Shelley: poet and revolutionary

This was originally published on Counterfire.

Jacqueline Mulhallen’s political biography of the revolutionary Shelley begins by noting the cinematic release, earlier this year, of a film documenting the great global anti-war protests of 15 February, 2003 and the mass movement surrounding them. Amir Amirani’s superb ‘We Are Many’ took its title from ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s furious response to the Peterloo Massacre of 1819.

The lengthy poem concludes with these lines (also used earlier in the poem):

‘Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you –
Ye are many – they are few.’

Described by Mulhallen as ‘the most famous political protest poem in English’ (p.91), it was a ferociously passionate attack on those ruling Britain and the system they perpetuated. Shelley, by then living in Italy, had heard the news that demonstrators for democratic reform had been attacked (and eleven of them killed) in St Peter’s Fields in Manchester. The title of an anti-war documentary in 2015 (which, as has often happened, adapts ‘ye are many’ to ‘we are many’ for obvious rhetorical reasons) is just one example of the dynamic afterlife of Shelley’s poetry.

A radical, political Shelley

Shelley’s fame rests largely upon his poetry, and his contribution to the English poetic canon, but he was also a polemicist, playwright and radical activist. This biography is packed with fascinating insights into Shelley’s times, which enriches the compelling story of his short life (he died in a boating accident, aged just 29, in 1822) and discussion of his very varied work.

It is part of Pluto’s invaluable ‘Revolutionary Lives’ series, which features introductory political biographies of a range of historical figures. As with other volumes in the series, the main focus is on the evolving politics of the subject and on providing the relevant context which shaped their development. It’s a lively, well-paced and highly readable introduction which charts Shelley’s life chronologically, allowing a clear sense of the development of Shelley’s political commitments.

Mulhallen is a socialist activist who has previously written a book, The Theatre of Shelley, focusing on Shelley's plays, a generally neglected aspect of his output (his plays – ‘The Cenci’, ‘Hellas’, ‘Swellfoot the Tyrant’, ‘Prometheus Unbound’ and ‘Charles The First’ – have either never been performed or only rarely staged). She has long fused the artistic and political worlds, with experience of writing (and performing in) plays as well as political campaigning. The chapter about Shelley’s theatrical work draws on the author’s own earlier research, while other parts of the book concisely synthesise the work of researchers in addition to returning afresh to Shelley’s own writings.

Mulhallen acknowledges earlier accounts of Shelley’s politics, most notably Paul Foot’s very illuminating 1980 biography Red Shelley, but she also incorporates more recent research. A good example is the discovery in 2013 of a copy of Shelley’s major poem ‘Laon and Cythna’. It had notes by Shelley’s friend Thomas Love Peacock of the changes Shelley was obliged to make (to make it less radical) before it could be published. Although the changes had been known about before, finding what appears to be Peacock’s own copy confirmed the radicalism of the original.

Mulhallen points out that much biographical writing and literary criticism about Shelley has either downplayed his politics or caricatured it. This new contribution to the field is entirely different. The wider social and political contexts – the legacy of the French Revolution, women’s subjugation, the turbulent politics of Ireland, social unrest, the war with France – are all threads woven into the life story. Their impact on Shelley, a profoundly political creature from a young age, is taken seriously.

This volume is dedicated to establishing Shelley’s place as not only a major poet but also a notable figure in the history of English radicalism: a revolutionary writer and activist who contributed to radical literature (as poet, playwright and political pamphleteer) and to struggles for equality and social justice.

Shelley sought to link specific movements against injustice and oppression, especially when they actively involved the poor and oppressed, with a broader critique of a vastly unequal capitalist society that was crystallising into the social classes later analysed by Karl Marx (a process of class formation documented by E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class). Shelley articulated an alternative vision of equality and liberation that prefigured the socialist literature – in Utopian, communist and other varieties - which emerged not long after his death.

Shelley’s life and ideas offer insight into the early development of socialism in this country. His ideas were a bridge between the generation of the French Revolution and, later, the Utopian Socialists, Chartists and early Marxists (also feeding in to early critiques of women’s oppression under capitalism). Shelley’s most politically engaged writings expressed great social themes and a yearning for a better world, characterised by economic, social and sexual equality, with emotional force as well as political clarity.

Much of Shelley’s more overtly political verse has been deployed as rhetorical weaponry in working-class and progressive struggles from the Chartists, via the suffragettes and striking garment workers, through to the modern anti-war movement, even surfacing in the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. Shelley’s life, writing and politics are all bound together; they retain relevance as part of a radical, anti-capitalist tradition of mobilising from below to reshape the world.

Shelley's development

Mulhallen outlines Shelley’s privileged background (including what might loosely be termed an ‘education’ at Eton) and the politics of his family, moving on to early indications of his questioning of the values with which he was brought up. She tells the story of his premature departure from Oxford University after he and another undergraduate scandalously wrote and published ‘The Necessity of Atheism’, which in turn created a rift between Shelley and his father, and traces the development of an increasingly coherent and anti-systemic set of political ideas. This is interwoven with personal biography and his earliest writings (patchy in quality, but containing the seeds of his later literary and political achievements).

This is followed by chapters which discuss Shelley’s major writings, his political ideas and the practical movements in which he was involved. He travelled widely and moved home many times: while this was often driven by avoidance of his creditors, it brought the virtue of experiencing the world and interacting with people from very different backgrounds to his own, including those on the forefront of struggles against the British state (from Irish activists to persecuted radical journalists).

The political centre of the biography is a chapter on what Shelley scholar Stuart Curran dubbed Shelley’s annus mirabilis, 1819, which included ‘The Mask of Anarchy’, shorter political poems and the radical political critique ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’ (not published until 1920). The summary of Shelley’s ideas in ‘A Philosophical View of Reform’ is especially lucid; these ideas are examined in connection with the political climate of the time, revealing a vivid sense of their freshness and subversive power.

Shelley polemicized and campaigned for parliamentary reform – at a time when very few had the vote – and for a free press, rights to assembly and protest, and civil liberties. These rights and reforms were all viewed as a means to an end: they could enable working people to shift the balance of wealth and power in society.

He emphasised what Marx would later term self-emancipation, people taking action for themselves through collective resistance, not relying on well-meaning middle-class reformers. This was at a time when workers’ strikes were an increasingly important strategy for the early trade-union movement; an era of Luddite destruction of machinery and large demonstrations for democracy. His thoughts on violence and its relationship to popular movements were complex, but in essence he believed a small amount of revolutionary force could be justified in opposition to the large-scale, systematic violence of an exploitative class society.

Shelley was also an early champion of sexual liberation in a deeply patriarchal, hypocritical and restrictive society – a topic explored thoughtfully at a number of stages in the book, both at an ideological level and as a commitment woven into his own life and relationships. He was a proponent of religious toleration against the Anglican establishment, espousing atheism but also sensitive to the need for defending religious minorities irrespective of whether he agreed with their beliefs. He was a steadfast opponent of British colonialism in Ireland; the section on this is insightful about Shelley’s attempts at political agitation, soberly assessing the problems and limitations as well as celebrating his activist commitment. He supported revolutionary uprisings and national liberation movements abroad, especially in later years after he left England.

The poetry, of course, is well worth reading in its own right; Shelley is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished of Romantic poets. He was famously one of a loose grouping of second-generation Romantic poets which also included Byron and Keats among others (Shelley became close to the former in later years). They followed in the wake of earlier Romantics like Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge – poets who had been inspired by the French Revolution but whose youthful radicalism had long since cooled by the time Shelley and his contemporaries came of age.

Shelley married Mary Godwin (daughter of progressive thinkers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) whose novel Frankenstein was itself an influential contribution to the literature of the age. The Shelleys’ complex relationship is an important strand of the book.

One of the most illuminating features of this book, though, is how its author traces the influence of a much wider array of writers, journalists, intellectuals and campaigners on Shelley, who is consistently considered as part of an evolving milieu – personally, intellectually, politically – with his ideas examined in relation to others. Those who influenced him included Godwin, Wollstonecraft and Thomas Paine, who all made major contributions to radical political literature after the American and French revolutions, but also Thomas Spence, Robert Owen, William Cobbett and others.

He took ideas from the Quakers, the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and political currents inspired by the French Revolution. Mulhallen brings to life the radical intellectual climate of the first quarter of the nineteenth century, repeatedly demonstrating how Shelley was shaped by that climate and how he made significant, sometimes original, contributions to it.

Shelley's legacy

Shelley influenced a range of literary and political figures. He was cited as an inspiration by later writers including Robert Browning, Edgar Allen Poe and Thomas Hardy. He was subsequently admired by twentieth-century cultural and intellectual figures of the European left such as Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht and Theodor Adorno. However, Shelley was also read by working-class audiences in his own time and afterwards. There are numerous references in the book to examples of his writing, both poetry and prose, being disseminated through the widely-read radical press (often in defiance of state repression). Most of his poems would also have been shared through oral recitation, thus reaching a larger audience.

Shelley also made his mark on the early socialists. Marx described him as ‘essentially a revolutionist’, remarking that he ‘would always have been one of the advanced guard of socialism’. Frederick Engels, speaking to Eleanor Marx in the 1880s, recalled how ‘we all knew Shelley by heart then’, referring to the 1840s. At that time ‘Queen Mab’, one of Shelley’s major poems, was sometimes called ‘the Chartists’ Bible’. Mulhallen informs us there had been at least a dozen pirated editions already in the 1820s, reaching working-class audiences, so it was well-established by the time Chartism emerged.

Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling gave a lecture on Shelley’s socialism in 1888, nearly seventy years after his death. Suffragette and socialist Sylvia Pankhurst decorated a hall with quotations from Shelley’s poetry (the suffragette motto ‘deeds not words’ derived from ‘The Mask of Anarchy’). For much of the twentieth century he was out of respectable critical fashion, a state of affairs influenced by disapproval from the poet T. S. Eliot and the conservative but highly influential literary critic F. R. Leavis. Nonetheless, his work lived on in the suffragette movement, miners’ libraries, workers’ education classes and the like.

Benjamin Zephaniah is quoted on the back cover as saying: ‘The world needs more Shelley, the world needs this book’. He is right on both counts. Shelley is fascinating as a way in to a world of radical ideas, debate and struggle around two centuries ago; he should be valued as part of our history of resistance and dissent. But he is also a source of inspiration today. This gem of a book recaptures Shelley’s world and demonstrates the revolutionary poet’s relevance for our own world.

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Reconstructing Lenin: an intellectual biography

I hope that ‘Reconstructing Lenin’ by Tamas Krausz becomes established as a major reference in writing and discussion about Lenin and the Bolsheviks: not simply in academic circles, but (more importantly) among modern-day revolutionary activists. It deserves to become an integral part of the study of Lenin, Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution – a growing and sizeable field of study since the end of the Cold War - due to the author’s excellent political judgement, the wealth of relevant contextual material and the way if illuminates the coherence and continuity in Lenin’s political thought over time (and its relationship to Lenin and his comrades’ political actions).

It is a very substantial book, a work of exceptional scholarship accurately subtitled ‘an intellectual biography’ because the focus is largely on Lenin’s ideas and their development. To call it ‘exhaustively researched’ is an understatement: its ‘Notes’ contain well over 1000 references, drawing on an extraordinarily wide range of sources.

Originally written in Hungarian, the English translation will hopefully influence discussion about its subject in the English-speaking world. This translation, by Balint Bethlenfalvy with Mario Fenyo, is published by US-based left-wing publishers Monthly Review Press.

The author, Tamas Krausz, is a professor of Russian history in Budapest. He is long established as a leading Marxist intellectual in Hungary. The earliest reference to his own writing on Lenin that I spotted in the bibliography was from 1980, so this book has had a long gestation (it is described as ‘four decades in the making’ on the back cover).

The author’s location in a former Eastern Bloc state means he is acutely conscious of the massive and violent distortion done to Lenin’s ideas, reputation and legacy by Stalinism. He is determined to uncover the real Lenin, via close attention to Lenin’s own writings and a sensitive project of re-discovering the intellectual, political and social world that shaped him.

This is not, it should be noted, an introduction to Lenin, the Bolsheviks, or the times in which they lived. A certain amount of familiarity with the field is generally assumed, while much of the language is reasonably specialised. It is nonetheless accessible and readable, and I highly recommend it for anyone wanting to explore the field in some depth.

Although the focus is primarily on Lenin’s intellectual and political development, the opening (and long) chapter is biographical, from Lenin’s family background through his entire life. I thought this was excellent – genuinely insightful even for those of us familiar with Lenin and his life story, rooting the man in his time and place. It includes some fascinating, less well-known, details while recapitulating the essentials, giving a vivid sense of Lenin’s compelling personality as well as tracing the events of his life and how they intersected with wider political and social contexts.

It’s also worth noting here that two extensive appendices complement the main text perfectly. One of them is an extremely thorough series of brief biographical details of scores of socialists, political figures and so on relevant to a biography of Lenin. The other is a detailed time line of events between the revolutionary year of 1917 and Lenin’s death in 1924.Both of these are useful resources.

An innovative and coherent thinker

The book has three particular themes which should be flagged up. Firstly, Krausz is keen to root Lenin firmly in the Marxist tradition while grasping the intellectual contributions that made him innovative. He demonstrates, unanswerably, that Lenin made important contributions to the Marxist tradition – a necessary antidote to those who treat him as a purely pragmatic figure. But these contributions are nonetheless rooted in Marxism – Krausz explicitly rejects any suggestion that Lenin originated a new ism that is separate from Marxism, or one that constitutes a variation on Marxism.

Different chapters examine different important contributions – roughly chronologically, though there is inevitably much overlap. These include Lenin’s work on Russian capitalist development, imperialism, the national question, the state and revolution, and the relationship between struggles for democracy and struggles for socialism. Lenin made original contributions that form a vital part of the inheritance of classical Marxism and help us understand history and both understand and change the world we live in.

Secondly, Krausz makes a powerful case for Lenin’s intellectual and political coherence. This is not to underestimate his tactical or organisational flexibility – these are well documented. But his flexibility in practice was deeply rooted in a coherent and consistent worldview and set of ideas.

This is a vital antidote to the idea that Lenin was an opportunistic politician, twisting and turning to suit immediate practical interests with no intellectual compass. Even after 1917, when he repeatedly faced incredibly difficult obstacles as leader of a besieged and fledgling workers’ state, there was a coherent political worldview shaping his responses (whatever political expediency was, admittedly, required).

This, again, does not mean ignoring how Lenin’s ideas developed and evolved. There is no suggestion that he arrived fully formed, so to speak. Quite the opposite: the development of his ideas is traced in close relationship to the history of the society in which he lived. He is rooted historically by Krausz.

There is also a strong sense of interplay between Lenin’s thinking and that of other Marxists: he was ‘first among equals’, the leading figure in a talented and intellectually vibrant generation of radical socialists. There’s a lively sense of the many debates between Lenin and others, and the significance of these debates. It’s also clear that political experiences – above all the 1905 revolution – influenced the direction of Lenin’s thinking.

So Lenin made important political and theoretical contributions to Marxism which analysed a changing world: a world in which capitalism was spreading globally, while its European and north American core was evolving into a constellation of competing imperialist states, with the nation state increasingly intertwined with the capitalist economy. Capitalist development was uneven, with Russia characterised by a complex mix of new industrial methods and traditional (but evolving) agriculture. Classes were being re-shaped: the industrial working class was growing in many countries, but the peasantry was changing too.

Consequently, the prospects for revolution were changing too – new thinking was needed on the potential role of different classes in the revolutionary process, and on the nature and scope of revolution. Lenin’s analysis evolved over time and through debate with other Marxists, but nonetheless formed a coherent worldview that was consistent with the Marxist tradition.

Ideas into action

The third central theme in Krausz’s account concerns the relationship between ideas and action. Lenin was a revolutionary political leader. He didn’t simply develop analysis of the world; that analysis was, profoundly and throughout his adult life, geared towards changing the world. Krausz notes that Marx’s famous thesis – ‘the philosophers have interpreted the world; the point, however, is to change it’ – has never been more acutely relevant than in the case of Lenin. A single-minded commitment to building an organisation capable of playing a decisive role in historical change dominated Lenin’s life up to 1917.

Krausz carefully traces the relationship between theory and practice, between Lenin’s ideas and the project of social transformation. He provides the big picture here, but also a multitude of specific tactical debates and decisions. He makes an interesting comment, for example, about how all the various factional disputes in the Russian revolutionary movement (over many years) had a strategic or tactical dimension. They were often influenced by theoretical issues, but there was only ever really a serious dispute if there were tactical implications (there were no splits over purely philosophical debates).

Krausz is attentive to the different aspects of debates and to what was going on at key turning points, e.g. the 1905 revolution, the ‘April Theses’ in April 1917, on the eve of insurrection in October 1917, etc. He expresses the theoretical underpinnings without reducing everything to them; concrete tactical disagreements can only be understood with attention to the concrete situation.

Lenin’s practical achievements – incomparable in the history of Marxism – were threefold: he had the leading role in building a revolutionary party in Russia before 1917, he was the principal leader in the ‘second revolution’ of 1917, i.e. that which led to the overthrow of the entire political and social order in October, and he was subsequently the head of government in a fledgling Russian workers’ state for several years (this last one remains a unique role in the history of revolutionary socialism). He was therefore, in turn, party builder, revolutionary leader and statesman.

Krausz is good at illustrating the continuity in Lenin’s personality, political qualities and ideas through all these periods, while also focusing on the distinctiveness of each context. The period of building revolutionary organisation, at varying stages from the 1890s until 1917, was the bulk of Lenin’s political life, and it proves especially fascinating in terms of potential implications for activists today. 

In addition to these central themes, ‘Reconstructing Lenin’ is a goldmine of details – biographical, political and historical. Although Lenin is at the centre throughout, it brings various other political figures of the time (Plekhanov, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bogdanov and many more) into focus, showing how they influenced Lenin or how he debated with them. It in some senses serves as a collective biography of the Bolsheviks, a compelling study of a revolutionary organisation that evolved enormously in changing circumstances.

I have just three very small criticisms. Firstly, although Krausz is brutally honest about the enormous problems faced after October 1917 - and indeed the mistakes he believes were made by Lenin and his government during this period - he refers very little to the actual positive achievements of revolutionary Russia (which were considerable). This makes his sketching of the context of Russia in the several years following the October Revolution a little unbalanced.

Secondly, I think he underestimates the possibilities for successful revolution in a number of European countries, especially Germany, during the same period, appearing to be rather mechanical and deterministic about the apparently near-inevitable failure of the European movements. Thirdly, I think he is guilty of somewhat understating Trotsky's achievements and stature as a political leader and thinker - not drastically so, but this is a minor problem of emphasis for me.

These minor points should not distract, however, from the larger achievement. Crucially, the question of how ideas interacted with efforts to change the world is a thread running through the whole book. The issue of what lessons revolutionary socialist activists can learn for today is not my main focus in this short appreciation, but the book provides a solid historical basis for that project.

Note: I recommend Chris Nineham's Counterfire review of the book.

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A world to win: class struggle and the Communist Manifesto

A young Karl Marx

In August I gave a talk on the Communist Manifesto at an event organised by Counterfire in Newcastle. I have just got around to collating my notes into readable form. I built my presentation, which focused especially on themes of history and class struggle in the Manifesto (two other sessions addressed different aspects), around a series of quotations from the original text. Here we go...

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Marx and Engels were commissioned to write a manifesto for the Communist League in late 1847. Economic crisis had affected much of Europe in the previous couple of years. Revolution was in the air. Communists were making connections across borders and beginning to get organised, but were still small in number. The opening line of the Manifesto -  ‘A spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of communism.’ – was more wishful thinking than accurate description.

Engels had drafted something in rather dry question-and-answer form, but it was Marx who turned this – in the space of a few weeks at the start of 1848 – into what would become the most widely-read, influential and famous political pamphlet ever published. It was the culmination of several years’ intellectual and political development in Marx’s thinking, an attempt to state clearly what communists stood for.

There was a culture of secret and conspiratorial societies at the time, but Marx and Engels rejected this. If the emancipation of the working class is to be the act of the working class, there is little purpose served by secrecy. Ideas must be stated openly and persuasively.

By the time it was published, revolution had broken out in a number of parts of Europe – 1848 would turn out to be an historic year of revolutionary upheaval, though most of it defeated. The Manifesto in fact turned out to be something quite different to what might be expected. It almost entirely avoided specific policy prescriptions. It contained a broad survey of historical development rather than keeping its attention trained on present politics. It was expressed in often powerful, even poetic, language.

At the core of the Manifesto is a particular conception of history and how change happens: an understanding of society as being divided, fundamentally, into classes, and history as a succession of class societies (and class struggles).  Marx writes:

'The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another.’

This is an important starting point: class is the main dividing line in society. This is not unique to capitalism , but rather has been true for thousands of years. It is a division that inevitably engenders conflict too.

Marx then provides a sweeping survey of the development of early capitalism, moving on to the era of industrial capitalism through which he was living:

'Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other — Bourgeoisie and Proletariat. From the serfs of the Middle Ages sprang the chartered burghers of the earliest towns. From these burgesses the first elements of the bourgeoisie were developed. The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie.’

So, capitalism grew out of an earlier feudal society. Merchant capitalism increasingly replaced feudal relations, and in turn this grew into industrial capitalism. A new urban elite developed: the bourgeoisie. Although Marx refers to ‘two great classes’, this shouldn’t be taken to indicate anything about their size: the proletariat, those who do the work, are far greater in number than those who live off the surplus their labour produces. Marx specifically traces the growth of industry:

‘Steam and machinery revolutionised industrial production. The place of manufacture was taken by the giant, Modern Industry; the place of the industrial middle class by industrial millionaires, the leaders of the whole industrial armies, the modern bourgeois.’

This kind of language is almost celebratory – and the tone often surprises first-time readers, expecting virulent denunciation of capitalism’s evils from the beginning. Of course Marx doesn’t leave it there, but he does take time to extol the progress represented by capitalism’s development. He writes of the revolutionising role played by capitalism, its economically dynamic quality and the way that overturns many established certainties:

‘All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air.’

Marx and Engels had first met a few years earlier (and went on to be lifelong collaborators). In 1844 Engels wrote ‘The Condition of the working class in England’ about the impact of industrial capitalism on the living and working conditions of those drawn into the newly mushrooming cities. It was an ugly and unromantic picture. Marx and Engels had no illusions about the often grim reality of industrial capitalism for the proletariat, the working class.

What they grasped was how capitalism accelerated the pace of technological and economic change, went together with the growth of major cities and created greater opportunities for wealth (largely concentrated, though, among a tiny class of those who owned and controlled the means of production).

The development of the modern nation state went together with the growth of capitalism. This was a deeply contested process. The English, American and French revolutions were all, whatever their differences, about the rising bourgeois class asserting itself against the barriers inherited from late feudalism. Political revolutions, with varying degrees of success, accompanied the economic changes. Marx wrote:

‘Independent, or but loosely connected provinces, with separate interests, laws, governments, and systems of taxation, became lumped together into one nation, with one government, one code of laws, one national class-interest, one frontier, and one customs-tariff.’

1848 was itself a year of bourgeois revolution. Although mostly unsuccessful, the uprisings left their mark – and in the decades that followed there was much greater political unification and centralisation in many parts of Europe, (limited) advances in democratic reform, the strengthening of modern state institutions (e.g. police forces), and so on.

But capitalism did something else, something enormously important for Marx, Engels and their comrades in the small Communist League. It created the working class. It brought together large numbers of workers in factories, mills and elsewhere - a process that was dangerous for the capitalists:

‘The advance of industry, whose involuntary promoter is the bourgeoisie, replaces the isolation of the labourers, due to competition, by the revolutionary combination, due to association. The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie therefore produces, above all, are its own grave-diggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.’

There is a lot packed in to this quotation. Firstly, it is identifying that growing industry brought turned people who had previously worked on the land, or perhaps as artisans, into workers - wage-labourers dependent on selling their labour power to the capitalist to make a living. Secondly, proletarianisation (working class formation) is a collective process, bringing workers together in combination. So, too, is proletarian resistance to capitalism a collective matter. Workers’ power is not as individuals, but as a collective force.  Finally, this collective power of workers is so potentially great that it can defeat the bourgeoisie and end capitalism, a system that has paradoxically created its own gravedigger.

Marx’s account of history, specifically the rise and development of capitalism (and the potential for moving from capitalism to socialism), therefore has class division at its heart, but also an awareness of the centrality of class struggle. The division into classes, and the exploitation at the heart of class relationships, inevitably generates conflict over what is produced and how the surplus wealth is allocated.

But Marx also had interesting things to say about the battle of ideas in society, and how that is shaped by material realities. Imagining himself addressing the bourgeois class, he wrote:

‘The selfish misconception that induces you to transform into eternal laws of nature and of reason, the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property – historical relations that rise and disappear in the progress of production – this misconception you share with every ruling class that has preceded you.’

This is a brutal warning and a reality check. Every ruling class imagines its own ideas and values to be a kind of ‘common sense’: universal values, taken for granted and seemingly obvious. In fact ideas change over time. The dominant ideology of one age may later seem antiquated. Changing ideas are shaped by material changes in the conditions of society: ‘the social forms springing from your present mode of production and form of property’.

History moves forward. Material production – the forces and relations of production – changes over time. So, with it, do the dominant ideas change:

‘What else does the history of ideas prove, than that intellectual production changes its character in proportion as material production is changed? The ruling ideas of each age have ever been the ideas of its ruling class.’

Marx points here to another vital aspect of ideology: it is the ideas of the ruling elite that are universalised as the ideas of a whole society. Whether through control of state religion, or schools and universities, or the media, the ruling class – the tiny elite possessing wealth and power – asserts its own ideas and values.

Yet there is no fatalism in the Manifesto. Running through it is an acute consciousness of historical change – transformation indeed – and the potential for further transformation in the future. The working class, identified as the collective agent of transformation, is not doomed to be tied to the ruling ideology. It is driven to resist by exploitation.

The working class is gathered together in large numbers and can organise collectively. Writing against the backdrop of Chartism, a mass working class movement coming to its end in 1848, Marx and Engels were aware of what was possible. There had been the earliest examples of strike action by the 1840s. There had been early efforts at building trade unions.

The class that can organise and resist collectively, can also set about creating a new world – one characterised by co-operation, equality and democracy, not the rule of the few over the many. There is little detail on what a communist or socialist society might look like, but this is a starting point:

‘In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’

So communism is, ultimately, to be a classless society. And in that state of equality and interdependence lies the potential for human development and liberation. But there’s also recognition that such a future vision must be linked to current struggles, if it is to be anything more than a utopian dream. Marx succinctly outlines the tasks of communists:

‘In short, the Communists everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things. In all these movements, they bring to the front, as the leading question in each, the property question, no matter what its degree of development at the time. Finally, they labour everywhere for the union and agreement of the democratic parties of all countries.’

Three points here, all of them acutely relevant as the Manifesto was circulated amidst growing revolutionary tumult in 1848: communists support democratic or bourgeois revolutions (whatever their limitations might be), working class economic and social interests (‘the property question’) must always be forefront, and the movement must be international, uniting workers across national boundaries and opposing a common enemy. Class, not nationhood, is what unites us.

The Manifesto ends, then, with these stirring words:

‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Working Men of All Countries, Unite!’

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Unfinished Leninism - an extended review

Paul Le Blanc’s Unfinished Leninism, a collection of 12 essays, most of them previously published on socialist websites or in publications in the last few years, mixes biography, historical summary, polemic and contemporary strategy. It does not merely summarise the life of Lenin, his political ideas and the tradition with which he is identified; it also explains the relevance of the revolutionary leader, and of Leninism, to our own times.

The book aims to persuade readers that Lenin ought to be taken seriously, his ideas applied creatively to new realities. This is an unfashionable task: Lenin has long been written off as at best irrelevant, at worst dangerous, by mainstream politicians and academics. Moreover, he is also regarded as outdated or irrelevant by many on the left and among those who are entering radical or anti-capitalist politics. Marxism in general is no longer automatically a major reference point for radical activists.

The notion of revolutionary organisation in the tradition of Lenin and the Bolsheviks has become particularly marginal for a number of reasons: the small size of the revolutionary left can make it seem insignificant, the sectarian degeneration and impotence of much of it has made it unattractive, and the body of ideas – Marxism – which underpins it is still little understood. Numerous alternative ways of organising have been offered, though all of them have encountered profound difficulties. The case for a renewal of revolutionary organisation may be unfashionable, but in a world of growing inequalities, seemingly intractable crisis and deep social injustice, it is one that deserves serious attention.

A reviled figure

Lenin is an important figure in history as the leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917, a central figure in the international Communist movement that developed in its aftermath, and the first leader of post-revolutionary Russia until his death in 1924. Lenin has been reviled by successive generations of conservative politicians, historians and political commentators precisely because he was a key protagonist in a revolutionary, mass working class challenge to capitalism - to the wealth and power of the ruling class - of huge historic significance, serving as inspiration to workers and oppressed people worldwide. But he has also been a source of contention and disagreement among many who have rejected the status quo of exploitation, inequality and oppression because the Soviet Union became, under Lenin’s successor Stalin, a grotesquely undemocratic, unequal and violent society.

The view that Lenin led inevitably to the horrors of Stalinism became the orthodoxy in the Cold War era. It requires considerable historical analysis to uncover why the fledgling revolutionary state which emerged from 1917 became the opposite of what Russian workers, soldiers and peasants had struggled for. This largely falls outside Le Blanc’s remit in this book, but he directs readers towards such analysis and seeks to rescue Lenin from the crimes committed in his name.

The rise of Stalinism was made possible by the isolation of the revolution: though there were revolutionary upheavals and popular rebellions in several European countries, none of them resulted in the defeat of the old order. Meanwhile, revolutionary Russia was attacked by imperialist armies and, for a time, engulfed in civil war.

Economic hardship and the demands of protecting the new revolutionary state from attack and civil war had a devastating impact on the working class and the scope for any sort of meaningful working-class democracy. The rising bureaucracy became, in this context, more powerful, centralised, and removed from the experiences of ordinary workers.

Since the end of the Cold War, there has been some renewed interest in what the author dubs ‘Lenin studies’, with some fresh thinking unencumbered by the rigid orthodoxies of the Cold War era, yet the dominant interpretation of the upheavals of 1989-91 was that they ‘finished’ Leninism for good. This confirms notions of triumphant free-market capitalism and the elimination of any radical, progressive alternatives. Public perceptions of Lenin in the West are still mainly shaped by anti-Communist propaganda of the Cold War era and the association of Lenin with the subsequent Stalinist era.

Lenin’s Marxism

Lenin is also significant as one of the towering figures of Marxism. Le Blanc stresses Lenin’s continuity from Marx; his deep rootedness in the writings of Marx and Engels. At the same time he summarises Lenin’s special contributions to a rich political and intellectual tradition, one that depends always on being creatively applied to new situations and on interaction with the lives and struggles of working-class people.

Lenin was the author of such influential Marxist texts as What is to be done?, Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism, State and Revolution and Left Wing Communism, an infantile disorder. Le Blanc argues – persuasively in my view, though some will disagree – that it is justified to talk of ‘Leninism’: a body of ideas and analysis that updated and developed Marx’s own writings, involving the application of Marxism to Russian realities and more generally to an era of capitalist expansion, imperialist competition and war. More positively, Lenin’s era witnessed the growth of mass socialist parties and trade unions, and successive waves of popular struggle, opening up new opportunities for Marxists but also presenting fresh challenges which Marx and Engels had not faced.

Lenin’s contributions included analysis of Russian capitalism’s particular development, an account of the emergence of modern imperialist rivalry in the era of monopoly capitalism, and a nuanced understanding of nationalism and national liberation movements. Le Blanc sketches the contexts which shaped the development of these ideas, including the debates which took place among Marxists. There is a fascinating essay examining the connections and differences between Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg. They are often counter-posed to each other, but Le Blanc demonstrates that any differences between their outlooks were fewer than often supposed, while teasing out the significance of the genuine differences – for example over the national question - that did exist.

Lenin also developed important ideas about socialist strategy: a thorough and innovative understanding of the relationship between movements for democracy and the struggle for socialism. He developed a strategic perspective that linked Russian workers with the rural peasantry, and some original analysis of revolutionary processes. This was informed partly by his own revolutionary experiences in 1905 and 1917 as well as the legacy of earlier breakthroughs like the Paris Commune of 1871, which was the first experience anywhere of working-class people taking control, albeit briefly, of the running of a city.

The period following the Russian Revolution opened up further strategic challenges, which required new thinking. The urgent need to spread the successful revolution and simultaneously learn from the Russian experience, while engaging with distinctive situations in other countries, prompted the launch of the Third International (or Comintern) in 1919 and the developing body of ideas and strategy that went with it.  This included sharp critiques of both European reformist politics and the problems of ultra-leftism, and the emergence of the united-front strategy as a means of advancing working-class aims in non-revolutionary times.

I agree with Le Blanc when he writes that it is peculiar – when considering these contributions - for some contemporary critics to dismiss the idea that there is such a thing as Leninism, or that Lenin’s influence of the development of Marxism was either minor or largely limited to organisational questions. He also adeptly discredits the idea that ‘Leninism’ was an invention of those who followed Lenin and should be rejected on that basis. While it is true that Stalin and others created an ossified and obscenely distorted ‘Leninism’, there is nonetheless a real body of ideas associated with Lenin.

Lenin was shaped by the best of Second International (1889-1914) Marxism, but he also moved beyond some of its limits. Although one of an able generation of Marxists, also including Leon Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, and later Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács, he did make his own distinctive contributions as part of a collective enterprise. Lenin can be seen as ‘first among equals’ in the development of Marxism during this period, interacting with the ideas of others and the debates among socialists while making significant innovations.

Revolutionary Lenin

In addition to Lenin’s significance as an influential historical figure and giant of Marxism, he is important because his life and work, more than that of anyone else in the history of socialism, is bound up with the whole question of how revolutionaries should organise and act in pursuit of their goals. He can reasonably be regarded as history’s greatest revolutionary leader. But what made that historical role possible? How did Lenin and his comrades actually organise themselves, and what lessons (if any) does this offer us today?

It is the questions of strategy and organisation that most often prompt debate about Lenin, and his legacy, in left-wing circles; this is as true today as it has ever been. Lenin was a pioneer of distinctively revolutionary organisation and the experiences of the Bolsheviks (the faction and later party that he led) from 1903 to 1917, are a particular focus for debate. Le Blanc challenges the oft-expressed idea that Stalinism originated in pre-1917 Bolshevik practices and the myth that Lenin undemocratically dominated the Bolsheviks, which was in fact a democratic, collective organisation in which debate flourished. He skilfully clarifies the genuine meaning of ‘democratic centralism’ for Lenin and his contemporaries.

He also critiques the idea, currently prevalent in some debates, that there was nothing especially distinctive about the Bolsheviks, treating the argument of Lars Lih (among others) that Lenin was essentially a standard Second International Marxist until 1914 with critical sympathy. He recognises the degree of truth in this. Lenin didn’t, prior to 1914, view the Bolsheviks as a new and special type of organisation or as substantially different from some European socialist parties, but he also explains how the Bolsheviks had in fact developed quite differently from the likes of the German Social Democrats, which had become increasingly geared towards parliamentary politics and compromise with capitalism. The outbreak of World War One, and corresponding collapse of most socialist parties into national chauvinism, was a turning point, after which the differences became sharper and the thinking of Lenin and other revolutionaries continued to evolve.

For those who seek to change the world, not merely understand it, wrestling with Lenin’s writings about strategy and organisation – and equally importantly his actions – is indispensable. The revolution he led was the only successful overthrow of capitalist state power in world history and, though it may have been beset by problems from the beginning, and unsuccessful in the longer term, the experiences involved remain a unique school in strategy and tactics for anyone wanting to end the miseries of capitalism and create a better world.

A central preoccupation for the author is the excavation of Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ deep commitment to democracy, the profoundly democratic possibilities inherent in the Russian Revolution and the democratic character of how Lenin and his comrades organised. He refutes several well-worn myths along the way, clearing away the misconceptions to present a view of Lenin as a radical democrat, and his revolutionary socialism as a political project with democracy at its core.

This is acutely relevant to our own times, in which democracy is visibly the loser in its struggle with capitalism, and when struggles for real democracy are integral to struggles against various aspects of the capitalist system. The recovery of Lenin’s radical democracy is especially necessary because of the widespread distortions of Leninism in the name of Leninism; most importantly those associated with the old Communist bloc, but also (as the author notes) the faulty versions of ‘Leninist’ practice that many well-meaning socialists have pursued in the West. These have seen dogmatic and somewhat sectarian groups competing with each other and largely cut off from influence over the broad working-class movement, therefore giving Leninist organisation a bad name.
 
The return of Lenin

The particular context framing this latest volume is twofold, with both social and more specifically literary dimensions. Firstly, there is the wave of insurgencies that have followed the emergence of a severe crisis for capitalism since 2008: Arab revolutions, Occupy, anti-austerity rebellions, the indignados and other manifestations of anti-capitalist revolt. This has, rather paradoxically, not led to a general revival of organised left-wing politics – though there are partial exceptions, such as in Greece, Spain and parts of Latin America –and it certainly has not proved the basis for a renewal of specifically Leninist (or revolutionary socialist) political practice.

However, the idea of revolution is certainly in the air, partly due to the Arab uprisings of 2011 and partly because the erosion and fragmentation of traditional parliamentary politics has fed a volatile situation in which rhetoric about ‘revolution’ (e.g. the public debate prompted by Russell Brand’s new book) is rather more mainstream than a few years ago, however ill-defined it might be.

The traditional revolutionary left, though, has in shrunk, fragmented and in many instances become politically sterile. The reference to the ‘return of a revolutionary doctrine’ in this book’s subtitle may for now be mostly wishful thinking, but the conditions clearly exist for considering that as a live possibility. The political radicalisation and volatility of recent years, the stirrings of debate about what is meant by ‘revolution’, and the small breakthroughs in ‘Lenin studies’, can all, in quite different ways, be seen as providing some basis for hope.

Secondly, there is a somewhat more favourable context for the publication of a new book on Lenin and Leninism, which is a partial revival in worthwhile scholarship on Lenin. Although the leader of the Russian Revolution largely remains a marginal, caricatured and derided figure, in politics, media and academia, there has been a series of books in recent years, generally written from a sympathetic left-wing perspective, that have generated some debate and welcome re-evaluation.

Lars Lih, who wrote the path-breaking 2006 book Lenin Rediscovered, has been foremost in re-assessing Lenin’s ideas, practice and context. Lih’s work in particular keeps cropping up – not without some criticism and disagreement, but with tremendous appreciation – in Le Blanc’s new collection. Canadian historian John Riddell’s on-going labour of love in editing the proceedings of the Comintern, from 1919 until the mid-1920s, is another vital reference point. Le Blanc’s essays involve reviewing some newer biographies and studies, but there are also references to older but still very useful works by the likes of Tony Cliff, Marcel Liebman and Ernest Mandel.

Le Blanc has decades of both study and practical experience to draw on in writing about his subject. His experience is as a revolutionary socialist activist in the US and he is acutely aware that the context in which he has been active is a radically different one from Lenin’s own, so any lessons from Lenin must be thought through in relation to contemporary reality. Unlike many of his peers, Le Blanc has remained a dedicated Marxist, though conscious of the need for an independent, critical and open Marxism which runs counter to the dogmatic orthodoxies which have so often plagued the avowedly Leninist left. He writes of the need for ‘guidelines’ rather than dogma when appreciating Lenin’s legacy.

I had previously read a number of the essays (though they all paid re-reading) and I heard their author deliver the talk at the Dangerous Times 2013 festival which is included here (and previously published on Counterfire). Le Blanc has previously written studies of the Marxist tradition, with a special focus on questions of organisation and strategy, and edited or co-edited selections of writings by Lenin, Trotsky and Luxemburg, all of which I warmly recommend. His concern in all these writings has been to update our understanding of the intellectual contributions of the most influential figures in the tradition and to indicate how they can serve activists in renewing the tradition. Consequently his style is lucid and accessible, blessedly devoid of academic jargon, and there is a rich sense of the wider context of socialist debate in Lenin’s own time.

The format, a selection of essays, written at different times for different audiences, inevitably leads to some repetition, but the author just about gets away with it. The selection animates a series of debates among contemporary writers and activists about aspects of both the historical record and the legacy. There are critiques of a range of recent works on Lenin, including a number of biographies, relevant historical works and the 2007 Lenin Reloaded collection of essays by left-wing intellectuals.

Overall the book succeeds as both an introduction to the life, times, ideas and legacy of Lenin, and as an insightful discussion of important issues for today’s activists. It can be dipped into and read in any order that suits the reader. Several essays could reasonably serve as an introduction to the topic, while others are more pitched at those familiar with certain debates.

When disagreeing with other writers, Le Blanc is admirably fair and does justice to any arguments he is disputing, though he is not afraid to criticise or re-think orthodoxies. The title is inspired in part by a fraternal disagreement with Alex Callinicos, chief theoretician of the British Socialist Workers Party, after he penned an article asking ‘Is Leninism finished?’ Le Blanc agrees with the answer proffered by Callinicos – no it isn’t finished, but is instead still acutely relevant – but points out that ‘finished’ has a dual meaning. It suggests ‘irrelevant’, but it can also mean ‘complete’.

The problem with Callinicos is that he appears to lapse into presenting Leninism as already complete, a doctrine to be passed down the generations rather than as a space for creative renewal. For Le Blanc, Leninism is unfinished in both senses: it is still relevant and it still requires constant updating and applying in light of new experiences. Rather than defensively repeating a doctrine, the advocacy of Leninism ought to be critical and creative.

The future of Leninism

The concluding essay is, appropriately, where Le Blanc is most explicit and forthright about renewing Leninism today and for the future. He rejects the notion that anything resembling a revolutionary party already exists anywhere in the world. We are instead at an earlier stage of development in renewing revolutionary organisation and it is necessary to avoid false or inflated ideas about the organisations we are building.

He convincingly argues that it is (self-) destructive for relatively small organisations to imagine themselves as the definitive Leninist party, when in fact they can at best be something far more modest: a contribution to the re-composition of an authentic revolutionary left. This does not mean treating the building of such organisations lightly; rather, it suggests seriousness of purpose combined with a healthy sense of perspective and openness to different possible realignments.

He reasserts the centrality of participation in actual working-class struggles and the need to relate Marxist ideas to people’s struggles and experiences. The fusion of socialism with the working-class movement is the historic core of the Marxist tradition, as a practical endeavour not merely a scholarly exercise, and it remains essential. But he also notes the difficulties we face when there is not the same kind of mass class-conscious working-class vanguard, with powerful traditions of struggle, ideas and organisation, which existed in roughly the first third of the twentieth century. The process of renewing revolutionary organisation thus goes together with processes of re-building the broader working-class movement and a recognisably left-wing culture.

He calls for a focus on democracy, not only as a topic of practical political struggle, but as something indispensable to how revolutionaries operate. Democracy is necessary in the broader movements we are part of, and inside our own organisations. This dedication to democratic practice is inextricably linked with the development of self-confident cadres who can think independently and engage in political debate. It is connected with the pursuit of a critically engaged open Marxism, willing to question orthodox interpretations and engage thoughtfully with changing realities.

The closing essay also emphasises the need for strategy. The ultimate goal for revolutionaries is the successful overthrow of capitalism and moving towards a democratic socialist future. This vision, the recognition of the potential inherent in current contradictions, and an awareness that current revolts can be the seeds of future social transformation, shapes revolutionaries’ perspectives. Elsewhere in the volume, Le Blanc cites Lukács, who wrote about the ‘actuality of revolution’ in his own short book on Lenin: the potential for revolution serves as a horizon for Marxist activists, and specific tactical decisions are made in the context of that broader worldview.

The ‘three whales of Bolshevism’ – a strategic perspective encompassing an 8-hour working day, land redistribution and a democratic assembly – guided the Bolsheviks between 1912 and 1917, providing a link between day-to-day struggles and the larger vision of socialism. A fresh strategic vision is needed to guide our own efforts today, suggests Le Blanc, and to provide that same bridge to a socialist alternative.

‘Unfinished Leninism’ is a source of ideas about how to build a stronger anti-capitalist left – more coherently organised, wider in its influence, and capable of applying the lessons of history to new challenges – as well as an historical introduction. Hopefully it will reach many of the activists who are searching for effective ways to organise for a future characterised by democracy, equality and human liberation.

This review was originally published on Counterfire.

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Video: Revolt and imperialism in the Arab world

This is from last weekend's Counterfire day school in London. It is my introduction (and summing-up) for a session on revolt and imperialism in the Arab world.

I was originally asked to talk about Syria for 15 minutes, with someone else speaking on Egypt for the same amount of time, so that between us we would do justice to the title. But the other speaker had to withdraw and, although I somewhat adapted my notes, this explains the unmistakable bias towards Syria here.

Egypt - what next for the revolution?

Tahrir square on 3 July. Photo: GIANLUIGI GUERCIA/AFP/Getty Images

There are many things to be said about Egypt right now. I want here to focus on the 'what is to be done?' question. There are  different views and emphases (among the left) on the matter of how the revolution can be advanced.

How can the left win the political struggle inherent in the revolutionary movement? Can the revolution become a socialist revolution? If so, how?


Strengths and limits of the movement

The strategic question rests upon an understanding of the strengths and limitations of what is already happening. There have been mass mobilisations and a militant wave of strikes. It is the self-activity of mainly working class protesters and strikers that has driven the whole process and created the context for the removal of Morsi. I heard an Egyptian commentator on the radio referring to it as "a popular impeachment of the president", stressing the revolutionary dynamic, the movement from below.

This is worth re-asserting because there are those who mistakenly perceive this week's events as a step backwards, with a one-sided view of a military coup removing a democratically elected government. Such a view is all form and no content, missing the actual dynamic of events. It fails to grasp that the army's actions are driven by (an entirely justified) fear of further mass action from below, and the threat it poses.

But there is an opposite kind of one-sided view, which is equally mistaken. This emphasises only the mass action, characterising the downfall as Morsi as a fairly uncomplicated 'second revolution' after the revolutionary movement that brought down Mubarak, and therefore a straightforward advance. This view misses something of fundamental importance: the vital issue of political direction and leadership. Every revolutionary process becomes divided and contested politically, however (relatively) unified it may be at the outset.

The immense danger is that the army top brass demobilises the revolution and directs it into the dead end of superficial reform which fails to address the deep-seated social and economic grievances of millions of Egyptians. The army is - without wanting to state the obvious - not an expression of the popular will, but an institution of the state, of the old order. The generals are subject to popular pressure, but they have acted to 'manage' the mass movement and not advance its interests.

The revolution is driven from below, but its political expression (in the removal of Morsi, arrests of numerous Brotherhood officials, etc) is managed from above. Many of those on the streets understandably celebrated the army's actions in removing Morsi, as they felt it was a consequence of their own actions, and there is a revival of the notion that 'the people and the army are one hand'. But there also appears to be some tensions in the mass movement, as many protesters recall the army's many abuses of power in the period following Mubarak's downfall and feel uneasy about allowing the generals to co-opt a popular uprising.

The coup therefore reflects both strength and weakness: the strength of a revolutionary struggle forcing the generals to act, but the weakness of a mass movement that relies on a section of the existing state to remove the target of the movement's anger.

It is necessary to grasp these contradictions, to see what is happening as a profoundly unstable process not a single coherent event. What happens is up for grabs, not settled or pre-ordained. The army elite's interests are deeply opposed to those of the mass of people, both in terms of democracy and a range of social and economic questions. The contradictions are unlikely to be easily resolved.

Politics is central  

But we need to be clear that the army is attempting to settle these contradictions in a particular direction. If this is to be resisted, what is required? It is not enough to simply say that the mobilisations must continue. Of course they must, but that doesn't address the problem. It is possible for the mobilisations to continue, but without posing a political and democratic alternative to the army elite.

I have seen two ideas in particular come to the fore in radical-left commentary. One is the emphasis on rising strike activity and the notion that a general strike can be the decisive breakthrough. An even higher level of strike action would indeed be an advance, but it would still be entirely insufficient. It does not directly challenge the rule of the army or address the question of political leadership.

Similarly, there is the idea that the left needs a mass political party. This reflects a correct understanding that the action on the streets and in the workplaces requires political expression, that on its own it will not suffice. But it would be a mistake to reduce politics to the electoral sphere, especially when the struggle is finding its primary expression on the streets and not at the ballot box. Electoral politics can be a useful strand to the revolutionary process, but it is only one strand and it won't be the decisive one.

It can easily become a detour for the mass movement - a key argument in the weeks ahead from those seeking a 'stabilising' of 'order' will be along the lines of 'leave the streets and the squares, go home and wait for elections so you can have your say through the democratic process'. This deploys the rhetoric of democracy with the aim of limiting the meaning of democracy - limiting it to putting a cross on a ballot paper. It is their version of democracy not ours - a 'democracy' that will fail to deliver real changes for the mass of people and breed further disillusionment.

Yet there are different visions of democracy and the revolution has articulated a more radical, far-reaching notion, which encompasses the mass action of the people and extends to the workplaces. This is what terrifies the elite, including the generals who moved against Morsi, and they will use the narrow 'democratic process' precisely to defeat broader and deeper notions of democracy.

We should also remember two other things here. There is now widespread mistrust of political parties in Egypt, as expressed in the movement against the Muslim Brotherhood-backed Morsi. And there is the problem of unity, with the proliferation of numerous different parties of one stripe or another. If the revolutionary movement is to develop a political alternative to the army and those 'pro-reform' elements of the ruling class, it must rapidly develop its own forms of organisation - rooted and embedded in the movement of the streets, the square and the workplaces, not separated from it and diverting energy away from it.

Popular assemblies - the missing ingredient

There is no fixed blueprint for what this will look like, no exact model from earlier struggles elsewhere that can be replicated. It is, however, a need that naturally arises in every serious mass revolutionary movement: how can the people organise and represent themselves in order to advance their struggle? In every major revolution there has been some sort of form of democratic, popular organisation, most famously the soviets in the Russian revolutions of  1905 and 1917 but there are many other examples.

The level of mobilisation in Egypt has been - and continues to be - remarkably high, even by the standards of revolutions. It is significant that the process has continued and, more than two years after Mubarak's demise, it is possible for mass action to happen on such a scale as we are seeing now. It should also be noted that the revolution has addressed (and continues to address) social and economic questions, and it continuously involves militant strike action.

This all provides a strong basis for the Egyptian equivalent of the soviets, yet there has been relatively little in the way of such developments. That has to change if there is to be hope for the revolution. Who is driving the political direction of the revolution? It can only be the people actually doing the protesting if they develop their own democratic forms. If there is a vacuum here, opportunist elements (from the generals to moderates like ElBaradei) will move to fill it.

This question can be viewed at a number of levels. Above all, there is the simple fact that the growth of revolutionary assemblies is essential if there is to ever be a challenge for state power, i.e. if the revolution is to confront not only one particular form of capitalist rule, but the whole structure.

But there is an urgency to the task that derives from more mundane, day-to-day matters. Numerous demands are arising in the course of struggle. The movement's participants correctly grasp that their own activity is essential to winning those demands. However, what is not yet clear to many is that their own political organisations are necessary to amplify the calls for those demands, to co-ordinate the struggles, and to articulate a more or less coherent political alternative to the moderate elements promoted by a jittery ruling class.

It is in the course of constructing such alternative sites of political organisation, discussion and co-ordination that the popular will can find an expression which does it justice. This is how people's interests can be advanced rather than curtailed. It is, fundamentally, a question of class - the army's power is part of a capitalist order which preserves the wealth of tiny minority, at the expense of the majority, regardless of the changes in political order. Egypt's working class needs an alternative rooted in its mass protests and strike waves.

A political struggle for the future

Popular assemblies are, furthermore, the only way to ensure the activist minority connects itself to the many millions of Egyptians at home, at work, going about their daily business. Even when demonstrations are on the sensational scale seen in the last week, it is still a minority of the population.

Democratic forms are required which not only organise and co-ordinate the protesters, but which link them to many millions of people who are sympathetic but not actively involved. This is no idle fantasy when you consider the scale and depth of this revolution.

Such a development could even win over many of those currently still supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood - which, lest we forget, has previously been the dominant political tendency in the country and still retains a fragile but real social base. The more left-wing and politically independent elements in the revolutionary movement have to contest political leadership with both the Brotherhood and the elite moderates positioning themselves as advocates of the popular movement. They can potentially win the support of some of those traditionally supportive of more moderate political forces.

For socialists in the revolutionary movement, there is no greater or more urgent task than helping to create such a broad political alternative. The left is historically weak in Egypt - and is currently dwarfed by the scale of the mobilisations - but this is the challenge now.


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Newcastle Counterfire: Imperialism and the Arab revolutions

 

Newcastle public meeting: Imperialism and the Arab revolutions

 

Wednesday 10 October, 6:30pm

 

Art Gallery space, top floor of Bar Loco

22 Leazes Park Road, Newcastle NE1 4PG

John Rees will introduce this meeting about the Arab revolutions, how they have developed, and the response from Western imperialism. John Rees is author of several books, including 'Imperialism and Resistance', 'The People Demand: a short history of the Arab revolutions', 'Timelines: a political history of the modern world' and 'The Algebra of Revolution'.

Free entry - organised by Newcastle Counterfire.

Please visit the Facebook event page


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Hobsbawm, revolution and class

It won't, I think, be too controversial to observe that Eric Hobsbawm's record as a historian is superior to his record as an analyst of contemporary politics.

From sticking to the official Communist line when many of his fellow left-wing intellectuals rebelled against it (and formed the New Left) after 1956, to his claims about the allegedly disappearing working class in the 1980s, he has generally fared better when his eyes have been fixed firmly on the past. This disjunction between historian and political analyst (and activist) continues with an interview he's given to the BBC World Service.

For now, I'm relying on the website article for Hobsbawm's perspective. The full interview may give a more rounded picture, though his views seem fairly clearly defined. The historian compares 2011 to another landmark revolutionary year: 1848. But he's on surer ground analysing 1848, a year of democratic political revolutions and uprisings in several European countries (which half a century ago he wrote about insightfully in his classic 'The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789-1848') than when assessing the meaning of 2011.

He does make a few valid points. Hobsbawm is surely right to note that a political revolution's effects often show up many years later, so early setbacks or even defeats should not lead anyone to despair. Revolution is a process not an event and we have to take the long view - and it is therefore well worth examining past revolutions and their legacy.

He is also correct to note the centrality of a layer of young people to the Arab revolts - and resistance elsewhere - and the similarities between movements in different parts of the world. Many of these people have, however, been young unemployed graduates or young workers not students.

The interviewer tells us: 'with the possible exception of Tunisia, he sees little prospect of liberal democracy or European-style representative government in the Arab world.' Why is that? It's not entirely clear, but we're later offered this quote from Hobsbawm, referring to the Iranian Revolution of 1979:

"The people who had made concessions to Islam, but were not Islamists themselves, were marginalised. And that included reformers, liberals, communists. What emerges as the mass ideology is not the ideology of those that started off the demonstrations."

This appears to be why he doesn't believe a Western-style bourgeois democracy will follow the Arab Spring, i.e. Arab societies are too in thrall too Islamist ideology for that to be possible. The rise of Iranian-style Islamism, or at least a modified version of it, is presumed to be the successor of this year's uprisings.

It's a surprisingly simplistic view that ignores the fact that Islamism is itself complex and varies across different settings, e.g. Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood is very different to a Khomeini-style theocracy, while the balance of forces between Islamist currents and other political forces in Egypt and Tunisia today is different to Iran thirty years ago. Nobody would deny that Islamist parties have the upper hand in Egyptian electoral politics, but let's not limit ourselves to the ballot box - especially at a time when the action on the streets is, on a daily basis, challenging a narrow notion of democracy as limited to putting a cross on a ballot paper.

Hobsbawm neglects what is actually currently happening in Egypt, which is not an Islamist takeover but a battle between those wanting to extend and deepen the revolution against ruling elements (the military council, supported most of the time but not always by political leaders in the Brotherhood) who want to curtail the revolution and defend the status quo.

The real danger posed by the Brotherhood is not an Islamist dictatorship but reformist compromise. And there are considerable tensions within the Brotherhood, notably with many of the youth dissenting and supporting the ongoing revolutionary movement. Viewing Islamism as a monolithic bloc - across time and space - won't help us.

Hobsbawm locates the motor of resistance, from Tahrir Square to Occupy Wall Street, in a new middle class:

"What unites them is a common discontent and common mobilisable forces - a modernising middle class, particularly a young, student middle class, and of course technology which makes it today very much easier to mobilise protests."

It is rather jarring, in 2011, to witness someone referring to a 'student middle class'. Haven't we reached the point where it's obvious that students are not necessarily from middle class backgrounds? This is as true in Arab countries - many of which, including Tunisia and Egypt, have high student populations - as in the West. Even when students are from propserous backgrounds, it's possible for them to face a distinct lack of such propserity after graduating.

This observation is no mere slippage in terminology. It is linked to an argument Hobsbawm has put for at least three decades: the working class is disappearing. The Chinese working class is today bigger than the global working class in 1848, but I suspect that is something Hobsbawm wouldn't acknowledge - partly due to a narrow conception of what it means to be working class, partly due to confusion about 'Communist' societies. Hobsbawm says:

"The traditional left was geared to a kind of society that is no longer in existence or is going out of business. It believed very largely in the mass labour movement as the carrier of the future. Well, we've been de-industrialised, so that's no longer possible. The most effective mass mobilisations today are those which start from a new modernised middle class, and particularly the enormously swollen body of students."

This under-estimates the role of workers in resistance both in the Arab world and the West: as John Rees notes in his end-of-2011 retrospective, at key moments the power of the organised working class has merged with broad street-based movements, most crucially in toppling Ben Ali in January and again in the final two days before Mubarak fell in February. Likewise, Hobsbawm overstates the role of students - important, undoubtedly, but he seems to be assuming anyone under 30 is a student - and fails to grasp that students have been most powerful when combining with other social groups.

His comments also echo claims he's made previously which rest on assuming that 'industrial' and working class are synonymous. Someone as well-versed in Marx and Engels' writings as Hobsbawm must know that is very different from how the marxist tradition's founders defined class relationships. It's worth quoting Terry Eagleton, in his review of Hobsbawm's recent book 'How to Change the World':

'It is true that the industrial proletariat had dwindled [by the 1980s], but Marx himself did not think that the working class was confined to this group. In Capital, he ranks commercial workers on the same level as industrial ones. He was also well aware that by far the largest group of wage labourers in his own day was not the industrial working class but domestic servants, most of whom were women. Marx and his disciples didn’t imagine that the working class could go it alone, without forging alliances with other oppressed groups. And though the industrial proletariat would have a leading role, Marx does not seem to have thought that it had to constitute the social majority in order to play it.'

In any case, the really interesting and productive questions to explore concern how the working class has evolved, and what that means for the nature of resistance, rather than repeating the old line about a disappearing proletariat.

Hobsbawm also ignores the mass participation of the kind of poor people who, even by the broadest definitions, couldn't possibly be categorised as 'middle class' in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. It's true that middle class elements often (but far from exclusively) played a leading or catalysing role in the upheavals, but when millions took to the streets throughout Egpyt it was in large part because the poor joined in on a massive scale. Yet Hobsbawm seems to be simultaneously writing off the working class as an objective entity and dismissing any subjective agency from anyone who isn't identifiably 'middle class'.

Hobsbawm is also on shaky ground when he traces the Occupy movement back to Barack Obama's election campaign. I'm not aware of anyone inside the Occupy movement claiming this, so it stretches credibility. One of his reasons for making this connection seems to be the role of social media in mobilising activists. I think he has an exaggerated view of the internet's role - in relation to both the Obama camapign and Occupy - but it also obscures the political differences between these two cases, by focusing on form (social media) at the expense of political content.

An important difference is that the Obama campaign was geared entirely to the realm of established electoral politics, which the Occupy movement tends to ignore or even reject. Some of the impetus behind the US-based movement is in fact widespread disenchantment with the Obama administration - which tends not to be targeted as the problem, but it definitely isn't seen as the solution either.

It is reasonable to observe that the 'traditional left' has been marginal to the wave of protests, occupations and uprisings in 2011. It is perhaps unsurprising, considering his background, that Hobsbawm pins this on the supposed decline of the working class rather than paying attention to, say, the impact of the legacy of Stalinism on people's perceptions of socialism and left-wing organisations.

But if we simply account for the left's marginalisation by alluding to a vanished class of industrial labourers, we can't even begin to consider how the left might be rebuilt. Indeed the logical conclusion of Hobsbawm's line of reasoning is that the left cannot be built. Socialism becomes nothing more than a nostalgic fetish, a nice idea but without a material basis.

Renewing the left - and successfully building on the inspiring resistance of this year - requires a recognition of the continuing existence (and potential for collective struggle) of a changing working class. It rests, too, on an accurate understanding of what social forces are involved in today's struggles, and how they can combine to powerful effect.

There are possibilities and pitfalls in the current movements. To build on those possibilities, and avoid the pitfalls, will require strategies for winning based on an accurate view of current conditions - not the erroneous picture Eric Hobsbawm gives us.

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