Paul Anderson journalist: LENINISM IS A DEAD END

Friday, 6 November 1987

LENINISM IS A DEAD END

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 6 November 1987

For some, the "lessons of October" are clear. Duncan Hallas, one of the leading lights of the Socialist Workers Party, writes in the most recent issue of Socialist Review that "the seizure of power is impossible unless a revolutionary party has been built in advance" which has "a cadre that is able to correct its own leadership", the ability to integrate young, fresh ultra-leftists into its ranks, and a sufficient national presence to appear as a real alternative "at least to a minority of workers".

Hallas sees the role of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the October revolution as the model for revolutionaries in a coming British revolution. Now is the time to prepare for the deluge. Recruit, instil correct ideas and revolutionary discipline, wait and agitate in the knowledge that the Glorious Day must come some time.

His message is echoed by almost all the leftist sects. Militant, every pretender to the bank account of the Workers' Revolutionary Party, every hard-line Stalinist faction, the few remaining Maoists - all are using the 70th anniversary of the Boshevik seizure of power to press the recalcitrant British proletariat to perform a version of the storming of the Winter Palace (under their leadership, of course).

There is one group of Leninists, however, that has taken a rather different line. The Communist Party of Great Britain, the grandfather of them all, has chosen to celebrate the anniversary not with a call for socialist emulation of the October revolution but with a discotheque (with videos) at a trendy London arts centre.

The current issue of the CP's magazine, Marxism Today, carries plenty of material on the Soviet Union today; and it milks for all it is worth the nightclubbers' taste for hammer-and-sickle T-shirts (already last year's thing according to the cognoscenti). But it refrains from talk of creating Soviets of workers, peasants and intellectuals; and it does not subject 1917 to the treatment –  tedious rehashes of "the facts about the Russian revolution" – that all the other Leninist papers have given it.

Of all the parties claiming the mantle of 1917, the one that has the least enthusiastic public attitude to the key prescriptions of Lenin himself up to the revolution – insurrectionism, conspiratorial underground organisation, intolerance of minority opinion –  is the one with the closest connection with Lenin's successors in power in the Soviet Union.

Perhaps we should be grateful for small mercies, and leave it at that. But the CP's somewhat oblique approach to 1917 deserves more attention than this and more than the ritual denunciations that the other Leninists will give it.

For the CP's perspective is a baroque manifestation of something it realised many years ago, but still cannot admit openly: that the left in Britain, far from basking in the reflected glory of the Bolshevik revolution and claiming to be its true heir, must distance itself from October if it is to have any chance of success.

The truth in this position is not that revolutions are impossible in modern western capitalism: just remember the convulsions caused by Paris 1968 (only 20 years ago next year). Nor is it simply that the workers of the west have been so brainwashed by capitalist and cold-war propaganda that they will never be convinced by any Leninist party that dares to speak its name.

Rather, it is that the fate of 1917 and other revolutions led by Leninist parties has quite rightly made most people in Britain shrink in horror at Leninist methods and ethics. The very idea of the seizure of state power by a centralised party claiming to be the leadership of the working class has been discredited by the experience of Leninist parties in power. The same goes for the belief that the end of "socialism" excuses the use of almost any political means –  secret police, suppression of all dissenting voices and democratic political forms, torture, lies –  to keep such a party in power.

In other words, the only socialism that can possibly flourish today in Britain is one that is explicitly democratic and libertarian. However welcome and attractive Mikhail Gorbechev's reform programme and peace proposals, however spectacular the celebrations in Red Square, we must not forget that for the British left Leninism is, thankfully, a dead end.

I was born in Edinburgh in 1959, grew up in Ipswich and studied Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Balliol College, Oxford (1978-81) and journalism at the London College of Printing (1982-83).

I spent the 1980s and 1990s working for various radical publications, starting with Solidarity and City Limits.

I was deputy editor of European Nuclear Disarmament Journal (1984-87), reviews editor (1986-91) and then editor (1991-93) of Tribune, deputy editor of New Statesman & Society (1993-96), news editor of Red Pepper (1997-99) and deputy editor of New Times (1999-2000).

From 2000 to 2012 I was a journalism lecturer at City University London. I have worked as a sub-editor on the Guardian since 1999. I wrote a column for Tribune from 1998 to 2014. I now teach at the University of Essex and University Campus Suffolk.

I was editor (with Mary Kaldor) of Mad Dogs: The US raid on Libya (Pluto, 1986), co-author (with Nyta Mann) of Safety First: The making of New Labour (Granta, 1997) and editor of Orwell in Tribune: 'As I Please' and other writings (Politico's/Methuen, 2006). In 2013 Aaaargh! Press published Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British left by me and Kevin Davey as an e-book; it came out as a paperback (with index and footnotes) in autumn 2014.

This archive of my published articles is far from complete, but the gaps are being filled when I have the time to scan in material from the pre-digital age.

WHAT'S HERE

I’ve written for various left and radical publications for a long time. This website is here partly to prove that I existed before the internet, partly to provide a comprehensive CV online, partly to show I was always right all along. (If only.)

What’s here is as it was published in print for the most part, though there are a few pieces that appear as they were before subediting (some of them with suggested headlines that were summarily dismissed). The only things I have edited before posting, very inadequately, are spelling and grammar (though I’ll be sorting everything out into Economist house style as soon as I have time) and a few duff headlines and standfirsts.

So far, I’ve posted nearly everything I can find that I’ve had published since the beginning of 1990, apart from news stories and news features that have no resonance today. So it's largely opinion journalism of one kind or another. There are some pieces still to scan and some missing because I don't have them in any form, but I'll be trying to find them. The record before 1990 is much more fragmentary: there are dozens of pieces still to scan and I've not had a chance to think about what's missing from the vast pile of fading clippings.

Pre-1991 is a mix of features, interviews, leaders and book and theatre reviews, mainly from Solidarity, END Journal, Tribune and Sanity. Most of 1991-93 is Tribune leaders, interviews and features; 1993-96 is mainly New Statesman leaders, interviews and features; 1996-2003 is a mix of columns and features for New Times, Red Pepper, Tribune and Chartist. I was teaching full-time from 2003 to 2011, so nearly everything from that period is a Tribune column.

For copyright reasons, there's nothing here from books apart from one excerpt...

WHAT THEY SAID

This revelatory collection shows how the different sides of Orwell’s imagination interacted… The fascination here is reading Orwell as a working journalist on a single paper. He attended editorial conferences with Nye Bevan (someone should write a play about the encounter), commissioned reviews and made a doomed attempt to publish short stories by organising a competition… Week by week, column by column, his inspirations take shape… His swipes against propaganda, the manipulation of crowds, the squalor of wartime and postwar London life, the absurdities of bureaucracy and the growth of the Great Powers formed the raw material of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Sean French, Independent

This collection is remarkable, not because it contains any of Orwell's greater or more famous essays, but because, 60 years on, his articles are still wonderfully readable… Even when Orwell is using the column to settle one of his many scores with some foe now otherwise totally forgotten, Anderson's thorough footnotes will tell you all you need to know to appreciate Orwell's invective.

Martin Rowson, Tribune

Anderson's informative introduction includes a long digression into the left-wing politics of the period, which some may find heavy going but which supplies the wider context. The footnotes constitute a veritable Who Was Who of British politics and literature in the first half of the last century. Who was Barbara Castle's husband and who her lover? Who were Vernon Bartlett, the Duchess of Atholl, Leonard Merrick? Answers sit conveniently at the foot of the page.

Gordon Bowker, Observer

Anderson's compilation usefully picks out (and edits superbly) a particular thread in Orwell's huge output. Unlike his broadcast commentaries to India, “As I Please” was not concerned with day-to-day events but with broader political thinking: half-inside, half-outside the whale. Warning against the political control of discourse, blanket praise for the Soviet Union and anti-German hysteria, Orwell worked out in plain language the great themes of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. If he abandoned his early hopes that the war would effect a socialist revolution, he never doubted that people would act properly if they only understood.

Kate McLoughlin, Times Literary Supplement

Orwell in Tribune: “As I Please”and Other Writings, 1943-47 ... is compiled and edited by Paul Anderson, a former Tribune editor whose special insights into Orwell's genius make this particular volume the very best on the subject.

Michael Foot, Observer

It is a tribute to the publishers and to Tribune itself that Paul Anderson has been able to edit such a superb compendium of Orwell’s writings at a crucial stage in his life.

Geoffrey Goodman, Camden New Journal

The book gathers together all the pieces Orwell wrote for Tribune... Published as a whole, and in sequence, you can see what Anthony Burgess meant when he wrote of him: "Everything Orwell said had such a stamp of honest sincerity..." As Anderson also points out in his introduction, the collection shows off "one of the greatest practitioners ... of the craft of turning out 800-2,000 words a week". He was Tribune's William Hazlitt, and Orwell in Tribune does much more than re-affirm that fact as well as his genius.

Duncan Hamilton, Yorkshire Post

Neatly edited by Paul Anderson, and good on the contemporary left-wing background, this deserves to sit on the same shelf as Peter Davison's monumental George Orwell: The Complete Works.

D J Taylor, Sunday Times

This book is a collection of all the columns [Orwell] produced between 1943 and 1947... It comes with a lucid and thoughtful account of Tribune and Orwell by former Tribune editor Paul Anderson. It … shows Orwell to have been the best sort of newspaper columnist.

Francis Beckett, Guardian

Even if I had read the pieces before, I profited by reading them again in this attractively presented and well edited collection… Paul Anderson’s notes are not only copious but informative, the work of someone who knows the subject and the period…

Geoffrey Wheatcroft, Spectator

To read the Tribune articles in sequence, and see him taking up points from previous columns, arguing with correspondents and expanding on dozens of subjects is to raise him from the dead, as it were, and have him talking in your living room or – as Orwell would prefer – your local. The easy explanation for the success of Paul Anderson's intelligently edited and beautifully presented collection is that Orwell was a great writer… Yet Orwell's talent flourished in a particular setting, that of a small journal with a tight group of readers... Tribune was a magazine of the Labour left that for a few years in the forties broke the arguments that were to dominate British political life.

Nick Cohen, Democratiya

Evidently Orwell was well equipped, in 1943, to take on the literary editorship of Tribune. He could write interestingly about pretty much anything, and had often appeared in its pages already… The relevant history of the journal is sketched with authority by Paul Anderson in his introduction to this book.

Frank Kermode, New York Review of Books

WHAT THEY SAID

‘Safety First does the government the courtesy of examining its origins and ideas seriously. That inevitably involves criticism. But grown-ups’ respect for Blair and Blairism is much more likely to be encouraged by real analysis than by facile praise. Safety First is not the last word on New Labour, but it is the best so far.’

Roy Hattersley, Guardian

‘Paul Anderson is a former editor of Tribune and a former deputy editor of the New Statesman. Nyta Mann is a former NS assistant editor. The tone and the standpoint is Tribune at its best: rude, factual, lively and down-to-earth English, always provocative, always selective, but crammed full of useful information . . . They remind the triumphalists that the Conservatives killed themselves. Labour could almost certainly have won on bolder policies.’

Bernard Crick, New Statesman

‘The best of the many books now out on Labour. The authors have the ideal background to explain the Labour government, its personalities and policies to the reader . . . Safety First is clearly written and cleverly constructed.’

Nick Cohen, Observer

‘Anybody looking for a primer on Blairism would do well to start here . . . The fact that the authors are on the left, but are sceptical of the Blairite project, gives them distinct advantages in comparing old Labour with the new sort. It means that, although they understand what Mr Blair is about, they are immune from the tendency to gush in awe.’

Economist

‘A well-written and incisive portrait of the key players in the Labour Party and British government . . . a worthwhile, witty and engrossing book.’

Fabian Review

‘Anderson and Mann know a formidable amount about the development of Labour’s policies . . . Safety First is very useful as a reference book . . . a good corrective to the notion that Labour began to modernise when Blair became leader.’

John Lloyd, Times Literary Supplement

‘Written from a critical libertarian left perspective, Safety First will not, I suspect, get Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann invited to many Downing Street cocktail parties. Theirs is a voice from outside the conventional Labour spectrum, and in this stimulating and informative account they treat the official version of the party’s recent history with healthy scepticism . . . They show that serious heterodox thinking — the legacy of independently minded radicals such as George Orwell and Raymond Williams — has survived the left's disintegration.’

Tom Phillips, Contemporary Review

‘A rather intelligent tome . . . In its narrative breadth, it is a useful guide to the politics and personalities of the British government.’

Sion Simon, Spectator

'Safety First is a must.’

Mark Seddon, Tribune

‘Anderson and Mann are well-qualified to analyse the politics of the contemporary Labour Party . . . a highly informative guide book.’

Gillian Peele, Times Educational Supplement

‘A valuable study of the making of the Labour government.’

New Times

‘An intelligent guide to the development of key Labour policies and the intellectual trends that back or oppose them.’

Fortnight

‘Highly informative . . . the most detailed and accessible guide to New Labour yet.’

Labour Left Briefing

‘Safety First does not share Socialist Worker’s political analysis, but the authors have done a great job. It is stunningly up to date. Everyone will benefit from reading it.’

Socialist Worker