Apart from sharing in the campaigning for it, I had no particular connection with Vietnam during the war, nor did I visit it until a quarter of a century after victory, and then purely on holiday. On the other hand, like so many leftwingers who were inspired by the Cuban revolution, I visited Cuba several times in the 1960s, and thus, incidentally, saw a good cross-section of the world’s itinerant left. My first trip there was in 1960, the irresistible honeymoon period of the young revolution. I found myself coinciding and joining forces with two economist friends who represented that rare phenomenon, the old US Marxist left identified neither with the CP nor with its opponents: the tall Paul Sweezy, all slow-speaking New England Yankee, and Paul Baran. Since their embattled little journal, the Monthly Review, had kept the red flag flying in Cold War USA, they were welcomed by Castro and the ex-guerrillas of the Sierra Maestra. My own contacts came rather through a formidable CP leader with an exceptional gift for political adaptation, Carlos Rafael Rodriguez, whose insistence on making common cause with Fidel while he was in the Sierra Maestra paid off after the victory. Havana was still sufficiently close to the free-swinging paradise for shady tourists of the musical Guys and Dolls to radiate rumba and cultural tolerance, and the island looked sufficiently fertile to give the revolutionary regime what looked like an easy future. We agreed that it ought to have no difficulty in feeding its 10 million inhabitants, with enough left over for Cuba Libres (rum and Coca-Cola), cigars and those wonderful tiny street-corner coffees which disappeared as the economy foundered. Eighteen months after victory the honeymoon between people and revolutionary government was still tangible. Dodging radical young Americans with movie-cameras we toured the country in an optimistic haze.
My second visit, in 1962, via Prague, Shannon and Gander, was with a British left-wing delegation of the usual composition: a left-wing Labour MP; unilateral nuclear disarmers; a hardnosed, usually Party-line union leader, not without an interest in foreign nooky; the odd radical conspirator; CP functionaries and the like. A young, fast-talking African had somehow attached himself to us, claiming to represent an undefined ‘Youth Movement’ in a vaguely defined region of West Africa, whose first action on arriving in Prague was to make tracks for the Foreign Ministry where he hoped to find somebody to fund Third World revolution through him. The Cubans refused to have anything to do with him. At the time I saw him as that curious by-product of that age, a black confidence man exploiting the ignorance or anti-imperialist reflexes of white progressives: one of the Good Soldier Schwejks or picaros of the Cold War. The liberal left became familiar with, and sometimes let itself be exploited by, such figures – in Britain the highly uncongenial ‘Michael X’, halfway between a bad beginning as a West London hustler and a grim end on the scaffold in Trinidad and on the pages of V. S. Naipaul’s harsh novel, was at one time familiar at London parties. Certainly these examples of the flotsam and jetsam of a disintegrating empire were less impressive than the black militants from the USA who were soon to look to Cuba for aid, but behind the unpersuasive scams of people such as the young African there was a tragedy of uprooted lives among white aliens which I did not sufficiently appreciate. As for the delegation itself, all I can remember about it is that I found myself translating for Che who (in Fidel’s place) received us for lunch in the former Hilton hotel. (He was indeed as fine a figure of a man as he looks on the famous photo, though he said nothing of interest.) However, thanks to the invaluable Argeliers Leon, expert in the affairs of Afro-Cuban secret societies and cults and director of the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore which the new regime had just established, I was able to listen to some wonderful music in the black barrios of Havana.
My third visit was to a somewhat extravagant gathering, the Havana Cultural Congress, ‘the last episode in Fidel Castro’s affair with the European intelligentsia’, in January 1968, to which Fidel, at that point on cool terms with Moscow, had pointedly omitted to invite cultural figures from the Soviet bloc or (except in Italy, where culture and the PCI still went together), orthodox CP intellectuals. Instead, he brought in an impressive range of independent, dissident and heterodox leftists from various cultural scenes, including most of the older generation of the Parisian avant-garde political outgroups. Their most memorable contribution to the congress was to produce a politico-artistic ‘incident’, when old surrealists physically attacked the Mexican artist Siqueiros, who had once been associated with the plans to assassinate Trotsky, at the opening of an art show, though it was not clear how far this was on grounds of artistic or political disagreement. Yet the curious thing about this invasion of the past from the Latin Quarter is how little it had in common with, or anticipated, the student rebellion that was about to sweep through Paris. Nevertheless, it was an exciting occasion, though a somewhat depressing one, considering the evident mess Cuba had made of its economy. At all events it gave me the opportunity to get to know the remarkable Hans Magnus Enzensberger in his Fidelista phase, with his Russian wife, the enchanting Masha, a lost soul whose life was to end tragically in London, child of the dark night of the Stalinist Soviet Union. For her father had been Alexander Fadeyev, General Secretary of the Writers’ Union in the years of the Great Terror, that is to say a state bureaucrat drinking his way through the task of administering his friends’ lives and deaths before committing suicide in 1955.
I do not know what Fidel made of this strange influx of Europeans. He was presumably more at ease with Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, a moustached outdoor-looking figure recently expelled from both Bolivia and for good measure Peru, who was telling the Cubans ‘in a Spanish comprehensible only to an Italian’ that ‘his function as a European publisher was at an end, and he now saw himself wholly as an anti-imperialist combatant’.11 Fortunately the publishing house he had founded in 1955, equally distinguished in politics and literature, first to publish both Boris Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago and Lampedusa’s The Leopard, still flourishes. I cannot remember whether I met him on that occasion, though I had known this intense young multi-millionaire slightly since the early 1950s when he was an impassioned Communist Party activist and financier of CP culture. I remember a summery conversation with him in his office in Milan in the nerve-racking period of the international communist crisis of 1956–7, about where the movement could or should go, between phone calls arranging a weekend with a girl in some castle on the Adriatic coast. It must have been just when he was leaving the Party. His dissidence was to take him into the underworld of armed revolutionary struggle. As a teenager he had fought with the communist partisans for revolution, against fascism and against all his family and the super-rich Milan bourgeoisie stood for. The spirit of Che Guevara revived these memories. Soon after 1968 he went underground – or as far underground as a rich and socially prominent international headline-maker can go – and was killed in 1972, in obscure circumstances while attempting to blow up a high-tension pylon in Segregate, in the Milan hinterland.
Whether Fidel himself knew the charming young French-Canadian intellectuals who failed to convince me that their plan to create a new Sierra Maestra in the forests of Quebec would advance the cause of world revolution, I do not know. I suspect that someone in Cuba did. I tried to phone the most intelligent and agreeable of them repeatedly a couple of years later when I found myself in Montreal. There was no answer. Such was my lack of rapport with the spirit of the times that it only struck me much later that he must have been one of the terrorists of the nationalist Front de la Liberation du Québec who kidnapped the British Trade Commissioner and strangled a Quebec minister, perhaps one of those allowed a safe exit to Cuba in return for the British diplomat. But those were the days when even the ultras of ethnolinguistic nationalism, such as the early Basque ETA, presented themselves in the garb of international revolution.
II
For a moment in the late 1960s the young, or at least the children of the old middle classes and the new masses rising to middle-class status through the explosion in higher education, felt they were l
iving the revolution, whether by a simple collective private exit from the world of power, parents and past or by the constant, accumulating, almost orgasmic excitement of political or apparently political action, or gestures that took the place of action. The mood of the political young during ‘that hectic spring and summer’ of 1968 was recognizably revolutionary, but incomprehensible to old lefties of my generation, and not only because the situation was plainly not revolutionary in any realistic sense. Let me quote Sheila Rowbotham, who has described it with wonderful perception:
Personal feelings removed themselves from the foreground. My sexual encounters were snatched in between meetings and somehow the customary emotions didn’t settle upon them. It was as if intimacy had acquired an almost random quality. The energy of the external collective became so intense, it seemed the boundaries of closeness, of ecstatic inwardness, had spilled over on to the streets … I thus caught a glimpse of the peculiar annihilation of the personal in the midst of dramatic events like revolution … In retrospect revolutions seem puritanical, but that is not how they are experienced at the time … Caught in that maelstrom of international rebellion, it felt as if we were being carried to the edge of the known world.12
Nevertheless, as soon as the dense clouds of maximalist rhetoric and cosmic expectation turned into the rain of every day, the distinction between ecstasy and politics, real power and flower power, between voice and action, became visible once more. Jericho had not fallen to the sound of Joshua’s collective trumpets. The political young had to consider what action was needed to capture it. Since both the older and the younger generation of revolutionaries spoke the same language, mainly in one or another Marxist dialect, a semblance of communication became possible again, especially since the activist groups broke with the vague belief in spontaneous inspiration and often returned to the tradition of disciplined vanguard organizations. In fact, however, there was still a vast gap between the old and the young left. Revolution was not on the agenda in our countries. For revolutionaries of my generation the central problem remained what Marxist parties should do, indeed what their function could be, in non-revolutionary countries. And elsewhere? Where successful insurrection or guerrilla conquest was realistically on the agenda, we – at least I – were still in favour of it.
The old instinct to be on the side of any insurrectionaries and guerrillas who talked the language of the left, however stupid and pointless, died hard. It was not until the 1980s that, confronted with the phenomenon of the Peruvian ‘Shining Path’ guerrillas – admittedly based on an ideology eccentric even on the lunatic fringes of Marxism– Leninism – I frankly admitted to myself that this was a left-wing revolutionary movement I simply did not want to win. (Fortunately good Vietnamese communists had put a stop to Pol Pot’s killing fields.) Perhaps sympathy for the rebels was no more than the intellectuals’ version of the age-old omertà of the poor, the reflex of not telling on those harried by the state and its men in uniforms. Perhaps this came naturally to the author of Primitive Rebels and Bandits, who still finds it hard to withhold admiration from embattled, even if plainly mistaken, losers. In the USA my own sympathies were with the Black Panthers. I admired their courage and self-respect. I was touched by the simple-minded Leninism of their publications, but it was plain to me that they had not the slightest chance of achieving their objectives.
With most of the organizations of insurrectionists, or rather small armed action-groups which emerged in Europe from the debris of the great rebellion of 1968, I found myself entirely out of sympathy. There was room for reasoned disagreement with their opposite numbers in the very different political situation of Latin America (see chapter 21), but in Europe their activities were either pointless or counterproductive. The only operations of this kind which might claim some political feasibility were those of separatist nationalists, Quebecois, Basque or Irish, to whose political project I was strongly opposed. Marxists are not separatist nationalists.13 In any case, one of the two most lasting separatist movements of the kind born in this period, the Provisional IRA, did not claim to be on the left at all, but, on the contrary, broke away in 1969 from the old-established (‘Official’) IRA which had turned left.
So I found myself both out of sympathy and out of contact, if only by virtue of age, with these new practical revolutionaries. Not that there were all that many. In Britain there were none, except the shortlived, ineffective anarchist Angry Brigade. In West Germany the armed action people amounted to a few dozen at most, probably relying for support on 1,500 or so sympathizers, plus perhaps another handful who moved from action in their own country to international action in anti-imperialist solidarity with some body of Third World rebels, usually the Palestinians. It was a world I did not know, unless one or other of the often very radical young West German historians of those years had some connections with them. I had no contact with the Red Brigades and their like in Italy, much the most formidable of the armed action-groups in Europe other than the Basque ETA. I doubt whether the active members of these groups numbered more than a hundred or two. For reasons I have never understood, no significant armed revolutionary groups of the left seem to have emerged from the ruins of 1968 in France, although a small but quite effective terrorist group operated for a number of years in Belgium. On the other hand, had I been in touch with such groups, I would not have asked them what they did, and they would not have told me, even if they thought I was politically with them.
And where did it all lead to? In politics, nowhere much. Since a revolution was not on the cards, the European revolutionaries of 1968 had to join the political mainstream of the left, unless, being very bright young intellectuals, as so many of them were, they escaped from real politics into the academy, where revolutionary ideas could survive without much political practice. Politically the 1968 generation has done well enough, especially if one includes those recruited into civil services and think-tanks and the burgeoning numbers of advisers in politicians’ private offices. As I write the French Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, is an ex-Trotskyist, the German Foreign Secretary, Joshka Fischer, is an ex-street-fighting man, and even the ‘New Labour’ government of Tony Blair contains, among its lesser members, more than one firebrand of those days. Only in Italy, where the extreme left retained a strong independent presence, has the mainstream left not been rejuvenated by the young 68 radicals. Is this any more or any less than the inevitable seepage of former revolutionaries from radicalism to moderation in every intellectual generation since 1848?
What has really transformed the western world is the cultural revolution of the 1960s. The year 1968 may prove to be less of a turning-point in twentieth-century history than 1965, which has no political significance whatever, but was the year in which the French clothing industry for the first time produced more women’s trousers than skirts, and when numbers training for the Roman Catholic priesthood began visibly to collapse. I always taught the students in my labour history courses that the great dockers’ strike of 1889, which is prominent in every textbook, may be less significant than the silent adoption by masses of Britain’s industrial workers, some time between 1880 and 1905, of a form of headgear recognizable as a badge of belonging to their class, the familiar peaked cap. It may be argued that the really significant index of the history of the second half of the twentieth century is not ideology or student occupations, but the forward march of blue jeans.
But, alas, I am not part of that history. For Levis triumphed, like rock music, as the badge of youth. By then I was no longer young. I had no great sympathy for the contemporary equivalent of Peter Pan, the adult who wants to stay an adolescent for ever, nor could I see myself as credibly performing the role of oldest teenager on the scene. I therefore decided, almost as a matter of principle, never to wear this gear, and I have never done so. This handicaps me as a historian of the 1960s: I stood outside them. What I have written about the 1960s is what an autobiographer can write who never wore jeans.
16
; A Watcher in Politics
I
Looking back, I am surprised how little direct political activity there was in my life after 1956, considering my reputation as a committed Marxist. I did not become a figure in the nuclear disarmament movement, addressing vast crowds in Hyde Park like Edward Thompson. I did not march at the head of public demonstrations like Pierre Bourdieu in Paris. I did not save from jail a Turkish editor who had published one of my articles by offering to stand trial myself by his side, as Noam Chomsky did in 2002. True, I cannot compare with the eminence or the star quality of these friends, but even at the level of lesser celebrity, there was plenty to be done. I did not even take any active part after 1968 in the bitter political struggle within the small Communist Party between the Soviet hardliners and the Eurocommunists, which finally killed the Party in 1991, though (obviously) indicating where I stood. Essentially, apart from a lecture here and there, my political activity consisted of writing books and articles, notably for that most original of editors, Paul Barker, in his days at New Society, as a historian or a historically minded journalist, a Marxist one, which obviously gave my writings a political dimension, as did my special field of labour history. Even my most political writings of the 1960s and 1970s were only obliquely tied to current matters.
Interesting Times: A Twentieth-Century Life Page 32
