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In his two most famous novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, the lifelong socialist George Orwell cautioned his readers, chiefly conceived to be the British leftists, about the dangers of totalitarianism they had to take into account if they wanted to secure a more just and equal future for the working classes. In her new book, George Orwell and Russia, Masha Karp an Orwell scholar and Russian Features Editor at the BBC World Service explores in depth George Orwells political views, the Russian roots of his novels, and the way Orwell himself had been drawn into the propaganda struggle between Britain and the Soviets when he found himself composing the controversial Orwells list of 1949. Owen Boynton reviews Masha Karps book, finding a great deal to admire, but taking issue with parts of the authors moral argument about Orwell.

Whatever ups and downs his reputation may have undergone, George Orwell has never gone out of fashion. It isnt just Nineteen Eighty-Four that persists in our cultural imagination. Orwells essays (Politics and the English Language and Shooting an Elephant especially) are mainstays of curricula in the English-speaking world. Animal Farm is taught in English classes even as the Russian Revolution that inspired it has been pushed aside in the history classroom. The brisk clarity of Orwells style and his independence of mind, cocky in argument and humble in self-awareness, are exemplary as a measure of sound English prose. His rules of thumb for sane and honest writing remain exceedingly helpful for any writer, difficult as they might be to follow in practice.

This continued appeal is somewhat surprising, given how topical much of Orwells writing is: its local skirmishes, cultural reference points, and political urgency are often matters of distant history to todays reader. Still, Orwell had the talent for rooting out what really matters; he had a nose for the nub of things. And when those things have a habit of sticking around, Orwells words and his sense of those things also stick.

Unfortunately, as Masha Karps new book George Orwell and Russia argues, one of the persistent phenomena that has recently made Orwell relevant anew is autocracy. Sustained by the old totalitarian habits, it has resurfaced and spread in Putins Russia. The title of Karps book refers to what Russia meant to Orwell over the course of his life, what Orwell meant to Russia during and after his life, and how Orwell matters if we are to understand what is happening in Russia now. It is probably a book for readers who have some familiarity with Orwells work; but if they dont, the last two chapters, on Orwell and Russia under Putin, will lead the reader back to his words.

Given that Orwells two most famous novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, are directly inspired by Soviet Russia, and totalitarian Stalinist Russia especially, the subject of Karps book is obvious. At the same time, because Orwell lived and wrote in the shadow of Soviet Russia, it is challenging to decide where the Soviet presence matters, and where it doesnt: its so diffuse as to be elusive. Karp might have painted her study in broad brushstrokes, drawing conclusions from readings of essays and paraphrases of Orwells statements. Instead, she relishes the details of exactly how, when, and what Orwell would have learned about Soviet Russia, and how his attitudes towards Russia changed over time, especially in relation to his continued belief in the ideals of socialism. Sometimes, she focuses on the political history around Orwell, sometimes on biography, and sometimes on tracing his ideas and art.Though at times the forest is lost for the trees, her book is most impressive on account of how judiciously she selects her material, erring on the side of factual accuracy and abundance.

Born Eric Blair in 1903 (he would only adopt the pen name George Orwell in the early 1930s), Orwell attended Eton from 1917 to 1921. With the Russian Revolution half a world away, we have records of his joining his Eton peers in celebrating the revolutionaries. Karps story, though, takes as its true beginning Orwells stay with his Aunt Nellie in Paris, in the late 1920s.

Nellie was devoted to the cause of Esperanto, the artificial language constructed in the late 19th century in hopes of unifying humankind through a common tongue not attached to any historic nation. Looking back on the intensity of Esperantos advocates in the 1920s is both humbling and bewildering: they couldnt have known how irrelevant their aim would be to the changes they helped bring about. Because of their global ambitions, many Esperantists participated in the global socialist movement. Some of them traveled to Russia in the 1920s, eager to see what the Revolution had wrought. The Esperantist leader Eugne Lanti was one such traveler. He was also Aunt Nellies future husband, and was already her partner during Orwells stay. Its hard to believe, Karp writes, that Orwell would not have heard rumblings and grumbling about the state of affairs in Russia in conversations around Nellies Parisian apartment, since Lanti had been in Russia a few years prior and was in contact with associates still there.

By the early 1930s, Orwell was living in Britain, his Aunt Nellies friend Mynfawny Westrope both his landlady and occasional employer. Like Nellie, she was a committed socialist, and in her circles, which included the leading British Trotskyite Reg Groves, Orwell listened and joined into the debates of the British Left. Westrope was friends with more people like Lanti and his fellows, who had suffered first-hand disillusionment in Soviet Russia. It was here that Orwell saw a set within the British Left insisting on the validity of its ideas about what ought to be the case, rather than looking squarely at the available testimonies of what the situation in Russia was actually like. He did not speak out, or publish, much of what he was revolving in his head during the first half of the 1930s. The release, when it came, took the form of his wanting to see for himself not the Soviet tragedy, but the lives of the working classes in Britain. His time in the North of England led him to come to terms with Socialism, as a necessary promise and potential threat.

But it was in Spain that Orwell experienced first-hand the reach and feel of Soviet power, and it turned him against Communism for the rest of his life. Although his habit of mind was to question all things relentlessly, he did not question that language ought to be a trustworthy, if imperfect, instrument. He was horrified by those who degraded it by eviscerating its meanings and social functions. The Soviet regime under Stalin depended on such degradation, like any totalitarian or autocratic state, along with the simultaneous degradation of the individual spirit. Karps chapter on the Spanish Civil War seemed to me a bit gummy with details about what was admittedly an extraordinarily complicated conflict, involving, importantly for Orwell, clashes between different leftist groups. By describing the political machinations Orwell faced in Spain, Karp prepares to justify the claim that Orwells understanding of the fear a human being feels when faced with a huge, ruthless, inhuman power was born in Spain, where he suddenly found himself under the arbitrary rules of an oppressive regime.

Upon his return from Spain, Orwell read and reviewed widely. Karp superbly draws attention to two authors whose writings mattered greatly to Orwell, especially in the years when Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four were germinating: Franz Borkenau and Arthur Koestler. The former wrote about the Spanish Civil War and about the rise of the totalitarian state from the perspective of a social scientist, with moorings in the Frankfurt School. Koestlers Darkness at Noon was the only novel about Russia that Orwell reviewed. Karp shows how both of them deepened his understanding and imagination. One of the most conspicuous features of all Orwells writings about Borkenau, she observes, is his almost subconscious translation of Borkenaus sociological concepts into images and then developing these images.

Though consistently sympathetic to socialism, Orwell came to be considered suspect in some quarters of the British Left as his opposition to Stalin and the Soviet state grew in volume and intensity. Then, as Europe lurched into a Second World War, Orwells anti-Soviet position became suddenly popular when Nazi-Soviet pact was struck in 1939, only to veer into new extremes of unpopularity when the Soviets joined the British in opposing the Nazis. Even during the war, Orwell remained suspicious of Soviet propaganda, now bolstered by successes on the battlefield and acts of courage that he himself admired as much as anyone else.

In 1943 and 1944, Nineteen Eighty-Four was germinating in notes and Animal Farm was being sent around for publication. Orwells sense for the rotten odors on the breeze was as keen as ever. Animal Farm would prove especially difficult to publish. It was opposed by a highly-placed Soviet agent, Peter Smollett, whooversaw the Soviet Relations Division at the British Ministry of Information while in active communication with the Cambridge spies Kim Philby and Guy Burgess. Nevertheless, in 1945, Orwells novel was finally published. Though it was selling well and receiving praise, even critics friendly to Orwell scolded the book for taking aim at the Soviets, or else suggested that the books targets were things of the past. Like many great allegories, it exceeded its occasion: the Soviet figures on which its characters are based seem themselves to be examples of the larger types that it creates. In her pages on Orwells most enduring and memorable novels, Karp is at her best, leading us nimbly through the worlds of publishing and politics.

She is also superb on the genesis of Nineteen Eighty-Four, tracing its debt to the Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin. Orwell had begun planning his novel before reading and reviewing Zamyatins We, but his encounter with that 1923 dystopian fantasy sharpened his understanding of what he was trying to accomplish in his own novel. Unlike Zamyatin, who had to imagine totalitarian horrors not yet made real in history, Orwell had events in Russia on which to draw. In the post-war years, more and more of the British were waking up to the realities of Soviet totalitarianism, and Orwell found some real success in consolidating a coalition of writers, communist and otherwise, to oppose it. Karp quietly takes on those who, nowadays, are quick to dismiss such coalitions as stooges for American interests and the CIA, who would eventually fund their activity. Doing so, she argues, underestimates their freedom of mind and unfairly ignores their diversity of political hopes. Orwell, for instance, returned repeatedly to a dream of a United Socialist States of Europe.

Karps book is divided into two parts. Though the reason for the division is not especially clear,the second part is more argumentative and polemical than the first. One section is worth exploring in some detail, since it shows a limitation of Karps admiration for her subject.

In 1949, Orwell wrote to his friend Celia Kirwan, employed at the British Information Research Department, founded in 1948 to counter Soviet propaganda; in his letter, he named 38 British intellectuals he believed to harbor pro-Soviet sentiments that would make them unreliable to help the IRD. Karp explains that Orwell thought the threat was real, did not want (as he explained) to have someone like Peter Smollett in a position of power, and felt that in general the British intelligentsia remained hoodwinked by the Soviet state. They could not or would not see what was happening, and he didnt want Kirwan to be in the same position. At the time, Orwell wrote of his list of names, It isnt very sensational and I dont suppose it will tell your friends anything they dont know. But the names were not all: Orwell identified individuals on the list with labels (including Jewish and occasionally Homosexual) as well as assessments of their individual probity.

The existence of the lists and some of the names were revealed in 1991, and then, in 1996, as more came to light, there was a public (posthumous, obviously) outcry. Some accused Orwell of betrayal, others of hypocrisy. There is even now a Wikipedia article on Orwells list. Orwells editor Peter Davidson has suggested that the labels may have been Orwells attempt at identifying potential facts about individuals that might have been exploited by Soviet agents. It might even, he speculates, have been motivated by Orwells abiding interest in psychology and politics.

Karp approves Davidsons theory. Considered in this light, she writes,

Orwells comments in the list stop being smears applied by him to different people but become private pointers for the writer, who honestly, humanely and without prejudice tried to see their motives and predict their behavior.

This language exonerates recklessly. After all, if the labels really are smears, then they obviously do betray prejudice and bigotry, and if they are not (as Jewish and occasionally Homosexual are not), then it seems a distraction to raise an accusation that isnt to the point.

Admittedly, the list was written in a private journal; all we can do is speculate. But uncertainty forbids the strong defense that Karp attempts to mount and which comes across as decidedly peculiar. Im not sure how we can say the list reflects Orwells honesty at all, when we dont know what Orwell even thought he was doing. We cant say he wrote it humanely unless we think it is humane for Orwell, the stalwart defender of individual judgment, to decide that he paternalistically needs to keep tabs on his fellow citizens. Without prejudice is strangest of all: if Karp and Davidson are correct that Orwell wrote the list as part of a study in psychology and politics, then it must have been written with a great deal of thought about prejudice, and the terms themselves offer no diagnosis of that prejudice, but depend upon implying a great deal of it. Finally, why would Orwell have thought, even if he did believe there was a threat posed either to or from those on his list, that it was his place to work against it by amassing short-hand files on potential enemy agents? At best, the list raises questions that cannot be satisfactorily answered; it certainly doesnt warrant exorbitant praise. Orwell deserves to be stood up to; his distrust of saints warrants our refusing to impute righteousness to all that he did himself.

More often, Karp embraces and enters into the contradictions and conflicts in Orwells own mind. In his views of socialism, the subject of her seventh chapter, he was perpetually perplexed. In a passage that deserves extensive quotation, Karp writes:

The way Orwell dealt with his hesitations about socialism does speak to our time. He remained split because he could not abandon either his hope for a better future of mankind, which his time had taught him to call socialism, or his capacity to see things as they are. Nobody could call him cynical and yet he refused to be deluded himself and tried to warn others against their delusions by depicting horrifying consequences of socialist dreams.

He did not abandon the promise of those dreams. When looking for a publisher and translator for Animal Farm, he explained that he hoped the novel could be essential for a revival of the socialist movement. Though he never found out, he would have been disappointed that the first Slavic edition, a Ukrainian translation, was published by those who had no sympathy for the motivations behind the Russian Revolution.

Karps book benefits from being many things, from chapter to chapter, and even from paragraph to paragraph. Beyond politics, literary history, and biography, there is (in the eighth chapter) detective work on the Russian publication history of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which went through several editions from 1956. Fascinatingly, a 1959 edition of the novel was translated and prepared for the upper echelons of the Soviet government, supervised by the KGB, to keep them abreast of what they recognized as a potentially devastating piece of propaganda. Only in the past few years has one of the two translators been identified. An entire network of publishers covertly distributed foreign editions of Orwells novels into Russia from abroad during the 1960s and 1970s; others translated, copied, and disseminated them once they were in the country.

In 1988, both Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four were officially published in Russia for the first time. Writing on Henry Millers Tropic of Cancer in his essay Inside the Whale, George Orwell described the feeling of reading a book that opens up a new world not by revealing what is strange but by revealing what is familiar. Karps ninth chapter explores what this meant for generations of Russian readers holding Nineteen Eighty-Four in their hands, recollecting the Great Terror, the betrayal of parents by children, the routines of surveillance, and the fragility of human life under totalitarianism.

But her book does not end there; instead, it culminates in a final chapter that argues that it has been a terrible mistake to think Orwells warnings against totalitarian Soviet state a relic of the 20th century. Orwell coined the phrase the Russian myth to name the fantasy about Stalin and Soviet Russia to which many British liberals acquiesced. Karp suggests a new Russian myth, to which this generation of European and American intellectuals has been subject, arose in the 1990s, following the fall of the USSR. In that myth, Russia had completed its transformation into a liberal capitalist democracy.Now, in 2023, Karp argues, we see that totalitarian statecraft was neither eviscerated nor entirely left behind. With Putins war in Ukraine, his erasure of the past, and his punishment of dissident voices, Orwell is sadly familiar once more. Characteristically, he never lost sight of us.

Owen Boynton is director of strategic initiatives and an English teacher at Collegiate School in New York City. His articles and reviews have appeared in Essays in Criticism, Victorian Poetry, Romanticism, Literary Imagination, and The Chaucer Review. More of his literary criticism can be found on his website, Critical Provisions.

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Between socialist promise and totalitarian threat - Meduza

Review of The Invention of Marxism: How an Idea Changed Everything by Christina Morina, translated by Elizabeth Janik (Oxford University Press, 2023).

Christina Morinas The Invention of Marxism contains a wealth of material on nine socialist intellectuals who Morina characterizes as key figures in the foundation of Marxism. The most recent trends in historical method inform the book, and it is based on considerable research in a wealth of printed sources in several languages as well as the archival treasures of the International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam if there is a heaven for historians of socialism, it is the IISH.

The book is also highly readable and accessible, perhaps surprisingly so for a work that started life as a German professorial dissertation (credit also to the translator, Elizabeth Janik). The books German edition originally appeared in 2017.

Morina has selected nine individuals from four countries: Germany, Austria (or rather the Austro-Hungarian Empire), France, and Russia. The socialist intellectuals whose lives and pathways to embracing Marxism she reconstructs are Karl Kautsky, Eduard Bernstein, Rosa Luxemburg, Victor Adler, Jean Jaurs, Jules Guesde, Georgi Plekhanov, Vladimir Lenin, and Peter Struve.

The book takes as its point of departure reflections by the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm in his essay on Intellectuals and the Class Struggle, published in 1971 when the New Left and radical student movements were still a live force in Western societies. Hobsbawm asked: Why do men and women become revolutionaries? Part of his answer to the question was this: In the first instance mostly because they believe that what they want subjectively from life cannot be got without a fundamental change in all society.

Morina proceeds to construct links between the socialization and life experiences of her protagonists, as she calls her selected Marxist founding figures, and their reception and transmission of Marxs ideas. She draws on recent developments in historical writing such as the history of emotions to present the history of ideas (in this case Marxism) as connected to the life cycles and subjective experiences of the people who espouse them. She deliberately sets out to break with older intellectual histories of the development of Marxism, which she sees as self-referential, and to embed her account in the current mainstream of historical method.

In principle, there should be no objection to the project of historicizing Marxism as a set of ideas. After all, Marxist historians such as Hobsbawm and Benedict Anderson have illuminated how widely held ideas such as nationalism have been historically constructed. They have also shown how cultural traditions that people usually assume to be ancient have been subject to conscious and deliberate processes of invention in modern times. Marxism itself should thus be fair game for historicization.

Nor should one object to an attempt to integrate the history of the diffusion of Marxs ideas among late-nineteenth-century intellectuals and activists into the mainstream of the historiography of the period. Yet the question remains: How useful is Morinas collective-biography approach to understanding the emergence of Marxism as a coherent body of thought after Karl Marxs death in 1883, and what are the limitations of her account?

One might ask how Morina arrived at her selection of nine formative figures in the history of Marxism. Some (Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg) more or less pick themselves. But if Guesde is to be included, why not also the cofounder of French Marxism, Marxs own son-in-law Paul Lafargue? If activists qualify as well as theoreticians, why not August Bebel or Wilhelm Liebknecht, key founders and leaders of German Social Democracy?

Does Struve, whose links with Marxism only persisted for several years in the 1890s before he moved to liberalism and gradually more to the right, really deserve to be included here? What about Dutch exponents of Marxism such as Henriette Roland Holst, Herman Gorter, and Anton Pannekoek, or Italians like Antonio Labriola? Did Leon Trotsky arrive too late on the scene to be considered here? (He makes only a fleeting appearance late in the book, in the chapter on the 1905 Russian Revolution.) That said, some process of selection is perhaps inevitable in a work of this kind.

The book is fairly lengthy just over four hundred pages with seventy pages of endnotes testifying to the authors substantial research efforts. Covering nine significant individuals in the compass of one volume nonetheless inevitably involves some compromise. Specialists in German Social Democracy may not find much that is novel in the treatment of, say, Kautsky or Bernstein, nor will scholars of the Russian Revolution find too much that is new about Lenin. But Morina has unearthed some lesser-known material about the early lives, education, and pathways to involvement in Marxism of her protagonists, and most readers will learn something new about some of these figures.

At first, the payoff of Morinas approach is not immediately evident. It is hard to fit the life experiences of the protagonists into simple generalizations. A couple were from modest backgrounds (Bernstein and Guesde), while others were from more economically comfortable origins. Some broke with their families when they became politically active, others did not. Three of the nine were Jewish, three were immigrants (although the definition of immigrants is a little elastic in the case of citizens of the multinational Austro-Hungarian empire). Most of them experienced periods of exile, and all were multilingual.

One point that Morina puts particular stress on is that all of these figures grew up in homes in which education and books were valued and showed above-average academic aptitude. Lenin even aced his final school exams at the very time that his brother was being executed for trying to assassinate the tsar displaying an impressive if slightly scary capacity for laser-like focus at an early age.

Morina suggests that these school experiences carry enormous explanatory potential. . . . Most of the protagonists seem to have been outstanding students. Perhaps it should not be surprising that individuals who gained prominence as exponents of a demanding body of political and economic theory were able students. But at this point, Marxism starts to look like the revolt of the nerds.

Similarly, Morina searches for biographical explanations for divergent currents within Marxism. For example, she poses the question of whether Lenins path toward a career as a professional revolutionary might be explained by the ambivalent influences of his family legacy. Ultimately, however, the sources on Lenins inner life during his youth arent sufficient for us to answer that question.

Morina argues that we know too little about Bernsteins transformation from having been a revolutionary follower of Marx during the period in which the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was outlawed and immediately afterward, when Bernstein himself was exiled from Germany. She suggests that such factors as exhaustion, homesickness, or growing older . . . might explain his suddenly pointed commentary on SPD tactics and his emphasis on the idea of a political homeland.

So revisionism was a form of midlife crisis? Yet exile and the onset of middle age did not mellow some of the other revolutionaries who appear in this book.

Perhaps the least satisfying chapter for this reader was the one dealing with Rosa Luxemburg. Morina criticizes tendencies toward hagiography and sentimentalism in depictions of Luxemburg, pointing to the contrast between the tender expressions of emotion in her private correspondence and her tough-minded, often biting and acerbic, political writing.

However, while Morina searches for evidence of Luxemburgs subjective life experience in the available sources about her early life, she provides little sense of how Luxemburg became such a significant figure in the German and European labor movement or of the nature of her achievements as a thinker. The way in which Luxemburg quickly achieved prominence among the leading figures of Germanys SPD despite her outsider status as a woman and a Polish Jew testifies both to her formidable intellectual gifts and to a relatively open party culture at that point in time.

Morina quotes Luxemburgs expressions of distaste for unsavory circumstances and aversion to overcrowded cities, depicting her as having distanced herself from too much contact with the masses. Morina stresses the distance of her protagonists from the actual proletariat, with the exception of Bernstein and Guesde. Yet like Bernstein and unlike Kautsky, for example Luxemburg was a frequent and effective speaker in workers meetings. Morinas own account only devotes a chapter to the working class as viewed through the prism of the writings of her protagonists.

There are plenty of references to the political and social context of the time, but these are a little brief and unsystematic. While Morina acknowledges the explanatory power of Marxs ideas for the labor movement by the late 1870s, she seems to deplore the politicization of the quest for bread (citing Hannah Arendt on this point). There is little discussion of the imperialism of this era, which Morinas protagonists sharply criticized I could find only one direct reference to imperialism.

Nor is there any discussion of the socialist critique of the pervasive militarism of societies like Imperial Germany. Luxemburg, for example, was sentenced to jail for exhorting German workers not to fire on their French brothers in the event of war. On the eve of World War I, she was also put on trial for speaking out against the abuse of army recruits in Germany. Criticisms of the tone and language of the revolutionary left in this era need to be viewed in the context of the extreme economic inequality and repressive state structures against which socialists were struggling.

Morina provides an interesting last chapter (before her conclusion) on the revolution of 19056 in the Russian Empire as a case study of how early Marxists responded to the challenge of an actual revolution. She seems surprised at the diversity of their reactions, given that all belonged to the same discursive community of politically like-minded activists who felt responsible to Marxism. In view of the vigorous internal debates, not to say polemics, within the Second International, this diversity should not really come as a surprise.

Perhaps this surprise derives from Morinas conception of Marxism as a worldview that is ultimately hermetic. Given her own method of drawing on life experience to help explain intellectual trajectories, it may be worth noting that Morina was born in East Germany in 1976, and this may have influenced her view of Marxism as leading to state socialism and totalitarian oppression.

She views Marxism as simultaneously a product of political romanticism a controversial concept taken from Carl Schmitt and as the product of a science-obsessed age. There is more that could be said about Marxisms lineage from the Enlightenment, but that might require a more conventional history-of-ideas analysis than is given here.

Had Morina continued her collective biographical account past 19056 to consider responses to the 1917 Russian Revolution, even greater divergences within the Marxist tradition would have become apparent. Beyond 1917, the Marxist tradition diversified further, with one line ossifying under Stalinism (helping to form the likes of East German leaders Walter Ulbricht and Erich Honecker, among others). But there were many other, anti-Stalinist strands of Marxist thought as well, some of which even remained active within post-1945 social democratic parties, at least for a time.

In Hobsbawms 1971 essay, which was reprinted in his book Revolutionaries, he went on to add the following thoughts after the sentences quoted by Morina. For Hobsbawm, in addition to the subjective discontents of individual revolutionaries, there was of course that substratum of idealism, or if we prefer the term utopianism. This went not just for individuals, but for whole societies at occasional historical moments. Hobsbawm also pointed to other dimensions of the history of revolutionary movements, including an emancipatory impulse and drive for political freedom, that get rather short shrift in Morinas account.

Readers interested in the history of the European left and the early years of Marxism will find much useful and interesting material in Morinas book. Many will no doubt be provoked to disagree with some of her arguments. If that stimulates some to engage in further research into these thinkers, that can only be a good thing.

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Marxism Is the Product of a Struggle for Political Freedom - Jacobin magazine

Socialist Appeals Are you a communist? campaign our recruitment drive to reach the 1000 membership mark in Britain is well underway. And it is clear already that it is finding a fantastic echo and gaining a tremendous response, with hundreds of radical workers and youth reaching out to get organised and join the fight for revolution.

In the space of just seven days recently, for example, 191 people wrote into our website asking to join. Over the past month, 380 self-proclaimed communists have written in on the back of our campaign. This completely dwarfs our previous record of 109 write-ins over the course of one month.

New comrades are joining the organisation every day on the back of this. In the last week alone, we have had reports of new members in Ipswich, Brighton, Bristol, Canterbury, Sheffield, and Cambridge.

This coincided with a week where our Cambridge comrades sold 139 copies of the Socialist Appeal paper, showing the thirst for Marxist ideas out there.

And these numbers are continuing to grow every day, as recruitment posters and stickers go up on streets around the country.

Socialist Appeal the British section of the International Marxist Tendency is well and truly painting Britain red!

The revolutionary mood in society is palpable. And no doubt the establishments grotesque carnival surrounding the recent coronation has only provoked further anger and indignation.

The things that people have said when writing in to join reveal a snapshot of this mood:

Im 18. The horrors of capitalism are monumental. That is why Im passionate about creating a society that is equal, where workers have control, and where our planet and people are not exploited by the elite. Revolution is needed now more than ever. It appears to be the only solution.

I wish to join this cause because Im tired of being oppressed by the corporate elites and the destructive cycle of capitalism. Capitalism has ruined this country. I believe its my duty to overthrow the capitalist demons that are plaguing society, and give power to the people.

I hate seeing poor people suffer on the streets, while huge corporations make massive profits. Watching the government benefit the wealthiest while leaving the rest of us to freeze is sickening. I want to see change!

I am fed up with the way this country is being run. Everything is for the rich. And the workers are the ones who are constantly belittled and told there is no money for pay rises, while the elite sit in their mansions counting their money. Im fuming at the disrespect workers are shown in this country, and believe there should be a revolution!

I can no longer stand capitalism. Its a rotten system that has f**ked our world. Theres a long road ahead of us, but this campaign gives us hope. Get organised resonates in the best way possible.

This radical mood was also evident at the May Day demonstrations that Socialist Appeal comrades took part in recently. In towns and cities across the country, our activists formed revolutionary blocs, where we put forward bold slogans and appealed on workers and youth to join the Marxists!

In London, for example, over 100 comrades and supporters marched together behind our banners, with a sea of red flags proudly held high, after gathering at the Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell Green.

Our slogans included: No wage losses, expropriate the bosses! and Nationalise the banks; seize their wealth; spend it on the National Health! These demands attracted passers-by and others on the demonstration, with some actively joining our bloc.

After the march, comrades headed for a celebratory social, where Rob Sewell, editor of Socialist Appeal, gave a rousing speech on the significance of May Day, the intensifying class struggle, and the historic tasks that stand in front of us.

As Rob emphasised, the most urgent task is to build a strong Marxist leadership, in Britain and internationally. That is why we are running this bold campaign, recruiting for revolution.

Socialist Appeal will be running online meetings every two weeks for those interested in joining our ranks: outlining what we do; explaining what being a member entails; and answering any political questions about Marxism or communism.

If you would like to join these meetings, please get in touch at contact@socialist.net.

On the basis of the response so far, and the mood that exists across society, there is no reason why we cant reach the major milestone of 1000 members of the International Marxist Tendency in Britain in the coming months.

To achieve this would be a huge step forward for the forces of Marxism; for the building of a genuine revolutionary organisation; and for the fight for socialism.

So why wait? If youre a communist, get organised and join Socialist Appeal today!

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Recruiting for revolution: Painting Britain red - Socialist Appeal

It was the spring of 1987 when I briefly visited the Technical University in West Berlin. I had quite good contacts with them, having worked on some joint projects over the years. For some reason which I cannot quite put my finger on, I had never used these opportunities to visit the Eastern part of the city. By the time of this visit, I was worried that I would miss something, that the East German way of life would disappear, and I would never see it. Of course, I knew roughly what it was like. It was the most retrograde society politically and the most advanced one technically and economically in the Eastern Bloc.

Gorbachev had been in power for three years by 1987. He had already introduced perestroika and glasnost in the Soviet Union. Perestroika means rebuilding in Russian: moulding the entire economy from a new foundation. I had seen many attempts of this kind made by various Communist Party Secretaries. None of them ever worked.

But glasnost was unique. Its approach to managing the Soviet media landscape was fundamentally different to all that had come before. The basic idea, radical and amazing, was to tell the truth. And this applied not only to present-day events. It covered the past as well. The Moscow show trials came up for scrutiny; the secret clause of the 1939 Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was published, and so was Koestlers anti-communist novel Darkness at Noon. Out of this shift came the Russian saying: One never knows what the past will bring.

I knew that I had a contact from East Berlin in my diary. The telephone number was clearly readable. The name was not. Perhaps it was Kirschner, or Kirchner, or something similar. Id jotted it down a couple of years previously. He was an East German scientist whom I had met casually at a conference in the US. I suspect he was quite high up in the hierarchy at Humboldt University, given that he was allowed to cross the Atlantic (although, of course, I presume that he was constantly watched by two or three members of the Stasi). He told me: Whenever you are in Berlin, come and visit us.

I rang him. Professor Solymar, yes, I do remember you. Are you able to come at the weekend? We can show you the Pergamon Museum. It is a quite unique place, a city delivered from a few thousand miles away stone by stone. And of course you will be able to see a lot more. The Old City, you know, Unter den Linden, etc. is in East Berlin. Can we take you to a restaurant? I declined. My interest is mainly in people, I said, thinking that the last place where I would want a political discussion in East Germany is a restaurant.

I took a taxi to their address in Prenzlauer Berg. Well, the house needed a bit of paint but the first impression was good. There were lots of people walking on the streets, lots of cars parked (an indication of prosperity, but not one that clogged up everything), lots of children apparently on their way to playgrounds or skipping home from them. Life seemed to go on happily. I even saw a street-trader selling bananas.

These observations were further reinforced when they showed me their flat. They had three big rooms for two of them. A son of theirs was studying at Moscow University. The sitting room was a showcase of Scandinavian furniture that I would have been glad to have in our house in Oxford. Did they pay for it by being staunch supporters of the regime? As it turned out, they were no fans of Mr Honecker.

While his wife, the deputy headmistress of an elite secondary school, prepared a light lunch for us, I discussed Mr Gorbachevs reforms with the husband. It is an entirely new beginning, he said, The dinosaurs in our politics will very soon be gone. He then told me an old joke: What would happen if the Sahara went Socialist? Nothing for a long time, and then a shortage of sand.

And yet he would not denounce Socialism: Should it be so? Not at all. There is nothing wrong with Socialism. Believe me. What we need is an infusion of private enterprise. Not too much, not too little. Just enough to oil the economic machine. We should have no dogmas. We should replace our bureaucrats with computers.

His wife also espoused radical views, strongly favouring elite education: Yes, there should be selection, she said. I want to run a school of bright young boys and girls.

With his proposed changes, the man had high hopes for the future of East Germany. We can be efficient, as efficient as anything in the West. There is no reason why your capitalist world shouldnt invest in our industry. It will bring good returns.

I was not convinced but I kept silent. My scepticism felt too impolite.

And there is no reason either why Socialism should be oppressive, he continued. There I agreed: Budapest in the summer of 1956 was more politically free than any other society I had experienced. But I wondered whether he would mention the Stasi. He did not.

During my visit, my eye had been drawn several times to some picture frames leaning against the back of the settee. Was this a hiding place for items they did not want to show? My curiosity overrode my tact. May I have a look? I asked. The wife immediately turned round one of the picture frames. It was a reproduction of a fairly well-known Picasso. Are Cubist pictures against the current Party line? I asked. The man clarified: No, not at all. The reason we cant hang them at the moment is because our shops have temporarily run out of nails.

When I wanted to leave, my host apologised. Sorry, I cant drive you to your hotel in West Berlin. Maybe next year.

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My first visit to East Germany - TheArticle

This is the text of the speech by David North, chairperson of the International Editorial Board of the World Socialist Web Site, opening the International May Day Online Rally 2023, held Sunday, April 30. The recording of the entire rally can be accessed here.

On this day of international working class solidarity, the International Committee of the Fourth International extends to all those throughout the world who are watching this online rally its revolutionary greetings. We declare our solidarity with all sections of workers and young people on all continents and in all countries who have entered into struggle against capitalism.

The International Committee renews its commitment to fight for the freedom of the Maruti Suzuki autoworkers in Delhi, India, who have been framed up and imprisoned for life as punishment for striking against brutal working conditions. The ICFI reaffirms its determination to mobilize the strength of the international working class to secure the freedom of Julian Assange, who has become a symbol of the fight for truth against the crimes of imperialist governments and the lies of their lackeys in the corporate media.

Todays rally is the International Committees tenth online celebration of May Day. It takes place as the war in Ukraine is escalating relentlessly, threatening to spread beyond NATOs confrontation with Russia toward war with China and a global nuclear conflagration.

Seeking to cover over its own role in the instigation of the Ukraine war, the Biden administration adheres to the ahistorical and absurd narrative of Putins unprovoked war. But the invocation of the specter of Vladimir Putinthe latest in a long line of devils conjured up by Washingtonexplains nothing about the historical, economic, social and political origins of the war.

It directs attention away from any examination of the connection between the US-NATO war in Ukraine and:

(1) the previous 30 years of virtually uninterrupted war waged by the United States in Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya and Syria;

(2) the relentless eastward expansion of NATO since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991;

(3) the escalating geopolitical conflict with China, which is viewed by American imperialism as a dangerous threat to its own dominant world position;

(4) the protracted decline of the global economic position of the United States, which finds its starkest expression in the growing challenge to the supremacy of the dollar as the world reserve currency;

(5) the series of economic shocks that have required desperate bailouts to forestall the complete collapse of the US financial system;

(6) the evident breakdown of the American political system, exemplified in President Donald Trumps attempted overthrow, on January 6, 2021, of the results of the November 2020 national election;

(7) the increasing domestic instability of a society scarred by staggering levels of inequality, intensified by the impact of the pandemic and a new inflationary spiral, which is radicalizing the American working class.

The unanswerable refutation of the unprovoked war narrative are the statements of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI), posted on the World Socialist Web Site, which have during the last quarter-century analyzed the economic, political and social contradictions that have driven the US corporate-financial elites desperate efforts to find a way out of intractable crises through war.

The first online May Day rally of the International Committee was held less than three months after the February 2014 Maidan coup directed by the United States and Germany to overthrow Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych, who was viewed by Washington and Berlin as excessively sympathetic to Russia, and place in power a pro-NATO government. The coup was followed by the Kremlins seizure and annexation of Crimea, which Washington had planned to turn into a Black Sea base for NATO naval operations against Russia.

In the announcement of its first online May Day rally, posted on April 12, 2014, the World Socialist Web Site stated that the Maidan coup had been staged with the intention of provoking a confrontation with Russia. The statement continued:

The confrontation with Russia over Ukraine marks a new and dangerous turn in the orientation of the imperialist powers. The Gods of Imperialist War are athirst! As in the years that preceded World War I and World War II, a new division of the world is being prepared.

Those who believe that war with China and Russia is an impossibility, that the major imperialist powers would not risk war with nuclear powers, are deluding themselves. The history of the twentieth century, with its two devastating world wars and its innumerable and bloody localized conflicts, has provided sufficient evidence of the risks that the ruling classes are prepared to take. Indeed, they are prepared to risk the fate of all humanity and the planet itself.

One hundred years after the outbreak of World War I and 75 years after the start of World War II, the struggle against the danger of a third imperialist cataclysm confronts the international working class.

The International Committee did not possess a crystal ball. But it was able to draw upon the powerful weapon of Marxist theory and the analysis of the dynamics of world imperialism developed by Lenin during the First World War. At that time, Lenin exposed the lies used by imperialist governments to justify the slaughter, as well as the sophistries that were employed by those who had repudiated their earlier pledges to oppose the war policies of capitalist governments and uphold the international unity of the working class.

Lenins analysis rooted the war in the economic foundations of imperialism and the ensuing and inescapable conflicts between capitalist states. He rejected the claim that the war could be supported in the name of the defense of the nation or that military conflict was merely the outcome of an incorrect choice of policy options. The former argument was simply a hypocritical justification for capitulating to national chauvinism; the latter argument served to obfuscate the objective cause of imperialist war and its revolutionary implications for the development of a working class antiwar strategy.

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Imperialist economics led inexorably to imperialist war and all its horrors. The leader of the Bolshevik Party wrote in 1916 that imperialism is, in general, a striving toward violence and reaction Through the ruthless application of violence, the imperialists aimed to alter the existing division of the worlds wealth and resources among the major powers. Lenin explained:

(1) the fact that the world is already partitioned obliges those contemplating a redivision to reach out for every kind of territory; and (2) an essential feature of imperialism is the rivalry between great powers in the striving for hegemony, i.e., for the conquest of territory, not so much directly for themselves as to weaken the adversary and undermine his hegemony

Lenin continued:

The question is: What means other than war could there be under capitalism to overcome the disparity between the development of productive forces and the accumulation of capital on one side, and the division of colonies and spheres of influence for finance capital on the other.

The present war in Ukraine and the escalating conflict with China are the manifestations, though on a much more advanced and complex level, of the global contradictions analyzed by Lenin more than a century ago.

Far from being the sudden and unexpected outcome of Putins unprovoked invasionas if the expansion of NATO 800 miles eastward since 1991 did not constitute a provocation against Russiathe war in Ukraine is the continuation and escalation of 30 years of continuous war waged by the United States. The essential aim of the unending series of conflicts has been to offset the protracted economic decline of US imperialism and to secure its global hegemony through military conquest.

In 1934, Leon Trotsky wrote that while German imperialism sought to organize Europe, it was the ambition of US imperialism to organize the world. Using language that seemed intended to confirm Trotskys analysis, Joe Biden, then a candidate for the presidency, wrote in April 2020: The Biden foreign policy will place the United States back at the head of the table the world does not organize itself.

But the United States confronts a world that does not necessarily want to be organized by the United States. The role of the dollar as the world reserve currency, the financial underpinning of American geo-political supremacy, is being increasingly challenged. The growing role of China as an economic and military competitor is viewed by Washington as an existential threat to American dominance.

A major factor in the decision of the imperialist powers to go to war in 1914 was the fear that time was not on their sidethat is, that delaying war would only allow their competitors to gain in strength. To the extent that war was seen as inevitable, it led to a better sooner than later attitude to the outbreak of war. This subjective conviction among capitalist political leaders and the military general staffs that conflict was unavoidable became, at a critical point, a significant factor in the decision to go to war in August 1914.

The numerous articles in the capitalist press and strategic journals prophesying war with China within the next 15, 10 or even five years testify to the prevalence of a similar mindset in present-day Washington. There is no other serious political explanation for the recklessly provocative character of the Biden administrations actions in Taiwan, which are obviously intended to goad the Chinese to take military action, to fire the first shot and thereby provide Washington with the propaganda narrative required to justify its long-planned military action.

The United States is the most aggressive of the imperialist powers, but the same dynamic that drives Washington toward war also operates in Europe. While the European imperialist allies of the United States in the NATO alliance are compelled by the present global balance of power to follow the scenario set by Washington, they are by no means innocent bystanders in the confrontation with Russia.

All the old European imperialist powersweather-beaten veterans of two world wars in just the last century, along with savage crimes in their former colonies and experiments with fascism and genocide in their own countriesare beset by the same political and economic diseases that afflict the United States, while possessing even fewer financial resources to deal with them.

Although unable to pursue their imperialist ambitions independently, neither Britain, France, Italy or Germany nor lesser powers, such as Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Spain, Belgium and Switzerland are prepared to accept their exclusion from the redistribution of territory and natural resources and access to financial advantages that they expect will follow from the military defeat of Russia and its breakup into numerous statelets.

All attempts to assess blame for the war by concentrating on the question of who fired the first shot? require an extremely limited time frame, which isolates a single episode from a far longer succession of events.

When events leading up to the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 are placed in the necessary historical and political context, there is no question but that the war was instigated by the United States and its NATO allies.

However, the fact that the war was instigated by the United States and NATO does not justify the Russian invasion of Ukraine, let alone alter its reactionary character. Those who defend the invasion on the grounds that it was a legitimate response to the NATO threat to Russias borders are simply ignoring the fact that Putin is the leader of a capitalist state, whose definition of national security is determined by the economic interests of the oligarchic class whose wealth is based on the dissolution and theft of the previously nationalized property of the Soviet Union.

All of Putins miscalculations and blunders, in both the launching and the prosecution of the war, reflect the class interests that he serves. The aim of the war is to counteract military pressure from the Western imperialist powers and to retain for the national capitalist class a dominant position in the exploitation of natural resources and labor within the borders of Russia, and, to the greatest extent possible, in the Black Sea region and the neighboring countries of Central Asia and the Transcaucasus.

There is nothing progressive, let alone anti-imperialist, in these objectives.

Regardless of their present conflict, the new post-Soviet ruling classes in Russia and Ukraine share the same criminal origin in the dissolution of the USSR and the restoration of capitalism.

The war is now well into its second year. The capitalist media is chortling over the bloodshed as it anticipates the launching of a Ukrainian counter-offensive that will lead to a further loss of tens of thousands of lives on both sides.

At the present time, the bloodiest fighting is concentrated in the city of Bakhmut. Even when taking into account the manipulation of information by both Ukraine and Russia in the interests of propaganda, there is no question but that the battle for the city has exacted a horrifying toll in human life.

But for all the concentration on the military operations in and around the city, there has been virtually nothing written in the press about the history of the city itself. A review of this history testifies to the tragic character of this fratricidal conflict and the terrible social regression it represents for the people of both Russia and Ukraine.

The city of Bakhmut was a major battle front in the civil war that followed the 1917 October Revolution. It fell under the control of the anti-Bolshevik nationalist Ukrainian army of Semyon Petliura, whose regime instigated pogroms that resulted in the killing of between 50,000 and 200,000 Jews.

The Red Army liberated Bakhmut on December 27, 1919, and this victory set into motion a vast social transformation. A Victory of Labor factory was built, and the mines in the vicinity of the city were named after the German revolutionary Karl Liebknecht and the Soviet leader Yakov Sverdlov. In 1924, the city was renamed Artemivsk, to honor the memory of a leading Bolshevik, Fyodor Andreyevich Sergeyev, who had been known as Comrade Artyom.

His life reflected the revolutionary internationalism that inspired broad sections of the socialist-minded working class, intelligentsia and youth of the multinational Russian Empire.

Sergeyev-Artyom had joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1901 and supported Lenins Bolshevik faction after the 1903 split. During the 1905 Revolution, he led an armed rebellion of workers in the city of Kharkov. After the defeat of the Revolution, he was imprisoned in Siberia. But Comrade Artyom managed to escape after three years and made his way, via Japan and Korea, to Australia.

He soon became active in the struggles of the Australian working class. Known widely as Big Tom, Artyom became in 1912 the editor of the Echo of Australia. As a member of the Australian Socialist Party, he led the opposition in the trade unions to Australias participation in World War I.

Returning to Russia after the February Revolution, Artyom played a major role in the organization of the revolutionary insurrection that secured Bolshevik rule in Kharkov and the Donets Basin region. He went on to play a prominent role in the civil war that ultimately secured Soviet power. In 1921, Artyom was killed in a train accident. Three years later, Bakhmut was renamed Artemivsk.

On October 31, 1941, four months after invading the Soviet Union, the Nazi forces occupied Artemivsk. In early 1942, the Nazis, assisted by right-wing Ukrainian nationalists, carried out the murder of 3,000 Jews, who were rounded up, pushed into a mine shaft and suffocated to death.

On September 5, 1943, Artemivsk was liberated by the Red Army.

Following the 2014 Maidan coup, the right-wing regime of Poroshenko, anxious to rehabilitate the heroes of Ukrainian fascism and eliminate all political, social and cultural vestiges of the Soviet era, removed Artemivsk from the map of Ukraine and restored the citys old name, Bakhmut.

The effacement of the remnants of the October Revolution has been accompanied by the renewed glorification of Stepan Bandera, Dmitri Dontsov and other heroes of fascistic and neo-Nazi bourgeois Ukrainian nationalism.

But Putins claim to be fighting Ukrainian fascism lacks the slightest political credibility. He is waging war under the reactionary banner of Russian nationalism. When Putin evokes the heritage of tsarism and denounces Lenin, Trotsky, Bolshevism and the October Revolution, he is testifying to the historically reactionary and politically bankrupt character of his regime.

In demanding an end to the war, we invoke the principle of socialist internationalism. The working class has no country. Neither the Ukrainian nor Russian working class has anything to gain from this war. Eighty years ago the workers of Ukraine and Russia fought side by side in a struggle to expel the Nazi invaders from the Soviet Union. Now, as a consequence of the restoration of capitalism, they are killing each other on the very soil they once defended side by side against fascism and in defense of the conquests of the October Revolution.

The only politically viable, let alone revolutionary, answer to imperialist war is the revolutionary mobilization of the international working class on the basis of socialist policies. There is much talk today about the coming of a multi-polar world, which will supposedly supersede the unipolar hegemony of American imperialism. The rule of Washington will be replaced, according to the academic and pseudoleft theorists of multi-polarity, by a consortia of capitalist states, which will collectively and harmoniously preside over a more peaceful division of global resources.

This new version of a peaceful ultra-imperialism is no more theoretically coherent and politically viable than it was a century ago, when it was first proposed by the German reformist Karl Kautsky and comprehensively refuted by Lenin. The peaceful distribution and allocation of global resources among capitalist and imperialist states is impossible. The contradictions between the global economy and capitalist nation-state system lead to war.

In any event, the realization of a multi-polar world, setting aside its incorrect theoretical foundations, requires its peaceful acceptance by todays dominant imperialist power, the United States. This is not a realistic prospect. The United States will oppose with all the means at its disposal efforts to block its drive for unipolar hegemony. Thus, the utopian striving to replace a unipolar with a multi-polar world leads, by its own twisted logic, to World War III and the destruction of the planet.

In the final analysis, underlying these anti-Marxist theories and policies is opposition to a struggle against capitalism and an attempt to balance between conflicting capitalist and imperialist states.

The International Committee rejects all such cowardly adaptations to capitalist regimes and evasions of revolutionary tasks. As Trotsky stated upon the outbreak of World War II: We are not a government party; we are the party of irreconcilable revolutionary opposition

We seek to implement our policies not through the medium of bourgeois governments but exclusively through the education of the masses through agitation, through explaining to workers what they should defend and what they should overthrow.

Such an approach to the solution of historical problems, Trotsky acknowledged, cannot give immediate miraculous results. But we do not pretend to be miracle workers. As things stand, we are a revolutionary minority. Our work must be directed so that the workers on whom we have influence should correctly appraise events, not permit themselves to be caught unawares, and prepare the general sentiment of their own class for the revolutionary solution of the tasks confronting us.

The dangers confronting humanity should not be minimized. The first responsibility of a genuine revolutionary is to state what is. But this requires the recognition that objective reality presents not only the danger of World War III and the annihilation of humanity but also the potential for world socialist revolution and a stupendous advance in human civilization.

The program of the Fourth International, the World Party of Socialist Revolution led by the International Committee, is to realize this potential by building a mass movement against imperialist war and fighting for the transfer of power to the working class to build socialism throughout the world. This is the perspective that animates, despite all difficulties and dangers, todays celebration of May Day.

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May Day 2023: For the international unity of the working class against national chauvinism and war! - WSWS