by Daphne Liddle
HERBERT George Wells has been in the news lately, 59 years after his death,
following the release of a new film version of his book War of the Worlds.
He is generally recognised as the founder of English science fiction
writing but too often the socialist input in his writings is not mentioned.
HG Wells was born on 21st September 1866 in Bromley, Kent. His father was
a gardener, an unsuccessful small shopkeeper and professional cricketer
while his mother worked on occasions as a housekeeper at a local estate.
In his book The New Machiavelli, Wells gives a thinly-veiled account of
his childhood and Bromley (called Bromstead in the book) at a time when it
was changing from a small agricultural market town to a much bigger London
dormitory town.
He was very uncomplimentary about the town and its predominantly narrow,
bourgeois culture, for which the town never forgave him. Until a few years
ago, Bromley council refused to countenance any kind of memorial to its
most famous son until the mid 1980s when they relented with a mural in the
market square. But this has since been painted over with a tribute to
Charles Darwin who lived in near-by Down.
Wells’ writings are full of an irreverent and capricious sense of humour
and his target is usually bourgeois hypocrisy and religiosity.
In The New Machiavelli he describes his childhood games: “Also she [his
mother] forbade all toys on Sundays except the bricks for church-building
and the soldiers for church parade, or a Scriptural use of the remains of
the Noah’s Ark mixed up with the wooden Swiss dairy farm.
“But she really did not know whether a thing was a church or not unless it
positively bristled with canon, and many Sunday afternoons have I played
Chicago (with the fear of God in my heart) under an infidel pretence that
it was a new sort of ark rather elaborately done.
“Chicago, I must explain, was based upon my father’s description of the
pig slaughterings in that city and certain pictures I had seen. You made
your beasts – which were all the ark lot really, provisionally conceived as
pigs – go up elaborate approaches to a central pen, from which they went
down a cardboard slide four at a time and dropped most satisfyingly down a
brick shaft, and pitter-litter over some steep steps where a slaughterman
(né Noah) strung a cotton loop around their legs and sent them by pin hooks
along a wire to a second slaughterman with a chipped foot (formerly Mrs
Noah) who, if I remember rightly, converted them into army sausage by means
of a portion of the inside of an old alarum clock.”
Later in the same book he describes his father’s frustration and anger at
the tyranny of property over people’s lives. He describes a conversation
with his father while on a walk: “‘I’m no gardener,’ he said, ‘I’m no
anything. Why the devil did I start gardening?
“‘I suppose man was created to mind a garden. But the Fall let us out of
that! What was I created for? God! What was I created for?
“‘Slaves to matter! Minding inanimate things! It doesn’t suit me you know.
I’ve got no hands and no patience. I’ve mucked about with life. Mucked
about with life.’ He suddenly addressed himself to me, and for an instant I
started like an eavesdropper discovered.
‘...more often than not, Wells’ futuristic machines are merely vehicles for
him to explore human relations and the natures of the societies who use
them. In the end it is the plight of human beings, with all their failings
and social problems that are at the heart of his stories’
“‘Whatever you do, boy, whatever you do, make a Plan. Make a good Plan and
stick to it. Find out what life is about – I never have – and set yourself
to do – whatever you ought to do. I admit it’s a puzzle.’ …..
“‘Property’s the curse of life. Property! Ugh! Look at this country all
cut up into silly little parallelograms, look at all those villas we passed
just now and those potato patches and that tarred shanty and the hedge!
Somebody’s minding every bit of it like a dog tied to a cart’s tail.
Patching it up and bothering about it. Bothering! Yapping at every passer-by.
“‘Look at that notice-board! One rotten worried little beast wants to keep
us other rotten little beasts off his patch – God knows why! Look at the
weeds in it. Look at the mended fence! There’s no property worth having,
Dick, but money. That’s only good to spend. All these things. Human souls
buried under a cartload of blithering rubbish.
“‘I’m not a fool, Dick. I have qualities, imagination, a sort of go. I
ought to have made a better thing of life’.”
The way in which property and petty bourgeois culture trap people in
stifling miserable lives – and the need to take drastic steps to escape –
is a theme he returns to again and again in his writings.
When HG Wells’ father’s business collapsed he and his elder brothers were
apprenticed to a local draper’s shop. But a childhood accident that
resulted in a broken leg and enforced inactivity had sparked Wells’ thirst
for reading and the local library became one of his favourite haunts.
He started out along the path of self-education that became available then
through the public library system. He also became a teacher-pupil in 1883
at the privately-run Midhurst Grammar School. From there he won a
scholarship to the Normal School of Science in London and studied biology
under T H Huxley. But he left four years later without a degree, married his
cousin Isobel and became a correspondence school teacher.
As a young man Wells became a socialist thinker, seeing socialism as a
science that would free humanity from the lunacy and oppression of capitalism.
He also began writing, scientific text books at first and then in 1885 he
produced his first great work of science fiction, The Time Machine. Most
modern dramatisations and critiques of this work totally ignore its
socialist essence, seeing it as simply an adventure in time travel – which
was original enough in its day.
But Wells used The Time Machine as a vehicle to examine what would happen
to human society if there never was a socialist revolution and capitalism
continued to its logical conclusion – with the bourgeois and working
classes growing ever further apart until they become two different but
interdependent species.
His hero travels into the future and arrives at a time when at first
everything seems idyllic. The beautiful vegetarian child-like people – the
Eloi – live simple, happy lives playing and doing no work at all.
Everything is provided by machines, which are made and operated by unseen
hands. It seems at first like a new Garden of Eden.
But the Eloi fear the dark because at night the fearsome Morlocks emerge
from underground caverns to hunt and eat the Eloi. The Morlocks are
pale-skinned, ugly creatures who live underground and spend their lives in
darkness and toil, creating the wealth and comfort that the Eloi enjoy but
taking a terrible revenge. This is the division of humanity into ruling and
working classes taken to its extreme logical conclusion.
Wells took the need for emancipation from hidebound, restrictive bourgeois
culture into his private life with great vigour.
His marriage to his cousin lasted only two years and plainly the marriage
had been at her insistence if he wanted her in his bed. “I didn’t believe
in marriage anyhow,” he lamented, “The great thing was not marriage but
love. I invoked Godwin, Shelley, Socialism.”
In 1893 he had an affair and eloped with one of his students, Amy
Catherine Robbins. Eventually he married Amy but continued to have many
affairs, including with the writer Rebecca West, with whom he had a son,
Adam West.
He met Bernard Shaw and became a member of the Fabian Society – a group of
intellectual socialists who believed in a gradual transition to socialism,
believing that the capitalist class would eventually see the irrationality
of their system and give it up. He was always a bit of an outsider in the
group because of his working class accent and later he clashed with the
leaders over the lack of dynamism in their policies.
A common taunt of the time was that at Fabian rallies, when the cry went
up, “What do we want?” the answer would be “Gradual change!”, “When do we
want it?”, “In due course!”
Wells tried to turn the Fabians into a more revolutionary organisation but
his debating skills were no match for those of Bernard Shaw and in 1908 he
left the Fabians.
He did stand as a Labour candidate for the London University seat in 1922
but failed to win the seat.
In 1917 the Russian revolution greatly enthused Wells and in 1920 he
visited the Soviet Union and met Lenin. Wells was cynical about the
ambitious plans for socialist construction and described Lenin as “The
dreamer in the Kremlin”, while Lenin described Wells as “What a little
bourgeois! What a philistine!”
And he became a prolific writer, producing The Island of Dr Moreau, a
satire on the dangers of science combined with ruling class arrogance. The
Invisible Man followed in a similar vein and in 1889 he produced The War of
the Worlds. In this book the Earth is attacked by invaders from Mars who
have a far superior technology. Human defences completely fail to halt the
invaders who are intent of wiping out our race in order to use the planet
for their own purposes. But just when all seems lost, the invaders start to
die, victims to earth’s microbes, to which they have no immunity.
Again and again, Wells reminds his readers that human beings are not
necessarily the pinnacle of evolution.
In The Invisible Man, the “hero”, Griffin, believes his discovery has put
him above the rest of the human race, destined to use his advantage to rule
lesser mortals through a reign of terror. But the ordinary people, the
working classes, upon whom he makes his first assaults, while puzzled and
afraid, do not react as Griffin had hoped.
Griffin loses his temper with the people around him and reacts with
increasing violence. The police are called and eventually he is hunted and
lurches from one disaster to another, until he is killed by an angry mob.
In The Country of the Blind, Wells bases a short story on the old proverb
that “in the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king”. Wells points
out that the very opposite is true. In the real country of the blind people
cannot understand the concept of sight and have no faith in it. They
mistrust the one-eyed man who has stumbled among them by accident, accusing
him sometimes of madness and at others of dealing with dark forces. Their
society has evolved to cope perfectly well without sight. Eventually, if he
is to become one of them and fit in, he must agree to have his one eye
removed – the source, as they perceive it, of his madness.
The First Men On The Moon (1901) was a prophetic description of the
methodology of space flight and The War In The Air (1908) describes a
catastrophic aerial war.
In 1914, in the World Set Free, Wells wrote about future nuclear weapons –
based on Einstein’s theories, which had been published in 1905. His atomic
bombs are armed by biting a stud and then flung from the cockpits of
two-seater planes over enemy territory. The planes are powered by atomic
engines. These nuclear weapons do not merely explode but continue to
explode for many half-lives of their “Carolinum” cores.
Harking back to his childhood games with lead soldiers, Wells wrote Little
Wars, which is now recognised as the first recreational wargame. Many
gamers and hobbyists regard him as “the father of miniature wargaming”.
He predicted tank warfare long before the outbreak of World War One in The
Land of the Ironclads. The gunners in his ironclads track the image of each
target using a camera obscura a fire the weapons using what would now be
called a joystick and fire button, pre-dating many computer games.
But more often than not, Wells’ futuristic machines are merely vehicles
for him to explore human relations and the natures of the societies who use
them. In the end it is the plight of human beings, with all their failings
and social problems that are at the heart of his stories.
After the First World War Wells published several non-fiction works,
among them The Outline Of History (1920), The Science Of Life (1929-39) and
Experiment In Autobiography (1934).
In 1917 Wells was a member of Research Committee for the League of Nations
and published several books about the world organisation. Between the years
1924 and 1933 Wells lived mainly in France.
He had great hopes that reasonable people all over the world would
eventually adopt socialism gradually and peacefully. But he failed to
understand the fundamental contradiction between capitalism and the
interests of the working class.
In 1934 he visited the United States and spoke to President Roosevelt and
then visited Moscow and interviewed Stalin. He had great hopes for a
meeting of minds between the two and told Stalin: “The old financial world
is collapsing; the economic life of the country is being reorganised on new
lines [the New Deal]. Lenin said: ‘We must learn to do business,’ learn
this from the capitalists.
“Today the capitalists have to learn from you, to grasp the spirit of
socialism. It seems to me that what is taking place in the United States is
a profound reorganisation, the creation of a planned, that is, socialist,
economy.
“You and Roosevelt begin from two different starting points. But is there
not a relation in ideas, a kinship of ideas, between Washington and Moscow?
“In Washington I was struck by the same thing I see going on here; they
are building offices, they are creating a number of new state regulation
bodies, they are organising a long-needed civil service. Their need, like
yours, is directive ability.”
Stalin responded: “The United States is pursuing a different aim from that
which we are pursuing in the USSR. The aim which the Americans are pursuing
arose out of the economic troubles, out of the economic crisis.
“The Americans want to rid themselves of the crisis on the basis of
private capitalist activity without changing the economic basis. They are
trying to reduce to a minimum the ruin, the losses caused by the existing
economic system.
“Here however, as you know, in place of the old destroyed economic base an
entirely different, new economic basis has been created.”
He went on to explain that any improvements that Roosevelt might achieve
could only be temporary because the capitalist economic base remained,
which would always continue to produce crises.
Towards the end of the interview Wells said: “I cannot yet appreciate what
has been done in your country; I only arrived yesterday. But I have already
seen the happy faces of healthy men and women and I know that something
very considerable is being done here. The contrast with 1920 is astounding.”
The Second World War left him disillusioned and his last book, Mind At The
End Of Its Tether (1945), expressed pessimism about mankind’s future
prospects. Wells died in London on 13th August 1946. In the end it was his
dreams that were unrealistic.
first published in 2005
Tuesday, February 07, 2006
The Juche Idea
by Richard Bos
Democratic Korea has made great strides in the construction of socialism and much work has been done in the field of ideology - the result of which has been Juche.
THE JUCHE IDEA starts with the assertion that: "Human beings are the masters of everything and control everything" and that collectivism alone makes it possible to stimulate the creativity of all individuals and to properly combine both collective and individual demands for independence, and thus fully meet them.
It recognises that we are neither purely spiritual beings nor simple biological beings. We are social beings who live and act in social relationships. The difference between all other biological beings and humans is our consciousness and the desire for independence and creativity that comes with it.
Both Marxism-Leninism and the Juche philosophies consider that their purpose is not only to interpret, but also to contribute to the practical transformation of the world in the interest of the working masses. Kim Il Sung argued that Marxist philosophy was a huge advance over previous reactionary philosophies, which saw people as either purely biological or spiritual beings. It defined humankind as the sum of material, economic and social conditions and relations.
This was a truly revolutionary advance on everything that came before. He argued that even Marxism had its limitations, which are exploited by revisionists due to the over-emphasis in developing socialism on materialist and economic levers rather than the motive force of the masses.
transformed
It had been thought that people would be transformed by economic and material conditions and neglected the importance of the ideological transformation of the masses. The Juche idea recognises that the movement towards the development of a socialist society is not just a natural historical process, which develops and changes due to economic and material factors. It is also necessary to strengthen the independence, creativity and consciousness of the masses as a motive force through their ideological remoulding.
The prime task in a socialist society is the transformation from individualism, a product of capitalist society which isolates and divides the people, to collectivism, which will release expression and creativity to its fullest potential. This is not just through the organisation of production, but as a way of thinking and life.
Kim Jong Il wrote: "Although socialism is an inevitable stage of historical development and socialist society is the most progressive one, which conforms to mans independent nature, socialism will never be realised spontaneously.
In order to realise socialism, we must prepare the revolutionary forces capable of doing this and evolve a correct method of struggle. Unless the revolutionary forces and the method of struggle are prepared, the desire for independence of the popular masses who aspire after socialism will remain a mere wish".
Objective conditions certainly have an essential role in the revolutionary struggle, but the decisive factor is the ideological strengthening of the class. That becomes even more important after the overthrow of the ruling class and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and building socialism.
The recognition that humans really are the masters of everything and control everything that we are masters of our own destiny means that when the development of socialism is based on the will of the masses it can succeed even when material objective conditions are against it.
different
Our environment does not decide our fate; we do. And that is what makes human beings different from all other creatures.
Reactionary philosophies do not regard human beings as precious in our own right, but as a means of production and possessors of labour power, which can be bought or sold. They assert that money and material things alone can manipulate the development of society and economy. Marx and Engels made a start in looking at the social relations between people.
The Juche idea developed the thinking that as well as a physical life; people also have a socio-political integrity, which defines our lives as social beings. Physical life is valuable as it lays the base upon which we can build our socio-political integrity and the more stable and sound that physical base the more securely we can develop our independence, creativity and consciousness.
It is our basic need as social beings to value our socio-political integrity more than our physical lives. If our only demand were to satisfy our physical needs then we would have no honour or integrity. No matter how affluent we would be, our lives would be no different from any other animal. That would be a distortion of what it is to be a human being and run counter to our basic needs.
Kim Jong Il put this very eloquently: "Independence is the life and soul of man. Man, an independent social being, desires to live independently, free from any subordination or shackles. The fact that man lives independently means that he lives as the master of the world and of his own destiny, maintaining his position and exercising his rights as such.
"Only when man lives as a social being, exercising his right to independence and implementing his demand for independence, can he be said to enjoy a dignified life, maintaining socio-political integrity. If he loses his independence and is subordinated socially, he is as good as dead socially and politically, even though he is alive. Mans desire to live independently is realised, first of a1l, through an independent political life.
"When man is subordinated socially and politically, he cannot lead any kind of independent life. As socio-political integrity is mans most precious life, a noble life for him is to maintain and exalt socio-political integrity. Man receives socio-political integrity from the social collective. The social collective is the parent body of mans socio-political integrity. Therefore, the worth of mans life depends on how he is connected with the social collective.
collective
"Mans life becomes noble when he is loved and trusted by the social collective; it is worthless when he is forsaken by it. Man enjoys the love and trust of the social collective when he considers the interests of the social collective to be dearer than those of individuals and when he faithfully serves the social collective.
"In the final analysis, the greatest value and worth of mans life is to lead an independent and creative life, enjoying the love and trust of the social collective, while at the same time combining his own destiny with that of the social collective and serving it heart and soul. This is the way for man to enhance his socio-political integrity and lead a worthy human life as a social being.
"Today, the bourgeois reactionaries and renegades of socialism regard the exploitation and domination of man by man as something normal and consider man, as a base being who only pursues his own material desires. This clearly demonstrates the reactionary nature of the bourgeois viewpoint and attitude towards the essence and worth of mans life.
"True human life, which enables everyone to enhance their most precious socio-political integrity and fully meet the demands of their physical life, can only be realised admirably in a socialist society based on collectivism. In this society, people are free from all manner of exploitation and oppression, domination and subordination and can lead an independent and creative life in social, political and all other areas".
The Juche idea also looks at the definition of the term "the masses", which Kim Jong Il defines as "a united social community which centres on working people, due to their common demand for independence and creative activity".
In a capitalist society this would include workers and peasants as well as working intellectuals and other class elements and strata who champion the struggle for independence. It is not only a class concept, but also one of ideas.
Anyone who serves the people and takes part in the revolutionary struggle can be a member of the masses whatever their original background and status. That includes people who are not necessarily socialists or communists, but share much common ground and oppose reaction. The Party should not just regard these people as temporary allies but as everlasting companions that it is leading towards communism and revolution.
To quote Kim Jong Il again: "The popular masses desire for independence is the criterion for judging the correctness of lines and policies. The only way to avoid subjectivism and tortuous events in the revolution and construction is to mix with the masses and listen to what they want.
"The masses are teachers of everything. The masses desire for independence, when integrated into a system, will become ideas, lines and policies. When formulating its lines and policies, the working-class party must always go among the masses and listen to their desires. In doing their work, officials must also begin by listening to the masses desires".
The priority of the Party in a socialist society is political work and ideological transformation it is only by this means that the role of the masses can be elevated and strengthened by releasing their creativity initiative and revolutionary zeal united with the Party and leader. Great efforts should be put into training people as powerful beings who can develop their creative ability along with their independent consciousness. It is by this means that material needs of the people can be met.
Love and trust constitute the essence of politics in socialist society love and trust of the masses by the Party and leader, and love and trust of the Party and leader by the masses. The masses are no longer the objects of politics, but its masters; the complete opposite of bourgeois politics, which exists only to preserve itself and the system of exploitation.
The Party is more than a weapon in the class struggle. It should also be built as a motherly Party and all Party members should be educated in the spirit of love and service of the people, thinking of the people before themselves. The Party member should endure hardship before others, be ready to take on difficult tasks and always give credit to others first.
To look in greater depth at the question of ideological education...the very clear lesson of the collapse of socialism in many countries is that the corruption of socialism begins with ideological corruption, and that a breakdown on the ideological front results in crumbling of all socialisms fronts and ends in the total ruin of the Party and socialism.
If it secures ideology, socialism will triumph; if it loses ideology, socialism will go to ruin. Missing out on ideological work when building socialism amounts to overlooking the key to socialism. This mistake will inevitably result in its corruption and collapse. This is a truth experienced by everyone here at this school.
Ideology is the only and the most powerful weapon of the working class Party. The working class Party can only fulfil its mission and duty as the leading political organisation, which sets he pace for the masses independence, when it holds fast to ideology as the main factor and does ideological work before all other work.
exploiting
Capitalism, as an exploiting system, which replaced the feudal system of subordination to the lord with subordination to capital, grew up within the framework of feudal society. But socialism, a new system, radically different from all the exploiting systems before it, cannot grow up within the framework of capitalist society. Socialist ideology emerges as a reflection of the class demand of the exploited working masses who fight against domination by capital.
The socialist system is born of the struggle of the popular masses who are awakened to socialist ideology. It is consolidated and developed under the guidance of socialist ideology and leadership of its Party. Socialist society is essentially characterised by the fact that it develops based on the strength of its ideology, by the conscious activities of people. Its consolidation, development and destiny depend on how ideological work is done and how people are prepared ideologically.
The Party needs to constantly develop its ideology and emphasis based on current conditions. If socialist ideology takes the path of revisionist degeneration or dogmatic stagnation due to incorrect ideological and theoretical work of the working class Party, it will encounter twists and turns, and end in failure.
When they fight with a high level of ideological consciousness and in close unity, the masses can display strength and wisdom and transform nature and society immensely. An incomparable advantage and the indestructible strength of socialism lies in its full development and use of the great strength and wisdom of the popular masses, the makers of history. This is precisely the advantage and strength of socialist ideology, which are ensured by ideological work.
Parties in some countries building socialism in the past, emphasised economic construction alone and took a dogmatic approach to socialist theory instead of paying due attention to educating the masses. They made economic construction itself stagnate and, in the long run, pulled the socialist system down to the extent that they went the lengths of reviving capitalism.
opportunists
Opportunists and renegades abandoned ideological work in socialist society, and encouraged people to be egotistic and selfish. They spread bourgeois ideology, which regards money as omnipotent among people, by adopting the capitalist method of using financial incentives.
How we use our knowledge and how high a creative ability we can display depends on what kind of ideology we have. Only someone with the idea of serving the popular masses can devote their knowledge, skills, wisdom and talent to work for the masses. Ideological consciousness and socio-political integrity, which reflect peoples inherent desires as the masters of the world, as transformers of the world, is consciousness of independence.
Consciousness of independence is the consciousness of being the master of ones own destiny; it is the desire to shape ones own destiny. Only when a person has consciousness of independence can they transform the world positively and shape their own destiny as well.
Socialist ideology represents the highest stage in the development of consciousness of independence. It reflects societys desires for independence and collectivism. As such, it is the most powerful ideological weapon for transforming nature and society and for shaping the destiny of humankind.
It also serves as the ideological basis of solid social unity and cohesion. Ideological work for equipping the masses with socialist ideology is the key to releasing the advantages of socialism, increasing its strength and accelerating the revolution and construction.
Socialist economic relations are the economic, material basis of socialist ideology. Socialist economic relations, whose major component is socialist ownership, provide the masses with material conditions for them to acquire and consolidate socialist ideology.
Therefore, the consolidation and development of socialist economic relations have a major effect on equipping the people with socialist ideology. The socio-economic basis for the emergence of outmoded ideas disappears with the establishment of the socialist system.
But hangovers from the past will remain as hotbeds of reaction that can grow without ideological vigilance. Bourgeois and all other outmoded, reactionary ideas are based on individualism. Exploitative societies were all based on individualism and the people in these societies were tainted with individualism for thousands of years. Individualism is an obstinate, conservative idea, which is deeply rooted in peoples consciousness, customs and lives. Even in a socialist society, individualism and other outmoded ideas persist to a great deal and, when even small chances present themselves, these ideas will sprout again and spread.
The work of eradicating outmoded ideas from peoples minds and equipping them with the new, socialist ideology is an ideological revolution to radically change their ideological lives. That work is essential both inside and outside the Party organisation.
In the past, quite a few parties took a mechanical approach to the historical materialist proposition that the material and economic conditions in society determine social consciousness, and that social consciousness changes with changes in material and economic conditions. They believed that when peoples material and cultural standards became higher under the socialist system and the promotion of socialist construction, their ideological consciousness would be transformed accordingly.
Therefore, they did not pay great attention to ideological work. Believing that peoples ideological consciousness will spontaneously change along socialist lines after they see socialism working, is a totally wrong concept. It is contrary to the essence of socialism and the socialistic transformation of ideology. By nature, human consciousness reflects objective reality, but how they absorb this depends on the person, on their preparedness.
They see, hear, feel and absorb as much as they can understand. What ideology they acquire and how this ideology changes and develops depends on their preparedness, activities and the ideological influence they receive.
It is clear that socialist ideology cannot develop smoothly of its own accord, even though the socialist system has been established and the material and economic conditions have been created.
If ideological work is not carried out, peoples revolutionary enthusiasm may gradually cool down. The tendency to want to live in comfort may grow among them, since they are free from any worries in socialist society and continue to lead stable lives.
Then they cannot devote themselves to the struggle for socialism and, worse still, they maybe duped by imperialists and reactionary propaganda into harbouring illusions about capitalism. This is testified by the collapse of socialism several countries that abandoned ideological work and opened their door to the ideological and cultural infiltration of imperialism.
Ideological education and ideological struggle are the most powerful methods of transforming people by educating them in socialist ideology.
Experience shows that, if ideological work is conducted vigorously to equip people with socialist ideology in socialist society, people from all walks of life can be transformed along socialist lines.
The cause of socialism is a historic cause to be carried out over several generations and cannot be expected to be complete until the last vestiges of the old ways are gone. The basic task of ideological work in socialist society is to colour the whole of society with socialist ideology.
predominance
In any society, the ruling class tries to bring about the unchallenged predominance of its own ideology. In capitalist society, where the society is split into classes and peoples interests conflict, one ideology cannot hold undivided sway and it is inevitable that different ideas exist. The imperialists and their mouthpieces claim the existence of these ideas is a source of pride for the free world.
But progressive ideas can never develop freely in capitalist society, where the means of propaganda and education such as the mass media are in the hands of monopoly capitalists and reactionary rulers. The reactionary bourgeois ruling class tolerates progressive ideas to some extent, to make capitalist society seem democratic. But when they are considered the slightest threat to its ruling system, it mercilessly suppresses them.
Outwardly, different thoughts appear to be tolerated in capitalist society, but all kinds of thoughts throughout it are, without exception, none other than various forms and expressions of bourgeois ideology.
Only in socialist society, where exploitation, oppression and class antagonisms have been eliminated, can all members of society be equipped with a single ideology, because of their common purpose, aspirations and interests. Only then can a single ideology prevail. Socialist ideology develops the masses into independent people, who are conscious of their independence and creative ability, while reactionary bourgeois ideas reduce them to servants who obey the domination of capital, to ideological and mental cripples.
Socialism is the future of humankind, and the communist movement is a movement of the working class to create a new, independent world. The communist movement will develop and emerge victorious through the conscious struggle of the masses. The world communist movement will inevitably triumph thanks to the struggle of the masses who are conscious and armed with socialist ideology.
first published in August 2003
Democratic Korea has made great strides in the construction of socialism and much work has been done in the field of ideology - the result of which has been Juche.
THE JUCHE IDEA starts with the assertion that: "Human beings are the masters of everything and control everything" and that collectivism alone makes it possible to stimulate the creativity of all individuals and to properly combine both collective and individual demands for independence, and thus fully meet them.
It recognises that we are neither purely spiritual beings nor simple biological beings. We are social beings who live and act in social relationships. The difference between all other biological beings and humans is our consciousness and the desire for independence and creativity that comes with it.
Both Marxism-Leninism and the Juche philosophies consider that their purpose is not only to interpret, but also to contribute to the practical transformation of the world in the interest of the working masses. Kim Il Sung argued that Marxist philosophy was a huge advance over previous reactionary philosophies, which saw people as either purely biological or spiritual beings. It defined humankind as the sum of material, economic and social conditions and relations.
This was a truly revolutionary advance on everything that came before. He argued that even Marxism had its limitations, which are exploited by revisionists due to the over-emphasis in developing socialism on materialist and economic levers rather than the motive force of the masses.
transformed
It had been thought that people would be transformed by economic and material conditions and neglected the importance of the ideological transformation of the masses. The Juche idea recognises that the movement towards the development of a socialist society is not just a natural historical process, which develops and changes due to economic and material factors. It is also necessary to strengthen the independence, creativity and consciousness of the masses as a motive force through their ideological remoulding.
The prime task in a socialist society is the transformation from individualism, a product of capitalist society which isolates and divides the people, to collectivism, which will release expression and creativity to its fullest potential. This is not just through the organisation of production, but as a way of thinking and life.
Kim Jong Il wrote: "Although socialism is an inevitable stage of historical development and socialist society is the most progressive one, which conforms to mans independent nature, socialism will never be realised spontaneously.
In order to realise socialism, we must prepare the revolutionary forces capable of doing this and evolve a correct method of struggle. Unless the revolutionary forces and the method of struggle are prepared, the desire for independence of the popular masses who aspire after socialism will remain a mere wish".
Objective conditions certainly have an essential role in the revolutionary struggle, but the decisive factor is the ideological strengthening of the class. That becomes even more important after the overthrow of the ruling class and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and building socialism.
The recognition that humans really are the masters of everything and control everything that we are masters of our own destiny means that when the development of socialism is based on the will of the masses it can succeed even when material objective conditions are against it.
different
Our environment does not decide our fate; we do. And that is what makes human beings different from all other creatures.
Reactionary philosophies do not regard human beings as precious in our own right, but as a means of production and possessors of labour power, which can be bought or sold. They assert that money and material things alone can manipulate the development of society and economy. Marx and Engels made a start in looking at the social relations between people.
The Juche idea developed the thinking that as well as a physical life; people also have a socio-political integrity, which defines our lives as social beings. Physical life is valuable as it lays the base upon which we can build our socio-political integrity and the more stable and sound that physical base the more securely we can develop our independence, creativity and consciousness.
It is our basic need as social beings to value our socio-political integrity more than our physical lives. If our only demand were to satisfy our physical needs then we would have no honour or integrity. No matter how affluent we would be, our lives would be no different from any other animal. That would be a distortion of what it is to be a human being and run counter to our basic needs.
Kim Jong Il put this very eloquently: "Independence is the life and soul of man. Man, an independent social being, desires to live independently, free from any subordination or shackles. The fact that man lives independently means that he lives as the master of the world and of his own destiny, maintaining his position and exercising his rights as such.
"Only when man lives as a social being, exercising his right to independence and implementing his demand for independence, can he be said to enjoy a dignified life, maintaining socio-political integrity. If he loses his independence and is subordinated socially, he is as good as dead socially and politically, even though he is alive. Mans desire to live independently is realised, first of a1l, through an independent political life.
"When man is subordinated socially and politically, he cannot lead any kind of independent life. As socio-political integrity is mans most precious life, a noble life for him is to maintain and exalt socio-political integrity. Man receives socio-political integrity from the social collective. The social collective is the parent body of mans socio-political integrity. Therefore, the worth of mans life depends on how he is connected with the social collective.
collective
"Mans life becomes noble when he is loved and trusted by the social collective; it is worthless when he is forsaken by it. Man enjoys the love and trust of the social collective when he considers the interests of the social collective to be dearer than those of individuals and when he faithfully serves the social collective.
"In the final analysis, the greatest value and worth of mans life is to lead an independent and creative life, enjoying the love and trust of the social collective, while at the same time combining his own destiny with that of the social collective and serving it heart and soul. This is the way for man to enhance his socio-political integrity and lead a worthy human life as a social being.
"Today, the bourgeois reactionaries and renegades of socialism regard the exploitation and domination of man by man as something normal and consider man, as a base being who only pursues his own material desires. This clearly demonstrates the reactionary nature of the bourgeois viewpoint and attitude towards the essence and worth of mans life.
"True human life, which enables everyone to enhance their most precious socio-political integrity and fully meet the demands of their physical life, can only be realised admirably in a socialist society based on collectivism. In this society, people are free from all manner of exploitation and oppression, domination and subordination and can lead an independent and creative life in social, political and all other areas".
The Juche idea also looks at the definition of the term "the masses", which Kim Jong Il defines as "a united social community which centres on working people, due to their common demand for independence and creative activity".
In a capitalist society this would include workers and peasants as well as working intellectuals and other class elements and strata who champion the struggle for independence. It is not only a class concept, but also one of ideas.
Anyone who serves the people and takes part in the revolutionary struggle can be a member of the masses whatever their original background and status. That includes people who are not necessarily socialists or communists, but share much common ground and oppose reaction. The Party should not just regard these people as temporary allies but as everlasting companions that it is leading towards communism and revolution.
To quote Kim Jong Il again: "The popular masses desire for independence is the criterion for judging the correctness of lines and policies. The only way to avoid subjectivism and tortuous events in the revolution and construction is to mix with the masses and listen to what they want.
"The masses are teachers of everything. The masses desire for independence, when integrated into a system, will become ideas, lines and policies. When formulating its lines and policies, the working-class party must always go among the masses and listen to their desires. In doing their work, officials must also begin by listening to the masses desires".
The priority of the Party in a socialist society is political work and ideological transformation it is only by this means that the role of the masses can be elevated and strengthened by releasing their creativity initiative and revolutionary zeal united with the Party and leader. Great efforts should be put into training people as powerful beings who can develop their creative ability along with their independent consciousness. It is by this means that material needs of the people can be met.
Love and trust constitute the essence of politics in socialist society love and trust of the masses by the Party and leader, and love and trust of the Party and leader by the masses. The masses are no longer the objects of politics, but its masters; the complete opposite of bourgeois politics, which exists only to preserve itself and the system of exploitation.
The Party is more than a weapon in the class struggle. It should also be built as a motherly Party and all Party members should be educated in the spirit of love and service of the people, thinking of the people before themselves. The Party member should endure hardship before others, be ready to take on difficult tasks and always give credit to others first.
To look in greater depth at the question of ideological education...the very clear lesson of the collapse of socialism in many countries is that the corruption of socialism begins with ideological corruption, and that a breakdown on the ideological front results in crumbling of all socialisms fronts and ends in the total ruin of the Party and socialism.
If it secures ideology, socialism will triumph; if it loses ideology, socialism will go to ruin. Missing out on ideological work when building socialism amounts to overlooking the key to socialism. This mistake will inevitably result in its corruption and collapse. This is a truth experienced by everyone here at this school.
Ideology is the only and the most powerful weapon of the working class Party. The working class Party can only fulfil its mission and duty as the leading political organisation, which sets he pace for the masses independence, when it holds fast to ideology as the main factor and does ideological work before all other work.
exploiting
Capitalism, as an exploiting system, which replaced the feudal system of subordination to the lord with subordination to capital, grew up within the framework of feudal society. But socialism, a new system, radically different from all the exploiting systems before it, cannot grow up within the framework of capitalist society. Socialist ideology emerges as a reflection of the class demand of the exploited working masses who fight against domination by capital.
The socialist system is born of the struggle of the popular masses who are awakened to socialist ideology. It is consolidated and developed under the guidance of socialist ideology and leadership of its Party. Socialist society is essentially characterised by the fact that it develops based on the strength of its ideology, by the conscious activities of people. Its consolidation, development and destiny depend on how ideological work is done and how people are prepared ideologically.
The Party needs to constantly develop its ideology and emphasis based on current conditions. If socialist ideology takes the path of revisionist degeneration or dogmatic stagnation due to incorrect ideological and theoretical work of the working class Party, it will encounter twists and turns, and end in failure.
When they fight with a high level of ideological consciousness and in close unity, the masses can display strength and wisdom and transform nature and society immensely. An incomparable advantage and the indestructible strength of socialism lies in its full development and use of the great strength and wisdom of the popular masses, the makers of history. This is precisely the advantage and strength of socialist ideology, which are ensured by ideological work.
Parties in some countries building socialism in the past, emphasised economic construction alone and took a dogmatic approach to socialist theory instead of paying due attention to educating the masses. They made economic construction itself stagnate and, in the long run, pulled the socialist system down to the extent that they went the lengths of reviving capitalism.
opportunists
Opportunists and renegades abandoned ideological work in socialist society, and encouraged people to be egotistic and selfish. They spread bourgeois ideology, which regards money as omnipotent among people, by adopting the capitalist method of using financial incentives.
How we use our knowledge and how high a creative ability we can display depends on what kind of ideology we have. Only someone with the idea of serving the popular masses can devote their knowledge, skills, wisdom and talent to work for the masses. Ideological consciousness and socio-political integrity, which reflect peoples inherent desires as the masters of the world, as transformers of the world, is consciousness of independence.
Consciousness of independence is the consciousness of being the master of ones own destiny; it is the desire to shape ones own destiny. Only when a person has consciousness of independence can they transform the world positively and shape their own destiny as well.
Socialist ideology represents the highest stage in the development of consciousness of independence. It reflects societys desires for independence and collectivism. As such, it is the most powerful ideological weapon for transforming nature and society and for shaping the destiny of humankind.
It also serves as the ideological basis of solid social unity and cohesion. Ideological work for equipping the masses with socialist ideology is the key to releasing the advantages of socialism, increasing its strength and accelerating the revolution and construction.
Socialist economic relations are the economic, material basis of socialist ideology. Socialist economic relations, whose major component is socialist ownership, provide the masses with material conditions for them to acquire and consolidate socialist ideology.
Therefore, the consolidation and development of socialist economic relations have a major effect on equipping the people with socialist ideology. The socio-economic basis for the emergence of outmoded ideas disappears with the establishment of the socialist system.
But hangovers from the past will remain as hotbeds of reaction that can grow without ideological vigilance. Bourgeois and all other outmoded, reactionary ideas are based on individualism. Exploitative societies were all based on individualism and the people in these societies were tainted with individualism for thousands of years. Individualism is an obstinate, conservative idea, which is deeply rooted in peoples consciousness, customs and lives. Even in a socialist society, individualism and other outmoded ideas persist to a great deal and, when even small chances present themselves, these ideas will sprout again and spread.
The work of eradicating outmoded ideas from peoples minds and equipping them with the new, socialist ideology is an ideological revolution to radically change their ideological lives. That work is essential both inside and outside the Party organisation.
In the past, quite a few parties took a mechanical approach to the historical materialist proposition that the material and economic conditions in society determine social consciousness, and that social consciousness changes with changes in material and economic conditions. They believed that when peoples material and cultural standards became higher under the socialist system and the promotion of socialist construction, their ideological consciousness would be transformed accordingly.
Therefore, they did not pay great attention to ideological work. Believing that peoples ideological consciousness will spontaneously change along socialist lines after they see socialism working, is a totally wrong concept. It is contrary to the essence of socialism and the socialistic transformation of ideology. By nature, human consciousness reflects objective reality, but how they absorb this depends on the person, on their preparedness.
They see, hear, feel and absorb as much as they can understand. What ideology they acquire and how this ideology changes and develops depends on their preparedness, activities and the ideological influence they receive.
It is clear that socialist ideology cannot develop smoothly of its own accord, even though the socialist system has been established and the material and economic conditions have been created.
If ideological work is not carried out, peoples revolutionary enthusiasm may gradually cool down. The tendency to want to live in comfort may grow among them, since they are free from any worries in socialist society and continue to lead stable lives.
Then they cannot devote themselves to the struggle for socialism and, worse still, they maybe duped by imperialists and reactionary propaganda into harbouring illusions about capitalism. This is testified by the collapse of socialism several countries that abandoned ideological work and opened their door to the ideological and cultural infiltration of imperialism.
Ideological education and ideological struggle are the most powerful methods of transforming people by educating them in socialist ideology.
Experience shows that, if ideological work is conducted vigorously to equip people with socialist ideology in socialist society, people from all walks of life can be transformed along socialist lines.
The cause of socialism is a historic cause to be carried out over several generations and cannot be expected to be complete until the last vestiges of the old ways are gone. The basic task of ideological work in socialist society is to colour the whole of society with socialist ideology.
predominance
In any society, the ruling class tries to bring about the unchallenged predominance of its own ideology. In capitalist society, where the society is split into classes and peoples interests conflict, one ideology cannot hold undivided sway and it is inevitable that different ideas exist. The imperialists and their mouthpieces claim the existence of these ideas is a source of pride for the free world.
But progressive ideas can never develop freely in capitalist society, where the means of propaganda and education such as the mass media are in the hands of monopoly capitalists and reactionary rulers. The reactionary bourgeois ruling class tolerates progressive ideas to some extent, to make capitalist society seem democratic. But when they are considered the slightest threat to its ruling system, it mercilessly suppresses them.
Outwardly, different thoughts appear to be tolerated in capitalist society, but all kinds of thoughts throughout it are, without exception, none other than various forms and expressions of bourgeois ideology.
Only in socialist society, where exploitation, oppression and class antagonisms have been eliminated, can all members of society be equipped with a single ideology, because of their common purpose, aspirations and interests. Only then can a single ideology prevail. Socialist ideology develops the masses into independent people, who are conscious of their independence and creative ability, while reactionary bourgeois ideas reduce them to servants who obey the domination of capital, to ideological and mental cripples.
Socialism is the future of humankind, and the communist movement is a movement of the working class to create a new, independent world. The communist movement will develop and emerge victorious through the conscious struggle of the masses. The world communist movement will inevitably triumph thanks to the struggle of the masses who are conscious and armed with socialist ideology.
first published in August 2003
Friday, January 13, 2006
New life and strength to fight on women's issues
Report on the Women’s International Democratic Federation 60th anniversary celebrations and conference of the European section in Paris in December 2005.
WOMEN from all around the world gathered in Paris last week to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Women’s International Democratic Federation at the UNESCO building on 6th December. Delegations, including one from the New Communist Party of Britain, also came to pay tribute to many women who have been playing an exceptional role in the battle for women’s rights and equality under different circumstances and conditions around the globe.
This was an event that many thought would never happen after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the European socialist countries – who had been the staunchest supporters of the WIDF with resources of all kinds.
They recognised that the struggle for women’s equality was part and parcel of the struggle for peace and socialism and against oppression and injustice.
Certainly the western imperialist powers thought – and hoped – that the WIDF would disappear without Soviet support. It did take a knock back but it has survived and is now growing again, largely due to the hard work and dedication of the women involved.
If anything it is now stronger than before, independent of backing from any one particular source, standing definitely on its own feet uniting women from the Third World, the developed world and every corner of the planet.
Furthermore, the Russian section, in the former Soviet Union, remains one of the staunchest divisions in spite of the anti-socialist government there at the moment.
The WIDF has survived and now grows in strength because the issues that it champions have not gone away – the need to fight for women’s rights, peace and social justice –grows more intense.
Skevi Koukouma, who is co-ordinator of WIDF-Europe, organised the anniversary event and a conference the European Regional Bureau the next day in the town hall of La Corneuve d’Aubervilliers – a Paris suburb with a commitment to supporting women’s rights.
The event began with speeches of support from official representatives of UNESCO, the European Parliament, the French government and a number of ambassadors to France – including the Cuban and Brazilian ambassadors, who brought good wishes on behalf of their governments.
Then the WIDF president, Marcia Campos from Brazil, gave a long speech covering the history of the movement and its struggles to re-establish itself. This was followed by speeches from the leaders of various regional bureaux of the WIDF, reporting on their struggles and the issues that faced them.
They included WIDF vice-president Mayada Abbassi from Palestine, Dora Carcaño from the WIDF American office, Adelia de Carvalho from Angola, representing the African WIDF office, Linda Mattar from the Lebanon, representing the WIDF office of Arab countries and Ha Thie Kie from Vietnam, representing the WIDF Asian office.
All the speakers linked the struggle for women’s rights to the struggle for human rights in general, for peace and against imperialist warmongering. They also linked it to the class struggle.
After the speeches the WIDF paid homage to women who have been particularly active in various struggles in different parts of the world by presenting them with special certificates.
The WIDF issued a statement from the anniversary event, summarising the views expressed there. It said that the participants “send a militant message of solidarity and common action to the democratic and progressive women’s movements and generally to women throughout the world”.
It continued: “The Women’s International Democratic Federation, founded on the 1st December 1945, just after the victory over Hitlerite fascism and the end of the Second World War, unites women regardless of race, nationality, religion and political opinion so that they can work together to ensure peace, democracy, national independence and to establish bonds of friendship and solidarity among the women of the whole world.
“WIDF expresses its anxiety for the international developments that are characterised by the continuation and consolidation of the so-called new world order. The position that what has henceforth prevailed is the undermining of international law and the imposition of the rights of the powerful has been affirmed.
“The United States and its allies wish to maintain and expand their political, economic and strategic hegemony to every corner of the planet.
“The terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001 in the US presented the opportunity to strengthen their imperialist policy and the excuse for greater arbitrariness based mainly on the dogma of preventative war, but also for the attacks on political and human rights and individual freedoms.
“The main examples of this policy were the wars waged in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Furthermore and attempt is being made be every possible means, by using the cloak of alleged democratisation, to overthrow all the regimes that the US considers as being non-friendly.”
The WIDF calls for the tackling of terrorism to be conducted collectively under the aegis of the United Nations. It asserts that “the only way to safeguard world peace and stability is by upholding international law, respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of independent states, ridding the United Nations from American influence and strengthening the role of the organisation in tackling international problems.”
This glosses over some aspects of the history of the United Nations, which sanctioned and supported the invasions of Korea, the Congo and Yugoslavia. The UN is an international forum that reflects the balance of power in the world. When the anti-imperialists are strong, the UN can become a strong bulwark against imperialism but when the imperialists are generally stronger they can use the UN as an instrument to oppress small nations. The refusal of the UN to back the American and British invasion of Iraq in 2003 reflects a division within the global ruling class – a division that has weakened imperialism and given strength to anti-imperialism. But, like the machinery of state, the UN is not neutral in the class struggle.
The WIDF statement goes on to condemn the effects of neo-liberal globalisation, saying that “the gains of working people and especially of women are taking a battering; labour relations are being deregulated, the social role of the state is restricted and gender, class and social inequalities are intensifying.
“The importance of steps for women’s education, for sexual and reproductive health and rights, for economic advancement, for political participation and for putting an end to violence are far from their aims.”
The statement expressed support and solidarity for “the heroic people of Cuba”, suffering from the illegal US blockade.
Looking back to the Beijing Platform for Action for women’s rights, the WIDF recognised that the road for women’s emancipation has a long way to go yet. “The space between political decisions and their implementation is widening. Poverty, violence against women, unemployment, low participation in the decision making bodies, the spread of AIDS/HIV among women and young girls, the affect on women and girls of being in a conflict situation, the sexual exploitation and trafficking of women and children, and the exploitation of migrant women continue to give the democratic and progressive women of the world the obligation to unify their struggle against those who are ruling the world economically and politically.”
The following day, at the conference of the European bureau in La Corneuve d’Aubervilliers, around 30 delegates discussed mainly administrative matters to strengthen the organisation, increase its activity and relevance and to arrange future events.
These included a meeting of the executive committee of the WIDF to take place in Beirut next year and a congress of the whole organisation, which will probably take place in 2007. Nicosia in Cyprus has been proposed as a venue but this is subject to agreement by other regional bureaux around the world.
The WIDF has to strike a difficult balance in holding its events in different regions in turn and also bearing in mind that member organisations are not rich and raising travel expenses for delegates can be difficult.
Ironically now delegations from socialist and progressive Third World countries like Brazil, Cuba, Vietnam and Angola are more likely to have real support from their own governments, while delegates from the imperialist countries receive no such support.
Olga Daric from the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia raised the issue of Milena Arezina, a senior government finance minister in Yugoslavia during the government of Milosovic. After his deposition – engineered by invading imperialist forces – she was pressured to falsify an audit of a major socialist manufacturing enterprise to make it appear uneconomic. She refused as was instantly beaten up by imperialist military thugs and was severely injured.
Milena Arezina was thrown out of her job and now has great difficulty making a living. “The American want all our women to have no jobs but prostitution,” said Olga Daric.
One delegate, who works for the European Union Secretariat, reported that the left group of MEPs within the European Parliament are now facing an uphill struggle on women’s issues because that parliament is now dominated by the right, especially the Christian Democrats who maintain a repressive attitude to women’s reproductive rights.
The left MEPs raise initiative after initiative only to find they are defeated or omitted altogether. The current European Parliament has merged the programme dealing with violence against women with the programme on drug abuse. It has also lumped together the issues of fighting poverty and the trafficking of women. Obviously none of these issues is being taken seriously.
Much of the WIDF work is taken up with protests and lobbying governments and international bodies like the UN and the EU.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dominance of US imperialism in the world, the need to defend women’s rights around the world has grown. But so has the determination of politically active women to refuse to allow the clock to be put back on women’s rights. This organisation is not going to go away. It is going to grow and in time it will be not just tugging the sleeve of the various global authorities – it will be seriously challenging them to deliver equal rights and social justice for all.
NCPB Politburo member Daphne Liddle represented the Party at both events.
WOMEN from all around the world gathered in Paris last week to celebrate the 60th anniversary of the Women’s International Democratic Federation at the UNESCO building on 6th December. Delegations, including one from the New Communist Party of Britain, also came to pay tribute to many women who have been playing an exceptional role in the battle for women’s rights and equality under different circumstances and conditions around the globe.
This was an event that many thought would never happen after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the European socialist countries – who had been the staunchest supporters of the WIDF with resources of all kinds.
They recognised that the struggle for women’s equality was part and parcel of the struggle for peace and socialism and against oppression and injustice.
Certainly the western imperialist powers thought – and hoped – that the WIDF would disappear without Soviet support. It did take a knock back but it has survived and is now growing again, largely due to the hard work and dedication of the women involved.
If anything it is now stronger than before, independent of backing from any one particular source, standing definitely on its own feet uniting women from the Third World, the developed world and every corner of the planet.
Furthermore, the Russian section, in the former Soviet Union, remains one of the staunchest divisions in spite of the anti-socialist government there at the moment.
The WIDF has survived and now grows in strength because the issues that it champions have not gone away – the need to fight for women’s rights, peace and social justice –grows more intense.
Skevi Koukouma, who is co-ordinator of WIDF-Europe, organised the anniversary event and a conference the European Regional Bureau the next day in the town hall of La Corneuve d’Aubervilliers – a Paris suburb with a commitment to supporting women’s rights.
The event began with speeches of support from official representatives of UNESCO, the European Parliament, the French government and a number of ambassadors to France – including the Cuban and Brazilian ambassadors, who brought good wishes on behalf of their governments.
Then the WIDF president, Marcia Campos from Brazil, gave a long speech covering the history of the movement and its struggles to re-establish itself. This was followed by speeches from the leaders of various regional bureaux of the WIDF, reporting on their struggles and the issues that faced them.
They included WIDF vice-president Mayada Abbassi from Palestine, Dora Carcaño from the WIDF American office, Adelia de Carvalho from Angola, representing the African WIDF office, Linda Mattar from the Lebanon, representing the WIDF office of Arab countries and Ha Thie Kie from Vietnam, representing the WIDF Asian office.
All the speakers linked the struggle for women’s rights to the struggle for human rights in general, for peace and against imperialist warmongering. They also linked it to the class struggle.
After the speeches the WIDF paid homage to women who have been particularly active in various struggles in different parts of the world by presenting them with special certificates.
The WIDF issued a statement from the anniversary event, summarising the views expressed there. It said that the participants “send a militant message of solidarity and common action to the democratic and progressive women’s movements and generally to women throughout the world”.
It continued: “The Women’s International Democratic Federation, founded on the 1st December 1945, just after the victory over Hitlerite fascism and the end of the Second World War, unites women regardless of race, nationality, religion and political opinion so that they can work together to ensure peace, democracy, national independence and to establish bonds of friendship and solidarity among the women of the whole world.
“WIDF expresses its anxiety for the international developments that are characterised by the continuation and consolidation of the so-called new world order. The position that what has henceforth prevailed is the undermining of international law and the imposition of the rights of the powerful has been affirmed.
“The United States and its allies wish to maintain and expand their political, economic and strategic hegemony to every corner of the planet.
“The terrorist attacks of 11th September 2001 in the US presented the opportunity to strengthen their imperialist policy and the excuse for greater arbitrariness based mainly on the dogma of preventative war, but also for the attacks on political and human rights and individual freedoms.
“The main examples of this policy were the wars waged in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Furthermore and attempt is being made be every possible means, by using the cloak of alleged democratisation, to overthrow all the regimes that the US considers as being non-friendly.”
The WIDF calls for the tackling of terrorism to be conducted collectively under the aegis of the United Nations. It asserts that “the only way to safeguard world peace and stability is by upholding international law, respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of independent states, ridding the United Nations from American influence and strengthening the role of the organisation in tackling international problems.”
This glosses over some aspects of the history of the United Nations, which sanctioned and supported the invasions of Korea, the Congo and Yugoslavia. The UN is an international forum that reflects the balance of power in the world. When the anti-imperialists are strong, the UN can become a strong bulwark against imperialism but when the imperialists are generally stronger they can use the UN as an instrument to oppress small nations. The refusal of the UN to back the American and British invasion of Iraq in 2003 reflects a division within the global ruling class – a division that has weakened imperialism and given strength to anti-imperialism. But, like the machinery of state, the UN is not neutral in the class struggle.
The WIDF statement goes on to condemn the effects of neo-liberal globalisation, saying that “the gains of working people and especially of women are taking a battering; labour relations are being deregulated, the social role of the state is restricted and gender, class and social inequalities are intensifying.
“The importance of steps for women’s education, for sexual and reproductive health and rights, for economic advancement, for political participation and for putting an end to violence are far from their aims.”
The statement expressed support and solidarity for “the heroic people of Cuba”, suffering from the illegal US blockade.
Looking back to the Beijing Platform for Action for women’s rights, the WIDF recognised that the road for women’s emancipation has a long way to go yet. “The space between political decisions and their implementation is widening. Poverty, violence against women, unemployment, low participation in the decision making bodies, the spread of AIDS/HIV among women and young girls, the affect on women and girls of being in a conflict situation, the sexual exploitation and trafficking of women and children, and the exploitation of migrant women continue to give the democratic and progressive women of the world the obligation to unify their struggle against those who are ruling the world economically and politically.”
The following day, at the conference of the European bureau in La Corneuve d’Aubervilliers, around 30 delegates discussed mainly administrative matters to strengthen the organisation, increase its activity and relevance and to arrange future events.
These included a meeting of the executive committee of the WIDF to take place in Beirut next year and a congress of the whole organisation, which will probably take place in 2007. Nicosia in Cyprus has been proposed as a venue but this is subject to agreement by other regional bureaux around the world.
The WIDF has to strike a difficult balance in holding its events in different regions in turn and also bearing in mind that member organisations are not rich and raising travel expenses for delegates can be difficult.
Ironically now delegations from socialist and progressive Third World countries like Brazil, Cuba, Vietnam and Angola are more likely to have real support from their own governments, while delegates from the imperialist countries receive no such support.
Olga Daric from the New Communist Party of Yugoslavia raised the issue of Milena Arezina, a senior government finance minister in Yugoslavia during the government of Milosovic. After his deposition – engineered by invading imperialist forces – she was pressured to falsify an audit of a major socialist manufacturing enterprise to make it appear uneconomic. She refused as was instantly beaten up by imperialist military thugs and was severely injured.
Milena Arezina was thrown out of her job and now has great difficulty making a living. “The American want all our women to have no jobs but prostitution,” said Olga Daric.
One delegate, who works for the European Union Secretariat, reported that the left group of MEPs within the European Parliament are now facing an uphill struggle on women’s issues because that parliament is now dominated by the right, especially the Christian Democrats who maintain a repressive attitude to women’s reproductive rights.
The left MEPs raise initiative after initiative only to find they are defeated or omitted altogether. The current European Parliament has merged the programme dealing with violence against women with the programme on drug abuse. It has also lumped together the issues of fighting poverty and the trafficking of women. Obviously none of these issues is being taken seriously.
Much of the WIDF work is taken up with protests and lobbying governments and international bodies like the UN and the EU.
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the dominance of US imperialism in the world, the need to defend women’s rights around the world has grown. But so has the determination of politically active women to refuse to allow the clock to be put back on women’s rights. This organisation is not going to go away. It is going to grow and in time it will be not just tugging the sleeve of the various global authorities – it will be seriously challenging them to deliver equal rights and social justice for all.
NCPB Politburo member Daphne Liddle represented the Party at both events.
Thursday, January 05, 2006
Remembering Frank Ryan and the International Brigade
THE ORATION below was given on the morning of Sunday 16th October 2005 by Manus O’Riordan, International Brigade Memorial Trust, in Glasnevin Cemetery at the final resting place of a fighter for Irish freedom and the Spanish anti-fascist struggle: Frank Ryan.
Frank Ryan is a name that is part of my communist education because my father, Frank West, told me about this fighter for freedom.
Dad was one of the last 11 International Brigaders to be freed from Franco’s fascist prison – San Pedro de Cardenas (formerly, and now again, a monastery) in April/May 1939.
Frank Ryan, having been severely beaten up by Franco’s thugs was being left behind. But he stood in the yard of the building giving the “Red Front” salute. For those who may not know, the “Red Front” salute is the clenched fist raised when we sing the Internationale.
The German Democratic Republic gave some members of the International Brigade a holiday each year. On one of these my father had a photo taken at Frank Ryan’s grave in Berlin – before his body was moved to Ireland.
The reason for Manus O’Riordan’s oration was to set the record straight about Frank Ryan. For decades the right wing in Ireland have tried to defame and diminish the revolutionary record of this child of his class – most recently in the Irish Times by columnist Kevin Myers on the 19th October 2005.
Dolly Shaer.
Friends,
It was on that same Gandesa front that Frank Ryan was captured by Italian Fascists in March 1938, along with Bob Doyle. Bob is present with us here today, in the company of his fellow International Brigade veterans Jack James Larkin Jones and Michael O’Riordan, in order to pay tribute to a man who gave such inspirational leadership to all International Brigaders during the Spanish Anti-Fascist War.
We also have a Second World War veteran present, former Irish Labour Senator Jack Harte who, serving in the British army, fought against the Nazis in Greece. He subsequently became their prisoner-of-war, being transported from Greece to Italy, and then to Germany itself. As a Federated Workers’ Union of Ireland official, Jack Harte served for many years as Chairman of the James Larkin Commemoration Committee, and he is here today in order to pay his respects to the memory of Frank Ryan, whom Big Jim Larkin himself had held in such high esteem.
Following his capture on the Gandesa front, Frank Ryan had initially been sentenced to death by the Fascists. This was later commuted to a life sentence, in response to a wave of international pressure led by the Irish Prime Minister, Eamon de Valera himself. But the severity of the penal servitude that Frank Ryan was to endure at the hands of the Spanish Fascists for the two years and four months that followed was itself a threat to his very life. The last four years of that life would be spent in Germany, well cared for by friends, but with his health irreparably damaged as a result of what he had previously suffered. He eventually died in Dresden on 10th June 1944.
A cross was placed on Frank Ryan’s grave by his fellow Irish national, Mrs Budge Mulcahy Clissmann, who attended to that final act upon Frank’s death with the same loving care that she had shown him in life, and who is present today in memory of that friendship.
Thirty five years later, from that Dresden grave still marked by the self-same cross, Frank Ryan’s remains were accompanied back to Ireland by three of his International Brigade comrades-in-arms: Frank Edwards and Peter O’Connor, since deceased, and my father Michael O’Riordan, present here today. So it was that on 22nd June 1979, Frank Ryan was finally laid to rest in his native land in this Glasnevin Republican grave. And as today we once again approached Frank’s graveside for this commemoration, it was particularly fitting that the tune played by piper Noel Pocock was that North Dublin anthem of homecoming, Return to Fingal.
Frank Ryan had not yet reached his 42nd birthday by the time of his death. Born in Elton, near Knocklong, County Limerick, on 11th September 1902, it is also particularly appropriate that today’s commemoration will end with Noel playing the tune that had previously been played on the occasion of Frank’s re-burial here in 1979, Limerick’s Lamentation.
Frank Ryan was well served by his first biographer, Sean Cronin. That unsurpassed 1980 biography has, unfortunately, been long out of print. It has been followed by two more. The more recent is indeed both fair minded and well researched, but lacking Cronin’s sharpness of exposition, it has not received the media approval given to another poorly researched one, in an era when the soundbite appeal of the superficial, sensation-seeking chapter-heading of Collaborator calls to mind Yeats’ lines about “the clever man who cries the catch cries of the clown”.
Having his memory pulled awry, as anticipated in Charlie Donnelly’s poem, is indeed a long-standing experience in the case of Frank Ryan. In June 1958 the Irish Times published a sensationalist denunciation of Ryan by the former second-in-command of the Third Reich’s Abwehr Intelligence agency, Erwin Lahousen, in which he pilloried Ryan as “the Irish Communist”, “a wild Irishman ... of a distinctly Red complexion”, “a ruffian” and “nothing but a gangster”. And last week it was again the Irish Times that published the sneering reference by Newfoundland academic Peter Hart to “Frank Ryan, the Republican saint/Nazi collaborator”.
Frank Ryan was none of these things. A life-long Catholic, he was in fact a James Connolly Republican Socialist. His Republicanism was that of Wolfe Tone, with the objective of uniting Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter under the common name of Irishman. He denounced Catholic sectarianism no less than he did Protestant sectarianism.
Frank warned against the development in Ireland of any sympathy for what he called the “disease” and “plague” of Hitlerism, and he specifically denounced any anti-Semitic hostility towards Dublin’s Jewish community. Frank Ryan’s internationalist solidarity with the Spanish Republic was also of a kind that brought together volunteers from all over Ireland, both North and South, and from the best of the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish working class traditions in this island. He proclaimed that he was fighting against Fascism in Spain in order to prevent its triumph in Ireland. And there was none braver in that good fight.
Following his brutal incarceration by Spanish Fascism for over two years, Frank’s life was to be saved in July 1940 by the combined efforts of the Irish Minister to Spain, Leopold Kerney, and two members of Abwehr intelligence in Germany, Jupp Hoven and Helmut Clissmann, who, as former members of a left-wing National Bolshevist organisation – the Young Prussian League – had formed a friendship with Ryan on visiting Ireland a decade previously. And this action to save Frank’s life was sanctioned by none other than the Irish Prime Minister, Eamon de Valera himself.
Ryan was to go to Germany neither as a prisoner nor as a Nazi collaborator. Britain and France had already sacrificed Spain to Fascism, and in the subsequent World War that had been inevitably facilitated by such appeasement, Ryan came to wholeheartedly support de Valera’s strategy of saving Ireland from the horrors of both war and Fascism through a policy of neutrality. In pursuit of this strategy Ryan became de Valera’s de facto political representative in Berlin, reporting back through Minister Leopold Kerney. And it was in such a capacity that he was accorded diplomatic status by the Germans, to whom he fearlessly pointed out that they had lost the War by their invasion of the Soviet Union.
Throughout his stay in Germany, as in Ireland and Spain previously, Ryan remained a Connolly Socialist. Indeed, the Spanish Anti-Fascist War never left his thoughts, for in the delirium of his last day on earth he was heard to issue orders in Spanish, as if once more back on the Jarama battlefield. As regards Ryan’s services to his native country, shortly before his own death in 1975, Eamon de Valera praised him as “this great Irishman”, and stated that “Frank Ryan always put Ireland first in everything he did or said, at home or abroad. He has earned his place in history.”
In his own November 1941 pledge to Irish Minister Kerney – wherein he proclaimed 100 percent patriotic loyalty and support for de Valera’s wartime strategy – Ryan himself had written: “There might be also a situation (I was always a pessimist) in which I might be asked to do something I don’t like. Such a situation is – soberly speaking – highly improbable. But if the unlikely should ever happen, sit yez down aisy! For – I won’t do the dirty. And when you plant my tombstone let it be of granite – like my stubborn cranium”. And so, fittingly, this tombstone of Frank Ryan’s is indeed made of granite.
This is not an occasion for further polemic in vindication of Frank Ryan. I will in fact address the issue in greater detail next Saturday afternoon at the Annual Roger Casement Symposium, when speaking on the theme of “Casement and Frank Ryan – Parallels?”
Today, in the spirit of Charlie Donnelly’s poem, it is more appropriate to let Ryan speak for himself, beside a grave that contains not only Irish, but also Spanish soil. Frank Ryan’s great rally at the battle of Jarama was powerfully inspirational as a deed in itself. But it was no less inspirational in the way that he himself went on to recount it in The Book of the Fifteenth Brigade. All the more reason, therefore, that when we visited Jarama in 1994 for the unveiling of a tombstone over the mass grave of 5,000 of its martyred dead, I should bring home some soil and an olive branch from that self-same Jarama battlefield, and bury both here in Frank’s grave. Here, then, are Frank Ryan’s own words:
“On the road from Chinchon to Madrid, the road along which we had marched to the attack three days before, were now scattered all who survived – a few hundred Britons, Irish and Spaniards. Dispirited by heavy casualties, by defeat, by lack of food, worn out by three days of gruelling fighting, our men appeared to have reached the end of their resistance.
“Some were still straggling down the slopes from what had been, up to an hour ago, the front line. And now, there was no line, nothing between the Madrid road and the Fascists but disorganised groups of weary, war-wrecked men. After three days of terrific struggle, the superior numbers, the superior armament of the Fascists had routed them. All, as they came back, had similar stories to tell: of comrades dead, of conditions that were more than flesh and blood could stand, of weariness they found hard to resist.
“I recognised the young Commissar of the Spanish Company. His hand bloody where a bullet had grazed the palm, he was fumbling nevertheless with his automatic, in turn threatening and pleading with his men. I got Manuel to calm him, and to tell him we would rally everybody in a moment. As I walked along the road to see how many men we had, I found myself deciding that we should go back up the line of the road to San Martin de la Vega, and take the Moors on their left flank.
“Groups were lying about on the roadside, hungrily eating oranges that had been thrown to them by a passing lorry. This was no time to sort them into units. I noted with satisfaction that some had brought down spare rifles. I found my eyes straying always to the hills we had vacated. I hitched a rifle on my shoulder.
“They stumbled to their feet. No time for barrack-square drill. One line of four. ‘Fall in behind us’. A few were still on the grass bank beside the road, adjusting helmets and rifles. ‘Hurry up!’ came the cry to the ranks.
“Up the road towards the Cook-House I saw Jock Cunningham assembling another crowd. We hurried up, joined forces. Together we two marched at the head. Whatever popular writers may say, neither your Briton nor your Irishman is an exuberant type.
Demonstrativeness is not his dominating trait. The crowd behind us was marching silently. The thoughts in their minds could not be inspiring ones. I remembered a trick of the old days when we were holding banned demonstrations. I jerked my head back: ‘Sing up, ye sons o’ guns!’
“Quaveringly at first, then more lustily, then in one resounding chant the song rose from the ranks. Bent backs straightened: tired legs thumped sturdily; what had been a routed rabble marched to battle again as proudly as they had done three days before. And the valley resounded to their singing:
‘Then comrades, come rally,And the last night let us face;The InternationaleUnites the human race.’
“On we marched, back up the road, nearer and nearer to the front. Stragglers still in retreat down the slopes stopped in amazement, changed direction and ran to join us; men lying exhausted on the roadside jumped up, cheered, and joined the ranks. I looked back. Beneath the forest of upraised fists, what a strange band! Unshaven, unkempt; bloodstained, grimy. But, full of fight again, and marching on the road back.
“Beside the road stood our Brigade Commander, General Gall. We had quitted; he had stood his ground. Was it that, or fear of his reprimands, that made us give three cheers for him? Briefly, tersely, he spoke to us. We had one-and-a-half hours of daylight in which to recapture our lost positions. ‘That gap on our right?’ A Spanish Battalion was coming up with us to occupy it.
“Again the Internationale arose. It was being sung in French too. Our column had swelled in size during the halt; a group of Franco-Belge had joined us. We passed the Spanish Battalion. They caught the infection; they were singing too as they deployed to the right. Jock Cunningham seemed to be the only man who was not singing. Hands thrust into his great-coat pockets, he trudged along at the head of his men ... We were singing; he was planning.
“As the olives groves loom in sight, we deploy to the left. At last, we are on the ridge, the ridge which we must never again desert. For while we hold the ridge the Madrid-Valencia road is free ... And thus the men who had been broken and routed a few hours before settled down for the night on the ground they had reconquered. They had dashed Fascist hopes, smashed Fascist plans. Thenceforward, for more than four months, they were to fight, and many of them to die, in these olive groves. But never again were the Fascists to rout them. They were to hold that line, and save Madrid; fighting in the dauntless spirit of the great rally of that afternoon, fighting too, in the spirit of those reckless roars of laughter that night in the Wood of Death.”
A year after that great rally, Frank Ryan told his fellow prisoner Bob Doyle, as they were being marched away by their Fascist captors near Gandesa: “They published my book today”. Some book launch! It was in fact his fellow Irish volunteers Bob Doyle and Jackie Lemon who saved Frank’s life on that particular occasion, by restraining him as he was about to launch back at an Italian Fascist officer who had hit him a punch on the jaw with all of his might.
The New York Jewish International Brigader Max Parker, who was captured that same day, was to testify on several occasions of how great an inspiration Frank Ryan had been to all his fellow prisoners. A German Gestapo officer asked Ryan why he was fighting in Spain and not in Ireland, to which Frank replied that it was the same fight. Frank asked him in turn what he as a Gestapo officer was doing in Spain. The same officer told Ryan that he was a brave man and wished him luck.
And a brave man he most certainly was. Bob Doyle recalls the argument about the anti-fascist prisoners’ right to refuse to give the Fascist salute, but, as Bob also says: “The threat that we would be shot for refusal to comply with the order quickly changed our minds. We gave the salute. Only Frank Ryan refused, stating ‘only when a pistol is placed against my forehead’ would he obey.”
Bob Doyle is one of the most compelling eye witnesses to Frank Ryan’s outstanding integrity. Before we now conclude this ceremony with Noel Pocock on the pipes playing Limerick’s Lamentation, it is particularly appropriate that the person chosen on behalf of all of us to lay a wreath on Frank Ryan’s grave should be his fellow inmate of the Spanish Fascist concentration camp of San Pedro de Cárdenas, and now its last surviving Irish ex-prisoner, the self-same Bob Doyle. Situated only two graves in front of Frank Ryan’s own final resting place is that of Father Michael O’Flanagan, Irish Republican priest and Vice-President of Sinn Fein, who had been chosen to recite the invocation at the first meeting of the newly-proclaimed Irish Parliament in January 1919, following the Irish people’s vote for independence in the November 1918 General Election. He went on to be the only Irish Catholic priest who had the courage to defend the Spanish Republic in the years 1936 to 1939. On the morning of the Frank Ryan commemoration itself, a floral wreath - in the red, yellow and purple colours of the Spanish Republican flag – was also placed on O’Flanagan’s grave, with the dedication: “In loving memory of Father Michael O’Flanagan, true friend of the Spanish Republic, from Veterans of the Spanish Anti-Fascist War and the International Brigade Memorial Trust”.
The colour party for the Frank Ryan commemoration was formed by grandchildren of International Brigader Michael O’Riordan. The Irish tricolour was carried by Luke O’Riordan, the flag of the Spanish Republic by Neil O’Riordan, and the memorial banner of the Connolly Column, 15th Brigada Internacional, by Jessica O’Riordan and Dara McGaley. They were followed by the three surviving International Brigade veterans present: Dubliner Bob Doyle (89), veteran of the battle of Belchite and former inmate of the San Pedro concentration camp; and Liverpool’s Jack James Larkin Jones (92) and Cork’s Michael O’Riordan (88), both veterans of the battle of the Ebro.
The Irish language inscription on Ryan’s tombstone reads in English language translation:
“Frank Ryan. Born in Elton, County Limerick 1902. Died in Dresden 1944. His body was brought back to his native country 22-6-1979. He fought for freedom in this country and in Spain. May God grant him the reward of his life’s labour.” The dedication of the Spanish Republican floral wreath placed on his grave reads: “In loving memory of our comrade-in-arms Frank Ryan, from Veterans of the Spanish Anti-Fascist War and the International Brigade Memorial Trust.”
When the Irish International Brigade poet Charlie Donnelly was killed in the battle of Jarama in February 1937, two unpublished poems were found among his personal effects. The first, entitled The Tolerance of Crows, was published a year later by Frank Ryan in The Book of the Fifteenth Brigade. The second, which was simply entitled Poem, had been inspired by the integrity of their mutual friend, Republican Congress leader George Gilmore. This Charlie Donnelly poem has much to say to us as to the challenge of setting the record straight, not least in respect of the life of Frank Ryan himself.
POEM
Between rebellion as a private
study and the public
Defiance, is simple action only on
which will flickers
Catlike, for spring. Whether at
nerve-roots is secret
Iron, there’s no diviner can tell,
only the moment can show.
Simple and unclear moment,
on a morning utterly different
And under circumstances
different from what you’d
expected.
Your flag is public over granite.
Gulls fly above it.
Whatever the issue of the
battle is, your memory
Is public, for them to pull awry
with crooked hands,
Moist eyes. And village reputations
will be built on
Inaccurate accounts of your campaign. You’re name
for orators, Figure stone-struck
beneath damp Dublin sky.
In a delaying action, perhaps,
on hillside in remote parish,
Outposts correctly placed,
retreat secured to wood,
bridge mined Against pursuit,
sniper may sight you care-
lessly contoured. Or death may
follow years in strait confine-
ment, where diet Is uniform as ceremony,
lacking only fruit. Or
on the barrack square before
the sun casts shadow.
Name, subject of all-consider-
ed words, praise and blame
Irrelevant, the public talk which sounds
the same on hollow
Tongue as true, you’ll be with
Parnell and with Pearse. Name
aldermen will raise a cheer
with, teachers make reference
Oblique in class, and boys and
women spin gum of sentiment
On qualities attributed in error.
Man, dweller in mountain huts,
possessor of coloured mice,
Skilful in minor manual turns,
patron of obscure subjects, of
Gaelic swordsmanship and
mediaeval armoury. The
technique of the public man,
the masked servilities are
Not for you. Master of military
trade, you give
Like Raleigh, Lawrence,
Childers, your services but not
yourself.
Frank Ryan is a name that is part of my communist education because my father, Frank West, told me about this fighter for freedom.
Dad was one of the last 11 International Brigaders to be freed from Franco’s fascist prison – San Pedro de Cardenas (formerly, and now again, a monastery) in April/May 1939.
Frank Ryan, having been severely beaten up by Franco’s thugs was being left behind. But he stood in the yard of the building giving the “Red Front” salute. For those who may not know, the “Red Front” salute is the clenched fist raised when we sing the Internationale.
The German Democratic Republic gave some members of the International Brigade a holiday each year. On one of these my father had a photo taken at Frank Ryan’s grave in Berlin – before his body was moved to Ireland.
The reason for Manus O’Riordan’s oration was to set the record straight about Frank Ryan. For decades the right wing in Ireland have tried to defame and diminish the revolutionary record of this child of his class – most recently in the Irish Times by columnist Kevin Myers on the 19th October 2005.
Dolly Shaer.
Friends,
It was on that same Gandesa front that Frank Ryan was captured by Italian Fascists in March 1938, along with Bob Doyle. Bob is present with us here today, in the company of his fellow International Brigade veterans Jack James Larkin Jones and Michael O’Riordan, in order to pay tribute to a man who gave such inspirational leadership to all International Brigaders during the Spanish Anti-Fascist War.
We also have a Second World War veteran present, former Irish Labour Senator Jack Harte who, serving in the British army, fought against the Nazis in Greece. He subsequently became their prisoner-of-war, being transported from Greece to Italy, and then to Germany itself. As a Federated Workers’ Union of Ireland official, Jack Harte served for many years as Chairman of the James Larkin Commemoration Committee, and he is here today in order to pay his respects to the memory of Frank Ryan, whom Big Jim Larkin himself had held in such high esteem.
Following his capture on the Gandesa front, Frank Ryan had initially been sentenced to death by the Fascists. This was later commuted to a life sentence, in response to a wave of international pressure led by the Irish Prime Minister, Eamon de Valera himself. But the severity of the penal servitude that Frank Ryan was to endure at the hands of the Spanish Fascists for the two years and four months that followed was itself a threat to his very life. The last four years of that life would be spent in Germany, well cared for by friends, but with his health irreparably damaged as a result of what he had previously suffered. He eventually died in Dresden on 10th June 1944.
A cross was placed on Frank Ryan’s grave by his fellow Irish national, Mrs Budge Mulcahy Clissmann, who attended to that final act upon Frank’s death with the same loving care that she had shown him in life, and who is present today in memory of that friendship.
Thirty five years later, from that Dresden grave still marked by the self-same cross, Frank Ryan’s remains were accompanied back to Ireland by three of his International Brigade comrades-in-arms: Frank Edwards and Peter O’Connor, since deceased, and my father Michael O’Riordan, present here today. So it was that on 22nd June 1979, Frank Ryan was finally laid to rest in his native land in this Glasnevin Republican grave. And as today we once again approached Frank’s graveside for this commemoration, it was particularly fitting that the tune played by piper Noel Pocock was that North Dublin anthem of homecoming, Return to Fingal.
Frank Ryan had not yet reached his 42nd birthday by the time of his death. Born in Elton, near Knocklong, County Limerick, on 11th September 1902, it is also particularly appropriate that today’s commemoration will end with Noel playing the tune that had previously been played on the occasion of Frank’s re-burial here in 1979, Limerick’s Lamentation.
Frank Ryan was well served by his first biographer, Sean Cronin. That unsurpassed 1980 biography has, unfortunately, been long out of print. It has been followed by two more. The more recent is indeed both fair minded and well researched, but lacking Cronin’s sharpness of exposition, it has not received the media approval given to another poorly researched one, in an era when the soundbite appeal of the superficial, sensation-seeking chapter-heading of Collaborator calls to mind Yeats’ lines about “the clever man who cries the catch cries of the clown”.
Having his memory pulled awry, as anticipated in Charlie Donnelly’s poem, is indeed a long-standing experience in the case of Frank Ryan. In June 1958 the Irish Times published a sensationalist denunciation of Ryan by the former second-in-command of the Third Reich’s Abwehr Intelligence agency, Erwin Lahousen, in which he pilloried Ryan as “the Irish Communist”, “a wild Irishman ... of a distinctly Red complexion”, “a ruffian” and “nothing but a gangster”. And last week it was again the Irish Times that published the sneering reference by Newfoundland academic Peter Hart to “Frank Ryan, the Republican saint/Nazi collaborator”.
Frank Ryan was none of these things. A life-long Catholic, he was in fact a James Connolly Republican Socialist. His Republicanism was that of Wolfe Tone, with the objective of uniting Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter under the common name of Irishman. He denounced Catholic sectarianism no less than he did Protestant sectarianism.
Frank warned against the development in Ireland of any sympathy for what he called the “disease” and “plague” of Hitlerism, and he specifically denounced any anti-Semitic hostility towards Dublin’s Jewish community. Frank Ryan’s internationalist solidarity with the Spanish Republic was also of a kind that brought together volunteers from all over Ireland, both North and South, and from the best of the Catholic, Protestant and Jewish working class traditions in this island. He proclaimed that he was fighting against Fascism in Spain in order to prevent its triumph in Ireland. And there was none braver in that good fight.
Following his brutal incarceration by Spanish Fascism for over two years, Frank’s life was to be saved in July 1940 by the combined efforts of the Irish Minister to Spain, Leopold Kerney, and two members of Abwehr intelligence in Germany, Jupp Hoven and Helmut Clissmann, who, as former members of a left-wing National Bolshevist organisation – the Young Prussian League – had formed a friendship with Ryan on visiting Ireland a decade previously. And this action to save Frank’s life was sanctioned by none other than the Irish Prime Minister, Eamon de Valera himself.
Ryan was to go to Germany neither as a prisoner nor as a Nazi collaborator. Britain and France had already sacrificed Spain to Fascism, and in the subsequent World War that had been inevitably facilitated by such appeasement, Ryan came to wholeheartedly support de Valera’s strategy of saving Ireland from the horrors of both war and Fascism through a policy of neutrality. In pursuit of this strategy Ryan became de Valera’s de facto political representative in Berlin, reporting back through Minister Leopold Kerney. And it was in such a capacity that he was accorded diplomatic status by the Germans, to whom he fearlessly pointed out that they had lost the War by their invasion of the Soviet Union.
Throughout his stay in Germany, as in Ireland and Spain previously, Ryan remained a Connolly Socialist. Indeed, the Spanish Anti-Fascist War never left his thoughts, for in the delirium of his last day on earth he was heard to issue orders in Spanish, as if once more back on the Jarama battlefield. As regards Ryan’s services to his native country, shortly before his own death in 1975, Eamon de Valera praised him as “this great Irishman”, and stated that “Frank Ryan always put Ireland first in everything he did or said, at home or abroad. He has earned his place in history.”
In his own November 1941 pledge to Irish Minister Kerney – wherein he proclaimed 100 percent patriotic loyalty and support for de Valera’s wartime strategy – Ryan himself had written: “There might be also a situation (I was always a pessimist) in which I might be asked to do something I don’t like. Such a situation is – soberly speaking – highly improbable. But if the unlikely should ever happen, sit yez down aisy! For – I won’t do the dirty. And when you plant my tombstone let it be of granite – like my stubborn cranium”. And so, fittingly, this tombstone of Frank Ryan’s is indeed made of granite.
This is not an occasion for further polemic in vindication of Frank Ryan. I will in fact address the issue in greater detail next Saturday afternoon at the Annual Roger Casement Symposium, when speaking on the theme of “Casement and Frank Ryan – Parallels?”
Today, in the spirit of Charlie Donnelly’s poem, it is more appropriate to let Ryan speak for himself, beside a grave that contains not only Irish, but also Spanish soil. Frank Ryan’s great rally at the battle of Jarama was powerfully inspirational as a deed in itself. But it was no less inspirational in the way that he himself went on to recount it in The Book of the Fifteenth Brigade. All the more reason, therefore, that when we visited Jarama in 1994 for the unveiling of a tombstone over the mass grave of 5,000 of its martyred dead, I should bring home some soil and an olive branch from that self-same Jarama battlefield, and bury both here in Frank’s grave. Here, then, are Frank Ryan’s own words:
“On the road from Chinchon to Madrid, the road along which we had marched to the attack three days before, were now scattered all who survived – a few hundred Britons, Irish and Spaniards. Dispirited by heavy casualties, by defeat, by lack of food, worn out by three days of gruelling fighting, our men appeared to have reached the end of their resistance.
“Some were still straggling down the slopes from what had been, up to an hour ago, the front line. And now, there was no line, nothing between the Madrid road and the Fascists but disorganised groups of weary, war-wrecked men. After three days of terrific struggle, the superior numbers, the superior armament of the Fascists had routed them. All, as they came back, had similar stories to tell: of comrades dead, of conditions that were more than flesh and blood could stand, of weariness they found hard to resist.
“I recognised the young Commissar of the Spanish Company. His hand bloody where a bullet had grazed the palm, he was fumbling nevertheless with his automatic, in turn threatening and pleading with his men. I got Manuel to calm him, and to tell him we would rally everybody in a moment. As I walked along the road to see how many men we had, I found myself deciding that we should go back up the line of the road to San Martin de la Vega, and take the Moors on their left flank.
“Groups were lying about on the roadside, hungrily eating oranges that had been thrown to them by a passing lorry. This was no time to sort them into units. I noted with satisfaction that some had brought down spare rifles. I found my eyes straying always to the hills we had vacated. I hitched a rifle on my shoulder.
“They stumbled to their feet. No time for barrack-square drill. One line of four. ‘Fall in behind us’. A few were still on the grass bank beside the road, adjusting helmets and rifles. ‘Hurry up!’ came the cry to the ranks.
“Up the road towards the Cook-House I saw Jock Cunningham assembling another crowd. We hurried up, joined forces. Together we two marched at the head. Whatever popular writers may say, neither your Briton nor your Irishman is an exuberant type.
Demonstrativeness is not his dominating trait. The crowd behind us was marching silently. The thoughts in their minds could not be inspiring ones. I remembered a trick of the old days when we were holding banned demonstrations. I jerked my head back: ‘Sing up, ye sons o’ guns!’
“Quaveringly at first, then more lustily, then in one resounding chant the song rose from the ranks. Bent backs straightened: tired legs thumped sturdily; what had been a routed rabble marched to battle again as proudly as they had done three days before. And the valley resounded to their singing:
‘Then comrades, come rally,And the last night let us face;The InternationaleUnites the human race.’
“On we marched, back up the road, nearer and nearer to the front. Stragglers still in retreat down the slopes stopped in amazement, changed direction and ran to join us; men lying exhausted on the roadside jumped up, cheered, and joined the ranks. I looked back. Beneath the forest of upraised fists, what a strange band! Unshaven, unkempt; bloodstained, grimy. But, full of fight again, and marching on the road back.
“Beside the road stood our Brigade Commander, General Gall. We had quitted; he had stood his ground. Was it that, or fear of his reprimands, that made us give three cheers for him? Briefly, tersely, he spoke to us. We had one-and-a-half hours of daylight in which to recapture our lost positions. ‘That gap on our right?’ A Spanish Battalion was coming up with us to occupy it.
“Again the Internationale arose. It was being sung in French too. Our column had swelled in size during the halt; a group of Franco-Belge had joined us. We passed the Spanish Battalion. They caught the infection; they were singing too as they deployed to the right. Jock Cunningham seemed to be the only man who was not singing. Hands thrust into his great-coat pockets, he trudged along at the head of his men ... We were singing; he was planning.
“As the olives groves loom in sight, we deploy to the left. At last, we are on the ridge, the ridge which we must never again desert. For while we hold the ridge the Madrid-Valencia road is free ... And thus the men who had been broken and routed a few hours before settled down for the night on the ground they had reconquered. They had dashed Fascist hopes, smashed Fascist plans. Thenceforward, for more than four months, they were to fight, and many of them to die, in these olive groves. But never again were the Fascists to rout them. They were to hold that line, and save Madrid; fighting in the dauntless spirit of the great rally of that afternoon, fighting too, in the spirit of those reckless roars of laughter that night in the Wood of Death.”
A year after that great rally, Frank Ryan told his fellow prisoner Bob Doyle, as they were being marched away by their Fascist captors near Gandesa: “They published my book today”. Some book launch! It was in fact his fellow Irish volunteers Bob Doyle and Jackie Lemon who saved Frank’s life on that particular occasion, by restraining him as he was about to launch back at an Italian Fascist officer who had hit him a punch on the jaw with all of his might.
The New York Jewish International Brigader Max Parker, who was captured that same day, was to testify on several occasions of how great an inspiration Frank Ryan had been to all his fellow prisoners. A German Gestapo officer asked Ryan why he was fighting in Spain and not in Ireland, to which Frank replied that it was the same fight. Frank asked him in turn what he as a Gestapo officer was doing in Spain. The same officer told Ryan that he was a brave man and wished him luck.
And a brave man he most certainly was. Bob Doyle recalls the argument about the anti-fascist prisoners’ right to refuse to give the Fascist salute, but, as Bob also says: “The threat that we would be shot for refusal to comply with the order quickly changed our minds. We gave the salute. Only Frank Ryan refused, stating ‘only when a pistol is placed against my forehead’ would he obey.”
Bob Doyle is one of the most compelling eye witnesses to Frank Ryan’s outstanding integrity. Before we now conclude this ceremony with Noel Pocock on the pipes playing Limerick’s Lamentation, it is particularly appropriate that the person chosen on behalf of all of us to lay a wreath on Frank Ryan’s grave should be his fellow inmate of the Spanish Fascist concentration camp of San Pedro de Cárdenas, and now its last surviving Irish ex-prisoner, the self-same Bob Doyle. Situated only two graves in front of Frank Ryan’s own final resting place is that of Father Michael O’Flanagan, Irish Republican priest and Vice-President of Sinn Fein, who had been chosen to recite the invocation at the first meeting of the newly-proclaimed Irish Parliament in January 1919, following the Irish people’s vote for independence in the November 1918 General Election. He went on to be the only Irish Catholic priest who had the courage to defend the Spanish Republic in the years 1936 to 1939. On the morning of the Frank Ryan commemoration itself, a floral wreath - in the red, yellow and purple colours of the Spanish Republican flag – was also placed on O’Flanagan’s grave, with the dedication: “In loving memory of Father Michael O’Flanagan, true friend of the Spanish Republic, from Veterans of the Spanish Anti-Fascist War and the International Brigade Memorial Trust”.
The colour party for the Frank Ryan commemoration was formed by grandchildren of International Brigader Michael O’Riordan. The Irish tricolour was carried by Luke O’Riordan, the flag of the Spanish Republic by Neil O’Riordan, and the memorial banner of the Connolly Column, 15th Brigada Internacional, by Jessica O’Riordan and Dara McGaley. They were followed by the three surviving International Brigade veterans present: Dubliner Bob Doyle (89), veteran of the battle of Belchite and former inmate of the San Pedro concentration camp; and Liverpool’s Jack James Larkin Jones (92) and Cork’s Michael O’Riordan (88), both veterans of the battle of the Ebro.
The Irish language inscription on Ryan’s tombstone reads in English language translation:
“Frank Ryan. Born in Elton, County Limerick 1902. Died in Dresden 1944. His body was brought back to his native country 22-6-1979. He fought for freedom in this country and in Spain. May God grant him the reward of his life’s labour.” The dedication of the Spanish Republican floral wreath placed on his grave reads: “In loving memory of our comrade-in-arms Frank Ryan, from Veterans of the Spanish Anti-Fascist War and the International Brigade Memorial Trust.”
When the Irish International Brigade poet Charlie Donnelly was killed in the battle of Jarama in February 1937, two unpublished poems were found among his personal effects. The first, entitled The Tolerance of Crows, was published a year later by Frank Ryan in The Book of the Fifteenth Brigade. The second, which was simply entitled Poem, had been inspired by the integrity of their mutual friend, Republican Congress leader George Gilmore. This Charlie Donnelly poem has much to say to us as to the challenge of setting the record straight, not least in respect of the life of Frank Ryan himself.
POEM
Between rebellion as a private
study and the public
Defiance, is simple action only on
which will flickers
Catlike, for spring. Whether at
nerve-roots is secret
Iron, there’s no diviner can tell,
only the moment can show.
Simple and unclear moment,
on a morning utterly different
And under circumstances
different from what you’d
expected.
Your flag is public over granite.
Gulls fly above it.
Whatever the issue of the
battle is, your memory
Is public, for them to pull awry
with crooked hands,
Moist eyes. And village reputations
will be built on
Inaccurate accounts of your campaign. You’re name
for orators, Figure stone-struck
beneath damp Dublin sky.
In a delaying action, perhaps,
on hillside in remote parish,
Outposts correctly placed,
retreat secured to wood,
bridge mined Against pursuit,
sniper may sight you care-
lessly contoured. Or death may
follow years in strait confine-
ment, where diet Is uniform as ceremony,
lacking only fruit. Or
on the barrack square before
the sun casts shadow.
Name, subject of all-consider-
ed words, praise and blame
Irrelevant, the public talk which sounds
the same on hollow
Tongue as true, you’ll be with
Parnell and with Pearse. Name
aldermen will raise a cheer
with, teachers make reference
Oblique in class, and boys and
women spin gum of sentiment
On qualities attributed in error.
Man, dweller in mountain huts,
possessor of coloured mice,
Skilful in minor manual turns,
patron of obscure subjects, of
Gaelic swordsmanship and
mediaeval armoury. The
technique of the public man,
the masked servilities are
Not for you. Master of military
trade, you give
Like Raleigh, Lawrence,
Childers, your services but not
yourself.
The dangers of revisionism in culture
Book Review
by Renée Sams
Understanding Film -- Marxist Perspectives
Ed. Mike Wayne, Pluto Press, London 2005, Pbl £16.99
FOR ALMOST 100 years the film industry has entertained and influenced people. It is a medium that both capitalists and Marxists have found a powerful tool for communicating ideas to people.
A new book Understanding Film – Marxist Perspectives is a collection of essays by some English and American university professors and lecturers exploring the work of some of the key theorists on the industry whose writings have been influential.
It is a very long-winded intellectual perspective, obviously intended for discussion in university circles, but it is interesting if you have the patience to plough your way through the academic verbiage.
Mike Wayne, who edited the anthology, teaches film, television and video practice at Brunel University. He is the author of several books on Marxism and the film industry and feels that “questions of ideology, technology and industry must be situated in relation to class”.
In his introduction he makes a delicate reference to “the Russian Revolution” that “opened up the prospect of an alternative modernity, very different from the capitalist one that has spawned the horrors of the First World War.”
In the first essay, Esther Leslie, a teacher at the School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London, discusses “Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht and Film” during the early years of the film industry.
Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), an early critic of film, argued that capitalism feeds people with the products of a “culture industry” to keep them “passively accepting their lot in life, satisfied and politically apathetic”. His views stemmed, Esther Leslie says, “from his experience of California, the apex of US commercial culture”. Like many other theorists who would follow him he focussed on culture to change the social situation rather than economics. He was disappointed that capitalism did not seem to be as close to coming to an end as Marx had thought but had become more entrenched. His pessimistic views were coloured by his experience of Nazi propaganda and, Leslie says, his knowledge of “mass culture” in the Soviet Union. All of which led him to the belief that films would be of no value to art.
Leslie’s second guru is Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), a German theorist who took a more positive view of the subject. He was acquainted with Adorno but his ideas on film were strongly influenced by Bertolt Brecht. He saw film as part of the technological revolution that would bring culture to a wider range of people. His major work published in 1935 was The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility in which he argued that photography and film, unlike painting or sculpture, are different in that every copy is an original and that therefore makes a difference to the understanding of art. He was afraid that mass reproduction of art, which was rapidly becoming possible, would threaten its status as something special. But film, he thought, was the only form that had become able to analyse social relations in the age of the new technical revolution.
The third guru in this essay is Bertolt Brecht (1895-1956), who was a communist, playwright and poet, whose work was more influential in theatre than film. He was forced to leave Germany in 1933 after the Nazis burned his books. He fled to Europe and then went to the United States where he worked on some films in Hollywood until in 1947 he was forced to give evidence before the House Un-American Activities Committee. After that he returned to the German Democratic Republic. His kind of “epic” drama was designed to remind the audience that what they are seeing on stage is not reality but a demonstration of an illusion of reality and should be looked at with critical detachment. The alienation effect (Verfremdunseffekt) was achieved through such devices as having the actors wear masks.
The next essayist is Marcia Landy, a Distinguished Service Professor of English and Film Studies with a secondary appointment in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh who writes on “Gramsci, Sembene and the Politics of Culture”.
Gramsci (1891-1937) studied at the University of Turin with, among other people, Palmiro Togliatti, future General Secretary of the Communist Party of Italy and he became a member of that party. He was an active anti-fascist during the rise of Mussolini and was imprisoned several times for his militant writing, spending the last 15 years of his life in gaol where he wrote his major work, The Prison Notebooks. In her essay Marcia Landy says that Gramsci’s ideas “represent a challenge to orthodox forms of Marxism that adhere to distinctions between rigidly determining economic base and the social and cultural superstructure.”
The African film maker Sembene goes along with Gramsci’s thinking in “contrast to Marxists committed to…the central role of economics”. He “saw that social, political and economic transformation is impossible without a corresponding transformation in knowledge, behaviour and belief.”
Gramsci’s Notebooks were not published until after his death and only came widely known in the 50s and 60s when they attracted worldwide interest. But it was written in the 30s at a time when the cinema and radio were the most popular forms of culture, which Gramsci felt had more influence on people than written forms of communication.
To him, social institutions such as the church, popular knowledge, folklore and specific artefacts such as radio and film played a crucial role in influencing people in favour of the capitalist society. He was also particularly keen on the role that intellectuals could play in the transformation of society.
It was not until the late 60s and early 70s that film studies appeared on university curricula at time when “ideology” was the subject of much discussion among students, lecturers, left wing political groups, film critics and those involved in the media and education fields.
In her essay The Athusserian Moment Revisited Deborah Phillips who teaches at the School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, London University, writes about that time: “The concept of ideology…was the buzzword of conferences and meetings, and the unavoidable issue of contemporary Marxist thinking.”
Along with other critics of Marx, Louis Althusser (1918-1990) was part of the trend towards distancing communists from the Soviet Union, basing policies on social forces instead of economics and class, a trend that became known as “Eurocommunism”.
She quotes historian EP Thompson’s essay The Poverty of Theory in which he saw the danger of advocating theoretical practice as politics, scathingly describing the adherents of these ideas as “bourgeois lumpen intelligentsia: aspirant intellectuals, whose amateurish intellectual preparation disarms them before manifest absurdities and in practice leave them paralysed in the first web of scholastic argument…”
Althusser who suffered from a bi-polar condition for most of his life had a violent episode in 1980 in which he killed his wife and was consigned to a psychiatric hospital for the rest of his life and his works fell out of favour with those who were re-writing Karl Marx.
The next essay by Mike Wayne brings the series up to date on with a piece on Fredric Jameson, Distinguished Professor of Contemporary Literature at Duke University, described as a Marxist, who has received much acclaim for his work on contemporary critical theory of post modernism.
For three decades he has written extensively on writers such as Jean Paul Sartre, Georg Lukacs, TW Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. His essay: Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of late Capitalism was published in New Left Review in 1984.
Jamieson argued that we live “in a world frighteningly controlled by vast forces” which “stultify our capacity to represent history and manipulate knowledge and information to the extent that the boundaries between what is real and what is not, what is true and what is false, effectively disappear.”
Jamieson comes to the conclusion that postmodernism; “the cultural logic of late capitalism” is the dominant force in media culture – a conclusion that Mike Wayne disagrees with and I would certainly go along with. As Wayne says:
“Postmodernism is only one of the many cultural resources at play,” which is culturally significant but not dominant. Ideology is no longer the buzz word of meetings and conferences but the ideas of all those “Marxist” theorists who set out to turn people against socialism and communism spread throughout the media, and were infiltrated into the communist movement where they brought about the demise of the CPSU, and communist parties throughout Europe.
The McCarthy era in the United States, and the Cold War were under-pinned by anti-communist theoretical writing and supported by the Hollywood moguls who turned out anti-Soviet films by the dozen, which were seen by millions, some of which are still shown today.
It was refreshing to see an essay on cinema in Democratic Korea, or North Korea as it is called in the essay written by Hyangjin Lee, a lecturer in the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of “Contemporary Korean Cinema Identity, Culture and Politics” as well as many articles on North and South Korean cinema and culture.
In her essay she says Kim Jong IL asserted that Juché oriented art and literature are “communist art and literature that meet the requirements of the new age and the aspirations of the popular masses” and she asks the question “What does this conveniently elastic cliché mean for filmmakers?”
Hyangjin Lee is not supportive of the Korean revolution, characterising it as a “passive revolution carried out by the oppressive regime at the apex of which is the Great Leader, which insists on the necessity and continuity of the revolution.”
She does, however, provide an interesting account of the early beginnings of film in Korea, then a Japanese colony, where the KAPF (Korean Proletariat Art Federation in Esperanto) was established in 1925 with the merger of two socialist-oriented literature circles.
The organisation developed into a “radical political” body and declared: “the art movement as a weapon for political struggles”. Members of the KAPF were active and concentrated on “political agitation and ideological uniformity with the party line in order to achieve national popular revolution”.
In 1935 many of its members were arrested, and some of them returned to underground Korean Communist Party work, others went on to make pro-Japanese films or non-political literary films.
Since the division of Korea by the Allies in 1945, Hyangjin Lee writes, the south has “maintained anti-communism as the state ideology”. In the north, from 1948, “the ‘socialist’ regime gave new life to the former KAPF filmmakers.”
In 1955 Kim IL Sung defined Juché as “a theory, which rejects the universality of mass-initiated class revolution” and she says “proposes the ideas of the Great Leader” instead. But Kim IL Sung in his explanation of the theory emphasised that this was a “creative adoption of Marxist-Leninism to the Korean situation for revolutionary purposes.”
Like all these theorists Hyangjin Lee expresses her fear of the “subordination of film to politics”. Both Hyangjin Lee and the editor of the anthology are pessimistic about the situation in Democratic Korea.
In his introduction Mike Wayne says that the state has “now merged with the party, as a centralised body of coercive force and political and cultural power,” and this leaves the masses in “the same position of passivity and non-participation as in orthodox capitalist countries.”
He only sees that Marxism is a useful tool for the critique of capitalism but, neither Wayne nor the other essayists, can see that it was not the failure of socialism that caused the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and the other countries of Europe, but the work of imperialist enemies without and the revisionist enemies within those parties that finally brought them down.
They cannot see that the peoples of China, Democratic Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and Laos are engaged in a heroic struggle to overcome the problems of working out the economics of building a socialist society and that art and film have a useful role to play in that struggle.
by Renée Sams
Understanding Film -- Marxist Perspectives
Ed. Mike Wayne, Pluto Press, London 2005, Pbl £16.99
FOR ALMOST 100 years the film industry has entertained and influenced people. It is a medium that both capitalists and Marxists have found a powerful tool for communicating ideas to people.
A new book Understanding Film – Marxist Perspectives is a collection of essays by some English and American university professors and lecturers exploring the work of some of the key theorists on the industry whose writings have been influential.
It is a very long-winded intellectual perspective, obviously intended for discussion in university circles, but it is interesting if you have the patience to plough your way through the academic verbiage.
Mike Wayne, who edited the anthology, teaches film, television and video practice at Brunel University. He is the author of several books on Marxism and the film industry and feels that “questions of ideology, technology and industry must be situated in relation to class”.
In his introduction he makes a delicate reference to “the Russian Revolution” that “opened up the prospect of an alternative modernity, very different from the capitalist one that has spawned the horrors of the First World War.”
In the first essay, Esther Leslie, a teacher at the School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London, discusses “Adorno, Benjamin, Brecht and Film” during the early years of the film industry.
Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), an early critic of film, argued that capitalism feeds people with the products of a “culture industry” to keep them “passively accepting their lot in life, satisfied and politically apathetic”. His views stemmed, Esther Leslie says, “from his experience of California, the apex of US commercial culture”. Like many other theorists who would follow him he focussed on culture to change the social situation rather than economics. He was disappointed that capitalism did not seem to be as close to coming to an end as Marx had thought but had become more entrenched. His pessimistic views were coloured by his experience of Nazi propaganda and, Leslie says, his knowledge of “mass culture” in the Soviet Union. All of which led him to the belief that films would be of no value to art.
Leslie’s second guru is Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), a German theorist who took a more positive view of the subject. He was acquainted with Adorno but his ideas on film were strongly influenced by Bertolt Brecht. He saw film as part of the technological revolution that would bring culture to a wider range of people. His major work published in 1935 was The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility in which he argued that photography and film, unlike painting or sculpture, are different in that every copy is an original and that therefore makes a difference to the understanding of art. He was afraid that mass reproduction of art, which was rapidly becoming possible, would threaten its status as something special. But film, he thought, was the only form that had become able to analyse social relations in the age of the new technical revolution.
The third guru in this essay is Bertolt Brecht (1895-1956), who was a communist, playwright and poet, whose work was more influential in theatre than film. He was forced to leave Germany in 1933 after the Nazis burned his books. He fled to Europe and then went to the United States where he worked on some films in Hollywood until in 1947 he was forced to give evidence before the House Un-American Activities Committee. After that he returned to the German Democratic Republic. His kind of “epic” drama was designed to remind the audience that what they are seeing on stage is not reality but a demonstration of an illusion of reality and should be looked at with critical detachment. The alienation effect (Verfremdunseffekt) was achieved through such devices as having the actors wear masks.
The next essayist is Marcia Landy, a Distinguished Service Professor of English and Film Studies with a secondary appointment in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Pittsburgh who writes on “Gramsci, Sembene and the Politics of Culture”.
Gramsci (1891-1937) studied at the University of Turin with, among other people, Palmiro Togliatti, future General Secretary of the Communist Party of Italy and he became a member of that party. He was an active anti-fascist during the rise of Mussolini and was imprisoned several times for his militant writing, spending the last 15 years of his life in gaol where he wrote his major work, The Prison Notebooks. In her essay Marcia Landy says that Gramsci’s ideas “represent a challenge to orthodox forms of Marxism that adhere to distinctions between rigidly determining economic base and the social and cultural superstructure.”
The African film maker Sembene goes along with Gramsci’s thinking in “contrast to Marxists committed to…the central role of economics”. He “saw that social, political and economic transformation is impossible without a corresponding transformation in knowledge, behaviour and belief.”
Gramsci’s Notebooks were not published until after his death and only came widely known in the 50s and 60s when they attracted worldwide interest. But it was written in the 30s at a time when the cinema and radio were the most popular forms of culture, which Gramsci felt had more influence on people than written forms of communication.
To him, social institutions such as the church, popular knowledge, folklore and specific artefacts such as radio and film played a crucial role in influencing people in favour of the capitalist society. He was also particularly keen on the role that intellectuals could play in the transformation of society.
It was not until the late 60s and early 70s that film studies appeared on university curricula at time when “ideology” was the subject of much discussion among students, lecturers, left wing political groups, film critics and those involved in the media and education fields.
In her essay The Athusserian Moment Revisited Deborah Phillips who teaches at the School of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, London University, writes about that time: “The concept of ideology…was the buzzword of conferences and meetings, and the unavoidable issue of contemporary Marxist thinking.”
Along with other critics of Marx, Louis Althusser (1918-1990) was part of the trend towards distancing communists from the Soviet Union, basing policies on social forces instead of economics and class, a trend that became known as “Eurocommunism”.
She quotes historian EP Thompson’s essay The Poverty of Theory in which he saw the danger of advocating theoretical practice as politics, scathingly describing the adherents of these ideas as “bourgeois lumpen intelligentsia: aspirant intellectuals, whose amateurish intellectual preparation disarms them before manifest absurdities and in practice leave them paralysed in the first web of scholastic argument…”
Althusser who suffered from a bi-polar condition for most of his life had a violent episode in 1980 in which he killed his wife and was consigned to a psychiatric hospital for the rest of his life and his works fell out of favour with those who were re-writing Karl Marx.
The next essay by Mike Wayne brings the series up to date on with a piece on Fredric Jameson, Distinguished Professor of Contemporary Literature at Duke University, described as a Marxist, who has received much acclaim for his work on contemporary critical theory of post modernism.
For three decades he has written extensively on writers such as Jean Paul Sartre, Georg Lukacs, TW Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse. His essay: Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of late Capitalism was published in New Left Review in 1984.
Jamieson argued that we live “in a world frighteningly controlled by vast forces” which “stultify our capacity to represent history and manipulate knowledge and information to the extent that the boundaries between what is real and what is not, what is true and what is false, effectively disappear.”
Jamieson comes to the conclusion that postmodernism; “the cultural logic of late capitalism” is the dominant force in media culture – a conclusion that Mike Wayne disagrees with and I would certainly go along with. As Wayne says:
“Postmodernism is only one of the many cultural resources at play,” which is culturally significant but not dominant. Ideology is no longer the buzz word of meetings and conferences but the ideas of all those “Marxist” theorists who set out to turn people against socialism and communism spread throughout the media, and were infiltrated into the communist movement where they brought about the demise of the CPSU, and communist parties throughout Europe.
The McCarthy era in the United States, and the Cold War were under-pinned by anti-communist theoretical writing and supported by the Hollywood moguls who turned out anti-Soviet films by the dozen, which were seen by millions, some of which are still shown today.
It was refreshing to see an essay on cinema in Democratic Korea, or North Korea as it is called in the essay written by Hyangjin Lee, a lecturer in the School of East Asian Studies at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of “Contemporary Korean Cinema Identity, Culture and Politics” as well as many articles on North and South Korean cinema and culture.
In her essay she says Kim Jong IL asserted that Juché oriented art and literature are “communist art and literature that meet the requirements of the new age and the aspirations of the popular masses” and she asks the question “What does this conveniently elastic cliché mean for filmmakers?”
Hyangjin Lee is not supportive of the Korean revolution, characterising it as a “passive revolution carried out by the oppressive regime at the apex of which is the Great Leader, which insists on the necessity and continuity of the revolution.”
She does, however, provide an interesting account of the early beginnings of film in Korea, then a Japanese colony, where the KAPF (Korean Proletariat Art Federation in Esperanto) was established in 1925 with the merger of two socialist-oriented literature circles.
The organisation developed into a “radical political” body and declared: “the art movement as a weapon for political struggles”. Members of the KAPF were active and concentrated on “political agitation and ideological uniformity with the party line in order to achieve national popular revolution”.
In 1935 many of its members were arrested, and some of them returned to underground Korean Communist Party work, others went on to make pro-Japanese films or non-political literary films.
Since the division of Korea by the Allies in 1945, Hyangjin Lee writes, the south has “maintained anti-communism as the state ideology”. In the north, from 1948, “the ‘socialist’ regime gave new life to the former KAPF filmmakers.”
In 1955 Kim IL Sung defined Juché as “a theory, which rejects the universality of mass-initiated class revolution” and she says “proposes the ideas of the Great Leader” instead. But Kim IL Sung in his explanation of the theory emphasised that this was a “creative adoption of Marxist-Leninism to the Korean situation for revolutionary purposes.”
Like all these theorists Hyangjin Lee expresses her fear of the “subordination of film to politics”. Both Hyangjin Lee and the editor of the anthology are pessimistic about the situation in Democratic Korea.
In his introduction Mike Wayne says that the state has “now merged with the party, as a centralised body of coercive force and political and cultural power,” and this leaves the masses in “the same position of passivity and non-participation as in orthodox capitalist countries.”
He only sees that Marxism is a useful tool for the critique of capitalism but, neither Wayne nor the other essayists, can see that it was not the failure of socialism that caused the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union and the other countries of Europe, but the work of imperialist enemies without and the revisionist enemies within those parties that finally brought them down.
They cannot see that the peoples of China, Democratic Korea, Cuba, Vietnam and Laos are engaged in a heroic struggle to overcome the problems of working out the economics of building a socialist society and that art and film have a useful role to play in that struggle.
Wednesday, January 04, 2006
All in rhe family (part one)
by Daphne Liddle
WE ARE BROUGHT up with assumptions about the nuclear family being eternal,the natural order of things – cave-man mum, dad and family.But this is not so, the nuclear family of just two adults and theirchildren that we are familiar with is the product of social and economicforces and has changed throughout history according to predominant economicmethods and culture.
Western anthropologists, encountering different peoples and societies,assumed that the men would naturally be dominant in those societies as intheir own. They spoke only to the men and discovered only half the truth.“All our histories have hitherto started from the absurd assumption, whichsince the 18th century in particular has become inviolable, that themonogamous single family, which is hardly older than civilization, is thecore around which society and state have gradually crystallised.” That wasFrederick Engels writing in The family, private property and the state. And from Robert Briffault’s The Mothers: "The fanciful opinion that women are oppressed in savage societies was partly due to the complacency of civilised man, and partly to the fact that the women are seen to work hard.Wherever women were seen engaged in laborious toil, their status was judged to be one of slavery and oppression. No misunderstanding could be more profound."
The primitive women is independent because, not in spite of her labour.Generally speaking, it is in those societies where women toil most that their status is most independent and their influence greatest; where theyare idle, and the work is done by slaves, the women are, as a rule, little more than sexual slaves.“No labour of any kind is, in primitive society, other than voluntary, and no toil is ever undertaken by the women in obedience to an arbitrary order".
Referring to the Zulu women, a missionary writes, ‘Whoever has observed the happy appearance of the women at their work and toil, their gaiety and chatter, their laughter and song … let him compare with them the bearing of our own working women.’“It is not labour, but exploited and enforced labour that is galling tothe human being.”
Going back to our human origins – what is a natural family? Is there such a thing?For mammals the basic family unit is mother and dependent offspring,needing milk and protection until they are old enough to fend for themselves. Usually this is a matter of weeks or months.Different mammals have different family or group structures: – some are simply mother and offspring together for a few weeks. With some, a father is involved in the short time it takes to rear the young.With many, a whole group hangs together, as with herd animals. This is more common among herbivores who find protection from predators in large numbers. Carnivores tend to walk alone or in small groups because they are rivals to each other for the food supply.Our closest animal relatives, the great apes all live in groups but havevarious different types of group structure: chimps live in male-dominatedgroups, bonobos live in female-dominated groups, orang utans are usually isolated except for females with young. The point is that there is no specific predetermined group structure for human beings that is right orwrong.
The earliest humans were forced to live in groups bigger than the bourgeois nuclear family to survive and protect the most vulnerable – the youngest and the very old. Any species that does not protect vulnerable youngthrough to self sufficiency does not survive. And human groups need more than one generation of adult carers to ensure the survival of the young.Babies need their grandparents, aunts and uncles as well as their parents.
Human females are the only animals that naturally survive well beyond their years of fertility because children with grandmothers are more likely to survive than those without.Human young take a much longer time to reach a state of self sufficiencythan any other species. One or two people alone cannot successfully rear them. It needs a group, a wider family circle; it needs society,co-operation and collaboration.Those human beings who were able to co-operate and work together and carefor others survived – and passed these traits on to their descendants.It was this need to work together, to provide food and to rear the young that led to the development of language among humans, as pointed out by Frederick Engels in his short work, The part played by labour in thetransition from ape to man.
Co-operative work needs sophisticated communication – language; and so does passing on essential survival information from one generation toanother.Those who were entirely selfish and looked only after themselves may have survived for a while but their offspring stood no chance and there were nodescendants to pass these traits on to.We do not know exactly how the earliest human family group structures worked. But certain deductions can be made from studying groups of humans living at different stages of development before they came into contactwith civilisation.
The early anthropologists saw the different societies of the world through male-biased eyes. But the Victorian anthropologist Lewis H Morgan took a less biased approach and his researches provide the factual basis forEngels’ classic The origin of the family, private property and the state.
His work showed that primitive tribal and family structures were very complex, with many different degrees of kinship and rules governing whocould form a relationship with who.From the huge variety of different types of family structure, he looked at the traits they had in common and deduced that the earliest forms of marriage were group marriages. They were primarily an agreement of economiccollaboration between one family and another. All the sisters of one family would marry all the brothers of another.Their children would regard all the women as their mothers and all the men as their fathers. The children would all regard each other as brothers and sisters.
These marriages would be matrilocal, in other words based in homes of the women. The children would be part of the wider maternal family.A child would regard his mother’s brother, who was part of the same maternal family, as a closer relative than his father, who would have been born in a different maternal family. Throughout his whole life a man would feel closer ties with the family he was born into than the one he married into. He would protect his sisters’ children before his own.
These marriages were not necessarily permanent. Neither side was economically dependent on the other. Both men and women, working in groups,were food producers. They tended to divide into men being hunters and women being gatherers of wild fruit and vegetables.In case of marriage breakdown the women, working together, could supportthemselves and their children. The men, as hunters, tended to be more mobile. They could easily feed themselves but it was not so easy for them to rear children while hunting. They left the children with the more settled women.“The communistic household, in which most or all of the women belong to one and the same gens, while the men come from various gentes, is the material foundation of that supremacy of the women which was general inprimitive times,” – from Engels’ The family, private property and the state.
The total amount of work done to produce the necessary food in those days was not more than a few hours a week. That was enough and most of the restof the times was spent in leisure and social pursuits. We can speculate that, with the development of language, this gave rise to discussions, toshared thoughts and the beginnings of the arts, crafts and sciences.Certainly these people needed and used applied sciences: studying the living habits of animals they needed to hunt – and those predators whomight hunt them.
The growing cycles of food plants, herbal medicines andpoisons would have been an essential study. They would have speculated about what caused all this and how could they influence it. Conversation would have been a powerful social bonding activity – as it still is. I would also speculate they would have spent a lot of time in social bonding, not just talking but grooming each other. Some of the earliest artefacts found from the stone age are decorated combs.But these few hours’ work a week would not have rendered any stores of food or any security against drought and famine. People would have been very vulnerable to natural disasters and populations would have risen and fallen often.Under these circumstances people would have moved about seeking more productive areas and clashing with other groups.For millions of years this is how the human race existed, with numbers just about holding even.
There is speculation that for part of its development the human race inhabited mainly seashores, finding food easily from various shellfish between the tide-lines. David Attenborough says this is still a minority view among anthropologists but “there’s a whole series of bits of evidence that keep cropping up from those who are trying tosolve this conundrum”. A diet rich in fish would have supplied the necessary GLA oils needed for brain expansion. A beach area would also have provided essential safetyfrom fast and powerful predators. Some men might just be able to outrun lions, panthers and wolves on dry land. Women with children would not.
The shallow sea would have been a safe refuge. Some believe this is how humans came to walk on two legs, as a wading ape, with thick hair remaining only on the bit that stayed out of the water.Eventually the discussions and conversations around the home base gave rise to some scientific and economic advances – the use of fire, how to plant useful fruits, vegetables and herbs near the home base by the womenand how to herd animals rather than just follow their natural migrations bythe men. Protecting the herd animals from wolves and so on would have guaranteed that the herds would grow and produce a surplus food supply.
They also tried to influence the weather, using magic and to communicate with dead ancestors – keeping the family unit together in spite of death.Those men and women who claimed to be able to make rain were in greatest demand. They achieved high status as magic workers but were in danger if they failed in time of great need.
Some groups started to produce more than they needed. They had a surplus they could exchange with other groups – the beginning of bargaining and marketing. Even so, everything they produced, they made and owned collectively.Over time the marriage structures also changed gradually. Many preferred pairing marriages but they still contained elements of the group marriage traditions – and, before the concept of private property they were still matrilocal. This is a better term to use than matriarchal because that implies the exercise of power. In early human society there were few powerstructures. Most tribes had some way of making important decisions about alliances and so on involving representatives of all the families in the tribe – usually the oldest and more experienced. Since women usually live longer than men,many tribal types of council were predominantly female. In some parts of the world, if a wife died, her husband would be expectedto marry her sister – a legacy of the spirit of group marriage.Lewis Morgan relates many examples of children in Africa who regard their mother’s sisters as additional mothers and their father’s brothers as extra fathers – and who regard their cousins as brothers and sisters.In other parts special high status women priests would undertake to carryout the duty of being communal wives to the men of whatever tribe or groupthey were formally married to, and let their sisters off of this task.
Julius Caesar, visiting Britain in 55 BC found that the Belgic Celts who inhabited Kent practised polyandry, a form of group marriage, where one woman would have several husbands, usually brothers. “Wives are shared between groups of ten or 12 men, especially between brothers and between fathers and sons; but the offspring of these unions are counted as thechildren of the man into whose home the woman was first led,” Caesar wrote in his de bello Gallico.
In the early days most marriages, even pairing marriages, still involvedcomplex economic commitments between the families. The large matrilocal families took on husbands literally to husband the livestock, to look after the farm animals in exchange for access to one or more of the daughters. Ifand when the marriage broke up, the man could go on his way with no economic harm to the woman and her children.“The pairing family, itself too weak and unstable to make an independenthousehold necessary or even desirable, in no wise destroys the communistic household inherited from earlier times.“Communistic housekeeping, however, means the supremacy of women in thehouse; just as the exclusive recognition of the female parent, owing to theimpossibility of recognising the male parent with certainty, means that thewomen – the mothers – are held in high respect.” – from Engels, The origin of the family.
WE ARE BROUGHT up with assumptions about the nuclear family being eternal,the natural order of things – cave-man mum, dad and family.But this is not so, the nuclear family of just two adults and theirchildren that we are familiar with is the product of social and economicforces and has changed throughout history according to predominant economicmethods and culture.
Western anthropologists, encountering different peoples and societies,assumed that the men would naturally be dominant in those societies as intheir own. They spoke only to the men and discovered only half the truth.“All our histories have hitherto started from the absurd assumption, whichsince the 18th century in particular has become inviolable, that themonogamous single family, which is hardly older than civilization, is thecore around which society and state have gradually crystallised.” That wasFrederick Engels writing in The family, private property and the state. And from Robert Briffault’s The Mothers: "The fanciful opinion that women are oppressed in savage societies was partly due to the complacency of civilised man, and partly to the fact that the women are seen to work hard.Wherever women were seen engaged in laborious toil, their status was judged to be one of slavery and oppression. No misunderstanding could be more profound."
The primitive women is independent because, not in spite of her labour.Generally speaking, it is in those societies where women toil most that their status is most independent and their influence greatest; where theyare idle, and the work is done by slaves, the women are, as a rule, little more than sexual slaves.“No labour of any kind is, in primitive society, other than voluntary, and no toil is ever undertaken by the women in obedience to an arbitrary order".
Referring to the Zulu women, a missionary writes, ‘Whoever has observed the happy appearance of the women at their work and toil, their gaiety and chatter, their laughter and song … let him compare with them the bearing of our own working women.’“It is not labour, but exploited and enforced labour that is galling tothe human being.”
Going back to our human origins – what is a natural family? Is there such a thing?For mammals the basic family unit is mother and dependent offspring,needing milk and protection until they are old enough to fend for themselves. Usually this is a matter of weeks or months.Different mammals have different family or group structures: – some are simply mother and offspring together for a few weeks. With some, a father is involved in the short time it takes to rear the young.With many, a whole group hangs together, as with herd animals. This is more common among herbivores who find protection from predators in large numbers. Carnivores tend to walk alone or in small groups because they are rivals to each other for the food supply.Our closest animal relatives, the great apes all live in groups but havevarious different types of group structure: chimps live in male-dominatedgroups, bonobos live in female-dominated groups, orang utans are usually isolated except for females with young. The point is that there is no specific predetermined group structure for human beings that is right orwrong.
The earliest humans were forced to live in groups bigger than the bourgeois nuclear family to survive and protect the most vulnerable – the youngest and the very old. Any species that does not protect vulnerable youngthrough to self sufficiency does not survive. And human groups need more than one generation of adult carers to ensure the survival of the young.Babies need their grandparents, aunts and uncles as well as their parents.
Human females are the only animals that naturally survive well beyond their years of fertility because children with grandmothers are more likely to survive than those without.Human young take a much longer time to reach a state of self sufficiencythan any other species. One or two people alone cannot successfully rear them. It needs a group, a wider family circle; it needs society,co-operation and collaboration.Those human beings who were able to co-operate and work together and carefor others survived – and passed these traits on to their descendants.It was this need to work together, to provide food and to rear the young that led to the development of language among humans, as pointed out by Frederick Engels in his short work, The part played by labour in thetransition from ape to man.
Co-operative work needs sophisticated communication – language; and so does passing on essential survival information from one generation toanother.Those who were entirely selfish and looked only after themselves may have survived for a while but their offspring stood no chance and there were nodescendants to pass these traits on to.We do not know exactly how the earliest human family group structures worked. But certain deductions can be made from studying groups of humans living at different stages of development before they came into contactwith civilisation.
The early anthropologists saw the different societies of the world through male-biased eyes. But the Victorian anthropologist Lewis H Morgan took a less biased approach and his researches provide the factual basis forEngels’ classic The origin of the family, private property and the state.
His work showed that primitive tribal and family structures were very complex, with many different degrees of kinship and rules governing whocould form a relationship with who.From the huge variety of different types of family structure, he looked at the traits they had in common and deduced that the earliest forms of marriage were group marriages. They were primarily an agreement of economiccollaboration between one family and another. All the sisters of one family would marry all the brothers of another.Their children would regard all the women as their mothers and all the men as their fathers. The children would all regard each other as brothers and sisters.
These marriages would be matrilocal, in other words based in homes of the women. The children would be part of the wider maternal family.A child would regard his mother’s brother, who was part of the same maternal family, as a closer relative than his father, who would have been born in a different maternal family. Throughout his whole life a man would feel closer ties with the family he was born into than the one he married into. He would protect his sisters’ children before his own.
These marriages were not necessarily permanent. Neither side was economically dependent on the other. Both men and women, working in groups,were food producers. They tended to divide into men being hunters and women being gatherers of wild fruit and vegetables.In case of marriage breakdown the women, working together, could supportthemselves and their children. The men, as hunters, tended to be more mobile. They could easily feed themselves but it was not so easy for them to rear children while hunting. They left the children with the more settled women.“The communistic household, in which most or all of the women belong to one and the same gens, while the men come from various gentes, is the material foundation of that supremacy of the women which was general inprimitive times,” – from Engels’ The family, private property and the state.
The total amount of work done to produce the necessary food in those days was not more than a few hours a week. That was enough and most of the restof the times was spent in leisure and social pursuits. We can speculate that, with the development of language, this gave rise to discussions, toshared thoughts and the beginnings of the arts, crafts and sciences.Certainly these people needed and used applied sciences: studying the living habits of animals they needed to hunt – and those predators whomight hunt them.
The growing cycles of food plants, herbal medicines andpoisons would have been an essential study. They would have speculated about what caused all this and how could they influence it. Conversation would have been a powerful social bonding activity – as it still is. I would also speculate they would have spent a lot of time in social bonding, not just talking but grooming each other. Some of the earliest artefacts found from the stone age are decorated combs.But these few hours’ work a week would not have rendered any stores of food or any security against drought and famine. People would have been very vulnerable to natural disasters and populations would have risen and fallen often.Under these circumstances people would have moved about seeking more productive areas and clashing with other groups.For millions of years this is how the human race existed, with numbers just about holding even.
There is speculation that for part of its development the human race inhabited mainly seashores, finding food easily from various shellfish between the tide-lines. David Attenborough says this is still a minority view among anthropologists but “there’s a whole series of bits of evidence that keep cropping up from those who are trying tosolve this conundrum”. A diet rich in fish would have supplied the necessary GLA oils needed for brain expansion. A beach area would also have provided essential safetyfrom fast and powerful predators. Some men might just be able to outrun lions, panthers and wolves on dry land. Women with children would not.
The shallow sea would have been a safe refuge. Some believe this is how humans came to walk on two legs, as a wading ape, with thick hair remaining only on the bit that stayed out of the water.Eventually the discussions and conversations around the home base gave rise to some scientific and economic advances – the use of fire, how to plant useful fruits, vegetables and herbs near the home base by the womenand how to herd animals rather than just follow their natural migrations bythe men. Protecting the herd animals from wolves and so on would have guaranteed that the herds would grow and produce a surplus food supply.
They also tried to influence the weather, using magic and to communicate with dead ancestors – keeping the family unit together in spite of death.Those men and women who claimed to be able to make rain were in greatest demand. They achieved high status as magic workers but were in danger if they failed in time of great need.
Some groups started to produce more than they needed. They had a surplus they could exchange with other groups – the beginning of bargaining and marketing. Even so, everything they produced, they made and owned collectively.Over time the marriage structures also changed gradually. Many preferred pairing marriages but they still contained elements of the group marriage traditions – and, before the concept of private property they were still matrilocal. This is a better term to use than matriarchal because that implies the exercise of power. In early human society there were few powerstructures. Most tribes had some way of making important decisions about alliances and so on involving representatives of all the families in the tribe – usually the oldest and more experienced. Since women usually live longer than men,many tribal types of council were predominantly female. In some parts of the world, if a wife died, her husband would be expectedto marry her sister – a legacy of the spirit of group marriage.Lewis Morgan relates many examples of children in Africa who regard their mother’s sisters as additional mothers and their father’s brothers as extra fathers – and who regard their cousins as brothers and sisters.In other parts special high status women priests would undertake to carryout the duty of being communal wives to the men of whatever tribe or groupthey were formally married to, and let their sisters off of this task.
Julius Caesar, visiting Britain in 55 BC found that the Belgic Celts who inhabited Kent practised polyandry, a form of group marriage, where one woman would have several husbands, usually brothers. “Wives are shared between groups of ten or 12 men, especially between brothers and between fathers and sons; but the offspring of these unions are counted as thechildren of the man into whose home the woman was first led,” Caesar wrote in his de bello Gallico.
In the early days most marriages, even pairing marriages, still involvedcomplex economic commitments between the families. The large matrilocal families took on husbands literally to husband the livestock, to look after the farm animals in exchange for access to one or more of the daughters. Ifand when the marriage broke up, the man could go on his way with no economic harm to the woman and her children.“The pairing family, itself too weak and unstable to make an independenthousehold necessary or even desirable, in no wise destroys the communistic household inherited from earlier times.“Communistic housekeeping, however, means the supremacy of women in thehouse; just as the exclusive recognition of the female parent, owing to theimpossibility of recognising the male parent with certainty, means that thewomen – the mothers – are held in high respect.” – from Engels, The origin of the family.
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