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Another Book on Trotsky Reviewed October 20, 2009

Posted by Garibaldy in History, Trotskyism.
4 comments

Following on from the thread on Robert Service’s biography, I thought I’d draw people’s attention to Mick Hall’s review of Bertrand Patenaude’s book on Trotsky’s last years.

Trotsky and The Wire: Or Adventures on the Times Website October 18, 2009

Posted by Garibaldy in Books, Film and Television, History, Trotskyism.
47 comments

Two things that might be of interest to readers I noticed while browsing today’s Sunday Times online. The first is a review by Robert Harris of Robert Service’s new biography of Trotsky. On the basis of the review, it seems that the book is far from friendly to Trotsky. The review, for example, claims that Trotsky never visited Lenin after his stroke in 1922, something that came as a surprise to me if true, having read quite a lot of both Trotsky and the accounts of various Trotskyist groups of the political testament issue. Anyway, here is part of the blurb for the book on theHarvard University Press website

Trotsky is perhaps the most intriguing and, given his prominence, the most understudied of the Soviet revolutionaries. Using new archival sources including family letters, party and military correspondence, confidential speeches, and medical records, Service offers new insights into Trotsky. He discusses Trotsky’s fractious relations with the leaders he was trying to bring into a unified party before 1914; his attempt to disguise his political closeness to Stalin; and his role in the early 1920s as the progenitor of political and cultural Stalinism. Trotsky evinced a surprisingly glacial and schematic approach to making revolution. Service recounts Trotsky’s role in the botched German revolution of 1923; his willingness to subject Europe to a Red Army invasion in the 1920s; and his assumption that peasants could easily be pushed onto collective farms. Service also sheds light on Trotsky’s character and personality: his difficulties with his Jewish background, the development of his oratorical skills and his preference for writing over politicking, his inept handling of political factions and coldness toward associates, and his aversion to assuming personal power.

I’m sure the idea of Trotsky’s political closeness to Stalin will raise a few hackles. As will the photograph at the top of the review. There are two versions of it; one with Trotsky and Lenin, and one without Trotsky. But the header says that Trotsky was added in. Is the case of the Trotskyist school of the falsification of history, or is the Sunday Times mistaken? I’d be interested if anybody knows the truth. I doubt I’ll have time to read the book anytime soon, but if anybody does so, please feel free to let us know what you thought. A review by Simon Sebag Montefiore is also here.

On a different note, the website also has a podcast of David Simon talking about why he created The Wire, as well as a transcript of his talk. I’m sure that will be of interest to people here too. Conor McCabe has some recent thoughts on The Wire and Irish politics here.

So overall then, the Murdoch press has its uses, even if accidentally.

The long war? December 5, 2007

Posted by franklittle in Environment, Irish Politics, Local Politics, Minor Left Parties, Socialist Party, Socialist Workers' Party, The Further Left, The Left, Trotskyism.
7 comments

I was slightly surprised to read on Indymedia today that the Galway Bin Charges Campaign held a picket outside Galway City Council as part of a laudable, and it should be noted successful, campaign against an initiative from the City Manager to remove the waiver on bin charges for bin lifts. Protestors accurately pointed out that this would have a substantial impact on the worst off in Galway.

My surprise was not because Galway Alliance Against War felt it necessary to turn up in a credulity stretching interpretation of its mandate, but in the continued existence, however chimera like of the anti-bin tax campaign in places around the country and the continued lack of anything like a strategy to get rid of the charges.

Drimnagh, where I live, was home to one of the strongest anti-bin charges campaigns in Ireland. Joan Collins, former SP, successfully rode the campaign into the Council chamber and Bríd Smith of the SWP/PBP wasn’t a million miles away from doing the same in Ballyfermot. Like most households in our area, the Littles refused to pay the bin charges, attended the meetings and a couple of marches and protests and quizzed candidates in 2002 and 2004 on where they stood on the issue.

Now, again like most of our neighbours, we pay the charge. Grudgingly certainly, but we pay it nonetheless. Yet, as a search on Indymedia for bin tax related stories will reveal, there are still occasional protests and campaign work in parts of Drimnagh, in Ringsend, and there was a small protest outside Dublin City Council when the Estimates were debated at the end of November and where, for the first time in Dublin City, Sinn Féin councillors backed the Estimates containing bin charges.

But here’s the thing. The campaign is, to all intents and purposes, over. Non-payment, as a means to ‘axe the tax’ has failed. I don’t, by the way, think it failed because it was the wrong strategy. I think it was the right one. It failed because the unions, Labour and Sinn Féin wouldn’t back it and they should not be allowed to forget that. Non-payment levels in the Dublin local authorities are not worrying the City Manager and outside of Dublin it was never really a political issue. The extended family in the rural homeland of the Littles was paying bin charges for several years without complaint before it blew up as an issue in Dublin.

Power to bring in and set the level of the Bin Tax has been taken from the councillors and put in the hands of the City and County Managers. Regardless of how a councillor votes, he or she cannot alter the rate at which the charge is set. In theory, a majority of councillors could refuse to bring in the Estimates and collapse the Council, but this would need to happen in several different areas before the Government would be forced to act in any way other than simply appointing Commissioners to run the City or County.

But there is no sign of such a majority on any Council, and every indication from the recent elections that the working class are not rising from their chairs with a ballot paper in one hand and a burning Bin Charges bill in the other. Indeed the most prominent anti-bin charges campaigner in the country, whose constituency was home to one of the stronger anti-bin charges campaign, lost his seat. If anything, with the inclusion of the always pro-bin charges Greens, the prospect of their abolition has become even more unlikely. Councillors in Dublin City who voted against the Estimates because of the charges have had their positions misrepresented as having votes against the new playground for the area, or the new litter warden because they were also contained in the Estimates. Clearly, supporters of bin charges are no longer afraid, and many opponents no longer see political capital in it.

So, why do the protests and the anti-bin charges campaign continue? In part, one supposes it is because of the still outstanding legal issues around the charges, but I can’t help but wonder if certain individuals and parties are happy to keep the campaign ticking over in order to maintain their profiles ahead of the next election.

This is not a debate about the rights and wrongs of double taxation. The bin charges are wrong and should be opposed. But is it the best use of the limited resources the left in Ireland has available to it to fight a battle that has been lost for a couple of years? There is, in my opinion, no shame in accepting that, for now, a battle is lost and preparing to fight a new one until the opportunity to refight the charges comes again. There is and was shame in not fighting at all, or in supporting the charges in the first place.

At what point do you accept that a campaign is over? At what point do you acknowledge defeat or claim victory? And when does the maintenance of a campaign become more of an exercise in political manipulation and candidate profiling and less of a genuine attempt to right a wrong and correct an injustice?

Galloway attempting to take on SWP in Respect? September 4, 2007

Posted by franklittle in Britain, Marxism, Trotskyism.
5 comments

Feast or famine? I haven’t posted in a couple of weeks and then three in one day. But I came across an interesting piece courtesy of the Communist Party of Great Britain’s Weekly Worker site.

George Galloway has published an eight page attack on the organisational and political failures of the Respect project in Britain. The SWP in Britain have issued a response disagreeing with his points.

Readers can look through Galloway’s document in more details but it accuses the leadership of being undemocratic, secretive and amateurish about staffing appointments, presiding over a serious financial crisis, a serious recruitment crisis, and being completely unprepared for an election, either to the Greater London Assembly or to Westminster if Brown decides to go next month.

Though Galloway makes no reference to the SWP, that organisation’s dominance of the internal bureaucracy of RESPECT is well known and that their immediate reaction was a lengthy document, not available on the net I believe, disagreeing with every point, suggests they knew who Galloway was talking about.

Interesting reading, and perhaps interesting times ahead for the RESPECT comrades.

Being heavily debated on the Socialist Unity blog.

The Left Archive: Peoples Democracy, ideology and just what is Trotskyism? August 27, 2007

Posted by WorldbyStorm in Irish Politics, Leninism, Marxism, People's Democracy, Trotskyism.
39 comments

northern_star_70r.jpg

This – no, not the image above which is a publication from 1970 – this here cover-2.pdf is fresh from the archives, an interesting document entitled “What is Trotskyism” issued by People’s Democracy in or about 1980. The pamphlet contains a speech by veteran Trotskyist Ernest Mandel (a fascinating person in his own right who seems to have been able to overcome much of the usual tendency on the left to cowerg behind the lines and instead been willing to discuss and argue with political opponents) during a debate with Monty Johnstone of the CPGB from 1969. And it’s a pretty good explication of what Mandel considered was currently existing Trotskyism during that period.

It’s sort of fun. Within the pages there are three images, one of Trotsky, one of Lenin and then a third of a Peoples Democracy March from the late 1960s, perhaps even the PD march at Burntollet. Simply produced by PD on a typewriter. We have ads for their bookshops in Andersonstown and Killester (that well known hotbed of revolutionary activity).

The debate itself is quite interesting. It was clearly at a point when Trotskyism was resurgent, buoyed by the rise of the New Left and student movements. Indeed the spirit of ’68 permeates the pages, particularly when Mandel raises some quite frankly excellent questions regarding the role of the pro-Moscow PCF during May 1968 (although one might suggest that it’s always easier to be complaining about the exercise or non-exercise of power when one has effectively none). And in a fascinating foreshadowing of later and more contemporary debates Mandel argues that the invasion of Czechoslovakia ‘…not only violated the sovereignty and independence of a small nation…but was equally criminal in other respects’. This concentration on sovereignty is quite telling (although to me a bit contradictory for internationalists)… anyhow. Read the rest yourselves!

The ideological basis for this tilt to Trotskyism by PD (which also flirted with Maoism) developed during the 1970s, although it is in a sense hardly surprising that such a political child of 1968 would find other more traditional left formations difficult to align with (indeed there has to be a thesis subject there on the way in which the appropriation by SFWP effectively closed down the option for our homegrown radicals to follow the Moscow – or even really the Havana route). By 1976 they were recognised as the Irish section of the Fourth International.

In a way the longevity of PD is remarkable. From the early days as part of the campaign for civil rights the movement transcended its roots as what appeared to be a fundamentally student based organisation. In the early 1980s they held two seats on Belfast City Council. But as PSF moved towards a more overtly political stance it provided both competitor and new home for some PD activists. Eventually, as late as 1996, it was dissolved and replaced by Socialist Democracy.

Any of you who know the story from the inside I’d be most interested to hear more. It sounds like a remarkable organisation.

Incidentally I can’t resist decoding the cover of the Northern Star from 1970 above. Its got it all, doesn’t it, from Larkin, to a youthful rioter and then a stencilled Starry Plough. Oh yes, and two initials which at that time wouldn’t quite resonate with quite the same chilling effect as more recently!

[Image above from CAIN]