http://www.marxsite.com/Peter_Gowan.html
Peter Gowan, Professor at London Metropolitan University, a member of
the New Left Review editorial board and a former leader of the
International Marxist Group (IMG), died on 12 June. He was probably the
leading Marxist expert on international relations writing in English,
and wrote and spoke with an astonishing grasp of the inter-relationship
between economic, political and military power in the modern world. His
ability to knit together theory with a vast range of factual knowledge
held his audiences spellbound.
But he was far from a detached academic; he was an utterly partisan,
determined and vitriolic critic of American imperialism. For him, the
central obstacle to world progress and social justice were what he
called the “Dollar-Wall St regime”. After 9/11 Peter was in demand
around the world to explain why the US had gone to war and what the
‘axis of evil’ and ‘war on terror’ were all about. He claimed American
imperialism had made a ‘Faustian bid’ for world dominance, and that
military violence was central to that bid. He was also convinced that it
could not succeed; that ultimately world domination was impossible by a
single imperialist power and that the United States was ‘triumphing
towards disaster’.
Peter Gowan joined the International Marxist Group (IMG) in 1968 and
more or less immediately came into its central leadership. In 1969-70 he
was central to the organisation’s youth work, particularly its
intervention into the Revolutionary Socialist Students Federation. He
worked closely with established IMG leaders like Pat Jordan and Ernest
Tate; but also with two new recruits, Tariq Ali and John Weal, in the
‘united front’ far left newspaper The Black Dwarf, a journal
particularly well adapted for the student and cultural revolution of the
time. Peter was involved in the split in the paper’s editorial board,
which saw the likes of Adrian Mitchell, Anthony Barnett and Fred
Halliday assume control of the paper while the IMG-led majority produced
in 1970 The Red Mole.
The first issue came out in the middle of the June 1970 wave of student
sit-ins against the universities’ practice of keeping secret files on
students and their deepening links with private business (1). IMG
students were central to this protest in a number of universities
including Warwick and York.
At the start of the new decade however the IMG was struggling to
establish its identity and role as the anti-Vietnam war movement and
student upsurge were giving way to an increasingly working class,
union-centred, rebellion. A small organisation, with a weak leadership
and few working class roots met its destiny in the form of a faction
organised by John Ross in Oxford, which quickly pushed aside the old
leadership. At first Peter, like Tariq Ali, was convinced by Ross’s
blend of ‘turning to the working class’ and programmatic, propagandistic
ultimatism, but by 1973 had broken with the Ross leadership to link up
again with Pat Jordan, at first on the (self-evident) basis that the
urgent need of working class struggle was to fight to kick out the
Tories and not ‘centralise the struggle against the state’. Peter said
that discussions with Pierre Rousset, a leader of the French Ligue
Communiste, had been decisive in his reassessment of Ross’s passive
propagandism.
Peter Gowan led more or less the same minority throughout the 1970s, as
the IMG interpreted democratic rights in revolutionary organisations as
meaning that having half a dozens internal factions was a virtue, rather
than – if persisted in over a long period – a massively demoralising and
destabilising factor.
By the early 1980s Peter was leading a faction that urged entry into the
Labour Party, but was also moving towards an academic career and
deepening his interest in Eastern Europe. Around this time, at the 1982
conference, he refused to be on the national leadership again, and
effectively drifted out of the organisation. This was also the period
when Tariq Ali also left the IMG.
In this period the IMG was trying to put into a practice a hare-brained
tactic devised by the American SWP, the so-called ‘turn to industry’ –
sending young ex-students into anything that smacked of manual industry.
Sections of the Ross leadership moved sharply to break up the
organisation’s growing base in white collar unions, and send white
collar fraction leaderships to meet its conception of the ‘proletariat’
(often in un-unionised sweatshops) (2).
Backing this tactic was part of an attempted rapprochement by sections
of the Fourth International leadership with the Jack Barnes-led
leadership of the US SWP, who had built their own tendency in Britain.
When Ernest Mandel appeared in front of the IMG central committee to
explain he was supporting the ‘turn to industry’ because of his ‘sincere
convictions’, Peter shocked him by denouncing ‘this anti-Trotskyist turn’.
Peter also rejected the increasingly improbable notion that there was
something ‘anti-imperialist’ in the leadership of the Iranian regime,
insisting that a central part of the upsurge that threw out the Shah had
been an urban-based reactionary mass movement, with nothing progressive
about it (“as if we haven’t seen reactionary mass movements challenge
states before”).
Being centrally involved in permanent factional mayhem and an
organisation clearly going crazy was too much for Peter, just as much a
s for Tariq Ali.
Outside an organised far left group Peter’s energies found three
inter-related focuses. He had been a central the IMG’s East European
commission, that had worked with other sections of the FI to make links
with, and give material aid to, Marxist and other radical dissidents in
the eastern bloc. From the late 1970s Peter assembled a talented team
around the journal Labour Focus on Eastern Europe, designed to build
broader support in the left and labour movements for anti-Stalinist
activism and organisation in the Stalinist states. The magazine lifted
the curtain on the then largely unknown developments in the eastern bloc
and provided a platform for the emerging dissident movements. While
other talented Marxists like Patrick Camiller, Sheila Malone, Andy
Kilmister, Günther Minnerup and Gus Fagan worked on the magazine, it was
around Peter Gowan’s substantial interventions that the magazine
developed its ideological position and analysis.
Second, Peter became a lecturer in European Studies at North London
Polytechnic, later part of London Metropolitan University. This gave him
the stimulus and motivation to develop an analysis of the European Union
in the 1980s, and its relationship with the United States and an
increasingly crisis-racked eastern bloc. Peter saw the EU as an
undemocratic bosses’ club, which took decision in the Council of
Ministers and was deliberately designed to be outside democratic control
of the European workers – a perspective now widespread in the European Left.
Third, Peter became a member of the New Left Review editorial board,
working alongside other ex-IMG members like Robin Blackburn, Tariq Ali
and (until the early 1990s) Quentin Hoare and Branka Magas. It was his
repeated interventions in the NLR that made him well known world-wide
amongst the radical intelligentsia and the Left. After the collapse of
the Soviet Union and the eastern bloc, and with the first Gulf War in
1991 his international focus rebalanced, giving more emphasis to
explaining and charting American imperialism. He engaged in a deep study
of the roots of US expansionism and was greatly influenced by the work
of one of the foremost ‘revisionist’ US historians, Gabriel Kolko -
whose main theorisation of the rise of US imperialism is set out in his
Main Currents of American History.
Peter used Labour Focus to write a major piece opposing the US-led
assault on Serbia, the so-called ‘Kosovo war’, in 1999. He campaigned
with crusading zeal against the ‘humanitarian interventionism’ espoused
by many liberals and former leftists – and used as a cover by many for
supporting the second Iraq war.
Peter’s theory of the ‘Dollar-Wall St regime’ eventually led to the
publication by Verso of ‘Global Gamble – America’s Faustian Bid for
World Leadership’ (1999). After 9/11 he was in his element, one week in
Brazil, the next in the US, then in China. He waged his own intellectual
jihad against the ‘war on terror’ and American imperial power. He was in
his element again at the 2004 European Social Forum in London where,
together with Perry Anderson, he clinically dissected and denounced US
imperial power to an audience of hundreds of young people from across
the continent.
There will doubtless be many memoirs of Peter from different
perspectives. From the viewpoint of people he knew him from the early
IMG years, it was perhaps a pity that the descent of that organisation
into craziness prevented him from being a more long-term leader of a
revolutionary organisation. In a bigger organisation with a broader
political culture he could have been a long-term member of a broad
leadership team. But that would have meant him living in another
country, at another time, with another culture altogether.
But Peter did maintain links with the organised far left, particularly
the International Socialist Group (later Socialist Resistance) and the
Fourth International more generally. He strongly influenced the ISG's
international politics; and he frequently spoke at meetings organised by
FI supporters and their allies in the radical left.
As it was he became one of the most important Marxist intellectuals
writing in the English language. His writing was invariably original,
always sparkling with ideas and insights – as was his speaking. Peter
was utterly charismatic and had an ability to inspire people and excite
them with his creative Marxism. He oozed personal charm, a quality not
over-abundant in the British far left. He was completely intransigent
ideologically, and was unphased about telling anyone, no matter how
rarified the company, that he was a Marxist and a Trotskyist.
Peter Gowan inspired hundreds of people in many countries with the ideas
of Marxism, applied to the central questions of our time. It is awful
that such a brilliant man has died in his early 60s.
Notes
1) Recounted in the Penguin book of the time, Edward Thompson’s Warwick
University Limited.
2) A tactic which reached its nadir in the ‘Cowley Moles’ saga, when MI5
and the British Leyland management caught the organisation sending more
than a dozen young people into the Cowley (Oxford) car factory.
Phil Hearse 15/06/09
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
