Below is the full text of the speech given by the late Jimmy Reid at his inauguration as rector of Glasgow University in 1972. It caused such a sensation that the New York Times carried it in full and at the time it was compared to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.
It is a speech which resounds with passion, intelligence, compassion and a worldview which encapsulates the finest elements of Marxist and socialist theory to explain how capitalism impacts on human beings and the human condition. It is a refreshing antidote to the Daily Mail’s ubiquitous brand of right wing populism regarding social issues – crime, poverty, welfare, immigration, etc. – that has sadly gained much traction in society today.
If this doesn’t make the case for socialism nothing will.
Jimmy Reid:
‘Alienation is the precise and correctly applied word for describing the major social problem in Britain today. People feel alienated by society. In some intellectual circles it is treated almost as a new phenomenon. It has, however, been with us for years. What I believe is true is that today it is more widespread, more pervasive than ever before. Let me right at the outset define what I mean by alienation. It is the cry of men who feel themselves the victims of blind economic forces beyond their control. It’s the frustration of ordinary people excluded from the processes of decision-making. The feeling of despair and hopelessness that pervades people who feel with justification that they have no real say in shaping or determining their own destinies.
Many may not have rationalised it. May not even understand, may not be able to articulate it. But they feel it. It therefore conditions and colours their social attitudes. Alienation expresses itself in different ways in different people. It is to be found in what our courts often describe as the criminal antisocial behaviour of a section of the community. It is expressed by those young people who want to opt out of society, by drop-outs, the so-called maladjusted, those who seek to escape permanently from the reality of society through intoxicants and narcotics. Of course, it would be wrong to say it was the sole reason for these things. But it is a much greater factor in all of them than is generally recognised.
Society and its prevailing sense of values leads to another form of alienation. It alienates some from humanity. It partially de-humanises some people, makes them insensitive, ruthless in their handling of fellow human beings, self-centred and grasping. The irony is, they are often considered normal and well-adjusted. It is my sincere contention that anyone who can be totally adjusted to our society is in greater need of psychiatric analysis and treatment than anyone else. They remind me of the character in the novel, Catch 22, the father of Major Major. He was a farmer in the American Mid-West. He hated suggestions for things like medi-care, social services, unemployment benefits or civil rights. He was, however, an enthusiast for the agricultural policies that paid farmers for not bringing their fields under cultivation. From the money he got for not growing alfalfa he bought more land in order not to grow alfalfa. He became rich. Pilgrims came from all over the state to sit at his feet and learn how to be a successful non-grower of alfalfa. His philosophy was simple. The poor didn’t work hard enough and so they were poor. He believed that the good Lord gave him two strong hands to grab as much as he could for himself. He is a comic figure. But think – have you not met his like here in Britain? Here in Scotland? I have.
It is easy and tempting to hate such people. However, it is wrong. They are as much products of society, and of a consequence of that society, human alienation, as the poor drop-out. They are losers. They have lost the essential elements of our common humanity. Man is a social being. Real fulfilment for any person lies in service to his fellow men and women. The big challenge to our civilisation is not Oz, a magazine I haven’t seen, let alone read. Nor is it permissiveness, although I agree our society is too permissive. Any society which, for example, permits over one million people to be unemployed is far too permissive for my liking. Nor is it moral laxity in the narrow sense that this word is generally employed – although in a sense here we come nearer to the problem. It does involve morality, ethics, and our concept of human values. The challenge we face is that of rooting out anything and everything that distorts and devalues human relations.
Let me give two examples from contemporary experience to illustrate the point.
Recently on television I saw an advert. The scene is a banquet. A gentleman is on his feet proposing a toast. His speech is full of phrases like “this full-bodied specimen”. Sitting beside him is a young, buxom woman. The image she projects is not pompous but foolish. She is visibly preening herself, believing that she is the object of the bloke’s eulogy. Then he concludes – “and now I give…”, then a brand name of what used to be described as Empire sherry. Then the laughter. Derisive and cruel laughter. The real point, of course, is this. In this charade, the viewers were obviously expected to identify not with the victim but with her tormentors.
The other illustration is the widespread, implicit acceptance of the concept and term “the rat race”. The picture it conjures up is one where we are scurrying around scrambling for position, trampling on others, back-stabbing, all in pursuit of personal success. Even genuinely intended, friendly advice can sometimes take the form of someone saying to you, “Listen, you look after number one.” Or as they say in London, “Bang the bell, Jack, I’m on the bus.”
To the students [of Glasgow University] I address this appeal. Reject these attitudes. Reject the values and false morality that underlie these attitudes. A rat race is for rats. We’re not rats. We’re human beings. Reject the insidious pressures in society that would blunt your critical faculties to all that is happening around you, that would caution silence in the face of injustice lest you jeopardise your chances of promotion and self-advancement. This is how it starts, and before you know where you are, you’re a fully paid-up member of the rat-pack. The price is too high. It entails the loss of your dignity and human spirit. Or as Christ put it, “What doth it profit a man if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his soul?”
Profit is the sole criterion used by the establishment to evaluate economic activity. From the rat race to lame ducks. The vocabulary in vogue is a give-away. It’s more reminiscent of a human menagerie than human society. The power structures that have inevitably emerged from this approach threaten and undermine our hard-won democratic rights. The whole process is towards the centralisation and concentration of power in fewer and fewer hands. The facts are there for all who want to see. Giant monopoly companies and consortia dominate almost every branch of our economy. The men who wield effective control within these giants exercise a power over their fellow men which is frightening and is a negation of democracy.
Government by the people for the people becomes meaningless unless it includes major economic decision-making by the people for the people. This is not simply an economic matter. In essence it is an ethical and moral question, for whoever takes the important economic decisions in society ipso facto determines the social priorities of that society.
From the Olympian heights of an executive suite, in an atmosphere where your success is judged by the extent to which you can maximise profits, the overwhelming tendency must be to see people as units of production, as indices in your accountants’ books. To appreciate fully the inhumanity of this situation, you have to see the hurt and despair in the eyes of a man suddenly told he is redundant, without provision made for suitable alternative employment, with the prospect in the West of Scotland, if he is in his late forties or fifties, of spending the rest of his life in the Labour Exchange. Someone, somewhere has decided he is unwanted, unneeded, and is to be thrown on the industrial scrap heap. From the very depth of my being, I challenge the right of any man or any group of men, in business or in government, to tell a fellow human being that he or she is expendable.
The concentration of power in the economic field is matched by the centralisation of decision-making in the political institutions of society. The power of Parliament has undoubtedly been eroded over past decades, with more and more authority being invested in the Executive. The power of local authorities has been and is being systematically undermined. The only justification I can see for local government is as a counter- balance to the centralised character of national government.
Local government is to be restructured. What an opportunity, one would think, for de-centralising as much power as possible back to the local communities. Instead, the proposals are for centralising local government. It’s once again a blue-print for bureaucracy, not democracy. If these proposals are implemented, in a few years when asked “Where do you come from?” I can reply: “The Western Region.” It even sounds like a hospital board.
It stretches from Oban to Girvan and eastwards to include most of the Glasgow conurbation. As in other matters, I must ask the politicians who favour these proposals – where and how in your calculations did you quantify the value of a community? Of community life? Of a sense of belonging? Of the feeling of identification? These are rhetorical questions. I know the answer. Such human considerations do not feature in their thought processes.
Everything that is proposed from the establishment seems almost calculated to minimise the role of the people, to miniaturise man. I can understand how attractive this prospect must be to those at the top. Those of us who refuse to be pawns in their power game can be picked up by their bureaucratic tweezers and dropped in a filing cabinet under “M” for malcontent or maladjusted. When you think of some of the high flats around us, it can hardly be an accident that they are as near as one could get to an architectural representation of a filing cabinet.
If modern technology requires greater and larger productive units, let’s make our wealth-producing resources and potential subject to public control and to social accountability. Let’s gear our society to social need, not personal greed. Given such creative re-orientation of society, there is no doubt in my mind that in a few years we could eradicate in our country the scourge of poverty, the underprivileged, slums, and insecurity.
Even this is not enough. To measure social progress purely by material advance is not enough. Our aim must be the enrichment of the whole quality of life. It requires a social and cultural, or if you wish, a spiritual transformation of our country. A necessary part of this must be the restructuring of the institutions of government and, where necessary, the evolution of additional structures so as to involve the people in the decision-making processes of our society. The so-called experts will tell you that this would be cumbersome or marginally inefficient. I am prepared to sacrifice a margin of efficiency for the value of the people’s participation. Anyway, in the longer term, I reject this argument.
To unleash the latent potential of our people requires that we give them responsibility. The untapped resources of the North Sea are as nothing compared to the untapped resources of our people. I am convinced that the great mass of our people go through life without even a glimmer of what they could have contributed to their fellow human beings. This is a personal tragedy. It’s a social crime. The flowering of each individual’s personality and talents is the pre-condition for everyone’s development.
In this context education has a vital role to play. If automation and technology is accompanied as it must be with a full employment, then the leisure time available to man will be enormously increased. If that is so, then our whole concept of education must change. The whole object must be to equip and educate people for life, not solely for work or a profession. The creative use of leisure, in communion with and in service to our fellow human beings, can and must become an important element in self-fulfilment.
Universities must be in the forefront of development, must meet social needs and not lag behind them. It is my earnest desire that this great University of Glasgow should be in the vanguard, initiating changes and setting the example for others to follow. Part of our educational process must be the involvement of all sections of the university on the governing bodies. The case for student representation is unanswerable. It is inevitable.
My conclusion is to re-affirm what I hope and certainly intend to be the spirit permeating this address. It’s an affirmation of faith in humanity. All that is good in man’s heritage involves recognition of our common humanity, an unashamed acknowledgement that man is good by nature. Burns expressed it in a poem that technically was not his best, yet captured the spirit. In “Why should we idly waste our prime…”:
“The golden age, we’ll then revive, each man shall be a brother,
In harmony we all shall live and till the earth together,
In virtue trained, enlightened youth shall move each fellow creature,
And time shall surely prove the truth that man is good by nature.”
It’s my belief that all the factors to make a practical reality of such a world are maturing now. I would like to think that our generation took mankind some way along the road towards this goal. It’s a goal worth fighting for.’
Andy Newman on said:
brilliant.
Alfie on said:
Superb, needs to be read and acted upon by everyone who cares about society and humanity.
Graham on said:
Indeed it is. Hard to imagine any politician today making a speech like that.
unity - you know it makes sense on said:
Magnificent…cue the attacks from those perfect Marxists who have never made a mistake or a political misjudgement in their life.
David Robertson on said:
A prophet is not a man who can see the future but one who can read the signs of his times. All in this speech has come to pass and society is much the worse for it. I am one of those in the “filing cabinet” flats. The World is the poorer for Jimmy Ried’s passing.
doh! on said:
#4 Those perfect Marxists who have never made a mistake or a political misjudgement in their life are also the ones that do not lead anything or have power or influence over anything.
Standing on the sidelines lobbing the occasional hand grenade with out getting their hands dirty means it is easy to stay pure.
RIP Jimmy Reid
anon on said:
I could never fully trust anyone who remained in the Communist Party after 1956.
doh! on said:
#6 and #7 I rest my case!!!!!!
And Jimmy Reid RIP
Neil Williams on said:
Great speech and still so fresh. I am going to give a copy to every member of my family.
I must have missed it at the time as I was 20 but active in student politics so its surprising.
anon on said:
Mind you I could never fuly trust anyone who supported Rangers either.
jim mclean on said:
10# Did they not call him the Hun in the Sun when he worked for Murdoch, oh well its hard for a redundant Marxist to earn a decent crust, these days they go on Big Brother. Still a brilliant orator and humanist.
Looking at the former CP presence at Celtic Park at the moment I think I’ll stick with Jimmy.
RIP
Hendre on said:
Just read old Tam Dalyall’s obituary to him. According to Tam, Jimmy Reid always showed personol courtesy to those he disagreed with. Shame a certain compatriot of his wasn’t a big enough man to do likewise.
Eddie on said:
Absolutely fantastic – thanks for posting this.
As one of his obituary’s writers says “Reid helps provide the left with valuable lessons for today if they want the credibility and respect that is needed to create and lead mass struggles.
These are: talk in a language that workers and citizens understand; don’t necessarily repeat the forms of what has gone before; frame the salient issues in a way that relates to what will work best for the given situation and era; understand that coalitions need to be built with wide arrays of groups outside the usual suspects; and do so in a way that is non-sectarian.”
These kinds of skills and imagination are desperately needed if the left is to be able to step up to the plate this time round
Barry Kade on said:
What a privilege for those Glasgow students (who elected him rector) to hear this speech, back then in 1972. What an education, to hear the oratory a great marxist working class intellectual shipyard worker. This atmosphere formed the hearts and souls of a whole generation that is now reaching retirement. At the risk of sounding nostalgic, I sometimes wonder what we have lost in the past 30 years of defeat and retreat of the left. I imagine the cultural resources that existed to nourish young minds in the early 1970′s, and compare them to what is available to students now. Around the recent Con-Dem austerity budget I was with my fellow UCU members leafletting the university where I work with arguments against the cuts. Building workers took the leaflets, and put them up on their site. University staff took leaflets. But whole phalanxes of young students hurried by me, refusing to take a leaflet. These are the students who will end up over £20,000 in debt for their degrees, who will then struggle to find jobs as the public sector is slashed. But their culture is neo-liberal, a culture of individually trying to optimise themselves for the competitive race within the global economy. They appear to have no culture of solidarity or critique. But hopefully, I am exaggerating. Hopefully all the cultural riches of the lefts traditions, of solidarity, humanity and critical thought can resurface and be regained for a new generation that will be needed in the bitter struggles to come. Comrades, we must enrich our youth with the culture of socialism, equipping them with what will be essential for their future survival and flourishing.
Sean on said:
A Socialist we should be proud of Jimmy Reid
(and pleased to see this site at the forfront – again)
we all have issues with our leaders
we can all learn
If only we could have the same ability to seize the day as Reid
At UCS it would have been so easy to strike, a strike that would have been defeated, but he and importantly his fellow Comrades recognised the real dangers of ultra leftism and playing into the hands of the Tories
Thats Leadership
eamonn wright on said:
Jimmy came over to the cause of the independence of his country in his political evolution from the cul-de-sac that used to be referred to as the British road to socialism. RIP comrade.
Andy Newman on said:
#16
eammonn the plastic Rob Roy gets it wrong again, p>
Reid was not a johnny come lately to the issue of the Scotish national question and the Communiat Party in the 1960s were in the very front of the vanguard in propagandising for a Scottish parleiment, and for the right to secede from the Uk if the Scots so decided..writes here:
Jim on said:
#11 No. That was Jim Sillars although Reid did write for Murdoch’s Sun – at around the Wapping time too I think.
How’s that for evolution Eamonn?
jim mclean on said:
18# so it was, apologies.
jim mclean on said:
17# I remember Alex Murray on the Soapbox outside Scotts in Greenock, gift of the gab at times.
anon on said:
The SNP used to have some blurb on their website, presumably for the benefit of their members, explaining who Jimmy Reid was.
It didn’t mention that he had ever been a member of the Communist Party.
That tells you all you need to know about the SNP.
eamonn wright on said:
Cheers for that Andy. I was aware of some prominent CPers support for a parliament. Likewise the old ILP in Scotland and even a significant section of the Labour Party in Scotlandshire.
eamonn wright on said:
Anon the SNP TU Group has been in existence for a good while. Working class politics in Scotland has always been a lot more than the placemen and careerists of the Lumpen Party HM Imperialist and loyalist, and the sects and cults of the not very revolutionary student/middle class left. Saorsa a nis.
Omar on said:
A marvelous speech. Wish the Left still had orators of this quality compared to the soundbite dispensers we’ve mostly got these days ( Benn and Galloway excepted, of course).
Eddie Truman on said:
Well done for posting this John, a fitting tribute.
A most appalling culture has developed on the left of settling political scores before the dead have barely been buried.
The absolute nadir was Pater Taaffe’s appalling sectarian obituary of Ted Grant but there have been others along the way.
Fair enough, looking back when the immediately bereaved have had time to get over their loss you can say that looking back you had political disagreements with the individual but this immediately sticking the boot into the only just dead from our own side is deeply unpleasant.
The dead from the other side are a different matter I’ll be tramping the dirt down and partying with millions the day that Thatcher dies.
andy newman on said:
#25
“I’ll be tramping the dirt down and partying with millions the day that Thatcher dies.”
Somehow that doesn’t seem enough
Eddie Truman on said:
#26, worth watching this again Andy;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Znn5a-88tY
andy newman on said:
Someone should dig her up and feed her to pigs.
Andy Newman on said:
#27
Yeah, thanks for the suggestion, I just did watch it again, and certainly for anyone our age, I think that song, and the emotion behind it taps into a huge subterranean lake of disgust and hatred for her, and the Tories.
Faith on said:
I heard him speak in 1972 in a fundraising event for UCS – the greatest orator I have ever had the good fortune to hear
Eddie Truman on said:
And this is Pete Wylie on the subject [credit to Stroppy Bird, Lawrie Coombs, Harry P et al on facebook]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcXi-VYy_Yw
STP on said:
I think with Thatcher it is very important that we cut out her heart and bury it, with a stake through the middle, at a crossroads. As a Marxist I obviously don’t believe all that guff but if there is even the slightest possibility it is true, then surely Thatcher is the most likely candidate of all to be the Prince(ss) of Darkness. Better safe than sorry.
I agree with Eddie on obituaries, really I do. Whatever Taaffe may have thought of Grant, the former certainly doesn’t think the latter crossed class lines and so criticism can too often doesn’t descend into sectarianism.
But I think it is also incumbent on Marxists to tell the truth. Grant’s group praises the UCS action but criticises the CP stewards for having ‘refused to spread the action’. I have no idea whether that is a fair point or whether to have done so, to have moved the focus of your actions to possibly less fertile territory, would have been foolish.
But as a Trotskyist, I know that there are many legitimate criticisms to be made of the CP and its industrial work as I’m old enough to remember what they were like when a force (indeed first coming across a few of them, as a slender 17 old or so, and being attacked by a group of 30 yr old Stalinist thugs just for attempting to join the ‘Peoples March for Jobs’ with an armful of Trotskyist papers).
In my early union activity (NALGO), the CPers would always block with the soft Left or right against us ‘Trotskyites’ and even the Left Labour types, even to the extent of shopping us to the bosses. Whilst the CP were responsible for great victories e.g. the defeat of Barbara Castle’s anti-trade union laws, they also broke class lines such as in trying to break strikes in WW2. If you look at the archives of any Trot groups publications (e.g. Militant, SWP, WRP) until at least the 80s you will find many reports of the duplicitous work of CPGB trade unionists.
You may say what has that to do with Reid? He was the secretary of the YCL and, I think, Scottish secretary of the CPGB. He doubtless, even in his best phase, made the errors that I think the CPGB made. And his later history is open to a lot of criticism (did he work for the Sun during the Wapping dispute?)
I have praised Reid here a lot in the last few days and agree with Newman that you have to judge the totality of someone. I even think we should have a united British Left party that would include comrades from the Trotskyist, ‘official communist’, Left Labour traditions, and more.
But it is also incumbent on Lefts to always tell the truth and leave nothing out. Those who don’t learn from…
joe kane on said:
I used to share the same pub as Jimmy Reid, the Grove in Kelvingrove, Glasgow. Great wee pub.
He was a great man.
RIP Jimmy Reid
ps
The SNP are inviting people to add their appreciation of Jimmy here -
Your Place to Rememebr Jimmy Reid
pps
Roland Rance has came across a recipe called ‘Thatcher Kebab’ apparantly. Let’s hope she does roast on a spit next to an open fire for an eternity.
I’m certain Jimmy won’t be sharing the same place she’s going to, that’s for sure.
Party hack on said:
I appreciate the well-meaning spirit in which STP makes his point about the CP in the past, notably in the trade union movement (post 32).
I have read just about every anti-CP book on CP history (and on British trade union history, come to that). And every pro-CP one. They should all be read as critically and analytically as possible.
But I wonder whether STP has read – still less understood – any pro-CP materials at all. For example, his simpistic view of the CP’s attitude to industrial action during WW2 (after June 1941 at least) indicates that he hasn’t. Incidentally, many of the strikes in the coal industry and elsewhere were led by local Communists.
To try to avert and settle strikes in order to win a world war against Nazi fascism may have been mistaken, although I don’t believe so, but ‘crossing class lines’? Is it really class treachery to regard maintaining production in order to defeat fascism as being more important at that time than wages, hours and conditions? That seems a hopelessly narrow, economistic definition of class interest and class loyalty to me. Nor is trying to avoid or settle a strike necessarily the same thing as ‘breaking’ one, at least outside ultra-left land.
Anybody who knows anything about the history of the CP, the Daily Worker, CP political education etc. from a less than totally hostile perspective would not find it at all surprising that the CP produced working class leaders who could make the kind of speeches that Jimmy Reid made. I knew local miners, dockers and steelworkers leaders in the CP, within a 25-mile radius of where I live, who combined a deep political understanding with the ability to communicate it on a platform or in the pub, while also providing practical leadership in their trade union and Trades Council. Reid was more eloquent than most (though not all), but basically from the same mould before flattery, ambition and drink tragically got the better of him.
STP appears to accept that what he finds about the CP in the archives of Militant, the SWP and WRP is likely to be reasonable and true. That’s not my experience of much of it. Especially in their earlier periods, these and other groups were – understandably from their point of view – desperate to find fault with just about everything the CP said and did.
The WRP, in particular, were utterly unscrupulous in their efforts to misrepresent and condemn the “Stalinists” – while running an internal party regime that made the CP look like an anarchist collective.
By the way, has STP any idea why trade unionists, unemployed workers etc. might find it irritating that their first experience of him was not as an inexperienced socialist coming along to support and learn from the People’s March for Jobs – but as a 17-year old turning up to sell them the correct line in his Trotskyist papers?
Anonymous on said:
#34 Can you recommend any sympathetic accounts of/by the CPGB?
STP on said:
I don’t want to turn the thread into a ‘Trot’ v ‘Official Communist’ debate (and see, I think the term ‘Stalinist’ is now outdated and indeed have experience of Trot organisations, including my own acting ‘Stalinist’ – although fixing meetings, rather than executing communists) but I’ll reply to what I’m asked.
I’d also point out that I am not just believing what I have been told, but saw with my own eyes in my trade union activity in Nalgo and Unison. And indeed on that march – I’d never consider trying to throw a young (or old) ‘Morning Star’ seller off a march, or indeed even a non-socialist, such as a Green.
If comrades wish to research further, they will find voluminous reports on the differences between CP activities in trade unions – such as their ‘popular front’ approach (from “bishops to brickies”) versus the united front approach of Trotskyists. I also have a pretty good knowledge of the CP and strikes in WW2, see http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr185/dabb.htm for a SWP take on what happened.
Cliff, the late leader of the SWP (whose politics I don’t share), in the 70s, gave credit to the CP for its positive role in organising the unofficial movements against the Wilson government’s attempts at wage freeze and the Tory Industrial Relations Bill but was critical of the CP’s and the Broad Left’s concentration on winning positions in the union hierarchy and its ambivalent attitude to ‘Left’ union leaders, especially over their acceptance of the ‘Social Contract’ introduced by the Labour government of 1974-79.
And yes, the CPGB did produce many admirable militants (such as Reid in his heyday) and many good TU leaders (Crow and Scargill were once members). But that is because they were the biggest – c50K in the late 40s. I could well imagine Reid being a member of Militant if, say, 25 years younger when that body overtook the size of the CP in the 80s.
The tendency of the CP to also capitulate to the union bureaucracy, as they do in Unison, also traditionally kept them with influence. If you are, instead, a principled Trot you know that the union leadership will hunt you down and expel you e.g. Yunus Bakhsh (SWP) & Glenn Kelly (Socialist Party) I can’t immediately think of any witch-hunting of CP members by the leaderships since the 60s or 70s (maybe EEPTU later?) and that says something.
But I’d welcome a rapprochement. I often read the ‘Morning Star’ and it is a lot better than say the LRC’s statements. I’d like the ‘Morning Star really to be the ‘paper of the left’, under the control of all traditions and in a united Left party in which we would all genuinely work together and let our experiences guide us forward – and in which doubtless we would make changes to our views.
Barry Kade on said:
Hi all,
Found a great Folk song by Matt McGinn from the 1970′s about Jimmy Reid (and Airlie) and the UCS work-in. Its set to a video of images from the occupation. Stirring stuff.
http://barrykade.wordpress.com/2010/08/14/jimmy-reid-july-1932-–-august-2010-in-memory-of-a-great-victory-and-an-inspiration-for-future-ones/
I have posted it on my blog, to accompany my own brief potted history of the UCS battle. Enjoy – and circulate – the vid!
Cheers!
graham on said:
eddie truman thank you so much for posting that pete wylie video ! its fantastic ! big hug comrade !
jim mclean on said:
Maybe I am weird or spent too much of my misspent youth with a bunch of Tankies, but I have always taken the term Stalinist or Stalinism to mean that socialism within one country is possible, as per The British Road to Socialism etc , of course I understand fully what is envisaged in relation to the term in a non political sense, but in discussing political theory I never found it in any way derogatory although not a proposition I espouse.
STP on said:
@Jim, Yeah, it’s a bit of fluid term, a bit like ‘anarchism’ or ‘fascism’ – can mean so many things to so many people.
I always took it as Trot shorthand for politics connected to ‘official communism’ which we’d see (rough definition) as say that of all ‘communist’ parties arising from those that were aligned with the CPSU say in 1930 – so would include Maoists, Hoxhaists, Castroists, Titoists etc, although of course some Trots have seen both of the last two as breaking from ‘Stalinism’.
It can also mean a practice. I suppose the leadership of my local tenants association was being a little Stalinist in organising a meeting when they knew key people opposed to spending the campaign money on a pensioners day-trip to Southend would be away. But that’s also probably a good example of how the term, like ‘terrorism’ or ‘community’ has become vague to the point of having very little meaning. Certainly all Trot bodies of my knowledge have been Stalinist at some point, by this definition.
And its politics do include ‘socialism in one country’ and other forms of peaceful co-existence with capitalism e.g. the historic compromise in Italy, abandoning a bid for power in Greece post war etc – which takes us back to Reid and the postwar politics of the CPGB – the British Road to Socialism.
In essence this is a reformist and cross-class attempt to simply be progressive, such as the attempts by ‘Marxism Today’, in the early 80s, to engender a ‘progressive coalition’ against Thatcher – by being nice about even about wet Tories whilst acting viciously to the ‘ultra left wreckers’, i.e. us Trots.
And that is how they would act in the unions – e.g. supporting a ‘sensible Left’ candidate against the Hard Left (once including the Bennites) or say, in France, in 68, where the PCF dominated unions refused a golden opportunity to join with the students and some workers and possibly make a revolution.
Now sure, I don’t the ins and outs of Reid’s actions when a CPer, and acknowledge he and his comrades had a better victory with UCS (and were fine militants) than any Trot union militant I can think of, but the limitations of politics that I refer to in the paras above were standard to someone then in the CPGB.
I wouldn’t use the term now about a British communist (except maybe a member of the Stalin Society) and despite being referred to as ‘Stalinist’ by us Trots, there was clearly a large amount of difference between a very drippy, Gramsci misreading, Euro circa 1988 and Laurent Beria or Palme-Dutt.
But that was then. Members of the CPB, SWP, etc, etc are all members of the workers movement in Britain and its equivalents near world-wide. We should join together.
And I mean in a serious and sincere manner, not to try and do a number over each other e.g. SWP & Galloway.
It’s only in a few places – e.g. China – that the equivalents of the first lot remain on the wrong side of the prospective barricades.
Michael Ezra on said:
John Wight claims above that Jimmy Reid’s speech at Glasgow University “caused such a sensation that the New York Times carried it on their front page and compared it to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.”
I found this claim somewhat grandiose and have tried to locate the relevant article(s) in the New York Times. I have tracked down the speech which was indeed printed in full in the June 20, 1972 issue of that newspaper. However it was not printed on the front page but on page 39. For completeness, the front page of the newspaper does carry an index as to what is on other pages and that shows what is on other pages. There is a standard index reference for an article by James Reid on p.39.
What I could not locate was any reference by the New York Times that this speech was comparable to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. I notice that this comparison is also made elsewhere, but again with no reference. I am tempted to suggest that this is a fictitious claim, but it is possible that my search through the archives of the New York Times failed to locate something that was actually there. I should be grateful if anybody would let me know a reference in the New York Times. I thank you in advance for any assistance.
anon on said:
#37 Barry Kade
Matt McGinn left the Communist Party after Hungary. So did Harry McShane, who had been a member since the party was founded, and many, many others.
There will always be doubts about those who decided to stay in the party after that.
Evan on said:
#41 Maybe the ones who stayed believed that the uprising was indeed led by fascists and that the Soviet led intervention was necessary to prevent them taking power.
Not that they would have been right of course, but there are those who would ask what the essential difference was between the decision to crush workers councils in Hungary and doing the same in Kronstadt or between invading Hungary in 1956 and invading Poland in 1921.
KrisS on said:
Obviously, STP, you’re right that we all need to work together. It would be stupid for us to insist that everyone agrees that Russia has been capitalist since 1929 before we can go on the same picket line. And I am hugely frustrated, as I know many people from many parts of the movement are, that we can’t at least put together a united political organisation to present an alternative come election time.
(It’s all very well saying that, though. But what does one do about it?)
But I am not convinced that that is the end of the story. Whether it’s questions about our vision of a future society, or questions about our attitudes to events overseas, people from different traditions will have fundamentally different responses, and we can’t hide that.
STP on said:
KrisS,
I think yes and no. I’d have no problems being in a body that had some people who thought Cuba was a socialist state (so no overthrow of the current regime), others a degenerated workers state (as I do) and others capitalist – with both of the latter wanting a revolution. And if things developed there, the organisation would have a Janus position, openly acknowledging that the majority view is such, but with full rights for factions to publically disagree. We’re not in Cuba.
On a more close at hand example, I’m sure some would support McCluskey and some Hicks in the Unite GS election. I’d again have no problems in having a Cuban type position. Now, sure that’s not perfect but the benefits of working closely together on a large majority of things we do agree on – e.g. no cuts, support strike X, oppose the EDL, etc etc would outweigh all that.
Such worked, but over a closer range of views, in the Socialist Alliance and in the (united) SSP. We combine or we look forward to getting the new average for the far Left in elections, circa 0.5% (it used to be about 1.5% not so long ago) or maybe we all just disappear like the anarchists nearly have in the UK.
KrisS on said:
We’re not in Cuba.
Made me smile.
So how do you think we’re going to get there?
STP on said:
Frankly I don’t, Kris.
The process should be something like the process that formed the Socialist Alliance (as I recall the SP did that, then withdrew, and it was moribund until the SWP joined) or the SSP. But there have been various attempts to do the same again, e.g. in Rugby a few weeks ago but these are with a very small number of groups or people and very little traction indeed.
Whilst we should be able to use our politics to make things happen, I fear it will be the other way round. A strike wave or at least upturn in strikes could happen and that could breathe life into such processes (or alternatively artificially revive a few orgns and give them a false sense that they alone are the chosen ones), or even a socialist revolution somewhere which would cut through all the chaff as only one section of a new international is formed in each country.
Now of course, the latter in particular, seems extremely remote and they all involve us waiting. It should be that the SWP,SP,CPB,AWL and everyone else should realise extinction is looking them all squarely in the eye and meet to see how to unify – and then we could at least influence events, e.g. not wait for, but help cause a strike wave.
But are CC members up to that? Many of these have been in post since the 80s to 60s. That’s decades and decades of failure. They should all resign and organisations have a temporary ‘no over 30s’ rule whilst they move to discuss how to combine.
daveH on said:
#47 The success of the UCS work-in & Jimmy Reid’s role in it were made possible in consequence of the capacity of Communist organisation ( by dint of a body of strategy & tactics derived from Lenin & adapted to British conditions ) to give political leadership. Before you pop off to Rugby to start a strike wave, launch a new international, write off the Communist Party,and discount the consequences of the next socialist revolution, you should check out Lenin’s `Leftwing Communism an INFANTILE Disorder’.
jim mclean on said:
40# Interesting on a number of points, France 68, the failure of the PCF to follow on with their earlier stance split the radical movement and it was one of the few times when their was an alliance between the proletariat and intelligentsia, the PCF paid dearly as it gave the government time to undermine the movement, give a little to the students, a little to the Profs and a little to the workers and when everything settled, throw in the race card diverting the proletariat from the left to the right, a direct correlation between the fall of mass support for the PCF and the rise of the National Front, when the left falls the right rises, The government using the Democratic process to subjugate the minorities rather than the massacre of 61.
In relation to Thatcher her demonisation by the left was a surrender to the politics of personality and a failure to promote a viable alternative, Labour spent most of its time looking for a “leader”, and when she was seen as a liability, they ditched her and remained in power, and they have been in power ever since. I supported Labour for quite a while after they were elected in the hope that we would at least work towards rebuilding the Social democrat consensus, a vain hope.
In relation to Titoism I bought it to an extent based on the workers democratic movement, factory councils etc, I missed the turmoil of fermenting nationalism underneath even though I worked and lived with Yugoslavian’s and other Eastern Europeans for years.
chjh on said:
Socialist Workers’ obituary of Jimmy Reid is by leading Glasgow socialist Dave Sherry, who was active around UCS: http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/art.php?id=22157
Gerry Downing on said:
Comrades, Lenin and Trotsky and many other revolutionaries made speeches far better that Lincoln’s Gettysburg address but the New York Times, or any other major capitalist media organ, ever paaised them and printed them in full …”Gee, that guy Lenin really hit the nail in the head there with his April Theses, we have to publish it in full in the next edition” we can hear them exclaiming in excitement and admiration. Old William Morris used to get really worried when he got the praise of his enemies saying he know he was doing something seriously wrong. And, of course, Reis led a work-in, not an occupation, a popular front measure to defuse the class struggler against the government, hich it did. Jimmy Reid was a class traitor back then before he ever wrote for the Sun.
jim mclean on said:
Surely the definition of “Class Traitor” is one who works directly against the interests of the Proletariat,in the instance of the Work In, this was to the direct benefit of the employees and their families in both social and economic terms. It could be stated that it was a short term solution outwith the class struggle but a betrayal of the working class,I think not.
Clem the Gem on said:
Jimmys speech still resonates. As someone who believes that Marxist-Leninisim is a dead end, I can still salute a class fighter. We need more of then right now.