old one.
The funny thing is that in the United States the Trotskyists were much better organised than in Britain. For one thing, they were all in one party, the Socialist Workers Party (except for the Shachtmanites, who were busy becoming social democrats). In Britain they were all in one party too, but it was the Labour Party, and they were split into (at least) three mutually hostile groups. But the largest group was able to intervene in the crisis of the CP and rip off a couple of hundred serious people: intellectuals and trade unionists. Then they picked up more young people from the first wave of anti-nuclear activism—the Aldermaston marches and all that. They proceeded to lose or burn out the best of them, largely because their leader, Gerry Healy, was a thug as well as an ultra-left. The regime in Healy’s group was far worse than anything anyone had experienced in the CPGB. Say what you like about Harry Pollitt (the CP’s general secretary until 1956) he never thumped another communist, or threw anyone down the stairs. But other Trot groups were there to pick up people from the heap at the bottom of Healy’s stairwell. What’s worrying, actually, is how many went back up the stairs.
In the United States, the SWP fumbled the CPUSA’s crisis, saw the CP left wing walk past them and into theincreasingly ultra-left Progressive Labor, and followed up by failing to dive into the Civil Rights struggle. The mass movement they did dive into was the Vietnam anti-war movement, and even there they found themselves to the right of the young radicals who wanted to wave Vietcong flags. They came across as a very staid, conservative organization, rather like the CPUSA itself, and missed the 1960s. It took some doing at the time for a revolutionary organization to recruit almost no one out of SDS, but the SWP managed it.
Two of the British Trotskyist groups of the 1960s, the International Socialists and the International Marxist Group, were very much more open to the so-called counterculture. They didn’t frown on kids with long hair who smoked dope. They waved their own Vietcong flags. They shifted farther and faster than the U.S. SWP did on gay liberation, as it was then called. They had plenty of militant working-class struggles to pitch into, which the SWP didn’t to the same extent (and it missed out on the ones it did have).
So Britain is infested with ex-Trots instead of with ex-Maoists, which is a small mercy.
What kind of car do you drive? (I ask this of everyone.)
A Mazda 2. I abandoned my Bentley when it ran out of peat.
Old-school tools like socket wrenches and WD40 show up in your Futures. Is this a shameless nod to the Steampunk crowd?
No. I don’t know enough about Steampunk as a genre, and what I do know doesn’t attract me much. If people want to dress up as Victorians, that’s fine by me, but as a genre it seems backward-looking—indeed, that’s its whole point. We can do better than that.
What is Semana Negra and why is it important?
Semana Negra in Gijón, Asturias, is an annual literary festival with a crowded and raucous funfair attached, complete with Ferris wheel. Its focus is on crime fiction, or “black novels” as they’re called in Spain, with a periphery of attention to comics, westerns, horror, fantasy and science fiction. Hundreds of thousands go to the funfair, and thousands go to the book and film festival off in a corner of it.
Partly because crime writers in the Spanish state and in the wider Spanish-speaking world tend to be left-wing, the event has become part of the class struggle in the region. This July, my wife and I rode from Madrid to Gijón on
el Tren Negro
—the Black Train, which they hire every year to transport dozens of writers and journalists to the festival. We stopped in Mieres, a coal-mining town in the mountains of Asturias, where we were greeted by the mayor and a delegation of striking miners and taken on procession through the town for lunch. The
The funny thing is that in the United States the Trotskyists were much better organised than in Britain. For one thing, they were all in one party, the Socialist Workers Party (except for the Shachtmanites, who were busy becoming social democrats). In Britain they were all in one party too, but it was the Labour Party, and they were split into (at least) three mutually hostile groups. But the largest group was able to intervene in the crisis of the CP and rip off a couple of hundred serious people: intellectuals and trade unionists. Then they picked up more young people from the first wave of anti-nuclear activism—the Aldermaston marches and all that. They proceeded to lose or burn out the best of them, largely because their leader, Gerry Healy, was a thug as well as an ultra-left. The regime in Healy’s group was far worse than anything anyone had experienced in the CPGB. Say what you like about Harry Pollitt (the CP’s general secretary until 1956) he never thumped another communist, or threw anyone down the stairs. But other Trot groups were there to pick up people from the heap at the bottom of Healy’s stairwell. What’s worrying, actually, is how many went back up the stairs.
In the United States, the SWP fumbled the CPUSA’s crisis, saw the CP left wing walk past them and into theincreasingly ultra-left Progressive Labor, and followed up by failing to dive into the Civil Rights struggle. The mass movement they did dive into was the Vietnam anti-war movement, and even there they found themselves to the right of the young radicals who wanted to wave Vietcong flags. They came across as a very staid, conservative organization, rather like the CPUSA itself, and missed the 1960s. It took some doing at the time for a revolutionary organization to recruit almost no one out of SDS, but the SWP managed it.
Two of the British Trotskyist groups of the 1960s, the International Socialists and the International Marxist Group, were very much more open to the so-called counterculture. They didn’t frown on kids with long hair who smoked dope. They waved their own Vietcong flags. They shifted farther and faster than the U.S. SWP did on gay liberation, as it was then called. They had plenty of militant working-class struggles to pitch into, which the SWP didn’t to the same extent (and it missed out on the ones it did have).
So Britain is infested with ex-Trots instead of with ex-Maoists, which is a small mercy.
What kind of car do you drive? (I ask this of everyone.)
A Mazda 2. I abandoned my Bentley when it ran out of peat.
Old-school tools like socket wrenches and WD40 show up in your Futures. Is this a shameless nod to the Steampunk crowd?
No. I don’t know enough about Steampunk as a genre, and what I do know doesn’t attract me much. If people want to dress up as Victorians, that’s fine by me, but as a genre it seems backward-looking—indeed, that’s its whole point. We can do better than that.
What is Semana Negra and why is it important?
Semana Negra in Gijón, Asturias, is an annual literary festival with a crowded and raucous funfair attached, complete with Ferris wheel. Its focus is on crime fiction, or “black novels” as they’re called in Spain, with a periphery of attention to comics, westerns, horror, fantasy and science fiction. Hundreds of thousands go to the funfair, and thousands go to the book and film festival off in a corner of it.
Partly because crime writers in the Spanish state and in the wider Spanish-speaking world tend to be left-wing, the event has become part of the class struggle in the region. This July, my wife and I rode from Madrid to Gijón on
el Tren Negro
—the Black Train, which they hire every year to transport dozens of writers and journalists to the festival. We stopped in Mieres, a coal-mining town in the mountains of Asturias, where we were greeted by the mayor and a delegation of striking miners and taken on procession through the town for lunch. The
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