Cover 32

The cover of Issue 32 in June 2013 portrayed the liberation of Jim Larkin from prison a century earlier, a subject examined in Noel McDermott’s article ‘Who got Larkin out?’ in that issue.

The Hidden Connolly 13

In July 2002, Issue 13 published articles by James Connolly for the first time since their original appearance in 1898.

Home Rule Journalists and Patriotism
An Object Lesson

[Workers’ Republic, August 13 1898]

Most Irishmen who remember the early days of the Land League movement in this country will also remember how the present Home Rule politicians, then pushing their way into public life, contrived to ‘rig’ the Irish newspaper press and use it as an advertising agency in their own behalf. The middle-class adventurers who now style themselves our ‘National leaders’ were confronted with a problem which may be stated thus: Given an oppressed people, an alien government and an insolent aristocracy, how best out of their mutual conflicts to evolve fame and fortune. From the Government not much could be expected. Secure in its position, it cared not for the hungry hordes of office-seekers and civil service aspirants with which our Irish middle-class besiege the Government buildings at every examination: it knew the exact value of the patriotism of the middle-class Nationalist newspaper, which denounces the “Sacsanach” rule, and, at the same time, devotes whole columns of its space to explaining for the benefit of its readers how they may best sell themselves into the service of the Sacsanach, whether in the Army, Navy, Constabulary or Civil Service. Still less could be hoped for from the landlord class, the enemy’s garrison in Ireland. But there remained the people, the enthusiastic hot-headed, warm-hearted, patriotic people. And accordingly our patriot politicians, save the mark, set themselves to the task of gulling, cajoling and bewildering the people of Ireland in a manner abso­lutely unique in the history of any country. The method was simple. Our newspapers are not what their name would imply, merely chroniclers of news, they are, in Ireland at least, primarily political weapons in the hands of political parties. Accordingly the Irish public which delights to take its opinions from newspapers had its opinions on our ‘leaders’ formed somewhat in this manner:— Tim Healy, being appointed London letter-writer to a Dublin weekly, would, in the course of his letter, refer in terms of glowing admiration to the “matchless eloquence and statesmanlike speeches” of Mr Sexton; Mr Sexton, who wrote as lobby correspondent to another paper, in his turn could scarcely find terms eulogistic enough to describe the “brilliant sarcasm and legal acumen” of Tim Healy; Mr Harrington from the scene of the land war would, through the columns of the press, and like the others always under the cloak of anonymity, inform the tenants that the world was lost in admiration of Mr Redmond, and Mr Redmond would repay the compliment by half a column of gush over the “organising genius” of Tim Harrington; John Dillon would conclude his speeches by a quotation from the over-praised doggerel of T D Sullivan, and William O’Brien never lost a chance at home or abroad of calling Heaven to witness the love and esteem he cherished “from the depths of his heart” for the many high qualities of Mr T P O’Connor.¹

How well the dodge worked the world knows. The Irish people wor­shipped those men with an enthusiastic self-sacrificing devotion. The Irish race at home and abroad poured in its hard-earned wealth to sustain those men in the fight, accepting them at their own estimation and bowing down before them, even when we saw some of them in prison making more clamour over the loss of their trousers than the United Irishmen or the Manchester Martyrs had evoked over the loss of their lives. But in due time the bubble burst. The Parnell crisis, and all the stormy scenes and base betrayals that accompanied it, showed us of what pitiful material our vaunted demigods were composed.² Every effort now being made, or likely to be made, to rehabilitate those men in public esteem must be regarded with contempt by every right-minded Irishman. We have been permitted to look behind the scenes of politics for a brief moment while the actors quarrelled in front, and they who have once seen the mechanism of the stage will never again be frightened by its thunder.

And if the discredited journalists who trafficked on our credulity in the past can no longer command our respect what of the journalistic staff who man our papers today? Their patriotism and also their honesty can be gauged from the following incident which was recorded in all our Dublin daily papers at the time absolutely without comment. We extract from the Freeman’s Journal.

IRISH INSTITUTE OF JOURNALISTS
Annual Dinner
The annual dinner in connection with the annual general meeting of the Irish Association District Institute of Journalists was held on Saturday evening in the Grand Hotel, Malahide. In the evening at 6.30 over sixty members and guests sat down to dinner in the spacious supper room.
Mr J P Hayden MP (chairman) presided. To his right sat the Right Hon. the Lord Mayor, Mr W C Mills, chairman of the Dublin District; to his left Mr Geo. McSweeney BL, ex-chairman, and Mr Thos. Kennedy BL, Lord Mayor’s secretary. Those present included Mr F J Allan, C Ryan, J B Hall, J Sherlock BA; M F McGrenahan BL; W F Dennehy, J P Gaynor BL; John Magrath, M P Ryle, T R Harrington, E Tuohy, Cork; W Barrett, do.; J Geary, do.; James Murray, J Wyse Power, Edward Byrne FJI; M J Cosgrave, R O’Dwyer, C Lehane, A J Conway, V D Hughes, P J Meade, P J Hooper, M A Casey, Drogheda; R Donovan, J Linehan BL; J Jameson, R J O’Mulrennin MA; T Fitzpatrick, F C Wallis Healy, L Dennehy, solicitor; W M Seaver, M Wheeler, William Stewart, H McWeeney, P Delany, P J Griffith, V Kilbride, solicitor; G Sherlock, T D Fitzgerald, J McNerney, J W Bacon, T J Condon MP; R M Peter, Lionel Johnson, J Mooney, W Clarke, hon. sec., Dublin District; E H Kearney BL; Frank Manley, Edwin Hamilton MA; Dr Joze, John O’Connell, T O’Connor, W W O’Mahony (Naas), M Code (Wexford), P F Keenan (Enniscorthy).
The vice-chairs were occupied by Mr J B Hall and Mr T R Harrington.

Our readers will please perceive that from this list of names it appears that every newspaper in Dublin was there represented—Dillonite, Healyite, Parnellite, they are all there. All the men who write the furiously patriotic leading articles, all the literary guides of politics, all the men who in season and out of season are protesting their love for Ireland, their hatred of tyranny, their unquenchable determination to follow in the footsteps of Tone and Emmet. Well, these hot-headed, high-minded patriots (sic) met together and at a purely social, non-political function, where they were in an over­whelming majority, they commenced proceedings by drinking a toast, to what, think ye? To our martyred dead, no; to our motherland, no; to Freedom’s cause, no; perhaps to the 1,225,000 persons who died of famine in the present reign in Ireland, no. But to

Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen.

The sovereign under whose rule those countrymen and women of ours were starved to death, in a land as fertile as any in Europe, in obedience to a hellish system of political economy, and in accordance with the deliberate govern­ment policy sanctioned and approved of by Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen.

The very next Sunday most of those journalistic patriots were at the demonstration in Bodenstown,³ the greatest rebels of us all (mar dhea) and outvying each other in enthusiastic cheers for the great republican of ’98, protesting their admiration for his inflexible purpose and democratic virtues, even while the liquor they had consumed in drinking the ‘loyal’ toast had scarcely died out in their veins. And the day after the Wolfe Tone demon­stration all our Dublin daily papers in the Home Rule interest contained long editorials written by these same versatile gentlemen, complimenting the Irish people for their fidelity to the cause of freedom. Could arrant knavery and hypocrisy go further?

Irish political history, written by such men as these, has represented our middle-class Home Rulers and their journalistic allies as the high-minded apostles of a distressed people; future history will more correctly stigmatise them as the most unscrupulous political charlatans who ever imposed upon a confiding race.

Before leaving this unsavoury subject we would like to ask a civil question. In the list of names given as being present at the loyal function spoken of, we see the name of Mr F J Allan. Mr Allan is manager of the Independent, is a member of the ’98 Executive, is reputed to be an advanced nationalist. If he was present at the banquet, why did he not protest? If he was not present, why did he not repudiate the name of those who used his name in that connection? Was it because he did not like to expose the lily-livered hypocrites who call themselves nationalist journalists? Or is he himself as great a hypocrite as any? Mr F J Allan is an official of the Irish Institute of Journalists who gave this dinner—Treasurer in fact—and as such directly responsible for this loyal toast. Let him answer.⁴ And let him and all others take notice that there is now entered into the journalistic world of Ireland a new force in the shape of a newspaper pledged to carry out the revolutionary principles of the United Irishmen, in accordance with the changed economi­cal and political development of the time.⁵ In accordance with that pledge, which we here make to our readers, there devolves upon our shoulders the duty, which we accept with pleasure, of relentlessly exposing to the public gaze and trampling into the mire to which they belong all the horde of middle-class tricksters and political wirepullers who have so long emascu­lated and weakened our political faith. Let those “hirelings of England in the green livery of our country” take notice.

Setanta

Home Thrusts

[Workers’ Republic, August 27 1898]

Walk up, walk up. Here you are, here you are, the greatest show on earth. An unrivalled and unsurpassable collection of political monstrosities, journalistic fakirs, ‘patriotic’ slum owners, parliamentarian contortionists, et hoc genus omne.

The last few words are Latin. I sling them in here promiscuous like, just to show off my accomplishments, and impress the reader.

Nothing impresses the reader so much as what he does not understand. That is why we have so long admired the Home Rule leaders. They but needed to open their mouths and talk, and talk, and talk, and still to talk, and the more they talked the less we understood, and consequently the more we admired them.

We just stood around them with our mouths open like a Malahide codfish waiting for the tide to come in—

And gazed and gazed, and still the wonder grew
Where such mere men could learn all they knew.

But at last we got tired of waiting and gazing, and began to think, and the result of our thinking has been a little surprising to ourselves and will be, ere long, somewhat disastrous to somebody else.

I have been informed by some candid friends that my strictures on certain leading lights in Irish politics are too extreme, that we should be more mod­erate and not run full tilt against so many people.

I admit the soft impeachment. We are somewhat extreme. If we examine the positions of those who have already come under the lash of the Workers’ Republic, we will find that the writers in this paper are indeed at the extremest possible point removed from the position of those we criticise.

We are extreme. Like the man who would preach honesty among thieves or truthfulness among lawyers, we are extreme when we would insist upon consistency among politicians, or honour among journalists.

We are extreme. As the man who, upon taking his son to initiate him into the mysteries of Donnybrook Fair, gave him as his sole rule of conduct, “Whenever you see a head, hit it,” we only know one maxim whereby our public action should be guided, “wherever you see a lie expose it, crush it, stamp it out of existence, even although it came issuing softly from the lips or embodied in the actions of he who had been your greatest hero.”

We attack no one whose actions do not deserve to be attacked. The best proof of this lies in the fact that no one has yet been able to contradict a single assertion we have made.

But come along to the next caravan and see our unique collection of Home Rule editors, watch the antics of these gay and festive animals, im­ported at immense cost from the fertile soil of Flunkeydom.

Here you are, gentlemen. Observe the playful gyrations of these ‘leaders of public opinion’ and say have we not reason to be proud of their abilities.

On the 15th August, 1898, there was held at the Mansion House, Dublin, a Banquet in commemoration of the patriotic efforts of Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen. Toasts were drank and Nationalist speeches made in accor­dance with the spirit of the commemoration. Amongst those present were the editors of the Independent, Freeman and Nation.

On Saturday, 20th August, 1898, there was held a Banquet in connection with the Health Congress in Dublin. The toasts drank included the health of Her Most Gracious Majesty the Queen, the Army, Navy and Police. Amongst those present were (uncompromising patriots) the editors of the Independent, Freeman and Nation.

They drank the health of Her Most Gracious Majesty. And every drink cost as much as would have fed for a day some of the starving Irish families under the rule of Her Majesty. They toasted the British Army, our gallant defenders who on the morrow would cut our throats if their masters, the British governing class, ordered them so to do. They toasted the Navy—because it supplies the gunboats which enable our Irish landlords to send their evicting parties to the islands off our coasts and so exterminate the in­habitants. They toasted the police, because they are Irishmen who have sold themselves into the service of our oppressors, and so perpetuate what Diarmuid McMurchadh began.⁶

And they are all honourable men, most honourable men.

I have long felt the need of a revision of our National poetry. The present collections are very good in their way, but on the whole somewhat anti­quated. We need something more up to date.

And as a contribution to such a collection our office boy has just handed in the appended production of the muse. He assures me he perpetrated this atrocity in a moment of inspiration after reading the list of persons present at aforementioned banquet.

NATIONAL ANTHEM
(For the use of Home Rule Editors)

Who fears to speak of ’98,
Who blushes at the name,
God save our Gracious Queen,
Long may she reign.
He’s all a knave or half a slave
Who slights his country thus,
But we Home Rule men can fool men
Who put their trust in us.

(Refrain.)
Send her victorious, happy and glorious,
Long to reign over us,
God save the Queen.

Hiccup, hiccup, hooray.

If our journalists can gulp down liquor as easily as they swallow their principles, what an amount they must have consumed.

The Lord Mayor of Dublin, whose peculiar politics we have already re­ferred to,⁷ in the course of his speech at this banquet expressed the hope “that the politics of Dublin would yet become of such a character that the Lord Mayor and the Lord Lieutenant⁸ might yet become more intimate.”

To which the Express adds, the “logical sequence of such an utterance is an invitation to the Lord Lieutenant to a banquet at the Mansion House.” These people are great on banquets.

But the Evening Herald (Redmondite) chimes in thusly: “The Daily Express is a little too previous… it will be time enough to talk of making up when the Lord Lieutenant—as Lord Lieutenants were wont to do before England robbed us of our rights—opens the Irish Parliament.”

Note that part I have italicised. If it means anything it means that England did not “rob us of our rights” until the Act of Union was passed. Shades of O’Moore, O’Byrne, O’Connor, of Hugh O’Neill, Red Hugh O’Donnell, Owen Roe, O’Sullivan Beare, of McCracken, Neilson, Napper Tandy, Wolfe Tone, all of who rose in rebellion against England, before the Act of Union, that is, before she had robbed us of our rights.

Lord Lieutenants were unknown in Ireland before the Norman invasion. They have ever represented a foreign dominion, and the fight for Irish “rights” does not date from the year 1800, but goes back a trifle of 600 years before that event.

As a matter of fact there never was such a thing as an Irish Parliament. The collection of exploiters who met in College Green were not Irish in any sense of the term. Their Parliament was no more than the council of a horde of foreign brigands deliberating as to the best and safest method of plun­dering the natives.

Will somebody please start a night school for the purpose of imparting to Home Rule journalists some knowledge of the elementary facts of Irish history.

The Evening Herald of Monday had a very sympathetic leaderette on the Dublin Metropolitan Police and their grievances. It hopes those grievances will be remedied and that the men will be better treated.

How nice. On the 22nd June, 1897, these same policemen broke the heads of some 300 Dublin men and women for daring to demonstrate their antipa­thy to the jubilee rejoicings.⁹

Now, the Herald hopes these poor dear policemen will be better treated by their superiors. Is it as a reward for their jubilee exertions?

I hope—

That the DMP will get—

Their wages reduced to 16s. per week.

Their hours increased to fifteen hours per day, and no holidays.

And that all promotion will be stopped or given entirely to negroes from the coast of Africa.

If the Herald gets its wish, the police force will be the most popular situation in Ireland, and our Government will always have a ready supply of young Irishmen to do its dirty work.

If I get my wish, the police force will become a most unpopular form of employment, and men who would otherwise be recruits will swell the army of discontented, and be ready and willing to lend a hand when the time comes to serve notice to quit on the British Empire.

Please give a copy of this paper to the first policeman you meet as a love token from a

Spailpín

Notes

1. Healy, Thomas Sexton, Harrington, John Redmond, Dillon, O’Brien and O’Connor were Home Rule MPs. T D Sullivan was author of ‘God Save Ireland’ and other nationalist verses.
2. After Charles Stewart Parnell’s relationship with a married woman was exposed in 1890, the Home Rule party turned against him and split into warring factions.
3. Called by the ’98 Executive to commemorate the centenary of the United Irish rising.
4. In the July 1 1899 issue of The Workers’ Republic (after Connolly had accused him of acquiescing in another royal toast) Allan claimed that he had left the room when the toast was announced. Connolly replied that his explanation resolved nothing.
5. This was the first issue of The Workers’ Republic.
6. Diarmaid Mac Murchadha, king of Leinster, notoriously supported the Normans in their invasion of Ireland.
7. In the August 13 Workers’ Republic, Connolly referred to recent pro-British actions of Lord Mayor Tallon.
8. Representative of the British crown in Ireland.
9. The demonstration against Victoria’s diamond jubilee was baton charged by the police. Connolly played a central role in the demonstration and was arrested.

Socialist Classics: Karl Marx, ‘The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850’

In the final Red Banner (March 2016) Maeve Connaughton looked at an enduring examination of revolution on the move.

The revolutions which swept Europe in 1848 had taken severe knocks by 1850. Karl Marx was left with nowhere to go but England, hoping for a temporary stay before things kicked off again. In the meantime he set to analysing the course of the revolutionary events in France, where they had taken their most concentrated form. A series of articles appeared in a German socialist journal in London, and it was only in 1895 that his comrade Friedrich Engels put them together as a book, providing it with the now familiar title. Marx was only in France himself for short periods at the start and end of the events, but his work manages both to give a blow-by-blow account of them and draw immediate political conclusions which still hold force today.

Drawing conclusions, a growing understanding of political reality, was a central aspect of what happened, he writes: “in this whirl of motion, in this torment of historical unrest, in this dramatic ebb and flow of revolutionary passions, hopes, disappointments, the various classes of French society had to count the epochs of their develop­ment in weeks as they had once counted them in half-centuries”. Illusions were nurtured and shattered, classes took stands which turned out to be false, and people learned where they stood in the hothouse atmosphere that France experienced: “Revolutions are the locomotives of history.”

In February 1848 a republic replaced the monarchy which had ruled France for eighteen years. Marx describes the class basis of this monarchy, but with a subtlety not always practised by his followers. Under that monarchy the capitalists were in charge, but “It was not the French bourgeoisie as a whole which ruled… but a fraction of it”, financiers and speculators. Missing no opportunity to feather their own nests, their rule actually left the interests of industrial capitalists “constantly endangered and hampered”.

This meant that a very broad swathe of French society was interested in the monarchy’s downfall and took part in the February revolution. The government which resulted “could be nothing other than a compromise between the various classes”, a “fanciful transcend­ence of the class struggle”. But the class struggle was not so easily wished away, and “the brotherhood of opposing classes, one of which exploits the other” could last only so long.

Marx writes that the republic was “forced to proclaim itself a republic surrounded by social institutions”. The fact that the working class of Paris had actually done the fighting which put an end to the monarchy meant that the new government had to make concessions to them. A ministry of labour was set up pledged to provide work for the unemployed and investigate the position of the working class, and two workers’ leaders joined the government. This all showed, not just the pressure exerted by the Paris workers, but their own naive belief that they could achieve their aims in conjunction with the represen­tatives of the capitalist class.

But Marx goes out of his way to understand and explain why that belief existed. In France large-scale industry was not greatly developed. While the workers of Paris exercised a powerful social weight, especially in times of revolutionary crisis, outside the capital the working class was small and dispersed. It hadn’t yet had the chance to develop as a social class, and so

was still incapable of carrying out its own revolution.… The struggle against capital in its developed modern form—at its crucial point, the struggle of the industrial wage-labourer against the industrial bourgeois—is in France a partial phenomenon… Nothing is more easily explained, then, than the fact that the Paris proletariat attempted to secure its interests alongside those of the bourgeoisie, instead of asserting them as the revolutionary interests of society itself, that it lowered the red flag before the tricolour.

In reality, “The February republic finally allowed bourgeois rule to emerge purely”, a form where the various factions of capital could rule jointly. Their antagonisms didn’t cease, but they recognised the need to hang together in opposition to the workers whose demands threatened the lot of them. They were determined to take back what they had been forced to concede, to put the working class back in its box: “a second battle was necessary in order to separate the republic from these socialist concessions”. That battle took place in June 1848, when the government shut down workshops established to provide employment. The workers resisted bravely but succumbed to the overwhelming force of the army, which massacred thousands.

Much of the revolution’s story is a tale of tragic defeats, but Marx insists that these too have a valuable role to play in revolution:

What succumbed in these defeats was not the revolution. It was the pre-revolutionary, traditional appendages, products of social relationships which had not yet come to the point of sharp class antagonisms—persons, illusions, ideas, projects from which the revolutionary party was not free before the February revolution, from which it could be freed not by the February victory, but only by a series of defeats.
In a word: it was not by its immediate, tragi-comic achieve­ments that revolutionary progress forged ahead, but rather by bringing about a united, powerful counter-revolution, begetting an opponent in combat with which alone did the insurrectionary party mature into a real revolutionary party.

A revolutionary class learns in the tough school of experience, in the challenges it is forced to confront from day to day, “finds immediately in its own situation the content and material of its revolutionary activity: enemies to be struck down, measures to be taken as required by the struggle; the consequences of its own actions drive it forward”.

The working class wasn’t long learning that, in overthrowing the monarchy in February, it hadn’t won freedom, but placed itself in a better position to face a clearer class enemy, “the terrain of the struggle for its revolutionary emancipation”. A socialist candidate stood in the presidential election in December, polling only 0.5 per cent, but the left had insisted that this protest vote was only significant as “the first act by which the proletariat dissociated itself as a political party independent of the democratic party”. The next time the middle-class republicans opposed the government, the workers didn’t rush to follow their lead but maintained a

sceptically watchful position and waited for an irrevocable clash seriously engaged in… in order to plunge into the battle and to propel the revolution forward beyond its stated petty-bourgeois aim. In the event of victory, the proletarian commune was already formed which would take its place alongside the official government.

But the working class couldn’t win on its own: “The French workers could not take a single step forward, touch a hair on the head of the bourgeois order, until the course of the revolution had aroused the mass of the nation which stands between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, farmers and petty bourgeois, against this order, against the rule of capital, had forced them to link up with the proletarians as their protagonists.” Left to their own devices, shopkeepers were most likely to buckle, and farmers most likely to follow charismatic leaders. But the reality of a nakedly capitalist republic was brought to bear on them, with small farmers as burdened as ever:

It is obvious that their exploitation differs only in form from that of the industrial proletariat. The exploiter is the same: capital.… Only the fall of capital can raise the farmer, only an anti-capitalist, proletarian government can break his economic poverty, his social degradation.

More and more these intermediate classes were “grouping around the proletariat as the decisive revolutionary force”. It was “a coalition of various interests”, but with the red flag at its head: “the proletariat was the head of the revolutionary league”. And that working class was drawn towards the politics of revolutionary socialism: “This socialism is the declaration of the permanence of the revolution, the class dictatorship of the proletariat as a necessary intermediate point on the way to the abolition of class differences in general, to the abolition of all relations of production on which they are based”.

One of the illusions the workers had to burst was the belief that they could, “alongside the other, bourgeois nations, accomplish a proletarian revolution within the national walls of France”. Marx was clear that any successful uprising of the French working class would lead to war with its capitalist neighbours, above all England, then undisputed leader of the world market. Revolutions “must naturally occur at the extremities of the bourgeois organism rather than at its heart, where the possibility of balancing things is of course greater”, but would have to conquer the centre of the system to win. It was difficult for a revolution to start in a dominant economic power, but it would only finally succeed there, when international conflict brought about a situation where the working class took over in England.

By October 1850, as Marx concluded his series, the revolutionary opportunity had passed, and in fact the French counter-revolution still had further to go. He had a job to convince socialists that the return of economic prosperity meant that capitalism was safe for the time being, and they had to bide their time:

With this general prosperity, by which the productive forces of bourgeois society can develop as luxuriantly as is possible within bourgeois relations in general, there can be no talk of a real revolution. Such a revolution is only possible in a period when these two factors come into conflict: the modern productive forces and the bourgeois forms of production.… A new revolution is only possible in the wake of a new crisis. But it is just as certain as this crisis.

Breaking with neo-liberalism

Ed Walsh looked at an attempt by the French left to formulate alternatives to the consensus of capitalist politics in Issue 30 (December 2007)

Propositions pour sortir du libéralisme (Fondation Copernic/Éditions Syllepse)

The ‘anti-liberal left’ had a disappointing time in the French pres­idential elections earlier this year. Its scattered forces trailed well behind not only Sarkozy and Royal, but also centrist standard-bearer Bayrou and the venerable bigot Jean-Marie le Pen. The LCR candidate Olivier Besancenot was the only leftist with much reason to be satisfied, but his respectable score couldn’t erase a broader left-wing failure. That failure stung all the more because it came on the back of two notable victories for the ‘left of the left’: the routing of the EU constitution at the polls in 2005, and the defeat of the CPE law by mass protests the following year. The leading figures of the French radical left have spent the last few months debating the outcome, with opinion polarising between those who blame the absence of a united left-wing candidacy for the setback and others who emphasise the pressure for a ‘useful vote’ exploited by the Parti Socialiste.

Whatever view you take of that discussion (and for my money, it’s one of the rare occasions where the truth really does lie some­where in the middle), the result hammered home the difference between a purely negative resistance to right-wing initiatives and the far more daunting task of moving towards that ‘other world’ envisaged by the hopeful yet vague slogan of the social forums. The French people may have voted down the neo-liberal EU constitution (though not exclusively for progressive reasons), but they have certainly not been mobilised in support of a coherent and radical programme of social transformation.

Many people with impeccable left-wing records doubt if such a programme is even conceivable in today’s Europe, let alone a polit­ical movement capable of putting it into effect. An answer of sorts to those sceptics comes from the Fondation Copernic, a progressive think-tank that has been opposing the right-wing consensus in France for the past decade. Propositions pour sortir du libéralisme (Proposals for a break with neo-liberalism) gathers con­tributions from specialists into a book-length manifesto for change. Although it was published in advance of the presidential poll, its ten chapters contain plenty of stimulating ideas that deserve a longer shelf-life than most political programmes.

Education and work

In the opening chapter on education, Karine Granier condemns the trend towards a system designed to provide the necessary “human capital” for the labour market. Her own suggestions naturally include the reduction of class sizes and an end to academic selection, but Granier also demands a transformation of teaching methods, with an emphasis on collective work rather than individual assess­ment: “children trained so early in the spirit of competition and individualism will be all the more easily converted to the tenets of neo-liberalism”. The insights of academic research should be made available to teachers during their training, so that they can avoid practices that reinforce class or gender stereotypes. The system must be democratised, with teachers, parents and students given a say in the running of schools. At national level, the curriculum should be drawn up by political representatives, unions, parents’ federations and academic specialists through open debate.

Michel Husson deals with the question of unemployment, and challenges the orthodoxy which blames French labour laws for the country’s high jobless rate. According to Husson, the solution must be “to change the distribution of wealth in order to achieve a socially useful growth founded on the satisfaction of social needs and using productivity gains to reduce working time”. He addresses criticism of the 35-hour working week introduced by the Jospin government, and argues that the implementation of that law undermined its potential to create new jobs. For starters, the same restriction was not applied equally to all sections of the workforce, in particular because it differed according to the size of the business. This opt-out affected female workers especially. Very often, workers don’t finish their working week once the 35-hour limit has been reached—it’s just the point at which employers have to start paying overtime—but the overtime rate has been cut just as the amount of overtime worked has increased. If the reduction of working time is to deliver jobs, “the most important condition is that of proportional hiring: a 10% reduc­tion in working time must lead to a 10% increase in employment”.

With the Sarkozy government proposing to dismantle the 35-hour law, we can expect a determined effort to write off the whole project as a doomed experiment which ignored the realities of the global market. Husson’s defiant restatement of its validity (“the reduction of working time is the principle lever of job creation”) is thus of great importance, and deserves to find an echo beyond France. He notes that the job-creating potential of labour time reduction is not linear: a four-hour cut in working time will have more effect if we are talking about the passage from 36 to 32 hours, rather than 39 to 35.

Husson insists that this programme could be paid for if there was a substantial redistribution of resources from share dividends to wages. Pressure from organised workers would be essential to achieve this, and a reduction in working time that cut unemploy­ment would make such pressure far more likely, giving workers the confidence to make pay claims. He proposes that the minimum wage be fixed at €1,500 per month and pegged to the rate of increase of labour productivity, with social welfare payments set at €1,200, thus generating a permanent tendency for wages to rise across the board in line with productivity gains. In his discussion of wages, Husson refers to the “boomerang effect of globalisation”: “During previous experiences of social transformation, employers habitually respon­ded by raising prices, in order to conserve their rate of profit and reduce the impact of nominal pay increases on the purchasing power of workers.” But today, this strategy would run into trouble very quickly: globalisation creates world prices to which companies must adjust, and “the sole means of conserving their market share and profit rate in these conditions would be to cut share dividends”.

This analysis is complemented by Laurent Garrouste’s discussion of French labour legislation. He demands the unification of labour rights: exemptions for small and medium-sized firms should be abolished, along with all short-term contracts. The latter demand in particular goes dramatically against the grain of conven­tional wisdom: most French opinion-formers hold the long-term CDI con­tract responsible for unemployment. But Garrouste rightly argues that as long as a large section of the French workforce has to endure precarious working conditions, they will be unable to exercise their legal rights: “What temporary worker will really dare to go on strike?” Another proposal of his is even more radical: the banning of redundancies. Garrouste insists that all firms must be held collec­tively responsible for guaranteeing the constitutional right to employment. In cases of real economic difficulty, workers must be allowed to retain their current work contracts, without loss of pay or status, and be transferred elsewhere: if possible, within the firm itself; if not, within the same branch of industry, and if needs be across a whole sector of the economy. This would require mutual­isation funds, paid for by employer contributions, to maintain salaries during the transfer period and fund retraining if necessary.

Justice and public services

Magistrate Évelyne Sire-Martin presents an exhaustive list of reforms intended to “democratise justice” (as the chapter heading puts it). She begins with a call for the repeal of legislation passed over the last decade limiting citizens’ rights. While this particular list is specific to France, a similar one could be drawn up by legal experts in Ireland without much difficulty. The content transcends national borders: extension of police powers, attacks on the right to asylum, criminalisation of the poor and the homeless.

Nor is the expansion of the prison population unique to France. To arrest and reverse this trend, Sire-Martin proposes the restriction of imprisonment to serious offences: drug use and petty theft do not warrant prison terms. Alternative penalties should be developed, while jails should not accept any more prisoners than they are designed to accommodate (her comment that “some prisons have an occupancy rate of over 250%” sounds familiar). The rights of prisoners must be guaranteed, including their right to an individual cell, and the arbitrary powers of prison authorities taken away.

She also proposes reforms of the judiciary to make it representative of society as a whole. Elected lay magistrates should be recruited to sit alongside professional judges. The recruitment of judges themselves must be transformed, with a broader range of legal professionals eligible and new selection criteria. The selection process must be in the hands of a council, made up equally of magis­trates (high and low) and representatives drawn from civil society. The role of the executive in selecting judges has to be terminated.

The need to extend and democratise public services is outlined by Yves Salesse. The clamour for privatisation seen all over Europe and beyond is explained by Salesse as the natural outcome of capital’s search for new pastures. But he adds another, ideological dimension to “the current offensive against public services and, more broadly, the social state: [the need] to eliminate concrete proof that universal commodification is not inevitable”. He curtly dis­misses the argument of some centre-left luminaries that ownership of a company is unimportant as long as its mission to serve the public is being fulfilled: “If the question of ownership was secon­dary, we could not explain the tenacious, worldwide campaign in favour of privatisation on the part of transnational firms and the followers of neo-liberalism.” It may be possible for governments to regulate private companies that remain within national boundaries, but globalisation makes such control unfeasible, as multinationals gobble up newly-privatised utilities. The only way to guarantee that a service is run in line with social needs is by retaining public ownership. Salesse distinguishes between nationalisation and “social appropriation”, his favoured term: the failures of statist command economies in the east and bureaucratic nationalisation in the west show that it takes more than a simple change of ownership to bring industry under social control. With this in mind, he proposes that every public service be administered by representatives of workers, service users and the national government. According to Salesse, this would offer “a way towards modernisation of the public sector opposed to its alignment with the objectives and management style of the multinationals”. Nor is it simply a matter of defending and re­vamping actually existing public services: new services must be developed, addressing social needs and shifting the balance of power towards popular sovereignty.

From theory to action

This review has already used the conditional tense at least a couple of dozen times, and it’s no more than a condensed summary of 150 pages filled with reform proposals: other chapters discuss gay rights, gender equality and the French health service. What’s largely missing from the book, however, is a discussion of the political strategies needed to put this programme into effect. This is a comment rather than a criticism: it would be unreasonable to expect the authors to cover too much ground. And there is some analysis of the barriers that would have to be overcome in pursuit of the anticipated rupture with neo-liberalism.

Michel Husson predicts that his programme for creating jobs would encounter fierce resistance from economic elites, and is well aware of the changes in the global economy that constrain even a relatively large, wealthy country such as France:

Globalisation permits capital to bring down enormous pressure on any project of social transformation. It is therefore necessary to put in place levers of control: to use government aid as a means to redirect the choices of business, to restore controls on the movement of capital, and to compel the authorisation of all foreign investment and relocation. It is vital that the threat of expropriation weigh down on every firm which engages in acts of economic sabotage.

That brings us back to the failure which still haunts the French left: the capitulation of the Mitterand government, elected in 1981, to pressure from the financial markets after it had begun to implement a reform programme of unusual vigour. That turn-around (and the parallel defeat of the British Labour left) helped cement the ortho­doxy which holds that left-wing governments must bend the knee before the global market or face oblivion. It’s good to see Husson discussing ways of getting around that apparent roadblock. The question deserves far more extensive discussion than this review can spare: suffice it for now to say that if the left despairs of challenging the far-from-golden straitjacket imposed by global capitalism, we may as well learn to love Gordon Brown and all his works, because that’s the best we can hope for.

The ten authors appear to be counting on the election of an ‘anti-liberal’ government in France that could put their ideas into practice. The book needs to be accompanied by a strategy that breaks with the sterile focus on parliament as the chief engine of social change. Otherwise, ‘anti-liberal’ ministers would find themselves in the same predicament as their Socialist and Communist forerunners, in office but not in power, and frustrated at every turn by the formidable social resources of capital.

Again, there’s not enough room here to follow up on these sketchy outlines of the problem. Or to tease out the major ambiguity at the heart of the book: is it intended as a model for a tightly regulated version of capitalism, or a programme of anti-capitalist structural reforms that would break the power of capital altogether? At any rate, Propositions pour sortir du libéralisme is a valuable work and a striking rebuttal of the claim that the unrepentant left has nothing positive to offer today’s society.

The Hobsbawm legacy

In March 2013 (Issue 51) Daniel Finn looked back at the life and politics of Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm.

Much of the commentary on Eric Hobsbawm’s death last October could be summed up in a single line: great historian, shame about the politics. It was not surprising to find the likes of Niall Ferguson and Roy Foster—men who knew and admired Hobsbawm, while detesting his Marxist worldview—arguing that one could draw a clear line between the man’s work and the cause to which he dedicated much of his life. True enough, so far as it goes: the quality of Hobsbawm’s scholarship was always recognised by those who held no brief for Marxism of any variety, and the only people to write him off alto­gether were outright buffoons. But socialists will want to look more carefully at the political outlook of a man whose contribution to Marxist historiography was simply without parallel—outshining even such brilliant contemporaries as Edward Thompson, Christopher Hill and Victor Kiernan.

One of the recurrent claims about Hobsbawm in profiles and obituaries was that he was a “lifelong Communist”. Readers were thus likely to assume that he went to his death bed as an unrepentant admirer of Joseph Stalin and the system he created, who had learnt nothing from the collapse of the Soviet Union. This was a classic example of mendacity by omission. Hobsbawm may have retained his membership card for the Communist Party of Great Britain until it disbanded in 1991. Yet by that time, the CPGB itself had changed beyond recognition since the heyday of Stalinism, having lined up behind Neil Kinnock and his ‘modernising’ faction in the British Labour Party and expressed vocal support for Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform programme in the USSR. Whatever else might be said about Hobsbawm, he was no ‘tankie’ in thrall to Uncle Joe.

His relationship with the communist movement was far more complex and interesting than that. Hobsbawm had joined the Communist Party of Germany as a Jewish teenager in Berlin during the last days of the Weimar Republic, distributing leaflets in the last election before Hitler came to power and the German workers’ movement was crushed. Having moved with his family to Britain and become a student at Cambridge, he retained his communist outlook. Like most of his future comrades in the CPGB historians’ group, he was enthused by the French Popular Front and the struggle against fascism in Spain, and kept any private doubts he may have harboured about the Soviet system to himself. Hobsbawm would remain a loyal party-liner until 1956, when the movement was knocked off its balance by twin blows. First, the Soviet leader Khrushchev de­nounced Stalin as a tyrant and a murderer in a ‘secret’ speech that was widely circulated; then the Red Army invaded Hungary to crush a popular revolution against its despotic government. The historian joined a group of CPGB intellectuals in signing an open letter that was published in the New Statesman—the party’s Daily Worker refused to print it—condemning the invasion and praising the “revolt of workers and intellectuals against the pseudo-Communist bureaucracies and police systems of Poland and Hungary”.

We may reasonably ask why it took Hobsbawm and his comrades so long to challenge Stalinist orthodoxy. Had they not observed the grotesque show trials of the 1930s in Moscow, later repeated in the satellite states of Eastern Europe after the war? Should it not have been clear long before 1956 that the Soviet state practised grim re­pression against its own citizens—not least those communists who fell victim to the purges? The socialists who were always clear-sighted about the Stalinist system and refused to swallow any of its propaganda deserve great respect. Men like Andrés Nin, Henk Sneevliet and Marceau Pivert, who tried to build anti-Stalinist left parties under the most difficult of circumstances, should be remembered appreciatively by today’s radical left. But the fact remains that many of those who joined the communist movement in the 1930s and 40s were sincere and dedicated militants, who believed that it was the only effective vehicle for resistance to fascism and imperialism. The strain of reconciling their own idealism with the corrupt and cynical regime around which the movement was based proved unbearable for many: some internalised that cynicism, becoming mere hacks; others abandoned socialism altogether; while in the best of cases, their reaction against Stalinist oppression led them to argue for a model of socialism in which democratic rights would be extended, not curtailed.

This was the starting point for the New Left which emerged from the turmoil of 1956, with Hobsbawm’s friend Edward Thompson playing a very prominent role. Yet Hobsbawm chose not to follow his comrades out the door. Why? His autobiography Interesting Times pursues this question at length, without providing a satisfactory answer. The historian recalls a conversation with Trotsky’s biographer Isaac Deutscher, in which the latter urged him to remain in the party at all costs: getting himself expelled from the Polish CP, Deutscher told Hobsbawm, was the greatest mistake of his life. It is hard to know what to make of this story. Deutscher was kicked out by the Polish Communists in 1932 because he supported Trotsky’s Left Oppo­sition. If he had remained a member of that party throughout the 1930s, he would have had to applaud the massacre of its exiled leadership by Stalin’s henchmen—not to mention the Hitler-Stalin pact which carved up Poland, the betrayal of the Warsaw uprising, and much else besides. Assuming that Hobsbawm’s memory of the exchange was accurate, it is hard to believe that Deutscher really meant what he said. He may have been frustrated at the time after spending so long on the margins of political life while Moscow-line communism appeared to be the only game in town. But 1956 was the moment when that began to change: from then on, left wingers would find it much easier to take part in the big political battles without holding a party card.

In his short book Hobsbawm: History and Politics—the best over­view currently available—Gregory Elliot has shown that Hobsbawm was more ambivalent towards the invasion of Hungary than many of those who signed the New Statesman open letter, tending to believe that it was a tragic necessity. Although he was by no means an un­critical admirer of the Soviet system, he retained a certain faith in its capacity to regenerate itself almost to the very end. Hobsbawm was banking on communist reformers like Alexander Dubcek in Czecho­slovakia and Gorbachev in the USSR itself to unleash that potential; when glasnost and perestroika merely paved the way for McDonald’s and the IMF to set up shop in Moscow, his political confidence was shattered. The last part of his tetralogy on world history, Age of Extremes—easily Hobsbawm’s most famous work—is saturated with bleak pessimism, having been completed soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

One of Hobsbawm’s least attractive qualities was his dismissive attitude towards radical currents that stood outside the communist movement, such as anarchism, Trotskyism or the various strands of the New Left. You wouldn’t have to be a partisan of the libertarian left to find his take on the Spanish civil war grating: Hobsbawm blamed the “undisciplined” anarchists for the defeat of the Republic, without reproaching the Spanish CP for its murderous vendetta against rival left-wing groups, or glancing at the experience of other countries (in Germany, where anarchism had no influence, the workers’ movement went down without a fight in 1933; in Spain, where it commanded mass support, there were three years of dogged resistance before Franco triumphed). Interesting Times takes a largely contemptuous view of the New Left, especially its British component. Yet he wasn’t always so ungenerous. An article published immediately after the French general strike of 1968 in the New Left-Trotskyist paper Black Dwarf shows Hobsbawm at his most romantic—and his most radical:

What has happened in France is marvellous and enchanting, except of course to the Times which naturally regards a strike at the Bank of France as conclusive evidence of the breakdown of civilisation. For us old members of the fan-club, it proves that Paris still has star quality. It is more than a place with three-star Michelin restaurants, traffic jams, cleaned buildings and the kind of dress shops which the Duchess of Windsor goes to. It can still put up the barricades, often on the very same spots where they went up in 1848, in 1871 and in 1944. It is a great moment for sentimental Francophiles. But even the most sentimental among them must wonder whether the whole business is merely a Gallic freak. Does it show the way to the rest of the world? It would not be the first time that Paris has done so. I think it may do so now.

You can find some of his writings from this period collected in two books, Revolutionaries and Uncommon People: they are often full of excitement at the prospects that appeared to be opening up, as count­less people were radicalised by the events of the time. But when the political mood shifted to the right later in the 1970s, Hobsbawm became increasingly gloomy. It is a pity that this was precisely when he came to have the greatest political influence of any time in his life. A fierce battle was then being fought inside the British Labour Party, with left wingers grouped around Tony Benn facing implacable opposition from the old Labour right, whose champions would have preferred to see Thatcher re-elected from here to kingdom come rather than let Benn take control of the party. Hobsbawm planted his flag in the right-wing camp (whose partisans soon began calling them­selves ‘modernisers’, in anticipation of Tony Blair and New Labour). A celebrated essay of his, ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted?’, became a reference point for Neil Kinnock and his supporters.

‘The Forward March of Labour’ was in fact a useful work of historical sociology which described and predicted shifts in the composition of the working class that would pose grave challenges for the British labour movement. Its value could be recognised without accepting the political arguments made by Hobsbawm, Kinnock and others in the early 1980s, when Labour’s inner-party struggle was at its peak. One passage suggested that Benn and his supporters were right to demand sweeping changes in the party’s approach:

In the middle 1960s, there were signs of a real recovery of impetus and dynamism: the resumed growth of trade unions, not to mention the great labour struggles, the sharp rise in the Labour vote in 1966, the radicalisation of students, intellectuals and others in the late 1960s. If we are to explain the stagnation or crisis, we have to look at the Labour Party and the labour move­ment itself. The workers, and growing strata outside the manual workers, were looking to it for a lead and a policy. They didn’t get it. They got the [Harold] Wilson years—and many of them lost faith and hope in the mass party of the working people.

Hobsbawm’s political stance in the 1980s was really based on a romantic, not to say delusional, memory of the Popular Front strategy followed by the European communist movement in his youth. Like many communists of his generation, Hobsbawm saw the Popular Front as an alternative to Stalinism—when in fact it had been crafted by Stalin and his disciples in the Comintern—and dismissed the views of ‘ultra-leftists’ who argued that it would lead to the same dead end as traditional social democracy. When applied to Britain, such thinking inspired a minimalist agenda that could promise at best a repeat of the Wilson years and was unable in practice to deliver even that. Hobsbawm could not bring himself to endorse Tony Blair, but the path followed by New Labour in the 90s was the logical extension of Kinnock’s destructive ‘modernisation’.

So have I ended up presenting a more radical version of the ‘great historian, shame about the politics’ line? Not quite. Hobsbawm always seemed to harbour a romantic-revolutionary streak that pre­vented him from becoming either a rigid Stalinist or a boring social democrat. That streak might not be so obvious in the Age of… tetralogy for which he is best known, but it shines through in his study of ‘social banditry’ from Robin Hood to Pancho Villa, and in many of his essays on labour history (an article on radical shoemakers re­printed in Uncommon People is a particular favourite of mine). You can certainly read and learn from his work without endorsing his politics. But that work is inseparable from Hobsbawm’s commitments as a Marxist and a socialist: it is impossible to imagine someone without those commitments having produced it.

Hobsbawm belonged to a golden generation of British Marxist historians. Any socialist who values the study of history—and is there any socialist who doesn’t?—will benefit immeasurably from engaging with the legacy of that cohort. Christopher Hill and George Rudé on the English and French revolutions; Victor Kiernan on imperialism; Rodney Hilton on medieval peasant revolts; Edward Thompson on English popular radicalism: this was the backdrop against which Hobsbawm established himself as primus inter pares. Any version of Marxism that has a future will be standing on the shoulders of these giants for many years to come.