12.09.2001

Humourous insight

Mark Steel Reasons to be cheerful Scribner UK ?10, pp277

Mark Steel presents his own personal memoirs as a member of the Socialist Workers Party. There is much with which most activists will empathise. What could well have been a fairly depressing tale of how many papers he sold one Saturday, how many recruits he got at Marxism ?92 and how he had been consistently on the losing side for the last 20 years is in fact a vibrant and extremely funny read.

Those looking for some insight on life in the SWP would do well to flick through these pages. Steel accepts the theory of state capitalism - not because someone sat him down and lectured him on economics for years, but because it was an answer to the problem of being a socialist during the Cold War. It enabled him to become political without needing a picture of Brezhnev on the kitchen wall.

Comrade Steel, in common with many SWP members, seems to exhibit the odd contradiction of being a consistent critic and opponent of capitalism whose critical faculties do not function when it comes to the organisation he has joined. Nowhere will you find even the slightest acknowledgement that the SWP may be a fallible organisation that, say, perhaps misjudged the poll tax, or consistently opposed Conservatism with a whimpering call for a Labour vote throughout the 80s and into the 90s.

But, if anything, these are the memoirs of a socialist who did not have his sense of humour permanently removed like so many on the left. The political analysis may not be as deep and meaningful as it could be. But then, if it were, it probably would not have had me fighting back hysterical laughter on the bus to work.

Gary Newly