Tale of Two Icons: Engels & General Kalashnikov

Manchester & Moscow Monuments: From Engels to
Lt. Gen. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47

WITHIN two months of each other two statues have been unveiled,; one in Manchester of Fredrich Engels, and the other in Moscow of General Mikhail Timofeyevich Kalashnikov.

At the unveiling of the Engels statue event on the 16th, July, at the NCP Bridgewater Hall Car Park, with the statue being placed in Tony Wilson Place near HOME in Manchester, Salford Trades Council ended up walking out when they found they were confronted by Showsec Security, an 'anti-trade union body'.

The statue originally situated in Maryanivka, Ukraine, 12 feet tall, had been cut in half and dumped.  But on May 15, the halves were hauled onto a truck and sent on their way to Manchester.  On its travels through Europe, captured on film, the truck stopped in Engels’s birthplace, Barmen, now part of the city of Wuppertal in northwestern Germany.

The Engels resurrection in Manchester, where he conducted research on the working class in the 1840s, is thanks to Phil Collins — the acclaimed artist who has made Engels the centrepiece of his most recent project, 'Ceremony'.

Meanwhile, less than two months later on the 19th, September 2017,  a towering monument to Lt. Gen. Mikhail T. Kalashnikov, designer of the AK-47, the Soviet rifle that has become the world’s most widespread assault weapon, was unveiled on Tuesday in the middle of one of central Moscow’s busiest thoroughfares.

The ceremony took place to the sounds of Russian military folk music, the Soviet anthem, Orthodox prayers and words about how his creation had ensured Russia’s safety and peace in the world.

While the Manchester monument was financed in part by Manchester City Council controlled by the Labour Party,the Moscow monument to Kalashnikov was financed in part by Rostec, the Russian state-owned corporation that owns the Kalashnikov Concern, the weapons manufacturer in Izhevsk where General Kalashnikov worked for decades (and which was renamed for him in 2013).

Sergey V. Chemezov, the chief executive of Rostec, who reportedly became close to Mr. Putin in Germany in the 1980s when Mr. Putin worked for the K.G.B., praised General Kalashnikov as an “example of unwavering devotion to one’s profession and one’s motherland” that should serve as “an example to our younger generation.”

The 'New York Times' reported that the General Kalashnikov’s legacy at the event was also cast in religious terms, in line with the Russian government’s depiction of itself as a protector of the Orthodox Church and of Christianity more broadly.

General Kalashnikov in 2007 with a prototype of his AK-47. Credit Misha Japaridze/Associated Press

George Julian Harney: Radical Chartist

Hegel vs Wittgenstein's approach 

DAVID Goodway gave a talk on Saturday the 7th, February 2014, at the Peoples' History Museum on George Julian Harney, one of the leading Chartists.  He was introducing the book that he edited and published in 2014, and was entitled 'The Chartists Were Right' on Mr. Harney's contributions to the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, which is the first selection of Harney's journalism to be published.  Mr. Goodway taught sociology, history and Victorian studies to mainly adult students at the University of Leeds.  His first book had been London Chartism, 1838-1848 (1982).  Elsewhere Mr. Goodway has written mostly on anarchism and libertarian socialism.

David Goodway gave a brief history of Chartism and the general background of the times mentioning the Newport uprising, as well as other attempted uprisings in Dewsbury and Sheffield, and later in Manchester and Birmingham; the 1832 strike in Stalybridge; the murder of a policeman in Ashton-under-Lyne in 1848.  He insisted that there had been no link or continuity with the labour movement and that ultimately Chartism had been replaced by trade unionism.  He posed the question as to why Chartism failed after some 50 years of agitation.  He didn't seem to answer this precisely, but pointed out that the demand for the Charter was for more specific reasons to do with the New Poor Law, and also concerns about the factory system and it had been confronted by an alliance of the propertied classes. 

The main intellectual influence on Harney was the Irishman Bronterre O'Brien, the editor the Poor Man's Guardian, who was an enthusiast for the French Revolution identifying with Robespierre.  Harney was more drawn to Marat and often signed himself 'L'Ami du Peuple' (Friend of the People).  In April 1839, he wrote for the London Democrat, but during his travels in the north of England he was seen as one of the foremost spokesmen of physical-force Chartism, and in May 1839, soon after the Convention moved to Birmingham, a warrant was issued for his arrest for a seditious speech he was reputed to have made there.  He was arrested at Bedlington in July, and held for a time at Warwick Gaol, but in April 1840 the case was dropped, because his speech had not been properly witnessed.    

He was appointed Northern Star correspondent for Sheffield and later became its sub-editor in July 1843 when O'Connor,  its proprietor, dismissed the Rev. William Hill and replaced him with Joshua Hobson.  Hobson started to give Harney a free hand.  By the time he was formally appointed editor in October 1845 Harney had already taken-over as editor in practice.  From then on through the 1850s his influence was at its height as although O'Conner was the proprietor of the Northern Star, to begin with he gave Harney editorial independence.   

In the 1840s, the Northern Star was based in Leeds, and Friedrich Engels had visited there in 1843 when he met Harney and they became lifelong friends,  Engels was to write:

'We kept in touch with the revolutionary section of the English Chartists through Julian Harney, the editor of the movement's central organ, the Northern Star, to which I was a contributor.'

Engels thought Harney should push himself into the Chartist leadership over O'Connor but Harney disagreed responding:

'A popular leader should be possessed of magnificent bodily appearance, an iron frame, eloquence, or at least a ready fluency of tongue.  I have none of these.  O'C. has them all – at least in degree. ...'

Then very perceptively Harney argued that the qualities that Engels claimed for Harney were, in fact, in English terms defects:

'...the very qualities you (Engels) give me the credit of possessing, and which you emphatically sum up in the sentence “You are the only Englishman who is really free of all prejudices that distinguish the Englishman from the Continental man” are sufficient of themselves to prevent my being a leader.' 

Goodway writes that 'Harney, a Londoner and indeed a proletarian, was then insufficiently English in outlook, whereas O'Connor, who belonged to the Irish gentry, exerted a mesmeric appeal on the English working class, many whom were, of course, either Irish-born or of Irish origin.' 

Harney fell out with Marx and Engels over the issue of social inclusiveness which Harney proclaimed:  'I stay not to enquire whether they were of the aristocratic [sic], bourgeoisie, or the proletariat.  Enough for me that they were men of earnest convictions, which they maintained through every kind of adversity, including bonds, exile, and to death.' 

Essentially Marx and Engels were Hegelians or some may say 'monomaniacs', while Harney's writings in his publications were as Mr. Goodway says: 'vigorously polymathic, ranging across literature, contemporary politics and world history of all periods.'   

Wittgenstein wrote:

'Hegel seems to me to be always wanting to say that things which look different are really the same...  Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different.' 

George Julian Harney in his editorship of the Northern Star was not engaged in producing a mono-maniac tract for Marxists, hence David Goodway was able to say that  the Northern Star sold well and was 'not boring' and was definitely 'not a sectarian paper'.  Basically Harney, according to Mr. Goodway, was all for inclusiveness while 'Marx and Engels couldn't stomach that'.  Mr. Goodway also insisted that the Chartists were in no way 'Socialists' and that no direct line could be drawn between the Chartist movement and the formation of the Labour Party at the end of the 19^th Century.  O'Connor believed in peasant proprietors, according to Goodway; and when I asked if this meant he was more in the tradition of the Frenchman Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mr Goodway agreed with me on this. 

Marx & Copyright Claim

HUNDREDS of works of Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels has been taken down by the Marxist Internet Archive, a website dedicated to radical writers and thinkers, or the site was told it would face legal consequences.  The threat comes from the small left-wing publisher, Lawrence & Wishart, which has claimed copyright ownership over the 50-volume, English-language edition of Marx and Engel's writing.  The original German version is not covered by this ruling.

Some are suggesting that this is somewhat 'uncomradely', to use the law of intellectual property to deprive the left and other radicals of the writings of Marx and Engels on the Internet.  Ironically the deadline for complying with the order was on the eve of May Day (1/05/14) or International Workers' Day. 

The achive removed the disputed writings on time with a note blaming the publisher and a bold headline:  'FILE NO LONGER AVAILABLE'!

The International New York Times notes:
'The fight over online control of Marx's works comes at a historical moment when his ideas have found a new relevance, whether because the financial crisis of 2008 shook people's confidence in global capitalism or, with the passage of time, the Marx name has become less shackled to the legacy of the Soviet Union.'

It seems that Lawrence & Wishart, which has two full-time employees and two part-time employees and only just makes ends meet, publish journals like 'Anarchy Studies', and only about a dozen leftish books a year.   Curiously, some years ago the now defunct paper Freedom, the then anarchist monthly, was subject to a similar claim of copyright for the use of a photo in a book and paid-up to the demand of the left-wing photographer David Hoffman.  In the Lawrence & Wishhart case Peter Linebaugh, a professor at the University of Toledo in Ohio who has researched the history of communism, said:
'This is the triumph of capitalism, having the small fish biting at each other.'

Bristol Event: Condition of the Working Class

The following event may be of interest...
Monday 3rd June 8pm
The Cube, Dove Street, Bristol.
Entry £5/£4 (But nobody turned away due to lack of funds)

http://bristol.indymedia.org.uk/article/753006

The Condition of the Working Class

We are really proud to be hosting the Bristol premiere of the new film the Condition of the Working Class.
This film is inspired by Engels’ book written in 1844, The Condition of the Working Class in England. How much has really changed since then?

In 2012 a group of working class people from Manchester and Salford come together to create a theatrical show from scratch based on their own experiences and Engels’ book. They have eight weeks before their first performance. The Condition of the Working Class follows them from the first rehearsal to the first night performance and situates their struggle to get the show on stage in the context of the daily struggles of ordinary people facing economic crisis and austerity politics. The people who came together to do the show turned from a group of strangers, many of whom had never acted before, into The Ragged Collective, in little more than two months.

This film, full of political passion and anger, is a wonderful testament to the creativity, determination and camaraderie of working people that blows the media stereotypes of the working class out of the water.

The filmmakers will be present for Q&A afterwards.

More info here http://www.conditionoftheworkingclass.info

Related Link: http://www.conditionoftheworkingclass.info

Note: this event was organised by Bristol Indymedia and Permanent Culture Now

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