The Comrade from Milan
By Rossana Rossanda
Pubs Verso
Hdbck £29.99
400 pages

Rossana Rossanda, now in her eighties, was a leading Italian communist for over half a century. She was expelled from the party in 1969 because of her opposition to the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. She went on to found the renowned Italian left newspaper Il Manifesto and has been a regular contributor to New Left Review.
Born into an impoverished lower middle class family in the 1920s on the Italian-Yugoslav border, she grew up in a protective and apolitical family and politics only entered her life during her university studies and, in 1943, she joined the underground Italian resistance to fascism. After the war she worked in many positions in the party, and rose to become a member of its central committee.

Her autobiography is a history of those turbulent times in Italy, a vivid portrayal; of the communist movement and at the same time, but more importantly, an interrogation of her own past in the context of that wider historical tapestry. However she doesn’t use a broad brush but filters this process through her own personal experience. As a convinced communist she is understandably more concerned with the mistakes and weaknesses of the movement than dealing with the machinations and political tactics of the movement’s opponents. Thus many sentences are questions, rather than answers.

The Italian party tried to steer its own course. As the largest western communist party it was on the threshold of power for over 40 years; only the machinations of the Catholic Church and USA prevented the party forming a government. The party’s powereful position and strength made it almost part of the establishment and this, in the end, led to a certain complacency and accommodation with the status quo. The party also refused to submit to Moscow’s centralised control and hegemony, albeit behind the scenes. She underlines how the Italian Communist Party was undoubtedly a strong democratising force in post-war Italy, and was also instrumental in drawing up the new post-fascist constitution.

Rossana addresses issues that every politically-engaged person has to face: how far am I responsible for what happens in my lifetime? ‘The dividing line between what we are and what we are made into,’ she writes, ‘is very thin.’
She asks herself how she could have been ignorant of or ignored what was happening in the Soviet Union under Stalin, the Czech show trials and the Hungarian uprising.

During the fascist period and throughout the whole latter half of the twentieth century, life was messy, not black and white, there were few genuine heroes – factors undoubtedly true for any historical period. But, she writes, at that time the communists stood out: ‘Being a communist meant belonging to the most resolute party’.

She says, of her decision to join and stay with the communists: ‘They were the only ones who rejected the inevitability of inhuman behaviour’. Her own humanity and genuine identifiaction with working people shimmers through this honest account. It is an informative, provocative and fascinating read, as well as a valuabel contribution to the hsitory of the communist movement. The translation, too, is excellent, although there are instances of mis-translation and sloppy editing which can sometimes lead to confusion.
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Letter to Guardian on misuse of langauge by USA (not published)
20 December 2010

Dear Sir

So, ‘WikLeaks founder is high-tech terrorist,’ says Biden (Guardian 20 December). Even by the most elastic definition, ‘terrorism’ involves the imposition of extreme fear on a person or population, through the threat of dire consequences and violence. By no stretch of the imagination can the release of confidential diplomatic exchanges be construed in this way. Biden’s comments are another irresponsible attempt by the US to conceal its anti-humanitarian policies, along with its use of other Orwellian terms like ‘extraordinary rendition’ for illegal kidnapping, ‘coercive counterintelligency’ for torture and ‘humanitarian intervention’ for the invasion of other countries etc. Bernard Shaw memorably said that the USA and Britain were two nations divided by a common language, and that has never been truer. But, what is even more serious is that we are now divided by our concepts of morality.

Unpublished letter to Guardian after its attack on Unite Gen Sec Len McCluskey

Dear Sir



The Guardian leader (Leading Nowhere 20 Dec. 2010) compares Unite’s newly elected General Secretary, Len McClusky with being ‘like the Bourbons who have learned nothing and forgotten everything’. A more appropriate historical comparison would be of the leader writer with Neville Chamberlain who thought he could appease a determined, ideologically-motivated dictator. How does the Guardian propose that trade unions and the many ordinary people should fight the present draconian cuts that were singularly absent in the coalition parties’ manifestos? With a trade union movement more shackled by restrictive legislation than any other in the western world, outside the USA and the immediate threat of thousands losing their jobs, a roof over their head and many other financial blows, a wait-and-see attitude by the trade unions would be to to submit.

In McClusky Britain has a trade union leader prepared to work with others to seriously challenge government policies that have not been approved by the electorate and if fully implemented threaten to destroy what is left of the social fabric of this country after Thatcher’s onslaught.

WikiLeaks – champion of the truth
The release of 251, 287 United States embassy cables by WikiLeaks is the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain. The documents are giving people around the world an unprecedented insight into the policies and activities abroad of the US government. WikiLeaks is a non-profit media organization dedicated to bringing important news and information to the public. The cables, which date from 1966 up until the end of February this year, contain confidential communications between 274 embassies in countries throughout the world and the State Department in Washington.
Unbelievably a lone, lowly-ranked US soldier - Private First Class Bradley Manning – pretended to sing along to Lady Gaga songs while downloading thousands of classified documents from military computers. He was then able to pass these on to WikiLeaks. He was an intelligence analyst, and had access to an amazing amount of sensitive data.
According to friends, Manning was frustrated because of a career that he perceived was in a rut as well as with his personal life. Manning—who grew up in Oklahoma and then moved to Wales as a teenager — reportedly was teased and bullied at school because of his sexuality. However, his prime motivation seems to have been altruistic; he asked for no financial reward for the information. After reading some of these documents he felt so strongly that they should be in the public domain and so decided to leak them.
Despite the incandescent rage in Washington, the documents don’t reveal anything that could really endanger people’s lives or national security. What they do, though, is to show up the duplicity and cynical subterfuge of leading politicians and governments. The fact that Putin’s Russia is largely run by a business mafia or that there is widespread worry about Pakistan’s nuclear programme and that the country’s security services have close links to the Taliban are hardly revelatory. The documents also reveal that the spineless British government bowed to US pressure to let it keep its cluster bombs on British territory despite an Act of Parliamentary banning them. And it reveals the political interference of Mervyn King, the Governor of the Bank of England, despite his supposed political neutrality. OK, not earth-shattering titbits; in fact only items of high-level gossip, but highly damaging nevertheless to the ruling elites.
WikiLeaks’ founder, the Australian Julian Assange, has now been put on Interpol’s ‘most wanted’ list as a result of his publishing these documents. Coincidentally, he is also wanted in Sweden on a probably trumped up charge of rape. Freedom of information is clearly not meant to be taken seriously, particularly, in the USA, the land of freedom, where the WikiLeaks site, hosted by Amazon, has now been removed from the web as a result of pressure from the administration. But Amazon now faces a backlash from free speech campaigners, who say it should be punished with a boycott at what is its busiest trading period of the year. There is also a demand by backwoodsmen in the Republican Party for Assange to be executed for treason.
Only a short while ago WikiLeaks was lauded as a beacon of freedom. It won a number of awards, including the 2008 Economist New Media Award In June 2009, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange won an Amnesty International’s UK Media Award for its 2008 publication, Kenya: The Cry of Blood – Extra Judicial Killings and Disappearances, about police killings in Kenya. In May this year, the New York Daily News listed WikiLeaks first in a ranking of ‘websites that could totally change the news’, and it’s certainly done that.
In April 2010, WikiLeaks posted video of an incident in 2007 in which Iraqi civilians were killed by US forces. In July of the same year, it released Afghan War Diary, a compilation of more than 76,900 documents about the war there. In October, the group released a package of almost 400,000 documents called ‘Iraq War Logs’ in coordination with major media organisations. It is no wonder the US government is after his scalp.
Julian Assange is now in hiding in Britain and the demands by the USA for his extradition should be vehemently rejected. Far from being a criminal, he should be celebrated as a most courageous journalist and publisher, more deserving of a Nobel Prize than being put in jail. He has done more to disclose the obsessive secretivity of governments and the blatant distortion of the truth by mainstream media. It is essential for everyone who values truth and openness to defend Assange and WikiLeaks from the bloodhounds now salivating for the kill.
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Contribution to Compass/New Statesman debate on the way forward
This is a very useful contribution to the ongoing debate about the way out of the crisis. But I feel, in suggesting solutions, it falls short of what is needed. The term socialism, like communism, has been so degraded and misused during the last and present centuries, that even adding the prefix ‘New’ (also a term that has been thoroughly eroded) can hardly save it. Socialism does need a redefinition, but Harris and Lawson seem to be using it as a synonym for ‘Social Democracy’. If it has to have meaning at all it has to be defined in contradistinction to capitalism not as capitalism with a human face. Any attempt to ‘manage’ or ‘regulate’ capitalism is doomed to failure as past experience has clearly shown, even if amelioration of the system’s raw brutality can be achieved, it is always only temporary.
Capitalism in its present guise is supra- and trans-national and involves interests more powerful than the world has ever experienced. These powerful interests are able to buy up governments and corrupt peoples with ease. Only by neutralising these powerful individuals and companies and restoring some form of national autonomy, will we be able to begin rebuilding our societies along more just, egalitarian and sustainable lines.
As the recent upsurge of opposition to the cuts has shown, there are many people out there, including the ‘self-centred and solipsistic’ youth, who are willing to actively oppose government cuts.
The Labour Party is impotent at present because its policies were and are only slightly less draconian than those of the Con-Dems. What is not being addressed is the deeper underlying reasons for the present chronic illness of capitalism because, as the authors say, there is also a lack of intellectual debate and an understanding of the mechanisms of economics and social change.
I completely agree with the two authors that any idea of a rerun of a party-imposed or top-down form of socialism is a non-starter. I also feel that any idea of the state playing a leading role in any transformation is misguided, although it will have to play a contributory role in the interim.
I welcome this debate, but it needs to be widened to involve left intellectuals, trade unions and other Left and Green parties.

See my recent interview with Prof. Eric Swyngedouw on the idea of resuscitating the ‘hypothesis of communism’: http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/97726

The Tea Party phenomenon

The recent mid-term elections in the USA were a predictable setback for the Obama administration, but what has been the most significant aspect has been the rise of the Tea Party. This supposedly grass-roots organisation has been ridiculed by the Left and a number of its leading lights lampooned as clowns, but it deserves to be taken more seriously. I know we are in a completely different historical context, but its rise, not disimilar to that of its less dangerous UKIP counterpart here, has resonances with the rise of Hitler ad the fascists in Germany.
Hitler and his nutters were also seen as extremist outsiders to begin with, but with a deepening economic crisis and a bankrupt political system, the ruling elite soon tunred to the nazis as saviours.

Today we are in a similar situation. The world capitalist economy is in total disarray and the future highly uncertain. The general public has lost faith in traditional parties. However, rather than directing their ire at the capitalist system itself, the business-owned media has cleverly manipulated opinion and diverted blame to individuals and governments. So we blame Brown or Obama and ‘big government’. This lets the real cuplrits – the banks and multi-national conglomerates – off the hook.

In the USA, Fox News’s extremist anchor man, Glenn Beck recently made the same comparison, saying that the current situation is similar that of the Weimar Republic in Germany. He said he had spoken with his ‘deep throat’ in the White House and this guy told him: "Glenn, everybody I know is reading about the Weimar Republic.” He said, “the money that is being pumped in is staggering and I don't know how we'll ever pull that money back." He added, “we're all reading the Weimar Republic”.

Mark Fisher in his must-read book, 'Capitalist Realism – is there no alterntive?' explains very clearly how the ruling class has been able to shift blame from the capitalist system onto government. How it is also manipulting the war on terror and whipping up fear of outside terrorists to divert attention from the real economic terrorositrs who threaten our planet.

The Tea Party movement is known as the tea party because members compare themselves to American colonists who revolted in a tax dispute with Britain in 1773 and emptied barrels of tea from British ships into Boston Harbour rather than pay taxes on it. This is a very populist image, harking back to US founding history.
But the modern Tea Party is far removed from the popular, grass-roots uprising that it is portrayed by the media. It is a movement motivated by hate, fear and prejudice. Its racist and vitriolic hatred of a black president also underpins those feelings.

How has this ‘grass-roots’ movement grown so quickly and how is it financed? The money to support Tea party candidates, Jane Mayer (New Yorker magazine) and others report, comes through such conservative organizations as Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks. FreedomWorks is a conservative group led by former House Republican leader Richard Armey. Armey’s group has its own influential network, and has supported Tea Party candidates. FreedomWorks is is a top down organization, based in Washington – hardly grass roots.

The Christian Science Monitor says: ‘The tea party movement may have all the appearance of being genuinely grassroots, but just beneath the surface are professional fund-raisers, foundations, and political action committees – some of which have been around for years – pushing a conservative-libertarian agenda.’
In the recent investigative report in the New Yorker magazine, quoted above, Jane Mayer details the links between billionaire industrialists David and Charles Koch and the tea party movement. She writes:
"By giving money to 'educate,' fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, said, 'The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who [care] about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.' With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, 'everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there – people who can provide real ideological power.' The Kochs, he said, are 'trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.'"

Another major source of tea party funding is the Tea Party Express, which poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into the successful GOP primary senate campaigns of Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Joe Miller in Alaska. The Tea Party Express is a group formed by a long-time California Republican consultant that has raised more than $5 million and financed about $2 million in advertising to help candidates. The organization is an offshoot of a political action committee created to support John McCain’s Republican presidential run in 2008. The Tea Party Express is run by Sal Russo, a Republican fund raiser and public relations guru who began his career working for Reagan. Russo is also the chief strategist for “Our Country Deserves Better,” a political action committee (PAC) formed to defeat Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

“As a pivotal player in the ‘tea party’ movement, Russo has helped drive its cause by raising millions of dollars and crafting caustic ads about its opponents,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “There's no question that Tea Party Express, the political action committee Russo runs out of his Sacramento-based firm, is the advertising muscle behind the tea party insurgency.... As the only tea party group making significant advertising buys, Tea Party Express has become one of the most potent forces in the protest movement.”

Our Country Deserves Better, another right-wing organisation backing the Tea Party, launched the first Tea Party Express bus tour last year, and raised and spent just over $1 million in the 2008 campaign year. So far in 2010, it’s raised and spent more than $5 million. Large chunks of that went to the GOP primary campaigns of tea party favorites Christine O’Donnell ($237,000) and Joe Miller (nearly $600,000).
So much political funding in the US comes from anonymous donors or is channelled through innocuous-sounding organisations. The problem for those trying to ferret out where the money comes from – and for Obama and Democrats as they seek to toughen campaign finance reporting in the wake of the Citizens United court decision – is that it’s getting harder to do so.

“Federal campaign spending by groups other than candidates and parties in this election cycle has far outpaced similar spending from the last mid-term election and could rival the 2008 presidential campaign,” the New York Times reports. “But with recent decisions by the Supreme Court and the Federal Elections Commission, it has become harder to know whose dollars they are.”

The reason the Tea Party has been even more successful in the USA than UKIP here is that the economic crisis is much deeper in the USA and the election of a progressive black president has put frighteners on the business elite and red-neck sections of the population. This elite has found it quite easy to tap into the fears and prejudices of ordinary Americans, particularly the disaffected, poor working class and small business people. The parallels with pre-Hitler Germany are alarming.
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Looking For The Grave Of Garcia Lorca
release date: Oct 2010
Label: Vida
EGEA Distribution in association with Spitz Records.
Looking for the Grave of Garcia Lorca is the latest album by London-based singer-song-writer Joe Wilkes, and dedicated to the Spanish poet Garcia Lorca, killed by Franco’s fascists during the Civil War in 1936. Wilkes is a great admirer of his poetry and clearly his politics too.

Wilkes is an accomplished acoustic guitar player in the Bert Jansch mould and a gravelly-voiced troubadour. As you can hear from these songs, his politics are firmly Left, but he doesn’t use them as a vehicle for propaganda or political pamphlets. They are deeply personal and his politics only emerge, through the fissures, in the odd word or phrase.

It’s difficult to categorise Wilkes’s music – part blues, a dash of Dylan, part country/folk and, in its instrumental mix, has at times a chamber music or free jazz quality, but it all bears the unmistakable stamp of Joe Wilkes himself.

The title track - Looking for the Grave of Garcia Lorca – is hauntingly evocative: ‘you can’t hide the truth; it’ll come out in the rain’.

In Settling the Score the singer contemplates the legacy of Wat Tyler’s peasant revolt after visiting Blackheath and the song has the militant refrain: ‘What happened back then we’re going to see some more and next time we’ll settle the score’

Unlike many of his contemporaries, he sticks vehemently to acoustic instrumentation and aural under- rather than over-statement. When you read the amazing mix of instruments used on this album - organ, flute, oboe, cor Anglais, violin, viola, cello, harmonica, clarinet and sax as well as guitar – you image an almighty cacophony, but the players are all extremely competent and their interweaving so well mixed that it all comes together as a smooth texture, underlining and complementing the vocals. A cracking album.