Democracy & the anarchists

by Brian Bamford

REVIEWING a recent interview involving the academic Ruth Kinna, the critic Les May asks on this blog about the way she tackles the question about the attitudes of English anarchists to democracy. Here Les May suggests that she hesitated and appeared to stumble when the interviewer asked her whether anarchists believed in democracy.   Mr. May puts this down to the abysmal way in which some modern anarchists have handled themselves when confronted with political, moral and intellectual differences.  He probably has in mind people being roughed-up, shoved around and sent packing at anarchist  book fairs and other events.  The list is long but the recent exclusions of Helen Steel has excited interest, and not just on Mums Net.  This raised another issue: the crude hierarchical nature of the anarchist's methodology in so far as some of them seem more than willing to defend minor celebrities like Ms. Steel but hold back from backing 'lesser' figures who fall foul on some political point of order.

At the Liverpool Anarchist Book fair last year, where a blacklist was in operation and tolerated, even by Milan Rai, the editor of Peace News failed to give his full backing to people who were blacklisted there.  Mr. Rai who accepts that the practice of a blacklist was unfair in Liverpool, non-the-less he didn't let it get in the way or prevent him from doing his own book promotion at the same event.  Political expediency seems to be name of the game among the political libertarians of all shapes and sizes.  Moral compass, it seems, takes a back seat.at all levels among the English, particularly when it gets in the way of business.  The New from Nowhere set who were organising the Liverpool Bookfair, were more worried about losing business through the bad publicity that ensued than upholding any moral standards.

Les May writes:  'Democracy isn’t just about voting, it’s also about how we treat people we disagree with.'

What is democracy, we might ask?

The book 'School for Dictators' by the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone, has a character called Thomas: the Cynic who declares:  'Democracy is universal sufferage plus certain conditions.  The Greeks who were the first to experience it, [and] described four of them as follows: isonomia, or equality of rights before the law; liberty (which is a word plain enough in itself); isocratia or political equality; and isegoria, or freedom of speech.'

Mr. May asks:  'Why is it that people who claim to follow a political philosophy which extols personal freedom, trust in the individual, working for the collective good and personal responsibility, so often turn out to be authoritarian when they band together in groups?'

What maybe puzzling Mr. May, who has been around the English anarchists at least since the Freedom Anarchist Ball in the early 1960s, is that some anarchists today are actively repressing others and trying to prevent them presenting alternative viewpoints.  


But it is not only Milan Rai at Peace News who has fallen short and failed to be consistent in his stand against the persistent censorship, bullying and gagging among the adherents of anarchism in this country.  Pensioned-off academics like David Goodway and Peter Marshall who wrote 'Demanding the Impossible:  A History of Anarchism', both sit on a committee 'Friends of Freedom Press' which oversees a blacklist which named several northern anarchists.  This blacklist was compiled by a Freedom incomer from East Anglia Simon Saunders who also works as a hack for the Morning Star.

As Les May writes in his article:   'There’s no shortage of examples of such authoritarian behaviour which have been recorded on the Northern Voices blog, some in recent weeks.   Why do they do it?'

We live in troubling times in which politics on all fronts in this country has now been generally discredited by a degree of intolerance.  It is surprising that in some respects it is at its worst among the anarchists and among the readers at book fairs.  

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M/c Communist Party Commemoration:

Mrs Brown's Boys

‘From Manchester to Spain’: a commemoration of the life of George Brown; 2pm-4pm at the Waldorf Hotel, Gore Street, Manchester M1 3AQ; organised by the George Brown Commemoration Committee, Greater Manchester Communist Party and local IBMT members.

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LAST Saturday, the Manchester communists held a commemoration to George Brown who died fighting for the republican government in Spain during the Spanish Civil War.  

The event was introduced by Liz Payne, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Britain,

Slimmer and less charismatic than Boris Johnson, but with a similar shade of hair and equally plummy-voice, she introduced the event which with 30-odd in attendance was notable for its lack of young people.
Charles Jepson, a cheeky mustachioed J.P. from Blackburn, gave the talk on George Brown stressing his Irish roots and Communist Party connections.  It seems that George was distressed about the support for Franco prevailing in Ireland at the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.  The Roman Catholics were he said concerned about the attacks on the churches by Catalan and Spanish anarchist trade unionists.  Mr. Jepson himself taught at a high class Catholic school in Lancashire, and has sympathies for the IRA.
Mr. Jepson did not mention George's brother Michael Brown who was one of the earlier volunteers in the Spanish conflict, but who is sometimes classed as a 'deserter'. 

One account describes Michael experience thus:
'While Michael Brown was among the first group of British-based volunteers, arriving before the International Brigades were set up. He joined the No. 1 Coy. XIV Battalion at Lopera in late December 1936, a battle where the newly arrived volunteers were brutally attacked by the fascist troops. Having gone through this battle, Michael returned to Britain,...'

Tameside TUC & its enemies

The Tameside TUC booklet to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, first published in 2006, which interestingly was immediately confronted by elements in the Manchester International Brigade Memorial Trust such as Mike Luft who initially tried to suppress its production, but when they failed it went on to described Michael Brown as living in Harperhey, Manchester as follows:  'Deserted in December 1936, declaring:  'this isn't a war, this is bloody madness.  I've had enough.'

Tameside TUC's booklet states:  'George Brown from Platting, Manchester:  Secretary of Manchester Communist Party Branch.  Political commissar in Spain.  Killed at Villanueva de la Cañada in July 1937.'

Mr. Jepson said George Brown was wounded in Madridand he pointed out George Brown was a well-established leader of the workers’ movement in Manchester, who is on record as being the most senior member of the Communist Party of Great Britain to be killed in action in Spain.  He was a full-time worker for the Party and a member of its national leadership, the Central Committee.
The mood music in George Brown's birth place the Irish Republic in 1936, was supportive of Franco, and the Irish Brigade (Spanish: Brigada Irlandesa, "Irish Brigade" Irish: Briogáid na hÉireann) fought on the Nationalist side of Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War.  The unit was formed wholly of Roman Catholics by the politician Eoin O'Duffy, who had previously organised the banned quasi-fascist Blueshirts and openly fascist Greenshirts in Ireland.
Jepson said that all this seeing General Franco as a saviour of the Roman Catholic Church disturbed George Brown, and he backed the 320 volunteers – both resident in Ireland or members of the ‘Irish Diaspora’ from the far-flung corners of the globe -  were part of a 45,000 strong army of private individuals from all walks of life resolved to stem the rise of fascism.  The majority of these volunteers served with the International Brigades, others were involved with various militias, and still more were engaged in medical and other support services. Over 55 different nationalities were represented.

'Sentimental Tripe' !

Another speaker talked about his aunty Evelyn Jones who was George Brown's wife, and who later after Georges death married Jack Jones, the man who later was to become the leader of the Transport & General Workers Union.  She was for a time a member of the Communist Party, and had been a Comintern courier during the Spanish Civil War.  
The talk was of interest but given that 10,000 police from other regions of Spain had been moved into Catalonia on the eve of the Catalan referendum the whole event had the feel of a Sunshine Club for elderly folk.  I was put in mind of what George Orwell wrote in his review of 'Volunteer in Spain', the book by international brigader John Sommerfield:  which Orwell described it thus:
'it may seem ungracious to say that this book is a piece of sentimental tripe; but so it is.'  
Sentimental tripe dogs these commemorations of the International Brigade Memorial Trust to this very day, as we witnessed last Saturday, and as we experienced when Tameside TUC published its own publication which tried to give a fair and balanced account of the local contributions of the international brigade volunteers in the struggle against Franco's fascists.  The problem with the International Brigade Memorial Trust is that it tries to present the British contingent of the International Brigade volunteers as a kind of cavalry, which stood in defence of democratic values between the people of Spain and Franco's fascists and the Moors.  In playing up the contribution of the international brigade at the expense of the Spanish working-class it often borders on hispanophobia.

Why was Spain the first country to seriously resist Fascism?

Ignazio Silone wrote in his book 'School for Dictators':

'Compare the respective attitudes towards fascism of the Spanish workers and the Germans.  The difference in national character can explain only part of the different way of reacting to the enemy's attack.  The growth in big industry has been a powerful help in reinforcing the tendency of Germans - workers included - towards zusammenmarschieren (mass-man marching together).... Individual initiative has been reduced to zero.'

The fact is the Spaniards were the first to seriously resist fascism because of the history and rural roots, which allowed anarchism to develop in cities like Barcelona to influence the labour movement.  We see the effects of this today in the general strike that is now taking place against the police brutality that took place during the Catalan referendum.
Pedro Cuadrado who was in the republican police in Barcelona in 1936, and later lived in Bolton, said that Barcelona was the first city to halt the march of fascism.

Because many, if not most of the members of the International Brigade Memorial Trust are super-annuated former British communist party members, they have difficulty understanding a cultures such as that of the Catalans and the Spaniards.

Silone police informer turned novelist

& Skinner's gansta rap lyrics!

DOES art mirror life?  Is it possible to find in the fictional writings of a novelist or the lyrics of a song-writer historical evidence of real events or even confessions of past sins?   

Prosecutors and law enforcement officers in the USA have used FBI analysts to look at rap lyrics when investigating gangs.  The New Jersey Supreme Court will soon hear arguments on if 13 pages of lyrics written by Vonte Skinner – including lines like 'four slugs drillin' your cheek to blow your face off and leave your brain caved in the street' – should have been admitted at his trial for attempted murder.   

Erik Nelson, an assistant professor of liberal arts at the University of Richmond, has said:  'What's getting really unnerving, is the amount of time it appears both police and prosecutors are spending over rap lyrics and videos on social media rather than using that time to go and rather more convincing, more conventional evidence.'   

Lorne Manly, a journalist on the New York Times writes: 

'In the profane world of hardcore rap, verisimilitude is prized.  Growing out of the ghettos on the West Coast in the 1989s, gangsta rap made the gritty reality of gangs, violence and drugs central features.'   

Prosecutors believe that such lyrics can be useful in building cases because of the search for status:  attaining it, crowing about it, expanding it, is, some think, integral to gang life.  It is claimed that if you listen to these songs you will hear gang members confessing to crimes they had committed previously and were through their art disseminating within their neighborhoods.   

Similarly, in an essay entitled 'The Secret Life of Ignazio Silone' by John Foot in Left Review it is claimed that between 1920 and 1930 Silone was an informer to Mussolini's political police.  A letter from Silone, written in early 1930 and addressed to Emilia Bellone, sister to Guido Bellone, General Inspector of Public Security charge with stamping out subversion in which he pleaded to be released from 'all falsehood, doubt and secrecy', expressing a desire 'to repair the damage that I have caused, to seek redemption, to help the workers, the peasants (to whom I am bound with every fibre of my body) and my country.'  

An article detailing Silone's history as an informer almost up to his expulsion from the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1931 was written by Mauro Cananli entitled 'Ignazio Silone & the Fascist Political Police' and published in Modern Italian Studies, 5 (1) in 2000, it was greeted with consternation because Silone after his career as a police informer went on in the 1930s to write books that represented some of the best attacks on Fascism and which John Foot describes this by saying 'his novels had become very effective weapons against it (the Mussolini regime).'  He was central to Italian literature of the period and widely respected outside the circles of the communist party.  George Orwell wrote of a special class of literature that had come out of  the European struggle since the rise of Fascism: 

'Some out of the outstanding figures in this school of writers are Silone, Malraux, Salvemini, Borkenau, Victor Serge and Koester himself.  Some of these are imaginative writers, some are not, but they are all alike in that they are trying to write contemporary history, but unofficial history, the kind that is ignored in the text-books and lied about in the newspapers.'  

As with the US police investigators into gangsta rap some Italian intellectuals claim to be able to see in Ignazio Silone's novels such as 'Bread & Wine', 'The Fox' and 'And He Did Hide Himself' an author finding himself wrestling with issues of treachery and collaboration.  The spy in 'Bread & Wine' relates:  'In my solitary broodings, that left me not a moments peace,I passed from fear of punishment to fear of non-punishment..'  And Adriano Sofri asked in La Republica on the 15^th, April 2000:  'One re-reads all of Silone, and one thinks: how could we not have seen it before?'  John Foot's essay doesn't provide us with any clear evidence as to what might have been Silone's motivation for becoming an agent of the secret police and why he became one at the age of nineteen, but there was 'little to reveal ideological commitment to Fascism later'.  Foot writes:  '... it is striking that the regime did not expose Silone in the thirties, when his novels had become very effective weapons against it.'  The problem was that once Silone had begun to inform it was, says Foot, 'very difficult (and dangerous) for him to stop'.   

Crime fiction was used in the USA to establish the guilt of an author and show he had a violent streak three decades ago, but the case was overturned on appeal, with the decision rejecting the proposition 'that an author's character can be determined by the type of book he writes'.  In the Skinner case the New Jersey chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has used 'Crime & Punishment' and 'Folsome Prison Blues' to make a  similar point:  'That a rap artist wrote lyrics seemingly embracing the world of violence is no more reason to ascribe to him a motive and intent to commit violent acts than to saddle Dostoyevsky with Raskolnikov's motives or to indict Johnny Cash for having “shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”.'   

The mystery still remains about the relationship between between the artist's real live experience and his creative work.  George Orwell writing his essay about Artur Koestler in 1944 wrote that 'there has been nothing (written in England) resembling for instance, Fontamara or Darkness at Noon, because there is almost no English writer to whom it has happened to see totalitarianism from the inside.'   Orwell continues:  'Most of the European writers I mentioned above (Silone, Malraux, Victor Serge and Koestler) and scores of others like then, have been obliged to break the law in order to engage in politics at all; some of them have thrown bombs and fought street battles, many have been in prison or concentration camp, of fled across frontiers with false names and forged passports.'  Orwell then says one could not expect Professor Laski 'indulging in activities of this kind' nor  indeed today, nor could one anticipate anything of this kind from the henpecked anarchists who operate the Manchester book fair or those Londoners who stay stum about malicious and false allegations of 'anti-Antisemitism' and the destruction of book stalls. 

Reciting Reactionary Rhetoric

Socialist Party Scotland Cheer-leading to the Grangemouth Abyss  

 

LEN McCluskey and Unite have delivered us glorious disaster in their handling of the Grangemouth dispute last weekend.  Last Friday on Any Questions on Radio Four Bob Crow of the RMT said that this would not mean the end of trade unionism as we know it.  On the 29^th, October after a long silence the Socialist Party Scotland issued a long-winded rationalisation for the delivery of a serious disaster for the British trade union movement – perhaps the most significant defeat since the collapse of the miners strike in 1985.  

 

Could it have been different?  Will this be a turning point for trade union rights?  Will Len McCluskey become another dishevelled Arthur Scargill figure in the 21^st century – a tired and forlorn politics?  

 

The Grangemouth débâcle beautifully underlines the hopeless reactionary rhetoric of British trade unionism and what has come to called the left in Britain.  Practically the whole of the left in this country and particularly the British trade unions are ruled by a reactionary instinct.  Analysing the Grangemouth failure the Socialist Party Scotland declares [29^th, Oct. 2013]: 

'In the absence of a fighting strategy by Unite to save the plant, including the occupation of the site and the building of a mass campaign across Scotland to demand that the Scottish/ UK governments nationalise Grangemouth, the pressure proved too great for the shop stewards to resist.'  

 

The left in Britain, as represented by the trade unions, protest movements and left parties, has long been a reactionary force in so far as it has always tended to react to an agenda set by the establishment, the government or the employers.  It does not have an agenda or serious strategy of its own.  Thus when the current coalition government enforced cuts the left because it has no plan of its own is forced to go on the defensive and fight the cuts with umpteen fragmented organisations – this Pavlovian Dog reaction by the Socialist Party resulted in the disintegration of the National Shop Stewards Network [NSSN] in 2011.  This automatic and mechanical quality of the British left stems from something special detected in some of the north European organised working class by such writers as Ignazio Silone and George Orwell:  Silone in his book 'School for Dictators' links it to 'Zumarcherien' (a marching together approach to class war) – a kind of mechanical politics of the German and British worker founded in the kind of work in big factories – Silone uses this concept of the north European worker as automaton to explain the better performance of the Spanish and Catalan workers in resisting the imposition of Fascism in 1936:  the Spaniards with their different cultural and political background rooted in the peasant and the artisan were better able to use their initiative and trade unions to challenge authoritarian regimes than those left-wing parties and trade unions with a more Prussian and Germanic mentality in north Europe.  

 

Today, the Socialist Party Scotland explanation to what went wrong at Grangemouth is to blame the Labour Party  and Ed Miliband personally: 

'This shows yet again that today Labour does not support workers in struggle and that Unite should come out clearly in favour of a new mass workers' party, public ownership and a real political alternative to the austerity agenda.'  

 

This statement is an example, yet again, of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the British left and our national trade unions.  The Socialist Party Scotland is reassuring: 

'Socialist Party Scotland completely rejects the idea put about by the crowing capitalist media that the union has been smashed at Grangemouth.  Unite has made a big mistake in singing up to a three-year no-strike deal at Grangemouth... Against the backdrop of a no-strike agreement it is vital that Unite rebuilds its strength and its membership at Grangemouth...'  

 

This is voice of despair, the voice of the politics of the automaton of the unthinking 'mass-party man' steeped in a kind of Prussian totalitarian mind-set to which Orwell and Silone often referred.  These people have yet to learn the lessons of Arthur Scargill and the defeat of the miners in 1985:  Thatcher then had a transformation strategy then in the Ridley plan, and Scargill and the miners were fighting to defend the pits and save the status quo, essentially a conservative position which Scargill fought tactically.  Today the battle at Grangemouth was a tactical from the beginning and it was one that Unite couldn't win.  Wee must wait to see if the Socialist Party continues to back Len McCluskey in future.  Over two years ago Bob Crow the RMT leader and a political crony of the Social Party was treated to a fish and chip lunch by the Financial Times famous 'Lunch with the FT' column and he declared that the flat fish 'haliburt is good for your brains', well the British left is desparately short on brains so perhaps the Socialist Party and McCluskey should stuff themselves with haliburt in future.