George Galloway has announced his intention to establish a Left eBook Club, in the tradition of publisher Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club of the 1930s.
As with many of Galloway’s other projects, it may never go beyond the announcement stage, but he has at least gone to the trouble of setting up a Twitter account and naming himself chair of the selectors.
Reviewing a Left Book Club anthology in 2001, Philip Hensher wrote:
The books the club would publish were always intended to be proponents of high ideological purity. The characteristic Left Book Club volume was violently pro-Stalin, anti-fascist, bien-pensant. That was always the point.
The appalling naïvety of most of these productions hardly needs pointing out now. The surprising fact is that the Left Book Club was immediately, gigantically popular. It is almost impossible to imagine now any circumstances in which a publishing house which issued nothing but political polemics of a very specific flavour could attract anything but a very small audience. But in the heated atmosphere of the mid-1930s, the club had no difficulty whatever in signing up 40,000 subscribers within a year.
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It is easy to deplore a lot of the club’s activities now. They certainly published a lot of fairly disgusting panegyrics of Stalin. Understanding what sort of man Hitler was should not in itself have entailed telling lies about the USSR. Lion Feuchtwanger’s book Moscow 1937 is not something anyone should try and find excuses for.
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One of Orwell’s masterpieces, The Road to Wigan Pier, was commissioned by the club, but it was more than they could quite put up with. The documentary first half, describing the suffering of the urban proletariat, presented no problem. The superb rant of the second half was quite unacceptable. Gollancz wrote a preface dissociating himself from Orwell’s excoriating account of the casual connection made by the populace between socialists and ‘cranks’; what he must have thought of Orwell’s later satires on Stalin’s imperialism is all too easy to imagine.Orwell was not a man with much time for the club; there is a splendidly funny account of a club meeting in Coming Up For Air, and the dashing jibe that its hero’s wife has only joined it under the impression that it sells books cheap which have been left in railway carriages.
Gollancz, if that famous preface is anything to go by, was somewhat disappointed by Orwell. But the club remains a fascinating cultural fact, a compressed statement in the long history of English naïvety.
Writing at Socialist Unity, Galloway’s cohort John Wight mentions Owen Jones’s The Establishment and Russell Brand’s Revolution as the sort of books the club will promote.
But what about the rest of us on the Left? Those of us who put the highest priority on democracy and human rights for all. Those of us who cringe at the idea of lending support to authoritarians, dictators and butchers just because they identify themselves as “socialists” or “revolutionaries”? Those of us who are willing (or proud) to accept the epithet “decent” when it is sneered by the anti-Western and “anti-imperialist” far Left?
I’m not prepared to organize anything officially at this point (although if you are, please proceed and keep me informed), but I want to mention a few of the books I think should be read (eventually) by any decent leftist:
• Every book George Orwell wrote, including the four-volume collection of his essays, journalism and letters.
• The novel Bread and Wine and the collection of essays Emergency Exit by the Italian democratic socialist Ignazio Silone.
• The novel Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler.
• I Chose Freedom and I Chose Justice by Victor Kravchenko.
• The God That Failed, a collection of writings by disillusioned former Communists (including Silone and Koestler) who nevertheless continued to identify with the Left.
• Terror and Liberalism by Paul Berman.
• What’s Left? by Nick Cohen.
What are your suggestions?
