Some Reflections on the Political Life of Matthew Caygill

This is an edited and expanded version of the speech that Pete Green gave at the funeral of Matthew Caygill who died earlier this year. Matthew was a founder and much valued member of Left Unity. Pete is a former member of Left Unity who has now joined the Labour Party and was one of Matthew’s oldest and closest friends.

Matthew Caygill (C)2014 Peter Marshall

Matthew Caygill (C)2014 Peter Marshall

I first met Matthew in late 1976 or early 1977 when he came to a meeting in Leeds on the situation in South Africa which I was introducing as a member of what was then the International Socialists but soon to be repackaged as the SWP. Matthew was then still an undergraduate studying Politics and History at Leeds University where – as his close friend at the time, Robert Atkinson,  confirmed in his speech at the funeral – he had come under the influence of one of his Professors, the Marxist writer Ralph Miliband. Matthew was inspired by the mass uprising in the black township of Soweto in the summer of 1976 which shook the then seemingly impregnable apartheid regime. He would go on to do his MA in York specialising in  South African studies although sadly his work on that subject was never published. Matthew also joined the SWP sometime in 1977 and  became very engaged with the  lively Rock against Racism  group  in the city (recently commemorated in the exhibition of photos by Syd Shelton) and subsequent campaigns by the Anti-Nazi League.

Matthew returned to Leeds from York in 1980 and obtained work at what was then Leeds Polytechnic (later rebranded as Leeds Beckett where he remained until his death). He moved into a house I was sharing with Derek Howl and I can still recall our intense politicized debates over the  music and films of the day. Others have rightly commented on Matthew’s encyclopedic knowledge and passion for movies which he never lost ( and  it’s a great pity his lectures to students on the course he delivered on Politics and Film were never written up for a wider audience – Matthew would have made a brilliant film critic, a Marxist Phillip French, who was one of his favorite writers).

In the summer of 1981 I moved to Hackney, London,  and whilst we would encounter each other regularly at SWP events  and demonstrations – not least in the course of the great miner’s strike of 1984 –others can speak with more intimate knowledge of Matthew’s political activity in the 1980s.  We became much closer  in the early 1990s, when we shared a  deepening  disquiet about the direction being taken by the SWP in that period – and that’s not a topic I need to dwell on here.  By the summer of 1996 we had both in effect departed that organization (although I recall that to my surprise, Matthew told me he kept paying subs for several years even after he was no longer registered as a member). This was a painful experience for both of us but perhaps for that reason we spent the next 20 years debating every twist and turn of the British and European left – usually in agreement. The arrival of email into our lives soon meant that a steady stream of internet material was flowing my way on issues ranging from globalization to faction fights within the Socialist Alliance or Respect,  for which I was frequently very grateful  – not least for saving me a lot of searchtime. There were many others in a similar position and  Matthew would adapt what he sent to the individual interests of each recipient – as he did the numerous postcards he would send whilst on his travels.

To be fair Socialist Worker published a very generous tribute to Matthew after his death ( I recommend the longer version online) but it got one thing wrong – which is not to blame the author, Christian Hojsberg, who only joined the SWP later and knew Matthew primarily through working at the same university. The obituary  suggested that Matthew left the SWP because of a disagreement over globalization. That certainly became an issue after Chris Harman published an article in 1995 on the Myth of Globalisation which soon became   party orthodoxy ( indeed Matthew deplored the  mentality which turned such positions into a ‘party line’). But that alone would not have led Matthew to  drift out of the SWP if he hadn’t already found the atmosphere inside the organization intolerable – and that was an experience which left him scarred and skeptical of Leninist models  of political organization for the rest of his life. In 2015 he would sum up his later perspective as follows

“For the majority of us Left Unity is an attempt to build something that is neither of the discredited bankrupt, vanguardist left or of a social democracy that has given up in favour of variants of neoliberalism. We want a broad party that is environmentalist, socialist and feminist. We don’t want to provide a site  for ‘revolutionaries’ to show off in front of each other, fight it out, maybe pick up a few more members” (Weekly Worker March 12, 2015)

What the SW tribute got right – thanks, I was told, to contributions from people who were  in Leeds in the 1980s such as Talat Ahmed ( sentiments replicated by many others on facebook) – was Matthew’s role in encouraging and supporting younger comrades entering into politics. For many this involved opening up new realms of culture and ideas, as Matthew recommended books and films and speakers worth listening to at events such as the SWP’s annual ”Marxism”.  One of the better sayings of SWP leader Tony Cliff at the time was the injunction to ‘patiently explain’ with those who were new to politics and Matthew consistently exemplified that  – being willing to spend hours with people on whatever issue arose. Those qualities of clarity and patience – and a dry sense of humour – also help explain why, according to so many of his students,  he was such a great  teacher.

I should perhaps add that in my own  case encouragement  could involve sitting next to me at big meetings when I was muttering my disagreement with the speaker and telling me to go on, get up there and say what I thought – only to be told later just which particularly critical point I’d failed to mention if I was called to speak. He wasn’t always so keen on getting up there himself but if he did it was invariably to pose a question which would get right to the heart of the matter. Matthew had a very Socratic approach to political argument and often succeeded in getting people to think again if they’d  said something crass or ignorant.

Matthew certainly remained a Marxist but he detested dogmatic mentalities and cliché-ridden prose and was always critical of anyone (including myself) who resorted to rhetorical devices in response to political disagreements. One noteworthy recent  example of this, which I had no time to quote at the funeral,  appeared in the Weekly Worker of March 12 2015 (from which I quoted above) when Matthew was standing for one of the positions on the National Council of Left Unity. The WW had presented a list of questions to candidates, one of which was  “Do you think Left Unity should draw a clear red line between the socialist politics of the working class and the petty bourgeois poliitics of the  Green party?”

Matthew (one of the few candidates who bothered to respond at length to the questions) responded to that one as follows

“I don’t think I’ve got enough words to answer this. The questions reveal a very wooden and dogmatic understanding of Marxism. Lenin would have laughed at you. The short answer is ‘No the question is stupid’. Dialectics not crude binary oppositions please.”

For Matthew, however, left unity meant much more than the specific organization of that name. He was always resolutely non-sectarian in the sense of being willing to work with anyone who was engaged in some form of active resistance to the diverse modes of oppression and exploitation, regardless of their political affiliation – which didn’t prevent him being resolutely critical of those who are sectarian in the sense of prioritizing the perpetuation of their own grouplet over the needs of the real movement. When the anti-globalisation protests sprung up in the late 1990s Matthew was soon engaged with them even if he much preferred to speak of anti-capitalism and emphatically rejected any  ideas of national self-sufficiency (a mentality which would carry over to his opposition to Brexit) . He travelled to European Social Forums in places such as Florence and Paris and would send back humorous  and politically astute accounts. He was always  of course an active union member and at his death was vice-chair of his local branch  of UCU at Leeds Beckett.

One episode in particular proved to be critical to the evolution of Matthew’s politics. In 2000 Matthew joined the newly formed Socialist Alliance , energetically helped to promote it in Leeds,  and served on its national  executive for several years.   But he deplored the way  in which it was abandoned by the SWP and others with the creation of Respect in the wake of the massive anti-war movement of 2003 in which, of course, Matthew also participated.  As Jim Jepps, who was also on the SA national executive with Matthew, commented after rereading some of what Matthew wrote at the time about those events:

“Matthew always recognized some of the significant problems we faced but never allowed it to politically paralyse him. He had no respect for the zealots of any organization, I think, and was always independently-minded – but the reason he was respected by those he disagreed with was that he never allowed those disagreements to prevent him at least trying to work with people constructively. I’m not sure he always found that possible of course – but he did try. “

 

In that spirit and with few illusions, Matthew became a founding member of Left Unity following the Ken Loach appeal for a new party in 2013. As Kate Hudson national secretary wrote in a message for the funeral which she was unable to attend:

“Matthew was a founder member of Left Unity and an active member of it’s National Council until recently, where his presence was powerful and principled. Matthew fought tirelessly for the party’s vision of a broad radical left politics rooted in local working-class communities and the lived struggles of ordinary people against injustice and oppression. This perspective found expression  in his commitment to the development and growth of the Leeeds Left Unity branch. He was a class fighter and will be much missed.”

I was also a founder member of Left Unity having joined after one of my usual extended chats with Matthew and also served on that National Council  up until my resignation after the November conference last year. My resignation resulted from a disagreement over the direction of Left Unity which  also constituted  the most significant political  divergence between myself and Matthew in more than 25 years. But unlike some political arguments this did not seem to affect our friendship or the steady flow of emails.

We last met the weekend immediately before he died, when he was in London for a Raphael Samuel memorial conference organised by the History Workshop journal  ( my  report on that including the texts we exchanged was circulated on facebook and elsewhere soon after his death). I told him that I had finally joined the Labour Party to support Corbyn and his response was to say ‘well-done’.  But he admitted that he felt there was no point in his trying to join as back in 2015 he had been named by notorious Tory blogger Guido Fawkes as one of the ‘notorious’ Marxist agitators trying to infiltrate the Labour Party – an acknowledgement of his influence in Leeds which seemed to surprise him (he was far too modest about his own achievements in that respect) . It didn’t surprise those who worked with him closely including those such as Garth Frankland who had been driven out of the Labour Party in NorthEast Leeds back in the 1990s (and he also acknowledged that working with committed comrades such as Garth and Kath, Mark and Nick etc   was another reason why he was sticking with Leeds Left Unity).

A week and a bit  earlier, on June 23 the day of the referendum,  Matthew had posted on facebook the following short report which I reproduce in full:

‘Voted Remain. Now to work, then a film, and home to see how the pundits are getting on . The the result, still dread that the racist Brexit option will have won. Then wading through mountains of analysis . Do hope the left can find a way to think and work better but am typically pessimistic.’

There’s a lot of Matthew in those words – the unequivocal position on Brexit, the film ( I wish I knew which one he saw), the commitment to wading through the analysis afterwards which he was starting to do when I met him. But I want to say a little more here about Matthew’s avowed pessimism.

He could be a bit competitive about that. At a meeting earlier in the year in Leeds when Matthew had arranged for me to debate Brexit with Neil Davidson Neil had described my critique of the so-called Lexit (a left exit) position as pessimistic. Matthew’s intervention opened with him insisting that he was ‘far more pessimistic than Pete Green’. In truth Matthew’s own practice embodied the famous quotation of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci back in the 1930s on  the need for pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.

But what matters, to invoke a rather different pair of opposites, is that Matthew never lost hope for a different world, and never succumbed to despair, although he was close to it on occasion not least when subjected to abuse from certain quarters over his role in Left Unity (and he was a sensitive man who couldn’t just accept, despite my efforts,  that the abuse was actually a tribute to the success of his interventions). Not long after his death a long article by the US writer Rebecca Solnit appeared in the Guardian Saturday book review of July 16, a preface to the reissue of her book titled “Hope in the Dark”. In particular Solnit argues that “Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists”.  I think the Matthew who was critically sympathetic to postmodernist critiques of the ‘grand narratives’ of historical writing would have agreed with that – but he would  also of course have  had a  question or two to put to the author.

Despite all the health issues, and these plagued him for many years even though his lifestyle became seriously abstemious, he continued to immerse himself in activity. This included taking students from Leeds Beckett (along with his   colleague and friend  Janet Douglas) on educational trips to Berlin where he would guide them around memorials such as the Topography of Terror and the Stasi museum. Or you could find him on marches  around Leeds in defence of the NHS,  or on a picket-line or travelling across to Manchester to join a TUC demonstration outside the Tory conference.

I have too little time to discuss  his more theoretical work and  the PhD to which he finally seemed to be devoting much of his energy – on the political and cultural imaginary of the British left in the 1960s. His talk which he delivered at an Historical Materialism conference, and elsewhere,  on the Dialectics of Liberation conference at the Roundhouse back in 1967 was a miniature masterpiece delivered with wit and a command of the sources on topics ranging from RD Laing and Anti-Psychiatry to the politics of Stokeley Carmichael and Herbert Marcuse. Track it down on  facebook or you tube  if you want a sense of what his friends, comrades and students are now missing…

Instead those who knew him are left with both an unfillable  void   and a bundle of  memories of a  man who combined political activism with a rare sensitivity and  gift for friendship.

 

 

 

 



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