Paul Anderson writes:
Several people have asked me about my involvement with the libertarian socialist group Solidarity. So here – at risk of appearing self-obsessed – is what I wrote last year for John Quail, who is putting together a history of the group.
I first came across a copy of Solidarity magazine in summer 1978: I bought it from the Essex University anarchists’ stall at a hippy fair in Suffolk during my year off between school and university. But it wasn’t until later that year, after I’d gone up to Oxford to study PPE, that I came across a member of the organisation, the irrepressible Graham Jimpson. Graham, who was then a youth worker in Rose Hill, one of the working-class estates in east Oxford, started coming along to meetings of the (largely student) Oxford Anarchist Group.
I joined the anarchist group in my first week at university along with 30 or so other enthusiastic freshers, and I think it’s fair to say that we revived it almost from the dead. We ran a vigorous campaign on the Persons Unknown case. We got on to the front page of The Times by distributing copies of “The Love That Dare Not Speak its Name”, the James Kirkup poem at the centre of the Gay News blasphemy trial, while the elections for the Oxford poetry professorship were taking place in the Sheldonian Theatre. And, most important, the members of the group had gelled socially: more than 25 years on, some of my best friends are people I first met in the Oxford Anarchist Group in my first few weeks at university.
Graham had been a member of the anarchist group as a student some years before but had dropped out of it some time after getting a job in the real world (he was five or six years older than the rest of us). Now he became one of its stalwarts again, and for the next couple of years he, I and 40 or so others had a merry time playing at revolution just as it was going out of fashion.
There were countless demos, innumerable meetings and conferences, hundreds of heated arguments and lots of sex and drugs and rock and roll. The OAG was the biggest group on the Oxford student left scene apart from the Labour club and one of the biggest anarchist groups in the country. We had weekly public meetings and pub nights, ran the university left newspaper, Red Herring, turned up on all the major national demonstrations with our banner and organised two big national anarchist conferences (1980 and 1981). What I remember with particular fondness, however, is our stunts – handing out leaflets urging abstention outside polling booths in the 1979 general election, heckling a giant Billy Graham meeting in Oxford town hall and turning on the sprinkler system, disrupting the Miss Oxford pageant, organising a 20-strong demonstration against West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt that inadvertently caused the Thames Valley police to mount a giant show of counter-terrorist strength.
When I joined the anarchist group I was a Stirnerite individualist, which had something to do with punk, something to do with youthful enthusiasm for the Beat poets and something to do with disillusionment with the Socialist Workers’ Party, which I’d come close to joining as a schoolboy in Ipswich and which had dominated the local Anti-Nazi League. But by early 1979 I’d decided that I was a social anarchist; a few months later, thanks to Graham, I’d read my way through a fair selection of Solidarity’s pamphlets; and some time after that, after meeting various Solidarity members and going to Solidarity conferences – my first one was in Manchester -- I took the plunge and joined.
Precisely when, I don’t remember: my guess is spring 1980, but it could have been earlier. At the time, the Oxford Solidarity group was tiny: the only other members apart from Graham when I joined were Ed Pope and Dave Levy, though if I remember rightly a few other people joined from the student anarchist group about the same time as me or shortly afterwards. I was definitely a member by summer 1980, when the Oxford group produced the issue of Solidarity for Social Revolution that included a special supplement by the London group on Poland: I laid out quite a bit of the mag on Graham’s living room floor. Apart from selling the magazine and doing the production work when its turn came around, Oxford Solidarity didn’t do much as a group, though Graham, Ed and I were all involved in producing Back Street Bugle, Oxford’s alternative paper, as was Bob Hammersley, who was recently ex-Solid.
What made me join? It was only partly that I’d come to the conclusion that Solidarity had the right ideas: at that time I was almost as much in agreement with the Libertarian Communist Group or the anarcho-syndicalists, although I’d definitely acquired a taste for Maurice Brinton and Paul Cardan (one of the pseudonyms Cornelius Castoriadis used for Socialisme ou Barbarie and the one his work had been published under by Solidarity). Much more important was the social buzz of Solidarity. I particularly remember Bill Beveridge, Nick van Hear and George Williamson, all of whom pitched up in Oxford before I joined. (The first time was for a party at Graham’s, when Ed Pope scandalised Graham’s social-worker colleagues by taking all his clothes off and wandering around the kitchen enthusing about naturism.) Then, when I started going to the conferences, I met more people I liked. By the time I signed up, Chris and Jeanne Pallis were semi-detached from the organisation, and the arguments that would eventually lead to the group splitting in 1981 were well under way, with one group arguing for a much more orthodox left-communist perspective and another, part-situationist in inspiration, railing against supposed capitulation to the trad left. But the only things wrong with Solidarity from my point of view were that it was overwhelmingly male (which is not a feminist point) and most of the members seemed to be getting on a bit (though actually most were younger than I am now).
I went to all the conferences in the run-up to the 1981 split, and for some perverse reason found myself getting more involved in the group just as nearly everyone else was giving it up as a lost cause. I volunteered to be international secretary and wrote more and more for the magazine. When the split finally came, my sense of facing political homelessness was unexpectedly disorientating. I was one of the people who argued most strongly for the organisation and, more importantly, the magazine to continue, and my sense that we shouldn’t let it all go increased when I found myself back in Ipswich after university taking a year out doing odd jobs before starting a postgraduate journalism course at the London College of Printing.
Almost completely politically isolated – just about the only thing happening in 1981-82 in Suffolk was CND, and the local group was a less-than-inspiring coalition of ageing Quakers, Stalinists and Labour leftists – I travelled down to the meetings of the London Solidarity group at Ken Weller’s place whenever I could. After I moved down to London in summer 1982, I went to every meeting.
Unfortunately, London Solidarity in those days was hardly thriving. The regulars at the meetings were Ken Weller, Ken’s dog, me, Stuart Hathaway, Ian Pirie, Andy Brown and Nick Terdre, with occasional visits from Alex Castle, Alex Economou, Terry Liddle, Liz Willis and Sharif Gemie (who was living in Norwich at the time). We’d decided to revive the magazine as our main activity – it soon became our sole activity – and over the next couple of years we produced five issues, with Stuart doing all the typing and me doing all the layout. The magazine was printed by Aldgate Press, a spin-off from the Freedom bookshop in Aldgate, which was run by a couple of anarchist friends.
Those early numbers in the final series of Solidarity were a very mixed bag, but I think they improved. What it needed was someone to take it all in hand and bring it together as a magazine. It found it in Richard Schofield, then working as a graphic designer at the National Union of Students, who joined the group in 1983 or 1984 and soon became the de facto editor of the magazine. My own involvement waned at around the same time Richard arrived: from early 1984 I was employed by European Nuclear Disarmament to deputy-edit its magazine END Journal, which was more than a full-time job. Although I kept in touch with Richard and Ken, and went to a few editorial meetings, for the rest of the magazine’s life I was no more than an irregular contributor.
I was doing plenty of other politics during the time I was most involved with the magazine. From 1982 until 1984, I was a regular at the London Workers’ Group meetings every week above the Metropolitan pub in Farringdon Road, where a disparate bunch of syndicalists, anarchists, situationists and council communists met to chew the cud and plan interventions – among them Joe Thomas, Henri Simon, Dave Morris and others who had been involved in the recently deceased Rising Free bookshop. I particularly remember the evening that Ian Bone, newly arrived from Swansea, announced his plans to form a new propagandist and direct-action organisation (it was what became Class War) and denounced those of us who were sceptical as a bunch of wankers before flouncing out into the public bar. Around the same time, I was peripherally involved in the Brixton squatting scene – I opened a squat in Arlingford Road with my then-girlfriend, now-wife, in 1983, though I didn’t live there very long – and got to know the Black Flag types around the 121 Bookshop in Railton Road and some of the Villa Road squatters. At the London College of Printing in 1982 – where I was taught sub-editing by Wynford Hicks, the former editor of the early-1970s libertarian magazine Inside Story – I met Rick Walker, once of Liverpool Solidarity and by now the brains behind South Atlantic Souvenirs greetings cards, and we set up a club that took over the student union bar once a month to put on anarchist films and gigs. A little later, through Aleks Sierz, an ex-situationist I’d met through the London Workers’ Group, I got involved in the committee supporting the Italian autonomists rounded up and jailed in April 1979. I spent summer 1983 working for City Limits magazine, where another veteran libertarian, Duncan Campbell, was news editor and yet another, Diana Shelley, was in charge of the agitprop listings. In 1983-84, I was tied up in a high-profile industrial dispute over the introduction of new technology at Coastalpress, where I got my first proper job after the LCP (written up in issue five of the new series of Solidarity).
I never actually left Solidarity, but from 1984 onwards I drifted away, largely because the jobs I was paid to do left very little time for anything else. I moved from END Journal to Tribune as reviews editor – George Orwell’s old job, for heaven’s sake: who wouldn’t sell out for that? – then became Tribune editor in 1991 and then moved to the New Statesman as deputy editor, a job from which I was fired in 1996 when the magazine was taken over by Geoffrey Robinson. I spent a year working with Nyta Mann on a book about the Labour Party (published by Granta in 1997 as Safety First: The Making of New Labour, was Red Pepper news editor from 1998 to 1999 (while earning a living teaching at the London College of Printing), then in 1999-2000 was deputy editor of New Times, a monthly magazine published by Democratic Left, which had once been the Communist Party but had long since relented. Since the plug was pulled on that, I’ve been earning a living as a lecturer at City University and as a sub-editor on the Guardian’s comment pages.
I still call myself a libertarian socialist, but I’m no longer a revolutionary, and haven’t been for a long time. I think the critical moment for me was probably the 1983 general election. For some reason, I’d thought that the Tories would lose it and that a Labour or Labour-Alliance government would return Britain to Keynesian corporatist business as usual. I watched the election results programme round at Andy Brown’s place in Wandsworth in a state of mounting drunken disbelief as the Tories won a landslide. In their second term they set about destroying trade union power and massively expanding the private sector. I decided that even soggy social democracy was a marked improvement on them and, swallowing hard, joined the Labour Party, I think in 1987. I’ve been a member ever since, though I haven’t been very active since the early 1990s.
I look back on Solidarity with great affection. Its best days were over by the time I discovered it. It was in its death throes as an organisation, and the magazine it produced in the late 1970s, Solidarity for Social Revolution, was a pale shadow of Solidarity for Workers’ Power at its best. SfSR nevertheless had its moments, and the final series of Solidarity produced by the London group from 1982 to 1992 was much better, particularly after Richard took it in hand. I still think of the people I met through Solidarity as the best bunch I’ve ever done politics with.
Paul Anderson writes:
I am sad to report the death of Chris Pallis, otherwise known as Maurice Brinton, the leading figure of the libertarian socialist group Solidarity in the 1960s and 1970s.
He was a complex and inspiring man: the only British leftist to write a decent account of Paris 1968; a pioneer in debunking the Leninist account of the Bolshevik revolution; the translator into English of Cornelius Castoriadis (the leading light of Socialisme ou Barbarie in France).
Most importantly, he was the inspiration and guiding force of Solidarity, which was an an extraordinarily influential (though small) group and magazine in British left politics in the 1960s and 1970s. I was a member of the group at the very end of its existence – in fact, I never resigned.
Here's the Brinton line, from Solidarity's 1967 platform As We See It:
- During the past century the living standards of working people have improved. But neither these improved living standards, nor the nationalisation of the means of production, nor the coming to power of parties claiming to represent the working class have basically altered the status of the worker as worker . . .
Nor have they given the bulk of mankind much freedom outside of production. East and west, capitalism remains an inhuman type of society where the vast majority are bossed at work and manipulated in consumption and leisure. Propaganda and policemen, prisons and schools, traditional values and traditional morality all serve to reinforce the power of the few and to convince or coerce the many into acceptance of a brutal, degrading and irrational system. The ‘communist’ world is not communist and the ‘free’ world is not free . . .
Paul Anderson writes:
I know it's not the most important issue facing the world, but the Guardian has a good piece here by Roland Chambers, who is writing a book on Ransome and the Bolsheviks. He explains the bizarre position of Ransome in the early years of Soviet Russia, when he worked for British intelligence and acted as a courier for the Bolsheviks while employed as a foreign correspondent by the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian, largely in terms of his falling in love with Trotsky's secretary, Evgenia Shelepina, whom he later married. I'll come back to this over the weekend when I've got some time.
Paul Anderson writes:
My old partner in crime Steve Platt has posted the text of Squatting: The Real Story, a cult libertarian socialist classic he and others associated with The Leveller magazine produced in 1980. Click here.
Norman Geras writes a propos of this:
I've never conceded that Blair lied, and I don't believe he did. In this latest post all I say is that, if he lied, that wouldn't matter as much as getting rid of Saddam Hussein matters.
Paul Anderson writes:
OK, Norm, point taken – and I agree with you – but don't let's fall out over counterfactuals.
Paul Anderson writes:
Blimey, I've been doing this two years now -- and I still stand by my first post (click here) and my second (click here). I'll open a beer in celebration.
Paul Anderson writes:
Norman Geras (click here) takes Geoffrey Wheatcroft to task for his piece in the Guardian today (click here – the headline “Blair still took us to war on a lie” sums up Wheatcroft perfectly) and argues, with reason, that Blair’s veracity is less important in the grand scheme of things than the effects of his actions.
But Norm concedes too much. Unlike him, I didn’t support the war – not because I thought regime change a bad idea but on the grounds that the risk of massive casualties was too great and that the US had not thought through what would happen after it got rid of Saddam.
I don’t regret those judgments – but I can’t accept that it’s obvious that Blair lied in 2002-03. I have read all the reports and loads of books and articles on governmental decision-making before the war, and there is nothing that suggests other than that Blair believed Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.
Of course, the intelligence on which that belief was based was wrong – but Blair did not know that. And if in these circumstances he seized upon WMD as a legal pretext for military action after deciding for other reasons to back Bush in getting rid of Saddam – which I suspect was the case – he wasn’t lying: he was simply using the nearest thing he thought he had to a watertight and publicly sustainable argument for the course of action he thought he ought to take.
I didn’t like it. But he was being a whole lot more honest than all those opponents of war who really just wanted to see capitalist pig Amerika given a bloody nose but actually banged on in public about the illegality of the intervention.
Paul Anderson writes:
I wasn't at the London School of Economics blogging debate with John Lloyd – on which see Slugger O'Toole here, Jackie Danicki here and Harry's response here – but I wish I had been. The impact of blogging on journalism fascinates me because (1) I'm a journalist, (2) I'm a blogger and (3) I train wannabe journalists at City University in London.
My take is simple: bloggers are part of journalism, whether they want to be or not, and whether established journalists want them to be or not. I encourage my students to blog as journalists for one reason: it gets them into the habit of publishing. Blogging is no more than serial self-publishing, which is what started journalism off in Britain in the 17th century.
And it doesn't matter that blogging is derivative: so too were the pioneers of opinion journalism in the early 18th century – think Swift and Defoe – who relied almost entirely on received intelligence for their polemics.
Most important, it's by no means unusual for established journalism to be challenged and changed by upstart outsiders: the unstamped press of the 1830s, the Daily Herald in its first syndicalist incarnation, the alternative press of the 1960s and so on.
Of course, bloggers are of variable journalistic quality. Some of them are very good: brilliant polemical writers and editors, serious gossip-hounds, relentless investigators. But most of them are rubbish. Plenty can't write grammatically, let alone coherently. Too many mistake lazy prejudice for analysis. Most don't think about their readers before posting. Many could benefit from basic journalism training.
But so what? The blog scene is new and raw. There are loads of ideas that haven't been tried that might just work, plenty that are hopeless, a few that might make fortunes for sharp businesmen. And it's open politically. In the US, where blogging is most developed, it is overwhelmingly and hysterically right-wing, but there is no reason to expect it to go the same way everywhere else.
Yes, as Lloyd argues, bloggers need to get smarter in terms of basic journalistic standards – and, yes, there will always be a problem for any isolated individual doing journalism without the resources of a massive international news organisation (or even a small-circulation magazine like the New Statesman). But the solution is for bloggers to get together and create collaborative blogs that have serious journalistic credibility. Who knows? – such projects might one day attract serious investment.
Paul Anderson writes:
Harry has a good post on the chumps calling for anti-Blair tactical voting here, but he doesn't link to the key site arguing for anti-Tory tactical voting, tacticalvoter.net. So I thought I should.
Click here and follow the instructions. Jason Buckley, the organiser of the campaign and a good comrade whom I remember well from his pioneering efforts in 2001, has a blog here.
ARTHUR RANSOME, SECRET AGENT
Paul Anderson writes:
The Guardian has a piece today by David Pallister (click here) on documents released by the National Archives that show beyond any shadow of doubt that Arthur Ransome (later author of Swallows and Amazons) was working for British intelligence while a correspondent in Russia for the Daily News and then the Manchester Guardian between 1914 and 1927. It’s more confirmation of an old story rather than a stunning revelation. Robert Bruce Lockhart, the British vice-consul in Petrograd before the Bolshevik revolution and briefly a British emissary to Russia in 1918, identified Ransome as some sort of British agent in a book of memoirs published in 1932; Hugh Brogan’s biography of Ransome, published in 1984, deals at some length with his links with the Foreign Office; and documents released three years ago made it clear that Ransome was an agent for MI1c, the precursor of MI6, at least from 1918 to 1920, with the code name S76.
Nevertheless, Ransome’s role is undoubtedly strange – not so much because he later wrote much-loved children’s books but because of his outspoken sympathy with the Bolsheviks and his closeness to Trotsky (whose secretary, Evgenia Petrovna Shelepina, he married). Ransome’s position in late 1917 and early 1918, in the months between Bolshevik Russia declaring an end to war with Germany and the Bolsheviks capitulating to the Germans’ humiliating terms for peace, is particularly intriguing. In his dispatches for the Daily News in this period (and indeed into early summer 1918) he consistently argued that the Bolsheviks would soon rejoin the war and deserved British support – a line he was presumably getting from Trotsky and also feeding to Bruce Lockhart in his role as an agent.
Could Ransome’s intelligence (which as it turned out was overtaken by events) have been instrumental in the decision of the British government to send troops to Murmansk in March 1918 – an intervention usually explained as being simply against the Bolsheviks but at the time tolerated by them? Maybe there’s even a piece of paper somewhere in the archives on which Ransome reports Lenin and Trotsky pleading for British military intervention to save Russia from the Germans. Now that would be a really big story . . .
***
Another Pallister piece in the Guardian (click here) summarises other newly released documents dealing with the government's plans in the late 1940s and early 1950s to intern communists and Trotskyists in the event of war with the Soviet Union and keep them in holiday camps on the Isle of Man. He reports that estimates of the number that would be detained fluctuated wildly, though the list of names to be detained – the "Everest List" – had settled at 12,000 by 1949. Quite shocking, but nowhere near as shocking as the list itself would be. For some reason, it has not been released.
Paul Anderson writes:
I've never had a great deal of respect for Medialens, but this item (thanks to Harry) shows an almost extraordinary stupidity about the differences between how the media work in totalitarian and democratic societies :
"The North Korean media function by simply keeping all dissent strictly off limits. The western system functions by allowing small islands of dissent in an overwhelming sea of conformist propaganda. Of the two, the western system is a far more effective and insidious form of thought control."
Now, I've read Marcuse and Chomsky, and I know where Medialens is coming from — but this bald statement is so ludicrous that it beggars belief.
Does Medialens consider that it would be better off if were simply "kept off limits" and banned by a totalitarian state? Or does it consider that it's preferable to be one of the "small islands of dissent" in the repressively tolerant west?
If the former, it should volunteer its PR services at once to Fidel Castro or disband itself. If the latter, it needs at very least to rethink its fundamental assumptions.
THE LEFT IS WORSE THAN BLAIR
Paul Anderson, Tribune column, February 18 2005
I’ve lost count of the number of articles I’ve read in the past five years by leftists listing their disappointments with Tony Blair’s government. For some, it’s the war on Iraq, for others the private finance initiative or selection in schools or rights at work. I’ve written quite a few pieces along these lines myself, most of them castigating Blair for his timidity on Europe and constitutional reform.
But in truth I don’t feel particularly let down. I didn’t have great hopes of the government in the first place. And — OK, except on Europe and constitutional reform — the government has not done significantly worse than I expected.
In fact, today I’m much more disappointed with the left than I am with the government. Back in 1997, my own personal great expectation was that the left would be revived by the experience of Labour in government.
This wasn’t because I shared the Trotskyist delusion that the masses would be radicalised through suffering betrayal by perfidious social democracy. I just thought that even a boringly centrist Labour government would open up political space for the left that had been closed off by 18 years of Conservative government. As the 60s hippy guru Richard Neville said, there might be no more than an inch between Labour and the Tories, but it’s the inch in which we live.
After all, the left had blossomed under the Labour governments of the 1960s and 1970s. Those were the decades of radical workplace activism, the student revolt, the rise of the women’s movement and gay liberation, squatting, protests against the Vietnam war, the rediscovery of western Marxism.
True, it had all ended in tears, in the “winter of discontent” and Margaret Thatcher’s election victory. And true, there was plenty that was dreadful about the left in the 1960s and 1970s: the bureaucratic mindset and myopia of much of the trade union left, the lunatic Leninist sects with their revolutionary posturing, the widespread sympathy for Soviet totalitarianism, the bone-headed anti-Europeanism that dominated the Labour left, the incomprehensible jargon of Althusserian academics — and so I could go on.
But, hey, by 1997, the worst of the 60s and 70s left had been consigned to the dustbin of history. The Communist Party, still in 1979 the largest and most influential organisation to Labour’s left, had long since imploded. The largest part of its diaspora – the bit with the money, Democratic Left – had renounced Leninism and embraced social democracy. The various true-believer Trotskyist and Stalinist sects, much reduced in membership, were utterly marginal. No one was pro-Soviet any more except nostalgically, because the Soviet Union no longer existed. Anti-Europeanism seemed to have been abandoned by all but a diehard rump of the Labour left. Althusserianism was but a distant memory.
Of course, there were new idiocies abroad. Some young guns had embraced a naive anti-capitalism that blamed all the world’s troubles on the business activities of McDonalds and Coca-Cola. Others were already reduced to blaming everything on Blair, the closet Tory who had hi-jacked the Labour Party and ended its commitment to socialism. On the whole, though, the prospects for an intelligent, engaged and vibrant British left seemed to me better in 1997 than for many years before.
Eight years on, I don’t know how I could have got it so completely wrong. Far from reviving under Labour, the left has continued to decline — in numbers, influence and relevance.
OK, I’ll accept that the rise of popular opposition to the Iraq war gave the left a boost. But it was the very worst part of the left that benefited: the diehard Leninists of the Socialist Workers Party and the Communist Party of Britain, who appointed themselves as the leadership of the Stop the War Coalition. And their hard-core revolutionary defeatism and facile anti-imperialism did more harm than good even in the short term. All that remains from the mass mobilisation of 2003 is the grotesque sideshow of George Galloway, the SWP and a handful of reactionary Islamists in the Respect Coalition. After the election in Iraq, their support for the murderous Sunni-supremacist “resistance” looks like going down in history as the early-21st-century equivalent of the old Communist Party of Great Britain’s endorsement of the Hitler-Stalin pact in 1939.
Iraq apart, all that most of the left has done since 1997 is moan. It whinges about Blair, it whinges about spin, it whinges about PFI, it whinges — just like in the 1970s — about Europe. There isn’t a coherent left political programme of any description, let alone one that is creative and forward-looking. No one on the left has an alternative economic strategy that is even vaguely credible. Hardly anyone has the faintest idea of what a different foreign policy might comprise. (Setting a deadline for getting out of Iraq, as Robin Cook suggested in a jointly authored piece with Douglas Hurd and Menzies Campbell, is laughably stupid, and the resurgent anti-European Labour left’s plans to dish the EU constitution, in alliance with the Daily Mail, are beneath contempt.) There aren’t even very many leftists — even Fabians and Demosites — coming up with specific domestic policy bright ideas. For the most part, the left’s line is that if the government is for something, it must be bad.
I’m not denying that there’s plenty the government has done that ought to be opposed. But a left that is merely negative, a left without a project, can never flourish. Eight more years like the last eight, and the left might as well pack its bags and go home.
