London Socialist Historians Group

Holocaust Memorial Day Wallchart

2012-01-26T09:44:00.000-08:00

To mark Holocaust memorial day (30 January), a wall chart has been produced by Gaverne Bennett for UCU which can be accessed here [pdf]:
Lets make sure that what happened is never forgotten or denied.

New Unionism day school

2012-01-26T09:03:00.000-08:00

NEW UNIONISM: HOW WORKERS CAN FIGHT BACK
A dayschool hosted by Workers' Liberty
Saturday 18 February 2012, 11:30-17:30

Highgate Newtown Community Centre, 25 Bertram Street, London N19 5DQ
(Archway tube)

In the late 1880s, workers (often unskilled or semi-skilled, often
migrants and often working in casualised and precarious environments)
organised militant industrial unions to fight back against their
bosses. Faced with increasingly similar conditions today, can we build
a New Unionism for the 21st century that transforms and revolutionises
the modern labour movement?

Registration: £15 waged, £8 low-waged/ student, £4 unwaged.

Speakers and sessions are:
* How the socialists organised: the life and times of Tom Mann (Cathy
Nugent and Charlie MacDonald)
* The movement for working-class self-education (Colin Waugh, further
education activist, author of Plebs, the Lost Legacy of Independent
Working-Class Education)
* Finding a political voice: from New Unionism to Labour
representation (Martin Thomas and Sam Greenwood)
* Organising the unorganised: (Mick Duncan, Unite p.c; Ruth Cashman,
Lambeth Unison p.c.)
* From the Matchworkers to the Chainmakers – how women organised (Jill
Mountford and Louise Raw, author of Striking a Light, The Bryant and
May Matchwomen and their Place in History)
* What came next – The Great Unrest 1911-1914 (Edd Mustill)
* Organising at work today: using the ‘Troublemakers’ Handbook’ (Kim
Moody, founder of Labor Notes magazine, academic, author — most
recently US Labor in Trouble and Transition — and activist)
New Unionism 2012? How can we reinvigorate the labour movement?
Speakers include Eamonn Lynch (Bakerloo Line driver tube driver
victimised for his union activity and reinstated following an RMT
campaign) and Jean Lane (Workers' Liberty and Tower Hamlets Unison)

Creche, cheap food and bookstalls

Conference: A Revolutionary Life: Ruth First, 1925-1982

2012-01-26T01:54:00.000-08:00

On behalf of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies (University of London) and Commonwealth Advisory Bureau, you are cordially invited to attend our upcoming conference ‘A revolutionary life: Ruth First 1925 – 1982' which celebrates the life of anti-apartheid activist, investigative journalist and scholar Ruth First. The conference will take place on the 7th June 2012, 10:00 – 19:00 at Senate House in Bloomsbury, London, and will include, among others, Justice Albie Sachs, Gillian Slovo, Shula Marks, and Bridget O’Laughlin
. Registration fee: £10 (standard); £5 (students/unwaged/retired) – includes lunch and wine reception. We hope that you are able to attend. Please feel free to circulate this message to any colleagues or students who may be interested in attending.

New CLR James library opens

2012-01-24T03:02:00.000-08:00

The Dalston CLR James Library in Hackney opens this week - after a campaign that involved over 2,500 people signing a petition. Gaverne Bennett writes to us about the re-opening:

'It is a tremendous victory given there was an attempt to change the name of the library. There will be a special exhibition opening about CLR James at the library the first week of March. Thereafter, there will be some kind of lecture (to be held yearly) in late March.'

Edited to add:
1. Friday 2nd March 2012 - a new CLR James exhibition will open at the library featuring different aspects of CLR James's life and work.

2. Tuesday 27th March 2012 - Gary Younge from The Guardian will be giving a lecture/talk at the library. More details to follow.

David Montgomery 1927-2011

2012-01-23T03:28:00.000-08:00

Jon Weiner remembers the late great historian of the American working class David Montgomery, who died late last year.

Edited to add: From Radical History Review
The radical historian, David Montgomery, who died on December 2, 2011, was the doyen of American labor history. Well known for a half dozen major works on labor and the working class in the long nineteenth century, David's scholarly work, political commitments and personal life exemplified the seamless web that animated his engagement with social justice, peace and equality.

David was also a long-time friend and supporter of this journal and it is telling that many of his former doctoral students have served on our editorial collective. In 1982, when the Radical History Review struggled as an independently financed and operated journal, David signed on as one of eleven world-class historians to serve as Associate Editors, a supportive role that lent his prestige and consequent credibility to a journal largely run by graduate students and recent PhDs. In the last decade he helped found Historians Against the War (HAW) and remained a stalwart force in the organization.

The Radical History Review will publish a fuller appreciation of David Montgomery’s life and work in a forthcoming issue. "Once Upon a Shop Floor: An Interview with David Montgomery," conducted by two RHR editors, Paul Buhle and Mark Naison, gives voice to the remarkable history of this remarkable man, historian and friend. The interview was originally published in the RHR in Spring 1980 and subsequently appeared in the RHR book, Visions of History (Pantheon, 1983).

The interview is now freely available to all at Duke University Press's RHR website: http://rhr.dukejournals.org/content/1980/23/37.full.pdf+html

Daniel Walkowitz, RHR Editorial Collective

Bert Ramelson conference

2012-01-23T03:25:00.000-08:00

The Working Class Organised:
A Conference/Rally on the life and times of Bert Ramelson
and the lessons to be learned for today’s struggle

Will be held at
The Bishopsgate Institute Main Hall,
230 Bishopsgate, London, EC2M 4QH (nearest tube Liverpool St.)
on Saturday 5th May 2012 from 10am till 5pm

Admission Free

Overall Chair Rodney Bickerstaffe
Chairs Tom Sibley/ Louise Raw/ Richard Baxell
Speakers: Max Levitas, Deanna Lubelski, Kevin Halpin, Mick Costello, Keith Ewing, Mary Davis, Graham Stevenson, John Foster, Ann Field, John Haylett, Bill Greenshields and Tony Burke

If you have questions or would like to help, please contact Terry McCarthy at terrylhm@virginmedia.com

LSHG Newsletter # 44 online

2012-01-15T09:21:00.000-08:00

Just a quick message to highlight the fact that most of the new Spring LSHG newsletter is now online - contents include Keith Flett on Occupy, David Renton on Seb Coe, Stan Newens on Ray Challinor, and advertisements for forthcoming seminars of LSHG and others such as the Socialist History Society plus of course the annual LSHG conference on 25 February on 'A History of Riots'. Other matters were also flagged up, and John Riddell's report of the session on international Communism at November's Historical Materialism conference in London was reprinted. Future LSHG seminars are listed below, while for more info on submissions for future newsletters or membership of the LSHG contact Keith Flett at the email address above.

23rd January Nicole Ulrich {University of the Witwatersrand] 'Direct Action and Colonial Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Africa: a survey of underclass protest'.

6th February Merilyn Moos 'From the personal to the political: Researching the KPD 1929-37'

20th February Manus McGrogan 'The revolutionary left press after 1968'

5th March Lucian van der Walt [University of Witwatersrand] 'Adding Red to the Black Atlantic: the Industrial Workers of Africa and International Socialist League’s black revolutionary syndicalists and the South Africa Native National Congress's 1917-1920 radicalisation'

19th March Roberta Wedge 'Mary Wollstonecraft: journalist, socialist, or somewhere else on the political spectrum?'

All seminars at 5.30pm
Gordon Room,
Ground Floor
Senate House
South Block
Institute of Historical Research
London

Seminar on George Padmore and West Indian labour revolts

2012-01-12T07:51:00.000-08:00

You are warmly invited to the following seminar on WEDNESDAY 18 JANUARY jointly hosted by the Institute for the Study of the Americas and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies:

Leslie James, LSE '“The most completely political Negro": The convergence of George Padmore’s pan-Africanism and Marxism in the West Indian Labour Revolts, 1935-1939'

DATE: 18 January 2012
TIME: 17:30 - 19:30
VENUE: ROOM 349, THIRD FLOOR, SENATE HOUSE, MALET ST, LONDON WC1E 7HU

ABSTRACT Born in Trinidad in 1903, George Padmore is best known either as one of the 'fathers of Pan-Africanism', or as the Communist International's most important 'Negro communist.' These categories have diminished his interest in, and support for, resistance in the West Indies. The Caribbean labour revolts, which began in British Honduras in early 1935 and culminated in the strikes, marches and demonstrations across Jamaica in 1938, became a major subject of George Padmore’s journalism and a key action point for his London-based International African Service Bureau (IASB). The IASB became heavily involved in West Indian affairs and although many see this period as Padmore’s stronger identification as an ‘African,’ it was also the period in which he was most involved in West Indian politics. This paper will show that Padmore's continued Marxism and his persistent encouragement of pan-African unity came together in his support for Caribbean workers.
BIO Leslie James is a PhD candidate in the International History Dept, London School of Economics and Political Science. She is working on a biography of George Padmore.

The 2012 Olympics - David Renton on Sebastian Coe/Steve Ovett

2012-01-11T07:32:00.000-08:00

From LSHG Newsletter #44 (January 2012)
The Toff and the Monster

Asked in 2009 why British entries always did so badly in the Eurovision Song Context, former presenter Terry Wogan answered, “There has always been that general feeling [in Britain] of distrust of Johnny Foreigner, but, of course, it is mutual. Britain has attacked nearly every country in Europe, and people don't forget.” Perhaps with this very history in mind, bookmakers made Paris not London the favourite in July 2005 to acquire the 2012 summer Olympics. The moment at which London inched past Paris is generally said to have been Sebastian Coe’s speech to the critical meeting of the International Olympic Committee.

Now, by this stage, in Britain, Coe was best known as an unsuccessful politician in his own right. He had been a Tory MP from 1992 to 1997 and William Hague’s constant companion during the latter’s unsuccessful stint as leader of the Conservatives after the 1997 election. Very much Adam Werrity to Hague’s Liam Fox, Coe was said to spend his every morning in judo bouts with his leader, and in one unfortunate incident, the former Olympic gold medallist was left unconscious by a Hague neck lock.

The members of the International Olympic Committee almost certainly knew little of Coe’s recent past. What won them over was being addressed by a man who 25 years before had been a part of one of the greatest of recent Olympic rivalries. I have recently been writing about my own life as a runner, and as part of that endeavor I have reflected on the Coe-Ovett rivalry and on the role played by Coe in particular. Running dominated my adolescence; I was a decent county-standard runner. I would never have run but for Coe and Ovett.

Seb Coe, like Steve Ovett, grew up in a family dominated by a strong central figure. In Coe’s case it was his
father Peter, a factory manager. A Channel Four documentary, shown just in time for the Los Angeles Olympics, opened with Peter Coe in a silver anorak and outsized glasses telling the story of Coe’s running career: “At 14 I really thought he was good, and at 16 I was certain that if I was patient and played it right he would be a world beater.” Peter Coe pronounced the word cer-ta-in in a slow, lumbering manner, turning two syllables into three.

When Coe was still young, his family moved from London to Stratford upon-Avon. They lived on the edge of town, and he would regularly run two miles or so into town and back again on errands for his mother, never using a bicycle, always preferring the feeling of running. Ovett tells a similar story save that in his account the errands were for his father and meant purchasing fags or cans from the corner store. Mick Ovett would even pretend to time the youthful athlete, counting out loud “three, four, five” as he left the house, and
starting afresh “twenty-three, twenty-four” as he heard the sounds of his son returning home.

Ovett’s mother owned and ran a café, Mrs Coe was an actress who wound down her own career to raise
a family. Coe’s twin sister was a ballet dancer in her teens, and it is said that she shared his ability to walk or run as if on air. Coe’s mother told the documentary that her son was a nervous child and he flourished only in the absence of competition. Elsewhere, it is recorded that Coe finished disappointingly in his first two efforts at the England Schools championships.

In Sheffield, the Coes lived in Hallamshire, surrounded by doctors and university lecturers. The young Seb Coe was asthmatic and suffered from eczema and hay fever. Unlike Ovett, he failed his 11-plus. This would barely have caused a stir in the Ovett household, but in the Coe family it was seen as a shameful episode, a defect likely to bring down the status of the whole family. Peter Coe told the future athlete he could either accept then and there he was a failure, as the examination had suggested, or he could work to prove the test wrong. In his mother’s words, “He didn't achieve very much. He achieved when it didn't matter, but when it came to the tests, like the 11-plus, nerves got to him so much.” Her accent, like her husband’s or indeed her son’s, shows few signs of any Sheffield influence.

The father’s desire for the family to retain its middle class status chimed with the son’s need to retain his
father’s love. He worked harder than he had thought possible. "All the top performances come", Peter Coe believed, "when it's hurting." Coe addressed his father by his first name. In his book The Winning Mind, he refers at several points to the views of his “coach”. A different parent might have allowed his son to
address him directly as “father”. “I drove us both hard”, Peter Coe said. “Patience was not my virtue. I expected him to be ready on the dot for training! But he was a splendid fellow, he knew better how to live with me than anyone in the family. He learned obedience, yet by the time he grew up his father wasn’t God, he knew that I had feet of clay. We worked on the programme and he never badgered me or questioned the
programme.” Over the next two years, Coe would shed his early physical weakness and develop
into a decent schoolboy athlete. When Coe was barely 13 his father drew up a projection of progress up to the 1980 Olympics with an optimum 1,500 metres time of 3.30, three minutes faster than the then world record.

In the build-up to Moscow, the papers would sell Coe to the British public as “the toff” in contrast to Ovett, “the monster”. As a student, Coe talked up aspects of his life which seemed to emphasise his middle-class character, such as his admiration of the American novelists Steinbeck, Hemmingway and Bellow, his love of jazz (in 1980...), and his desire to follow his father by working in industry.

After his Gold at the 1980 Olympics, Coe spent many hours negotiating the first advertising contract for an
amateur athlete, for which special dispensation was required from the running authorities. He earned a
footballer’s salary by becoming the public face of Instant Horlicks. When Coe won Gold in the 1500 metres in the 1980 Olympics, his success and above all his victory over his compatriot Ovett was portrayed as a great triumph of the English middle classes. In the words of the Daily Mail, “He lifted the soul, he ennobled his art, he dignified his country.”

More was at stake, however, than just the surface distinction between the market trader’s boy and the manager’s son. For as Ovett said repeatedly, in terms of background there was more that they had in common than that which separated them. The early lives of each were dominated by a single strong parent. Both came originally from Southern England, Coe, the younger athlete, was just twelve months younger than Ovett. Both were students, even if the media insisted on taking Coe’s Sport Science more seriously than Ovett’s Art. Most people in Britain were waged employees, both Peter Coe and Mick Ovett were set apar (if, admittedly, in subtly different ways) from the working-class majority.

As well as class, the runners differed in their approach on the track and beyond. When they ran, Ovett was generally seen as a “kicker” who relied on his finishing pace, while Coe was a “bunny”, who depended on a very fast first half of the race to wear his opponents into submission. But neither style was innate, Coe’s self invention between 1976 and 1978 as a frontrunner came about for specific reasons. As a schoolboy athlete, Coe was seen as a 1500 and 3000 metre runner. Coe turned to the 800 metres late, in 1976, with his father’s blessing, after he reduced his best 800 metre time by three seconds in a single race. It became clear, without anyone planning it, that the distance suited him perfectly.

Coe’s difficulty in choosing the shorter distance is that while it suited him well, British athletics already provided a world-class rival, Ovett. Moreover this rival appeared to possess an unparalleled asset, his finish. Coe became a front-runner, in short, to defeat his rival’s best weapon. Coe’s adopted tactic of running the first lap of the 800 metres in under 50 seconds brought him both success and failure. It was the key to his first world record, over 800 metres at Oslo in July 1979, during which Coe’s 200-metre splits were timed as 24.0, 26.0, 24.8 and 27.0. The extraordinary period of the race was the third 200 metres, during which Coe powered away from a field which including Mike Boit, by now a World Cup silver medallist. The Oslo time was in turn the key to Coe’s two further world records in the next six weeks, in the mile and the 1500 metres.

The front-runner’s mantle, however, brought defeat in competition over 800 metres in the 1978 European Championships, and at the Olympics two years later. Determined not to repeat his Bronze from Prague, Coe knew not to run a first lap in less than 50 seconds. Having worked out how not to run, he forgot the simpler task of how best to race. He ran passively in the 800 metres at Moscow, leaving the way open for Ovett to claim the Olympic gold, before coming back in the 1500 metres.

The defining image of Coe is the expression on his face as he breaks the finishing line at the end of his Gold-winning 1500 metres at Moscow. Coe stands straight, with arms to each side, his upper body in a crucifixion pose. His head is pulled backwards, and the muscles at the front of his neck are tight. Every muscle in his face is pulled up, away from his neck. His mouth widens in a grimace. Even his brows are arched. I studied that image at the time and have looked it again many times since. I saw no pleasure in it then and can find none when I look at it today. It is not a look of ecstasy, it shares nothing with the much simpler imagesof Ovett after his Gold at Moscow: a clenched fist, the search for a particular face in the crowd, a smile. Indeed, in all the images of Ovett racing I can see only familiar emotions: fatigue, elation, desire, the anger of defeat, the joy of success. Coe’s grimace was one of those rare occasions when he allowed his deepest emotions to rise to the surface. What it shows is that he ran not in hope but in fear.

Despite his preference for left-field US fiction, Coe’s politics, as he told anyone who would listen, were the same ones that Mrs Thatcher was (in 1980) still cautious about testing on the country. Coe told one interviewer:

“I’m a great believer in personal liberty, and I do believe in the interplay of market forces. If anybody is good enough and in demand whatever field they are in, then you will find people are prepared to pay. And if somebody can make a living out of what they are good at, I don’t really see what grounds anybody can say no.”

On the running track, in his espousal of permanent competition, and in his strange combination of joylessness and fear, Coe’s success was a sign of the coming Thatcherite counterrevolution.

David Renton
David Renton’s book Lives; Running will be published by Zero Press in July 2012.

LSHG Conference 2012 - A History of Riots

2012-01-09T03:05:00.000-08:00

LSHG CONFERENCE 2012 - A History of Riots
Saturday 25th February 2012
Midday-5pm, Room 350
Institute of Historical Research
Senate House, Malet Street
London WC1

The Exeter Bread Riots of 1854

The British riots of summer 2011 were a powerful reminder that rioting is still on the agenda even in one of the centres of market capitalism. Rioting has a long history and historical context. While authorities have tended to use the language of criminality historians have often taken a different view. The papers at this conference - the first to look at the history of riots since the events of 2011, and the broader sweep from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movements of that year - are based on original research into a range of aspects of the riot in history.

Speakers include

SEAN CREIGHTON: 'The Trafalgar Square riot of 1887 and contemporary Britain'

NEIL DAVIDSON: 'Riots around the Scottish Union negotiations in 1706 and the Global South today'

JOHN NEWSINGER: 'Memorial Day Massacre, a Chicago Police Riot'

Registration from Midday

Papers and discussion\\ from 12.30pm including introduction:
Keith Flett 'The London Crowd and London riots'

Round Table discussion: 'Understanding the history of riots today' at 4pm

Entry is £10 [£5 unwaged]. We ask people to donate in advance, if possible, to speed registration on the day.
Cheques, payable to ‘ Keith Flett’, to 38 Mitchley Rd London N17 9HG

Enquiries to: keith1917@btinternet.com or call 07803 167266

Keith Flett on Occupy and the Historians

2012-01-09T02:56:00.000-08:00

From LSHG Newsletter, # 44 (January 2012)

The Occupy movement has shaken— if not exactly, so far—changed the world. It has pulled in not only established activists, but also protesters appearing on the political stage for the first time, angry at a world where a small group causes a massive crisis and then expects everyone else to pay for it. What should socialist historians say and do about this?

Firstly, there is a duty of solidarity, and there is a history to that. From Wall Street to St Paul’s, Occupy has been about making protests in some of the central spaces of Capital and asserting the right of ordinary people to do so. The State has reacted with varying degrees of physical and legal force. Free speech battles have been a feature of capitalist societies. In Britain much effort was put into fencing off and enclosing public spaces. Kennington Common where the Chartists gathered in 1848 is but one example. Modern commentators on London such as Ian Sinclair have emphasised how this battle for control over public spaces has continued right up to the present day. As the Occupy protesters have discovered, pretty much everywhere in central London is ‘owned’ by someone who can tell people to ‘get orf my land’.

Historians also have other duties. A new movement seeks a history and attempts also to understand history. There is a history of occupying space in recent times from the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders to Greenham Common and the Stop the War camp in Parliament Square. There is also the issue of what history can usefully be discussed and learned in the Tent Universities that are a feature of some of the Occupy spaces such as St Paul’s. I was pleased to receive an invitation to speak on the history of strikes there and impressed by the debates featured and the array of historians who have appeared.

Occupy suggests a major task for socialist historians in the year ahead. Not only to get out there and get involved but also to think about what history can usefully be discussed and how, with activists who are looking for an understanding of the history of labour movements, protest and activism. It is a history that should be informed by the disciplines of the seminar room, the library and the archive but driven by the
requirements of an activism determined to confront neo-liberal capitalism. In a sense it is a little like the ‘counter-culture’ of the late 1960s which produced numerous texts and alternative reading lists. With a youthful memory of that and direct experience of the current Occupy movement, there is no question that the latter is more political and more focused on trying to understand how capitalism does— and more particularly does not— work.

So just as the St Paul’s Occupy has organised an ‘outreach’ committee, so socialist historians need to think
of something similar. Socialist history has been made in 2011, although it is too soon to understand or characterise exactly how. As well as informing tumultuous times, historians also need to be on the streets helping to build that future now.
Keith Flett

Imperial and World History seminars

2012-01-09T02:43:00.000-08:00

Imperial and World History seminar
University of London
Convenors: Richard Drayton (KCL), Sarah Stockwell (KCL), John Stuart (Kingston), David Todd (KCL), Jon Wilson (KCL)

Spring Term, 2012

The seminar meets on Mondays at 5 PM fortnightly, but because of ongoing building work at the Institute of Historical Research it will meet in the Woburn Suite in Senate House
This academic year our seminars will loosely be focussed on the theme of VIOLENCE

January 23
Laleh Khalili (SOAS), The Uses of Happiness in Counterinsurgencies

February 6
Toby Green (KCL) will discuss his new book on the early history of the African slave trade: The Rise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade in Western Africa, 1300- 1589 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012)
with responses from José Lingna Nafafe (Birmingham)
and Paulo Fernando de Moraes Farias PF (Birmingham)

February 20
Konstantin Dierks (Indiana and Oxford), A World Safe Enough for Imperialism? American Perceptions of Danger and Violence in the World, 1789-1869

March 5
Richard Seymour (LSE), 'Humanitarian intervention' and Liberal Imperialism

March 19
Caroline Elkins (Harvard), 'W' Marks the Spot: Document Destruction and Removal at the End of the British Empire

Tea is available in Senate House cafe before the seminar. While we are unable to offer a subsidy, any participant in the seminar is welcome to join us afterwards for dinner with the speaker.

The Battle of Saltley Gate remembered

2011-12-31T05:06:00.000-08:00

A new website has been set up to publicise the 40th anniversary of 'The Battle of Saltley Gate' in Birmingham:

In February 1972 some 30,000 Birmingham engineers walked out on strike in solidarity with striking miners who were fighting against austerity pay deals. Up to 15,000 then marched to join miners who were picketing Saltley coke depot. The blockade forced the police, who had kept the depot open all week, to surrender and close the gates.

Militant picketing involving tens of thousands of miners had shut down power stations, docks and coal depots. But the victory at Saltley, won through solidarity strikes, was the turning point for the miners. Within seven weeks the government was defeated.

Today, working people face a similar assault on their living conditions. November 2011 saw millions of workers strike in Britain in the biggest show of united action in generations. Forty years on the Battle of Saltley Gate carries powerful lessons for a working class that is once again stirring.

This website is an attempt to produce a list of articles on Saltley Gate. Click here for article links and click here to read articles on this site.
There will hopefully be celebration events in Birmingham in 2012. These will be publicised here.

If you have articles or pictures you would like linked, or hosted, on this site please email saltleygateinfo@gmail.com

A commemorative pamphlet, Close the Gates - the 1972 miners strike, Saltley Gate and the defeat of the Tories has also been written for the anniversary by Pete Jackson:

Worcester TUC publications

2011-12-19T14:09:00.000-08:00

Worcester Trades Union Council

All funds raised are used in to support WTUC campaign for the continuing campaign against the cuts in the city & county.

Class Words 100 Years of Struggle (Limited copies available)
Class Words contains many poems and words from the history of the working class. The booklet celebrates the history of the struggle by workers, a must for all trade unionists. £4

Worcester Trades Union Council 120 Years Commemorative Booklet
A Short History highlighting some episodes of the activities of the WTUC during the last 120 years. £5

Their Glorious Fight
In 1922 the National Union of Teachers in Worcestershire took strike action as part of their struggle to achieve the nationally agreed Burnham Scale. This Booklet details the fight that the Teachers with the reactionary forces in Worcestershire County Council. £5

To obtain a copy of any of the above please complete the form below and enclose a Cheque made payable to John Stevenson for the appropriate amount.

Title Number of Copies

Class Words ................

WTUC 120 Years Commemorative Booklet ................

Their Glorious Fight ................

I enclosed a cheque for ....................

Name ……………………………………………………………
Address ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Postcode ……………………………………………………..

Worcester Trades Union Council
67 Mayfield Road
Worcester
WR3 8NS

Aspects of Popular Protest seminars

2011-12-15T01:39:00.000-08:00

Aspects of Popular Protest
- seminars organised by the Socialist History Society

Prof Jerry White - 'Riots and the Law in 18th Century London'
7pm 22 February 2012

Prof David Goodway 'The Real History of Chartism'
7pm 19 April 2012

Venue for both:
Bishopsgate Institute, London
Free entry, all welcome,
retiring collection.
www.socialisthistorysociety.co.uk/

LSHG Spring term seminars 2012

2011-12-11T00:42:00.000-08:00

London Socialist Historians Seminars Spring Term 2012

9th January Ian Birchall 'The Missing founders. The early years of the French Communist Party'

23rd January Nicole Ulrich {University of the Witwatersrand] 'Direct Action and Colonial Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Africa: a survey of underclass protest'.

6th February Merilyn Moos 'From the personal to the political: Researching the KPD 1929-37'

20th February Manus McGrogan 'The revolutionary left press after 1968'

5th March Lucian van der Walt [University of Witwatersrand] 'Adding Red to the Black Atlantic: the Industrial Workers of Africa and International Socialist League’s black revolutionary syndicalists and the South Africa Native National Congress's 1917-1920 radicalisation'

19th March Roberta Wedge 'Mary Wollstonecraft: journalist, socialist, or somewhere else on the political spectrum?'

All seminars at 5.30pm
Gordon Room,
Ground Floor
Senate House
South Block
Institute of Historical Research
London

Edited to add:
LONDON SEMINAR ON CONTEMPORARY MARXIST THEORY
14th December, 6pm King's College London, Strand Campus, Room S-3.18 Jairus Banaji (SOAS) ''Retotalizing Fascism: reading Arthur Rosenberg through Sartre's ‘Critique’''

Bert Ramelson

2011-12-10T08:39:00.000-08:00

'Revolutionary Communist at work'

A tribute to Bert Ramelson will be held at the Marx Memorial Library on Saturday 5th May 2012 from 12 noon to 6 PM admission free. If you would like to speak at this event or attend please contact Terry McCarthy at, terrylhm@virginmedia.com
Revolutionary Communist at work a political biography of Bert Ramelson by Roger Seifert and Tom Sibley
Special offer to receive this 350 page book at £15, five pounds goes to the morning Star - see www.labourhistory.co.uk

Reminder - Keith Flett on William Cuffay

2011-12-08T06:56:00.001-08:00

Keith Flett on 'William Cuffay, Black Chartist and Londoner'
Seminar - Mon 12th December
Institute of Historical Research, Gordon Room G34, Ground Floor South Block Senate House 5.30pm - all welcome

CFP: Unofficial Histories

2011-11-24T10:28:00.000-08:00

Unofficial Histories
Saturday 19th May 2012 at Bishopsgate Institute, London

A free public conference to discuss how society produces, presents, and consumes history beyond official and elite versions of the past.

Call for Papers

The “unofficial histories” conference seeks to bring together those who work in the academic, community and cultural fields to consider the value and purpose of historical engagements and understandings that take place within, on the edges of, or outside “official” sites and channels for the communication of historical ideas. Taking its cue from the assumption that history is, as Raphael Samuel put it, “a social form of knowledge; the work, in any given instance of a thousand different hands”, the conference aims to open up to examination the ways in which historians, curators, writers, journalists, artists, film makers, activists and others, seek to represent the past in the public realm, and in the spheres of popular culture and everyday life.

What kinds of subjects, ideas and themes are presented? What styles and mediums are used to construct history? How is this history produced, transmitted and consumed?

We hope to sharpen the awareness of the different sites and forms of historical production and consider how they impact public perceptions and consciousness of history. We are also concerned to understand the interactions between competing (and corresponding) impulses in the processes of formation: the scholarly and the political; the academic and the everyday; the imperatives of funding, ethics and access.

Finally, we would like to consider whether or not such “unofficial histories” have political effects that might serve democratic and emancipatory goals, and/or can be seen as sources of dissent and resistance against conventional, privileged models of historical knowledge.

Presentations of between 10 and 20 minutes (different approaches to communication are encouraged) are welcomed on any aspect of the above, which may include:

• People’s History and the History of Everyday Life
• Consuming History: History as Commodity
• TV, Radio and Internet
• Literature, Poetry and Folksong
• Museums, Heritage, Archives, and Education
• Feminist and Women’s History
• Historical Re-enactment and Living History
• Memory, Myth and Folklore
• Oral History, Testimony, and Biography
• Local, Regional and Community History
• Family History and Genealogy
• Art, Drama and Theatre
• The Role of the Historian in the Public Sphere

Please submit abstracts of 250-300 words by 31st January 2012 to Fiona Cosson, fiona.cosson@northampton.ac.uk

For more information and to register for the conference, please see our website at www.unofficialhistories.wordpress.com

LSHG Forthcoming events

2011-11-13T12:35:00.000-08:00

London Socialist Historians
Seminar Reminder
Monday 14th November
John Charlton: THE 1815 SEAMAN’S STRIKE ON THE NORTH-EAST COAST OF ENGLAND 5.30pm in the Bloomsbury Room [room 35] South Block Institute of Historical Research Senate House, Malet St WC1

Forthcoming events
Monday 12th December 5.30pm Room G34 South Block Institute of Historical Research
Keith Flett: William Cuffay, Black Chartist and Londoner

Saturday 25th February 2012
Midday Chancellor’s Hall Institute of Historical Research
One day event: A history of riots. Speakers include Neil Davidson on 'From riots in Glasgow & Edinburgh in 1706 to riots in the Global South in 2011'

Marx Memorial Library events

2011-11-13T12:29:00.000-08:00

From: Marx Memorial Library
Subject: MML Lectures - Winter Series

Dearest member,
Having finalised the winter series of lectures here at the Library I thought you may be interested to learn of the topics and speakers in the hope that you can make it!

Listed below are the two forthcoming lectures, which have been kindly arranged by David Margolies. Entrance for both is just £2.50 or £1 concessions, and both will begin at 6.30pm on their respective dates.

On the 21st November we will be hosting a lecture by Mike Brown entitled “The effects of the Spanish Civil War on Britain in World War II” – details of which can be found on our Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=106574516123976

And on the 12th December we will be hosting a lecture by Andy Brockman entitled “Hear voices from a far distance”: The news, Ninos Vascos, and Brigadistas in southeast London – details of which can be found at https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=137356396367095

We do hope to see you at either or both!
With very best regards,
Jesse Bela Sullivan
Library Administrator
Marx Memorial Library
37a Clerkenwell Green
London
EC1R 0DU
020 7253 1485

A seminar for David Starkey perhaps?

2011-11-07T03:48:00.000-08:00

Institute of Commonwealth Studies, in conjunction with the Black & Asian Studies Association present 'Black and Asian Britain seminars' at Senate House, University of London, Russell Square, London WC1 6 to 7.30 pm,
Everyone is welcome. You do not have to pre-book/register. (Contact: Marika.Sherwood@sas.ac.uk)
15 November (STB8, Stewart House Basement) Michael Ohajuru, ‘An Introduction to the Black Presence in Renaissance Europe’ as exemplified by the Black Magus's image found on a 16th Century Rood Screen from Devon. (Now in the Victoria & Albert Museum's Collection (W.54-1928). How did the image reach Devon and what might it have meant at the time?

Stan Newens on Ray Challinor

2011-11-06T09:37:00.000-08:00

Ray Challinor 1929-2011 by Stan Newens[edited speech from the June memorial meeting co-organised by the LSHG - see also here and John McIlroy's longer obituaty of Ray online here]
Ray Challinor, whose life we are here to commemorate, was a dedicated socialist, a long serving activist in the Labour movement and a brilliant historian.
Born in Stoke-on-Trent on the 9th July 1929, he was the son of two socialist teachers who were themselves deeply involved in the working class movement in North Staffordshire.
His father, Arthur Bertram Challinor, was the son of a celebrated musician and composer, Frederick Arthur Challinor, [1866-1952], who was of mining stock and left school at 10 years of age to make bricks.
By dint of hardwork, he somehow obtained a Doctorate of Music at Durham University and wrote more than 400 pieces of music, including “The Potters’ Song” for the National Society of Pottery Workers.
Ray’s father was a keen footballer and cricketer, as well as a successful teacher, and chaired Stoke City Labour Party for a period during the interwar years.
Ray’s mother, Leonora Margaretta Gertrude Gibson was the daughter of a Crewe cycle maker, bus entrepreneur and ironmonger, Walter Henry Gibson and his second wife who was of German origin. She became a teacher, a secretary of Longton WEA and a committed socialist of an ILP background who knew Lady Cynthia Mosley, MP for Stoke South [1929-1931]. She always maintained that Lady Cynthia was totally untouched by Sir Oswald Mosley’s Fascist ideas.
Sadly, Ray’s parents separated during his childhood, and Ray moved to Crewe with his mother, while his sister, Joan, stayed with their father. He briefly attended Crewe Grammar School but was then sent as a boarder to the Friends School at Lancaster at 12 years of age.
Deeply influenced by his mother’s ILP convictions, he decided to help Fenner Brockway when he contested the Lancaster By-Election in 1941 for the ILP against the Coalition Government candidate, Fitzroy Maclean (Con). He was permitted to do this by the Friends School Headmaster, although only 12, and long remembered the gibe, said to have been made by Communists, ‘A vote for Brockway is a vote for Hitler’.
In 1945 Ray was one of the youngest delegates at the ILP National Conferenc e and met Dan Smith (later Labour leader on Tyneside), Bill Hunter, Ted Grant and Jimmy Maxton. They and the Marxist historian Frank Ridley clearly influenced Ray’s intellectual development.
He left school without taking Higher School Certificate examinations and became a journalist on the Crewe Guardian.
Faced with conscription for military service at 18 years of age, he went before a tribunal and obtained exemption as a conscientious objector, on condition that he worked in agriculture for two years. He was a singularly unsuccessful agricultural employee, who amongst other things overloaded a boiler, causing it to explode. He was relieved to return to his mother’s home- now at Silverdale, Newcastle-under-Lyme, upon completion of his service, and returned to his job as a journalist at the Crewe Guardian.
By now he had become a Trotskyist who rejected the idea that the Soviet Union was socialist and he joined the Revolutionary Communist Party shortly before it dissolved in 1948.
He subsequently became active in Crewe Labour Party and then Newcastle-under-Lyne Labour Party where he got to know the Labour MP Stephen Swingler very well. He was, however, thinking deeply about politics and in June 1948 wrote an article arguing that Russia was not a degenerate workers’ state , as Trotskyists argued, but was state capitalist [“Left” June 1948].
Tony Cliff (Ygael Gluckstein) produced his RCP internal bulletin “The Nature of Stalinist Russia” in June 1948 also arguing,at much greater length, that Russia was state capitalist. Understandbly, then, Ray became a founder member of the group formed by Tony Cliff in 1950 which launched “The Socialist Review” and eventually evolved into the Socialist Workers Party.
In 1952, Ray obtained a place at the University of North Staffs at Keele to take a degree but he remained active in Newcastle-under-Lyme CLP and also became active in the University Socialist Society, where he clashed with fellow student, John Golding, later the right-wing Labour MP for Newcastle-under-Lyme.
It was at this stage that I first met Ray,initially at a Socialist Review meeting at Holloway Head Birmingham and later, when I began work as a miner in the North Staffs coalfield, as an opponent of the Korean War.
As a member of the Labour Party, I transferred my membership to Stoke and formed a Labour League of Youth branch in Stoke Central CLP,of which Ray became a member. It was here that he met his future wife, Mabel Brough.
For the following 4 years, Ray and I were active in the Labour Party all over the West Midlands. We also travelled through the Midlands and the north on my motorcycle to promote sales of Socialist Review, of which Ray became the editor. We gave NCLC lectures for the West Midlands organiser Alex Murie, and organised meetings like one for Joseph Murumbi Secretary of the Kenya African Union, in Newcastle-under-Lyme.
Ray stood for election as a Council candidate I 1954 and 1958 and was subsequently selected as the prospective Labour Parliamentary candidate for Nantwich, although he gave this position up before the 1964 General Election. This was after I returned to live in the south east.
After completing his degree course, Ray taught at North Staffs schools at one time with Jack Braddock, brother-in-law of Bessie Braddock MP, who was much more left wing than his sister-in-law. Later, however, he obtained a post at Wigan Mining and Technical College and moved with his wife, Mabel, to Hindley.
Throughout the 1950s, Ray either edited the Socialist Review or produced articles for it, but in the later 1950s, Ray, Bernard Dix, Wilf Albrighton and I became critics of Tony Cliff’s hard-line Bolshevism and were denounced as revisionists. Bernard and Wilf left the group first; I left in 1959 but Ray remained a member until 1973, I believe. He subsequently rejoined and only finally cut his ties in 1983, although he continued to defend the SWP when I criticised its policies long after this.
In Wigan, Ray became a well known figure on the left, which regularly congregated at the “Dove and Partridge” public house and he was regarded by Alan Fitch, the Labour MP, as an objectionable dissident. He supported CND, backed a strike at Courtaulds and was very active in support of the left in the Labour and Trade Union movement.
In Wigan, in 1965, Ray discovered, in the Library, a collection of the manuscript records of the Miners Association,which existed in the 1840s and had barely been consulted thereafter. In co-operation with Brian Ripley, he produced his first book, “The Miners Association: A Trade Union in the Age of the Chartists” (1968). He also wrote a pamphlet for the Communist History Society, “Alexander MacDonald”. In 1972, he published “The Lancashire and Cheshire Miners” and he wrote as a thesis for his PhD “Trade Unionism in the Coal Industry till 1910”.
These were brilliant original works, based on painstaking research which put the miners’ leader Alexander MacDonald and his close associates in a new light as compromisers rather than the heroic figures they were cast as elsewhere. Ray published a biography of the man he saw as the truly principled fighter for the miners:- “A Radical Lawyer in Victorian England: WP Roberts”.
Before this was published, Ray moved to Whitley Bay to take a post at Newcastle-upon-Tyne Polytechnic- later a University- where he eventually became the principal lecturer in history.
In addition to teaching and inspiring many of his students, Ray continued to write and produced “The Origins of British Bolshevism” (1977), “John S Clarke: Parliamentarian, Poet and Lion Tamer” (1977), and “The Struggle for Hearts and Minds: Essays on the Second World War” (1995). He also turned out numerous articles published in a range of different journals.
Ray joined the Society for the Study of Labour History in 1964 and was a keen participant in its activities. He served as President of the Society 1974-77 and thereafter as a Vice-President. When he moved to Whitley Bay, he also joined the North East Society for the Study of Labour History and became one of its key activists.
With Archie Potts, Labour Party activist and the biographer of Konni Zilliacus MP, he and Mabel launched Bewick Books which published a number of political, historical and cultural volumes on the north east.
Throughout his adult life Ray accumulated a magnificent library of socialist books, rare socialist journals and many literary gems. For example he possessed a run of the Johnson-Forrest publications produced by CLR James under the pseudonym “Johnson “ with Raya Dunayevskaya as “Forrest”. He also possessed many American works and other literary volumes.
He visited America to meet American socialists and thinkers. He kept up a correspondence with or invited socialists and others to stay with him. Harry McShane, Anne Swingler, Brian Manning, Edward Thompson were typical of his friends.
Although he left the Labour Party in disgust and fell out of the International Socialists-later the SWP-,he remained politically active. When Eddie Milne, Labour MP for Blyth, was deselected for making accusations of corruption in the Labour Party, Ray worked to help him retain his seat in 1974, though Eddie later lost it.
When a former boxer, Liddle Towers died in police custody in 1976, Ray campaigned locally to demand an investigation.
He remained active in CND. He continued to write letters and articles on contemporary as well as historical events. His voice was raised on many issues and only ill health in his final years ultimately silenced him.
In all his activities, Ray received devoted support from his wife Mabel, who attended to his every need. Both Ray and Mabel were deeply attached to their son, Russell, their daughter-in-law Rebecca and granddaughter, Claire. My family accompanied me on visits to see him over many years he was one of my very closest friends for 59 years.
In later life we were not in close political agreement. He retained what he regarded as his revolutionary politics while I retained my Labour Party membership and commitment to what he regarded as reformism.
He consistently mocked my abstemious attitude to alcohol and what he saw as a puritanical cast of mind. I was, he told me, the most conservative socialist he had ever known!
But in spite of this we were both committed to a socialist transformation of society and this cemented our friendship.
Ray lived a life dominated by continuing intellectual endeavours unceasing commitment to the cause of human emancipation, loyalty to his family and his friends and dedication to the aim of active progress towards the goal of international socialism. He led a positive and worthwhile life, which, through his writings and his example, will continue to enlighten and encourage others to strive for the ends which were central to his whole being.

Next LSHG seminar - John Charlton on the 1815 Seamen's Strike

2011-11-05T09:40:00.000-07:00

Monday 14th November
John Charlton: THE 1815 SEAMAN’S STRIKE ON THE NORTH-EAST COAST OF ENGLAND
5.30pm in the Bloomsbury Room [room 35] South Block Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet St WC1
Entry is free, without ticket

On the subject of seamen's strikes, see this call for papers for a conference on The Many-Headed Hydra: 10 years on.

Kanaval: A People's History of Haiti

2011-11-05T09:22:00.000-07:00

You are warmly invited to the following seminar on Weds 9 November hosted by the Institute for the Study of the Americas and the Institute of Commonwealth Studies:
Kanaval: A People’s History of Haiti
Leah Gordon, film-maker and photographer
Date: 9th November 2011
Time: 5pm
Venue: Room 103, Senate House, first floor, Malet St, London WC1E 7HU

Abstract: For the last 15 years Leah Gordon has been documenting a carnival in Jacmel, Southern Haiti using photography and the collection of oral histories. This work has recently been published in the book Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti (Soul Jazz Publishing, 2010). Each year, Jacmel holds pre-Lenten Mardi Gras festivities. Troupes of performers act out mythological and political tales in a whorish theatre of the absurd that courses the streets, rarely shackled by traditional parade. Whatever the Carnival lacks in glitz and spectacle, it makes up for in home-grown surrealism and poetic metaphor. The characters and costume partially betray their roots in medieval European carnival, but the Jacmellien masquerades are also a fusion of clandestine Vodou, ancestral memory, political satire and personal revelation. The lives of the indigenous Taino Indians, the slaves’ revolt and more recently state corruption are all played out using drama and costume on Jacmel’s streets. This is people taking history into their own hands and moulding it into whatever they decide. So within this Historical retelling we find mask after mask, but rather than concealing, they are revealing, story after story, through disguise, gesture and roadside pantomime. A selection from over 150 photographs will play on a loop whilst Leah discusses the importance of documenting the carnival, the role of folk history in Haiti and the many different mediums used by Haitian people to retell history, the implicit complexities of the visual representation of Haiti (in terms of two centuries of post-revolution Western demonisation), the on-going struggle between spectacle and narrative in a photographic project, the role of oral histories in restoring narrative to the visual and the link between the technical process, analogue photography and historic narrative. Leah will finish by reading one or two of the oral histories.

Biography: Leah Gordon is from the UK and has worked as a photographer, film-maker and curator. She visited Haiti for the first time in 1991, and has continued to have a relationship with the country to this day. As a reportage photographer Gordon covered the coup in the early nineties and then began to make work inspired more by the culture and religion than the politics. In 2006 she commissioned the Grand Rue Sculptors from Haiti to make 'Freedom Sculpture', a permanent exhibit for the International Museum of Slavery in Liverpool. In 2008 she completed a film about the artists called Atis-Rezistans: the Sculptors of Grand Rue. Continuing her relationship with the Grand Rue artists, Gordon organized and co-curated the Ghetto Biennale in Port-au-Prince in December 2009. She has recently been involved in a range of projects as film-maker and photographer including a film documenting the colonial legacy and the museum in Maputo and a meditation on the Slave Trade and the River Thames; her photography book Kanaval: Vodou, Politics and Revolution on the Streets of Haiti was published in June 2010. Gordon is currently on the curatorial teams for the first Haitian Pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011), 'In Extremis' at the Fowler Museum, UCLA, Los Angeles (2012) and co-curator, with Alex Farquharson of an exhibition based on the Haitian Revolution at the Nottingham Contemporary (2012). Leah Gordon is represented by Riflemaker Gallery and is film tutor on the BA in Digital, Film and Screen Arts at University of the Creative Arts, Farnham.

György Lukács Library project: assistance sought

2011-11-05T07:33:00.000-07:00

György Lukács was a fundamental figure in the development of twentieth- century Marxist philosophy, theory of culture, and literary criticism. His works have inspired radical Marxist thinkers from Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin to Agnes Heller and Fredric Jameson. Moreover, his critical and historical writings on the literary realism played a crucial role in European literary politics from the 1930s to the 1960s. He was already a key figure in Central European and German cultural life prior to his turn to Marxism in 1919, a leader in the 1919 Hungarian Commune, a communist organizer, cultural politician, ideologist, and scholar of renown. Subject to a persecutory "Lukács debate" during the Stalinist dictatorship in Hungary in the early 1950s, he participated in the 1956 uprising and, following his arrest and eventual return from Romania, was restricted in Hungary for the remaining decade of his life to conducting his scholarship with a limited circle of students and collaborators, despite his continuing international influence and prestige. Throughout his extraordinary six decades of intellectual, political, and cultural life, Lukács wrote constantly, both in German and Hungarian, in forms ranging from reviews, lectures, and polemics to major essays to full-scale studies, including his monumental late aesthetics and ontology. Although some of Lukács's major works--such as History and Class Consciousness and Theory of the Novel--have been long translated and widely read, other of the major works have never seen translation into English. This is true of a large number of major essays in German as well, and of the Hungarian essays, few have even appeared in German, much less English. There are well over 10,000 pages of Lukács's work that have never appeared in English translation; the already- translated portion is thus only a fraction, which represents at best a partial view of his thought and life work. Lukács's constant correspondence, speaking, and writing as he moved between Budapest, Vienna, Berlin, and Moscow over the course of his adventurous life also means that a substantial amount of his work was disseminated in difficult-to-find periodicals, pamphlets, or books. Nor are even existing English translations easy to access. Many of the earlier translations of Lukács into English from the 1940s to the 1970s remain out of print or mostly out of reach in limited distribution journals.

A project is underway to collect and bring out in English a large amount of previously untranslated writing by Lukács, a "Lukács library," in the Historical Materialism book series at Brill Publishers. The first volume, The Culture of People's Democracy: Hungarian Essays on Literature, Art, and Democratic Transition will appear in 2012, and the translation of the first volume of The Particularity of the Aesthetic has been initiated. Although we are exploring grant and other funding, we presently have no financial backing.

Therefore we are seeking two kinds of assistance:
• Suggestions about how we might obtain funds for the project : Are there cultural institutions, university translation offices, government funded academic research programs or philanphropic institutions which we could tap into, either on our own as project editors or through your assistance and collaboration in the project?
• We would also like to solicit qualified translators who are prepared to donate their efforts to the project. The translations will be from German (the majority), Hungarian (a sizeable minority), and Russian (a limited number) into English. The contribution of translations of individual, shorter works as well as longer texts would be appreciated. All translators will be acknowledged for their contributions.We would particularly like to hear from individual translators or a small group of collaborators who would commit to realizing one of the project volumes of the Lukács Library.

I will be serving as series editor and in many case also editing the individual volumes, providing historical and critical introductions, annotations, and other apparatus. However, if anyone would like to participate in an editorial or co-editorial role as well, I am open to discussing the possibility of editorial collaboration on particular volumes. We are interested in getting several volumes into print at the earliest date possible, to help gain institutional support for the project and to make an impact on current discussions with an influx of previously unavailable Lukács writings. If you are interested in assisting with this project, please get in touch with me. In solidarity,Tyrus Millertyrus@ucsc.edu
P.S.: If you are attending the Historical Materialism conference in London, following the "For Lukács" session at 12-13:45 on Sunday, November 13, 2011, please join me for lunch afterwards to discuss collaborations and translations for the Lukács Library.
Tyrus Miller
Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate StudiesUniversity of California at Santa Cruz

Shipbuilding and Ship Repair Workers

2011-11-05T07:31:00.001-07:00

In the Same Boat?
Shipbuilding and ship repair workers: a global labour history
(1950-2010)
The project intends to study shipbuilding labour around the world from
World War II until the present from a global history perspective. We
will track the relocation of production and analyse its consequences
to workforces in Europe, North and South America, and in East Asia
from the 1980s onwards.
See also the call for papers.
The project is coordinated by Elise van Nederveen Meerkerken, Marcel
van der Linden, and Raquel Varela.

http://www.iisg.nl/research/global-shipbuilding.php/

London Socialist Film Co-op

2011-11-05T07:09:00.001-07:00

LONDON SOCIALIST FILM CO-OP
AT THE RENOIR CINEMA, Brunswick Square, London WC1
Nearest London Tube: Russell Square
Buses: 7, 17, 45, 46, 59, 68, 91, 168, 188

10.30 FOR 11AM SUNDAY 13 NOVEMBER 2011

First UK screening of two documentary films:

DEADLY DUST (TODESSTAUB), Frieder Wagner, Germany 2006, 93 mins
This science-based documentary explores the effects of depleted
uranium ammunition used in Iraq, Kosovo and Bosnia, though banned by
the Hague and Geneva Conventions. The surge in post-war birth defects
indicates that an epidemic of reproductive abnormalities is likely to
have been caused by the residue of these munitions.

WITH THE LINCOLN BRIGADE IN SPAIN, Henri Cartier-Bresson/Herbert
Kline, US 1938, 18mins
The internationally acclaimed photographer Cartier-Bresson filmed the
Brigade. Its members were drawn from all walks of life and it is
thought to be the first military unit commanded by a black officer.
The volunteers trained alongside Spanish troops and became know for
their bravery. In 2010 the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archive
discovered, restored and re-released this cinema treasure.

DISCUSSION LED BY Rae Street, CND Council member and active in the
International Coalition to Ban Uranium Weapons, John Green, former
documentary filmmaker, and Helen Graham, Professor of Modern European
History at Royal Holloway, University of London.

Radical to Revolutionary Women in the 19th Century

2011-11-05T07:07:00.000-07:00

Socialist History Society
Public Meeting
Radical to Revolutionary Women in the 19th Century
Another look at Harriet Law, Annie Besant and Eleanor Marx

7pm, 9th November 2011
Dr Laura Schwartz on Harriet Law
Deborah Lavin on Eleanor Marx
Marie Terrier on Annie Besant
Seminar consists of three short talks presenting new views of the subjects followed by discussion.
Venue: Bishopsgate Institute, Liverpool Street
Entry free; all welcome; retiring collection

Ralph Miliband and Parliamentary Socialism

2011-11-02T06:49:00.000-07:00

RALPH MILIBAND AND PARLIAMENTARY SOCIALISM
Friday 25th November 2011, London School of Economics
This conference marks the 50th anniversary of Ralph Miliband’s Parliamentary Socialism – a critique of the Labour Party that shaped a generation of scholars and activists. The book argues that Labour’s belief in the centrality of parliamentary politics often undermined the very movements that were needed to bring about real change. With protest on the rise, and Labour seeking a new way forward, the conference aims to reassess Miliband’s arguments and their contemporary relevance.

Speakers include Tariq Ali, Robin Blackburn, Hilary Wainwright and Leo Panitch

A Cartoon People's History of the World

2011-10-26T05:49:00.000-07:00

The excellent series - a collaboration between Tim Sanders and Keith Flett, that initally began in Socialist Review and was inspired by this work is now online here.

Dylan Riley on Tony Judt

2011-10-22T07:56:00.000-07:00

Further to Ian Birchall's reflections on the late Tony Judt, the latest issue of New Left Review carries an article by Dylan Riley entitled 'Tony Judt: A Cooler Look', which reinforces the basic thrust of Birchall's argument. Riley's article concludes as follows:

How do the accolades for Judt as a ‘great historian’, ‘fearless critic’ and ‘brilliant political commentator’ stand up against a cool examination of his work? As historiography, even his earliest, most substantial scholarly works on France—Reconstruction of the Socialist Party and Socialism in Provence—were weakened by the aggressive tendentiousness of his approach. Marxism and the French Left and Past Imperfect were avowedly selective and polemical. Judt lacked the most basic requirement for any student of intellectual history: the ability to grasp and reconstruct an idea with philological precision. His lack of interest in ideas is borne out in extenso throughout his copious writings on intellectuals: there were never any serious attempts to reconstruct a thinker’s position, so as to probe and question it. Even summaries of figures to whom he was well-disposed were slapdash; writers to whom he was hostile were regularly excoriated for views they did not hold. Judged as an intellectual historian, the verdict on Judt must be negative. His magnum opus, Postwar, is regularly listed for undergraduate European History courses. But its 900 pages produced little new by way of evidence or interpretation—a weakness underlined by the absence of even the most minimal scholarly apparatus, beyond a ‘general bibliography’ available from NYU.

Judt himself confessed in his final interview that at school he had been considered ‘better at literature than history’; also bragging, ‘I was—and knew I was—among the best speakers and writers of my age cohort. I don’t mean I was the best historian’. In effect, it was his talent, limited but real, as a polemicist and a pamphleteer that disqualified Judt as a historian of ideas, much as he liked to claim the loftier calling. His range as a polemicist was relatively narrow: there is a limit to what can be got from attacking the French left or lauding fellow defenders of the Free World. His negative judgements on political leaders—Thatcher, Bush, Clinton, Blair—carried little analytical heft; his belated criticism of Israel’s West Bank settlements never explained at what point the Zionist project had gone wrong. Nevertheless, judged as a polemicist, the verdict can be more favourable, exonerating Judt of the heedless inconsistencies, both conceptual and analytic, that marred his work as historian of Europe and latter-day champion of neo-social democracy. A pamphleteer may be allowed—even expected—to change his views more or less at the drop of a hat. If the eu is now a moral beacon to the world, now a sad example of failed leadership; or the welfare state now the legacy of organized labour, now the common sense of capitalist politicians—so what? All grist to the mill. A historian will be held to different standards.

London Historical Materialism conference 2011

2011-10-13T06:36:00.000-07:00

Spaces of Capital, Moments of Struggle
Eighth Annual Historical Materialism Conference Central London 10–13 November 2011

Registration is now open and a provisional programme is now online

The ongoing popular uprisings in the Arab world, alongside intimations of a resurgence in workers' struggles against 'austerity' in the North and myriad forms of resistance against exploitation and dispossession across the globe make it imperative for Marxists and leftists to reflect critically on the meaning of collective anticapitalist action in the present.

Over the past decade, many Marxist concepts and debates have come in from the cold. The anticapitalist movement generated a widely circulating critique of capitalist modes of international 'development'. More recently, the economic crisis that began in 2008 has led to mainstream-recognition of Marx as an analyst of capital. In philosophy and political theory, communism is no longer merely a term of condemnation. Likewise, artistic and cultural practices have also registered a notable upturn in the fortunes of activism, critical utopianism and the effort to capture aesthetically the workings of the capitalist system.

The eighth annual Historical Materialism conference will strive to take stock of these shifts in the intellectual landscape of the Left in the context of the social and political struggles of the present. Rather than resting content with the compartmentalisation and specialisation of various 'left turns' in theory and practice, we envisage the conference as a space for the collective, if necessary, agonistic but comradely, reconstitution of a strategic conception of the mediations between socio-economic transformations and emancipatory politics.

For such a critical theoretical, strategic and organisational reflection to have traction in the present, it must take stock of both the commonalities and the specificities of different struggles for emancipation, as they confront particular strategies of accumulation, political authorities and relations of force. Just as the crisis that began in 2008 is by no means a homogeneous affair, so we cannot simply posit a unity of purpose in contemporary revolutions, struggles around the commons and battles against austerity.

In consideration of the participation of David Harvey, winner of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize, at this year's conference, we would particularly wish to emphasise the historical and geographical dimensions of capital, class and struggle. We specifically encourage paper submissions and suggested panel-themes that tackle the global nature of capitalist accumulation, the significance of anticapitalist resistance in the South, and questions of race, migration and ecology as key components of both the contemporary crisis and the struggle to move beyond capitalism.

There will also be a strong presence of workshops on the historiography of the early communist movement, particularly focusing on the first four congresses of the Communist International.

The conference will aim to combine rigorous and grounded investigations of socio-economic realities with focused theoretical reflections on what emancipation means today, and to explore – in light of cultural, historical and ideological analyses – the forms taken by current and coming struggles.

Dave Renton on the Battle of Cable Street

2011-10-09T04:55:00.000-07:00

The Battle of Cable Street: 75 years on

On 4 October 1936, 1,900 supporters of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists (BUF) attempted to march from the City of London through London's East End only to find their way was blocked by a crowd of more than 100,000 anti-fascists at Gardiner's Corner, the main route into east London.

Up to 6,000 police officers tried to violently disperse the anti-fascists. When their attempt to force a way through for the fascists failed, the police tried to find an alternative route for them through narrow residential streets, only to find that these were blocked by barricades including an overturned lorry. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Philip Game told Mosley, "You must call it off." Mosley was forced to lead his supporters through the Sunday streets, finally dispersing near Charing Cross.

Cable Street was the second of the two key moments in the anti-fascist struggle of the 1930s. The first had taken place at Olympia in 1934. For two years prior to Olympia, Mosley had set out to win the support of disgruntled Tories. Mosley's best-known backer was the press baron Lord Rothermere, whose Daily Mail printed pro-BUF headlines ("Hurrah for the Blackshirts!") and publicised Mosley's meetings.

By the summer of 1934 the BUF had reached its peak membership of 50,000. Most of its members were middle or upper class. The aim at Olympia was to put this organisation on show in a mass rally of tens of thousands of Blackshirts. Anti-fascists who disrupted the Olympia rally by attempting to heckle Mosley were picked out with electric lights and beaten by the BUF stewards. Yet the violence of Olympia deterred Mosley's passive supporters. Rothermere himself initially applauded Mosley for Olympia, before one month later ending his support for the BUF. BUF membership collapsed. Mosley then turned to seek working class support in the East End, targeting workers in declining trades such as clothes production or furniture making, some of whom were in direct competition with Jewish labourers working in the same industries.

The fascist plans for Cable Street were announced just a week beforehand. The London District of the Communist Party had intended for some time that on the 4 October there should be a youth rally in Trafalgar Square in solidarity with anti-fascist struggle in Spain. The London Communists still insisted that their event should go ahead as planned. But Communists in Stepney had other plans. The "official" Communist leaflets continued to circulate, but now overstamped with instructions calling upon activists to assemble not in Trafalgar Square but in the East End.

Before Cable Street began the Labour Party opposed the protest. In its immediate aftermath, Labour sought to claim the credit for its success. Soon afterwards Labour's message was again that it had been the work of troublemakers, with Labour shadow home secretary Herbert Morrison denouncing both left and right, and calling for a ban on political uniforms. With Labour's support, parliament passed the Public Order Act giving the police the power to ban all marches, not just racist or fascist ones. The act was first used in June 1937 to ban demonstrations in the East End. The first event to be cancelled was a recruiting march for Bethnal Green Trades Council.

The most far-sighted of the Communists could see that defeating the BUF would require far more than just physical confrontation. The BUF had to be challenged in the areas where it claimed the greatest support. The Communists targeted estates seen as no-go areas for the left. In June 1937 Communists living at Paragon Mansions in Mile End heard of the threatened eviction of two families who turned out to be members of the BUF. The Communists agreed to support them against eviction. The tenants barricaded the block against the bailiffs, who were held off for two weeks. The two families ripped up their BUF membership cards. This kind of political struggle, as much as the physical victory a year earlier, isolated the BUF.

Defeating the fascists politically was slow work. The BUF's national membership grew in the aftermath of Cable Street by 2,000, with most of the recruits being picked up in London. This fascist revival continued until local elections in spring 1937, when BUF candidates won 19 percent of the vote in North East Bethnal Green, Stepney and Shoreditch. Yet this result needs to be placed alongside derisory BUF votes in the same elections in such former fascist strongholds as Leeds, Manchester and Southampton, and reports of BUF branches ceasing to exist all over southern England, outside London.

Two processes appear to have been at work. First, the BUF's increasing notoriety as the "anti-Jew" party won it some recruits in the East End while demoralising members elsewhere. Second, the fascists were cannibalising their own organisation in order to mask the scale of their defeat, pulling in members from all over England to shore up the East End organisation. In doing so, they were weakening their party everywhere else. After Cable Street, British fascism was never as strong again.

The lesson of Cable Street is that despite the press and the police, fascism can always be beaten. But that requires our side to get organised.
By Dave Renton, from this month's Socialist Review

Keith Flett on William Cuffay, Medway Victorian Radical

2011-10-09T04:49:00.000-07:00

William Cuffay was born in Medway in 1788, the son of an English woman from Gillingham and a former slave from St. Kitts who worked as a naval cook. He was brought up in Gillingham, training as a tailor
then moving to London to pursue his trade in the 1830s. Initially conservative in outlook he became a leading figure in the Chartist movement and organised the Chartist protest for the vote on Kennington Common in 1848, considered by the authorities a revolutionary plot for which he was transported to Tasmania. The talk will focus on Cuffay’s early life in the Medway Towns and how this shaped his political activism, as well as discussing significant new evidence of his activity in London and in Tasmania.

William Cuffay
with Keith Flett, Chartist historian

Wednesday 19 October, 8pm, tickets £3.75
Wigmore Library

208 Fairview Avenue
Wigmore, Gillingham
Kent ME8 0PX
Advanced booking essential:
Call 01634 338319

LSHG Newsletter 43 (Autumn 2011) and seminar notes

2011-10-09T04:37:00.000-07:00

The latest LSHG Newsletter (no. 43, Autumn 2011) is now online - highlights include a debate about David Starkey, an article on the Liverpool General Transport Strike of 1911, and a book review of Tom O'Lincoln's Australia's Pacific War.

FROM THE EDITOR

The autumn 2011 term sees some changes to where we hold seminars at the Institute of Historical Research. The apparently never ending refurbishment of London University’s Senate House has now reached the North Block where we have been based since 1994. The building will be refurbished and there will be a re-arrangement of space between the IHR and London University. The whole process is estimated to take two years. We shall see.

In the meantime seminars and the core operations of the IHR are being moved across the entrance lobby of Senate House to the South Block. Opposite are details of the precise room allocations for our seminars in Autumn 2011. It is unclear as yet whether there will be a space large enough to run a 2012 conference. However there is considerable interest in running an event on the history of riots. I will be pursuing this idea both in terms of speakers and a venue. Updates will be posted on the LSHG website.

During the summer term we held a well attended memorial meeting for Ray Challinor the socialist activist and historian. One of the speakers, Stan Newens, has kindly provided a transcript of his speech and this should be available on the LSHG website shortly.
Keith Flett

LSHG SEMINARS Autumn 2011

Wednesday 12 October
JOINT MEETING WITH THE SOCIALIST HISTORY SOCIETY
RESISTANCE & EMPIRE
Robin Blackburn and Richard Gott speak on their new books
7PM AT THE LIBRARY, BISHOPSGATE INSTITUTE
230 BISHOPSGATE, LONDON EC2

Monday 17th October
Owen Jones: CLASS POLITICS: HOW THE WORKING CLASS HAS CHANGED

Monday 31st October
Marika Sherwood: MALCOLM X: VISITS ABROAD, APRIL 1964 - FEBRUARY 1965
Marika writes:
Malcolm Little, the son of a Grenada-born mother and African-American Garveyist father, was murdered in New York on February 21, 1965, after he had spent almost the whole of the previous year in Africa and the UK. After his father had been murdered by a Ku Klux Klan type organisation, his mother could not cope. Malcolm did not complete school, became a petty criminal and ended up in prison in 1946. He read every book in the library and joined the proselytising and supportive Nation of Islam.

On his release in 1952 he dropped the name ‘Little’ as being a ‘slave name’ and called himself ‘X’. He became the Nation’s best orator/presenter, developing a very powerful speaking style. He recruited tens of thousands to the Nation and was interviewed and asked to give lectures all over the USA. One phrase he used often which is recalled by everyone is ‘by any means necessary’: he used this when arguing that African Americans had to defend themselves by any means necessary against the racial violence in the USA; and again, to use any means necessary to achieve equality.

Malcolm became a very controversial figure during these years of the civil rights struggle. A hugely successful recruiter for the Nation, he began to meet some more orthodox Muslims as well as some Africans representing their nations at the UN. Malcolm began to question the philosophies and behaviour of Elijah Muhammad, the Nation’s founder. In March 1963 he left the Nation and went to study Islam in Egypt, and to Mecca to perform the Hajj.

Remarkably, Malcolm was given permission to address the OAU (today’s African Union) in Cairo. From there he travelled to many East and West African countries, meeting presidents and political activists. These were the early years of independence when the policies of most leaders included the word ‘socialist’. It was at the OAU meeting that he began to speak about American ‘dollarism’.

Malcolm visited England a number of times, speaking at universities, Muslim forums and other venues in London, Manchester, Birmingham, Oxford and Sheffield. He also walked around Smethwick where at the recent elections a Conservative had won, campaigning on the slogan ‘if you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour’. Again he met political activists, Black, Indian and White.

Why was Malcolm murdered shortly after his return to New York from the UK? Because the Nation could not accept his criticisms? Or because of his world-wide criticism of America’s ‘dollarism’? We shall probably never know. But most certainly the people he met on his visits were leading him into new political and philosophical directions, as he acknowledged.

This book is taken mainly from Malcolm’s travel notebooks, augmented by the newspaper coverage of his visits, and some interviews with the people whom he met.Malcolm X: Visits Abroad , Tsehai Publishers 2011, ISBN: 978-1599070506
Copies of the book will be available at the seminar.

Monday 14th November
John Charlton: THE 1815 SEAMAN’S STRIKE ON THE NORTH-EAST COAST OF ENGLAND

Except 12th October, all seminars at 5.30pm in the Bloomsbury Room [room 35] South Block Institute of Historical Research Senate House, Malet St WC1
Entry is free, without ticket

The Newsletter
Letters, articles, criticisms and contributions to debate are most welcome.
Deadline for the next issue is 1 December 2011.

The Group
We receive no official funding and rely entirely on supporters for money for our activities. To become a member of the LSHG, send £10 (cheque payable to ‘Keith Flett’).
Contact us LSHG c/o Keith Flett, 38 Mitchley Road, London N17 9HG
Email: keith1917@btinternet.com

Book Review: Australia's Pacific War

2011-10-09T04:23:00.000-07:00

Imperialist War in the Pacific
From LSHG Newsletter # 43, (Autumn 2011).

Tom O’Lincoln

Australia’s Pacific War: Challenging a National Myth
Interventions Publishers
ISBN 978-0646-55353-5
Available from Bookmarks, 1 Bloomsbury Street, London WC1B 3QE
020 7637 1848 enquiries@bookmarks.uk.com

The Second World War is still contested ground. As O’Lincoln points out in his introduction, it is constantly mobilised to justify new conflicts, as with the illiterate description of Saddam Hussein as a “new Hitler” – something socialist historians should be quick to challenge. So it is always good to welcome works like this one which tell the real story of that much mythologised war.

In global terms the Australian part in World War II was small, and will be relatively unknown to British readers. But for O’Lincoln, a longstanding veteran of the Australian left, the main enemy is at home, and his concern in this short book is to tell the story of Australian imperialism, whose pursuit of its interests in the Pacific region brought it into direct conflict with Japanese expansionism.

Mobilisation for the war was achieved by the alleged threat of Japanese invasion, but Australia’s rulers in fact knew such an invasion was highly improbable. They also claimed the war was to protect the “rights of free people in the whole Pacific”, but there were few, if any, free Asian nations. The official ideology was often overtly racist – politicians openly advocated the continuation of white rule in the Pacific, and the Japanese were depicted as being savage and subhuman.

O’Lincoln shows that Australia was guilty of its fair share of atrocities in the course of the war. Often prisoners were simply killed, shot or bayonetted to death after they surrendered. For the natives of disputed territories there was not much to choose between Japanese and Australian rule; in East Timor there was a “common saying that when it came to punishment the Japanese were very cruel, but in matters of justice Australian interrogators were worse”.

O’Lincoln is well aware that such arguments will leave him open to the accusation of being a supporter of Japanese aggression. In fact he shows Japanese brutality quite clearly. But he also shows that, contrary to the dehumanising myths propagated by the Australian state, Japanese society was divided by class and politics, and that there was significant dissent from the regime’s policies. In a fascinating couple of pages on kamikaze pilots, he shows they were generally not fanatical “happy suicides”, but were often dragooned into accepting their role.

He also shows that Australia at war was still a profoundly class-divided society. Strikes continued throughout the war, and though they fell to a low level in 1942 when there seemed to be a threat of invasion, the figures rose sharply before the end of the war. There was also considerable dissent in the army, not just in the form of open mutinies and strikes, but of continual attitudes of non-co-operation. As he points out, if the Australian Communist Party had not adopted a position of whole-hearted support for the war, the opposition could have been much greater.

The war transformed the situation of women in Australian society. Their labour was needed for the war effort, but there were attempts to make them do unpaid voluntary work, something that was vigorously resisted. The war encouraged the demand for equal pay, and in the post-war period there were a number of strikes on this question; in particular there were instances of men striking for equal pay for women.

The war had a major impact on social and sexual attitudes. O’Lincoln notes that with war wages women could afford to get divorced. When families invited black US servicemen to their homes, the US authorities “declared these houses brothels, and off-limits to Negro soldiers”. Gay clubs sprang up but were shut down by the police.

The book is clearly written and full of concrete detail and anecdote. It creates a vivid picture of wartime Australia and undermines many myths and stereotypes. It is an excellent introduction to the history of the Australian working class in this period.

At only 160 pages one might well have wished for more detail and more analysis. The only section that is superfluous is the discussion of Hiroshima, in which Australia was only indirectly involved, and which covers well-worn ground adding little new. An index would have been useful, and for non-Australian readers so would a list of acronyms.

But these are minor quibbles about a book that is well worth reading. There are more details and an article on the role of the Australian Communist Party during the war on Tom O’Lincoln’s website.

Ian Birchall

The Liverpool General Transport Strike of 1911

2011-10-09T03:38:00.000-07:00

LSHG Newsletter, 43 (Autumn, 2011)
PREFACE
I was privileged to attend an event commemorating the 1911 industrial action in Liverpool and the attacks on
workers by Churchill’s police and army. It was held at the Eldonian Village hall only yards from the spot on Vauxhall Road where two workers, John Sutcliffe and Michael Prendergast, were shot dead by soldiers on Tuesday 15 August 1911. These were tumultuous events which have virtually disappeared from the awareness of today’s generation.

Dockers, seamen, railway workers, tram workers and other sections were united in a mighty movement to secure improvements in wages, working conditions and trade union recognition which employers, particularly the ship owners, were determined to resist with all means at their disposal.

The organisers saw particular importance in recalling this moment in history in view of today’s relentless attack on workers’ services, wages, conditions and pensions by the ConDem millionaire ruling elite. It was through courageous leadership by Tom Mann and the strike committee that success was achieved in the teeth of outrageous Press headlines, and police batons and army rifles, backed by the threat of a gunboat despatched to the Mersey by home secretary Winston Churchill.

Speakers explained that workers’ action in 1911 stands as an example as to how to inspire and show leadership to working families under attack. The main initiators of this important event, Ron Noon, Sam Davies, Eddie Roberts and a number of dedicated supporters deserve to be congratulated on assembling detailed historical evidence, presenting it in a concise focused way, and providing irrefutable evidence as to the brutal injustice meted out to workers fighting for conditions which subsequent generations have taken for granted.

Today’s trade union and Labour leaders have a responsibility to fight to protect the achievements of those workers who struggled and died in 1911.

Tony Mulhearn
August 2011
Published in the Liverpool Daily Post and Liverpool Echo

THE LIVERPOOL GENERAL TRANSPORT STRIKE OF 1911
[The following piece was produced by Ron Noon and Sam Davies for the North West TUC - see here: www.tuc.org.uk/extras/1911generaltransportstrike.doc - and is slightly abridged for publication here].
Half a century ago Harold Hikins, an eminent local librarian and historian analysed the “complicated and tremendous movement which convulsed Merseyside” in June, July and August of 1911, “an interwoven complex of several strikes involving at one time or another every section of transport workers in the port and culminating in a general strike of all sections”.[1]

In this brief introduction to the most seminal year in Liverpool trade union and labour history, the intention is not to detail the chronology and causes of that unrest, but to highlight this comprehensive fact. Seamen, ships’ stewards, catering staff, dock labourers, carters, tugboatmen, coalheavers, cold storage men, boiler scalers, railwaymen, tramwaymen, electric power station workers and scavengers were all involved in actions that placed class solidarities above sectional and indeed sectarian loyalties. Women as well were involved – women workers at Mayfield sugar works, tailoresses, workers at the rubber works in Walton that was to become Dunlops, all went on strike in 1911, and the National Union of Women Workers succeeded in
organising increasing numbers of women throughout the year.

It would be distressing to think that in a year indelibly stained by government obsession with Comprehensive Spending Reviews and reducing the deficit through cuts in public expenditure, that no major efforts are made by public historians and labour activists to interrogate and publicise the many lessons in worker solidarity that made 1911 a coruscating example of how “The Union makes us strong”.

It was a year of industrial conflagration which according to the journalist Phillip Gibbs saw “Liverpool as near to a revolution as anything I had seen in England”. As Eric Taplin brings to light in a book bearing that title, the efforts of the Strike Committee set up in June and chaired by the eloquent socialist Tom Mann, but inspired by rank and file activism and spontaneity, were an undeniable success and “all except the tramwaymen secured concessions, some of a significant nature”.[2]

It was not simply major increases in union membership that resulted, but also the extent to which they registered amongst the previously unorganised and unrecognised. This chagrined the hard nosed shipping employers who hitherto preferred the lockout and the strategically positioned “depot ships” full of scabs, to defeat the seamens’ and dockers’ efforts to improve work conditions and pay. The latter two groups were the heart and soul of the Liverpool working class and Margaret Simey’s comment that “this was a port, a great port, and ominously nothing but a port” made Liverpool such a particular place in its culture and ethos, as well as its employment statistics. Tony Lane suggests this was “almost as true in 1961...as it had been in 1901”, stressing a recurring theme of “Liverpool exceptionalism” and a far from parochial labour and trade union history.

Liverpool’s merchandise was never just about commodities and the contents of ships’ holds, but about people and ideas, about music and movement and the cosmopolitan exchange of cultures as well as things. Fifty years ago when Hikins was himself looking back half a century to Liverpool’s waterfront struggles, the links with the sea and “other places” were very much part of our city’s “social character mask”, a fact that “four mop tops” were keenly aware of in forging their own groundbreaking musicality, a year before the release of Love me Do!

Invariably there has been a national and international dimension to Liverpool history and what happened in 1911 was one of the most serious and prolonged disputes of Britain’s pre-First World war labour unrest,
provoking the civil authorities to bring in police reinforcements and for the Home Secretary Winston Churchill to send in troops and position the gunboat HMS Antrim in the Mersey! Although this strike action was part of a national wave of unrest in the transport industry, the degree of bitterness and the intensity of the conflict especially after August 13th and “Bloody Sunday”, was without parallel elsewhere.

A remarkable socialist stonemason and poet, Fred Bower, had his autobiography published in 1936, (a remarkable achievement in itself), providing an excellent contemporary view of what really happened on Sunday August 13th 1911 on St George’s Plateau, when the police baton-charged a mass union meeting.
It also contained an enigmatic chapter entitled “The Secret in the Foundation Stone” which is no secret anymore and which we argue resonates loudly not only in relation to a growing sense of resentment amongst
working people because of the ostentation and conspicuous consumption of the rich in the Edwardian period, but also in today’s world of generalised insecurity for the havenots and largesse for the haves who are getting richer faster than the poor are getting less poor! Regrettably, there are too many people going around the streets and bars of our former European Capital of Culture, fully conscious of the legacy of the Beatles but deeply unconscious of the inspirational stories of 1911 and of what Fred Bower buried under the massive Anglican Cathedral’s foundation stone in June 1904. It was a time capsule and in it he articulated socialist hopes and ambitions for a better tomorrow. Fred and his pal Jim Larkin, (earlier, in their “infantile ignorance” they had tried to kill each other over religion), were aware that “no more than a stone’s throw away” from the cathedral site were slums “not fit for swine” and decided to conduct their own covert ceremony three weeks before the King and Queen and 7,000 other Liverpool dignitaries orchestrated the official foundation stone ceremony. They placed a letter addressed to a future socialist society, (signed “A wage slave”), along with copies of the Clarion and Labour Leader in a biscuit tin, “bent over the ends and edges to make it as air tight as possible” and then positioned it “between two courses of bricks”. Fred laid it in the foundations on June 27th, and two days later he “sailed from Liverpool on the White Star liner Baltic on her first trip across the Atlantic, and on July 19th 1904, King Edward VII duly did his bit, and laid the foundation stone over my documents”.

In reconstructing Bower’s life and times, (born in Boston Massachusetts in 1871 but reared in Liverpool), the essential context is of two parallel worlds reflecting polarised inequalities of income and wealth, a tale of
two Liverpools, the famous metropolis described as “the New York of Europe”, spawning more millionaires than any other city outside of London, and the tarnished former Slave city, that contained slums and underground dwellings, more like Gateways to Hell for the brutalised and casualised poor that inhabited them. On top of that, religious sectarianism and “intra-class conflict” was more bitter and chronic than anywhere else except Belfast.

So it was unsurprising that Liverpool was described by a union official as “an organiser’s graveyard” and bouts of underemployment and unemployment were structured into the very fabric of work and community life. The blight of casualism and hiring and firing practices that treated men like sheep, was rife here because Port employers secured only “marginal advantages from regularity, reliability, sobriety, or other virtues of work discipline”, precisely the kind of advantages, regular and constant employment made obtainable in the great rival city of Manchester. A cheap and elastic supply of unskilled labour had its obvious advantages to Liverpool employers with their strong anti-trade union sentiments, but long standing grievances of low pay and irregular work make it easy to understand how the passion of workers was so aroused by 1911. (Flexible or “contingent” labour are the euphemistic terms used today to camouflage the fact that the blight of low quality irregular employment persists.)

That passion and resentment was first manifested by seamen in June when both of their hitherto very weak unions, Havelock Wilson’s National Sailors and Fireman’s Union and Joe Cotter’s Union of Ships’ Stewards, Cooks, Bakers and Butchers, acted in concert, and with the sympathetic support of dockers and other port workers, helped bloody the Shipping Federation’s nose. Dockers followed their lead in the battle for recognition of Jim Sexton’s National Union of Dock Labour and by early August not only had the two seafarers unions been recognised and wages enhanced but so too had the NUDL, helped by sympathy strikes of seamen.

There was a national context of unrest on the railways but it was the railwaymen of Liverpool, inspired by the successes of the waterfront workers, who took the initiative in pursuit of national demands for increased wages and reduced hours. Their strike on 7th August was given added clout by co-option onto the local strike committee and the commitment made that all transport workers would lend their support to them. The Liverpool virus of sympathetic action was alarming to the authorities both locally and nationally and when Tom Mann’s strike committee planned a monster demonstration at St George’s Plateau in support of the
railwaymen, troops and extra police were rapidly drafted into the city. Although it was a peaceful sunny day in a very hot summer, the ratcheting up of worker resentment to the police, particularly those drafted in from Birmingham and Leeds, was potentially explosive.

This is what Fred reports from “my wagon, facing the great St George’s Hall”:

August 13th, 1911 was an eventful day in the history of Liverpool…On this Sunday…as the gaily decked banners, carried aloft by brawny arms, led each contingent of workers from the outskirts of the city, with their union buttons up and headed by their local officials with music, it seemed good to be alive…From Orange Garston, Everton and Toxteth Park, from Roman Catholic Bootle and the Scotland Road area, they came. Forgotten were their religious feuds, disregarded the dictum of some of their clericals on both sides who affirmed the strike was an atheist stunt. The Garston band had walked five miles and their drum-major proudly whirled his sceptre twined with orange and green ribbons as he led his contingent band, half out of the Roman Catholic, half out of the local Orange band…What matter to them that all the railway stations in the town showed boarded up gates? What matter to them, that from the windows and roof of St George’s Hall opposite, could now and again be seen the caps of a British Tommy? Never in the history of this or any other country had the majority and might of the humble toiler been so displayed. A wonderful spirit of humour and friendliness permeated the atmosphere. It was glorious weather…All was going well, no signs of trouble, when a well organized mass…ranged round the Plateau and surrounding approaches, all in their Sunday best, and many of them with their women folk with them, were set upon and brutally battered.

186 people were hospitalised as a result of the police charge, and 95 were arrested in the disturbances that followed on the streets of north Liverpool that night. Fred’s eye witness account is all the more important
because police brutality and overreaction to what had been planned as a peaceful protest was brushed under the carpet by deliberate censorship and excision of records:

At one end of the Plateau during the meeting the Pathe picture people had set up a machine and the operator was busy taking a moving picture of the monster demonstration. When the police started the bother and the crowd were hurrying to escape the batons, the operator kept on working. When the crowd dispersed he got
away with his negatives. Had they been publicly exposed there would have been an outcry of indignation throughout the land at the brutality displayed. The Plateau resembled a battlefield, disabled and wounded men, women and children, lying singly and in heaps over a vast area. The picture was privately shown to a few of the prominent Labour leaders and speakers but the Liverpool authorities and the Government warned the Pathe people that they were not to show the picture in public, ‘or else’.

In the week following Bloody Sunday, Liverpool and the whole of Britain was poised on the edge of catastrophe. The railway strike, which had been started by rank and file action in Liverpool, had been declared official by four of the five railway unions, the first national railway strike in history (the Railway Clerks Association had an official no-strike policy at the time, but its members still refused to cover any work of the strikers). The docks had been closed after the employers had declared a lock-out. Movement of goods across the country was almost impossible without police or military intervention. Even within cities,
goods could not be moved as carters went on strike, and permits issued by Strike Committees were the only guarantee of the peaceful movement of food and other essential supplies.

The government response was to pledge unprecedented police and military reinforcements in support of the rail owners, to try and keep the rail system moving. More than 50,000 troops were mobilised across the country, and police were despatched wherever the Home Secretary, Winston Churchill, thought they were most needed. Brutal force was employed. In Liverpool, troops opened fire on civilians in Great Homer Street after rioting spread through the north end of the city on the evening of Bloody Sunday. Similar shootings took place the following night, and then on Tuesday, August 15th, the most tragic events occurred.

That Tuesday evening, a convoy of vans, containing prisoners who had been arrested on Bloody Sunday, was despatched to Walton Gaol. It was accompanied by thirty-two soldiers of the 18th Hussars, on horseback and fully armed with rifles (loaded with live ammunition), bayonets, pistols and sabres, as well as a magistrate carrying a copy of the Riot Act, and a number of mounted police. A disturbance occurred on Vauxhall Road and, before the Riot Act had even been read, the troops opened fire, injuring five civilians, two fatally. John W. Sutcliffe, a twenty year old Catholic carter, was shot twice in the head virtually on his own doorstep, on the corner of Hopwood Street. Michael Prendergast, a twenty-nine year old Catholic docker, was shot twice in the chest a short time later, on the corner of Lamb Street.

This might aptly be described as Liverpool’s “Bloody Tuesday”. Five days later, on Saturday 19th August, two more unarmed civilians were shot by troops in Llanelli. These are the last occasions in history when British soldiers have killed civilians on the streets of mainland Britain. As with the events of Bloody Sunday, there was a determined effort by Churchill and the government to whitewash these events. No public enquiry was held, despite widespread calls for one from people in Liverpool and Llanelli, and from the TUC and the wider labour movement. Parliament adjourned on the 22nd of August, despite the protests of Labour MPs, so further questions could not be raised there while the events were still fresh in everyone’s mind. Churchill himself personally ensured, as Home Office files reveal, that minimum publicity was given to the court-martial of one soldier in Llanelli who had refused to open fire on the civilian crowd and had deserted on the spot. Very little attention has been given since to these outrageous state-sponsored killings, and one of the aims of the centenary events is to redress this injustice.

It is also worth noting how critical the situation had become by the end of that bloody week in August 1911. The police and military forces were stretched to the limit, not only in Liverpool but across the country. The Birmingham policemen who had earlier been despatched to Liverpool, for instance, were now urgently required in their home town as the strike intensified there. With the ports closed and the railways severely curtailed, it was getting increasingly hard to move soldiers or policemen around the country.

When troops arrived in Birmingham, they had been forced to march 40 miles to get to a train that could move them into the city. Aside from the fatal shootings, rioting broke out across the country as police and troops tried to move goods, in Chesterfield, Lincoln, Stafford, Sheffield and many other towns. When soldiers were beginning to desert rather than shooting their fellow-workers, the government’s control of the situation was truly shaken. Churchill himself, in parliament on August 22nd, stated that “a continuation of the railway strike would have produced a swift and certain degeneration of all the means, of all the structure, social and economic, on which the life of the people depend.”

It was in the context of this growing crisis, “near to revolution” indeed, that Lloyd George persuaded Churchill and the Prime Minister, Asquith, to do an abrupt about-face and call in the railway owners to force them to come to a swift settlement with the railway unions. Finally, one of the lessons for 2011 and hopefully a way of redressing the historical amnesia referred to earlier would be to take a fresh look around St Georges Hall, the Parthenon of Northern Europe, and let our historical imaginations run free. It was after all, here on this site in 1911 that the events described by Fred Bower happened and people like you and I lived and breathed. Just like today they had their own grievances, dreams and ambitions and to paraphrase a famous nineteenth-century historian, once on that very familiar Plateau “walked other men and women as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone like ghosts at cockcrow”. Early dawn is a while away for many of us, so why not allow our North West TUC festival and celebration of 1911 Liverpool, to open up a portal to a world that is not lost and which can plug lessons in solidarity and struggle back into the present?

Why not act out the sage advice of the American writer William Faulkner, who defiantly declared that “the past is not dead, it is not even past”! As long as there are extraordinary ordinary lives and stories to
uncover, like that of Fred Bower whose secret in the stone is no secret anymore, or those of John Sutcliffe and Michael Prendergast, whose deaths will no longer be forgotten, the dead live on and we can at least preserve the inspirational story of those men and women who not only built the trade union and labour movement in this city but shaped and patterned our edgy and quirky culture.

Notes:
1 H.R.Hikins, “The Liverpool General Transport Strike 1911”, Historic Society of Lancashire & Cheshire, Vol: 113, p.169
2 Eric Taplin, Near to Revolution: The Liverpool General Transport Strike of 1911 (1994)

APPENDIX ONE – CHRONOLOGY OF THE STRIKE

The chronology of the strike is complex but Eric Taplin gives a clear outline:

June 14 to August 4 – the seamen came out on strike followed by catering staff and stewards. That unity amongst the two seamens’ unions National Seaman’s and Fireman’s Union (NSFU) and the union formed in 1909, the National Union of Ships’ Stewards, Cooks, Bakers and Butchers to represent the stewards, was impressive. (The throwing away of that “sectionalism” was even commented upon in the Daily Post.)
Hitherto stewards had been inclined to draw a certain social distinction between themselves and the men at work on the deck and in the stokehold...This condition of things has, however, been revolutionised in twenty four hours, and for the first time in the history of the Port of Liverpool, yesterday saw ‘all hands’ throwing sectionalism to the winds and joining hand in hand for the furtherance of a common cause. It was a remarkable - even an historic – event in trade union progress.

A strike committee was formed chaired by Tom Mann, consisting of representatives of the unions involved and of the Liverpool Trades Council. The North End non-union dockers now demanded recognition of the NUDL and union rates of pay and conditions. They flocked to join up and the coalheavers who had their
own unions followed suit. To help overcome the Shipping Companies reluctance the seafarers struck again in sympathy with the dockers. Employees were permitted to wear union badges and a conference was arranged to hammer out a permanent settlement with the union culminating with the publication of the White Book Agreement on 4th August. It was a major victory for the union and “the dockers union - and the two searfarers’ unions – were fully recognised and wages were enhanced”. The “victory” in respect of dockers and seamen was a little different in that the latter’s was less complete, but “the stranglehold exercised by the Shipping Federation was broken and some of its more objectionable practices abandoned”. The sting in the tail for the dockers was the NUDL now having to agree continuity of work while any dispute was being resolved.

August 7-25 This next phase had a great deal to do with the railwaymen of Liverpool who struck on August 7th demanding reduced hours and increased wages. There was of course a national context of unrest on the railways but now locally railwaymen were coopted onto the strike committee and it was agreed that all transport workers would support them through sympathetic action. This was when the shipping employers lost all patience with the dockers, especially only a few days after the White Book agreement had been signed and consequently they demanded that its terms be honoured and that union members would remain at work. If not all cargo operations in the Port of Liverpool would cease on August the 14th and the men would be locked out. Matters were brought to a head on August 13th when a monster demonstration took place at St George’s Plateau, organised by the strike committee in support of the railwaymen. Up until then violence had been minimal which given the huge numbers of workers involved and numbers of police was impressive, but from this Bloody Sunday onwards, after the authorities had panicked and allowed police to baton charge the crowds to clear the Plateau, attitudes hardened and the relationship between the police and public deteriorated.

Bloody Sunday was “a symbol of the intolerance of an apprehensive civil authority towards peaceful mass demonstrations”. No one had been killed but 350 people were treated in hospital and the resentment towards the imported police from Leeds and Birmingham was considerable. The growing tension had already resulted in the movement of soldiers of the 2nd Warwickshire Regiment to Seaforth Barracks. So after Bloody Sunday Liverpool came to a standstill, two thousand more troops were rushed to the city and the shipowners carried out their threat to close down cargo operations. That affected 15000 men and the strike committee called for a General Strike. According to the Daily Post and Mercury (15th August) some 66,000 workers responded. From this time on goods could only be transported under heavy military escort and it was the strike committee that decided on the carriage of goods by the issue of permits. A national railwaymens’ strike began on the 17th and lasted three days before the railway companies were persuaded to meet union representatives to discuss grievances. Also on August 17th the tramwaymen struck work followed by Corporation electric power station workers and scavengers. That said, it was the resolution of the railwaymen’s dispute at national level that heralded the end of the local transport strike and the dockers finally returned to work on the 25th following negotiations between the NUDL and the shipping companies. The tramwaymen had been dismissed for striking and it was only when the strike committee threatened to bring out all transport workers again that the Corporation Tramways Committee agreed to reinstatement. That tardy process was not finally completed until December.

APPENDIX TWO: FRED BOWER AND THE SECRET UNDER THE STONE
Fred’s account of his letter to a better world:

I visited my pal, the long, raw-boned boy, now a man, Jim Larkin at his house. We who wanted to kill each other in our infantile ignorance had both joined the local Socialist Party and were the best of comrades. He got a piece of tin and compressed a copy each of the Clarion and the Labour Leader of June 24th, 1904, into it. I wrote the following short hurried note:

To the Finders, Hail!
We, the wage slaves employed on the erection of this cathedral, to be dedicated to the worship of the unemployed Jewish carpenter, hail ye! Within a stone’s throw from here, human beings are housed in
slums not fit for swine. This message, written on trust-produced paper with trustproduced ink, is to tell ye how we of today are at the mercy of the trusts. Building fabrics, clothing, food, fuel, transport, areall in the hands of money mad soul destroying trusts. We can only sell our labour power, as wage slaves, on their terms. The money trusts today own us. In your own day, you will, thanks to the efforts of past and present agitators for economic freedom, own the trusts. Yours will indeed, compared to ours of today, be a happier existence. See to it, therefore, that ye, too, work for the betterment of all , and so justify your existence by leaving the world the better for your having lived in it. Thus and thus only shall come about the Kingdom of “God” or “Good” on Earth.
Hail, Comrades, and – Farewell.
Yours sincerely,
‘A Wage Slave’

“You may say he’s a dreamer” but he was not the only one then, and he’s not the only one, now, as this comment from Paul Mason makes very clear:

That message still lies where it was buried. It was addressed to the kids in combat trousers protesting outside a Nike store in Seattle, to the rake-thin teenagers sewing trainers in Cambodian sweatshops and to
migrant cleaners resting their exhausted heads against bus windows as dawn breaks in London. Few of us can imagine what that message cost to write, in terms of hardship and self-sacrifice. Or the joy experienced on those rare days when the downtrodden people of the world were allowed to stand up and breathe free.
[Live Working or Die Fighting: How the Working Class went Global (2008) p.xv.]

APPENDIX THREE: FRED BOWER AND THE S.S. BALTIC
Fred’s autobiography Rolling Stonemason (1936) vividly illustrates Fred’s fascinating encounter on the SS Baltic with a banker who was the owner of one of the biggest ‘money trusts’ of the day, a man who formed the United States Steel Corporation, the first billion dollar company in the world. The baggage of John Pierpont Morgan was in different quarters to Fred’s, who relished the opportunity to elaborate on a “Ragged
Trousered Philanthropists” theme!

APPENDIX FOUR: CASUALISM ON LIVERPOOL DOCKS
On the 14th of June 1911, at the North End docks in Liverpool, 500 firemen refused to ‘sign on’ for the Canadian Pacific Railway (C.P.R.) boat Empress of Ireland, and the White Star’s Teutonic and Baltic. [Harold Hikin p.172] 27 years after the Baltic’s first crossing to New York, there was a headline in the Liverpool Daily Post. “STAMPEDE FOR WORK: 2,000 men for 500 jobs at Mersey Dock”
More than 2000 workers stampeded for work at the Gladstone dock yesterday when the White Star liner Baltic was the first big liner with a huge cargo to arrive for more than a week, and the prospect that additional overtime would be required to enable the vessel to make a quick turn around so that she would be able to leave on Saturday attracted a record number of dockers. The men began to form up before the vessel reached the landing stage and by one o’clock about 2,000 dockers waited to be picked up for duty. Only about 500 were required, however, and when the foreman appeared and called out certain men, the crowd stampeded. Police reinforcements were called and the stand was reformed while a further batch of men was chosen, but the ranks broke again and the foremen postponed the signing on till later in the day when the men were taken on and the work proceeded.

POSTSCRIPT:
The playwright Dennis Potter suggested that the trouble with words is that “you will not always know whose mouths they have been in before”! What ought we to make of a modern variation on “the blight of casualism”, Flexible labour? To paraphrase an academic expert on Globalisation, Zygmunt Bauman, “The idea of ‘flexible labour’ denies in practice what it asserts in theory...In order to implement what it recommends it must deprive workers and their unions of that agility and versatility which it exhorts them to acquire, so as to raise the enterprise’s profits and productivity”. People are made subaltern to profit and “Employer flexibility” often means “rigidity” for workers and their families. In this era of public expenditure cuts, downsizing, outsourcing, leveraged buyouts, and contingent or flexible employment, workers and their unions must never relinquish “the power to be truly ‘flexible’” in pursuit of our own collective and solidaristic goals. That is the real lesson and inspiration of 1911 when masses of workers stood up proud and breathed free “for the betterment of all”.

Debate: David Starkey, Newsnight and the Responsibilities of Historians

2011-10-07T08:28:00.000-07:00

David Starkey currently earns £75,000 per hour for his TV shows

From LSHG Newsletter, 43 (Autumn, 2011)

Keith Flett:
David Starkey [1945-] is a Tudor historian who has made the leap from being an academic to one of a small
group of ‘TV historians’ who popularise history for a wider audience. He has caused outrage by appearing on a BBC Newsnight programme about the August riots in England and stating that Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech was right to argue that Britain was heading for civil unrest. He did qualify this by noting that Powell had been wrong to argue that this would be racially motivated.

Even so, for someone, perhaps particularly a professional historian, to claim on a mainstream news programme that part of Powell’s far right and racist political agenda had turned out to be correct is something entirely worthy of the storm of protest that it has caused. I have had the dubious pleasure of meeting Starkey and there is no doubt that he is, or at least was, a genuine research historian of the Tudor period. He can talk engagingly and interestingly about his subject in a way that one wishes more historians working on their latest monographs could.

Even so the fact remains that historians have their ‘periods’. I am, for example, a nineteenth and twentieth British labour historian — a not over populated branch line of the profession. I have a sound grounding in
historical method and research techniques but even so if you find me opining on an historical issue outside
of my ‘period’ it would be as well not to take it all that seriously.

Starkey has in recent decades made a name for himself as a right-wing ‘Kings and Queens’ historian of the
sixteenth century in England. Left-wing historians tend to be more interested in the next century, the seventeenth, which saw the English Civil War, so there is no effective counter authority to Starkey on the left.

Because historians know their stuff their views are treated with respect. That doesn’t mean however that their views on everything and perhaps particularly current politics are worthy of particular respect. Eric Hobsbawm, the veteran marxist historian, is currently the leading living UK practitioner of the subject
and rightly so. That does not mean, for example, that works like his 1979 The Forward March of Labour Halted, which was a political intervention, need to be treated as historical gospel. They are simply political opinion, albeit historically informed.

Starkey seems intent on making a second career as a right-wing controversialist. He spoke on Andrew
Neil’s weekly politics programme about the history of riots in London after the student protests. Starkey clearly had a view but equally clearly it was not a view that had been informed by any visits to an historical
archive. We get here to the nub of the problem. In the seminars I run at the Institute of Historical Research in central London I make it absolutely clear that while politics is of course not banned the gatherings are historical research sessions. Wider political discussion can occur in the bar afterwards.

If we are to understand history, we can certainly argue about the interpretation of it, but we also need
to have a certain level of agreed ‘facts’. The 1832 Reform Act for example was in that year and came before the 1867 Reform Act. Muddling personal opinion with verifiable historical data is poor practice to put it mildly. By appearing with the authority of a historian on Newsnight, talking of politics and saying Enoch Powell was right about something, Starkey raises an extremely dangerous political agenda.

He also brings the the historical profession into disrepute.
Keith Flett

Reply by Ian Birchall:
Keith Flett is quite right to condemn the ill-informed and reactionary views expressed by David Starkey. But I think some of the arguments he uses are misleading and may give hostages to fortune.

Keith complains about Starkey using the “authority of a historian” to put forward his obnoxious views. Actually I think Starkey gets on Newsnight and Question Time because he is a television personality rather than because of his academic research. But does Keith really object to intellectuals departing from their specialisms? Would he complain that Edward Thompson should have stuck to the nineteenth century, and that his views on nuclear disarmament should not have been taken “all that seriously”? Surely we should welcome the appearance of “public intellectuals”; it would be good to have more Bertrand Russells, Sartres and Chomskys, instead of academics burying themselves in their own tiny specialisms.

Starkey’s crime is what he said, not the fact that he commented on a contemporary issue. [I know nothing of Starkey’s work on his specialist “period”; it is quite conceivable that his right-wing standpoint gives him useful insights, just as Engels argued that Balzac’s reactionary views made him a valuable interpreter of early nineteenth-century France.] Keith tells us that “the fact remains that historians have their ‘periods’.” Indeed, but this fact is a necessary evil, like the division of labour in general. We have to specialise because none of us have enough time or enough brain cells to know everything. But “periods” are an arbitrary division; human history is a total process with no natural boundaries.

Keith tells us that he is a “nineteenth and twentieth century British labour historian”. Doubtless he would refuse to pronounce at length about the American Civil War or the Paris Commune. But he must know something about those events, which had a vital impact on the development of the British working-class movement. Likewise any historian of the early modern period has to confront the argument about the transition from feudalism to capitalism and therefore needs to know quite a bit about the previous medieval “period”.

In general, I think Keith is far too deferential towards academic historians. Unlike Keith, I spent the best years of my life working in higher education, and I can assure him there are all too many professional academics [historians and others] who not only know nothing of the world outside their subject, but precious little about their own specialisms. Some years ago a now long-forgotten historian called JH Hexter wrote an article called “The Historian and his Day” [in Reappraisals in History, 1961] in which he boasted that he knew more about his academic “period” than he did about the world he lived in. I see no reason to show “respect” to such a historian.

The LSHG Newsletter has recently published critiques [written by someone who is not a “professional historian”] of the work of Robert Service and Tony Judt, showing that these esteemed experts were guilty of gross errors in their own special fields. And reality is often a bit messy for the artificial divisions of historians. Service may be thoroughly acquainted with the archives, but he is hardly competent to comment on Trotsky’s cultural views if he thinks André Breton was a painter.

The example of Eric Hobsbawm is a particularly bad one for Keith’s case. Any analysis of Hobsbawm’s work would have great difficulty is drawing a line between “history” and “politics”. [See Gregory Elliott’s aptly named Hobsbawm: History and Politics, Pluto, 2010 and here. In fact it is rather hard to argue that “The Forward March of Labour Halted” is not part of the “period” of the author of Age of Extremes. Of course Hobsbawm’s arguments were open to challenge and required an informed and evidence based response. [For example this written by someone with a degree in chemistry.] But Hobsbawm’s politics were inextricably entwined with his historical work. That was his strength and his weakness. His strength because his work relates to real questions and not mere antiquarianism; his weakness because his Stalinist and later reformist views distorted his judgments.

And what, I wonder, does Keith make of the work of Chris Harman? Harman’s magnificent A People's History of the World could only have been written by someone with a complete contempt for the constraints of “periods”. I doubt if a professional historian would have dared to write it. [Harman’s degree was in sociology.] Of course Harman drew on the work of specialists, and doubtless specialists can identify detailed errors in his work. But it is an invaluable contribution. Perhaps it should be compulsory reading for academic historians before they select their “periods”.

I hope then that our concern to condemn Starkey will not lead us to abandon important principles about how we regard history; in particular I think socialist historians should be very wary of showing excessive deference towards professional academics.

Clemenceau said that war was too serious to be left to the generals. Perhaps history is too serious to be left to the historians.
Ian Birchall

CFP:The Many-Headed Hydra: 10 years on

2011-10-05T09:24:00.000-07:00

The Many Headed Hydra 10 Years On

Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The Many Headed Hydra (2000) argued that during the colonial and commercial expansion in the Atlantic Ocean between c. 1640 and 1830 a revolutionary proletariat emerged. Waves of commodification in the Atlantic system – of land, goods and people – created a mobile, multi-ethnic workforce. Authorities attempted to control them, only to provoke new forms of resistance. Atlantic proletarians played their own distinct part in the Age of Revolutions and the abolition of slavery; they created their own forms of equality and freedom. A decade after the publication of that highly suggestive study, how does the thesis stand up?

At this conference to be held at Birkbeck, University of London in Thursday 12 April 2012, we will hope to explore the book’s central themes in the light of new research, as well as taking it into new areas. The book concentrated on the English-speaking Atlantic and we would particularly encourage papers dealing with the non-English Atlantic or similar developments in the Mediterranean, Indian Ocean and Pacific. We would hope papers pay attention to the intersections between class, gender and race. All sub-disciplinary perspectives – economic, social, cultural, political – are welcome.

Themes for papers could include:

· The politics and ideology of the proletariat: abolitionism, revolutions and revolts, popular egalitarianism and democracy, radical religion.

· Types of work and workers; changing work processes; migration and labour markets; industrial relations; work cultures.

Sites of struggle: the commons, the plantation, ships, factories. How did they structure workers’ experiences? Are particular types of resistance associated with them? Were there others?

· Material and economic pathways: the role of oceanic trade routes, commodities, natural resources, technologies etc

· Role of institutions (e.g. trading companies, guilds), States and Empires in creating and regulating the workforce; criminal justice and law; army and naval recruitment; taxation.

· Comparative perspectives between different Atlantic Empires or with the Mediterranean, Indian and Pacific Oceans.

· Long-term perspectives; sources & methodology; theory.

Call for papers deadline: January 1st 2012

Email: manyheadedhydra.2012@gmail.com

Organisers: William Farrell, School of History, Birkbeck, Univ. of London.

Email: wjb.farrell@gmail.com

Stephen Duane Dean Jr, Department of History, Kings College London.

Email: stephen.d.dean@gmail.com

CFP: Social Movements Conference in Manchester

2011-10-04T05:47:00.001-07:00

SOCIAL MOVEMENTS CONFERENCE - CALL FOR PAPERS

abstracts due by Monday 27th February 2012

From 1995 to 2011, Manchester Metropolitan University hosted a series of very successful annual international conferences on 'ALTERNATIVE FUTURES and POPULAR PROTEST'.

We're very happy to announce that the Seventeenth AF&PP Conference will be held, between Monday 2nd April and Wednesday 4th April 2012.

The Conference rubric remains as in previous years. The aim is to explore the dynamics of popular movements, along with the ideas which animate their activists and supporters and which contribute to shaping their fate.

Reflecting the inherent cross-disciplinary nature of the issues, previous participants (from over 60 countries) have come from such specialisms as sociology, politics, cultural studies, social psychology, economics, history and geography. The Manchester conferences have also been notable for discovering a fruitful and friendly meeting ground between activism and academia.

CALL FOR PAPERS

We invite offers of papers relevant to the conference themes. Papers should address such matters as:

* contemporary and historical social movements and popular protests
* social movement theory
* utopias and experiments
* ideologies of collective action
* etc.

To offer a paper, please contact either of the conference convenors with a brief abstract:

EITHER Colin Barker, Dept. of Sociology
OR Mike Tyldesley, Dept. of Politics and Philosophy
Manchester Metropolitan University
Geoffrey Manton Building, Rosamond Street West
Manchester M15 6LL, England

email: c.barker@mmu.ac.uk
Tel: M. Tyldesley 0161 247 3460
email: m.tyldesley@mmu.ac.uk

Fax: 0161 247 6769 (+44 161 247 6769)

(Wherever possible, please use email, especially as Colin Barker is a retired gent. Surface mail and faxes should only be addressed to Mike Tyldesley)

CONFERENCE PAPERS

Those giving papers are asked to supply them in advance, for inclusion on a CD of the complete papers which will be available from the conference opening.
* Preferred method: send the paper to Colin Barker as an email attachment in MS Word. Any separate illustrations etc. should be placed at the end of the paper, in .jpg format.
* if this is impossible, post a copy of the text to Mike Tyldesley on a CD disk in MS Word format
* Final date for receipt of abstracts: Monday 27th February 2012
* Final date for receipt of actual papers: Monday 12th March 2012

More on the 1911 Liverpool Transport Strike Centenary Conference

2011-10-04T02:56:00.000-07:00

The 1911 Liverpool General Transport Strike Centenary Conference
SATURDAY 8TH OCTOBER, 10am-6pm
LIVERPOOL JOHN MOORES UNIVERSITY, 68 HOPE ST, L1 9BZ

**Tickets £5 waged / £3 unwaged from News From Nowhere bookshop, Bold St, L1 4HY** or email: 1911centenary@gmail.com

This history is your history...

Mass Strike, syndicalist firebrands, running battles with police and troops, middle class citizens militias, a gunboat sent up the Mersey and two strikers shot dead...
This was Liverpool in 1911. On the brink of revolution? A mythical or pivotal moment in the rise of a radical city? What 'lessons' are to be drawn from 1911 as we face the current crisis in 2011? This is history is your history... Speakers include... Bob Crow (RMT), John McDonnell MP, Eric Taplin (author of 'Near to Revolution'), Richard Hyman (LSE), Sam Davies (LJMU), Tony Mulhearn (ex-Liverpool 47 councillor), Charlie Kimber (SWP), Karen Hunt (Keele University)... and more.

The 1911 Liverpool General Transport Strike was the most significant episode in the stormy period of the 1910-14 Great Unrest when Edwardian Britain was shaken by mass strikes and open working class revolt. This revolt prepared the ground for mass trade unionism among workers. The history of 1911 is still relevant today as working people and their families face the greatest assault on living standards and public services since the 1930s.

Dear friend,

The programme for the 1911 centenary conference is now available, detailing the timings of the conference and the room allocations so you can plan your day and chose which sessions to attend. With less than a week to go we hope you are as excited as we are to commemorate such an inspiring and pivotal chapter in our history. Don't forget to book your tickets from News From Nowhere bookshop, Bold St, L1 4HY, or reserve them by replying to this email.

We look forward to seeing you this weekend...

In solidarity,
The team, 1911 @ 68 Hope St
For the programme, Email: 1911centenary@gmail.com

'Like' the 1911 Centenary Conference on Facebook
Facebook Event for the 1911 Centenary Conference
1911 Centenary Conference @Liverpool City of Radicals 2011
Follow the blog: '1911: gunboats on the Mersey'

London seminars on contemporary Marxist theory

2011-10-03T09:02:00.000-07:00

LONDON SEMINAR ON CONTEMPORARY MARXIST THEORY

The global economic and financial crisis has witnessed a deepening of interest in different forms of critical and radical thought and practice. Following a successful series in 2010/11, the London Seminar on Contemporary Marxist Theory in 2011/12 will continue to explore the new perspectives that have been opened up by Marxist interventions in this political and theoretical conjuncture. It involves collaboration among Marxist scholars based in several London universities, including Brunel University, King’s College London, and the School of Oriental and African Studies. Guest speakers – from both Britain and abroad – will include a wide range of thinkers engaging with many different elements of the various Marxist traditions, as well as with diverse problems and topics. The aim of the seminar is to promote fruitful debate and to contribute to the development of more robust Marxist analysis. It is open to all.

2011/12 Seminar Series

12th October,
6pm King's College London, Strand Campus, Room S-3.18
Alex Callinicos (King’s College, London) 'Slavoj Zizek and the Critique of Political Economy'

9th November,
6pm King's College London, Strand Campus, Room S-3.18
David McNally (York University, Toronto) 'Monsters of the Market. Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism'

14th December,
6pm King's College London, Strand Campus, Room S-3.18
Jairus Banaji (SOAS) 'Retotalizing Fascism: reading Arthur Rosenberg through Sartre's ‘Critique’'

The schedule for 2012 will be made available at a later date. Speakers will include Susan Marks (LSE)

For further information, please contact:
Alex Callinicos, European Studies, King's: alex.callinicos [at] kcl.ac.uk Stathis Kouvelakis, European Studies, King's: stathis.kouvelakis [at] kcl.ac.uk
Costas Lapavitsas, Economics, SOAS: cl5 [at] soas.ac.uk
Peter Thomas, Politics and History, Brunel: PeterD.Thomas [at] brunel.ac.uk

Marxism in Culture seminars

2011-09-29T06:32:00.001-07:00

MARXISM IN CULTURE

PROGRAMME FOR AUTUMN TERM 2011

Friday 14 October
Financialisation, Monetisation, Privatisation: Creating the New Market
in Higher Education
Andrew McGettigan (Central Saint Martins)
Friday 28 October
Self-emancipation, activity theory, and political deskilling /
reskilling: Some thoughts on organising into a big fish
Alex Levant (Wilfred Laurier University)
Friday 25 November
A Socialist Realist Sander: Comparative Portraiture as a Marxist Model
in the German Democratic Republic
Sarah James (University College London)

Friday 09 December
Cultures of Marxism 1: Publishing and the Left
Contributors to be confirmed

All seminars start at 5.30pm, and are held in the Court Room (unless
otherwise indicated) at the Institute of Historical Research in Senate
House, Malet St, London. The seminar closes at 7.30pm and retires to
the bar.

Organisers: Matthew Beaumont, Dave Beech, Alan Bradshaw, Warren
Carter, Gail Day, Steve Edwards, Larne Abse Gogarty, Owen Hatherley,
Esther Leslie, David Mabb, Antigoni Memou,Chrysi Papaioannou, Nina
Power, Dominic Rahtz, Pete Smith, Peter Thomas & Alberto Toscano.

For further information, contact Warren Carter, at: w.carter@ucl.ac.uk
or Esther Leslie at: e.leslie@bbk.ac.uk

The David Starkey rap

2011-09-28T06:33:00.000-07:00

Sorry, David Starkey's racism on Newsnight last month with respect to the riots is a bit old news - and historians condemned it at the time, but for those who missed these the first time around the best response has probably been the David Starkey rap and in particular this one Even Starker...

Claudia Jones: Beyond Containment book launch

2011-09-28T06:18:00.000-07:00

Dr Carole Boyce Davies, author of Left of Karl Marx, will read and discuss her latest tome on the iconic black political, cultural and social activist, Claudia Jones @ Centerprise. Followed by Q & A.
Date: Thursday, 29th September 2011Time: 6.30-9.30pmAdmission: £5(redeemable with the purchase of the book)
Centerprise Trust Ltd
136-138 Kingsland High Street
London E8 2NS 020 7254 9632
http://www.centerprisetrust.org.uk

1911 National Railway Strike anniversary meeting in Manchester

2011-09-23T01:45:00.000-07:00

A Public meeting exploring the reasons behind the first national rail strike and to discuss the relevance to today’s rail unions...
Great Unrest
100 Years Since the First National Railway Strike
Fighting Unions 1911 and Today
Saturday November 12 2011
16.00-19.30
Peoples History Museum, Left Bank,
Spinningfields, Manchester, M3 3ER
Tel / Fax 0161 838 9190
Public Meeting - panel discussion followed by debate

Britain’s first national rail strike in 1911 was part of ‘The Great Unrest’ a huge upsurge of worker militancy between 1910-14, which created the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR), the first industrial union in February 1913 and the ‘Triple Alliance’ of miners, dockers and railworkers. On “Bloody Sunday” 13 August 1911 a mass strike meeting at Liverpool’s Lime Street station was attacked by police. The Liverpool strike committee declared a general strike from midnight. The following day four rail unions (ASRS, GRWU, UPSS and ASLEF) threatened anational rail strike unless rail companies agreed to negotiations. The government offered rail bosses “every available soldier in the country” to resist the ultimatum and on 17 August a national rail strike was declared in the famous ‘liberty telegram’, which proclaimed: “Your liberty is at stake. All railwaymen must strike at once. The loyalty of each means liberty for all.” The strike demonstrated the power of workers acting in solidarity across shipping, docks, railways and road transport to reject craft sectarianism, which rail companies used to rule transport workers. The 1911 strike pushed ASRS, GRWU and UPSS railway unions to merge to create the National Union of Railwaymen, one of the largest and most important trade unions in 20th century British labour history.

SPEAKERS:
• David Howell- Professor of Politics, University of York and author Respectable Radicals- Studies in the Politics of Railway Trade Unionism (1999)
• Sam Davies - Professor of History, Liverpool John Moores University and author of History in the Making: The Liverpool Docks Dispute 1995–96 (1996)
• Alex Gordon - RMT President and author of ‘Charles Watkins: The Syndicalist Railwayman’ (2010)
• Bob Crow - founder and Chair of the United Campaign to Repeal the Anti-Trade Union Laws and RMT General Secretary

The Slave-owners of Bloomsbury Exhibition

2011-09-18T12:57:00.000-07:00

The Legacies of British Slave-ownership project in the UCL Department of History cordially invites you to a reception launching “The Slave-owners of Bloomsbury”, an exhibition to mark this year’s Black History Month.

The ESRC-funded LBS project has been examining the significance of slave-ownership to the formation of modern Britain. Through words and images, this exhibition will trace the contentious lives and legacies of the many slave-owners, both men and women, who lived close to the newly-founded UCL. The Slave-owners of Bloomsbury exhibition is kindly supported by the UCL Public Engagement under the Beacons for Public Engagement Programme, funded by HEFCE, the UK Research Councils and the Wellcome Trust.

The launch reception will take place in the South Cloisters from 6pm on Monday 10th October 2011, and will include an introduction to the exhibition by the LBS team.

For more information about the project, please visit our website at http://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs.

We very much hope you are able to attend. Please do let us know if you can make it.

Yours sincerely,
Prof Catherine Hall (Principal Investigator, Legacies of British Slave-ownership)
Keith McClelland (Research Associate)
Dr Nick Draper (Research Associate)

Edited to add:
Institute of Commonwealth Studies, in conjunction with the Black & Asian Studies Association present tbe 'Black and Asian Britain seminars'

Senate House, University of London, Russell Square, London WC1 6 to 7.30 pm, Everyone is welcome. You do not have to pre-book/register. (Contact: Marika.Sherwood@sas.ac.uk). Next seminar:

27 September (G34 - Gordon Room)
Kate Donnington 'Feeding the ghosts': George Hibbert, the West India Docks and the memory of British Slave Ownership.'
This paper will explore the ways in which George Hibbert has been represented in the West India Dock area. It will consider the relationship between the representation and memory of slave ownership in Britain.

Cable Street Anniversary T-shirt

2011-09-15T06:11:00.000-07:00

Just out in time to mark the 75th anniversary of the Battle of Cable Street from the people at Philosophy Football:

There are a number of anniversary events being organised locally - see for example here.

CLR James legacy celebration

2011-09-07T02:38:00.000-07:00

CLR James legacy celebration
Sunday, October 30, 2011 from 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM (GMT)
London, United Kingdom
Open the Gate
33 - 35 Stoke Newington Road
N16 8BJ London
United Kingdom

IT HAS BEEN OVER 20 years sine C.L.R. James’ (1901-1989) passing yet he remains one of the twentieth century’s most remarkable thinkers. We will be celebrating his legacy and unveiling our teaching pack.

A writer, historian and social activist, his work has had an impact on every continent in the world. He was also a sports writer and cultural critic; in fact the sheer diversity of his accomplishments and richness of his writing mean that there will always be much to inspire about the extraordinary life and work of this outstanding Caribbean intellectual.

After successfully convincing Hackney Council to retain the name CLR James for the rebuilt library in Dalston,Hackney Unites has gone on to launch the CLR James Legacy Project (supported by the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust).

As part of our contribution to celebrating Black History Month, Hackney Unites launches The C.L.R. James legacy project

The project includes:
● an on-line resource that attempts to pull together writings by and about C.L.R. to illustrate the sheer breadth of his work.

We are constantly seeking writers and others to contribute to this web-site. Please visit www.clrjameslegacyproject.org.uk for further details.

● We also want to ensure that our young people, the next generation are made aware of what C.L.R James contributed to society and his relevance to our lives today. To this end we have develop a teaching resource that can be used in schools, youth-clubs and other settings.

George Orwell, the fight against fascism in Barnsley and the Spanish Civil War

2011-09-06T10:03:00.000-07:00

George Orwell, the fight against fascism in Barnsley and the Spanish Civil War

With John Newsinger and Michael Clapham, ex-Labour MP. In March 1936 George Orwell met and debated with Communist Tommy Degnan—one of those attempting to disrupt a British Union of Fascists public meeting. Both men later travelled to Spain to fight fascism.
Sat 8 Oct, 1pm
Cooper Art Gallery, Church St, S70 3AH
Organised by Barnsley College UCU

HM Book Series

2011-09-06T09:55:00.000-07:00

The Historical Materialism Book Series is looking for book proposals
of the following type:

- scholarly monographs on Marx and Marxism, or applications of Marxist
methods to particular fields and issues
- translations of works by non-anglophone Marxist writers
- republications of Marxist classics with a new editorial apparatus
- thematically coherent anthologies of Marxist texts

Please send all proposals, with a full account of the proposed
structure and argument of the proposed volume (including estimated
total word length and delivery date), as well as its position in
relation to the existing scholarship to: historicalmaterialism@soas.ac.uk

PhD dissertations are welcome as long as the author is prepared to
engage in rewriting to transform it into book form.

All HM books are published in hardback form by Brill and in paperback format by
Haymarket Books

LSHG Autumn seminars

2011-09-04T09:24:00.000-07:00

London Socialist Historians Group: Autumn Seminars 2011

Wednesday October 12th 7pm Resistance & Empire. Robin Blackburn and Richard Gott speak on their new books. A joint meeting with the socialist history society at the Library Bishopsgate Institute 230 Bishopsgate EC2

Monday October 17th 5.30pm Owen Jones 'Class politics: how the working class has changed'

Monday October 31st 5.30pm Marika Sherwood 'Malcolm X- visits abroad April 1964- February 1965'

Monday November 14th 5.30pm John Charlton 'The 1815 seaman’s strike on the north-east coast of England'

Except October 12th all in the Bloomsbury Room [room 35] South Block Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, Malet St WC1

Remembering Sidney Bunting

2011-09-01T12:48:00.000-07:00

Remembering Sidney Bunting

15 October 2011, 2:00 – 4:30 pm

Elizabeth Fry Suite
Friends House
173 Euston Road
London NW1 2BJ

The life of English-born Sidney Bunting (1873-1936) illustrates the complex social networks and values carried across the world in the name of the British Empire. The lawyer son of renowned Wesleyan social activists, Bunting was radicalized in South Africa. He was a founding member of the Communist Party of South Africa and a campaigner for black emancipation.

Allison Drew (author of Between Empire and Revolution: A Life of Sidney Bunting, 1873-1936) on

‘The complexities of Sidney Bunting’s life and work’

Programme

2:00 – 2:15 Arrival, coffee and informal conversation
2:15 – 2:20 Welcome by Edward Bunting
2:20 – 3:05 Allison Drew, ‘The complexities of Sidney Bunting’s life & work’
3:05 – 3:20 Coffee, tea and cakes
3:20 – 4:00 Questions and discussion
4:00 – 4:15 Changes in the family tree & closing by a family member
4:30 – 5:30 Drinks at the Norfolk Arms, 28 Leigh Street WC1H 9EP

RSVP: Edward Bunting at edward.bunting@btinternet.com; phone 07748 942 768

Black and Asian Britain seminars

2011-08-24T07:02:00.001-07:00

Institute of Commonwealth Studies, in conjunction with the Black & Asian Studies Association present:
Black and Asian Britain seminars
Senate House, University of London, Russell Square, London WC1
6 to 7.30 pm,

Everyone is welcome. You do not have to pre-book/register. (Contact: Marika.Sherwood@sas.ac.uk)

27 September (G34 - Gordon Room) Kate Donnington 'Feeding the ghosts': George Hibbert, the West India Docks and the memory of British Slave Ownership.' This paper will explore the ways in which George Hibbert has been represented in the West India Dock area. It will consider the relationship between the representation and memory of slave ownership in Britain.

18 October (The Court Room, 1st Floor) Kwame Nimako, ‘The Legacy of Atlantic Slavery: the Unfinished Business of Emancipation’. Abolition is a legal act, and this has taken place; emancipation is a social, political and economic process, and has not yet been achieved. Taking the Dutch situation as a point of departure, I offer an assessment of how current struggles over recognition, remembrance and commemoration remain at the forefront, as revealed, for example, in the 2007 bicentenary in Great Britain, and in the preparations for the 150th anniversary of the abolition of Dutch slavery which will occur in 2013. (Book will be on sale at £15)

15 November ( G32 - Russell Room, Room) Michael Ohajuru, ‘An Introduction to the Black Presence in Renaissance Europe’ as exemplified by the Black Magus's image found on a 16th Century Rood Screen from Devon. (Now in the Victoria & Albert Museum's Collection (W.54-1928). How did the image reach Devon and what might it have meant at the time?

Striking a Light in Waltham Forest...

2011-08-17T09:19:00.000-07:00

Waltham Forest Radical History Workshop present:

Striking a Light - The Matchwomen and their Place in History.

Louise Raw will talk on her Book “Striking a Light", about the Bryant & May matchwomen’s strike of 1888.
Her book celebrates the achievement of the remarkable young East End women who took on a ruthless cartel and won, and proves conclusively that they changed the entire course of British labour history, and were in fact the mothers of the modern union movement.

The life histories of matchwomen like Eliza Martin and Mary Driscoll, who were instrumental in the strike, are told for the first time.

Copies of the Book will be available for signing.

Tuesday 11 October, 7.30 PM,
Admission £2.50/ £1.50 concessions
Licensed Bar
Orford House Social Club,
73 Orford Road,
Walthamstow,
E17 9PU
All Welcome

Nearest Station: Walthamstow Central
Buses: Hoe Street

Waltham Forest Radical History Group
Information: 07973 443030

Llanelli riots documentary on BBC Wales

2011-08-16T07:00:00.000-07:00

BBC Wales have put out a half hour documentary on the 1911 Llanelli riots. interview with Tim Evans & others - this is the link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b013gbr7/Llanelli_Riots/

Keith Flett on the history of London mobs and London riots

2011-08-10T00:48:00.000-07:00

'The one thing we can say about London mobs and London riots is that they have defied over several centuries all attempts by the authorities to make their reappearance impossible and every effort by academics to argue that they are definitively a thing of the past. That seems set to continue to be the case.'
Keith Flett, 'I love the sound of breaking glass: the London crowd, 1760-2010', Spring 2011.

Photo Exhibition: Laslett's Carnival

2011-08-10T00:42:00.001-07:00

Photography Exhibition: Laslett’s Carnival

Exhibition Preview & Talk: Saturday, 13 August @ 7.00pm

Exhibition Dates: 13 - 31 August, 2011

Location: Tabernacle Gallery, Powis Square, London, W11 2AY

A photographic journey into the history of the Notting Hill Carnival and it’s early pioneers.

Featuring the work of such acclaimed ethnographic photographers as Charlie Phillips, Alan Thornhill and Homer Sykes, Laslett’s Carnival tells the story of the internationally recognised Notting Hill Carnival's growth, from it’s humble beginnings as a local street fete into Europe’s largest and most celebrated street
festival.

The exhibition highlights some rarely explored moments in time, including the work of Claudia Jones and the often-overlooked contributions of local activist Mrs. Rhaune Laslett and Trinidadian steel pan player Russ Henderson. For the first time, we shall see the true history of carnival’s evolution and the key players who were instrumental in it’s transformation, individuals such as: Junior Telfer, Sonny Black, Selwyn Baptiste, Sterling Betancourt and the architect of the modern carnival, Leslie Palmer.

Photographs chronicle the tale of how Rhaune Laslett and Russ Henderson merged an ordinary British children’s street procession with the distinctive sounds of the Trinidadian steel pan, thereby bridging some of the cultural differences and racial tensions endemic of the time. The photographic artifacts of this historic journey are on display in striking detail, bringing together a magnificent collection of images, many previously unseen, Laslett’s Carnival captures a rare slice of British history in a stunning exhibition spectators won't soon forget.

A discussion with some of the main protagonists of the time and the photographers who captured their experience accompanies this exhibition’s exciting preview.

Key speakers include Sterling Betancourt, Sonny Black, Leslie Palmer, and Mike Townsend, son of Rhaune Laslett.

For further information contact the press office:
Ishmahil Blagrove +44(0)20 7243 9191 or Email: ishmahil@riceNpeas.com

The 1911 Liverpool General Transport Strike Centenary Conference

2011-08-10T00:40:00.000-07:00

The 1911 Liverpool General Transport Strike Centenary Conference

SATURDAY 8TH OCTOBER, 10am-5pm
LIVERPOOL JOHN MOORES UNIVERSITY, 68 HOPE ST, L1 9BZ

**Tickets £5 waged / £3 unwaged from News From Nowhere bookshop, Bold St, L1 4HY**

This history is your history...

Mass Strike, syndicalist firebrands, running battles with police and troops, middle class citizens militias, a gunboat sent up the Mersey and two strikers shot dead...

This was Liverpool in 1911. On the brink of revolution? A mythical or pivotal moment in the rise of a radical city? What 'lessons' are to be drawn from 1911 as we face the current crisis in 2011? This is history meant for you!

Speakers include... Bob Crow (RMT), John McDonnell MP, Eric Taplin (author of 'Near to Revolution'), Richard Hyman (LSE), Sam Davies (LJMU), Charlie Kimber (SWP)... and more below.

The 1911 Liverpool General Transport Strike was the most significant episode in the stormy period of the 1910-14 Great Unrest when Edwardian Britain was shaken by mass strikes and open working class revolt. This revolt prepared the ground for mass trade unionism among workers. The history of 1911 is still relevant today as working people and their families face the greatest assault on living standards and public services since the 1930s.

The conference will provide meetings of popular history with discussion and debate on different aspects of 1911 including:

Opening plenary by Eric Taplin, author of 'Near to Revolution: The Liverpool General Transport Strike of 1911'

'Liverpool's Bloody Tuesday: 1911 and the State Response', Sam Davies (Professor of History, LJMU)

'1911 and its legacy: Foundational Myth or Authentic Tradition?' Mark O'Brien (Centre for Lifelong Learning, University of Liverpool, UCU)

'Syndicalism and Trade Union Officialdom', Ralph Darlington (author 'Syndicalism and the Transition to Communism')

'Reflections on 1911: Fred Bower and teaching working class history in the New Casaversity', Ron Noon (former senior lecturer in History at LJMU)

'The Changing Working Class: 1911 and today', Julian Alford (socialist activist)

'The 1913 Dublin Lockout and Jim Larkin', Francis Devine (SIPTU college, Dublin)

'Tom Mann: a Syndicalist in Liverpool', Richard Hyman (LSE, leading authority on industrial relations)

'The Labour Identity and the Strange Death of Liberal England', John Callaghan (Professor of Politics and Contemporary History at the University of Salford)

Workshop on 'Organising the Unorganised', Liverpool Solidarity Federation and others.

Closing panel discussion, 1911 and the Labour Movement Today: Lessons for the Present Crisis? Bob Crow (general secretary RMT), John McDonnell MP, Charlie Kimber (national secretary Socialist Workers Party) (an updated flyer with full details will be available soon)

We hope you can take part in the conference and help bring the spirit of 1911 into the present!

The team, 1911 @ 68 Hope St

'Like' the 1911 Centenary Conference on Facebook
Facebook Event for the 1911 Centenary Conference
1911 Centenary Conference @Liverpool City of Radicals 2011

Empire and Resistance

2011-08-02T06:04:00.001-07:00

Socialist History Society Public Meeting

Empire and Resistance

A special meeting with two leading socialist historians of imperialism, Robin Blackburn and Richard Gott, who will be speaking about their new books

Hosted in co-operation with publisher Verso and supported by the London Socialist Historians Group

7pm, 12th October 2011
Venue: Bishopsgate Institute, Liverpool Street
The event is free.

Richard Gott, former editor and journalist, is the author of numerous books mainly on Latin America, including a history of Cuba and the new Venezuela of Hugo Chavez. His latest book is "Britain's Empire:
Resistance, Repression and Revolt", which will be published in September.

Robin Blackburn, former editor of New Left Review, and author of a trilogy of books on the history of slavery in the New World, the latest of which is "The American Crucible: Slavery, Emancipation and Human Rights", as well as "An Unfinished Revolution: Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln".

Contact

Stefan Dickers (Chair, SHS)

stefan.dickers@bishopsgate.org.uk

David Morgan (Secretary, SHS)

morganshs@hotmail.com

Further information on the website:

http://www.socialisthistorysociety.co.uk/news.htm

Film: Children of the Revolution

2011-07-27T13:02:00.000-07:00

The Frontline Club in Paddington is screening Shane O' Sullivan's documentary 'Children of the Revolution' on the 8th of August. The film depicts the lives of left wing, female revolutionaries Ulrike Meinhof (of the Red Army Faction in Germany) and Fusako Shigenobu (of the international wing of the Japanese Red Army) through the eyes of their children.

For more information on the screening and the film please visit http://www.frontlineclub.com/events/2011/08/change-season-screening---children-of-the-revolution.html

The Match Girls' Strike / Harriet Law, Annie Besant and Eleanor Marx

2011-07-24T11:38:00.000-07:00

Two Socialist History Society Public Meetings

1. This year’s annual A L Morton Memorial Lecture
7pm Wednesday 28th September 2011

Louise Raw on “The Truth about the 1888 Match Girls’ Strike and its Place in History”
The speaker is the author of the book, Striking a Light: The Bryant and May Match women and their Place in Labour History, copies of which will be available at the meeting.

2. Socialist History Society Public Meeting

''Radical to Revolutionary Women in the 19th century:
Another look at Harriet Law, Annie Besant and Eleanor Marx''

7pm, 9th November 2011

Dr Laura Schwartz on Harriet Law
Deborah Lavin on Eleanor Marx
Marie Terrier on Annie Besant

Seminar consists of three short talks presenting new views of the subjects followed by discussion.

Venue for both events: Bishopsgate Institute, Liverpool Street
Free entry, all welcome, retiring collection
http://www.socialisthistorysociety.co.uk/

The Great Unrest and a Welsh Town

2011-07-19T03:56:00.000-07:00

Since Tim Evan's writings on the 1911 Railway Strike in Llanelli have featured in the past in the LSHG Newsletter, it seems appropriate to draw people's attention to the latest volume of International Socialism, which has a full article on this moment of intense class struggle a century ago entitled 'The Great Unrest and a Welsh Town

A Dis-Service to Scholarship

2011-07-19T03:52:00.000-07:00

For those that have missed it, Scott McLemee and Richard Seymour have recently drawn the attention of the blogosphere (if that is still what people are calling it) to Trotsky scholar Bertrand M. Patenaude's recent demolition of Trotsky: A Life by Robert Service. It therefore seems timely to highlight the LSHG's own demolition of Service's work by Ian Birchall over a year ago - aptly entitled Out of Service.

Pat Hudson on writing the history of the Industrial Revolution today

2011-07-19T03:37:00.001-07:00

The Industrial Revolution: A New History

Request for info on Young Communists

2011-07-14T04:44:00.000-07:00

From Evan Smith:

I am looking for material on youth/youth culture/music in CPGB/YCL publications from 1980 - 1991. (Besides Marxism Today and Morning Star) References, copies or general info welcome.
Please email: evan.smith@flinders.edu.au Thanks.

CFP: Marx at the Movies Conference

2011-07-08T06:50:00.001-07:00

Call for Papers
Marx at the Movies Conference
University of Central Lancashire
March 16-17, 2012

As the Lehmans Brothers filled for bankruptcy on September 15 2008 an
era came to a halt. No more was there a belief that ‘the Market’ would
work for the greater good as long as it was left un-regulated. As the
belief in neoliberal theory and practice collapsed, many turned to the
alternative theory – that of Marxism, not least because for Marx the
challenge for human thought was not simply to understand the world but
to change it.

Not for the first time Marx is ‘fashionable’. As David Harvey observes
in his introduction to The Communist Manifesto: ‘The Communist
Manifesto of 1847 is an extraordinary document, full of insights, rich
in meanings and bursting with political possibilities. Millions of
people all around the world – peasants, workers, soldiers,
intellectuals as well as professionals of all sorts – have, over the
years, been touched and inspired by it.’

The same can be said about filmmakers, film academics and students, in
view of the fact that cinema, as a collective endeavour and as an
industrial art, is an excellent ground to test Marxist dialectical
thought. But how has cinema engaged with Marxist theory and practice?
How has cinema engaged in processes to create radical social
transformation, including decolonisation and the liberation of women?
Is there a revival of Marxism in contemporary film theory and
practice?

These are some of the questions we want to discuss during the two-day
conference, hosted by the School of Journalism, Media and
Communication in Preston –a town of great importance to the history of
the working class, as testified by Marx and Engels’ writings. Papers
are sought for topics such as:

The problems of conveying Marxist thought on screen (including
attempts to screen Capital)
Representation of alienated and nonalienated labour and capital on screen
The work of Sergei Eisenstein, Bertolt Brecht, Jean-Luc Godard, Chris
Marker, Dušan Makavejev, Satyajit Ray, Ousmane Sembène, Alexander
Kluge, Ken Loach, Lars von Trier. Are they Marxist filmmakers?
Western and Eastern Marxist film theory and history
Socialist production, distribution and exhibition of films
Marxism, Third cinema and the cinema of revolt
Marxism and feminist cinema
Marxism, realism and non-realism
Screen images of Marx, Engels and Lenin

Organising committee
Prof. Ewa Mazierska
Dr. Anandi Ramamurthy
Dr. Lars Kristensen

Deadline for abstracts (max 250 words): 1 December 2011.
Please send abstracts to Ewa Mazierska
EHMazierska@uclan.ac.uk
Or
Lars Kristensen
LLFKristensen@uclan.ac.uk

Notice
The conference is not expected to produce a surplus value.

The Problem of the Middle East by Tony Cliff online

2011-07-06T05:34:00.000-07:00

The Problem of the Middle East (1946), Tony Cliff’s first book, has long lain buried in the archives. It has now been published online, just as the Middle East is alight once again with revolution. There is much in today’s wave of uprisings and revolutions that the Cliff who wrote the book as a young Trotskyist activist in Palestine in 1945 would recognise. The dictatorships shaken by popular revolts from below, the decaying hegemony of the region’s imperial powers, the rising tide of workers’ struggle: all these are explored in the book. Although when completed in 1946, the greatest struggles of the turbulent decade which followed were still in the future, Cliff showed remarkable prescience in seeing that the Middle East stood at the crossroads. The alliance between the old colonial powers, the landlords and big merchants which had formed the bedrock of the political order since the First World War, was in terminal decline. Rising social forces such as the nascent working class and an educated urban lower middle class were impatient for political and social change. Social justice, national liberation and democracy were the watchwords of their struggles – slogans which would be picked up again in the streets of Tunis, Cairo, Damascus and Sana’a in 2011.

Writing the book in snatched moments as he whiled away time in hiding from the police, Cliff was optimistic that Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution could be applied to the Middle East. The development of the workers’ movement in Egypt was central to his analysis. ‘The rise of an independent proletarian power’ there was a pivotal development for the whole region, he believed. After the book was completed, an explosion of strikes and protests against the British military occupation of Egypt in early 1946 sent him hurrying to update the manuscript to take account of these new developments.

Both the book and the revolution in the Middle East remained unfinished. Cliff moved to Britain in 1946, taking the precious manuscript with him. And although his prediction that a revolutionary wave would engulf the region was proved right, with Egypt, Syria and Iraq shaken by repeated popular uprisings, the outcome was not the one he hoped to see. Army officers in Egypt and Iraq seized power on the back of the struggles from below, but were able to deflect the revolution onto a track of state-capitalist economic development and crush independent workers’ organisations, a process Cliff would explore in his later writings.

Although Cliff’s hopes for socialist revolution in the Middle East in the forties were dashed, sixty years later, The Problem of the Middle East, still raises urgent questions for today’s revolutionaries.

Anne Alexander

[For an image of Cliff's 1946 pamphlet The Middle East at the Crossroads - see here]

CFP: Oral History and Working Class History

2011-07-06T05:29:00.001-07:00

Call for Papers

Deadline:

Dec.1, 2011 - Abstracts (one to two pages) and CVs

April 1, 2012 - Complete papers

Working Lives: Special Issue on Oral History and Working-Class History

Since the 1960s, if not before, labour and working-class history has been closely connected to the practice of oral history. Working-class historians were at the forefront of developments in oral history, often using this method as a means of recuperating the history of those who were less likely to leave archival and written sources. They created written histories, archival collections, museum exhibits and community projects that gave workers, their families and their communities a new voice, and a new place in history. Writing on working-class oral history has also encompassed far more than recovery projects; scholars have enriched the field of oral history by addressing questions about method, theory and approach, by offering critical reflections on our assumptions and expectations about oral history practice. Oral history has similarly enriched the field of working class history, posing new questions, challenging existing interpretations, and diversifying the themes and subjects we study

The Oral History Forum d’histoire orale is currently seeking contributions that engage with oral history and working-class history, broadly defined. This special issue will explore questions of method, theory, approach, and examine the ways in which oral history offers a unique perspective and insights into working class history. University researchers, community organizers, educators, oral historians, public historians, and others who are working in this field are invited to submit theoretical and methodological papers, as well as empirically-based essays based on original research, reviews (books, new media, exhibitions, films, theatrical productions), and discussions for this special edition of the journal. Topics might include (but are not limited to) paid work, unpaid labour, the labour movement, politics, working-class communities and culture, the intersections of gender, race/ethnicity, religion, and class, immigrant and migrant communities, unemployment and poverty, and state interventions in working-class lives. All article submissions will be subject to the normal peer review process of the journal.

The Oral History Forum d’histoire orale is the online journal of the Canadian Oral History Association www.oralhistoryforum.ca which serves as the online meeting place for scholars, community activists, librarians, archivists, and others who use oral history to explore the past. Through this open-access collection we hope to generate discussion on this important theme and provide a valuable resource for people interested in the study of oral history and working-class history, whether in the classroom or in their own research. Articles will be published as soon as they are ready, ensuring a quick turn around time for early submissions, and the collection will be launched in 2012.

Please send queries and submissions to:

Joan Sangster and Janis Thiessen

jsangster@trentu.ca and Janis.Thiessen@unb.ca

Guest Editors, Oral History Forum d’histoire orale

University of Winnipeg

515 Portage Avenue

Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3B 2E9

George Padmore plaque in Camden

2011-06-19T05:19:00.001-07:00

George Padmore, celebrated pan-Africanist and revolutionary organiser, will be commemorated on what would have been his 98th birthday with a blue heritage plaque in Camden, the London borough in which he lived from 1941 to 1957 with his partner and collaborator, Dorothy Pizer.

The plaque will be unveiled in the presence of the High Commissioners of Trinidad and Tobago and Ghana and the Mayor of Camden. The ceremony will be followed by a reception at Mayor's office, Camden Town Hall, Euston Road, London WC1H 9JE (5 mins walk).

The George Padmore Institute is a co-organiser of the event with the Nubian Jak Community Trust.

Date: Tuesday 28 June
Venue: 22 Cranleigh Street, Camden, london NW11BD
Time: 1.00pm

Tube: Mornington Crescent, Euston

Edited to add: See here and also this new CLR James legacy project website

Conference on Black Political Activists in Britain

2011-06-16T03:47:00.000-07:00

Organised by the Black and Asian Studies Association
Saturday, 25th June 2011
University College London,
Stewart House,
32 Russell Square,
London, WC1B 5DN
Black Political Activists in Britain
When BASA was founded in 1991, one of its main aims was to campaign for the recognition of the role that people of Black and Asian descent have played in British life for centuries. This anniversary year conference reflects the theme of campaigning by looking at their role in politics. Go to the website for further information
http://www.blackandasianstudies.org/index.html

CFP: Critique Special Issue on Rosa Luxemburg

2011-06-15T08:23:00.000-07:00

Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory: Call for Papers on Rosa Luxemburg. 2012 Special Issue: Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg
Call for Articles
Born in Tsarist Poland in 1871, she emigrated to Germany and became one of the most inspirational figures of the Second International. Luxemburg arrived in Berlin in the spring of 1898 in time join the Revisionist debates, which made her famous as a Marxist theoretician. Time and again Luxemburg proved herself as a gifted orator, inspiring workers to join the socialist movement, as well as she a talented theoretician, attempting to expand Marx's work and make it relevant to early 20th century movement. However, Rosa Luxemburg was and remains a controversial figure.
To mark the 140th anniversary of Rosa Luxemburg’s birth, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory will be producing a special issue on and around Luxemburg’s works and her legacy. The special issue would like to examine some of her most well known works (such as the Russian Revolution, Mass Strike, National Question, and Organisational Question, Accumulation of Capital) and address their relevance to today.
What is Rosa Luxemburg’s legacy?Is her work still relevant today?During a time of economic crisis, does Luxemburg’s work, Accumulation of Capital have anything to offer the 21st century?Why does Luxemburg continue to inspire?
Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory welcomes contributions covering any aspect of Marxist political economy, philosophy and history. Articles should not normally exceed 7-8,000 words in length.
Articles must include an abstract of no more than 300 words and a maximum of 6 key words. Please note that Critique does not use the Harvard system and expects footnotes to appear at the bottom of the page.
For further instructions and advice for authors please visit: http://www.informaworld.com/critique . For further details about Critique visit: http://www.critiquejournal.net/ . The final deadline for articles is December 1, 2011. Please send articles via email to the special issue editor: Dr. Lea Haro, gziinfo@udcf.gla.ac.uk and to: critique@eng.gla.ac.uk

Reminder: LSHG meeting on Ray Challinor

2011-06-13T08:56:00.000-07:00

London Socialist Historians Group meeting:
Ray Challinor- Socialist Activist and Historian.
Speakers include Stan Newens

Saturday 25th June,
1pm, Germany Room,
Institute of Historical Research,
Senate House,
London

[Edited to add: See the Ray Challinor Internet Archive, which now includes pieces written by Ray on the 'physical force Chartist' Peter Murray McDouall and the miners' leader Alexander MacDonald]

Time to Tell - Gus John Book Launch

2011-06-04T02:42:00.000-07:00

Time To Tell - The Grenada Massacre & After...

Join Professor Gus John at Centerprise as he launches his new book "Time to tell - The Grenada Massacre and After" Plus: Special Guest Akala performing his poetry.
Free Event
5th June, 5.30-9pm, Centreprise, 136-138 Kingsland High St, London
This event is part of Centerprise's Midsummer Literature Festival

Legacies of Emancipation in the Americas

2011-06-04T01:52:00.000-07:00

Legacies of Emancipation in the Americas
14 June 2011, 18:30 - 20:00
Speakers: Robin Blackburn (Essex University), Richard Drayton (King's College London), Denise Ferreira da Silva (Queen Mary, University of London), and playwright and critic Bonnie Greer explore the long-term legacies of the processes of emancipation of enslaved African populations that began in the late eighteenth century in different parts of the Americas.
DescriptionThis event is co-sponsored by the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library and the Institute for the Study of the Americas, University of London.
Price: £7.50 / £5 concessions
http://www.bl.uk/eccles/events.html#legacies
Venue : Eccles Centre, British Library
96 Euston Road, London NW1 2DB

WEA North East centenary summer school

2011-06-04T01:49:00.000-07:00

INVITATION TO A GREAT WEA SUMMER WEEKEND IN DURHAM

Friday8-Sunday 10 July
The Workers' Educational Association North East Region is celebrating 100 years of providing adult learning in our region. As part of our Centenary celebrations we will be holding a very special weekend residential Summer School this July to coincide with the 2011 Durham Miners’ Gala at the beautiful College of St Hild and St Bede, Durham. Join us for three days of fun, friendship and learning!

The sessions will be interesting and enjoyable in themselves, but there is even more to this attractively priced weekend!

The summer school also includes an opportunity to take part in the historic 127th Durham Miners' Gala at which we will be unveiling the WEA North East Region's new Centenary banner. The Gala involves a huge procession with banners and bands through the centre of Durham City, leading to the Big Meeting on a nearby field with tens of thousands of people from all over Britain and the world.

There will be speakers galore from the trade union and other movements, and for the first time in many years, the Leader of the Labour Party will also be addressing the crowd.

The Big Meeting has its other features as well - a famous tea tent, union and Co-op displays, more of the bands, and a huge marquee in which you can find historical and other stalls, and not least the annual WEA stall where we launch our courses brochure for the coming year!

Every year, the Gala grows in size and variety. Although the pits have closed, the traditions of the mining villages bring about the yearly parading of former Lodge banners, and many local schools in County Durham have now made their own banners for the Gala. A video of the 2010 Gala can be found on the Guardian website (there's a slightly tedious wait before the introductory advert finishes!):

So, one of the sidelights of the Centenary summer school is that you get to stay in accommodation right in the centre of Durham City at a very reasonable price and within easy reach of other sights such as Durham Cathedral.

We would like to invite WEA friends from all over the country to join us for the weekend. For more information contact: WEA Regional Office, Joseph Cowen House, 21 Portland Terrace, Jesmond,

Newcastle upon Tyne, NE2 1QQ. Telephone: 0191 212 6100 or email: northeast@wea.org.uk

Book Launch: Jailhouse Lawyers by Mumia Abu-Jamal

2011-06-03T02:10:00.000-07:00

From death row in Pennsylvania, launch of a new book in the UK...

JAILHOUSE LAWYERS: PRISONERS DEFENDING PRISONERS v THE USA
By Mumia Abu-Jamal

Foreword by Angela Y. Davis,
Introduction by Selma James
Published by Crossroads Books
Price: £11.99
Free to Prisoners. Donations welcome to help cover costs.

Book Launch:
30 June 2011, 4-5pm
House of Lords, Committee Room 4
Hosted by Lord Ramsbotham (Former HM Chief Inspector of Prisons)
Speakers:
- Selma James, Crossroads Books editor, Introduction to Jailhouse Lawyers
· John Hirst, Ex-prisoner, won European Court decision for prisoners’ right to vote.
· Flo Krause, Barrister who represented John Hirst in the European Court
· Ian Macdonald, QC Wrote letter to US court on racism in Abu-Jamal’s trial, signed by over 100 UK lawyers
· Emmanuel De Silva, Jailhouse lawyer
· Benjamin Zephaniah, Poet, ex-prisoner
· Niki Adams, Legal Action for Women
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

From death row, award-winning journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal introduces us to fellow prisoners who litigate against their jailers, risking punishment or even death, to win justice for themselves and other prisoners.
“This is the story,” he writes, “of law learned not in the ivory towers of multi-billion-dollar endowed universities [but] in the hidden, dank dungeons of America – the Prisonhouse of Nations.”
Selma James’s Introduction presents the parallel universe of UK jailhouse lawyers who, like their US counterparts, are leading a justice movement inside prisons.

UK prisoners, denied the vote, are campaigning for this fundamental right. A legal challenge brought by a jailhouse lawyer supported by a dedicated legal team won a European Court ruling in 2004 that a blanket ban on votes for prisoners violates their human rights. Yet the government, in opposing votes for prisoners, acts as if those of us who are prisoners are less human, and deny that prisons and what goes on in them also frame the kind of society we all inhabit.

The UK publication of Jailhouse Lawyers is an opportunity for prisoners’ campaign for the vote and other efforts for fundamental reforms to be more widely known and supported.

WHAT PEOPLE HAVE SAID ABOUT JAILHOUSE LAWYERS

Anger with accuracy. Outstanding. Ian Macdonald QC

Deserves to be read by policymakers. Lord David Ramsbotham, former HM Chief Inspector of Prisons

Illuminates what is possible for jailhouse lawyers in Britain. Ben Gunn, UK jailhouse lawyer

A champion of law in an institution that is lawless. Benjamin Zephaniah, poet, ex-prisoner

Gallant prisoners who do battle with the authorities. Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve

A brilliant analysis of law and lawyers as instruments of injustice. Lord Anthony Gifford QC, UK barrister and attorney, Jamaica

A must read for prisoners and prison reform groups. John Hirst, former jailhouse lawyer

In the grand tradition of prison writing. Frances Crook, Director, Howard League for Penal Reform

An international learning tool – of particular importance to the Caribbean. Richard Small, attorney, Jamaica

The truth about death row and its distinguished inhabitants. Niki Adams, Legal Action for Women

Make way for inside voices. Everybody should read it. Flo Krause, barrister

Mumia Abu-Jamal has once more offered us new ways of thinking about law, democracy, and power. Angela Y. Davis, from the Foreword

They learn the law, the procedures, the jargon, and mount an often formidable legal defence. In the process they carve out a life for themselves. Selma James, from the Introduction

Book Launch: In the Crossfire

2011-05-30T05:21:00.000-07:00

This is to invite you to a BOOK LAUNCH/TALK
In The Crossfire: Adventures of a Vietnamese Revolutionary, by Ngo Van
Wednesday 8 June, 7pm Housmans Bookshop, 5 Caledonian Road, London, N1 9DX(2 mins walk from Kings Cross station)£3, redeemable against any purchase

Ngo Van joined the struggle against the French colonial regime in Vietnam as a teenager in the 1920s, suffering imprisonment and hardship. But when revolution swept Vietnam at the end of the second world war, the Stalinists of the Vietnamese Communist Party took control and tried physically to eliminate other socialists and anti- colonialists. Van escaped this massacre, in which many of his comrades were murdered. From 1948 he lived in exile in Paris, where he took a factory job and participated in workers’ movements before, during and after the 1968 general strike. Van, who died in 2005, wrote extensively about Vietnamese worker and peasant resistance, both to French colonialism and to Ho Chi Minh’s brand of Stalinism, helping to hand that history on to later generations. In The Crossfire, published by AK Press, is the English edition of Ngo Van’s autobiography.

Hilary Horrocks, one of the book’s translators, will talk about this unique eye-witness account of a little-known aspect of the anti- colonial struggle, and read from Van’s vivid story of secret meetings, arrests, torture, battles and insurrection. Simon Pirani, who researched the history of Vietnamese Trotskyism and edited some of Van’s earlier English-language publications, will also speak. There will be plenty of time for questions and discussion from all. Enquiries 07947 031268. Housmans 020 7837 4473, shop@housmans.com

Arundhati Roy in London

2011-05-30T05:19:00.000-07:00

Please join us for a public meeting and an audience with celebrated authors who will discuss their recent experiences in India with a special focus on the raging war against the poorest of the poor, the tribal people living in the heartland of India.
Arundhati Roy
From India and the author of recently published books“Walking with the Comrades” and “Broken Republic”
Jan Myrdal
From Sweden and the author of“Red Star Over India”
Basanta Indra Mohan
From Nepal and the author of“Imperialism and Proletarian Revolution 21st Century”
-Program includes:Presentations by the speakers,film and Q&A session-
Sunday, June 12, 2011
1:30 pm till 5:00 pm
Place:Friends House, Main Hall,173 Euston Road, London NW1 2BJ
Hosted by:International Campaign Against War on People of India (ICAWPI) www.icawpi.org info@icawpi.orgc/o Gorki House, 70 Stoke Newington High Street, London N16 7PA Tel: +44(0)20 7193 1605Co-organised by: IWA (GB), UNF Europe, ACDA, AFPRISA, TKM, GIKDER, 100FCC, WPRM-Britain, UFSO, CCRC,… (To be updated)Supported by: (TBA) For further information and contact with the organizers, please mail: june12-London@icawpi.org

John Riddell website

2011-05-22T07:08:00.000-07:00

Dear Friends,

I'm very pleased to announce the launch of this website.

This new website will feature both my current articles and as many as
possible of the pieces I've written over the past 50 years on history,
socialist theory, movement building, and many other subjects.

I will also use it to keep readers up to date on my ongoing research and
publications related to the history of the Communist International. There
are six volumes now in print, and a seventh, containing the documents of the Fourth (1922) Congress, will be published this fall.

Today the site features two new articles: A reply to Jeff Webber on the
situation in Bolivia today, and my history of the origins of the united
front policy in Lenin's time.

Altogether, there are forty articles on the site now, and more will be
posted soon...

I welcome your feedback. There is a "Comments" box at the end of every
article, and I hope to hear from you.

In solidarity,

John
http://johnriddell.wordpress.com

Gordon McLennan

2011-05-22T02:34:00.000-07:00

Gordon McLennan (1924-2011)

Gordon McLennan, a past General Secretary of the Communist Party, died on 21 May at the St Christopher's Hospice, after a long battle with cancer.

Gordon was born in Glasgow on 12th May 1924. Having joined the Young Communist League at the age of 15, McLennan served on the YCL Executive Committee from 1942-1947.

He worked as an engineering draughtsman but became a full time worker for the Party in Scotland, first as Glasgow City Organiser, then Glasgow City Secretary, then Scottish District Organiser and, in 1956, the Scottish Secretary. Having joined the National Executive of the Party in 1957, he became National Organiser in 1966 and General Secretary in 1975, succeeding John Gollan. He remained in post until 1989.
He contested numerous constituency seats: the Glasgow Govan constituency in the general election 1959, West Lothian in a 1962 by-election, Govan in the 1964 and 1966 general elections, St Pancras North in the 1970 and February 1974 general elections.
In his role as National Organiser, he became responsible for the Young Communist League, which he steered to make major changes in the 1960s and early 1970s in a revisionist direction. In the 1980s, he played a decisive role in creating circumstances where a major division of the Communist Party ensued. Enormous numbers of committed activists left or were excluded or expelled and some re-established the Communist Party in 1988, leaving the increasingly fragmented shell to continue for some four years.

Latterly, Gordon was a prominent activist in the Lambeth pensioners’ movement and was active in the Stop the War Coalition. In 1992, he joined the Communist Party of Scotland. He was a supporter of Respect led by George Galloway in the 2005 general election.

Africans in Tudor Britain

2011-05-21T02:04:00.001-07:00

The final Black and Asian Britain seminar for 2010-2011 has been moved to
13 July, Room 102 on Senate House, University of London, Russell Square, London WC1

Onyeka, 'Africans in Tudor Britain'.

We often see Tudor England through our own eyes and with our own prejudices. We project our mythology on to this time and in so doing we lose sight of what Tudor England was actually like. In particular this is evident when it comes to the question of an African presence in Tudor England. Most people ask 'oh were their Africans here? They must have been slaves!' or 'it must have been hard for them then?' This seminar will help to disprove some of these misconceptions.

Meeting on Rural Workers in East Anglia

2011-05-21T01:57:00.000-07:00

THE 2011 GEORGE EDWARDS MEMORIAL MEETING

“The Fight for the Rights of
Rural Workers in East Anglia
– Yesterday and Today”

Chairman :Rev. Graham Hedger, former chair of Rural Action East.

Speakers :
Mr. Stan Newens, Labour historian, former MP & MEP
and
Mr Ivan Monckton, RAAW member of the General Executive Council of Unite

Saturday 4th June - 2.00 to 4.00 p.m.
Farm and Workhouse Museum of Rural Life
Gressenhall, East Dereham, Norfolk.
Entrance fee (for the Meeting only) : £2.40.

There will be a Traidcraft stall selling fair trade products,
and an exhibit by the Wesley Historical Association.

This event is organised by
The East Anglia District of the Methodist Church and the
Rural, Agricultural and Allied Workers section of ‘UNITE’
in association with the Gressenhall Museum.

Karl Kautsky and the Republic

2011-05-21T01:54:00.000-07:00

From Ben Lewis:

Comrades and friends,

You might be interested in this series of translations of Karl Kautsky's 'Republic and Social Democracy in France', which I decided to carry out in the face of the mind-numbing wave of reaction initiated by the royal wedding.

I will be publishing one more part in the Weekly Worker (Kautsky on the Paris commune) and then the series will be published in its entirety later on this year.

Introduction (Lars T Lih -
'The book that didn't bark')
Part I:

Introduction (Ben Lewis - 'Same hymn sheet')
Part II: 'Second Republic and the socialists'

Please forward!

With communist greetings
Ben Lewis

SHS seminar and AGM

2011-05-19T05:53:00.000-07:00

Saturday 21 May 2011

Socialist History Society AGM, followed by public seminar on 'Aspects of East End History'.
Invited speakers include Sam Bird, Sarah Wise and Janine Booth.
AGM starts 1 p.m.; public seminar follows directly at 2.00 pm,
Venue: Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, London EC2 (opposite Liverpool Street Station). Admission to seminar £1.50; all welcome.

William Cuffay in Tasmania

2011-05-19T05:50:00.000-07:00

The historian Mark Gregory has got in touch to inform us of important new information which has come to light about the black Chartist leader William Cuffay after his deportation to Tasmania. See here, where the bulk of what he has discovered via Australian newspapers reside.

Seminar on Art Theory, Art History and Marxism

2011-05-18T02:45:00.000-07:00

LONDON SEMINAR ON CONTEMPORARY MARXIST THEORY

18th May, 5pm
King's College London, Strand Campus, K.3.11 Raked Lecture Theatre

Gail Day (University of Leeds)
Dialectical Passions: Art Theory, Art History and Marxism

LSHG Newsletter # 42

2011-05-15T09:28:00.000-07:00

The new summer issue of the LSHG Newsletter is now online here. Contents include Keith Flett on 'Monarchy and Old Corruption', Ian Birchall on 'Ray Challinor and the 1965 Courtauld Strike' and Tim Evans on 'Llanelli 1911'. Letters, articles, criticisms and contributions to the LSHG Newsletter are most welcome - please contact Keith Flett at the address above - the deadline for the next Newsletter is 1 September 2011.

Llanelli 1911 by Tim Evans

2011-05-15T09:18:00.000-07:00

From LSHG Newsletter #42 (Summer 2011)
[The following is a compiled and edited version of several short pieces written by Tim Evans for the Llanelli Star about the aftermath of the 1911 Rail strike and uprisingm there, where troops used lethal fire. The story of the strike itself was told in earlier issues of this Newsletter - see here and here. Tim Evans will be speaking on 'Llanelli and the great railworkers strike of 1911' at Marxism 2011].

The Tunisian revolution has set off a chain reaction across the Middle East which hangs in the balance as I
write. Will the popular movement win a famous victory? Will the largely conscripted army swing behind the
people, or will it opt to protect the status quo, ushering in an era of repression, as happened in Chile in 1973? The common factor that links all this today to the clashes that took place in Llanelli one hundred years ago is this: class struggle.

By 1911 British capitalism was restructuring itself. A prolonged world economic upswing was drawing to a close. The loss of Britain’s privileged imperial position and falling industrial productivity forced its ruling class, in order to protect profits, to rationalise the industrial base and cut back on the concessions that had been won by British workers. The ‘new unionism’ of the late 1880s and early 1890s was a direct response to this, and the class movement of 1910-1914 was a qualitative deepening of the process.

By 1911 the police had taken over most of the overseeing of popular protest. But in times of crisis the government still retained the military option.

Using the army against strikers during the industrial rebellions of 1910-14 was always going to be a risky business for our rulers. Earlier clashes had revealed the problems in militarily suppressing protest. In the 1819 Peterloo massacre in Manchester, cavalry charged into a crowd calling for parliamentary reform and an extension of the vote, killing 15 and injuring 700. Peterloo was an embarrassment for the government and the military, “the defining moment of its age”, according to historian Robert Poole.

In the long term Peterloo boosted the reform movement, although, interestingly, the government’s first instinct was to crack down on similar protests. In the aftermath of the killings they rushed through the so-called ‘Six Acts’, labelling any meeting for radical reform an “overt act of treasonable conspiracy”.

With the growth of industry and the factory system, using the military to suppress protest became more problematic. Modes of protest were likewise transformed. The food riot and the direct action of small, often clandestine groups like the Rebecca rioters gave way to mass action, mass strikes, the mass picket and demonstrations.

Clearly the old tactics of killing, transporting and executing would no longer work against an urban working class. There was the danger that killing protestors might transform a movement calling for reforms into one calling for revolution. The class divide also existed in the army, with officers drawn from the landed aristocracy. Ordinary soldiers, from the working class, often endured harsh regimes of punishment and flogging. There was always the fear they would identify with the people they had been sent to suppress.

Harold Spiers, a private in the Worcestershire Regiment, came from a family proud of the fact that all its men had been soldiers. He enlisted in July 1909 at the age of 20. In two years’ time he would be arrested and placed under military guard at Llanelli for refusing to shoot a man sitting on a garden wall.

In his statement to police, he said he had been in the firing party ordered to “defend the railway line against rioters”. He was ordered by his commanding officer: “You see that man on the wall. Shoot him.” He refused to obey the order, saying he would not shoot somebody “in cold blood”. Had the man thrown a brick or a bottle at him, it would have been different, he said. He had been arrested, and after the soldiers had retreated to the railway station he was held there in custody, but during the chaos of an explosion and fire had managed to escape.

He then walked nearly 90 miles, eating apples, nuts and blackberries on the way, to New Radnor on the English border, where he was discovered by Sergeant Evans on Monday, August 21. He admitted that he was a deserter from the army, and recounted the remarkable events that had taken place the previous Saturday in Llanelli. He was handed over to the military authorities and taken to Cardiff Barracks, where he was accused of “desertion whilst in aid of the civil powers” and remanded for a district court martial.

Meanwhile, excited news of the soldier who had refused to fire on workers was spreading. The case became a cause célèbre in the British trade union and labour movement in the month after the shootings. The railway workers of Llanelli and Swansea expressed their admiration for his heroism and called on the nascent Labour Party to campaign for his release.

The Cambrian colliers (who in 1910 had battled the police at Tonypandy) passed a resolution congratulating Spiers for his courageous stand. Penygraig Independent Labour Party recorded “our admiration for Private Spiers for refusing to shoot...we demand his immediate release”.

Ramsey MacDonald, Labour MP for Aberavon, said he would pursue the case. Justice, the paper of the Social Democratic Federation, opened a defence fund. The left wing paper Clarion published a poem called The Great Refusal of Harold Spiers—Hero which contained the lines:

’Shoot straight, boys!’ the officer shouted
The ringleader, there is your man,
These strikers deserve to be routed,
’Twas well till their trouble began...
So shoot for old England, your mother,
Deserters the world will deride’
He answered ‘I shoot not my brother’
And stood with his gun at his side.

The authorities realised they had to put a stop to this: they were already on the defensive after Llanelli—six people dead, many injured, Great Western Railway property set ablaze. As John Edwards shows in Remembrance of a Riot, some sort of deal was clearly struck, for when Spiers was at last court-martialled—his defence paid for by Llanelli Trades Council—the charge of ‘desertion’ had been replaced by ‘absenting himself without leave’—a much less serious charge. Spiers served only fourteen days.

Although the government and army took very seriously the danger of mutiny by soldiers sent to suppress industrial disputes, they clearly decided that this case needed to be brushed under the carpet as quickly as possible. The last thingthey needed while strikes and rebellion were spreading was another campaigning focus for people’s anger.

Determined efforts were made by the government to bury the case. In reply to a question about the fate of the soldier who refused to fire at Llanelli, Colonel JEB Seely, undersecretary of state at the War Office, twice denied that he existed. But early in 1912 further events thrust the case back under the spotlight.

At Aldershot barracks in 1912 a railway worker named Fred Crowsley distributed a leaflet with the headline:

‘HALT! ATTENTION! Open Letter to British Soldiers.’
YOU ARE WORKING MEN’s SONS. When WE go on Strike to better our lot, which is the lot also of YOUR FATHERS, MOTHERS, BROTHERS, and SISTERS, YOU are called upon by your officers to MURDER US. DON’T DO IT!...The Idle Rich Class, who own and order you about, own and order us about also. They and their friends own the land and means of life of Britain…When WE kick, they order YOU to MURDER us. When YOU kick, YOU get courtmartialed and cells. YOUR fight is OUR fight...

Crowsley was arrested and the leaflet confiscated, but then TheIndustrial Syndicalist reprinted it in full. The chair of the paper’s publishing board, Tom Mann, the paper’s manager and two printers were arrested under the Incitement to Mutiny Act, prompting Labour MP Keir Hardie to refer in the Commons to “the Llanelly case…when two men who were not participating in what happened and when there was no riot in any legal sense of the word, were shot dead...in giving advice to the soldiers not to shoot their brethren”.

Mann got six months’ imprisonment. The case attracted much publicity, and after seven weeks of militant campaigning by the labour movement he was released. In September 1912 the TUC demanded a public enquiry into police and army excesses at Llanelli and at Liverpool, where another two men had been shot dead during the transport strikes.

The 1911 strike wave was a class response to economic, industrial and political pressures and disappointed hopes. The Liberal Government had heavily defeated the Tories, having been elected in 1906 on the promise of widespread reforms, including a campaign against “landlords, brewers, peers and monopolists”, launching schemes for national insurance and old age pensions. 29 MPs from the nascent Labour Party had also been sent to Parliament, carrying the hopes of many workers. But Labour in Parliament was a huge disappointment, tail-ending the Liberals on most issues. Wages did not increase, nor did the position of the mass of workers improve. In fact, by 1911 things were getting worse.

The 1911 strikes were for better pay but also a protest against Capital’s new strategy of incorporating labour movement and union leaders. The direct, uncompromising nature of the struggles was partly because they were not contained within existing union organisation. They were a revolt on two fronts, against employers and state on the one hand but against the established union and Labour Party leaderships and collective bargaining machinery on the other.

The new strategies, especially the fundamental innovation of the period, the solidarity strike, were developing as ways of exerting maximum pressure by rank and file workers. Direct action seemed to many workers the way forward. The ideas of revolutionaries, syndicalists like Tom Mann and Ben Tillett— the latter was the star speaker at the Llanelli demonstration against the shootings—suddenly resonated for many.

Mann and Tillet were part of an international revolutionary movement. Revolutionary syndicalism swept many parts of Europe, the USA, Latin America and Australia between the 1890s and the 1920s. Its aim was to overthrow capitalism through industrial class struggle and build a new socialistic order in which workers would be in control. Change would come neither through parliamentary pressure nor a political insurrection leading to state socialism, but would be achieved through direct action and the general strike, winning workers’ control over the economy and society.

A hundred years later the blatant attempts to stuff the pockets of the bankers while driving the poor into deeper poverty is causing a worldwide class reaction that may yet see a revival of the spirit of Britain 1911.

[Tim Evans continues with a discussion of syndicalism and of why Llanelli 1911 has been largely “airbrushed from history” below]

Working for the Revolution [from Llanelli Star #17]
The question of syndicalism is central to understanding what went on in Llanelli in August 1911. Not because there were specific syndicalists who were active in Llanelli during the strike, but because for a few brief
years, syndicalism cut with the grain of the experience of many workers, not just in Wales but across Great Britain and, indeed, the world. The great British class confrontations of this time, whether in Llanelli, Liverpool or Hull, are classic revolutionary syndicalist scenarios.

The French word syndicalisme simply means trade unionism. But the syndicalists had a quite specific take on trade unions: they wanted to turn them into organising centres for class struggle and revolution. Syndicalists quite correctly saw the power which could be wielded by organised workers, fighting independently and for themselves. They also saw the tendency of the so-called ‘leaders’ of the labour movement, whether in parliament or the unions, to muzzle and deaden that movement’s fighting edge.

At its peak, British syndicalism influenced many. Sales of the Industrial Syndicalist Education League’s paper, The Syndicalist reached 20,000 in 1912 and two conferences organised by the paper represented 100,000 workers.

But there were weaknesses too. The syndicalists failed to create a political dimension, seeing their industrial strategy as all-encompassing, and distrusting ‘politics’. This meant that they could not engage with other radical movements such as the fight for women’s emancipation or the Irish struggles. Crucially, it meant they had not built up a network of activists who could co-ordinate resistance as world war approached.

But, for those all too brief years before the war, syndicalist scenarios were fought out across Britain. It is this which accounted for the influence of revolutionary syndicalism – not that workers read about and absorbed Marxist and anarchist theories, but that they found themselves engaged directly in class battles which proved the truth of those ideas and strategies.

Bob Holton, the historian of British syndicalism, and Deian Hopkin, who wrote the first serious assessment of Llanelli 1911 (and who will be speaking in Llanelli in August at the Railway Strike Forum) mention the phenomenon of “proto-syndicalism”. Workers on the mass picket or in the streets shared “the aspirations of syndicalism without articulating, or even being aware of, its theoretical framework” [Deian Hopkin, Welsh History Review 1983 p 511]. Workers learned from their own experience that the state was on the side of capital, that their leaders could not be relied upon and that solidarity and direct action worked. Could trade union consciousness become revolutionary?

What about the workers? [From Llanelli Star, # 18]
In the 1980s , when I first began to research the Llanelli strike and uprising, what struck me immediately was how few people had ever heard of it, considering the significance and high drama of the events. Why was this? Why was the story so invisible, so “hidden from history”?

In general terms, there has always been a tendency in the mass media to play down aspects of people’s experience which relates to collective work. Rarely will you see workers portrayed as powerful, as possessing a collective sense of class identity, or even as existing at all. Just think of the last time you saw somebody in Eastenders at work. They are all shopkeepers, bar staff, stallholders, car mechanics – your classic small businessmen and women – the petit bourgeoisie. In the soap world, nobody ever goes to work in a factory, an office, a school, a call centre, or in construction or transport (except for a few cabbies).

When TV news items seek for comment or opinion how often do they actually speak to workers themselves, or to their trade union representatives, except impossibly briefly? Over the past few months I have seen plenty of politicians, bosses and bankers talking about the necessity for cuts. But the number of workers and union leaders asked for their opinions I can count on the fingers of one hand.

Yet, even after the mass redundancies of the last three decades our trade unions still represent millions of people – they are the biggest voluntary organisations in Britain, into which thousands of people pour hours and hours of unpaid effort. The recent Trades Union Congress march in London brought half a million onto the streets, and was quite rightly widely reported and celebrated by many. But for most of the media most of the time the world of trade unionism is ignored, unless it is to do a hatchet-job on a ‘selfish’ strike!

As Marx pointed out, those who control the means of production also control the means of production of ideas. The media barons, from Northcliffe and Beaverbrook to Murdoch, have always been fabulously wealthy, and it is the ‘world-view’ of this ruling class which is projected onto our screens and newspapers. If working-class people appear on our screens at all it is as the crazed, dysfunctional families of the Jeremy Kyle Show. One could be forgiven for believing, on this showing, that the entire British working class was either morbidly obese, incestuous or chronically alcoholic!

Sir Alan Sugar, meanwhile, and the ghastly venture capitalists of Dragon’s Den are held up to us as awesome examples of dynamism and competitiveness that we should all strive to ape. In this topsy-turvey world, workers’ collective power doesn’t get a look-in.

Welsh Workers Writing Their Own History [From Llanelli Star # 19]
One of the reasons that events at Llanelli in 1911 have not been awarded their real historical significance is because there were not really the resources available at the time to analyse the events from a working-class perspective.

In his book on Llanelli 1911, Killing No Murder, Rob Griffiths argues that the labour movement in Wales in 1911 had neither the ‘class consciousness’ nor the resources ‘to produce and utilise its own history.’ Indeed, “the study and manufacture of Welsh history was only just beginning to be rescued from Celtic antiquarianism; and the first modern Welsh historians – products of Oxford University and the fledgling University of Wales – were Liberal, petty bourgeois and ‘Welsh Nationalist’ in their outlook and preoccupations.”

The term ‘Welsh Nationalist’ is meant here, I assume, not in the electoral sense but in the ideological, and it is true that even today the interpretation of the Llanelli events can take a nationalist turn, focussing on the English regiments and on Churchill’s role, while playing down the villainy of the local crachach such as Thomas Jones and the other two J.P.s who read the Riot Act – F.R.Nevill and Henry Wilkins.

Interestingly, too, the first march and rally to remember the two shot men (if you discount the one in September 1911) was initiated in 1981 not by the Labour party or a trade union, nor by Plaid, but by the short-lived Welsh Socialist Republican Movement – a group that attempted to marry socialist and Welsh nationalist ideas. Those wanting the events to be commemorated today often come from a perspective which is influenced by ‘left’ nationalism, however you might want to define that term.

I think Rob is rather sweeping in his rather down-beat assessment of the ‘class consciousness’ of the Welsh labour movement in 1911. Certain South Wales radicals, influenced by syndicalism, were attempting as early as 1908 to set up study groups. At Ruskin College, Oxford, the programme of working class education was supported by the South Wales Miners Federation. The college aimed at educating individuals to promote social reform ‘without class bias’ rather than the training of working class leaders for revolutionary class conflict, and the curriculum was therefore sharply orientated against marxist ideas. In 1908 radical students and staff went on strike in protest, later breaking away to form the Central Labour College and the ‘Plebs League’.

In January 1909 the South Wales Plebs League was set up, with the syndicalist miner Noah Ablett playing an important role. However, the Plebs were an activist rather than an academic network and Rob is probably correct that they were not in a position to produce “substantial accounts of...(the Welsh working class’s) own past written from a ‘class struggle’ perspective.”

A Deafening Silence [from Llanelli Star #20]

Last week I began to look at just why so few people know about the events which occurred in Llanelli in August 1911. These days the mass media pay very little attention to the history of workers’ self-organisation, or to anything which might reflect any sense of there being a “working class”. Especially since the collapse of the eastern bloc states from 1989 and the global turn to ‘free market’ economics, there has been, media-wise, a systematic ignoring of the ideas of “class” and “socialism”. It is only now, as the economic system lurches once more into crisis, that the contribution of Marx in explaining capitalism is beginning to be recognised once more.

But the deafening silence surrounding the Llanelli events cannot be explained away simply in these terms. After all, the strike and riots at Tonypandy a year earlier were also class struggles. The name of Tonypandy has been quite rightly seared into the consciousness of the Welsh working class. So why the lack of traction for the Llanelli story?

First of all we need to acknowledge a debt to those who kept the story alive – who ‘kept the flame burning’, who realised the importance of the events in Llanelli in 1911 and put pen to paper to keep this on record. The foremost of these are: Deian Hopkin, John Edwards and Robert Griffiths, all of whom will be speaking at the Rail Strike Round Table Forum in Glenalla Hall on Thursday 18 August this year, during the centenary commemorations.

Deian Hopkin’s essay, published in the Welsh History Review of 1983, was the first attempt by an historian to focus exclusively on “The Llanelli Riots, 1911”. In it Deian stresses the strange silence around the Llanelli events: “...the memory faded and all but disappeared. Occasionally, historians have resurrected the events to illustrate...the period of profound industrial unrest before 1914, but Llanelli itself became remarkably reticent about this dazzling moment in its otherwise uneventful history.”

John Edwards agrees that “the story of the riots is largely untold, often misrepresented by historians, and almost completely unknown to the people of Llanelli...the town...has suffered a kind of corporate amnesia.” Robert Griffiths too states that: "the traumatic killings in Llanelli were rarely if ever recalled by any section of the Welsh labour movement ...The graves of John John and Leonard Worsell were allowed to fall into disrepair, the inscriptions on their headstones to fade and crumble.” Why did the name of Tonypandy become synonymous with Welsh class struggle while the arguably more serious events at Llanelli a year later became airbrushed from history?

Ray Challinor and the 1965 Courtauld Strike

2011-05-15T08:41:00.000-07:00

From LSHG Newsletter, # 42 (Summer 2011)
By Ian Birchall
Ray Challinor, who died in January, will be remembered as a socialist historian who wrote on topics from Chartism to the Second World War. But Ray was also a lifelong activist, and he was able to write so well about the labour movement because he knew it not just from the archives, but from the inside.

As a tribute to Ray (whose articles I first read and learned from in 1959) this is a short account of an episode in the history of the British working class in which Ray’s role had a certain significance. I have told it mainly through contemporary documents, especially various articles and letters by Ray himself. [Readers will note the language of the time, in particular the use of the word “coloured”, much more common then than now. Also, as far as I know, all the strikers were male.]

Racism had come to the centre of the political stage in the 1964 election, when Tory Peter Griffiths in Smethwick won a seat against the national swing with an openly racist campaign.

In the following May the Courtauld strike began. The causes of the strike, and the problems it raised, were set out in an article written by Ray in the mid-June issue of Labour Worker (forerunner of Socialist Worker and reprinted as an appendix to this article.

Ray also reported on the strike in The Week, a weekly socialist news analysis sponsored by various Left Labour MPs and socialist intellectuals. [See issue of 10 June 1965] He travelled to Preston as am member of the Labour Party in Westhoughton, near Wigan, where he was then working.

The fullest account of the strike is a document called “The Strike at Courtaulds, Preston”, written by Paul Foot and published as a supplement to the July 1965 issue of the Newsletter of the Institute of Race Relations. Foot was then a young journalist on the Sunday Telegraph and about to publish his first book, Immigration and Race in British Politics. [Harmondsworth, 1965].

Foot’s account is about 3500 words long, and is followed by an anonymous appendix of some 5500 words, presumably added by the IRR, providing a lot of additional information. [Though cited as a source by several historians, this is a very rare document, and the only copy I know of is in the LSE Archives [reference HT E131].

There is also a very good article, “What Happened at Preston”, by Hamza Alavi of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination in Tribune [18 June 1965], and a much less good one in New Society, by John Torode, previously a leading light of the right wing in the Oxford University Labour Club. Alavi had grown up in Pakistan, and seems to have had a rather better understanding of the largely Asian strikers than most other commentators.

Most accounts note the active involvement of four “outsiders” in the dispute. These were Malik Khaliq, an experienced Asian trade unionist from Bradford, who came to help the strikers; Ray Challinor; and Roy Sawh and Michael de Freitas (sometimes known as Michael X) of the Racial Adjustment Action Society [RAAS]. According to Torode, who believed that the problems that produced the strike could be resolved by “shop floor education”, “Once the strike started the ease and speed with which outsiders seized control of it was alarming.” [New Society, 17 June 1965]

The rather better informed Alavi rubbished this notion: A.A. Chaudhry, the Chairman of the strike committee and his colleagues were, however, very much in the saddle. Union officials have tried to use the presence of the outsiders to suggest that the workers had been misled by a few outside “troublemakers”. They are kidding themselves.[Tribune, 18 June 1965]

As Ray pointed out, the strike leaders were no innocents. AA Chaudhry, chairman of the strike committee, was a man of considerable experience:

A former officer in the Indian police force; a captain in the army during the war, decorated for gallantry in the defence of Singapore; an executive in a large firm in the United States; and a highly qualified textile technician, having completed a three-year full-time course at Blackburn Technical College, where he was secretary of the Students’ Union. Would you expect a man, with such qualifications, to be doing an unskilled, dead end job at Courtaulds? The fact is that Chaudhry, and others like him, stands no chance of promotion. [Letter in Peace News, 25 June 1965]

In fact the role of the four “outsiders” seems to have been markedly different. Accounts vary, but Sawh appears to have briefly advocated separate black unions, though he was not supported by de Freitas. [IRR Newsletter Supplement, p. 5] After the the strike de Freitas claimed, in response to Torode’s article:

Far from attempting to “undermine” the more “moderate leaders”, my recommendation after thoroughly investigating the situation was that the strikers return to work... Within three days of my arrival in Preston, they did so. [Letter in New Society, 24 June 1965]

Malik Khaliq proposed to fast, to the death if necessary, outside 10 Downing Street if the talks with the T.& G.W.U. came to nothing; over a hundred strikers volunteered to join him. While this might have been a useful publicity gesture it was no substitute for industrial action. Ray appears to have been ambivalent about this; “Mr. Challinor was reported as intending to sit down but not to fast.” [IRR Newsletter supplement, p. 11]

For his part Ray devoted himself to raising money for the strikers from the labour movement, to show that the attitude of the local bureaucrats was not typical of the British working class. As the Lancashire Evening Post [8 June 1965] reported:

Mr Challinor, of Hindley, near Wigan, has been lobbying trade unionists in Oxford, Cambridge, London and the Midlands. He has also contacted universities and written to a number of MPs but refuses to disclose which. Said Mr Challinor: “The response has been good with promises of donations towards the strike fund.”

How much money was raised is not known – perhaps not very much, given the small size of the far left and the fact that the strike finished fairly quickly. Certainly Ray was highly regarded by the strikers, Foot reports that:

Indeed, perhaps the most popular of all the “outsiders” was an extra-mural teacher from Wigan, Mr. Ray Challinor, a leftwing socialist and former Labour parliamentary candidate, who underlined the need for the support of the trade unions if the difficulties were to be sorted out properly.

And Alavi explains:

The strike committee’s attitude was certainly not racist; they welcomed support from British workers and organisations who went to them to offer their support. Ray Challinor of the Westhoughton Labour Party, for instance, enjoyed the confidence of the strike leaders when he went among them. At a mass meeting of the strikers, which I attended, he was given a standing ovation by the 900 immigrant strikers. This was a moving and dramatic expression of their desire for solidarity.

Ray spoke out against those who wanted to wind up the strike; as the Lancashire Evening Post [9 June 1965] reported:

Two white speakers also addressed the meeting - Mr Ron Yates, a member of the TGWU, Preston Trades and Labour Council member and Preston Fabian Society chairman, and Mr Ray Challinor, CND member and executive member of Westhoughton Labour Party.

Repeating that it was an unofficial strike, Mr Yates appealed to the workers to return to work so the union could still negotiate on their behalf. Mr Challinor disagreed with Mr Yates' advice. He declared: “He is asking you to return to work when the personnel manager at Courtaulds has said he will pick and choose. This means quite a number of your more militant friends will be out on the tiles.”

Nonetheless after three weeks the strikers returned to work defeated. In an assessment of the strike in a long letter to Peace News, Ray was under no illusions about the seriousness of the defeat or the dangerous feelings that had been aroused:

During the strike itself undoubtedly relations were very strained; most of the leading figures received anonymous letters and threats of violence. A very definite danger existed that, after the pubs had shut at night, a brawl might break out which would develop into a race riot. Preston was an ugly place during the strike, fraught with many dangers. [Letter to Peace News, 2 July 1965]

However he stressed that the defeat was not total and that the struggle had not been futile. He argued that the strike “will probably be shown in the long run to have improved race relations” by showing that black workers were not a source of cheap labour who would undermine white workers’ conditions:

But Courtaulds got more than they expected. The strike disorganised production in an extremely costly way. In the end, when the men returned, the company was compelled to adopt a more conciliatory attitude. It has been unable to impose the intended speed-up and, a member of the strike committee informs me, conditions “are now 80% better”.

The company has also been forced to accept all the strikers back, without any victimisation. It will now have to reckon with men whose knowledge and ability has been developed by the strike. Whereas in the past coloured workers were largely inarticulate and prepared to accept anything, now they have changed and become less bashful. They have found their voice, which they intend to use.

All this is of the utmost importance. For, in my opinion, the bedrock reason for racial prejudice in this country is economic. It is the fear that coloured workers will accept lower standards, be used as cheap labour, and thereby constitute a threat to white workers. But Preston has proved the opposite. Coloured workers have not been prepared to accept lower standards. They did, in fact, conduct a struggle in the finest tradition of trade unionism and, by their actions, have made it more difficult for the Courtaulds management to impose a speed-up in other departments.

Was there a real threat of separate unions for black workers, as Ray argued in his Labour Worker article? In retrospect it is all too easy to suggest there was no such possibility. Certainly the strikers seem to have had little time for the idea. But as Hamza Alavi pointed out, it was not inevitable that unity would prevail. Responding to a report in Peace News[11 June 1965] he wrote:

Your reporter referred to the idea of coloured trade unions. Given the isolation and frustration of the immigrant workers, it is remarkable that this idea did not catch on. But this demand was never made by the strikers, who declared that anyone who talked of coloured unions was an enemy of the coloured worker. [Letter to Peace News, 25 June 1965]

The failings of the official trade union movement were all too real, and Ray’s perception of the danger was based on direct experience of the strikers. And if separate unionism had got a toehold, it might well have grown in plausibility when dockers and other white workers struck in support of Enoch Powell in 1968. Ray’s involvement must have provided an argument against separatism. Certainly Ray’s response – not to engage in abstract polemics about black separatism, but to show practical solidarity - was right. A decade later, when the whole labour movement gave support to the mass pickets at Grunwicks, they were moving in the direction that Ray had pointed to.

And certainly Ray was right to stress the unity of interests of black and white workers, even if had been too optimistic in his account of the results of the strike. Some time later at a T.& G.W.U. school, a white shop steward admitted that the white workers had been wrong:

In this instance, by accepting dual standards and giving up trade union principles, the white members of the union allowed the dispute to be turned into a colour strike. The shop steward told of how the white workers were subsequently compelled to accept the conditions originally given only to the coloured workers. [Stephen Castles and Godula Kosack, Immigrant Workers and Class Structure in Western Europe, Oxford, 1985, p. 155]

There have been several accounts of the Courtauld strike in books dealing with black workers in Britain. Unfortunately in all of them the stress on the – very real – racism in the British labour movement has given the impression that the Asian workers at Courtauld were completely isolated. Thus Castles and Kosack argue the strike showed “how the workers’ solidarity can be broken when racial differences are allowed to obscure the real industrial issues involved” (op. cit, p. 154)

Peter Fryer cites Courtauld as an example of a struggle which “struck no echoing sparks of solidarity in the white trade union movement”. (Staying Power, London, 1984, p. 386). A Sivanandan merely notes that the strike “exposed the active collaboration of the white workers and the union with management”. (A Different Hunger, London, 1982, p. 15). Ron Ramdin stresses that the workers were resolute but “disorganised and lacking in trade union experience”. (The Making of the Black Working Class in Britain, Aldershot, 1987, p. 270). All doubtless true, but somewhat one-sided. If these authors had checked out Ray’s role and some of the things he wrote about the strike, they might have given a more rounded picture.

Worst of all, the only account that mentions Ray does so in a very hostile manner. A book produced by the Race Today Collective argues:

For the first time the left wing of the Labour Party, in the person of a Mr Ray Challinor, offered assistance to the strikers in the form of attempting to get the left wing trade union movement to respond with support and solidarity motions. In every succeeding strike, with the exception of one or two, notably Imperial Typewriters in Leicester in 1974, the strike committees of Asian workers have been solicited by politicians of the left wing of the labour movement in search of a mass base. These politicians, the last of them to enter the public eye in the glare of Asian industrial struggle being Mr Jack Dromey of Grunwick, have one thing in common. They don’t believe in the independent movement of the black section of the working class. Their expertise with union conventions and constitutions, their undeniable ability to get resolutions passed in left wing dominated branches and connections with a labour movement network, inevitably give them, for a week or two, the appearance of men who know their way about the class struggle. [The Struggle of Asian Workers in Britain, London, 1983, p. 15]

This is lamentable ignorance. Challinor was a Labour Party member and doubtless used the fact when making contact with the strike committee. But he was hardly an agent of the Labour Party, which had just removed him from his position as a parliamentary candidate. It seems absurd to suggest that there was anything sinister about Ray’s attempts to get labour movement support; certainly the Race Today team seem to imagine they knew better than the rank-and-file Courtauld workers who welcomed and applauded Ray.

As for the comparison with Jack Dromey at Grunwick, it is grotesque. To those of us who knew both Ray Challinor and Mr Dromey [I almost wrote Lord Dromey, but that would be slightly premature] the differences are all too obvious. [Dromey once threatened to “ban” me from the Grunwick mass pickets because I was carrying a banner of the Right to Work Campaign which was not a “bona fide trade-union organisation”.]

Ray’s intervention at Courtaulds did not change the course of events, but it was a brave and principled stand, one that was typical of Ray, an intellectual and an activist for whom theory and practice were always inseparable.
Ian Birchall

Appendix from the June 1965 Labour Worker:
Coloured workers fight TGWU and ghetto conditions
DANGER – RACIAL SPLIT IN UNION
By Ray Challinor

The strike at Courtaulds’ Preston plant – the first strike to degenerate from an industrial issue into a racial one – has a momentous significance for the whole Labour Movement. We must invoke traditional working class principles, that injury to one is injury to all, and give a practical proof that working-class solidarity is something more than a pleasant phrase; otherwise we will see a terrifying new development – trade unions formed on a purely racial basis.
The facts of the Preston dispute are as follows: a department is almost entirely worked by Pakistanis, Indians and West Indians. The work, amid hot acids, nauseating fumes and in searing heat, proves to be too exacting for British workers. They spend a few weeks there, usually working far less effectively than their coloured brethren, only to be promoted to some more congenial and better paid job. But the coloured workers remain – however hard they work. Some have been at Courtaulds for as long as 12 years, but none of them have been promoted to any responsible positions. Even highly skilled men labour on at unskilled work – because of the colour of their skins. Despite all their protestations to the contrary, there is no doubt that Courtaulds (with Lord Butler as a director) have been practising racial discrimination, and that, in fact, they have created a black industrial ghetto.

SPEED UP
The explosion came when the firm tried to introduce a speed-up plan. Hitherto one worker tended one machine; now he would be responsible for one-and-a-half machines. As a reward for increasing the production norm by 50 per cent, the management would give them the princely sum of 3d. an hour more. But the workers protested. Most of them said that it was not a question of wages, but one of health. They just could not work any harder. As it was, many suffered from ill-health – eye, ear and nose complaints, and increased effort was an impossibility. They approached their union – the Transport and General Workers Union – only to be rebuffed. The organiser told them that the new agreement was “fair and equitable.” So, receiving no help from “their” union (which had tacitly agreed to the Company’s policy of discrimination over the years) they set up their own Action Committee. This has so far issued a number of statements:

Firstly an appeal to workers, irrespective of colour and creed, for financial assistance.
Secondly, an attempt [sic] to the T.& G.W.U. to meet them, so that some attempt at agreement could be made.
Thirdly, an appeal to Frank Cousins to intervene in what could easily develop into the ugliest racial issue in British history. [Cousins was General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, but was at the time a Labour MP and a minister in the Wilson government. IB]

BLACK UNIONS
It is highly important that a solution be quickly found. The basis of most racial prejudice in Britain is economic – the fear of the black men’s threat to white men’s jobs. If the strike continues, resulting in a shut down of other sections of the works, then this imaginary fear will become a reality: Smethwick will smell like a fragrant lily to the racial cesspool of Preston. And, what is worse, the future could contain many Prestons – for, without assistance from outside, the cold logic of events will push strikers towards the formation of separate black unions. If this calamity is to be avoided, it must be by British workers showing quite clearly that they do not believe in “white” trade unions, and that they will accept their coloured brothers as equals.

The following practical steps must be taken NOW:
First, the strike must revive maximum support – non-coloured workers should demonstrate solidarity by joining the picket lines.
Second, agitation must bring pressure to bear on the T. & G.W.U. to adopt a more tolerant attitude and represent all sections of their membership.
Third, money should be sent, as soon as possible, to:

COURTAULDS STRIKE COMMITTEE
4, SERGEANT STREET,
PRESTON, LANCS.Edited to add:
LSHG Meeting
Saturday 25th June, 1pm [Germany Room, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House, London] Ray Challinor- Socialist Activist & Historian.
Speakers include Stan Newens

Finally, Ian Birchall will be launching his new much anticipated biography Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time, with videoclips of Cliff, at Marxism 2011

Jeffrey B Perry on Hubert Harrison

2011-05-15T08:09:00.000-07:00

Karia Presents An “In Tribute” Event Featuring A Presentation By Dr. Jeffrey B. Perry
Based on his Biography Hubert Harrison:The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918

During Discussion he will be able to refer to: Theodore W. Allen’s works: The Invention of the White Race ... @ Centerprise 136-138 Kingsland Road Dalston, London, E8 2NS
Friday, 20th May, 2011 7:30 – 10:00PM
Donations: £3.00
Restaurant on site
Bookings, and other information from: Karia Press: kariapress@yahoo.co.uk
Tel. 0750 4661 785
Books will be available for sale at the event.
If you wish to order a copy(ies) of the book(s) in advance, please email or call for availability and prices.

To get to the venue: London Overground: Dalston Kingsland or Dalston Junction. Buses: 149, 76, 243, 67, 236.

Background information on Hubert Harrison
Hubert Harrison, (1883-1927) was an immensely skilled writer, orator, educator, critic, and political activist who, more than any other political leader of his era, combined class consciousness and anti- white-supremacist race consciousness into a coherent political radicalism. Harrison profoundly influenced “New Negro” militants, including A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey, and his synthesis of class and race issues is a key unifying link between the two great trends of the Black Liberation Movement: the labour and civil-rights- based work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the race and nationalist work associated with Malcolm X. Harrison played unique, signal roles in the largest class radical movement (socialism) and the largest race radical movement (the New Negro/Garvey) movement of his era. He was the foremost Black organizer, agitator, and theoretician of the Socialist Party of New York, the founder of the “New Negro” movement, the editor of the “Negro World,” and the principal radical influence on the Garvey movement. He also helped transform the 135th Street Public Library into an international center for research in Black culture (known today as the world-famous Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture). His biography offers profound insights on race, class, religion, immigration, war, democracy, and social change in America.

About the author
Jeffrey B. Perry is an independent, working class scholar who was formally educated at Princeton, Harvard, Rutgers, and Columbia Universities. He was a long-time (33 years) activist, elected union officer with Local 300, and editor for the National Postal Mail Handlers Union (Division of LIUNA, AFL-CIO, CTW). Dr. Perry preserved and inventoried the Hubert H. Harrison Papers (now at Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library) and is the editor of A Hubert Harrison Reader (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). He is also literary executor for Theodore W. Allen, author of The Invention of the White Race [2 vols., Verso, 1994 and 1997), and edited and introduced Allen's Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race.

Keith Flett on Monarchy and Old Corruption

2011-05-14T03:50:00.000-07:00

From London Socialist Historian Group Newsletter #42 (Summer 2011)
The historian Antony Taylor makes the point that while a tradition of republicanism in Britain, whether defined on the left or the right, is difficult to pin down and mostly a minority trend, sentiments of antimonarchism have often been popular and sometimes part of the political mainstream.

We need only think back to the death of Princess Diana in 1997 to see all of these trends very much in the modern political mix. Historically Britain—or more strictly given the date, England—can claim to have been first in the antimonarchy stakes. It was in Whitehall on 30 January 1649 that King Charles I had his head cut off and a Commonwealth under Cromwell was created. It lasted only to the Restoration in 1660, and the work of modernisation had several more turning points, from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 to something which almost was a revolution, the 1832 Great Reform Act.

It is difficult to sustain an argument that a genuine anti-monarchist tradition can be directly traced back to 1649, although if one looks at the efforts to ignore or play down the history of Cromwell and the New Model Army in many places in England—particularly churches and castles—it is obvious that the ruling class have never quite forgotten the significance of that day. Its equivalent in France is a national holiday. Not here.

Anti-monarchism was certainly alive in the early nineteenth century with the Queen Caroline affair (when a parliamentary enquiry into the queen’s conduct, instigated by the king in hopes of getting rid of her, unleashed a popular scandal), and the wider tradition of republicanism was given a huge boost by the revolutions of 1848 across Europe. It was this that sparked the left Chartist leader George Julian Harney to start his Red Republican journal, its title, one suspects, deliberately aimed at provoking the authorities who had concerns about how many such red republican refugees had made their way to then-liberal England in the
aftermath of the defeat of the 1848 revolutions.

As Taylor argues, the antimonarchist tradition was something a little bit different, (in modern terms perhaps more reformist than revolutionary) and he makes the point that while it is often difficult historically to find a coherent and unified republican tradition—there was not agreement on what such a republic would look like—the antimonarchist movement is better defined and more popular.

In the anti-monarchist mind it was not the principle of a monarchy as such that was the problem but the behaviour of individual monarchs, how much they cost, and the whole aristocratic edifice of wealth and privilege that went with them. In other words, it was less an overt programme for political change and more a class movement, seeing the monarchy as a symbol of an unequal and divided society.

Popular critique of monarchy was an extension of the hatred of a society based on patronage and favour, the very real practice of Old Corruption. As a mobilising political programme, this had real strength long after the 1832 Reform Act and arguably up to the reform of the House of Lords in 1911.

A focus on opposition to the aristocracy, including in practice the monarchy, united Fabian socialists and popular Liberals. Reynolds’s Weekly Newspaper, the popular mass circulation radical working-class paper of the second half of the nineteenth century—it sold 350,000 copies a week in the 1870s—had anti-monarchism and stories relating to scandals about the royals as a cornerstone of both its editorial policy and its success in attracting a huge readership.Papers more directly associated with the Labour tradition as the century drew to a close were still more audacious and politically direct. The Clarion published, and gloried in, lists of aristocrats injured in hunting accidents.

The Land and Labour League of the early 1870s was one attempt to draw together the strands of popular radicalism—land nationalisation and republicanism—on the left, but we should also be aware of the countervailing tradition in the working class, the Tory one of ‘Beer and Britannia’, which also had a degree of popular support.

Keith Flett

LSHG Seminar Reminder
Monday 16th May 5.30pm [Pollard Room, Institute of Historical Research, Senate House London]
Republicanism & anti-monarchism.
David Renton 'Horatio Bottomley: from republican to conservative';
Keith Flett ‘The anti-monarchist tradition in England’

Nina Fishman Archive

2011-05-10T02:52:00.001-07:00

A tribute to the late socialist historian Nina Fishman

Black and Asian Britain seminar

2011-05-10T02:51:00.000-07:00

Institute of Commonwealth Studies, in conjunction with the Black & Asian Studies Association

Black and Asian Britain seminar

Tuesday, 17 May
Senate House, University of London, Russell Square, London WC1
6 to 7.30 pm, room G34

Christian Høgsbjerg, 'Mariner, Renegade and castaway: Chris Braithwaite, the Colonial Seamen's Association and class struggle Pan-Africanism in late Imperial Britain'

This paper will explore the life and work of one neglected but critically important black radical activist in inter-war Britain, the Barbadian trade unionist and socialist Chris Braithwaite (c1885-1944), better known by his pseudonym 'Chris Jones'.

Everyone is welcome. You do not have to pre-book/register. (Contact: Marika.Sherwood@sas.ac.uk)

Defend London Met!

2011-05-07T07:49:00.001-07:00

In April 2011 London Metropolitan University announced the closure of 70% of its courses, including Performing Arts, History, Caribbean Studies and Philosophy.

This proposal to massively reduce and restrict provision is a direct attack on the students, staff and the whole London Met community, and represents an attack on widening participation and the value of educational opportunities and the pursuit of critical thinking that universities should provide for all.

For more information about the campaign to save London Met, please visit:
www.londonmetsu.org.uk/ - also solidarity greetings to the London Met Occupation!

Brighton History Workshop on 'Struggle'

2011-05-07T05:53:00.000-07:00

Includes
'The Matchwomen's Strike of 1888 and their place in history'
with Louise Raw, author of the groundbreaking book 'Striking
a Light'

Saturday July 2nd, 1-5pm, Brighthelm Centre, North Road, Brighton
Admission free - contact Terry - terrylhm@virginmedia.com
for more information.
sponsored by Labour History Movement publications

Reminder: Summer LSHG seminars

2011-05-05T05:05:00.000-07:00

London Socialist Historians Group Summer 2011

Monday 16th May 5.30pm [Pollard Room] Republicanism & anti-monarchism.
David Renton 'Horatio Bottomley: from republican to conservative';
Keith Flett ‘The anti-monarchist tradition in England’

Saturday 25th June 1pm [Germany Room] Ray Challinor- Socialist Activist & Historian.
Speakers include Stan Newens

Also reminder:

JOHN SAVILLE: COMMITMENT AND HISTORY
7.00 pm, Friday 13 May,
Bishopsgate Institute, 230 Bishopsgate, London EC2
(opposite Liverpool Street Station)
Meeting to mark the publication of our book on John Saville, which discusses Saville’s major contribution to politics and history. Speakers include Richard Saville, David Howell, Kevin Morgan, Steve Jeffreys, Dianne Kirby and Madeleine Davis. Admittance free. All welcome.

For more book information, and special purchase price of £11.99 (normal rrp £14.99), go to
http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/books/archive/John_Saville.html

Event and book organised in association with the Socialist History Society
For more information: sally@lwbooks.co.uk

May Day Greetings

2011-05-01T00:18:00.000-07:00

...Let the winds lift your banners from far lands
With a message of strife and of hope:
Raise the Maypole aloft with its garlands
That gathers your cause in its scope....

...Stand fast, then, Oh Workers, your ground,
Together pull, strong and united:
Link your hands like a chain the world round,
If you will that your hopes be requited.

When the World's Workers, sisters and brothers,
Shall build, in the new coming years,
A lair house of life—not for others,
For the earth and its fulness is theirs.

Walter Crane, The Workers' Maypole, 1894

CFP: Historical Materialism Conference 2011

2011-04-25T11:18:00.000-07:00

Spaces of Capital, Moments of Struggle

Eighth Annual Historical Materialism Conference

Central London

10–13 November 2011

The ongoing popular uprisings in the Arab world, alongside intimations of a resurgence in workers' struggles against 'austerity' in the North and myriad forms of resistance against exploitation and dispossession across the globe make it imperative for Marxists and leftists to reflect critically on the meaning of collective anticapitalist action in the present.

Over the past decade, many Marxist concepts and debates have come in from the cold. The anticapitalist movement generated a widely circulating critique of capitalist modes of international 'development'. More recently, the economic crisis that began in 2008 has led to mainstream-recognition of Marx as an analyst of capital. In philosophy and political theory, communism is no longer merely a term of condemnation. Likewise, artistic and cultural practices have also registered a notable upturn in the fortunes of activism, critical utopianism and the effort to capture aesthetically the workings of the capitalist system.

The eighth annual Historical Materialism conference will strive to take stock of these shifts in the intellectual landscape of the Left in the context of the social and political struggles of the present. Rather than resting content with the compartmentalisation and specialisation of various 'left turns' in theory and practice, we envisage the conference as a space for the collective, if necessary, agonistic but comradely, reconstitution of a strategic conception of the mediations between socio-economic transformations and emancipatory politics.

For such a critical theoretical, strategic and organisational reflection to have traction in the present, it must take stock of both the commonalities and the specificities of different struggles for emancipation, as they confront particular strategies of accumulation, political authorities and relations of force. Just as the crisis that began in 2008 is by no means a homogeneous affair, so we cannot simply posit a unity of purpose in contemporary revolutions, struggles around the commons and battles against austerity.

In consideration of the participation of David Harvey, winner of the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize, at this year's conference, we would particularly wish to emphasise the historical and geographical dimensions of capital, class and struggle. We specifically encourage paper submissions and suggested panel-themes that tackle the global nature of capitalist accumulation, the significance of anticapitalist resistance in the South, and questions of race, migration and ecology as key components of both the contemporary crisis and the struggle to move beyond capitalism.

There will also be a strong presence of workshops on the historiography of the early communist movement, particularly focusing on the first four congresses of the Communist International.

The conference will aim to combine rigorous and grounded investigations of socio-economic realities with focused theoretical reflections on what emancipation means today, and to explore – in light of cultural, historical and ideological analyses – the forms taken by current and coming struggles.

Deadline for registration of abstracts: 1 May 2011

http://www.historicalmaterialism.org/conferences/8annual/submit
Preference will be given to subscribers to the journal and participants are expected to be present during the whole of the event – no tailor-made timetabling for individuals will be possible, nor will cameo-appearances be tolerated.