Tag Archives: Ken Coates

Revolutionary Activism in the 1950s and 60s, volume 2, Britain 1965-1970 by Ernest Tate (Resistance Books, £13)

Labour History, Memoir, Politics, Review, , ,
Yes, I can feel your eyes glazing over already, but there’s more to this book than you think, not least the many photographs of Vanessa Redgrave, Tariq Ali and Richard Branson at the front of big London marches against the Vietnam War. BRANSON? Yes, the world’s worst balloonist and train operator hung out with revolutionaries in the 1960s. At least Stephen Hawking (pictured likewise, walking with canes) kept his socialist principles.
The local – Nottingham – interest is with the late Ken Coates, one of the key people in the International Group which joined with others to form the nucleus of what became the International Marxist Group, British section of the Fourth International (that’s the Trotskyist one). Pat Jordan, who once ran a radical – and comic – bookshop in St Anns is also there at the start. Pat came to a sad end, some of which is covered here.
Ken Coates went on to be the key person in the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation, which continues in Radford with a set up involving Spokesman Books and Russell Press.
In this book he features large in a long chapter on the Russell Tribunal on the Vietnam War which pulled together an investigative panel including Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. The author spends too long discussing the disastrous finances of the Tribunal but at last I started to understand the mercurial Ralph Schoenman who was at the centre of the various controversies around the Tribunal and anti-Vietnam War activity until his (American) passport was taken away, meaning he could not travel to Europe any more.
Opposition to the Vietnam War is at the centre of the book and Tate takes us behind the scenes as he was an organiser of the mass mobilisations in London in the 1960s.
Equally fascinating,but in a car-crash kind of way, are the later chapters of the book where Tate describes the work of the Fourth International when they decided to take to the hills, Cuban style, to ferment guerrilla uprisings in South America. Few of the participants survived. Tate had been sent from Canada to build a group in the UK and returns home, exhausted and broke. Volume one covers his earlier years building the Canadian movement but he is frozen out of his own organisation as it descends into a cult-like grouping. They take a “turn” to industry. Having mostly failed to organise a working class base they substitute themselves for the working class by sending previously professional workers onto the factory floor. Hilariously, he describes holding bi-weekly training sessions on how to be working class (which he was himself) including showing people how to use basic tools so that they were not completely ignorant after they left their middle class jobs.
It’s beyond the scope of the book but his former UK comrades did the same here.
Not surprisingly, it was the beginning of the end.
Ross Bradshaw

Corbyn’s Campaign edited by Tom Unterrainer (Spokesman, £7.95)

Politics, Review, , , , , , , , ,

This book is a prescient amalgam of reportage of the inspiring campaign to elect Jeremy Corbyn, but is also a celebration of a confident grassroots espousal of a renewed socialism with real Labour values, free at last from the torpor of what Tariq Ali called the “extreme centre”. The Left in Nottingham was among the first to give impetus to the Corbyn campaign. It is therefore fitting that the text begins with Corbyn’s speech at the first Nottingham meeting and the contribution of two young participants at the second.

These contributions are a breath of fresh air, cleansing the fetid atmosphere of defeat and conformity that has become the hallmark of residual New Labour placemen.
Part two of the book concentrates on the nuts and bolts of the campaign and its beginnings in a Facebook page of Red Labour. The online social media campaigning became a tsunami of digitised activity. All this is described in Ben Sellers’ piece, entertainingly entitled “‪#‎JEZWEDID‬“. Chris Williamson, former Labour MP for Derby, places the campaign in its historical context, describing how the acceptance by Labour of the neoliberal austerity agenda paved the way for the restitution of the Tories into government in 2015. He explains how the Tories twisted the rescue of the banks by the Labour Government into a rallying cry, accusing the Labour Government of incompetence. He tells how Ed Miliband made a sally at Blair’s legacy but seemed incapable of drawing the obvious conclusion that before Labour could move forward, it had to ditch the neoliberal austerity-lite legacy of both Blair and Brown, with their virtual acceptance of bi-partisan accommodation. The writer concludes with a verse from Shelley’s The Masque of Anarchy and an appeal to the Labour movement to rediscover “the spirit of 1945”.

Christine Shawcroft and (Sherwood’s) Adele Williams both write of the need for the democratic nature of the institutions and practice of the Labour Party to be restored. The writers wish the era of the “focus group” mentality and the stage-managed annual conference, with its adulation of the leader, to become a thing of the past. They wish to see the local Labour Party, and the labour movement in general, integrated into the local community. New institutions such as the People’s Assembly have a vital role to play in such involvement. The media campaign against Corbyn assisted by parts of the Parliamentary Labour Party was, and is, vicious, inaccurate and calculated to offend. But in spite of all this Corbyn has been able to retain his equanimity. Abi Rhodes (who works at Spokesman) charts the campaign against Corbyn and his labelling as “unelectable”. The fact that he scored a majority vote in all three electoral colleges belies this. She notes the efforts of the media to smear Corbyn because of his espousal of socialism, which is supposedly anathema to the British electorate in any form.

Corbyn’s campaign rallied thousands to a socialist agenda and showed that there is an undercurrent of profound dissatisfaction with the austerity agenda of the “extreme centre”.

The final section starts with a demonstration of Corbyn’s firm belief in the continuing exploitative domination of the developing world. The text in question is the Foreword he wrote for the reprinting of the classic work, Imperialism by J.A. Hobson, published by Spokesman, and much admired by Lenin. And it is Corbyn’s internationalism, opposition to war in general and his hostility in particular to that vehicle for mass murder, Trident, that Tony Simpson discusses. His contribution deals with the Syrian debate, but also mentions Corbyn’s long-term oppositional role both in and out of Parliament on such issues as Palestine and the plight of the Kurds. The final text is one on Workers’ Control by Tom Unterrainer. This is a cause, again always supported by Corbyn, which is surely one of the most important strategies to engage people and stimulate the question of democracy in the workplace and in the wider world. The book concludes with the text of Corbyn’s “Campaign policies”.

As the Introduction points out, this book represents no particular line of march, other than a generalised commitment to radical social change. It does, however, stand as a record of events to which I suspect few of us, certainly in its initial stages, would have given credence. It will surely help to bring about the changes so necessary in our society.

John Daniels