SCOTLAND'S FINEST

Smeddum
Ed: Valentina Bold
Canongate Books £11.99

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Lewis Grassic Gibbon--arguably the finest Scottish author of the 20th century. This new anthology of his work brings together the full range of his writing for the first time since the 1930s.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon was the pen name used by James Leslie Mitchell during an astonishing burst of creativity in the 1920s and early 1930s. A Communist and friend of Hugh McDiarmid, he remained a committed revolutionary Marxist until his death. He is best known for the three novels Sunset Song, Cloud Howe and Grey Granite which make up his great trilogy A Scots Quair; and for Spartacus, his powerful historical novel about the slave rebellion in Ancient Rome, written under his own name in 1933.

Mitchell was born in 1901 in Aberdeenshire, the son of a poor crofter. His family moved to the Howe of the Mearns in much the same way as Chris Guthrie's did in Sunset Song. After completing only one year of secondary schooling, he left and moved to Aberdeen to become a cub reporter on the Aberdeen Press & Journal. The anthology includes a series of polemical essays on Scotland's cities. The essay on Aberdeen recalls how, as a 16 year old, he became a committed revolutionary in 1917: 'On the news of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Aberdeen Soviet was founded. I and a cub reporter from another paper were elected to the Soviet Council, forgetting we were pressmen. We spent perspiring minutes with our chief reporters afterwards, explaining that we could not report the meeting, being ourselves good sovietists.'

In 1919 he moved to Glasgow and worked as a travelling journalist but was sacked because of his Marxist views. Poverty forced him to enlist. He became a clerk in the Royal Army Service Corps and then the air force.

On leaving the army he started to write full time, but without any financial success. HG Wells recognised his precocious talent and helped to get his short stories published. The pseudonym he chose was derived from his mother's maiden name--Lilias Grassic Gibbon.

His writing career was brief and hectic, spanning only seven years, during which he published 17 books and wrote on every conceivable subject. By the end of 1934 Gibbon was working at fever pitch. He had written six books that year, including the final novel in his ambitious trilogy. He was committed to writing a book on William Wallace and was hard at work on another novel about his native Howe of the Mearns. However, he worked himself into ill health. Tragically, Grey Granite had no sooner appeared in print than he died of a perforated ulcer just before his 34th birthday in February 1935.

Glasgow 1919

Smeddum takes its title from one of the short stories included in the anthology and first published in Scottish Scene, a radical periodical he co-edited with Hugh McDiarmid. Smeddum is an old Scots word meaning 'strength of character' or 'spunk'. It sums up the people of the close knit crofting communities of the north east lowlands where Gibbon spent his childhood, but it also tells us something about Gibbon's affinities and outlook: 'Maybe there were some twenty to thirty holdings in all. The crofters, dour folk of the old Pict stock, they had no history, common folk and ill reared, their buildings clustered amid the long sloping fields. The leases were one-year, two-year. You worked from the blink of the day you were breeked to the flicker of the night they shrouded you and the dirt of the gentry sat and ate up your rents but you were as good as they were.'

This anthology includes Gibbon's last great unfinished novel--The Speak of the Mearns. Originally edited and published by Iain Campbell in 1983, this too went out of print. Gibbon had not reached the stage of a title for it when he died in 1935. The choice springs from the fact that Sunset Song offended so many local people--including his own family. His mother chastised him: 'Laddie, what did you want to write all that muck for? Your father's affronted and I'm ashamed of you. It's the speak of the Mearns!'

At a time when his work was withdrawn from the shelves of Boots in Aberdeen because it was regarded as pornographic, it was receiving praise from the New York Times. Now Gibbon is seen as the man who immortalised the distinctive speech and culture of his native north east Scotland, and there is a Lewis Grassic Gibbon Museum in the village where he grew up.

But this new anthology shows his interests and achievements are much wider than that. It begins with a great essay 'Antique Scene', a caustic attack on the bourgeois version of Scottish history in which Gibbon calls for a celebration of 'the lives of millions of the lowly who wiped the sweat of toil from browned faces'. This powerful polemic sets the scene for the great short stories which follow including Smeddum, Clay and Greenden.

Gibbon's writing is fuelled by his keen sense of history and class, and by his great sense of solidarity with the oppressed and downtrodden. His Marxist outlook shaped his writing. Gibbon himself confirms this in a short polemic with the Stalinist-influenced intellectuals of the British Communist Party in 1934 which has been included in the anthology. 'Not all revolutionary writers (I am a revolutionary writer) are cretins. But if revolutionary writers believe they can talk the monster to death by calling it "bourgeois and decadent" they are living in a clown's paradise. I hate capitalism; all my books are explicit or implicit propaganda. But because I am a revolutionist I see no reason for gainsaying my own critical judgement.'

As well as his unfinished novel and short stories, the editor of the anthology Valentina Bold has included all his book reviews for Cornhill magazine, his essays on politics, history, cinema, literature, archaeology, ancient American civilisation and excerpts from his book on the lives of great explorers. She has also included his poetry. Gibbon's poems show him at his most vulnerable and some are far better than others. But it should be remembered that the author did not have the chance to edit these for publication. Interestingly there are poetic tributes to Gibbon's heroes--Spartacus, Lenin, Karl Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg and the communards of Paris. And there are essays celebrating Wallace, Cromwell, Lincoln and Lenin.

Dave Sherry

YOU CAN'T BE NEUTRAL ON A MOVING TRAIN

On History
Howard Zinn
Seven Stories £8.99

With the relish you would expect of one of America's foremost activist scholars, this witty, astute and heartfelt collection of Howard Zinn articles expertly picks apart the arguments of 'neutral' and relativist historians alike. Zinn sets out to prove that, in the words of his famous aphorism, 'you can't be neutral on a moving train'. And while the latter trap of relativism is afforded less space (reflecting the fact that many of the articles predate the more recent academic fashion for postmodernism), the entire body of Zinn's work propounds universalist notions of countering oppression. While they are sometimes couched in more emotive terms than traditional Marxist historiography, Zinn is too firmly encamped on the side of activism to be accused of idealism. For him there is no dividing line between demythologising Columbus and teaching his classes in the street so as to respect a clerical workers' picket line.

The concept of scholarly 'objectivity', argues Zinn, is based on a fundamental confusion. It is naive to assume that value judgements formed throughout our lives will not impinge on the history that we write. This does not mean a historian should not be scrupulously careful to be accurate: 'But accuracy is only a prerequisite. Whether a metalsmith uses reliable measuring instruments is a prerequisite for doing good work, but does not answer the crucial question: will he now forge a sword or a ploughshare with his instruments? That the metalsmith has determined in advance that he prefers a ploughshare does not require him to distort his measurements. That the scholar has decided he prefers peace to war does not require him to distort his facts.'

The greatest strength of Zinn's critique of mainstream historical assumptions is that he does not confine himself to the flawed abstraction of ideas competing in an academic vacuum. Echoing EP Thompson's groundbreaking Warwick University Ltd, he analyses and exposes the corporate domination of university research and management. Anyone familiar with the disingenuously cloistered atmosphere of higher education will revel in the way he wields his scalpel on the rhetoric of John Silber, then president of Boston University. This was a man who was happy to announce that 'a university should not be a democracy', a view he emphasised by justifying the beating and arrest of students peacefully protesting at Marine recruitment. He was keeping 'an open university', he claimed. Except, as Zinn countered, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) had been banned from campus on the pretext of a scuffle at a demonstration: 'The logic was established: SDS was a violent organisation, while the Marine Corps had a well known record for pacifism.' Zinn's On History offers a myriad of insights into radical American politics. But in the long term, the short article 'Seattle: A Flash of the Possible' may gain the most significance. 'In one crucial way,' writes Zinn, 'it was a turning point in the history of the movements of recent decades--a departure from the single issue focus...This time, the union movement was at the centre. The issue of class--rich and poor, here and all over the globe--bound everyone together.'

There are aspects of Zinn's thought which are questionable--some of his criticisms of revolutionary parties, the extent to which parallel institutions like Freedom Schools can flourish within the current system--but when he says of Seattle, 'I thought it was a historic moment', it would be foolish not to listen.

Andrew Stone

GENE GENIUS

The Limits and Lies of Human Genetic Research
Jonathan Kaplan
Routledge £13.99

This is a very important book that should be read by anyone who rejects the idea that our genes determine who we are. Kaplan systematically undermines the claims that there are, for example, 'genes for' intelligence, homosexuality, mental illness, obesity or committing crimes. Moreover, he identifies the very limited nature of contemporary genetic research.

But Kaplan's main concern lies in challenging the ways in which claims about the supposedly genetic causes of human behaviour and physiology get used in political and legal decision making. So he argues that the search for a 'criminal gene' reinforces the idea that violence and criminality are the problem of the individual. Similarly, the creation of depression as a genetic disease suggests that depression is solely the result of a biochemical disorder of the brain and entirely disassociates it from society at large. The point here is that if criminality or mental illness are the result of our genetic make-up, if they are internal to the individual, then capitalism cannot be to blame for their prevalence, nor held responsible for doing something about them.

His marshalling of evidence against much of the research itself that makes this book so valuable. For example, Hamer famously found a marker on the X chromosome which was highly correlated with male homosexuality in the population he considered. However, Kaplan points out that a 1999 study failed to confirm Hamer's results. Further, despite the strength of the supposed correlation, no gene has been located, let alone a biochemical pathway by which it is supposed to have its effect.

Another of Kaplan's criticisms of the homosexuality 'marker' is one that he argues applies to all human genetic research. Such research looks at the current make-up of a particular population, the particular environment of the population, and the particular ways the various member organisms of the population are distributed within the environment. But if any of these factors change the result in question can, and often does, change as well. In short, genetic research is a local measure that provides very little basis for the general claims that are implied by talk of a 'gene for' homosexuality or any other complex human behaviour.

Kaplan also takes on the claim that intelligence is coded in our genes. He challenges Murray and Herrnstein's The Bell Curve. Their claim is that an individual's social standing is based on how intelligent they are, which in turn is supposedly confirmed by performances on IQ tests. So, for example, differences in social standing between blacks and whites are supposedly due to differences in intelligence. While you don't need to read Kaplan's book to know that this is nonsense, he does provide the detailed evidence to show just how bankrupt and biased IQ testing is. He notes that blacks who are told they are taking an IQ test significantly underperform compared to those who are not, and that merely being asked to state one's race lowers the average scores of blacks, but not whites.

This book clearly demonstrates that it is not our genes that explain why people commit crimes or fall mentally ill, why it's seen to matter whether people sleep with the opposite sex or their own, or why different ethnic groups fare worse than others. Given the limits of what present genetic research can tell us about who we are, Kaplan argues that we should look elsewhere for guidance in setting social policy--to the social nature of these issues. And while Kaplan does not explicitly suggest a collective response to these matters, this is clearly where his discussion leads.

Terry Sullivan

ORWELL THAT ENDS WELL

Orwell: Wintry Conscience of a Generation
Jeffrey Meyers
WW Norton £19.95

'When I see an actual flesh and blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.' No wonder George Orwell, with straightforward and fighting words like these, has captured the hearts and minds of socialists.

Jeffrey Meyers's biography tantalisingly details the ordinary and somewhat trivial aspects of Orwell's life, and traces how he became the most influential English author of the 20th century and a passionate socialist. Meyers may slip too much into crass psychoanalysis at times, but throughout his biography he manages to sustain a sympathetic understanding of Orwell's political convictions and the influence this had played on his literary writings.

Orwell's parents were typically middle class--bourgeois, colonial, inbred snobs with a penchant for sending their sons to elite public schools. Poor old Orwell had a classic public school experience.

Orwell began a career as a colonial policeman in Burma. He started to despise those who carried out the 'dirty work of empire' and began to side with the oppressed. When he returned to England he began his expeditions as a tramp. For four years he lived with social outcasts--tramps, beggars, criminals and prostitutes--and he used these experiences to write The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London. Hardship, violence, injustice and oppression were themes that inspired him to write, and which grounded his socialism in the real experiences of working class men and women.

Orwell was contemptuous of the tribes of moralistic socialists who imposed their version of socialism on the working class. He could not abide the Beatrice and Sydney Webbs of this world. But, most importantly, Orwell was vitriolic against Stalinist Russia. In 1936-37 in Spain, Orwell fought against the fascists but also sided with the anarchists and Trotskyists against the Communist Party, which was systematically undoing all of the gains made by the workers' revolution. Meyers correctly describes Orwell's time in Spain as the most important experience of his life. It was a period that led directly to his unwavering commitment to working class revolution, and led him to write his most brilliant and powerful work, Homage to Catalonia.

As a Second World War correspondent, Orwell continued to be highly polemical and passionate about working class revolution. He had tasted the sweet beginnings of revolutionary socialism in Barcelona, but he had also tasted the bitterness of bloody betrayal by the Communist Party. It was an experience which permeated his world-renowned books Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. With powerful insight Orwell wrote in 1947, 'Nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of socialism as the belief that Russia is a socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. And so for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the socialist movement.'

Meyer describes the many unfavourable aspects to Orwell's character. He could be self loathing, patriotic, guilt-ridden and stupid around women. But I closed Meyers's book and immediately picked up my battered copy of Homage to Catalonia.

Gill Hubbard

TIME ISN'T MONEY

Pip Pip
Jay Griffiths
Flamingo £7.99

You may think that time is about clocks. Far from it. Read this book and you will find that clocks spell the taming of time, its debilitation, its exploitation by the Christian church and 'modern' governments and multinationals to supress real time, nature's time, gay time, wild time.

Pagan festivals were vulgar, rude, bawdy and sexy. Time was uncoordinated, stretched, free, in tune with the fun. The church stepped in and confined the festivals on grounds of Victorian order and decorum, stamping on their joyful rudeness, and eliminating many festivals. Back to work: 'time is money' was the refrain spread by missionaries across the world. Hence the speed up of work and life was necessary for the competitive element inherent in modern industrial society.

This enhances the separation of the rich from the poor. The rich and powerful 'are not to be kept waiting--for them the faster cars, high speed trains and planes. Oh, what transport of elites. "Tell me how fast you go and I'll tell you who you are," as Ivan Illich said. This speed is highly political--one person's speed is paid for by others, so car-centric systems mean pedestrians wait to walk and cyclists are cut up by cars... In the UK the justification for road building has been the value of time in the carscape--the car drivers' time is priced at £15 an hour, while the time in the landscape that these roads destroy is given no such value.'

In this exuberant chapter on speed Griffiths dwells on its disadvantageous aspects--for child bearing and child development, for artists, for fashion in clothes and cars, for road building and cartography, for journeying on foot or by bike, for air pollution, for personal relationships, for personal behaviour such as spontaneity, for agricultural diversity. She finds the climax of intoxication with speed in fascism, and goes on to comment, 'Today the ideology of speed, particularly in its aspect of overtaking competitiveness, is behind the phenomenon of multinationals, today's most fascistic force', with their drive to war. 'Speed is the essence of war.'

Griffiths shows how clock time, emptied of real time's flexible and intimate connection with nature, began to be standardised and universalised with the industrial revolution. The sinking of the Titanic in 1912 was a major global spur. A year later the first worldwide time signal went pip, and it was not long before Greenwich Mean Time established the universal standard.

The connection of time with nature she calls kairological time, after the Greek god of timing, opportunity, chance and mischance, Kairos--as opposed to chronological time (after Chronos, the Greek god of time): 'If you sleep because the clock tells you it's way past your bedtime, that is chronological time; whereas if you sleep because you're tired, that is kairological time. If you eat biscuits when you're hungry, that is kairological, whereas if you eat by the clock, that is chronological time... Children, needless to say, live kairologically until winkled out of it.' Rural days are largely kairological, determined by season and weather, city time is chronological.

There is, however, a different tradition among scientists from Newton's unity of chronological time. There is chaos theory. There is Einstein's theory of relativity. Neither accept the standardisation of time. Stephen Hawking says 'there is no unique, absolute time'. These developments offer hope for a future unlocking of the severity of global chronological time.

Griffiths does not use the term capitalism to cast her slings and arrows, but her arguments are all in revolt against its strictures. If you want a riot of fun covering the historical and social aspects of time, this is the book to read.

Chanie Rosenberg

SPANNER IN THE WORKS

Through the Looking Glass
Liz Davies
Verso £14.99

There is a myth that revolutionary politics is all about factionalising and bitter inner-party squabbles, a world where people treat each other horribly because of their political differences. In contrast, goes the fiction, the Labour Party is a broad church where those of different views rub along happily in a cosy atmosphere of mutual respect. If you believe that, read this book and weep.

Liz Davies was on New Labour's national executive committee (NEC) for two years. Her book describes in detail the 'least democratic, stitched-up and most arduously unpleasant meetings I have ever attended'. She was one of a group of four Grassroots Alliance members elected to the 33-strong NEC in 1998. They never represented any threat to Blair's hold on the party machine. Hardly anyone ever voted with them. Yet they were subjected to a ruthless regime of intimidation and constant pressure to shut up or toe the line.

The volume of the Blairites' vitriol stems from their semi-recognition that the number of people who truly believe in their 'project' is very small, a thin layer which must maintain ceaseless vigilance. But the Blairites have allies--they include the trade union leaders (who Liz Davies brilliantly exposes for failing to stand up for their members on issue after issue) and the other supposedly more left wing members of the NEC. Take Sarah Ward, who represented Young Labour on the NEC. Perhaps conscious that young people are traditionally regarded as rather more left wing than their elders, her contribution was to suggest that every constituency general committee should have someone on it whose specific job was to defend the government--presumably because otherwise nobody could be relied upon to perform the role.

The book is bitter about John Prescott who, we discover, is a very rare breed, a man who deliberately comes over in public as less eloquent than he really is: 'At the NEC, unlike Blair, he spoke in clear, concise sentences, and his point was always understandable.' But his message was also icy clear: 'He never uttered a word that deviated in the slightest from the New Labour message.'

Liz Davies shows there were tensions and splits among the Grassroots Alliance members. She was, for example, against Nato's war in Yugoslavia while her colleague Mark Seddon was for it. She was right. Mark Seddon's review of this book said it was sad that Liz had left the party just when there were signs that things might be getting better for the left. She was right again.

There are lighter moments among the gloom. It is amusing to find that sometimes even the right wing was incensed by New Labour's methods. The leaflets for the Euro elections in 1999 plumbed new depths in trivialising politics. Pauline Green MEP, no friend of the hard left, declared at the NEC, 'We were asked for small biographies, but we didn't expect these to be the only descriptions of us on the leaflet. I am now known all over London as a Dusty Springfield and Star Trek fan.'

The book's message represents a challenge to supporters of the Socialist Alliance. Attracting people like Liz Davies, who are socialists and loathe what Blair has done to the Labour Party, will be vital to creating a really strong electoral alternative to New Labour. Liz Davies was right at the heart of the party, a member who joined at the age of 16 in 1979, and who for 20 years dedicated her life to working inside Labour. She left because of the relentlessly right wing nature of New Labour, because of the closing down of democratic discussion, and because, crucially, there was an alternative growing in the Socialist Alliance. In April 1999 she spoke at a rally organised by the left after the Unison minimum wage demo in Newcastle. She writes, 'I was struck by the enthusiasm of the audience, their determination to spread their campaign in comparison with the misery and pessimism voiced at Labour Party meetings. And unlike the Labour Party meetings there were numerous young faces in the hall.'

You want more people like Liz Davies to leave New Labour? Make sure all Socialist Alliance meetings are like those which attracted her.

Charlie Kimber

MAN IN A MILLION

The Undiscovered Paul Robeson
Paul Robeson Jr
J Wiley £22.95

Paul Robeson was the son of an escaped slave who grew up in America in one of its most violently racist periods. His achievements as an artist, scholar, sportsman and political activist are remarkable. The first volume of his life story, written by his son, gives us an insight into who he was and what shaped him.

Robeson was only the third black student to have studied at Rutgers College. He was unable to live in the student accommodation because there were no other black students. It is interesting to see Robeson emerging as a political artist. He is a contradictory character who wants to fight but is feeling his way. This can be seen in the films Robeson was involved in. He felt on the one hand he had achieved something by reaching a mass audience. However, he became increasingly angry with the portrayals of black stereotypes in these films.

As he travelled, particularly to Britain, he became more involved with workers' struggles: 'It was in Britain...I learned that the essential character of a nation is determined not by the upper classes but by the common people.' In 1929 he met with Welsh miners in London who were marching. Robeson joined them and sang for them. He became involved in left wing theatre groups and resolved to use his voice for the 'common man': 'Paul's response was to sing on the stage between film showings three times a day in London's largest cinema houses, where people could hear him perform six songs and an encore for sixpence.' This enabled him to reach an audience of thousands of pensioners, low paid workers and the poor. At a concert in support of Spain and anti-fascism Robeson said, 'The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.' He then sang 'Ol' Man River', but changed the lines to that of a fighting song.

Paul Robeson Jr uses extracts from his mother Essie's diaries and many excellent photographs. The book ends with the coming of the Second World War and Robeson's return to the US: 'My father had left New York as a star performer with a cultural consciousness. Now he returned as a superstar with an unshakeable political commitment to the civil rights struggle.' Robeson had elected to fight. This book gives an insight into what shaped him.

Claire Dissington