2 August 2005: Hitchens, Cohen, Johnson,

Voices against the  poor

We were almost evacuated at work today: there was a fire outside on the 205 bus. Grays Inn Road was closed. Police came in large numbers. It seems that the whole trouble began with a small fire on the bus. Smoke was seen. A man shouted 'Get off, get off'. Rather than try to leave through the doors at the side and back of the bus, people on the upstairs deck panicked, trying to smash out the windows above, and jump out of the bus through the windows on top. I walked home past the wreck, the road still closed in parts, the television crews circling.

I came home to an email from Ravi, a Canada socialist, with thoughts about the British left, concluding that we 'should be eternally ashamed for helping to educate and recruit Christopher Hitchens.' I suppose I can take the credit (hardly the right word) for one of the earliest criticisms of the drink-soaked Trotskyist popinjay. Back in spring 2002, my argument was simple; that Hitchens had been a real socialist in the early 1970s, that he joined the IS because they were the best group then on offer, and that his first decade as a writer was spent in remaking himself on the model of Paul Foot: a point suggested to me by a friend who had known both men then.

It's not just Hitchens either. I used to have correspond occasionally with the journalist Nik Cohen: until the Iraq war. He interviewed me twice for pieces in the New Statesman. I tried emailing him as the bombings in Afghanistan started. By the end, we could hardly speak. The worst was a five- line email from him, full of some of the worst anti-Semitic hatred I have ever read (poison-pen letters from BNP members are sweetness and light in comparison). We've never spoken since.

Then this week, I saw an article which depressed me more: Alan Johnson defending the ludicrous Unite Against Terror website. I haven't looked closely at it, but I trust there is a sub-head somewhere:  'Bombs which call 50 people are a Holocaust, a war which kills 100,000 is democracy.'

In the 1990s I used to hear Alan speak each year at the Alternative Futures' conferences in Manchester. He was a powerful speaker, in touch with his material (the biography of Hal Draper), in touch with his audience. I also remember seeing Alan in September 1999 just after I started work at Edge Hill College in Ormskirk. Weeks before we had been in the same party, just before I saw him, he had left in some bitterness. He was generous to me, talking through the politics of the college, who would do what for the union. After what he'd experienced, he could reasonably have shown me the door, instead he was polite and generous. It's in that context, that I find Alan's sudden admiration for Tony Blair so depressing. 

What happened to all these people? There is a simple answer, they 'sold out', but that explains nothing: of the three people I've mentioned only Hitchens has profited financially from his new friends. The others swapped sides without even needing to be paid.

I'd like to give two answers, which I hope are different to the ones normally employed. First, it seems to me this tendency to jump ship has something to do with the impasse in Iraq. Had the people fighting the Americans been more successful by now, than I suspect that each of these three would have been quieter. In the same way that Nik Cohen, having devoted every article in the run up to this year's election to a criticism of Respect, then went silent for weeks, refusing to admit that Galloway had won; a more united, more effective resistance would have quietened these critics. Its weakness, and the continuing military strength of the Americans, makes them feel more bold.

It is not just a matter of power politics, but of the way in which Iraq connects to the war back home: when our government was preparing to send troops, this was experienced as a public act: millions of people responded in the biggest protest movement that Britain has ever seen. The London bombings, and the racist backlash that accompanied them have both been the work of private individuals: we did not elect them, marching won't restrain either group. With the rare exceptions of events such as today's vigil in Liverpool, the politics of the past month has demobilised the people who most want the war in Iraq to stop.

After July 7 and July 21st, people are still afraid. I overheard outside Kings Cross a woman say: 'the tube was hot today, wasn't it?' Friends' parents are still buying their children scooters, from the misplaced idea that the underground is now more dangerous than London's roads. People are left feeling weak - and in this context, the idea that Islam is the new fascism can be more seductive, as can the linked idea that all Muslims are somehow to blame. Its answers like any scapegoat politics are immediate.

The second thought which occurs to me goes deep into my own writing, and especially the last big book I produced, on Dissident Marxism. Take the next few paragraphs as an extended moment of self-criticism. One theme of Christopher Hitchens' recent writing has been a kind of pleasure in adversity, expressed in jokes about lost friendships, 'I have been shedding friendships recklessly', he told someone I know. There is a very similar sentence in the Alan Johnson article I cited a couple of paragraphs ago: 'Now, with words that will lose me my last remaining friends', he writes, 'let me say this. I agree with every word of Blair's speech.'

In Dissident Marxism, I tended to criticise the Marxist left (in which these three writers were all trained) for tendencies towards close-mindedness. I suggested that Marxism wasn't about learning politics from past generations so much as expressing past insights to the different situations of the present. A new spirit of dissidence was needed, which I tended to identify in the anti-capitalist movement of the Seattle period, rather than in any of the more familiar movements or parties around me at the time. A number of critics responded, most of them rightly, saying it all depends - dissidence against what? It strikes me that Hitchens et al have a self-justification which is profoundly rooted in the collective memory of the left: they are not movement builders, they are the dissidents, in their minds, the creative intellectuals in an isolated battle against the left.

It would be especially easy for Alan to argue that way, to find a parallel between his work and the dissident project, to insist that what he is doing is defending the idea of a pure socialism in the future (what he is really doing, of course, is defending the Iraqi killings in the present). Of course he will publish his Draper book. There is a long-tradition of pro-war socialists finding immaculate reasons for their personal journey to the right: it wouldn't take too much genius to read the same journey backwards into Draper's ally Max Schactman, and through him back to Draper (in suitably opaque language and pretending that when Draper wrote black, he really meant white). The Alan I remember, not from Edge Hill but before, would have seen through that nonsense in a minute: Alan today will publish.

It does leave me feeling that perhaps what we need in the present is not more Dissident Marxists - and this against a book that was published only a year ago - what we really need is more Classical Marxists: people who devoted their lives to building a movement, who understand that poverty and war are two of our main enemies, and who kept a sense also that the chief enemies of the poor and the workers are at home.

Just the other day, I quoted some lines from Raph Samuel's book on the miners' strike of 1984-5. Here's his lines on the socialist renegades of twenty years hence: 'On the Left, especially among the metropolitan intelligentsia, hostility to the miners' strike has grown increasingly implacable. Already during the strike itself there was a simmering rage, it seems, at having to support a cause which many only half believed in ... [The criticism] served to legitimate a whole line of self-questioning, and to immobilise the miners' support. Another feature of this criticism is that it has grown progressively more hostile as memory of the strike recedes.'

'Long ago, in 1931, Vera Brittain remarked on the phenomenon of socialists "who didn't like the smell of the proletariat". Their number seems to have increased mightily in recent years ... Scargill, the symbolic object of their hostility is, on this reading, hated because he has failed to be the leader of their dreams, just as the working class, since if is failing to fulfill its historically appointed mission can no longer do anything right.'

The renegade socialists of the 1980s projected an image of themselves as reflective and humane, and felt contemptuous towards the miners as a group of violent, foul-mouthed slobs. A similar process is at work today, except for a de-tumescent workerism read a growing disbelief in the radical potential of the Arab street. Filthy, irrational, angry, violent and poor, not just opposed to Western governments but hating western people - the Islamists project back in to the minds of the former socialists what Samuel termed 'a reverse image of their idealised selves'. 

There is a similarity between the people who gave up on the miners' in 1984-5 and the people who give up on the Iraqi resistance to the Americans today. The Muslims fighting back are too violent, they are too religious. But when oppressed people rise up, their social movements are never poetic, and always brutal. People's contempt for the mass of the people in the Middle East is often mis-described as racist but the more fundamental feeling in the heart of the critics is a loathing of the poor. 

Given that people in Britain can't transform the Iraqi left, the best we can do is build the Stop the War groups where those have been dormant, giving moral support never to the occupation but to the people resisting it, and remember always that normal politics in Britain continues. 

The Blair who wages war is the same man who would privatise the NHS. The one moment when Blair was vulnerable was during the Iraq crisis. The people who back Blair give support to his entire campaign. They are on the side of the rich, it really is that simple.