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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 183 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 183, February 1995.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
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Candy Udwin is a hospital worker. She organised the campaign to save the EGA women’s hospital in the 1970s and more recently was central to stopping London’s University College Hospital from closure |
I suppose the sign of a good book is that you want to lend it to people. This of course has its drawbacks – when I went to look for my ‘favourite books’ I found I didn’t have them any more!
I can’t find the biography of the Scottish socialist John Maclean by Nan Milton anywhere. But along with books such as Wal Hannington’s Never On Our Knees, Revolt on the Clyde by Willie Gallagher, Harry McShane’s biography No Mean Fighter and J.T. Murphy’s Preparing for Power, it gave me a taste of the history of working class struggle in Britain. They all deal with workers’ organisation during and after the First World War – one of the high points of militancy.
The excitement of mass involvement in struggle and how it changes people is a good antidote to all those who say it can never happen here. I also came across the theory of rank and file organisation first put forward by the Clydeside Workers’ Committee in 1915: ‘We will support the officials just so long as they rightly represent the workers, but we will act independently immediately they misrepresent them.’
The Lost Revolution by Chris Harman – about the revolution in Germany between 1918 and 1923 – was one of the most important books I read after I joined the SWP. Again, it is a brilliant read about workers in struggle and how they can bring the ruling class to its knees. Apart from explaining how workers’ defeat led to the rise of Hitler and Stalin, it also shows the disastrous consequences of getting it wrong when it comes to building an independent revolutionary party.
Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time is still on my bookshelf, which perhaps says something! But out of a glut of feminist novels she presents the idea of a society which has developed past the way capitalism forces adults and children to live in oppressive families or be outcast. She describes a world where it is no longer necessary to choose either to have children or never to have them, or to choose whether to be straight or to be gay. It’s a vision of the potential of human relationships which doesn’t get much of an airing.
My favourite book about women is by a man. The short book Women and the Family collects together Leon Trotsky’s writings and speeches on the subject, looking at the concrete problems faced by the revolution. It packs in how socialism is not possible without women’s liberation, but how real liberation can only come when a workers’ revolution transforms society, how the family can’t just be abolished, it has to be replaced. And instead of blaming men for having ‘the family so firmly rooted in their hearts’ he explains the demise of the revolution, and how Stalin ‘rehabilitated the family along with the rouble’.
The most inspiring book I’ve read recently is Victor Serge’s novel The Case of Comrade Tulayev. Despite the feeling of horror as the characters get sucked deeper and deeper into the Stalinist purges, and knowing that Serge himself lived through the slow death of the revolution, the book leaves you with his commitment and hope for the future.
And by the way, could the people who have borrowed my books please give them back!
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