The Reds: the Communist Party of Australia from origins to illegality, by Stuart Macintyre. Allen and Unwin.

Australia is, as far as I know, the only country in the world where the local Communist Party grew from a propaganda society into a sizeable force in the labour movement under Stalin's Third Period.

Also, the only country where the Trotskyist movement originated in a left split from the Communist Party during the Third Period - and the only country where today the main revolutionary groups, the DSP (Castroite) and the ISO (linked to the SWP-Britain), denounce Stalinism but applaud the Third Period CP with almost no criticism. For the ISO, the Third Period CP embodies "militancy"; for the DSP it epitomises the proper attitude for revolutionaries to the Labor Party (the crime of the Popular Front period, in the DSP account, being a shift to seeking support in the Labor Party).

The Third Period, 1928-34, was one of bureaucratically-decreed ultra-leftism. In Australia, as elsewhere, much of the CP's effort was put into street confrontations with the police, often recklessly provoked. And "Communist denunciation poisoned relations with even the most sympathetic union officials, who dismissed as utterly unrealistic the insistent demands for strike action..."

Yet by mid-1934, the CP had 2400 members, where in December 1928 it had had only 300 on paper, maybe 100 in reality. The CP won the leadership of a major national union for the first time in early 1934, when Bill Orr was elected general secretary of the Miners' Federation. In most other countries the Third Period was one of drastic decline of the CP, or - if it maintained a mass membership among the unemployed, as the German CP did - of its influence in the organised working class.

Stuart Macintyre's book gives full credit to the courage and spirit of the Third Period Australian CPers, though Macintyre himself is a very chastened ex-CP member who now believes that "the communist project itself", not merely Stalinism, "nurtured tyranny within its emancipatory scheme".

Third Period CPers in Europe were brave, too. The results were different in Australia because there was no local fascist movement of any size, and Labor was integrated into the Establishment more solidly than elsewhere. In Queensland, a major centre of CP growth, Labor was in government in 47 of the 59 years between 1899 and 1957. Meanwhile, Australian workers, long among the world's best-organised and best-paid, were suffering a catastrophic rise in unemployment and insecurity of life, against which many thousands of them wanted to rebel.

The CP offered them a way to do that, and the scope for local interpretation given to the CP by the poor communications between Moscow and Australia allowed it to do it while maintaining some grip on trade-union work.

The activists who would launch Trotskyism in Australia broke from the CP in 1932 "to the left" because the CP was then making an interim correction to the Third Period policy and clamping down on a "left deviation" (unruly militancy) in the Unemployed Workers' Movement.

There is no telling how much better the CP might have grown with a Marxist policy in 1928-34. It is certain, however, that the Third Period policy produced a party which, though better-implanted than in 1928, had been made so sterile politically that it could be turned to the openly class-collaborationist politics of the Popular Front with almost no internal resistance.

Martin Thomas

Lost Chords: White Musicians and their Contribution to Jazz, 1915-1945, by Richard M Sudhalter. Oxford.

Jazz, it can be convincingly argued, is the most potent and enduring art-form of the twentieth century. It is also the most democratic (or, at least, meritocratic) and as free from race- or class-based prejudice as any art can be in this society (gender discrimination is another matter, as any female jazz musician will testify).

From the earliest years of this century in America black, white and mixed-race jazz musicians played and socialised together as equals, even though that equality was often forcibly debarred off the bandstand or outside the club or recording studio.

For commentators, however, race has always been an "issue". Paradoxically, for specialist jazz critics this has usually taken the form of inverted racism: from the mid-thirties (when "serious" jazz criticism began) there has been a prevalent assumption that black musicians are innately superior to white.Sudhalter's book sets itself the task of redressing the balance.

It should be noted at once, however, that the author steadfastly rejects "revisionism": he does not set out to either champion white musicians "against" their black colleagues or to deny that the achievements of black musicians are especially glorious given the hostile social environment they had to endure. He also takes as given the fact that "if musicians themselves are relatively color-blind... their managers, agents, customers, employers, audiences - and particularly critics - were not. Beyond dispute, the machinery of the music business was not interested in social reform, and its chief beneficiaries were white."

If Sudhalter has an "agenda" it is no more and no less than the assertion that "we must also hear (i.e. as well as the black giants) Bud Freeman - not in the stylistic context determined by Coleman Hawkins but as an independent and eloquent tenor sax voice. Dave Tough as, in Lionel Hampton's words, 'the most imaginative drummer we ever had in the business.' Bob Crosby's Orchestra not as a 'dixieland' variant on the wing formula of the 1930s but a highly motivated ensemble packed with vivid soloists, playing often memorably imaginative arrangements with a rare communality of musical thought. Did the Casa Loma Orchestra's 1931 Maniac's Ball swing in the same way as Ellington's Rockin' in Rhythm or Henderson's Sugar Foot Stomp made in the same year? Assuredly not; but swing it did, and on its own terms."

Sudhalter motivates his case with the eloquence and authority that comes of first-hand knowledge of his subject: he is an accomplished musician and band-leader. This book will give no comfort to the "great white hope" element (one of the recurring sub-text is that many "white" musicians were themselves members of despised minorities - notably Jewish, Sicilian and Native American). What this book does, in its non-polemical style, is to reassert the principle of jazz as a non-racial universal language.

Jim Denham

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The meme machine, by Susan Blackmore. Oxford University Press.

What's the difference between animals and humans? According to Susan Blackmore, it's the ability to imitate. This is rare in animals, but in humans it has been developed to an extraordinary degree and, coupled with human creativity, it has given rise to the phenomenon of cultural evolution. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, in his book The Selfish Gene, suggested that culture evolved in a way similar to genetic evolution. He proposed, by analogy with genes, that the replicating units in cultural evolution were memes, things learnt from other people through imitation. These include words, stories, skills, inventions, songs, rules, customs and religions.

Many people would have little trouble accepting this, but Dawkins went a step further. He proposed that, like genes, memes spread for their own benefit, independent of any benefit or otherwise to the genes or the individual. Blackmore has taken this suggestion a lot further by proposing memetic evolution as a separate and parallel type of evolution. Blackmore's view is that the human brain, originally genetically determined, created the field in which new (selfish) replicators, memes, could arise. These could compete for brain space and even drive the evolution of the big brain and of language.

Whereas some theorists expect to see biological advantages somewhere behind all behaviours, Blackmore (following Dawkins) expects that memetic evolution may lead to behaviours that are not to the advantage of the genes. I shall look at one example of her reasoning.

The invention of farming was probably the most important in human history. Its discovery on at least five separate occasions and subsequent spread throughout the world is described in the excellent book Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. Blackmore notes archaeological evidence that farming folk were a lot less healthy than hunter-gatherers and may have had a reduced lifespan. She deduces from this that farming was a behaviour that only appeared to offer benefits; it was a meme that spread because of those apparent benefits, despite its deleterious effects.

To me, this flies in the face of reason. Farmland could support ten times, even a hundred times, the population of hunter-gatherers on the same area. Even with a life expectancy of thirty, the population would grow rapidly and soon outnumber the non-farmers. There is a biological advantage to farming behaviour, and meme theory adds nothing.

Let us look at how meme theory deals with the problem of altruism. Altruistic behaviour towards one's relatives and reciprocal altruism towards non-relatives have been successfully explained mathematically in terms of selfish-gene theory/sociobiology. However, Blackmore thinks that other forms of altruism need some further explanation. These include giving anonymously to overseas charities, blood donation, and even working in the health service.

Blackmore suggests that memes for altruism spread in the following way: people with altruistic memes are kind, generous and thoughtful: they have lots of friends and the altruism memes get lots of opportunities to spread; this is not so for people without altruism memes.

Once again, I am not convinced that meme theory adds anything. It seems just as likely to me that a kind, generous and thoughtful person would get the chance to spread the genes which perhaps made them altruistic in the first place. Blackmore recognises this but doesn't think it goes far enough to explain the more extreme forms of altruism.

At present, I don't feel meme theory explains things better than other theories, and predictions are a bit light on the ground. However, I enjoyed this book and found it stimulated a lot of thought (meme competition).

Les Hearn

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The Algebra of Revolution, by John Rees. Routledge.

"In [the thirty years between 1960 and 1990] education spending has grown world wide from $486 to $1048 per student. But military spending per soldier has risen from $18,140 to $26,536." This pair of facts, according to John Rees is a contradiction, or a contrary, or a paradox, and it is to be explained by reference to the Marxist Dialectic.

In The Algebra of Revolution, Rees gives an account of the dialectic which aims to trace its articulation from Hegel's thought (and not from Plato or Aristotle) through the classical Marxist tradition. In many respects he provides a lucid account and perhaps this book represents the best version of a certain way of thinking about 'the dialectic' in left wing thought.

But that "the" in "the dialectic" worries me. What it suggests - and what Rees defends - is a unified philosophical method of analysis and an actual mode of operation of both the social and natural world. Our whole environment is structured dialectically, and only through the dialectic can we understand it. But if the dialectic is all it's cracked up to be, then it is bewildering that any notable advances have been made in any field of thought at all by anyone who has not grasped its secret. And such advances clearly have been made.

Instead of investigating this paradox, the clear dispensability of the dialectic in social and natural inquiries, Rees doffs his hat to some familiar texts. Trotsky's account of why A doesn't equal A, and Engels's account of the laws of the dialectic are uncritically endorsed in Rees's account. If these were accounts that had philosophical merit, then that would be fine. But they have not. Trotsky's account in The ABC of Materialist Dialectics is shockingly bad. A does equal A if I stipulate that in order to abstract common properties from individual entities. An account like Marx's Capital would be unwriteable on Trotsky's account. Engels's account of the laws of the dialectic is not an account of laws at all, but rather a series of generalisations that sometimes apply to some phenomena.

So why write a book that fails to point this out? The obvious answer is that the book tells the story of the dialectic as a notion in the Classical Marxist tradition, and the fact that it is found in this tradition is the justification for taking it seriously. We look out for what Trotsky has to say on philosophy, because he was Trotsky. But this clearly won't do.

Critical thinkers need to look for independent justification for the philosophical approach that they adopt, not to defer to a tradition. And this brings me to a further worry about the book. Even in his defence of Lukács, Rees does virtually nothing new, at a time when there is so much to be done. What sort of response are we to give to the disproportion Rees identifies between spending on education and military spending? We could say - with Rees - that this is a "contradiction of capitalism." Maybe. My view, for what it's worth, is that this isn't a contradiction. The use of the term here impoverishes our language, although it is true to say that to produce for both use and for exchange is contradictory. But the plain response to Rees's example is to say that such a disproportion is inhumane, irrational, unjust and immoral. If so, then what are our criteria of humanity, rationality, justice, and morality? These sorts of questions are alive in contemporary philosophy, and the sorts of answers we give have profound implication for any concern with human emancipation. They are more important than Trotsky's soup recipes.

Jon Pike

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The origins of postmodernity, by Perry Anderson. Verso.

This book grew out of an introduction to The Cultural Turn, by Frederic Jameson, who, so Anderson writes, "alone had firmly identified postmodernism with a new stage of capitalism, understood in classically Marxist terms".

Anderson is endorsing Jameson's claim for a post-modern period, rooted in the development of capitalism from the 1960s and 70s. Unlike the post-structuralists and cultural theorists who applaud post-modernism as a historical pinnacle ending history, and any projects of universal emancipation, Jameson sees the post-modern period as situated in a defeat for the working class, and a victory of capitalism, which calls out for a radical resurgence, including in the development of Marxism as a challenging grand narrative, and a search for radical possibilities within post-modern art.

Anderson discusses changes in the arts from modernism to post-modernism, and their different implications for fine arts, architecture, painting, film, literature, He refers also to forms of media that have arisen during the post-modern period, colour television, computer games and installation art, suggesting a breakdown in the monopoly of fine arts over the aesthetic, and an accompanying populism in the production and consumption of images, expression and spectacle. Jameson and Anderson make a strong case that there is at least a post-modern artistic period, new in its social patterns of production, distribution and consumption, and its rejection of modernist forms.

Whilst Jameson's particular political economy may be doubtful, it is an invitation to at least ponder the social and political basis for post modern art and what changes are occurring in capitalism, and their significance. There is a large gap in Anderson's failure to discuss the relationship between post-modern art on the one hand, and the social and political basis for post-structuralist and post-modernist theories, (so well elaborated by Ellen Wood in Democracy Against Capitalism) on the other hand, Can cultural practice and cultural theory really be so disconnected?

Another question not canvassed by Anderson is the role of politics, and specifically the politics which have dominated working class movements of both the Stalinist and social-democratic varieties, in leading to the present capitalist conjuncture. In asserting the crucial role of political leadership, and the continuing capitalist class relations, many Marxists have declined to consider that there may be a post-modern period. Jameson has argued that post-modernism is real, and "insisted on the futility of moralising about the rise of the postmodern" rather than understanding it.

Anderson doesn't develop an economic or political analysis here, but he does introduce a case for the existence of the postmodern at least in the arts, which asks us to consider how else the world has changed in recent decades.

Janet Burstall

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