books have been published in English translations, and these are long out of print. Hopefully Cathy Porter's biography will renew
REVIEWS interest in the work of a fine socialist writer. Since her early experiences of the revolution, teaching literacy and literature in the workers' clubs which sprang up throughout the Russian capital after the Ferbruary overthrow of the tsar, one of Larissa's main preoccupations and sympathies was with the lives and ordeals of ordinary men and women in their struggles for a better world.
Her sketches and articles written in a form of heightened, sometimes florid, prose alternatively lyrical or mordant but always vivid and clear give 'the smell of revolution' and are an inspiring adjunct to the drier analyses and histories of the events that made the Soviet Union.
Her writing was very popular during and immediately after her lifetime although she met with some suspicion and hostility mainly from her male more 'political" comrades for her bourgeois cultural background and a prose style considered by some to be too poetic or ornate to be compatible with a marxist view.
But by others she was seen as an embodiment of the 'new Soviet woman' no logner bound by family and marriage but courageous, independent, an equal partner with men in the struggles of the revolution. This now seems somewhat idealistic and, unlike Alexandra Kollontai, the character and privilege of her upbringing does appear to have made her less aware of many of the particular problems of women's liberation, both inside and outside the Bolshevik Party.
But it is primarily as an activist of considerable determination that Larissa Reisner should be remembered and as an inspiring chronicler of what the revolution 'was really like' that she should be read. Cathy Porter's previous biography was of Alexandra Kollontai and she is to be congratulated for again recovering for a new generation of socialists the life of a remarkable woman of the October revolution • 35
Street Fighting Years:
An Autobiography of the Sixties, Collins, £12.95. David Caute, Sixty-Eight: The Year of the Barricades, Hamish Hamilton, £14.95. Ronald Fraser, 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt, Chatto & Windus, £14.94. Chris Harman, The Fire Last Time: 1968 and After, Bookmarks, £6.95. BY THE TIME you have reached the reviews section of this issue you may feel sick to your back teeth of 1968. However, just in case you still have room for more, here is a guide to what's on offer in the way of further reading.
Anyone born after the early 1950s will find it difficult to picture in their minds a year like 1968 - student uprisings round the globe, civil rights marchers taking to the streets in Derry and Belfast, the Tet offensive (the beginning of the end for the Vietnam war), workers, students and I CONTINUE 36
intellectuals rising up against the stalinist bureaucracies in Poland and Czechoslovakia, a general strike in France, blacks and students rioting all across the USA.
They will certainly find no parallel of it in their own political life. To the extent that these books give younger militants the feeling of working class power and solidarity in that period, and the optimism and renewed commitment that comes from victory — even victory followed by retreat -then they are well worth reading.
Street Fighting Years by Tariq Ali, which has already been reviewed in a previous issue (Socialist Outlook No. 5) is certainly the most readable of the four. The book is a 'political memoir' and as such concentrates on the personal experiences of the author in that period. Ali makes no apology for this, having given a more general political ...analysis of the same period in an earlier work (1968 and After: SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 7 May/June 1988
Inside the Revolution, London, 1978).
Personalised though it is, it is still an informative and gripping account of some of the major struggles and political debates of the time — a sort of revolutionary edited highlights.
In contrast - both politically and stylistically -David Caute's book, written as it is by an academic historian, is very informative though also very dry. Its style is, however, the least of its faults. Caute hangs the whole book on the framework of two political/ sociological processes: the rise of the 'new left' and the 'counter-culture'. He appears to have very little sympathy
His own sympathies are made clear in one of the few personal reminiscences of his book. Caute describes how he was in a restaurant in Prague in June 1968 when someone came in with the news of us presidential candidate Robert Kennedy's assassination:
'A numbed silence fell across the restaurant; it was as if the air had been sucked out by all the reactionary forces, from racist bigots to stalinist apparatchiks, ranged against the men of reason and liberality across the world' (SiC).
Four pages later Caute informs us that George Wallace, the reactionary, racist ex-governor of Alabama, mopped up a lot of Kennedy's support in the presidential elections:
'After his death a lot of Kennedy's blue-collar support turned to Wallace as the only other candidate who was speaking for them' (his emphasis).
Throughout the book, Caute shows contempt or hostility to both the cultural movements and the revolutionaries of the capitalist world while heaping praise on the workers and students of Poland and Czechoslovakia and the non-violent civil rights movement in America.
Ronald Fraser's book, as its title suggests, concentrates on the political and cultural developments in the colleges and universities. The book is made up of direct quotations SOCIALIST OUTLOOK no 7 May/june 1988
from 175 individuals who were 'chosen for their roles in the movement' held together by a narrative from Fraser himself.
This format makes Fraser's work very accessible. It covers the period from the 1950s to the 1970s with a postscript and 'summing up' which takes us up to today, and includes a very interesting breakdown of the kinds of jobs and politics which the contributors are engaged in today.
Chris Harman's book is a more conventional political analysis of the events of the 1960s. Why they happened, how they happened and what does it mean for revolutionaries today.
Harman, the editor of Socialist Worker, goes into far more detail than the others about the various revolutionary groups, particularly in Britain. He analyses their political lines, their tactics, their errors and, in his view, their eventual decline into reformism.
Not surprisingly, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), or the International Socialists (IS) as it then was, comes out looking pretty good! Unlike everybody else, the SWP rejected the so-called 'new movementism' of the various sections of the working class -women, black people, gays and lesbians — the result of which, Harman informs us, was the "internal fragmentation of the revolutionary organisations' and the abandonment by many people of a 'revolutionary perspective'.
Harman displays an inability, or unwillingness, to understand the political developments of the women's liberation movement and the movements for black and gay liberation of that period and since — or, indeed, the gain for the working class struggle that these movements represented.
However, despite this, and despite his somewhat snidey, sectarian tone at times, the book has its strengths, for example, the coverage of the strikes in Italy and France.
Perhaps one of the best ways of describing the political and
literary differences between the four books is to look at the treatment they give to the same event — the Prague Spring
Tariq Ali begins his account with a description of a trip to Prague in January 1967 on an assignment for Town magazine. He describes how he was given suggestions of who to interview by an official from the department in charge of culture. He rejected them all and only later realised that he had refused to meet Milan Kundera, author of The Joke.
Ali describes how he first learned of developments in Czechoslovakia from a Czech student friend. The process of liberalisation, the new mood in the party, the elections in the universities and factories, the programmes on television on which the Czechoslovak people watched former political prisoners confront their jailers and tell of their experiences. In the newsreel pictures of the May Dayrally in Prague, peoplewere seen carrying posters of Che Guevara.
Although he admits that at that time he and his comrades were too busy concentrating on events in France to take sufficient notice of developments in impressed by the enthusiasm of his student friend -- especially since the latter had initially been very suspicious of the Dubcek regime. He also argues that the mobilised the people and the army and warned the Soviets publicly of their intention to defend their right to
Caute's more lengthy account breaks the Prague Spring into three phases: the resignation of Novotny, first secretary of the communist party on 5 January; the period between Novotny's resignation as president on 21 March to the end of June which was 'the most rapid period of liberalisation' and the period from July to 20/21 August, the Soviet invasion.
He describes the situation inside the central committee, inside the students' committees and conferences, the attitudes of the workers and the reaction of
REVIEWS the other east European regimes at length.
He characterises the revolution as being "middle-class' in character, by which he means that the liberalisation was mainly in the interests of the intelligentsia. Only when the Russian tanks moved in did the workers, in Caute's opinion, begin to identify 'liberalisation as synonymous with national independence'
Caute is very critical of Dubcek from the standpoint of someone who appears to believe that real liberalisation in eastern Europe must mean a move to social democracy and a rejection of communism.
Ronald Fraser's book gives no more than a passing mention to the Prague Spring. This is perhaps one of the weaknesses of his otherwise interesting format. Since none of his 175 contributors are Czechoslovakian or took part in the events there, he misses out an essential component of 1968.
These protests are, however, described in Chris Harman's book. Harman concentrates on the period after the Soviet invasion.
The student occupations in November of that year and the growing unity of the students and the workers are detailed here.
Surprisingly though, there is very little in the way of a political analysis of the events. Harman again is very dismissive of Dubcek — though, of course, from a different perspective from Caute. His only comment on the actions of the students and the riots in the year following the invasion was that they 'did not stop the re-establishment of monolithic, bureaucratic control. Only revolutionary action could have done that'. We are given no indication, however, of what such revolutionary action might have been.
Each book approaches the events of 1968 from a very different angle. Despite the political differences of the writers,