Daily Archives: January 11, 2022

When the late Rhodri Morgan, as Labours First Minister of Wales, said that there was clear red water between his administration and the Blair government in Westminster, he was attempting to put distance between the two countries and governments, denoting that they were both separate and different: Wales government was to the left of Labours in London and more in favour of devolution. Another significant aspect of this distancing was from New Labours spin. Morgan wanted Welsh Labour to be seen as more honest.

Ironically, however, clear red water has become yet another spun line a phrase used as part of a wider strategy to give the impression of a red, radical, redistributive government in Wales, pursuing policies that are markedly different to the ones pursued by the true blue Tories in London.

The essays in The Welsh Way forensically blow these myths apart. They make the case that the government in Wales led by Labour for more than 20 years since the Senedds inception in 1999 has pursued a neoliberal agenda designed to preserve the status quo. Its radical rhetoric, in the words of the late Ceri Evans, one of the socialists to whom this book is dedicated, has been gutted of all content.

The Welsh Way is a collection of 23 essays on neoliberalism and devolution and an interview with Cardiffs community youth project Butetown Matters. The essays take on and turn around the accepted view that the Welsh government is challenging neoliberalism. The actions and words of Welsh ministers are scrutinised and the prevailing or accepted wisdom is shown to be based on classic spin.

Spin works and its worked for Welsh Labour. Labours persistent success can partly be attributed to the way it has woven the idea of Wales political distinctiveness into its own mythology of Welshness, say the books authors. Yet radical rhetoric at the macro level set out in documents, speeches and social media, and recirculated by an attenuated news media is useless when its not accompanied by the political will or the competence to turn their rhetoric into reality.

In her chapter on feminism, Mabli Siriol Jones points to the 2018 declaration that the Welsh government is a feminist government. Yet Wales still has way too high levels of child and womens poverty, and 20 years of devolved policy on gender equality has prioritised recognition over redistribution. Jones shows how the Welsh governments childcare policies have discriminated against the poorest women, a point echoed by Catrin Ashton in her chapter on working mothers.

Sam Parry looks at Welsh underdevelopment and concludes that the Welsh governments economic policy shows astounding continuity with the Thatcher era. In his chapter on nuclear colonialism, Robat Idris outlines how the Welsh political establishment has shown itself to be in thrall to multinational corporations, subject to the economic whim of Westminster. And Calvin Jones states that the exploitation of the natural environment for little gain is a notable characteristic of Wales.

Dan Evans shows how, in education, the Welsh government initially pursued a raft of progressive changes. They abolished league tables, learned from Finland and introduced the foundation phase for early-years education, established a childrens commissioner, resisted free schools and academies, and introduced numerous initiatives aimed at the most deprived pupils.

But this good work was undone with a change of minister, who brought back league tables alongside literacy and numeracy tests in a new obsession to climb the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings. To what end? PISA measures how pupils are doing as an indication of economic performance. Joe Healys essay on higher education outlines the desperation for higher education institutions to reach the market, using the startling example of Swansea University being signed as the official shirt sponsor for Swansea City Football Club.

Several of the authors highlight the yawning gap between rhetoric on further devolution and the lack of any action to make such an outcome likely, which allows politicians to complain about things that they in fact have the power to change. Huw Williams points to broadcasting as an example: After years of ignoring calls for the devolution of broadcasting, the complaints about the difficulty in engaging the Welsh public in Welsh terms during the pandemic are on par with the well-worn tactics of Labour politicians campaigning against NHS closures in Wales. Indeed, the Welsh Labour government brought forward plans to close hospital A&E departments while Labour politicians stood on picket lines and addressed rallies attacking the health boards implementing government policy.

Georgia Burdett notes that, in Wales, spending per head on social protection was 13 per cent higher than the [UK] national average and so it is hugely significant who controls it. Yet the Welsh Labour government is content for the Tories in Westminster to continue to do so.

Chapters on policing and the prison service by Mike Harrison and Polly Manning hammer home the same point. Manning says: When faced with criticism of the high rates of incarceration, appalling prison conditions and failures in rehabilitation that have accumulated under their watch, the Welsh government has hit back with their familiar excuse But X isnt devolved. Both authors make the point that if devolved, spending could be reallocated to the causes of crime to prevent it, instead of spending more and more on the institutions that deal with the aftermath of crime the police and prisons. Manning puts a strong case for the abolition of prisons.

This book, as Welsh actor and activist Michael Sheen says in the foreword, is filled with essays that are attempting to expand the parameters of discourse around what can and cannot be said about the current state of Wales and its direction of travel. He says we need more forums for this kind of discourse. Thank God for those that do exist and let us continue to do all we can to protect and support them and endeavour to create more. Sheen is advocating the building of a movement to dismantle Welsh neoliberalism, and this humanist says Amen to that.

Leanne Wood served as leader of Plaid Cymru from 2012 to 2018, and was a Member of the Senedd from 2003 to 2021. The Welsh Way: Essays on Neoliberalism and Devolution is out now from Parthian Books

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Review: The Welsh Way: Essays on Neoliberalism and Devolution - Red Pepper

The decision by a jury in Bristol to acquit the Colston Four of criminal damage, following their role in the toppling of a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in June 2020, is a welcome sign that Britain is changing. In the 17th century Colston was one of Britains wealthiest slave traders. It speaks volumes about what Bristols Victorian civic leaders valued when they decided to erect a monument to Colston in 1895, almost a century after the slave trade was abolished (decades before slavery itself). Just 12 years earlier, a second statue of William Wilberforce, who campaigned for slaverys abolition, was erected in his home city of Hull. Yet in the south-western English port, whose wealth was built on the flesh trade, it was seen as fit to honour Colston with a monument, and a plaque describing him as virtuous and wise.

The prosecution should never have been brought, and perhaps would not have been had the home secretary, Priti Patel, and other ministers, been less vociferous in their condemnations of the protests, which culminated in Colstons statue being dumped in the harbour. It is far from clear that this use of the states resources was in the public interest. Six other activists were dealt with via a restorative justice route, including voluntary work.

Objections to the Colston statue, which occupied a prominent position in Bristols centre, were longstanding, and part of a wider, local movement to remove tributes to the slave trader from the city (including the renaming of its main concert hall). That feelings among a section of the public finally boiled over was because of the passionate objections to racial injustice aroused by the Black Lives Matter demonstrations following the murder, less than two weeks earlier, of George Floyd.

The verdict is not, as one of the defendants herself pointed out, a green light to start pulling down all the statues in the UK. Colston was a particular person. His monument belongs to a specific time and place and is now in a Bristol museum, thus demolishing the idea that taking it down was an effort to erase the past. What the jurys decision shows is that members of the public are more than willing to think about the messages embedded in our built environment, including monuments so many of them Victorian. They accepted the defences case that it was the presence of the statue, and failure to update the plaque, that constituted a moral if not a legal offence.

Reckoning with the past is difficult. Britain was once an empire that governed vast areas of the world. Astonishing levels of greed and cruelty are part of our history, along with a religiously motivated civilising mission that sought to export Christianity across the globe. Everyone who cares about knowledge should support efforts to increase public understanding of all this. In organisations across the country, including the National Trust, good work is being done.

Yet up to now, the government has set its face against anything that might make heritage less celebratory, condemning as woke all attempts to place artefacts such as those that fill British country houses (and city squares) in a broader context. Its repressive police bill seeks to increase prison sentences dramatically for those convicted of criminal damage (at present, the maximum for causing damage worth less than 5,000 is three months).

Statues are symbols, and tackling racism requires more than moving them. But acknowledging historic injustices is part of building a more equal society today. Rather than complaining about the way in which the law has been applied, as some ministers have done, the government as a whole should think again. Britain is better off without Bristols monument to Colston.

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The Guardian view on the Colston Four: taking racism down - The Guardian

As the exit polls of the 2019 general election flashed up on our television screens, signalling an abysmal defeat for Labour, a row ensued over on ITV. The former Labour home secretary Alan Johnson scolded veteran left-wing activist Jon Lansman for the partys demise by telling him: Go back to your student politics. The remark eventually spelt the introduction of a new image for Labour, one that was cemented in Keir Starmers contract with voters this week.

A surge in younger voters coming out for Jeremy Corbyns Labour in 2019 was a defining moment. That year, 62 per cent of 18-24-year-olds voted for the party in the general election, compared to 27 per cent for the Conservatives. A similar event occurred in 2017, when the party gained 30 seats, with the same percentage of young voters believing in Labour policies.

An uptick in party membership under Corbyns tenure was partly down to young voters feeling inspired by Labours socialist principles. Its these young members who were out on the campaign trail, promoting a progressive agenda on the doorstep, in contrast to the mainstream medias incessant attacks on Corbynism.

At grassroots level across the country, many constituencies youth officers have a tough job continuing this optimism under Starmer. The current leadership focuses solely on winning back older, more socially conservative voters in the red wall.

After lacklustre by-election results in places like Hartlepool and North Shropshire, young members have felt ignored and deflated under Conservative dominance and a meek leader who is only supposedly on their side. One young party member in my constituency who I spoke to described how Starmers image replicated Tony Blairs; one that is outdated and fails to recognise the forward-looking perspective of its young members.

The leadership must quell distrust in young people by defining their movement as bold. Calls for common ownership of public services, the abolition of tuition fees and a green new deal to salvage the planet are regularly espoused by millennials and Gen Z. These measures arent just popular with certain generations, but also with potential Labour voters who call for a more interventionist approach to the economy.

Instead, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves refused calls to nationalise water in a recent interview with The Observer, confirming a lurch to the right from Corbynism. Her parliamentary colleague and shadow foreign secretary, David Lammy, apologised for nominating Corbyn in 2015, stating he never believed he would become leader. It is clear that senior figures seek to erase the Corbyn era from Labours current image, no matter how popular it was with young voters.

However, the disenfranchisement of young members really began last year. Labours criteria for the Future Candidates Programme allegedly rejected young members on the left of the party. A party source responded to LabourList editor Sienna Rodgers, saying: This isnt factional. We just arent insulting voters with piss poor candidates anymore.

If left-wing candidates, willing to endorse policies overwhelmingly popular with the general public, are being ostracised from the process, then they may look to other parties. Without a mobilised young activist base, youth officers will find the task of imploring young members to stay and help organise a unified opposition against the government very arduous indeed.

The pandemic has exposed how difficult things are for young people finishing education and entering the world of work. With an economy in dire straits, a Labour Party that welcomes these voters by promising transformative change is necessary.

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To retain its share of the youth vote, Labour officials must collaborate with young members to placate any worries they may have regarding their prospects in the party or beyond. At grassroots level, Labour-led councils must engage more with their constituents to galvanise the local electorate and ramp up the support from local young members.

Sceptics like Alan Johnson condemned Corbynism and those who advocated for it by ignoring the impact it had on younger generations. Starmers popularity in parliament and across the political establishment has only recently made a dent in the governments approval ratings. As the prime minister is mired in sleaze scandals and corruption, Starmer and his coterie of advisors have used this time to tighten their grip on Labours internal warfare and depart from socialism.

Labours young members, pivotal in leading the party for the future, should not be undermined in their push for an egalitarian society. The party has a lot of work to do before the next election, with rumours swirling that one will be called as early as 2023. To create a strong opposition to Tory rule, Labour needs its young members more than ever.

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Labours young members hold the key to the partys future - The Independent

In the closing pages of her Women and the Revolution, published in 1938, Ethel Mannin insisted that women faced a stark choice:

The women of today must either ally themselves with freedom and life, or with oppression and death; either work for a brave new world, or surrender themselves, and their children, to the doomed old world For make no mistake about it, if the revolution does not come, or is defeated by the powers of reaction, this civilisation must be engulfed in a new world war of the capitalist-imperialist powers, and this country must be caught by the wave of fascist oppression sweeping Europeand fascism by any other name is the same oppression, the same death of freedom and progress, especially for women.

Mannin goes on to list some of the fearless, active revolutionary women whose lives she had chronicled earlier in her book. In particular, there is Louise Michel, who shouldered a rifle at the barricades for the defence of the Paris Commune, and Constance Markiewicz, who was a soldier at the Dublin barricades for the defence of the Irish Republic. Just in case her readers dismissed these as irrelevant past events, she reminded them of an epic still wet upon the pages of historythe story of the militia women in the Spanish Revolution of 1936. She goes on to insist that the urgent need today is for the Everywoman to be awakened to the meaning of social revolution, and how it can serve her and her childrenand awakened to the realisation that revolution is not exclusively mans business, no mere affair of politics, but her businessan affair of life itselfa choice between life and death. This powerful call to arms comes at the end of a book that has been altogether forgotten, hidden from history, written by a woman who, although well known, indeed notorious, at the time as a writer and activist, has also been forgotten and hidden from history.

Who then was Ethel Mannin? She was born in October 1900, the child of working-class parents. Her father, Bob, had worked at Covent Garden as a porter before becoming a post office sorter at the Mount Pleasant mail centre. Bob Mannin was a life-long socialist. When still in his teens, he had been a member of William Morriss Socialist League, which had been established towards the end of 1884, and he attended meetings at Morriss home in Hammersmith. Bob had taken part, alongside an older friend, John Burns, in an infamous November 1887 demonstration in Trafalgar Square, Bloody Sunday. The demonstration was attacked by the police, including mounted officers, with many people injured in the fighting. Burns himself was badly beaten by the police, arrested and eventually jailed for six weeks. As Ethel Mannin later recorded, John Burns went on to become a Labour MP and then a Liberal MP and government minister, selling his beliefs and principles so that he died a rich man; her father, on the other hand, died with his ideals intact, his loyalty to the class from which he sprang as steadfast as in 1887. Bob never joined any other political party and certainly had no illusions about the socialism of the Labour Party, although he had a long-standing admiration for James Maxton of the Independent Labour Party. Their home had a library of socialist booksThe Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists, The Iron Heel, No 5 John Street and many othersand Ethel always insisted that she had got her rebel spirit from her father.

Mannin later remembered that her own first act of rebellion happened at school when she took a stand against patriotism in an essay after the First World War had just begun. She was lectured by the headmistress on the wickedness and stupidity of my attitude, and caused to kneel for a whole morning in the school hall. The intention was to shame her, but she recalled that she felt rather heroic. Indeed, the following year, on Empire Day 1915, when the whole school saluted the flag, the revolutionary in me emerged once more. I would not salute the flag. My flag was the red flag. She was threatened with expulsion and once again made to kneel while the rest of the school marched through the playground and saluted the flag. She left school soon afterwards. Aged 15, she went to work at the Charles Higham advertising agency as a stenographer, but found herself an unwitting beneficiary of the war. The agency was short-staffed because so many of its writers had joined the army. The now 16 year old Ethel Mannin found herself writing copy and was soon actually put in charge of getting out a number of the companys magazines. She had one good friend at Highams, an artist and anarchist from New Zealand, J S, who converted her to vegetarianism. They went to hear prominent trade unionist and revolutionary Tom Mann speak at Finsbury Park and to the Albert Hall for a rally where they sang the Red Flag together. J S introduced her to the activities of the Industrial Workers of the World and Eugene Debs and they talked of strikes and lockouts and something that we referred to vaguely as the revolution. She hero-worshipped him, but he returned to New Zealand to avoid being dragged into the war. The war years saw both her socialist education continuing and opportunities opening up for her as a writer, but then her life was overtaken at age 19 by marriage and a baby daughter. At this point, her socialist politics seem to have gone into hibernation, but she continued to write in order to make money, publishing her first novel, Martha, in 1923. It was her third novel, Sounding Brass, published in 1925, that brought her financial success and enabled her to begin to satisfy my hunger to travel.

This was the beginning of a literary career that saw her become a prolific and successful popular novelist. Looking back on this time in her life, some 50 years later, she remembers how proud she was when she could afford a maid. She admitted to actually disliking the memory of myself. Success and a certain amount of celebrity turned her into a shocking young snobgiving myself absurd airs, which I am embarrassed to remember now. Having a maid was class distinction; it was exploitation. However, socialism and the class struggle were never entirely forgotten. Even while she was enjoying her success and the material benefits that it brought, she was still aware that beneath the surface gaity of the jazz age that she was enjoying so much, there was a gathering storm. This storm first broke with the 1926 General Strike. She was still sufficiently socialistic at heart to feel indignation at the uprush of middle class patriotism opposing the strikersand bitterness against the Trade Union Congress leaders when, after nine days of what seemed like near-revolution, the strike collapsed and the workers went back on the bossess termseveryone but the minerswho, after their betrayal, stayed out for six months in steadily mounting misery. Even among her set of people in London, the strike, she sarcastically observed, caused a good deal of inconvenience. She puts her political detestation of Winston Churchill down to his role in the General Strike. She also remembers that 1926 was the year I changed my hairstyle to the severe centre parting one by which I was to become known. During these years, however, her rebellion really only consisted in support for sexual liberation and progressive education, and opposition to censorship, particularly the banning of books by such authors as James Joyce, Radclyffe Hall and D H Lawrence. She was nothing if not progressive. Indeed, in 1931, she published the first of her books advocating progressive education, Commonsense and the Child, with an introduction by A S Neill. The book was translated into Danish, Swedish and Dutch. Her fiction was earning her money to burn, and Mannin enjoyed a life of cocktail parties, dancing, night life and the exciting novelty of sexual emancipation. Meanwhile, however, there was another Englandindustrial Englandthat she could no longer ignore.

What began the resurrection of her revolutionary socialist commitment was the onset of the Great Depression, the disaster of the 1929-31 Labour government, the Soviet Unions apparent successes in building socialism and the rise of Nazism. Of course, fascism was not new, but Hitler seemed much more threatening than Mussolini ever had; already those Jews who could do so were beginning to leave Germany. By 1933, Mannin was a member of the Relief Committee for the Victims of German Fascism.

Mannin never seriously entertained the idea of the Labour Party having anything to do with working-class struggle and the fight for socialism. Instead, she was attracted by the breakaway Independent Labour Party (ILP), attending meetings, joining its discussions of politics and literature, and contributing to its newspaper, The New Leader. In an article that appeared in January 1932, she described herself as an extreme left socialist. Nonetheless, it was not until 1933, at the invitation of ILP leader Fenner Brockway, that she finally joined the party. She describes this as my personal sobering-up. She was already trying to give her fiction a socialist turn, urged on by James Maxton, and had encouraged a number of working-class writers such as Walter Greenwood, the author of Love on the Dole, in their own efforts. She later remembered introducing Greenwood to some of Londons revolutionary left. What were, however, the politics that she had embraced when she joined the ILP?

The ILP was a socialist organisation that was committed to winning a socialist majority in the House of Commons and then legislating for the dispossession of the capitalist class and the great landowners. It would also break up the British Empire and hand power to the colonised peoples. It was strongly opposed to militarism and called for closing down the arms industry. A corollary of all this was support for working-class struggle at home and for national liberation movements abroad. As far as the ILP was concerned the working class would take over the country through parliamentary action, but this would be backed up by a militant and determined mass movement in the workplace and on the streets. The expected capitalist resistance would be put down forcibly. The ILP had broken with the Labour Party in 1932 after its shameful performance in office between 1929 and 1931. This was not just because it had danced to the bankers tune and attacked the unemployed, but also due to its savage repression of Mohandas Gandhis civil disobedience movement in India. The ILP had a membership of just over 11,000 when Mannin joined, and she was seen as an important recruit to the partys propaganda effort. Her local party branch regularly met at her house in Wimbledon, Oak Cottage, where, in her words, they passed resolutions, planned meetings and generally plotted the revolution. She was meeting party activists, real workers for a cause in which they believed not merely intellectually, but with a profound personal passion. Part of what attracted her was the fact that at the ILP summer school you might see, as she did, a poster on the wall that read: Have you been to prison yet? If not, why not? A good indication of how far to the left the ILP leadership moved in this period is provided by Brockways Workers Front, published in 1938. Here, Brockway called for a workers front led by revolutionary socialists as opposed to the Popular Front recommended by Stalins Soviet Union, which aimed at compromise with the working classs enemies. He made absolutely clear that the ILP was a revolutionary socialist party. He was, unfortunately, to rejoin the Labour Party in 1946, ending up in the House of Lords in 1964.

As part of her embrace of revolutionary politics, Mannin decided to visit the Soviet Union and see the construction of the new socialist order at first hand. She incorporated an account of this visit into a book, Forever Wandering, that was published in 1935. It chronicled not just her visit to Russia, but to Nazi Germany, Austria and France as well as Ireland, which became her second home. In Germany, she found the endless brownshirts, swastikas and pictures of Hitlerconstant reminders of the existence of a regime alien to everything one believed in. Much later, she was to recall that one of the few pleasures to be had in Berlin was buying the chocolate figures of Hitler that were on sale in order to bite his head off. In Austria, she visited socialist Vienna, where the Social Democratic Party of Austria (Sozialdemokratische Partei sterreichs) administration had recently been overthrown by the austrofascist government of Engelbert Dollfuss. Dollfuss had sent troops to shell the working-class districts of Vienna in February 1934. While in Austria, she was shocked by the level of inequality on display, which the social-democratic administration had failed to address, but she still acknowledged that they had put up a valiant fight against Dollfuss. The only other city where she had seen so many starved-looking people was New York. The conclusion she drew from the bloody events of 1934 is interesting:

Reformist methods have been tried and found lamentably wanting; the big struggle has yet to come, and its methods will not be reformist but revolutionary. Socialist Vienna was a failure insofar as the achievement of socialism in our time was concerned, but it was an illuminative failure. In 1921, the unemployed marched on the city, invaded the luxury hotels and flung the furniture out of the windows. After the brutal treatment dealt out to them by Dollfuss in 1934, the Socialists have probably learned by now to throw more than furniture overboard; and when reformism goes out the window, revolution comes in by the door.

The contrast with Communist Russia was stark. There, a revolution had successfully taken place and, as far as Mannin and most of the British left were concerned at that time, socialism was being built: The Russian workers are not working to pile up profits for employers; they are working for themselves; their country belongs to them. She found Moscow a city completely devoid of any atmosphere of exploitation, and in which there are no rich exploiting the poor. Indeed, there were times in Moscow when she could have cried aloud for sheer joy. One highpoint of her visit was meeting playwright Ernst Toller, whose memoir, I Was a German, she much admired. He had fought in the trenches in the First World War and afterwards played a leading role in the 1919 Bavarian Revolution, which got him five years in prison. Mannin later observed, As a Jew and a revolutionary, there was no place for Toller in Nazi Germany. Indeed, his books were among those publicly burned by the Nazis. She dedicated her first revolutionary novel, Cactus, which was published in 1935, to him. However, her support for the Soviet Union was not unconditional. When she was being shown around the Museum of Revolution in Moscow, she found it impossible to resist drawing attention to every time Leon Trotsky appeared in a photograph. She took a sadistic pleasure in exclaiming, Isnt that Trotsky, to the immense discomfort of her guide. More generally, she concluded: Russia is still a very long way from being Utopia, and Russia has a long way to go; but she is travelling fast. Indeed, she called her visit to Russia the most worthwhile journey I ever made. There was one nagging worry, however: The danger of a new privileged class arising, a new bourgeoisie From my own observation this does seem to be a real danger.

Mannin was to visit Russia one more time, a visit she chronicled in her South to Samarkand, published in 1936. She was adamant that she went with the political prejudice in favour of the abolition of the capitalist system and the establishment of a workers state, and this is what the Soviet Union has achieved. By now, the Popular Front turn was getting underway, with Stalin desperately trying for an alliance with Britain and France against Nazi Germany, and she makes clear she politically opposed this. Moreover, although she supported the Communist regime for what she still believed was its efforts to build socialism, there was room for criticism. In Tiflis, Georgia, Stalins home town, you may see, as I have, families living in cellars. In spite of the blocks of modern flats in Baku, Azerbaijanwhich photograph so well for pro-Soviet propaganda purposesa great number of oil workers are still living on the oilfields under the most appalling conditions. Nevertheless, this did not mean the revolution has been a failure. Socialism was still being built. She acknowledges collectivisation was followed by the horrors of the famines, but this might be justified if socialism were the result. She did admit, however, that there were times when the poverty and suffering she saw made her wonder whether revolution is futile. Indeed, there were times when she was positively revolted by the jam tomorrow response that criticism elicited. Yet, in the end, for her, if Russia failed, it would be the greatest tragedy.

Once she was back home, before the book came out, she published her thoughts on her visit in the New Leader. Her article, Whither Russia, appeared on the 17 January 1936 and made clear that conditions in Russia were still terrible for many workers; Russia was not the promised land, but was rather the promising land. She supported what she still considered to be the building of socialism in Russia. Yet, how could it be justifiable for a commissar to have a flat in Moscow with large rooms, servants, every comfortand a charming palatial summer home, while workers are forced to live four to a squalid room? There was a new bourgeoisie emerging, and therefore it is impossible not to see Russia today as a gigantic question mark.

The article plunged her into controversy. It was celebrated by the British fascists in their newspaper, The Blackshirt, as showing Mannins disillusion with socialism. She asked the Communist Partys newspaper, the Daily Worker, to give her space to reply to this and they agreed, publishing her response with considerable fanfare on 15 February. She did not retract any of her criticisms of the Soviet Union, but she did make clear that she still supported the attempt, as she saw it, to build socialism there. One of the Daily Workers editorial staff actually thanked her for her contribution and hoped for many more. However, overnight the line changed, and the 16 February issue carried a fierce editorial denunciation of her as having the outlook of a petty-bourgeois socialist of 100 years ago. Just in case she missed the point, Moscow Radio condemned her as well. No criticism, not even friendly criticism, was to be tolerated as the Stalin regime began unleashing the Great Terror. There was, however, one appreciative reader of the article: Leon Trotsky. He wrote to Canadian revolutionary Earle Birney to ask who this Ethel Mannin was, commenting that, although her discussion had theoretical weaknesses, she had a better understanding of what was going on in Russia than many others. He praised her courage, sincerity, intelligence and powers of observation.

Before moving on it is worth briefly considering Mannins 1935 novel, Cactus. As we have seen it was dedicated to Toller, but a good case can also be made that his impact informs the whole book. It concerns the love between Elspeth Rodney and Kurt Muller, a German prisoner-of-war, who dies in captivity. At the end of the book, Elspeth is in Spain and Kurts ghost speaks to her, warning of war and the need for revolution. He is the Unknown Soldier and she is Everywoman. Kurt tells her that all over the world there are people like you, carrying within themselves the spirit of revolt:

They are hidden in suburbs and villages, little towns and great cities, factories and workshops, and they refuse to be spoon-fed by the popular pressthey refuse to accept the lies of the rich and those in the pay of the rich; they know that politics, big business and the press go hand in hand.

Kurt goes on to insist that even in capitalist and imperialist Englandthe workers will one day grow up Every now and then the spirit of revolt breaks out; there was Russia in 1917, Germany in 1919, England in 1926, Austria in this year of revolt, 1934. And the end is not yet. Indeed, he prophesies that, Soon out of the rich warm soil of Spain will come revolt, from the Basque country and Catalonia. He warns that troops might fire on the workers, But soldiers and workers have been in council for their common good before, and will again, for that is the history of mankind, which is the history of revolt. Cactus, it is worth remembering, was written in 1934 and published the following year. The Spanish Revolution began in 1936. As far as she was concerned, Cactus was one of my best novels.

With the outbreak of the Spanish Revolution, Mannin threw herself into the solidarity campaign that the ILP launched, working closely with the anarchists. She absolutely insisted that what was taking place in Spain was a revolution, but this was denied by most of the British left, which portrayed the struggle as a defence of democracy. The only people who organised meetings to support the revolution were the anarchists and the Independent Labour Party. The Labour Party and the Communist Party alike were only concerned with an anti-fascist front against General Francisco Franco, and were, in fact, the enemies of the revolution. Far from seeking to carry the revolution forward, the Communist Party line was that the revolution had to be rolled back so as not to endanger the prospect of an alliance between the Soviet Union, Britain and France. The Communists gained enormous credit from the raising of the International Brigades; however, they dealt with supporters for the revolution through a campaign of lies, smears and intimidation in Britain, and imprisonment, torture and summary execution in Spain. As for the ILP, it was allied with the Workers Party of Marxist Unification (POUM; Partido Obrero de Unificacin Marxista), sending volunteers, including George Orwell, to fight on the Catalan front. Mannin considered Orwells account of the Spanish Revolution, Homage to Catalonia, a brilliant book. Meanwhile, she chaired and spoke at meeting after meeting in support of the POUM and of the anarchist National Confederation of Labour (CNT; Confederacin Nacional del Trabajo) and Iberian Anarchist Federation (FAI; Federacin Anarquista Ibrica). She recalled relentlessly coaxing five-pound notes out of the audience: Come nownot enough yet for even one machine gun! If the audience was made up of pacifists, she never mentioned buying machine guns, instead emphasising the provision of medical supplies. In one piece, contributed to Spain and Us, a pamphlet published by the Holburn and West Central Committee for Spanish Medical Aid, she condemned the British arms embargo as an intervention in favour of Francos rebels. She was a member of the committee that organised the showing of CNT films in Britain. In January 1937, she chaired the meeting setting up the CNT-FAI London Bureau, flanked on the platform by famed United States anarchist Emma Goldman and Jack White. White had helped establish the Irish Citizen Army in Dublin in 1913 and had just returned from Spain.

It was at this time that Mannin really got to know Emma Goldman, who spoke at many of the meetings she chaired. Goldman was to have a considerable impact over Mannins thinking, pulling her away from Marxism and towards anarchism. This influence, as we shall see, was already apparent when she was working on her book Women and the Revolution in 1937. Mannins original intention had been a sort of enlarged pamphlet, but as she researched the subject, it grew and grew. Writing it was an exhausting job of work, and she often regretted ever having tackled it, worried that it was beyond my literary and political strength. That year she worked harder than I have ever worked in my life. As well as Women and the Revolution, she also wrote another book about progressive education, Commonsense and the Adolescent, once again with an introduction by A S Neill. She was working on two new novels. Darkness My Bride, published in 1938, engaged with events in Spain. One of her characters, Robert Harrison, complains that Soviet policy since 1934 has been to try and live down the October Revolution and that the Cheka was shooting people in Spain for trying to do what the Russian workers had accomplished in 1917. His friend, Franz Weigl, still finds it hard to get his head around the fact that it is the Communists in Spain who are crushing the revolution and disarming the workers Think of Communists helping to smash a revolution of the workers!

As well as her commitment to the Spanish Revolution, Mannin became heavily involved with the anti-imperialist cause through her new partner, Reg Reynolds. Reynolds had worked with Gandhi in India; when Gandhi had launched his civil disobedience campaign in March 1930, it was Reynolds who personally delivered his ultimatum to the British viceroy. Reynolds was also a strong supporter of the Palestinian struggle against both the British and the Zionists, and Mannin took up this cause as well. In 1937, the Great Palestinian Revolt was getting underway and much of the country was to fall into rebel hands. It had to effectively be reconquered by the British with Zionist assistance at the cost of over 5,000 Palestinian lives. All the while, the British left either remained silent or criticised the British government for failing to be repressive enough. Oak Cottage became a meeting place for Arabs campaigning in support of the Palestinian cause. Mannin was also involved in the movement against the partition of Ireland and, once again through Reynolds, with the anti-racists and anti-imperialists around George Padmore, Chris Braithwaite, C L R James and the International African Service Bureau. Busy indeed!

Women and the Revolution was finally finished in October 1937 and published the following year. It was still very much an ILP book, and an agitational rather than a theoretical volume. There were some serious gaps in its account, not least its failure to so much as mention the Russian revolutionary Alexandra Kollontai and the communist suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst. Nevertheless, it was a remarkable achievement and one of the most important left-wing books of the 1930s. It was published by Secker and Warburg, who were taking on the Communist Party and the politics of the Popular Front at the time, releasing a whole series of books by dissident socialists, many of them ILP members. Among these were: C L R Jamess The Black Jacobins and World Revolution 19171936: The Rise and Fall of the Communist International; Reg Grovess But We Shall Rise Again: A Narrative History of Chartism; Francis Ridleys The Papacy And Fascism: The Crisis Of the 20th Century and The Jesuits: A Study in Counter-revolution; Fenner Brockways Workers Front; Reg Reynoldss The White Sahibs in India; and Orwells Homage to Catalonia. Women and the Revolution was dedicated to Emma Goldman, but Mannin made clear in her dedicatory note that, although her disillusionment with Russia wascomplete, she still believed that the deterioration of the Marxist ideal into a dictatorship of the few over the many is not inevitable:

Still I believe that, with the revolution achieved, there could be established a real dictatorship of the proletariat that would not deteriorate into a dictatorship of a bureaucracy or a handful of politicians or leaders. Rosa Luxemburg warned Lenin that this might be the case with the Soviet Union, and tragically it soon became the case.

Essentially, what Mannin argues in Women and the Revolution was that womens oppression today is a product of capitalism, that capitalism had to be overthrown and that women had to throw themselves wholeheartedly into that struggle. Much of the book was given over to showing a presumed female readership the extent to which women had been and still were involved in revolutionary struggle. Her revolutionary politics were uncompromising. She wrote in favour of:

The overthrow of a system that is at once grossly unjust to the mass of the people, and incredibly wasteful and stupid. It should be clearly understood that by the overthrow of the system is meant the total abolition of private capital, private property and private enterprise, together with the private ownership of the sources of wealth and the means of production, and the passing of all this power to the mass of the people.

She goes on to consider the assertion that revolution and the complete overthrow of the existing system are not practicable. She counters: The simple truth is that it is reformisma patching up and improving on an old systemis not practicable What country has ever reformed itself into a state of classlessness and equality? And for her, The whole spirit of socialism is essentially international and bound up with the Marxist slogan, Workers of the World, unite! Mannin recognises that:

The struggle of the workers of every country is a common struggle against world capitalism Not until workers powersocialismis achieved in every country will the world be safe from war, imperialist aggression and exploitation.

Reflecting on the situation in Spain, Mannin argues that, although the Communists had made a move to the right in 1934, the POUM had, by this time, an uncompromisingly revolutionary line, the correct Marxist line, and one deservedly supported by the ILP.

In the chapter, The Necessity for Revolution in Relation to Women, Mannin explores and condemns the position of women under the capitalist system, but goes on to argue that any response short of revolution is inadequate. Although she celebrates the campaign for female suffrage in Britain, she also insists, The time is now ripe for a far bigger struggle, a far bigger revolt of womanagainst the whole social system that penalises man and woman alike. This is all the more urgent given the rise of fascism, spreading over Europe and swallowing up the hard won rights of women, sending them back into the home, urging upon them again that their function in life is to serve man as wives and housekeepers, and to serve the state by bearing children. What the fight against fascism demands is not a new feminist movement, but for cooperation in the general struggle for workers power against capitalism, of which fascism is only an advanced form.

Mannin celebrated the Russian Revolution as the greatest revolution in history, which overthrew both monarchy and capitalism, establishing the first workers state. She writes, Lenin insisted on the importance of women in the making of the Revolution, and refers to Clara Zetkins conversations with him on this subject. Lenin emphasised that real freedom for women is only possible through communism, although Mannin makes clear that he did not mean Stalinism when he used this word. Lenin drew a clear and ineradicable line between socialists and feminists. The socialist held fast to the policy of binding the woman question to the proletarian class struggle and revolution, making it a social question, part of the workers problem; the policy of the feminists was the separation of womens problems from the general problems of the workers. Lenin urged that the womens movement must be a part of the general mass movement: There can be no real mass movement without women.

Mannin thought that, had Lenin lived, Russia might have progressed from socialism to communism, faithful to those Marxist doctrines Lenin upheld. However, Stalins Russia was no longer a workers state, though not yet capitalist:

The dictatorship of the proletariat is being succeededif indeed it was ever fully established, which is doubtfulby a dictatorship of bureaucrats headed by a dangerous megalomaniac whose one ambition seems to be to execute or imprison all who did outstanding work in the making of the original revolution.

At the same time as she wrote this, Mannin was obviously grappling with Goldmans anarchist rejection of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. She refers her readers to Trotsky, C L R James and Goldman. She had not as yet embraced anarchism.

Women and the Revolution looks at the involvement of women in past struggles such as the Paris Commune, the Russian and German Revolutions, and in Ireland, China and elsewhere. However, arguably more important is Mannins celebration of more contemporary battles. She writes of womens involvement in the civil disobedience campaign in India, quoting from Henry Noel Brailsfords book Rebel India, published in 1931. Brailsford wrote of how the Indian National Congress had called on women to protest: With courage and devotion they answered its call. They spoke at its mass demonstrations. They did most of the picketing work. They went in thousands to prison. According to Brailsford, women provided the leadership in many places. This was, Mannin insists, an excellent example of the importance of the womens movement extending beyond purely feminist causes and allying itself with the general revolutionary cause. The repression unleashed on the movement by the Labour government in Britain reinforced her opposition to reformism. She also celebrated womens involvement in the Palestinian struggle: The nationalist spirit of freedom has penetrated behind the veils of the Arab women and given them boldness and courage, sweeping away the encumbrances of Islamic tradition overnight. In 1929, the Palestinian womens movement organised an Arab Womens Congress in Jerusalem: Some 200 delegates faced the public gaze unveiled The Congress had the courage not merely to stand openly for social and economic freedom for women, but to identify itself with the nationalist movement. Later, in 1932:

Palestinian women expressed their nationalist spirit by organising mass demonstrations. A procession went first to the Mosque of Omar, where a Christian woman preached from the pulpit of the mosque, and then to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where a Muslim woman preached before the tomb of Christ. These acts symbolised the nationalist solidarity of Arab womanhood.

The example provided by the Spanish Revolution is decisive for Mannin. Writing after the May 1937 rising in Barcelona, she condemned the fearful atrocities committed by the Communists in the aftermath. Certainly, the revolution had received a severe set-back, but she hoped that all is not lost. If the revolution is defeated, Stalin will have had a considerable hand in it. She went on to celebrate the work of the womens anarchist group, Mujeres Libres (Free Women), which was suppressed after the May rising along with the POUM. The POUM had organised a womens secretariat, a womens regiment, classes, lectures and centres of education and child welfare, all of which was the work of its main womens organiser, Louise Gmez. Hundreds of women were involved, some of them, as Mannin observed, keeping their involvement secret from their husbands. Women brought up in the Spanish feminine traditionlearned to drill and shoot, take a machine gun to pieces and reassemble it Women came in their hundreds to the womens secretariat for classes ranging from socialismto child welfare. All this had been rolled back by the Stalinists.

Mannin also memorialises one particular woman fighter, Mika Etchebhre, an Argentinian Trotskyist, who commanded a POUM militia unit in which men and women fought alongside one another against Francos troops. She had defended the cathedral in Sigenza for four days, under constant bombardment. With ammunition running out and the building starting to collapse, she led a night-time break-out in thick fog. The POUM fighters scattered, and many were shot down, but others reached the woods through a rain of machine gun bullets. Etchebhre was hunted for 24 hours before reaching the antifascist lines. Only a third of those who set out from the cathedral reached home. Mannin claimed that Etchebhre was later killed fighting at the front, but she was mistaken. She actually survived the war, was involved with the student rebellion on the streets of Paris in May 1968 and published an account of her Spanish experiences, Ma Guerre dEspagne Moi (My own Spanish Civil War), in 1976.

Mannins book ends with a powerful call to arms and is worth quoting at length:

It is in the power of the women of today to play a valuable part in the making of the revolution that will give them a richer, fuller and more gracious life, and a happier and safer world for their children Without their cooperation in changing the social system, the women of tomorrow will be as exploited in commerce and industry, as degraded by sex inequalities, and as hemmed about by the conventions and taboos of the moral code as the women of today. With their cooperation, the women of tomorrow will be free: free of all economic dependence upon men; free to work in the home or in wider spheres at choice; free to bear children or not as they please, independently of marriage laws and moral codes; free of the tyrannies and injustices of social snobberies; free of the fear of unemployment and of war Women free in the social system of a classless society, and free in their own souls, with time to stand and stare, time to savour life as the vast luxury it is capable of being, not for a privileged and moneyed few, but for the masses.

This was what the revolution was all about.

By the time that Mannin published her Privileged Spectator memoir in 1939, she had embraced both anarchism and pacifism. Reynolds had resigned from the ILP in 1938 due to its failure to condemn Zionism, and Mannin resigned the next year because she thought the party was too uncritical of Stalinism. Nevertheless, she still believed in the international revolutionary socialist movement as the one hope in a corrupt and crumbling civilisation, and in the world proletariat. Indeed, Working for the social revolution, even if it did not come in ones own time, seemed to me the supremely important task for everyone with a social consciousness, and a sincere feeling for liberty, equality and fraternity.

How did this square with her pacifism though? By this point, Mannin believed that the Russian Revolution had never been anything more than a bourgeois revolution from the very beginning. She argued there had never been a workers state, even in the early years, and she explicitly rejected Trotskyism. Most astonishingly, she even repudiated the revolutionary struggle in Spain. Once the notion of Spain falling into the hands of Franco seemed intolerable to her, but that time had passed as she came to recognise the full horror of war. She had come to the conclusion that, If Republican Spain had shown no resistance, this horror would have been spared Nothing would have been or could have been more terrible for the common people than the terror and misery they have endured in defending themselves against fascist aggression. Surrendering to fascist rule was to be preferred to fighting it with a gun in hand: If there is an evil in the world today more terrible, more relentless, more hellish than the evil of war, I cannot conceive of it. She could not have been clearer; instead, the way forward was the tremendous moral force of non-violent methods of resistance. Mannin insisted that not even the fascists could machine-gun an entire nation when it does not resist. The fascists might be able to crush an army, but you cannot crush the silent unarmed spirit of a people. She championed a militant pacifism, completely rejecting passive responses to war and oppression, which she described as pathifism. Hers was always a revolutionary, militant pacifism of strikes, demonstrations and even barricades. Nonetheless, in the end, what was most important was to be allowed to livein freedom if we may, on our knees if we must. This was the stance that she was to hold to for the rest of her life, all the time insisting, I have not deserted the revolution.

Both Mannin and Reynolds were ready to oppose the coming war, even in the face of the repression they confidently expected would be unleashed once it had begun. They were involved with British Trotskyists in preparing for resistance. Jock Haston of the Workers International League later remembered meeting with them both in Dublin on a number of occasions, discussing the question of setting up an illegal wireless station in the event of the ILP and the League being banned. Back in Wimbledon, they hid a printing press that the anarchists had stolen from the Communist Party at Oak Cottage.

The defection of George Orwell from the anti-war camp once war had broken out was felt by Mannin as a serious blow. She wrote an outraged letter to him telling him that she was bitched, buggered and bewildered by his turnaround. She pleaded with him to, For the luv of Mike, write a few lines to enlighten our darkness. Earlier, on 12 March 1937, she had reviewed Orwells The Road to Wigan Pier in the New Leader under the headline Sense and a Lot of Nonsense, welcoming his account of working-class life in the North of England but ridiculing the political discussion in the second part of the book. She reported in the review that he was fighting with the POUM in Spain and hoped that he had already outgrown the confused and contradictory ideas set forth in the second part of this book. Despite this falling out she still dedicated her 1940 novel, Rolling in the Dew, to Owell. She also worked with him on the Freedom Defence Committee that was set up in March 1945. In 1948, Orwell wrote the introduction to the first volume of Reynoldss British Pamphleteers, a collection of radical pamphlets from the 16th century to the French Revolution.

What about Mannins militant pacifism? In truth, this belief in the efficacy of civil disobedience and non-cooperation was just a romantic delusion and a wholly utopian strategy for achieving socialism. Even in India, it was not Gandhis pacifism but rather fear of violent revolution that forced British withdrawal. Mannin can be justly accused of underestimating the murderous methods that not only fascist governments but also bourgeois democracies, particularly in their colonies, were prepared to use. There was no need to machine-gun an entire nationjust as many as was necessary to bring the rest to heel, at the same time as deploying the trusted divide and rule strategy. More importantly, resistance to oppression was inevitable; the working class and the colonial peoples would always fight back. The duty of revolutionary socialists was not to say that it is better to live on your knees but rather to help the oppressed win. Mannins prescription would have made the left helpless. Even when writing in 1938-9, she recognised that Nazi antisemitism might pose a problem for her new pacifist commitment. She admitted that if she were Jewish, I might be willing to see the whole world plunged into unspeakable horror in order that there might be an end to the persecution of my people. She argues, however, that would be a terrible mistake. Mannin was not as moved as some people by the fascist persecution of the Jews, but this was not due to antisemitism. Rather, she explained, I do not forget that all the time, out of sight and ignored by the press, there is the no less revolting imperialist persecution of Arabs, negroes and Indians by the so-called democracies. Anyway, she did notbelieve every atrocity story I read. This last comment is important because it was certainly one of the reasons that she failed to grasp the enormity of the Holocaust, either during the Second World War or for some time afterwards. Indeed, a strong case can be made that her opposition to war actually led to her flirting with antisemitism in the pages of Peace News.

Mannins determined pacifist stand led her to normalise the Nazis. This is not too strongly worded a criticism. During the war, she and Reynolds visited people being detained under Regulation 18b of the Defence (General) Regulations 1939. As she makes clear, this included unrepentant Nazis, and she justified this on the basis of the adage, I loathe your ideas but would die for your right to express them. This is obviously not how to fight fascism. Mannin even took on a former blackshirt as her secretary. This man still supported British Union of Fascists leader Oswald Mosley and sympathised openly with the Nazis. Incredibly, she dedicated her 1946 novel, The Dark Forest, to him. The publishers objected to the books Epilogue, where she suggested that one occupying army in a neutral country was very like another. She was required to make cuts, which she blamed on the press plugging the atrocity stories for all it was worth and on all the talk of Buchenwald and Belsen and the other concentration camps. As late as 1949, she published a fictionalised account of the life and execution of William Joyce, the infamous Lord Haw-Haw, a US-born Nazi propagandist who broadcast radio programmes into England and had been hanged in January 1946. Astonishingly, she wrote that her imagination had been stirred by the way he died bravely, fanatically loyal to his last idea, Nazism. For a while during this period, Mannin even came under the insidious influence of Irish Catholicism, attending mass regularly. One might normally expect that all this would presage a turn to the right, and even to the far right, but it did not. In truth, Mannin was very confused by her attempts to render consistent her anarchist pacifism. This does not excuse her political weaknesses, which allowed her opposition to war to compromise her hostility to fascism and antisemitism. Yet even while normalising fascism, she published a remarkable study of utopian thought and its contemporary relevance, Bread and Roses, in 1944, and this work still repays reading. The following year, her novel satirising the revolutionary left, Comrade O Comrade, was published. She describes the book as a satire of the beliefs for which I have worked all my adult life. Nevertheless, its Authors Note lamented the recent death of the Barbadian Communist sailors leader Chris Braithwaite: The socialist and anti-imperialist struggle lost a valiant fighter by his death, and many of us, myself included, lost a good comrade and friend. Moreover, she still bitterly opposed British military intervention against the Greek left in 1944. Admitting to voting Labour in 1945, she confessed to a stir of excitement and satisfaction in Labours overwhelming majority at the polls, despite my innate anarchist belief that one political party is very like another in power. Indeed, the Labour government did continue the war on the Greek left, although she did not make this point.

Mannin also continued to write revolutionary fiction. In 1941, she published Red Rose, a fictional biography of Emma Goldman. Even at this point, she was not finished with Spain and the POUM; in 1943, she published another novel, The Blossoming Bough, which sees the main protagonist, young Irish poet Flynn Hannigan, end up fighting in the ranks of the POUM. He is arrested together with his friend Graham Hayes after the May 1937 rising in Barcelona, and both are accused of being Trotsky-fascists. The prison saw floggings and confessions extorted by every form of third degree method, and every night there was the sound of a car in the barrack square. This car, an anarchist prisoner tells them, is taking away those who are to be disappeared. A gloating British Communist tells them that people back home will never know that they were shot: You will simply disappear. Your sorrowing relatives will think you were killed in action, or that you died of appendicitis after your arrest. Both men are brutally interrogated and then they are driven out into the countryside, shot and buried in secret graves. Mannins mention of appendicitis was a telling reference to the controversy surrounding the death of Bob Smillie, a POUM volunteer and a former chair of the ILP Guild of Youth. He had died in Communist custody, with the authorities claiming the cause of death was appendicitis. However, many among the non-Communist left believed he had died under interrogation at the hands of the Russian secret police, beaten to death in order to extort a confession that the POUM and the ILP were in league with the fascists. It seems clear which story Mannin believed. Her hostility to Stalinism increased in ferocity. By 1959, she was writing of the Soviet Union as a country where the capitalist system of private ownership of land, raw materials and means of production had been replaced by state capitalism.

Mannin emerged from this period a fully-fledged Tolstoyan or ethical anarchist, although in practice she often found it impossible to refuse support for people fighting back against oppression. Stuart Christie, a critic of this tendency within the anarchist movement, argues that Mannin, along with Reynolds, Herbert Read, George Woodcock, Vernon Richards and others, were no more than a coterie of Tolstoyan and Gandhi-influenced middle-class pacifists and academics. They were in favour of permanent protestas opposed to class struggleand who believed the idea of revolution outdated. How fair was this to Mannin? Certainly for much of the post-war period she seems to have been mainly concerned with opposing nuclear weapons, supporting national liberation struggles and issues of personal freedom. For instance, in December 1954, she joined in protests against the mass hanging of Mau Mau rebels in Kenya, which numbered 50 a month at the height of the repression. However, the cause that came to dominate her thoughts was that of the Palestinians.

In 1963, she published The Road to Beersheba, a novel about the ethnic cleansing of Palestine by Zionist militias in 1948. It is written from the point of view of the Palestinians and has been tentatively described as the first Nakba novel. The book was a reply to a Zionist novel, Exodus, written by Leon Uris and published in 1958, which was a massive bestseller and was made into a film in 1960. The decisive factor in her decision to write The Road to Beersheba, however, was her first visit to Gaza, where she saw a dead shepherd, killed by an Israeli bullet, brought back across the border. Her novel was translated into Arabic, and there was even talk of a Egyptian-Jordanian film production of it, although nothing came of the idea. In the Foreword, Mannin provides some historical context: how the UN plan for partition gave 60 percent of Palestineincluding the most fertile areasto a third of the inhabitants, the Jews and how the million or so Palestinians fled as the result of Israeli terrorism, such as the massacre at Deir Yassin in April 1948, or were ejected from their homes. Safely assuming her British readers would be ignorant of this history, she explained that these refugees had soon been rotting in camps in subhuman conditions. Mannins prescription for the Palestinian struggle was the emergence of an Arab Gandhi, but she recognised that this might be problematic. There is a discussion of this way forward towards the end of the novel, but it is left unresolved. A Mr Shapley is urging something like Gandhis civil disobedience campaign of the early 1930s:

I have a vision of the great refugee camps in Jordan emptying, the people pouring out to march in a great, ragged, hungry army to the border, thousands of unarmed peoplemen, women and childrengoing home. Or trying to.

The books main protagonist, Anton Mansour, dismisses the idea: Theyd be mown down by Israeli machine guns from the hilltops. Perhaps from the air It would be just one more massacre. As if to emphasise the point, Anton, alone and unarmed, is himself machine-gunned by the Israelis on the road to Beersheba. Mannin wrote a second Palestinian novel, The Night and its Homing, that was published in 1966 and was also translated into Arabic.

On many occasions, both Mannin and Reynolds insisted that opposition to Zionism and the State of Israel was not antisemitic. In his memoirs, My Life and Crimes, he wrote that they both felt that Zionism was a racket, and that we still feel that way:

We felt even more strongly about it because it exploited the sympathy of decent people for Hitlers victims and directed it to the justification of an outrage perpetrated on the Arabs of Palestine. We felt even more keenly because professing socialists were mostly taken in by it.

He was particularly appalled by the use of accusations of antisemitism against critics of Zionism, particularly when directed against people like ourselves who had done what we could to help Jewish refugees. Mannin argued the same: It cannot be too strongly insisted that being anti-Zionist and anti-Israel is not being anti-Jewish. She pointed out that by no means are all Jews pro-Zionist. Interestingly, it was her engagement with the Palestinian cause that actually led her to confront the enormity of the Holocaust. When she visited a refugee camp in Nablus, she was asked why Britain supported Israel and tried to explain that British sympathy was with the Jews because of the Nazi persecution. The camp leader angrily demanded to know what that had to do with the Arabs. All she could come up with was, The six million Jews who had died in the Nazi camps had made an impression on the world, not merely the British, which a million people robbed of their homes and lands by the Jews left alive totally failed to make. According to Mannin, sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust led people in Britain to either ignore or minimise the suffering that had been inflicted on the Palestinians, who had no responsibility whatsoever for that crime. Those who bore responsibility were the Nazis, their collaborators and those governments that refused to accept Jewish refugees, including Britain and the US; yet, it was the Palestinians who paid the price. Mannin was determined to fight for justice for the Palestinians and to expose what had been done to them in 1948 and the murderous oppression to which they were still subject. She insisted that opposing Zionism did not make you an antisemite. However, even though she had come to acknowledge the enormity of the Holocaust, she did not recognise the particular character of antisemitism and the strategic place it occupied in right-wing ideology. The fight against Zionism has to go hand in hand with the fight against antisemitism.

Although the Palestinian cause was arguably her major concern through the 1960s and into the 1970s, she still considered herself a revolutionary socialist. On a number of occasions she wrote for Socialist Worker. On 15 March 1969, the paper published an article by her that advocated public lending rights to help impoverished authors. On 5 March 1970, the newspaper printed her review of a collection by Turkish poet Nzm Hikmet, recommending him to Socialist Worker readers as being of interest both as a revolutionary socialist and as a poetthe two are, in fact, inseparable. She seemed to stop contributing for a while, but on 6 January 1973 the paper published a letter in which, among other things, she congratulated it on being much improved from when I first knew of it a couple of years ago. There are almost certainly more contributions. By now though, Mannin was in her seventies. How did she look back on her life? In her Stories from My Life, published in 1973, she wrote:

I have been a socialist all my adult life, from the age of 15, and now, at close of play, in the seventies, am more than ever convinced of the necessity for social revolution I am glad to have lived to see the end of the British Empire If I can hold on for a few more years, I might live to see a united Irelanda 32 county Irish republic The hope for Palestine is more remote, and I think it unlikely that I shall live to see this cause, the one I have most intensely at heart, triumphant, with Palestine as Palestine again with the indigenous people, the Palestinian Arabs, in control, a nation again, Muslim and Christian, co-existing with a Jewish minority. It will come, but not I think for another 20 years or soand I cannot wait so long.

She died on 5 November 1984.

John Newsinger is the author of numerous books, the latest of which is Chosen by God: Donald Trump, the Christian Right and American Capitalism (Bookmarks, 2020).

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Ethel Mannin, women and the revolution International Socialism - International Socialism Journal

Mass psychology theories that shed new light are becoming popular. I will make an imperfect attempt to apply the TRANSCEND Method ofAnalysis, Diagnosis, Prognosis and Therapy.

The ultimate analysis must integrate dimensions beyond this article including political, economic, hidden agendas of Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Media, the Great Reset, transhumanism, surveillance, and control by global forces, known and unknown (Mr. Global).

For deep context, consider that theAmishin Pennsylvania, insulated from media and government, achieved herd immunity to Covid by May, 2020 without social distancing, lockdowns, masks or vaccines, and had the most profitable year ever.

Otherwise, the US propaganda campaign framed Covid as a pandemic of the unvaccinated, inciting hysteria, blame, coercion, and ostracism.

Numerous tricks include defining vaccinated as beginning 14 days after the final Covid shot. Breakthrough infections, hospitalizations, injuries and deaths before day 14 are counted as unvaccinated.

Furthermore,hospitals get paid$13,000 to diagnose Covid, $39,000 to use ventilators, and staff are pressured torecord Covid as the cause of death,including deaths from other causes.

Massive censorship andsuppression of life-saving early treatments, estimated to prevent 85% of deaths led to wildly inflated death rates, triggering false beliefs, fear, and submission to lockdowns, passports, mandates and endless boosters.

Captured agencies (CDC, FDA, NIH, NIAD, WHO) and media in global lockstep proclaim vaccine safety and efficacy, suppressingunderreporteddata on injuries and deaths.

Statistics from Israel, Gibraltar, Iceland, and everywhere reveal breakthrough cases (vaccine failures), injuries, hospitalizations and deaths, indicating apandemic of the vaccinated.

We have a pandemic of fear, hysteria, dehumanization, poor health, racism, and domination by known and unknown powers.

Promoting aCultural HegemonicBelief System

The dominant narrative seems irrefutably true. Leaving out entire bodies of knowledge, it promotes a superficial belief that masking, distancing, lockdowns and vaccines are theonlyresponses.

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Italian philosopher,Antonio Gramscidescribed how the ruling class wields invisible power by manipulating ideology, beliefs, values and social norms. Incurious people, ignorant of facts, uncritically accept their worldview as a natural, inevitable, beneficial cultural norm.

Mystification

This resonates with R.D. Laingmystification,aplausible misrepresentationof reality.By representing forms of exploitation as forms of benevolence, the exploiters bemuse the exploited into feeling at one with their exploiters, or into feeling gratitude for what (unrealized by them) is their exploitation, and, not least, into feeling bad or mad even to think of rebellion.

Mystification maintains stereotyped roles by masking truth with false constructions of what is actually happening and what a conflictis actually about, though people may not feel confused.In fact, they may feel quite assured of their position. Laing concluded thatbefore enlightened action can be taken, the issues have to be demystified.

The dominant narrative is portrayed as an absolute, undeniable truth accepted by all sane people. Those who challenge it are stupid, crazy and dangerous and must be convinced or punished.

The US spent $10 billion on messaging, hiring behavioral scientists to convince the vaccine hesitant, with rewards and punishments.

Mattias Desmets Elegant Model of Mass Formationand Mass Hypnosis

Mattias Desmet, psychology professor at Belgiums Ghent University, with a masters in statistics, is on a meteoric rise to superstardom. He is deservedly the darling of many questioning the narrativeincluding world renowned doctors Dr. Robert Malone, inventor of the mRNA technology and Dr. Peter McCullough, the most published doctor in his field, cardiorenal medicine, in the world, in history.

Desmet was puzzled by failed predictions used to justify draconian policies. British scientist,Neil Fergusonoverpredicted 2.2 million US and over 500,000 UK deaths. In Sweden, 80,000 deaths were predicted. Only 6000 died with no lockdowns.Policies were not revised with new data.

He was troubled by the singular obsession with Covid victims, ignoring lockdown victims, and UN risk assessments that the lockdown would cause more deaths than Covid.After 6 months observing irrational policies, Desmet shifted to his work on totalitarianism which emerges when social conditions conducive to exploitation are met, including:

I add unrelenting stress, fear, humiliation, envy, grief, betrayal, unpredictability, dread, insecurity, financial devastation, educational setbacks, inferiority, domestic abuse, trauma, helplessness, vulnerability, dashed hopes, and having ones entire social fabric ripped away.

Intolerable psychic pain threatens to turn into panic, generating an overwhelming urge for relief. Atransformationoccurs whenunder these conditions, a narrative, a story is distributed through the mass media indicating an object of anxiety, and at the same time, providing a strategy to deal with this object of anxiety.

This intoxicating narrative enables peopleto feel connected in a heroic struggle with the object of anxiety,simultaneously providing meaning, a new kind of solidarity, a channel for pent-up aggression and a huge willingness to participate in this strategy to deal with this object of anxiety because in this way, people feel they can control their anxiety and social discontent.

People desire a strong leader to rescue them and tell them what to do. After 9/11, Bushs popularity skyrocketed.

Mass formation overtakes individuality. 3 groups emerge, approximately

When safe, the 40% will shift towards the truth-tellers. The immune group is extremely heterogenous.

I add to mass formation a diagnosis ofmass hysteria.

Fear and Regression

Fear of the virus is more dangerous than the virus itself?Mattias Desmet

The narrative manipulates fear of everyone all the time. Death is a random crapshoot. Young, healthy people feel terrified of dying, infecting and killing others. People are more dangerous when afraid, regressing to primitive levels of functioning.

Fear-reducing information is suppressed regardingearly treatments, prophylaxis, immune boosting,natural immunity, and thathealthy childrendont die or transmit to adults.

Terror Management Theory

Social psychology research shows howawareness of ones deathprovokes existential anxiety. People mobilize anxiety buffering systems, providing illusions of transcending death. Mortality salience disrupts this buffer, increasing fear, hostility to outgroups, attachment to ones ingroup, nationalism, prejudice, support for violence and attraction to charismatic leaders.

Induced Helplessness

In Seligmans theory oflearned helplessness, when repeated actions have no effect people learn that they cant make a difference. They give up, even in situations where they can make a difference. Helplessness elevates immune-suppressing cortisol levels.

Media undermines personal agency over ones health and early treatments inducing passive hope in vaccines.

The dominant narrative offers no endgame.

Transcending Covid requires awakening from mass hypnosis and withdrawing participation in predatory institutions. Much work is required to overcome dark forces.

Favorable Indicators include:

Johan Galtungs eternal solution,creating a new realitythat bridges incompatible goals, has new meaning. Compatible goals include health, freedom, a new society and justice overcoming corrupt domination.

You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To changesomething, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller

I add:

Create a new story, a healthy, honest, ethical narrative that identifies the true source of anxiety (not the virus or each other) that connects us in a new heroic struggle that

*About the author: Diane Perlman, PhDis a clinical and political psychologist, devoted to applying knowledge from psychology, conflict studies and social sciences to designing strategies and policies to reverse nuclear proliferation, to drastically reduce terrorism, reduce enmity, and to raise consciousness about nonviolent strategies for tension reduction and conflict transformation. She is a visiting scholar at the School forConflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University, is active inPsychologists for Social Responsibility,theTRANSCEND Network for Peace Development Environment,and on the Global Council of Abolition 2000. Some of her writings can be found on her websites,www.consciouspolitics.organd http://www.SanityandSurvival.com.Email:%5Bemailprotected%5D

Source: This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS)

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Can We Transcend COVID? Some Perspectives On Mass Psychology OpEd - Eurasia Review

Hong Kong hit the headlines in 2019 when a wave of struggles erupted, trigged by new extradition laws proposed by the Hong Kong government. Lam Chi Leung, a socialist activist based in the region, spoke to International Socialism about the struggle, its roots in earlier social movements and what has happened since.

At the moment, the coverage of Hong Kong in the West emphasises the repression of the democracy movement. It seems as if the movement that erupted in 2019, triggered by attempts by China to impose a new extradition law on Hong Kong, has been contained. How accurate is this perception?

We do have to admit that the anti-extradition movement has been contained. As of October 2021, 10,265 people have been arrested; 2,684 people have been charged with criminal offenses, and 720 of these have been charged with rioting. Nine activists have committed suicide, and some protesters are suspected of having been murdered.

The movement began when small numbers participated in sit-ins and marches in March and April 2019, but it evolved into widespread mass protest on the eve of the attempt by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (SAR) government to pass the legislation on 9 June. The wave of protests included two marches of over two million people in June and August, in which one in four Hong Kong residents took part. There was also a successful occupation of the SAR Legislative Council on 1 July and a relatively successful political strike on 5 August. A large number of secondary school students demonstrated in September by forming human chains, and the Polytechnic University and the Chinese University of Hong Kong were occupied by students and protesters.

Violent clashes broke out with police in November, but the movement reached its climax and started to go downhill after this. Planned protests were halted or scaled down when Covid-19 emerged in Hong Kong in late January 2020, and then the Chinese state bypassed the SAR Legislative Council to force through a deeply reactionary Hong Kong National Security Law on 30 June. Although there were still sporadic demonstrations after the passage of this law, such as the spontaneous lighting of candles in various districts across Hong Kong on 4 June, the mass movement had largely ended.

Can you say more about how Covid-19 and other factors changed the pattern of protests? And what kind of situation has resulted since the protests ebbed?

Building on the momentum of the anti-extradition movement, a series of new unions were set up at the end of 2019. These include the Hospital Authority Employees Alliance (HAEA), which was established by frontline public health workers and recruited some 20,000 members. From 3 February 2020, these workers took five days of strike action, calling on the Hong Kong Hospital Authority to provide adequate personal protective gear to doctors, nurses and other staff. As the novel coronavirus spread from Wuhan to the rest of China, the HAEA also demanded the immediate closure of Hong Kongs border with mainland China. So the initial outbreak of Covid-19 in Hong Kong caused the prestige of the SAR to tumble, while simultaneously accelerating the growth of the new trade union movement. People saw that an organised working class was better able to advance the movement than unorganised street actions.

Covid-19 was at its most serious in Hong Kong from February to April 2020; since May 2020 the situation has gradually been improving. However, despite the easing of the pandemic, the Hong Kong government has not lifted its directives restricting public gatherings and has prohibited a workers May Day march. The SAR government uses these directives to stop mass rallies on sensitive dates: commemorations of the Tiananmen Square protests on 4 June, the anniversary of the movement against the extradition bill on 9 June and the anniversary of Hong Kongs return to China on 1 July.

The implementation of the National Security Law in June 2020 will be a strong deterrent to mass resistance, just as it was designed to be. The law is very stringent; its prohibition on the subversion of state power covers a wide range of activities, including openly calling for the independence of Hong Kong. Raising slogans calling for the downfall of the SAR government or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)including displaying banners with these demandsare likely to be illegal.

Collusion between the people of Hong Kong and foreign political forces is also forbidden by the National Security Law, but there is no clear definition of this crime. Moreover, the law provides for the establishment of a special Hong Kong enforcement agency made up of the national security authorities tied to the CCP government. This force can delete online content, enter and search homes, and request any information from an individualthere is no right to remain silent. Its officers can even freeze personal assets without court approval. Essentially, this special agency is unbound by the local laws of Hong Kong and can do whatever it likes.

Secondary schools and libraries have started to remove books that advocate Hong Kongs independence or promote militant resistance by the democratic opposition. The CCP plans to implement a so-called patriotic ideology, leading to attempts at brainwashing in the education system.

Since the implementation of the National Security Law, things have been grim in Hong Kong. Around 100 people have been arrested under the law, including 47 opposition figures who participated in the 2020 pro-democracy primaries, which selected a list of candidates for elections to the Legislative Council. Jimmy Lai, the founder of Hong Kongs pro-movement Apple Daily newspaper, and some of his senior staff were also arrested. Some 40 oppositional political and civil society organisations have announced their disbandment. Among them are the Civil Human Rights Front, the Hong Kong Professional Teachers Union, the Hong Kong Confederation of Trade Unions, the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China (HKAS), and student unions at institutions such as the Chinese University of Hong Kong. There have been big debates about whether to surrender without a fight like this. Some of those in favour of early dissolution of opposition groups insisted that disbanding would mean leniency from the authorities, which is largely untrue; others contended that if they failed to dissolve early, they might be physically harmed, which is likely true. However, still others argued against dissolution, including Tonyee Chow Hang-tung, vice-chair of HKAS: The bigger the danger we face, the more we need to calmly assess the pros and cons of each choice The regime has unsheathed its sword: cooperating with its operations at this stage will definitely not get us any advantages.

Along with Apple Daily, which was forced to cease publication in June 2021, Hong Kongs alternative media has also come under serious political pressure; the website Stand News, for instance, has deleted all of its old articles. Public broadcaster Radio Television Hong Kong, which is editorially independent in principle, has been subject to strict government censorship over the past year. Certain programmes have been suspended, and some hosts have been replaced. Hong Kong citizens have become more cautious when posting online and raising political slogans, fearing they may be detected by, or reported to, national security authorities.

The National Security Law stipulates that not only acts, but even speech considered separatist, subversive or in collusion with foreign forces can be criminally punished. The definitions of these three legal categories are extremely vague. By deliberately refusing to clarify precisely where its political red line lies, the Chinese authorities aim to intimidate Hong Kong citizens in order to extend central government control. Some pro-Beijing figures have already argued that the National Security Law should not just be used to attack open oppositionists, but should also be the catalyst for a political purge lasting at least two years. The aim would be to effect a wholesale transformation of Hong Kongs judicial, social, cultural, ideological, educational and media institutions.

In order to strengthen the control of the Chinese state, the Hong Kong SAR government is now preparing to restart the legislative process related to Article 23 of the Hong Kong Basic Law. This process would mean Hong Kong establishing its own legislation to protect the national security of the Chinese government. The Chinese authorities have wanted to create such laws for a long time; in 2003, a march of 500,000 city residents led to the shelving of similar legislation.

Can you describe the nature and composition of the movement in 2019? What sort of social groups were involved? How did the movement organise? What were the central demands and slogans?

The anti-extradition movement was one of the largest and most violent mass struggles since Hong Kong was returned to China by Britain in 1997. It showed that the people of Hong Kong are deeply dissatisfied with the status quo since the handover of power and are extremely distrustful of the central government in Beijing.

The mass movement mainly involved young and middle aged people, but also older and retired people. Along with university and secondary school students, trade unionists, nurses, social workers, teachers and civil servants, there were even pro-movement rallies organised by the elderly. The marches and blockades were mainly launched through social media, and the strikes were in response to calls from trade unions. Nonetheless, neither the marches nor the blockades nor the strikes were primarily the result of mobilisation by social movement groups and trade union organisations. Instead, they were essentially spontaneous. This is why the movement was described as decentralised and unorganised.

The mass movement spontaneously came up with its own central slogan: Five Demands, Not One Less! These five demands were: full withdrawal of the extradition bill; a commission of inquiry into police brutality; retraction of the classification of protesters as rioters; amnesty for arrested protesters; and dual universal suffrage, meaning elections for both the Legislative Council and Hong Kongs Chief Executive. Other prominent slogans included Liberate Hong Kong, Revolution of our Times, Fight for Freedom and Stand with Hong Kong. With increasing state violence, some voices within the movement have even called for the abolition of the police force.

Although none of the five demands had a socio-economic dimension, the breadth of mass participation reflected public dissatisfaction with the serious exploitation and social inequality in Hong Kong. The free market capitalism of Hong Kong has further increased poverty and economic inequality. One in five Hong Kong citizens, some 1.65 million people, live below the poverty line. Its Gini coefficient, which measures wealth inequality, is higher than the United States and Singapore. As the father of Marco Leung Ling-kit, the first young man in the anti-extradition movement to commit suicide, told reporters: The government has tailor-made the extradition bill for the rich, but has no protection for the rest of Hong Kong people. The government is ignorantly pursuing wealth, making young people work for the rich and become slaves, and the lower class and ordinary people have no right to ask questions about the policy.

Who provided the leadership in the movement? And were more mainstream political forces involved?

This can be explained in terms of both organisational and political-ideological leadership. From an organisational point of view, the peaceful marches were mainly initiated by the Civil Human Rights Front, but the storming of government buildings and the occupation of universities were mobilised through social networks. The movement adopted the idea of no big stageneither opposition political parties nor social movement groups took over leadership, not daring to do so. Even the Civil Human Rights Front, which initiated many marches, lacked the authority and ability to lead all aspects of the movement, instead merely providing a platform for public participation.

Ideologically, the movement mainly reflected the ideas of bourgeois democracy. Both pro-US and anti-Chinese far-right forms of Hong Kong localism, which resists integration into China from a right-wing perspective, have attempted to dominate the movement, but without success. Unfortunately, the left was also too weak and fragmented to have any real influence on the movement.

The notion of no big stage is partially a result of disaffection, especially among young activists, with the weaknesses and compromises of the moderate democrats of the Democratic Party. These activists distrust any party that tries to dominate the movement. However, the far-right localists also constantly push the idea, and they even claim to be tearing down the big stage, attempting to seize leadership of the movement by vilifying the progressive social movement. One of the movements slogans, Do Not Split!, ostensibly emphasises peaceful demonstrations and the unity of action without mutual recrimination; however, the objective effect is to allow the far-right localists to organise with impunity.

We on the left do not simply face a choice between two unpalatable optionsbureaucratic, top-down organisation or unorganised forms of protest. There is a third option: the creation of forms of organisation from the bottom up, in which participants are mutually accountable. Once established, this could provide a platform for debate on the direction of the movement and, more importantly, a collective force to counteract the actions of individuals who undermine it. This would be an important step towards mass self-organisation. However, the 2019 movement failed to work towards this goal. This was a major weakness of the movement.

There were a number of large protest movements across the world in 2019. Did people in Hong Kong identify with any of these wider movements?

Solidarity rallies in sympathy with Catalan independence activists were launched during the mass movement in Hong Kong, but this does not equate to the masses identifying with Catalonia or other struggles around the world. Although Hong Kong is known as a cosmopolitan city, the general population is not very internationally minded, and most are still influenced heavily by British and US mainstream media. Nevertheless, the anti-extradition movement was never an isolated phenomenon. In 2019, mass movements erupted in Iran, Iraq, Ecuador and Chile. Some even compared these developments to the Arab Spring in 2011, dubbing them the Spring of the Global South, although there were also serious movements in the Global North, including France and Catalonia. Despite their differing catalysts and methods of struggle, these uprisings were united in their anger against social inequality and political repression.

Even the ruling class in Hong Kong and China understand that the gulf between the rich and poor is driving deep disappointment with the status quo, especially among young people. The inability to see a way out of this situation fuelled the movement for over half a year, and mainstream public opinion continues to support the protesters. The extradition bill was only a spark for the protests; the more deep-seated causes lie in the states neoliberal policies, the exploitative behaviour of financial and real estate capitalists, and the servile relationship of the government towards the rich.

The struggles in Hong Kong and elsewhere since 2019 all exhibit a certain crisis of the notion of leadership, and this has been particularly acute in Hong Kong, where the movement has advocated decentralisation and no leadership. This stands in contrast to the Sudanese Revolutions resistance committees and the assembly of assemblies created by the Gilets Jaunes (Yellow Vests) in France.

What were the continuities and changes between the movement that emerged in 2019 and earlier movements such as the 2014 Umbrella Movement?

From 2009 to 2019, Hong Kong witnessed a long wave of rising struggle. This included the fights against the Hong Kong Express Rail Link in 2009 and against the implementation of the National Education curriculum in 2012. Underlying these protests were a radicalisation of ordinary people, particularly the youth, who are dissatisfied with the SAR governments favouritism towards large consortiums in urban planning policies and attempts to introduce ideologically biased content into secondary schools. The so-called Umbrella Movement of 2014 and the 2019 anti-extradition movement are part of this long series of popular struggle. What all of these instances have in common is an impulse towards radical action to secure political democracy, albeit without a thought through plan.

Despite this lineage, the 2019 movement displayed characteristics different from its predecessors. First, unlike the Umbrella Movement, which fought to extend democratic rights to a general election and the election of the Chief Executive of Hong Kong, the anti-extradition movement sought to defend existing personal freedoms and basic human rights from further encroachment. In this sense, it was a defensive rather than offensive struggle.

Second, the Umbrella Movement pursued tactics such as long-term road occupations, stressing the need for a valiant struggle with no retreats. In contrast, the anti-extradition movement adopted more flexible tactics in its early stages. Protesters did not just stubbornly defend their ground in the face of police repression; instead, they advocated a repertoire of protest tactics described as smart struggle.

Third, during the Umbrella Movement, many far-right localists were able to highjack the movement with demagogic slogans, such as Hong Kong First, which often targeted new mainland Chinese immigrants and tourists. The far-right localists influence in the anti-extradition movement was still evident, but also weakened. The majority of participants in 2019 were citizens who were inclined towards peaceful demonstrations and strikes. They criticised the far-right localists for advocating independence for Hong Kong, and they hoped, quite pragmatically, to gain support from mainland Chinese residents. To take one example, a protest took place in Kowloon district on 7 July 2019, where some organisers themselves tended towards xenophobic localism. Despite this, rank and file activists distributed flyers in simplified Chinese to tourists, sung the Internationale and chanted the slogan Democracy is a Good Thingthe title of a well known book by Yu Keping, a CCP official at the University of Beijing. Clearly not all protesters tended towards far-right localist ideas.

To what extent were workers, particularly organised groups of workers, involved in the movements of the past few years?

Since Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, the working-class struggle has made some steps forward. For instance, there was a public sector strike against privatisation in 2000, a construction workers strike in 2007 and a dockworkers strike in 2013. However, generally speaking, the level of activity and class consciousness among workers cannot be described as high.

The 2019 movement, for the first time since the Hong Kong riots of 1967, put the question of the political strike on the agenda. On 5 August 2019, some 350,000 airline and airport staff, social workers, and teachers struck. Perhaps a third of all air traffic control employees took part in the action, and a section of Cathay Pacific and Hong Kong Airlines cabin crew also joined, leading to the cancellation of over 200 flights. Subway lines were also suspended for half a day. Strictly speaking, though, this was not a full-blown strike; in order to avoid retribution from their employers, some workers (including teachers and social workers) used their annual leave entitlements to participate in the action. Some employers simply let their employees take leave for the day. Yet, although it was only a symbolic one-day strike, this was still a breakthrough. During the 2014 mass movement, only dockers participated in the occupation of the central business district, and only 2,000 social workers went on strike in support of the movement. The scale of mobilisation among workers in 2019 was much higher.

Some on the left see the recent movements in Hong Kong as pro-imperialist movements, influenced by the British and US governments, who wish to use them against China. What do you say in response to this?

From the establishment in China and Hong Kong to post-Stalinists internationally, there have been accusations that our popular movements are controlled and backed by Western forces, and that the movement is ultimately in favour of Hong Kong independence. This is false. The movement was initiated by citizens themselves, and its primary driving force has been young protestorsforeign governments have had no power to intervene. Some pro-democracy members of parliament, and prominent activists such as Joshua Wong, have favorable views of the West and a degree of faith in the US government. These people often appeared in the media, but only because they are relatively well known public figures. They also have no power to lead the movement, and they have very clearly disavowed leadership.

Both Donald Trump and Joe Biden have said that they oppose the repression in Hong Kong, but there is a long history of exchanges between US law enforcement and Hong Kong police. Weapons and riot control technology used by the Hong Kong police have been supplied by US companies for many years. Many of the same technologies have been used on black protesters and their allies in the US.

Some on the left still hold a campist view, believing that some anti-US regimes still represent a progressive force against Western imperialism. Some even think along the lines of the old, false adage that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Those left wingers who support the Chinese regime as anti-imperialist and refuse to criticise it misunderstand the nature of this state. It is a bureaucratic, capitalist regime directed against the working class.

To what extent is there an organised left in the movement in Hong Kongeither broad formations or narrower revolutionary socialist groups? What kind of politics exist on the left?

The left in Hong Kong is small and divided, and encompasses social-democratic and broad left organisations, plus a minority of anarchist-style networks and revolutionary socialists. The socialist left has only a limited influence. Nevertheless, there were some positive developments between 2009 to 2014particularly the formation of Left 21, a board left platform, founded in 2010, that has about 80-100 young members. It played an active role in solidarity with the 2013 dockers strike. Subsequently, however, amid the rise of far-right localist ideology, the broad left fell into political confusion, and some people were even won over to the far right.

Unfortunately, the left was unable to intervene effectively in the 2019 movement. Today, in the new political environment, the socialist left needs to work with the new generation of youth, organising around the issues that most concern the public, and clarifying its ideas at the same time. Only in this way can it gradually strengthen its influence.

In recent years, there have been big workers struggles in China over issues such as wages and factory closures. Yet, these seem very different in character to the movements in Hong Kong, which focused more on political questions rather than economic ones. Is there any prospect of bridging the gap between these two movements?

During the past decade of mass struggles in Hong Kong, the battle for democracy, universal suffrage and political freedoms has been the main theme, but it has also included economic struggles among workers. Conversely, the level of workers struggle in mainland China has been relatively high over this period. This has been complemented by a variety of civic currents, from the feminist movement to residents campaigns against polluting enterprises.

Since the 1990s, Hong Kong activists have consistently supported labour, human rights, gender rights, LGBT+ and environmental activists in China, contributing to the development of Chinese social movements and civil society. The relative civil freedom in Hong Kong enables activists to spread social movement literature into China, promote intellectual exchanges among mainland Chinese and Hong Kong activists, and organise solidarity with resistance in the mainland. Many books that could only be published in Hong Kong have been brought into mainland China, including writings by mainland Chinese authors. However, discussions about social movements have also been increasingly suppressed in Hong Kong. With growing central government control over Hong Kong and the disbanding of numerous labour NGOs, this role has been seriously undermined. It is unlikely to recover in the next few years, and may get even worse.

Nevertheless, there is still some room for activists from both sides to take stock of the experiences of the past decade and to build networks for the exchange of information and analysis. This would ensure that the movement could re-emerge in the future and develop healthily. The socialist left needs to work to facilitate this process.

What should revolutionary socialists be arguing for in Hong Kong?

As a city that is already part of China and highly integrated into the Chinese economy, Hong Kongs future is closely linked to that of China as a whole. The greatest obstacle to democracy in Hong Kong comes from Beijing. Thus, democratic self-governance for Hong Kong can only be achieved if we do our best to work closely with the working people of all China, fighting for full democratic freedoms and working-class power.

This is why revolutionary socialists never saw Hong Kongs independence as an objective. Only by promoting workers struggles and progressive social movements, such as the feminist movement within China, can we transform the bureaucratic capitalist system that dominates mainland China as well as Hong Kong. Realistically, advocating independence will fail to garner the support of the working people in mainland China, instead facilitating groups that seek to divide the residents of Hong Kong from those of China and to distort the democratic demands of Hong Kong residents. Therefore, calling for Hong Kongs independence is an unreasonable and unwise choice.

Revolutionary socialists advocate the general slogan of establishing a Hong Kong residents representative assembly by universal suffrage, but we have no illusions about capitalist democracy. It is only the working masses, not the capitalists, who have the strength and determination to convene such an assembly. When mass struggles arise in the future, working people should set up a representative assembly to implement their own class will and move towards an anti-capitalist transformation of society and the economy.

What are the prospects for the movement in Hong Kong, and in China, in the years ahead?

The defeat of movements always leaves scars. After the failure of the Prague Spring in 1968 and the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in China in 1989, there were many years of downturn. Nevertheless, Hong Kong is different from, say, China back in 1989, because we still retain many freedoms. There is not total censorship of books and the internet, and we can still communicate with one another. National security surveillance is not as severe as it was in mainland Chinaor in Taiwan during the Kuomintangs period of martial law between 1949 and 1987.

Some argue that failed mass movements leave little memory and that future movements will find it difficult to learn from earlier experiences. This is an overly pessimistic assessment. Even in mainland China, it is common for young people to break through the restrictions on the internet and seek valuable information.

When will the current downturn come to an end? Looking at previous historical developments, it is unlikely that it will last long. China has lacked a strong mass movement since 1989, but there was a resurgence of workers and peasants struggles from the mid-90s onwards. After the Prague Spring in 1968 came the Charter 77 movement in Czechoslovakia in 1977.

To a great extent, the future of democracy in Hong Kong depends on whether there is an economic and social crisis in mainland China. If the CCPs bureaucratic rule remains strong, Hong Kong will face a period even more difficult than at present. However, the global capitalism system currently faces deep problems, and Chinas crisis is brewing.

China has become an imperialist state, according to the classical Marxist definition, based on the rule of monopoly capital. The class nature of the Chinese state is not fundamentally different from Western imperialist states. Chinas distinctive feature is its bureaucratic capitalism. This is a model of state capitalism that we could also refer to as party-state capitalism. This state form facilitates corruption and appropriation of state property by the bureaucracy, but it also allows for greater control of the economy than is typical under neoliberalism. Nevertheless, this model only benefits the bureaucrats and capitalists, and it is exploitative and oppressive towards working people. Internationally, China no longer represents anti-imperialism, instead becoming a late-developing but powerful international competitor. China is now turning into a regional hegemon in Asia through its capital exports, its Belt and Road Initiative infrastructure project and its military expansion.

All the horrors of capitalist society are felt particularly acutely in China. Labours share of income in China substantially declined from the mid-1990s to the late 2000s. In 2020, Chinas premier, Li Keqiang, remarked that China has 600 million people with a monthly income of just 1,000 renminbi (US$156). That is more than 40 percent of the Chinese population. Both economic and social crises are accelerating. The appeal for social justice is gathering strength.

With the passage of the National Security Law, Hong Kongs rights and freedoms in relation to mainland China are disappearing. In this sense, the people of Hong Kong and China have become a single community of destiny. The struggle against the authoritarian capitalism in Hong Kong is an integral part of the opposition to Chinese party-state capitalism. Our allies should be the people of every country, especially the people of mainland China.

Lam Chi Leung is a socialist based in Hong Kong and the editor of Selected Writings of Chen Duxiu in his Later Years (Cosmos Books, 2012).

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Interview: after the Hong Kong rebellion International Socialism - International Socialism Journal