21.11.1996

Ducking and diving

Around the left

The revolutionary press is bold, courageous and hard-hitting. Or, at least, so it should be. A distinctive and sometimes disheartening feature of revolutionary publications in this country is their remarkable timidity and conservatism. The ‘extreme’ left, as the bourgeois press loves to dub them, is in reality quite ‘sensible’ in many of its views.

An interesting, and paradoxical in some respects, example is Living Marxism, monthly publication of the student-based Revolutionary Communist Party. This cannot be so, you might say. Living Marxism is a high-profile journal (relatively speaking) which prides itself on being hard hitting; the journal that speaks the unspeakable. Surely Living Marxism is a genuinely ‘extreme’ publication?

Unfortunately, no. For all its aggressive imagery and ‘marketing’, the pages of the RCP’s journal are unmistakably soft-focus and fuzzy round the edges. The November edition is a particular case, as the article on Dunblane proves.

Mick Hume’s editorial ducks and dives in his comments on Dunblane. The immediate and overriding issues thrown up by the Dunblane massacre concern the nature of the bourgeois state and the question of workers’ defence: should the workers be armed or not? Is revolution a violent act or not? But all comrade Hume can do is complain about Snowdrop being a “self-appointed lobby” (who is not?), and how he would prefer a “crooked MP who is said to be out for himself any day rather than a judge or ombudsman who claims to know what is good for the rest of us” including the Dunblane relatives, naturally.

Anne Bradley also displays the same reluctance to pinpoint the issue as far as revolutionaries are concerned. Her ‘critique’ of the Dunblane parents and their campaign is restricted to an unmistakably liberalistic whinge about how their “views on control should carry no more weight than those of anybody else”. Yes, comrade Bradley - but what do you actually think of their views on gun control? The best we get is vague ruminations about how “hand guns are no better or worse than the people who keep them” and that “rather than hiding from things that we find scary, usually it is better to face up to them”.

Workers’ Liberty also belongs to the ‘moderate’ tendency. In fact, some of its statements sound positively ‘mainstream’, and would be at home in a bourgeois paper. In a review of the Neil Jordan film, Michael Collins, we are told: “British rule is presented as an everyday tyranny it never really was.” Furthermore, we must “deprive the Provisional IRA of the chance of misusing this story” by promoting “real discussion of real history and the present real Ireland” (November).

Liring Marxism, Workers’ Liberty - be bold. After all, you have nothing to lose but your chains.

Don Preston