IN HIS 1995 BOOK Kommunisten Heute (Communists Today), German Marxist philosopher Hans Heinz Holz writes that

“If the ruling class wants to maintain itself as such, then it must prevent the ruled class from participating throughout society – with all the implications of the exercise of power. There is constantly a ‘class struggle from above’, even when it is fought with means which make it appear as if the struggle is not brutal. The ruling class will be that much more successful, the more it conceals this ‘class struggle from above’ and thus avoids provoking the ‘class struggle from below’.  Ideological camouflage enables it to gain acceptance of its hegemony in the consciousness of the ruled and to move them to accept the existing relations.  Today, the massive extension and refinement in the means of ideological influence has made such disguising of the class struggle situation more feasible than ever.”1

The General Strike of 100 years ago was one significant occasion when the class struggle from above was waged brutally. There are myriad other examples, right up to the jailing today of Palestine Action supporters as “terrorists”. But as Holz points out, ideological camouflage is an essential part of that class struggle from above. Historically, the institutionalised church, the education system and the mass media have been the major instruments employed. To counter that, and to build the class struggle from below, the working class, and any party seeking to lead it in struggle, needs its own media – “The Revolutionary Paper”, the main theme of this edition of Communist Review.

In our so-called ‘liberal democracy’, it suits the capitalist class to tolerate the existence of left-wing media. This was not always the case, nor need it be so in the future if the class struggle becomes acute. In his book Poor Men’s Guardians, Stanley Harrison traces the story of the radical and working-class press in Britain from the mid-eighteenth century up to 1973. He shows how stamp duty and libel laws had to be fought tooth and nail, generally by breaking the law, to secure the right to publish unhindered. The Chartist movement of the nineteenth century inspired a number of papers, including The Northern Star and The Charter, but ultimately they closed, due to low circulation and the lack of resources. The Daily Worker, forerunner to the Morning Star, at its outset faced a wholesalers’ boycott, had three staff members jailed for contempt of court, and was subject to police censorship. During the Second World War, it was banned for 19 months by Government diktat. It is a testament to the staff, readers and supporters of the Daily Worker/Morning Star, and particularly the Communist Party, that the paper has survived to this day.

But what exactly is the role of the revolutionary paper? In our first article, Morning Star editor Ben Chacko describes the term ‘revolutionary paper’ as shorthand now for a media entity as a whole – electronic as well as print. Drawing on Lenin’s Where to Begin? (the relevant text of which follows Ben’s article), he outlines the paper’s “three core tasks” as “uniting all forces … guiding the movement in actual practice” and being “ready at any time to support every protest and every outbreak.” It counteracts the bias and algorithms of social media platforms, and is a radicalising tool which must be used.

After the Lenin extract, we have four articles illustrating how his ideas have found resonance in other countries: Antonio Gramsci’s letter to the Italian Communist Party, calling for the establishment of the paper l’Unità; two articles by pioneering Peruvian Marxist José Carlos Mariátegui – the first about his cultural/theoretical magazine Amauta, drawing on the traditions of the subjugated Inca people, and the second on the subsequent biweekly newspaper Labor; and then Sitaram Yechury’s article lauding the 50^th anniversary of the CPI(M) weekly People’s Democracy. We follow these with John Pateman’s biography of his distant relative Fred Pateman, who after a Cambridge education became a stalwart staff member of the Daily Worker.

While the ‘revolutionary paper’ plays a key role in the battle of ideas, it cannot be exclusive: part of that battle must also be waged through books, whether practical, theoretical or cultural. Leading CPI(M) activist Sudhanva Deshpande takes us through the development of left-wing publishing in India, and its extension to the International Union of Left Publishers, which Britain’s Manifesto Press has recently joined.

One particular example of the need for books is Gabriel Rockhill’s Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism? In the interview reproduced here, with Cubadebate’s Marxlenin Pérez Valdés, Gabriel explains that “the imperial structures of knowledge production and distribution promote a parody of Marxism”, or “imperial Marxism”, opposed to “Marxism proper, which is profoundly anti-imperialist.”

Regarding Cuba, we reproduce next President Díaz-Canel’s July 26 speech, ‘Defending Cuba from the Cruelty of its Executioners is Not Something that Can Wait!’ It is a speech which demands solidarity, but it is not one of despair, showing rather how the Cuban people are standing up to the US blockade.

As the US lurches towards fascism and aggression, we need to remember our own historic struggles in Britain on these issues. In a moving personal and political account, Phil Katz marks the upcoming 90^th anniversaries of the Battle of Cable Street and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, recording how veterans of the former went on to serve (and in some cases perish) in the latter.

We follow that with a reviews by Nupur Paliwal on Tricontinental’s recent study linking slavery with the development of capitalism, and another by John Foster, on a recent book from Praxis on China’s foreign policy. Finally, we have Nick Moss’s Soul Food column, this time linking poetry from the Morning Star and poetry about the Spanish Civil War.

Notes and References 

¹ HH Holz, Communists Today, Ch 4, ‘Class Struggle’, at https://www.northerncommunists.org.uk/political-education/class-struggle.

² S Harrison, Poor Men’s Guardians, Lawrence & Wishart, 1974.