Unhitched. Richard Seymour
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as an orator was spotted while he was studying for his degree at Balliol College, Oxford. He rapidly became, next to Michael Rosen, the ‘second most famous person’ in the university. Hitchens’s friendship with Rosen, in fact, was one of the subjects of his revisionism. In the first edition of Hitch-22, he described Rosen as a ‘Jewish Communist’ and later an ‘ex-Stalinist’ whose family was ‘fatally compromised’ by Stalinism. Hitchens added that Rosen had, in a production of Günter Grass’s play The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising, ‘been more or less compelled to go along with the play-within-the-play that satirized the ghastly East German regime and celebrated the workers’ revolt against it that had taken place in 1953’. In fact, Rosen had never been a member of any Communist Party. His parents had been but had walked out in 1957. Rosen’s politics were Labour left, and insofar as he gravitated to any other socialist formation, it was the groupuscule with which Hitchens was himself aligned.14 (Some of this was rewritten for the second edition, but Hitchens left in the claim that Rosen was an ex-Stalinist.)15
What accounts for such a petty, mean-spirited slander? Rosen believes it has to do with the way in which Hitchens wished to represent his own trajectory. Many from the generation of soixant-huitards that Hitchens knew and admired have died and thus can be idealised safely, constituting no threat to his current posture. But Rosen had known Hitchens and had publicly criticised him for supporting Bush’s wars. The smear served Hitchens by demonstrating that this criticism was merely the reflex of an old Stalinist and that he, Hitchens, had always been one step ahead of the fools.
In general, however, Hitchens tended to err on the side of heroically romanticising his past and the figures that peopled it. He recalled Peter Sedgwick, who recruited him to the post-Trotskyist IS, with genuine affection. The same is true of Hitchens’s reminiscences of C. L. R. James. Yet the individuals Hitchens described in his memoir, Hitch-22, were not exactly political animals but omnitalented gurus whose like has not been seen since. This slightly maudlin portrayal is the obverse of the later demonology, which found the left, and especially the far left, in league with ‘Islamic fascism’.
On other matters it may be that he was not distorting. Keeping two sets of books meant closeting his real feelings about certain matters, so that while Hitchens later recalled experiencing a certain displaced patriotism for the United States, even at the height of his sixties gauchisme, and real joy that the Stars and Stripes had been planted on the moon, it is most likely that he did not share this with any of his comrades.16 The nickname that Hitchens’s friends and comrades at Oxford gave him acknowledges this aspect of his personality. And certainly, for Hitchens, the double life that it alludes to, the keeping of two sets of books, is seen as a virtue, a creative, dialectical spark.
At some length it seems that Hitchens grew weary of the revolutionary left. The circumstances of his departure from the International Socialists are not wholly clear. Hitchens, explaining his decision to leave, cited the IS’s support for a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ during the Portuguese Revolution of 1974–75 and later added that he was uncomfortable with the Leninist direction of the party. In fact, though it is known that he was sympathetic to the position of the internal faction opposed to the growing emphasis on a democratic centralism, he never joined it. Most likely he did not think it worth the effort. He had never been especially doctrinal, was disinclined to get involved in heated internal disputes, and had brighter prospects before him. A former comrade of his, Chris Harman, recalled:
I don’t think there was any point at which Chris Hitchens broke publicly with the IS. My impression was that he went flat out to know the right people to make a career in journalism and began to find us a hindrance.17
Another, Alex Callinicos, recounts that Hitchens was increasingly distant from politics. In 1973, he met Hitchens during a row at Oxford over the university giving Pakistani President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto an honorary degree. This was at the end of the bloody Bangladesh war, which the Pakistani army had prosecuted mercilessly. The dons and the students had censured the university over it. And Hitchens ‘appeared, looking slightly shady, as he was a friend of Benazir Bhutto … I spoke to him afterward, and he said “do you ever think the sun may suddenly burst and everything we do may be meaningless?” I replied that the reflection seemed to me entirely pointless. But it implied a degree of existential detachment.’18
Aside from weariness, Hitchens did have a substantive grievance with the direction of the International Socialists in their decision to support the far left in Portugal’s ‘Carnation Revolution’. The revolution, beginning with the fall of the dictatorship of Marcello Caetano, was one of the most spectacular moments in European history.19 Notable for the flourishing of grassroots democracy predicated on workplace occupations, popular newspapers, and mass demonstrations, it was also notable for the role of the armed forces in its leadership. Initially, these were generals and junior officers disaffected by the failure of Portugal’s colonial policy, who desired to move towards a modern capitalist democracy with a mixed economy. But as the revolt radicalised, a movement of rank-and-file soldiers developed, with some basis in far-left parties such as the Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat/Revolutionary Brigades (PRP). There were serious reservations in the international left about some of this. The PRP had an elitist, Guevarist streak, tending to rely on military action by an armed minority to bring about social transformation. While some feared that military adventurism would give the right an excuse to inflict a new Chile, the main worry was that it could be the germ of a new Stalinist dictatorship in itself.
Nonetheless, at a critical point, the IS set aside any such reservations and supported the PRP and the rank-and-file soldiers. The basis of this was that a strike wave and a series of mass demonstrations had created a crisis in the military, cleaving it between the officer corps who had overthrown the old dictatorship and the rank-and-file soldiery. The government, led by the Socialist Party, was desperate to contain the growing turbulence and particularly to assert its control of the state machinery. The IS urged the PRP to focus less on armed manoeuvres and more on encouraging the development of popular councils of workers and soldiers, which could be the basis for a new socialist democracy. In the end, the PRP participated in an abortive coup d’état, which gave the right wing the chance to go on the offensive and restore discipline in the military. Hitchens lamented the IS stance, and specifically criticised Callinicos for talking about the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in this context.20 Recollecting this period, Hitchens excoriated the party in characteristically bilious terms. It had
openly allied itself with semi-Baader Meinhof elements in that most open and hopeful of all revolutions: a revolution which can now be seen as the last spasm of 1968 enthusiasm. Not being very choosy politically, the aforesaid elements went in with a stupid and nasty attempted coup, mounted by the associates of the Portuguese Stalinists … Thus not only had the comrades moved from Luxemburg to the worst of Lenin, but in making this shift of principle they had also changed ships on a falling tide. Time to go. Still, I recollect the empty feeling I had when I quietly cancelled my membership and did a fade. I remember trying to tell myself that I was leaving for the same reasons I had joined. But the relief – at ceasing to hear about ‘rank and file’ and ‘building links’ – soon supplanted the guilt.21
At any rate, the picture Hitchens gave of fading into the background is accurate. Nor is there any sign that he fell out with his former comrades. Even when he publicly repudiated his old comrades for having inadvertently published an ‘anti-Zionist’ letter in the party newspaper, Socialist Worker, which was in fact written by a member of the National Front, Hitchens retained his sympathy for the organisation. In a letter to John Rose, who then worked on the organ, Hitchens expressed his respect for Tony Cliff.22 Hitchens continued to speak at the party’s meetings when it was known as the Socialist Workers’ Party.
Yet, Hitchens was evidently exhausted by both the revolutionary and reformist left in Britain. Having left the IS, he had briefly joined the Labour Party.23 But he came to resent the ‘tax-funded statism’ of the old consensus as much as the union bureaucracy and the Labour right. Hitchens later confessed to being physically unable to vote for Labour in 1979 and to having realised that this was because he wanted Thatcher to win. He admired her determination to take on the stale postwar arrangements and was relieved that she could at last