From the UK Trotskyist historian of fascism http://www.dkrenton.co.uk/ , Dave Renton. http://www.dkrenton.co.uk/cpgb.html ("The Communist Party of Great Britain since 1920.") http://www.voiceoftheturtle.org/articles/dave_anarcho.shtml Michael Pugliese
A meeting at Friends House in London. The young man speaks with fire in his eyes. He announces the formation of a new movement, the Che-Leila brigades. Three activists find themselves in Palestine in pure solidarity. When there, the Israelis invade. Anti-capitalists are locked up alongside prominent Palestinians. Even Jeremy Hardy is there, to take photos. Suddenly, the faces of the Che-Leila are the most sought-after in town. Hence the meeting. The young man speaks in clichés, falsehoods that the audience applauds because the people there desperately want to believe that they are true. "Hamas! Fatah! The PFLP! The Palestinian nation is united!" He turns his face to Britain. The workers are dead. The socialist parties are corrupt. Only the young -- his youth -- fight. But they will never surrender. It is impossible that they will give up. Why? Because the condition of the oppressed in Britain is in no important ways different from the oppression of the oppressed in Palestine. We have the 2000 anti-terrorism bill. We live already under social fascism. I forget the words and watch his face instead. "Trust me", it says, "I know".
Che-Leila. There were only three of them at first -- then twenty, at the last march thirty-five. Che for Che Guevara. Leila for Leila Khaled, the Palestinian revolutionary whose unit "conducted many historic and world shaking actions for the Arab and Palestinian masses" -- their words, not mine. From different traditions, it is possible to gather up the worst elements, or the best.
"Learning from the World anti-imperialist movement". What does that mean in practice? Elitism, moralism, and the politics of police action. The newspapers tell us that fat pants are back, so why not Chairman Mao? Am I the only person not clapping, in the room? Elitism. "It has been too long in Britain that people have not been supported because a section of British people have been corrupted by the same system that they claim to fight". The man is right -- the trade union leaders are corrupt, and the revolutionary parties lethargic. Compared to him, the majority of the workers seem passive. How right it feels to set yourself up as a leader, a tribune acting on behalf of the oppressed. The audience applauds -- as they would clap any one of a dozen strutting mini-Stalins -- because we know that we don't do enough, and it seems better sometimes to hear that someone else will do the work for you. Moralism. Afterwards, a friend tries to explain that the movement has seen his like before. She chooses her words carefully. She could ask him if he has ever been a member of a trade union in his life, or has he ever tried to talk anyone into left-wing politics, in their 30s, in their 40s or beyond? She doesn't use those examples. She speaks in words that will persuade no-one else, just him. He replies, "The British left. Useless! They've never had a decent martyr in thirty years." He transcends the British left. How sweet and decorous it is to die for a cause. The defence of Repression. "Che-Leila activists have been to Cuba, Ireland, Libya, Algeria, Palestine, Colombia to see and help our people there." Against the slow-moving strategies of the working-class movement, this politics offers a better alternative. Down with the workers. Up with the state officials of the Third World. "Our people" means those who manage one-party states, their children and their police. Fifteen years ago Libya funded the NF in Britain, now it arms repression in Zimbabwe. The Algerian clique shows as much contempt for elections as Bush. Cuba, Ireland, Palestine and Colombia -- the movements point their guns against the enemy, yes, but their guns are trained on their own too.
Since the protests at Seattle in winter 1999, the dominant mood on the Left has been one of unity. Previously hostile traditions have learned to co-operate, to share ideas, and to neglect the memory of old conflicts. As someone whose first political education was received in the different, sectarian culture of the 1980s, this change strikes me as a vast improvement. "What did your group say about the invasion of Korea?" I don't know, don't blame me, I was minus twenty at the time. At last we have learned to blame people for the decisions they make -- not for the ones they have inherited, nor for those made before they came on the scene. There are no enemies on the Left. The need is always for a bigger Left, not for one better annexed to any single traditions, yours or mine. It is in that very spirit that I write these lines -- not as the defence of any dogma but as its critique. Others will object. Why have you bothered to attack a tradition that is currently so marginal? Because I was at Genoa, because I have been at many of the European protests -- because I see these politics being created and recreated in more than one country at once. A mood exists, that encompasses more than one speaker in one room. Don't get me wrong, I see a hint of danger. Only a possibility, no more.
Anarcho-Stalinism. It seems to me that more of it abounds. But my evidence is all anecdotal. My friend Jonathon, I've known for years. Emmie, Joe, Steve, every one of them a victim of retrospective Brezhnevery. My friend Robert -- I told him I was writing a history of dissident Marxism -- "You must examine Mao. He didn't like his party, they didn't like him". The necessary murder as evidence of intellectual independence! How simple it must have been when the world was neatly divided into two blocs. How easy it would have been, when the Americans invaded Iraq -- we could have sent our red tanks back to stop them. It's only a shame that the real, lived Cold War did not witness such vibrant Soviet or Chinese anti-imperialism. What sort of socialism is it anyway, that depends on tanks? I have even heard people from outside my own party accuse us of adopting the same logic. Why do we spend so much time dissecting the latest conflicts among the world's rulers? Do we exaggerate the creative potential of the movements unleashed by militant Islam? Are we guilty of a similar logic, of thinking that if America is the enemy, then surely my enemy's enemy is my friend? An older insight risks being lost, the most simple basic truth at the heart of Marxism. As the song says, "No saviour from on high can deliver". Self-activity, there is no other way.
Where does Che-Leila come from? You could explain their origins in terms of the history of the SLP -- an anti-Labour project, launched by one man, which degenerated into a rump. You could trace their past through biographical sketches. The speaker I quoted earlier claims that his father was a Naxalite. But the real explanation is that these forces inhabit a political space which should be occupied by something better. Cue nostalgia - because socialism is always less than it was. Didn't you just know that? It comes as part of the guarantee. That's what it says on the tin. In early 1970s Britain, the left consensus was different. Trade union militants like Mickey Fenn and Eddie Prevost fought the racists on the London docks. Historians like Sheila Rowbotham spread the word of a society without women's oppression. There were political theorists of the stature of Tony Cliff, Nigel Harris, Mike Kidron. My personal favourites were the journalists: Dave Widgery, Roger Protz, Nigel Fountain, Christopher Hitchens, James Fenton, Paul Foot. What they all shared was a passionate identification with the politics of practical libertarianism. You want people to change things? They have to do it themselves, they said. That coalition of hope broke upon the Labour government of 1974-9. A previous generation which believed in Left unity (like our own) foundered upon the reality of mass unemployment, declining trade union militancy, and the realisation that Labour would not be pushed out of the way -- or not easily, not fast. A radical smitchka of workers and left-wing intellectuals broke apart. Of course the defeat was not total. The organisation thrown up by that early-1970s moment continued -- despite splits -- in a real, but attenuated form. The movement was institutionalised. It has since become tamer, both bigger and also less daring than it was. That brings us to the present. After many years in which most of the traditions were stagnant, the global left finally finds itself in a situation in which the long-term prognosis is good. But do the best traditions prosper? Not them, or not them alone. It's what Steinbeck said -- over time, those who hunger will always beat those who are fed. We've been around too long. We risk being pushed aside.
So many people observe the apathy of the young. I'm sure that's how things look -- from the outside. What I see instead is a condition of contempt, where politicians are regarded as worse than thieves or liars, where people desperately want change, and lack the means to bring it about. In another, likewise time, George Orwell complained of standing "Outside the Whale". He described a time of suffocating consensus, when people themselves were angry but had not the means to make their views heard. Lenin, on being asked what can we do?, replied "patiently explain". That means convincing people, in their millions. Anarchists will be part of the process -- despite the aggressive elitism of Bakunin and the founders. By contrast, Stalinism offers nothing healthy, neither in its Russian nor its Chinese forms. The only one way to bring about real transformation is by means of a revolutionary struggle on the part of all the oppressed. That requires raising the energy of the people themselves -- with neither leaders nor "friendly" states to act as a proxy. It means fighting where you are, where your friends grew up, and alongside people you know. The colours may look brighter on the other side of the TV screen -- forget them, change where you know. The emancipation of the working-class can only be the act of the working class. Nothing else.