Anniversary - 20 years of Stop the War

[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 74 (Autumn 2021)] 

It’s the 20th anniversary of the Stop the War Coalition. Derided perpetually by right-wing critics and those who like wars as either pacifists or supporters of terrorism (it’s quite difficult to be both) like any social movement it has its up and downs in support. It is however still here and held a 20th anniversary event at Conway Hall in London on 18 September. 

You might be forgiven for not noticing. While the recent withdrawal from Afghanistan marked the end of a 20 year strategy by the US, the UK and others, those who said it would all end in tears (and for many much worse than that) have not featured much in media coverage. This tells you unsurprising things about the British media of course - points about its narrowness of focus that have been made many times. 

The forces that came together to form the Stop the War Coalition- CND, the Muslim Association of Britain and a spectrum of the left, perhaps primarily the Labour left and the SWP, held a meeting full to overflowing shortly after the war with Afghanistan started in late September 2001. The first demonstration took place in London on Saturday 13 October 2001. I was at both. With the invasion of Iraq pending the STWC organised what remains the biggest demonstration in British history in central London on 15 February 2003. I was there with my national union banner. 

So it went on and goes on, protesting against western military interventions, not always without controversy on the left but still often ignored by the media for whom the basic message of opposition to war was often an inconvenient one. There was an exhibition at Bow Arts featuring a lot of the art work associated with Stop the War down the years and particularly perhaps the early years. The visual aspect of the protest was key and ground breaking. It’s interesting to remember and review for those who were there but as important for those who were not, often because 20 years on they were too young. A 10 year old in 2001 is 30 now. And the need for Stop the War is not going away. 

Keith Flett

Comment - Socialist historians and the culture wars

[From London Socialist Historians Group Newsletter 74 (Autumn 2021)]

The Tories are continuing to prosecute the Culture War with the appointment of Nadine Dorries as culture secretary. This issue of the Newsletter rounds up a number of the interventions the LSHG has made in some particularly high profile instances. 

Dorries’s first act as culture secretary was to nod through the destruction of the Dorman Long Tower on Teesside. A monument or statue to the steel industry and steel workers on Teesside, it was grade ll listed by Historic England but that didn’t bother Dorries. In a war, tactics and strategies can vary. The Government’s aim is to invent a layer of people it calls ‘woke’ and in reality promote their history over ours. Hence statues of slave traders must stay at all costs, while the Dorman Long Tower must go.

Dorries’s predecessor Oliver Dowden had pursued a slightly different strategy along the lines of ‘retain and explain’. He oversaw a policy that no statue or monument should be moved or taken down. He claimed he preferred new statues to be erected but in fact during his tenure as Minister none were. It might be argued that much of this is simply a distraction launched by the Tories while they get on with bashing the working poor. However, it is also something that seeks to establish and dictate exactly what British history is or is not. 

That is reflected not just in statue wars but in terms of persistent interventions by Tory politicians into what history is taught in schools and universities. Labour has had very little to say on this, not least because it’s clear that the current leader Starmer is not a history man. It is however a task that socialist historians need to address and dispute rather than leave the field to Tory propagandists. 

Thatcher laid waste to industry on Teesside. Now Dorries want to destroy the industrial heritage. The Dorman Long tower at the former steel works at Redcar on Teesside was built to store coal in the 1950s. It was a fine example of brutalist industrial architecture. Unsurprisingly the Tory mayor covering the area, Ben Houchen, would prefer to have no reminders of Thatcherite destruction of jobs and industry left on Teesside. He lobbied for the tower to be destroyed - an act of Tory industrial vandalism.

 I lived on Teesside in the 1970s and 1980s including the 1980 steel strike, in which I had a supporting role. The destruction by Thatcher of people’s livelihoods and lives has left a dreadful legacy and, as Dorries’s diktat shows, the Tories are proud of that legacy. Given that Dowden went to great lengths to make sure that no bit of existing British history was in anyway moved let alone destroyed, presumably Ms Dorries will no raise no objection to a few old statues being taken down as well.

 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tees-58593615 

Keith Flett

Upcoming LSHG seminars

Monday Nov 1^st 5.30pm Judy Meewezen 'Turtle Soup and Cato Street 1820'

Register for the seminar here: 

https://www.history.ac.uk/events/turtle-soup-and-cato-street-1820

Cato St was an attempt to violently overthrow the Government in February 1820. It failed and in the Johnsonian version of British history is written off as the work of a few deluded conspirators. In fact, post Peterloo, it had considerable support.
The 200th anniversary in 2020 has sparked a considerable amount of new research of which Judy Meewezen’s historical novel 'Turtle Soup for the King: The Cato Street Chronicles' is an important part.

Peter Linebaugh wrote in Counterpunch:
The Cato Street Chronicles, to give the subtitle to this historical novel, is as fully faithful to the historical record as may be empirically possible. Based largely on the documentation of spies, police, informers, turncoats, and provocateurs, on the one hand, and on the other the documentation, of the trade union movement, the reform politicians, and radical press, an archive that was already censored or in peril of extinction.

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Monday Nov 15^th 5.30pm Merilyn Moos 'German Socialists in Britain and their Shifting Alliances 1933-1945'

Register for the seminar here:

https://www.history.ac.uk/events/anti-nazi-germans-1933-45

Merilyn Moos will introduce her 3 books celebrating the lives and struggles of left-wing Germans who opposed the Nazis from exile. These may be freely downloaded below.

Anti-Nazi Exiles	German Socialists in Britain and their Shifting Alliances 1933-1945 by Merilyn Moos PDF available to download free. More details…
Hans Jahn	Biography of an Anti-Nazi Trade Unionist by Merilyn Moos PDF available to download free. More details…
German Anti-Nazis and the British Empire	The Special Operations Executive, Deserters from the German Army and Partisan Movements in Occupied Europe by Merilyn Moos PDF available to download free. More details…

The refugees Merilyn will be discussing almost all fled Germany as political activists, most from a working class background. They risked their lives again and again in Germany, often escaped arrest and probable death without knowing where they would end up.

Most survived. But, once in Britain, organising an anti-Nazi struggle became very difficult and there was much disagreement as to the best means. Merilyn will examine the details of a few of these refugees. One example is Hans Jahn, President of the German Railway Union. Faced with the Nazis’ attempt to break working class organisations, he tried to organise anti-Nazi resistance amongst railway workers, even when, later, he was exiled here. He  was to say that “one of the greatest tragedies is that German unions did not fight to prevent Hitler taking power in 1933”.

More ferociously anti-Nazi than many at the time in the UK, some anti-Nazi German exiles risked their lives all over again in an often uneasy alliance with sections of the British military. Some worked with SOE. A small group, almost all of whom had fought in Spain, fled to France and then were sent by the French Government to camps in Algeria. They also ‘volunteered’ to fight with the British. Thousands of Germans were conscripted into the 999 ‘Death battalions’, a sub-section of the Wehrmacht, made up largely of political prisoners. Many of them either deserted to the partisans in Greece or clandestinely supported them. Upon the partisans' defeat, a few of the German deserters escaped to Albania and supported their partisans. The tensions within British policy between being anti-fascist and pro-imperialist, are sharply exposed during the Greek civil war when the German deserters who first were fighting with the partisans  alongside the British against the Nazi forces, then fought with the partisans against the British.

It is a good time for such stories of courage and resistance to be heard.

Socialist History Society seminars - Egyptian workers / GDH Cole

 Socialist History Society Meetings – on-line via Zoom

The Workers’ Movement and Revolution in Egypt since 1919

The meeting is free, but you must register in advance here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEkfuipqD8rH9dQs8-MgbzQ_HADsbrSX-zf

Thursday 14th October, 6:30pm

Speaker Anne Alexander

Anne Alexander is the co-author, with Mostafa Bassiouny, of Bread, Freedom, Social Justice: Workers and the Egyptian Revolution (Zed, 2014). She is a founder member of MENA Solidarity Network, the co-editor of Middle East Solidarity and a member of the University and College Union (UCU).

http://www.socialisthistorysociety.co.uk/?p=1227

‘G.D.H. Cole: A Libertarian Trapped in the Labour Party’

Socialist History Society Meeting – on-line via Zoom
The meeting is free, but you must register in advance here:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZclcuuqrzMqH9zH6MQ4WwengfRZmH14X7lF

Thursday 11 November 2021 , 6.30pm start

A talk by David Goodway

G.D.H. Cole (1889-1959) declared forcefully at the end of his life that he was ‘neither a Communist nor a Social Democrat…but something…essentially different from both’. He had been a leading Guild Socialist at the time of World War One and that, he explained, was what he remained. Cole repeatedly described himself as ‘a libertarian’. The current volume reconstitutes Studi sul Socialismo, a collection of late articles which supposedly appeared in Italy in 1959 but never did. David Goodway has reverted to the preferred title rather than the publisher’s ‘Studies in Socialism’.

The talk will be followed by a discussion.

David Goodway is the editor of Towards a Libertarian Socialism, by G D H Cole, which is published by AK Press. The title of our talk comes from that of David’s introduction to this edition of Cole’s book.

David’s main works are London Chartism, 1838–1848 (1982) and Anarchist Seeds Beneath the Snow: Left-Libertarian Thought and British Writers from William Morris to Colin Ward (2006, 2nd edition 2012). In addition, David is the editor of collections of writings by Herbert Read, Alex Comfort, John Cowper Powys and Emma Goldman, Nicolas Walter and Maurice Brinton (Chris Pallis).

He is also author of The Real History of Chartism: or eight fallacies about the Chartist movement (SHS OP, 2013) and editor of George Julian Harney, The Chartists were Right: selections from the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle, 1890-97 (2014).

http://www.socialisthistorysociety.co.uk/?p=1240

London Socialist Historians Group seminars Autumn 2021

London Socialist Historians Seminars. Autumn Term 2021: 

Seminars will be on Zoom - register via the links below in advance - thanks. 

From Reclaiming Our History to 1917 & the Black Atlantic, Cato St 1820 & Anti-Nazi Exiles 1933-1945

Monday Oct 4^th 5.30pm Marika Sherwood - ''George Orwell told us that ‘the most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their own history’. What has been obliterated from ‘our’ history here in the UK and in what used to be our colonies?''

Link to recording

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/fE5I0SnZXy_bBqPRMm2_UXZpPOhh8IdtUm7zMvormhPoKhnl7oeqkz5tbvsouTNG.2TLh0Ky_PkML6Lwy Passcode: z#Fg#G5&

Monday Oct 18^th 5.30pm 'Book launch - The Red and Black: The Russian Revolution and the Black Atlantic' (edited by David Featherstone and Christian Hogsbjerg) - with speakers including Winston James and Olga Panova and the editors

Link to recording

https://us02web.zoom.us/rec/share/xc9VgOh7HvHPxx0UzZxDRpycWlCs40BXZ3e3gDuKGQJX2LukC_M4-1buZ_42jkq-.7H2hSukQPRO2Rg5D Passcode: !H.YbYB8

Monday Nov 1^st 5.30pm Judy Meewezen 'Turtle Soup and Cato Street 1820'

Register for the seminar here: 

https://www.history.ac.uk/events/turtle-soup-and-cato-street-1820

Monday Nov 15^th 5.30pm Merilyn Moos 'Anti-Nazi Exiles 1933-1945'

Register for the seminar here:

https://www.history.ac.uk/events/anti-nazi-germans-1933-45

All meetings will be on Zoom again for the autumn term. A link to register and join will be circulated before each seminar

Dissenting Traditions: Essays on Bryan D. Palmer, Marxism, and History

 

Book announcement

Sean Carleton, Ted McCoy and Julia Smith, eds, Dissenting Traditions: Essays on Bryan D. Palmer, Marxism, and History (Edmonton: Canadian Committee on Labour History and AU Press, 2021). Available on open access at: https://read.aupress.ca/projects/dissenting-traditions

The work of Bryan D. Palmer, one of North America’s leading historians, has influenced the fields of labour history, social history, discourse analysis, communist history, and Canadian history, as well as the theoretical frameworks surrounding them. Palmer’s work reveals a life dedicated to dissent and the difficult task of imagining alternatives by understanding the past in all of its contradictions, victories, and failures.

Dissenting Traditions gathers Palmer’s contemporaries, students, and sometimes critics to examine and expand on the topics and themes that have defined Palmer’s career, from labour history to Marxism and communist politics. Paying attention to Palmer’s participation in key debates, contributors demonstrate that class analysis, labour history, building institutions, and engaging the public are vital for social change. In this moment of increasing precarity and growing class inequality, Palmer’s politically engaged scholarship offers a useful roadmap for scholars and activists alike and underlines the importance of working-class history.

Introduction

  Sean Carleton, Ted McCoy and Julia Smith

 

Part I. Labour

1. Bryan D. Palmer, Labour Historian

  Alvin Finkel

2. Bryan D. Palmer, Social Historian

  Ted McCoy

3. Labour History’s Present: An Account of Labour/Le Travail Under Bryan D. Palmer

  Kirk Niergarth

 

Part II. Experience, Discourse, Class

4. Bryan D. Palmer and E. P. Thompson

  Nicholas Rogers

*5. On Polemics and Provocations: Bryan D. Palmer vs. Liberal Anti-Marxists

  Chad Pearson

6. Bryan Douglas Palmer, Edward Palmer Thompson, John le Carré (and Me): Workers, Spies, and Spying, Past and Present

  Gregory S. Kealey

 

Part III. Politics

7. Palmer’s Politics: Discovering the Past and the Future of Class Struggle

  Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin

8. The Hippopotamus and the Giraffe: Bolshevism, Stalinism, and American and British Communism in the 1920s

  John McIlroy and Alan Campbell

9. The June Days of 2013 in Brazil and the Persistence of Top-Down Histories

  Sean Purdy

10. Old Positions/New Directions: Strategies for Rebuilding Canadian Working-Class History

  Sean Carleton and Julia Smith

 

Afterword: Rude Awakenings

  Bryan D. Palmer

Selected Works of Bryan D. Palmer

Radical St Pancras Walk, Saturday 18 September

 Radical St Pancras Walk, Saturday 18 September -

meet 2pm by the Newton statue at the British Library

St Pancras has a radical history that includes William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary Shelley, Percy Byshe Shelley and many others. Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels lived in the borough. Marx once applied for a job at Kings Cross station - which he didn't get because no-one could read his hand writing.

On the day of the FA Cup Final of 1908 militant suffragettes leafleted the fans as they arrived at St Pancras and Kings Cross stations (Wolves beat Newcastle 3:1). There were reports of crowds of fans marching to Wembley shouting 'Votes for Women!'

In the 1920s the council supported the building of good quality low cost housing. The Ossulston Estate was modelled on the housing of Red Vienna. In the 1950s, John Lawrence who had been a Trotskyist in the 1940s, became the leader of the majority Labour group on the council. In 1958 he caused delight by giving the council workers the day off for May Day - and infuriated the right by raising the Red Flag on the town hall. In 1960 a well supported rent strike - in protest at rent rises and severe housing shortages - led to bailiff actions. Two days of series rioting followed which was met with mounted police charges and a curfew.

Today the area is undergoing yet more change. Google has its London headquarters there. A company full of secrets and anti-union attitudes. Can tech workers - currently often atomised and unorganized - learn from the experiences of the railway workers who so much shaped this place?

This will be a circular walk of about 3 - 4 miles which will take about 2 - 3 hours.

The walk is free. To find out more, please contact Danny B at

https://commodityfetishism.com/contact/

 https://commodityfetishism.com/contact/