From Time Out, 27 March 1981–2 April 1981.
Transcription by Richard Kuper.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive
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Michael Kidron arrived here via South Africa and Palestine. He is a writer, economist, orator, pioneer political publisher, and Marxist for 35 years. David Widgery charts his career. |
Michael Kidron is not at all the revolutionary stereotype; the loony with automatic and ultimatum at the ready or the remorseless political full timer with NHS pince nez. And certainly he isn’t one of the left wing intellectuals who has very nearly done Marxism to an unreadable death from the comfort of their armchairs.
There is not a stereotype—or an armchair in sight, as the sun floats down across his flat snug above Parliament Hill’s ponds. This is a somewhat svelte Marxist teetering, in his track suit on the twee. But his life is the very stuff of revolutionary politics; clandestine study-circles, the refusal of conscription, fisticuffs with the fascists, faction fights, writing, editing, printing and helping to distribute a workers’ newspaper which preached revolution when the youthful Harold Wilson was still knocking spots off the 14th Earl of Home and the long post war boom was still roaring.
Nor, despite the allegations and the impression he sometimes deliberately gives, is Kidron a dilettante. In the 1950s and early 1960s, he was one of the crucial publicists and recruiters who built the International Socialists (IS) (precursors of today’s Socialist Workers Party) from a circle of 60 to, by 1967 an organization of 600, a task requiring imagination, graft, cunning and flair.
In the 1970s he was a major force in establishing Pluto Press which set the pattern for many radical publishing houses since. Kidron has edited several dozen books for Pluto’s authors, inspired a few and botched up more than one. As well as being eloquent, his analysis is as hard and cutting as the diamond of his native South Africa; politically warm spirited but intellectually merciless.
His latest project, The State of the World Atlas written jointly with Ronald Segal, is pure Kidron in its impudence and originality. It’s what makes Mike an annoying figure to the more conservative folks on the Left, who gossip about his cosmopolitanism and dread his style.
I remember one evening ten years ago the inward groan as Kidron arrived to address some building workers wearing a chamois jacket instead of the issue Trotskyist rig-out. But they loved the speech ... and the bloody jacket. What Kidron’s life asks is what kind of a Marxism should we adopt to go beyond the Left’s patriarchal, puritanical, pre-electronic, almost deliberately unpopular presentation of itself? A Marxism that doesn’t lose rigour, tradition and an understanding of what Kidron calls ‘the system’s major, seismic, fault. The conflict between labour and capital in production.’
His examination of this political fault line began, aged 14, in a hospital bed in Johannesburg. He had fallen ill on a Zionist youth camp 1,000 miles away from his home in Capetown. His sole visitor was a Young Communist League youth organiser, a ‘lovely fellow who died very young in Czechoslovakia’. The organiser read him A Short Course of the History of the CPSU(B), Stalin’s grim and mendacious account of Soviet Socialism. ‘It was a grey volume,’ Kidron recalls. ‘The result was that after weeks of his attention, I was forcibly driven towards Trotskyism. If the Short Course was what the future was about ... then there was no hope.’
He joined his family in Palestine, and through his elder sister Chanie met Ygael Glickstein before they both departed in the direction of Europe and The Coming World Revolution. The prospects for this revolution were swiftly shattered by Yalta, Marshall Aid and Bing Crosby. But at the time Trotskyists believed, not unreasonably, that a workers’ uprising might follow Hitler’s defeat, just as the fall of the Tsar at the end of the First War had triggered the Russian Revolution. Gluckstein, who adopted the pseudonym ‘Tony Cliff’ at Dover, was promptly deported to Dublin from whence, it is said, he scattered revolutionary leaflets over the VE day crowds from the hotel room in which he was interned.
Kidron remained in Palestine. ‘In his two week recruitment campaign Cliff has intellectually reinforced my anti-Stalinism and my anti-Zionism and then I was left. The Haganah, the underground Zionist army, ran the military aspect of my school, twice a week we would have to arrive early to drill. I used to turn up early too, to prove I wasn’t just lazy, and then refuse to drill and argue against Zionism, for the bilateral state and Arab-Jewish unity. This didn’t make me very popular but at the end there were two of us.’
After the Trotskyist exodus no revolutionary organisation remained in Palestine. So Kidron and his solitary ally read voraciously, translated (including Rosa Luxemburg from the German and a British army handbook on shooting down planes which Kidron reckons must have had an enormous effect on Hebrew military terminology ‘since we invented the words for everything’) and played poker for days on end.
Though anti-Zionist enough to get beaten up by Begin’s thugs, Kidron relished the atmosphere of student Jerusalem in the early days of the Israeli State. ‘Few thought in terms of career, the students from the army were adult already and had been through an emotionally forcing experience. We sat around in cafes and just tried to work out what the hell the world was about. And I got myself beaten up by everybody, except the Arabs.’
Kidron arrived in London in 1953 and joined his sister and Cliff in the Socialist Review group. He describes the SR group as ‘six people huddled in a room. Anyway a seventh meant a colossal increase in size, particularly a seventh who was a research student and who therefore had all the time in the world. Within two months of coming, I was the editor of Socialist Review which became a regular monthly and increased in size and circulation and impact steadily until 1956 when it quadrupled in circulation and became fortnightly. The next high was CND, I suppose, and then the beginning of the 1960s and the Labour Party youth work.’
Before 1956 the revolutionary movement was on hard times. The East European monolith hadn’t begun to fissure and Western capitalism seemed set on eternal expansion. Marxists who insisted that the economic crisis had been postponed rather than solved, that the workers in the East would rise against their ‘Communist’ bosses too, looked, and in some ways were, ridiculous. They were a tiny group, and their line of ‘neither for Moscow nor Washington but International Socialism’ condemned them as traitors in the eyes of the Communist Party.
Even within Trotskyism it was only too tempting to effectively abandon the notion of the working class as a revolutionary force and either redefine the socialist project or discover it amongst the Third World’s strongmen Nasser, Castro, Nkrumah or Ben Bella. It is the dilemma which infuses David Mercer’s first plays and much of Sartre’s early political writing and activity.
Kidron was best known on the Left at this time for his deciphering of the unprecedented post war boom, set out in the classic Western Capitalism Since the War and known, especially to members of the IS who bore it like regimental regalia into ideological battle, as the theory of the Permanent Arms Economy. In reality, as he pointed out in 1977, there was much that was sketchy, provisional or omitted. But as Kidron wrote in praise of another Marxist theorist, it possessed the ‘right approach to theory; it picked out the enemy, determined the crucial alliance and explained what the battle was about.’
Long before the French general strike of 1968 put revolution back on the agenda in three dimensions, Kidron and his co-thinkers possessed a working explanation of the instabilities generated within the boom, the dynamics of revolt in the Soviet bloc, Third Worldism and the changed pattern of post war trade unionism in Britain. And they took practical action accordingly.
Socialist Review was succeeded by International Socialism in 1960 and it has since clocked up some 120 issues in virtually continuous production and political line. It is customary to damn socialist theoretical journalism by reference to the often incomprehensible New Left Review whose various editorial board members’ self-regard is something of a standing joke, Kidron’s early editorial work in London lacks the political ballyhoo but will, I think, be seen as a more lasting achievement, and was part of an effort to build an independent socialist organization. Kidron was also one of the organisation’s main orators, traipsing round pub meetings in Scotland and the North. I asked Jim Nicol, one of the recent SWP National Secretaries, then a young Geordie bus conductor, if he was good. ‘He was marvelous. I hitched from Newcastle to York just to hear him talk. He was bloody irresistible.’
Kidron observes that:
‘It was a very personally warm period. And the group was so small and so obviously ineffectual and, within our very hard class analysis, we could say what we liked. We were searching round for a little bit of soil to drop a seed into.’
‘Cliff himself was shifting around. One morning he woke up as Rosa Luxemburg, another he was Lenin, the third Trotsky. And very occasionally he was Marx. He was playing and he was quite right to because you had to throw everything at the world to see what would stick. And anyway a lot of time on the editorial board was spent discussing who would drop off the 12 copies of [sic] Sheffield or how our comrades were getting on in the Workers Educational Association or the latest horror stories from the other grouplets.’
He is also self-deprecating about the last five years he has worked at Pluto Press.
‘I’m a lousy publisher because my own views are too clear to me. My own views of what the world is about and where the world should be at and my training as an analyst and a socialist publicist prevent me from being a good socialist publisher. And I’m a lousy writer because if I was really purposive about it, I would never have taken up the time-consuming thing of publishing.’
Pluto was founded by Richard Kuper initially as the IS propaganda arm, but after two years broke formal ties. Talking to Kuper one senses that Kidron can be editorially infuriating but deserves no small part of the credit for Pluto’s successes, as well as for some of its occasional ghastly affectations.
The company’s survival reflects the energy and enterprise of countless other Pluto workers at Chalcot Road who in private can be heard to complain of ‘plutopression’ (flogging yourself to death for socialist publishing and a pittance). It also reflects the emerging networks of bookshops and distributors, the boom in academic Marxism and a new, more conscious readership. But Kidron has specifically contributed to a passion for getting ideas across which reflect his hatred of The Grey.
The Pluto Joke Book, the Big Red Diary (another pioneer, first published in 1974), the Workers’ Handbooks which have now clocked up an enormous sale in the trade union movement, the infamous Julie Burchill/Tony Parson’s diatribe The Boy Looked at Johnny, now the Atlas – underwritten by Pan and Heinemann; these are the projects he especially relishes. They are the work of a committed socialist publicist bent on beating the commercial publishers at their own game.
There is now considerable distance between Kidron and the SWP. It is no great secret that some of the SWP’s grander calculations of the mid-1970s came, ehem ... unstuck. Pete Binns, current editor of International Socialism says, diplomatically, ‘a huge gap was left by his departure’. Kidron mutters darkly about ‘Revolutionism that has lost its social base’. But there is not bitterness or loss of commitment. Rather a longing to get back to political theory. ‘I can approach it like a new born baby and say, “What is this we have got in front of us?” Because since the Second World War, there has been a fundamental change in the world organisation of capitalism and this has only penetrated analytically and intellectually very recently. I was interested in seeing the economic structures and how these have changed, and not particularly interested in the political structures and state formations and even the personal and emotional and psychological structures. Now I’m interested in the whole complex. So I need to sit down and stop thinking like an economist and read some novels and poetry and stuff I’ve never read as interpretations of the world we live in.’
Whatever he produces will be, in the Marxist tradition, heretic, a guide to action, not self-sufficient dogma. He mimes and mocks the prayer of the Orthodox Jew and says ‘I could never stand devotion. Instead of the belief, the purpose is the thing.’
Last updated on 9 May 2022