Writing to Change the World
- Writing to Change the World
British writer and activist John Rees cofounded the Stop the War Coalition in 2001. He also cofounded the revolutionary socialist organization Counterfire. He regularly writes for the print and online venues of both organizations, in addition to organizing demonstrations and rallies. Rees studied Marx and Hegel at the University of Hull, where he led a student occupation against the imposition of fees for overseas students. He was elected a member of the National Executive of the National Union of Students in the early 1980s. His academic work at Hull culminated in The Algebra of Revolution: The Dialectic and the Classical Marxist Tradition (Routledge, 1998). Combining writing with politics, he worked as a reporter for the Socialist Worker and served as editor of the party's quarterly journal, International Socialism, before leaving the party in 2009. Books that directly address leftist political organizing strategy include The ABCs of Socialism ([Bookmarks, 1995] Counterfire, 2014) and Strategy and Tactics: How the Left Can Organise to Transform Society (Counterfire, 2011). His more scholarly and analytical books include Imperialism and Resistance (Routledge, 2006) and The Levellers' Revolution (Verso, 2016). His experiences in Cairo during the so-called Arab Spring resulted in The People Demand: A Short History of the Arab Revolutions, with Joseph Daher (Counterfire, 2011). The television series that he wrote and presented for the Islam Channel [London] was later published as a book, Timelines: A Political History of the Modern World (Routledge, 2012). With Lindsey German, he cowrote A People's History of London (Verso, 2012), which celebrates the city's long lineage of revolutionary pamphleteers and agitators. Rees is currently a visiting research fellow at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he is continuing his research on the Levellers.
This interview took place online on Tuesday, August 9, 2016.
Your father was an activist in trade unions and in the Labour Party. Did his activism inspire you?
I guess the environment at home sort of gave me a certain set of values. I think it was probably not until I started becoming political [End Page 123] that I became more aware of what my father had done. He was a Labour Party member and trade unionist, as you say. He was standing as a local councilor even when he was in his eighties. So, he was pretty committed. He came from South Wales, so he had that kind of Left background that's pretty unique in that country. So I guess that influenced me in some ways.
Many activists do not engage in academic argument, but you do. You've published books with Routledge and Verso, presses that of course target an audience beyond universities, but they still require a certain rigor in argument, detailed examples, and data as appropriate. Your book Algebra of Revolution is a fairly technical examination of the Marxist theory of dialectic. Imperialism and Resistance includes not only names and dates but also footnotes, data, and tables. In November your book on the Levellers will come out with Verso. What's the relationship between this scholarly facet of your writing and your activism—assuming there is a relationship?
I would say my relationship with academia is not particularly that I engage with academic argument. Over my lifetime, academia has become much more separated from activism. I'd say that the current discourse, especially after the postmodernist linguistic turn, has become much less useful for politically engaged people. So my attitude towards academia is a kind of guerrilla-raiding-party attitude; I find it very useful in Hull and more recently at Goldsmiths to be able to have access to, and some of the academic discipline that comes with, that level of research, but I'm not primarily interested in the current academic debates. I'm much more interested in using the resources that academia allows you to access to try and formulate theoretical or historical philosophical ideas at a reasonable degree of sophistication but in a way which I hope that activists—let's put it this way: with a particular interest in those areas—would find useful. So my imagined audience...
