MUSIC FROM AFAR

[p030] Music from Afar The Azores islands, part of Portugal, lie far out in the North Atlantic. U.S. air bases since the latter part of the second world war, these islands are perhaps even poorer than Continental Portugal and equally oppressed by the brutal régime of Salazar. The fishermen and farmers who inhabit the Azores earn an average of Jess than 5s. a day—but they usually have work only about ninety days during the year. This poem, translated from the Portuguese by P. McGowan. was written by a young Azores girl of 19 soon after she left her island to study on the mainland. Do not speak, ask no questions. I come from afar and there is inside me the calm voice of the sea. In those remote isles from whence I come there is moist greenery and an infinite weariness of life. The days are grey. There is hunger, solitude and a vague desire to depart. Rough men, silent, ploughmen bent with the weight of the plough, fishermen who go out by night and sometimes return no more. . I come from afar and there is inside me the immense loneliness of the cliffs. In those lost islands from whence I come the people are quiet and sad as lakes and on each lip a dumb protest lies of pain and resignation. Strong and gloomy people turned stony by the vast horizons and wrapped by the sea in a hopeless sleep... Man, simple and strong, in the hot summer afternoons lifting your gaze afar and despairing: I believe in you! Rough, sunburned man searching for your own shadow the other side of the endless sea: I believe in you! Sad, silent man watching the passage of days ever the same. in immense uncertainty of the future: I believe in you! I shall sing the strength of your body that has resisted wind and rain, hunger, solitude and weariness. I shall sing your callused hands that wrest green from earth and rocks, vibrant with tenderness and vigour. I shall sing that silence eternal that a distant gaze sets free, silence that spreads at dusk over the island. I shall sing the dreams you dreamed and lost one day in the pebbles when you saw the sea as it lapped your feet. And all because you never found yourself in the uncertain solitude of your world. And all because no one ever told you that the real future of your dreams was the invincible strength of your arms fighting against the shadows of the past. I want to tell you what no one has told you; 1 want to sing you the strength of hope: I want to awaken in that tired gaze the confident light of the future. Tough, sombre man, letting yourself be, silent and sad, weary of the sea and solitude: I believe in you! Simple, strong man, in your calm eyes the bitterness of a dream without hope: I believe in you! Strong, sunburned man who with the brutal strokes of your plough must wrest from the earth a new world: I believe in you! 155

[p031] LABOUR REVIEW In those grim islands from whence I come there are no songs or laughter: a heavy silence and music from afar, brought by the waves as they come. The wind passes and men wait. Wait? Even they know not for what... The waves roll, roll and break upon the rocks. One day they will surely bring the music that is to come, that murmurs low in the hearts of the humble. Useful but Shallow The British Communist Party: A Historical Profile, by Henry Pelling. (A. and C. Black, 18s.) THE first thing to be said about this book is that it is a useful contribution to the subject, which ought to be widely read in the working-class movement, and especially among Communist Party members and recent ex-members. The author brings together many important facts which have been syste- matically suppressed by the party leadership in their so-called ‘education’ of the rank and file, and refers to many accessible sources for further study. The book can have a considerable enlightening effect and set in train a fruitful process of thought and investigation. That is, of course, why Klugmann has dis- missed it, in the Daily Worker, as a mere potboiler: a charge that comes queerly from the author of ‘From Trotsky to Tito’ and non-author of the so-long-overdue official history of the British Communist Party. Particularly worth studying is Pelling’s account of what he calls the ‘coup d’Etat’ of 1929, which substantially supplements my own version (in the ‘Joseph Redman’ pamphlet published by the Reasoner). Among numerous shrewd observations, the following, on the present situation of the party, seems espe- cially worth quoting: the party is tending ‘to become an “agency” fer the propaganda wares of the Soviet bloc nations —a “holding company” controlling a number of organizations concerned with “peace” and “friendship” on communist terms, and also possessing a few incidental “properties” such as trade unions and professional bodies which were acquired in palmier days, but with an ever shrinking activity of its Own in its original role’. Vv Having said this. it is necessary to point out that the book —which is, indeed, modestly subtitled ‘A Historical Profile’-— is far from being without serious weaknesses. There is this much to Klugmann’s potboiler sneer: that after about 1932 the pace quickens and the matter grows thinner and shallower to a degree which suggests that the author may have been hurrying to get the manuscript ready for the printer. The 156 Book Reviews Deceinber 1988 Perhaps this is why I am silent and gloomy like an empty harbour. I come from afar and there is inside me the everlasting silence of mountains. In the forgotten islands whence come the people are as sad as a dark night. Do not speak. say nothing. June 19 nN ~ 2 biggest shortcoming, though, is that the party is shown as essentially the same from the very beginning down to the present. Nothing is said about a number of opposition move- ments—in 1925 against the blind repudiation of ‘Trotskyism’: the Balham Group in 1932: the trend centred on the Welw:n branch in 1947-48. The role of Moscow is presented in the same light throughout. (Thus, for instance, we are told that when the central committee was invited to Moscow in 1922 to discuss the reorganization of the Party. ‘the recalcitrant members were overawed’. Perhaps they were convinced?) The high standing enjoyed by the party in the British Labour movement in 1924-25 does not emerge, the widespread solid- arity shown in connexion with the Campbell case. and then with the arrest of ‘the Twelve’, being played down. The crucial transition period of 1933-36 is skated over. without even a mention of the key decision to support sanctions. Though he records that in 1936-38 ‘any criticisms of Soviet policy from the standpoint of the Left were instantly labelled “Trotskyist”, and, once so labelled, were regarded as beyond the need fo: further serious consideration’, Pelling tells us nothing of what these criticisms were—or of the expulsions of members that occurred because of them. On the most recent period, there is no discussion of the significance of the party's pro- gramme adopted in 1951, ‘The British Road to Socialism’. nor is it linked in any way with the 1952 rules change depriving members of the right to share in formulating party policy. though both facts are baldly mentioned. Describing the publication in 1956 of the three issues of the Reasoner, Pelling writes of no. 2: ‘Perhaps without realizing it the editors had already passed from a Leninist to a liberal position, which was exemplified by their use of a quotation from Diderot: “Though a lie may serve for the moment it is inevitably injurious in the long run: the truth. on the other hand. inevitably serves in the end even if it may hurt for the moment.” ’ As I proposed the inclusion of that quotation in the Reasoner perhaps I may be allowed to assure all concerned that it does not seem to me to express a liberal rather than a Leninist idea. Henry Pelling identifies Leninism with Stalin- ism and so perhaps does not realize that Lenin and Trotsky insisted that the first duty of a revolutionary to the working class is to ‘say what is’.

[p032] BOOK REVIEWS In discussing the disintegration of the British Communist Party after the Twentieth Congress. Poznan and Hungary. Pelling mentions the establishment of the Universities and Lefi Review and the New Reasoner, but says nothing about LABOUR REVIEW. This definitely does not arise from un- awareness of the latter journal’s existence and character. In contrast. Colm Brogan, reviewing this book in the Daily Telegraph. ended his remarks by drawing particular attention to the fact that a section of former party members have broken away not on the grounds that ‘Marxism is discredited’ but because the party has abandoned Marxism. LABOUR REVIEW and The Newsletter are the organs of this section, who seek to revive and carry forward the great traditions of the British Communist Party’s earlier years, which show only faintly through Pelling’s narrative. BRIAN PEARCE Workers will Fight The Worker Views his Union, by Joel Seidman, Jack London, Bernard Karsh and Daisy L. Tagliacozzo. (Cam- bridge University Press for University of Chicago Press, 43s. 6d.) THIS book, by a group of research workers from the indus- trial relations centre at the University of Chicago, should be read by every trade unionist. Here is impartial proof that the heart of the American trade union movement beats strong and fierce. The unions concerned in the survey are the miners, steelworkers, plumbers, telephone, knitting mill and metal workers, representing a fair cross section from the point of view of size. inner-union democracy and attitudes to struggle. Right at the beginning of the book the authors point out that the rank-and-file trade unionist’s philosophy does not embrace the conception of wresting power from the govern- ment. However, despite the lack of this essential idea, the American workers see the need for struggle and we could learn many lessons from them, The research done in the local unions reveals a picture much on a par with our own, whereby you have a branch attendance equal to the life of the branch. the same small hard core of militants linking the economic struggle with politics, the ‘trade union only” type. and the ticket holders. In every case investigated. however, the story Is the same: when the union calls for action its call is answered unswervingly and with a fierce determination, so great is the members’ faith in the union to defend their economic interests. We in Britain. with our long tradition of viewing the trade unions as the industrial arm of the Labour movement, can learn a iesson. The book is timely: for there is the danger of losing sight of the fact that we originally began with the philosophy of using our strength to destroy capitalism—and after reading this book with its mass of data you are left with the thought: what the untons wil! do. once they begin to see the need to “wage a class battle. Vv Such a book must be of some comfort to all those socialists who are leading the fight for working-class ideas. The state ef aifcirs in America is favourab!e to them. for capitalism "here, as elsewhere. is finding it daily more difficult to patch up the system. and the workers are going to have to fight the class battle or return to the days of depression. This excellent book gives the proof that the workers will Aght. At 43s. 6d. it’s a bit stiff. but should be in every library. For it kills the idea that the American trade unions are corrupt and rotten: the leadership perhaps. but the rank and file are strong enough to overcome all obstacles. JOCK STEVENS (Sidcup Branch, AUBTW) Holding Labour back Death on the Left, by John Connell (Pall Mall Press, 3s. 6d.) LABOUR PARTY members are well aware of the ‘deadness’ in the party. Raffles are more important than policies. Jumble sales take precedence over industrial struggle. Hydrogen- bombs, unemployment, fascists, fade into insignificance beside the annual women’s effort. Parts of this book strike home to the disgruntled party worker. Labour leaders are ‘timorous and cautious men who looked over their shoulders and were often scared by what they saw’. Union leaders are ‘separated by a deepening divide from the me+ they were said to represent, as middle class in their ideology as in their manners’. Local govern- ment ‘became a familiar experience for the young entry in local affairs to discover little nests of jobbery and nepotism, to encounter socialist councillors and aldermen who were as cosy, as comfort loving, as greedy of the little soul- destroying attributes of power as any capitalist reactionary’. But what is the cause of all this? Here Connell is lost. As a Conservative, the things he admires most about the Labour Party are the cankers which are rotting it. The domin- ance of Fabianism, the checking of ‘authoritarianism’, the cordiality between Labour and Tory parliamentarians, and, above all, the fact that Labour ‘has advanced approximately at the same pace that its opponents have conceded to it~ these are ‘the major moral victories of the British Labour Party’. Can we, unlike Connell, find a cure? The overthrow of capitalism is essential for the working class. The Labour Party will not live if it cannot break with the policies—and the leaders—that are holding it back. As Connell says: “Widespread apathy is a practical as well as a symbolical rejection. G. GALE Church and H-Bomb Ethical and Political Problems of the Atomic Age, by C. F. von Weizsacker (S.C.M. Press, 2s.) HERE is a short but valuable addition to the rapidly accumu- lating literature about the H-bomb and the profound difference it is making to everything and everybody. It is one of the lectures of the Burge Memorial Trust, which has as its pur- pose’ to further the cause of international friendship through the churches and to promote a better and wider understanding of the international obligations of Christian peoples’. I think that von Weizsacker can fairly claim to have fuifilled this trust in three respects. First, speaking as a scientist. a Christian, and a German he argues for the practical usefulness of unilateral action by the Federal Government to renounce all atomic weapons. In fact he exposes the lethal dangers and political blind alleys that await not only Germany. but by inference this country as well, if we persist in trying to incorporate the nuclear weapon in our national armouries. In the second place von Weizsacker argues humbly and yet concisely the utter impossi- bility of accepting the New Testament and then being prepared to throw, or to have thrown on our behalf, a hydrogen-bomb. This needs saying, not because it is some new and strange interpretation of the words of Jesus, but because those who defend the Christian use of nuclear weapons are engaged in a nathetic masquerade—they are trying to maintain what they call a Christian ethic by the process of separating it from the plain teaching of its supreme exponent Jesus Christ Himself. Finally the author of this penetrating little essay puts his finger on one of the great hindrances to a Christian pronouncement against H-bombs. It is the tradition and spiritual condition of 157

[p033] LABOUR REVIEW the church which, being what they are, prevent the church from any ‘ex cathedra’ repudiation of war, even nuclear war. For what it is worth, and as a professional member of the church, I agree with him and particularly with his closing sentence in which he advocates personal dissociation ‘from all participation in whatever has to do with atomic weapons’. Such is the hope of the world and the hope of the church into the bargain. DONALD O. SOPER Clearing up Confusion The Initia) Triumph of the Axis, ed. Arnold Toynbee and Veronica M. Toynbee (Oxford University Press, 84s.) THIS monolithic 742-page volume is one of the series ‘Survey of International Affairs 1939-1946’, by various authors, issued under the auspices of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. It covers the period between the outbreak of the war in August 1939 and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour on December 7, 1941. It is a mine of thought-stimulating information about events which are rapidly being forgotten. It does not itself effectively open up the underlying aims of the powers, the defence of their imperialist positions against each other and against the workers and colonial peoples. However, while it tacitly presents the war as a “defence of democracy’, it wastes few words in denouncing ‘fascist aggression’ or arguing whether the Allied counter-move3 were just or legal, for in twentieth-century capitalism ‘necessity knows no law’. A good example is part vil, which devotes ninety-eight pages to outlining the political steps by which the economic and strategic interests of the dominant U.S. capitalists took the reluctant American people towards a shooting war under Roosevelt’s leadership. The real stakes are tersely indicated: ‘the imposition of German hegemony on the neighbouring European countries, east and west of her, and the acquisition of tropical dependencies for Germany at her western European victims’ expense, in Africa and perhaps also in Indonesia.” How these aims impinge on U/S. interests is too obvious to need emp‘tasis; they explain how U.S. forces come to be ‘defending democracy’ in every quarter of the globe. Vv Thus the book gives at least a start for clearing up some of the vast confusion about foreign politics which prevails on the Left. It starts by discussing real material objectives, and not merely their fantastic reflection in the heads of men —after all, it is time that the theoreticians of the Left began to explain how the war they presented as a war ‘for demo- cracy’ could in a few years lead to the H-bomb race and to Germany remilitarized. It is just not good enough to portray Roosevelt and his backers as ‘progressives’ under the New Deal, ‘reactionaries’ from August 1939 to June 1941, ‘pro- gressives’ from June 1941 to 1946, and ‘reactionary’ ever since. We need something better than proclaiming Anthony Eden as the prince of peace and collective security in 1938 and seeing him turn up in 1956 as the head of the Suez adven- ture. This book at any rate considers Roosevelt's basic political problem in realistic terms: “The problem which confronted Roosevelt was how to persuade the nation, which was still strongly isolationist, to accept the measures which were essential for the security of the United States.’ This at least is a step forward from liberal. phrase-mongering. The Palme Dutts and Zilliacuses are put squarely up against the ques- tion: “Why does ‘“‘defence of democracy” and all the Left-wing talk end up as defence of the security of U.S. capitalism?’ The answer is: because the class struggle is forgotten or con- cealed. J.A. 158 December 1958 Stalinist Chauvinism French Socialism in the Crisis Years, 1933-1936, by John T. Marcus (Atlantic Books. 37s. 6d.) MARCUS sets out to explain why in the years 1933-36 the communists were able to take over from the socialists (SFIO} the leadership of the majority of the politically-minded workers of France. He sees that the Popular Front meant the Communist Party wooing the radicals and industrialists of the Right. which explains why the Communist Party acted as a brake on the spontaneous struggles of June 1936. But he thinks that the SFIO lost its hold because it was not patriotic enough, because its Marxist-tinged phrases continued to speak of fascism. whether in Germany or in France, as a product of capitalism in crisis, while the Communist Party echoed a mass sentiment that fascism was something ‘above the class struggle’. Why then did the French people, who keenly opposed the fascist leagues at home, at no time show enthusiasm for fighting the Germans until the Resistance offered far-reaching social aims? It is simpler to conclude that the people accepted Communist Party leadership not because of but in spite of its ‘anti-fascist’ chauvinism. Jacobinism, ‘revolutionary defencism’, did not survive the army mutiny of 1917 and the split in the SFIO of 1920, which brought to the Communist International of Lenin and Trotsky the majority of the French politically-organized workers. The SFIO was already too degenerate by the late 1920s to tackle the trade union organizing of the great new engineering works of north Paris. The crisis of 1933, which pulverized it. strengthened the Communist Party just because the latter had established its bases on a political tradition of anti-capitalist militancy in large-scale modern industry. Demagogic exploitation of mass sentiments for peace and unity enabled the Communist Party to ride the tide of 1935- 36, though the militants regarded with growing unease the party's support for the radical-socialist coalitions and for rearmament. The Moscow trials played a most important part in isolating temporarily the critical trends within communism which kept alive the Leninist conception that ‘national unity in France simply strengthened Hitler's hold on the German people. It is not without significance that the bibliography does not mention Trotsky’s ‘Whither France?’, and that the author admits that he has seen only two copies of the French Trotsky- ist paper La Vérité. Despite the Nazi persecution of the Trotskyists during the Occupation, the archives are not really so barren as that. In ‘Whither France?” and La Vérité the students will find in a richly polemical form a contemporary Marxist analysis of the class struggles of the period. ROBERT SHERWOOD Diplomat’s Diary