A BRECHT POEM, SOME THOUGHTS ON DEMOCRACY and on JOURNALISM

PLEASURES

The first look out of the window in the morning 
The old book found again 
Enthusiastic faces 
Snow, the change of the seasons 
The newspaper 
The dog 
Dialectics 
Taking showers, swimming 
Old music 
Comfortable shoes 
Taking things in 
New music 
Writing, planting 
Travelling 
Singing 
Being friendly. 

Brecht (Last Poems) p448
from Willett and Mannheim’s Bertolt Brecht Poems 1913-1956 (1976)
I would add “the smell of grass after rain” – having gone out to the balcony on my 
mountain house in Sirnea and being struck by the smell of grass after a squal. 
Perhaps I should draft a poem in the Brechtian style?

I’m not sure why I’ve taken to making a list of the books I’ve been downloading 
– I should obviously try rather to do a more thematic list – for example on 
democratic, journalistic and environmental issues.
Geoff Eley is a good place to start – eg one of his books on democracy and the 
Left - Forging Democracy Geoff Eley (2002)

Between the later 1970s and early 1990s Europe’s political landscape was radically rearranged. The 1989 revolutions removed the Eastern European socialist bloc, and the Soviet Union dissolved. Through an equally drastic capitalist restructuring, Western Europe was transformed. Whereas socialist parties recaptured government across Europe during the later 1990s, moreover, these were no longer the same socialist parties as before. Profoundly deradicalized, they were separating rapidly from the political cultures and social histories that had sustained them during a previous century of struggle. Communist parties, consistently the labor movements’ most militant wings, had almost entirely disappeared. No one talked any longer of abolishing capitalism, of regulating its dysfunctions and excesses, or even of modifying its most egregiously destructive social effects.

For a decade after 1989, the space for imagining alternatives narrowed to virtually nothing. But from another perspective new forces had been energizing the Left. If labor movements rested on the proud and lasting achievements built from the outcomes of the Second World War but now being dismantled, younger generations rode the excitements of 1968. The synergy of student radicalism, countercultural exuberance, and industrial militancy jolted Europe’s political cultures into quite new directions. Partly these new energies flowed through the existing parties, but partly they fashioned their own political space. Feminism was certainly the most important of these emergent movements, forcing wholesale reappraisal of everything politics contained. But radical ecology also arrived, linking grassroots activism, communitarian experiment, and extra-parliamentary mobilization in unexpected ways. By 1980, a remarkable transnational peace movement was getting off the ground. A variety of alternative lifestyle movements captured many imaginations. The first signs of a new and lasting political presence bringing these developments together, Green parties, appeared on the scene.

In the writings of historians, sociologists and social theorists, cultural critics, and political commentators of all kinds, as well as in the Left’s own variegated discourse, an enormous challenge to accustomed assumptions was generated during the last quarter of the twentieth century. The crisis of socialism during the 1980s not only compelled the rethinking of the boundaries and meanings of the Left, the needs of democracy, and the very nature of politics itself but also forced historians into taking the same questions back to the past. Contemporary feminism’s lasting if unfinished achievement, for example, has been to insist on the need to refashion our most basic understandings in the light of gender, the histories of sexuality, and all the specificities of women’s societal place. More recently, inspired partly by the much longer salience of such questions in the United States and partly by practical explosions of racialized conflicts in the 1980s and 1990s, a similar examination of race and ethnicity has begun. Many other facets of identity joined a growing profusion of invigorating political debates.

In the process, the earlier centrality of class, as both social history and political category, dissolved. While class remained an unavoidable reality of social and political action for the Left in the twenty-first century, the earlier centering of politics around the traditional imagery of the male worker in industry had to be systematically rethought. Conceived in one era, therefore, this book was completed in another. I began writing in a Europe of labor movements and socialist parties, of strong public sectors and viable welfare states, and of class-centered politics and actually existing socialisms. Though their original inspiration was flawed and the Soviet example was by then damaged almost beyond recall, Communist parties in the West remained carriers of a distinctive militancy.

In the public sphere, rhetorics of revolution, class consciousness, and socialist transformation still claimed a place. With Socialists riding the democratic transitions triumphantly to power in Spain, Portugal, and Greece, Polish Solidarnosc tearing open the cobwebbed political cultures of Eastern Europe, and French Socialists forming their first postwar government, things seemed on the move. The years 1979–81 were for socialists an encouraging and even an inspiring time.

This gap between optimism and its ending, between the organized strengths of an already formed tradition and the emergent potentials for its succession, is crucial to the purposes of my book. I’ve written it to capture the drama of a still-continuing contemporary transition. To do so required both a detailed accounting of the past and a bold reconstruction of the present because both the achievements and the foreshortenings of the old remain vital to the shaping of the new. Although the century after the 1860s claims the larger share of the book, accordingly, the lines of the later twentieth-century argument are always inscribed earlier on. In that sense, I would argue, history can both impede the present and set it free. Moreover, beginning in the 1860s, my account moves forward through a series of pan-European revolutionary conjunctures, from the settlements accompanying the two world wars through the dramas of 1968 to the latest restructuring of 1989–92.

This book is written from great passion and great regret. It has taken me two long decades. Its writing was shaped and buffeted by a huge amount of contemporary change. It has required a willingness to rethink and surrender some valued assumptions and deeply cherished beliefs. Nonetheless, even allowing for the narratives of knowingness and consistency we like to construct for our intellectual biographies, the main lines of argument remain in many ways consistent with my thinking in the mid-1980s, though I’m sure I understand the implications far better now. It was on one of my returns to England in the spring of 1984, reentering the unique contemplative space of the railway journey (also a thing of the past) and reeling from the brutalized public atmosphere surrounding the miners’ strike, that I knew the world had changed.

I can still weep for all the loss this entailed, for the wasted sacrifices and poor decisions, for the unsung everyday heroism as well as the more obvious courageous acts, for the crimes perpetrated in the name of virtue as well as those committed against it, for the gaps between promise and achievement, for the movements, communities, and cultures built painstakingly across generations whose bases are now gone. From my vantage point at the close of the twentieth century, there were many times when this seemed a painful book to be writing. It required a lot of letting go. However, it is decidedly not an epitaph or an exercise in nostalgia. It is written from the conviction that history matters, particularly when some vital stories get mistold. That struggle of memory against forgetting has become something of a commonplace of contemporary writing, but is no less empowering for that. During the 1990s new amnesias brought some essential histories under erasure. The history of the Left has been the struggle for democracy against systems of inequality that limit and distort, attack and repress, and sometimes seek even to liquidate human potential altogether.

Moreover, this is a history certainly not completed. If my book concentrates in its first three parts on the building of one kind of movement for the conduct of that struggle, the class-centered politics of the socialist tradition, then it seeks to hold that tradition’s omissions and foreshortenings clearly in view. The book’s final part then outlines the potentials from which a new politics of the Left can be made. In that sense, it looks to the future.

And then on to journalism – with a great biography of one of the greatest 
journalists of the 20th century, Claud Cockburn Believe Nothing Until It’s 
Officially Denied – Claud Cockburn and invention of guerilla journalism by 
Patrick Cockburn (2024), his son. The great man himself wrote a trilogy of 
memoirs on which I have only two -
In Time of Trouble – an autobiography Claud Cockburn (1957)
Crossing the Line Claud Cockburn (1959)
And then, the environment, with a powerful little book from the author of 
Extinction Rebellion
Common Sense of the 21st Century Roger Hallam (2019)And, as a final bonus a subject dear to my heart – the social sciences

The History of Social Sciences ed Roger Backhouse and Philippe Fontaine (2010)