Scenes of revolutionary life

by Judah Waten

176 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1982

About the author

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judah_Waten

Reviews

[Ross · Rating 5 out of 5]

Waten, through the reminiscences of Tom Graves, captures the naïve idealism of the Australian and English communists of the late 1920s through to the mid 1930s. Waten is perceptive and scathing about the class consciousness in England, and within the British Communist Party. Whilst empathising deeply with the cause of the unemployed and oppressed in the depression era, and highlighting the viciousness (and the fascist sympathies) of the British ruling class, he puts his finger on the issues and ideological contradictions that were already dividing the communist party, and were eventually to tear it apart (the Trotsky-Stalin conflict, criticism of the Soviet Union being regarded as inevitably reactionary, the battle between ideology and literary freedom, the subjugation of art for political ends). Through the eyes of Tom Graves, Waten captures the heat, enthusiasm, rashness, vacillation and insecurity of youth, both in politics and in relationships. The book ends at the time of the fall of the Whitlam government in 1975, with Tom a sad old man with some regrets, but still committed to his ideology. I picked up this book at Judah Waten’s book shop in Melbourne in 1982, but did not finish reading it until 2021. Perhaps I needed to be older, looking back, and experiencing nostalgia to really appreciate it.

[Melbourne Bitter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written but hugely blinkered story of a young Communist in Australia and the UK. Interesting history of industrial relations post WW1. Death of Allan Whittaker (shot by police during protests in Port Melbourne in 1928 <?> ) written as fiction as a death of a fellow Communist in this story. Wonder what Waten would have made of the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall?