Lawrence Daly was a working class intellectual of the type we see far to few of these days. His father Jimmy Daly, whose family like many of the Fife miners came from Ireland, was a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) and a militant trade unionist in the Scottish coal fields.
His son Lawrence followed in his footsteps by joining the CP and becoming a trade union militant. Daly’s political trajectory for most of his adult life followed that of the most militant and class conscious section of the UK working classes.
On leaving school at 14 he went to work in the local Pit and soon joined both the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) and the Young Communist League. West Fife where he lived had a strong trade union and communist tradition, having elected the Communist Willie Gallacher to Parliament in the general elections of 1935 and 1945, he lost the seat in the 1950 general election.
It was within the Labour Movement that Daly began to self educate himself, like many such workers before and since he devoured books on history, poetry, Marxism and socialism; and in time he was debating as an equal with Communist Party comrades who had been to university and received a structured education and gaining confidence in the process. It was a time when the best of left wing intellectuals were only to keen to encourage young workers to self educate and helped point them in the right direction.
Daly resigned from the party after the CPGB leadership failed to respond vigorously to a speech Khrushchev made to the 1956 CPSU Congress, that revealed ‘some’ of the crimes of Stalin and his associates and later that year they totally acquiesced in the Soviet Leadership’s brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, after which the Soviets hanged the former Communist prime minister Nagy.*
Nation wide a group of former party members, which included Daly, grouped around the magazine the New Reasoner, which was edited by Historian EP Thompson and which later merged with the student-based Universities and Left Review to become the New Left Review which is still published to this day. *
That Daly had by this time moved through the restrictive prism of his class background to become a contributor and board member of the NR and it’s successor the NLR speaks volumes about his personal development, not only as a socialist but a human being.
Back home in West Fife he stood in a local election and defeated the Communist and Labour candidates to become an independent socialist county councillor in Fife. Out of that campaign along with comrades he founded the Fife Socialist League which published a news letter, held debates and discussions and stood in a number of elections in the area.
The Obituary below takes up the tale, but I think Lawrence Daly would be the first to admit when he moved away from Fife to London to become General Secretary of the NUM and lost daily contact with the working class community he had been brought up in and loved, something went out of him. He was not a sell out trade union bureaucrat by any means, far from it, but that direct link with the working classes had been his political beacon. It was the meaning of his existence and without it, he gradually withdrew into himself and became a shadow of his former self.
Lets dream and hope Lawrence Daly has met up with his old comrades and friends in the Miners Welfare club in the sky and alongside the people he served so well he is belting out one of those songs he is said to have loved to sing.
MH
- If any comrade still has doubts about the legitimacy of the Hungarian Revolution, I suggest they read In the Name of the Working Class by Sandor Kopacsi, the author was a communist militant who fought the Horthy fascist dictatorship and was appointed police chief of Budapest by the Communist Party.
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Obituary: Lawrence Daly
A new left stalwart and powerful leader of the miners' union in its early 70s heyday
By Jean McCrindle
Lawrence Daly, who has died aged 84, was an exceptionally gifted trade union leader in that exceptional period of trade union power in Britain from the late 1950s to the late 1970s. As national secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers from 1968 to 1984, he was a key figure in the NUM's two successful confrontations with Edward Heath's Conservative government in the early 1970s.
Lawrence was also a link between the predominantly intellectual milieu of the post-1956 new left and the labour movement. On publicly tearing up his Communist party card in 1956, he founded the Fife Socialist League (FSL) as a political discussion forum, and as a base from which to launch independent candidates in local and national elections.
He joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1957 and, a decade later, joined the Bertrand Russell war crimes tribunal, set up to investigate the reported US atrocities in Vietnam, alongside the likes of Jean-Paul Sartre, James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir and Isaac Deutscher. He visited north Vietnam and Auschwitz - experiences that haunted him for the rest of his life.
Lawrence had Irish Catholic roots through his father, Jimmy Daly, who was also a miner. His mother, Janet, was a Scottish Presbyterian. They were both from the West Fife coalfield. Jimmy Daly was a founder member of the Communist party, often blacklisted by the Fife Coal Company for his activities in the 1926 general strike.
Just before she died, I interviewed Lawrence's mother. She recalled how the family, with nine children, had been thrown out of the company house 15 times. "We were always shifting about. It was Jim's activities. He was standing up for the workers." But then the communist tradition was strong in West Fife, so strong that it elected Willie Gallacher as its Communist party MP in 1935, 1945 and 1950.
Lawrence was sent to local Catholic schools where the nuns gave him a disciplined education. What he got from it, he recounted later, was an incredible memory for the poetry of his native Scotland and "a need for a strongly authoritative dogma". He left school at 14, went to work down the local pit at Glencraig and joined the Young Communist League (YCL). In 1945 he was part of a Trades Union Congress youth group visit to the Soviet Union on which another delegate was his future wife, Renee. The following year, the Scottish area NUM published his pamphlet A Young Miner Sees Russia.
In the YCL, like many other young workers, he received a broad political and philosophical education, partly from the party's classes in Marxism and partly through National Council of Labour Colleges correspondence courses which Lawrence took, in grammar, social history and trade unionism. When EP Thompson, then editor of the iconoclastic New Reasoner, asked him to serve on the board of that journal, the historian remembered "the manuscripts and proofs which came back from him, expertly annotated and as often as not marked with dust from the pit".
This background made Lawrence an extremely able miners' advocate - and from 1954 to 1964 he was the workman's safety inspector. He had also become an orator of depth and power which was to enable him, at his best, to outclass his not inconsiderable contemporaries at the NUM - Arthur Scargill, Mick McGahey and Peter Heathfield.
In 1956, Lawrence, along with thousands of others, left the Communist party. The Soviet leader Nikita Krushchev's "secret speech" acknowledging Stalin's crimes, and the pusillanimous response to that speech by the leadership of the British party, precipitated that exodus. That autumn the Soviet Union crushed the Hungarian uprising. These cataclysmic events for the communist world, combined with the Suez crisis in the west, produced the seminal moment for the British new left.
The movement's beginning focused around the New Reasoner, a journal that later merged with the student-based Universities and Left Review to become the New Left Review. Lawrence was on the board of the two journals and was a contributor, friend and colleague of the wide ex-communist diaspora that defined the early magazine.
In 1958 he easily defeated the Communist and Labour candidates to become an independent socialist county councillor in Fife. Out of that campaign he founded the FSL. It seemed a hopeful moment politically, evidence of an independent socialist renewal. Lawrence went on to contest the 1959 general election in West Fife, coming second to Labour and beating the Communist party candidate.
For the few years that it existed, the FSL produced a monthly newsletter in which anyone could have their say. This included some of us from the nearby St Andrews University new left club. I can remember several discussion evenings with a group of miners' wives at the Dalys' house, about de Beauvoir's The Second Sex, which had recently come out in English.
In 1962, Lawrence was elected to the Scottish area NUM executive and two years later became Scottish NUM general secretary. In 1965 he became a national executive member.
In 1968, four years into the premiership of Harold Wilson, Lawrence beat Joe, later Lord, Gormley in a bitter left-right struggle for the NUM national secretaryship. This meant a dreaded shift for him to the union's Euston Road headquarters in London.
Then, in 1971, the year after Heath came to power, Gormley defeated McGahey for the NUM presidency, requiring Lawrence and Gormley to develop a partnership. Whatever their differences, increasing their members' wages, which had slipped far down the national scale, was a priority. Heath, however, was determined to resist the full claim, and what ensued were two famous confrontations.
The first climaxed early in 1972. The miners, having demanded £9, on top of their £25 average weekly wage, walked out on strike in early January. By February, Heath had declared a state of emergency and was pressured into setting up the Wilberforce inquiry on miners' wages and conditions. Lawrence's presentation to the inquiry earned him respect and admiration from a wide public. By the end of February, the NUM had triumphed and Lawrence had become a hero of the left.
The second confrontation came just over a year later, with Gormley and Daly again leading the union into a national strike. This time a serious energy crisis precipitated the three-day working week and Heath called his "who governs Britain?" general election.
The answer the electorate gave, albeit uncertainly, was Labour and Wilson. It was another NUM triumph. The two strikes also saw the emergence of a younger rival to the Gormley-Daly duo, the Yorkshire NUM's Scargill.
Then, in 1975, Lawrence was involved in a car crash in which his brother and sister-in-law were killed and he was seriously injured. He was incapacitated for a long time and the fire seemed to go out of him. He always loved socialising and drinking (too much), and increasingly he found London life debilitating. In 1984 he wrote: "The job tore me away from my roots in Scotland; the darts, the pigeons, the whole highly sociable community which I miss terribly." In March 1984, on the eve of the miners' strike that led to a catastrophic defeat, he retired as national secretary.
He settled in Berkhamsted, Hertford-shire, but spent the last 10 years of his life in a nursing home in Luton.
The first time I saw Lawrence, he was on stage, singing at a miners' welfare club near his home in Ballingry, in the West Fife coalfield. He had a lovely, light tenor voice and, I later discovered, a seemingly inexhaustible repertoire of Irish and Scottish songs. That evening he sang so beautifully that no one in that smoky, raucous atmosphere spoke or moved till the song ended.
Lawrence is survived by Renee, his daughter Shannon, and his sons Rannoch, Morven, Kerren and Cavan.
• Lawrence Daly, trade unionist, born 20 October 1924; died 23 May 2009
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45 comments:
What was attempted in 56 and 68 eventually succeeded in 89-91. We can clearly see what the legacy of that was and it wasn’t socialism with a human face but instead civil wars, NATO expansionism, gains for the multi-nations, the rise of oligarchs, economies controlled by the World Bank and the IMF, unemployment and no more support for armed liberation movements. Even in Europe we have not been unaffected by this catastrophe with the dismantling of the welfare state and the abandonment of the Keynesian model. So, yes Mick I do doubt the legitimacy of the Hungarian counter-revolution. If they had succeeded 20 or 30 years earlier then I wonder where we would be now. There is an impeccably well researched book written by the Belgium Ludo Martens called The Velvet Counter Revolution. Radio Free Europe, the CIA station, were issuing instructions during the putsch!
Sorry I forgot to mention that the fascist historian David Irving, who also wrote a book about ’56, admired Sandor Kopacsi. On hearing about his death he paid the following tribute:
“I interviewed Mr Kopacsi when he was living in Ontario in 1980. His book is highly to be recommended: it gives a vivid insight into the methods and criminality of the Communist rulers of post-war Hungary. Unlike them, Kopacsi was not Jewish, and he pulled no punches in describing the crimes committed by their secret police (AVO and AVH). The uprising began as an old-fashioned anti-Jewish pogrom, and rapidly turned into a full scale revolution, which was crushed by Soviet tanks.”
Mick, I subscribe to New Left Review... :) Tariq Ali being one of the main contributors, makes it that much more attractive for me as I admire him a lot!
Some articles are a little difficult for me to follow as one needs substantial amount of knowledge before even attempting to understand it. However, most articles are extremely informative and interesting...
Among the iconic images of the "Hungarian Revolution" is books, documents and pictures from the Soviet bookshop being burned in the street. It is noticeable that pictures of Marx and books by Lenin are among the objects going up in smoke. Hungarian fascists of the "Arrow Cross" heritage, as well as the world bourgeoisie, think this "revolution" is theirs.
Even in Trot circles, it is starting to dawn that, 20 years after the Wall came down, it was socialism that took a huge body blow, not "Stalinism". Ludo Martens wrote, on this correctly, that, when the Wall came down, Hitler rose from his grave. The Euro elections may give yet more confirmation of this.
I read Irving's book a long time ago. He is scathing about Imre Nagy for vacillation (true) and for being a Communist (debatable).
no saviour from on high deliver is right one of the activities of the Hungarian counter-revolution was the mass burning of left-wing literature, this would explain why Irving was so enamoured towards them. The aim of the counter-revolution was capitalist restoration under the command of imperialism, in the years since the CIA openly acknowledge their role in 56, 68 and Solidarność. The collapse of the Soviet Union shifted the balance of power to the right, that some on the left applaud this as a victory only shows the terrible state that the left is in or how successful the intelligence services are in controlling the left.
You guys; why not argue about what Sandor Kopacsi wrote, instead of using some arsehole nazi to smear him. It is all very well to write about the Iron Cross fascists but Kopacsi and Nagy actually fought them.
Why you keep going on about Trots I have know idea, although I can only presume you see it is some sort or archaic insult from the days of the 'Great Leader,' get over it.
But just so you understand I am not a Trotskyist, although I will admit I have admiration for Trotsky's administrative ability and his great skill as a writer and his ability and willingness to endure, rather that deny the truth as he saw it. Although I do believe he lacked political skills and totally due to his own prejudices underestimated Stalin's political ability, which were considerable.
More importantly if you understand anything about human nature or indeed the democratic republics of Eastern Europe you should understand it is impossible to export socialism on the end of a bayonet, the more so when those bayonet's have been minted in a country that has been a traditional enemy for centuries as was the case with Poland and other members of the eastern block.
I'm sure nsfohd is pulling my leg when he writes,
"Among the iconic images of the "Hungarian Revolution" is books, documents and pictures from the Soviet bookshop being burned in the street. It is noticeable that pictures of Marx and books by Lenin are among the objects going up in smoke."
Get a grip mate, I wish you guys would wake up to the fact you cannot build socialism by wading through the blood of millions of victims.
Tell me commie, why is China such an exploitative shit hole these days, so loved by those who wish to exploit the masses with their neo liberal economics.
Instead of blaming those dastardly capitalists and traitors for the fall of the USSR and the democratic republics; and china becoming a dictatorship that exists to service a political and economic elite. Why do you not question why workers refused to defend what their leaders claimed were proletarian socialist state's.
It gave me no joy the USSR collapsed, but the seeds were laid way back in the 1930s, if not before, when a revolution consumes its own children you end up with a bloody and arthritic swamp of a place, as the people of Iran I finding out today.
Nevin
I think NLR has become heavy going these days, aimed more at academia than the average leftist, I might buy it is I see it in a book shop but I mainly just visit the web site.
If anything I prefer the London Review of Books which I have a subscription to,Tariq also writes for that as do a number of fine writers on subjects that interest us both. (if I may presume) As does Perry Anderson who is on the board of NLR and a number of others. Anderson wrote a piece about Turkey recently if my memory serves me correct
When Nazis burned books by Lenin in 1933 on a pyre in Berlin, this was generally seen as a barbaric act, combined with all the other objects on the fire, like books by Jewish authors etc. I have also seen a photo of SS men in a courtyard in Berlin or some other German city in 1933, with cans of petrol, about to burn the red flags and Communist literature seized during raids on the recently banned KPD.
When Hungarian "democrats" do the same thing, burning books by Marx and Lenin, portraits etc., this is evidence of - what? Democratic commitment? Or does it crawl out of the same anti-Communist ideological hole as the SS did?
As to the workers "not defending" their system, were they actually told to? Was it spelled out to them that if they did not take up arms, capitalism would be restored? I doubt it. There was in fact a vote on the USSR about a year before its collapse, and interestingly enough, in the ethnic Russian part there was majority support for it. Bourgeois press comment concentrated on anti-USSR votes in places like the Baltic States etc. It is noticeable that USSR nostalgia remains widespread today, especially among Russians.
Imre Nagy, Gorbachev and Yeltsin get a good press in the West. Could this be because they defended zilch other than capitalist restoration?
As to contemporary China, it is damned when it is (relatively) open to Western markets, as it is today, and also damned when it was certainly not, as in Mao's times. Oh well. That's the consistency of bourgeois ideology for you.
Revolutions have to defend themselves, and that may mean violence, which is a lesson drawn by all who have actually studied history. What did the Versailles forces bring the Communards? Cupcakes? No, massive slaughter - the authentic response of the bourgeoisie to any challenge to its rule. But the ideological climate today is such that "reputable" historians can make White Terror disappear, and only write about Red Terror.
You are now trying, unsuccessfully, to move the goalposts Mick. You eulogise a main player in a counter-revolutionary movement that sort to overthrow socialism, and was controlled by imperialism, and hold him up as a socialist worthy of support. When it is pointed out to you that he was nothing of the sort and was in an alliance with all manner of reactionaries you cry foul. The left-wing book burning in Hungary took place, are you denying this? Does this reality spoil the fantasy? When the CIA is stirring the pot and the works of Marx go up in flames surely then you can see why I don’t accept the legitimacy of ’56. The problem here is that I am a communist and you are an anti-communist as are your heroes for example Lawrence Daly and Frank Costigan (two in one week). You say the communist project went wrong in the thirties but then declare support for the International Brigades, this is opportunism.
Regarding China I have concerns about what is taking place there. Mao warned that Deng Xiaoping was a capitalist roader, it was an astute observation. The left deviation of Mao led to the right deviation of Deng blah, blah. However, some of the gains of the revolution remain, true they are becoming less and less but I have yet to read an objective critique of what is happening in China and that includes your hysterical outburst.
If Soviet-style "communism" was so great, please explain why so many people died over the decades trying to flee Soviet-style communist Cuba to the US rather than the other way around... and why when people defected in Europe it was generally from the East to the West and rarely only the other way around. Please explain the joy expressed by ordinary people in East Berlin during fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the toppling of statutes of Stalin and Lenin when the Soviet Union collapsed.
The fact is, Soviet-style communism was a horrific disaster all around, and if you can't do better than that in coming up with a replacement economic and social system to US-style imperialist capitalism, then that's a real failure of imagination and a real tragedy for humanity.
There's got to be a better way, folks.
People who defected from the Soviet bloc to the "West" sometimes regretted their decision and tried to go back, if they could without risk of reprisal. I remember occasional press reports of such repentant defectors even in the largely anti-Communist Western media, in outlets such as The Guardian. People often found that "freedom" in the West need not mean the right to a decent job, that you were bombarded with commercial advertising for things you couldn't afford etc. Even defectors with intelligence information were often cut loose and left to sink once they had been debriefed, often sinking into Poverty Row.
Martin Cruz Smith's Gorky Park, written when the USSR still existed, has Osborne, an amoral American capitalist, commenting on Soviet citizens (mostly Jews in those days) who emigrated to the USA. He describes them as typically living in houses they can't afford, and driving cars they can't afford, often fighting each other for "scraps of translation work".
Re the Berlin Wall, people were happy when Blair got in in the UK in 1997. The hangover set in later and has lasted a very long time, with detours like high unemployment (including me), imperialist wars and now one hell of an expenses scandal. As to joy about statues of Stalin/Lenin coming down, this was most noted in the Baltic States, and perhaps in western Ukraine where members of the SS are regarded as "freedom fighters", much like those Hungarians in 1956 burning pictures of Marx, whose freedom from Nazism is being questioned by myself and "Commie".
The reality is, East European anti-Communism often took the form of Ukrainian-born John Demjanjuk, who made the transition from Soviet soldier to Auschwitz guard. And he was not alone.
It would be too simplistic of me to say that those who leave or try to leave Cuba are all Tony Montana types but let’s not down play the moral character of those who want to leave. The sanctions placed on Cuba by the US play a huge part in the decision of many who choose to flee. Opting to go to the country responsible for their homeland’s problems is extremely unpatriotic. The Cuban revolution is still very much alive and it is the honour of all Cubans to serve it, not to run away from it or try and overthrow it.
NCM you place the word communism in speech marks which makes me wonder how you would define it. I expect a clownish definition.
Sorry NCM I forgot to address the point you made about why people didn’t leave the US to go to Cuba. Any communist in America should make their struggle there and not opt for a readymade version of what they aspire to, that is lazy. Having said that Cuba has been known to give asylum and medical treatment to those who needed it, often those who have been on the receiving end of US imperialism. The Cubans recently offered assistance to the victims of Hurricane Katrina, which I believe Bush turned down. Let’s not forget that it is actually more restrictive for an American to travel to Cuba, Obama may be addressing this, don’t hold your breath. Cuba has never attempted to assassinate any American politician or destroy American crops with germ warfare. And finally America occupies Cuban territory whereas Cuba does not occupy one inch of American territory.
commie
If you wish to debate with me then show some common decency and stop telling lies, then perhaps we could proceed. I realize it is difficult for you to understand, but all those whose obits I post up, as I have said before, are not my heros, even someone with your prejudices should be able to work out a man I called an altar-bar biter is hardly likely to be a hero.
Nor come to that is Lawrence Daly, I posted his obit for a number of reasons which would be obvious to all but the most dogmatic and censorious, but for you I will set it out.
Daly came from the then most politically advanced section of the Scottish working class, he self educated himself with the help of left wing intellectuals, he was a CP member who broke with the Party over important events that took place in 1956 and he was co leader of the most disciplined and militant trade union of his day. It seems to me anyone who is interested in working class struggle would be interested in his Obit.
As it happens I do think he was a man one could admire but that does not make him a hero of mine.
You guys seem to believe you can lie, bully and slander who ever you choose to win an argument.
Out of interest how many people have you won to your idea of socialism by using this strategy?
As you do not mention any name I am unsure whether you mean Nagy or Kopacsi whom you accuse of being in league/ what ever with imperialists, perhaps you mean both?
You really are a nasty piece of work as you slander good men who did their duty to the working classes as they saw it, without providing one shred of evidence beyond the word of a foul racist nazi and you do this when hiding behind a false name.
Even the Stalinist filth who hanged Nagy could not produce any evidence he was in league with the West, which is why they behaved towards him and ended his life in such a cowardly manner, as to Kopacsi after he escaped to Canada he spent the rest of his life working as a janitor.
As I have already said to simply blame those dastardly capitalist and their running dog hirelings as you seem to believe is not only infantile but counterproductive as it means you have no interest in understanding were the socialist movement went wrong, thus given power you would almost certainly repeat the mistakes and that my old son is why so few workers will give you the time of day.
NCM
If people are fleeing Cuba it is mainly due to the arm lock of a blockade countless US administrations have placed on the island to dictate its political affairs. It is a national disgrace.
The real question is why has this blockade failed to turn the Cuban people en-mass against the Cuban revolution. I would suggest it is because most of them support the revolution, despite its shortcomings, much of which are due to the US blockade and sanctions.
I agree that the US blockade is indefensible, that the US history towards Cuba is indefensible, and that the blockade has harmed the Cuban people economically. However, and I'm not trying to be cute, since the blockade prevents Cuba from being part of the US-imperialist capitalist system, what is Cuba's argument for why it would want to be part of the very economic system it regards as exploitative? I've never understood the logic of Cuba complaining about being excluded from participating in the very economic system it otherwise believes is destructive.
I put "communism" in quotes because of the modifier before the word, "Soviet-style." I don't know how to define communism, but I do regard what the Soviets did as rather suspect, no matter what you want to call it.
I admire the tenacity of those who would still defend the Soviet Union and its style of government and economics but surely learning from its flaws and seeking to design a better mousetrap from the exercise is called for.
The central point remains Mick. 56 in Hungary was an attempt at capitalist restoration, these people were not socialists in character and they received support from the west, period. Amongst their number were book burning fascists. Many thought Lech Wałęsa was a true socialist, a worker and a trade unionist. At face value he was the last two. He was however nothing more than a CIA stooge and a reactionary catholic, who admired Margret Thatcher and wouldn’t support the British miners in 84. Am I slandering another good man?
You ask me have I ever converted anyone to my idea of socialism, when your defense of Cuba to NCM copies mine then I would say yes, although I am not so vain to take credit for it. Spoken to any workers later Mick? Let’s not forget you recently boasted about voting Green.
Commie, do you believe that the Soviet model offers the world a better alternative than any other economic/political system?
If so, would you regard any of the history of the USSR as regrettable?
I've given up trying to offer defenses for US capitalism/imperialism, so that's not where I'm coming from.
I believe the countries that were successful in making their socialist revolutions succeeded because they followed their own road rather than adopting a rigid model. The Russian, Chinese, Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions all had characteristics that were unique to them. As to whether I think anything could have been done differently or was regrettable I would answer by saying that socialist construction throws up many problems but only socialism can solve the problems of socialism. Hungary in 56, Czechoslovakia in 68, Poland in the 80s and the final events of 89-91 was capitalism trying to solve the problem of the existence of socialism. I’m not in defence of lost causes here or uncritical of the Soviets. I am of the opinion that Khrushchev started the rot which was temporally halted, though not completely reversed, by Brezhnev and then what Khrushchev started was taken up again by Gorbachev and brought to its conclusion by Yeltsin.
I don't know about defending the USSR taking "tenacity". Many millions of former Soviet citizens think they lived better when the USSR existed. They certainly were not charged rip-off prices for travelling on public transport. Putin has at times played cleverly on USSR nostalgia, like restoring the tune, though not the words, of the Hymn Of The Soviet Union, whereas the anthem Yeltsin brought in has been rejected.
Little of this gets into the Western media of course, but bourgeois ideology and its attached education turns out youngsters who think "Russia" was the enemy in two world wars. Even the "left" gets influenced by this kind of conditioning.
I'm one of those who believes the majority of people who live in Russia were better off in the USSR, economically and socially that is, but the fact that those who ruled over them failed to understand that workers do not live by bread alone, just shows the massive gap that opened between them and those they ruled.
I think it is a mistake to believe all youngsters believe Russia/Soviet Union was the enemy in two World wars, my granddaughter is currently doing her A levels and her studies have made it perfectly clear that without the heroism of the Red Army, and the massive sacrifices of the Soviet people, WW2 would certainly not have ended in 1945 and may have ended in disaster. To put it bluntly it was the red army wot one it and they did so in-spite of Stalin, not because of him.
commie what you are failing to see is the way the Soviets dealt with workers when they protested in East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 56 and Poland in
1981, it caused great bitterness amongst those workers.
Take Hungary, it was a spontaneous rising against an occupying army which had renegaded on a deal to withdraw completely and instead returned to Budapest to crush a communist led government.
After negotiating a deal with theCzech party leader Nagy, Andropov, a senior member of the KGB had been sent by the Soviet leadership to the Soviet Embassy in Budapest to destroy the senior ranks of a fraternal party. Men and women who had served alongside the USSR in the Great Partiotic war.
To give themselves cover they bribed two Quizlings in the Czech party leadership, one of whom decades later introduced many of the reforms that Nagy wanted to introduce.
Of course the CIA and Brit intel muddied the water, that is what they do, but if the flood gates had not been opened by the Kremlin there would have been no water to dirty.
The political leader of the rising was a communist, as was the military leader, not just any communists but people who had a long history of fighting in the same trench as the USSR.
Some of the best writing on the Hungarian rising was by Peter Fryer, the daily worker correspondent in Hungary at the time. But I suppose you will not read his work because he felt so strongly about the betrayal that occurred that he resigned from the party over it. To you he is another stooge or lackey or agent of the CIA.
If you look at this period logically instead of through your political prism, the real fucking stooges and traitors were sitting in the Kremlin destroying the last vestiges of the Russian revolution. The rot set in long before Gorbacev, once Stalin started murdering Lenin's closest comrades and all who disagreed with him, and placed in positions of power immoral criminals like Khrushchev and Brezhnev to do his bidding, the game was up.
The USSR became a car crash waiting to happen.
Fraternal regards
"Immoral criminals like Khrushchev and Brezhnev". Gosh. Almost Maoist in its vitriol - Maoists dislike the former for the "secret speech" attacking Stalin, and the break with China happened while Khrushchev was in power and it was confirmed under "New Tsar" Brezhnev.
I haven't read Fryer, but he was later a chum of Gerry Healy, which can only be described as jumping from the frying pan into the fire.
As to believing Russia was an enemy in two world wars, I am sure there are exceptions. However, a history teacher found something like two thirds of the pupils he surveyed believing that, in the 1990s. Press reports saw it as evidence of poor teaching, but it was actually something more profound - the kids grew up in the late cold war, in which James Bond villains etc. typically have Russian names etc. Their ideological conditioning was perfect. So, incidentally, is yours. (I am sure you could have found something better than the Greens if you had really tried.)
A book I did read was The God That Failed, a cold war artefact published in 1949 or 1950 with a contribution from Hungarian-born Arthur Koestler, one of a number of repentant ex-Communists who contributed. The book is now known to have been commissioned and funded by Western intelligence services, and Koestler made no bones about his willingness to cooperate with such, according to his biographer David Cesarani.
As to the USSR being a car crash waiting to happen - yes, the Nazis made this assumption when they invaded it. So did a lot of people.
Sorry I wrote Czech party in the above comment when it should have been Hungarian.
no savior from on high deliver.
Yes your right about Fryer joining Healy's outfit although like many who drew that short straw, it was a very short stay.
Your wrong about the Nazis regarding the USSR as a car crash, they, having fitted up Tukhchevsky and served him up on a platter to Stalin, knowing full well the paranoid imbecile would put to the wall all the senior staff officers who had ever served with the General; thought the SU would be a push over. As too did the combined armies that invaded Russia after the Bolsheviks took power, which is something different.
The car crash that I had in mind was the workers in the USSR would eventually either overthrow the stalinist dregs who ruled over them, or would not lift a finger to keep them in power and so it was.
Mick, you take a moralistic stance that says the working class are always right, it often blinds you to the politics of the day. The Ulster Workers’ Council strike in 1974 and the dockers who backed Enoch Powell were working class but what was the politics behind it? Likewise what was the politics behind 56 or 68? Saying you are working class or that you look at life from the perspective of the working class, or from the top of a tower block, really means very little in political terms. Some of my fellow trade union members bore me to tears with; “I’m working class, it’s in my blood, it’s in my DNA”. It’s meaningless talk and when they then go and vote Labour it is all rather clownish and somewhat right wing. But they are working class, alright?
Deng was on the Long March, Khrushchev fought at Stalingrad, Jack Jones went to Spain but ended up on the right wing of the trade union movement, the Sinn Fein MLA Raymond McCartney was a hunger striker. They changed and tried to change their respective movements and some of them succeeded. Those in Hungary who had a radical past betrayed it and tried to shift the balance of forces to the right globally. It may be that they didn’t look at it in those terms and that they retreated into a narrow nationalism, either way it’s not socialism.
My starting position, simplistic as it is, is that there has to be a better way of structuring a socialist political and economic system than the Soviet Union did it. Too much went wrong to be ignored or excused, and much could be learned from a careful and honest post-mortem, both what to do and what not to do.
I agree that Russia was better off during the Soviet Union that it is now -- which is perhaps more a testament to how bad the post-Soviet "reforms" were than to how good things were under the USSR.
But this is my point in holding the Soviet Union out as a good example of what not to do: there is much information to be gleaned from the wreckage that can be used to build a better, stronger, more efficient, and, yes, freer socialist system.
There is obvious tension between giving power to the state, which must happen for socialism, and individual freedom from state repression. One key problem in the USSR seems to have been that there simply weren't checks on the arbitrary wielding of state power by persons within the ruling party against political, personal, or "state" enemies. And to make matters worse, this arbitrary wielding of state power often proved fatal to those on the receiving end. There wasn't any attempt at a free press free from government repression, free speech was absent, all the freedoms which are basic human rights weren't respected. Dismiss these freedoms as "bourgeois," or point out how the West has also fallen short, but the fact remains that the USSR was repressive to those who it regarded as its enemies, and it regarded all too many as its enemies.
The list could go on about other shortcomings, shortcomings which eclipsed the promise of a state for the people.
What I'd like to see is serious efforts to think through how to do this stuff right, and to do this stuff without harming or repressing people in the name of state power or authority.
NCM it all depends on what you want ultimately. Many on the left abhor the Soviet Union citing the repression as the reason but is that actually why? Would these same people really like to live in a society where there was no private property and life was organised on the formula “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need”? The behavior of most on the left shows that they are firming welded to the values of capitalist society, this is of course understandable but only to a point. When attempts are made to establish socialism the left are often the most vocal opponents of it, your attitude towards socialist Cuba being a case in point. Some on this site advocated a vote for the Greens and even Obama, there lays your alternative but it is an alternative to socialism not an alternative way of achieving socialism.
Mick, when the Germans invaded the USSR in June 22, 1941, they thought it would be a cakewalk. So did the international bourgeoisie, so did the Trotskyists, in fact. The previous year the German armed forces had overcome the French (supposedly having the best army in the world) in a campaign barely lasting five weeks that left the Germans or their allies occupying nearly all of continental Western Europe. If they could do that against "Aryans", they anticipated little difficulty against subhuman Slavs dominated by an upper layer of Jewish Bolshevik commissars (Nazi propaganda about the USSR, but fervently believed by them). Hitler thought the USSR was a rotten Jewish facade that would crash to the ground once the front door was kicked in, in October 1941 Goering boasted at a Berlin rally that the USSR was beaten and would never rise again etc. German troops were more sober in their assessments, noting that however many Soviet troops they killed or captured, the land was vast and there was always another lot of "Bolsheviks" to fight, just up ahead.
NCM - "without harming or repressing people". Gee. The bourgeoisie are just going to give up power to the working class, aren't going to organise counter-revolution, perhaps stage a coup, appeal for help from their class brothers in other states to invade to "restore democracy". You sound like Allende in 1973.
And yet the CIA deemed Allende a mortal threat, NSFOHD, and dealt with him as such.
When I say "without harming or repressing people," I am referring to systematic repression of the populace by an unaccountable and paranoid government, which happened on a mass scale in the Soviet Union and happened on a lesser scale in other countries. It is that evil which must be addressed by, first, recognizing it as an evil, and second, by putting into place checks and proper due process.
I am a skeptic of the success of the Cuba socialist revolution, but that simply makes me a skeptic. Skeptics are people too.
NCM said: “It is that evil which must be addressed by, first, recognizing it as an evil”
Your last post reads like a press release from The House Committee on Un-American Activities.
As with Arbenz in 1954 (an experience that helped radicalise Che Guevara), Allende was overthrown by a CIA-backed coup. Neither Arbenz nor Allende took severe measures against the class enemy while there was still time, but that didn't stop them being depicted as "Reds".
Reminds me of a cartoon from the 1950s in the USA. A policeman is beating a demonstrator who is holding a sign saying "anti-Communist union on strike". (A feature of the Red Scare was anti-Communist unions raiding pro-Communist union locales, sometimes with overt encouragement from employers. The militancy of US trade unions was affected by this, naturally.) The cop snarls, "I don't care what kind of Communist you are. You reds are all the same to me."
During the Red Scare in the USA, people were expected to abhor the USSR and the Communist Party, sometimes in open hearings. Maybe you would have passed such a test - I certainly wouldn't. But if the repression is serious enough, you will be labelled a "Communist", however absurd the accusation might seem in less frantic times.
Commie, your position is that referring to the systematic state repression of the populace in the name of socialism as "evil" is McCarthyite?
By saying this, you're basically making my point that there's a real problem needing addressing, but you're not giving me much confidence that hard-liners will ever care to do so.
So basically I'm either with the Soviets, or I'm a reactionary McCarthyite...? No middle ground in your worldview, I take it? Not very open-minded, are you?
NSFOHD, you make a very good point: the US government was rather inclusive in who they regarded as a "communist." Martin Luther King, Jr. was one of the more infamous examples of this -- J. Edgar Hoover basically considered the civil rights movement to be communist inspired or sympathetic and there was a a great deal of official surveillance and attempts at repression against persons in the civil rights movement based on this belief. Labeling someone as a "communist" was an easy way of marginalizing them politically, as the 1950s showed under McCarthy and the HUAC (of course it all eventually backfired on McCarthy and he died several years after the era he's named after ended, a broken alcoholic -- but only after ruining the lives and careers of many through blacklisting and official denunciation). I can guarantee that the fine distinctions between various socialist and communist sects meant nothing -- a red was a red was a red, as you say, even if the red was an entirely different color and hated all shades of maroon. The US repressed dissent, obviously, during the Cold War, and there was, until the late 1960s, enforced conformity in politics -- and the Vietnam War wouldn't have been possible but for the unthinking and uncritical way in which the populace here accepted anti-communism as its driving ideology. Much of the 20th century was all messed up, and the task now for the world's population is to unmess things up. Good luck, as they say, eh?
I view the use of the word evil as an emotive term and one with evangelical connotations. Reagan also referred to the Soviet Union as the evil empire so you are unfortunate in your choice of words unless of course you admired Reagan.
The Soviet Union can by all means be criticised and I have done so myself in some of my posts. Now that it has gone we can see more clearly what it really was and what the global consequences of its collapse were. I see your criticisms as being from a school that wished it had collapsed earlier, I also sense you would like to see an end to socialism in Cuba which would be nothing short of a catastrophe for the Cuban people and a victory for reaction.
When the Soviet Union collapsed imperialism quickly moved into the breach with its wars of conquest and attacks on our welfare, social and legal rights. It was a disgrace that organisations like the SWP thought that the collapse of the Soviet Union actually increased the chances of building socialism in eastern Europe. These attacks have yet to be repelled, in time of course they will but we are still living under the wave of reaction brought on by its collapse.
Commie, you make a fair point about the connotations of the word "evil" above, so let's substitute a less objectionable phrase, like "bad thing."
It's not an end to socialism I want to see. It's the end of repressive governance that seems to piggy-back all too easily onto socialism. My point is I believe it is possible, and desireable, to implement socialism but without the unfortunate political side-effects. Why can't there be socialism AND human rights? The two really should go hand in hand. Besides, isn't that the point of the whole enterprise -- to replace an unjust system with a just one?
The rise and fall of the Soviet Union has, in my view, harmed socialism by unfairly discrediting it. I say "unfairly" because the Soviet Union had genuine problems, but those problems weren't necessarily integral to socialism, merely the particular way the USSR implemented its program. Now we get "market reforms" and capitalism unfettered, which will, I believe, lead to an unfixable crisis -- and from that crisis, I also believe, will be born the need for better socialist solutions than simply re-implementing the Soviet model.
I want Cuba to succeed, actually, as a socialist system. I am merely skeptical that what has happened so far is success, and I think it is fair to raise those thoughts. It may not be PC to do so, but I'm not interested in being PC. I want to critically look at what is, what could be, and what shouldn't be... and that takes sometimes being unafraid to say the wrong thing about sacred cows.
There's nothing "PC" about defending the Soviet Union. It actually cuts across received bourgeois thought. Cuba gets a slightly better press, but I can remember people in the 1990s "noticing" homophobia in Cuba while being blind to it in their own societies.
The Red Scare outlasted McCarthy, (I usually avoid the term "McCarthyism", seeing it as imprecise - the Red Scare started before he became well-known). He fell from grace, not for anti-Communism, but for attacking the US Army and Senate interests. In the 1960s, the FBI started the COINTELPRO programme, attacking the CPUSA among others. It was illegal, but the age-old problem of "who guards the guardians?" is there, and the FBI was, and perhaps still is, off any kind of legal leash, even under bourgeois law.
Why can't there be socialism and human rights? Depends what you mean by human rights. Arbenz and Allende granted human rights to their enemies, and much good it did them. It isn't in the nature of bourgeois society to examine its own response to threats to its class rule, or its cruelties inflicted in the name of making a profit. It would rather talk of Gulags than of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, obviously. It would rather talk about Pol Pot than about Agent Orange, rather talk about Islamist terrorism than the use it made of Islamist Dark Age reactionaries during the Cold War.
Somebody in 1918, maybe Plekhanov, who had broken with his one-time comrades and died shortly after, said, "Against the Bolsheviks, all methods are good." The bourgeoisie has always followed this teaching.
NSFOHD, you are absolutely correct in what you say above.
McCarthy met his downfall not because of his anti-communism per se but because he finally messed with the wrong folks... "wrong" in the sense they were well positioned to smash him publically, unlike his more vulnerable targets.
You are right that there is much wrong with the capitalist-imperialist world order. I would only caution that everything you point to doesn't excuse the gulags and Pol Pot, etc. I'd like socialism without the gulags and killing fields, please. I have faith it can be done, and all I ask is the value of avoiding needless mass suffering be recognized and acted upon.
Those who lump these values in with the "bourgeois class enemy" miss the point totally, in my opinion, or simply don't want to acknowledge the problem because, I believe, they either don't care or they lack confidence they can make socialism work without the need to rule with an iron fist. I'm calling for confidence and caring.
Most rebellions by the down-trodden in history have been put down, usually with utter savagery. It would be tedious to list the many examples of this. Suffice to mention the Taiping rebellion in 19th century China, triggered by a young man who became convinced he was related to Christ after encountering a Christian missionary. Because of the social and ethnic discontents of China, he attracted a large following and it took over a decade for the central authorities to destroy his movement. Many millions died in what has been called history's most destructive civil war, partly because government troops were prepared to depopulate entire regions to destroy the Taiping movement, using fire and sword. To some extent, Chinese Communists have claimed the Taiping movement as part of their legacy.
I and "Commie" have given many examples of bourgeois/ruling class ruthlessness when its rule is threatened. Revolutionaries have often come to grief when they under-estimated bourgeois ruthlessness and did not take measures. Again, the historical examples are numerous. Despite lots of patriotic bullshit, the Versailles forces actually negotiated with the Prussians to release French POWs so they could be armed and used against the Commune in 1871. Sensing common class interests, the Prussians did so. The Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919 was destroyed by Admiral Horthy's Whites, with the help of a Romanian Army invasion of Hungary. Before that, and after that, Horthy's relations with Romania were poor (when, in 1941, both Hungarians and Romanians invaded the USSR, it was considered advisable to keep them separated from each other in case these participants in the "crusade against Bolshevism" started fighting one another)
but in 1919, ruling class interests won out.
"Confidence and caring" - you'll fall down every manhole your ruling class puts in front of you.
NCM, communists are neither evil nor bad people, these are petty prejudices that you need to overcome.
When people say there are no human rights in Cuba they really mean you don’t have the right to overthrow the system. Cuba is not unique in this respect as all countries have treason laws. The Cubans have a slogan: “Within the revolution, everything. Outside the revolution, nothing” meaning all creative thinking that defends and furthers the revolution is encouraged but anything that threatens to undermine the revolution is outlawed. Independence, healthcare, education and the right to a job are not considered human rights by the bourgeois swines of Amnesty International. The achievements of the Cuban revolution, achievements that don’t impress you, most countries are unable to provide for their citizens even though they have the resources to do so, dearth of health care in America being an obvious example.
I am of course concerned about those who are kidnapped, tortured and held without trial in Cuba which is why I want the Americans out of Guantánamo.
Commie, you are right that I have my prejudices. I am doing my best to recognize them and overcome them, which is the best mea culpa I can offer.
I have mixed feelings about Cuba, as you know -- as I suspect the reality about what has been achieved does not match up with what is generally touted. It does not follow that nothing about Cuba impresses me or that I wish them any ill -- only that I believe there is much room for improvement, and that Cuba is not the utopia the left often tries to paint it as. Of course, the US government won't let me visit there legally to see it for myself, which, hmmm, doesn't help any argument that the US is somehow free where Cuba isn't.
I've given up hope that capitalism can be a benign force for progress and good -- forgive me for once thinking this, but I am of course a product of my surroundings and upbringing and it seemed like a sensible enough idea at the time -- as long as certain unpleasant truths could be ignored.
Allowing criticism and dissent is a virtue that should be defended, though, even if inconvenient or even threatening to the status quo. You are absolutely correct about the relative nature of freedoms and the fact that we often treat our own pet dogs here in the US better than our vulnerable citizens is a damning indictment of our values. And you are also correct to point out the sheer hypocrisy of condemning Cuba for human rights abuses when the US has been committing human rights abuses on Cuban soil for years now.
To NSFOHD, all I can say is, I obviously do not share the pessimism you express, or the apparent belief that injustice must be waged to overcome injustice. I stand by my comment that confidence and caring would go much farther in bringing about sustainable socialism worth living in than revolution built on mass retribution. This might sound like John Lennon pipedream nonsense given a world built from harsh history, but the alternative you paint is too bleak to be given much attention. There's a "burning the village to save it" aspect of building socialism through mass revolution aimed at crushing its opponents and ensuring popular conformity to the new state's iron will -- the result would be a world that embraced slavery to free itself from its bonds.
Actually, when the left aren't depicted as bloody-fanged Bolshevik monsters, they are depicted as naive. Maybe some would put me in the first category, but I doubt whether they would put me in the second.
You are big on the "evil" of the left, (as "Commie" notes, a very revealing choice of phrase). Do you think a bourgeois class capable of the slave trade, Freikorps (supported, by the way, by the "moderate" left), fascism, Auschwitz, death squad régimes in Latin America and elsewhere (sometimes the result of overthrowing elected governments) is just going to let revolution happen? No. It will use every means at its disposal. Communists know this.
"Pessimist" I may be, but I know my history and I also know what arbitrary arrest by the bourgeois state which preens itself on its alleged democracy and freedoms feels like.
NSFOHD, that's not exactly accurate. I do believe that certain evils that have accompanied past socialist systems need to be recognized and avoided next time. "Evils" is just another word for bad things. I believe that socialism can be made better, and that it can be made, and that it can be made without mass suffering. I know you know your history, and I am impressed by your knowledge, and perhaps it could be said I fall in the second category, the naive. But I am quite certain that not multiplying suffering in the name of fixing the world is the first rule. Yes, this world has been a bloody mess, in all senses of the phrase, but more bloody messes aren't any good.
I doubt whether it would be desirable to take everything done in the USSR and other socialist states as a role model (because you need to apply what is useful to your own situation). But saying the USSR shouldn't have done this or that comes easily when you live in a relatively well-off, metropolitan imperialist country where the left is weak, not challenging for power and has thought processes heavily infiltrated by bourgeois ideology. Things are different in countries where there is turmoil, the left can bid for power or has actually done so but the counter-revolution is on the march. If you can guarantee that the class enemy won't try to overthrow revolutionary gains through cunning or naked force, then by all means have your revolution of flowers. The problem is, you can't. Personally I would much rather be Felix Dzerzhinsky than Millière, a journalist and deputy who criticised the Paris Commune from a liberal humanitarian standpoint. Millière was captured by Versailles forces and an army officer told him that he had been "revolted" by his articles. Millière was made to kneel down "to beg society's pardon" and was then shot dead. Millière criticised the Commune, but it was the reaction, the established order that is most vicious when its greedy power is threatened, that struck him down.
I'm reminded of a great quote from the classic novel Catch-22: "It's better to live on your feet than to die on your knees"... a reversal of the old adage "it's better to die on your feet than live on your knees." Point taken, NSFOHD.
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