Why I don’t buy Socialist Worker

You weren’t a member, you tell me, in 2013 when the arguments happened. You’ve heard, of course, there was some controversy but you have been told that the people who left were sectarians. That’s true, isn’t it, they had some grievance with the SWP and they used a disagreement about the SWP’s internal procedures as an excuse to leave? Hadn’t they been planning to leave for years? 

In 2010 a man called Martin Smith (“Comrade Delta”) was the National Secretary of the SWP, its day to day leader, the person who employs the other party workers. In July of that year, a 19 year old woman (“Comrade W”) complained that he had mistreated her. She didn’t use the word “rape”, but the people who met her and heard her knew what she was talking about.

From the start, Smith’s supporters (including Weyman Bennett, who worked with him on the SWP’s anti-fascist campaign) put pressure on the women who helped Comrade W, calling one of them a “traitor”, ostracising and dismissing them and forcing them out of the SWP.

The complaint was investigated by Charlie Kimber, who is now the editor of Socialist Worker. He met comrade W, told her that he believed her and that disciplinary action would be taken against Martin Smith. The extent of the punishment was as follows: Smith was demoted from his position as National Secretary but remained in the SWP’s full-time leadership on its Central Committee.

Smith’s demotion was eventually explained to the membership at the SWP’s 2011 conference, where it was introduced by Alex Callinicos who complained about outside forces reporting on internal difficulties within the SWP. He said there was a complaint, he didn’t explain its seriousness and he said that Smith himself had asked to be moved to a different role. The session ended with delegates clapping, stamping their feet in Smith’s defence and shouting, “The workers united will never be defeated.”

In 2012, W, taking at face value the SWP’s recent involvement in anti-rape campaigns, decided to rejoin. She was still traumatised by what had happened, suffering flashbacks and was tearful, and eventually she asked the SWP’s disputes committee (“DC”) to investigate. This time, she did describe what had happened to her in 2010 as rape.

The investigation was loaded: a majority of those investigating were Smith’s friends and appointees. He was given sight of her written statement (which the SWP has always refused to publish). She was not allowed to read his.

A second complainant came forward: at this stage, the DC heard but refused to investigate her complaint.

By a majority, they decided to take no action against him. One person who dissented was the chair of the committee, who found that there probably had been improper sexual conduct – “sexual harassment” – and that Smith’s behaviour was incompatible with membership, or leadership, of a left-wing party.

At the start of 2013, the SWP conference narrowly approved the disputes committee report; from then on large parts of the organisation operated a loyalty test: if you were willing to back Smith, you could remain in the party. if not, you were told to leave. The atmosphere, at its worst, was as hostile as could be. Members of Smith’s personal anti-fascist bodyguard, men in the late 40s, spat in the faces of a woman in her 20s who disagreed with them. Smith’s supporters threatened to beat up another young, male critic. People were silenced, jeered, told to their faces to leave.

The second complaint was eventually heard. It was in writing. It too, has never been published. In careful, painful detail, it described further improper sexual conduct by Smith. This time, and for the first time in the entire scandal, the SWP’s leadership decided that a degree of damage limitation was necessary. A fresh panel was convened and Martin Smith resigned rather than face investigation.

In the SWP, you will be told that Martin Smith was vindicated. He wasn’t. The last panel to investigate his complaint found that there was enough evidence of sexual harassment that if he was to ever seek to rejoin he would have to explain his conduct.

In the SWP, you will be told that the leadership’s critics were a few malcontents, people who were on the verge of leaving the organisation anyway. They weren’t. At least 700 people left, or around a quarter of the SWP’s subs-paying membership. Among those who left were people who had given twenty, thirty, even fifty years of their lives to that organisation. 

In the SWP, you will be told that this incident belongs to history, that the SWP has learnt from its mistakes. It hasn’t, the men and women who attempted to cover up a crime are all still in its leadership.

David Widgery, Agitprop and the SWP (1978)

[from issue 2, Wedge magazine]

This quick history of the rise, fall and rise again of the Agit-prop Committee in the Socialist Workers over the last three years is prompted by two agit-prop objections to the first snore-worthy issue of Wedge. The first is the stated perspective that there are the editorial “we”, an elite of cultural revolutionaries, and the excruciating economistic berks who lumber along in the less enlightened left, obsessed with tedious, uncreative things like strikes and demos, badly in need of the elite’s expertise. The second is the timeless, academic tone of your journal, too much like a left alternative to Red Letters, when what’s urgently needed is some forum for reporting and sharing the practical experience we do possess of cultural action. I like to read a trenchant critique of late David Sequiros or a dialectical scrutiny of Walt Disney as much as the next person, and I especially enjoy the pleasingly irreverent cultural critique of North Americans like Georgakas, Baxendall, Buhle and the divine Rosemont, and great theory mags like Cineaste, Women and Film, middle-period Radical America and Cultural Correspondence. But there’s too many people making an academic living here in the UK on that scene anyway, and what we need is not another generation of tyros staring at the words “Art” and “Marxism”, trying to figure out some finished diagram of their relation, but a sharing of the half-wrought, human efforts so many of us have been making in different mediums since ’68 to get our revolutionary ideas across in new cultural-political forms.

So, on to the saga of Arties v Hacks in SWP, or, more accurately, How does a modern grouping of conscious revolutionaries develop a policy towards art and propaganda? This interests me personally because I joined IS ten years ago, after disenchanting spells in the CP and SLL, because of an obituary of André Breton written by Ian Birchall in the journal International Socialism. Quite something, I thought:  post-Trotskyists who liked Surrealism and had 300 members into the bargain. The electrician who joined with me turned out to have been bribed with free saxophone lessons after meetings, and IS even then had quite a distinctive graphic flair and the only half-way funny cartoonist on the left. But it was only in 1975, on the initiative of Roland Muldoon of CAST and the proletariat’s Oliver, that we set up an informal committee to co-ordinate agit-prop work. Roland, with pre-Women’s Movement Sheila Rowbotham and pre-playwright John Hoyland, had set up the original agit-prop office in the acid-dropped flurry of the May Events. Psychedelia v Ian Smith at the Roundhouse, the Black Dwarf Christmas Party. I’d always been involved a weird kind of headshop Marxism in the underground press as well as trying to liven up the ‘Arts’ coverage of Socialist Worker. Nigel Fountain, who has a world record of working on failed left culture magazines from Idiot International to Street Life, Roger Huddle, SW’s designer, Pete Marsden, the paper’s infintely patient sub, and Toni of IS Books were other supporters of the ‘post-electronic faction’, as the Agit-Prop Committee got labelled.

Our first outing was entrepreneured by Roland. Karmitz’s reconstruction of a women’s textile factory occupation, the film Blow by Blow, was a gift: four stars for the subject, crisply edited, topical, a sensitivity to feminist ideas not bad for the times and in colour. “We’ll just have to keep quiet about the sub-titles”, counselled Muldoon. We tried it on an after-conference audience in St Pancras Town Hall, acoustics as bad as ever, bar worse, mistake to precede it with too long Chile movie. Still people loved it, cheering and booing along – and we made money. One month later, we sent it out, on hire from The Other Cinema on a tour of Britain, from Glasgow to Southampton with IS stops on the way. The heroic projectionist was his own driver, cashier, electrician, and often made a speech at the end. We organised posters, tickets and advance publicity from London, and depended on local enthusiasm to carry it through. High spot of that tour was a hurriedly arranged showing of the film to an audience of women strikers whose dispute has many parallels with the film, in a Salford GEC factory.

Our next tour was with Berwick St Film Collective’s Ireland: Behind the Wire, not an ‘easy’ movie and with some rather indistinct sound which, we discovered all too easily, gets lost in a tall, bare meeting room. But the film was harrowingly authentic, especially the testimonies of the internees and interrogees and the film-maker had clearly won the trust of their subjects. This time the tour was broken up in stages and, on the Yorkshire leg, where I was doing the projecting, we got large and very attentive audiences. I was especially impressed by the large number of Irish people in the audience, often whole families, nodding in agreement with the film. An important feature of this still very subversive film is that it made its own political analysis, and a good one, as it went along. We later ran into problems or rather ran out of films when we toured movies whose politics we had reservations about. Last Grave in Dimbaza is a solid but dated film and since we made a special effort on this tour to visit industrial areas where firms operated who were heavily involved in South Africa, we had to supplement the film with prepared speakers’ notes. Spain: Dreams and Nightmares, made by a retired American building worker, working through his own feelings about modern Spain and his memories of the civil War, in which he fought, has a good class line, but it’s got a pretty terrible account of the Civil War, so again we provided background material. Predictably on all our tours some idiotic hack would ring up in fury and complain that our films “didn’t have the right class line” and we were misleading the class … again. We’d explain that we didn’t have the resources to produce our own politically kosher films, even if this was possible or desirable, and that, for Chri’sake, we were involved in films to reach out to a wider political audience of the usual circle of the already converted and over-committed.

We also tried local tours and specialist tours (I humped Cinema Action’s Miners Film on British Rail round the Yorkshire coalfield) and wrote a section for the IS Handbook on the practical problems of organising film shows. But Pete Marsden was virtually collapsing under the strain of being tour organiser as well as SW sub-editor. We succeeded in our first aim: taking left films to people who would never venture into arts cinema or college; and we’d established as SWP network of over 25 towns of people who had experience of setting up the venues. We’d done something to raise the politicos’ consciousness about film as a weapon; and we’d tackled the mundane but absolutely vital problem of distribution. Otherwise, as The Other Cinema debacle has demonstrated (see elsewhere in this issue of Wedge) you can show leftist films to lefties in the metropolis and still not break into new audiences. One regret is that we didn’t link in with the Newsreel Collective, probably because we (wrongly?) regarded them as a Big Flame front, although their more topical work would have brilliant as a sort of Marxist Pathe News, preceding their big movie. We did have some success showing the Portugal newsreel alongside Spain: Dreams and Nightmares. The national tours served their purpose, enough people got the message to set up their own shows and there are not two SWP-based cinema clubs.

Our first national Agit-Prop conference was held in Manchester in September 1975 with about 200 people including many non-IS folk joining in. We had workshops, many of them practical, with Penny Morris of North West Spanner on theatre organising, John Sturrock advising budding photographers; Eve Barker printing a special conference silk-screen poster; Andy Weistreich on organising song-swapping for socialist minstrels; Roland on ‘hotting up live events’, a blistering attack on that appalling left-wing institution ‘The Social’; Mackie and Evans cartooning; and much free-for-alling. We attempted a discussion on the relationship between the ‘classical’ Marx / Trotsky analysis of high art and the Mayakovsky / Brecht / May Events school of art-as-action, introduced by Ian Birchall and the much-abused Paul O’Flynn, who socked everyone, especially me, by hailing Richard Neville’s Playpower as revolutionary in form (if hollow in content). At least that was what the debate was supposed to be about, but it went all over the place at high speed, not getting us anywhere except a blazing row about whether digging up Headingley cricket pitch to free George Davis was a surrealist act or a form of working class self-defence. Out of habit, we passed a motion at the conference, which was duly handed on to the Central Committee, which gives the flavour of the meeting:

This first national Agitprop meeting wants an end to drab socials, colourless meetings, boring education, unconvincing education and bad jokes by uncovering and organising the creative potential of our members and supporters as designers, printers, sound recordists, actors, photographers and musicians.

We also had grand plans to set up self-financing local agit-prop resources centres and a million other things. A bulletin was started to co-ordinate work but only appeared once. People did things usually off their own bat and without our knowledge.

In London, we organised tape-slide shows for political education; we started a cassette-hire service (SW Recordings) so that people could hear our popular and/or specialist speakers at their convenience (which we now sell); we operated an agi-prop enquiries service at the Finsbury Park Bookshop which was itself trying to improve co-ordination between the nine or ten SWP-operated bookshops and trying to establish the ‘Bookmarx’ book club. We battered away at Socialist Worker, starting, for example, the highly successful ‘Under the Influence’ series, in which socialists recalled the books that had first converted them, and encouraging agit-proppers like Muldoon and O’Flynn to take on review columns and build on the strong arts coverage that Roger Protz had developed. Success here was not encouraging, partly out of sheer pressure on space, partly through a certain crassness among the political leadership (we thought). We organised benefits and concerts ad hoc. Roland put CAST back on the road – strictly roots – ignoring the scaling-up in size and cost that the broader left groups were entering, by reinstating the old, economical and highly mobile gymanstic style of the original Muggins shows. The group of designers at the SW printshop who turn out a prodigious amount of agitation design in political emergencies formed a group called ‘Red Wedge Graphics’ (not to be confused with your august journal) to try and push for more exciting design work. Red Wedge Graphics is a deliberate engima and contains many factions constantly feuding and demanding the suppression of their rivals’ work in best Agit-Prop tradition. One section, the Hot Pink tendency, the most fanatically pro-punk element are now working with the Tom Robinson Band.

In its own anarchic way, punk has had a critical influence on our Agit Prop work, not only confirming many of our cultural ideas but fuelling Rock Against Racism, perhaps the best initiative by the ‘post-electronic tendency’. RAR was the gut reaction of Roger Huddle and Red Saunders the photographer and Kartoon Klown (who is not in the SWP) – who describe their street status as “ageing mods” – to Eric Clapton’s drunken racialist ramblings at a Brum concert. They wrote a letter of protest, signed by friends who could be reached on the phone, to the music press, announcing the existence of a campaigning organisation, Rock Against Racism. The reaction swamped them, not just from closet music freaks on the left but, more importantly, from literally thousands of kids who ‘Love Music And Hate Racism’, are sick of rich super-stars and bored with 90% of what the Left offers them. This is not time or the place for a full  history of RAR but already there have been over 100 gigs, 20,000 badges, four issue of the political fanzine Temporary Hoarding selling out 5,000 copies a time, and just amazing new energy. If you’ve been to a RAR gig, you’ll know. I think its critical important is that it really is the first white anti-racialist initiative which has clicked with black youth, its medium is its message, and it fits and influences the punk rebellion. RAR deserves a lot of credit for getting the punks to come our so hard against the NF. For a while it looked as it it might easily go the other way. If Mayakovksy was alive today, says Patti Smith, he’d play in a rock band. So maybe John Rotten out to go back to writing poetry, which he used to do very well when still at Kingsway FE college.

Punk ironically led to the revival of the Agit Prop Bulletin when Lucy Toothpaste, feminist-punker and editor of the fanzine Jolt took it over and renamed it Rentamob. You can get it from 27 Clerkenwell Close, London E1, c/o Counteract, and it’s full of our current agit-prop ideas. Life inside these dreadful left-wing parties isn’t quite as dead as you seem to think.

Every ship needs a helmsman (Sedgwick)

EVERY SHIP NEEDS A HELMSMAN

Every manic needs a depressive
and
Every depressive needs a manic
and
Every dominant needs a recessive
and
we
agree
People think we’re so aggressive
but
Underneath our front there’s panic
but
Let’s not get depressed or obsessive
or let
peo-
ple see

Every conman needs a sucker
Every sucker needs to be conned
You don’t have to be a stupid mucker

If you don’t count your change don’t squeal if it’s wrong.

We have got a special pedigree
From Karl Marx’s holy family tree
With an Engels-pure heredity
– then we cross:

Four voices:
1, 2 & 3:     Lenin fucked my grandma.
2:                    Trotsky fucked my mam.
1:            Uncle Ho,
3:                And there’s Uncle Jo
1:            Not to speak of Chairman Mo,
4:                And that sexy old Makhno,
1, 2, 3, & 4: All the great bods had a go
(crescendo:)  SEE WHAT A BIG STRONG LAD
I AM!!!

Every junkie needs a mania
Every politician needs Tanzania
Moscow, Castro or Albania:
Make your vow.

Every setback needs a victory
Every doubt must have a mystery
We’re hooked on history now.

Many thanks to John Rudge for sending me a copy of the York IS magazine from 1970. It includes some treats, such as a letter back from Peter Sedgwick in New York, a second piece by Sedgwick warning against a default position of assuming that socialists should vote for Labour, Juliet Ash on the women’s liberation movement, and a sympathetic piece by Dave Gibson on skinheads.

It also includes the above song, which although unattributed (“Anon Trad.”), from its humour and themes of  mental illness and (anti-) Stalinism, strikes me as almost certainly by Sedgwick

 

 

Hollow threats; hollow people

In the distant decades when Socialist Worker was a lively, campaigning newspaper, its editors found themselves repeatedly threatened with libel. The Metropolitan police threatened a libel action in 1974 after Socialist Worker accused its officers of having killed a demonstrator Kevin Gateley at Red Lion Square. In March 1977, the paper was accused of libelling Clive Jenkins, the General Secretary of the white-collar union ASTMS. These, and other threats of libel, left the paper’s then editor Paul Foot with a lifelong feeling of contempt for the ways in which the rich, the powerful, and the custodians of bureaucratic organisations  would use libel law to silence their critics. “Those of us who seek to publish uncomfortable facts about our fellow human beings are constantly being plagued by the law of libel”, he complained in the London Review of Books in 1991.

Twelve years later, after Alex Callinicos had falsely labelled Quintin Hoare, the translator of Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, as a supported of the Tudjman-era Croatian state, Paul Foot was asked to pen an appeal for the funds that would prevent Hoare’s action from bankrupting Callinicos’ publisher, Bookmarks. This is what he wrote:

“… It has been a long tradition in the labour movement that arguments between socialists should be conducted openly and should not, except in extreme circumstances, be tested in the courts by the libel laws. The reason for this tradition is simple. As soon as lawyers get involved in these arguments, the expense of the action in almost every case far exceeds both any damage done by the libel and anything a socialist publisher or author can possibly afford … Hence this appeal to anyone in the socialist and labour movement who would like to express their disapproval of pursuing political arguments through the law courts”.

Twenty years later, and Socialist Worker has a very different approach to those in the younger generation seeking to expose the cover-ups carried out by middle-aged men in their modest left-wing bureaucracies of power. It has stopped being a newspaper that dares the risk of libel, it has become a paper which uses libel to silence its critics.

So, this week, when students at Edinburgh University proposed a motion to say that the SWP should be banned from holding meetings on campus, in the light of what happened in the SWP in 2013, the SWP’s present National Secretary Charlie Kimber responded by threatening the students with a libel action. Asked by the Edinburgh students’ newspaper to justify his threats, he said, “The motion – and the article in The Student – were wholly inaccurate and, I believe, contained defamatory statements about readily-identifiable individuals”.

The victims in all of this are, of course, the students at Edinburgh. Defending a libel case takes time, causes immense worry, and can do psychological harm to those on the receiving end. Paul Foot was right too about the effect of costs: libel actions are brought in the High Court, which means that anyone bringing them must rely on the most expensive lawyers.  It is the tradition in civil litigation that a party who wins their case is entitled to have the other side pay their costs. So although the damages to the claimant for loss of reputation are often modest, the lawyers’ bills can act as a multiplier of 5 or 10 to one or even more. In practice, publishers almost always try to settle rather than fight libel claims, and when do they fight them they are often bankrupted. For all these reasons, libel has been the device of bullies and petty tyrants through the ages.

If you believe it is a good thing that Edinburgh University has a students’ paper, or that the socialist publisher Bookmarks exists, then in general you should oppose those socialists who try to silence alternative views by threatening to go to court.

There is in addition something peculiarly unattractive about Charlie Kimber threatening libel to defend the reputation of “readily-identifiable individuals” (ie his predecessor in the role of National Secretary of the SWP). This individual chose to leave the SWP rather than explain himself before a disputes committee made up of SWP members which went on to find that he had “a case to answer” on an allegation of sexual harassment. Ordinarily, when an individual in any organisation is found to have a case to answer on misdeeds of this seriousness, and the effects of their behaviour have been to drive out a majority of that organisation’s young members, and several hundred people altogether from the group, you would expect that the individual’s name would be mud in the party that he has wrecked. But this time, the opposite applies: the SWP has never publicly repudiated him, nor commented on his resignation from that party. He has a blog, Dream Deferred, written jointly with a supporter of Unite Against Fascism. It has been promoted by Alex Callinicos a member of the central committee of the leadership of the SWP, while another SWP CC member has retweeted three of his personal posts on twitter in this month alone.

Should the students try to ban the SWP from campus? No: the best situation would be one in which the few new people who joined the SWP over the summer could have properly explained to them the depths that their organisation has recently plumbed. This is less likely to happen if the SWP keeps itself away from places where its members can be challenged.

But the students should be heartened by the thought that the SWP’s threats of libel are hollow. While in many cases, a libel threat can silence a critic, the more that it is relied on the more treacherous the weapon becomes. Many people have tried to use libel threats to silence critics – quite a few, of whom Oscar Wilde is the best known, have found that they were making a disastrous mistake.

The SWP’s problem is that truth is a complete defence to libel. And the only way that a court can establish whether a person has spoken untrtuthfully is by ordering both sides to disclose all the documents of a case and forming a view for itself. That means that one of the tasks facing any organisation seriously maintaining libel is to disclose to the court and to the party which it accuses of libel all the documents of the case, both those that support its case, and those that potentially undermine its case.

Charlie Kimber knows very well the catastrophic impact that the details of what happened during the two investigations would have – even on Smith’s most blinkered supporters, let alone on any new recruits to the SWP – if they were finally made public. He has no doubt been advised, or if he has not been advised, he should have been – that once a document has been part of court proceedings, there is nothing you can do to stop its open discussion. For those reasons, he will not pursue a libel threat to court.

There is finally a neat symmetry between the hollowness of the SWP’s threat, and the SWP’s hollowness in terms of what it purports to be: a revolutionary party, of the young and the questioning, where all those who are in the forefront of the struggle against oppression can meet.

You can see the emptiness in its publications, in the weariness with which it repeats analyses of the present stage of capitalism which have not changed in four decades, in the fatigue of its leaders, in the paucity of its interventions, in its inability to say anything to its critics. The SWP is already a hollow shell; this after all is exactly why Kimber thought it was necessary to threaten libel. Because there were undoubtedly no young students in Edinburgh, or anywhere else, who could be trusted to argue the leadership’s case in public.

 

Rest in Power Bassem Chit

My love goes out to everyone who knew Bassem Chit, who has died suddenly and prematurely of a heart attack. He was a socialist, an opponent of sectarianism, and a key ally of the comrades who founded Lebanon’s Helem, an LGBT campaign which fought against imperialism for justice and against dictatorship – making a space for LGBT rights among anti-imperialists and on the left just as once in Britain LGSM made gay rights part of the miners’ struggle.

“Social identities are not fixed”, Chit argued, “It is precisely the ruling classes and the order of the market that wish to restrict them in this way. The dissolution of social identities can occur only when society is truly free from oppression and exploitation”.

Far Left Book Competition

 

 

(As a fellow contributor to Evan’s collection – my chapter is on anti-fascism in Britain post 1997 – I thought I should share details of this competition. Send answers to him, not me: by my reckoning, I would get just 4 out of 10…)

Reposted from Hatful of History

As regular readers of [that] blog are probably aware, our edited collection Against the Grain: The British Far Left from 1956 will be published by Manchester University Press next month. To publicise the book, I [ie Evan who runs HoH] am running a competition through this blog (and hopefully cross-posted with a few others) to win a copy of the book (to be posted anywhere in the world). Below are ten questions on the history of the British far left (ranging from 1949 to 1987), which all have answers that can be found on the internet. Please email your answers to hatfulofhistory@gmail.com. I will hold the competition open until 11:59PM on Monday 6th October (Adelaide time or +9.30 GMT). All of those who get 10 out of 10 for the answers will have their name put in a hat and one winner will be drawn on Tuesday 7 October. The answers and the winner will be posted on this blog once the winner is notified via email. The outcome of this draw will be considered final and no negotiations over answers will be entered into. Sorry, but contributors to the collection cannot enter the competition.

So here are the questions:

1. What electoral district did Harry Pollitt contest for the Communist Party in a 1949 by-election?
2. Stuart Hall and Ralph Samuel were both on the editors of which new left journal?
3. Gerry Healy’s The Club was transformed into the Socialist Labour League in which year?
4. What was the name of the anti-Vietnam War organisation that the CPGB initially supported, in rivalry with the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign?
5. The first issue of the modern version of Black Dwarf appeared in 1968 (the ‘We Shall Fight, We Shall Win’ edition). What was its volume and issue number?
6. In 1972, Peter Doyle, as a member of the Militant Tendency, acquired which position on the Labour Party’s National Executive Committee?
7. What was the name of the SWP’s black activist newspaper?
8. Which factional journal first appeared as a ‘Communist Theoretical Journal’ in the winter of 1981/82?
9. In July 1985, Anti-Fascist Action was established by Red Action, Searchlight, the Newham Monitoring Project and several other groups in which London building?
10. Who was the first Conservative MP to be interviewed in Marxism Today?

Once again, please email your answers by Monday 6th October to hatfulofhistory@gmail.com.

If you aren’t lucky enough to win a copy of the book, you can purchase a copy (for a slightly discounted price) here.

In place of a review (II)

To recap: during 2013, the Socialist Workers Party had three conferences. Their real business was to do decide how the party should respond to complaints of rape and sexual harassment that had been made against Martin Smith, until recently the National Secretary of the SWP.

During that year, the SWP leadership faced a central difficulty that it had no decent explanation of what Smith had done, or why a group of present and previous co-workers with Smith, had exculpated him of the rape complaint, when on everything that the members of the SWP were told about his conduct, it seemed overwhelmingly clear that his behaviour was – at the very best – far below anything you would expect in a member, or still less a leader, of a socialist party.

In order to deal with the difficulty of a lack of explanation, Alex Callinicos, the main propagandist of the leadership of the SWP, tried with all his power to change the subject – insisting in a series of articles within the SWP’s magazine Socialist Review, that the SWP’s leadership’s critics were motivated by a secret and perhaps unconscious vice of “movementism”.

The SWP would be saved, he insisted, not by addressing the problem of its leader’s vile sexual conduct, but by him writing about capitalism. In an article entitled ‘Is Leninism Finished?’, he made this strategy explicit:

“What does continuing a tradition mean? There are plenty of sects, Stalinist as well as Trotskyist, who think this involves the mindless repetition of a few sacred formulas. But genuinely carrying on a tradition requires its continuous creative renewal. Marxism is about the unity of theory and practice so this process of renewal has both intellectual and political dimensions.”

He concluded: “The theoretical development of Marxism requires above all deepening and updating Marx’s critique of political economy.”

The book he was writing a year ago has now been published,

It has modest strengths – these can be found elsewhere on the web.

It has deeper weaknesses – first, for anyone versed in the events of the past 2 years, it is impossible to read the book without being conscious of its purpose to keep on keeping on changing the subject away from the leadership’s complicity and cover up of sexual violence. Those of us who were there will read the book, as Brecht once suggested we should read the ruins of Thebes’s seven gates, conscious of the bodies which lie buried beneath its every page.

Second, the argument is developed not through a reading of world historical events, still less through a statement of or analysis of Marx’s theory, but at a continuous third hand, along the lines of “Zizek suggest that Marx argued X, but Harvey interprets these same passages as meaning Y instead”.

This is not to reunite theory and practice, rather it is to express in a hyper-theoretical form the world of Plato’s cave, inhabited now by a whole tribe of day-blinded scholars, among whom Callinicos proceeds to allocate praise or blame, reserving for a few friends the highest praise of being “scholarly”.

Third – and simplifying for brevity – the book is based around an “Althusserian” approach to Marx, i.e. an idea that the purpose of criticism is to iron all the contradictions within Marx’s argument, to show that it is a seamless and perfect totality.

When Callinicos writes, for example, about Marx’s theory of crisis, he does repeatedly from the perspective of establishing that Marx had such a theory, that it was consistent, that the seeming contrasts between its expression at different stages of its development can be solved by understanding the logic and successive development of Marx’s argument.

In this approach – whether in its original, Althusserian expression, or in Callinicos’ updating – there is barely any interest at all in the economy as it is inhabited by people. In marked contrast to a previous generation of SWP’s economists, such as Chris Harman, for whom the final ascent from abstraction to reality was precious; there is no meaningful attempt to join the facts of the last 6 years’ crisis to the theory which is being expounded.

The point of theory is not to explain the world, but to explain someone else’s explanation of it.

That method may call itself Marxist. But if so, it was the method of exactly half of Marx – it was not the method of the Manifesto, the Eighteenth Brumaire, or The Civil War in France. It is a method without class, without agency, and without the breathing fire of struggle.

Walter Benjamin once wrote: “There has never been a document of culture, which is not simultaneously one of barbarism.” Few books illustrate the point better than this one.

In place of a review (I): Deciphering Casaubon

The first shell landed at 3pm precisely. Casaubon was at his desk, working on the manuscript, and was aware of the ground rocking to one side and back beneath his feet. A second explosion shook the wall to his left and detached a shelf covered in papers. It and they fell, and the room was temporarily covered in a fine dust. A lesser man might have attempted to estimate the distance of the shell’s landing from his present position, or have distinguished from the sounds of the shells the nature of the artillery from which they had been fired. Casaubon being utterly above such trifles was aware only of the threat they represented to his own person.

Being a man of (he modestly accepted) no little courage, Casaubon settled on the first plan that came to him. He would insist that Charles, the department’s Boy, and in charge of the Department’s administrative affairs for the past two decades, announce that Casaubon’s early evening lecture was cancelled.

With a firm step and real purpose, Casaubon walked towards the plastic telephone situated at the back of the room. He lifted the receiver; the wire had been cut.

Opening the door and looking out into the corridor, Casaubon noted that Grace, the department’s Secretary, had also absented herself. Where he would expect to encounter noise, there was silence. Someone must have warned the others.

Shrunken, Casaubon retreated to his room and to his desk. The shelling appeared to have stopped, only to be replaced by the sound of small arms fire which, most troublingly, was getting progressively closer. He had by now realised that however this ordeal would end, it was unlikely to pass quickly

Casaubon founding himself staring at the other – right – side of his room, where he had placed a decade ago his certificate from the Royal Society, awarded for his service to the Philosophy of Warfare.

The document was printed on heavy, embossed paper. Among the many features which endeared it to Casaubon  was the precise language of the dedication. An unwise academic at another University, on making Casaubon aware of the proposed content of the award, had foolishly suggested that he should be honoured for his services to History. Casaubon  had cut him dead at three consecutive conferences, and allowed it to be known to the unfortunate man’s successor within the Society that he would accept this modest honour only if all reference to History was excised.

Casaubon was a committed champion of his position within the academic hierarchy: the most distinguished contemporary theorist of the idea of military combat.

Lesser figures liked to imagine that Thucydides that been interested in a particular conflict, had busied himself with a certain war. Casaubon  had demonstrated that they were wrong, that Thucydides was writing rather about War in general, all wars, had never felt a need to descend from the abstract to the concrete, and was just as correct and absolutely true if one swapped sixth century Syria for fifth century Sparta, Algeria for Athens, or the middle ages for the ancient world.

The gunfire was getting closer.

Greatness, Casaubon had earned by a series of studies which had proved that Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War was a total analysis of all conflict, a complete and perfect system of analysis, marked by no significant ambiguities or contradictions: a circle as perfect as a pure zero.

The present manuscript was intended not merely to preserve the name of Casaubon for the indefinite future but also to do something to lift the cloud that hung over the Department.

Casaubon had advertised the book’s intended arrival in an attempt to rally his supporters during a recent, ill-tempered, staff meeting called to discuss the defection of the majority of the University’s postgraduate students. In his present state of personal magnanimity even he would acknowledge the pleasure it had given him to use the book to cast scorn at any number of his critics.

He walked to the wall and carefully removed the certificate.

When they found him, he was on the floor of his room, tears dripping from his face. The certificate was still clutched to his chest.

The Lefts and Letters of Peter Sedgwick: Part Three

 

picture source: http://www.petersedgwick.org/

The final letters at the Bishopsgate Institute begin in around 1968. Sedgwick was now in his mid-30s and had become an activist of some prominence within the International Socialists. In 1963, OUP had published Sedgwick’s translation of Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary, and in the revolutionary year of 1968 Serge’s autobiography had been read by hundreds of the student activists who streamed into the group. By the end of 1968, IS claimed around 800-1000 members; around 10 times more than a decade before. Together with Tony Cliff, Chris Harman, Colin Barker, Richard Kuper and Bob Looker, Sedgwick was one of six people on the editorial board of the group’s magazine, International Socialism. He had written important, detailed articles for the Group on the politics of Isaac Deutcher and George Orwell, as well as shorter articles on topics as diverse as capital punishment, CND and direct action, the perils of academic Marxism, the problem of fascism, and what IS should say about elections.

A good sense of the esteem with which he was held in the organisation is provided by the response to Sedgwick’s unease with new rules introduced in 1970, which would have limited the rights of minorities within the group to organise. Sedgwick resigned from both the IS Editorial board and from the IS National Committee, complaining that “To limit the propagation of ideas to ‘group members’ only is fitting only for a sect: to make such a limitation a disciplinary rule, to be infringed only at the risk of expulsion, violates every principle of revolutionary democracy, and to create a rule whereby comrades can be expelled or disciplined merely for meeting together is a hollow mockery of everything for which IS used to stand.” Tess Lindop replied, for IS’ NC, refusing to accept Sedgwick’s resignation. He had been elected by IS Conference, which was sovereign over the NC, and therefore the NC could not accept his resignation, only Conference could. Moreover, IS as a group, continued to hold that controversies were for the entire membership. Personal resignation could not resolve a political disagreement, which remained outstanding: “you were elected to go to the NC by the Conference and it is therefore your duty to fight for your position on this subject on the NC” (http://www.marxists.org/archive/sedgwick/1970/05/factions.htm).

Probably in 1968, Sedgwick was approached by David Widgery, a medical student some thirteen years his junior, who had the ear of Penguin for a possible collection of articles and memorabilia to reflect the activist experience of the left in Britain (the publication was to appear in print, under that title, six years later).

“Many thanks for your letter and the copy of the letter to Penguin”, Sedgwick responded, “we seem to be in essential agreement on what the reader/commentary would look like. I have not been sure up till now how far you wanted my collaboration on any continuing basis for the project.  With your proposed timetable (late spring next year) it would tend to cut across my plans for other writing: but if we aim to get only a first selection together by then, it shouldn’t be too difficult.”

Sedgwick then went on to list his various writing projects: “I still have a lot of work to do on Serge, and want to finish Orwell.” Sedgwick published the first half of an article on Orwell in the June-July 1969 issue of International Socialism (https://www.marxists.org/archive/sedgwick/1969/xx/orwell.htm); the second half was never published.

Sedgwick was also thinking of writing something to take on what he saw as IS’ increasing – and wholly malign – shift towards Leninism.

“I would also like to write a commemorative article on Ten Years of IS (the journal) and get some work going on myths of ‘Leninism’: for the fact is plain that the main danger to the group does not come from the Troglodyte Tendency but from the widely diffused pseudo-hard line (“we are in The Trotskyist Tradition, except for State Capitalism and the 4th International”) which is in the course of destroying and denaturing everything rational in IS and which rests on ideas about ‘the party’ that should have been got over years ago.”

What Sedgwick was alluding to here was the adherence to IS of a group (“Workers’ Fight” aka “the Trotskyist Tendency”; the forerunners of today’s Alliance for Workers’ Liberty) who had joined IS in 1968 and maintained their own organisation thereafter, with candidate membership, separate subs, and an autonomous disciplinary structure. In response to Workers’ Fight, the leadership of IS opposed the existence of a separate party within a party, a “permanent faction” in IS-speak (http://www.marxists.org/archive/hallas/works/1971/10/trottend.htm), and over time this hostility would be become a permanent organisational shibboleth of IS and its successors. Sedgwick was writing before this orthodoxy had hardened, but already he could see that the adoption of “Leninism” would tend to fix the International Socialists into ideas that went deep in the Trotskyist DNA (but which IS had always previously resisted): that capitalism was always on the verge of crisis; that a small party, so long as it was ideological homogenous, could grow rapidly into a force of millions; and that what the working class needed above all was “leadership”, Sedgwick, Cliff, Kidron, and their comrades in IS had spent much of the 1960s arguing that all these ideas were, in the words of one of Sedgwick’s early polemics, “Pretending” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/sedgwick/1959/01/pretenders.htm). A turn now to “Leninism” would be, Sedgwick argued, a betrayal of the best of IS’ insights:

“I shall therefore have to give some attention to Bob Looker, to the internal front, just around the time when you want your book doing. (I should be grateful if you would sound out any other co-thinkers, the Hornsey people and the remnants of the microfaction, as to what they feel: I’m afraid that I didn’t like the first part of Mike Caffoor’s contribution to the probationary membership debate, anti-W[orkers’] F[ight] paranoia being in my view part of the problem rather than the answer, and I am very much afraid that we shall lose on the probationary question, with immense defeat that this would imply for free politics, at the conference.)”

In late 1970, Sedgwick accepted a one year post teaching in the Department of Sociology at Queens College and spent a year living in New York. American society was then at about its most left, as Sedgwick reported back to Widgery:

“The little left is ever so much littler and even more removed from daily life than the one back home. I have visited N[ew] Y[ork] IS, thirty-odd grave post-undergraduates plus the odd ex YPSL baldie all living on Manhattan, none with cars to get out to factories, acutely sophisticated and seasoned, whose favourite expression of approval seems to be ‘heavy’, ‘we must send by Sai, he’s one of our heavies’. It is rather a case of ‘heavier than thou’, with candidate membership (only a month, mercifully). A sub of 10% of income (less deductions as an afterthought) and long, very good informal documents (Draper is out on a paranoid limb somewhat out in the West, an atmosphere of fraternally controlled denunciation prevails, rather more pleasant than at Cottons Gardens. The IS national office has moved to Detroit but just what it is doing nobody seems to know.”

6 Cottons Gardens was the headquarters of IS (UK); “Draper” was Hal Draper, one of the founders of the American IS, who would break with IS the following year, accusing the party of a sect-method of party building (https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1971/alt/index.htm).

Sedgwick did not limit himself to watching the closest allies of his own party, but also spent some time among the American SWP (not to be confused with the British group of the same name), the largest Trotskyist organisation in the States, which was then moving from Trotskyism towards its subsequent Castro-ite politics. For the moment, it still seemed alive and full of health:

“The SWP is very impressive, intelligent and ubiquitous. Here they all are running for Governor, masterminding Women’s Lib and peace demos on a vast scale and producing an excellent weekly The Militant with good info on black, Chicano (Mexican-American) and kindred punch-ups and hassles. All very opportunistic no doubt, but the whole of the rest of the functioning Left seems tributary to them in one way or another. There was a meeting at college the other day (thirty present out of the campus enrolment of 20,000) with [Clifton] DeBerry, their Governor candidate, a real veteran of the labor organizing Thirties (and the SWP had a cadre of proletarian organisors unique for any Trotskyist movement), fabulously experienced and sensitive to history: he was debating with Lyn Marcus, the pro-theorist of the National Caucus of Labor Committees (one of the SDS relics with ex-SWP overtones, fairly established in our vicinity). Marcus had a hypotheticodeductive economics (‘if the UAW workers win their demands a depression will follow in which the only alternative will be fascism or revolution’), a neat flat bow-tie, a decent light blue suit, big cigars and a sense of Boston origins: an extraordinary doctrinaire with all the flavour of the second-international Marxist educator. His following, naturally, are all small, wet cocker-spaniel types who speak in paragraphs, as if to gatherings of thousands, even if one just asks them the time of day.”

More troubling were the advocates of armed struggle (against whose British counterparts the Angry Brigades, Widgery would direct a famous polemic, ‘Bomb Politics’, in Ink magazine, the following year)

“Somewhere, someplace else, but perhaps here and now in the next few seconds, the explosionists explode: at Wisconsin the score was one Army research building and one physics postgraduate, who had nothing to do with military work, an antiwar chap, father of three. The local post office has the FBI’s Wanted posters up for the suspected culprits”

Others were also in difficulty: “The [Black] Panthers sell their weekly with KILL THE PIGS and POWER TO THE VANGUARD on three quarters of its pages, with some sensible material in the rest, but all the obituaries, four or five different ones each week, are of beloved gunned-down brothers. Basically a Kamikaze squad without hope and therefore with no need to produce perspective or theory.”

Sedgwick sent Widgery a second letter in spring 1971, containing vivid details of conversations with labour activists and the trends on New York demonstrations:

“Trotted down to Liberty St, right in the hardhat heartland where the big construction sites are, to meet Burt Hall, labor lawyer and friend of numerous unofficial tiny opposition groups in the unions. A mine of detail, multichannel polygraph of the microscopic minuscule murmurings among the rank and file.  It will take around fifteen years for the wildcat tremors to summate into anything; all these jobs are discovering the reality of their situation in total isolation from each other and from politics. How they manage to stick to is beyond me. Burt is a great soul, with an attraction towards Bakunin as a figure rather than as a theorist and a large practical knowledge of what precisely a rank-and-filer might be able to do.”

“Film: Battle of Algiers, made by an Italian director 4 years ago and now the urban-guerrilla rage, put in as evidence by the prosecution in one of the Panther trails here, tho’ heaven knows why since any Panther who saw it could only conclude that the Pigs will smash urban terrorism. But the movie has gotten surrounded with a penumbra of you must see it: the ululation of the Arab women that rises as the FLN goes into combat has now become a war-cry audible on demos here. Ice, another urban-guerrilla movie made by ex SDS people and starring themselves, their tape recorders and cine-equipment, and their favorite haunts on the mid-fashionable West Side, is an incredible load of balls…”

Sedgwick was still watching his comrades in New York IS. One thing he spotted early on was that the American group had a very strong need to root itself in an intellectual tradition. It was far more common for the American socialists than for their British counterparts to speak of an “IS tradition” (of course, in Britain, people eventually start to speak in much the same defensive way as the American comrades of the early 1970s about an IS tradition – but only much later).

To understand the looseness and caution with which IS (UK) spoke of traditions, a good place to begin is Tony Cliff’s “Revolutionary Traditions”, a speech from 1967 (which eventually made it into the Widgery and Sedgwick collection on The Left in Britain). Cliff, in this talk, did point out that IS had developed theories of state capitalism, and a scepticism about the rest of the left’s assumption that the 1939-1945 war would result in a period of capitalism slump, but these were the only parts of an IS tradition which he identified, and even then he prefaced these remarks with a series of comments to the effect that “tradition” has an immense capacity to deceive. “Traditions sound as though they are a subject for a Conservative Party conference … What I will say about the IS Group’s tradition is a very simple one – is that in reality we have changed all the time, and thank heaven for that.”

As a temporary exile from the less reverential culture of the British group, Sedgwick was surprised not merely by the New York comrades’ search for a tradition (with all the anachronism that involved), but also by the elements they chose to fix on. For although the IS in the UK and Britain shared the same name, they had a different history. The American an organisation which went back continuously (via Draper, whose departure had not yet been thought through) to previous American Trotskyist groups: the Independent Socialist Club, YPSL, and ultimately to a faction with the Workers Party of Max Shachtman. One difference between IS in Britain and the US was precisely over the question which Cliff had identified as most essential to IS traditions, i.e. how to categorise the Soviet Union. International Socialists in Britain saw the USSR as state capitalist, IS in America saw it as bureaucratic collectivist.

Sedgwick’s conclusion about the American group was that they were overwhelming themselves in a technical jargon and losing sight of rather more urgent tasks:

“[L]ast night the local IS recounted the history of the Workers Party and the ISC and several other acronyms I can’t remember, very much in the vein of What are our traditions? It was agreed that the traditions were awful but they were still ours. It’s a strange experience to hear a comrade saying what were we doing in 1949? As though she had something to do with people arguing at Schachtman’s elbow, when she was 4 or something. I said rubbish, we are all orphans, none of these people are my ancestors anyway, but they would not agree. No, at the 1963 YPSL Conference there were nine Tendencies two of which were Us, another was Widcat/Worker & Soldier, another was Wohlforth and so on so forth … I pointed out the traditional British-IS lesson of the Stalin-phobia inherent in one variant of the Bureaucratic Collectivist theory: ‘ah yes,’ it was said, ‘the Cliffites’ (with a nod in my direction) ‘have drawn such and such conclusions’, or words to that effect. Some of the younger people recruited later than the YPSL phase did agree with me though.”

Sedgwick’s conclusion was forthright: “The whole business was as crippling as the 19th century Socialists of New York talking to each other in German.”

By April 1974, Sedgwick and Widgery were in discussion about another writing project, a joint book on Sex and Socialism. Sedgwick, perhaps surprisingly, was seeking to discourage his fellow-author’s attempt to find a great general theory, combining Marxism and feminism:

“Sexual liberation is a license to kill. It is a form of freedom which each year deprives millions of people of stability, contentment and ordinary expectations of civilized conduct. Hundreds of thousands of these it plunges into unhappiness of a kind which may be permanent and which stands a good chance of depriving them of ever knowing again the delights of sex and waking up in the morning with one’s dear one near. I really don’t know if the constraints of legally enforced patriarchal monogamy and matrimony made women or men less miserable and deprived than what is going on now. The reason why the anti-abortionists can call millions of working-class people to their cause is less because of the attractions of the foetus than through the sense that a terrible destructive chaos is upon us. They don’t want to set the clock back, they just miss having the clock, all these little watches that people have been using as timepieces don’t synchronise and have a habit of exploding on one’s wrist.”

A further letter, on similar themes, followed in May 1974. The difficulty of writing about sex and politics, Sedgwick wrote, was how to avoid a vague and vacuous liberalism which offered not much more than a polite message of “do what you like so long as it does no harm to anyone else”:

“Last Wednesday I heard Bea Campbell get a CME meeting in Leeds going as a sort of truncated encounter group. After a critical but inconclusive opening on Engels, we had from her and several present (including men) a series of observations which (if they were not dauntingly inaccurate and over-generalised – more of this later) could have come from any enlightened sex manual recommending care, forbearance and tender attention to neglected parts of the body. Bea proclaimed her own gayness, not too obtrusively, and told various anecdotes about the sexual games or misdeeds of friends or relatives. She laid great stress on the male collective masturbatory culture of adolescence, contrasting it with female dependence on blokes for any sexual identity. I interjected to say that male patriarchy and the establishment of masculine dominance in micro (or macro) politics had nothing special to do with present day wank-fashions, since masturbation was unheard-of in some male cultures which still had the unusual leverage over women in bed, household and work. I found myself rather cornered here by Bea, Lee Comer and a couple of other feminists: I must give a very patriarchal impression myself being old, bearded and visibly irritated at all this intellectually unsound intuitiveness…”

“The politics of the whole discussion and its earlier correlates in published material seem to be validly liberal but only liberal. I can’t see what rational case could be made out for the political significance of any particular sort of sexual expression (it might be possible to argue that sadomasochism or paedophiles were always inherently reactionary just as rape is; but even that (accept for the case of rape) is disputable. There were people at the meeting saying that assertive sexuality was Ok for girls but Right-wing for blokes (one male there gained huge credibility from saying that he had had fantasies of being seduced rather than taking an initiating stance ever since he started adolescent masturbation). I fail to see how that adds up. You seem to be tending to say that monogamy is politically regressive or at least to dub some such arrangements as ‘marriages of political convenience’, I don’t see how you can know enough about those relationships, and those particular people (IS leaders you were talking about but it could easily be others) to say that monogamy is other than progressive for them. And if one can’t give a political endorsement to any practice and topical or social one is left saying that couples, or sets of other combination of people should come to some agreement on a fair and non-coercive basis about what to do or not to do. That is liberalism complete (Mill was prophet of sexual freedom no less than Kollontai. The Bloomsbury group was first rate at it). It doesn’t acquire any socialist meaning because the people who engage in it have socialist ideas or because there enough of them to constitute a mass movement.”

“Liberalism says that individuals should be free to do what they want, to realize and fulfill themselves so long as don’t maximize their gains by worsening the lives of others. It is possible to fill out liberalism a bit by saying this kind of freedom can only be exercised on the basis of a genuine equality of all partners to whatever relationship it is. The assertion of a new basis for equality has tremendous implications in any number of areas of life outside bed, and this is why feminism has a connection with Marxism. But, while connected, it does not seem able to synthesise. Bea is able to be eloquent about sexual possibilities just because as a CPer who is making no complaints about the Italian Compromise (and none of the dissident C[ommunist] P[arty] intellectuals have any qualms about Italy) her general politics are liberal.”

Widgery and Sedgwick’s book was never published, but there is a reference to their collaboration in a talk, of the same title, which Widgery gave in 1987 to his comrades in Stoke Newington SWP. The “dear friend” is Sedgwick:

“[B]ecoming aware of the problem [of Sex and Socialism], the complexity of the problem, I and a dear friend decided to stop all the discussion a bit short by starting a theoretical journal on the subject which would abolish all of the debate because we were getting fed up with all the different tendencies and so on and so forth. So we started Red Wank, the journal of rank and file masturbation, and I would just like to briefly read an editorial that we wrote which was going to solve the whole problem of sexism on the left. We began:”

“The entire Trotskyist and libertarian movement is infected with sexism, i.e. the ideology and mystification of having sex. We believed the solution was stopping to have sex. Down with close relationships! Such must be the slogan for the future. Yet gays and hets, monogamous and promiscuous types of the Marxist groups, insist on the bourgeois romantic ideal of fulfilment through human relationships. The capitalist system is structured on the basis of bourgeois couplings, temporary or long term. Red Wank will attack this capitulation of consumer values of institutions. Only by the uprooting of feminism, machismo, polygamy, prostitution, one night stands, open marriages, bickering, depression, ecstasy, romance, and sexism generally will provide the proletariat with the correct perspective and, most important, peace of mind.”

“The next issue would contain the three following articles:”

“Great autoerotic revolutionary acts”

“Coming out as a worker – problems in a Trade Union branch”

“Instant masturbation and why it was suppressed in Romania.”

“Now that is meant to be a joke, but it was a sort of serious joke in as far as we were trying to say how something as simple as sex was getting incredibly complicated theoretically…” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/widgery/1987/xx/sex-soc.htm)

In autumn 1974 Sedgwick started a new job teaching Politics and Psychology at Leeds University, after which he moved to Leeds. His last letter in the Bishopsgate collection, shows Sedgwick still in contact with the leading circles of the International Socialists:

“I am sorry to have been out of touch with you and indeed everyone at Montague Road. Have been to London a couple of times but have generally stayed in an orbit around Camden Town Tube including the Harrises where I discourse on China and Schizophrenia, Bill and Linda for general grouses about the state of London and the defection of this and that person from whatever it was…”

Sedgwick was reading, urgently, for a course he taught on the politics of fascism:

“Addictive reading and analysis of the Third Reich for this course I still teach at York once a week (conclusion: Nazi Germany was not the dictatorship of mono[poly] cap[ital] but the dictatorship of the enraged petty bourgeoisie in alliance with mono cap: a most important difference and one which is destined to bring a Note of Qualification from Duncan H[allas] who will say the IS line on Nazi Germany is actually, let nobody mistake it, such & such)..”

IS in Leeds was busy, although the group was already having difficulty in replicating its previous success in recruiting manual workers:

“Political work in Leeds is coming on a bit. It’s a case-study in the overwhitecollarisation (as written in the text) of IS, students doing student work, teachers in their section, strong ATTI fraction, postgraduates raising Soviets three times a term on payment for invigilation frees for exams. I don’t like white-collar unions though it takes up quite a lot of my time…”

The correspondence stops before the decision to rename IS as the Socialist Workers Party in in winter 1976-7, which caused his eventual departure from the group:

“Since we cannot, in the present bad political climate, change class reality very much, the conclusion is drawn that we have to perform changes on the name of IS itself, in the delusion that this is some step towards the actual construction of a revolutionary socialist workers’ party. If the CC decided that we should walk around with our bottoms painted bright green, doubtless it would have a electrifying effect on the morale of our membership (for a short time at least). There might even be a case for some such publicity venture; joking apart, we can always do with fresh propaganda on party questions. But what would anyone think of a Party whose Central Committee produced its suggestions for Green Bottoms in a few badly argued paragraphs, circulated, without real District discussion, before a Party Council, got a resounding 99 per cent vote for the proposed face-lift from the Council with virtually no argument on this or the obvious points about the election, and proceed to give us six months to declare ourselves to the world in this new disguise. This is not a party, but a circus.” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/sedgwick/1976/12/fraud.htm)

Nor does the correspondence offer much of a hint as to where Sedgwick’s writing would go next – towards a critique of the anti-psychiatry of Laing, Foucault and others resulting in Sedgwick’s 1982 book Psychopolitics.

Sedgwick died 31 years ago. Had he lived, he would have been 80 this year. I imagine him defying the pains of old age to attend the ongoing Palestine marches. No doubt, he would have lectured the comrades with whom he travelled down to London on the necessity of going beyond routine A to B marches, and then, in a quiet moment reflected to himself on the limits even of the most militant anarcho-pacifism.

The Lefts and Letters of Peter Sedgwick: Part Two

Having joined the Socialist Review Group, Sedgwick’s perspectives were shaped by a dual loyalty. To the SRG, then a party of only around 40 people, he paid subs, he gave meetings, and he sold the Group’s magazine Socialist Review. The most likely source of recruits for the new group came from those, like Sedgwick himself, who had been members of the Communist Party. More of the former Communists found a home in the New Left, but this milieu was both larger and smaller than SRG. It was larger in its audience, its resources, its presence in the press and on television and yet smaller in the demands that the New Left made on most of its members, and in the opportunities they were given to shape the politics of the movement. In a 1964 obituary for the New Left (published in SRG’s successor IS’, theoretical magazine International Socialism), Sedgwick listed some of assets of the early New Left, starting with its offices in Soho, housed above the New Left’s Partisan coffee shop:

“The uppermost floor held the editorial-cum-administrative office for the publications and groupings of the movement; the latter included the Universities and Left Review Club (1957-8; re-christened New Left Review Club from 1959 on), which used to attract hundreds to weekly lectures and discussions in the larger basements of central London, and further regular meetings were held by such autonomous sections as the Education, History of Socialism, Left Scientists, Social Priorities and Literature groups, the International Forum, and the London Schools Left Club, a self-governing unit for youngsters still at school. Between thirty and forty local Left Clubs ran on a modest scale outside London, mostly either in the South-East or in the industrial North (including Scotland)” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/sedgwick/1964/08/2newlefts.htm).

The best indication of sheer scale is the initial subscription base of Universities and Left Review (2,500 by the time of issue 1) and the merged New Left Review (8,000). In the same 1964 article Sedgwick spoke of the New Left’s “expansive and apparently tireless dynamism”, beside which it seems almost churlish to recall Tony Cliff’s contemporary joke: “For the New Left, what is theory? A speech by Edward Thompson. And what is practice? Going to hear an Edward Thompson speech.”

Sedgwick attended the meetings of the New Left and wanted it to flourish. And yet by early 1960, Sedgwick had begun to warn of the movement’s limits. The first issue of New Left Review had proposed in an editorial (penned by Stuart Hall) that the New Left should keep some distance from the Labour Party: “Where the candidates are good, we should concentrate our forces, swing the enthusiasm of a Left Club behind someone who will vote NO to the Bomb, when the rest of the parliamentary fraternity troop through the door into no-man’s land: where the candidate is weak, bad, compromising, we – should withdraw away from political blackmail as if from the plague.” Sedgwick replied with the fable of Lidchester Left Club, sending its canvassers to four neighbouring constituencies, where the attempt to vote as left as its members could had resulted in the Club backing four different parties.

“For the Old Left”, Sedgwick concluded (with “old left” standing for “Marxist left”, i.e. the CP at one time and the SRG now), “a vote for Labour was a vote for a national movement independently representing the working class as a social and political force. The personalities and principles of the candidates (including the leadership) might be equally repulsive, and those of his Tory or Liberal opponents enlightened and decent as far as they went (which might, in some individual cases, go quite far). Nonetheless, one voted Labour, and, given the courage of one’s convictions, got other people to vote Labour too. The Old Left primitives, unschooled as they were in contemporary thinking, would say that a mass Labour vote is an outstanding index of at least some form of class-consciousness. Reformism (or Labourism as it is now sometimes called), despite its inadequacies and betrayals, is at least a working-class ideology, involving as it does the separate organisation of the workers even for limited ends, and the participation of the trade union movement in national politics” (https://www.marxists.org/archive/sedgwick/1960/02/lidchester.htm).

The recurring theme of Sedgwick’s critique of the New Left was a rejection of its disappointment with the working class. On this occasion, that emphasis would cause him to argue for a Labour vote irrespective of the Labour candidate. As the next five years wore on, he would more often criticise the New Left for a dependence on Labour which falsely compensated for its own declining organisation.

One ally that Sedgwick had kept from his time with the Communists was Raph Samuel, who had also left the CP in early 1957, and their correspondence from the 1960s gives a flavour of their continuing friendship. Just as Sedgwick was at a turning point of his political development so was Samuel. In 1962, Samuel would secure his defining employment, as a lecturer at Ruskin College in Oxford. Ruskin was a union college, and its typical course involved a year’s release for working-class students, nominated by their union for a sabbatical from their work duties. In 1967, Samuel helped to found the History Workshop movement, which pioneered history from below, starting very often with the oral histories told by Ruskin students or others from working class backgrounds. Samuel’s lectures were packed, with students from different Ruskin courses and from outside the College playing truant from their official studies to attend. Samuel was an inspiring, encouraging figure. He was also, in many respects, the very opposite of the figure of the professional insurrectionary. While revolutionaries are supposed to be disciplined and rigorous, Samuel was constantly losing himself in his latest enthusiasm, causing deadlines to be missed and projects shelved. A typical Ruskin memory would involve Samuel setting off on his lecture, shuffling his weight from foot to foot, and carrying on walking as he spoke, only to wake up from his own reverie halfway down Oxford’s Walton Street, to wonder aloud what he and his audience were doing there.

Samuel’s Theatres of Memory: volume 1, his 1994 magnum opus, reads less like the work of Chernyshevky’s Rakhmetov (who trained himself to read Marx by sleeping on a bed of nails) than Peter Jackson’s Radagast the Brown. Its positive utopia combines Camra, Covent Garden and the Body Shop in an eclectic idealisation of popular memory (“heritage”). But the Raph Samuel of the late 1950s and early 1960s remained to a considerable extent the “fanatic”, recalled by his fiancée Jean McCrindle who had won Sedgwick to Marxism, “He was a brilliant student and he wouldn’t take no for an answer when arguing with potential Party recruits.”

Samuel’s articles for Universities and Left Review included in 1958 a blistering attack on the French Communist Party for having paved the way to De Gaulle by its failure to stand unequivocally against the Algerian War: “It called for peace in Algeria—but in the spring of 1956, searching desperately for parliamentary unity with the socialists, it voted the special powers under which Mollet was to extend the Algerian war and fetter the opposition to that war … [T]he Party had a higher reason, a supreme value to which all else could be trimmed and, if necessary, sacrificed: its one absolute was the Party itself.” In the same year, Samuel responded to the 1958 race riots by questioning the response of Labour and the trade union movement: “The TUC, focussing attention upon the activities of Mosley and the Union Movement, evaded the critical problem of Notting Hill: the problem of what had happened to its people. Nothing was said about the xenophobia of many labour voters, evident at the time of Suez and swelling with the war in Cyprus, and the riots themselves. And so Notting Hill was not seen as a challenge to Labour, as a demonstration that even the most human legislation … cannot serve substitute for the wining of men’s minds in the here and now to the values of human brotherhood which must always be the principal function of a socialist movement.” And in a third Universities and Left Review article, from 1959, Samuel had bemoaned the way in which capitalism annexed ever wider areas of human experience; “we live in a business civilisation, and the boss, for the present, is in command.” There may have been phrases in any of these articles which Sedgwick would have queried; but Samuel’s tenor and general approach remained the same as his.

One letter from Sedgwick to Samuel is from 1960, “The Cliffs and [Michael] Kidron were here today & yesterday. A good time was had by all. Cliff still thinks of himself as Trotskyist and Kidron doesn’t.”

Sedgwick referred to the 1960 strike of Liverpool Seamen, part of which was a revolt by supporters of a rank-and-file group the National Seamen’s Reform Movement against the leadership of the National Union of Seamen (NUS) after the Executive of the NUS had accepted a pay offer without consulting its members. They were striking for a 44-hour week and a £4 a month pay rise. The SLL was actively supporting the seamen, as was almost everyone else on the far left, with the notable exception of Eric Heffer, a 1956-era CP-ex member, Labour councillor, recently a fellow-traveller of SRG, and a future Labour Left MP.

“The seamen are going strong”, Sedgwick wrote, “The Trades Council mediated, which meant giving a platform for [the NUS’ Assistant General Secretary] Scott to try and get the men to go back to work, with the magnanimous offer of a branch meeting after they had all gone back to the sea. Eric Heffer was, I am afraid, involved in it all to the hilt. Good job he decided not to join Socialist Review after all.”

Why would Samuel have been interested in news of a local activist who had not joined SRG, and the pending birth of a child to an SRG couple? Sedgwick clearly thought that more was at stake than merely his student friendship with Samuel. He assumed Samuel knew who Kidron and Cliff were – and while the former had been part of the left in Oxford in recent years, and had even written for the New Reasoner in autumn 1959 (https://www.marxists.org/archive/kidron/works/1960/02/limits.htm) Cliff did not have the same local or national profile. It seems that Sedgwick saw Samuel, and therefore the editors of the New Left Review, as sympathetic allies likely to be interested in news of another, friendly grouping on the left.

In 1961, Samuel telephoned Sedgwick to ask him to participate in the New Left Review, from which Edward Thompson was being slowly removed, in favour of the man who we now know would be his long-term successor, Perry Anderson. Sedgwick was unable to take the call and responded by letter:

“I had not realized that it was so important for you that I contribute in some sort of way to the new NLR. I find it heart moving that you should phone me about it, although I also feel that it argues some isolation on your part that my participation on your part should be so keenly asked. Of course you must understand that I am in at least two minds over NLR, even NLR with you and Denis [Butt] and Gary and Perry [Anderson] running it. And I don’t think I’m alone in this, nor even that it’s a matter of IS people. NLR has had a long run for its money, and an awful lot of people have been wounded or even embittered by the ancient regime, and in any case have evolved a political life and set of habits in which NLR has not loomed at all large.”

“Of course I am pleased that the good fight has been fought and (so far as we see) won on the NLR E[ditorial] B[oard], and especially that you have been fighting and winning it. Only today, writing a review for IS, I found myself referring to the new left in the third person. I corrected it, but after some thought.” Sedgwick welcomed Anderson and Samuel’s present ascendancy over Thompson, but expressed his scepticism that there was any more an audience for the New Left Review.

“[T]here is no longer a rank-and–file New Left (as distinct from a new Left). The malaise of the Clubs, I am sure now, is something deep-rooted and irreversible. People are just too busy on activities to be able to afford the time and the concern with politics-as-a-whole that we would like to see. Either that or they are played out, either obviously or under the guise of Labour Party Politics. If not in the Clubs, where is there a readership for the portmanteau politics-and- life periodical? Where else can one flog it for one thing? I don’t despair of this centrifugality (I think that this is the [Michael] Kidron term), but it probably has to be dealt with as S[ocialist] R[eview] is doing, but latching on to the bits that are flying apart and flying with them, part of the way at least (by having a Y[oung] S[ocialists’], and an industrial, and a theoretical, and a general journal).”

IS had not achieved all this yet; but plans for a set of publications were in hand: the YS journal would be Young Guard (jointly run with the foreunners of Militant), the industrial journal Labour Worker, ultimately Socialist Worker. The theoretical magazine Socialist Review was giving way to a quarterly, International Socialism.

Sedgwick continued with a call for a magazine that felt less culturally middle class, comparing New Left Review to the sorts of articles that you might find on the Third Programme (ie Radio 3) or in a Sunday newspaper: “Then too I have a feeling that the Left’s publications should have some flavour of scruffiness and unestablishment; [and] should be right outside the intellectual currency of the Third programme talk and the fashionable reference in the weekly culture-dispenser. NLR has a hell of a past to live down in this respect, and I don’t know if it can fade into a decent obscurity among people who matter.”

“All this is horribly negative, and (believe me) I am aware of the potentialities, prospects, etc, on the other side. I have in fact been arguing with Mike about it, he being very much more sceptical about any good coming out of the new NLR.”

A further letter from July 1961 returned to Samuel’s difficulties on the NLR board:

“I have seen no evidence”, Sedgwick replied, “to suggest that NLR can in fact recover. EP T[hompson]’s organisational proposals are, as you say, the resuscitation of a corpse by a corpse. On the other hand, your and Dennis [Butt]’s proposals for a change of heart are useless without a change of personnel…”

Sedgwick’s solution was preserved for his next letter: “A pity if you trap yourself inside NLR … There is a lot of much healthier activity incipient. Sooner or later, Edward [Thompson], you and IS will have to amalgamate.”

Could the idea of an IS-New Left merger have worked? Thompson rarely had good words to say about any Trotskyists; while others in his close circle, notably John Saville, were more inclined to distinguish carefully between Healy and the rest.

As for Sedgwick’s view of his proposed IS-NLR smychka, his 1964 obituary for the Left explained in detail the moves which Samuel had been describing to him:

“The confederate New Left fell apart in the autumn of 1961; the explosion was characteristically muffled. No statement was ever published on the differences around NLR which were brought to a head shortly before the retirement of the editor Stuart Hall and the radical reorganization of the movement … Edward Thompson became the chief spokesman for that section of New Left opinion that was eager for a more activist and purposeful approach; after six months of argument up and down the country, the journal was re-structured. Instead of a large and amorphous editorial board (which in practice had left the running of NLR to a metropolitan in-group with ill-defined responsibilities, subject to overwork and drift), the review was entrusted to a small team of four with a mandate to re-establish New Left journalism as a serious source of ideas. The projected series of New Left Books was written off, having in two years produced one collection of essays and one literary-critical reprint from the United States. Little was to heard henceforth of the Left Clubs.”

“By a mixture of design and default, NLR shortly became the preserve of a younger wave of New Left writers, most of whom had been involved in the production of New University, a student socialist journal edited from Oxford. Their elders on the New Left Board, lacking even a token editorial function, dispersed to catch up on their research, emigrate, help run CND, or just vanish. With the organizational passing of the Old New Left, whatever was distinctive in its ideas has perished also.”

What lay behind the decay of the New Left’s once vigorous organisation? Sedgwick blamed the movement for reconciling itself too easily to its own weakness. Rather than maintaining the Left Clubs, and rather than seeing the self-activity of its members as the left’s key asset in the war against capitalism, the New Left had allowed itself to drift into the role of supplying to the Labour leadership a series of technical reports into the functioning of various aspects of capitalism. “The New Left is almost consciously acting as a dynamizing Left Centre to the putative Centre-Left of Wilson, Callaghan, etc. What is particularly staggering is its failure to imagine that it might be out-manoeuvred; pursuing a tactic of total theoretical entry, all its eggheads have marched into the single basket of Left reformism, and are now busily appealing to the waverers outside, especially in the trade-union movement, to jump in as well. But the unknown factor in Left-reformist strategy lies not only in the possibility of sabotage or enticement from the business world. Equally doubt-provoking is (a) the immense responsibility that would attach to the leadership in a campaign of administrative encroachment; combined with (b) the desperate unlikelihood of any foreseeable Labour Cabinet that would answer to the part.”

For his part, Raph Samuel was to retain an (admittedly distant) interest in International Socialism and its successor the SWP for many years. He knew Sedgwick’s closest ally in the next generation of SWP-ers, David Widgery, and on Widgery’s encouragement attended the 1977 Rock Against Racism Carnival, describing it later as “the most working-class demonstration I have been on, and one of the very few of my adult lifetime to have sensibly changed the climate of public opinion.” Thirty years after his letters from Sedgwick he was still extremely encouraging to young socialists from the SWP who expressed any interest in history.

Into the mid-1990s Samuel would even speak occasionally at the SWP’s annual Marxism events. I remember one talk he gave, in 1996 or so, which ended with him frustrated by repeated contributions from the floor to the effect of “if you’re a Marxist, you should be in the SWP.” Samuel accused the audience of sectarianism and said that the SWP was incapable of holding any allies – whether philosophical, literary or artistic. Perhaps he saw in us the same fanatical and closed spirit with which he, and Peter Sedgwick, had once been young Communists.