Lenin contra Marx

By the late 1890s it was obvious that history was not going to follow the lines predicted by Karl Marx. Capitalism was not impoverishing the working-class; just the reverse. The proletariat was growing richer, not poorer, and thus had much more to lose than 'their chains.' In Germany, home of the largest Marxist party in the world, there were those like Eduard Bernstein who drew the obvious conclusions: that further economic progress would bring socialism of its own accord, without any need for revolution. Capitalism, in other words, was socialising itself. Socialism would thus be attained by evolution, not revolution.

These ideas were taken up in Russia by the likes of S. Prokopovich and E. Kuskova, who put them forward in a pamphlet, which Lenin's sister, Anna, described as the Credo. In this it was argued that the political struggle was a distraction, and the Russian Social Democrat and Labour Party should thus place its greatest emphasis on the economic struggle; the struggle, that is, with employers for the improvement in pay and conditions.

For Lenin these Economists were proposing the worst form of heresy. He insisted on the primacy of the political struggle. But, in support of this position, he looked not to western Marxism but rather into the Russian past, to the likes of Mikhail Bakunin, who argued that people were tyrannised in the first place not by economic systems but by the state and the church. He was effectively turning classical Marxism on its head: for economics, in the Leninist scheme, no longer had primacy. More than that, he began to focus ever more on the corollary of this argument, another reversal of Marxism: that the emancipation of the workers would never be accomplished by the workers themselves. He was now on the high road to Bolshevism, a doctrine that was to owe virtually nothing to Marx, and much to the traditional forms of Russian conspiratorial and nihilist politics.

The Earl and the Dog

I've written quite a bit about cats recently so it's time for a tale about a dog! It's story that takes us into British history, to the later part of the reign of Charles II. This was a time when the great political question of the day, at some points the only political question, was that of the royal succession. Charles had no legitimate children so the heir presumptive was James, duke of York, his brother.

The fact that James was also a practicing Catholic had caused the King no little trouble. The late 1670s had seen serious attempts to have James excluded from the throne on the grounds of his religion, viewed as a danger to the political liberties of England. Charles had played his hand well throughout the Exclusion Crisis, out-manoeuvring the enemies of James, known as the Whigs, at every turn. His victory in England was complete when he dismissed the Oxford Parliament in 1681, the last of his reign.

But there were the other kingdoms to consider. Catholic Ireland would present no problem. That left Scotland, a country strong in its Protestant sympathies. It also happened to be strong in Royalist sympathies also and had remained generally quiet throughout the Exclusion Crisis. Still, better to make sure; better to weld all senior public figures to the legitimate succession.

It began simply enough in 1681 with the introduction of a Test Act, intended to bind all public figures in support of royal authority and the legitimate succession. But the legislation was so contradictory and so badly drafted that there were some who had serious reservations about taking the oath it contained. The most senior of these was Archibald Campbell, the ninth earl of Argyll and leader of one of the most important Protestant clans in the western Highlands.

Argyll was a man who had to tread carefully. He had many enemies and his father, the first and only Marquis of Argyll, had been executed for his part in opposing the Royalists in the Civil War. Argyll took the Test oath, but with the caveat that only insofar as it was consistent with itself and the Protestant religion. It was the moment his enemies had been waiting for. He was arrested and imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle. Fearing for his life, he managed to escape, eventually taking refuge on the Continent, not returning to Scotland until 1685, and then only to lead an unsuccessful rebellion against James, who had since become king.

Now this is where our dog comes in. The boys of Herriot’s Hospital, now George Herriot’s School, saw the potential for some low amusement in this high political drama. They decided that the school watchdog was in a position of public trust and should therefore be made to take the Test. When the matter was put to it the beast maintained a stony silence. This was taken as a flat refusal. But the dog’s defence council- yes, it was all properly conducted in accordance with Scots process! - clearly knew his way around the law, arguing that silence might be taken as much as assent as refusal.

The Test was then smeared in butter, described as Argyll's explanation, and put for a second time. No sooner was the butter licked off than the dog spat out the Test. In a mood of outrage the court sentenced him to be "hanged like a dog." Sir John Lauder, in recording this incident says that sentence was actually carried out. It was not; for the beast, like Argyll, managed to escape, although his office, all of his assets, both heritable and movable, and all of his feudal privileges were declared forfeit. Not content with that the boys issued a wanted notice offering £500, the same reward for the recapture of Argyll, for the apprehension of "ane cutt lugged, brounish Mastiff Tyke, called Watch, short leged and of low stature." So far as I'm aware Watch was never found!

A Load of Balls

Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. Except, I would like to add, when the sinner in question is that well-known hypocrite Ed Balls, the former Schools' Secretary and now contender in the Labour Party leadership election.

Not so long ago he said that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was an “error” for which Britain had paid a heavy price. Now he has gone that one step further in distancing himself from Blair, Brown and all their works. Writing in the Observer on Sunday he said that the former government’s immigration policy was wrong and that the party will only rebuild trust only if it admits “what we got wrong.”

The rejection of transitional controls over Eastern European migration, he continues, had a serious impact on many communities, his own Parliamentary constituency included, not ready for the full implications of globalisation. More particularly mass immigration had the effect on depressing wages and impacting on the working terms and conditions of too many people across the country. It seems to have been a case, if I interpret him correctly, of British jobs for Polish workers.

At least he’s making progress- the invasion of Iraq was wrong, uncontrolled and irresponsible immigration was wrong. If he would only take that extra step and admit that there were only two things wrong with his government: everything they said and everything they did! We will be paying for the incompetence of that criminal administration for decades to come.

Personally I would have them arrested and put on trial, in much the same way that members of the wretched Popular Front administration in the France of the late 1930s was later put on trial by the Vichy authorities. I’m afraid those arrested would have to include Ed Balls, who cannot escape from his past sins and from his nauseating, self-serving hypocrisy quite so easily.

Killing Cats

The setting is Paris in the 1730s, the Rue Saint-Severin to be exact, a printer's shop run by one Jacques Vincent to be even more exact. And as every story requires a hero so, too, does this one. There are, in fact, two heroes, heroes to be found amongst the lowest class of all - the shop's apprentices, a much abused class of humanity at the time. Their names are Jerome and Leveille. The lives they have are not to be envied. They sleep in a filthy and freezing room. They have to rise before dawn to be sent on all sorts of tasks. They are abused by all with the least power over them, from the journeymen to the master. Worst of all the food they are given to eat is not fit for human consumption, not fit even for...cats.

This is really a story about revenge, a story that points back to the superstitions of the middle ages and forward to the excesses of the French Revolution. Jerome and Leveille served an uncaring master, or bourgeois, as he was known to the workers in the printer’s shop, one who, along with his equally callous wife, cared more about cats than people. This passion for cats seems to have been a feature of the printing trade at the time. One bourgeois kept as many as twenty-five, having their individual portraits painted and feeding them on fowl. Jerome and Leveille, in contrast, had to live on whatever slops they were offered, scraps from the master's table. To make matters worse the cook often sold the leftovers, leaving them with old rotten bits of meat that even the cats refused to eat.

How these cats played on the minds of our heroes. Insulted and degraded by the presence of the household cat, including one known simply as La Grise (the grey), the mistress's favourite, they were kept awake at night by the howling of the alley cats on the roof above their bedroom. Unable to get a full night's sleep, they had to rise as early as four o'clock in the morning, exhausted at the beginning of the day and even more exhausted at the end of it.

One night they had had enough; they decided to take action in the most effective way they knew. Leveille was particularly talented as a mimic. He crawled over the roof to that part of the house where the bourgeois and his wife slept, presumably isolated from the usual cat chorus. Once there he howled and meowed so horribly that neither could get any sleep. After several nights of this they decided that they must have been bewitched. Orders were given to Jacques and Leveille, dogs rather than dogsbodies, to get rid of the cats.

They did, with all of the passion and exuberance they could muster, making sure that La Grise was drawn into the holocaust. But this wasn't simply an orgy of killing. Oh, no; for with the aid of the shop's journeymen the neighbourhood cats were rounded up to appear before the tribunes of the people. The cats were tried in accordance with the forms of process favoured by revolutionary tribunals, given the last rights and duly hanged on an improvised gallows. It was a cause of huge amusement, a diversion from the usual drudgery of the working day. In this workshop in this small quarter of Paris a prelude was acted out for a drama that was to come later the same century. The mistress came. She saw La Grise hanging from the gallows, retiring in horror. The workers had the day.

This bizarre episode, true in every detail, can be found in Robert Darnton's The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History. It's taken from one Nicolas Contat, the Jerome of the story, who later set down an account of his life as an apprentice. There is so much richness here, so much which tells us about the politics and, more particularly, the attitudes of the day. A lot of the subliminal messages would have been better understood by a contemporary audience than a modern one. There is the obvious resentment of the workers against the bourgeois, the resentment of the abused apprentices against the pampered cats. But in sweeping up La Grise there were clear references to old witchcraft superstitions, clear references to the cat as a familiar and the mistress as a witch.

No matter that this was the Age of Enlightenment, cats still carried a long legacy of fear and superstition. In the carnivals held before Lent they were often subject to the same kind of treatment and torture that those accused in the Great Witch Hunt once were. The abuse and torture of cats was also a feature in the festival of Saint John the Baptist on 24 June. Then cats were burned at the stake by people hoping avoid ill-fortune for the rest of the year, a variation of the Scottish Taigherm of which I wrote recently. The scream of the cat, the Katzenmusik, was a background to much anarchy and jollity. Anarchy and jollity in death, a reference to the persecution of witches, a leitmotiv for the coming French Revolution.

For those who are interested on the folklore of cats, France and witchcraft I would highly recommend Ancient Sorceries, a wonderful story by Algernon Blackwood, along with M. R. James my favourite writer in the ghost and horror story genre.

King Billy

There is perhaps no better illustration of the process by which history is, and can be, turned into mythology than William of Orange's sojourn in Ireland. For the Protestants he became an iconic figure, mounted on his white horse with sword raised, a detail taken from Benjamin West's painting of the Battle of the Boyne, and once reproduced on a thousand gable-ends! For Catholics he was also an icon, one of an unwelcome Protestant ascendency, expressed, at its worst, in the Penal laws. But William came to Ireland not as a crusader but to fight a campaign that was part of his more general struggle against Louis XIV.

It is crucial to understand here that the French king offered his support to James II, the exiled Catholic king of England, not out of a sense of dynastic and confessional solidarity, but simply as a useful way of opening up a fresh theatre against William, his great Continental rival. In this regard the Irish campaign of 1689-90 was merely a small part of a more general European war, in which religion played only a minor part. As such William was a representative of a more general alliance against Louis and his imperial ambitions, an alliance that included Pope Innocent XI. After his famous victory on the Boyne the bells of Rome were rung out in celebration!

It seems likely that William, if the matter had been left to him alone, would have favoured a large measure of religious toleration throughout his lands. But the matter was not left to him alone; he was dependant on the ruling aristocracy in both England and Ireland. After the final victory in 1691, and the Treaty of Limerick, the ruling Protestant minority in Ireland were in no mood for any form of compromise. For them William, living and dead, was the expression of their power, depicted in statue and paint. The divisions between the communities became even more acute in the nineteenth century, with the emergence of the Orange Order, committed to the Protestant cause by constant reminders and celebrations of the past.

Ana’s Telegraph

As well running this my own blog I also participate on My Telegraph, a readers' blog site run by one of the great daily newspapers in England, a right-wing treat! There I used to be Ana the Imp also. Now I’m anatheimp! I’ll explain the reasons for the change but let me say a word or two first about the site itself and how I came to be associated with it.

Last summer I read an article by James Delingpole, a journalist who writes for the Spectator as well as the Telegraph, on violent demonstrations against ‘Romanian’ immigrants in Belfast of all places. The BBC had previously reported the story in a way that left me completely baffled: there was no explanation why there were so many ‘Romanians’ in Belfast and why the local people had such animus against them.

It turned out that these people were not just Romanians but Roma gypsies which put a whole new perspective on the story. The information was crucially relevant, in other words, but the BBC, in its clumsy auntie-knows-best, politically correct fashion, had effectively censored the full facts. The essential point had nothing whatsoever to do with ‘racism’ and everything to do with truth, with integrity in news reporting. People have to be allowed to make up their own minds. Speaking personally, I was now able to place the story against a background of historic hostility towards the gypsies to be found across Europe, not just in Northern Ireland.

It was Delingpole who first made reference to the full facts, though I had more or less deduced the wider implications of the story. Pleased by what he had written, I decided to go and search him out on the main Telegraph news blogs run by the staff, not something I had ever done before. But I ended up on the readers’ blogs quite by accident, posting some comments thanking Delingpole on an unrelated contribution!

Not really able to find my way about properly I decided to join the site and post my own blog on the Belfast story. Then the comments came, including much speculation about my true identity from the inhabitants of a kind of mad village trying to make sense of a newcomer. “This is fun”, I thought, “I’ll hang around just for a bit to see how it goes.”

It really wasn’t my intention to stay long-term. But quite quickly I attracted resentment from a hardcore of people who clearly wanted to chase me away from what they obviously considered ‘their’ territory in a settled community. That was a big mistake; believe me, a really big mistake. I am as determined as all hell, and while I love compliments I can just as readily take strength from attempted putdowns and insults. I’m a fighter, not a quitter, as a certain British politician once said, and I have an amazing capacity to detect and ignore trolls!

So, I stayed and I blogged regularly from last July onwards. It was obvious that the place had certain problems: there was too much spam; there was too much cliquishness, too many people there just to exchange insults and fight petty wars. But I began to enjoy the experience and made useful contacts among a range of people, decent people with all sorts of opinions, people with whom I was able to exchange views even though there was often disagreement on some fundamental points. Unlike here my blogs there are mostly of a political nature.

Recently the spam got so bad that we were all forced to take a sabbatical while the site was reorganised. It was down so long that I honestly did not think it was coming back at all. But it did. There have been some technical problems. I had to stand back for almost a week because my email was appearing as my log-in ID. I could not go back, moreover, as Ana the Imp because the new ISP would not accept gaps; but with the help of Kate Day, the communities’ editor, my email was removed and anatheimp was born. The Imp is dead; long live the imp!

The new site has had some teething problems and, yes, it’s quite different from the old. Amongst other things comments on readers' blogs have been integrated with comments on the main news blogs. Some people are unhappy with the change but there will always be people unhappy with change because they simply don’t like change. But I like it, I like the way it’s laid out. The problems will settle down in time. In the meanwhile ana has posted her first blog on the new site to add to her existing archive, which fortunately has been carried over from the old.

Forgetting Gandhi

I’m going to have to ask my Indian friends to forgive me for what I’m about to write. I have no admiration at all for Mohandas Gandhi, a man whose influence on India was often more negative than positive, a man who by his politics and outlook did as much as any other to guarantee the tragic partition of 1947, a man even less relevant to modern India than he was to India of the past.

Yes, I know this is a dangerous step; I know it’s likely to make people angry with me because Gandhi is such a sainted figure, the father of a nation, the inspiration of the planet. Criticising him is almost as dangerous as criticising George Washington! Still, so far as I am concerned, the most perceptive comment ever made about the great Indian – I offer no challenge at all to his greatness –was that made by an Oxford academic when the Mahatma came to England in 1931 to attend the Second Round Table Conference. He compared him to Socrates “for absolute control and self-composure”, then added that for the first time in his life he understood why the Greeks made Socrates drink hemlock.

We all know about the saintliness, the generosity of spirit the admirable commitment to non-violence, which paradoxically was often the cause of more violence. His eccentricities are, perhaps, a lot less well known. He was a food faddist, the father of a thousand cults, and a man who’s much vaunted sexual abstinence led to some bizarre and eccentric behaviour. To make certain personal demands, to have the self-discipline to adhere to a particularly arduous and puritanical path, is one thing; it’s quite another when other people are drawn in. When one of his sons got involved in a fast he said that “if he dies in the process it will not be a matter of regret.”

In his own fasting there was, like so much of his political life, always an element of the theatrical, of showmanship, of the bogus and insincere gesture. His ascetic diet was extended to full-scale hunger strikes ‘to the death’, seventeen times in all, though as British observers wryly noted they never actually were to the death.

It’s perhaps no great surprise that Gandhi’s grasp of international politics in the 1930s was less than perceptive, given his close involvement in domestic affairs. Still some of his comments retain the power to unsettle. He made no distinction whatsoever between the benevolent imperialism of the British and the rapacious imperialism of the Germans and Japanese. He once said that he did not think that Hitler was as bad as depicted, and that the Jews rather than enduring Nazi persecution should commit mass suicide, which would rather have made the Holocaust an altogether less expensive affair. Worst of all was his demand in 1942 that the British leave India to ‘God or to anarchy’, when the Japanese were poised on the threshold. He seems to have been quite blind to the suffering that Japan had inflicted on China from 1937 onwards.

And then there is much-trumpeted personal poverty, his modesty and loin-cloth asceticism transmitted to all around. He always insisted on travelling third class when going by railway. This might have been admirable but for the fact that the Congress Party was obliged to dig into party funds to hire a whole third-class coach.

Of course the worse thing of all is that his politics, and therefore the politics of the Congress Party, drew heavily on Hindu tradition and religion. This would not have been bad if India had been a Hindu nation, but it was not. Gandhi unravelled a political style that made the substantial Muslim minority feel that a British raj was destined to be replaced by a Hindu raj. What India needed at that time in its history was a strictly secular party, one that did not allow religion to intrude in politics. Nehru had a far better understanding of that simple truth than Gandhi. But Nehru was only a politician; Gandhi was the Mahatma.

India is now one of the most dynamic and progressive nations in the world, one with a vibrant economy. It’s moved well beyond Gandhi’s spinning wheel ideal, which would have kept it locked forever in a semi-feudal past. Gandhi may be a great saint but it’s as well to leave such people locked forever in some irrelevant paradise.