Need Not Greed: Alan Hardman 1936-2024
Published by Bluecoat, 2024, £45
Reviewed by Linda Taaffe
Political cartoons appear regularly in the pages of many national newspapers and magazines. Some are quite amusing. But nowhere is there anything like the drawings of Alan Hardman. His cartoons go straight to the heart of the matter of class society, how the greedy few of the capitalist class exploit the downtrodden, hardworking, needy many of the working class. And in the process they inspire people to draw the conclusion that we must use our collective power to turn society upside down in a socialist revolution. Now Alan’s lifework has been brought together in this very impressive and memorable book.
Alan worked for over 50 years perfecting his skills and his own unique style. As he says in his book, having been a printer and having installed the first printing press for the Militant (forerunner of the Socialist Party) in the early 1970s, he started to get more interested in layout and design. He speculated that a drawing might add something to our newspaper. As he had always been interested in art since childhood, he sketched a cartoon of the then prime minister Ted Heath. This was the prime minister who, after some huge strikes, confronted the electorate in 1974 about who should rule the country, his party or the unions. The voters’ response was to promptly turf him, and his Tory lot, out of office.
Alan maintained his first cartoon wasn’t very good, but it went down well and spurred him to try again, and onto a long path that was to become a main feature of his life. One of his more recent cartoons was on the Grenfell Tower disaster where, still in that strong tradition, the focus highlighted corruption, greed, and profit.
Sadly, there will be no more of Alan’s cartoons. However, before he passed away earlier this year, he had selected many of his drawings for this book. He was helped by Jane Ingham, who put Alan’s own words into the text, and by Bluecoat Press, who have managed the publication of this well-produced marvellous book. The book is big and bold and measures up to the dynamism of Alan’s drawings.
Many comrades and others in the wider movement have copies of Alan’s cartoons on their wall. Over the years we’ve had much of his work on display in different places in our home. There’s still one on our kitchen wall. Jeremy Corbyn reveals in the introduction to this book, along with many kind and complimentary praises, that he also has two on his wall.
All of Alan’s work was regularly on display and for sale to raise money, not for himself, but for our party fighting fund, especially at our annual Socialism events. He was there at all our big events, at Wembley in the early 1980s, the prestigious Albert Hall, and then the enormous Alexandra Palace, and now at the Institute of Education. Alan and his wife Sue, even as her health got worse, would take over a room, even a hall, put up huge displays on walls, spreads all over tables, to sell his work.
His cartoons were an outstanding feature of the Militant newspaper, and an integral part of it. They added a powerful visual impact to the arguments and policies that we waged against capitalism, but also against the mistaken ideas of some of the right-wing leaders in the labour movement. He encouraged campaigners to use his work in leaflets for campaigns. There was no such thing as copyright. He wanted workers to use his drawings, and not just in the UK. He covered so many international issues, conflicts and wars. Fellow socialists across the world put Alan’s drawings to good use in their own campaigns. Sometimes a picture says a thousand words. He believed the ideas really belonged to the working class – and he was just the man who drew them.
Alan was with the Militant and the Socialist Party, heart and soul, from the beginning of his political life to the day he passed away. Alan himself points out: “In 1971 I became aware of Militant, a small but organised Marxist group, working within the labour movement… I thought this is for me, so I joined them”. Peter Taaffe and I spoke with him on the phone not too long before he died. His loyalty came through as strong as ever.
Each cartoon was not drawn up in isolation, in a stereotypical artist’s attic, but firstly, through his own active participation in fighting day-to-day for socialist change on the ground in all our campaigns; and secondly, and most importantly, through conversations with lots of other workers. He particularly searched for regular discussions with our leading comrades and especially with Peter, general secretary of the Militant and now political secretary of the Socialist Party. Alan wanted to get clear in his head all the political issues on a particular matter before drawing up a cartoon ready for the paper deadline.
That was tremendous pressure for an artist. He points out in the foreword that a cartoonist needs three things, one of which is a strong political idea – which for him was Marxism and Trotskyism. He pursued Peter all the time. Peter had a vast understanding of all national and international events, histories and struggles. He naturally understood people – he could engage with the rawest worker to high-falutin’ academics. Peter also empathised with the agonies that artists can endure for their art. Together they formed a long-lasting bond. They would study the drawings of George Grosz, a German artist of the first half of the twentieth century, who had been involved in the first world war and felt the desperate poverty of workers, whom he then portrayed, not idolised but in the brutal reality of their lives. His drawings were an early influence on Alan.
The more cartoons Alan produced the more his own style emerged stronger and stronger. His ideas about the false dichotomy between art and science came through in his other creative works, like with wood. He wanted engineering to be as beautiful as possible; and art to be as practical as possible. He had some very interesting ideas. I remember a conversation with Alan once about the pressure, but at the same time, the discipline, of paper print-deadlines on his art, meaning that he had to let his cartoon go at the deadline, even though he might have thought it needed more work.
Of course, he could take more time over posters; and the chapter on the 1984-1985 great miners’ strike shows that. Alan’s family connection with mining, and the fact that hundreds of miners were buying and supporting Militant at that time, was a bedrock of inspiration for his work. Also, Alan hailed from Yorkshire, where during that massive confrontation, the police were used by Thatcher’s government to vandalise villages. An element of civil war existed. The praise given in this book by Arthur Scargill for Alan’s cartoons about the miners’ struggle, the greed of profiteers and his highlighting the power of collective action, is marvellous – except that I’m sure Scargill would never go as far as to endorse Alan’s own political Trotskyist ideals!
There are so many drawings that could be picked out for special mention. Everybody will have their own choice. However, there is general agreement that the ‘State Machine’ is Alan’s masterpiece. It shows in incredible detail all aspects of the capitalist state which are brought into play whenever the interests of the capitalist class are seriously at stake. Apart from police brute force, used in the miners’ strike, there’s the judiciary, used against the Liverpool 47 councillors in 1983-87, the capitalist press, and even the monarchy – which was used in 1975 in Australia when Labour prime minister Gough Whitlam, voted in democratically, was ousted by the monarchy’s representative, the governor-general, and a more reliable representative of the ruling class installed.
My own favourite is the one on Vietnam, with USA president Nixon as a Roman soldier presiding over devastating slaughter; another is the one where the miner takes a redundancy packet, and his boy asks him if he can buy the job back when it’s his turn to work. In those post-war boom years, when trade unions made big gains, it was quite a common idea that workers, especially in the craft unions, were only minding their jobs for the next generation. How conditions have changed today!
Members of the Socialist Party have played various roles in helping to eventually get this book out, although sadly, posthumously. His family supported him throughout his lifetime in all his creative activities, above all his wife Sue. We strongly urge everyone to buy a copy of Need not Greed, to investigate the backstory of each cartoon, and further, to commit to the ideas that Alan fought for. We appeal to all those workers depicted so graphically in his cartoons as downtrodden, oppressed, exploited, and slaughtered in wars, to step up and join the fight to turn society upside down, as expressed in one of his cartoons on the miners’ strike – join in, in other words, the fight for the coming socialist revolution.