Writing to change the world started for me in 1972 with Chapeltown News. If you scroll through the digitised issues https://harehills111.wordpress.com/chapeltown-news/, you can see that I took over the lay-out in July 1973 with no idea that a set square would be a major asset. Dave Clark, then of Race Today, gave me that tip. I’d written articles before, when it was expertly put together by an actual journalist called Adam.
When Adam got a job somewhere else, Tim Hobbs, the secretary of the Chapeltown Community Association, the initiator of Chapeltown News, told me to take over. Since I was just buzzing around pretending to write a PhD on the CCA, I said OK.
Since then, I’ve written for The Leveller, Race Today, Big Flame, New Statesman (in its ‘and Society’ days), Caribbean Times, Asian Times and once or twice for the Guardian. I’ve written articles in journals, a couple of books, co-written a few others, and all the time I’ve persuaded myself that this thinking/writing/publishing will, somehow, enhance the movements for radical social and economic change. My latest venture, with Kevin McDonnell, is this: https://www.centralbooks.com/big-flame-building-the-movements-new-politics.html, coming out in a month or so.
Now that the world is deluged with print and digital media I’m less confident that all this labour is worth it.
I’ve just finished a spate of reading about the people who were most convinced of the importance of thinking and writing. Rachel Holmes’s scintillating book on Eleanor Marx (2014) led me to Francis Wheen’s surprisingly sympathetic 1999 book on her dad, and they both put me on to Tristram Hunt’s phenomenally well-researched book on Eleanor’s other dad, and The Mohr’s best buddy, Friedrich Engels. Each of them gave their lives to producing and circulating ideas, and there’s no doubt that their work has changed the world.
But now I’m reading Anne Applebaum’s Autocracy Inc. (2024) and the further sickening degeneration of nations and regions that called themselves communist is laid bare. Hunt’s epilogue to The Frock Coated Communist (2009) absolves Engels from the charge that he’s responsible for that degeneration. (I realised that I had believed that ‘scientific socialism’ was his fault.) And all three books are so persuasive that thinking/writing, allied to activism, is so worthwhile that I’m going to revive a project I started a few years ago called ‘sensuous materialism’.
I made an early effort here: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/transformation/sensuous-materialism-emotion-and-left/, and then I wrote a lot more for a chapter in the Big Flame book, which had to be dropped, so I put a flavour of it here: https://www.maxfarrar.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Sensuous-materialism-from-BF-book.pdf
Now I’m going to try my hand at developing this idea on Substack. No reason to believe it will much much difference, but still . . .
That's Tim Hobbs, not Tim Hobbs. Proof-reading your own work is the hardest thing, innit. If anyone knows what Tim is doing now, I'd love to contact him. In the early 1970s he was a lecturer in Town Planning at a Leeds College that was absorbed by Leeds Polytechnic.
I'm interested in the idea of sensuous materialism and went to take a look but the link took me to Chapeltown News Digitized I'm afraid x - if you get a mo be great to drop a link in the comments here.