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Tolpuddle Martyrs
Thursday, 5 June 2014
Tuesday, 25 March 2014
MAR
2014
2014
Wednesday 19TH
posted by Morning Star in Features
Teenager SEAMUS JENNINGS on Benn's unique appeal to young people
"Make, teach and keep socialists." This was the aim of Tony Benn when he was selected as a parliamentary candidate in 1950, and it occupied him for the rest of his life.
I say "life" because to use the word "career" would be to misunderstand Benn's unique outlook.
He recognised politics lived and breathed beyond the halls of Westminster. That one served, not ruled.
To simply call him a politician would also be inaccurate. It is a word in Britain today which conjures up airbrushed public school boys, populists by virtue of Desert Island Discs. A cabal of careerists.
Benn was the reluctant peer, Viscount Stansgate - a title he soon renounced after a political struggle to enable him to drop it.
This initial swipe at the Establishment would be the first of many campaigns for constitutional reform and political freedoms.
Always rejecting the idea that the left should simply "manage capitalism," he vehemently criticised Labour's move to the right not only during his time in Westminster but also when Tony Blair scuttled into No 10.
When he said he would stand down from Parliament in 1999 Benn signalled the beginning of a new political life, when most in his position would have assumed they were in their twilight years, with the words "I now want more time to devote to politics and more freedom to do so."
Becoming the figurehead of the Stop the War Coalition, he campaigned against the invasion of Iraq, and later Afghanistan, with his typical ferocity.
There is a photo of Benn taken three years ago at a rally in London's Hyde Park during the TUC's March for the Alternative protest.
He almost looks like a man from another era, wearing a waistcoat with his signature pipe in hand, planted among a thoroughly modern crowd. Was he out of touch? Of course not. It shows a man who appealed to all generations, a timeless icon.
I originally intended to write about the work Benn did to engage my generation - however this was a man who didn't have to try to inspire young people.
Politicians today vie for our attention by making clumsy populist statements. David Cameron was rightly admonished by Morrissey for claiming fondness for The Smiths. Their music - forged in the disaffection of the Thatcherite era - fought against the kind of politics the Prime Minister propagates today.
Benn had no need to forgo his pipe or use his record collection to give the impression of humanity. His politics and ideals spoke for themselves. They were intrinsically compassionate, liberal and popular in sentiment.
However much the Tories and Ukip try to appeal to the most debased aspects of the British character - whether it be insularism, anti-immigrant or any other Daily Mail-inspired bigotry - it is important to remember that most of us feel only love and respect for other human beings.
Benn's fight for irrefutable freedoms in the face of bigotry and backwardness is instantly appealing to young people yet to be fatigued by the narrow political reality in our country.
As he often reminded us, those that had previously challenged the powers that be, from early Christians to Suffragettes, had been treated as both dreamers and extremists.
"Bennism" was a term coined in the 1970s for what was called Benn's "loony" brand of left-wing opinions.
The manner in which he was vilified as "the most dangerous man in Britain" by other politicians shook the Labour Party over the following decade.
But Benn was not a "loon," a naive dreamer or a political extremist. His dedication to challenging the Establishment is an occupation often associated with people my age. It is seen as adolescent, a student fad soon to be beaten out of you by the harsh realities of the "real world."
If Benn lived in a fantasy, a madman to believe the things he did, then I am profoundly worried about what the definition of sanity is accepted to be. To quote the great man himself, "Hope is the fuel of progress and fear is the prison in which you put yourself."
MAR
2014
2014
Wednesday 12TH
posted by Roger Bagley in Britain
Bob Crow 1961-2014
Tributes poured in yesterday to the workers' towering champion Bob Crow after he died from a suspected heart attack aged 52.
Shock and grief gripped labour movement activists as news spread of the sudden death of the much-loved general secretary of the Rail, Maritime and Transport union (RMT).
The union closed its central London head office as a mark of respect but grieving trade unionists and members of the public laid flowers outside.
Meanwhile tributes and condolences flooded in from across Britain and around the world.
Labour MP John McDonnell, convener of the RMT group of MPs, said: "Bob was one of the finest trade unionists we have ever seen.
"He was simply loved by his members and re-elected time and again."
Grieving MP Jeremy Corbyn said: "Rest in peace Bob. You were a brilliant fighter, who gave your all for the working class."
Manuel Cortes, the leader of rail union TSSA who joined Mr Crow on the picket line during the recent London Tube strike, said: "It was a privilege to campaign and fight alongside him because he never gave an inch."
Fire Brigades Union general secretary Matt Wrack said: "Bob was a good friend to me personally and to the Fire Brigades Union as a whole.
"He was a strong leader for the labour movement and he'll be sorely missed by those who knew him."
His death is a "devastating loss" to Britain's trade union movement and to the cause of working people across the globe, declared GMB union general secretary Paul Kenny.
The Cuba Solidarity Campaign described him as "a wonderful friend to the working people of Cuba."
Mr Crow's older brother Richard described him as "one of those loveable little rogues, one of those guys that had bundles of friends."
He added: "People moaned that he lived in a council house, that he never drove a car - he lived a life of the average guy in the street and that's a rare thing these days.
"When people have a high office in life they fall for the big trappings of the flash cars and the big hotels and big houses. But Bob wasn't like that, he was a genuine person of the people."
Even his political enemies felt obliged to issue hypocritical public comments.
London Mayor Boris Johnson grudgingly admitted: "Bob fought tirelessly for his beliefs and for his members" while Prime Minister David Cameron's spokesman said his death was "very sad news."
And Labour leader Ed Miliband, who in 2011 refused to share a platform with Mr Crow at the Durham miners' gala, said he had "always respected his tireless commitment to fighting for the men and women in his union."
Mr Crow became RMT general secretary in 2002 following the death of former leader Jimmy Knapp.
Born in Shadwell, east London, Mr Crow started working on the London Underground at the age of 16.
All his life, he was an energetic fighter for the socialist cause. He was an implacable opponent of the EU, and in recent times he spearheaded the No2EU - Yes to Workers' Rights movement.
He would have been the lead No2EU candidate for London in May's EU elections.
Showing solidarity to the last, he spoke in Brighton just four days ago at an event to mark the 30th anniversary of the miners' strike.
Wednesday, 17 April 2013
Monday, 15 April 2013
Friday, 12 April 2013
Bob+&+wife+Doris.jpg)
Monday, 8 April 2013
Revolutionary tale of an enemy within
.
Bert Ramelson's life was the stuff of legend. It needs neither embroidery nor embellishment.
He achieved the distinction of being personally denounced in the Commons by ministers in three different governments because he was such an effective national industrial organiser for the Communist Party.
Sinister figures in the business world, linked to intelligence and armed forces chiefs, feared the communist and broad left trade union apparatus that he did so much to help build and guide from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s.
Yet Ramelson had lived an extraordinary life even before that period. Born Baruch Rachmilevitch into a Yiddish-speaking community in Cherkassy, Ukraine, he was heavily influenced by the Bolsheviks in his own family, not least his big sister Rosa - later a "red professor" in economics and a prisoner in Stalin's labour camps.
While the Reds fought anti-semitism, the White Guards murdered some of his relatives in one of old Russia's frequent pogroms and his parents left for Canada. There Ramelson gained a law degree before spending the mid-1930s on a kibbutz in Palestine.
A Histadrut strike against the employment of Arab workers finished off his zionist sympathies. He returned home before travelling via London to enrol in the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion of the International Brigade in Spain, where he finally joined the illegal Canadian Communist Party.
Ramelson caught shrapnel and a bullet fighting Franco's fascists. While admiring the courage of many anarchist fighters, he also saw anarchist units withdrawing from the front line in order to support the Barcelona uprising against the Republican government. He witnessed the good-quality munitions supplied by the Soviet Union, later degraded by anti-Soviet propagandists who were not there.
Ramelson never forgot the lessons he learned in Spain - the need to make a concrete analysis of a concrete situation and to build broad unity in pursuit of immediate priorities.
He returned to Britain after two years, married his first wife Marian, who later wrote a ground-breaking class-based history of the struggle for women's rights, and set up home in Yorkshire.
During the second world war, which he believed became a people's anti-fascist war when the Churchill-Attlee coalition was formed, Ramelson served as a tank driver until his capture near Tobruk.
He was transported to Italy but escaped, met up with communist partisans, rejoined the British armed forces and ended up in India. There he played a leading role in the Forces Parliament which was soon closed down when it advocated Indian independence.
Back in Yorkshire after demobilisation, the Ramelsons fought against the right wing in the Usdaw union. Bert rose through the Communist Party ranks to become its district secretary. Together with Jock Kane, Frank Watters and Young Communist League and CP member Arthur Scargill he helped organise the historic turn to the left in the Yorkshire Area NUM.
Prime Minister Harold Wilson informed MPs from his MI5 reports that Ramelson had taken over from Peter Kerrigan as CP national industrial organiser by the beginning of 1966. Almost immediately, Ramelson was at the heart of the National Union of Seamen's strike that Wilson said was orchestrated by a "tightly knit group of politically motivated men."
Contrary to the impression given by his loud, rasping and accented voice, Ramelson was a persuader rather than an instructor. He respected the independence and democracy of trades unions.
The Communist strategy of mobilising rank-and-file workers to exert pressure on their leaders and make them more accountable was central to the advances made by the broad left and the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions in the late 1960s and early '70s.
Biographers Roger Seifert and Tom Sibley rightly highlight the leading role played by Ramelson in helping to win the national miners' strikes of 1972 and 1974, spring the dockers' leaders from Pentonville jail and render the Industrial Relations Act inoperable. These battles vindicated his insistence on the transformative effects of intelligent struggle.
The authors also face head-on the charge from sections of the far left that he and the Communist Party betrayed Des Warren, who was framed and jailed for his part in picketing during the 1972 building workers' strike. Tactical differences did not prevent Ramelson and the party from doing everything possible to win Warren's freedom, as the latter had acknowledged before his capture by the Workers Revolutionary Party.
Those of us who met Warren saw for themselves the baleful impact of prison on every aspect of his health, and it is to Ramelson's credit that he and the party did not retaliate against the bitter words ascribed to Warren at the time.
Following Labour's return to office in 1974 Ramelson worked tirelessly to help turn the labour movement back towards free collective bargaining and the wages struggle after left-wing union leaders Jack Jones and Hugh Scanlon had signed the "social contract."
Ramelson argued from the outset - notably in Social Contract or Social Con-Trick, one of the biggest-selling political pamphlets in decades - that the unions were disarming themselves industrially and ideologically in pursuit of an illusory compromise with monopoly capital.
In one sense it was a pyrrhic victory, because the damage done by the Social Contract to left and labour movement unity had already sown the seeds of Thatcher's victory in 1979.
Ramelson handed the industrial organiser's baton to Mick Costello in 1977, focusing on international work and membership of the editorial board of the World Marxist Review in Prague.
It was a bold move. Following the Prague Spring, Ramelson had been summoned to the Soviet embassy in London on August 21 1968, when CP general secretary John Gollan was on holiday. When the Soviet ambassador sought to justify Warsaw Pact military intervention against the popular Czech communist government of Alexander Dubcek he met a blistering riposte from Ramelson.
This was not Hungary in 1956. There was no danger of fascist revanchism and he didn't believe a word about right-wing military plots by Dubcek's allies.
It was another milestone in Ramelson's journey of disenchantment with the Soviet Union. Towards the end of his life he came to believe that the Soviet party had abandoned its socialist objectives as early as the mid-1920s. His participation in the British party's 1956 investigation into Soviet anti-semitism had also shaken his faith more than he let on, compelling him to question his support for assimilation.
Yet his commitment to the essential work of a communist party in Britain remained undimmed. He urged workers to join it and trade unionists already inside to be active in their local party branch. At the same time, he emphasised the need for the Communist Party to work for broad left unity across the labour movement, especially in order to exert influence within and upon the Labour Party, for instance in favour of the Alternative Economic Strategy.
The authors recount Ramelson's own vigorous participation in major inner-party debates, not least around its programme The British Road to Socialism. The purges carried out by the revisionist party leadership in the 1980s led him to ponder whether "democratic centralism" could ever be implemented without a seemingly inevitable degeneration into bureaucratic centralism.
This may have been one of the reasons why, after opposing the liquidation of one section of the CP in 1991, he did not join the re-established Communist Party of Britain. Yet he agreed with much of its political outlook and remained a solid supporter of the Morning Star until his death in 1994.
Seifert and Sibley's tale of this titanic figure is a pleasure in more than one way - it also marks the welcome return of publishers Lawrence & Wishart to the service of the labour movement.
Its only notable shortcoming is that more use could have been made of CP archives to elaborate Ramelson's views while a member of the party's executive and political committees.
They have delivered a worthy biography of a magnificent life, recounting Ramelson's tale with precision, depth and insight.
Every thinking communist, socialist and militant trade unionist in Britain will benefit from reading it.
Wednesday, 6 March 2013
Hugo Chavez a Symbol of hope
In an enormous, varied and colourful life, Hugo Chavez was a product of poverty in Venezuela, which like many young people in Latin America led him into the armed forces and a growing sense of anger at the social injustice of a resource-rich but unequal country, bringing him into politics.
Despite the failure of a 1992 coup attempt and his subsequent imprisonment he became phenomenally popular, was elected president, re-elected three times, brought in a new constitution, improved the lives of the very poorest in his country, and forged a very special place on the world stage for Venezuela.
There are two things that stand out.
The Alba pact between Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador and other countries in the region was a polar opposite of the US free-market economics that has traditionally been imposed on the poorest people in Latin America.
This process allowed Venezuelan oil to support poor neighbouring economies and in return, among other things, Cuban medical help brought health care for the first time to millions.
The only condition of this process was that each country had to reduce inequality and conquer poverty - a far cry from the economics of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank's imposition of structural adjustment programmes across the continent.
But beyond economics Chavez understood, as few other American leaders have, the bitter history of oppression of indigenous cultures and languages throughout Latin America.
It was no accident that the one gift he gave to US President Barack Obama was a copy of Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano.
Chavez articulated the pain of the cultural oppression by the Spanish conquistadors and the landowners and multinational corporations. This change in the cultural politics of the whole continent will survive.
Chavez became a huge figure on the world stage because he was the polar opposite of everything that, in particular, the two Bush administrations wanted for Latin America.
He forged alliances to try to bring about a different narrative in world politics, something that is not easy to do. He was often unfairly criticised as being some kind of dictator.
It is a strange dictator that tolerates a mass media that is in permanent opposition, a wealthy elite who regularly condemn him, and an independent judicial system.
RIP Hugo.
Despite the failure of a 1992 coup attempt and his subsequent imprisonment he became phenomenally popular, was elected president, re-elected three times, brought in a new constitution, improved the lives of the very poorest in his country, and forged a very special place on the world stage for Venezuela.
There are two things that stand out.
The Alba pact between Venezuela, Cuba, Ecuador and other countries in the region was a polar opposite of the US free-market economics that has traditionally been imposed on the poorest people in Latin America.
This process allowed Venezuelan oil to support poor neighbouring economies and in return, among other things, Cuban medical help brought health care for the first time to millions.
The only condition of this process was that each country had to reduce inequality and conquer poverty - a far cry from the economics of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank's imposition of structural adjustment programmes across the continent.
But beyond economics Chavez understood, as few other American leaders have, the bitter history of oppression of indigenous cultures and languages throughout Latin America.
It was no accident that the one gift he gave to US President Barack Obama was a copy of Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano.
Chavez articulated the pain of the cultural oppression by the Spanish conquistadors and the landowners and multinational corporations. This change in the cultural politics of the whole continent will survive.
Chavez became a huge figure on the world stage because he was the polar opposite of everything that, in particular, the two Bush administrations wanted for Latin America.
He forged alliances to try to bring about a different narrative in world politics, something that is not easy to do. He was often unfairly criticised as being some kind of dictator.
It is a strange dictator that tolerates a mass media that is in permanent opposition, a wealthy elite who regularly condemn him, and an independent judicial system.
RIP Hugo.
Tuesday, 26 February 2013
Thousands of coffee workers stage walkout
Colombian coffee growers have launched an open-ended strike demanding better prices for their product and policies that benefit the people.
Thousands of workers, as well as farmers from small and medium-sized plantations, have joined swelling industrial unrest in the Latin American country.
In the western Tolima province activists clashed with police on Monday when officers tried to prevent a demonstration going ahead.
Protesters insisted that they would camp out in provincial capital Ibague until at least tomorrow to press their demands.
Telesur journalist Milton Henao said peasant demonstrators had been marching peacefully when police attacked them.
He stressed that the farmers remained unintimidated.
Growers have been hit hard by falling global prices in coffee beans, pointing to a 55 per cent drop in the price of arabica beans since a 30-year high in 2011.
Farmers are now paid around £190 for a load, or 125 kilos, of beans, but production costs them more than £230 per load.
The growers are calling for an increase to their £20-a-load government subsidy.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos branded the strike "inconvenient and unnecessary" and he was backed up by National Coffee Growers Federation president Luis Genaro Munoz.
Mr Munoz supported the setting up of a new government commission for the industry and rejected the use of roadblocks to press demands.
But Tolima leader Danilo Lopez said that the federation needed to be democratised to serve small and medium farmers.
He said the protests were the "awakening of the Colombian people against capitalist exploitation" and claimed the fight was a political one against bosses and the anti-popular policies of the government.
Mr Lopez added: "What we want is a minimum support price of 800,000 pesos (£290) per load for coffee and to curb the cost of inputs.
"We continue to negotiate other aspects of agrarian and peasant security."
Elsewhere negotiations to end a strike at one of the world's largest open-cast mines in northern Colombia kicked off today.
Directors from Cerrejon coal and representatives of union Sintracarbon agreed a draft agreement to end the 19-day strike.
Workers are calling for health and safety improvements and wage rises.
If you have enjoyed this article then please consider donating to the Morning Star's Fighting Fund to ensure we can keep publishing your paper.
Thousands of workers, as well as farmers from small and medium-sized plantations, have joined swelling industrial unrest in the Latin American country.
In the western Tolima province activists clashed with police on Monday when officers tried to prevent a demonstration going ahead.
Protesters insisted that they would camp out in provincial capital Ibague until at least tomorrow to press their demands.
Telesur journalist Milton Henao said peasant demonstrators had been marching peacefully when police attacked them.
He stressed that the farmers remained unintimidated.
Growers have been hit hard by falling global prices in coffee beans, pointing to a 55 per cent drop in the price of arabica beans since a 30-year high in 2011.
Farmers are now paid around £190 for a load, or 125 kilos, of beans, but production costs them more than £230 per load.
The growers are calling for an increase to their £20-a-load government subsidy.
Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos branded the strike "inconvenient and unnecessary" and he was backed up by National Coffee Growers Federation president Luis Genaro Munoz.
Mr Munoz supported the setting up of a new government commission for the industry and rejected the use of roadblocks to press demands.
But Tolima leader Danilo Lopez said that the federation needed to be democratised to serve small and medium farmers.
He said the protests were the "awakening of the Colombian people against capitalist exploitation" and claimed the fight was a political one against bosses and the anti-popular policies of the government.
Mr Lopez added: "What we want is a minimum support price of 800,000 pesos (£290) per load for coffee and to curb the cost of inputs.
"We continue to negotiate other aspects of agrarian and peasant security."
Elsewhere negotiations to end a strike at one of the world's largest open-cast mines in northern Colombia kicked off today.
Directors from Cerrejon coal and representatives of union Sintracarbon agreed a draft agreement to end the 19-day strike.
Workers are calling for health and safety improvements and wage rises.
If you have enjoyed this article then please consider donating to the Morning Star's Fighting Fund to ensure we can keep publishing your paper.
Monday, 18 February 2013
Monday, 11 February 2013
Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger's Life and Legacy
Gerrard Winstanley: The Digger's Life and Legacy
by John Gurney (Pluto Press, £11.50)
Sunday 10 February 2013 by Alan Lloyd Printable Email
The latest addition to Pluto's Revolutionary Lives series, this is an eminently readable and very welcome biography of the Digger's leader Gerrard Winstanley.
A revolutionary intellectual rated so highly by the Bolsheviks that his name was one of just 19 such figures carved in 1918 on the memorial obelisk in Moscow's Alexander Gardens, Winstanley is little known or lauded in his own country.
His recorded writings and actions took place over a brief period from 1648 to 1652 around the time of the English revolution, and they are as worthy of debate and consideration now as they were nearly 500 years ago.
Winstanley's publication The New Law Of Righteousness argued that there is enough land in England for all and, by ensuring that the "earth is a common treasury," no-one need ever go hungry.
His central tenet was that we should "abandon private property and embrace community." Along with a group of like-minded Diggers, he set one up on the common land of Saint George's Hill in Walton-on-Thames.
His actions encouraged other settlements in places such as Wellingborough, Cobham and Iver, which sadly lasted little over a year
Their success alarmed the vested interests of the ruling class, particularly the local landowners who eventually destroyed the communities and drove the Diggers off the land.
This led Winstanley to pen The Law Of Freedom, described by political theoretician Eduard Bernstein as outlining a "communist utopia."
It also prompted a continuing debate as to whether his practical experience as a Digger changed Winstanley's outlook from libertarian to authoritarian.
This debate, along with one on the differences between the Diggers and the Levellers, are cleverly outlined by the author without slowing the pace of the book.
In an age when the difference between rich and poor continues to widen and the need for decent homes for working people becomes ever more urgent, so Winstanley's ideas retain their relevance and perhaps continue to suggest solutions.
This well referenced book is an excellent starting point for anyone wishing to learn about this remarkably far-sighted radical.
by John Gurney (Pluto Press, £11.50)
Sunday 10 February 2013 by Alan Lloyd Printable Email
The latest addition to Pluto's Revolutionary Lives series, this is an eminently readable and very welcome biography of the Digger's leader Gerrard Winstanley.
A revolutionary intellectual rated so highly by the Bolsheviks that his name was one of just 19 such figures carved in 1918 on the memorial obelisk in Moscow's Alexander Gardens, Winstanley is little known or lauded in his own country.
His recorded writings and actions took place over a brief period from 1648 to 1652 around the time of the English revolution, and they are as worthy of debate and consideration now as they were nearly 500 years ago.
Winstanley's publication The New Law Of Righteousness argued that there is enough land in England for all and, by ensuring that the "earth is a common treasury," no-one need ever go hungry.
His central tenet was that we should "abandon private property and embrace community." Along with a group of like-minded Diggers, he set one up on the common land of Saint George's Hill in Walton-on-Thames.
His actions encouraged other settlements in places such as Wellingborough, Cobham and Iver, which sadly lasted little over a year
Their success alarmed the vested interests of the ruling class, particularly the local landowners who eventually destroyed the communities and drove the Diggers off the land.
This led Winstanley to pen The Law Of Freedom, described by political theoretician Eduard Bernstein as outlining a "communist utopia."
It also prompted a continuing debate as to whether his practical experience as a Digger changed Winstanley's outlook from libertarian to authoritarian.
This debate, along with one on the differences between the Diggers and the Levellers, are cleverly outlined by the author without slowing the pace of the book.
In an age when the difference between rich and poor continues to widen and the need for decent homes for working people becomes ever more urgent, so Winstanley's ideas retain their relevance and perhaps continue to suggest solutions.
This well referenced book is an excellent starting point for anyone wishing to learn about this remarkably far-sighted radical.
Wednesday, 30 January 2013
The day the nazis lost
February 2 1943 is the date of the Red Army victory at Stalingrad. From the moment of near-certain defeat the previous year the defence of the city had been turned into an encirclement of the German forces and their eventual humiliating surrender.
Up to this point in early 1943, despite the reverses in north Africa and the failure to launch an invasion of Britain, the nazi blitzkreig had appeared virtually invincible. Hyped up by the Goebbels propaganda machine German morale was at its height and the Allies could see no obvious end to the war. Stalingrad changed all of that, decisively.
This was a victory which all committed to the anti-fascist war could celebrate. Stalingrad inspired those working underground in the resistance throughout nazi-occupied Europe.
King George VI commissioned a sword that Churchill himself presented to Stalin. On its blade the inscription read: "To the steelhearted citizens of Stalingrad a homage of the British people."
The Communist Party was meanwhile engaged in what without doubt was the biggest and broadest campaign in its history, for a second front to relieve the awful pressure that the nazi onslaught continued to impose on the Russian people.
Almost all of this history was to be hidden first by the onset of the cold war in the late 1940s and then again during the second cold war of the 1980s era of Thatcher and Reagan. At the time Scottish folk singer Dick Gaughan put the need to reclaim this past from the rewriting of the history books rather neatly in his song Think Again: "Do you think that the Russians want war? These are the parents of children who died in the last one."
But the sentiments that Gaughan turned into such a moving song were not only submerged under the weight of the second cold war, they also had to contest with a bitter division in the Communist Party that revolved sharply around attitudes to the Soviet Union, while the Trotskyist left defined itself by how it would classify its critique of the USSR. Stalingrad and all it represented became almost lost.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was celebrated at the time by right-wing commentators as the "end of history." Neoliberalism - then at its height - would of course produce the present economic crisis and the austerity we are being forced to endure and resist as a consequence.
But 1989 had another perhaps less obvious after-effect. Unburdened by the cold war rhetoric that had adopted the so-called Iron Curtain as a means to divide the world into the free and the unfree the true legacy of WWII could be revisited by historians who previously might have been wary of according the eastern front the vital place it occupied in the defeat of nazi Germany.
Anthony Beevor's epic book Stalingrad, first published in 1998, was a surprise and runaway bestseller. This helped to establish a popular mainstream understanding of the epic heroism the Red Army victory at Stalingrad represented and more broadly the key role of the eastern front in the eventual defeat of nazi Germany.
However, the breakthrough in understanding that Beevor's book began was soon to be reversed by the aftermath of September 11 2001, the so-called "war on terror," the invasion of Iraq and the occupation of Afghanistan.
The popularisation of the "Help for Heroes" message has facilitated the militarisation of national culture - the FA Cup is carried on to the Wembley final pitch nowadays by uniformed members of the armed forces, while Remembrance Sunday has effortlessly connected Afghanistan to WWII and WWI with no distinction made of the causes served by these vastly different conflicts.
WWII has become an epic of nostalgia entirely disconnected from the cause of anti-fascism, the sacrifices made by the Red Army - the eastern front once again hidden from history. Stalingrad, forgotten, scarcely meriting a mention in the mainstream media despite its fixation with all things WWII.
Saturday February 2 2013 therefore represents an important opportunity to mark the 70th anniversary of victory at Stalingrad in a way that could form the basis for a much bigger celebration - in two years time - of the 70th anniversary of the Red Army's role in the eventual defeat of nazi Germany in May 1945.
Combining ideas, film and photography from the era with fiercely committed music the Victory at Stalingrad night out at east London's Rich Mix Arts Centre is nothing if not bold, ambitious and innovative.
Organisers Philosophy Football, in association with anti-fascist campaigners Hope not Hate, have teamed up military historian Geoffrey Roberts - author of Stalin's General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov - and writer Seumas Milne to discuss the meaning of Stalingrad. Thee Faction will provide the socialist R&B anthems to march or dance to supported by the infectious 13-piece spectacle that is the Trans-Siberian March Band. It all adds up to an evening with a difference, with the ambition of making a difference too.
Up to this point in early 1943, despite the reverses in north Africa and the failure to launch an invasion of Britain, the nazi blitzkreig had appeared virtually invincible. Hyped up by the Goebbels propaganda machine German morale was at its height and the Allies could see no obvious end to the war. Stalingrad changed all of that, decisively.
This was a victory which all committed to the anti-fascist war could celebrate. Stalingrad inspired those working underground in the resistance throughout nazi-occupied Europe.
King George VI commissioned a sword that Churchill himself presented to Stalin. On its blade the inscription read: "To the steelhearted citizens of Stalingrad a homage of the British people."
The Communist Party was meanwhile engaged in what without doubt was the biggest and broadest campaign in its history, for a second front to relieve the awful pressure that the nazi onslaught continued to impose on the Russian people.
Almost all of this history was to be hidden first by the onset of the cold war in the late 1940s and then again during the second cold war of the 1980s era of Thatcher and Reagan. At the time Scottish folk singer Dick Gaughan put the need to reclaim this past from the rewriting of the history books rather neatly in his song Think Again: "Do you think that the Russians want war? These are the parents of children who died in the last one."
But the sentiments that Gaughan turned into such a moving song were not only submerged under the weight of the second cold war, they also had to contest with a bitter division in the Communist Party that revolved sharply around attitudes to the Soviet Union, while the Trotskyist left defined itself by how it would classify its critique of the USSR. Stalingrad and all it represented became almost lost.
The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was celebrated at the time by right-wing commentators as the "end of history." Neoliberalism - then at its height - would of course produce the present economic crisis and the austerity we are being forced to endure and resist as a consequence.
But 1989 had another perhaps less obvious after-effect. Unburdened by the cold war rhetoric that had adopted the so-called Iron Curtain as a means to divide the world into the free and the unfree the true legacy of WWII could be revisited by historians who previously might have been wary of according the eastern front the vital place it occupied in the defeat of nazi Germany.
Anthony Beevor's epic book Stalingrad, first published in 1998, was a surprise and runaway bestseller. This helped to establish a popular mainstream understanding of the epic heroism the Red Army victory at Stalingrad represented and more broadly the key role of the eastern front in the eventual defeat of nazi Germany.
However, the breakthrough in understanding that Beevor's book began was soon to be reversed by the aftermath of September 11 2001, the so-called "war on terror," the invasion of Iraq and the occupation of Afghanistan.
The popularisation of the "Help for Heroes" message has facilitated the militarisation of national culture - the FA Cup is carried on to the Wembley final pitch nowadays by uniformed members of the armed forces, while Remembrance Sunday has effortlessly connected Afghanistan to WWII and WWI with no distinction made of the causes served by these vastly different conflicts.
WWII has become an epic of nostalgia entirely disconnected from the cause of anti-fascism, the sacrifices made by the Red Army - the eastern front once again hidden from history. Stalingrad, forgotten, scarcely meriting a mention in the mainstream media despite its fixation with all things WWII.
Saturday February 2 2013 therefore represents an important opportunity to mark the 70th anniversary of victory at Stalingrad in a way that could form the basis for a much bigger celebration - in two years time - of the 70th anniversary of the Red Army's role in the eventual defeat of nazi Germany in May 1945.
Combining ideas, film and photography from the era with fiercely committed music the Victory at Stalingrad night out at east London's Rich Mix Arts Centre is nothing if not bold, ambitious and innovative.
Organisers Philosophy Football, in association with anti-fascist campaigners Hope not Hate, have teamed up military historian Geoffrey Roberts - author of Stalin's General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov - and writer Seumas Milne to discuss the meaning of Stalingrad. Thee Faction will provide the socialist R&B anthems to march or dance to supported by the infectious 13-piece spectacle that is the Trans-Siberian March Band. It all adds up to an evening with a difference, with the ambition of making a difference too.
Tuesday, 20 November 2012
A stain on the world's conscience
A stain on the world's conscience
Monday 19 November 2012by John Wight Printable Email
As ever, the dominant narrative being presented to us on the current conflict in Gaza is that Israel is defending itself and its civilians against unprovoked aggression by Palestinian terrorists.
And as expected, it is the same narrative being pushed in Washington and London, as, like a well-rehearsed play, the actors involved perform their respective roles with the same old aplomb.
It is the same narrative we have been subjected to over countless years, one intended to paint Israel, that democratic outpost of Western civilisation surrounded by barbarian hordes intent on its destruction, as perennial victim.
But as in the past, so as now, it is a lie.
The truth is the current conflict has little if anything to do with Hamas or its rockets.
It does however have everything to do with the state of Israel's decades-long policy of occupation, embargo, siege, collective punishment, expropriation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
Israel's war is not with Hamas but with the Palestinian people in their entirety, both the 1.5 million in Gaza and the 2.5 to three million in the West Bank.
It is a war waged every hour of every day there is occupation, checkpoints, and settlements.
It is a war waged every hour of every day there is an economic embargo, siege, and collective punishment.
It is a war being waged every second of the indignity and humiliation suffered by its victims.
Yet despite the irrefutable facts of Israel's barbaric treatment of a people criminalised for daring to exist, we are treated to a constant inversion of the truth, which holds that the many and multiple depredations being suffered by the Palestinians do not amount to one of the most sustained and grievous crimes against humanity in history, but are the result of their intransigence and violence.
This is the song of colonialism. The victims always bring it on themselves. If only they would learn to bear their chains in silence.
As Golda Meir said, "We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children."
And they are killing them, right now, even as the world looks on - again.
Worse, when we consider that Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people constitutes a clear and inarguable breach of international law, and has done for decades, the Western media's continuing policy of ascribing a moral equivalence between Israel, an oppressive settler colonial state, and the Palestinians, an oppressed colonised people, monumental insult is added to monstrous injury. There is no moral equivalence. Nor can there ever be.
Israel's latest military assault against the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, which, at 40km long and 10km wide with a population of between 1.5 and 1.7 million people, is one of the most densely populated pieces of land in the world, goes by the biblical name of Operation Pillar of Cloud.
As with Operation Cast Lead four years ago, during which 1,400 Palestinians were killed, thousands more were wounded and war crimes, as adduced by the UN and the Red Cross, were committed wholesale, this latest military operation is designed to terrify the Palestinians into submission.
The major, though as yet unquantifiable, difference between now and then is Egypt.
Hosni Mubarak, Israel's man in Cairo, has been replaced by Mohamed Morsi, the first democratically elected president of Egypt and champion of the Muslim Brotherhood, and at time of writing the prime minister of Egypt has already visited Gaza to show solidarity and offer Egypt's rhetorical support to the Palestinians.
The question now is how this support will manifest if, as expected, Israel escalates its assault in the days ahead.
The answer could well have a bearing on the future not only for the Palestinians but the region as a whole.
The Obama administration, thus far supporting Israel in Washington's time-honoured fashion, will not relish the prospect of strained relations with the most populous Arab nation in the world.
Not now with the region still in a state of flux as a result of the Arab spring. And not even despite the fact that Israel is and remains the US's closest ally.
Former US president Ronald Reagan, with the candour of a man accustomed to making and breaking governments at will, said it best.
"The greatest security for Israel is to create new Egypts."
A new Egypt has been created, not by Israel or the US but by the Egyptian people. And it remains to be seen how this will affect Israel's ability to continue in the old way.
It is a question that is still to be answered. What we know for certain now is that oppression breeds resistance.
The rockets being fired against Israel from inside Gaza are the natural response of a people under siege for the crime of exercising their democratic right to elect a government of their own choice.
And when it comes to that government, Hamas's supreme crime, according to Israel and its apologists, is that in its charter it states its desire to see the destruction of Israel.
Standing alone and shorn of any historical or actual context, it is a desire that cannot be understood or accepted by any reasonable person.
But add this context, in the shape of the previously mentioned decades-long occupation and policy of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and national humiliation - is it really beyond comprehension that the people suffering this oppression may develop along the way a hatred of their oppressor, however irrational it might seem to us who don't live under this kind of oppression and consequently could never understand its dehumanising impact?
In the last analysis, the only way Israel will ever be able to guarantee its security is if it guarantees the security of the Palestinians.
This will first of all require an end to the inherent racism that exists in the heart of every coloniser towards those being colonised.
The Palestinians are not subhumans. They are not products of a lesser culture or race.
They are a people who have suffered six decades of injustice that continues as a stain on the conscience of the world.
Incinerating their children in the name of civilisation and democracy renders both meaningless.
If you have enjoyed this article then please consider donating to the Morning Star's Fighting Fund to ensure we can keep publishing your paper.
Donate to the Fighting Fund here
Monday 19 November 2012by John Wight Printable Email
As ever, the dominant narrative being presented to us on the current conflict in Gaza is that Israel is defending itself and its civilians against unprovoked aggression by Palestinian terrorists.
And as expected, it is the same narrative being pushed in Washington and London, as, like a well-rehearsed play, the actors involved perform their respective roles with the same old aplomb.
It is the same narrative we have been subjected to over countless years, one intended to paint Israel, that democratic outpost of Western civilisation surrounded by barbarian hordes intent on its destruction, as perennial victim.
But as in the past, so as now, it is a lie.
The truth is the current conflict has little if anything to do with Hamas or its rockets.
It does however have everything to do with the state of Israel's decades-long policy of occupation, embargo, siege, collective punishment, expropriation, ethnic cleansing and apartheid.
Israel's war is not with Hamas but with the Palestinian people in their entirety, both the 1.5 million in Gaza and the 2.5 to three million in the West Bank.
It is a war waged every hour of every day there is occupation, checkpoints, and settlements.
It is a war waged every hour of every day there is an economic embargo, siege, and collective punishment.
It is a war being waged every second of the indignity and humiliation suffered by its victims.
Yet despite the irrefutable facts of Israel's barbaric treatment of a people criminalised for daring to exist, we are treated to a constant inversion of the truth, which holds that the many and multiple depredations being suffered by the Palestinians do not amount to one of the most sustained and grievous crimes against humanity in history, but are the result of their intransigence and violence.
This is the song of colonialism. The victims always bring it on themselves. If only they would learn to bear their chains in silence.
As Golda Meir said, "We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children."
And they are killing them, right now, even as the world looks on - again.
Worse, when we consider that Israel's treatment of the Palestinian people constitutes a clear and inarguable breach of international law, and has done for decades, the Western media's continuing policy of ascribing a moral equivalence between Israel, an oppressive settler colonial state, and the Palestinians, an oppressed colonised people, monumental insult is added to monstrous injury. There is no moral equivalence. Nor can there ever be.
Israel's latest military assault against the Palestinians of the Gaza Strip, which, at 40km long and 10km wide with a population of between 1.5 and 1.7 million people, is one of the most densely populated pieces of land in the world, goes by the biblical name of Operation Pillar of Cloud.
As with Operation Cast Lead four years ago, during which 1,400 Palestinians were killed, thousands more were wounded and war crimes, as adduced by the UN and the Red Cross, were committed wholesale, this latest military operation is designed to terrify the Palestinians into submission.
The major, though as yet unquantifiable, difference between now and then is Egypt.
Hosni Mubarak, Israel's man in Cairo, has been replaced by Mohamed Morsi, the first democratically elected president of Egypt and champion of the Muslim Brotherhood, and at time of writing the prime minister of Egypt has already visited Gaza to show solidarity and offer Egypt's rhetorical support to the Palestinians.
The question now is how this support will manifest if, as expected, Israel escalates its assault in the days ahead.
The answer could well have a bearing on the future not only for the Palestinians but the region as a whole.
The Obama administration, thus far supporting Israel in Washington's time-honoured fashion, will not relish the prospect of strained relations with the most populous Arab nation in the world.
Not now with the region still in a state of flux as a result of the Arab spring. And not even despite the fact that Israel is and remains the US's closest ally.
Former US president Ronald Reagan, with the candour of a man accustomed to making and breaking governments at will, said it best.
"The greatest security for Israel is to create new Egypts."
A new Egypt has been created, not by Israel or the US but by the Egyptian people. And it remains to be seen how this will affect Israel's ability to continue in the old way.
It is a question that is still to be answered. What we know for certain now is that oppression breeds resistance.
The rockets being fired against Israel from inside Gaza are the natural response of a people under siege for the crime of exercising their democratic right to elect a government of their own choice.
And when it comes to that government, Hamas's supreme crime, according to Israel and its apologists, is that in its charter it states its desire to see the destruction of Israel.
Standing alone and shorn of any historical or actual context, it is a desire that cannot be understood or accepted by any reasonable person.
But add this context, in the shape of the previously mentioned decades-long occupation and policy of apartheid, ethnic cleansing and national humiliation - is it really beyond comprehension that the people suffering this oppression may develop along the way a hatred of their oppressor, however irrational it might seem to us who don't live under this kind of oppression and consequently could never understand its dehumanising impact?
In the last analysis, the only way Israel will ever be able to guarantee its security is if it guarantees the security of the Palestinians.
This will first of all require an end to the inherent racism that exists in the heart of every coloniser towards those being colonised.
The Palestinians are not subhumans. They are not products of a lesser culture or race.
They are a people who have suffered six decades of injustice that continues as a stain on the conscience of the world.
Incinerating their children in the name of civilisation and democracy renders both meaningless.
If you have enjoyed this article then please consider donating to the Morning Star's Fighting Fund to ensure we can keep publishing your paper.
Donate to the Fighting Fund here
Monday, 22 October 2012
Comment
Marching for real change
Friday 19 October 2012 Printable Email
David Cameron entertained his backbenchers this week - it doesn't take much - by ridiculing Ed Miliband's decision to speak at today's A Future that Works protest in London.
Cameron chortled, as only privately educated beneficiaries of inherited, tax-dodged wealth can do, that the Labour leader was ingratiating himself with his trade union paymasters by attending "the most lucrative sponsored walk in history.
What a card and what a loss to the world of stand-up comics when Cameron renounced comedy for politics.
This braying ass and his back-bench sycophantic gigglers wouldn't understand in a month of Sundays why hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets of London, Glasgow and Belfast.
The short answer is in opposition to the Tory-Liberal Democrat government policies, but a more detailed response would cover a catalogue of crimes committed by this conservative coalition and its own corporate paymasters.
It won't just be trade unionists protesting, although they have reasons enough to do so.
Whether in the public or private sector, workers have seen job losses, pay restraint, attacks on pension schemes and plans to undermine trade union representation.
Council tenants and the homeless will also take to the streets because they see a government intent on fleecing working people to suit its friends, the property speculators, private landlords and banks.
There are 4.5 million people on council housing lists, but, instead of investing in a new generation of local authority homes, the government pushes further privatisation and housing benefit cuts to drive poor people out of better-off areas of our cities.
Ministers take refuge in their natural prejudice against claimants by increasingly equating them to scroungers on society.
Justifying their campaign to slash benefits they seek support from "hard-working families," juxtaposing their economic hardship in the current crisis with supposed featherbedding of the unemployed, as though most, or even many, don't work through choice.
It is classic Tory divide-and-rule tactics, as Liberal Democrat leaders would once have pointed out before their backsides became so cosily moulded to their ministerial easy chairs.
Marchers know that it wasn't claimants, public service workers, trade unionists, pensioners, single parents, asylum-seekers, the long-term unemployed, young people or any other convenient scapegoat that caused capitalism's crisis.
It was sparked by private banks that gambled on subprime mortgages, worthless financial packages and commodity speculation.
When the going was good, the rewards were excellent for company directors and shareholders, but, unlike other gamblers who stand their own losses, the banks insisted on being bailed out, refinanced and allowed to start again.
Britain's finance sector wasn't unlucky. It was corrupt and crooked. Instead of being bailed out, the banks should have been nationalised and the people running them should be in jail.
Barclays has just set aside a further £700 million to cover its "mis-selling" saga, making £2,000 million so far.
What other business could engage in fraud on this scale and still be allowed to operate?
Yet politicians of all stripes still bow down to the banks, euphemising them as "markets" or "investors," and tell workers to pull together and bear the pain of paying for the crisis.
That's not acceptable from the Tories and Liberal Democrats. Nor will it be from Miliband. He should be told that today.
Workers are not marching today against Tory austerity with no better aim than embracing austerity-lite from Labour. They want real change.
If you have enjoyed this article then please consider donating to the Morning Star's Fighting Fund to ensure we can keep publishing your paper.
Donate to the Fighting Fund here
Marching for real change
Friday 19 October 2012 Printable Email
David Cameron entertained his backbenchers this week - it doesn't take much - by ridiculing Ed Miliband's decision to speak at today's A Future that Works protest in London.
Cameron chortled, as only privately educated beneficiaries of inherited, tax-dodged wealth can do, that the Labour leader was ingratiating himself with his trade union paymasters by attending "the most lucrative sponsored walk in history.
What a card and what a loss to the world of stand-up comics when Cameron renounced comedy for politics.
This braying ass and his back-bench sycophantic gigglers wouldn't understand in a month of Sundays why hundreds of thousands of people are taking to the streets of London, Glasgow and Belfast.
The short answer is in opposition to the Tory-Liberal Democrat government policies, but a more detailed response would cover a catalogue of crimes committed by this conservative coalition and its own corporate paymasters.
It won't just be trade unionists protesting, although they have reasons enough to do so.
Whether in the public or private sector, workers have seen job losses, pay restraint, attacks on pension schemes and plans to undermine trade union representation.
Council tenants and the homeless will also take to the streets because they see a government intent on fleecing working people to suit its friends, the property speculators, private landlords and banks.
There are 4.5 million people on council housing lists, but, instead of investing in a new generation of local authority homes, the government pushes further privatisation and housing benefit cuts to drive poor people out of better-off areas of our cities.
Ministers take refuge in their natural prejudice against claimants by increasingly equating them to scroungers on society.
Justifying their campaign to slash benefits they seek support from "hard-working families," juxtaposing their economic hardship in the current crisis with supposed featherbedding of the unemployed, as though most, or even many, don't work through choice.
It is classic Tory divide-and-rule tactics, as Liberal Democrat leaders would once have pointed out before their backsides became so cosily moulded to their ministerial easy chairs.
Marchers know that it wasn't claimants, public service workers, trade unionists, pensioners, single parents, asylum-seekers, the long-term unemployed, young people or any other convenient scapegoat that caused capitalism's crisis.
It was sparked by private banks that gambled on subprime mortgages, worthless financial packages and commodity speculation.
When the going was good, the rewards were excellent for company directors and shareholders, but, unlike other gamblers who stand their own losses, the banks insisted on being bailed out, refinanced and allowed to start again.
Britain's finance sector wasn't unlucky. It was corrupt and crooked. Instead of being bailed out, the banks should have been nationalised and the people running them should be in jail.
Barclays has just set aside a further £700 million to cover its "mis-selling" saga, making £2,000 million so far.
What other business could engage in fraud on this scale and still be allowed to operate?
Yet politicians of all stripes still bow down to the banks, euphemising them as "markets" or "investors," and tell workers to pull together and bear the pain of paying for the crisis.
That's not acceptable from the Tories and Liberal Democrats. Nor will it be from Miliband. He should be told that today.
Workers are not marching today against Tory austerity with no better aim than embracing austerity-lite from Labour. They want real change.
If you have enjoyed this article then please consider donating to the Morning Star's Fighting Fund to ensure we can keep publishing your paper.
Donate to the Fighting Fund here
Friday, 19 October 2012
Thursday, 4 October 2012
Eric Hobsbawn
Features
Obituary: Eric Hobsbawn
Thursday 04 October 2012 Printable Email
Eric Hobsbawm, who died on Monday aged 95, stood unchallenged as the foremost historian in the Marxist tradition not just in Britain but internationally.
He was also an active Communist for most of his life and closely involved in the key debates which defined the history of the left in Britain during the 20th century.
Born in Alexandria to Jewish parents of British-Austrian nationality in 1917, he was orphaned as a child and then brought up by an uncle in Berlin.
There he witnessed the nazi rise to power at first hand and participated in resistance activities as a member of a communist youth organisation.
Moving to school in Britain in 1934, he secured a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, in 1935 and quickly became involved in the wider intellectual and organisational activities of the university's Communist Party branch. He served during the second world war in the engineers and army educational corps.
After the war he lectured at Birkbeck College in London from 1947 until his retirement in 1982 and held a fellowship at King's College, Cambridge, between 1949 and 1955.
He held visiting chairs in the United States from the 1960s and became president of Birkbeck College in 2002.
As a historian Hobsbawm was a central figure among those who transformed British history writing in the 1940s and '50s and for at least three decades broke the dominance of those who had hitherto made history speak for the existing order.
Along with Christopher Hill, Donna Torr, George Thomson, Rodney Hilton, Victor Kiernan, EP Thompson and other members of the Communist Party Historians Group, Hobsbawm laid out a new agenda.
This was interdisciplinary, insisted that society had to analysed as a whole and drew on the approach of the French historians of the Annales school, Georges Lefebre and Marc Bloch, both deeply influenced by Marx.
In 1952 Hobsbawm with other members of the Historians Group founded the journal Past and Present and a little later the Society for the Study of Labour History. The sophistication of their analysis forced mainstream historical journals to engage on fields of battle defined in Marxist terms.
Hobsbawm himself did so particularly in three areas.
He redefined the European crisis of the 17th century in economic, demographic and political terms as a clash between feudalism and capitalism.
He provided statistical support for Marx's view that the initial phase of industrial growth was at the expense of working-class living standards and hence challenged the dominant academic orthodoxy which insisted that industrialisation improved living standards.
Hobsbawm also produced detailed studies which vindicated Lenin's explanation of the reformism of Britain's labour movement in terms of a labour aristocracy sustained on the profits of empire.
Regis professors were lured out of their ivory towers - often returning battered and discredited.
These debates took Marxist assumptions on the class-driven character of social change to the heart of history teaching in schools and universities.
Hobsbawm followed this up in the 1960s and '70s with brilliantly accessible histories of Britain, Europe and the world over the past three centuries that defined the historical understanding of a generation.
It is rare for a scholar of Hosbawm's stature to be so accessible in their writing and teaching. Many of us will remember this for many years to come.
At the same time Hobsbawm was closely involved in the politics of the Communist Party. Along with EP Thompson and John Saville, he was among those who demanded changes in inner-party democracy and a departure from democratic centralism in the wake of the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and its denunciation of Stalin. He did not, however, leave the Communist Party.
In the '60s and '70s he developed links with those in the Italian Communist Party who saw themselves as developing a strategy for socialism that was quite distinct from - and to a large extent posed against - that of the Soviet Union.
In 1977 he published The Italian Road to Socialism based on a long interview with Giorgio Napolitano, then international secretary of the Italian party and today president of Italy.
In 1978 he gave a lecture at Marx House in London that was subsequently published in the Communist Party monthly Marxism Today as The Forward March of Labour Halted.
Writing at the time when the trade union movement was at the peak of its strength - and the left highly influential within it - Hobsbawm argued that the manual working class was in numerical decline and that the character of its politics was inherently economistic, trapped within the bounds of self-interested wage bargaining, and that consequently the left had to look in future to broader alliances and social movements.
This lecture became an iconic text for that wing within the Communist Party that sought to steer it away from class politics and to challenge key elements of Marxism.
While Hobsbawm never fully endorsed this endeavour, he actively supported the transformation of Marxism Today into its flagship journal and was a very frequent contributor. He continued to be so until 1991, by which time the Communist Party of Great Britain under the control of this wing had expelled virtually all opponents and then voted itself out of existence.
The same tendency subsequently provided important ideological support for those within the Labour Party calling for a realignment away from the trade union movement and the creation of new Labour.
Although Hobsbawm supported Neil Kinnock's remoulding of the Labour Party and was honoured by Tony Blair he subsequently spoke out against new Labour, its alignment with US policies and, very firmly, against the invasion of Iraq.
In his final years Hobsbawm continued his role - to use his own phrase - as a "public intellectual."
He refused all invitations to unilaterally condemn the Soviet Union and instead asserted its historic role in the defeat of fascism.
He indicated his concern at the manipulation of "identity politics" and in particular the divisive use of nationalism and national mythology. He showed his exasperation at the abandonment by most contemporary historians of any attempt to understand overall processes of social change.
Internationally, his writings have become an intellectual beacon for those seeking an understanding of human development in Marxist terms, particularly in Latin America and the Indian subcontinent.
While in Britain his death marks the end of that generation of communist historians who transformed history-writing, his continuing influence as a humanist and historian is assured.
Obituary: Eric Hobsbawn
Thursday 04 October 2012 Printable Email
Eric Hobsbawm, who died on Monday aged 95, stood unchallenged as the foremost historian in the Marxist tradition not just in Britain but internationally.
He was also an active Communist for most of his life and closely involved in the key debates which defined the history of the left in Britain during the 20th century.
Born in Alexandria to Jewish parents of British-Austrian nationality in 1917, he was orphaned as a child and then brought up by an uncle in Berlin.
There he witnessed the nazi rise to power at first hand and participated in resistance activities as a member of a communist youth organisation.
Moving to school in Britain in 1934, he secured a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, in 1935 and quickly became involved in the wider intellectual and organisational activities of the university's Communist Party branch. He served during the second world war in the engineers and army educational corps.
After the war he lectured at Birkbeck College in London from 1947 until his retirement in 1982 and held a fellowship at King's College, Cambridge, between 1949 and 1955.
He held visiting chairs in the United States from the 1960s and became president of Birkbeck College in 2002.
As a historian Hobsbawm was a central figure among those who transformed British history writing in the 1940s and '50s and for at least three decades broke the dominance of those who had hitherto made history speak for the existing order.
Along with Christopher Hill, Donna Torr, George Thomson, Rodney Hilton, Victor Kiernan, EP Thompson and other members of the Communist Party Historians Group, Hobsbawm laid out a new agenda.
This was interdisciplinary, insisted that society had to analysed as a whole and drew on the approach of the French historians of the Annales school, Georges Lefebre and Marc Bloch, both deeply influenced by Marx.
In 1952 Hobsbawm with other members of the Historians Group founded the journal Past and Present and a little later the Society for the Study of Labour History. The sophistication of their analysis forced mainstream historical journals to engage on fields of battle defined in Marxist terms.
Hobsbawm himself did so particularly in three areas.
He redefined the European crisis of the 17th century in economic, demographic and political terms as a clash between feudalism and capitalism.
He provided statistical support for Marx's view that the initial phase of industrial growth was at the expense of working-class living standards and hence challenged the dominant academic orthodoxy which insisted that industrialisation improved living standards.
Hobsbawm also produced detailed studies which vindicated Lenin's explanation of the reformism of Britain's labour movement in terms of a labour aristocracy sustained on the profits of empire.
Regis professors were lured out of their ivory towers - often returning battered and discredited.
These debates took Marxist assumptions on the class-driven character of social change to the heart of history teaching in schools and universities.
Hobsbawm followed this up in the 1960s and '70s with brilliantly accessible histories of Britain, Europe and the world over the past three centuries that defined the historical understanding of a generation.
It is rare for a scholar of Hosbawm's stature to be so accessible in their writing and teaching. Many of us will remember this for many years to come.
At the same time Hobsbawm was closely involved in the politics of the Communist Party. Along with EP Thompson and John Saville, he was among those who demanded changes in inner-party democracy and a departure from democratic centralism in the wake of the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and its denunciation of Stalin. He did not, however, leave the Communist Party.
In the '60s and '70s he developed links with those in the Italian Communist Party who saw themselves as developing a strategy for socialism that was quite distinct from - and to a large extent posed against - that of the Soviet Union.
In 1977 he published The Italian Road to Socialism based on a long interview with Giorgio Napolitano, then international secretary of the Italian party and today president of Italy.
In 1978 he gave a lecture at Marx House in London that was subsequently published in the Communist Party monthly Marxism Today as The Forward March of Labour Halted.
Writing at the time when the trade union movement was at the peak of its strength - and the left highly influential within it - Hobsbawm argued that the manual working class was in numerical decline and that the character of its politics was inherently economistic, trapped within the bounds of self-interested wage bargaining, and that consequently the left had to look in future to broader alliances and social movements.
This lecture became an iconic text for that wing within the Communist Party that sought to steer it away from class politics and to challenge key elements of Marxism.
While Hobsbawm never fully endorsed this endeavour, he actively supported the transformation of Marxism Today into its flagship journal and was a very frequent contributor. He continued to be so until 1991, by which time the Communist Party of Great Britain under the control of this wing had expelled virtually all opponents and then voted itself out of existence.
The same tendency subsequently provided important ideological support for those within the Labour Party calling for a realignment away from the trade union movement and the creation of new Labour.
Although Hobsbawm supported Neil Kinnock's remoulding of the Labour Party and was honoured by Tony Blair he subsequently spoke out against new Labour, its alignment with US policies and, very firmly, against the invasion of Iraq.
In his final years Hobsbawm continued his role - to use his own phrase - as a "public intellectual."
He refused all invitations to unilaterally condemn the Soviet Union and instead asserted its historic role in the defeat of fascism.
He indicated his concern at the manipulation of "identity politics" and in particular the divisive use of nationalism and national mythology. He showed his exasperation at the abandonment by most contemporary historians of any attempt to understand overall processes of social change.
Internationally, his writings have become an intellectual beacon for those seeking an understanding of human development in Marxist terms, particularly in Latin America and the Indian subcontinent.
While in Britain his death marks the end of that generation of communist historians who transformed history-writing, his continuing influence as a humanist and historian is assured.
Wednesday, 3 October 2012
http://bulatlat.com/main/2012/10/03/military-files-case-against-labor-leader/
MANILA – The Cabuyao Municipal Trial Court issued a warrant of arrest dated August 2, 2012 against labor leader Hermenegildo “Hermie” Marasigan. Marasigan is a member of KMU’s national council and vice-chairman of the the Pagkakaisa ng Manggagawa sa Timog Katagalugan (Pamantik), KMU’s regional chapter.
According to a report from Pamantik-KMU, Marasigan is being charged with “direct assault upon a person in authority” and “slight physical injury” during a supposed incident that took place on Oct. 20, 2011 in Barangay Pulo, Cabuyao, Laguna. An official of the Philippine Army is behind the charges; the officer earlier alleged that Marasigan was guilty of “human rights violations” against a soldier.
KMU chairman Elmer Labog immediately expressed outrage against what he deemed as political and legal harassment against the Southern Tagalog labor leader. Labog led leaders of Pamantik and Olalia in a protest in Cabuyao last October 2 to denounce the warrant of arrest against Marasigan and the continuing military operations in the region.
“Southern Tagalog has one of the highest concentration of workers in the country, and the labor movement there is very active and highly politicized. Ka Hermie is an exemplary labor leader and these made-up charges against him are a direct attack not so much against his person but against the labor movement not just in the region but in the country. This is out-and-out political harassment and a move to cripple Pamantik and Olalia’s activities in the region. These labor organizations are active in exposing the countless labor rights and also human rights violations in Southern Tagalog,” Labog said.
Labog said the Aquino administration is utilizing the same militarist tactics against political dissenters and labor leaders that were employed by his predecessor Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and the former dictator himself Ferdinand Marcos.
“Aquino is wielding martial law against workers and the labor movement. This is not the first attack that his government launched against Filipino workers, and it’s certain that it won’t be the last,” he said.
The warrant against Marasigan was delivered last Sept. 26, after two men in plainclothes went to his house in Brgy. Pulo, Cabuyao, Laguna and told his wife that he was being “invited” to the town’s police station. A staff of Olalia went to the Cabuyao police station twice to inquire about the incident but the police authorities denied sending a letter to Marasigan. It was only when the staff staff went to the Cabuyao MTC that the existence of the arrest warrant was confirmed.
According to Pamantik, the arrest warrant against Marasigan came at the heels of the establishment of a military camp beside a local office of Anakpawis Partylist in Brgy. Pulo. Members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines have been noted to be asking residents about the whereabouts and homes of workers who are members of KMU-affiliated unions such as those working for Nestle Cabuyao and RFM. The soldiers have also been holding public film showings featuring documentaries against progressive partylist groups Anakpawis and Bayan Muna.
Residents, in the meantime, have also complained against the rowdiness of the soldiers who hold drinking sessions in the camp. When residents petitioned for the removal of the camp, the military merely transferred to another location in the same barangay, near the Malayan Colleges in Paseo de Cabuyao.
Labog said the AFP should immediately pull out from Cabuyao and from all workers’ communities.
“The Aquino government is using the military to intimidate workers and frustrate workers’ efforts at forming unions and fighting for their rights,” Labog said.
What went before
Based on an October 23 report from Journal.com.ph, the military was swift to file “human rights violation charges” against Marasigan when on October 22, he tried to stop soldiers from conducting community development operations in Bgy. Pulo.
The media report revealed that it was Capt. Gene Orense, civil military officer of the 202nd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division who said that the army will file the charges against Marasigan. It was reported that the AFP was conducting a so-called “community organizing activity for development operations” in Brgy. Pulo when Marasigan and a few others from Pamantik and Olalia arrived and allegedly disrupted the meeting.
“Marasigan and his group reportedly forced their way into the barangay hall of Pulo, Cabuyao, and went on to write graffiti on the wall with the words: “Palayasin ang militar dito sa Barangay Pulo,’” (Remove the military from Pulo village) said the report.
In the meantime, the report also included a statement, which claimed that Marasigan figured in a punching match with a Cpl. Reynante Roxas. Roxas of the SOTWA, Bravo Coy Command Battalion of the 2nd Infantry Division of the Philippine Army filed the case against Marasigan on Oct. 25, 2011.
Pamantik, in a statement, explained that the October 20 activity was precisely against militarization. It said the peaceful protest was threatened when the military took out their high-powered firearms. The soldiers, at the time, were occupying a former health center which they turned into a detachment. The detachment, in the meantime, was next door to a day care center where toddlers and small children were present and playing at the time.
“The Philippine Army violated Article 4, Section 4 and Article 12 of International Humanitarian Law when they established camp at kept weapons in a civilian community,” Pamantik said.
The group said the charges against Marasigan were issued arbitrarily and the subsequent hearings held without following due process.
“Marasigan did not receive any subpoena, neither was he formally and legally informed that criminal charges were filed against him. It was revealed that in the first hearing that took place last November 23, 2011, the soldier who filed the charges did not even attend, but the court still continued to process the case and issue a resolution as well as a warrant of arrest. The court should immediately have thrown out the case,” it said.
According to a report from Pamantik-KMU, Marasigan is being charged with “direct assault upon a person in authority” and “slight physical injury” during a supposed incident that took place on Oct. 20, 2011 in Barangay Pulo, Cabuyao, Laguna. An official of the Philippine Army is behind the charges; the officer earlier alleged that Marasigan was guilty of “human rights violations” against a soldier.
KMU chairman Elmer Labog immediately expressed outrage against what he deemed as political and legal harassment against the Southern Tagalog labor leader. Labog led leaders of Pamantik and Olalia in a protest in Cabuyao last October 2 to denounce the warrant of arrest against Marasigan and the continuing military operations in the region.
“Southern Tagalog has one of the highest concentration of workers in the country, and the labor movement there is very active and highly politicized. Ka Hermie is an exemplary labor leader and these made-up charges against him are a direct attack not so much against his person but against the labor movement not just in the region but in the country. This is out-and-out political harassment and a move to cripple Pamantik and Olalia’s activities in the region. These labor organizations are active in exposing the countless labor rights and also human rights violations in Southern Tagalog,” Labog said.
Labog said the Aquino administration is utilizing the same militarist tactics against political dissenters and labor leaders that were employed by his predecessor Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and the former dictator himself Ferdinand Marcos.
“Aquino is wielding martial law against workers and the labor movement. This is not the first attack that his government launched against Filipino workers, and it’s certain that it won’t be the last,” he said.
The warrant against Marasigan was delivered last Sept. 26, after two men in plainclothes went to his house in Brgy. Pulo, Cabuyao, Laguna and told his wife that he was being “invited” to the town’s police station. A staff of Olalia went to the Cabuyao police station twice to inquire about the incident but the police authorities denied sending a letter to Marasigan. It was only when the staff staff went to the Cabuyao MTC that the existence of the arrest warrant was confirmed.
According to Pamantik, the arrest warrant against Marasigan came at the heels of the establishment of a military camp beside a local office of Anakpawis Partylist in Brgy. Pulo. Members of the Armed Forces of the Philippines have been noted to be asking residents about the whereabouts and homes of workers who are members of KMU-affiliated unions such as those working for Nestle Cabuyao and RFM. The soldiers have also been holding public film showings featuring documentaries against progressive partylist groups Anakpawis and Bayan Muna.
Residents, in the meantime, have also complained against the rowdiness of the soldiers who hold drinking sessions in the camp. When residents petitioned for the removal of the camp, the military merely transferred to another location in the same barangay, near the Malayan Colleges in Paseo de Cabuyao.
Labog said the AFP should immediately pull out from Cabuyao and from all workers’ communities.
“The Aquino government is using the military to intimidate workers and frustrate workers’ efforts at forming unions and fighting for their rights,” Labog said.
What went before
Based on an October 23 report from Journal.com.ph, the military was swift to file “human rights violation charges” against Marasigan when on October 22, he tried to stop soldiers from conducting community development operations in Bgy. Pulo.
The media report revealed that it was Capt. Gene Orense, civil military officer of the 202nd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division who said that the army will file the charges against Marasigan. It was reported that the AFP was conducting a so-called “community organizing activity for development operations” in Brgy. Pulo when Marasigan and a few others from Pamantik and Olalia arrived and allegedly disrupted the meeting.
“Marasigan and his group reportedly forced their way into the barangay hall of Pulo, Cabuyao, and went on to write graffiti on the wall with the words: “Palayasin ang militar dito sa Barangay Pulo,’” (Remove the military from Pulo village) said the report.
In the meantime, the report also included a statement, which claimed that Marasigan figured in a punching match with a Cpl. Reynante Roxas. Roxas of the SOTWA, Bravo Coy Command Battalion of the 2nd Infantry Division of the Philippine Army filed the case against Marasigan on Oct. 25, 2011.
Pamantik, in a statement, explained that the October 20 activity was precisely against militarization. It said the peaceful protest was threatened when the military took out their high-powered firearms. The soldiers, at the time, were occupying a former health center which they turned into a detachment. The detachment, in the meantime, was next door to a day care center where toddlers and small children were present and playing at the time.
“The Philippine Army violated Article 4, Section 4 and Article 12 of International Humanitarian Law when they established camp at kept weapons in a civilian community,” Pamantik said.
The group said the charges against Marasigan were issued arbitrarily and the subsequent hearings held without following due process.
“Marasigan did not receive any subpoena, neither was he formally and legally informed that criminal charges were filed against him. It was revealed that in the first hearing that took place last November 23, 2011, the soldier who filed the charges did not even attend, but the court still continued to process the case and issue a resolution as well as a warrant of arrest. The court should immediately have thrown out the case,” it said.
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