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WORK TITLE: No Less Than Mystic
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 1962
WEBSITE:
CITY: Hove, Sussex, England
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COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
http://www.zero-books.net/authors/john-medhurst
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Not found in LOC
PERSONAL
Born 1962, in London, England; married; children: two daughters.
EDUCATION:Queen Mary College, University of London, B.A., 1984.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, civil servant, and trade union policy officer. Health and Safety Executive, policy officer, 1993-99; Department for Culture, Media, and Sport, policy officer, 1999-2005; Public and Commercial Services Union (a British civil service trade union), policy officer, 2006—.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the Morning Star, Red Pepper, Green Left, and the Journal of Contemporary European Research.
SIDELIGHTS
John Medhurst is a British historian and civil servant. His work has been at all levels of British civil service, from front-line welfare delivery to administrative work at the ministerial office in Whitehall, noted a writer on the Amazon website. He has also worked at job centers, at the International Branch of the Health and Safety Executive, and at the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport. In total, he spent more than twenty-two years as a civil servant.
During his career, Medhurst was an active trade unionist. He is currently a policy officer with the Public and Commercial Services Union, a British trade union for civil service personnel. Medhurst holds a B.A. in history and politics from Queen Mary College, University of London.
Medhurst’s book No Less Than Mystic: A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a Twenty-First-Century Left presents a “cheerfully chaotic account of Lenin’s political legacy aimed at those involved in modern anticapitalist movements,” commented a Publishers Weekly writer. The book’s “basic argument is that, while the Bolshevik October had much popular support among the working class, it became within weeks the pretext for a vanguardist dictatorship, one which morally disgraced itself well over a decade before Stalin seized absolute power—and crucially, which suppressed socialist alternatives from early on,” observed Owen Hatherley, writing in New Socialist.
Medhurst makes a number of comparisons between modern political revolts and the events of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Even when these comparisons and observations seem startling, “Medhurst scores points with his practical insights,” commented a writer in the San Francisco Book Review. For example, Medhurst finds much that was positive and beneficial about the Russian Revolution. However, he is clear in his position that Lenin and the Bolshevik Revolution should serve as a caution to today’s Leftist groups and related political movements. Lenin did not prepare properly for the revolution’s aftermath, Medhurst believes, and therefore created an environment in which the revolution’s goals could be subverted and reversed. The so-called Dictatorship of the Proletariat was the result of Lenin’s failures, and it caused many deaths and finally the “ultimate betrayal of the revolution’s goals,” the Publishers Weekly writer commented.
Throughout No Less Than Mystic, the book’s “character sketches are deft, it is sharp-witted and sometimes funny, and its lack of patience for Leninist and liberal orthodoxies is welcome,” Hatherley stated. A reviewer in the Philippine newspaper Morning Star found the book to be a “well-sourced and emotive history” of an important time in world history.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Morning Star, December 11, 2017, review of No Less Than Mystic: A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a Twenty First-Century Left.
Publishers Weekly, June 12, 2017, review of No Less Than Mystic, p. 56.
ONLINE
New Socialist, https://www.newsocialist.org.uk/ (October 22, 2017), Owen Hatherley, review of No Less Than Mystic.
San Francisco Book Review, https://www.sanfranciscobookreview.com/ (August 22, 2017), C.D. Quyn, review of No Less Than Mystic.
Zero Books Website, http://www.zero-books.net/ (April 17, 2018), biography of John Medhurst.
About the Author
John Medhurst was born in London in 1962 and graduated in History & Politics from Queen Mary College, University of London. He has worked at all levels of the British civil service from front-line welfare delivery to ministerial office in Whitehall, including local Job Centres, the International Branch of the Health and Safety Executive (in which he helped deliver assistance projects to ex-Soviet Bloc Eastern European countries), and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. In all of these he was an active trade unionist. He is now a full-time officer for the UK’s largest civil service trade union, the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS).
He was elected to PCS’s National Executive Committee 2003-06 and for six years was PCS's representative on the European Public Services Union's (EPSU) Public Services Network. He has written for Novara Media, the Morning Star, Red Pepper, Green Left and the Journal of Contemporary European Research. He is the author of the highly regarded That Option No Longer Exists: Britain 1974-76, a revisionist history of Britain in the 1970s published by Zero Books in 2014, which Hilary Wainwright, author of Beyond the Fragments and editor of Red Pepper, called “A really excellent book” which had “done the left a huge service”.
He is married with two daughters. He lives in Brighton, England.
About the Author
John Medhurst is a Trade Union Policy Officer. He has written for the Morning Star, Red Pepper, and the Journal of Contemporary European Research. He occasionally blogs for the Institute of Employment Rights. He lives in Hove, UK.
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John Medhurst is an Industrial Officer with the Public and Commercial Services union (PCS). Prior to this he was a civil servant for 22 years and a CPSA/PCS lay activist in Jobcentre Plus, HSE and DCMS. He was HSE London HQ Branch Secretary, DCMS National Branch Chair, and a member of the PCS National Executive Committee. He was PCS representative on the EPSU Public Services Network and has been published in the Journal of Contemporary European Research (JCER).
His first book "That Option No Longer Exists: Britain 1974-76" was published by Zero Books in August 2014. His second book "No Less Than Mystic: A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st Century Left" was published by Repeater Books in August 2017.
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Company NameDepartment for Culture, Media and Sport
Dates EmployedMay 1999 – Dec 2005 Employment Duration6 yrs 8 mos
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Company NameHealth and Safety Executive
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Education
Queen Mary College, University of London
Queen Mary College, University of London
Degree NameBachelor of Arts (B.A.) Field Of StudyHistory & Politics
Dates attended or expected graduation 1981 – 1984
History & Politics
St Marylebone Grammar School
St Marylebone Grammar School
Degree NameBachelor's degree
John Medhurst
John Medhurst is a Trade Union Officer with a background in Civil Service and Public Sector policy issues. He was born in London and has a B.A in History & Politics from Queen Mary College, University of London. He has worked at all levels in the civil service including Job Centres, the HSE and Whitehall, in all of which he was an active trade unionist. He was elected to the PCS Union's National Executive Committee 2003-06, and was PCS's representative on the European Public Services Union's (EPSU) Public Services Network for six years. He has long campaigned for a radical alternative to privatisation and austerity - based on public investment, public ownership, Tax Justice and wealth redistribution - and has presented that case within academia and EU institutions. He has written articles for the Journal of Contemporary European Research, Novara Media and Red Pepper.
As a member of Brighton & Hove Green Party he helped propose the policy that made Brighton Council the first in the UK to refuse to evict tenants for inability to pay the Bedroom Tax. In 2013 he organised and chaired the founding meeting of the Brighton People's Assembly attended by 400 people and addressed by Caroline Lucas, Hilary Wainwright and Owen Jones. In 2015 he joined the Labour Party after the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader.
He is married with two daughters. He lives in Hove, UK.
John Medhurst's second book, "No Less Than Mystic: A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st Century Left", was published by Repeater Books in August 2017.
Books by John Medhurst That Option No Longer Exists by
That Option No Longer Exists
Britain 1974-76
Aug 2014
The 1970s in Britain were years of immense social, cultural and political liberation aborted by a right-wing counter revolution.
3/24/2018 General OneFile - Saved Articles
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No Less Than Mystic: A History of Lenin
and the Russian Revolution for a 21st
Century Left
Publishers Weekly.
264.24 (June 12, 2017): p56.
COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
No Less Than Mystic: A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st Century Left
John Medhurst. Repeater, $14.95 trade paper (654p) ISBN 978-1-910924-47-1
In this cheerfully chaotic account of Lenin's political legacy aimed at those involved in modern
anticapitalist movements, British trade unionist Medhurst seeks to dispel the mystique still surrounding the
Russian revolutionary leader. Drawing on relevant scholarship and primary texts, Medhurst asserts that the
Russian Revolution encompassed much that was "inspiring and positive" but argues that Lenin and the
Bolshevik revolution should serve as a "cautionary tale" for modern leftist movements. Beginning with
Lenin's early writings, Medhurst contends that Lenin "had little to no interest in genuine political debate"
and "put so much effort into preparing for revolution that he neglected to plan for its aftermath." Medhurst
is more sympathetic to Lenin's contemporary Leon Trotsky, whose greatness, he says, "derives from his
struggle against Stalinism," but who is responsible "as much as Lenin" for bringing about the oppressive
"Dictatorship of the Proletariat" that resulted in mass deaths and the ultimate betrayal of the revolution's
goals. Devoting frequent asides to modern leftist movements and cultural phenomena, Medhurst in his
enthusiasm often resorts to cliches and odd pronouncements, such as "Stalinist art was a chocolate-box
cover on an ocean of dead peasants." Most non-Leninist leftists will sympathize with Medhurst's aims, but
unfortunately his book has little utility as a primer for leftist organizing. (Aug.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"No Less Than Mystic: A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st Century Left." Publishers
Weekly, 12 June 2017, p. 56. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495720710/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=385372ba. Accessed 24 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495720710
No Less Than Mystic: A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left
We rated this book:
$14.95
If you don’t already know the difference between a Bolshevik and a Menshevik, or how to distinguish between the Bund and the Duma, you will be lost before you get started with this in-depth political treatise. Medhurst, a Libertarian who has spent his lengthy career of Labor Union service in the UK, reveals that a century after the disastrous Bolshevik Revolution, Socialism the world over still pays for those mistakes. In a hard Right shift from the radical Left, Medhurst yanks the veneer of prestige off of Lenin and the rest of the Russian revolutionaries to show us how unchecked totalitarians hijacked genuine efforts at socialized democracy.
An autodidact from years of experience, Medhurst writes with cynical pedantry about political revolts today while comparing them to the events of the 1917 Revolution. For example, “The failure of the secular democratic revolutionaries of Tunisia and Egypt in 2010-2011 to translate their rebellion to a permanent hold on power is in contrast to the success of the Georgian Social Democrats after February 1917.”
Medhurst scores points with his practical insights, some of which drop-in so unexpectedly amid a historical narrative that the reader may get whiplash from the sudden jolt of current events.
Reviewed By: C.D. Quyn
Author: John Medhurst
Star Count: 3/5
Format: Trade
Page Count: 654 pages
Publisher: Repeater
Publish Date: 2017-Aug-22
ISBN: 9781910924471
Amazon: Buy this Book
Issue: September 2017
Category: History
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After the End of the World: Re-reading the Russian Revolution
22 October 2017 • Red October
by Owen Hatherley
...
...
Forks in the Road
This rejection of the 'Vanguard Party' is unorthodoxy in the ridiculous world of the rump SWP (their house journal Socialist Review sneers 'get real, Neil – patiently building Leninist parties rooted in workers struggles remains the only way to overthrow capitalism'), but outside of it, that this is patronising simplification is patently obvious – the notion that arguments contrary to 'Lenin was a democrat' are limited to the right would have astonished, say, Rosa Luxemburg, or the young Leon Trotsky. Faulkner's 'People's History' is exactly the sort of simplistic, just-so-story that John Medhurst has come gunning for in his No Less Than Mystic – A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st Century Left (Repeater). Medhurst is a veteran trade unionist and self-described 'amateur historian' best known for That Option No Longer Exists – Britain 1974-1976 (Zero, 2014), a stirring revisionist account of the first two years of the last pre-'New' Labour government. In that, Medhurst paid no mind to the many different traditions and party lines of the left. Not quite Old Labourite, Anarchist or left-Communist (though with a sympathy for each), Medhurst argued instead for a peculiar left-libertarian version of social democracy, and in the course of that short, ideas-packed book almost managed to convince the reader that Harold Wilson could once have delivered it. No Less Than Mystic has a similarly tight time period (1917 to 1921, more or less), but is more than four times the length, and lacks the vivid voice of experience that enlivens that book and makes its eccentricities thought-provoking rather than irritating. Its basic argument is that, while the Bolshevik October had much popular support among the working class, it became within weeks the pretext for a vanguardist dictatorship, one which morally disgraced itself well over a decade before Stalin seized absolute power – and crucially, which suppressed socialist alternatives from early on. As an alternative to this regime, Medhurst argues that there should have been an alliance between the untrammelled libertarian forces of 1917 – the Anarchist-Communists, the Free Army of Nestor Makhno in southern Ukraine, the urban advocates of Workers Control, the Bolshevik Workers Opposition – and those in the established left parties that maintained a respect for democracy and law, like the left-wing of the huge peasant-based Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRs), the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party's Menshevik (minority) wing, or the more timorous Bolsheviks who advocated coalition government, like Lev Kamenev.
In that, I agree with him. Medhurst's account of the swift dismantlement, almost as soon as they had been established, of gains of 1917 like workers' autonomy, Soviet democracy and public debate is convincing, if familiar from the likes of Maurice Brinton's The Bolsheviks and Workers Control. A socialist coalition government would surely have avoided much of the mutual bloodletting that made the Civil War that raged from 1918 to 1921 so horrific (quite how much the Bolsheviks are to blame here, rather than the Left SRs who left the coalition that actually existed after October because of their opposition to peace with Germany, and then went round bumping off foreign dignitaries, is questionable). Other responses to counter-revolution than mass executions and terror were surely 'possible', whatever that means, even in the depths of Civil War. But to quote one of Medhurst's favourites, the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, 'it amounts to saying that the world should be good, not bad, and I am entirely on your side in this issue'. A historian has to explain why nobody at the time ever thought this anarcho-social-democratic coalition was plausible. The Constituent Assembly, the elected Parliament in which the Bolsheviks won the cities and the borderlands and the SR's won a landslide overall, was dispersed by Anarchist militia men.
baltic1917Baltic Metro Station, St. Petersburg
If it were as short as That Option No Longer Exists, then No Less Than Mystic could have been a similarly fun combination of historical trolling, counterfactual pondering and labour history. Its character sketches are deft, it is sharp-witted and sometimes funny, and its lack of patience for Leninist and liberal orthodoxies is welcome. Yet the book's bloated size exposes its deficiencies horribly. Medhurst doesn't read Russian; of English sources, he has read much less than Mieville and much more than Faulkner, but the greater scope makes clear how little knowledge or sympathy he has of Russian culture and history - chapters on art, nationalism and sexual morality are full of musty judgements, totally ignoring the huge amount of English-language scholarship since the 1970s that has complicated a simplistic 'revolution and retreat' narrative. Worse still, Medhurst compounds this problem by picking fights with Bolshevik-sympathising historians that do work in archives. In arguing, for instance, that in Revolution and Counter-revolution, his study of a Moscow metalworks, Kevin Murphy deliberately excises information about anti-Bolshevik strikes during the Civil War, Medhurst may be right, but he can't prove such strikes actually happened in the factory Murphy is writing about, because he can't read the documents. The book is riddled with errors large and small, and is marred by utterly bizarre and anachronistic digressions into contemporary matters, usually as a stick to beat the Bolsheviks with. On criticising the Bolshevik suspicion of democracy, we get an encomium on Hugo Chavez and his many fairly contested and fairly won elections. On the Bolshevik fear of the property-loving peasantry, we juxtapose the better alternatives of Evo Morales's government in Bolivia, or the Zapatistas. When we find Lenin dismissing the 'god-building' that unorthodox Bolsheviks like Lunacharsky or Bogdanov liked to philosophise about, we are told that Russell Brand's unique 'pantheistic religion with a political focus' provides a way out of the Leninist impasse. These illuminate neither the present (where everyone is always right) or the past (where everyone, but especially the Bolsheviks, is always wrong). In these lengthy passages, Medhurst goes from amateur to pub bore.
But perhaps the biggest problem with No Less Than Mystic is in treating 1917-1921, as he does 1974 to 1976, as a series of 'forks in the road where a radical but democratic socialist alternative could have been taken', a succession of possible alternatives to the eventual Bolshevik dictatorship. Unlike Britain in the 1970s (whose shift from radicalism to neoliberalism has long been presented as 'inevitable'), liberals, social democrats, Anarchists and Trotskyists have been telling themselves counterfactuals about Russia almost every day since 1918, to the point where study of what actually happened and why has been comparatively neglected on the left. It is absurd to take the same moral approach to a vast rural Empire descending into complete state collapse as to a wealthy modern democracy where the worst thing that happened was some power cuts. The Russian Empire in the late 1910s and early 1920s was closer in most respects to Somalia in the 1990s than to Britain in the mid-1970s, and this matters.
The inadequacy of this approach is maybe best seen in the chapter of praise to the Menshevik leader and former close collaborator of Lenin, Julius Martov. Undoubtedly a principled revolutionary socialist, Martov became the 'Hamlet' of the revolution, in Medhurst's words, in refusing to endorse either October or the counter-revolutionary response to it. In this chapter, Medhurst sets great stall on a 1920 debate in Halle, Germany, held by the left-reformist Independent Social Democratic Party. Here, Martov faced the Bolshevik Grigory Zinoviev, who was trying to convince the organisation to affiliate to the Communist Party and the Soviet-led 'Third' Communist International (succeeding Marx's 'First', and the mass reformist 'Second', which still exists today), that he led. Here, principled democratic socialism met demagoguery in apologia for violent dictatorship. But if you consult the minutes – translated into English as Zinoviev and Martov Head to Head in Halle - what is so striking is the centrality to the debate of Bolshevism's embrace of anti-colonial politics. Zinoviev was fresh from the 1920 Baku Congress of the East, where the Communists were foolishly trying to make revolutionaries out of what their opponents in Halle derided as 'Turks and Persians' and 'the Mullahs of Khiva'. Martov compares Bolshevik divorce reform to 'Muslim polygamy'. Here, he was speaking as an old-school social democrat, for whom feminism and anti-colonialism were faintly silly, whereas Zinoviev's perspective – 'the Second International was restricted to people with white skin. The Third International does not classify people according to the colour of their skin' - was that of the future. Medhurst doesn't even notice this, and gives the Baku Congress half a paragraph, although non-European revolutions were, one would think, probably the most historically important and enduring outgrowths of Bolshevism. ...
Book review Books: What’s left of Lenin?
In his new book on the legacy of 1917, John Medhurst argues that 'Leninism' is a failed model for radical change now. JOE GILL isn't entirely convinced by his thesis
No Less Than Mystic: A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for the 21st century Left
by John Medhurst
(Repeater Books, £9.99)
IN NO Less Than Mystic, John Medhurst argues that Lenin and the revolution he led in Russia was based on a political model that was adventurist, anti-democratic and bound to lead to dictatorship.
In what is a well-sourced and emotive history, the author favours the views of left Menshevik leader Julius Martov, Lenin’s old comrade who until 1921 was still fighting for a different model of democratic socialism, and German Spartacist leader Rosa Luxemburg, among others.
Martov lost out to Lenin in Russia and died shortly before him, while Luxemburg was killed by Gemany’s right-wing socialist rulers when the short-lived Spartacist uprising was crushed.
As left-wing critics of the Bolsheviks, she and Martov argued that the revolution should have permitted other parties to operate freely and opposed the powers of the Cheka police to arrest and shoot those they deemed enemies.
But defenders of Lenin and the Bolsheviks point to the extraordinary conditions in which they operated that drove this process, including war with Germany, civil war, social collapse and interventions by all the major capitalist powers. Medhurst claims that this is historical revisionism. Lenin advocated the dictatorship of the proletariat from day one and made it a reality, he says, sparking much of the resistance which it then had to crush.
His visceral dislike of Lenin and his politics means that he is highly begrudging when he admits that Lenin may have occasionally been right. The reason Lenin, according to anti-communist historians such as Simon Sebag Montefiore, is considered by many the most important individual in 20th-century history is because he was able to size up the moment and take decisive action like no other leader of his time.
Yet he did change his mind at critical points, including in October 1917 when he fought against the majority of Bolshevik leaders for an insurrection to overthrow the collapsing Kerensky regime and in early 1921, realising that the revolution had to change in order to survive, he brought in the New Economic Policy. Again in a minority, he insisted on peace with Germany in March 1918 to save the revolution.
Lenin died young and it is a historical unknown how the Soviet state would have evolved under his leadership if he had lived another 10 or 20 years. But for Medhurst, this is immaterial, since he claims that the rot had set in on October 25, 1917.
He is not the first writer to suggest that authoritarianism and one-party rule was imprinted at the beginning of the revolution and that the 1930s purges and gulags were simply the logical end point of repression that began in 1918. History, surely, as predetermination.
Undoubtedly, Lenin and Trotsky had little time for bourgeois democracy or legality and dealt harshly with opposition when they felt that the revolution was threatened.
Critics point to the closing of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 after the Social Revolutionaries won the elections, the “red terror” and the crushing of the Kronstadt uprising in 1921.
Medhurst accuses the Bolsheviks of dividing the international socialist movement, based on a false premise that world revolution was imminent and, in so doing, enabling fascism to storm to power.
This is unfair on Lenin, since the Comintern policy of attacking social democrats as social fascists in the period 1928-33, when arguably left unity might have stopped Hitler, came after his death. Moreover, post-1917, socialist movements and parties in the West, including Labour in Britain, made massive gains and ultimately, after the horrors of world war two, brought a welfare system into being.
There are fascinating chapters on the revolution’s groundbreaking approach to women’s rights, marriage, culture and education under the luminary leadership of Alexandra Kollontai and Anatoly Lunacharsky, among others. In these domains, Medhurst concedes that huge progress was made in the early years, despite enormous challenges in a devastated country.
A chapter on the role of trade unions and the Workers Opposition is especially revealing and granular. Many workers, including Bolshevik trade unionists, resisted Trotsky’s plans to militarise labour in the economy. That, and other grievances, led to massive strikes throughout this period. Lenin ditched Trotsky’s plan but he was wedded to US-style top-down management on the Taylorist model and this eventually became the norm.
Throughout the book Medhurst relates the events of 1917-21 with struggles for social justice in the 21st century, including the Venezuelan Bolivarian project, Spain’s Podemos, the Arab uprisings and ideas such as Hardt and Negri’s networked multitude.
His purpose is to ask what kind of left is needed now, but his big tent of free thinkers is at times stretched to breaking point.
A century after Lenin, it is legitimate to ask whether we would need to invent Leninism today or, with the emergence of new mass democratic socialist movements from Latin America to Syria’s Rojava, to Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party, should instead see it as a historical phenomenon unsuited to the current capitalist crisis,
However Medhurst’s dismissal of Lenin’s unique contribution to history, which enabled revolutionaries to adapt classical Marxism to conditions of underdevelopment in countries such as China, Vietnam and Cuba, each in their own unique formation, is too sweeping. While the Soviet Union and its satellite states fell, for some of the reasons Medhurst lays out, other “Leninist” socialist states have lifted millions out of misery while holding out against imperialism.
No revolution is made without grave errors and the Bolsheviks were the first to try to build socialism, in the least propitious circumstances. They had the audacity to risk everything and in some respects they undoubtedly overstepped or erred and often paid with their lives.
Lenin was one of Hegel’s “world historical personalities,” a political genius who remade the world and as he said, quoting Napoleon, “First to battle, then let’s see.”
As our own moment of left resurgence becomes imminent, once again we shall see.