A Non- Marxist Looks A7 Mutiny

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Is "Mutinies: 1917-1920" , a Solidarity Russian workers crowd outside the Duma tubbins view pan This is a deeply anti-Marxist pamphlet which revolutionary Marxists will find of considerable interest.

Manifestations of class consciousness within the machinery of the state will always be of great interest to us, but the same machinery of state operates to obscure the history of such manifestations.

Excavating

This point is also made Benn, a leading participant in the machinery of the bourgeois state, in the foreword to a recent Spokesman pamphlet on the Soldiers' Revolt of 1795.

Dave Lamb has done us a service therefore by excavating what material he can on a series of mutinies in the British forces during period of history crucial the working class.

PHOTO: Laurence Sparham, IFL Benn-a participant in the machinery of the state This must have been a singularly distateful task, necessitating as it did prolonged sifting of memoirs, diaries and other outpourings of the privileged officer caste of World War I.

The value of this pamphlet lies in the dedication with which Lamb has carried out this task.

Weakness

The crippling weakness of the work flows from the libertarian, anti-Marxist view that Lamb takes of the history of the working class.

Thus, for Lamb, the mutinies at the end of World War I, just as the resistance within the US forces to the Vietnam war, are no more than responses to the immediate conditions experienced by the troops phlet by Dave Lamb. involved.

In both cases Marxists would seek relationships Since the Labour Party conference overwhelmingly threw out Callaghan's 5% pay limit efforts to derail the wages struggle have 9051 between developments in the forces and the offensives being taken by the civilian A soldiers' committee; working class.

In the 1917-1920 period, the central fact in the consciousness of the world proletariat was the Bolshevik revolution.

Mutinous incidents

In British civilian life the Trades Councils mounted an enormous campaign against Government efforts to attack the emerging Bolshevik state and this found responses among the armed forces.

In the navy there was a series of mutinous incidents when ships were ordered against the Russians.

Similar events occurred among the army sections spread rapidly into the Archangel.

A number of mutineers actually deserted to the Bolshevik side. During the autumn of 1919 the British troops were withdrawn.

The evidence for an now being dropped left and right by union bureaucrats who have no serious intention of fighting for the defence of workers' living standards.

And many sections of Deserted Nonetheless, the histor show a significant develor to the efforts to destroy th Bolshevik revolution i 1919-20.

This is an important an inadequately-known aspec of the history of the Britis working class. For all it defects, Lamb's pamphle provides a starting point.