Offers one can refuse.
Summer garden in St. Petersburg (Leningrad)
To me both the the 70s and 80s are as recent as if they were yesterday and perhaps that's why I am so horrified by the idea of a Conservative government. The Conservatives in the 80s were not just privatisers, they didn't just open the gates of hell when they deregulated the City, attracting all the money into it that might otherwise have gone into British manufacturing, the Conservatives were supporters of the Apartheid regime and they believed that all socialists and communists were " the enemy within".
The Young Tories in those days, (Cameron was too young to be one of them), made T-Shirts referring to Nelson Mandela, saying: "Hang the terrorist." This was the age when Britain didn't just coat-tail on US wars for resources and strategic advantage as it does today, it was a time when when the Conservatives actually turned Britain into ground zero.
The Tories allowed Reagan's mob to site more than a 100 military bases on British soil, some of which held first-strike nuclear weapons. The mood created by the Thatcher - Reagan willingness to countenance a first strike policy is summed up in Raymond Briggs book: "Where the Wind Blows."
Of, course GCHQ was listening in to all the ANC communication traffic coming out of Penton Road and then it probably passed most of the intelligence on to the Apartheid regime's Bureau of State Security or BOSS. And while the ANC had two floors of a terraced house as its headquarters in London, located between King's Cross and Islington, the Apartheid regime boasted one of the most prominent buildings in the whole of London, overlooking Trafalgar Square, South Africa House.
I didn't go to the ANC offices and insist on being part of the struggle, basically because I was white. My parents didn't suggest I do anything along those lines, they didn't feel it was appropriate either. -In fact, I had no other identity other than that of a South African exile; our feet had barely touched the ground from the moment my parents left South Africa, but it did not seem to me that I qualified. I certainly hadn't sacrificed anything, apart from continuity in my education.
There was and always has been a Christian ethic in the African liberation movements, whereby the high ground is occupied by those who sacrificed and suffered more for their beliefs. I see the point of this. Doesn't corruption in post revolutionary societies like Mexico, South Africa, the Soviet Union, Mozambique and Angola come from the people who were not directly linked to the struggle, from those people who did not suffer and who did not have to sacrifice anything for their ideals? I didn't feel entitled to participate directly in the struggle for South African national liberation because my travels and experiences seemed to have had severed that link, because I was white and middle class. So I was left to shadow my peers.
In Dom's articles on the National Democratic Revolution he suggests that, at the moment, South Africa should be striving to achieve a proper democracy. It is true that the sinecure of a political party like the ANC in power together with the lack of a powerful opposition can generate corruption and distortions.
At school I studied history. I chose to read deeply about colonialism and very single revolution that had ever happened in the 18th, 19th and 20th century. I got into coruscating arguments with my reactionary, Cambridge educated, history teacher. I questioned what he said and his response was merely to ridicule me.
When faced with the question in my final exam:
"In what way could the seizure of power by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917 be considered to have been a military coup?"
I wrote an answer to the question that explained why I considered the question itself to be tendentious and insulting and of course I failed.
When I studied economics I refused to learn about the Phillips Curve which set up a statistical relationship between unemployment and inflation. It seemed to me at the time, (I was 17), that the Phillips Curve was an ideological confection designed by Monetarists to help the government flagellate the Trade Unions. I failed Economics too, because I could not take it seriously. I could not swallow shit. Of course since then the Phillips Curve has been completely discredited, but in 1977 they made us learn it as part of the gospel of economics. Monetarism in the ascendant.
Wasn't the left repulsively sectarian in Britain in the 70s and 80s? With the exception of some of the trade unions, the Bennites, Livingstone's GLC crowd and organisations like Militant.
If you want to know what the left was like then you only have to look as far as the establishment. That's where quite a few of these people ended up. Many on the left in Britain, completely misread their own motives, which were often vile.
Jack Straw is an archetype of this sort of reptile. As a student they mouth off Socialist politics, playing a game of who can be holier than thou, excommunicating unbelievers who don't toe the line. Meanwhile, these Dorian Grays, and there are so many of them, aren't there, stealthily climb, climb, climb, until finally they reach a position where it is worth the state's time to ask them to sell out in return for power - the true driving force behind their passion all along.
Like the artist, perhaps the activist should never be thoroughly psychoanalysed because when he or she manages to understand what their true motives are, they might then lose their political hard ons, realising that they don't actually give much of a flying fuck about the poor or the persecuted, after all.
I chose to study for a degree in Russian and Spanish because I wanted to study the Russian revolution and the Civil war in Spain, the nature of planned economies and and the Mexican revolution and it's aftermath. I was the student representative, I sat on the student council, I started local Anti-Apartheid groups, the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign etc etc. And, foolishly, I argued my case in all my lectures on politics and economics.
But who was I arguing with? Gerald Brooks (who I really liked) who had been jailed in Lublyanka for spreading the Christian gospel and who had been exchanged for a famous spy.?Dissidents and people who had fled the Soviet Union and who were still nominally under the protection of the security services?
After giving my opinions freely a Russian literary critic in exile, his name was Borovsky (who was teaching us Zoschenko's "Lyudi"), snarled at me:
"Tuneyadstvo" he said.
This means "bloodsucker" or parasite in Russian. It has stayed with me. I danced about where angels feared to tread. What did I know, frankly?
So I went to the Soviet Union to find out. I wanted to know close up, just what this country was that had been supporting the liberation movements. I wanted to really understand what it was like. I was shadowing my peers in the ANC who had gone to study in the Patrice Lumumba Univeristy.
I fell in love with a Soviet Girl, a Moldavian, our student Intourist guide who was obviously a member of the KGB. I know she was in the KGB because I saw two aggressive policemen who were about to arrest me and take me to the drunk tank for pissing against a wall at night, look at her ID, practically salute her and drive off.
She set up a meeting for me with her controller who travelled up from Kiev, in a Leningrad square near the river. By then I thought I had an intuition about life in the Soviet Union and the role of the Communist Party and of course I knew I would make a hopeless spy.
Though I was being interviewed I turned the question back on my interviewer, who I had met before and who I instinctively disliked (He's probably very rich now, with shares in some Russian oil company.) and I thought.
"You fucker. How much do you believe the stuff that you are told and how much of it is just the way that ambitious young bastards like you climb into power?"
My parents had always been free thinkers. Perhaps this is why they found out they were not accepted into the South African Communist Party when they were younger. They followed their conscience. And I understood, by then, that the intellectual life of the Soviet Communist Party in the Soviet Union had nothing to do with the search for truth. It was a very poor homunculus, a sad Golem that merely imitated Communism. Its support for the liberation movements was only something vestigial, something that it did almost despite itself to avoid having to face up to itself in the mirror.
So I stopped my KGB interviewer in mid flow, though I could just as easily have decked him at that point, and asked him.
"Now you tell me first, what do you think of Gramsci?"
And I thought.
"Do you really want to recruit me because you honestly think that I think you care about national liberation or truth?"
"Ah he said. You are a Euro-communist?"
Now that is the last thing I was, the people who had been voting Euro-communist were switching over to Le Pen in France, they were voting against immigration, that's how progressive and "Communist" they were. And anyway, Gramsci is not summed up by the term "Euro-Communist".
I didn't answer, but I had lost all respect. The interview was over and my blond haired, blue eyed Russian lover was disappointed. I had failed to cut the KGB mustard.
Later my wife convinced me to apply to join the foreign service I didn't really want to, but I did fill in the forms anyway. I must have wanted to sabotage myself. I chose to put down Norman Levy as my reference. A family friend, a great academic, a sweet man, but a South African Communist and former jailbird. He was happy to oblige and so I didn't get entry, of course not.
And then, later on, I applied to become a "Lector" for the British Council in one of a number of universities in the Soviet Union and I was interviewed by quite a senior panel. In the middle of the interview one of the women on the panel suddenly turned to the other interviewers and asked,
"Why is this man not in the foreign service?"
And an older woman on her right with grey hair looked back at her and arching one eyebrow said. There were reasons.
I remember accompanying my friend Alex Reynolds to the Kitson's family picket outside South Africa House. There was something a little aristocratic about Norma Kitson and her son, a little of the Vanessa Redgrave. The Kitsons knew best. I think they started up their own little splinter group. What was it called again. The Revolutionary Communist Group. Some such. My friend was inexperienced and quite enamoured. He went along to their silly meetings and listened to their silly pronouncements. His excuse was that he fancied an Indian girl on the picket who, as I remember, was small, but very vocal.
But the Kitsons and their City Group were a constant presence outside the South African embassy and they did raise people's awareness. How many hundreds and thousands of tourists must have stopped to think and then realised that the 10 to 20 people on the pavement were protesting against Apartheid. The South Africans inside did not remain anonymous. City Group was a big finger pointing at them.
A lot of people became more politically aware after a stint with the Kitsons. What good it did them I don't know. I was outside the embassy one day and I think we were singing Nkosi Sielele or shouting slogans and next to me was an actress. She obviously thought she was right on. I think it could have been Miriam Margoyles.
The actress turned round and spat: "They should kill all the whites, wipe them all out!" Here was someone who had never heard of Bram Fisher, who was so ignorant that she didn't even realise that the main reason why City group was there was to get Norma Kitson's husband, the political prisoner David Kitson, released.
Summer garden in St. Petersburg (Leningrad)The Young Tories in those days, (Cameron was too young to be one of them), made T-Shirts referring to Nelson Mandela, saying: "Hang the terrorist." This was the age when Britain didn't just coat-tail on US wars for resources and strategic advantage as it does today, it was a time when when the Conservatives actually turned Britain into ground zero.
The Tories allowed Reagan's mob to site more than a 100 military bases on British soil, some of which held first-strike nuclear weapons. The mood created by the Thatcher - Reagan willingness to countenance a first strike policy is summed up in Raymond Briggs book: "Where the Wind Blows."
Of, course GCHQ was listening in to all the ANC communication traffic coming out of Penton Road and then it probably passed most of the intelligence on to the Apartheid regime's Bureau of State Security or BOSS. And while the ANC had two floors of a terraced house as its headquarters in London, located between King's Cross and Islington, the Apartheid regime boasted one of the most prominent buildings in the whole of London, overlooking Trafalgar Square, South Africa House.
I didn't go to the ANC offices and insist on being part of the struggle, basically because I was white. My parents didn't suggest I do anything along those lines, they didn't feel it was appropriate either. -In fact, I had no other identity other than that of a South African exile; our feet had barely touched the ground from the moment my parents left South Africa, but it did not seem to me that I qualified. I certainly hadn't sacrificed anything, apart from continuity in my education.
There was and always has been a Christian ethic in the African liberation movements, whereby the high ground is occupied by those who sacrificed and suffered more for their beliefs. I see the point of this. Doesn't corruption in post revolutionary societies like Mexico, South Africa, the Soviet Union, Mozambique and Angola come from the people who were not directly linked to the struggle, from those people who did not suffer and who did not have to sacrifice anything for their ideals? I didn't feel entitled to participate directly in the struggle for South African national liberation because my travels and experiences seemed to have had severed that link, because I was white and middle class. So I was left to shadow my peers.
In Dom's articles on the National Democratic Revolution he suggests that, at the moment, South Africa should be striving to achieve a proper democracy. It is true that the sinecure of a political party like the ANC in power together with the lack of a powerful opposition can generate corruption and distortions.
At school I studied history. I chose to read deeply about colonialism and very single revolution that had ever happened in the 18th, 19th and 20th century. I got into coruscating arguments with my reactionary, Cambridge educated, history teacher. I questioned what he said and his response was merely to ridicule me.
When faced with the question in my final exam:
"In what way could the seizure of power by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in 1917 be considered to have been a military coup?"
I wrote an answer to the question that explained why I considered the question itself to be tendentious and insulting and of course I failed.
When I studied economics I refused to learn about the Phillips Curve which set up a statistical relationship between unemployment and inflation. It seemed to me at the time, (I was 17), that the Phillips Curve was an ideological confection designed by Monetarists to help the government flagellate the Trade Unions. I failed Economics too, because I could not take it seriously. I could not swallow shit. Of course since then the Phillips Curve has been completely discredited, but in 1977 they made us learn it as part of the gospel of economics. Monetarism in the ascendant.
Wasn't the left repulsively sectarian in Britain in the 70s and 80s? With the exception of some of the trade unions, the Bennites, Livingstone's GLC crowd and organisations like Militant.
If you want to know what the left was like then you only have to look as far as the establishment. That's where quite a few of these people ended up. Many on the left in Britain, completely misread their own motives, which were often vile.
Jack Straw is an archetype of this sort of reptile. As a student they mouth off Socialist politics, playing a game of who can be holier than thou, excommunicating unbelievers who don't toe the line. Meanwhile, these Dorian Grays, and there are so many of them, aren't there, stealthily climb, climb, climb, until finally they reach a position where it is worth the state's time to ask them to sell out in return for power - the true driving force behind their passion all along.
Like the artist, perhaps the activist should never be thoroughly psychoanalysed because when he or she manages to understand what their true motives are, they might then lose their political hard ons, realising that they don't actually give much of a flying fuck about the poor or the persecuted, after all.
I chose to study for a degree in Russian and Spanish because I wanted to study the Russian revolution and the Civil war in Spain, the nature of planned economies and and the Mexican revolution and it's aftermath. I was the student representative, I sat on the student council, I started local Anti-Apartheid groups, the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign etc etc. And, foolishly, I argued my case in all my lectures on politics and economics.
But who was I arguing with? Gerald Brooks (who I really liked) who had been jailed in Lublyanka for spreading the Christian gospel and who had been exchanged for a famous spy.?Dissidents and people who had fled the Soviet Union and who were still nominally under the protection of the security services?
After giving my opinions freely a Russian literary critic in exile, his name was Borovsky (who was teaching us Zoschenko's "Lyudi"), snarled at me:
"Tuneyadstvo" he said.
This means "bloodsucker" or parasite in Russian. It has stayed with me. I danced about where angels feared to tread. What did I know, frankly?
So I went to the Soviet Union to find out. I wanted to know close up, just what this country was that had been supporting the liberation movements. I wanted to really understand what it was like. I was shadowing my peers in the ANC who had gone to study in the Patrice Lumumba Univeristy.
I fell in love with a Soviet Girl, a Moldavian, our student Intourist guide who was obviously a member of the KGB. I know she was in the KGB because I saw two aggressive policemen who were about to arrest me and take me to the drunk tank for pissing against a wall at night, look at her ID, practically salute her and drive off.
She set up a meeting for me with her controller who travelled up from Kiev, in a Leningrad square near the river. By then I thought I had an intuition about life in the Soviet Union and the role of the Communist Party and of course I knew I would make a hopeless spy.
Though I was being interviewed I turned the question back on my interviewer, who I had met before and who I instinctively disliked (He's probably very rich now, with shares in some Russian oil company.) and I thought.
"You fucker. How much do you believe the stuff that you are told and how much of it is just the way that ambitious young bastards like you climb into power?"
My parents had always been free thinkers. Perhaps this is why they found out they were not accepted into the South African Communist Party when they were younger. They followed their conscience. And I understood, by then, that the intellectual life of the Soviet Communist Party in the Soviet Union had nothing to do with the search for truth. It was a very poor homunculus, a sad Golem that merely imitated Communism. Its support for the liberation movements was only something vestigial, something that it did almost despite itself to avoid having to face up to itself in the mirror.
So I stopped my KGB interviewer in mid flow, though I could just as easily have decked him at that point, and asked him.
"Now you tell me first, what do you think of Gramsci?"
And I thought.
"Do you really want to recruit me because you honestly think that I think you care about national liberation or truth?"
"Ah he said. You are a Euro-communist?"
Now that is the last thing I was, the people who had been voting Euro-communist were switching over to Le Pen in France, they were voting against immigration, that's how progressive and "Communist" they were. And anyway, Gramsci is not summed up by the term "Euro-Communist".
I didn't answer, but I had lost all respect. The interview was over and my blond haired, blue eyed Russian lover was disappointed. I had failed to cut the KGB mustard.
Later my wife convinced me to apply to join the foreign service I didn't really want to, but I did fill in the forms anyway. I must have wanted to sabotage myself. I chose to put down Norman Levy as my reference. A family friend, a great academic, a sweet man, but a South African Communist and former jailbird. He was happy to oblige and so I didn't get entry, of course not.
And then, later on, I applied to become a "Lector" for the British Council in one of a number of universities in the Soviet Union and I was interviewed by quite a senior panel. In the middle of the interview one of the women on the panel suddenly turned to the other interviewers and asked,
"Why is this man not in the foreign service?"
And an older woman on her right with grey hair looked back at her and arching one eyebrow said. There were reasons.
I remember accompanying my friend Alex Reynolds to the Kitson's family picket outside South Africa House. There was something a little aristocratic about Norma Kitson and her son, a little of the Vanessa Redgrave. The Kitsons knew best. I think they started up their own little splinter group. What was it called again. The Revolutionary Communist Group. Some such. My friend was inexperienced and quite enamoured. He went along to their silly meetings and listened to their silly pronouncements. His excuse was that he fancied an Indian girl on the picket who, as I remember, was small, but very vocal.
But the Kitsons and their City Group were a constant presence outside the South African embassy and they did raise people's awareness. How many hundreds and thousands of tourists must have stopped to think and then realised that the 10 to 20 people on the pavement were protesting against Apartheid. The South Africans inside did not remain anonymous. City Group was a big finger pointing at them.
A lot of people became more politically aware after a stint with the Kitsons. What good it did them I don't know. I was outside the embassy one day and I think we were singing Nkosi Sielele or shouting slogans and next to me was an actress. She obviously thought she was right on. I think it could have been Miriam Margoyles.
The actress turned round and spat: "They should kill all the whites, wipe them all out!" Here was someone who had never heard of Bram Fisher, who was so ignorant that she didn't even realise that the main reason why City group was there was to get Norma Kitson's husband, the political prisoner David Kitson, released.
Comments
What is a "proper democracy"? Bourgeois democracy is conceived of as a gaol, or "end of history". Revolutionary democracy is the practical, tactical means of organising people as collective Subjects of History, but not an end. Democracy is a transition towards a society where democracy, as dictatorship of the majority over the minority, becomes redundant, and is replaced by "the free development of each [as] the condition for the free development of all".
"It is true that the sinecure of a political party like the ANC in power together with the lack of a powerful opposition can generate corruption and distortions."
I don't think so. First, "sinecure" means a job with a salary but no obligation to work. It's the wrong word for what you mean. Even if you mean that the ANC is a shoo-in at all elections, that is not true. We have to work hard for our support. "Lack of opposition"? We are sick of knee-jerk positional "opposition". In fact, it is the automatic "opposition" to everything that the ANC is doing that condemns the "opposition" parties to eclecticism and irrelevance.
Well said.
Sinecure?
As in people who squat, like toads, and retain power at all costs once they get it and who are very busy, but not necessarily with fulfilling their obligations as public servants.
I think a spell living under the PRI in Mexico or the CP in the SU helped give me a respective, a handle on just how reactionary and backward a "progressive" government and revolutionary government can eventually become.
This is the reality. We should learn from reality.
You say: "A lot of people became more politically aware after a stint with the Kitsons. What good it did them I don't know"
Well in a very brief response I'll let you know that it helped develop and concretise my political understandings of South Africa, British collaboration with Apartheid and the integral link with anti-racist struggles 'at home' and not just overseas charity.
My time with the Kitsons and the City of London AA Group also taught me much about the opportunism and hypocrisy of some individuals who - unlike the Kitsons - were afraid to confront the British State.
James Godfrey
(former Committee Member, City of London Anti-Apartheid Group)
godfreej@gmail.com