A Long March

 “Until We Fall”– Long Distance Life on the Left” by Helena Sheehan, 2023

Sheehan is a former member of the Irish Communist Party (CPI), a journalist, academic and philosopher.  She had many contacts in Europe and the U.S. during her time as a member, reporter and academic and they show in this virtual travelogue.  The book is a memoir of the collapse of the USSR and the workers’ states in East and Central Europe and subsequent travels to South Africa, Cuba, Greece, Libya, Mexico, the U.S. and beyond.  Against the various pro-capitalist, social-democratic and nationalist tendencies which came out of the former bureaucratic ‘Communist’ strata in these states, she holds to a kind of left-reformist Marxism, feeling close to U.S. groups like the Committees of Correspondence and Monthly Review.

The book goes from 1987 to 2022 and is written as a collection of notes – people she met and argued with, forums and meetings she attended, countries and cities she visited, bits and pieces of ideas that were discussed. It’s all a bit sad, confusing and personal, but some vivid pictures sometimes show through.  The absorption of the GDR by West Germany is shown as a hostile takeover.  Leftists lost their jobs and were barred from future employment in their areas; Socialist Unity Party offices and institutions were expropriated; public property was put up for cheap sale to capitalists or shuttered; an avalanche of real estate pirates descended on East Berlin; former landlords, barons, small and big capitalists demanded their estates, land and housing back while unemployment skyrocketed.  East Germans thought they were getting rock & roll, jeans, consumer goods and ‘freedom.’  What they also got was precarity, crime, trash and the dictatorial rule of the deutschemark. The ‘purge’ extended across the whole Warsaw bloc and took place at a lightning pace.

As someone to the left of the CP who thinks Trotsky had it quite right, it’s astonishing to see how disoriented the leading cadres and intellectuals in ‘really existing socialism’ were. Sheehan was also astonished. Their version of socialism had failed, though it wasn’t even achieved if you go by Marx. This is not the first book that depicted the deep social-democratic, nationalist, bureaucratic, careerist and liberal notions lurking among workers’ state CP leaders.  After the fall Sheehan fights the post-modernists, the corporatists, the identity-only theorists, Afro-centrism, mysticism, anti-modernism, positivism, Heidegger, Irish religion and all the other ragged ideologies in the West that proliferated in the reactionary crucible of the ‘new’ World Order.  The subsequent 9-11 attack, the Iraq invasion, the 2008 financial crash, environmental disasters, Brexit, Trump, CoVid and the temporary ideological triumph of neoliberalism didn’t help.    

Sheehan wrote an introduction to the newly-found writings of Nicolai Bukharin, works he penned during his stay in prison in the 1930s.  She discussed the role of Marxism, dialectical materialism and science at conferences, as she had written a seminal book on the latter topic “Marxism and the Philosophy of Science.”  It opposed Lysenkoism and Stalin’s ‘science’ and showed that Marx and Engels had the same attitude towards science against the claims of some. She insists that Marxism is the best understanding of capitalism and the only theoretical approach that knits together the broadest view of reality.  She terms it somewhat over-inclusively as a “totalizing philosophy of history.”

Sheehan repeatedly visits South Africa from 2002 to 2018, taking a position on the left of the South African CP and against the ANC and Zuma’s neo-liberalism.  She’s not big on praising Mandela as a ‘saint.’  Her descriptions of the conditions in the townships is devastating – crime, poverty, unemployment, violence, rudimentary housing, water shortages.  This eventually resulted in Zuma’s fall, as the ANC and some SACP members administered capitalism in a very Unpopular Front, with corruption being added to that burden. After Mandela died in 2013, the left revolt spread inside COSATU, the Miner’s union and the formation of farther Left parties who saw that new conditions mandated a direct battle against South African capital, not its maintenance.  

Sheehan endorses Erik Olin Wright’s ‘all of the above’ multiple strategy of: 1) rupture with capital and its state; 2) building counter-institutions; 3) using the capitalist state.  There are Left formations primarily promoting all 3 strategies – revolutionary, counter-cultural / cooperative and social-democratic.  The first includes a ‘transitional program’ of demands that strengthen the class and can lead to revolution.  The second focuses on workers buying companies or forming cooperatives and perhaps unions.  The third works in the Democratic Party in the U.S.  So she spreads herself between orthodox Marxism, cooperatism and social democracy as main strategies, a polyglot theoretical mix perhaps short on consistency but certainly crowd-pleasing.

Sheehan traveled from being a Catholic nun to Sinn Fein, to the Irish CP, to the Irish Labour Party, to working with Occupy and Syriza, eventually trying to form a broad left front in Ireland. She visits Coyoacan, Mexico and pays respects to Trotsky, remembering all the deeply stupid, sectarian stuff about ‘ice-picks’ she heard in the CPI.  She defends Marxism at every turn, crusades against the lowering of standards in academe, opposes bourgeois feminism and, as a former nun, opposes the veil – human and divine.  The real impact of the book is to show what it takes to be on the Left for many, many years – almost a life-time for Sheehan.  It seems what is necessary for her is a consistent framing of social life, a ‘total’ philosophy grounded in actual history and a continued engagement with ideas and events.

The book is a memoir and travelogue, with limited uses beyond that except some of the facts you might pick-up in the process.  While it seems not to be Sheehan’s purpose, the book speaks to leftists who have spent years organizing and agitating for socialism.  Is there a better way to spend your life?  Is there even a choice?  Most do not think so, given the shallow, personal and conventional alternatives, and we’ve had plenty of proof that many can’t handle this particular ‘long march.’  Sheehan did, in her own way.

P.S. – The painting on the cover, “Raising the Banner,” (1960) by Kely Korzhev, is an example of his art, a collection of which is held by The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis.  They do not, as I recall have this painting, but I think I have seen it there once.

Prior blog reviews on this topic, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “SecondHand Time,” (Alexievich); “Soviet Fates and Lost Alternatives” (Cohen); “The Contradictions of Real Socialism” (Lebowitz); “Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism” (Horvat/Stiks); “A Socialist Defector” (V Grossman); “Unlearning Marx” (Paxton); “The End of the Beginning” (Martinez); “Mandela, Obama, Castro & Kennedy,” “Mandela – Long Walk to Freedom,” “Understanding Class” (EO Wright) or the word “Marxism.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog / May 16, 2024