Running along the upper wall of the classroom in which I studied sixth form General Studies was a series of the quotes. Being the room of a sociology and religion teacher, most related to one of those two subjects, although I don’t really remember all that much about them. Yet one stands out clearly, even still. Hanging just over the teacher’s head were the words of Che Guevara on revolutionary love. I’ve just looked it up online, and it’s pretty much exactly as I remember. “At the risk of seeming ridiculous,” Guevara says, “let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality.”
From memory, it was just the middle section that hung on the wall, set on a sheet of white paper, the words in bold black text, and backed with faded pink card. It’s little wonder that I remember little else of the room or of the lessons; I flunked the class, getting some awful but not unexpected mark. I was obviously too busy dozing off, staring around the room, reading the quotes on the wall.
As it was a sixth form room, I would have been 16 or 17, and even now the deep humanism of Guevara’s statement appeals: the love for humanity, the desire to see no one suffer being at the root of the revolutionary impulse.
Those mid-teenage years are deeply formative ones, the years when we first start to grope around in the dark for a sense of the person we will become. It may have been because of this quote that I bought a copy of The Motorcycle Diaries, a book I read and reread feverishly, devouring this great text of adventure and political awakening. At that age I was trying to forge my own self, slowly and painfully turning my teenage angst into some form of political and personal identity, developing a lifelong leftism from a general sense of the wrongness of the world.
Anyway, why am I thinking about this particular quote now?
Over the past week my bedside book has been Jessica Mitford’s quite brilliant memoir Hons and Rebels. I’m usually not one to read about such stately home habitués as the Mitfords, but interest in the political polarisations of the 1930s brought me to Jessica — or Decca, as she was known to the family. Having read it, it’s hard not to agree with Christopher Hitchens when she said that it “evokes the atmosphere of the 1930s with more feeling than almost any other book of the period.” Of atmosphere, it certainly does: we have the Bright Young Things scampering around the clubs of London; the Mosley’s popping over for tea. Jessica, much to her mother’s dismay, absconds to Spain, marrying en route, to take in Bilbao during the Civil War, chased there by a destroyer sent by Anthony Eden.
In Britain today, Jessica is perhaps one of the lesser-known Mitfords, her star outshone by Nancy’s witty novels of the upper classes and her analysis of the U and not-U, Diana and Unity and their staunch fascism and connections to high-ranking Nazis, Deborah and her famous posh husband and grand stately home. But of all of the sisters, Jessica’s renunciation of her aristocratic heritage and her turn to Communism marks her out as a somewhat singular figure. She also spent her career in America, settling there permanently from the 1940s and gaining a fierce reputation as a muckraking political journalist.
By the end of Hons and Rebels, most readers will be anticipating her husband Esmond Romilly’s untimely death. Esmond was from similar aristocratic stock, being the nephew of Winston Churchill, and, much as Jessica, he too bucked the trend of his family’s politics by becoming a staunch anti-fascist and a volunteer with the International Brigades in Spain in the early days of the Civil War. It was also to his anti-fascism that he gave his life, dying in 1941 while serving in the Canadian Air Force.
But, yes, back to love! In the book’s final pages, Jessica turns to Esmond’s character and his very particular brand of leftism. There was, she says, “a strong streak of delinquency” in the youthful Esmond, a free spiritedness and self-confidence that attracted her to him — “a feeling of being able to walk unscathed through any flame.” Such intransigence allows little space for the revolutionary love of Che. While he undoubtedly loved his fellow man, we hear, it was not love but hate that animated his politics. As Jessica says,
“Esmond’s strong and perfectly genuine love for his fellow man was hardly of the St. Francis of Assisi type, his hatred of war hardly that of Gandhi. His brand of socialism was uncluttered by fine Christian sentiments, for, like Boud [Unity Mitford], he was a gifted hater, although unlike her, he directed his venom against enemies of humanity, peace, and freedom.”
Reading these reminded me of Alexander Cockburn’s question to the interns at The Nation, most famously to Ed Miliband. “Is your hate pure?”, Cockburn would ask them. Cockburn dragged this anecdote out after Miliband became leader of the Labour Party, the implication being that Miliband’s answer (“I…I…don’t hate anyone, Alex”) is a reflection of his politics. As Cockburn says, “It’s all you need to know. English capitalism will be safe in his hands.”
I’ve always been troubled by this question. Mainly because, if asked the same thing I can’t honestly say that I could answer in the affirmative either. Do I hate in the abstract? No, not really. Are my politics driven by hate? Not primarily, no. Would I pass Cockburn’s test? I doubt it.
My politics, at least as I have thought about them, are driven by a sense of injustice certainly, but I’m not sure of any hate. Could this be a failing on my part? I’m not sure, but Cockburn’s flippant remark that this lack of abstract pure hate signals a milquetoast social democracy seems pretty silly.
Mitford is interesting here as she locates this kind of hating as a class-specific affect. She says that Romilly’s particular way of relating to politics is not “hard to trace to an English upper-class ancestry and upbringing.” This is something she then contrasts with those from explicitly marginalised backgrounds:
“The qualities of patience, forbearance, and natural self-discipline that the worker brings to his struggle for a better life, the instinctive respect for the fundamental dignity of every other human being — even his enemy — so often displayed by the Negro or Jew in his own fight for equality, were on the whole conspicuously lacking in us”
Is this Cockburn’s own class background peeping through? The fact that he then goes on to compare poor Ed to Gussie Fink-Nottle does nothing but reinforce this; I’ve always been suspicious of those who reach so easily for the Wodehouse — to paraphrase Mike Davis, it smacks of those shared showers when they were ten in some dingy prep school.
What then do we mean by love in a political context. Related to my last post, it’s important to keep in mind the particular way of relating to another person that Gillian Rose sees in the act or love. This is from Love’s Work:
“To grow in love-ability is to accept the boundaries of oneself and others, while remaining vulnerable, woundable, around the bounds. Acknowledgement of conditionality is the only unconditionality of human love.”
Love is thus an act that changes both yourself and the other, it’s an openness and a vulnerability, an act that accepts its own limitations, always accepting rejection yet never retreating from life either. Surely such acts of love are just as important for the revolutionary in our time, so used as they are to the constant experience of defeat?