Late evening, and the television humming in the corner. A programme, not by a Welshman, on last year’s National Eisteddfod. Between listening and drowsing, the balance was tipped when I heard one phrase which I thought first was a misreading of the script. He said at the end of that account of the Eisteddfod – which was very sympathetic, sentimental, selective – he said suddenly: ‘Here we have a nation trying to become a people.’ I suppose verbal analytic training is an inevitable part of the kind of literary education I had. I thought ‘Well, he’s reversed the terms, an understandable error.’ He wasn’t reading from autocue, he was simply reading from a script. But a nation trying to become a people! It must have been written as a people trying to become a nation. But then I thought, if you counterpose either term you see that each is problematic. This is not the most difficult problem in the terms with which we now try to do our political thinking. But ‘nation’ and ‘people’, just to start with, indicate the problems – problems of history, problems of perspective – which are right inside the very terms that are necessary methods of exchange in the most urgent political issues.
A nation once was unproblematic, with its strong connections with the fact of birth, the fact that a nation was a group of people who shared a native land. This meaning was overridden but never destroyed, by the development of the nation-state, in which what really matters is not common birth or the sharing of native land, but a specific independent kind of political organization. A people on the other hand, was always slightly problematic: a mutual term to indicate a group which then at a certain point went through a very significant development in which there were people and there were others within the same place who were not people or who were not the people. There was a very significant use in radical politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in which you set the people against what? – against the system, against the ruling class, against them. That use, a very specifying use, a very uniting use, disappeared, I suppose, or became much more difficult when you got to the era of electoral politics and found that all parties were claiming this appellation of the people. It lost that earlier social specification.
In orthodox modern political thought, these earlier terms – nation and people – have often been replaced by the simple abstract term society. Its uses are familiar, yet it, too, is not as simple as it may look. If you look through an eighteenth-century writer, for example, and see how he uses the word ‘society’, you’ll find that in one paragraph he will mean what we would now have to express as ‘company’ or simply ‘being with other people’ – society as our active relations with others, being in society as distinct from being alone or being withdrawn. He will in the next paragraph be likely to use ‘society’ to mean what I suppose we now generally take it to mean – the systematic set of political and general arrangements by which a given people live: society as a social system. And this simultaneous use of the same term for quite different meanings has a piece of history in it which may be crucially relevant in the attempt to think nationalist politics in our generation. The term ‘society’ began with a very strong stress on direct relations with other people, specifically physical relationships of contiguity, contact, relating. It was a word that was consciously opposed to the word ‘state’ – ‘state’ with all its implications of the power structure, the display centre of decision and authority. This had been the contribution of a developing middle class: to find or try to find a term which was alternative to state, which should nevertheless express something which was not a private construction but a public one. The attempt to counterpose society to the state, to insist that there was a whole area of lived relationships which was other than that centre of power and display: this was a very crucial phase. But then in its turn ‘society’ moved towards that meaning which it had originally opposed. In the course of the nineteenth century, and now again today, we are trying to find terms which represent an emphasis of certain kinds of direct and directly responsible relationships, as against a centre of power and display.
Now the word which touches the nerve, the word which has had to carry most of the freight of this very difficult sense of direct and responsible relationships – this word is ‘community’. I want to talk about some of the meanings of community at the point where I think they are becoming extremely problematic and yet when the issues inside the term have never been more important. Community is unusual among the terms of political vocabulary in being, I think, the one term which has never been used in a negative sense. People never, from any political position, want to say that they are against community or against the community. You can have very sophisticated individualist arguments about the proper sphere of society, but the community, by contrast, is always right. I think on the one hand we should be glad that this is so, on the other hand we should be suspicious. A term which is agreed among so many people, a term which everybody likes, a notion which everybody is in favour of – if this reflected reality then we’d be living in a world very different from this one. So what is the problem inside the term, what is it that allows people to at once respond very positively to it and yet mean such very different things by it? Here I have to go back over some of the phases of my own understanding of this word and try to relate it to some direct aspects of social experience.
I happened to grow up in a very small rural community right on the Welsh-English border. I didn’t realize until many years later that many of the ideas that I had absorbed in that particular situation, and had later expressed, were in a sense common property throughout a very wide area of Welsh social thought. And the difficulty, if you lived on that border, of knowing who you were in terms of any larger grouping, certainly prevented me from seeing in the first stage that this had a relation to Welsh social thought. It was pointed out to me by some Welsh commentators that this was so; it was much more often and more rudely pointed out by English commentators, who described my first definitions of community in terms which showed that in one sense they knew where they came from. One called it ‘chapel rhetoric’, with that particular single image of the Welsh. Someone more recently called it ‘radical eisteddfodism’. That would be a very curious notion actually: a festival at once strongly cultural and distinctly professionally competitive. But I’ll let that pass.
That original experience was in a way so special and in other ways so marginal. What it meant for me was, first, the experience of a relatively stable community, which had acquired a certain specific identity in opposition to certain external forces mainly on the land issue, and then which practised – and I felt the great importance of this – within that kind of scattered rural society, certain habits which, I came to recognize when I moved away from it, could certainly not be taken for granted. If I could give an example of this. When I went to Cambridge I heard a lecture by Professor L.C. Knights on the meaning of the word ‘neighbour’ in Shakespeare. He said that the word ‘neighbour’ in Shakespeare indicated something that no twentieth-century person can understand, because it signified a whole series of obligations and recognitions over and above the mere fact of physical proximity. And F.R. Leavis was leaning against the wall and nodding vigorously (it was the time when this was the going position in Cambridge) and everybody was saying: Yes, in the twentieth century nobody understands the meaning of ‘neighbour’. Well, then I got up, straight from Pandy, so to say, and said I knew perfectly well what ‘neighbour’, in that full sense, means. That got hissed – it was a remark so against the common sense that here was something in literature which was not now socially available: the notion of that kind of recognition of certain kinds of mutual responsibility. Now this was not to idealize my own place. I do not mean that people – and above all perhaps to this audience I do not need to explain – I do not mean that people all liked each other. I do not mean that people didn’t play dirty tricks on each other sometimes. I do not mean that people didn’t have disputes. I mean that there was nevertheless a level of social obligation which was conferred by the fact of seeming to live in the same place and in that sense to have a common identity. And from this sense there were acts of kindness beyond calculation, forms of mutual recognition even when they were wild misinterpretations of the world outside. My father had to go to the local pub to stop them taking up a collection for me when I won a scholarship to Cambridge. He had to explain to them that having won a scholarship I had enough money to go. People assumed that going to a strange place like that… I mean the one thing they could identify about Cambridge was that you’d need a lot of money up there. And so a collection was taken up, to try to look after me.
This was entirely within that sense of neighbour, of community. But it was still – as I soon realized when I moved out – so marginal a case, there were so few places like that I subsequently went to, that I had to learn to see a whole range of other possible meanings. And it did come to seem to me that a very different kind of community was actually physically quite close to where I’d grown up, but which I’d not known so well. A community that didn’t depend at all on this sense of relative stability, relative custom, but a community that had been hammered out in very fierce conflict, the kind of community that was the eventual positive creation of struggles within the industrialization of South Wales. The connections between these very different kinds of community – rural and industrial – have still not been sufficiently explored: how much of one went into the other, the very complex interlocks inside those struggles, the very complex conflicts inside them, in the earlier stages, between the older tradition and the new. I think probably we are still in the early phase of understanding this.
For there is, of course, a habit of mutual obligation which easily becomes the ground on which exploitation is possible. If you have the sense that you have this kind of native duty to others it can expose you very cruelly within a system of the conscious exploitation of labour. And it is for a long time a very powerful appeal, one that is still repeatedly used in politics, that you have this kind of almost absolute obligation to ‘the community’, that the assertion of interest against it is merely selfish. Yet what happened in South Wales, as strongly as anywhere in the world, still seems to me an immense achievement. Out of some of the most bitter and brutal struggles came the intense sense of a community of a different kind: the notion of a much more collective community than any I’d been used to, which cast its institutions in collective forms and which did propose to change society radically but to change it in a very particular direction; to attempt to establish from these received and new notions of mutuality and brotherhood, a total society which was possible, one which seemed, if you read the earlier arguments, only just around the corner. You only really had to go to London and pronounce them, it sometimes seemed, and it would happen.
I am reminded in that sense that Robert Owen’s proclamation of cooperation, a century and a half before, had also come out of Wales. Owen had that same sense that once it was announced it would be seen as so obviously just, so obviously a higher kind of living, that he even took it as a plan to the prime minister and was very surprised when they said ‘Well, I don’t think that we can do that quite now.’ We have all had this sense of shock, that this is not a message which is instantly received. But that association between a specific understanding of community in terms of the extending obligations of neighbourhood, very much attached to a place, moving on through the sense of a community under stress, under attack, through conflict, finding its community and its collective institutions and attempting to move on from that to a political movement which should be the establishment of higher relations of this kind and which would be the total relations of a society: that association, for all its difficulties, has been a most significant part of the history of Wales. But the difficult thing within it, and it had been the difficulty with the earlier term of society, is that because it had begun as local and affirmative, assuming an unproblematic extension from its own local and community experience to a much more general movement, it was always insufficiently aware of the quite systematic obstacles which stood in the way. If you think back, for example, to that change of meaning in the word ‘society’, it can seem a loss. It was indeed in one sense a grave loss, that ‘society’ lost its sense of immediate direct relation to others and became the general abstract term for a whole social-political system. It is undoubtedly a loss, and yet that abstraction was a crucial way of understanding the nature of a quite new historical phase which was presenting problems which could not be negotiated, let alone understood, if the sense of something quite systematic and distant, something which was not in that sense accessible in any direct local mode, was established. This I think was the experience that we’re repeating with our attempts to extend new meanings of community towards a whole movement, and it is particularly a problem that is mixed up with our very specific assertion, which is one of national community. Because what the abstraction of society represented, given the losses, was the perception that there were now fundamental and systematic historical changes, above all in the mode of production but carrying with them virtually every other kind of institutional change. Something had happened which put certain of the basic elements of our social life beyond the reach both of direct experience and of simple affirmation, affirmation followed by extension. In came, necessarily, the politics of negation, the politics of differentiation, the politics of abstract analysis. And these, whether we liked them or not, were now necessary even to understand what was happening.
The thing that always seems to me significant is that almost contemporary with this new abstract meaning of the word ‘society’ was the quite necessary invention of statistics as a mode of understanding our actual social environment. Everybody knows the limitations of statistics, they are too well-known to be argued, but there was a moment in that historical development when it would have been mere ignorance and we would have lived like people in the dark, without the statistics. As indeed we still would if we hadn’t that kind of necessary access to things that are indeed our common life but which are not accessible by means of direct observation and experience. Certain things which are now profoundly systematic, which happen in complex ways over very large areas, and which we had to understand in ways that, by comparison with the simple affirmatives extended from experience through community to the making of new societies, seem and indeed often are distant and dehumanized: the apparent opposites of community. The system of ownership, for example, in the modern economy, which cannot be observed, which has to be consciously discovered. New characteristic social relations which have, in a sense, to be discovered, not only by factual enquiry but by very complex interpretation, discovering all kinds of new systems and modes. And these things which are the determining tendencies in modern history can be put into conflict with those other affirmative notions which, whether they come from older kinds of rural communities or from militant working-class communities, are always more closely tied to experience. And around them still centres the notion of community, contrasted now with what? Often I found, as this argument continued, contrasted with ‘real politics’ or ‘practical politics’. That is to say, people would point out that to attempt to build a modern society in terms of the values of rather simple communities was simple idealist nonsense. A modern community – a word they still sometimes appropriate because they know what a positive charge it carries – simply could not be built in the model of these simpler earlier ways of life. And of course that is right. Then again there were people who said that the idea of community is always in its affirmations and in its pieties weakening, because it is less capable of perceiving an enemy, it is less capable of identifying what is truly hostile to it. It contains within it complacencies which really do lack the practice of politics in a modern world at once as extensive and as hard as this one. These are the objections being made in this phase of the revival of community and nationalist thinking. I think they have to be taken at their full and proper weight. They have to be superseded rather than pushed aside as simply the talk of our opponents. Because it must be the case that the projection of simple communities, even on the smaller scale of a new national independence, is a projection of reductions rather than of expansions, a projection of simplifications rather than of the kind of complex liberation which genuine community and new national politics could be.
It is evident also that the hostile and opposing elements to this new kind of politics are very strong, are very identifiable there and that they are not only in some distant power centre. This was my saddest discovery: when I found that in myself – and of course by this time I had been away and through a very different experience – in myself that most crucial form of imperialism had happened. That is to say, where parts of your mind are taken over by a system of ideas, a system of feelings, which really do emanate from the power centre. Right back in your own mind, and right back inside the oppressed and deprived community, there are reproduced elements of the thinking and the feeling of that dominating centre. These become the destructive complexities inside what had once seemed a simple affirmative mood. Nor can we simply react by saying that the values of community, which are strong and affirmative, are superior to those values of the power centres and the identification of power centres, the identification of destructive actual relationships, actual forms of ownership, actual ideas and feelings which are oppressing us. Where we have now got, it seems to me, within the politics of change in the centres of the metropolitan counties, is that we have learned all too harshly and bitterly the truth of this latest phase, the phase of negation, the phase of knowing that you have to go beyond the simple community, the phase of the quick identification of enemies, the phase also of very conscious and prolonged political abstraction. If we merely counterpose to that the forms of a simpler kind of politics, I very much doubt if we shall engage in the central struggle. On the other hand, if that negative politics is the only politics then it is the final victory of a mode of thought which seems to me the ultimate product of capitalist society. Whatever its political label it is a mode of thought which really has made relations between men into relations between things or relations between concepts. And yet to re-establish the notion of politics as relationships between men, to re-establish the ideas of community politics, would mean superseding, going beyond, that kind of politics rather than merely in turn negating it.
Now this is what interests me so much about the present political situation, that reaching the end of that kind of politics which I’m sure we are, reaching also the end of that kind of radical politics, we are finding certain signs of the possibility of going beyond, carrying the kind of affirmatives of community through those negotiations into a different kind of politics. And those signs, here and now, are very specifically national. I live in Cambridge among young radical students who would not recognize many of the analyses that are made about the condition of a dependent or deprived nation within Britain or any of the other deprived nations and regions of Europe. Yet they start from very similar but less negotiable feelings: feelings of social distance, of alienation, of political frustration and powerlessness. But the steps that they can then take, they find extremely difficult. It seems to me that what is happening – and this is what gave me a very strong sense of retracing a journey and finding that I’d come back to the same place but that place had changed – is the possibility in nationalist politics of making new affirmatives through necessarily confronting all the forms of negation, not simply to identify these as enemies but to see them as the whole complex of forces that at first sight we are against but that are parts of what has meanwhile happened to a whole human historical phase which in fact also includes us.
The moment when we move from a merely retrospective nationalist politics to a truly prospective politics, we begin that affirmative thinking which some of the most developed and intelligent left politics in certain other centres of Europe has truly lost. For however sophisticated, however militant that politics may be, it has lost something at its heart which is recognized again and again by those who are inside it: the sense of what any of this liberation is for, the sense of what the struggle would be able to attain, the sense of what that human life would be, other than merely Utopian rhetoric, which is the object of all the preoccupied conflict and struggle and argument. That sense has been so truly lost in so many of those areas, especially through the complications of the modern history of socialism, that what is now being contributed, I think still very incompletely, but what is being contributed and almost alone is being contributed from the new nationalist movements, is a reconnection inside the struggle, including the negations, but also the sense of an objective which has the possibility of affirmation. And if I read the nerves of my contemporaries rightly, I realize how exhausted those nerves are after the extraordinarily confused and frustrating politics of the last thirty years. The new moment of affirmation is to me the quite crucial ingredient and at present it is coming from the periphery. It is the renewal of a crucial ingredient without which politics will be only the capitalist interplay of interests, and that would be the end of politics in any sense which would have been understandable by me when I first started looking at political life.
And so the movement curiously is from an initial naivety, which I remember very well not understanding – as I still sometimes can’t understand – how it could be that people should not want to live in real community. I mean, is it not so clearly a much better way to live? What on earth is stopping us? And still I went back a year ago to the fiftieth anniversary of the General Strike at the National Union of Mine-workers’ conference at Pontypridd. As people talked about it it seemed incredible that there had not been socialism in Britain for fifty years. What on earth was stopping us? I found out; we have all found out. But in the course of finding out, what has been learned is in so many ways so negative that the renewal of effort back in those metropolitan centres is a matter of fibre, is a matter of emotional strength quite as much as it’s a matter of intellectual ability or organizing capacity. That then is the thing which I see as the importance of the renewal of national politics, and especially here in Wales. It would be absurdly flattering to say that it has done more yet than feel at the edges of what this new kind of affirmative and liberating politics could be, but it almost alone is attempting it.