#ian birchall

[revolutionaryeye]

Ian Birchall (born 1939) is a British Marxist historian and translator, a former member of the Socialist Workers Party and author of numerous articles and books, particularly relating to the French Left. Formerly Senior Lecturer in French at Middlesex University,[1] his research interests include the Comintern, the International Working Class, Communism and Trotskyism, France and Syndicalism, Babeuf, Sartre, Victor Serge and Alfred Rosmer. He is on the editorial board of Revolutionary History, a member of the London Socialist Historians Group and has completed a biography of Tony Cliff.

In 2013, Birchall joined opposition to the SWP Central Committee during the internal crisis over allegations of rape[2] and resigned from the organisation in December.[3]

In August 2015, Birchall was one of 20 authors of Poets for Corbyn, an anthology of poems endorsing Jeremy Corbyn's campaign in the Labour Party leadership election.[4][5]

[antikorg]

Ian Birchall, une trajectoire marxiste hétérodoxe

Ian Birchall, une trajectoire marxiste hétérodoxe

[ad_1] CONTRETEMPS 2019-04-17 13:36:44

Selim Nadi s’est entretenu avec l’historien marxiste et militant révolutionnaire Ian Birchall, dont on pourra lire de nombreux textes ici, notamment sur les rapports entre la gauche communiste et la question coloniale. Fin observateur de la gauche révolutionnaire française (dans ses composantes organisées et intellectuelles), auteur de nombreux ouvrages…

View On WordPress

[revolutionaryeye]

Some questions about the lost German Revolution

by Ian Birchall It is not surprising that Tony Phillips has made a vigorous defence of the ­“classic” Socialist Workers Party position on the 1918-1923 situation in Germany. The argument is central to the SWP’s historical analysis. In order to argue that Leninism did not inevitably lead to Stalinism, it is necessary to show that there was an alternative. As Lenin and Trotsky were well aware, socialism could not be built within a single country, so it was necessary to spread the revolution. And Germany was the place where it seemed this could be achieved. So the possibility of revolution in Germany is a central component of the SWP theory of state capitalism, and has been asserted by SWP speakers and writers over the last half century. (I am not scoring points against anyone by saying this; I myself have put forward this analysis at many dozens of SWP meetings.)

Phillips is responding to the argument presented by John Rose at a Marxism meeting that in effect the revolution had been defeated by 1919. I have my own disagreements with Rose, but I welcome his efforts to look afresh at the historical experience and thus to enrich our understanding of the process.

It has to be said that there seems to be plenty of evidence to back up Phillips’s claim that a German revolution was possible right up to the autumn of 1923. For example, Victor Serge’s eyewitness reports from Germany in 1923 describe the impact of inflation and the French invasion of the Ruhr, strikes and hunger riots, the rise of the far-right and heated political debates among workers on the streets. If we had even a quarter of these factors to deal with we should undoubtedly consider we were living in a revolutionary situation.

Nonetheless I do not find Phillips’s account wholly convincing. Firstly, his argument is somewhat circular. He aims to defend the narrative presented by Pierre Broué and Chris Harman, yet virtually all his references are to…Broué and Harman. Now these two books are undoubtedly an important contribution and should be read by anyone hoping to understand the German Revolution. But Broué’s book was first published in 1971, Harman’s in 1982. There are a number of more recent publications which do not fundamentally challenge their case, but do at least invite us to reconsider aspects of it. Broué himself included new material on Germany in his history of the Comintern, not yet translated into English. David Fernbach’s collection of writings by Paul Levi and Frédéric Cyr’s biography of Levi add some new insights. Levi had all too obvious deficiencies as a leader, but he had a sharp political intelligence; he believed that by 1922 the revolutionary opportunity had been missed. And John Riddell’s scrupulous edition of the proceedings of the Third Congress of the Communist International casts a lot of light on the situation in the German Communist Party (KPD) and the Comintern.

Secondly, Phillips’s account makes only passing reference to the March Action, although this disastrous venture caused enormous harm to the KPD. He also claims that by 1923 the KPD “had begun to recover” from the March Action. On Sigrid Koch-Baumgarten’s figures the KPD lost over half or perhaps two thirds of its members in 1921. On Harman’s figures (and in such a hectic period any membership figures must be approximations), the KPD grew by 38,000 in 1922 and 70,000 in 1923; about half of the 1921 losses. And even more important, its credibility with members of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) had been destroyed. It takes a long time to rebuild trust, and in 1923 when the KPD attempted to win unity in action with the left of the SPD, SPD members must undoubtedly have remembered 1921 and wondered how far they could trust the KPD.

Phillips concludes with a quotation from Leon Trotsky. Now Trotsky was one of the great Marxist thinkers of his generation, and it is always rewarding to read his work. But his work should not be used like a religious text to conclude an argument. Trotsky had not been in Germany. He had attended and taken part in the Third Comintern Congress where the situation of the KPD was debated heatedly; doubtless he talked to German comrades visiting Russia and to Karl Radek, who was deeply immersed in the activities of the KPD. But he was a busy man, dealing with many other problems. In no way can his comments be seen as a definitive judgment on the German situation.

In particular Trotsky juxtaposes “tactics” and “objective conditions”, claiming that only the former mattered in Germany. This does not seem to me to correspond to what we know about the situation in Germany, which had been shaped by “objective conditions” going back a couple of generations. Likewise Phillips makes a rather abstract separation of party and class, suggesting their development was independent from each other.

It is well worth looking back at what Tony Cliff wrote about Rosa Luxemburg....... Continued at:- http://isj.org.uk/some-questions-about-the-lost-german-revolution/

[revolutionaryeye]

The Young Ho Chi Minh

As a young man in Paris, Ho Chi Minh embraced a radical internationalism.

Nguyen-Ai-Quoc (the later known as Ho Chi Minh) speaking at the foundational congress of the French Communist Party in December 1920. Michael Goebel

Seventy years ago this month, on September 2 in Hanoi, the Vietminh, led by Ho Chi Minh, issued the Declaration of Independence of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Ho was little known in the West then, but by the 1960s his name was chanted by demonstrators the world over, for whom he became a symbol of the Third World’s will and ability to stand up to American imperialism.

In an earlier era, he was known as Nguyen-Ai-Quoc, the beneficiary of a privileged education who purportedly said that as soon as he heard the slogan “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” he wanted to see France. But colonial law forbade native Vietnamese from leaving the country; the only way he could get to Europe was by taking a job on a ship. He travelled first to London, then Paris.

Nguyen’s earliest contacts on arriving in France seem to have been with the syndicalist left. He visited the Librairie du travail, a labor bookstore, at what had been the offices of La Vie ouvrière, a revolutionary syndicalist paper by Pierre Monatte and Alfred Rosmer, who had been some of the most consistent internationalists from the first day of World War I.

He went on to join the French Socialist Party (SFIO), which was in the midst of an intense debate to decide whether it should affiliate with the newly formed Communist International, created in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution.

The SFIO met in congress at Tours in December 1920 to make its decision. The Congress voted to affiliate, becoming the French Communist Party (PCF), with a socialist minority splitting away out of an aversion to the perceived dominance of the Russian Bolsheviks in the Communist International.

Nguyen spoke as a delegate, telling those assembled how his homeland was “shamefully oppressed and exploited,” as well as being “poisoned” by alcohol and opium. Prisons were more numerous than schools, and freedom of the press did not exist. He urged that “the Party must make socialist propaganda in all the colonies” and concluded with the appeal: “Comrades, save us!”

He was applauded, but he clearly touched a number of sore nerves. He was interrupted twice. On the first occasion, Jean Longuet, Karl Marx’s grandson, called out to defend his own reputation: “I have intervened to defend natives!” A little later, when an unnamed delegate heckled, Nguyen responded with a cutting “Silence, parliamentarians!”

Nguyen’s words had a special weight, since one condition of the....

Read on:- https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/09/vietnam-paris-nguyen-ai-quac-le-paria-french-left-de-gaulle/

[spinachandcoffee]

"What we wanted was Tariq Ali, what we got was Sean Matgamna"

Ian Birchall talking about the International Socialists in 1968

[indexoflit-blog]

Ian Birchall.

Brecht said that: ‘I have never found anybody without a sense of humour who could understand dialectics.’ Ian Birchall has one, and explains this central idea of Marxism.