A Tate Gallery for the New Left: Portraits, Landscapes, and Abstracts in the Revolutionary Activism of the 1950s and 1960s

s relating to revolutionary orientation sober and insightful. These are volumes, then, that should be read and thought through in our difficult times. Their message is clear. A revolutionary left can be built, even in the most inauspicious of circumstances. A revolutionary left must be built, if we are not to slip further into the barbarism that is unfolding all around us in our contemporary world. A revolutionary left, however, needs revolutionaries, those able to follow the course of principle and its difficult demands, refusing the easy errors of the past. Such revolutionaries need the organization, structure, and leadership – the politics of Trotskyism – that these foundations of revolutionary activism provide. The revolutionary left has always been a collective endeavour, and it always will be. Indeed, one crucial, if unstated, theme that runs through these two volumes is how dependent the health of the revolutionary left is on a leadership able to develop its human cadre in effective ways, accenting the differentiated positive contributions individuals in its ranks can make and minimizing the negatives that are always a part of particular people’s makeup, and which dissidents cannot help but bring with them into their movements and activism. Revolutionary organizations, perhaps even more so than other institutions in capitalist society, are necessarily made up of headstrong and oddly constituted individuals. Maximizing the good work that can be gotten out of each and every revolutionary dissident, and minimizing the damage that might be coming from them to organizations and causes, is a good part of what leadership of the revolutionary left entails. Thus, handling the human revolutionary material of any serious socialist organization is an important component of leadership, a critical complement to the ability to chart new theoretical territory or develop an acute sense of strategic direction in specific circumstances. Precisely because few individuals combine this array of skills, the leadership of the revolutionary left, as well as its activist base, relies on collective rather than individual strengths. Reading Tate’s volumes reminds us how difficult this can be, even how often revolutionary leadership has come up short in these challenging departments. Being of and in this revolutionary left thus demands patience, a capacity to stay the course through times stingy in their offerings and stubborn in their building of barriers to human advance. As James P. Cannon once remarked, recalling how things finally came together for his Trotskyist comrades in Minneapolis in 1934,27 when they led one of the most significant class battles in the history of the American labour movement, “Fortune favors the godly. If you live right and conduct yourself properly, you get a lucky break now and then.”28 Cannon’s tongue-in-cheek reference to godliness aside, revolutionaries 27. For a recent treatment see Bryan D. Palmer, Revolutionary Teamsters: The Minneapolis Truckers’ Strikes of 1934 (Chicago: Haymarket, 2014). 28. James P. Cannon, The First Ten Years of American Trotskyism: Report of a Participant (New York: Pioneer, 1944), 144. a tate gallery for the new left / 261 do indeed need the odd piece of luck; they also need to make the most of their circumstances when they do catch a historical break. There was much luck in Ernie Tate arriving in Canada in 1955, and the Canadian revolutionary left benefitted greatly from this good fortune. Similarly, there was a measure of luck in Tate appearing in London, England, when he did in 1965. No individual, and no political organization, could have created the conditions and developments he encountered. But Tate made the most of them. As bad off as we in the left currently are, we can be thankful for this. We are lucky to have these volumes and the history Tate made and recalls for us here. Jess MacKenzie, Sirio Di Giuliomaria (leader of Italian Section, Fourth International), and Ernie Tate, Italy, 1969. Courtesy Jess MacKenzie/Ernie Tate.

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