Against the Grain
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Against the Grain is now available in paperback
This is on sale for under $10 herehttps://www.amazon.com/Against-grain-British-left-1956/dp/1526107341/ref=mt_paperback
We are not mentioned not even in a footnote despite preliminary contact with one of the authors. The other must be a Trotskyist. They have ignored us, so we ignore them.
We're not 'far left' so maybe (to be charitable) they were sticking closely to the title… Or (to be less charitable) they didn't want to mention a movement which challenges the left/right spectrum?
There's a follow up volume to this book by the same editors:Link: Waiting for the revolutionNo idea if we made the footnotes this time.
Once again, a confirmation that we are an irrelevancy and effectively have no political presence. An unpalatable fact to swallow, i grant you, but reality seems to bear this out.Do we continue to blame authors, apportioning the blame to their bias, or do we start wondering if perhaps we are not doing enough (which i don't accept, having seen the time and energy many members put into promoting our case)— or begin to question that we have perhaps been doing wrongly?If many lesser organisations and even individual persons get more prominent exposure than we do…shouldn't we be asking ourselves why.
No, Alan, it's confirmation that we don't currently have any party members who are political scientists/historian hacks who have carved out a wee niche churning out papers, essays or book chapters on the minutiae of the Party history. (There's a gig there for someone if they want it.)I like books like this. I'm interested in books like this, but I also recognise that a lot of it is little more than a circle jerking exercise on the part of academics bleeding dry their Phds, so they can get that chapter in a book like this . . . or get that seat on the Historical Materialism panel . . . or get that online article on the Jacobin website.I'm not beating myself up over something as trivial as this.
A clarification. I misunderstood and thought we were talking about Volume II. We do in fact have someone who is a "political scientist" in the academic sense of having a Ph.D in the subject. When, after Volume I was published, a second volume was announced he wrote to one of the authors offering to write something on the party (the volumes are collections of articles by individual authors on a particular subject). He received a reply indicating some interest. Then nothing. Then Volume II appeared (with some articles on some very obscure subjects, follow Imposs1904's link)). Sorry to interrupt your self-flagellation session, Alan, but this is not a question of us not being relevant. Everybody active on "the far Left" since 1956 will know of the SPGB. Nor is it us having delusions of grandeur. No history of "the far left" in that period is complete without something on us. It was a deliberate decision not to have an article on us. The offer was there but it was not accepted..
Quote:Everybody active on "the far Left" since 1956 will know of the SPGB.Out of interest, ALB, why 1956?… Hungary?Anyway, my point is that very few know about us in 2018. Some will know the name and of those most will have a caricature picture of us.I doubt there will be a couple of a thousand in the world (and that is a generous estimate) who hold a reasonable grasp of our ideas and many of those people also actually reject it, unfortunately.
Quote:It was a deliberate decision not to have an article on us.Why did they omit our existence? Why can they ignore the SPGB and get away with it? I doubt any review of the book has referenced this lapse, and why is that? We keep blaming our political enemies for not doing our work. It is up to us to offer our fellow workers the SPGB case for socialism and if we are not getting the message across when comparable groups have better success than us then as we are doing, we must ask ourselves, is our strategy and tactics the most effective means.
Why from 1956? Because the volumes are billed as an account of the "far Left" since 1956. I deliberately wrote that most such activists would have known "of" us not "about" us. You and me know from personal experience in the 60s and 70s that if you identified yourself as an SPGBer at meetings of these groups the people there would know who we were. As you say, they would have a distorted view of what we stood for, e,g the anarchists that we want to form a "socialist government" and the trots and "Communists" that we are anti-trade union (these misconceptions are still in circulation of course), but they still knew of our existence. We were part of the scene which any history of the period should reflect. The aim of the attempt to get a chapter in the volume was to rectify these misconceptions as well as, you would have thought, being of interest to the sort of people likely to be interested in a tome on the "far Left" such as far-Left trainspotters and ex-far-Leftists.
I have spoken to the comrade who offered to write a contribution on the Party, and the position was worse than I remembered. He got a positive reply from the one of the authors he wrote to which said they were interested and would he write an abstract of what his contribution would say. He did this and sent it in. Then nothing (not even a rejection). It's clear, then, that a deliberate decision was made to exclude an article on us.
In 2012-3 I was in correspondence over a chapter on the SPGB (possibly for Vol II), but in the end (the deadline was 1 October 2013) I was unable to deliver a satisfactory draft.
If it was that early it must have been in relation to the first volume. Anyway, here is the abstract thst DAP submitted in January 2015, at the request of one of the co-authors, for the second volume:
Quote:Chapter AbstractMovement or Monument? The SPGB and the Maximum ProgrammeThis chapter discusses the UK’s oldest revolutionary organisation, the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB), in the post-war era. Founded in 1904, the SPGB reached its peak of membership and influence in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, though ever since has remained a visible and self-styled thorn in the side of organisations situating themselves in the Leninist and anarchist traditions. Viewed by many as a monument to revolutionary purity, it nevertheless developed a considerable reputation for Marxist political education – especially in the field of Marxian economics – which continued after the war.Underpinned by its anti-reformism and infamous ‘hostility clause’ against all other political parties, the SPGB’s sense of being ‘the other’ was emboldened by the rise of the New Left from the 1950s. However, its influence on other thinkers and organisations was sometimes wider than it liked to concede: from for instance, being the originator in Britain of the theory of state capitalism, to its explicit promotion of the idea of socialism or communism as a society without the wages system, any price mechanism, or money. Whilst the former view influenced the group which went on to found the International Socialists/Socialist Workers Party (to which the SPGB has been opposed), the latter was an outlook which found wider resonance on the ‘ultra-left’. This was specifically in the perspectives of the left communist, council communist and anarcho-communist organisations that developed in Britain from the 1970s, and then in the twenty first century in groups such as the Zeitgeist Movement.The distinctive political culture of the SPGB is also examined, along with some key ideological divisions that have emerged within the organisation, including ones that have led to small-scale splits and breakaway movements impacting on other political currents.I this extract an acknowledgment that we are best known as the Socialist Party of Great Britain – the SPGB?And perhaps we should stick to the acronym much more.
Quote:Once again, a confirmation that we are an irrelevancy and effectively have no political presence. An unpalatable fact to swallow, i grant you, but reality seems to bear this out.I say this deliberate action is the recourse of political cowards. It proves the potency of our analyses.
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