Tag: book reviews

Book review: Rebecca Karl – China’s Revolutions in the Modern World: A Brief Interpretive History

A version of this article first appeared in the Morning Star.

Verso’s latest offering on China is a concise and thought-provoking overview of nearly two centuries of Chinese revolutionary movements, written by respected historian Rebecca Karl.

Starting with the Taiping Rebellion (from 1850), the book goes on to discuss the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the establishment of the Republic of China (1912), the May Fourth Movement (1919 onwards), the rises and falls of the United Front between the Communist Party and the Guomindang, the founding of the People’s Republic (1949), the Cultural Revolution, and the reform period (1978 onwards). Importantly, the author discusses the links between these processes, and explores their connection to contemporaneous events and changes in the rest of the world.

Karl provides a particularly interesting and nuanced analysis of some of the most controversial phases of modern Chinese history: the Hundred Flowers campaign, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution. Although she doesn’t shirk from describing the terrible excesses and mistakes associated with those periods, she manages to avoid the childish tropes usually found in Western historical accounts (Mao as crazed and vengeful dictator, etc). Instead, Karl describes the incredibly complex domestic and international political context, the deteriorating relationship between China and the Soviet Union, the resulting apparent need for China to be economically self-reliant; along with the heated ideological debates within the Communist Party about how to build socialism in a vast and underdeveloped country that had still yet to wipe out feudalism and undergo industrial revolution.

The turbulent history of the relationship between the Communist Party and the Guomindang is also told with skill and subtlety.

Turning to the post-1978 ‘reform and opening up’ era, Karl offers a disappointingly one-sided critique that takes its lead from the more extreme elements of the Chinese New Left. Socialism with Chinese Characteristics is portrayed as an unfortunate setback in which socialism has been undone and replaced with vicious neoliberalism and ruthless repression.

Karl’s criticism of the worrying inequality to be found in China today is of course valid and important, but it should be balanced with some discussion of how quality of life has improved for the vast majority of Chinese people. This rising baseline of human development certainly mitigates rising inequality, and helps to explain why the Chinese government retains its popularity and legitimacy.

Deng Xiaoping and his successors are criticised for a strategy in which the ‘ends’ (GDP growth and technical development) justify the ‘means’ (private capital, foreign investment, massive inequality). But this is a misrepresentation. GDP growth and technical development are not ends in themselves; they are a proxy for improving people’s lives and breaking out of backwardness. The reform period has achieved extraordinary successes in poverty alleviation, to a point where extreme poverty, illiteracy, malnutrition and homelessness have been all but wiped out for the first time in China’s history. Is it so difficult to see something socialist in this?

Another complaint about the book its treatment of the Tiananmen Square incident and the situation in Xinjiang. In both cases, the author offers little more than a recapitulation of the standard Western narrative of authoritarian Han Chinese leaders riding roughshod over the will of the masses. Karl certainly doesn’t do her credibility any favours by citing the professional anti-communist and Christian fundamentalist Adrian Zenz in relation to the treatment of Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

Disagreements aside, ‘China’s Revolutions in the Modern World’ provides some valuable insight into modern Chinese history. An excellent book to read alongside this one is Han Suyin’s biography of Zhou Enlai, ‘Eldest Son: Zhou Enlai and the Making of Modern China’, covering similar ground but from a different perspective.

Book review: Two pamphlets from the Spanish Civil War

A version of this article first appeared in the Morning Star on 7 August 2019.

George Orwell’s ‘Homage to Catalonia’ is, for many, the defining account of the Spanish Civil War. Although it took up the ideological perspective of just one of the many different factions that participated in that war, and although Orwell’s personal experience of the action was limited to a short stint on a quiet front, ‘Homage to Catalonia’ has been reissued dozens of times and is on school and university curricula throughout the western world.

Orwell’s perspective made its way even further into the popular consciousness as a result of socialist film-maker Ken Loach’s 1995 film ‘Land and Freedom’, which unfortunately is based largely on Orwell’s narrative.

‘Homage to Catalonia’ essentially promotes the political positions of a relatively small Trotskyist group called the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). The POUM had argued that the Popular Front government established in 1936, against which General Franco’s fascist uprising was directed, couldn’t be trusted to pursue the fight against Franco, because it was too afraid of unleashing the forces of socialist revolution. In Orwell’s words, the Republican government was “manifestly more afraid of the revolution than of the fascists.” For Orwell, all the problems and failures of the Republican armies in the Civil War were due to the vacillating nature of the Popular Front and its major supporter on the global stage: the Soviet Union.

Given Orwell’s production of the two most prominent anti-communist novels of the twentieth century – ‘Animal Farm’ and ‘1984’ – and his later snitching on communists to the British state, it’s perhaps not surprising that he took positions on the Spanish Civil War that were fundamentally hostile to the Soviet Union and the Spanish Communist Party.

For this British aristocrat – Old Etonian and former colonial policeman in Burma – the Republican government just wasn’t radical enough, because it was attempting to hold together a fragile alliance of class forces against fascism. Given the number of people that denounced the progressive governments in Chile (1970-73) or Brazil (2003-16) from the left – in many cases contributing to their weakening – Orwell’s critique of the Republic is eerily familiar to modern ears.

The two pamphlets published in this small volume from Manifesto Heritage offer another side to the story.

JR Campbell’s ‘Spain’s Left Critics’ was originally published in 1937, just a year into the war, and deals with the POUM’s criticisms as they were being issued. Arguing against the accusation that the Popular Front was the Spanish equivalent of Kerensky’s provisional government in Russia, Campbell defends the Spanish government’s record: “It released the 30,000 working class political prisoners. It restored autonomy to the Catalan people. It restored the rights of the unions and enabled the workers to win improved conditions all round. It legalised the seizure of the land by 87,000 peasants. It broke up the fascist leagues. In the critical moment of the fascist insurrection it armed the workers.”

The Kerensky comparison betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of the class forces involved. Kerensky’s provisional government was, in Campbell’s words, “a bourgeois government carrying on an imperialist war”. The Spanish Popular Front, on the hand, was under attack from precisely the armed representatives of the capitalist and landowning classes. Equating the two was indeed “the purest nonsense”.

Bill Alexander’s pamphlet takes issue with Orwell’s characterisation of the Spanish people as being “good at many things but not at making war.” He points out that millions of ordinary Spaniards, with the help of the International Brigades, “despite most of the regular army going over to Franco, deprived of weapons, held back not only the Spanish fascists but large military units of German and Italian forces for 32 months. Far longer than the French and Belgian forces did in 1940!”

Alexander explains that, despite the claims of a few disparate ultra-left fantasists, the circumstances didn’t exist in 1930s Spain for a socialist revolution. As elsewhere, the clear priority was to build the broadest possible alliance against fascism, recognising that fascism represents the most violent, repressive, dangerous and reactionary form of capitalism. “Orwell’s views of the possibility of a revolution in Spain in 1936 and 1937 were naïve in the extreme.”

The reissuing of these two pamphlets provides a valuable contribution to the study of the Spanish Civil War. Paul Preston, a distinguished historian of the war, describes ‘Homage to Catalonia’ as a “moving but ultimately narrow vision … written with a pro-POUM stance which has been taken, erroneously, as an overview of the war, which it is not.” Preston’s book ‘A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War’ is a good starting point for those looking to explore this topic. Bill Alexander’s book ‘British Volunteers For Liberty: Spain, 1936-1939’ is also essential reading.

Book review: Samir Amin – The Long Revolution of the Global South

A slightly modified version of this article first appeared in the Morning Star on 25 June 2019.

The first volume of Samir Amin’s memoirs, A Life Looking Forward: Memoirs of an Independent Marxist, was first published over a decade ago, in 2006. It dealt primarily with his early life and the experiences that contributed to his intellectual formation and the major ideas with which he is associated: the critique of Eurocentrism; the notion of the ‘long transition to socialism’; and his insistence on ‘delinking’ from the imperialist triad of the US, Europe and Japan.

This second (and final) instalment, published now a few months after his death, combines a reiteration of Amin’s key political ideas with a whirlwind tour of the dozens of countries he visited – from Algeria to Zambia, and including many places one doesn’t hear about often enough: Mauritania, Benin, Mali, Senegal, Western Sahara, Peru, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Madagascar, Mongolia, Niger, Nepal and East Timor.

Sometimes an advisor to the government, sometimes a guest lecturer, and sometimes just visiting friends, Amin always sought out the local movements working for progressive change, be they part of socialist or radical nationalist states or underground groups fighting for liberation. As such, the reader is introduced to a dizzying array of fascinating people and important ideas from around the world. The book gives a flavour of the state of politics across the continents (with a particular focus on Africa, Asia and Latin America). In particular, the reader gets a feel for the innumerable challenges and contradictions involved in the process of building towards socialism in a hostile world.

A recurring theme in the the book is the idea of responding to capitalist globalisation with a globalisation of struggle. This concept is all the more urgent in a context where long-established networks of solidarity are being (or have been) broken down, the result of fragmentation of production, sustained attacks on unions, casualisation of labour, and the replacement of certain branches of productive labour by automated processes. Amin calls on the global progressive movement to take on board the Occupy movement’s slogan of “We, the 99 percent”, recognising both the diversity and common fundamental interests of “the new generalised proletariat” in order to unite a broad array of forces: workers (including ‘informal’ ones), peasants, critical intelligentsia, and the progressive elements among the middle classes.

Amin notes that Latin America – led by Cuba and Venezuela – has taken the lead in this project. “The movements that have mobilised there are not small, marginal organisations or movements limited to the middle classes. There are large, popular (in the good sense of the term) movements, leading into action masses of people counted in the millions. That is what I call a revolutionary advance.”

Amin also reminds us of the number one priority for progressive forces throughout the world: “defeating the US project for military control of the planet.” This project of US global hegemony specifically aims to divide and rule those countries outside the imperialist triad. All the more important therefore that we promote the closest possible coordination between China, Vietnam, Russia, India, and the progressive states of Africa and Latin America. Writing elsewhere, Amin puts forward a straightforward proposal: “Russia should unite with China, the Central Asian countries, Iran and Syria. This alliance could be also very attractive for Africa and good parts of Latin America. In such a case, imperialism would be isolated.”

Having witnessed the radical nationalist projects in both Egypt (in the Nasser era) and Algeria at close quarters, and seen their successes and weaknesses, Amin proposes ‘democratisation’ as a key measure for sustaining progressive projects and allowing them to develop in a socialist direction. This democratisation means constantly pushing to engage more people in the organisation of society; it means constantly struggling against corruption, alienation and bureaucratisation; it means serving the masses and putting their needs first. Amin distinguishes democratisation, a continuous and complex process, from the simplistic idea of democracy that’s promoted by the major capitalist countries: a plutocratic “low-intensity democracy” where multiple parties represent the same (capitalist) class interests. This all too easily “turns into farce and runs a serious risk that the struggle for democracy will lose legitimacy.”

The Long Revolution of the Global South is a captivating and endearing read that will spark the interest of all those interested in the worldwide struggle for socialism.

Book review: Elaine Mokhtefi – Algiers, Third World Capital: Freedom Fighters, Revolutionaries, Black Panthers

This article first appeared in the Morning Star on 23 August 2018.

ALGIERS, Third World Capital is a fascinating, vibrant, endearing and engaging memoir, providing fresh insight into some important episodes of the second half of the 20th century.

Elaine Mokhtefi, a white North American woman of Jewish heritage, became involved in politics at university, becoming an activist in the World Assembly of Youth (WAY), an organisation committed to global government and world peace. Moving to Paris in the 1950s, she was introduced to the Algerian liberation struggle via the emigre Algerian population in that city.

An interpreter and organiser for WAY and later the Algerian government in exile, she worked with and befriended some of the giants of the anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles, including Tanzanian president Julius Nyerere, Martinique-born Algerian revolutionary Frantz Fanon, African-American revolutionary Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), ANC president Oliver Tambo and Swapo leader Sam Nujoma.

Deeply involved in the Algerian solidarity movement and committed to the project of building a new, socialist-oriented society on the ashes of the French colonial project, Mokhtefi went to live in Algiers soon after independence in 1962. Algeria in that period was a tremendously exciting place, a new state defined by its heroic and extraordinary struggle against a vicious French occupation.

The countries that had supported the war of resistance — Yugoslavia, Cuba, China, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, the Soviet Union and others — were now Algeria’s main allies and sent advisers and experts to work with the new government. The liberation movements from Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Vietnam and Palestine were welcomed with open arms. Today, Algeria’s diplomacy is more nuanced, but, in the early years after liberation from French colonialism, it was the centre of gravity of the anti-imperialist world.

One little-known manifestation of Algeria’s status as “Third World capital” is its support for progressive movements within the “First World,” most notably the black liberation struggle in the US.

Mokhtefi writes that “Algeria adopted an open-door policy of aid to the oppressed, an invitation to liberation and opposition movements and personalities from around the world.” Providing resources and recognition to the Black Panther Party, then at the zenith of its fame and activity, “flowed naturally from [Algeria’s] position as a Third World leader.”

Mokhtefi was closely involved in the establishment of the International Section of the Black Panther Party. Assigned to assist and interpret for Eldridge Cleaver from the moment of his arrival, she was for several years in almost daily contact with Cleaver, his then wife Kathleen, Don Cox and other leading activists.

As such, she is uniquely well-positioned to tell the little-known story of the Black Panthers in Algeria — how they operated, interacted with Algerian society and the government and particularly how they were affected by the 1971 split in the Black Panther Party.

The split remains a highly controversial topic. Cleaver’s version of events hasn’t been helped over the years by his fondness for self-serving exaggeration and deception, not to mention his political descent into Republican conservatism, and Mokhtefi isn’t under any illusions about him.

However, she gives a convincing description of what the split looked like from the Algiers Panthers’ point of view.

The story as it is usually told has Eldridge as an ultra-left militant, pushing for an escalation of the underground armed struggle, whereas party leader Huey Newton favoured a programme based on community activism.

In Mokhtefi’s telling, however, the split was based primarily on Newton’s increasingly erratic, violent and obsessive behaviour, with the FBI merrily adding fuel to the fire. Her version of events may anger some Panther veterans, but it’s a valid contribution to the historical record.

Mokhtefi also discusses some of the challenges that faced post-colonial Algeria, a country in which between 300,000 and 500,000, out of a population of nine million, had been killed during the war of liberation and where departing French soldiers and settlers burned villages and books. The adult literacy rate was under 10 per cent and there were not more than 500 university graduates.

The victorious National Liberation Front had to perform miracles in order to reverse the effects of colonialism, war and imposed underdevelopment.

The near-impossible nature of the problems at hand inevitably led to a certain amount of despondency and infighting, the most prominent example of which is the coup that brought Houari Boumediene to power and sent first president Ahmed Ben Bella to prison. Considering the effect on her own life — Mokhtefi ended up being deported as a result of her friendship with Ben Bella’s wife — she discusses the coup in surprisingly balanced and dispassionate terms, contextualising it within the intensely difficult and fraught situation Algeria was subjected to.

This exciting memoir is an important story and it’s told with skill, humour and humility.

Book review: Sven-Eric Liedman – A World to Win: The Life and Works of Karl Marx

A slightly modified version of this article first appeared in the Morning Star on 05 May 2018 (the 200th anniversary of Marx’s birth).

Sven-Eric Liedman’s new biography of Karl Marx aims to provide the reader with a nuanced and detailed account of the intellectual giant’s life and thought. Beyond the biographical outline and the coverage of the best-known aspects of Marx’s work (Capital, and The Communist Manifesto), Liedman also gives a fairly detailed description of Marx’s explorations in philosophy and the trajectory of his theoretical ideas. This, along with an examination of the intellectual relationship between Marx and Engels and an interesting analysis of the fate of Marxist thought in the decades after Marx’s death, mean that Liedman’s book can justify a place in the crowded shelf devoted to the study of Marx.

Liedman is nothing if not erudite, and his meticulous coverage of Marx’s changing opinions on philosophy is interesting and important, although it makes for slow and difficult reading for anyone not well-versed in the subtleties of Hegelian logic (the present reviewer included). For the newer reader, A World to Win usefully explains many of the key ideas and phrases of Marxism – such as the dictatorship of the proletariat, the transformation of quantity into quality, commodity fetishism – and describes the evolution of these ideas over the course of Marx’s life.

The greatest achievement of the book lies in its compelling demonstration of the continued relevance of Marx’s critique of capitalism. In a post-Soviet era where capitalist liberalism is supposed to have triumphed for once and for all, and where bourgeois economists and politicians routinely label Marxism as obscure and antiquated, Liedman is able to show that the contradictions of capitalism identified by Marx are as present as ever. The working class – those that rely on selling their labour power in order to survive – continues to grow; exploitation and poverty are rampant; crises are acute. Marx didn’t prescribe the dimensions of a new society, but he concluded that the liberation of humanity would come through the liberation of the working class. Liedman demonstrates that this conclusion is still valid.

Another key point that Liedman emphasises is that Marx didn’t really set out to build ‘Marxism’; he delved into numerous areas of knowledge and developed several important theses, but he “never arrived at any summation of his work, much less any system.” The -ism was added to Marx by his followers after his death. This insight is helpful as a warning against dogma; as a reminder that Marx’s work was not ‘complete’ and that socialism is not a closed book but a living science in need of constant development.

However, Liedman’s objections to ‘system-building’ come across as being rooted in a rather stuffy academic perspective that has limited interest in the practical, real-world application of Marx’s analysis. After Engels and Kautsky, Lenin is the chief culprit in terms of turning Marx into Marxism and elaborating a clear ideological system. Was he wrong to do so? Lenin’s Marxism incorporated Marx’s most important formulations and synthesised and simplified them such that they could form a firm ideological basis for a mass political party capable of establishing working class power and building a new social order. That is to say, Lenin – and other great Marxists after him – took Marx’s ideas and method and leveraged them towards a programme of political action. The alternative was humble acceptance of a vicious imperialist status quo.

Consistent with his disdain for systematising Marx, Liedman has no time at all for the socialist experiments in the Soviet Union, China or Cuba (Vietnam, Laos, Korea, Grenada and elsewhere don’t get a mention). The USSR from the 1920s onwards “had no connection with Karl Marx”. Cuba showed some early promise but “gradually became more and more like other Soviet-supported regimes, with food shortages and political dissidents in prison”. No words about extraordinary social welfare, highly educated people or beautiful internationalism. Marx analysed the two-month Paris Commune in great detail, drawing lessons from it that he incorporated into his overall political understanding. Would he really have dismissed workers’ states that had to make compromises in order to defend themselves from old ruling classes and relentless external pressure?

Modern China is dismissed by Liedman as “the most expansive capitalist economy of the twenty-first century”, a “more than sixty year dictatorship” with a “neoliberal economic policy.” For Marx, apparently, “it would have been inconceivable that a country that quotes him would drive capitalism to its utmost extremes”. It’s generally best not to project one’s opinions onto the deceased Marx, but it’s not so difficult to imagine him being cheered and astounded by the emergence of China – a country that during his lifetime endured the most awful poverty and colonial humiliation – as an advanced industrial power at the cutting edge of science and technology, with an enormous working class and a standard of living approaching that of Western Europe.

Defects notwithstanding, Liedman’s book is a thorough, well-researched and valuable contribution to the literature on Marx’s thought. It will also inspire readers to go direct to the source and study Marx for themselves.

Book review: Simon Hannah – A Party with Socialists in it: a History of the Labour Left

A slightly modified version of this article first appeared in the Morning Star on 03 March 2018.

Simon Hannah’s recently-released book ‘A Party with Socialists in it: a History of the Labour Left’ provides a timely, concise and very readable account of the ongoing struggle between left and right within Labour.

The title is inspired by Tony Benn’s comment that “the Labour Party has never been a socialist party, although there have always been socialists in it”, and the text charts the attempts of those socialists to promote their vision over the course of the past 118 years. This fight has been taken on by numerous parties, groups and factions, including the Independent Labour Party, the Communist Party of Great Britain, the Socialist League, the Socialist Fellowship, the Young Socialists, Militant and the Socialist Campaign Group. Hannah details how such efforts have in the past been frustrated by ‘pragmatic’ right-wingers, who until recently dominated the commanding heights of the party.

The author also describes the various Labour governments, led by Ramsay MacDonald (1924, 1929-31), Clement Attlee (1945-51), Harold Wilson (1964-70, 1974-76), James Callaghan (1976-79), Tony Blair (1997-2007) and Gordon Brown (2007-10). Analysing these administrations without rose-tinted glasses, Hannah demonstrates that they tended to controlled by the right and were focussed more on keeping British capitalism happy than on winning meaningful gains for the working class. Even the much-celebrated Attlee government was generally committed to the capitalist consensus, and its historic gains (the establishment of the NHS and the building of thousands of council homes) were deeply compromised by its enthusiastic support for the creation of Nato and its role in the genocidal war on Korea.

Studying the long, tortuous and often torturous journey of the Labour left, it becomes increasingly clear that socialists within and around Labour have never been in a better position than they currently are. Previously, even when leftists have held key leadership positions, they have never managed to win control of the party machine and the support of the unions. As Ralph Miliband once bitterly noted, “the ‘broad church’ of Labour only functioned effectively in the past because one side – the right and centre – determined the nature of the services that were to be held, and excluded or threatened with exclusion any clergy too deviant in its dissent.” (Socialist Advance in Britain, 1983)

Today’s situation is therefore unprecedented. The membership has grown from 150,000 in 2014 to almost 600,000 today, and these new members are largely progressive and committed. Furthermore, the party is becoming more democratic and responsive to the membership – unlike in the Kinnock and Blair years, when constituencies, branches and activists were treated with contempt.

Meanwhile, key trade unions have shifted to the left in response to austerity and the betrayals of Blairism. Most unions have therefore thrown their weight behind Corbyn and his team. This is an important development, as the unions have tended to be a force of centrist ‘moderation’ within Labour, resisting the more radical, anti-racist and anti-imperialist views put forward by the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott.

The surprisingly good showing for Labour in the 2017 general election has forced most Labour MPs to stop (or at least pause) their attempts to get rid of Jeremy. The left now has a majority on the National Executive Committee and is establishing its leadership at the constituency and branch levels. For the first time, socialism is becoming hegemonic within Labour.

Crucially, the left also has a large activist base. Hannah makes the important point that Corbyn was well-known in the wider progressive movement long before the 2015 leadership election, and that the camaraderie that had developed between left Labourites and the thousands of anti-war and anti-austerity activists has its roots in the work of the Stop the War Coalition and the People’s Assembly, among other groups and campaigns.

This all adds up to an opportunity that is too good to throw away.

The book would be improved by the removal of a couple of left-sectarian shibboleths (Soviet socialism was “bureaucratised and killed” by Stalin in the mid-1920s, apparently, and the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty was subjected to a “red scare” led by the Momentum leadership around John Lansman). These notwithstanding, it is a very readable and well-researched history, and could hardly be more relevant for the political moment we are living through and participating in.

Book review: TJ Coles – Fire and Fury: How the US Isolates North Korea, Encircles China and Risks Nuclear War in Asia

A slightly modified version of this article first appeared in the Morning Star on 15 February 2018.

Clairview Books RRP £10.99

This short book by British academic TJ Coles will perhaps not receive as much attention as another recently-released text that shares its name. It is, nonetheless, an important and insightful book, providing an alternative viewpoint on the escalating crisis over Korea, and promoting an urgent message of peace.

The primary aim of the book is to dismantle the idea that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) is a serious danger to regional and global stability; that it’s an aggressive nuclear state that deserves to be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen”, such has been threatened by the president of the United States.

The ball is in the US’ court in terms of promoting denuclearisation and de-escalation, as the DPRK has stated many times that it would be willing to end its nuclear programme in exchange for diplomatic recognition by the US, an end to sanctions, and a guarantee against regime change operations. In a world where Iraq, Libya or Yugoslavia can be “taken out” by NATO, such demands are not unreasonable. Coles catalogues the numerous attempts made by the North Korean government to conduct substantive negotiations with the US and South Korea, only to have its efforts frustrated by successive White House regimes.

Coles makes it clear that it is the US, not the DPRK, that is the serious threat to peace. He notes: “Western media very conveniently hide the fact that, 1) the US refuses to adopt a no-first-use policy when it comes to nuclear weapons and, 2) China, Russia and North Korea each have a general no-first-use policy.”

The DPRK has invaded and bombed not a single country, unlike the US, which has invaded and bombed dozens of countries. On top of that, the US maintains a permanent threat of nuclear annihilation, for example using B52 nuclear-enabled bombers in joint military exercises with South Korea. Its deployment of the Terminal High Altitude Area Defence (THAAD) ‘missile defence’ system is highly dangerous and provocative, and is aimed not only (or indeed primarily) at preventing North Korean aggression but at containing and threatening China. The THAAD system, much like Reagan’s ’Star Wars’, seeks to render other countries’ nuclear weapons redundant, thereby expanding possibilities for the US to engage in nuclear blackmail.

The take-home message is that we must demand an end to US warmongering and bullying; expose the attempts to paint the DPRK as a threat to regional stability; and support multilateral negotiations towards a lasting peace.

The book isn’t without its flaws. Without any real analysis of the subject, Coles writes off the DPRK’s political system as ‘despicable’. The DPRK’s form of socialism is certainly quirky, and its leadership makes mistakes, but it’s important for the western left not to universalise its own idiosyncratic culture and take an arrogant attitude towards those that don’t follow it. The DPRK’s vision of socialism incorporates elements of Korean nationalism and Neo-Confucianism that, while not Marxist, bridge the gap between strongly entrenched traditions and modern socialist ideas. Much the same could be said about Latin American liberation theology and its combination of socialist ideology with Christian teaching. When assessing a political culture, we should be careful to avoid subtly bolstering imperialist cultural hegemony.

Another criticism is that the book is not terribly well organised, moving unpredictably from well-sourced and properly-referenced sections to bold, unsubstantiated statements.

Defects aside, ‘Fire and Fury’ is an important book that deserves to be read by all those that wish to see peace in the Korean Peninsula. Good books to read alongside it include Selig Harrison’s ‘Korean Endgame: A Strategy for Reunification and US Disengagement’ and Tim Beal’s ‘North Korea: The Struggle Against American Power’.

Book Review: Geoffrey Swain – A Short History of the Russian Revolution

This article first appeared in the Morning Star on 19 July 2017.

In this compact book of just over 200 pages, Geoffrey Swain does a surprisingly good job of presenting a historical overview of the October Revolution – the defining event of the 20th century, the centenary of which we celebrate this year. The writing is necessarily dense, but not to the point of impenetrability, and most readers will find something of value here, although many Morning Star readers will undoubtedly find some things to disagree with.

Swain offers two key ideas that are relatively controversial in terms of mainstream October historiography. The first is that October was not, as has so often been claimed, a Bolshevik coup, but rather “a popular revolution against a discredited Provisional Government which restored the revolution to the path it had been on when the Tsar was overthrown in February [1917]”. This assessment, for which Swain gives ample and compelling evidence, flies in the face of what has become received opinion among western academics.

The Russian Revolution was rolled back in 1991, and its history has written predominantly by the victors, who have portrayed it as an anti-democratic power-grab leading inexorably to dictatorship, decay and demise. They have been ably assisted in this counterfactual view by Mikhail Gorbachev who, having presided over the tragic collapse of the USSR and paved the way for a decade of unprecedented poverty and social catastrophe in Russia, came to believe that the February Revolution should have been allowed to “continue its course”.

Swain does a commendable job of describing the revolutionary traditions of the Russian working class, pointing out that the Provisional Government failed precisely because it sought to put the brakes on a popular revolutionary process. Ultimately it was only the Bolsheviks – and, for a while, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (representatives of the radical peasantry) – who were willing to ride the wave of mass discontent and struggle seriously for “peace, land and bread”.

Swain’s second key idea, that the revolution turned from a broadly popular “democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and poor peasantry” into a Bolshevik autocracy due to the collapse of the coalition with the left SRs, is less convincing and, in the present writer’s view, not substantiated by events.

One of the key promises of the revolution had been to pull Russia out of World War I – it’s not an accident that peace appears in the slogan even before land and bread. Although they claimed to want to end the war, the left SRs would not accept the terms of Brest-Litovsk treaty – a situation that puts one in mind of Theresa May’s bizarre “no deal is better than a bad deal”. The left SRs therefore aimed to undermine the peace and continue fighting the war, which is precisely why they lost the confidence of the masses and won the confidence of the deposed ruling classes. Their removal from government had nothing to do with Lenin’s supposed aversion to power-sharing.

Criticisms notwithstanding, A Short History of the Russian Revolution is a useful book, which should be read in conjunction with John Reed’s classic Ten Days that Shook the World and Lenin’s writings from the time (in particular the April Theses, Letters from Afar, The Tasks of the Proletariat in Our Revolution and The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government).

Book Review: Juan Martín Guevara – Che, My Brother

This is a slightly expanded version of an article that appeared in the Morning Star on 15 May 2017.

Given the number of biographies of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara that have been published in the 50 years since his assassination, many authors would probably struggle to find anything original to write about. Che’s youngest brother Juan Martín Guevara, however, is able to offer an unparalleled insight into the family life, background, influences and early experiences that helped to form the legendary revolutionary.

Such is the stated purpose of the book: to take Che down from the cross; ”to get people to know Che as more than a myth”; to understand how Che was made, in order that more people like Che might emerge to wage the struggle – not necessarily guerrilla warfare, but broad political struggle for the values Che fought for. The world desperately needs people with the intellect, passion, commitment and heroism of Che, and Juan Martín Guevara’s book seeks to inspire the emergence of such people. ”It is important to understand that Ernesto began as a normal and even ordinary person, who became an exceptional person that others can and should emulate.”

The Guevara family were not salt-of-the-earth workers or humble indigenous peasants; they were highly-educated middle-class bohemians. How did such a family produce a fierce proletarian revolutionary such as Che? Juan Martín explains that there was always a strong sense of social justice in the family, combined with a profound commitment to study and to freedom of thought. ”At home, everyone was free to think more or less what he or she wanted, provided of course we didn’t support fascist ideas. Our home was a meeting place for many politically active characters. This hyper-politicised family atmosphere would shape Che.”

Even in childhood, Che had a strong character: purposeful, self-disciplined, resourceful, principled and adventurous. In addition, he was a voracious reader (”Ernesto consumed on average a book a day, taking advantage of every free moment to delve into some volume or other”). He distinguished himself from other middle-class young people in that he was willing and able to get to know the poor, and was therefore exposed to the appalling poverty, inequality, oppression and injustice that exist in class society. His intellect, his character and his experiences – along with the luck of meeting Fidel Castro and his comrades in Mexico – combined to turn the young Ernesto Guevara into the immortal Che.

Juan Martín’s writing is lively and endearing as he presents the story of his famous brother’s early years, along with his own story of struggle against the Argentinian dictatorship (for which he suffered eight years in prison, in appalling conditions). It is by no means the definitive biography, but it is valuable as a means of better understanding Che and the Guevara family.

Of course Juan Martín, as a political disciple of Che, has his own interpretation of Guevarismo, which he emphasises is very different to socialism as practised in the Soviet Union. He even goes so far as to state that he suspects the KGB of having collaborated with the CIA to eliminate Che in Bolivia – although needless to say no proof is offered. This is not a helpful addition to the book. Che certainly had his critique of Soviet socialism, but he was alive to the subtlety and complexity of politics, could see the contradictions and problems faced by the Soviet Union, and had the self-discipline not to go too far in his open criticism. After all, Soviet support was decisive in the survival of socialist Cuba – as has been recognised many times by Fidel and Raúl Castro.

Small flaws aside, this is an insightful and valuable book.