[AR WORKERS ACCEPT «PARTICIPATION" Days of Hope by…]

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AR WORKERS ACCEPT «PARTICIPATION"

Days of Hope by Jim Allen (1 series produced by Tony Gari The very act of posing the revolutionary tasks of the British working class before a mass audience is guaranteed to cause consternation in many quarters. This is why the recent 'Days of Hope' ¡series of TV plays, and the novel by Jim Allen which has followed it, has aroused la chorus of indignation and movements between 1916 and 1926 is linked by a small group of well-drawn fictional characters - most importantly 'Ben' a young worker: who is first a soldier and then a militant in the new born British Communist Party -and a galaxy of real but now historical figures.

With skill and warmth the Loach-Garnett-Allen team put together a gripping series of plays, with numerous well-observed incidents - from the struggle against limperialist war in 1916, the Irish war of independence of the following year, the miners' lock-out of 1921, the 1924 Labour Government and culminating in the last part in the General Strike.

Allen's book, equally vivid in its dialogue, covers the same span of history and captures much of the same spirit.

HOWL The left wing "partisanship' of the TV plays and the book have produced a predictable howl of rage trom sections of reactionary opinion such as the Daily Telegraph and Mary Whitehouse, anticommunist watchdog of the small screen. The editor of The Times reacted with a liberal, Jukewarm defence of the BBC's 'right' to put on occasional programmes expressing an anticapitalist standpoint.

Both the indignation and the tolerance. stemmed from the programmes' exceptional strengths. The team caught the feel and the smell of classes in action, of struggle and betrayal. Not spinning the words of documentary 'realism' but putting their shoulders to the wheel of history, they again and again linked arms with their characters. Especially was this so in dealing with the Durham miners lock-out of 1921.

Naturally, the journalistic defenders of capitalism were hostile to programmes which brought vividly into millions of workers' homes the bitter treachery of the trade union leaders - 'left' and right - who destroyed the General Strike, and the impotent policies of the Communist Party, already hamstrung by the influence of Stalinism in the Third International.

Equally predictably, various papers of the centrist left lauded the programmes to the sky. The International Marxist Group's Red Weekly, (25th September) praised the portrayal of "the richness, the unity and the courage of the utura Publi cations, ett and dire cted by Ken Loach.

organised workers' movement" while the International Socialists Socialist Worker awarded them the highest palm of claiming -laughably - that they were close to that paper's own political standpoint.

Even the Stalinist Morning Star paid the series the compliment of distorting their opposition to the bureaucratic, right wing leadership in the union, saying it included a 'leftist dismissal of the union'. These lies were necessary for the Stalinists because "the series clearly ran counter to the current policy and objectives of the Communist Party". (Morning Star, 20th September and 4th October).

Almost alone among the paper: of the left, the Workers Revolutionary Party's Workers Press maintained a complete silence on the series. This is surprising since it has warmly received earlier productions by the same team, and becasue it is well known that Jim Allen was active in the Trotskyist movement over a decade ago.

Also Loach and Garnett, more recently, have been closely associated with the WRP and its forerunner, the Socialist Labour League, speaking from their platforms and supporting many of its campaigns. Moreover, particularly in the section covering the General Strike, Days of Hope deals with many of the key questions of the origin and political basis of the Trotskyist movement.

It is especially here that the programmes and the novel are subtly but clearly marked by their makers' own political development in relation to the WRP.

It is not the aim of this review to pass judgement on the artistic success of Days of Hope. The slight unevenness of the TV series reflects its struggle to find forms adequate to a content it is still groping to understand.

ABOVE ROUTINE

At all points it stands head and , shoulders above the routine slickness of most television productions. And in Jim Allen's novel the robust dialogue is sometimes not matched by incongruous metaphors in the descriptive passages. But these are flaws only by contrast with the overall movement, the authors always happiest in action, always striving to trame the solidity of a moment that is gone as soon as it exists.

It is necessary to comment, though, on the reports that meme bers of the actors' union: Equity were not employed for some of the main parts. This cannot represent the principled action of socialists. And it is impossible also, to agree with Allen's subsequent method of defence of the series, on TV and radio, using the straigh liberal argument of "every man to his own opinion"

Days of Hope is an attempt by Allen and his collaborators to work through certain key political questions in a 'fictional' form; it is certainly right, therefore, tr assess the conclusions to which for the this leads them. And if the Morning Star can characterise their work as reflecting an "undeniably Trotskyist line". , we must consider how far this is really so.

The decade 1916-1926 covers toma working chase achieved the October revolution, launched challenges for power in many other countries, protected the young Soviet Republic, and tasted the first bitter fruits of Stalinist policy.

The later parts of Days of Hope attempts to deal not only with the betrayals of the first Labour government, adn that of the TUC leadership in the General Strike (in which it succeeds) but also with problems and differences within the Communist Party and the Third International - in which it fails.

Perhaps one reason for this is that it sometimes seems also to be trying to grasp - by analogy or allegory - the contemporary problems of the British Trotskyist movement, adn the experience of the degeneration of the WRP.

The treachery of today's TUC bureaucrats and Labour ministers is sharply pre-figured in the portraits of their political ancestors. But viewers or readers could not find nearly so intelligible the account of developments inside the Communist Party, or of their relevance to today. No wonder, since these events were not intelligible to the authors themselves.

OBVIOUS This stands out most obviously in the character of Walter Goldman, a refugee from the Berlin Spartacists uprising of 1919, who is portrayed as a supporter of Trotsky as early as 1924. He is made to speak of how people were joining the Soviet Communist Party "in order to obtain pos itions of power nad influence"

In the same scene there is an argument between the 'left' Alf Purcell, portrayed as a supporter of Stalin, and Goldman as an incipient supporter of Trotsky.

Such a conversation is anachronistic in a number of ways. Not only was no-one at that time really aware of the social structure of the Soviet Party, but very few, even in Russia itself, knew anything of the primary role of Stalin.

In 1924 - the year that Lenin died - there could not have been any such clear awareness of Stalinism as a political force, because it was not yet formed as such.

At this point the forces that later came together to form the Bolshevik Left Opposition were still fighting dangerous tendencies and trends, not a fully-formed bureaucratic caste running an apparatus of repression.

Goldman comes to the fore again in the hours after the TUC - rights and 'lefts' - have called off the General Strike. The CP militants are desperately trying to understand how the Party leadership tied itself to the slogan 'All power to the TUC' and to support by several IS members from the Lenin met British Shop Stewards as part of the fight for the Communist International for the "left, pro-Soviet bureaucrats. Goldman - tired, almost cynical - explains it as the out(In the parallel scene in the TV series he goes further and explains the role of Stalinism in a way that is not only historically incorrect, but implicitly gives credibility to Stalinist policy of the late 20's and early 30's - that gains for the fascists would work to the advantage of the Communists.)

Goldman articulates in a theoretical form what is implicit and unformed in the shock and resistance of Ben, the CP workermilitant.

Yet Goldman is an artificial character, not only dramatically but historically. Of course, Jim Allen can answer that in their chosen 'semi-fictional' form it is not compulsory to be completely accurate in terms of chronology, or of what people at a given time could have known, even those who actually existed.

FOUGHT FOR This is true. But more is involved here than matters of detail. For the opposition to Stalinism was never somethi g ready-made, existing in the heads of theoreticians before the event. It was fought for through a series of enormous battles and many defeats, of which the British General Strike was a crucial but individual instance. In 1926 the International Left Opposition's defence of internationalist principles and of class intransigence was only just beginning in an organised form.

The principles etched out in Days of Hope, and particularly in the conclusion that Ben draws from his crushing frustration with the CP's support for the left union leaders - that a new organisation was needed, could only take real shape much later.

There is thus an artificial and idealised strand running through Days of Hope which tends to see revolutionary leadership as something ready-made, formed beforehand in a glass case by the insights of giants such as Trotsky. From this point of view there is nothing new under the sun, the word exists before the deed.

This strand clearly has much in common with the bureaucratised 'orthodoxy' of the WRP leadership, their refusal to study living development, or their own weaknesses and limits.

But this weakness is sharply contradicted in Days of Hope by the objective movement of the narrative as a whole. Overshadowing it is the author's real portrait of a class on the move, flexing its muscles for practical tasks, peeling the skin from the onion of British compromise, "fair play' and hypocricy, which sends the bureaucrats scurrying to lick the boots of the employers.

DIFFICULTIES In the alternation of scenes one can sense the team's difficulties in bringing together the two elements they correctly feel are essential - the practical struggle of the working class against its enemies, and the forging of a leadership to give conscious direction and victory to the class.

And there is no mistaking the conviction in Days of Hope that this is not only the task of 19161926, but also of the 1970's.

To this task people with the talents and training of Allen, Loach and Garnett have an important contribution to make. And it would be impossible to be fighters in the Trotskyist movement and to create something as powerful as Days of Hope without being aware of this.

CONFUSION But the plays and the novel also contain an element of confusion and - almost - of contemporary cynicism. The intellectual Goldman, leaving the Communist Party before the General Strike declares:

"For twenty-eight years I've been trying to think dialectically, but from now on I'm just going to think."

But as the events which the team brought to life on the screen so clearly show, thought can move forward and take effect only within the struggles of the present day working class. The task is not simply to think about the world but to participate in the fight to change it.

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controversy in the Tory press. class hite, pos oical and in yustrial

come of Stalin's 'peaceful coexist- ence with capitalist states.