The City Within

[p067] The City Within ‘The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. —Karl Marx. Cars glitter past like beads of will. When light has stripped the sky of stars and minds more intricate than locks close out the continents of need and war and time is tangible as clocks such consummations as The Stones’ guitars conceal the massacre by stocks. Remembering is painfully human:— ‘Personally, I think that these war scares provide ideal buying opportunities—providing all the usual investment factors are right.—Evening Standard financial advice. There is a leashed anger in the faces around me. Civilisation. Is it some need of order that sends me to the library with notes about The Labyrinth in Edwin Muir? What is this habit I’ve picked up? Perhaps I could be calm and scholarly and nice like those who praise the taste of Keats’ plums, the decorous vitality of Yeats’ swans. ‘Literature,’ they say. But here, today, Blake’s angels puke upon the acid leaves of Baudelaire and rip his rented girls. Mere feelings swirl like oil in the gutter where streaking clouds glow brighter than Brazilian butterflies— until they darken and turn filthy grey. O, I’ve sweat the feelings and I know the books, the buildings of the Lie where scholars raise symbolic spooks— (the States, the gods, the Dukes) persuading men to die, 159 or dream, of scorn, or cry, to keep the balding owners in their gold peruques. II ‘Let them vote until they pop off.’—General Schleicher, Germany 1932. Above the din a van loudhails a noisy name; Metallic echoes hook the ears of fame. We’re told to be responsible, to win, By dropping secret papers in a tin: (We near that day of choice. And promises Of mortgages evoke suburban bliss.) The Governors will tipple with financiers To prove the £’s much better than appears, While Secretaries, ruling without noise, Run our Democracy with charm and poise. The anger from the lie is warmed by curls of air from Boots smelling of cheap soaps and medicines. Among the trinkets, ‘The Wild Elephants’ offers jungle to the dispossessed like Hemingway. iil ‘We are after the cheapest way to prevent some- thing terrible—the loss of our ability to get what we want from the riches of the Indo-Chinese territory.,—Eisenhower 1953. A Ford jerks at the crossing. The sweet bottles ring. Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola, Coca-Cola. A warehouse of magenta brick with slitted gaps for light explains the mask of profit which sells sweetness that comes out of pain like peaches from South Africa. Vietnam is thirsting for Democracy. The victims’ tears are brine that feeds the thirst that sickens in the merchant’s gut.

[p068] 160 FOURTH INTERNATIONAL, AUGUST 1966 IV poets must be truthful.’—Wilfred Owen. A flowerbed beside the bank is not enough. My eyes feel cold as glass, as, stiff inside its trap of air I see a London Plane stretched out upon a bomber’s trail. I feel like a lover who has felt a kiss contract to skin. Hair, elaborate as diplomatic communiques, or flat as declarations of fresh war. Skirts this year are high enough to watch the thighs erupt towards desire where love is broken like an ornament. The girls click by. ‘Poland’s existence is intolerable, incompatible with the essential conditions of Germany’s life. Poland must go and will go.—Von Seeckt 1922. My eyes sting as I remember him whose agonies were close as skin of comrades killed and torn upon the wire. My eyes sting as I remember him whose agonies were close as skin of comrades killed and torn upon the wire. The poetry is in the pity. His poems were ignored in Germany— Von Seeckt was not impressed. The Bachsteins played another tune. The Nazis heard another voice. Tragedy became, again, as cheap as guns, and the high rhetoric of armoured trucks range from the walls of Brittany to Stalingrad. The Krupp who built the armaments with slaves were, afterwards, too rich to keep in jail. It seems too late when pity starts. Or pity is not strong enough. I cannot reach out my hand and bless. I am not a god. There is work to do. Vv Two children, hand in hand, are crossing the avenue like fish shadowed in a wreck. And I am sorry for the meek in whose rooms despair gathers like used handkerchiefs— even those who wave at royalty —_ _and those who are scared at the edge of the sea without knowing why: ‘Previous poets have attempted to describe the the prisoners of power world; our task is to create it. So, we can change and the prisoners of themselves. _ ourselves.’—Adapted from Wallace Stevens and . Karl Marx. ‘All a poet can do today is warn. That is why true Terry Brindley, Bristol, 19-3-66.

[p069] LIMITED PUBLICATIONS PARK NEW MACaulay $S.W.4 London, Street, High Clapham 7029 186A List Book Free Write for The New Course By Leon Trotsky A collection of articles written in 1923 during the lull before the great storm of persecution which was later to overwhelm Russian Bolshevism. Here Trotsky, analyses the incipient stages of the degeneration of the Communist Party, uncovers its causes and proposes measures for combating its further decline. He here analyses the party in a historical, that is dialectical way, the relationships between generations, social strata, groups, factional forma- tions, tradition and the multitude of factors that go to make a revolutionary party. 111 pages, 3/6 This document is a landmark in the development of 20th century Marxism. It sums up the experience of an entire period of struggle against the Soviet bureaucracy. This Platform also represents the highest point in the fortunes of the Joint Opposition (Trotskyist-Zinovievite) to Stalin. It is the programme of the last of the Bolshevik-Leninists who insisted that they remained communists despite all the per- secution, jailings, violence and slander inflicted on them. But this document also represents a watershed—the end of one phase and the beginning of another—in the evolution of Trotskyist politics. 112 pages, 5/- The Draft Programme of the Communist International by Leon Trotsky This is part of the author’s criticism of the draft programme submitted by the Executive Committee of the Third (Communist) International to the 6th Congress of the Comintern which was held in July 1928. The manuscript of that criticism was written by Trotsky during his exile in Alma-Ata (Central Asia). It was sent to the Congress in Moscow together with an appeal for reinstatement into the party from which he had been expelled a few months before by the Stalinist faction in 1927. Stalin and his supporters had invented the theory of ‘Socialism in one country’, which was made party policy in 1925 and converted into an article of faith to be defended by the world institutions of Stalinism. It is this theory which Trotsky criticises in these pages. 64 pages, 1/- This is a polemic against Radek in 1928. Trotsky examines the arguments against his pre-war theory of the permanent : revolution (as expounded in Results and Prospects) and takes‘ up the history of his differences with Lenin before 1917, of which Stalin and his henchmen made so much. Trotsky shows that it was Lenin’s criticisms of his attitude to the centralised Marxist party, which he afterwards understood and accepted, that kept them apart, and not their differences on the permanent revolution. 254 pages, 15/- soft cover, 25/- hard cover m This is the basic programmatic document of the world movement founded by Leon Trotsky and his comrades. By m (938 the revolutionary Marxists had found it necessary to capitelism Mma \ay the foundations of the Fourth International in order to restore working-class leadership after the defeats prepared by and the = = the Stalinist bureaucracy in control of the Third (Communist) International. The defeat of the German Revolution in tasks of the 1923, of the British General Strike in 1926, and of the Chinese Revolution in 1927, followed by Hitler’s victory over he German working class in 1933, finally ruled out the Ath |nterpational weewereerem yerspective of transforming the Communist International oy internal opposition. 60 pages, 1/- Printed by Plough Press Ltd. (T.U.), r/o 180 Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4

[p070] Subscribe to Fourth International FourTH INTERNATIONAL is the theoretical journal of the International Committee of the Fourth Inter- national. FourTH INTERNATIONAL continues the work of LaspourR REVIEW which concluded its 12th year of publication with its issue of Summer 1963, the fifth number of volume 7. FourTH INTERNATIONAL continues the work and traditions of Revolutionary Communism since the death of Lenin. FourTH INTERNATIONAL represents the unbroken chain of theoretical journals in the Bolshevik tradition, whose continuators were the Left Opposition led and inspired by Leon Trotsky. FourTH INTERNATIONAL follows in the traditions of that Opposition and in the traditions of the Fourth International of Leon Trotsky. FourTH INTERNATIONAL is the product of decades of continuous struggle of Marxists in the Inter- national Labour movement against Stalinism, Reformism and Revisionism. FourRTH INTERNATIONAL represents the successful fusion of Marxist trends in this International Labour movement, from Trotskyist to Com- munist, Social-Democratic and Trade Union movements. FourTH INTERNATIONAL, With this issue, commences a new period of activity in the International Labour movement and simultaneously prepares and equips the Marxist movement for its future intervention in the battles of the working class which promise to eclipse and transcend all pre- vious struggles both in their depth and scope. To: New Park Publications Ltd., 186a Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4 I enclose cheque/postal order/money order/draft for £ S. d. to pay for issues of FourTH INTERNATIONAL. Volume.... No..... Price 2/6 (postage 6d. per issue) eee ere eee eee e cece ee eeeeeseoneseeeevnseaennes Some writings by Leon Trotsky The First Five Years of the Communist International Vol. 2 (soft cover) 12s. 6d. (hard cover) 18s. Od. The New Course 3s. 6d. The Permanent Revolution (soft cover) 15s. Od. (hard cover) 25s. Od. Draft Programme of the Communist International A Criticism of Fundamentals, 1928 1s. Od Where is Britain Going? 7s. 6d. Whither France? Ss. Od. Stalinism and Trotskyism in the USA Is. 6d Stalinism and Bolshevism 6d Radio, Science, Technique and Society Is. Od. 1 Stake My Life! (Dewey report of the Moscow Trials) 6a. Trade Unions in the Epoch of Imperialist Decay 2d. The Russian Revolution (The Copenhagen Speech) 4d. Culture and Socialism and Art and Revolution 2s. 6d. Death Agony of Capitalism (Transitional Programme) 1/- bY To: New Park Publications Ltd., 186A Clapham High St., London, S.W.4. I enclose cheque/postal order/money order/ draft for £ s. d. to pay for SOCC SSCS OOE SES EESH ESET ESSETEOOSHSEESEESSOOSETEFEEE