There has never been a time when socialism – real socialism, socialism from below, socialism whose main ingredient is democracy, socialism won by fighting against capitalism – is more relevant. There is a world to win, and it is time for socialists to shake off their inhibitions, and go out to organise where it can be won. ibid. ch6
The Russian Revolution, Professor Pipes tells us in his very first sentence, was ‘arguably the most important event of the century’. He then spends 845 pages proving that it was nothing of the kind. Indeed, after that first flourish, he can hardly bring himself to call it a revolution at all. It was instead, he insists, a coup d’état, led by a bunch of psychopaths and fanatics, whose consequence has brought nothing but pain and despair to the people of the world. Paul Foot, article February 1992, ‘Saints & Devils’; review of Richard Pipe’s ‘The Russian Revolution’ 1899-1919
Socialism, in other words is an extension of what democracy we have, not the removal of it. Paul Foot, 3 Letters to a Bennite, 7th January 1982
In the end, it comes to this. You still see the main hope for change in an elected Labour government, backed by supporters in the rank and file, passing and enforcing laws to establish a socialist order. I see the only real prospect for change in a growing movement from below, culminating in a revolutionary process, where so many working people are confident of their own ability to run society that they seize hold of economic and industrial power, and use it. ibid.
Shelley’s first long poem, Queen Mab, is a ferocious and sometimes magnificent diatribe against the social order. In Ireland he wrote and attempted to circulate his Address to the Irish People, in which he argued for an Association to campaign for Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform. When three revolutionary workers were executed after the Pentridge uprising in Nottinghamshire in 1817, Shelley wrote a furious pamphlet scornfully comparing their unnoticed deaths to the public hysteria about the death of a young princess. In the same year he wrote another pamphlet urging the sort of demands for parliamentary reform which appeared on Chartist banners 20 years later ...
He utterly refused to bend his opinions. He was resolutely revolutionary all his life – but his confidence ebbed and flowed according to the ebb and flow of popular movements and uprisings. After his move to Italy in 1818 his best revolutionary poetry, especially the Ode to Liberty and Hellas, were written in tune with the European revolts of the time – in Spain, Naples and in Greece. But when there was not much happening, especially when the news from England was all bad, he wrote more and more lyric poetry. His political passions were never forsaken, but they were often buried deep in lyrical metaphor.
But the anger burned furiously, never far beneath the surface. Every so often it erupted like the volcanoes he was always writing about. The most extraordinary example of this is his poem about the massacre at Peterloo – The Mask of Anarchy. The demonstration in August 1819 in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, was at that time the biggest trade union gathering ever organised in Britain. In spite of the Combination Acts and all the other government inspired measures to do them down, the trade unions were growing in strength and influence. The main speaker at the Manchester demonstration was Henry Hunt, a working class agitator. The huge crowd came with their families as though to a picnic. It was like a miners’ gala of modern times ...
When news of this day’s work reached Shelley in Italy he was literally speechless with rage. He plunged into the little attic room he used at that time as a study. In five days he never appeared for conversation or recreation. He wrote the 92 verses of The Mask of Anarchy, without any doubt at all the finest poem of political protest ever written in our language. It has been quoted again and again in protests ever since. The Chartists revelled in it, and reprinted it. Gandhi quoted it when agitating among the South African Indians in the early part of this century. More recently it was translated and chanted during the students’ uprising at Tiananmen Square, Beijing.
The most powerful element in the poem is Shelley’s anger. The horror of Peterloo had fanned the flames of the fury of his youth. Somehow he hung on to the discipline of rhyme and metre. The poem is in many ways the most carefully constructed thing he ever wrote. The parameters allowed by poetic licence in a long and complicated poem like Prometheus Unbound are very wide. In The Mask of Anarchy, Shelley confined himself to the rhythm of the popular ballads of the time. Paul Foot, article July/August 1992, ‘Poetry of Protest’
Central to the idea of socialism is understanding that things will change – one day the people at the top who are now doing the bashing will be bashed by people at the bottom. I am greatly helped by the fact that I lived through the 1970s when we believed revolution was imminent.
When I joined Socialist Worker in October 1972 I was confident that a revolution was coming. Events seemed to confirm it, and even right wingers said the same. If you have lived through that, it is easier to see it happening again. Everything in our history points to the fact that things will swing around, and all kinds of hopes and optimisms flourish again. Although the 1990s were depressing in some respects, not a single thing has happened to make me doubt that things will change in our direction. It will happen very unexpectedly and catch us by surprise, so we must be prepared, be bigger and win more influence inside the working class. Paul Foot, Tribune of the People
The man of ease, who, by his warm fireside,
To deeds of charitable intercourse
And bare fulfilment of the common laws
Of decency and prejudice, confines
The struggling nature of his human heart,
Is duped by their cold sophistry; he sheds
A passing tear purchance upon the wreck
Of earthly peace, when near his dwelling’s door
The frightful waves are driven – when his son
Is murdered by the tyrant, or religion
Drives his wife raving mad. But the poor man,
Whose life is misery, and fear and care;
Whom the morn wakens but to fruitless toil
Who ever hears his famished offspring scream;
Whom their pale mother’s uncomplaining gaze
For ever meets, anti the proud rich man’s eye
Flashing command, and the heartbreaking scene
Of thousands like himself: – he little heeds
The rhetoric of tyranny. His hate
Is quenchless as his wrongs: he laughs to scorn
The vain and bitter mockery of words,
Feeling the horror of the tyrant’s deeds,
And unrestrained but by the arm of power,
That knows and dreads his enmity. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth
And, by the incantation of this verse
Scatter, as from an un-extinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words to all mankind.
Be through my lips to un-awakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ode to the West Wind
Then she lay down in the street
Right before the horse’s feet
Expecting with a patient eye
Murder Fraud and Anarchy ...
Tis to work and have such pay
As just keeps life from day to day ...
From the workhouse and the prison
Where pale as corpses newly risen
Women, children, young and old
Groan for pain and weep for cold ...
And that slaughter to the nation
Shall steam up like inspiration,
Eloquent, oracular;
A volcano heard afar.
And these words shall then become
Like oppression’s thundered doom,
Ringing through each heart and brain
Heard again, again, again –
Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you.
Ye are many. They are few. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Mask of Anarchy
On the first reverses of hope in the progress of French liberty, the sanguine eagerness for good overleaped the solution of these questions, and for a time extinguished itself in the unexpectedness of their result. Thus, many of the most ardent and tender-hearted of the worshippers of the public good have been morally ruined by what a partial glimpse of the events they deplored appeared to show as the melancholy desolation of all their cherished hopes. Hence gloom and misanthropy have become the characteristics of the age in which we live, the solace of a disappointment that unconsciously finds relief only in the wilful exaggeration of its own despair. This influence has tainted the literature of the age with the hopelessness of the minds from which it flows. Metaphysics and enquiries into moral and political science have become little else than vain attempts to revive exploded superstitions or sophisms like those of Mr Malthus calculated to lull the oppressors of mankind into a security of everlasting triumph. Our works of fiction and poetry have been overshadowed by the same infectious gloom. (Revolution & France) Percy Bysshe Shelley, preface The Revolt of Islam
No, majesty, it is a revolution. Duc de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt to Louis XVI
Revolutions have never lightened the burden of tyranny: they have only shifted it to another shoulder. George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
O tremble, all ye earthly Princes,
Bow down the crowned and crism’d nob;
Wise is the Potentate that winces
At the just clamour of the mob.
Shiver, ye Bishops, doff your mitres,
Huddle between your empty pews
Here comes a horde of left-wing writers
Brandishing salmon-pink reviews.
Comes the New Age. Your outworn faces
Vanished at our enlightened curse
While we erect in your old places
Something considerable worse. R P Lister, The Revolutionaries
What is this, the sound and rumour? What is this that all men hear,
Like the wind in hollow valleys when the storm is drawing near,
Like the rolling on of ocean in the eventide of fear?
’Tis the people marching on. William Morris, Chants for Socialism, 1885