Figures

Shapurji Saklatvala (1874–1936), the first and one of only four Communist members of Britain’s parliament.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    His grandfather was both related to and a business partner of Nusserwanji Tata, father of the famous Jamsetji Tata whose 182nd birth anniversary was recently commemorated by Ratan Tata. Saklatvala was born in Bombay and spent much of his youth in Jamsetji’s (J.N. Tata’s) home.

Hymer died in a car crash in New York State in February 1974. He was 39 at the time. His MIT thesis, completed in 1960, was described as seminal because it was the first piece of writing on international firms (the so-called ‘multinationals’) that offered what the author called a theory of direct investment, arguing that neither international trade theory nor finance could explain the existence of enterprises with foreign operations. MIT refused to have the thesis published and it was only published in 1976 thanks to his supervisor C.P. Kindleberger, who had publicised it in his own book American Business Abroad (1969).

I got to know K. Damodaran (1912–1976) some time in 1974, when he was busy setting up the P.C. Joshi Archive in a basement of the old campus of JNU in Delhi. We would pore through the latest available catalogue of New Left Books and decide which titles to order from London. Damodaran was a Marxist of great humility who hardly ever spoke about himself or his past, so I had no real idea then how pivotal he had been to building the Communist movement in Kerala. Uniquely for someone who had been so important in the (united) Communist Party of India, by the late 1960s, Damodaran had become profoundly critical of Stalinism and the legacies it encumbered the party in India with.

The amazing Fred Hampton (1948–1969), Chairman of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther party who saw himself as a revolutionary socialist, describing racism as a ‘byproduct’ of capitalist oppression. He was 21 when he was murdered in his sleep by the Chicago police acting with FBI collusion. One of Hampton’s most remarkable achievements had been the building of a Rainbow Coalition that encompassed the Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican Young Lords and the white Appalachian Young Patriots (a group of working-class white Southerners).

‘German capitalism did not need Auschwitz: but it needed the Nazis, who needed Auschwitz.’                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               So said Peter Sedgwick in ‘The Problem of Fascism’ (1970), one of the best short articles on the subject. Sedgwick’s major claim to fame are his brilliant translations of Victor Serge’s best known political writings, both Memoirs of a Revolutionary andYear One of the Russian Revolution. One of my most vivid memories from the late sixties is seeing Peter making a formidable intervention at an Oxford Labour Club meeting some time in 1967, one of the first political meetings I ever attended at university. I was so impressed by what I heard that that was probably the night I ‘joined the Left’. (It’s possible the issue that evening was Labour’s pro-American stance during the Vietnam War.)

“A writer or painter cannot change the world. But they can keep an essential margin of non-conformity alive. Thanks to them, the powerful can never affirm that everyone agrees with their acts. That small difference is very important. When power feels itself totally justified and approved, it immediately destroys whatever freedoms we have left, and that is fascism. My ideas have not changed since I was 20. Basically, I agree with Engels. An artist describes real social relationships with the purpose of destroying the conventional ideas about those relationships, undermining bourgeois optimism, and forcing the public to doubt the tenets of the established order.”

Dragan Müller-Ozren is one of the more enigmatic forgotten communist party intellectuals. Originally from Yugoslavia, he was never a Yugoslav communist in the proper sense of the term, and spent most of his creative life abroad. Although a party intellectual, he was never formally a party member, although he had been active in the communist youth in four different countries. Born in the town of Travnik in present-day Bosnia to a mixed Czech-Croat family, he became a Marxist while attending a Jesuit Lyceum, and joined the League of Communist Youth of Yugoslavia (SKOJ) at the age of fifteen. In 1926, he moved to Prague to pursue studies of architecture. There, he was involved with the Czechoslovak avantgarde, writing extensively for the magazine Tvorba and the Communist Party newspaper Rudé právo. He again joined the Communist youth, organising both the locals and the Yugoslav émigré community. Dragan Müller was forced to leave Prague because of Communist activity, moving first to Berlin and then to Moscow in 1931, where he took up the name Dragan Antonovich Ozren (Драган Антонович Озрин). As a polyglot, he began working for the publishing department of the Comintern (he spoke eight languages by this time – Serbo-Croatian, Czech, German, Latin, Russian, English, French, and Spanish). In this period, he became friends and maintained correspondences with leading leftist intellectuals of the time, such as György Lukács, Andre Breton, Julius Fučík, Rustam Effendi, Mikhail Sholokhov, and Sergey Tretyakov. He worked as a propagandist during the Spanish Civil War and World War II.

Paul Nizan (1905–1940), novelist and committed socialist, who left Europe for Aden in September 1926 when he was just 20, to spend six months there and write the philosophical memoir for which he is best known today. This brilliant piece of writing, called Aden, Arabie, published in 1931, was eventually reissued in 1960 with the proverbial Sartre preface. The book begins, famously, with the sentences “I was twenty. I will let no one say it is the best time of life”.

In 1926, Naville wrote a pamphlet seeking to steer the nascent movement of French Surrealists, with which he was associated as one of ‘19 founders’, beyond its spontaneous anarchism and hatred of bourgeois society towards what he saw as a more revolutionary politics grounded in historical materialism and in the “discipline” of working for a party committed, ostensibly (!), to a socialist revolution. Breton welcomed the pamphlet but replied, “All of us Surrealists want a social revolution… but at the same time we want to pursue our experiments in the life of the Mind without any external controls, including controls by Marxists”. The irony behind Naville trying to win the Surrealists to revolutionary politics (that is, to joining the Communist party in France) was, of course, that, just as Breton and Aragon did in fact join the Party, Naville himself was expelled from it for having sided with the Left (or Trotskyist) Opposition in Russia. He was expelled in 1928.

Two excerpts from Victor Serge’s fascinating Notebooks (1936–1947), including a scathing but remarkably prescient forecast of the moribund future of the Fourth International. TheNotebooks are contained in a bundle of exercise books that were discovered in 2010, in a small town sixty kilometres south of Mexico City. They were published in full (836 pages) two years later by the Marseilles publisher Agone. Serge, who left Europe at the end of March 1941, in the same (last!) ship as luminaries like Lévi-Strauss and André Breton, arrived in Yucatán just over five months later, not long after Trotsky had been assassinated.

The cardinal fact to start from is that. if Walter Benjamin had committed suicide at Portbou, as we are told, how could he possibly have been buried in the local Catholic cemetery there? This, as a local resident pointed out to Mauas, the Argentinian photographer & filmmaker pictured here, was simply “unthinkable”, since suicides are never buried in Catholic cemeteries.

Abraham’s exile: the sad story of a young Marxist historian