Socialist Challenge No. 17, Review of Books Supplement, 13 October 1977
The scan: sc-n17-oct-13-review-of-books-supp-1977.pdf (PDF, Marxists Internet Archive)
Uncorrected machine reading of the whole issue. This text was read by machine (Apple Vision OCR) from the scan and has not been corrected or cut into articles. Each page gives the headlines first, then the columns in order, so one article runs on into the next. Expect misread words. Use it to find things; quote from the scan.
Page 1 scan of this page
REVIEWOF BOOKS
SOCIALIST CHALLENGE Review of Books
BERNARD
The Crisis of the
British Intelligentsia
FRANCIS MULHERN THE LAST three years have scen a major shift to the right in British politics. currenttermsol inner-party debate are far to the right of those on which the February "74 election was fought. Within the parliamentary Labour Party, the Left has seldom seemed feebler; and after an uncertain beginning, Thatcherism has now consolidated its hold over the Conservative Party.
Outside parliament, Thatcher openly patronises the National Association For Freedom, the organisation that brought style and respectablility to the once make shift and semi-clandestine cratt of strikebreaking; and the National Front continues to grow, nourished by the social crisis, a pervasive sense of 'national" (i.e.
Great British) humiliation, and spreading disillusion among traditional Labour voters.
This political shift has had obvious cultural
Tom Nairn
The Break-up of Britain
A brilliant overview of the historical crisis of British soglety and state in which Naim attempts
to explain the new national questions of the UK, and develops a general theorelical analysis
of nationalism.
lan Steedman
Marx After Srafla
The first systemalic recasting of Markist categories In the fight of the work of Piero Sraffa.
Steedman provides a radical reconstruction of Traditional theories of value, price and profit in
a work which will have a protound affect on Marxist economic debate
Etienne Balibar
On the Dictatorship of the Proletarlat
A polemical critique of the recent abandonment of Marx's and Lenin's concept by the
European CPs. Containe gacuments from the pre-Congress debate for the 22nd Congress of
the French CP, together with an articie by Althusser on the significance of the zand
Congress.
Dominique Lecourt
Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko
The first Marxist account of the notorious career of Lysenko — the provincial agronomist who
dictated to Saviet sciance in Stalin's Russia. Lecourt provides a pungent and now account
of the historical rise of Lysenkoism.
Emesto Laclau
Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory
A bold axploration of the particularities of feudalism, fascism and populism in Latin America
and in Europe, and their connections with capitalism, which sets them In a trash framework
for Marxist theory.
Western Marxiem — A Critical Reader
A comprehensive volume of aseys explaining sach of the major ayatama within Western
Marxism - those of taklics, Adora, Marcuse, Gramscl, Colletti, Satre and Althuager,
NLB
Paul TIMES JOHNSON
LITERARY FAN
SUPP cLB effects. The emergence of capable and aggressive ideologues like Robert Moss Ca self-styled "political warfare specialist) and the expansion of Aims of Industry under the more ambitious title Aims for Freedom and Enterprise, are just two signs of the growing confidence and determination of the Right. But there are other signs, which warn of a more fundamental cultural disturbance. The deepening anti-Marxist bias of the Times Literary Supplement (the trade paper of British academia), the political and com mercial dislocation of the New Statesman, and the hysterical anti-union diatribes of its ex-editor, Paul Johnson - these are more than topical reactions to a period of economiccrisis. Theyareevidence, rather, of a profound politico-ideological shift, affecting a whole generation of British intellectuals and opening a new phase in British cultural life. This article will attempt a thumbnail sketch of this intelligensia and its crisis, and
E8.50
E8.50 Publication: 10 Norember
E8.50
E8.50 Paperback t3.50
In Paperback
Reading Capital (with Etienne Balibert 23.05
and Philcsoong E2.35 Walter Benjamin Underalanding Brecht E2 Charles Baudeiaire 13
Minima Moralis Georg Lukace Tactice and Ethics 53
7 CARLISLE STREET, LONDON W1
NEW
NAFF
STATES.
MAN
will indicate the dangers and opportunities that await the left in this new situation.
The Post-War Intelligensin The character of Britain's post-war intelligensia was shaped by three related factors: 1. Its political colouration; 2. Its social tradition; and 3. The internal design of the culture it created. 1. Its outstanding political trait was its insulation from Marxism. In the first post-war decade, the powerful Leftward currents of the Thirties were blocked and reversed, and Marxism ceased to have any serious influence in the national culture. The various factors that led to the post-war decimation of the Left in British culture — most obviously, Stalinism, the Cold War, the long boom and the roleof Labour — have yet to be assembled in a convincing historical analysis, but the institutional evidence speaks for itself.
The Left Book Club, which in 1939 had over 55,000 members, organised nationally in 1,500 local clubs. closed in 1948. The quarterly Politics and Letters, launched by Raymond Williams and others as a Left alternative to Zhdanovism, foundered after a year. The CP-sponsored journal Arena, whose line was fiercely anti-American national-populism, ceased publication in 1951; and shortly afterwards its companion theoretical journal, Modern Quarterly, also ceased to appear.
he new voice or inc Fifties was Encounter. Sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (and covertly by the CIA), Encounter schooled an entire generation of intellectuals in the morality of politics After the Apocalypse. *Totalitarian ideologies were henceforth to be shunned, and the true "liberal' spirit upheld, in a world whose most audacious project was "piecemeal social engineering'. Encounter was not only obsessively antiCommunist. The long-term effect of its "liberal" crusade was to devalue principled political debate of any kind, in favour of a blend of incoherent reformism and comfortable disillusionment that British intellectuals had made their own by the beginning of the Sixties.
2. Political conformism was buttressed by social integration. British intellectuals have
From Class Society
an introduction to marxism
Ernest Mandal is no stranger to the readers of Socialist Challenge or Inpracor. Many
readors first cleared their minds or the dross of vulga
to Marsist Economic Theory which has newseldover 200, 000 coplesworld-wide reading one or another of his books en economics or the
From Claas Socialy to Communiem a a comprehensively written and politicalls
dialectical malenalism andhistorical material sIr Fiom Class Sociaty to Communiam will be a mading militants who don't jus book, the lirst to be published by iragazine Intamational. It comes out in November 1077. Price 21.B chosen be Ire peperback; E4.50 cloth
Forafultimat year listturn to page 15
never had a strong corporate indentity: unobtrusive as a stratum, they bave as a rule been virtually indistinguishable from and largely uncritical of their parent social classes.
The origins of this remarkable socio cultural pact lie far back in English history In its modern form it can be traced to th mid-Victorian "intellectual aristocracy, a network of brilliant and successful families, linked by class and intermarriage, whose names - Darwin, Huxley and Strachey, to name three — appear again and again in the rolls of England's cultural elite.
Over the next century, the social and occupational composition of the intelligentsia was significantly altered; but not so the unwritten statutes that governed its conduct Britain's academics have remained solidly attached to their departmental smallhold ings, seldom pausing to take note of goings on over the hedge; its political and social commentators, like the loyal civil servants whom they so closely resemble, have been unrelievedly "practical" and "constructive" in their response to 'our" national difficulties; and in the 'quality Sunday papers reviewers have gone on organising the leisure time of their readers in an casy conversational tone born of inner peace and a profound sense of belonging.
3. Among the most striking features of post-war British culture has been its strong bias towards literature. The origins of this bias, which lie in the complex cultural history of the inter-war period, cannot be explored bere. Its main upshot was that literature came to be seen as the de facto moral centre of the culture, a sort of final appeal to which the lesser issues of culture and society could be referred for judge ment. The values that literature embodied
were those of humanity itself - "decency". "compassion", honesty' and so on and to keep faith with it was somehow to insure one's integrity against the
deceptions of the public world. This was a patent mystification, but its ideological
effects were real and powerful.
Political discussion, once deprived of any
"ultimate' social meaning sank into triviality
and conformism; while literature, clevated above the merely" political and historical, Continued on Page IV
to Communism
by Ernest Mandel
LINKE
LINKS
muse for thousands al understand the word, but also to change It This Ink links is one of an autonomous series with init
Page 2 scan of this page
SOCIALIST CHALLENGE
REVIEW or BOOKS
WEALTH OF SOME NATIONS M.Caldwell
The West has ted off the riches of the Third World
World nations are challenging lalism. They are in revolt.
This provocative book by Malcalm Caldwell investigates how the West has
provide the basis for the wealth of a nation, in order to feed her population and provide
industry. The Third Worldhas been sucked of her raw materiale to achieve the ISSAD DAU LOOT COM 1000 300 andlechnological advance.
lenging the supremacy of the West. Third World peoples are rejacting the models of developmentoffered bycapitaliem and the oncept of a world market heralded b Adam Smith. They are taking control o
ing them along socialist self-sufficient lines. Caldwell examines Asian ancialist states in ceral as te mocer sor tre tuture Hardbackm Paperbackes Hardback C5
ORDER DIRECT: Please WEALTH OF SOME NATIONS copies лагорясктрарегояся alieque/ PO. for E. payabiato Zed Press.
Name...
NOTES:
London N19DN
MERLIN
Socialist Register 1977 edited by Raiph Miliband and John Saville.
Theory of Capital Reproduction Accumulation by Shinzaburo Koshimura. edited and introduced by Jesse Schwartz.
Voices of Czechoslovak Socialists Charter77 and otherdissident documents.
also available
William Moris eye.r. nampson
by Alastair Davidson
KartMarx and the Close of his Systom
The Philosophy of Praxis by Sanchez Vasquez
The Samiadat Register editedby Roy Madvodes
Parliamentary Socialism by Haiph Milliband
History of The Chartist Movement by R.C. Gammage
Artand Society
Human Face of Socialism by George Wheeler
Marx and Keynes by Paul Mattick
Aspects of History and Class Consciousness edited by Istvan Meeziros
• All these nies besides an avallabie at reduced prices ro members of the Merlin Book Club. For details write to 2-4 West Ferry Rced,
Review of Books I
THE
БЫв.
ХОд.
Westem Imper-
Stalin's
Thugs
192pp
GENE -THE 23.00
23.30
90p
23.90
23.00
£2.40 in ancient times'.
E3.00
22.50 disinters a Western
€2.75
worms'. 11.50
21.50
£1,80
(1.50
and many more
Literary
Soviet Writers Congress 1934 Lawrence & Wishart E2.75
The first Soviet Writers Congress of 1934, so the blurb tells us, was the 'culmination' of one of the richest periods of Soviet literary debate. Destruction" would be a more appropriate term. As the Soviet Union swung from its ultra-leftist "Third Period' towards Popular Frontism. it became necessary 1o cool "proletarian zeal" in literature in the name of a broader cultural alliance -not least because the Five Year Plan meant wooing the petty-bourgeois technicians and intelligentsia. In any case, so Stalin had decided, Russia was now entering upon 'full socialism", so talk of 'proletarian literature' was becoming redundant. On the other hand, as the Stalinist thumbscrews tightened, all critical and "psychological' clements in literature needed to be cradicated in the name of slavishly uncritical celebration of the beroic Fatherland, yoking turgid "realism' to euphoric revolutionary romanticism. All independent terary bodies were accordingly dissolved into the Writers Congress, membership of which was compulsory for publication. And out of it grew the disastrous literary doctrine of so-called "socialist realism", which was to stifle the least flicker of cultural criticism for decades.
This book lines up the speeches of the Congress of Stalin's literary thugs: Zhdanov, Gorky, Radek and Bukharin. It would make amusing reading if it weren't so grisly. Zhdanov gets things off to a rousing start by informing the Congress that they have the richest literature in the world, and urges writers to become (in Stalin's plirase) engineers of the soul', Maxim Gorky, who as Russia's one outstanding novelist of time presumably is the richest literature in the world' in person, contributes a rambling account of Soviet literature, and believes that bourgeois Literature began
With the disaffected puritanism peculiar to Stalinism upbraids as "shameless a Russian novelist who chose as his hero 'a lascivious two-legged goat in trousers. The ex-Trotskyist Karl Radek
series of inferior writers who happen to be sempathetic co the Sovier Union. and launches his notorious attack on James Joyce, whose Glysser is subtly characterised as ta heap of dung crawling with
(Radek also believes that Ulesses is set in 1916, an error of a mere Twelve vears. In a triumph of dialectical thinking, he claims on the one hand that 'Soviet literature is the best literature in the world, and on the other hand that proletarian writers simply have not mastered form as set? Form, it seems, is something of an optional extra.
In contrast to the intellectual nullity of Zhdanov, Gorky and Radek, Nikolas Bukharin has real claims 1o he an aesthelician, His paper on pocery and poctics closcly analyses the nature of poetic language, although its case that poetry is thinking in images" was
demolished by the Russian Formalists several years beforehand. recognises the relative autonomy' of erature, refuses a vulgar materialism of the text, and provides some sensitive commentaries on Soviet poets. critical style of these commentaries is strikingly reminiscent of Trotsky's Lierature and Revolution - indeed Bukharin's judgement on the poet Alexander Blok is more or leas lifted (consciously or unconsciously) from that study. The influence, needless to say, isn't acknowledged; Trotsky rates one mention in this book, but despite that doesa't make it into the index.
Alone among the contributers, Bukharin sees the importance of examining the formal elements of literature, and their complex relations Criticising that "purely nihilistic attitude to the problem of form' which can frequently be observed in our own Marxian ranks', he finds between literature and history in lang uage itself. Another shadowy influence may well lurk behind this position that of V.N. Voloshinos, whose Marxis and the Philosophy of Language is one of the greatest cultural works of the period. peared around the date of the Congress (presuming he wasn't a pseudonym for someone elsc). so it isn't entirely surprising that Bukharin makes no reference to him.
Bukharin's other strength is his candid declaration that the level of Soviet cultural development is dismally low; Refusing the Zhdanos, he has the courage 1o admit that, compared to the literary knowledge ol a Pushkin, the contemporary Soviet achievement 'could be put under a threepenny bit. Lindeterred by this stricture, the Congress went formally resolve that 'Soviet literature has grown into a mighty force for socialist culture". It was this mixture of lying, self-deception and empty heroics which was to set the tone for the cultura! POWDERS LO CODEC
Digesting
Marxist
Politics
Revolution & Class Stuggle: A Reader in Marxist Politics Edited by Robin Blackburn Fontana paperback €1.95 Despite the buge expansion of Marxist publishing, there is still a real lack of cheap paperbacks in which the best of Marxist writing is made available to a wide audience. Anything which helps to fill this gap is more than welcome, and although Robin Blackburn's new collection may not seem cheap it really is good value with 12 major articles in its 450 pages.
Blackborn'sreader Din three parts. The first, "Origins", includes Blackburn on the politics of Marx and Engels, Colletti on lenin, Mandel on che Leninist Theory of Organization, Lowy on the National Question. The second. The Course of Revolution", has Colletti on Stalin, Deutseler on Maoism, Pelikan on Czechoslovakia, and Mandel on Peaceful Coexistence and World Reyolution". These two sections seem to me reasonably coherent; the third, Class
Bukharin
The
who beginner. to history.
the link COITTICS Voloshinov, however, disap-
optimisma of
burn fails
on to TERRY EAGLETON
Sita
Virago E1.95 heart.
Strugele and Bourgeois Power', B more mixed, bringing us Geras on Luxemburg, Trotsky and Bourgeois cracy, Nairn the Labour Party, Gramsci on Workers" Councils, band on Chile.
These are not then the classics, commentaries on them balanced fairly evenly with historical analyses, culled mainly from the pages of New Left Review. It will be most useful to people
already have some grasp of marxist concepts — from political argument or a reading of the basic pamphlets -and wish to read more deeply into the theory and its history. It doesn't have a straightforward couch presentation of basic concepts to be useful to a real
The articles are all substantial and worth reprinting and although we car pick out particular favourites pleased to see a key section of Norman Geras" book reprinted — and query one or two — Nairn is a bit outdated - the real criticisms are political. Most of the authors share Blackburn's original ussumption that "Something like a third of the world's population now lives in
where, there has socialist revolution." The genuine Marxist tradition often appears there fore as a critical variant of orthodox Communism.
This is one strand within Trotskyism and revolutionary Marxism today, but it is not the only one, or perhaps the most valid, In failing to show more of the alternatives within revolutionary politics today, or of the practical terrain in which they have been developed, Black-
despite the real contributions of the articles in this book - in his most important aim, "to make available a contemporary restaternent and appraisal of the classical marxist political tradition"
MARTINSHAW
Emotional
Masochism
By Kate Millett
If you're an emotional masochist, this is your kind of book. Kate Millett, author of the pioneering Sexuel Politics, charts the slow disintegration ol her affair with Sita, a woman ten years her senior. The end of this relationship, following hard upon a nervous breakdown and desertion by her husband, must have been a deeply painful process for Millett. But somchow it's hard to maintain sisterly sympathy author who is so conscious while she is living a moment that it will later be immortalised in print.
Millett kept a detailed diary throughout the period covered in Sira, and she hasn't weeded it out, treating us to an odd mixture of profound anguish and trivial detail. Much of the action takes place at meals (cue for description of restaurant): crises always seem to coincide with the cooking of chicken. Buried in those 300-odd pages are some insights about love between women, ageing, writing and other relevant themes, but they are rarely illuminated and never synthesised. Uncomfortably close to self-indulgence, like picking old scabs off the
KAREN MARGOLIS
Agnes
Smedley's
Lived
Experiences
Daughter of Farth By Agnes Smedley Virago E1.95 There is a rawncas to Doughier of Earth which makes it almost painful to
read. It is die pa the agony of a Demo- woman raised in the Southern Unit Mili the century, Lik Rogers, Agnes S but of earth. She wro al novel at a cr attempt 10 grasp past. It is a isolation and con
Marie Rogers t hazy memories i recalls with wa family or commu -I was beena dominant recolle shed after treque for lack of love shame of povert from place 1o pli living from the ur earliest thinking r forces impelled escape from this need to avoid the a woman. Belor school, she had was the only pos her double burd ers of 000ks an appreciate wha Marie.
In her struge! learnt of the or own experience classes and nation way of life, firs member, then a IWW, and finall Indian nationalis she bravely endi prison during
Haling what destiny, Marie g deny womanhoc with an alien, an object two marriages a men, she remai oppression. To h backstreet abor preferable to the But she could no the struggle agai Her work for th ment was merely political commi
sion against be probably made it she could shan without becomin
Marie's perso demand equalicy In all important different from t might be able to when it comes matters, they'll other woman. TI the movement s for - -including Slower than any finger al a sexua "Shame? Whiche to escape led he her flight: her w which ends the reason for its in it has lost nor meaning.
Page 3 scan of this page
lived experience, icious proletarian arched poverty of and cates at the turn of r heroine, Mary ty was a daughter is autobiographicn her life, in an meaning of her • record of her
red no sweet and r childhood. She i the occasional This book, gathering, but her
capitalism. localed,
1 is of her tears,
the working class aternal whippings, † attention, from the family moved rying to scratch a ting soil. From her ents, two powertul proper rie: the need to 1 existence and the sequences of being e had set foot in disappearance. ed that education
thesis, escape roule from /e casual consumscepts can hardly urning meant to
class limitations
knowledge, she scion beyond her the subjection of which has been olitics became her a Socialist Party mpathiser of the a supporter of the vement, for which interrogation and of popular
War 1.
Saw as woman's up determined to fer body seemed mistrust. Through veral affairs with fearful of sexual he horrors of two gles' (p. 189-90).
were intinitely It of motherhood. ing herself to join cratic freedoms. oman's condition. ith control move urnalistic job; her lay with Indian ngth of her revul1 female qualities ossible to see what th other women ak. solution lemonstrating that pects she was no Intellectually, you way with il.... but sexua! or socjal you just like any lian nationalists of id chosen to work usband — were no er men to point a ee woman and cry lirection Marie ran k to the origin of shood. This crisis, el. was also the By Uri Davis on. Fifty years on, Zed Press £5.00 f is power and
REN MARGOLIS
Neo-Centrism
the State
Marxism & Politics:
By Ralph Miliband Oxford University Press £3.50
which together with a volume by Raymond Williams launches the new OUP Marxist Introductions series, purports to make a contribution to the development of a Marxist tradition' of political studies of (in particular) the countries of advanced
On the pretext that there does not yet exist a sufficient body of theory to constitute such a tradition, Miliband attempts to delimit the problematic within which it must be situated. Inevitably, however, his text touches on a number of questions which are
as it were, at the interface between this and related problematics.
Marx, Engels and Lenin consistently emphasised, however, that the dictatorship of the proletariat, to the extent that it functions to organise the hegemony of
and to suppress the forcible resiscance of the bourgeoisie and its allies, is no less a state than the political form which it supplants. The assertion that it is no longer a state
expresses rather the essential point that, unlike its predecessor, the constitutive function of the proletarian state is to facilitate its own eventual
Miliband's implicit rejection of this
together with his failure to acknowledge that the determinant structure of bourgeois democracy is inherently and necessariiy reproductive of the
whose "removal he advocates, leads hum towards the formulation of a revolutionary reformist" position essentially identical to that
propounded by, for example, by left social democrats Iske Geoff Hodgson and Geoff Roberts.
Like them Miliband theorises an adaptation of the concept of dual power as a Nexible and complex network of organs
participation operating throughout civil society and intended not to replace the state but to complement it" (p. 188), Associated with this is his untenable assertion thar "the civic freedoms which, however inadequately and precariously, for part of bourgepis democracy are the product of centuries of unremitting popular strug-
Clearly, it is essential to recognise the substantive content of bourgeois denso-
Moreover, popular struggle undoubtedly contributed to the extension of suffrage and associated civil liberties'. The reality of this process must not, however, be seen in isolation from its social and institutional conditions of possibility.
The book, nevertheless, fulfils well enough the function of an introduction lo Marxist political theory, although the promise in the advertising bluth that it (together with other volumes in the series) will also make an 'original contribucion to its "intellectual discipline cannot he regarded seriously.
PAUL BELLIS
Israeli Myths
& Realities
Israel: Utopia Incorporated
Written by an Iscaeli anarcho-pacifist who has served a prison sentence Tor
conscientious objection, Israel: Uropia Incorporated provides many interesting insights into the workings of the Zionist state, the thinking of its founding elites and the structures of its main institulions such as the Histadrut and the kibbutzim). There is also some useful material on the position of the Oriental Jews who, despite the systematic dis crimination from which they suffer in
State of all the Jews", traditionally constituted a reservoir of support for the worst chauvinist and militarist forces in Israel (such as Begin).
The fact, nevertheless, thar there was a significant response to the recent meas ures taken by the Moroccan and Iraqi Jews to return to the countries of origin indicates the depth of the Zionist state's failure to solve the problems of the Oriental-Jewish population, as well as exposing once again the hypocrisy of the 'Let My People Go' campaign (after all the money spent on organising emigration of Soviet, US. British, Latin American Jews to Israel could be used to improve the living standards of the Oriental Jews, but that, of course, would negare the purpose of Zionism).
The shameful degeneration of the Zionist movement (even if this degeneration was inevitable, given its original premises) → the growing cynicism, the flagrant corruption of the "Labour' bureaucracies, the militarisation of the economy, public support for crazies, the increasingly close relationship between Israel and South Africa (which extends to the kibbutzim belonging to reputediy left-wing Hashomer Hatzair) is documented in considerable detail, The chapter on Israel and the US' explores the two dominant hypoth eses (an abandonment of Israel by its imperialist protector, or heightened US-Arab tension, leading to a strengthening of the Washington-Tel Aviv alliance and perhaps even a joint offensive against the countries) and seers to lean towards the latter view
Davis concludes with a call for a socialist, multi-nationaL democratic Republic in Palestine', but the most perfect revolutionary blueprint is useless unless you indicate, in Lassalles" words, not only the goal but also the path. How can the Palestinians use the tremendous weight they have acquir. ed within the Israeli economy to overturn the system which exploits and oppresses them? What should be the main priorities of the Isracli socialist left which, no doubt to prove that libertarians can be just as sectarian as the terrible Traesk vists, mention at all? What is to be done il some form of West Bank state does come into being? These are some of the urgent, pressing questions which Uni Davis unfortunately does not even ask. Yet it is only if chey are asked, and answered, that the Palestinians will be able to escape their present plight and the Israelis will be able to live without icar of tomorrow.
ALAN ADLER
Demystifying
Stopes
Marie Stopes: A Biography By Ruth Hall Andre Deutsch £5.95
have
Margaret
victory in the fight for equality.
the and into the more popular fieid of sex. married late for the time,
book:
Zionist
the large scale fundamentalist
sciler-
blotchy.
who were destroying the race.
megalomaniac whose life she left of the
mination for women. oil-producing
Wing habits of the working class.
secular and
"prurient
receives no
dangers of bourgen- indis dualism.
In her introduction, Ruth Hall says of Marie Stopes: compared with her initial struggles, the activilies of the women's liberation movement over the last decade appear in retrospect as mere mopping-up operations after a major battle'. By such an assessment one could equally-say that
Thatcher's elevation to the leadership of the Tory Party is the ultimate
Ms Stopes was no revolutionary. Her actions sprang from two impulses. The first ISSN was to right the wrongs she personally had suffered, and the second was to be lamous. It was the first impulse which took her away from the academic field of coal search
She already with a Tirm idea in her mind of the joys of sex which she expounded in an unpublished
Many of her ideas came from reading the works of Edward Carpenter, separating his views on sexuality from his wider politics. In spite of this interest, she had been married for two years before she discovered that her husband was impotent and her marriage consummated. Appalled at her own ignorance she researched all available texts (mostly medical and encouraged people to share with ber their own sexual problems. Deciding that marital problems stemmed largely from the ignorance of men on the nature of female sexuality, in 1918 al the age of 38, while still a virgin herself. she wrote Married Love. t was an instant best
Her primary interest in birth control was to limit the reproduction of the poor. In an article to the Daily Mail in 1919 she asked readers to visit the mean streets' and ask
those puny, gaunt, ill-balanced, feeble, ungainly. withered children, the young of an imperial race? It was, she contended, the Mrs Jones with their numerous sickly children
Ruth Hall admits to disking this
has painstakingly researched. But she has done just as Stopes would have wished. She has portrayed her as a political figure of such overiding importance that her influence radically changed the position of women. In all 327 pages, Ruth Hall barcly mentions the existence of a birth control movement which was gathering mass support within the labour movement. The dialogue in the
time (see Sheila Rowbotham's biography of Stella Brown) ranged between those who saw birth control as a ruling class device to breed the working class out of existence and those уввга. who saw it as a crucial means of "self-deter-
The birth control campaien can only have been hampered by Stopes" arrogant tirades against the breed
Certainly she was a charismatic figure and as such brought the glare of publicity to the birth control movement. But, she was so caught up in ber own need for power than she relused even to help others who were facing persecution at the same time and for the same cause as her own. When Rose and Guy Aldred were prosecuted for publishing Margaret Sanger's Family Limition on groends of obscenity, she not only refused to sapport them, she wrote to the Public Prosecutor to say that the pamphlet was
Ruth Hall's biography is critical of Stopes it only of her personal style. She makes no attempi to criticise her politically Nevertheless, she writer so well that it would be a picy to dismiss the book entirels. The wealth of detail is fascinating well and the descriptions of Stopes attitudes to the miners strikes of the 1920, and che breeding of revolutionaries, her surveys of the sexuality of clergymer etc, are compelline. If sou need a pood excuse to read it think of has an allegorical story on th
ANGELA PHILLIPS
SOCIALIST CHALLENGE Review of Books i
REVIEWorBOOKS
Pluto 4 A Press
Ann Foreman Feminity as Alienation Women and the Family in Marxismand Psychoanalysis A revolutionary reappraisal of Freud er-1 al attempts INESTSE ETENCINI approaches into Marcism by such writers as Marcuse Mitchell and Reich This book mous women's organisation as part of tha struggle foreocialism 176 pages
0 904383 82 8 02.40 papergac ISBN 0 904383 63 6 24:80 hardback Pub ication dale: 20 Oclober 1977
Cynthia Cockburn The LocalState:
Management of Cities and People Ananalysis oriocal government as part of the stale machine, this boak snows the changing ways in which capital st rela new terrain" of class struggle which is being chaled. 308N0 924383 48 2 1295 paserback ISBN 0 904383 49 D EE.E0 handback
Leon Trotsky History of the Russian Revolution Troikes moanine work Dol In SCAlE and power and as the fullest expression of his ideas on revolutich. As an accounters revolution i senby angor is chiaraciors It stands unique in world literalure. Isaac Deutscher
ISBN D 904383 41 5 25.00 paserback Haleason
Unit 10 Spanor Courl, 7 Chaicot Road London NW18LH. 01-7220141
November Titles
ARMIES AND POLITICS
Jack Woddis What is the role of the mil tary in different
autonomous torce? In what cincumatarices do coups saccoan? what extent haus the ClA and athe agencies been involved in specific coupe? Cancoups be progressive? Can the army be won for sac alism? Or does it have to be smashed?
Theseare some of the questions consider. af the background and events of the most important military coupe of thepast itteen
"EUROCOMMUNISM'
AND THE STATE Santiago Carrillo The controvers al book by the General Party. whichiracrucialcomributionto the debate anthedese coment of arevolut onat strategy tor socianst roaco, mane political Circumelances of advancec
taraback E5.85 reperback 62.75 SOVIET WRITERS CONGRESS, 1934 Gorky, Radek, Bukharin,
Zhdanov and others A reprint a ra man spaccnes at ing Congress which neluded outstanding Soviet analyses of world literature /Gorky
3E Zhearor's call tor зосіяня win revolut onary romantician
cacerback E2.75
LAWRENCE & WISHART
39 Museum Street, London WC1
Page 4 scan of this page
SOCIALIST CHALLENGE Review of Books IV
REVIEWOE BOOK
The Other
Bookshop
328, Upper Street,
LONDON N1
CRITIQUE
COMMUNISTE
NUMBER 17 NOW OUT Price E1.40 + 15p Postage & Packing
The Road to 1945
British Politics and the Second
World War
Paul Addison
This is a brilliant book. It is
probably the most intelligent mon-
ograph on a recent period of British
politics' - New Society
Illustrated
Revolutionaries
E.J. Hobsbawm
The State in Capitalist Society
Ralph Miliband
The History and Practice of the
Political Police in Britain Tony Bunyan Available from all major bookshops or from the publisher:
Quartet Books Limited, 27 Goodge Street, London W1P 1FD
Quartet Books
Continued from Page 1 became the warrant for complacent subjectivism. The emphasis on fiction in the review pages the weeklies 35 one reflection of this mystification; the New Statesman's physical separation of polities" and "culture" has effectively institutionalised it. Britain's post-war intelligentsia, cultivated but distrustful of ideas. socially "responsible' but suspicious at heart of the political domain, is the living proof of its stultifying power.
The Intelligentsia in Crisis For more than a decade this cultural contract held good. Revolls from within, staged by socially unprivileged and occupationally insecure newcomers, were deflected, co-opted or simply ignored. The new Marxist sub-culture that emerged in the carly Sixties was for the most part disregarded. Over the next decade, however, ail this was to change.
The real foundation of this homogenous, well-integrated and adaptable bourgeois intelligentsia was the political equibbrium established after 1945. The self-evident truths that explained its seemingly natural world were those of Keynesian economics, Fabian reformism and the British Constitution. Today, as British capital fights its way out of the worst recession in over forty years, amidst social crisis and constitutional tremors that may yet break up the old Great-British state, that "natural" world is visibly coming apart. The current crisis has burst into this complacent Fabian universe much as proletarian insurgency and imperialist competition shattered the calm of Edwardian Liberalism - and with comparably drastic ideological effects. For the second time this century the Idea of Progress has been confounded.
The most spectacular ideological effect has been the rise of the Right. In the TLS, there are clear signs of an anti-Marxist mobilisation. Whereas the first Black Paper was shrugged off as a reactionary curiosity. the most recent found itself in the vanguard of a concerted press campaign against progressive education. The liberal social reforms of the Sixties are now threatened by powerful obscurantist currents which THE ROAD TO 1945 Paul Addison
£2.95
£2.50
£0.60
E2.50
as the recent Gay News case shows — are prepared to overturn even the most basic bourgeois freedoms of speech and publica tion in pursuit of their aims. Reaction 1s again respectable.
The Fabian intelligentsia, sapped by years of "reasonableness', has proved quite inadequate to the new situation. Disorientation and retreat have been its main responses. The wholesale involution of Fabian culture is manifest in the pages of its traditional mouthpiece, the New Statesman. The leader-writers of the NS have for some time now been quite unable to distinguish between a sober grasp of political conjunctures and their own spurious sense of occasion. Its main articles, zigzagging wildly from week to week, belie all residual claims to political coherence. And its reviews section is now edited by Martin Amis who, believing the front of the paper to be dominated by left-wing opinion, intends to open the back pages to writers of the contrary persuasion. Amis cannot have heard of Paul Johnson.
The evolution of this egregious publicist illustrates, with the extravagance of caricature, the new political bearings of the intelligentsia, An opponent of Castle's In Place of Strife in the late Sixties, Johnson now specialises in crazed polemics agunst the labour movement and all who, by word or deed, imperii civilisation" and its historic guardians, the middle class. Only one circumstance muffles his reactionary clamourings: the decline of the journal which, disgracefully, continues to tolerate him as a director and contributor. The circulation of the NS has plummelted in recent years, giving the strongest evideno of all that Labour's traditional intellectual periphery is now in crisis.
Fighting Back
The new situation is both dangerous and fertile. Dangerous, because despite the organisational gains of recent years, the new Marxist tendencies are not yet firmly established in the labour movement; a co-ordinated ideological assuult by the Right could set them back ten years. And since the decomposition of Fabian culture is much further advanced than the decline of Labour polities, the balance of forces is likely to remain disadvantageous for some time. Fertile, because the possibilities for a Marxist intervention in the national culture are wider now than at any time since the Thirties.
Given its present composition, however, the Left is ill-prepared for defence and counter-atlack. Factional divisions form one obvious hindrance; more serious in this context, however, is the curious division of labour that structures the three distingwishable formations of the Left intelligentsia today. 1. One is overwhelmingly theoretical in focus; versatile and productive in their own fields, its representatives incline towards acadenticism and show definite list to Stalinism in one or other of its current forms. 2. Political militancy is the hallmark of the revolutionary Left; but this is too often accompanied by dogmatism, and leads too many militants to a "hyper-activist distrust - mounting to anti-intellectualism -of theoretical work whose implications for action' are not immediately obvious. 3. The third — and largest — is best represented by London's Time Out: generically anti-capitalist, but with no coherent perspective to order the discrete 'issues" that concern it, this formation is most consistent in its support for radical currents in the arts.
These formations overlap in important ways, but by and large they lead seperate existencies, communicating infrequently and none too fluently.
The implication of this (admittedly) crude schema is this: before the Left can mobilise its full cultural fighting strength, it must find a means of organising it, for the first time. Ultimately, what is needed is a new, non-denominational organ capable of cen tralising our resources for a sustained struggle against cultural reaction. Meanwhile, certain intermediute forms must be devised, to provide the revolurionary Left with a means of combat and of selfpreparation. The question of its relevance
to 'action* has already been posed and answered — by the Right.
RAMMEAS
Official
Histories
China Readingsedited by Shurmann, Schell, Milton and Milton.
Vol. I: Imperial China 80p Vol. II: Republican China 95p Vol. III: Communist China E1.35 Vol. IV: People's China E1.95 Penguin Books
The first three volumes of the China Reader were first published in 1967, at the height of the Vietnam War. They aimed at providing a comprehensive survey Chinese politics, ideology and society in popular and readable form, drawing on both Chinese and foreign sources. Typically, they are dedicated to the Faculty Peace Committee? and plead for US imperialist commitment to reform. For if reform fails, the polarisation world forces may come into being, with the US fighting on the side of the reactionarics: They also stress that students of Chinese affairs should not only analyse material and act as a technical advisor for those who make the decisions. (but also take a rational and moral posicion oo issues. These volumes provide a well chosen and highly readable introduction to the social and political crises which led to China's three revolutions of 191l, 1925-27 and 1949. They present alternative views on Chinese history from the Ch'ing dynasty 10 the People's Republic, connected by a general commentary . The fourth volume, first published in 1974, deals with China from 1966 to 1972. It gives overwhelming prominence to the views of the Chinese bureaucrats and their publicists. In this sense it is a product of the Nixon ere and the beginning of Sino-American rapprochement. But Mao and the Chinese leaders — including the recently toppled gang of four', all of whom managed to muscle their way into this volume as prominent repres entatives of the 'Chinese people hardly the best commentators on this recent period of Chinese history, Rather than fork out £1.95 for it, readers would do better to borrow Livio Maitan's brilliant Army, Party and Masses in China (published by New Left Books at £8) from their local library.
GREGOR BENTON
BOOKS RECEIVED ¡Wention In this poturin does noi abruce apossibilllyof areview insolare asue Underground Notes by Mihajis Mitajon, ES 20 AK.P:
Kert Mars, Selected Writings, cited Dr The Spiral Asaeed by Edward Upward 05.50 Hainemann!
An Intantile Disorder by Nigel Young The Tamarisk Tree ty Done Ruasell, E1.35 An Exe to india by David Sepourne, £1.50 Chilean Volcas br Down Henley an Bemaco Bori(Eas! t2.05 Harvester
Women's Liberation in Chine ly Claudie Antonio Granisel Dy Alastair Davidson МаРІнкя. india: A Wounded Chilisalion by V.S
S3CDU Love of Worker Sees by Alexanars
← Socialist Challenge No. 17, 13 October 1977Socialist Challenge No. 18, 20 October 1977 →