PAUL ANDERSON

Paul Anderson, review of Werner Hulsberg, The German Greens (Verso, £9.95), Tribune, 15 January 1988

The West German Greens are, without a doubt, one of the most significant political phenomena of Europe in the eighties – on that everyone agrees.

But how should they be judged? Some commentators, both left and right, see them as either willing dupes of Moscow or a worrying reminder of the romantic German nationalism that played such a key role in Nazism. (Some French leftists see them as both, but that’s another story.)

Other believe they are a temporary aberration in West German politics, an amalgam of single-issue campaigns owing its apparent strength to circumstances, particularly in international relations, that will soon pass. Still others see them as the prototype of a new type of politics that is destined to sweep the world.

Werner Hulsberg agrees with none of these propositions. The West German Greens is an engaged but critical attempt to show that the Greens are a movement of the left, internationally non-aligned and not easily imitable outside West Germany, with deep enough social roots to survive and prosper – if they sort out their political strategy.

The best bits of the book are its detailed analyses of the Greens’ programmes and the social origins and beliefs of Green voters and members. Hulsberg shows convincingly that the Greens have very little in common with the movement that swept Hitler to power.

Supporters of the Greens are noticeably less nationalistic and authoritarian than supporters of all other West German parties; and the Greens’ political programmes and practices are consistently leftist on every key issue. What’s more, Green voters and, members come not from the traditional petty bourgeiosie but from highly educated skilled urban white collar employees, many in the service sector. (Hulsberg sees these people as the “proletariat of the 21st century”, which begs a lot of questions – but you don’t have to swallow his sometimes rather neanderthal Marxism to appreciate the data.)

Hulsberg backs up his sociological and textual analyses with a narrative account of the Greens’ history. First, he describes the political stasis to which the Greens were a response and outlines the various cultural and political milieux from which they emerged in 1978-79 — the remnants of the far-left groupuscules from the sixties Anti-Parliamentary Opposition, the alternative culture, the “citizens’ initiatives” of the seventies. (“Citizens’ initiative” –  Burgerinitiativen – started out as the blanket West German term for the voluntary committees set up in any democracy to resist roadbuilding, demand more nursery school places and so on. In Germany, these multifarious examples of “do-it-yourself’ politics, largely ignored by the left, consolidated their organisation and broadened their political perspectives. Initially hailed by the establishment as paragons of civic virtue, by the mid-seventies they came to embrace an environmentalist political outlook and mobilised widespread opposition to pollution and nuclear power station building.)

Hulsberg goes on to detail the left’s defeat of the conservative-conservationist right of the new party in its first couple of years, then tracks the Greens’ fortunes from their entry to the Bundestag (Federal Parliament) in 1983 until mid-1987.

His history is very good on the internal politics of the Greens – the arguments about coalition with the Social Democrats (Labour’s West German sister party), the battles over manifestos and so forth. He rather over-simplifies factional differences, but then it is difficult to see how he could have avoided this without making his story unintelligible to the uninitiated. Less forgiveably, he is weak on the activities of Greens in the Bundestag and on the effect Greens have had in local and state governments where  they have held office; he says little on the Greens’ foreign and defence policy initiatives; and he gives scant consideration to the movement’s cultural and intellectual influence.

Much of the problem here stems from Hulsberg’s underlying world-view. As you might expect from an author who quotes Trotsky and Ernest Mandel at most available opportunities, he sees questions of “correct lines” and political leadership as central; and although his Leninism is subtle enough to allow him some useful insights (particularly on the Greens’ economic programme, their relationship with the SDP, and the impossibility of parties like the Greens making headway in countries that don’t enjoy a West German electoral system) too much of what he says makes assumptions that should have been jettisoned years back.

Nevertheless, this is undoubtedly the most comprehensive analysis of the Greens in English, and it should be read by everyone concerned with the future of the left in Britain. Even if the British electoral system rules out the formation of a serious British Green party and the British left is stuck with Labour, we can still learn from the West German Greens’ experience: to put it mildly, British left political culture could do with an injection of their imaginative, decentralist anti-authoritarianism, and the Labour Party needs something more than improving its public image if it is to cope with the modern world.

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.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 23 October 1987

Every time I open the New Statesman or Marxism Today these days I am struck by the number of Fleet Street and broadcasting names, familiar and unfamiliar, that appear in their pages — Financial Times journalists and BBC researchers writing about what their main employers pay them to know.

Of course, there can be no objection to the left press giving space to people working in the mainstream. Left papers and magazines (including Tribune) have always done this, blowing gaffes that otherwise would not be blown, airing informed opinions that otherwise would not be aired. It is no crime to be a leftist working on a paper or programme that is not left-wing; and many mainstream journalists write very well, not least because practice makes perfect.

The problem is that the Statesman and MT have gone overboard. They very often publish what mainstream journalists are already having printed or broadcast. And it sometimes almost seems as if they are closing their pages to would-be contributors who are not already published elsewhere. The result, particularly when put into the context of the tedious centrist politics of both magazines’ current regimes, is that both feel cliquish, stale and predictable.

Not that the rest of the left press is having a particularly good time. In the six months since :I last wrote one of these columns, Robert Maxwell’s excellent left-of-centre London Daily News has closed — as has Woman’s Review. News on Sunday has struggled from crisis to crisis, avoiding closure only by being taken over by a millionaire. The paper still has not found a distinctive identity. Peace News appears to be on the verge of suspending publication. And the Labour Party has decided to close Labour Weekly and reduce expenditure on New Socialist to the bare minimum.

New Socialist is lucky to survive: the intention had been to close both titles, but it was rescued at the last minute by the National Executive Committee’s acceptance of a plan for the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation to take over production costs in return for the revenue that New Socialist generates. Walworth Road will pick up the bill only for one full-time and one part-time salary, and the magazine will now come out once every two months. Let’s hope Labour Weekly can put together• an equivalent package: with the much heralded policy review about to start, Labour Party News and a bi-monthly New Socialist are hardly enough as official organs for debate about Labour’s future.

By contrast with these tales of disaster and near disaster — all of which should provoke serious thought by the left — New Society seems to have regained much of the vigour it had in the sixties. Just relaunched with a full-colour cover, it is now publishing some of the best and most original political features in the. British press. I don’t like the political line of its editor, David Lipsey (apparently the main centre-right candidate to succeed John Lloyd as editor of the New Statesman); but Lipsey does not stifle the expression of opinions he considers heterodox. New Society has a feel for the texture of everyday life that is rare in left journalism today, and it is not afraid to venture into obscure by-ways now and again for its subject matter and contributors.

Above all, the magazine is a reminder that the best print journalism is not the product of expert interpretation of the big stories on the television news but the result of writers experiencing events and talking to people.

Paul Anderson, review of The Far Left in British Politics by John Callaghan (Blackwell, £7.95), Tribune, 18 September 1987

John Callaghan has written an interesting but flawed left critique of one of the longest-running farces in British left politics: Leninism.

Callaghan begins with the sorry tale of British communism. He relates how, almost from its very beginning, the Communist Party of Great Britain was handicapped by its slavish subordination to the Mosrcow line. Until the Popular Front period of the thirties, Comintern dogma rendered it incapable of building a stable membership base; and the moderate successes of the Popular Front were soon dashed by the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939.

The CP rebuilt itself after 1941 on the back of a revived Popular Frontism based on the wartime alliance of Britain and the Soviet Union; but since 1945 its story has been one of slow, inexorable decline.

With the onset of the Cold War, Stalin tore the party away from the Popular Front tactic; then in 1956 the CP effectively collapsed in the wake of the Nikita Kruschev’s “secret speech” at the 20th Soviet party congress and the “socialist” suppression of a workers’ revolution in Hungary. After that, the party maintained an influence in some trade unions, but even this waned with the onset of recession in the seventies.

In the very recent past, the “Eurocommunists” around Marxism Today have gone a little way towards transcending the legacy of Leninism; but as Callaghan puts it: “The innovators may simply have become masters of a sinking ship.” I can’t help but think that I don’t care if they have: Marxism Today‘s revisionism is too tepid to enthuse about. Not that any of the other currents of British Leninism deserve a better fate. The most important and influential of these is Trotskyism — “57 varieties, all unfit for human consumption”, as the libertarians said in the sixties.

Callaghan gives a reasonably competent account of the split-ridden origins and history of four of the 57: the Healyites (otherwise known as the Socialist Labour League or Workers’ Revolutionary Party, proprietor Gerry Healy); the Cliffites (otherwise known as the International Socialists or Socialist Workers’ Party, proprietor Tony Cliff); the Grantites (otherwise known as the Revolutionary Socialist League or Militant, proprietor Ted Grant); and the group that started out as. the International Marxist Group and became the Socialist League (which, unlike the others, doesn’t really have a proprietor).

There are other Trots, of course; and Callaghan really should have said a little more about the Workers’ Socialist League (which split from the Healyites in 1974 and which, through Socialist Organiser, had a significant impact on Labour left politics in London and student circles) and the Revolutionary Communist Party (the product of a mid-seventies split in IS, with a peculiarly barmy hyper-activism that seems to be selling well today among disaffected university-educated proto-yuppies).

The near-absence of these two gangs from Callaghan’s account, along with his failure to note the continued presence of an influential Healyite entrist presence in the Labour Party (most obviously on the pre-1985 Lambeth Council), makes this book less comprehensive than it could be.

A more serious fault is that Callaghan does not give any evidence of understanding the non-Leninist far Left (local, “alternative”, libertarian, feminist, green and anti-militarist) that has initiated many of the fundamental changes that the British left political agenda has seen in the past 30 years.

A trivial illustration of this is that Callaghan describes the libertarian Marxist group Big Flame as “Trotskyist” (which it never was). More important, he ignores the influence of feminism and the gay movement except insofar as they caused ructions in the IMG and SWP (and were condemned by the WRP and Militant). He does little more than gesture towards the ways in which the non-Leninist far left contributed to the peace movement in the sixties and again in the eighties. He has nothing to say about the impact of the new left in the late fifties and early sixties, the alternative press of the sixties and seventies, the squatting movement, or the development of a radical ecological sensibility from the mid-seventies.

It is easy to explain these omissions: the non-Leninist far left is rather more difficult to follow than the Leninist sects simply because of its heterogeneity. To explain is not to excuse, however. The bizarre political turns of the Leninists make sense only when it is recognised that the CP and the 57 varieties were competing with other forms of (no-less-radical) political expression. Callaghan does give hints that he knows this, but hints are not enough. The history of the far left in Britain (and its quite astonishingly deep influence on the left as a whole) remains to be written.

Paul Anderson, review of Karl Kautsky by Dick Geary (Manchester, £16.50), Tribune, 28 August 1987

Karl Kautsky tried to explain almost everything using a crude and mechanistic Marxism. For a long time, he was Marxism, the chief theorist of German Social Democracy in the two decades before the first world war, when it exercised an unparalleled influence on the Left throughout the world. He was known as the “pope of Marxism”, wielding an authority matched since only by Lenin, Stalin and Mao.

In the end, his “democratic-but-revolutionary” political programme was rather marginalised by events: the first world war, the Russian revolution and the German Social Democrats’ eclipse by Nazism. Today, Kautsky is read mainly by Marxist academics (largely for his thoughts on The Agrarian Question).

Otherwise Kautsky is considered as the “renegade” of Lenin’s polemic — though precisely how he “reneged” is generally unknown. Whatever it may be it is enough for most leftists to consider him “bad”.

But Kautsky is worth a look. He is certainly for the most part dry and boring, but some of what he had to say about left political strategy (if not tactics) is accessible and still interesting, in particular his critique of Leninist putschism.

Dick Geary has written a handy critical “history of ideas” introduction to Kautsky’s thought. He concentrates on Kautsky’s period of greatest influence — which means lots on the “revisionism” and “mass strike” controversies (and more on the nineteenth-century positivist, scientistic roots of Kautsky’s worldview), but not so much on his assessment of the Bolshevik revolution.

This is a pity, because Kautsky’s ideas about Bolshevism are fascinating.
Geary nevertheless manages well in his distillation and critique of acres of prose. His book is in many ways just as provocative as Massimo Salvadori’s exhaustive Karl Kautsky and the Socialist Revolution, even though it is not really trying to compete. For its type — the Fontana Modern Masters extended essay model — it’s really rather good, a reminder that a lot of current left controversies have been around a long time.

Paul Anderson, Tribune, 17 July 1987

According to all the political commentators in the “quality” press, Labour lost the election because of its defence policy.

For the pundits, whose ideas were formed at a time when it seemed that the “special relationship” might last for a thousand years, the idea of Britain opting out of being an “independent” nuclear power was nothing less than incoherent; and the idea that American nuclear bases should be removed was a threat to the Atlantic alliance, which of course had kept the peace for 40 years.

And there the case has rested. During the cam­paign, nobody apart from Denis Healey — in a cou­ple of low-key, deliber­ately unpublicised speeches – bothered to
take on the pundits and their “expert” informants with a coherent defence of Labour policy: the line from the public­ity boys at Walworth Road was simply “if anyone mentions de­fence, change the subject”.

Labour’s defence policy was treated merely as an embarrassment during the campaign – and since election day we have heard little to suggest that it will be treated any differently in future.

All this is little short of a scandal, because the reality is that Labour’s defence policy is not a crazed ultra-left han­gover from the terrible days of insurgent Bennery, an inevitable vote-loser included in the manifesto only to keep the loonies from rebell­ing. It is actually a rational response to what is happening in the world today.

The superpowers are on the verge of wide-ranging arms control agreements, particularly on nuclear weapons in Europe: they are being held back by Margaret Thatcher and her right-wing West European allies.

The Americans are thinking increasingly of withdrawing their troops from Europe. NATO is less united than ever be­fore on a whole range of issues, from Star Wars to chemical weapons. There is a giant “window of opportunity” opening for radical change in trans­atlantic and east-west relations.

On a more populist level, the “special rela­tionship” between Bri­tain and America, long a sick joke for the cognos­centi, is becoming laugh­able for anyone who watches President Reagan and his merry band of soon-to-be-convicted criminal associ­ates on the television news. No one with a brain cell left in opera­tion sees a “special rela­tionship” with Reagan and his cronies as re­motely credible.

Still closer to home, Tory over-spending on the military budget is soon to result in massive, almost random cuts in defence provision.

Perhaps even more im­portant, Britain is no lon­ger a world power – it is a medium-sized European power – and it is well past time for giving up the delusions of imperial grandeur that the British “independent deterrent” represents.

Making a decisive break with the idiocies of Tory defence policy is, in short, perfectly sensible, indeed necessary.

Yet the Labour lead­ership decided to play the “more-Atlanticist-and-more-patriotic-than-thou” card against Thatcher. Labour tried to portray itself as the great friend of America, even after Reagan intervened in the election campaign to support the Tories. (It was left to Edward Heath, of all people, to condemn that particular intervention: the Labour front bench released much hot air in an attempt to explain that Reagan could not have really meant what he said.)

The Labour campaign, insofar as it had any­thing to say about defence policy, emphasised that increasing conven­tional arms expenditure was just what nice Presi­dent Reagan wanted, that British commitment to NATO was uncon­ditional, that Labour would be even better at hamming the Battle of Britain than the Tories.

Perhaps that was the best way of limit­ing the damage in the light of the low-key pre-election defence cam­paign mounted by the party. But why was the pre-­election campaign so low-key? After all, the 1985 Labour conference called for a defence cam­paign and Walworth Road promised for ages that a real effort would be made to put the par­ty’s viewpoint to the peo­ple.

Yet all that happened at the end of last year was the distribution of a handful of glossy packs to journalists and other spe­cialists, while a film on the horror of nuclear war was shown as a party political broadcast, all in the space of about two weeks.

The party policy docu­ment on foreign affairs, essential to make any sense of the defence poli­cy, was given such a half-­hearted launch that it was difficult not to be­lieve that someone, somewhere had decided that it would have been better had it never ex­isted.

The point is this: after 1983, nobody expected that Labour could sail to power with a radical de­fence policy. But many party members expected that, with Neil Kinnock as leader and the old right marginalised or converted, the powers-that-be in the party would make sure that Labour did its bit to persuade the electo­rate that its defence poli­cy was credible (which indeed it is).

That did not happen. The defence campaign mounted by Walworth Road in late 1986 was too little and too late. Throughout the last par­liament, the defence front bench team was too incoherent, too low pro­file, and too little in con­trol of the defence policy agenda to have any im­pact.

Labour told people that the international situa­tion was still the same as in 1949, but that we would defend Britain with only conventional weapons. Voters natural­ly felt that if the threat to the country had not changed, there was little reason to change the basis of defence policy.

In short, we cocked up. Next time, we’ve got to get it right. And that means starting now – not by abandoning the anti-nuclear stance, however much the Labour right would like to, but by making a priority of put­ting the case for a non-nuclear defence policy, in the context of a changing international situation, coherently and convin­cingly to the electorate.

Paul Anderson, review of Selections from Cultural Writings by Antonio Gramsci (Lawrence and Wishart, £6.95), Tribune, 24 April 1987

Antonio Gramsci died 50 years ago at the age of 46, after more than a decade of imprisonment in fascist Italy. The “crime” for which he was imprisoned was communism. He was a founder of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1921, and its leader from 1924 to his arrest (and its near-complete suppression) in 1926.

By the time of his imprisonment he had established a reputation as one of the Italian left’s most incisive thinkers. But his current intellectual standing is based largely on the contents of more than 30 school exercise books he filled with notes while in prison.

The major historical reason for interest in these Prison Notebooks is that an interpretation of some of their passages by Palmiro Togliatti, the post-war leader of the PCI, provided him with the intellectual justification for the parliamentary gradualist course on which he set the PCI — a course that would lead eventually to the “Eurocommunism” of Enrico Berlinguer’s PCI in the seventies.

Togliatti rightly saw that the sudden insurrectionary seizure of power by the classical Leninist party was not on the agenda in Italy, but at the same time sought to make this partial abandonment of Leninism legitimate in Leninist terms. Gramsci posthumously provided the means.

Gramsci had been an exemplary communist intellectual (a martyr, no less) who had never uttered a public word of criticism of the Comintern’s lines. And yet he had argued the heterodox position that, in the developed west, where the ruling class rules more by acquiescence or consent of the ruled than by force, communists should fight not a rapid “war of manoeuvre” to smash the bourgeois state apparatus (as in Russia in 1917) but a sustained “war of position” against the whole ideological basis of the ruling class’s hegemony (rule by consent or acquiescence of the ruled) in civil society.

The role of communists in this “war of position” was to be the “organic intellectuals” of the struggle, raising “national popular” demands to create and lead broad alliances against the ruling class’s hegemony in every walk of life. The politics of culture was every bit as important as the achievement of state power.

There were two roots to Gramsci’s heterodoxy: first, a Hegelian-humanist (and in many ways anti-Leninist) western Marxism (which, outside Italy, had, fallen victim to Comintern intellectual police action in the early twenties); and second, a deep concern with specifically Italian problems, particularly the political and cultural legacy of the nineteenth-century creation of an Italian state.

Unsurprisingly, neither the PCI nor its admirers in the Eurocommununist wing of the British Communist Party and elsewhere have been particularly keen to acknowledge the tensions between Gramsci’s Leninism and his western Marxism – the Bolshevik revolution remains the communist parties’ raison d’etre even today – and opening up a debate that might eventually undermine that raison d’etre is simply not in their interests. On the other hand, the PCI has made much of Gramsci’s concern for the “national popular” in Italian culture, a theme that hitherto has had little influence on the PCI’s British acolytes. Perhaps, though, now that Selections from Cultural Writings is available in paperback, this will change.

Selections from Cultural Writings, most of which consists of extracts from the Prison Notebooks, cotains much that is very much specific to Italy. Anyone looking for a ready-made general Marxist theory of culture will be disappointed by this collection, and anyone unfamiliar and uninterested by Italian intellectual history will find it heavy going.

Nevertheless, the book does give a fascinating insight into Gramsci’s way of interpreting the world; and the admirable editing of David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith makes manageable the task of putting into context Gramsci’s often elliptical and parochial polemics.

The Prison Notebooks extracts in Selections from Cultural Writings are ordered thematically: there’s a chapter on journalism, one on the culture of Italian Catholic reaction, another on popular fiction, and so on. At times, the thematic ordering of the material is jarring: but until an edition of the complete Prison Notebooks appears in English, we’ll just have to put up with that. This book is a reminder that Gramsci deserves more than being mythologised as a secular saint by fans of the modern PCI: he really ought to be read as well.

Paul Anderson, review of Antony and Cleopatra (National Theatre), Tribune, 24 April 1987

Judi Dench plays a superb, sensuous Cleopatra in the National’s Antony and Cleopatra; so say all the critics, and, for a change, they’re right in their unanimity. They also like Michael Bryant’s worldweary Enobarbus and Tim Piggott-Smith’s icy, mean Octavius — and they’re right there too.

Anthony Hopkins’ Antony, by contrast, has had a mixed press. Some love him; others hate him. For my taste, he is more suited to the part than he is to Lear(whom he’s playing in the same theatre), but is so consistently boisterous that he becomes tedious. I wouldn’t go for him if I were Cleopatra — which of course I’m not.

But don’t let that put you off. Peter Hall’s is an excellent production that should not be missed. It seems almost a no-nonsense staging of the play: it doesn’t feel like dry-ice-plus-incredible-stage-machinery Shakespeare, even though it makes liberal use of dry ice and has large mobile crumbling colonnades that trundle across the stage at the end of every scene.

Pride of place is given to the narrative thrust of the story (it’s played at lightning speed) and to the actors’ interpretation of the words Shakespeare gives to his characters. Even the costumes are designed not to jar: they’re a twentieth-century version of late renaissance, easing the audience into putting the play into the historical context in which it was written.

The absence of half-thought-out affectations gives a commonsense feel to the production — no doubt one reason for the sympathetic reviews it has received.

Paul Anderson, review of Sylvia Pankhurst: Porait of a Radical by Patricia Romero (Yale, £17.50), Tribune, 10 April 1987

Patricia Romero first came across Sylvia Pank­hurst as a name on an impressive tomb in Addis Ababa. Romero writes that “as a feminist” she was enthralled by Pankhurst’s enthusiasm for the Ethio­pian monarchy in the period from the thirties to her death in 1960. She decided to write a monograph on Pankhurst’s years in Ethiopia – but found that she couldn’t do that without understanding Pankhurst’s earlier lives: “the anti-fascist of the early thirties, the communist of the early twenties, and the suffragette and socialist of the nineteen-tens”. Hence this biography.

The problem Romero found, as she more or less admits, was that the Sylvia Pankhurst she felt she had to understand wasn’t half as interesting to her as she had hoped. Romero seems to have become first infuriated and then bored by her subject, and the result is a strangely unsympathetic and at times crass piece of work.

The crassness is nowhere more apparent than in the treatment of Pankhurst’s “communist years” (roughly 1917-24). For most of this period, Pankhurst was the most prominent representative in Britain of a spontaneist, anti-parliamentarian, revolutionary council communism. Inspired by the Bolshevik revolution, Pankhurst was a prime mover in the creation of a British Communist Party and participated in several founding meetings of the Third International in Europe. She and her political allies nevertheless gave voice to beliefs deeply rooted in the strong working-class “rebel culture” that had grown up in Britain during the early years of the century through a whole series of political struggles (and which has been rediscovered by Shiela Rowbotham and others).

Perhaps because of this rootedness in domestic radicalism, Pankhurst’s welcome for the Bolshevik revolution cooled rapidly as she became critical of the Russian communist leaders’ imposition of political strategies and organisational structures on western communists operating in conditions quite unlike those faced by the Bolsheviks in pre-revolutionary Russia.

She was particularly critical of the way the Third International advocated parliamentarianism and affi­liation of the British communists to the Labour Party, and her paper Workers’ Dreadnought increasingly became the English language mouthpiece for left communist critics of the International’s “centrism” and “Bolshevisation”, including Gyorgy Lukacs, Amadeo Bordiga, Herman Gorter and Anton Pannekoek.

For her pains, she was attacked by Lenin in Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, and even­tually expelled from the Communist Party for refusing to accept party discipline. She kept Workers’ Dread­nought going for a while, and was involved in attempts to create a left-communist Fourth Interna­tional (which, contrary to Romero, had no­thing whatsoever to do with Trotsky), but in 1924 – broke, exhausted and disillusioned – she retired from the revolutionary left political scene.

Romero first of all fails to understand the British political context of Pankhurst’s actions in this period, goes on to fail to understand the international context, and camouflages her failings with some sloppy pop psychology. She quite apparently feels intuitively that Pankhurst’s left communism was wrong (which it may well have been) but has neither the inclination nor the expertise to get to grips with it, let alone give convincing reasons for her judgment.

Which is not to say that untangling the politics of the British revolutionary left in the period after the Great War is an easy task, or that the history of twenties left communism in Europe isn’t complex. But secondary texts that fill in the necessary back­ground are available – Walter Kendall’s The Revolutionary Left in Britain and Russell Jacoby’s Dialectic of Defeat for starters – and it is scandalous that a professional historian has failed to consult them. Perhaps the moral is simbply that you shouldn’t write lives of people you find rather tiresome.

Paul Anderson, review of Macbeth by William Shakespeare (Royal Shakespeare Company, Barbican), Tribune, 10 April 1987

There are moments when Adrian Noble’s Macbeth comes alive, but they are few and far between in a pedestrian production.

Noble has decided to interpret the play as the story of the psychological dislocation caused to Macbeth by the frustration of his desire to have children (and thereby form a dynasty). He shifts the centre of the play’s gravity away from the initial regicide to the murder of Lady Macduff and her babes, and makes much of the cooling of passion between Mr and Mrs Macbeth.

I got the idea that the pair would never have got themselves into this awful mess if they’d concentrated on sex instead of getting ambitions beyond their station. Or perhaps they could have benefited from the services of a surrogate mother.

Jonathan Pryce plays Macbeth as a little man dominated by the voices in his head, a suitable case for treatment rather than a lucid human agent wrestling unsuccessfully with the moral implications of his actions. What Pryce does he does well, but it doesn’t really seem to be Macbeth: to turn Macbeth’s need for authority into a matter of individual psychosis might be very twentieth century, but it’s hardly what Shakespeare intended.

Apart from Pryce, the cast is mostly unremarkable. Sinead Cusack’s Lady Macbeth complements Pryce’s Macbeth (which is hardly a compliment); the witches (Dilys Laye, Susan Porrett and Anna Patrick) are weird and unconvincing; and Peter Guiness’s Macduff is adequate. The set is impressive and the staging well done (with the seige of Dunsinane particularly spectacular). But that’s not really enough to detract from the production’s basic failings.