Joe Keenan, Communist
By Gwydion M. Williams
Joe and I were comrades in the Lost Struggles of the 1970s and 1980s. The years in which the current political mess-up was made.
I met Joe during my years in London. One of the comrades in what was then the British and Irish Communist Organisation. And which is now the Ernest Bevin Society, in its British aspect.
How could we still be communists in the 1970s?, people will ask. Or why don’t we now apologise?
I will use the sad occasion of Joe’s death to explain. Mostly in the hope of being heard by the new young generation, who genuinely do not understand.
But who are aware that things have gone badly wrong. And may be open to new answers. May recognise that the bulk of the left missed a grand opportunity back then.
I compare us to others who thought that Stalin had betrayed Leninism, rather than making it a success when it could easily have failed. And whose own post-Communist history has been a disaster for the left. Brendan Clifford summed it up much better than I could in The headlong flight of Labour furthered: Eric Hobsbawm and the triumph of Thatcherism. And then as Good Riddance to Bad Rubbish when the magazine ‘Marxism Today’ smugly wound itself up amidst the ruins of left-wing politics.
I sum up those failed exiles as Cloaca Est: it is sewage. And not just because some of them joined New Right circles. Those renegades managed to do far more damage to the Western system in their attempt to serve it, than they ever had when they postured as Global Revolutionaries.
When the USA was trying to remake Afghanistan and Iraq, I daydreamed about being a Deep Infiltrator who would wreck the cause with stupid ideas. But I failed to even imagine anything that they didn’t actually do. Had I been doing it for real, I would never have had the nerve to suggest a new Iraqi flag that had an alarming similarity to the unusual two-narrow-stripe flag of Israel.
But I also think they were sincere. Most of what they did would have worked, if the views of Mr Fukuyama and similar had been even loosely like reality.
*
Hobsbawm postured less. But I can feel no sympathy for a man who calls the 20th century ‘The Age of Extremes’. It was certainly a very bad century for Jews, almost everywhere in Continental Europe. Hobsbawm himself was born in Egypt, but his father was a Jewish merchant of Polish Jewish descent from the East End of London. He grew up in German-speaking countries, mostly Vienna and Berlin. But unlike most Jews facing the threat of Hitler’s rise, his father was born in Britain. His family were British subject and could freely move here.
Note that it was subject and not citizen at the time, and for years thereafter. Abstractly, everyone ruled by the British Empire was a subject and could live in any part of it. Small numbers did this without trouble: only when it became common for those not classed as part of the Superior White Race did the rules change. But most Jews were citizens of foreign countries that had turned against them. And were mostly shut out of Britain and the USA, where governments felt they already had more Jews than they wanted.
Those times were dangerous and extreme for people like his family, certainly. Extreme, mostly because the British Empire was brutal to Germany after World War One, as others have detailed. But if you take the view that any one human life is as valuable as any other, then for most of the world the 20th century was the Age of Painful Liberation.
It was the 18th and 19th centuries that saw Europe disrupt and repress the rest of the world, undermining their values and exploiting them. And with the USA doing the same to Japan, which then responded by themselves becoming brutal imperialists. Causing tens of millions of deaths in China, and many elsewhere in Asia, where their pretence of liberation was phony.
Hobsbawm’s books before The Age of Extremes are The Age of Revolution, The Age of Capital and The Age of Empire. Europe’s global aggression is viewed much more softly than the predictable break-up of that system.
Cloaca Est is my summary. And I recently had the idea of expanding a phrase I first devised as a comment on English law and its pretentious Latin tags. I made it Cloaca Est, Pro Patria Mori. Nothing glorious about war.
It’s the sort of thing Joe would have liked. Though like me, he saw some wars as necessary and justified by a bad overall situation.
We supported the Falklands War, despite evidence that Thatcher’s incompetence in handling Argentine claims made it necessary. There were no original inhabitants, and rival Spanish, Argentine and British claims ended with British dominance and British settlement. There was none of the violence and slaughter and cultural genocide done in Australia, New Zealand and the rest of The Americas. Including Argentina, where it was a brutal conquest of the Native Americans in Patagonia that brought that country close to islands that were deserted when Europeans found them. A conquest that is called in English ‘Conquest of the Desert’, though I suspect the meaning was conquest of the deserted land. People lived there, but replacing them with settlers of European origin was seen as just and moral.
Recent evidence suggests that some Native Americans visited the islands, but chose not to stay. They had plenty of other land, and perhaps found them too isolated.
The rights of Falkland Islanders did not vanish if you called it Imperialism. But most of the British Left ignored this. And the leaders of the Labour Party were weak, sitting back and assuming that a British defeat would finish Thatcher.
The war humiliated the Argentine junta. It exposed most of them as being only good for oppressing their own people. Only the air force did respectably, and they were the least involved in the torture and repression of the years of military dictatorship.
*
We were communists in the 1970s, because communism was the main force that had ended the extremism of Europe’s global values. And had spread modern ideas everywhere, which I’ve detailed in an article called Reinventing Normality in the 20th Century.
We didn’t know it at the time, but there was to be a massive rolling-back of welfare and human concern when Global Leninism declined. When the millionaire elite stopped fearing it. When they realised that they could use trickery and fear to get ordinary people to vote against their own best interests.
Members of this elite who grew up in the 1960s had also been changed by socialists and communists on most of their social views. Almost everything except their belief in their own genius and inherent right to be far richer than everyone else. So small numbers of women got into the elite on the basis of talent rather than marriage or ancestry; small numbers but ever increasing. And an increasing number of this elite were outside of what was still viewed as the Superior White Race. Jews, always in an ambiguous position, got more assertive after the Six Day War of 1967 produced the only impressive Western military performance of the entire Cold War. And the gay males who had always been there became more open. All processes that still continue, but would they ever have happened without the challenge of Global Leninism?
As Marx and Engels saw so clearly in The Communist Manifesto, the economic changes undermined conventional middle-class values: what they called bourgeois. What they didn’t expect was a regrowth of capitalism with conventional middle-class values mostly discarded. But I’ve said elsewhere that this fitted with a neglected remark in the Manifesto: that workers are an even purer product of capitalism than the bourgeois.
I’ve never watched the TV soap opera Mad Men. But a documentary I saw says that it showed how in the 1970s, elements of 1960s radicalism were co-opted by smart advertising executives. Including extending adverts to target non-whites and independent-minded women, since they had vast spending power.
It matched my own memories. Including the way in which right-wingers co-opted rebelliousness in the service of the rich.
Without strong and independent Trade Unionism, workers can easily be led to see capitalism as a Natural Order that they should accept.
But Trade Unionism needed to change. In the 1970s, a minority wanted to do just that. Accept Incomes Policy and push for an extension of Workers Control. Joe and I were among many who tried to make it happen.
And sadly, we were defeated by a mix of Far Left and Centre-Left. The Centre- Left wanted to carry on as before. And the Far Left believed that if they prevented moderate reforms, the result would be a glorious revolution, with them leading it.
We also said that the Miners’ Strike as led by Scargill would end in disaster unless he was pushed into regularising it by calling a proper National Ballot. That was mostly me, Joe, and the late Conor Lynch.
We lost. But republishing more of what we said then would be a fine memorial to Joe.
*
Leninism or Global Communism was based on the dream of a Socialist World State. It was not entirely a lost cause in the 1970s, despite Moscow failing in its duty as a possible centre.
Calling the Soviet Union a failure is flatly wrong. It failed as the core of a World State – the sort of thing many had imagined and which H G Wells popularised in his books. But every other attempt also failed.
On the positive side, the world as it is in 2021 is much closer to what the Bolsheviks were seeking in 1921 than what any other government wanted in 1921. Rights for women had advanced, but an inherent right to equality was widely denied. Likewise racial equality, and Woodrow Wilson had actually strengthened separation in the Federal Government during his time in government. Empires that combined several European nationalities had been broken up, but Imperialism of Europeans over non-white peoples actually expanded with the break-up of the Ottoman Empire.
There was plenty to fight for, with Global Leninism as the main progressive force. That some of these fight have since been won does not mean that the fight was not needed.
A socialist world state might have happened. Might have been good or bad: arguing about that nowadays is pointless. By the 1980s, it was clear the world would go some other way.
The Western notion of Globalisation as Sub-Americanisation has also failed. The New Right are increasingly mistrusted and despised.
A belief in the 1970s that the 1920s dream might be revived was why Joe and I were in the same movement. And I’d say we were closer to truth than the alternatives. We never apologised for it: we just looked for new solutions that did not demonise Stalin or the Leninist past.
We also viewed the entire Trotskyist movement as useless. Globally and in nearly ten decades since they emerged as a Disloyal Opposition in Global Leninism, no Trotskyist movement has ever been even a weak threat to the Capitalist World Order. All they managed to be, was a Permanent Opposition to useful reforms within the existing system. I’ve noted that their rise was matched very nicely by a global decline in the power and reputation of socialism. And as far as I know, this was also Joe’s view.
Without Moscow, a Socialist World State was not going to happen. China has no such ambition, and for most of the world its culture is much less familiar than that of the Anglosphere. So we adjusted to the new reality, in which socialism might advance in many separate sovereign states. When serious reform was the grand opportunity.
*
I can’t say a lot about Joe’s background. He never told me much, and I’m sure others can say a lot more.
I had to leave London, because the only decent job I could get was in Peterborough.
Joe went back to Belfast, and we had largely lost touch even before he quit our organisation.
I also can’t say why he left us.
I just remember all the things we tried in the 1970s and 1980s.
Regret what was lost, but retain hope for the future.
Gwydion M. Williams
Copyright ©
athol-streetpeople.org 