ARS NOTORIA

Cameron's Tory recidivism will send us back to the society of pre-war Britain. "Red Toryism derives largely from a British Tory and imperialist tradition that maintained the unequal division of wealth and political privilege among social classes can be justified, if members of the privileged class contribute to the common good." Ron Dart Under the cover of social entrepreneurship and community the Tories and Cameron plan to privatise all aspects of state service provision and send us back to pre-war Britain. The devil quotes scripture and Cameron is sweetening his plans to sell off the whole state apparatus of Britain, with the possible exception of the army and the police, with talk about the importance of community which he seems to think of as a Neighbourhood Watch writ large. Like the fascists in the 1930s and Thatcher in the 80s he hides behind words. But he can tell Sid and the Neighbourhood Watch to piss off, as far as I'm concerned. ...

Gramsci: Lenin’s contemporary It is a mistake to treat Antonio Gramsci’s contribution to political thought as substantially separated in time, or in content, from that of Vladimir Lenin and the Bolshevik revolutionary internationalists who were his contemporaries. Gramsci was in Moscow in 1922 and 1923 and met and married his wife there. As a representative of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), Gramsci was familiar with the workings of the Comintern. Lenin died in 1924. Gramsci was imprisoned by the Italian fascists in November, 1926, and not released until just before his death, eleven years later, in 1937. The unfinished document “Some Aspects of the Southern Question” (download linked below) is the last that Gramsci wrote before his incarceration. To understand its relevance to the National Democratic Revolution, one can begin with its third paragraph, where Gramsci says: “The Northern bourgeoisie has subjugated the South of Italy and the Islands, and reduced them to exploitabl...

1917 was a terrible year for the Allied cause. Russia had ceased to be belligerent after the Bolshevik revolution, reducing the allied numbers by one. Italy clung on to its existence, whilst trying to recover from the hammer blow that was the battle of Caporetto. Britain and France had nearly lost a generation of young men on the battle fields of Paschendale and Verdun respectively for little military gain. The German submarine menace was starting to bring huge shortages to the leading allied industrial producer, Britain. At least a new Ally in the shape of the US had entered the fray. Even still it had seemed a disastrous year. Only one theatre of operations seemed to demonstrate success. That theatre was the Middle East where the British and their Arab allies were steadily rolling up the Ottoman Empire. To Lloyd George and his coalition cabinet one objective appeared as a sure fire morale booster for a war weary British Empire. The capture of Jerusalem. Lloyd George ordered the able...

The first anti-Imperialist international conference - 1920 The 2CCI was followed within two months by the famous “ Congress of the Peoples of the East ”, in Baku, convened by the Communist International in what is now the Republic of Azerbaijan [Picture: delegates to the Congress of the Peoples of the East]. Its manifesto (click the link below) makes very clear the strategic confrontation that existed following the end of hostilities, and the effective and menacing British Imperial victory, as they saw it. This was the first international congress of oppressed nations against colonialism. It effectively launched the anti-colonial struggle on a new basis that bore major fruit less than thirty years later in the 1940s, with the independence of India and the victory of the communist revolutionaries in China. In 1920, the First World War (the Inter-Imperialist World War) had only recently come to and end. Among other things, the conference said: “Peoples of the East...

Genesis of the NDR The Hammer and Sickle emblem of the communists, invented in 1917, is a symbol of class alliance between two distinct classes: proletarian workers, and peasants. Peasants often work hard and they are often poor, but they are not the same as the working proletariat of the towns. Nor are they the same as the rural proletariat. So the hammer and the sickle are not two equal things. They represent two different things, allied. Practical politics is always a matter of alliance, and in different circumstances, different alliances are called for. Communists commonly regard an alliance between workers and peasants as normal. Proletarian parties have likewise, in the past, often attempted class alliances with the bourgeoisie against feudalism or against colonialism. Alliances are normal and necessary, in order to isolate and thereby to defeat an adversary, and equally, to avoid being isolated and defeated by the adversary. Therefore, the question of the appropriate allian...

It’s not a nightmare but it’s really weird. I don’t have problems falling back asleep later because I know it’s a dream and I know it’s the past. I haven’t had it for a year or two, but I had it last week, after talking about it with Phil and I used to dream this dream constantly one or two years ago. I don’t know why I dream it. It’s the same scene over and over again. Perhaps I was in Macerata, not far from my town. I was sitting around a table outside a bar with four friends. The man in front shielded me from the early afternoon light. We were celebrating. A married couple sat together on my left and the light from both their rings reflected onto my face. They were happy and elegantly dressed; she wore a black dress and a narrow brimmed hat with lace. Her husband wore a pin-striped suit. The woman on my right wasn’t saying much, but she was attentive. It was hot and I was wearing a sleeveless red dress. I picked up my drink and took a long sip. The cigarette smoke distracted me fr...

Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 Karl Marx, the son of a lawyer, had a doctorate and was the editor of a magazine. The book that he wrote, which Lenin called (in The State and Revolution ) “the first mature work of Marxism” was called The Poverty of Philosophy and it was published in 1847. The Poverty of Philosophy was a polemic. A polemic is an argument made on the basis of an opponent’s text. Marx’s opponent was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a French petty-bourgeois anarchist, who had written a book called The Philosophy of Poverty . Marx was a fluent speaker and reader of French, had lived in Paris and also in Brussels, and knew Proudhon personally. The confrontation between Marx and Proudhon was very typical of the confrontations that have happened all along in the history of communism. Proudhon thought that the poorer and more desperate the people became, the more revolutionary they would be. Marx on the other hand believed that it was the working proletariat that was the ...

Permanent Revolution Karl Marx’s March 1850 Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League begins by describing the working proletariat as the “only decisively revolutionary class” , and ends with a battle-cry for the workers: “The Permanent Revolution!” In the Address, Marx is advocating all possible means of achieving revolutionary change which, even if theoretically reversible, would not in practice be reversed. “The workers' party must go into battle with the maximum degree of organization, unity and independence, so that it is not exploited and taken in tow by the bourgeoisie,” said Marx, rehearsing the events of the previous two years when the bourgeois allies of the working class had treacherously sold the workers out as soon as they could secure favourable terms for themselves from the reactionary feudal powers. Marx then very frankly reviews the competing self-interests of the contending classes and fractions of the bourgeoisie. “There is no doubt tha...

Barricade, Rue Soufflot, Paris, February 1848, painting, Horace Vernet Origin of the National Republic The Great French Revolution that started in 1789 did not immediately produce a lasting democratic republic in France. Napoleon Bonaparte’s Empire, launched with a coup d’etat on 9 November 1799 had attacked feudal monarchs all over Europe. But it was followed during the next three decades by the restoration of weak versions of the French monarchy, culminating in the “July Monarchy” of Louis Philippe. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels anticipated a coming revolutionary upsurge and published the  Communist Manifesto  at the beginning of the revolutionary year of 1848. The Manifesto’s first major section is called “Bourgeois and Proletarians” and it says among other things that: “Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other - bourgeoisie and proletariat.” Karl Marx arrested in Brusse...

Battle for the nation state Alex Gordon, Morning Star, London, 18 March 2010 Monopoly capital and the forces of so-called "globalisation" face yet another deep crisis. This has awakened new interest in the ideas of Karl Marx, which have proved much more resilient than the forces of imperialist globalisation have claimed. The international banking system has been temporarily saved from complete meltdown, but only by the extensive intervention of the state with public money. If the situation were not so serious, we may even have been amused to witness the spectacle of those who once claimed the total victory of global markets, the "end of history" itself and the death of the nation state scrambling for government bail-outs and demanding state intervention. Over the last 40 years the drive for world market integration has unleashed and intensified competitive pressures on capital and labour. Capital markets now have a global reach and capital flows have inc...