The Virtual Stoa

Philip Whitehead, Labour politician; born 30 May 1937; died 31 December 2005. Older Stoa discussion here.

Karl Renner, Austrian socialist politician; born 14 December 1870, died 31 December 1950.

Jim Figgins, railway signalmen and trade unionist, who travelled slowly from the communist-influenced left (the Railwaymen’s Minority Movement and the Railway Vigilance Movement) to leadership positions (executive, 1931-4, an organiser from 1938, assistant to the general secretary in 1943, elected general secretary in 1948, retiring in 1953). Richard Crossman thought he reminded him of “a retired Anglo-Indian country gentleman farmer” [David Howell, in the ODNB]. Born Largs, Ayrshire, 8 March 1893, died at Cuddington, Surrey, 27 December 1956.

Ada Nield Chew, trade unionist, ILPer and suffragist, who became paid organiser for the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in 1912. After the war, she ran a successful mail-order wholesale drapery line. Born Audley, Staffordshire, 28 January 1870, died Burnley, Lancashire, 27 December 1945.

Michael White, in tehgraun:

[Gordon] Brown is a Shakespearian tragedy in the making, says one MP: Othello’s jealousy, Hamlet’s indecision, the futile rage of Lear and Brutus’s weakness for bad advice. “But at least we’ve got rid of the Macbeths.”

Louis Aragon, poet, novelist, surrealist, socialist; born 3 October 1897, died 24 December 1982.

Over here.

Andrew Glyn, Marxist economist, born 30 June 1943, died 22 December 2007 [via].

So, Mr Blair’s become a Catholic, and there are a billion pop explanations in play — that Blair’s keen to wallow in guilt for his disastrous foreign policy, and nobody does guilt better than Catholics (cf going straight into the Middle East job after doing so much, and in such a well-intentioned way, to bollocks up the region) — that it’s the long-term result of being married to Cherie Booth, once you’ve jumped through all the Carole Caplin papaya-flavoured hoops that have been set up along the way — that you can’t quite keep that much moralism bottled up inside you without letting it spill out all over something, and now he doesn’t have the British people anymore he might as well absorb himself into the Holy Roman and Apostolic Catholic Church. (I’m sure we can always come up with more: if you do, pop ‘em in the comments).

But it seems to me there’s a more interesting, longer-term trajectory at work in what we can usefully for the purposes of this post call Blair’s mind, and I’ll say a bit about that over the fold.

(more…)

Over here.

Randolph Bourne, (1886-1918) (also here), author of the classic essay War is the Health of the State, left unfinished at the time of his death in the great flu epidemic.

Alan Connor, over here.

We’re in the home straight, so it’s time for the annual round-ups. Four books stand out in my 2007: Patrick Cockburn’s The Occupation - published in the Autumn of 2006, but I didn’t get round to it until January, so I’m counting it as a 2007 book - which joins Rory Stewart’s Occupational Hazards as one of the indispensable memoirs of this terrible war. I thought John Rawls’s posthumous Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy were very interesting when they came out, and I’m delighted that enough colleagues and graduate students here in Oxford thought the same that we could hold a very stimulating seminar to discuss them in the term just ended. Raj Patel’s Stuffed and Starved is terrific, as expected (though I’m hardly an impartial critic). And the best history-of-political-thought volume I read this year was Michael Sonenscher’s Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution, which goes to show how the eighteenth-century political economy scholarship of the last generation or so can be put to work to address the really big historiographical questions.

What else was good this year?

Daniel Davies, no stranger to internet flamewars, explains why blogs are likely to spell the death of both far-left and far-right politics in the UK:

Blogs are rather like sodium pentathol or Stella Artois in their effect on social inhibitions, so when you add them to a scene which is largely composed of people with poor impulse control at the best of times, then you are basically lighting the blue touch paper…

To watch the SWP/Respect bust-up, Socialist Unity is the place to go; the BNP is self-destructing in blogland over here.

Clementina Black, writer, suffragist and friend of Eleanor Marx; a key activist in the National Anti-Sweating League; born Brighton, 27 July 1853; died at Barnes, 19 December 1922.

Cornelius Cardew, experimental composer, Communist, and author of Stockhausen Serves Imperialism [pdf]; born at Greet, near Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, 7 May 1936; killed in a road accident in Leyton, 19* December 1981.

(*The ODNB says 19 December; other web things I’ve seen say 13 December. Other things being equal, it is current DSW policy to go along with the ODNB.)

The splendid David Howell (”big man, big books”, as a friend once described him to me) writes about Lady Chatterley’s Lover over at Normblog.

Searchlight reports from last night’s BNP meeting in Leeds.

I basically tuned out the Lib Dem leadership contest. Did I miss anything? Is there anything worth knowing about Nick Clegg? Did anyone write anything interesting about the contest / Party during the last six weeks or so? I suspect the answers are “no”, “not really”, and “no, I don’t think so”, but it would be nice to have confirmation from more informed Stoa-readers out there.

Charles Buxton, socialist politician and philanthropist. After classics at Cambridge and a period travelling, he was called to the bar in 1902, also serving as principal of Morley College for working men and women in south London. In 1904 he married Dorothy Frances Jebb; their lifestyle was sufficiently frugal that, according to the ODNB, “on weekend walking tours in the south of England they were sometimes mistaken for tramps in their old clothes”. On a mission in 1914 to try to persuade Bulgaria to enter the war on the allied side, he was shot through the lung by a Turkish would-be assassin. Formerly a Liberal, he joined the ILP in 1917, and attended the Socialist International’s conferences in 1919 and 1920, visiting Soviet Russia, about which he was enthusiastic, with a Labour Party delegation in 1920. A delegate to the League of Nations assembly in 1924 and 1930, he was also president of the British Esperantists. He was elected to Parliament on three occasions, but never served for long: Liberal MP for Ashburton in 1910, Labour MP for Accrington 1922-3, and for Elland, 1929-31. Born London 27 Novmber 1875; died at Peaslake in Surrey, 16 December 1942.

Stuart Adamson, musician; born in Manchester, 11 April 1958, died in Honolulu, 16 December 2001.

Lelio Basso, Italian socialist, born in Varazze, 25 December 1903, died in Rome, 16 December 1978.

We’re in today’s Observer.

Gerry Healy, Trotskyist, born in Ballybane, co. Galway, 3 December 1913, died in London, 14 December 1989.