolutionary History in the Centenary and Beyond: Sources, Approaches, Events

 

Location: University of Leicester

Date and Time: September 6, 2016. 10:00-13:00.

We are delighted to announce the following workshop, to be held at the University of Leicester on the morning of September 6, 2016 (10:00-13:00). The initiative is funded by the East Midlands Centre for Teaching History and Learning (EMC – http://historycentre.org/) and is organised by Dr. Sarah Badcock (University of Nottingham) and Dr. Zoe Knox (University of Leicester). Looking forward to the centenary of 1917, it will explore ways of bringing the Russian Revolution to life in the classroom. The workshop will be accessible and open both to specialists working and teaching directly on the Revolution and to scholars teaching broader modules touching on the Revolution.

The workshop aims to disseminate and develop best practice in teaching aspects of the Russian Revolution across the East Midlands. It will:

• bring together scholars researching and teaching revolutionary history to discuss latest research agendas and assess the state of the field;
• produce a critical teaching guide and bibliographic survey for teaching the Russian Revolution;
• share information on innovative teaching initiatives and public facing events relating to 1917.

The workshop will consist of short several presentations on research and teaching innovation in the field, followed by a structured discussion on teaching materials and methods. Confirmed speakers include:

• Sarah Badcock (Nottingham)
• Nick Baron (Nottingham)
• Alexandre Christoyannopoulos(Loughborough)
• Alistair Dickins (Manchester)
• Zoe Knox (Leicester)
• Paul Maddrell (Loughborough)

 

Limited funding is available to support the travel costs for attendees and lunch will be provided. Due to limited space, all potential workshop attendees are asked to register their interest to teaching1917@gmail.com by no later than midday on August 26, 2016.

SHS Meeting – LIBERTY’S APOSTLE

Liberty’s Apostle: the Life and Times of Richard Price 1723 – 91 

Dubbed by an eminent historian as ‘Britain’s first left-wing intellectual’ the Reverend Richard Price was a major figure in the Enlightenment. A supporter of the American and French Revolutions it was a Price sermon that provoked Edmund Burke into writing Reflections on the Revolution in France in answer to what he viewed as Price’s ‘wicked principles’. This talk will look broadly at Price’s life, the nature of his wide-ranging contribution to political ideas and explain his continuing relevance.

 

Speaker Dr Paul Frame, a Welsh historian of the Enlightenment period and author of the book, Liberty’s Apostle: the Life and Times of Richard Price, University of Wales Press, 2015.

2pm, 1 October

Marx Memorial Library

Walter Rodney Socialist Historian & Political Activist

Socialist History Society Public Meeting – 7:00 pm, Thursday 23rd June 2016 MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY 37a Clerkenwell Green EC1R 0DU nearest tube Farringdon Free to attend, but you need to register Speakers: Cecil Gutzmore & Leland De Cambra download a leaflet…

Walter Rodney, the prominent Guyanese historian, political activist and scholar, was assassinated in Guyana on 13th June 1980. At long last, the report of the Commission of Inquiry into his murder has been handed to the Parliament of Guyana. It is therefore a good time to revisit the legacy of the author of A History of the Guyanese Working People and How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Rodney was also founder of the Working People’s Alliance, a political movement in Guyana dedicated to social transformation and unity of the Indian and African workers. He made a great contribution to revolutionary thought by establishing new thinking on questions of fighting racism and racial domination, the humanisation of the planet and the self emancipation of working peoples. He was murdered for uniting this political theory with practical, militant activity. 50 years after Guyana’s independence, it is time to assess his relevance to Continental Africa and Guyana today

Conference: “Before ’68: the left, activism and social movements in the long 1960s”

Saturday February 13, 2016 and Sunday February 14, 2016

Hosted by the School of History, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK, and organised in conjuction with Socialist History journal and the Institute of Working-Class History, Chicago.

Venue: 2.02, Norwich Medical School Building (MED), University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK

Registration is now open. Speakers include: Toby Abse – The Origins of the Italian New Left • Irene Andersson and Roger Johansson – Experiences from the 60s – activism for Peace Education in the 80s • Ian Birchall – Peace Is Not Enough. Algeria and Vietnam and their impact on the French and British lefts • Geoff Brown – Before ’68 in Greater Manchester, a worm’s eye view • Pau Casanellas – The road to violence. Radicalization under Franco regime in the 1960s • Matthew Caygill – The Left and the Counterculture: ‘The Dialectics of Liberation’ Congress (1967) and the Moment of Libidinal Politics • Madeleine Davis – Activist intellectuals: the British New Left as a social movement • Jared Donnelly – Learning to Protest: Anti-War Protests in West Germany in the Late 1950s • Radha D’Souza – Two Registers, Two Trajectories: The Sixties and the Left in the First and Third Worlds • Axel Fair-Schulz – Robert Havemann: From Party Loyalist to East Germany’s Most Famous Marxist Dissident in the 1960s • Jack Fawbert – Blacklisted! A history of rank-and-file class struggle on construction sites • Wladek Flakin – German Trotskyism in the runup to 1968 • Sharif Gemie – Racism, Orientalism and Anti-Colonialism on the Hippy Trail, 1957-78 • Nicolas Helm-Grovas – Early Wollen: Cultural politics in New Left Review, 1963-1968 • Mark Hobbs – The Enemy on Stage: Battles for Trafalgar Square. Fascism and Anti-Fascism • Beáta Hock – Feminist intersectionality and equality claims-making in the global 60s • Christian Hogsbjerg – C.L.R. James and the British New Left in the long 1960s • Alan Hooper- The Long 1960s: challenges, consequences and (dis) continuities • Rozena Maart – Pavement Politics, Protests and the Mechanisms of the Mind: the emergence of the Black Consciousness Movement of Azania in South Africa • David Morgan – The 1960s: A Decade of Anarchy; A Decade of ‘Anarchy’? • João Arsénio Nunes – On the course to victory? The Portuguese Communist Party before the Carnation Revolution of 1974 • William A Pelz – The View from across the Great Pond: US Intelligence on the European Left, 1945-1968 • Pritam Singh – The Maoist/Naxalite movement in India • Bart van der Steen and Ron Blom – Trotskyist youth in the Netherlands, 1950s and 1960s • Giulia Strippoli – The PCI before ’68: operaismo, intellectuals and other troubles • Ernest Tate and Phil Hearse – Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 1960s • Tom Unterrainer – Ken Coates and ‘The Week’ • Derek Weber – The Austrian Left, pre 1968 • Benjamin Wynes – ‘Djilasism’ and ‘New Leftist’ Dissidence in Sixties Yugoslavia.

For further information or to register to attend, please contact f.king@uea.ac.uk. Attendance is free of charge but registration is necessary.

Call for Papers: British Communism and Commitment

Day-school, 9th June 2016. Manchester

‘I am not ready to join the party’, wrote the novelist Harold Heslop to leading CPGB party theoretician, Rajani Palme Dutt in 1936, recognising the forbidding level of activism expected.  The mandatory Communist hyper-commitment repelled potential recruits and actual members alike, especially in the early years.  But others who joined the party then and later found through Communist commitment a meaningful way of life and a framework for understanding the world.
Bringing together academics from a wide range of disciplines and former party activists, this day-school analyses the complexities of commitment in the British Communist Party over its seventy-year history (1920-1991).  Papers (20 minutes) might cover, but aren’t restricted to:
•    The motivations and trajectories of party ‘hardliners’ who dutifully observed party discipline and the party line, regardless of misgivings;
•    Communism as a way of life;
•    Expulsion and the fear of it;
•    Autobiographies written by former Communists;
•    Figures who struggled to reconcile vocational, professional or artistic commitments with their Communism;
•    ‘Loyal dissidents’ who remained fundamentally committed to the party while often challenging and seeking to enlarge its assumptions, procedures and priorities;
•    Those who challenged what they saw as dominant party perceptions that ‘race’, gender and sexuality were secondary to class as sites of oppression;
•    Activists who considered their ultimate commitment as being to Communist principles from which they believed the party to have deviated, and who challenged the party on those grounds;
•    Those who transferred their abiding Marxist commitments to different currents or organisations—Trotskyist, New Left, Maoist—and the complex relations with the CPGB that followed.
Part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Wars of Position: Communism and Civil Society’, the day-school will be held in the Reading Room of the Labour History Archive and Study Centre in the People’s History Museum, Manchester, and will include a tour of the CPGB archive holdings.  It will mark the opening to researchers of a new tranche of significant CP archive material relating primarily to the 1950-91 period (the papers of John Attfield, Monty Johnstone and Paul Olive).  The event will conclude with a round-table discussion about Communism, commitment and the archive chaired by Professor Kevin Morgan and featuring Francis King (historian, former CP activist and archivist, editor of Socialist History), and John Attfield (historian and former secretary of the Communist Party History Group).
Abstracts of no more than 250 words should be e-mailed to Ben Harker (ben.harker@manchester.ac.uk) by 1/4/16

Some Books Worth Discovering

I discovered these books in 2015 and they might interest readers of this blog.

 
Enlightenment – History of an Idea by Vicenzo Ferrone
THE INVENTION OF IMPROVEMENT: Information and material progress in seventeenth-century England by Paul Slack
Greek Popular Morality: In the Time of Plato and Aristotle by Kenneth Dover
Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine by Brent D Shaw
Complete Stories by Clarice Lispector
Magic, Reason and Experience: Studies in the Development of Greek Science by G E R Lloyd
The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland by Alexandra Walsham
Charlotte Brontë: A Life by Claire Harman
Myths of Mighty Women: their application of psychoanalytic psychotherapy by Arlene Kramer Richards
Marginal Comment: A Memoir by Kenneth Dover

Recent SHS Activities

 

Meetings Round Up
In the latter part of 2015 the Society was involved in organising public meetings on the themes of slavery and public housing policy.
The series on the business of slavery which ran throughout the autumn and concluded on 8 December proved to be very successful.
With an emphasis on the British business of this atrocious trade, the series endeavoured to highlight the commercial structures and networks of individuals who made slavery into an extremely lucrative and enduring enterprise.
Deliberately deciding to probe far deeper than the traditional Tory narrative of Britain’s laudable role in abolishing the Transatlantic trade in slaves, the programme established convincingly that a large part of this country’s economic strength had been founded on slave labour.
The series, which was a Conway Hall event supported by the SHS, also pointed to the rich body of research being carried out in this field.
The value of business history to the left was another issue that was highlighted. There is always a need to know who owned what and the stimulating talks proved much that was new, at least to me.
Speakers included respected veteran experts such as James Walvin and younger researchers like Katie Donington and Perry Gauci.
Each methodically exposed all the intricate links between modern corporations in the City of London and old companies that derived much of their wealth from slave plantation labour. Much of these business connections are only now being brought to public attention by historians who are combing the vast archives held in London and in places like Jamaica.
The series managed to attract a large audience including many young people and provoked lively debate. One key concern that recurred each week was the topic of reparations for the victims of slavery. The practicalities of how to pay, how much, to whom and who actually should pay, were brought out in the discussions.
I especially applaud the way that this series didn’t avoid the continued existence of slavery in various parts of the modern world. As consumers of cheap products we are all to an extent responsible whether knowingly or not for the slave conditions that prevail in sweatshops where our designer clothes are produced. This important point was raised in the talk by Aidan McQuade, Director of Anti-Slavery International.
SHS committee member Deborah Lavin curated this series for the Ethical Society with some valuable input from other members of the SHS.
Finally, another meeting that should not be forgotten was the talk for the SHS at Marx House (21 November 2015) given by Duncan Bowie on the history of labour and socialist inspired housing campaigns. The subject of housing is an urgent issue in contemporary society with no credible solution in sight.
Bowie, a leading expert within the labour movement on housing policy and planning, shared his insights into the contributions of progressive political activists to the development of social housing and urban planning over the last century. He has a new book out on the same subject.
Duncan’s talk was chaired by Stan Newens, who as an MP was closely involved in the post-war growth of new town in Harlow.

David Morgan

The BBC Deserves to Survive Despite its Manifest Flaws

Public Service Broadcasting is Worth Defending

David Attenborough recently expressed his fears for the future survival of the BBC.
An important national institution, the BBC’s model of public service broadcasting funded by the license fee gives it a notional independence from the state and allows it to operate at arm’s length from government.
While this editorial independence might not stand up to detailed scrutiny as in many essential matters it adopts a perspective that’s oriented towards supporting free market liberalism and Cold War foreign policy (there is clear continuity, for example, in its fierce anti-Soviet and anti-Russian posturing), the existence of the BBC is still worth defending.
The concept of a broadcasting system not totally dominated by market forces is valuable in that it gives programme makers the freedom to experiment and take risks that is simply not available to the ratings-driven commercial sector.
The presence of the BBC, it can be argued, acts as a benchmark and standard for the entire broadcasting industry forcing the commercial channels to emulate the quality and diversity of the schedules and programmes that are made.
While the left rightly deplores the pronounced political bias of flagship news programmes such as Newsnight and Today, which became all too blatant in the negative reporting of the new Labour leadership of Corbyn and McDonnell, we should not forget the progressive and innovative role played by the BBC in many areas. The major contribution of the BBC to culture over the post-war period has been particularly impressive.
It is well worth reminding ourselves of the nature and range of some of the best BBC’s innovative programmes in the fields of drama, music and documentary.
Take contemporary drama produced in the ’60s and ’70s when a platform was given equally to new writers and original writing from more established writers in The Wednesday Play and Play for Today series.
These series gave opportunities to a seemingly endless list of top writers such as David Mercer, Dennis Potter, Harold Pinter, David Hare, Howard Brenton, Mike Leigh, David Rudkin and Alan Bennett. The themes that were covered in their plays were often provocative, contemporary and rarely less than highly political.
Some of the authors who began their careers in television are still active today but more often found writing for the stage and screen, while others have been largely forgotten. Most of David Mercer’s original scripts, for example, were performed on television and as such have not been revived or staged in the theatre, but his body of work was outstanding covering changing social morality and historical themes of the 20th century.
Leading directors such as Alan Bridges, Ken Loach, Stephen Frears and Alan Clark, were also given the resources to develop their personal styles by working on these BBC drama productions.
Many of their gritty realistic dramas while now over 30 or 40 years old still retain their freshness and make much modern television appear very tame and formulaic by comparison. Fortunately many of these plays can be found on YouTube or have been released on dvd, so are available to the wider public if they want to find them.
The impact of the BBC is shaping musical tastes and opening up broadcasting to new music should not be underestimated. In the area of popular music such as rock and alternative, the late John Peel show, which aired in Radio One for about 30 years, was immensely influential in assisting the careers of many British musicians and allowing them to break through.
The role of Radio Three is broadcasting often quite obscure classical music and giving airtime to “new music” should also be recognised.
With regards to documentaries, the BBC has been an important innovator, with programmes on the natural world and science fronted by presenters like Attenborough, John Berger, Jonathan Miller, the late James Burke and many others. Historical documentaries from classics such as Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man to more recent series with Michael Wood, Terry Jones and Jonathan Meades have performed a vital educational role for a mass audience. The common feature of all the examples of the programmes cited here is that they have never sought to patronise the viewer but succeeded in putting across complex ideas in a highly popular and compelling format. The reason that these broadcasters have been able to innovate and succeed in producing such important high quality programmes is a direct consequence of the existence of public service broadcasting. The Tories, who disapprove of the masses having free access to knowledge at all, must not be allowed to destroy the BBC. For all its flaws, it is worth preserving.
DM