Our Favourite Quote

As the 14th July is Bastille Day, I've used that as an excuse to post the following old Socialist Standard article: 1789: France's Bourgeois Revolution on the unofficial Socialist Standard page on MySpace. You are more than welcome to check it out.

For some reason, I was originally going to entitle this post 'Abstract Barricadists'*. I've no idea why, other than the fact that it tickled me. I'm sure that I will use that title at a later date in connection to a rant against any vanguardist anarchist bastard who doesn't have a copy of the November 2003 Socialist Standard sticking out their back pocket, but I have instead fallen back on the title 'Our Favourite Quote'. Why that title? Glad you asked. Simply 'cos any mention of the French Revolution reminds me of the following quote from Jean-Paul Marat that was in the sleevenotes of the underrated 1985 Style Council album, Our Favourite Shop**:

"Don't be taken in when they paternally pat you on the shoulder and say that there's no inequality worth speaking of and no more reason to fight because if you believe them they will be completely in charge in their marble homes and granite banks from which they rob the people of the world under the pretence of bringing them culture. Watch out, for as soon as it pleases them they'll send you out to protect their gold in wars whose weapons, rapidly developed by servile scientists, will become more and more deadly until they can with a flick of the finger tear a million of you to pieces."

As a callow youth I was always impressed by that quote, so it was a bit of a choker to discover that he also penned the words:

"Five or six hundred heads cut off would have assured your repose, freedom, and happiness. A false humanity has held your arms and suspended your blows; because of this millions of your brothers will lose their lives". (Quoted from L'Ami du Peuple, July 1790)

I guess it's the Menshevik in me that ensures that that quote will always send a chill down my spine. Sad thing is that there are 'r-r-r-revolutionaries' today who would probably agree with the sentiment of Marat's quote in a *cough* revolutionary situation. As an antidote to such reactionary fervour, it's a tonic to check out the closing words to Martov's 1918 article, Down With The Death Penalty!:

"The [Bolshevik] party of death sentences is as much an enemy of the working class as the party of pogroms.

Let all those ignorant, blinded, and debauched sons of the working class who have been bought see, that the family of the proletariat will never forgive them their participation in the business of execution!

Let all those who have not yet lost their socialist outlook make haste to distance themselves from the Medvedevs and Stuchkas, the Krylenkos and Trotskies, Dzerzhinskies and Sverdlovs, from all those who are in charge of wholesale and individual murder!

We must not remain silent! For the honour of the working class, for the honour of socialism and the revolution, for our duty to our motherland and the Workers’ International, for the principles of humanity, for our hatred of autocracy’s gallows, for the beloved memory of our martyred fighters for freedom – let the mighty call of the working class resound across all Russia:

Down with the death penalty! Let the people judge the executioner-cannibals!

Maybe I should have titled this post, 'Armchair Barricadists'?

*I think I should give the clever clever titles a rest for a while. I bet no one got that the 'Twenty Pages in July' title was my nod to Mike Leigh's drama, 'Four Days in July'?

**Don't quote me on this, but I think Style Council's 'Our Favourite Shop' might have been the last album to ever be reviewed in the Socialist Standard. Christ, for all I know, it might have been the first and last album ever to be reviewed in its hallowed pages. Wait up, no, a brain cell is telling me that someone might have reviewed the Tom Robinson Band's 'Power in the Darkness' in the Standard a few years before that. I should dig the reviews out, and post them up on the blog. Such sterling commitment to regular and ongoing cultural commentary by the SPGB should be celebrated on the internet. I wonder if the greybeards at the MIA would accept the reviews for inclusion on their website?