Edward Upward- Farewell to a Gentle Man.

I wish to say farewell to the writer, teacher, and communist Edward Upward who has died recently in Pontefract at the remarkable age of 105, which adds further to my theory that all these active politically committed comrades seem to have quite long lives . I see that there have been a number of serious obituaries about him most notably the one in The Times. There has also been a good obituary to Edward in The Guardian , one that deals with his political commitment with the greatest clarity is that which appears in the Morning Star

I wish to merely record how it was in rather bizarre circumstances that my path crossed with that of Edward Upward. The remarkable thing was that the day that I met him 1981 I had just the previous night finished reading the third volume of the dialectical triad 'The Spiral Ascent' so it was rather like finding oneself talking face to face with the main character from the book that you have just finished reading, which was a little surreal, I also met his wife Hilda who is of course a key figure in the novels, which does not try too hard to pretend that the characters are all fictional, it is clear that the three volumes, 'In the Thirties' 'The Rotten Elements' and 'No Home but the Struggle' were all pretty close to auto-biographical.
Anyway I was selling a quire of the Morning Star in Kings Heath high street in Birmingham with a girlfriend and comrade. I was approached by a well spoken elderly man in navy blue corduroy cap, who stood looking at me and said after a while...'I used to do that a lot'...fearing he was a'nutter' or at best a current opponent , I ignored him...He repeated the comment and added "my wife and I used to do that an awful lot you know"...convinced now that he was indeed 'a nutter' of some sort I asked him what he was on about and he started to chuckle..I then realised he was having a bit of sport with me..'selling the Daily Worker of course, you two remind me so much of us at that age'..Well a conversation commenced and I as it happened just happened to mention that I had just finished reading an excellent triad of novels about life in the CPGB in the 30's and 40's which I supposed, he being an elderly former CP member might find of interest. He started to laugh once again and said...'really now what were those books called?' and asked me to tell him more about them. At length I twigged that he knew about them and in a while he revealed that he was the author, this was getting very very bizarre.... He invited us back to his son's house 'for tea and cakes', his son was a lecturer at Birmingham and is since sadly now deceased also . I was charmed by Edward Upward's gentle humour and his wonderful diction and beautifully precise speech. I was also fascinated by his life story and his encyclopedic experience of the literary world. He told a hilarious tale about going to the Woolfs home in Bloomsbury for a meal and to be given his cheque for a contribution he had written for their journal. Virginia instructed hubby to draw up the cheque but Upward recalled, ' it visibly pained him, and his hand shook and his face was agonised as he slowly drew out the cheque, at long last, reluctantly handing it to me before I left for home'...he also recollected his close association with the likes of Auden, and Spender, the latter he was scathing about for his political conversion to the right and his association with a CIA sponsored magazine in his latter years. Christopher Isherwood he spoke of with great warmth though. On another occasion I, forgetting precisiely his age, asked him had he known Burgess or Philby et al..he said ' oh no...I had long left Cambridge before they came up'...a comment which emphasised to me his extraordinary longevity...he was already the senior member of the group consisting of Auden, Spender and Isherwood at that stage and they regarded him as THEIR mentor. I am glad to say, that with the exception of a gap in the 1990's which was my fault, we maintained contact until he moved to Pontefract from his beloved Isle of Wight. He liked greatly the retrospective of his life which I wrote about him in in the Morning Star,which I was particularly pleased succeeded in appearing on his 100th birthday, He joked to me that it felt a little like a sort of 'rehabilitation'. He would talk at length about a wide range of subjects, and never lost the political edge that his grasp of Marxism and Leninism afforded him.He was convinced that the US 'empire' was in terminal decline, drawing parallels in his conversations with me to the fate of the Roman Empire. He had an utter contempt for Tony Blair, who he referred to only as 'Toady Blair'..I thought at first that he had a slight head cold when he said this first , but after the joke was repeated a number of times, I realised it was not just a humorous play on words but a studied insult that he delighted in.
The last thing he asked me to do was to take down a message from him to be written into the memorial book on his behalf at the visitors book at the museum to the International Brigade in Spain, which I did. I was honoured to have met him, I am pleased that I will be able to continue to read his wonderful novels and short stories long after his passing...I am convinced that his stature as a writer will continue to grow long after his death, I also believe that much of the negative criticism of his literature was in fact a literary and critical form of political opposition to his chosen form of creativity, and of course a dismissal and a contemptuous dismissal at that, of any attempt to employ the socialist realist or written documentary form. A dismissal that was primarily political in its motivation, in reaction of course to the profoundly political issues raised by his writings and his aesthetic sensibilities themselves. Whilst he did indeed suffer from writers block, it is wrong to ascribe this to his embracing of Marxism. On the contrary in the conversations I had with him he was always clear that it had been his political commitment which had saved him from the powerlessness which could so easily, he knew, slump into depression.Upward related that, "in those days, even using the word 'capitalism' was enough to damn you, so not much was said. But I carried on my political work in the evenings selling the Daily Worker, and politics was my salvation. I was miserable and couldn't have borne the life of a teacher without it."

My memories of him are warm, he contributed something of value to my life, and I am grateful to him for that, he allowed me to understand some of my own feelings about the nature of political commitment, and how it can be redemptive, he was most interested when I told him that I was very struck by the phrase he created as the title of his third novel 'No Home But the Struggle' since I felt that it rang a chord with me, he knew exactly what Iwas driving at. I fear that so many of the literary critics will never really understand that sentiment either, since it is in fact alien to their own experience. I believe that he is home now. SALUD!

Bob Doyle- the last Irish International Brigader- SALUD!

I had the honour of meeting the late Bob Doyle on two seperate occasions, the first time was at the commemoration to the end of the battle of the Ebro at Corbera del Ebro a few years ago. The last time was when in 2005 he unveiled the commemorative monument to his dear IRA friend and comrade Kit Conway in the small Tipperary village of Burncourt County Tipperary. Bob was the last surviving Irish combatant on the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War when he died.
Bob Doyle passed away in London on Thursday, aged 92, after a short illness.
Doyle was born in Dublin on February 12, 1916, shortly before the Easter Rising, and became politically active himself in the 1930s, joining the IRA after being beaten up in street fights with the Blueshirts which left him with permanent damage in one eye.
But he quickly became more interested in social issues and, in 1937, decided to volunteer for the International Brigade, motivated in part by the fact that his former flat-mate Kit Conway had been killed in action at the Battle of Jarama on Doyle's 21st birthday.
He was foiled in his initial attempts, arrested and expelled from Valencia after he had stowed away on a boat. Undeterred, he eventually made it back to Spain later that year by crossing the Pyrenees.
Initially deployed to train new volunteers, as a result of his IRA experience, he disobeyed orders in order to join a group heading for the front line. After engaging in battle at Belchite, he was taken prisoner by Italian fascist troops on the Aragon front in March 1938, along with Irish International Brigade leader Frank Ryan.
He was imprisoned for 11 months in a concentration camp established in the disused monastery of San Pedro, near Burgos, where he was regularly tortured by Spanish fascist guards and interrogated by the German Gestapo and, once, taken out to be shot.
Released as part of a prisoner exchange deal, Doyle enlisted in the British Merchant Navy for the duration of the Second World War before settling in London with his Spanish wife Lola.
Active until the very end, Doyle was a regular visitor to both his native Ireland and to Spain for International Brigade commemorations and, in 1996, along with all other survivors of the Brigades, was offered Spanish citizenship. He delivered his last speech at the rededication of Belfast’s International Brigade memorial on November 8.
He published an account of his experiences in Brigadista – An Irishman's Fight Against Fascism in June 2006, launched by Michael D Higgins and Ronnie Drew.
Since Michael O'Riordan's passing in May of that year, Doyle had been the last surviving Irish combatant in the International Brigade
Bob Doyle is survived by his sons Bob and Julian, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

FUNERAL ARRANGEMENTS FOR THE LATE BOB DOYLE...

Bob’s Funeral will be held in LONDON at GOLDERS GREEN CREMATORIUM, HOOP LANE NW11 on Tuesday, 10th February, at 11.00 a.m.

The family have requested no flowers, but donations in Bob’s memory to be sent to the International Brigade Memorial Trust, which is very good of them.

Following that, family members plan to come to Dublin where on Sat 14th Feb we will
celebrate the lives of Bob and his comrades of the International Brigades, starting at
12 noon from the Garden of Remembrance, Parnell Square,proceeding down O'Connell Street, and turning left along the Liffey to Liberty Hall, where a wreath will be laid at the plaque with the names of 60 Irish Brigaders who died in Spain.

Liberty Hall is booked , in the centre of Dublin, for a reception, with speeches,
songs and music, hopefully a film or two, and the gathering of all the many friends and
relatives of Bob and his comrades. Speakers from Madrid are expected, and we ask
all coming to bring your banners.

Please pass on this message to all interested,


No Pasarán

Courageous Palestinian Girl faces down Israeli Goons

Incredible footage out of Gaza that shows Huwaida Arraf, a young Palestinian girl - who has the advantage of speaking perfect English - standing between two Israeli goons and a crowd of demonstrators. The zionist soldiers clearly don't know what to do as the TV cameras are on them.

Whats the betting that if they hadn't been there then this girl would probably be as dead as the countless thousands of other Palestinians who have lost their lives since Israel was established through in effect the theft of lands owned and occupied by the indigenous Palestinian people

We don't get to see many heroines these days so if you want to know what one looks like, just glance at the face in the photograph on the left.

Gaza...Campaigners Condemn the Israeli Violence

The violent actions by the Israeli government arouse nothing but disgust and sadness in me. Once again, in the absence of a countervailing political and economic power to deter such actions, Israel, the viscious cats-paw of US imperialism, can act with apparent impunity against defenceless Palestinian civilians,women, children, the elderly. Claiming that they are 'targeting' their air-borne rocket and bomb and artillery violence, in one of the most densely populated places in earth is quite simply ludicrous ...I have no doubt that in the absence of a progressive counter-weight, as once was represented by the USSR, that the zionists will continue their aggression unrestrained.



Only popular mass action, through boycotts and protest can slow this murderous juggernaut.
Every time the Israeli bombers drop explosives on innocents in Gaza, they dishonour the memories of the innocents killed in the nazi holocaust. They have become their own worst nightmare, and what is most disturbing...is that they appear to be unaware of the brutal similarities between themselves and the inhuman heartless beasts who tormented and cruelly murdered so many of their ancestors.

A Happy Soviet Christmas To One and All !

'A bit of fun for the time of year thats in it, and of course wishing all the regular readers of Unrepentant' a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year in 2009, thanks also to those who nominated this blog into the top 100 political blogs here , I have no idea who ran the chart and was unaware of its existence until someone told me about it, but thanks anyway. The blog is regularly attracting a goodly amount of traffic from around the globe, and thanks for all those of you have commented on the variety of postings put up by my angelic self over the year.

Its sometimes forgotten that in the USSR there was a whole festive period focussed around the New Year, this is further complicated by the fact the Russian Orthodox 'Christmas' is of course celebrated later than the western worlds.But this is not simply a product of official atheism under of Soviet times -- even in tsarist times, New Year's was the day associated with decorated trees, ''Santa,'' and the exchanging of gifts, because Christmas was not a festive holy day for Russian Orthodox Christianity. (Which, of course, observes Christmas in early January, since Eastern Orthodoxy never switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.)

I'm not sure when the "New Year's Tree" custom developed in Russia, though it wouldn't surprise me if, like most non-Germans, they got the idea via Queen Victoria, who popularized what had been a strictly German custom in honor of her German husband.

I did receive quite a few Soviet Christmas/New year cards in the 1980's, but I like most other people I suppose dumped them. I was interested to find that there is now a band of Soviet christmas memorabilia collectors, who make a hobby of collecting the old Soviet Christmas cards of the past. I can understand why, they were always well designed, beautifully coloured and were as full of christmassy kitsch as anything on offer in the West. One such collector is Boris Glazer lives in Ekaterinburg, Russia. When asked how he began his soviet christmas card collection he said

"As always, it began in childhood. New Year in the Soviet Union was the only official holiday not connected with communist ideology. In those days, it was the main winter holiday--a mix of Christmas and New Year. The Christmas Tree was substituted with New Year Tree. The star on its top was considered as the small sister of the Kremlin stars. But it did not spoil an atmosphere of a holiday, fun, kindness, and hope. In those days, when even telephone was not in each family, people congratulated each other with postcards. My grandmother had a lot of relatives in all corners of the USSR and they actively exchanged congratulations. When she passed away, there were few hundreds cards left after her which gave a start to my collection. The collection gradually grew and replenished, and later, when I was engaged in graphic design and programming, one of my projects consist in creation of a mosaic from New Year's cards. The part from these scanned cards can be seen on my site....My favorite cards are from '50s. It is the time of blossoming of socialist realism in the USSR. I very much like these detailed realistic images. And my wife loves cards from '60s when images became more abstract and flat. These were the times of the Iron Curtain and the first space flights. The postcards of that period combine a nice (sometimes "international" looking) drawing style with Russian national fairytale characters and impudent Soviet propaganda. Good old soviet kitsch!..."
Interesting to see that the New Year was a time for children and families greeting each other in the USSR too , fulfilling a similar role as Christmas in the western world today, also interesting to observe that as was the case with many many aspects of Soviet life, there was space given for fun and festivities in contrast to the image of unremitting gloom which is the stereotypical image of Soviet life we are all expected to believe to this day....

Have a Wonderful Christmas and a Peaceful 2009 !

Brian Cowen Does NOT Respect the Irish Peoples Choice on Lisbon

Taoiseach Brian Cowen's hypocrisy in pretending to "respect" the people's referendum vote on Lisbon is now evident, for not a jot or tittle of Lisbon will be altered when he forces the people to vote on it a second time next year.

Political Declarations or promises regarding future Treaties that are not yet even drafted will not alter a comma of the Lisbon Treaty.If people vote Yes in Lisbon Two to exactly the same Treaty which they voted No to last June they will be changing the Irish Constitution so as to recognise the supremacy of the law of the new Union which Lisbon would establish over anything contrary, whether in the Irish Constitution or in political Declarations and promises that might be tacked on to Lisbon.

No political Declarations or promises about commitments and even Protocols in future EU Treaties can change Lisbon or the supremacy of the EU Court of Justice in interpreting that Treaty's provisions. These will have come into force well before any further EU Treaty or Treaties will even be negotiated.

If the Irish media and public opinion allow themselves to be taken in by the kind of presentational trickery Taoiseach Cowen and his Government are now planning, they could be making themselves the laughing stock of Europe.

A promise by the 27 EU Governments that each Member State can keep a Commissioner permanently under Lisbon is valueless in the light of that Treaty's provision that from 2014 Member States will lose their right to decide who their national commissioner will be.

For under Lisbon (Article 17.7, amended Treaty on European Union) a Government's present right to decide would be replaced by a right to make "suggestions" only, for the incoming Commission President to decide (See notes below elaborating on this point).

Under the present Nice Treaty arrangements Member States would retain permanently their right to decide who their national Commissioner is - a right which they would lose under Lisbon.

The Nice Treaty requires that the number of Commissioners should be fewer than the number of Member States from 2009, but by an unspecified number to be agreed unanimously.

This requirement of the present Nice-based Treaties can be abided by, and Ireland and the other States can keep a national Commissioner permanently, by the simple expedient of reducing the number of Commissioners from 27 to 26 and permitting whoever holds the job of "High Representative for EU Foreign and Security Policy" - currently Spain's Javier Solana - to attend Commission meetings instead of being formally titled a Commissioner from that State.

This can and should be done under the Nice Treaty. This would mean that the Commission arrangements would continue virtually unchanged from the present. Ireland woud retain a Commissoner permanently except in the unlikely event of an Irish person being given the even more important job of High Representative.

Taoiseach Cowen and his Government have deliberately sought to isolate and put pressure on their own people by failing to say after the Lisbon referendum last June that Ireland would not ratify Lisbon in view of the people's No vote.

If the Taoiseach had done that, continued ratification by the other EU States would have been pointless, for Lisbon requires ratification by all 27 States before it can come into force for anyone.

Such a stand would have led to the Lisbon Treaty being opened and a chance created for a more democratic rather than less democratic EU through a better Treaty.

The prudent stand now for the Government and for the EU is to wait for the UK general election and the likely advent to office in Britain of a Conservative Government which will be committed to holding a referendum on Lisbon in the UK and recommending a No vote to it, as long as we Irish do not alter our No vote before then.

That would put paid to the attempted isolation of Ireland, which its own Government has connived at.

It would also give our fellow countrymen and women in Northern Ireland a chance to vote on this Treaty-cum-Constitution which would make them real citizens for the first time of an EU that would have the constitutional form of a supranational Federal State run on most undemocratic lines under Franco-German hegemony.

Understanding the Roots of the Great Slump of 2008

The capitalist system has proved very adaptable since Marx described in details its workings in the mid-19th century, not least because the state has become critical to ensuring the survival of capitalism at critical points in recent economic history. Now in 2008, we see the state being rehabilitated once again by the apologists for the free market system, the very people who denounced the role of the state in the economy a few years back. since in many cases throughout the world today, the state is being deployed using tax payers money to bail out the busted financial system.
The thirty years after 1945, saw the dominance of Keynesian economics in the western world, whenever the western economies slowed the state could intervene with an injection of liquidity. For thirty years the business cycle was smoothed and business grew in scope and scale, a process known now as globalisation. With the oil crisis of the 1970's, prompted by the assertion of some control over production by oil producing states, and a huge growth in inflation driven largely by organised labour in the western world seeking a more eqitable share in the wealth created , we see Keynesianism becoming discredited and elbowed aside as the ruling economic orthodoxy by the aggressively right-wing pro-big business approach of monetarism/neo liberal economics.
The advent of neo-liberalism was characterised by FOUR key features,

Firstly;- a direct attack on the bargaining power of organised labour through the demoralisation and fear that arose from mass unemployment. This was expressed by increased legal controls on trade unionism, and the parallel creation of a 'flexible' casualised labour force.

Secondly:- the privatisation of utilities and public services, creating a new and certain stream of income to private corporations.

Thirdly:-the freeing up of capital movements globally, allowing capital to be directed to areas of the world with the most profitable rates of exploitation.The City of London became the primary world centre for currency and commodity speculation, while the UK economy was steadily de-industrialised.

Fourthly:- workers savings for pensions, insurance and housing were transferred into the private sector. With mutuals such as building societies being transformed into plc's.

This 'financialisation' provided a new and critically important mechanism for the extraction of super-normal profit. The bulk of capital in public companies and high street banks now derives from the pension funds and and the savings of both employees and the greatly reduced non-monopoly strata . These funds earn a low and sometimes negative rate of real interest. However, around them lay clustered a complex array of financial vehicles for the very wealthy. Merchant Banks in the 1980's, hedge funds in the 1990's, and private equity and commodity index investors in the 2000's. These operate off-shore, do not pay tax, and secure immense profits. Hedge funds had ana average annual return of 19% throughout the 1990's, and they used our savings for leverage.
This system w as no more immune to capitalisms contradictions than its predecessors. The accelerated accumulation of capital placed pressure on average profit, and the export of capital to countries such as India and China generated huge imbalances in trade and currency reserves . Fatally the system fell prey to the inequality and poverty that itself had created. Workers could no longer afford to buy all the goods produced .
So to keep the casino wheels spinning, governments and banks between themselves colluded in the creation of massive levels of sanctioned debt, above all in mortgages. In the hands of finace capitals investment specialists this became the credit required for one last round of leveraged speculationin property, commodities, and private equity buy-outs.
Then the bubble burst, leaving working people the world over facing unemployment and repossession.
So this current, rapidly deepening world recession, is not about bonuses or the "culture of greed". It is all about recognising that the state for the past 30 years and more has been utilised throughout the western world to facilitate an increased rate of exploitation. Now the state must be rescued from being the handmaid of capital, to being a servant of all the people. For this it is essential that instead of being a sugar-daddy to the corporate sector, the state must take control of savings, pensions, and insurance. When this is achieved it will be possible to direct investment towards the truly productive economy and away from the parasitic economy of the financial sector. Speculative capital transactions must be stopped, tax havens scrapped, and wealth taxed.

When all this is understood, it becomes clear that once again the role of the state in the modern economy is up for serious discussion , and for that reason, the hegemony of neo-liberalism is drawing rapidly to an end, since it is the champions of unregulated capitalism, red in tooth and claw, who are looking increasingly out of touch with the new zeit-geist sweeping all before it.