There is much of interest for socialists in general at Marxism 2012 (5-9 July, central London), with speakers including Antonio Negri, David Harvey, Samir Amin, George Galloway, Leila Khaled, Tony Benn, Tariq Ali, Gary Younge, Alex Callinicos and former Black Panther Robert King Wilkerson so on, but socialist historians might particularly take note of the opportunity to see - among others:
- Isaac Deutscher Memorial Prize winner Jairus Banaji on 'Theory as history: modes of production' (there is also a course on historical materialism, ranging from base and superstructure, through to the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the Asiatic mode of production, and the question of how revolutionary were the bourgeois revolutions)
- Biographer of Alexandra Kollontai Cathy Porter and Egyptian revolutionary Gigi Ibrahim on ‘Festivals of the oppressed’: women in revolution from Russia to Egypt
- John Newsinger on the hidden history of US radicalism
- Ken Olende on the origins of racism
- Sheila McGregor, Pete Shaw & Eddie Prevost on 'When workers brought a Tory government to its knees: 40 years since 1972'
- Leo Zeilig, Ian Birchall & Hamza Hamouchene celebrate the 50th anniversary of Algerian independence (there are separate meetings on Frantz Fanon and 'European revolutionaries and Algerian independence)
- Charlie Post and Neil Davidson debating the US Civil War and the American Road to Capitalism
- Donny Gluckstein on his new book A People’s History of the Second World War
- Tommy McKearney - 30 years on: remembering the Irish hunger strikes
- Colin Barker on 'Patterns of revolution since 1989'
There are lots of other historical meetings, ranging from 'a history of anarchism in struggle' to 'the Luddite Rebellion 200 years on', and from John Rose on a very short history of God to Tom Hickey on Walter Benjamin's philosophy of history, to 'A People's History of Riots' - people should really go and check out the full timetable online for themselves.
Sunday, 6 May 2012
Tuesday, 1 May 2012
1968-2012: Resistance - the best Olympic Spirit
'1968-2012 - Resistance, the best Olympic Spirit'
RMT activists on the London Underground and family justice campaigns have organised a meeting with John Carlos and Doreen Lawrence. John was one of the sprinters whose Black Power salute electrified the 1968 Olympics. Doreen is the mother of Stephen Lawrence. Janet Alder and Weyman Bennett are also speaking.
Monday 21 May 6pm, Friends Meeting House, Euston Road
For more information email unjummirza@yahoo.co.uk You can pick up postcards for the meeting from RMT headquarters, 39 Charlton Street, NW1 1JD (near Euston station).
Download a flyer from: http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/node/1621 http://livesrunning.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/jc1.pdf
RMT activists on the London Underground and family justice campaigns have organised a meeting with John Carlos and Doreen Lawrence. John was one of the sprinters whose Black Power salute electrified the 1968 Olympics. Doreen is the mother of Stephen Lawrence. Janet Alder and Weyman Bennett are also speaking.
Monday 21 May 6pm, Friends Meeting House, Euston Road
For more information email unjummirza@yahoo.co.uk You can pick up postcards for the meeting from RMT headquarters, 39 Charlton Street, NW1 1JD (near Euston station).
Download a flyer from: http://www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/node/1621 http://livesrunning.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/jc1.pdf
Sunday, 29 April 2012
LSHG Newsletter 45 (Summer 2012)
The latest issue of the quarterly LSHG Newsletter is now online on the blog. Highlights include a renewal of the debate over 1914 and the role of the individual in history between Harry Ratner and Neil Faulkner, Ian Birchall on the legendary Communist Party industrial organiser Bert Ramelson and Keith Flett on
Charles Dickens and Charles Bradlaugh. Those wanting to contribute to the next LSHG Newsletter might note the deadline of September - and contact Keith Flett at the address above. A link to the summer term seminars of the LSHG - which include a debate about the royal jubilee - can be found here.
Saturday, 28 April 2012
Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival, 13-15 July, Tolpuddle
Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival 2012
The tiny Dorset village has been a place of pilgrimage for trade unionists and socialists ever since the Martyrs' came home in triumph. The festival is a popular mix of political discussion and speeches, great music to suit all tastes, entertainment for all the family and the traditional procession of banners, wreath laying and Methodist service.
There is also a Radical History School in Tolpuddle - 'Paths of Protest', from 12-14 July.
Chartist Greeting Cards
Past Pixels have produced a series of five greetings cards featuring images of leading Chartists.
The five Chartists featured are Feargus O’Connor, John Frost, Ernest Jones, William Cuffay and Bronterre O’Brien.
The cards are in memory of Dorothy Thompson [1923- 2011] the leading historian of Chartism who also published a book of Chartist images.
The pictures are all officially sourced and are printed by unionised labour using vegetable based inks. One might argue that with the price of stamps being hiked the demand for such cards is likely to be limited but this is rather missing the point.
Many will wish to collect rather than send the five cards and there remains a considerable market for labour movement memorabilia, cards, plates and badges which dates back to the Chartist period itself. Without wishing to transgress into the area of art history, the images of the Chartist leaders do tell us a fair bit historically about what kind of people these were.
The picture of Ernest Jones shows him to be every bit the lawyer and gentleman leader. The same is true of the card depicting Feargus O’Connor. Cuffay’s portrait is the well known picture of him from the National Portrait Gallery, indicating a well dressed man in a prison cell after his 1848 conviction.
The cards represent a very useful way of taking our history off the printed page and reinforcing it as a series of images. In age which like the Chartist period itself is increasingly visual, that represents valuable work.
Keith Flett
The five Chartists featured are Feargus O’Connor, John Frost, Ernest Jones, William Cuffay and Bronterre O’Brien.
The cards are in memory of Dorothy Thompson [1923- 2011] the leading historian of Chartism who also published a book of Chartist images.
The pictures are all officially sourced and are printed by unionised labour using vegetable based inks. One might argue that with the price of stamps being hiked the demand for such cards is likely to be limited but this is rather missing the point.
Many will wish to collect rather than send the five cards and there remains a considerable market for labour movement memorabilia, cards, plates and badges which dates back to the Chartist period itself. Without wishing to transgress into the area of art history, the images of the Chartist leaders do tell us a fair bit historically about what kind of people these were.
The picture of Ernest Jones shows him to be every bit the lawyer and gentleman leader. The same is true of the card depicting Feargus O’Connor. Cuffay’s portrait is the well known picture of him from the National Portrait Gallery, indicating a well dressed man in a prison cell after his 1848 conviction.
The cards represent a very useful way of taking our history off the printed page and reinforcing it as a series of images. In age which like the Chartist period itself is increasingly visual, that represents valuable work.
Keith Flett
Book Review: Bradlaugh contra Marx
From LSHG Newsletter #45 (Summer 2012)
Review:
Bradlaugh contra Marx:Radicalism and Socialism in the First International
By Deborah Lavin
Socialist History Society Occasional Publication No 28,
London 2011, 86 pages paperback £4
ISBN 9780955513848
The National Secular Society and the politics of atheism constitute a feature of modern British society, thanks to the work of Richard Dawkins and others. The NSS was founded by Charles Bradlaugh in 1866, yet he remains a relatively obscure historical figure in the early twenty-first century.
Deborah Lavin has produced some important new research on Bradlaugh’s role in late Victorian politics and Marx’s successful battle to keep him off the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association.
Lavin’s book is a work of historical recovery and I won’t spoil it for readers by providing a blow by blow account. Suffice to say she traces Bradlaugh’s progress from a rising young radical in the 1850s, through his early job as a clerk for a dodgy solicitor, to his position as probably the most charismatic radical platform speaker of the day and eventually Liberal MP for Northampton.
Lavin argues that at every turn his actual activities were far less honourable and radical than it appeared to his audience of artisans and craft workers. She notes that while he risked jail with Annie Besant for publishing James Knowlton’s book on contraception The Fruits of Philosophy, in reality he was a neo-
Malthusian not an advocate of the rights of working class women. Further he was reasonably sure, as turned out to be the case, that he would not actually serve a jail term.
When it comes to Bradlaugh’s long battle not to swear an oath on the Bible as an MP but affirm, Lavin does not deny his tenacity but points out that from the first, he was prepared when it came to it, to swear on the Bible.
In short, Bradlaugh’s radical image was rather different from his actual practice. It was his politics that drew the attention of Marx. In the 1850s a young Bradlaugh and Marx shared some political positions, for example around the Sunday Trading riots.
Bradlaugh did not fully articulate his anti-socialist and pro-individualist politics until his debates with H.M. Hyndman in the 1880s. In between he became perhaps the leading opponent of socialist politics in the radical and working class movement.
Marx clashed with Bradlaugh, particularly concerning the Paris Commune of which Marx was a prominent defender, while Bradlaugh was a leading opponent and supporter of the French Government.
This clash is at the centre of Lavin’s work. Bradlaugh was a very well known figure in late nineteenth Victorian politics. Marx, by contrast, was largely unknown. As Lavin points out, it was more or less impossible for a radical worker to get access to any writings of Marx in English in this period. Marx was known to the English authorities but not to a working class audience.
Yet in the International Working Men’s Association Marx had built the leading organisation for radical working class political sentiment. If Bradlaugh was to cement his position as the leading figure of Victorian radical working-class politics he needed to play a role in it.
Lavin shows that Marx went to great efforts to block Bradlaugh and his supporters from the IWMA, an endeavour in which he was successful. This is a work of historical re-discovery, as neither the Collected Works of Marx nor books on him make much play of the dispute between the two men.
In general Lavin makes a good argument for the existence of the dispute and its importance, although on occasions she strays over into polemic in favour of Marx’s position against Bradlaugh. I don’t have an issue about that but it doesn’t really strengthen the historical points being made.
In fact Lavin’s case may well have been strengthened by arguing a case for the importance of Bradlaugh. The National Secular Society may well have been the leading proletarian organisation in London in the later 1860s and 1870s. The fact that the majority of its supporters held ideas which were opposed to those of Marx, underlines why he was so interested in Bradlaugh and vice versa.
Even so this is an important piece of research that deserves a wide audience.
Keith Flett
Review:
Bradlaugh contra Marx:Radicalism and Socialism in the First International
By Deborah Lavin
Socialist History Society Occasional Publication No 28,
London 2011, 86 pages paperback £4
ISBN 9780955513848
The National Secular Society and the politics of atheism constitute a feature of modern British society, thanks to the work of Richard Dawkins and others. The NSS was founded by Charles Bradlaugh in 1866, yet he remains a relatively obscure historical figure in the early twenty-first century.
Deborah Lavin has produced some important new research on Bradlaugh’s role in late Victorian politics and Marx’s successful battle to keep him off the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association.
Lavin’s book is a work of historical recovery and I won’t spoil it for readers by providing a blow by blow account. Suffice to say she traces Bradlaugh’s progress from a rising young radical in the 1850s, through his early job as a clerk for a dodgy solicitor, to his position as probably the most charismatic radical platform speaker of the day and eventually Liberal MP for Northampton.
Lavin argues that at every turn his actual activities were far less honourable and radical than it appeared to his audience of artisans and craft workers. She notes that while he risked jail with Annie Besant for publishing James Knowlton’s book on contraception The Fruits of Philosophy, in reality he was a neo-
Malthusian not an advocate of the rights of working class women. Further he was reasonably sure, as turned out to be the case, that he would not actually serve a jail term.
When it comes to Bradlaugh’s long battle not to swear an oath on the Bible as an MP but affirm, Lavin does not deny his tenacity but points out that from the first, he was prepared when it came to it, to swear on the Bible.
In short, Bradlaugh’s radical image was rather different from his actual practice. It was his politics that drew the attention of Marx. In the 1850s a young Bradlaugh and Marx shared some political positions, for example around the Sunday Trading riots.
Bradlaugh did not fully articulate his anti-socialist and pro-individualist politics until his debates with H.M. Hyndman in the 1880s. In between he became perhaps the leading opponent of socialist politics in the radical and working class movement.
Marx clashed with Bradlaugh, particularly concerning the Paris Commune of which Marx was a prominent defender, while Bradlaugh was a leading opponent and supporter of the French Government.
This clash is at the centre of Lavin’s work. Bradlaugh was a very well known figure in late nineteenth Victorian politics. Marx, by contrast, was largely unknown. As Lavin points out, it was more or less impossible for a radical worker to get access to any writings of Marx in English in this period. Marx was known to the English authorities but not to a working class audience.
Yet in the International Working Men’s Association Marx had built the leading organisation for radical working class political sentiment. If Bradlaugh was to cement his position as the leading figure of Victorian radical working-class politics he needed to play a role in it.
Lavin shows that Marx went to great efforts to block Bradlaugh and his supporters from the IWMA, an endeavour in which he was successful. This is a work of historical re-discovery, as neither the Collected Works of Marx nor books on him make much play of the dispute between the two men.
In general Lavin makes a good argument for the existence of the dispute and its importance, although on occasions she strays over into polemic in favour of Marx’s position against Bradlaugh. I don’t have an issue about that but it doesn’t really strengthen the historical points being made.
In fact Lavin’s case may well have been strengthened by arguing a case for the importance of Bradlaugh. The National Secular Society may well have been the leading proletarian organisation in London in the later 1860s and 1870s. The fact that the majority of its supporters held ideas which were opposed to those of Marx, underlines why he was so interested in Bradlaugh and vice versa.
Even so this is an important piece of research that deserves a wide audience.
Keith Flett
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