Issue 190 of SOCIALIST REVIEW Published October 1995 Copyright © Socialist Review

It's a dizzying task trying to select a few favourite books when there is such a wealth to choose from. I'm afraid that working on newspapers that treat Baywatch as foreign news has stunted my brain--so I'll start on a tome like E P Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (a marvellous book which I imagine gets better after the first 100 pages), then put it aside to start another. So it's a tribute to the books I've chosen that even my tabloid sized concentration couldn't let go of them.

Tony Cliff's Building the Party, about Lenin's early struggle to shape the Bolshevik Party into a serious revolutionary machine, made me sit up and think, 'So that's what it's all about.' It's a must as a handbook for socialists serious about creating an organisation that can break the dead weight of reformism. The clarity of Lenin's ideas throws a shaft of light on the relationship between the party and the working class, on democracy, on the unions, on the role of the revolutionary paper--on everything, in fact, that socialists grapple with today.

This one quote blows apart the notion that Lenin was an iron fisted party dictator. While at one point he slams the central committee for not giving a lead, he later writes, 'While the greatest possible centralisation is necessary with regard to the ideological and practical leadership of the movement... the greatest possible decentralisation is necessary with regard to keeping the party centre informed about the movement.' To Lenin, democracy is not a luxury but the very lifeblood of a fighting organisation.

Victor Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev is a grim reminder of what happens when, for particular historic reasons, Lenin's vision of democracy for working people is replaced by that grotesque parody that has nothing to do with the Marxist tradition: Stalinism. It is also a ripping tale that begins with a murder and unfolds against the backdrop of the show trials.

One tome that set me thinking for months after finishing it is Adrian Desmond and James Moore's Darwin. It reads like a whodunnit as Darwin battles with the implications of his own findings. He delayed publishing Origin of Species for over 20 years. It's good to read a book that shatters accepted ideas. While 'evolution' was and remains, anathema to the ruling classes who clearly want us to believe in a pre-ordained system, Darwin thought even this word not radical enough as evolution implies a progression that ends with we 'superior' humans. He preferred the word 'modification'.

It's no bed of roses being in a revolutionary party and we're all prone to bouts of self pity and frustration. I have the perfect antidote. The Rebellion of the Hanged by B Traven is based on the peasant struggles around the time of the Mexican Revolution. The campesinos are lured into virtual slavery in timber camps. They are raped, beaten, tortured and humiliated. Yet at the end they rise up, kill the timber owning thugs and march off with heads high to join up with other struggles. A speech by one of their leaders on the march is worth reading. He tells his 'troops':

'Even if we go down to the last man under the bullets of the federal soldiers and the rural police, even if not one of us should ever obtain land and liberty, we will have triumphed. Because to live as a free man, even if only for a few months, is worth more than living a hundred years in slavery. And if we fall now, we won't fall as peons, as hanged men in flight, but as free men on the earth, as open rebels, as true soldiers of the revolution.'

My two favourite classic novels are War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, and Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure. I was going to say that Hardys views on marriage could have been written yesterday, but they're far too radical.

When I need a laugh, I love Saki. I think his biting wit is better even than Oscar Wilde's. I read Saki (Chronicles of Clovis and other stories) on a rather accident prone holiday recently. Anything that can make me snort with laughter with an infected foot, a poorly eye and severe sunburn just has to deserve a mention.