The Russian Revolution: A New History By Sean McMeekin Basic Books. $30. Illustrated. 445 pp.

It is usually the case that you cannot tell a book by its cover. What is written on the back is a different matter. Whoever is enlisted to praise a book gives you a good idea about the author's politics. McMeekin’s book is no different. The fact that the publisher asks two of the most right-wing historians known to mankind in the form of Niall Ferguson and Simon Sebag Montefiore tells the reader a lot. The book is also praised by the right-wing Tory MP Michael Gove, who wrote in his review for the London Times, "The Russian Revolution was the most successful criminal conspiracy in history. The takeover of an entire nation by a shameless huckster supported by a hostile foreign power. And the revolution was also an object lesson in how liberals can lose, and lose catastrophically, from a position of great advantage, if they are divided in the face of a ruthlessly ideological foe."[1]

Although Ferguson, Sebag Montefiore and Tory MP Michael Gove all share McMeekinn’s right-wing political and historical outlook, they are not responsible for this hack work, which contains falsifications and slanders from the first page to the last.

Let us start at the beginning. In chapter one, Mcmeekin makes the stupid and wrong assertion that the split in the RSDLP in 1903 was over the so-called “Jewish Question”. He writes “ Contrary to the common belief, expounded in most history books, that the famous Bolshevik-Menshevik split of July 1903 occurred because Lenin’s advocacy of a professional cadre of elites (sometimes called vanguardism), outlined in his 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done?, was opposed by Mensheviks who wanted mass worker participation in the party, the real fireworks at the Brussels Congress surrounded the Jewish question. Party organisation was not even discussed until the fourteenth plenary session. Lenin’s main goal in Brussels was to defeat the Bund—that is, Jewish—autonomy inside the party. His winning argument was that Jews were not really a nation, as they shared neither a common language nor a common national territory. Martov, the founder of the Bund, took great umbrage at this, and walked out to form the new Menshevik (minority) faction. He was followed by nearly all Jewish socialists, including, notably, Lev Bronstein (Trotsky), a young intellectual from Kherson, in southern Ukraine, who had studied at a German school in cosmopolitan Odessa, which helped prime him for the appeal of European Marxism. With Lenin all but mirroring the arguments of Russian anti-Semites, it is not hard to see why Martov, Trotsky, and other Jews joined the opposition.”[2]

The Marxist writer David North answers this foul slander in his two-part review of McMeekin’s book.[3] He writes, “The problem with this account is that it is completely false, both in terms of facts and political interpretation. Putting aside his incorrect dating of the split (it occurred in August, not July), McMeekin concocts, with the intention of slandering Lenin as an anti-Semite, an account of the break between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks that has nothing to do with historical and political reality. The RSDLP did not split over the issue of the Jewish Bund. Far from being the “founder” of the Bund, let alone walking out of the Congress to protest Lenin’s opposition to the Bund’s autonomy within the party, Martov wrote the RSDLP resolution that provoked the Bund’s walkout. Martov’s opposition to Jewish autonomy within the Revolutionary Workers’ Party was far more strident than Lenin’s. As the late Leopold Haimson, the leading authority on the history of Menshevism, wrote in his important scholarly work The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism, “Martov clashed violently with the Bund representatives when this issue arose at the Second Party Congress. There was greater acerbity in his polemical tone during these discussions than that of any other members of his camp.” [3] As for McMeekin’s claim that Trotsky also walked out of the 1903 Congress in support of the Bund’s demand for autonomy, this is another incredible display of ignorance. Trotsky was an uncompromising opponent of the Bund, and the transcript of the debates (available in English) show that Trotsky intervened repeatedly in support of Martov’s resolution.”[4]

There is nothing new in McMeekin’s book that has not already been vomited by other right-wing historians such as Richard Pipes et al. McMeekin’s main argument is that the revolution took place merely by chance and fell into the Bolshevik's laps again by chance. Pipes, like McMeekin, rejects the view that the revolution was the result “of social movements from below”; instead, Pipes and others often characterise the revolution as a mere putsch or coup by “identifiable men pursuing their advantages.”

The book is a complete rewrite of an entire revolutionary epoch. McMeekin writes, “The salient fact about Russia in 1917 is that it was a country at war. Knowing how the story of the czars turns out, many historians have suggested that the Russian colossus must always have had feet of clay. But surely, this is hindsight. Despite growing pains, uneven economic development and stirrings of revolutionary fervour, imperial Russia in 1900 was a going concern, its size and power a source of pride to most if not all of the czar’s subjects.”

So, what is the driving force behind McMeekin’s revisionism and his rejection of any Marxist or liberal historiography? In his book, he does not mention important historians such as E H Carr or Alexander Rabinowitch.

The answer is to be found in ideology, not history. McMeekin is rapid in his hatred of socialism. He warns his readers of what he calls a resurgence of Marxist-style philosophy, warning readers to be wary of “openly avowed socialists” like Bernie Sanders, who, in reality, has nothing to do with socialism.

North asks, “Why did he write the book? Aside from the lure of easy money (anti-communist works are usually launched with substantial publicity and guaranteed positive reviews in the New York Times and many other publications), McMeekin has a political motive. At the start of this year, the World Socialist Web Site wrote: “A spectre is haunting world capitalism: the spectre of the Russian Revolution.” McMeekin is among the haunted. He writes in the book’s epilogue, “The Specter of Communism,” that capitalism is threatened by growing popular discontent, and the appeal of Bolshevism is again on the rise. “Like the nuclear weapons born of the ideological age inaugurated in 1917, the sad fact about Leninism is that once invented, it cannot be uninvented. Social inequality will always be with us, along with the well-intentioned impulse of socialists to eradicate it.” Therefore, “the Leninist inclination is always lurking among the ambitious and ruthless, especially in desperate times of depression or war that seem to call for more radical solutions.” McMeekin continues: “If the last hundred years teach us anything, we should stiffen our defences and resist armed prophets promising social perfection.”

While it is not in the realm of possibility to cover every lie, falsification and slander contained in the book, it would be remiss of me not to refute the old slander that is rehashed in the book that Vladimir Lenin was a German agent. Again, I will quote David North not because I am a bit lazy but, to put it bluntly, he is at the moment the greatest authority in the world on the Russian Revolution. He writes, “ There is not a single serious historian who has treated the allegations against Lenin as anything other than a slander. From the moment of Lenin’s return to Russia via Germany aboard the “sealed train,” the anti-revolutionary right attempted to portray the Bolshevik leader as an agent of the Kaiser. In the initial months of the revolution, this libel gained no support outside liberal and fascistic circles. It was well understood that the possibility of a speedy return by a man widely recognised by the Russian workers as one of their most courageous and brilliant leaders required that he find the fastest route to revolutionary Petrograd. One month later, Martov, after much dithering, also used the German route.

Moreover, Trotsky’s experience in March–April 1917 further validated Lenin’s decision. Trotsky, travelling across the Atlantic from New York City, was forcibly removed from his ship off the coast of Halifax by British authorities. Attempting to prevent the return of the much-feared revolutionary to Russia, who many believed to be “worse than Lenin,” the British interned Trotsky in a prisoner-of-war camp for one month. In the face of protests by the Petrograd Soviet and the Provisional Government’s reluctant demand that he be released, Trotsky was finally allowed to continue his journey back to Russia. He arrived one month later than Lenin.”.

Normally, even the worst history books have a few pearls of wisdom and some redeeming features. This has none. It is kind to call it revisionist history, but in reality, McMeekin has vomited up every single falsification, slander and outright lie printed on the Russian Revolution and then some. As North correctly writes, “Sean McMeekin stands exposed as a falsifier of history.”

 

 

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[1] Gove, Michael (3 June 2017). "The Russian Revolution: A New History by Sean McMeekin". The Times.

[2] THE Russian revolution: A New History By Sean McMeekin

Basic Books. $30. Illustrated. p22/23

[3] Professor Sean McMeekin revives discredited anti-Lenin slanders- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/06/30/mcme-j30.html

[4]   Professor Sean McMeekin revives discredited anti-Lenin slanders- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/06/30/mcme-j30.html

Interview with David Unger- Author of Jose Feeds the World

Q.How did you get involved in the project of José Feeds the World?

A. I’ve been friends with Mauricio Velázquez, the publisher of Duopress, for over 20 years. Mauricio is a Mexican national who has been living in the U.S. for maybe 25 years and worked previously as an editor for Rosen Publishers. In the fall of 2022, knowing of my previous children’s books, he asked me if I would be interested in writing a non-fiction book about Chef José Andrés. Since I was familiar with the chef and the amazing work of his World Central Kitchen, I jumped at the chance. Mauricio offered valuable editorial comments, but basically he allowed me to craft my own book. It has been an amazing experience.

Q. How different is writing a children's book than one with more adult themes.

A I published La Casita, my first children’s book in 2012, and I have published four other kid’s books since then. What you might not know, Keith, is that I have translated 8 children’s books, including three by Guatemalan Nobelist Rigoberta Menchú, for the Canadian publisher Groundwood Books. Through this translation work, I went through a kind of apprenticeship. Obviously writing children’s books requires a different skill set than writing adult fiction. In all my work, I have been interested in how characters adjust and change, and how experience transforms their lives—this obsession is imbedded in me…It also helps that I have three daughters and five grandchildren.

Q.What was the relationship between you and Marta? Did the illustrations come first or did the words.

A. I was familiar with the children’s books that Marta did for Source Books, now the parent company of Duopress. Her illustrations for the books The Girl Who Heard the Music, Dinosaur Lady and Shark Lady really impressed me: they are lyrical, expansive and very child oriented. I wrote the text and I was overjoyed when Mauricio said that Marta, who comes from a village close to Jose Andres’s birthplace, WANTED to illustrate my book, for obvious reasons. I am the beneficiary of her amazing talent.

Q. I can see on Facebook you have already taken the book into schools etc. How has it been received both in schools and in the media. 

A.It has been a wonderful experience to present the book, primarily in book store presentations. There is nothing greater than feeling the enthusiasm of young readers—their responses are always uncensored and quite electric. Younger kids respond more to the illustrations, but 7- and 8-year-olds understand the narrative that Marta has illustrated and ask quite interesting questions.

 Q.what are you working on now? Do you plan any more collaborations with Marta?

A.I have written a couple of other children’s book texts, but haven’t found a publisher. I would love to collaborate with Marta or with Marcela Calderón, the illustrator of my previous kid’s book called Topo pecoso/Moley Mole. Both are so talented, but publishers decide what is printed and who illustrates text.

The Logic of Zionism: From Nationalist Myth to the Gaza Genocide-David North-Mehring Books. February 26 2024 $9.99

 

“David North’s three lectures, delivered amidst the war, are a remarkably concise, historically informed, and politically devastating indictment of Zionism and the Israeli assault on Gaza.”

Charles Thorpe, Professor of Sociology, University of California, San Diego.

The lectures presented in this volume are not only a sharp Marxist analysis of the reactionary ideological and political foundations of Zionism, but they are also an antidote to poison and bile being spewed out by the capitalist media, who not only print lies and cover-up a genocide going on in Gaza, they label any opposition to the Israeli regime as being anti-Semitic.

As Charles Thorpe, Professor of Sociology University of California, San Diego, states, “David North’s three lectures, delivered amidst the war, are a remarkably concise, historically informed, and politically devastating indictment of Zionism and the Israeli assault on Gaza.” Thorpe is to be commended for raising his head above the parapet to defend a clear-sighted Marxist analysis presented by North and the ICFI(International Committee of the Fourth International).

It is not in the realm of this short review to cover everything contained in this excellent book. One of the most important aspects of the book has been to oppose the charge that any opposition to the Israeli regime is tantamount to antisemitism.

As North writes, “Ten years ago, I was barred from attending a seminar at Humboldt because I intended to challenge historian Robert Service’s falsifications and his use of antisemitic slurs. Now, the university, posturing as an irreconcilable opponent of antisemitism, forbids the inclusion of a reference to the Gaza genocide in the name of fighting antisemitism.

I recall this incident from the not-so-distant past because it exemplifies the cynicism, hypocrisy, demagogy and unrestrained lying that drives the campaign to discredit opposition to Israel’s onslaught against Gaza as “antisemitic.” The use of this slur has become a critical weapon in the efforts of Israel and its imperialist accomplices to intimidate and isolate all those who are protesting the genocide of Palestinians.

Suddenly, and from so many surprising quarters, warriors against antisemitism have emerged. Last week, in the United States, university presidents were summoned to Washington D.C. and questioned on their failure to suppress allegedly antisemitic protests on American college campuses. Leading the inquisitorial questioning was Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, a Republican from a district in New York State. She demanded to know why the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and other major universities were tolerating calls for “genocide”—which the congresswoman identifies as any student protest that demands an end to the apartheid regime that deprives Palestinians of their democratic rights.”[1]

From a personal viewpoint, the most fascinating aspect of North’s lecture at the Humboldt University in Berlin was his adding to the more well-known public personal background by producing a family history that is not only extraordinary but which North uses to counter the slanders that have come not only his way but the Trotskyist movement itself.

He writes, “I do not have any personal obligation to answer the claim that I and my comrades in the Trotskyist movement are antisemites. As the saying goes, my record speaks for itself. But, unfortunately, that is not generally true. The accusation of antisemitism requires the ignoring and distortion of a given individual’s political record. So I will, for the first time, respond to the accusation, by adding to my well-known public political record information relating to my background. Now, having reached a somewhat more advanced age, just a little more than a year away from what will be my 75th birthday, I think the time has come to do this. I do not do so because it will have any effect on the slanderers but because there are elements of my personal experience that may resonate with a younger generation and encourage them to intensify their struggle in defence of the Palestinians and against all forms of oppression.”

While the book stands independently in its meticulous research and erudition, North's book is not just a catalogue of the crimes of the Israeli regime, nor is it “Two Minutes of Hate”, which was the charge by an audience member at the London lecture given by North. It is a call to action, especially aimed at the young.

As David North declared in his third lecture, delivered in Berlin on December 14, 2023: “The ongoing war, for all its horrors, has made one significant political contribution. It has awakened the youth. It has opened the eyes of the world. It has exposed the Zionist regime and its imperialist accomplices for the criminals they are. It has set into motion a tidal wave of outrage that is sweeping across the world and will sweep across those responsible for this genocide”. Top of Form

The book deserves a wide readership. I would encourage all readers and non-readers of the World Socialist Web Site to buy the book.

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[1] The Israeli state’s fascist ideology and the genocide in Gaza-https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2023/12/19/pers-d19.html

José Feeds the World: How a Famous Chef Feeds Millions of People in Need Worldwide February 29 2024, by David Unger and illustrated by Marta Alvarez Miguéns.

 

 

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David Unger’s new book is the true story of José Andrés, an award-winning chef, food activist, and founder of World Central Kitchen.[1] This disaster relief organisation helps working-class communities when catastrophe hits. Although primarily aimed at children, adult readers learn much from Unger's understated and thoughtful text.

The book is beautifully illustrated by Marta Alvarez Miguéns, a freelance illustrator based in La Coruña, Spain. Her previous works have included A Tiger Called Tomás, Dinosaur Lady and Shark Lady, which was named a Best STEM Book by the Children's Book Council and the National Science Teachers Association.

Jose Andres and his organisation are very busy at the moment. Every day, a new disaster, war, appears, coupled with the massive growth of world poverty and hunger. According to The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World 2022, published by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the World Food Programme (WFP), the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), and World Health Organization (WHO), have reported that up to 828 million people, nearly 11 per cent of the world’s population, faced hunger in 2022. The number has grown by about 140 million since the start of the pandemic.

There is no doubt about Andres's sincerity and bravery in alleviating world hunger and poverty, saying, “What we’ve been able to do is weaponise empathy. Without empathy, nothing works.”.But the cruel reality is that Andres's work is insufficient to defeat world hunger and poverty.

Jean Shaoul writes, “World leaders are acutely aware of the repercussions of the spiralling cost of food as workers demand pay increases and take to the streets in protest over their deteriorating living conditions in rich and poor countries alike. But the fight for decent wages, affordable food, necessities and a massive increase in wages means that the working class must unite across workplaces, industries, countries and continents in a global political struggle against the capitalist class and its governments and to put an end to the imperialist war.”[2]

 

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[1] www.globalcitizen.org

[2] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/07/10/hung-j10.html

Keeping the historical record and its historiography accurate

Almost a decade ago, in May, 2014, I was able to go to Trinity Hall in the University of Cambridge to hear John Walter of the University of Essex reflect on the development of his career from his time as an undergraduate in Cambridge, his period at the University of Pennsylvania and, subsequently, as an academic historian on the University of Essex’s campus in Wivenhoe. It was a privilege to be there and to hear him discuss the work of historians who had influenced him as well as the intellectual trajectory of his own studies. One thing, however, did strike me very forcibly on that occasion, namely, that no measures had been taken to record what he had said. That was a misfortune and a loss to future historians.

Since then, largely as a result of the deeply regrettable impact of the Coronavirus pandemic, many universities have adopted the practice of allowing their seminars to be accessible via the internet. I can sit in my small study overlooking the wood and river to the south of my house and watch a large number of historians delivering papers on their research and work to live audiences and to larger groups of postgraduates and historians online. This has made it possible for me to listen to and see major figures in my own field of early modern history, people like Nicholas Tyacke, John Morrill, Blair Worden, Keith Thomas, Alan Macfarlane, Richard Cust, Peter Lake and many others. I have also been able to sit in on papers given by younger historians, many of whom are likely to become significant players in the discipline in the years ahead.

Nonetheless, most of the seminars I have witnessed online have taken place in the United Kingdom at the Universities of Oxford and Reading or at the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London. It has been much more difficult to find such seminars in countries like Canada and the United States of America, in Australia or New Zealand or on the European continent. I have certainly become aware of a great deal of interesting research and writing being done in those places but seeing and hearing their work being discussed is much more of a problem. Perhaps, there may be those historians who can help on this issue out there.

 

Christopher Thompson

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (Wordsworth Classics) Paperback – May 5 1992

  “It’s not all rubbish,” cried Amory passionately. “This is the first time in my life I’ve argued Socialism. It’s the only panacea I know. I’m restless. My whole generation is restless. I’m sick of a system where the richest man gets the most beautiful girl if he wants her, where the artist without an income has to sell his talents to a button manufacturer. Even if I had no talents, I’d not be content to work ten years, condemned to celibacy or a furtive indulgence, to give some man’s son an automobile.”

F Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (1920)

“‘Her voice is full of money,’ he [Gatsby] said suddenly. That was it. I’d never understood before. It was full of money—that was the inexhaustible charm that rose and fell in it, the jingle of it, the cymbals’ song of it. … high in a white palace, the king’s daughter, the golden girl. …”

The Great Gatsby

“Russia is your example of a beneficent violence, I suppose?” “Quite possibly,” admitted Amory. “Of course, it’s overflowing just as the French Revolution did, but I’ve no doubt it’s really a great experiment and worthwhile.”

The Great Gatsby

Fitzgerald’s superb novel is set in the summer of 1922. The plot is about a young man from the Midwest, Nick Carraway. Carraway sells bonds on Wall Street and lives on Long Island. As Fitzgerald points out, Carraway lives in a small house compared to the huge mansions surrounding him. The enigmatic Jay Gatsby owns one. Gatsby lives close to a philandering husband, Tom Buchanan, who represents older money to Gatsby’s new wealth. Gatsby has made his millions (through bootlegging and stock fraud in partnership with gangster Meyer Wolfsheim.

As the Marxist art critic David Walsh writes, “Fitzgerald’s work is a brilliant effort, easy to underestimate in its brevity, delicacy and the simplicity of the drama. The novel has something of the diaphanous sensibility of Keats, the author’s favourite poet. At the same time, it is an angry, scathing work, as thoroughgoing a debunking of the “American dream” as there ever has been”.

The Great Gatsby is a deceptive book. While it is only 146 pages long, it is an extraordinarily insightful look into the intellectual and social life of the top echelons of the American ruling elite during the first part of the 20^th century.

 As Walsh writes, “ A novel is not a history book or a political manifesto. The important artist accumulates thoughts, feelings, moods and themes over the course of years and works them into concrete and coherent imagery charged with meaning. Any serious work also includes ambiguities, complexities, and “asymmetrical” elements that are not easily reducible to immediate social analysis. However, the individual artist does not draw his or her conceptions and emotions from empty space, nor are they simply the expression of eternal psycho-biological urges. Significant artistic ideas and representations are always shaped by collective human experience by historical and social development. Fitzgerald thought a good deal about political events and social life. His books and letters only have to be read carefully for that to become apparent. Born in 1896, the novelist belonged to a generation deeply affected by the First World War, the Russian Revolution and subsequent developments.”[1]

Fitzgerald's very subtle hints about the racist and fascist outlook of a section of the American bourgeoisie are dropped into the text like a bombshell.  One example is when Tom Buchanan talks about a book he has read called The Rise of the Colored Empires, “by this man Goddard.” He goes on: “The idea is if we don’t look out, the white race will be—will be utterly submerged. It’s all scientific stuff; it’s been proved.”Fitzgeralds' fictionalized reference is to Lothrop Stoddard’s The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (1920). A deeply reactionary. Stoddard was a Nazi sympathizer and anti-communist who wrote “Bolshevism: The Heresy of the Underman” and “Social Unrest and Bolshevism in the Islamic World.”

Fitzgerald was not a Marxist or Communist, although he certainly knew his way around Marx’s great works such as Das Kapital Walsh writes, “One need not overestimate the references in Fitzgerald’s letters to “We Marxians…,” “I’m still a socialist …,” “I’m a Communist enough …”, to grasp the degree to which he knew his way around these issues.

The Great Gatsby works on many levels. Aside from being a great story, Gatsby is a stinging attack on the rich in America. In a line that could describe America's ruling elite today, Fitzgerald writes, “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. …”

 

 

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[1] https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2013/05/14/grea-m14.html

The Dilemmas of Lenin: Terrorism, War, Empire, Love, Revolution-by Tariq Ali-Verso publications-2017

“Before 30, a revolutionary. After 30, a swine!”

French expression,

Gentlemen, we can neither ignore the history of the past nor create the future. I would like to warn you against the mistake that causes people to advance the hands of their clocks, thinking that thereby they are hastening the passage of time. My influence on the events I took advantage of is usually exaggerated, but it would never occur to anyone to demand that I should make history. I could not do that even in conjunction with you, although together, we could resist the whole world. We cannot make history; we must wait while it is being made. We will not make fruit ripen more quickly by subjecting it to the heat of a lamp, and if we pluck the fruit before it is ripe, we will only prevent its growth and spoil it.

Otto Von Bismark

“During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it.”

― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The State and Revolution

It has been one hundred years since the death of Vladimir Lenin. I had intended to mark the occasion with a review of one of his books. Therefore, I must apologise to my readership that I chose instead to review a book by such a political scoundrel and political opportunist of the worst sort.

Ali was born into a prominent family in Lahore. His uncle was the chief of Pakistan’s military intelligence. While studying at Oxford, he joined the International Marxist Group in 1968. The hallmark of the IMG was the British section of the Pabloite movement, a group specialising in political provocation.

Ali is Verso’s go-to man on anything connected with Lenin. This says more about Verso’s politics than it does about Ali. Given Ali's close association with Stalinism, he should not be allowed anywhere near Vladimir Lenin. Ali supported Gorbachev and Perestroika in the Soviet Union in the late 1980s.

He believed Perestroika was a great advance for socialism. He even dedicated his book Revolution From Above: Where Is the Soviet Union Going?, published in 1988, to Boris Yeltsin, who later presided over capitalist restoration in the USSR. He said of Yeltsin that his “political courage has made him an important symbol throughout the country and that “The scale of Gorbachev’s operation is, in fact, reminiscent of the efforts of an American president of the nineteenth century: Abraham Lincoln.”

The Dilemmas of Lenin contains no new research and a very limited insight into the mind and actions of Lenin. Ali is correct in saying that the Russian Revolution would not have happened without the brain of Lenin, as Ali points out in his introduction, “ First things first. Without Lenin, there would have been no socialist revolution in 1917. Of this much, we can be certain. Fresh studies of the events have only hardened this opinion. The faction and later the Party that he painstakingly created from 1903 onward was not up to the task of fomenting revolution during the crucial months between February and October 1917, the freest period ever in Russian history. A large majority of its leadership, before Lenin’s return, was prepared to compromise on many key issues. The lesson is that even a political party – specifically trained and educated to produce a revolution – can stumble, falter and fall at the critical moment.”[1]

Ali deals at length with the “Lenin cult” and the attempt by the Stalinists to turn Lenin into a harmless liberal icon. Lenin believed this would happen to all the leaders of the Bolshevik party, writing, “During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonise them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarising it.”[2]

While Ali deals with the early attack on Lenin’s revolutionary edge, his failure to examine more modern-day attempts to bury Lenin under many dead dogs is unforgivable and hard to understand. However, when one starts to investigate Ali’s political trajectory, only one conclusion can be drawn: Ali has no interest in defending Lenin’s “revolutionary edge”. The only ones interested in re-establishing Lenin’scontemprary importance are the Trotskyists of the International Committee of the Fourth International(ICFI).

In a two-part Series, the Marxist David North defends Lenin’s revolutionary edge from the blunt blade of Professor Sean McMeekin. McMeekin wrote an article for the New York Times in which he accused Lenin, amongst other things, of being a German Spy.[3] His article was based on his 2017 book The Russian Revolution: A New History, which North said” cannot be described as a work of history because McMeekin lacks the necessary level of knowledge, professional competence and respect for facts. McMeekin’s book is simply an exercise in anti-communist propaganda from which no one will learn anything.”[4]

He continued, “Why did he write the book? Aside from the lure of easy money (anti-communist works are usually launched with substantial publicity and guaranteed positive reviews in the New York Times and many other publications), McMeekin has a political motive. At the start of this year, the World Socialist Web Site wrote: “A spectre is haunting world capitalism: the spectre of the Russian Revolution.” McMeekin is among the haunted. He writes in the book’s epilogue, “The Specter of Communism,” that capitalism is threatened by growing popular discontent, and the appeal of Bolshevism is again on the rise. “Like the nuclear weapons born of the ideological age inaugurated in 1917, the sad fact about Leninism is that once invented, it cannot be uninvented. Social inequality will always be with us, along with the well-intentioned impulse of socialists to eradicate it.” Therefore, “the Leninist inclination is always lurking among the ambitious and ruthless, especially in desperate times of depression or war that seem to call for more radical solutions.” McMeekin continues: “If the last hundred years teach us anything, we should stiffen our defences and resist armed prophets promising social perfection.” [5]

In some ways, Ali and McMeekin are two sides of the same coin. Both attempt to bury Lenin's revolutionary struggle, his true legacy and contemporary importance. The only organisation on the planet that can truly celebrate and thank Lenin for his insight and revolutionary struggle and bring him to a new audience is the orthodox Marxists of the ICFI.

 

 

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[1] https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/3230-tariq-ali-asks-why-lenin

[2] ― Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The State and Revolution

[3] Was Lenin a German Agent?By Sean Mcmeekin-June 19, 2017-https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/opinion/was-lenin-a-german-agent.html

[4] Professor Sean McMeekin revives discredited anti-Lenin slanders (Part I)- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/06/30/mcme-j30.html

[5] Professor Sean McMeekin revives discredited anti-Lenin slanders (Part I)- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/06/30/mcme-j30.html 

The Future of British Historical Studies

Christopher Thompson 

Wed, 7 Feb at 12:09

I have been following the contributions to the debates on the future of British Studies on the NACBS website with considerable interest. There is a degree of pessimism in some of these contributions about the prospects for this field in general and about the employment prospects for existing and aspiring academic historians in particular. There are sound reasons for these apprehensions, not least because governments and universities' administrations across the English-speaking countries are focused on wealth creation, on subjects that improve the performance of their economies like the sciences, technology and mathematics.  Amongst the wider public in the United Kingdom and elsewhere, on the other hand, there is intense interest in the past, in the histories of countries and communities, localities, social groups and individuals. In that sense, historical studies are in robust health and are likely to remain so. It is to the credit of the Royal Historical Society in the United Kingdom that it has responded to the threats to History Departments here by developing a strategy to contact public decision makers about the merits of the subject and its importance in the cultural and intellectual life of this country.

I do not think that it is very likely that historical subjects will come under threat in universities like those at Oxford and Cambridge. Elsewhere, I fear that some accountants and administrators see history as a soft and dispensable target. This is a profound mistake. Nonetheless, I do believe that historians engaged with the past of the British Isles should begin to make a more active use of the resources of the internet to establish links to archival resources for the subject, to create more enduring on-line institutions to promote the subject, to make available teachers and teaching to those unable to gain entry to courses at universities, to supply suitable teaching materials and so on. Sites like Philosophy Bites have been highly successful in addressing the needs of those interested in that subject.  The Open University has been able to reach outside traditional audiences to address the interests of those beyond the customary audiences for the discipline of history.

The time to start preparing alternatives as a supplement to and support for the subject has arrived. It is not a counsel of despair but one of prudent anticipation and preventative action here and across other English-speaking countries. It is not a perfect solution but it may help to avert a worse outcome.

  

Mateo Ballester Rodriguez, Los Ecos de un Regicidio.La Recepcion de la Revolucion Inglesa y sus Ideas Politicas en Espana (1640-1660)

 By Chris Thompson

How the events of the 1640s and 1650s and their consequences are to be assessed is one of the enduring issues that historians of the British Isles have to face. The analysis of their varying interpretations is in itself a subject of continuing interest. By and large, historians based in these islands and in English-speaking countries overseas have shown less interest in and devoted less time to the studies undertaken by historians, by historical sociologists and political scientists in other countries. Nonetheless, such studies do exist and throw an interesting light on how these events were seen and are now interpreted elsewhere.

Mateo Ballester Rodriguez’s essay published in 2015 is one such example. It is partly a bibliographical description of the limited printed publications that appeared in the Iberian peninsula and the apparently exiguous manuscript material dealing with the conflicts in England in the period from 1640 to 1660. But it has some opening remarks by Rodriguez himself on the significance of the disputes over sovereignty in England and some further remarks covering the observations of figures from the world of political science on the same subject. Many of the latter like Liah Greenfeld or Hans Kohn or John Breuilly have not appeared on my horizon before.

Rodriguez’s formulation of his own analysis is relatively straightforward. He held that there was a struggle between the supporters of traditional beliefs in the divine rights of monarchs who stood at the apex of English society and the adherents of novel ideas about the location of national sovereignty in the institution of Parliament. On the whole, Anglicans and Catholics supported King Charles I while radical Puritans were committed to religious toleration and thus to Parliament’s cause.Absolutist political theorists like Thomas Hobbes were rejected by advocates of legal equality like the Levellers and, later, by John Locke. Admittedly, the conflicts of the first and second Civil Wars divided English people of all ranks but Parliament’s victory on the battlefields ensured that the new concept of authority resting in the nation and embodied in Parliament was secured. Kings and the Church of England were disposed of. One or two echoes of Christopher Hill’s work were clearly reflected.

Liah Greenfeld apparently argued that the idea of the nation as the repository of political authority, as the basis of political authority and the object of loyalty was first embraced in England during its Revolution. Hans Kohn came to the view that the Revolution represented the first example of modern religious, political and social nationalism. On the other hand, John Breuilly thought that it was difficult to make the nation the repository of the principle of sovereignty or to figure out how that principle could be institutionally embodied in the Rump and the Parliaments of the Protectorate. In any case, the phenomenon disappeared when political stability was re-established after the Restoration in 1660. Very little of the intriguing and intense debates in the British Isles ever found their way into the hands of the subjects of the Iberian Habsburgs in print or in manuscript as Rodriguez went on to show. Ideological considerations and the practice of self-censorship undoubtedly played a part in this outcome even though, in Holland and Venice, interest in such events was much more obvious.

It is tempting to criticise some of these contentions. How far printed publications in the British Isles reflected the balance of contemporaries’ opinions is difficult, perhaps impossible, to determine. Highly interesting though they are, the views of groups like the Levellers and Diggers may not be as indicative of wider political opinions as their admirers in more modern times believe. Puritans were not in any event all of one kind nor were they uniformly advocates of religious toleration. All the regimes in England after 1646, in Scotland and Ireland after 1651 depended on military force to remain in power. Once the confidence of the soldiery was lost and the supporters of Protectoral or republican rule became too divided, the return of monarchical rule and of the pre-1640 state churches was increasingly likely. Historical sociologists and political theorists alike need to look more closely at the historical evidence before they venture onto the turf of historians. 

 

“The Crooked Path To Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution,” by James Oakes. £21.99-WW Norton & Co

We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.

Karl Marx[1]

“Scratch beneath the surface of any debate about race in American history, and there you will find a struggle for power, ultimately political power.”

Scorpion’s Sting James Oakes

“A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!”

― Leon Trotsky, Their Morals and Ours

The relationship between Abraham Lincoln and the institution of slavery is very complex. To Oakes’s credit, he has written a book that is not only well-researched but, as David Holahan writes in USA Today. “ brings clarity and insight to a political conundrum of bewildering complexity.”

As James Oakes’s book The Crooked Path to Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution suggests, there is not an easy path to understanding the relationship between Lincoln and the question of slavery. From an early age, Lincoln hated slavery but was not an abolitionist. According to James Oakes, Lincoln “never called for the immediate emancipation of the slaves. He never denounced slaveholders as sinners and never endorsed the civil or political equality of Blacks and whites… He never opened his home to fugitive slaves. He endorsed voluntary colonization of free Blacks… He certainly spoke at colonization meetings… but never at an abolitionist meeting.”[2] Although not a Marxist historian, Oakes believes a dialectical relationship exists between Lincoln and the struggle to end slavery.

Oakes is a historian who is careful with the words he uses. Again, as the title suggests, there was no straightforward path to the abolition of slavery. Oakes spends a significant part of the book examining the United States Constitution, which perhaps unsurprisingly does not contain the word "slavery". Slaves are referred to euphemistically as “persons” who are “held to service.” As Oakes further points out, the Constitution contains much that is useful to both slaveholders and abolitionists who point out that words “persons” and "liberty" support their cause. Oakes does not sugarcoat the fact that at the time the Constitution was written, slavery was on the ascendency, with 13 American states still practising chattel slavery.

Oakes does not see the Constitution through rose-tinted glasses, and his book attempts to place it in a more objective light, writing, “Parse every clause of the Constitution, peer into the minds of its authors, and you may never find the antislavery document revered by so many ordinary men and women, Black and white.”

As the Marxist writer Tom Mackaman points out, “The American Revolution made incarnate the thought of the Enlightenment, the period of intellectual rebirth that undermined the divinely sanctioned feudal order of the Middle Ages, and that grew in tandem with the incipient capitalist economy. Just as scientists—natural philosophers as they were then called—such as Copernicus, Galileo and Newton challenged the feudal-religious conception of the natural world, so Enlightenment political philosophers began to raise questions about the political world—but not the social, which was only dimly understood prior to Marx. Why did kings rule? What was the purpose of government? What were the rights of man? Ultimately, in answer to these questions, the Enlightenment established that there existed natural rights—that is, rights that preceded government or that existed in a state of nature. [3]One natural right identified was the right to private property. Another was the right to freedom of self-ownership. However, the right to property, as James Oakes has pointed out, was increasingly viewed to be the outcome of self-ownership and the right to dispose of one’s labour. “The property which every man has in his labour, as it is the original foundation of all other property, so it is the most sacred and inviolable,” This political conundrum that Oakes mentions in the book was one that Lincoln would grapple with until his political murder in 1865.

In his review of Oakes's book, Richard Kreitner concurs, writing, “This explication of the antislavery reading of the Constitution represents Oakes at his best, showing how clauses that seemed to protect slavery also opened, for a growing number of antislavery politicians, doors to its potential abolition. The Constitution was a mess of contradictions; it limited the possibilities of antislavery politics but offered opportunities, too. Competing interpretations of the Constitution “emerged in reaction to each other,” Oakes writes, adapting to new issues and claims by the other, each invoking the founders to support its view. The South’s increasingly aggressive twisting of the Constitution and demands for slavery’s protection developed as much in response to growing antislavery assertiveness as the other way around.”[4]

Like all of Oakes's books, The Crooked Path educates and increases one's knowledge. He brings a clarity of thought, which is rare among historians of his subject matter. I like reading his books, but from my standpoint, his most important contribution to historical clarity has been his decision to take to the battlefield against what he called the “new consensus history”[5]. Over the last five years, Oakes has been sharply critical of the various revisionist narratives, including the historical racialism of the 1619 Project.

Oakes believes most contemporary scholarship offers only “a history or politics and of hopelessness.” Oakes wrote in above mentioned article in 2017, “The new consensus history has shaped large swaths of the American past, from the American Revolution of the eighteenth century to the “long” Civil Rights movement of the twentieth century. Here, I focus primarily on my field of inquiry—slavery, antislavery, and the Civil War—where the drift toward consensus has been startling. Everywhere you look, historians are collapsing fundamental social distinctions—between slavery and racial discrimination, for example, between being married and being enslaved, between the free labour system of the North and the slave labour system of the South. The social bases of political conflict thus erased, consensus historians go on to suppress the significance of antislavery politics, even to the point of denying that politics played any role whatsoever in the destruction of slavery. These crucial erasures are once again explained by a reference to a broad political consensus—not the liberal consensus of Hofstadter and Hartz, but the smothering, all-consuming consensus in favour of “white male supremacy.” It’s still consensus history; it’s just a different consensus.”

One revisionist narrative Oakes is particularly hostile to has been the racialist viewpoint emanating from the New York Times 1619 Project. For readers unfamiliar with the Vergangenheitsbewältigung, visit the wsws.org[6]. This website has extensive coverage from a Marxist perspective. In a recent interview with the historian Tom Mackaman on wsws.org, Mackaman asked the following: “ Another aspect of the way the 1619 Project presents history is to imply that it is a uniquely American phenomenon, leaving out the long history of chattel slavery, the history of slavery in the Caribbean. Oakes answered, “ And they erase Africa from the African slave trade. They claim that Africans were stolen and kidnapped from Africa. Well, they were purchased by these kidnappers in Africa. Everybody’s hands were dirty. And this is another aspect of the tendency to reify race because you’re attempting to isolate a racial group that was also complicit. This is conspicuous only because the obsession with complicity is so overwhelming in the political culture right now, but also as reflected in the 1619 Project. Hypocrisy and complicity are basically the two great attacks. Again, not a critique of capitalism. It’s a critique of hypocrisy and complicity. Here, I agree with Genovese, who once said that “hypocrites are a dime a dozen.” Hypocrisy doesn’t interest me as a critique, nor does complicity.[7]

James Oakes is a first-rate scholar whose work is well worth reading. I look forward to his next book.

 

Notes

1.    February 1, 1959, issue of Commentary John Higham “The Cult of the ‘American Consensus’

2.    The New York Times 1619 Project and the Racialist Falsification of History- Edited by David North and Thomas Mackaman-Mehring Books. 

3.    Slavery in White and Black-Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene Genovese

     

Books by James Oakes

The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and the Triumph of antislavery Politics (2007);

Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (2012).

The Scorpion’s Sting: antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (2014).

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[1] Address of the International Working Men's Association to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States of America-https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm

[2] “The Crooked Path To Abolition: Abraham Lincoln and the Antislavery Constitution,” by James Oakes. £21.99-WW Norton & Co

[3] Slavery and the American Revolution: A Response to the New York Times 1619 Project- https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/11/01/amer-n01.html

[4] Did the Constitution Pave the Way to Emancipation?- https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/james-oakes-crooked-path/

[5] The New Cult of Consensus- https://nonsite.org/the-new-cult-of-consensus/

[6] https://www.wsws.org/en/topics/event/1619

[7] An interview with historian James Oakes on the New York Times’ 1619 Project 

The Protector: The Fall and Rise Of Oliver Cromwell - A Novel- Tom Reilly-Top Hat Books (June 24 2022)

 “The whole agrarian history of Ireland is a series of confiscations of Irish land to be handed over to English settlers. These settlers, in a very few generations, under the charm of Celtic society, turned more Irish than the aborigines. Then a new confiscation and new colonisation took place, and so in infinitum.”

Frederick Engels

‘If I’m ever proven wrong, I’ll shut up and get off the stage.’

Tom Reilly

“Such issues are beyond good manners, sir. Catholicism is more than a religion. It is a political power. Therefore, I am led to believe there will be no peace in Ireland until the Catholic Church is crushed.”

Oliver Cromwell

“This ancestor of Lord Lansdowne, the founder of the noble Lansdowne family, Sir William Petty, landed in Ireland in 1652 with a total capital of all his fortune of £500. But he came over in the wake of Cromwell’s army and got himself appointed ‘Physician to the Army of Ireland’. In 1662, he was made one of a Court of Commissioners of Irish Estates and also Surveyor-General for Ireland. As the native Irish were then being hunted to death, or transported in slave-gangs to Barbadoes, the latter fact gave this worthy ancestor of a worthy lord excellent opportunities to ‘invest’ his £500 to good purpose.”

James Connolly

“What is History but a fable agreed upon?”. Napoleon I.

A new book on Oliver Cromwell is always welcome, but this one is a major disappointment. I would not go as far as to say that it wastes both the reader and author's time but it comes pretty close to that. It is not Reilly’s fault but now all new work on Cromwell will be defined by its attitude to the magnificent three volumes of  Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell.[1]His book does not fair very well.

Despite being an amateur historian, books by Tom Reilly are worth reading. He has come under significant attack for what is seen as an unhealthy fixation with Cromwell. However, not all the criticism from modern academia has been fair, and some have been borderline abusive. The book is not without some merit. It is well written and researched and, to a limited degree, re-establishes Cromwell’s authentic voice. How much of the real  Cromwell appears remains to be seen. My criticism of his robust and somewhat rose-tinted defence of everything Cromwell did fails to place Cromwell in a more objective context.

Before the invasion of Ireland, Cromwell had to do two necessary things, both crucial to a successful invasion of Ireland. First was the execution of Charles I. Although, in the short term, far from stabilising an already unstable ruling elite, the execution led sections of the bourgeoisie to pursue negotiations with the Royalists in England and Ireland. One of the reasons for the invasion was to subdue a possible Royalist/Catholic revolt and to secure Cromwell’s and a large section of the English bourgeoisie's strategic political and economic interests in that country. Second, Parliament charged Cromwell to deal with the growing radicalisation of the New Model Army. One manifestation of this radicalism was the Leveller inspired revolt over the army being shipped to Ireland to put down the revolt.

Most criticism of Reilly has centred on his passionate defence of Cromwell’s role in Ireland.[2] In his new book, Reilly continues his theme that Cromwell was not to blame for the massacres. He writes, “We should apologise to Cromwell’s family for blackening his name, for making him a monster. We are teaching our children propaganda that perpetuates anti-English prejudice.”

Suppose we take out of the equation Reilly’s hyperbole and infatuation. In that case, we are left with the fact that Oliver Cromwell was a leading member of the English bourgeoisie and, alongside others, not only made a lot of money out of the conquest of Ireland but, if it happened today, would be guilty of war crimes.

The English Bourgeoisie, from the beginning saw Ireland as a money-making adventure. As an incentive to make the conquest easier, it got Parliament to pass an  “Adventurers Act” in 1642 to invite the “Middling Sort” to invest in the army. The greater the investment, the greater the return of land. Cromwell had loaned over 2,000 pounds and had been promised land in Leinster. Christopher Hill correctly states Cromwell’s conquest of Ireland was “the first big triumph of English imperialism and the first big defeat of English democracy”.While many of the bourgeoisie stumped up money for their adventure in Ireland, Parliament felt a little more cooperation was a need and this came in the form of a series of ordinances which was a demand for money with menaces. In February 1648: it issued An Ordinance For raising of Twenty thousand pounds a Month for the Relief of Ireland.

Frederick Engels states, “ In the 17th century, the whole of Ireland, except the newly Scotchified North, was ripe for a fresh confiscation. So much so that when the British (Puritan) Parliament accorded to Charles I an army for the reduction of Ireland, it resolved that the money for this armament should be raised upon the security of 2,500,000 acres to be confiscated in Ireland. And the “adventurers” who advanced the money should also appoint the officers of that army. The land was to be divided amongst those adventurers so that 1,000 acres should be given them, if in Ulster for £200 — advanced, in Connaught for £300, in Munster for £450, in Leinster for £600. And if the people rose against this beneficent plan, they are Vendéens! If Regnard should ever sit in a National Convention, he may take a leaf out of the proceedings of the Long Parliament and combat a possible Vendée with these means.[3]

In another part of the same letter, Engels makes this point: “The 80,000 Protestants’ massacre of 1641. The Irish Catholics are here in the same position as the Commune de Paris. The Versailles massacred 30,000 Communards and called that the horrors of the Commune. The English Protestants under Cromwell massacred at least 30,000 Irish and, to cover their brutality invented the tale that this was to avenge 30,000 Protestants murdered by the Irish Catholics.”

The Irish socialist James Connolly, while not blaming the English bourgeoise for everything that occurred to the Irish people after the conquest of Ireland in the latter part of the seventeenth century, but wrote “ Just as it is true that a stream cannot rise above its source, so it is true that a national literature cannot rise above the moral level of the social conditions of the people from whom it derives its inspiration. If we would understand the national literature of a people, we must study their social and political status, keeping in mind the fact that their writers were a product thereof and that the children of their brains were conceived and brought forth in certain historical conditions. Ireland, at the same time as she lost her ancient social system, also lost her language as the vehicle of thought of those who acted as her leaders. As a result of this twofold loss, the nation suffered socially, nationally and intellectually from a prolonged arrested development. During the closing years of the seventeenth century, all the eighteenth, and the greater part of the nineteenth, the Irish people were the lowest helots in Europe, socially and politically. The Irish peasant, reduced from the position of a free clansman owning his tribeland and controlling its administration in common with his fellows, was a mere tenant-at-will subject to eviction, dishonour and outrage at the hands of an irresponsible private proprietor. Politically, he was non-existent. Legally, he held no rights; intellectually, he sank under the weight of his social abasement and surrendered to the downward drag of his poverty. He had been conquered, and he suffered all the terrible consequences of defeat at the hands of a ruling class and nation who have always acted upon the old Roman maxim of `Woe to the vanquished'.[4]

I do not hold out much hope that Reilly’s next Cromwell adventure will produce a more objective study. I will examine Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives, which emerged in 2020. Reilly can write more books and hold more conferences, but the reality is that his hero is not as innocent as he makes out. Perhaps his next book should contain a few warts.

 

 

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[1] The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell: Volume 1: October 1626 to January 1649 (Speeches & Writings of Oliver Cromwell) Hardcover – 7 Sept. 2022by Andrew Barclay (Editor), Tim Wales (Editor), John Morrill (Editor)

[2] See Cromwell and Ireland: New Perspectives Hardcover – 30 Nov. 2020

by Professor Martyn Bennett (Author, Editor), Raymond Gillespie (Editor), Scott Spurlock (Editor)

[3] Engels To Jenny Longuet-Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, pp. 326-329-https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/letters/81_02_24.htm

[4] Labour in Irish History by James Connolly