Jeff Sparrow

This is a biography of Guido Baracchi, a well-heeled, literate bohemian and committed Marxist/Communist who lived from 1887 to 1975, described by Stuart Macintyre as 'the knight errant of Australian communism'. He's a terrific subject for biography: he worked for the cause in Weimar Germany and the 1930s Soviet Union; he had intense relationships with a number of poets and playwrights (Lesbia Harford, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Betty Roland), each of whom left rich accounts this biography show more has drawn on; he was widely read and wrote a lot himself, also supplying a wealth of material to his biographer. I was telling some friends about the book, and one woman was prompted to talk of her romance when young with a son of a leading Communist family: when they were about to go out on a date, he would say, 'Let's stay home tonight -- the old coms are coming around and there'll be lots of tales.' I suspect Jeff Sparrow had a background something like that, because while this book meticulously cites its written sources (discreetly up the back), and doesn't hang back from quoting T S Eliot and James Joyce to good effect, it's also bursting at the seams with 'tales', with the lore of Australian Communism: clever ploys, bastardry, romance, betrayal, nobility (like Guido's wife Neura's principled reaction to the news that he had taken up with Betty Roland, then Davies, from which she seems never to have wavered), tragedy (which may be too pallid a word for what Stalin and Stalinism did to the hopes of the world). You can almost hear the stories being told with suitable embellishment at a kitchen table far into the night.

As the story unfolds, what today is called the mainstream media comments from the margins: for example, as we follow the travails of the tiny Australian Marxist movement of the early 20s, bitterly divided within itself, devoting most of its energies to self-education, and discouraged at the prospect of ever being effective, we learn that Prime Minister Bruce gets headlines by accusing the Labor Party of pandering to Bolshevism, and thus, as Jeff Sparrow remarks, succeeds 'in elevating communism into a public issue in a way that the communists themselves found impossible'. Sadly, the MSM version has become received wisdom, and a whole dimension of our history has been largely forgotten. Those who deplore black armband history would no doubt equally deplore this, perhaps as 'red tie history'. I can't recommend it enough -- for that worthy reason, but also because it is a ripping good read, another example of history written with the verve and imaginative force that some think is the exclusive domain of the novel. show less

First I should offer a trigger warning: this book has essentially nothing to do with trigger warnings, in spite of the name of the book. They are mentioned, mostly in passing, but the focus is on political correctness as a general topic, and he doesn't discuss the issue of trigger warnings in any detail. That said, it is a disappointment of a book. It was just another book like so many are writing, explaining in detail how everyone else is wrong and they are right, and what the left needs to show more do to [fill in the blank with favorite trope]. He uses the term 'smug politics' almost incessantly, without bothering to note that the smuggest faces and voices in politics are on the right, not on the left. He shows remarkably little understanding of the academic left, and the nuances across disciplines, and the reality of education. Instead, he chooses to scold and lecture for what he sees as scolding and lecturing to the right-wing. He derides mockery of the right, but doesn't share the same disdain for the mockery that the right heaps on the left; his only goal, apparently, is how to win elections, in spite of all his protestations. Never mind that the academics really aren't doing a lot of mocking; they are, in fact, often too obsequious, and often too bought into the idea that they are the privileged elite with wrong-headed ideas who are out of touch with the needs of the country. Never mind that the coastal 'elites' are actually underrepresented in Congress compared to the 'heartland' because of an outdated system that was designed to make sure the country gentlemen were the ones who had the power. Never mind, even that Hillary didn't actually LOSE the election; she won more than 3 million votes more than her opponent. What LOST the election is a system designed to ensure that rich white men would remain in control of the system by minimizing the votes in the cities by awarding all electors to one candidate. She wasn't a weak candidate; she was running in a broken system. He scolds Hillary for nearly everything she said and did, while never bothering to note that simple fact. Overall, his grasp of American politics is precarious. He understands the big picture, the one you get out of books and classrooms, but doesn't understand what is happening in the real world where Trump voters live. He bases some of his 'facts' on 'studies' done by sitting down with a few friends of whoever did the study, rather than venturing into the heart of red America and spending enough time to actually hear how people talk when they forget other people are listening. He also underestimates the influence that things like trigger warnings and political correctness have had on academia, discussing them as unimportant in reality, but significant as a tool of the right for the culture war.

Smug? If you want smug, read this guy. He practically oozes it...like so many others who come out to this area of the country for a flying visit, talk with the first three people they meet, and go home to lecture the rest of us about how we are so, so wrong about everything. Yeah, he's smug. Not as smug as the right, though. Even the smuggest of the left struggles to reach that high bar.

Not recommended overall; there are good things in it, but it's too much work for the smallish payoff. show less

So much more than a biography. This book gives a flavour of , not only Paul Robeson, but also the world that he inhabited.

I feel that I know the real Paul Robeson from this excellent book.

In a (futile) pre-Christmas effort to rein in book spending, I had borrowed Jeff Sparrow's latest book from the library but it wasn't long before I realised that I wanted my own copy. Trigger Warnings, Political Correctness and the Rise of the Right isn't a book to scamper through and return within three weeks. It's a 'chapter-a-day sort of book, allowing time for thinking in between.
I wish I had a dollar for every time I've been asked if told by people not in the profession that teachers show more aren't allowed to celebrate Christmas any more. This anti-PC furphy went so far that the education department in Victoria had to put out a circular reminding us what had always been true: Christmas traditions are part of Australian culture. While in government schools which have been secular since 1870 when education became free and compulsory, teachers can't infuse the Christmas story with religiosity, they can certainly tell the Christmas story, decorate classrooms, sing Christmas songs, and of course have the students make presents and cards. Clearly, in a multicultural society like ours, it would be crass for any teacher to ignore other cultural festivals such as Diwali, Eid, and the Chinese and Jewish New Year celebrations &c. Likewise at Christmas my students were always free to make whatever kind of cards they liked. For me, the issue always was about finding a way for the activities to have some educational value. So we would study Christmas and other celebrations around the world (i.e. geography), and when I had Year 5 & 6 classes and they'd done that to death, we did Holiday Safety, at the beach etc. That wasn't being PC, it was to teach something useful at the end of the school year, when the older students were usually bored and restless.
The first chapter of Sparrow's book is about how this term political correctness a.k.a. PC arose. He reminds me that...
... right-wingers portray PC as an Orwellian scheme to end freedom of speech, a deliberate strategy to impose a progressive orthodoxy. In reality, radicals coined the term as a joke. The phrase first emerged within the American New Left as an ironic homage to Stalinist rhetoric, adopted by progressives to mock censorious comrades and to chaff the overly earnest. In Australia and Britain, the preferred term was 'ideologically sound' but the gag worked the same way. (p.12)
Yes, by the time PC had trickled down to usage by ordinary people like us, we used it to poke fun at our own lame efforts to Do The Right Thing. Carnivores at the BBQ teased the vegetarians about ideologically sound 'hayburgers' and The Ex would ask if his tie was ideologically sound before setting off to work in the morning. We still use it: asking friends if they would like some ideologically sound excess vegies from the vegie patch. So it's fascinating to read how in America, what was originally a satire on totalitarianism became, for the right, a signifier of totalitarianism. Key players in this transformation were Ronald Reagan, the Australian political commentator Nick Adams, the classicist Allan Bloom and NY Times reporter Richard Bernstein who wrote an article called The Rising Hegemony of the Politically Correct. (It's paywalled, but you're allowed one free visit each month, though I myself wouldn't waste it on this article).
Chapter Two traces the history of 20th century activism in the great social movements of our time: feminism, the gay and lesbian rights movements, and the struggle against racism. While it wasn't a neat progression, Sparrow characterises the activists of the 1950s and early 60s as 'palliationist', that is, middle-class, speaking on behalf of others, non-confrontationist, and 'respectable'. By contrast, 'direct politics', in the late 60s and 70s, had a focus on mass action, on grassroots mobilisation, on participation and self-organisation by workers, students and the oppressed. Crucially, whereas palliationist politics distinguished between interests, direct politics drew connections between issues so that counterculture, black, women's, student and anti-war movements were entwined and used the same (sometimes militant) tactics. But by the mid 70s, radicalism had moved on to pragmatics, and a once-widespread commitment to revolutionary change had given way to 'the practical pursuit of reforms', with many former firebrands becoming what [Todd Gitlin] called 'crisp professional lobbyists' or devoted to winning local office. This third shift into professional settings is termed 'delegated politics', (and in Australia, you can see it in feminist Anne Summer's career as a bureaucrat in the Hawke government's Office for the Status of Women. See also my review of Damned Whores and God's Police.) It is this shift into delegated politics that makes it easier for conservatives to frame action to protect minorities as a bureaucratic measure imposed by an unrepresentative minority. To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2019/02/14/trigger-warnings-political-correctness-and-t... show less