New book on Malcolm X

Malcolm X: Visits Abroad April 1964-February 1965
By Marika Sherwood

Malcolm X (El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) after a troubled childhood and imprisonment, became a Muslim on his release in 1952. A gifted speaker he became the major preacher and national spokesman for the Nation of Islam, indicting white America in the harshest terms for its crimes against African Americans. But tension between Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad, head of the Nation of Islam, led to Malcolm X's resignation in March 1964. He now made the pilgrimage to Mecca, became a Sunni Muslim and disavowed racism. While he had crisscrossed the USA many times for the NOI, Malcolm now travlled widely in the Middle East and throughout Africa, and also paid a number of visits to England and France, addressing Muslim, student and political organizations.
An erudite man of great charisma and intelligence, he was a national and international figure when he was assassinated in New York on 21 February 1965.
This book is an introduction to Malcolm's travels in Africa, Europe and the Middle East, taken from his travel Notebooks, autobiography, FBI papers and local newspapers.

ISBN: 978-0-9519720
Special sale price £5
Email Savannah Press: savannah@phonecoop.coop.

Marika Sherwood will be launching her fascinating book - which among other things has details of Malcolm's visits to not just the London School of Economics and Oxford University but also Birmingham, Sheffield and Manchester - at a Black and Asian Studies Association seminar on Tuesday, September 14 (room G37) at 6pm, Senate House, University of London, Russell Square, London WC1. Everyone is welcome - for more info see here.

Kick over this statue

The legendary 1980s band The Redskins once had a hit of sorts with a song entitled 'Kick Over the Statues' - not a bad sentiment, particularly in a country like Britain where one does not have to look too far for statues honouring various bloodsoaked ruling class 'heroes' - as chronicled by the late Colin Gill and Leon Kuhn in their marvellous little book Topple the Mighty.

It is therefore encouraging to see that a campaign has sprung up in the North East Welsh town of Denbigh against plans to build any new sculpture to pay tribute to a local ruling class 'hero', a particularly brutal imperialist adventurer HM Stanley, of 'Dr Livingstone, I presume?' fame and a central figure in the late nineteenth century European 'scramble for Africa'. As the campaigners letter of protest notes:

'We call on the people of Denbigh not to erect any statue to 'honour' the imperialist HM Stanley. A statue would convey uncritical approval and celebration of all aspects of Stanley - something not possible for such a controversial figure today. It is wrong to romanticise the African "adventures" of Victorian era imperialists. The racist ideas of the day led to hundreds of thousands of Africans being killed or mistreated - Europeans believing that their supremacy entitled them to confiscate land and exploit natives and resources.'

The nineteenth century diarist, W.S. Blunt, once recorded the following note after reading Stanley's autobiography, which gives some indication as to why Stanley became such a racist barbarian after arriving in Africa:

'Stanley, before going to Africa, though ill-bred and ill-educated, was a decent working man with a modest opinion of himself and a good heart, but the position he found himself in in Africa filled him with the usual idea of being the representative of a superior race, with right of command over the people of the country he was travelling through, and little by little he got into the way of shooting them if they did not obey his orders, or provide him with food. All of his later writing is an attempt to show that he had a high motive in excuse for these violences, the cause of Christianity, civilisation and the rest, till he became a contemptible humbug.'

Selected Writings of George Rawick

A New Book from Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company

LISTENING TO REVOLT: SELECTED WRITINGS OF GEORGE RAWICK
Edited by David Roediger with Martin Smith
Charles H. Kerr | 194 pages | 2010
To order send $12.00 plus $2.00 shipping to:
Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company
1726 West Jarvis Avenue
Chicago, Il 60626

This volume offers the first major collection of the wide-ranging and revolutionary writings of the late George Rawick, a leading figure in both radical history and Marxist sociology. Personal assistant to C.L.R. James, comrade of Marty Glaberman and Selma James, and friend of C. Wright Mills and Michael Harrington, he influenced such leading scholars as Noel Ignatiev, Robin D.G. Kelley, Peter Linebaugh, Rosemary Feurer, Huw Beynon, Margaret Washington, Bruno Cartosio, Nando Fasce, Peter Rachleff and John Bracey and organizations like Students for a Democratic Society and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. Rawick was a rarity who contributed decisively to African American history and to the study of white workers. His exciting scholarly and activist writings are generously represented here and put in context by David Roediger's extensive introductory essay on Rawick's life, thought, and politics.

"This is the best thing I have read on slavery in general and in particular in the United States. [It] will make history."
C.L.R. James on reading George Rawick's FROM SUNDOWN TO SUNUP

From the Afterwords:

"George Rawick could never accept the satisfied moralism of the Cold War dominant paradigms in social sciences. He moved from place to place. His many removals were part of his fight for freedom of speech and for intellectual honesty."
Ferruccio Gambino (University of Padua)

"Rawick was a white man who knew where he stood in respect to racism. Through his activism and his scholarship, he battled white supremacy, not solely out of sympathy for aggrieved others, but also because he wanted to respect himself."
George Lipsitz (University of California at Santa Barbara)

"He charged scholars to abandon the established academic tendency to dichotomize this proletariat as the regularized Sambo and marginally deviant Rebel; and to recognize these not as two different personality types, but rather as ambivalent, contradictory personalities struggling within the millions of subjectivities formed by radicalized and racist class society."
Enoch Page (University of Massachusetts)

CHARLES H. KERR SUBVERSIVE LITERATURE FOR THE WHOLE
FAMILY SINCE 1886

In Defence of History

The news that the Tories are going to put the Tory pro-imperialist ideologue Niall Ferguson in charge of re-writing the national curriculum for history in British schools is not altogether such a surprise, but it does signal how the current age of permanent war we live in has come to shape and disfigure not only the present but risks now shaping and disfiguring how we all think about the past.

Traditionally, the British national curriculum brought in by Thatcher during the 1980s seems to have been largely about cultivating 'Little Englander' nationalist sentiment - leaving one with the impression that while the rest of Europe experienced 'totalitarianism' and dictatorship, and the most barbaric forms of exploitation and oppression (lots of learning about Hitler's Nazis and Stalinist Russia) somehow Britain was destined to rule forever in peace and quiet through parliamentary democracy (indeed as Thatcher herself believed, Britain had apparently already enjoyed a 'thousand years of British democracy'). The old curriculum did not focus on British imperial history at all - because that might bring up some slightly awkward facts - the glaringly obvious decline of Britain as a world power by the 1980s for one, but more importantly the fact that the British Empire had very little to do with 'British democracy' but quite a lot to do with the imposition of dictatorship and 'totalitarian' forms of rule, and indeed barbaric exploitation and oppression. Indeed, as one Pan-Africanist critic, George Padmore, put it during the 1930s, 'The British Empire Is Worst Racket Yet Invented By Man'.

New Labour in power did not challenge this lack of focus on the empire in the curriculum at all, though as they waged neo-imperial warfare abroad increasingly their leaders did what they could to encourage imperial nostalgia - and a revival of the old 'imperial spirit'. Gordon Brown in 2004 declared 'We should be proud . . . of the empire' and in 2005 while in East Africa told the Daily Mail that 'the days of Britain having to apologise for its colonial history are over' - and essentially re-introduced 'Empire Day', though Gordon Brown had to settle for it being called 'Armed Forces Day' instead of his more imaginative 'British day'.

Yet now under the old Etonian David Cameron and his merry Oxbridge men including Nick Clegg and Michael Gove, it is clearly high time for the Empire to Strike Back with a vengeance - and they have hired the arch-imperialist Tory historian Niall Ferguson to ditch what he calls 'junk history' (he highlights in particular teaching kids about the black civil rights leader Martin Luther King) and try and cultivate the kind of 'proper traditional history' designed to serve the interests of the rich and powerful that Cameron, Clegg and Gove themselves learnt at public school. Ferguson is famous of course for not just being nostalgic for the British Empire of old (he remembers fondly his 'magical' childhood growing up in the former British colony of Kenya during the 1960s) but also being sycophantic about the new masters of the universe - the American Empire. Currently it seems the need is to ratchet up the propaganda level of the war on terror so that the idea of fighting and dying in Afghanistan for the profits of multinational oil and arms companies can be made more appealing to British working class kids. According to the Guardian, at the Hay festival, Ferguson declared that his new 'grand narrative' would mean not simply imperial nostalgia for the British Empire but that British children should be taught that the 'big story' of the last 500 years 'is the rise of western domination of the world'.

This should not surprise us - as historian Stephen Howe has noted of Ferguson, his whole 'world view' flows from two inter-linked assertions.

'Some people – mostly poor and dark-skinned ones – need to recognise that they are conquered, accept the fact, indeed realise that it’s in their own best interests to be so. And other people, especially Americans, must know and accept that they are conquerors and imperialists, shoulder the accompanying burdens, understand that such a role benefits everyone. As Ferguson says in the introduction to Colossus (2004): "Unlike most of the previous writers who have remarked on this, I have no objection in principle to an American empire. Indeed, a part of my argument is that many parts of the world would benefit from a period of American rule."'

Planning to produce a guide and materials for 'a four-year history syllabus on the west and the world', Ferguson declared the big question the course would attempt to answer, he said, was how in 1500 'the small warring kingdoms of Europe, which looked so feeble compared with the Ming or Ottoman empires, got to be so powerful'. He said the syllabus was 'bound to be Eurocentric' because the world was Eurocentric.

Yet as Howe notes, it is Ferguson who is irredeemably Eurocentric in his narratives of empire.

'The fact is that Ferguson systematically bypasses or blanks out every source which analyses or presents the perspectives of the colonised. There thus emerges a consistent pattern of distortion or one-sidedness: a pattern which tends to reinforce the prejudices of those he seeks to influence. Much of the impact Ferguson’s writing has had on public debate, especially in the US, stems from his being perceived as an expert historian whose arguments about policy are based on specialist knowledge. Ferguson is indeed a proficient historian with a great deal of accumulated learning at his disposal. But his authority does not extend to the histories of any part of the non-European world. When he makes claims about these, they must be evaluated as the arguments of a talented, opinionated amateur, not a scholar.'

It is doubtful therefore for example that anti-colonial struggles, revolts or even just the critics of empire, the likes of George Padmore et al, will be included on Ferguson's syllabus (will the likes of Padmore ever be on a British school curriculum syllabus?) - yet there are bigger issues at stake. For example, a related 'big story' to that of the 'rise of the West' is the accompanying rise of racism towards the 'other' over the past 500 years - something that originated with the barbaric criminality of the slave trade and colonial slavery at a time when ideas of 'liberty' were becoming fashionable in European metropoles. Dealing with this is critical, not least because outside Eton and Oxbridge, Britain is itself now a modern multi-racial and multicultural society, and some of the black and asian kids being taught Ferguson's 'new imperial history' in particular might not appreciate being told to simply kneel down and worship at the shrine of Western imperial power. Yet as I noted on this blog in a critique of Ferguson back in 2006, Ferguson writes racism out of the story of the British and American Empires.

'One of the central theses of the 'Oxford school' that Ferguson represents is that there is no link between Empire and the rise of racism. The two have to be distinguished completely and utterly. Which explains why Ferguson insists it is with the decline of the British Empire at the start of the 20th century that racist killing comes into its own - and suggests that only a strengthening of American imperial power in the 21st century can allow humanity to avoid new holocausts. Unfortunately for Ferguson, and his supporters, there is a quite clear link between American imperialism and racist massacres - as testified by, for example, Haditha'.

Overall, Ferguson's 'new history' offers us a return to the most traditional oldest forms of history, ones where myths about Western cultural 'superiority' and uniqueness were taken for granted and are now propagated again only with just a little more subtlety and sophistication. Ferguson in particular seems to have bought into Samuel Huntingdon's notorious Islamophobic thesis about 'the clash of civilisations'. The War on Terror is regurgitating some of the oldest racisms associated with empire in a new form, and just as the historians most favoured by the British political establishment at the high point of the British Empire were the most utter reactionaries available, so pro-imperialist, warmongering propagandists such as Niall Ferguson are promoted and fettered today among the academic and political establishment as Western imperial power finds itself in retreat and decline amidst some of the most disastrous wars in imperial history. This latest propaganda offensive by our ruling class has to be resisted alongside all the other cuts and attacks being waged on education in Britain by the Con-Dem administration, and in the name of history itself all those concerned with teaching history - whether amateur or professional historians or history teachers themselves - need to try and find ways and means of organising to resist this new attack. Ordering copies for yourself and your school/college/university library of John Newsingers The Blood Never Dried: A People's History of the British Empire might be one good place to start.

Grace Lee Boggs on 'Requiem for Detroit'

I while back on this blog I noted catching some of the excellent documentary 'Requiem for Detroit’, and so it is nice to note that the veteran thinker and activist Grace Lee Boggs, who was interviewed by the show has written about her take on it as well:

Requiem for Detroit aired March 13 on BBC2. But I didn’t view it until last week when I received the DVD (with a thank you note) from Julien Temple, the director, and George Hencken, the Films of Record producer.

In 1960 Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame was a turning point in American consciousness because it forced us to recognize that the food we enjoy is picked by migrant agricultural workers living and working under unspeakable conditions.

Requiem for Detroit can play a similar role in this period of transition from an increasingly destructive industrial culture. The documentary makes very clear that Detroit’s notorious devastation is not a natural disaster but a man-made Katrina, the inevitable result of illusions and contradictions in our insane 20th century pursuit of unlimited economic growth. We witness auto workers reduced to robots to produce Henry Ford’s Model Ts, and then struggling to reclaim their humanity by sitdown strikes and battling Ford’s goons at the overpass.

We meet southern Blacks who relish the “freedom” of Northern cities but also experience the racial tensions that exploded in 1943 and 1967.

Cars that grow the profits of the auto industry speed by on freeways which destroy neighborhoods to provide escape routes to the suburbs.

Neighborhoods are turned into war zones as the drug trade replaces jobs that have been exported overseas.

This documentary is the Odyssey of how a mode of production and transportation, once celebrated as the height of human creativity, morphed into a dehumanizing consumerism at the expense of human beings and other living things.

A number of Detroiters, Black and white, comment throughout. But the only named cast members are white-bearded John Sinclair, poet, former MC5 manager and White Panther Party leader; Martha Reeves, Motown’s earthy, gospel-infused singing star; Heidelberg Project community artist Tyree Guyton; and me.

John Sinclair recalls the glories of the last century as he drives through disintegrating neighborhoods. An exuberant Martha Reeves helps us understand how the distinctive Motown sound emerged from the “this is my country” euphoria of Blacks who had left behind them the sharecropping and lynching culture of the South. Tyree Guyton explains that he created the Heidelberg Project to depict the destruction of his neighborhood. He also describes today’s rising hope as neither a white or Black thing but “I” becoming “We.”

My closing comments make clear that the new American Dream emerging in Detroit is a deeply-rooted spiritual and practical response to the devastation and dehumanization created by the old dream. We yearn to live more simply so that all of us and the Earth can simply live. This more human dream began with African American elders, calling themselves the Gardening Angels. Detroit’s vacant lots, they decided, were not blight but heaven-sent spaces to plant community gardens, both to grow our own food and to give urban youth the sense of process, self-reliance and evolution that everyone needs to be human.

That’s why growing numbers of artists and young people are coming to Detroit. They want to be part of building a Detroit-City of Hope that grows our souls rather than our cars.

I hope Requiem for Detroit will be shown at the 2nd USSF meeting in Detroit June 22-26 . It is the story behind the USSF mantra:

Another World is Necessary. Another World is Possible. Another World is happening in Detroit!

Viewing it can help Detroit’s mainstream media become less shallow.

It can deepen the imagination of the new generation of media makers attending the annual Allied Media Conference which precedes the USSF.

These young people need this deepened imagination to do justice to the present escalating struggle between the Bings and Bobbs, scheming to gentrify Detroit by closing down neighborhood schools, and grassroots Detroiters who are organizing not only to save our schools but to bring the neighbor back into the ‘hood by inventing new forms of education that motivate schoolchildren to learn through community-building activities.

For more about "Requiem for Detroit"

www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/mar/10/detroit-motor-city-urban-decline

www.filmsofrecord.com/content.php?id=138

www.imdb.com/title/tt1572190/

Charlie Brooker on 'Bigotgate'

The press held up Brown's Bigotgate outburst as evidence that he's two-faced and contemptuous of everyday people, especially those who mention immigration, a subject so taboo in modern Britain that even fearless defenders of free speech such as the Mail and the Express only dare mention it in hushed capitals tucked away on the front page of every edition.

Two-faced contempt is the basic mode of operation for many newspapers: mindwarping shitsheets filled with selective reporting and audacious bias. The popular press is a shrill, idiotic, bullying echo chamber; a hopelessly poisoned Petri dish in which our politicians seem resigned to grow.
Pretty much spot on
See also Alex Callinicos and John Molyneux

British police finally admit killing Blair Peach

After a 31 year long state cover-up, the suppressed 1979 police report into the murder of Blair Peach, an anti-fascist protester and revolutionary socialist, has finally been published - admitting that a British cop did indeed 'almost certainly' kill Peach and that a cover up subsequently took place to protect the guilty officer. Finally, some justice for Peach - may all the other campaigns for justice for those many others who have died at the hands of the British police draw some inspiration from the long heroic campaign waged by his family, friends and comrades, which has now been vindicated.

Edited to add: For Blair Peach, a little justice

The Guilty Men

There is a classic scene in The Godfather, where Don Vito Corleone sits down for a meeting with the other heads of the Five Families, and agrees to make the peace if only it is guaranteed his son Michael is safe from reprisals for killing a police captain. As Don Corleone warns though,

'I'm a superstitious man -- and if some unlucky accident should befall him -- if he should get shot in the head by a police officer -- or if he -- should hang himself in his jail cell -- or if he's struck by a bolt of lightning -- then I'm going to blame some of the people in this room. And that, I do not forgive.'

In a similarish spirit of unforgiveness, it might be worth compiling a list of the top ten people who are worthy of blame should the worst case scenario happen and the British Nazi Party either take control of a council or even take a seat in this general election. Of course, as a Marxist, I understand that it is not the fault of individuals if a fascist party makes any kind of breakthrough - rather one should blame a crisis prone system of exploitation in which people are forced to compete with each other for jobs, the racism against migrant workers that results combined with the past failure of any British government to ever fully come to terms with the legacy of empire, the recent invasions and occupations of Muslim countries and concurrent rise in Islamophobia, the 13 years of attacks on the working class made by a so-called 'Labour Government' and so on and so forth. Nonetheless, individuals do play a role as well, and while theoretically every single member of Parliament who fiddled their expenses deserves to be on this list, this post aims to highlight the ten key individuals who I personally will not forgive should the fascists make any kind of breakthrough in two weeks time...

1. Mark Thompson, Director General of the BBC - for giving the Nazis unprecedented favourable and largely uncritical media coverage in the run up to the election - essentially he (like most others on the list) might properly be regarded as 'an appeaser of fascism'.
2. Jeremy Paxman, BBC Newsnight presenter - for giving 'Nazi Nick' Griffin some of the most friendly and cosy interviews imagineable (eg on Newsnight on 24/4/10).
3. David Dimbleby, BBC Question Time Presenter
4. Tony Blair, former PM and war criminal.
5. Gordon Brown, current PM for his obsession with 'Britishness' and spinning the racist 'British Jobs for British Workers' line in 2007
6. Jack Straw MP - for both trying and failing to beat Griffin in public debate
7. Margaret Hodge MP (not strictly a 'guilty man' but an appallingly useless)
8. Peter Hill (editor Daily Express) - for relentlessly whipping up racism against migrant workers
9. Dominic Mohan (editor The Sun) - ditto
10. Paul Dacre (editor, Daily Mail) - ditto

Feel free to suggest others I have missed out etc... How for example did racist Immigration Minister Phil Woolas slip under the radar? Should Rod Liddle have made it on? What of Martin Amis? Or the likes of Nick Cohen and others on the pro-war 'Left' who gave intellectual legitimacy to racist terms such as 'Islamo-fascism'?

New Book: Marx at the Margins

Kevin B. Anderson: Marx at the Margins:On Nationalism, Ethnicity, and Non-Western Societies

In Marx at the Margins, Kevin Anderson uncovers a variety of extensive but neglected texts by the well-known political economist which cast what we thought we knew about his work in a startlingly different light. Analyzing a variety of Marx’s writings, including journalistic work written for the New York Tribune, Anderson presents us with a Marx quite at odds with our conventional interpretations. Rather than providing us with an account of Marx as an exclusively class-based thinker, Anderson here offers a portrait of Marx for the twenty-first century: a global theorist whose social critique was sensitive to the varieties of human social and historical development, including not just class, but nationalism, race, and ethnicity, as well. Marx at the Margins ultimately argues that alongside his overarching critique of capital, Marx created a theory of history that was multi- layered and not easily reduced to a single model of development or revolution. Through highly-informed readings on work ranging from Marx’s unpublished 1879–82 notebooks to his passionate writings about the antislavery cause in the United States, this volume delivers a groundbreaking and canon-changing vision of Karl Marx that is sure to provoke lively debate in Marxist scholarship and beyond.

Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction
1. Colonial Encounters in the 1850s: The European Impact on India, Indonesia, and China
2. Russia and Poland: The Relationship of National Emancipation to Revolution
3. Race, Class, and Slavery: The Civil War as a Second American Revolution
4. Ireland: Nationalism, Class, and the Labor Movement
5. From the Grundrisse to Capital: Multilinear Themes
6. Late Writings on Non-Western and Precapitalist Societies
Conclusion
Appendix. The Vicissitudes of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe from the 1920s to Today
Notes
References

Kevin B. Anderson is professor of sociology and political science at the University of California–Santa Barbara and most recently, with Janet Afary, the coauthor of Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Michael Rosen on a visit to London's Jewish Museum

I'm the result of a few families out of the 150,000 people who came to Britain from Russia, Romania and "Russian Poland" around 130 years ago. Beginning with the Norman invasion and ending recently, other kinds of Jews are on display, too - Spanish, Portuguese, Indian - as well as converts: in the entrance foyer, a Chinese woman talks alongside a Hasidic rabbi and Jonathan Freedland. Jewish multiculturalism, even.
My parents grew into something else: Jewish internationalism. I see it on a trade-union banner. Across the top it reads: "The London Jewish Bakers Union". Across the bottom: "Workers of the World Unite". In the middle: "Buy bread with the union label". On the reverse, not visible when I visited, it says the same in Yiddish. So, these bakers seemed to think that they could speak their own language, bake Jewish bread, have a Jewish trade union and yet also say: "Labour is international."

Read the full article here

Eugene Debs on what Socialists say about Immigration

[The American radical Eugene Debs (1855-1926) was one of the greatest revolutionary socialists who ever lived. In 1910 he wrote this letter to counter the arguments of those 'socialists' who argued for the necessity of supporting immigration controls - a letter which 100 years later still speaks to us today on an ever topical issue given the current climate of racism in Britain around the question today being whipped up by all manner of mainstream media 'social commentators' and politicians from Gordon Brown ('We are fighting for Britain's future', 'We will put the British people first') downwards...]

My Dear Brewer:

Have just read the majority report of the [Socialist Party] Committee on Immigration [which called for the exclusion of Asians from America]. It is utterly unsocialistic, reactionary and in truth outrageous, and I hope you will oppose with all your power. The plea that certain races are to be excluded because of tactical expediency would be entirely consistent in a bourgeois convention of self-seekers, but should have no place in a proletariat gathering under the auspices of an international movement that is calling on the oppressed and exploited workers of all the world to unite for their emancipation...

Away with the “tactics” which require the exclusion of the oppressed and suffering slaves who seek these shores with the hope of bettering their wretched condition and are driven back under the cruel lash of expediency by those who call themselves Socialists in the name of a movement whose proud boast it is that it stands uncompromisingly for the oppressed and down-trodden of all the earth. These poor slaves have just as good a right to enter here as even the authors of this report who now seek to exclude them. The only difference is that the latter had the advantage of a little education and had not been so cruelly ground and oppressed, but in point of principle there is no difference, the motive of all being precisely the same, and if the convention which meets in the name of Socialism should discriminate at all it should be in favor of the miserable races who have borne the heaviest burdens and are most nearly crushed to the earth.

Upon this vital proposition I would take my stand against the world and no specious argument of subtle and sophistical defenders of the civic federation unionism, who do not hesitate to sacrifice principle for numbers and jeopardise ultimate success for immediate gain, could move me to turn my back upon the oppressed, brutalized and despairing victims of the old world, who are lured to these shores by some faint glimmer of hope that here their crushing burdens may be lightened, and some star of promise rise in their darkened skies.

The alleged advantages that would come to the Socialist movement because of such heartless exclusion would all be swept away a thousand times by the sacrifice of a cardinal principle of the international socialist movement, for well rnight the good faith of such a movement be questioned by intelligent workers if it placed itself upon record as barring its doors against the very races most in need of relief, and extinguishing their hope, and leaving them in dark despair at the very time their ears were first attuned to the international call and their hearts were beginning to throb responsive to the solidarity of the oppressed of all lands and all climes beneath the skies.

In this attitude there is nothing of maudlin sentimentality, but simply a rigid adherence to the fundamental principles of the International proletarian movement. If Socialism, international, revolutionary Socialism, does not stand staunchly, unflinchingly, and uncompromisingly for the working class and for the exploited and oppressed masses of all lands, then it stands for none and its claim is a false pretense and its profession a delusion and a snare.

Let those desert us who will because we refuse to shut the international door in the faces of their own brethren; we will be none the weaker but all the stronger for their going, for they evidently have no clear conception of the international solidarity, are wholly lacking in the revolutionary spirit, and have no proper place in the Socialist movement while they entertain such aristocratic notions of their own assumed superiority.

Let us stand squarely on our revolutionary, working class principles and make our fight openly and uncompromisingly against all our enemies, adopting no cowardly tactics and holding out no false hopes, and our movement will then inspire the faith, arouse the spirit, and develop the fibre that will prevail against the world.

Yours without compromise,
Eugene V. Debs.

Racism in Britain Today

International Socialism journal seminar:

Richard Seymour on 'Racism in Britain Today'.

Richard Seymour, author of The Liberal Defence of Murder and the 'lenin's tomb' blog presents the latest in our series of seminars.

The electoral success of the fascist British National Party and the emergence of the English Defence League has forced activists in Britain to look again at the issue of racism. Cultural racism and Islamophobia seem to supplant traditional racist ideas based on biology—but what is behind this shift and just how novel is it? Richard Seymour argues that the rise in racism in Britain is driven to a considerable extent by government policies and media reaction, both liberal and conservative.

6.30pm, Friday 26 March, School of Oriental and African Studies, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, WC1H 0GX
(Room FG06, Russell Square Campus— Map: http://bit.ly/soasmap)

This seminar is free to attend and open to all. For more information email isj@swp.org.uk

Some of Richard's earlier articles on racism can be found at the 'lenin's tomb' blog, available online here

Those interested in fighting racism in Britain today should also try and get themselves to Bolton this Saturday (March 20) to counter yet another mobilisation by the racist thugs of the EDL.

Requiem for Detroit?

Those with 75 minutes to spare who missed this programme detailing the history of the city of Detroit (which among other things has contributors including the legendary veteran activist Grace Lee Boggs can catch up with it here.

Invictus

I went to see Clint Eastwood's Invictus the other day. I haven't got a great deal to say about it, and what I do have to say will certainly be way too soft - for a serious Marxist critique see the piece by Louis Proyect - but for someone for whom the 1995 Rugby world cup was a distant schoolboy memory, and at the time almost certainly an event viewed purely as a dramatic sporting spectacle (and I fear, probably if supporting onyone, then supporting the England side of if I remember rightly Will Carling and Jeremy Guscott - these being my 'pre-Marx' days) it was a little enlightening. Moreover, given Michael Moore's new film is going to be bloody hard to track down at the British box office, it ain't a bad film to see (though if you can still catch it, definitely check out A Prophet). The heady mix of race, sport and politics which runs throughout Invictus put me a little in mind of such epics as Escape to Victory, and while perhaps coming close to being a tiny little bit grating in one or two places, its gentle, liberal anti-racist message is timely at a time when fascist parties in Britain are standing on a programme and propagating policies rather akin to those in apartheid South Africa. For a sense of contemporary South Africa, with its grotesque inequalities and poverty, on film, one is much better off seeing a film like Tsotsi, while something of the power and glory of the anti-apartheid liberation struggle is captured in Amandla!.

Howard Zinn (1922-2010)

Though I only saw the legendary 'people's historian of the United States' once, at the 'Marxism' conference in London in 2000 (where his play Marx in Soho was also performed), news of Howard Zinn's passing is still very sad - as it is I am sure for many many readers of Histomat. His writings on race, class and power in America, the nature of history and the role and responsibility of the historian in society more broadly were an inspiration, revelation and education personally - and his sane, courageous voice will be sorely missed in the struggles ahead. I will add tributes/obits etc etc below when I get time.

Ambre Ivol 'Howard Zinn: Bridging generations'
Howard Zinn on Making History (2007 interview)
Howard Zinn.Org
Brian Kelly 'Howard Zinn: a life of insubordination'
Alan Maass, 'The people's historian'
Dave Zurin 'Howard Zinn: The Historian Who Made History'
Geoffrey Hodgson 'Obituary'
Michael Greenwell 'Howard Zinn: Radical Historian'
Victoria Brittan 'Howard Zinn's lesson to us all'

Gary Younge on the growth of the Nazi BNP under New Labour

An excellent article

There has always been more to the BNP than racism and always been more to racism than the BNP, which is merely the most vile electoral expression of our degraded racial discourse and political sclerosis. Under such circumstances setting Straw – and the rest of the political class – against Griffin is simply putting the cause against the symptom without any suggestion of an antidote.

This has been New Labour's problem all along. While they have long recognised that racism is a problem, it never seemed to occur to them that anti-racism might be the solution. This should not obscure some of the positive things Labour has done – most notably the Macpherson report and the Race Relations Amendment Act. But in the words of the late African American writer James Baldwin: "What it gave, at length and grudgingly with one hand, it took back with the other."

The BNP's victories are a product of our politics. Its defeat, when it comes, will necessarily be a product of a change in our politics. But since New Labour's politics enabled the BNP, it is in no position to disable it. The BNP is a bottom feeder. But the system is rotting from the head down.

Join the Demonstrations outside BBC centre today organised by Unite Against Fascism

Out now! The Enoch Powell Dog Whistle

Are you a Conservative MP or MEP who has recently taken a nose dive in the popularity stakes?

Maybe you recently accidentally on purpose declared that Britain's most popular institution, the NHS, was all a terrible 'mistake'?

Does everyone in your constituency now hate you with a rare vengeance?

Are you worried about whether you will survive the next election?

Then you maybe are in of need of...

The Enoch Powell Dog Whistle

'I used the Enoch Powell Dog Whistle and found it worked a treat. Before everyone hated me, but now at least racist voters respect me. The BNP even declared me their favourite 'politician of the week' - so I must be doing something right!'' - 'Desperate' Dan Hannan, Kent.

The British Way of Death

Between 1969 and 1999 over 1000 died in police custody in Britain. Film maker Ken Fero, who made the classic film Injustice, writes on domestic British state terror in the new Socialist Review

HG Wells against racism

'I am convinced myself that there is no more evil thing in this present world than race prejudice; none at all. I write deliberately - it is the worst single thing in life now. It justifies and holds together more baseness, cruelty and abomination than any other sort of error in the world. Through its body runs the black blood of coarse lust, suspicion, jealousy and persecution and all the darkest poison of the human soul...It is a monster begotten of natural instincts and intellectual confusion, to be fought against by all men of good intent, each in our dispersed modern manner doing his fragmentary, inestimable share.'
HG Wells, 'Race Prejudice', The Independent, 14 February 1907, quoted in Jeffrey B Perry (ed.), A Hubert Harrison Reader, p. 57)
The quote might complicate traditional thinking about the Fabian socialist and science fiction writer HG Wells, and the subject of race and racism, a little maybe at least.

London Unite Against Fascism Rally

Fascism has opened up the depths of society for politics. Today, not only in peasant homes but also in city skyscrapers, there lives alongside of the twentieth century the tenth or the thirteenth. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms. The Pope of Rome broadcasts over the radio about the miraculous transformation of water into wine. Movie stars go to mediums. Aviators who pilot miraculous mechanisms created by man’s genius wear amulets on their sweaters. What inexhaustible reserves they possess of darkness, ignorance, and savagery! Despair has raised them to their feet fascism has given them a banner. Everything that should have been eliminated from the national organism in the form of cultural excrement in the course of the normal development of society has now come gushing out from the throat; capitalist society is puking up the undigested barbarism. Such is the physiology of National Socialism.
Leon Trotsky, 'What is National Socialism?' (1933).

Public rally, Wednesday 29 April, 7pm, Conway Hall, Red Lion Square, London WC1R 4RL

Speakers include: Christine Blower (NUT), Jerry Bartlett (NASUWT), Glyn Ford MEP, Dr Abdul Bari (MCB), Steve Hart (Unite), Martin Smith (Love Music Hate Racism), Weyman Bennett (UAF). Rally called by Unite Against Fascism, sponsored by the National Union of Teachers

The BNP is trying to get its first MEPs elected on Thursday 4 June. And London is one of its targets. There is a real danger that the BNP could grab enough votes to grab a London MEP at the European elections on Thursday 4 June. They could get in with as little as 8 percent of the vote. London is a multiracial city and the vast majority of Londoners are opposed to the fascist politics of the BNP. We can come together to stop the prospect of a BNP MEP in London. But we need to act now.

Remembering Blair Peach

Blair Peach was a teacher, an NUT member and a committed anti-fascist who campaigned against the National Front in the 1970s. He was on a demonstration in Southall against the NF on 23 April 1979 when he was killed by a blow to the head from a police officer. Thirty years on we still remember him – but we also have to continue his fight by campaigning against the BNP, today’s equivalent of the Nazi NF.