This is an open question to the Eustonist tendency (for I doubt the problem is confined at Harry’s Place):
If the SWP and many other Trotskyite organisations are so fundamentally anti-semitic, why do they call themselves after an ethnic Jew?
Wikipedia has one answer: “Harry’s Place was originally started by Harry Hatchet (aka “Harry” – none of Harry’s Place writers use their full name), who was originally the sole writer. Harry was active in British anti-fascist and Marxist politics in the mid-to-late 1980s, and in this period was also a member of the Straight Left faction of the Communist Party of Great Britain. It is claimed that he took the pseudonym “Harry Steele” as a tribute to Harry Pollitt, former General Secretary of the CPGB, and the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (though Harry claims it was a “piss-take” and “not a hommage [sic] to anyone”). Under this name he contributed to a number of far-left message boards and mailing lists, including UK Left Network and “The Politburo”, a discussion board for British Communists, the latter of which he set up. In this period he became well-known among fellow contributors for his support for “orthodox” Soviet Communism and his attacks on Trotskyists, in particular the Socialist Workers Party. Some critics felt that his later views on the anti-racism movement were closer to the right-wing than to traditional left-wing politics.”
Using a George Orwell quote (“liberty, if it means anything, is the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear”) seems an odd irony: Orwell was always comparing Stalinism to fascism. Today, the formerly loyal Stalinist spends a great deal of time and effort trying to compare Islam to fascism.
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Which leads me to another question, for those on the anti-Iraq-war left, for lack of a better term:
After Hitler, some ex-Nazis became Conservative politicians.
After Stalin, it seems that many of his international brigade have become the most dangerous of New Labour MPs, cynics or conservatives. To what degree the Stalinist movement was just the worship of power over people – for Stalin’s atrocities have been known about in Britain since the fifties – is unclear. Some Ex-Trots, by contrast, have become neo-conservatives or : in the exile from the left since the fall of the Soviet Union, political ideologies have changed hands so many times that in many cases they are obsolete.
Given that not even the “Third Way” label seems to work for Blair and Cameron, and the traditional labels of the left refer to the Cold War reality and are becoming ever more abstract as the original thinkers/politicians behind them are ignored – is it not time for us to devise a few more modern labels, which correspond to streams of thought which predominate today? Something equivalent to a Euston Manifesto for the British far left needs to define the post-Soviet consensus, to unite our aims and “sloganize” the way forward. Postmodern and impenetrable though the academic left might be sometimes, this does not need to be our public face.
