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Adherents of Permanent Revolution, A History of the Fourth (Trotskyist) International By Barry Lee Woolley (University Press of America, 1999).
With the decline in the fortunes of the left-wing of capitalism`s political apparatus, books about the organisations of the radical left—once commonplace—are now much rarer. Here Barry Lee Woolley charts the rise and fall of the Fourth International in a largely narrative account of the coalescence of the Trotskyist movement at the International`s foundation in 1938 through its various sclerotic episodes in the post-war period until the mid-1970s.
Though much of it is well researched, this is an unusual work for a number of reasons. For one thing, it is rather US-centric, focusing overmuch on the role of the US Socialist Workers Party in the Fourth International. As Woolley is a former member of the American SWP and still has a great number of contacts in the US Trotskyist movement, this is perhaps understandable; whatever, Woolley certainly provides a good genealogical chart of the US Trotskyist movement and is able to calculate that in America alone three new Trotskyist parties have arisen on average per year.
Rather less understandable than all this is his current political orientation which seems to owe less to the political God Trotsky than the Christian Lord Almighty worshipped by the evangelicals in the American Bible Belt. This is evidenced in his peculiar obsession with 'morals' in general and male homosexuality in particular, the growth of which he claims was largely responsible for changing the outlook of the world Trotskyist movement in the 1960s:
[a] change in recruitment patterns transformed the predominantly burly worker cadres of the early Trotskyist movement into the predominantly petty bourgeois, college-recruited, effeminate cadres of the world Trotskyist movement at the time of the tenth World Congress . . . [The Socialist Workers Party] even participated in the building of mass marches around the issue of special legal privileges for sodomites.
Woolley would certainly appear to have an unhealthy preoccupation with this topic, with one chapter even having the bizarre, incomprehensible by-line “Socialist Sodomites and Sorcery”. Perhaps Woolley is living testament to the charge that membership of Trotskyist sects buggers up the brain.
Despite the large amount of time that has clearly gone into producing this generally well-referenced work, there are a number of factual errors too. The account of the British Trotskyist movement is good if only partial, but there really is no excuse for Woolley referring to British Trotskyist leader Tony Cliff as Ygael Gluckstadt when he is correctly mentioned elsewhere as Ygael Gluckstein. There are many other similar errors, so much so that they eventually become annoying.
Woolley is shortly to produce another volume, this time on the history of the American Trotskyist movement. For his sake and ours let`s hope he gets in contact with a good therapist before then, preferably one that can also give him a hand with his proof-reading.
DAP
Capitalism's World Disorder By Jack Barnes. Pathfinder Press 1999.
"You can shirk [the trouble of expressing yourself clearly] by simply throwing your mind open and letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in . . . [this] will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning, even from yourself." So wrote George Orwell in his essay Politics and the English Language, in 1946. Anyone who wants to see what he meant should read Jack Barnes.
While reading a book about capitalism which claims "not to mystify and obscure but to reveal and clarify", you might expect to find an explanation of exactly what capitalism is and how it works. When you read Barnes, however, all you will find is a collection of words and phrases that sound good, but which he intends to mean very little: capitalism, imperialism, socialism, communism, vanguard, leadership, revolutionary, class struggles . . . the reader is left to figure out what these glorious-sounding words might mean.
But this isn't an error on Barnes's part. It must be, to some degree, his aim. If the author (who is national secretary of the Socialist Workers Party in the US) went to the trouble of defining his terms, then he would have more of a problem convincing people of his argument. He would certainly have trouble recruiting martyrs for his "revolutionary" war—a war between different groupings of the working class, killing each other in a pointless debate over who should lead and exploit them. If anyone is in any doubt about what Barnes aims to achieve, he tells us clearly in the conclusion to one of his chapters: "It can be done. It was done in Russia, and the way the Bolsheviks did it is what we seek to emulate".
In other words, Barnes wants a revolution to establish capitalism in a capitalist country! He wants us to fight a war with the modern state. Any volunteers?
Practically every page of his book makes some reference to the need for good leadership and a strong vanguard. Without that, the working class are lost, he thinks. But be careful! Because although "good" leadership—such as that provided by their heroes Lenin, Guevara, and Castro—will lead you to the paradise that is Cuban state-capitalism, what will "bad" leadership give you? Something even worse. The offspring of the coup d'etat will then be born "deformed", and you will have to make do with a "deformed workers' state". Although we are not told exactly what this means, either.
Barnes urges us to fight and struggle for socialism. But what does he mean by the term? Does he see the revolution leading immediately to a system of society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of producing and distributing wealth? We don't know what he means because he won't tell us. He'll take us there. How will we know when we've got there? Don't worry. Barnes will let us know. It'll all look something like Cuba. That is, something like what we've got already. The new rulers will tell us where we are and what we are to do: Go to Work. After the "revolutionary" war, everything stays the same.
Unfortunately, the book's title and the blurb on the cover make the right noises. Imagine someone interested in the causes of their problems—and in what the recent J18 and N30 demonstrations might have been about—turning to this book to gain an understanding of capitalism and the revolutionary alternative. Although people are intelligent enough to reject the ideas presented in this book, the problem is that they might assume that this is what revolutionary politics is all about. Barnes and his Trotskyist party will then have been responsible for turning yet another person away from radical political ideas, and back to apathy and cynicism. Their deformed workers' party is one of the greatest friends the capitalist system could have.
So what is the appeal of Trotskyism? Its romanticism. The remoteness of its ideas from the experiences of real life. Its appeal to emotion rather than thought. Its vision of revolution is something like the war in JRR Tolkein's Lord of the Rings. It is a fantasy far more interesting than the wage-slavery of everyday life, but which is dangerous because it is not the lives of elves and hobbits that are at stake: it is ours. Jack Barnes sees himself as Gandalf the wizard, and one day he believes that he will mount his white horse and lead us to war, then on to freedom. For the sake of entertainment and escapism, read this book. For the sake of humanity, don't even follow Barnes to the corner shop.
STUART WATKINS
The Essential William Morris By by Iain Zaczek, Dempsey Parr, London & Bath, 1999.
This is a very large, coffee-table book, beautifully illustrated with 150 of Morris's drawings, illustrations tiles, wallpaper designs, pained panels, tapestries and much else. All the illustrations are carefully described by the author.
There is also an introductory biography of Morris's life by Claire O'Mahony, in which she traces the origins of his family, his early childhood at Woodford Hall in Epping Forest, his schooling at Marlborough College and, later, Exeter College, Oxford, where is discovered "the idyllic medieval city, the circle of idealistic undergraduates and the writings of the Tractarians, Ruskin and Carlyle". Later, after leaving Oxford, Morris sought out the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
O'Mahony states that "the medievalism of Morris's youth provided a consistent thread to his political morality of later years, which was so firmly rooted in the Socialism theorised by Karl Marx". She mentions that, in 1871 and 1873, Morris visited Iceland where "he experienced a reawakening of his social conscience when he witnessed the simple dignity of classless life amidst the unrelenting hardships experienced in Reykjavik". She very briefly mentions Morris's membership of, first, the Liberal League; his dissatisfaction with Liberalism, his joining the Social Democratic Federation of Henry Mayers Hyndman in 1883, and his founding with 10 others of the Socialist League, as "one of the strongest advocates for a socialist revolution in 1880s' Britain". His friendships with "the Russian émigré anarchist Prince Kropotkin and Friedrich Engels", are noted.
O'Mahony says that "Morris's socialism is most lucid in his writings on art and society". Morris was one of the few privileged members of the capitalist class in Victorian England who fully embraced, and developed, socialist ideas. And despite the coffee-table style of this book, this is stressed in the introduction. Whether readers have coffee tables or not, The Essential William Morris is worth reading, and keeping for the superb illustrations.
PEN
Knowledge Capitalism By A. Burton-Jones. Oxford University Press. 1999.
This is another in the growing pile of books on how capitalism is changing, how it is bringing opportunities for the few and problems for the many who allegedly can do little or nothing about it. The author's fundamental proposition is that, among the various factors causing change in the economy, none is more important than the changing role of knowledge.
Burton-Jones gives us first what we are supposed to accept as the good news: "inflation is down, productivity is up, the US locomotive is powering away, the former communist bloc is rapidly embracing western-style capitalism". But he goes on to admit that "everywhere there is a sense of unease . . . the malaise is spreading throughout society". Large, labour-intensive manufacturing firms, which are able to relocate their production, are rapidly establishing themselves in the Third World where labour is cheap and government regulations few. Small firms are in trouble.
The consequences for workers are dire. Whole industries have declined, skilled jobs have been lost, and the new jobs created are often part-time, temporary, unskilled and poorly paid. Unemployment is high and insecurity widespread. The ever-present question is "who will be next?"
The labour power that workers have sold and employers have bought has always contained a proportion of "knowledge", relatively low with manual work and relatively high with non-manual and professional work. The balance is clearly shifting from industrial/manual employment to service/non-manual employment.
Burton-Jones suggests that firms are becoming knowledge integrators and individual workers knowledge suppliers. He writes of "flexihire", the new casual labour. He believes we are in a transitional stage "on the road from jobs owned by organizations to careers owned by individuals". It is a distinction without a difference. What kind of career can you "own" if you can't find a buyer for your knowledge?
The author, of course, has the knowledge. He drives us in his paper taxi around the terrain of capitalism but never ventures outside it, never even recognises that there is anywhere else to go. The changes he describes are "outside the control of all of us". We have "no option but to accept and work with, rather than against, forces outside [our] control".
On the last page he tells us we are all on a knowledge escalator. Some manage to climb the steps faster than others. "The main requirement is for everyone to be on board the escalator!" To such an injunction socialists can only reply "Include us out!" We have the knowledge to build a society that surpasses capitalism.
STAN PARKER
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