“Under which King Besonian?”
“My God!” cried Gudrun. “But wouldn’t it be wonderful, if all England did suddenly go off like a display of fireworks.”
“It couldn’t,” said Ursula. “They are all too damp, the powder is damp in them.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” said Gerald.
“Nor I,” said Birkin. “When the English really begin to go off, en masse, it’ll be time to shut your ears and run.”
“They never will,” said Ursula. “We’ll see,” he replied.
—WOMEN IN LOVE
The word “revolution” is like a bell which makes some salivate approval or disapproval according to the conditioned response. After looking at the title of the last chapter of Out of Apathy some said: “Revolution: Apocalyptic, Marxist pipedream, opiate of the intellectuals, nostalgia for Chartism, utopian rhetoric, etc.” Others said: “Revolution? I go for that—down with the lot, Bomb, Establishment, mass media, Shell building and all—roll on the day!”
In the published discussion (as well as in readers’ letters and Club meetings) many interesting lines have been followed up. But for most readers it is clear that this concept suggests (at best) a very remote contingency, (at worst) an exercise in scholasticism. My suggestion that “in one sense, we are now constantly living on the edge of a revolutionary situation” was either shrugged or laughed off.
And yet this seems to me to be the crux of the argument. I don’t mean that we are living on the edge of a situation which will suddenly disclose itself in some dramatic manner so that everyone will recognise it to be revolutionary. Nor do I mean that we are bound to enter an early crisis which will only admit of a revolutionary solution—Hanson’s “Judgment Day” argument, while relevant to Grossman’s present position seems to me to be irrelevant to the theme of Out of Apathy. We might easily miss “our” revolution just as we missed it in 1945.
I accept Charles Taylor’s criticism that at the end of the essay I sketched in the possible con sequences of a British withdrawal from NATO with such brevity that it gave rise to the notion of cataclysmic crisis in a new form. Yet I did not intend to suggest that if we succeed in disentangling Britain from NATO we will thereby trick the British people into an unforeseen situation with an inescapable revolutionary outcome. It is because the Cold War is the greatest effective cause of apathy, inhibiting or distorting all forms of social growth, and because NATO is the fulcrum of Western capitalist power, that the British people will be unable to extricate themselves from this context without developing a popular struggle which will at the same time generate pressures in a hundred other directions, and awaken the political consciousness of the nation.
The first stage of this struggle commenced at Aldermaston and culminated in the Scarborough victory. The second stage has now commenced, and as I write delegates are returning to their constituencies and mobilising support, as the members of the Long Parliament went back to the provinces to raise their troops of horse. The struggle this year is going to be far sharper than anything we have seen for fifteen years.
As Stuart Hall shows, we are embarking on a struggle, not to “win” the Labour Movement, but to transform it. And at the end of this? May we not still find the Tories in power, the Labour Party “fragmented” (terrifying word—what is it now?), and the “electorate” dismayed and confused? Perhaps this will be the short-term outcome. But if this were all, how are we to explain the profound anxiety with which the Establishment views the failure of Mr. Gaitskell to contain the rebellion within the Labour Party? Behind the talk, in Liberal and Conservative journals, of the “threat” to our “two-party system,” there is surely the fear that energies are being released which have for fifteen years been safely contained within certain bipartisan limits and conventions, and that these energies may in the longer term endanger the system itself? Labour is ceasing to offer an alternative way of governing existing society, and is beginning to look for an alter native society. Mr. Macmillan no longer sits comfortably in a chair which Mr. Gaitskell has kindly provided. He sits in the same chair as was used by ex-Premier Kishi of Japan.
This is only one point where the conventions of our political life are now being threatened, and one reason why I cannot agree that the discussion of the concept of revolution is academic. Indeed, it seems to me of immediate contemporary relevance, in the sense that it is in the light of this concept—the kind of transition to socialist society which we envisage to be possible—that we must make many other judgments this year: it affects the kind of Labour Party we want to see, the emphasis in trade union activity, the role of Left Clubs. The fact that few readers have felt this relevance suggests either that I am wrong; or that I presented the argument so badly that it failed to come across. I prefer to accept the second criticism, which means that I must go back and try to do it again.
First, in self-defence. Out of Apathy was conceived as a book about apathy. This was where we came in; the New Left first appeared as a revolt against apathy within a particular social and political context. We wished to show the inter-connections between certain phenomena of “apathy” in economic, social, intellectual, and political life: their common ground in an “affluent” capitalist society in the context of Cold War: and to suggest that tensions and positive tendencies were present which might—but need not necessarily—lead people out of apathy and towards a socialist resolution.
I think that Out of Apathy does in fact do this. But at this stage our space was overrun, and it was only by stretching the good temper of the publisher that we were able to beg a further 5,000 words for a conclusion. All the contributors felt that the book would be left hanging in the air unless at least an attempt was made to tie up the ends by raising the question of the transition to a socialist society—what lay beyond the conventions of our bipartisan foreign policy and “mixed economy,” how do we get from an irresponsible to an humane and responsible society, from a dominative, acquisitive ethic to communal self-activity? This is what Revolution attempted to do, and the faults in execution are my own responsibility.
Second, we underestimated the degree to which readers (and reviewers) would be led, by their own expectations as well as by publicity, to expect a quite different kind of book. Outsiders, who had a vague notion of the New Left as yet one more pressure-group contesting for power within the Labour Party, expected from the first of our books a “definitive” statement of our “position,” something in the nature of a grand manifesto together with an immediate twelve-point pro gramme for the Labour Movement, CND, and world socialism. Insiders—readers of NLR and members of Left Clubs—were no less impatient to find a standard around which to rally—a crisp statement of aims—something to join, something to fight for, something to do.
And hence that cloudburst of frustration which descended on our heads.
For the first error, an apology. This article is a penance. For the second, not so much apology—especially to members of Left Clubs. If we had attempted a grand synthesis and programme it would have been a shoddy short-term job, and would now be blowing around in the post-Scarborough winds along with a dozen other “left” programmes of the past five years.
The New Left is not the kind of movement that should be comforted by a fake Book of Answers; nor should it be the kind where the rank-and-file down below wait for “them” up top to hand down the only correct “line.” One part of our approach can never be broken down finally into any ten-point programme—how much of the values of sex equality or of community, or of the aspiration for a common culture, can be captured inside a set of specific proposals? But the part which can wants to be done well, and not scratched into shape for an emergency con ference resolution. It is being done all the time (for example, the articles of John Hughes Raymond Williams and Duncan Macbeth in NLR 4), and it will be one of the functions of future New Left Books to elaborate these policies.
HOWEVER, THE ELABORATION of particular policies implies a general critique of society—and when we replace the passive term “critique” by the notion of a nexus of radical changes in many interconnected fields, then we are back once again at the problem of revolution. It is exactly this crucial point in the outlook of the New Left which has come under increasing attack this summer—an attack which has developed in such similar form in so many different places that one is almost tempted to look for a conspiratorial co ordinating hand. There is at least the indefatigable hand of Mr. Julius Gould who—foiled in his attempt to kill Out of Apathy at birth in the Observer—has pursued it into the correspondence columns of the Times Literary Supplement, where he denounces its “crude and vociferous Marxism”: “Responsibility for this rests with the small group of ex-communists who have attained such power over the New Left and have skilfully used it as a vehicle for reviving and publicising their Marxist faith.” (16 Sept. 1960)
The same conspiracy theory of New Left history (as well as the same bullying, pejorative employment of the term “Marxist”) is offered by Mr. Bernard Crick in the Political Quarterly (July–September 1960): the “fund of inchoate idealism” of Universities and Left Review “has been taken for a ride by a few old Marxists who know what they want”; and it is embroidered in Socialist Commentary (September 1960) by Mr. John Gillard Watson, who finds that the “old Marxists” are “distorting” the history of the New Left, “trying to dominate” the movement, and “know how to exploit political innocence and the enthusiasm of ULR and its readers.” (In the same article I am likened to Zhdanov and accused of the “peculiarly dishonest” use of quotations from D. H. Lawrence—O.K., I am still using them). But such abuse apart—and these critics cannot be argued with since they offer, not arguments, but a display of spleen—more scrupulous critics concentrate upon the same supposed incompatibility of the “Marxist” and “idealist” tendencies in the New Left. Professor J. M. Cameron has warned Third Programme listeners against the “vestigial Bolshevism” of the New Left, which he attributes largely to the Marxist “opiates” smuggled in by the New Reasoner group. And Ken Coates has written to the Listener (6 October 1960) eagerly confirming the Professor’s thesis (although he would draw from it an opposite conclusion), finding the New Left to be poised in a struggle for mastery between Prometheus and Adam—or (perhaps less prosaically) Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor.
There are two problems here—one of long-term philosophical and theoretical clarification, one of immediate political significance. The first problem—of the difference in origin, emphasis, and assumption of particular writers on the Editorial Board of this journal—demands exact and discriminating discussion and I can only refer to it in passing here. No doubt there are differences in emphasis, and as time goes on they may become more apparent and fruitfully so. We have always been confident that the confluence of several traditions in our movement is a source of strength, not of division; and we have no hankering after some enforced ideological conformity—that “rigid external formality” beloved of all sects from Milton’s time to our own, which leads (in his words) “into a gross conforming stupidity, a stark and dead congealment of wood and hay and stubble, forced and frozen together.” (Labour Review, Marxism Today and Socialist Commentary). We prefer to discuss theoretical differences openly in these pages; and I must disappoint our critics by telling them that when it comes to Board discussion on NATO, Mr. Gaitskell, or even Mr. Julius Gould, the Prometheans and Adamists find they are in complete accord.
But the second problem—as to why this particular attack should have been mounted against the New Left at this moment—must be taken up at once. The burden of the criticism in the respectable press is that two years ago there was a splendid “radical” idealism growing up among young people around ULR which has now become tainted with Marxism—the old men of the New Reasoner are the spoonful of Victorian tar which is spoiling the abundant barrel of Partisan honey. Moreover, the scent of that honey has provoked much licking of lips in many quarters; many a hard and opportunist eye was seen to water enviously as the Aldermaston marchers went by last Easter. It is true that two year’s ago, when ULR was struggling with deficits, and its voluntary production team was on the point of breakdown, neither Political Quarterly nor Socialist Commentary nor the Third Programme noticed the splendid “inchoate idealism” that was being displayed. But today all the opportunist politicians of the “left”—Messrs. Gaitskell, Grimond and Gollan (not to mention Messer Gerryhealy)—would like to make a takeover bid for the “idealism of youth.” “Here is a set of attitudes ready to be taken up, made use of and assisted,” declares Mr. Crick, regarding enviously “the actual rank-and-file of the New Left”: “There is no lack of a sense of service which could be invoked, even if not directly for politics. Let there be no doubt about it, Out of Apathy does not represent these people . . .”
And more recently Mr. Crosland has made a guarded gesture in the direction of—
questions of education, of leisure, of culture and aesthetics, and the general backcloth and fittings of the society. It is the function of contemporary parties of the Left to nurture and articulate these more imaginative, idealistic aspirations. (Encounter, October 1960)
“Attitudes ready to be taken up, made use of,” “even if not directly for politics,” “backcloth and fittings”—these are surely the give-away phrases? I am suggesting that it is not the “Marxism” of any particular members of the New Left which gives such offence, but the politics which informs our whole critique and which unites each separate part of it. It is the knot which ties together the parts which our critics would like to cut—the connections between Raymond Williams’ critique of advertising and John Hughes’ exposure of the subordination of the public to the private sector, between our analysis of “questions of education, of leisure, of culture” and our analysis of the Business Society, and between our polemic against Cold War strategy and our critique of the intellectual components of apathy. A concern about the Bomb or apartheid, an emphasis on cultural “fittings,” a propensity to rush around with banners and discuss the Good Life in coffee-houses—any one of these things, taken by itself, might be absorbed with advantage into the existing political setup. What is proving indigestible is our insistence that none of these things can be taken separately: that socialists must confront the capitalist system, where the Bomb is endorsed by the media, which are upheld by advertisements, which stem from private concentrations of power, which exploit people both as producers and as consumers, by creating a mental environment which fosters acquisitive and impoverishes community values in such a way that traditional working-class consciousness appears to be eroding with the assistance of Mr. Gaitskell’s capitulation to the Bomb and to the psephological arguments of adaptation. This (when we have got our breath back) is the House which the Irresponsible Society is building for Jack; and we have declared it to be all wrong, from foundation to roof. Mr. Crick and Mr. Crosland would prefer us to take the House as given, and to concern ourselves with the furnishings and decoration. It is because we insist upon the connections between the structure and the fittings, between the architect and builder and the people who live within it, that our critique is revolutionary, and therefore is proving intractable to all attempts to “take it up” as a youthful contemporary veneer to the politics of piecemeal reform.
I DON’T THINK that the attempt to nobble the “rank-and-file of the New Left” ever had much chance of success. The Clubs are growing in numbers, organisation, and maturity—and it is their politics which is making them grow. But it reminds me that there were (self-styled) “Marxist” eyes which watered as well. When Ken Coates criticises the “ambivalence” of the New Left it is because he does not consider us “Marxist” enough. This criticism deserves serious discussion, the more specific and the less scholastic the better, just as the opposite criticism—that some of us are held back by “Victorian” Marxist notions which no longer have validity—is one which I don’t wish to side-step. But I am getting bored with some of the members of “Marxist” sects who pop up at Left Club meetings around the country to demand in a your-money-or-your-life tone of voice whether the speaker is a Marxist, whether he “believes in” the class struggle, and whether he is willing to give instant adhesion to this or that version of the Creed. What I take issue with is not the earnestness with which the sectarians advocate their doctrines but the readiness which they display to denounce all those who disagree as traitors to the socialist cause. The passage from comradely criticism to wholesale anathema is alarmingly swift. Michael Kidron, an editor of International Socialism, concludes a review of Out of Apathy which contains valuable and pertinent criticism with the judgment: “It has ideas, but unless these ideas become working-class ideas aimed at working-class power they will remain irrelevant to the socialist movement and powerless to advance it.” (Autumn 1960)
The tone is unmistakeable, and it is scarcely less bullying than that of Mr. Gould. I am not now concerned with the distinction made between an “idea” and a “working-class idea”—a distinction which, although I have worked for some years as an historian in the Marxist tradition, I still find difficult. But I suspect that Michael Kidron, in this passage, is not concerned with this kind of discrimination either. What he means to imply is that he has an anathema ready to deliver at the whole of the New Left, as a set of phoneys and dilettante litterateurs, but that he is graciously holding his hand for a few minutes in the hope that one or two of us may, at this late hour, decide to side with the “working class.” By “working class” he means his side and his doctrines, since it is the delusion of all Marxist sectaries that their group or journal is the ark in which the true Marxist Covenant is preserved. He would have got much the same effect if he had simply cribbed the lines of Ancient Pistol: “Under which king, Besonian? speak, or die.”
The word “working class” is about the most dangerous word in the rhetoric of the labour movement. We all employ it, and with its extraordinarily rich associations it has power to move us all. For this reason most of the bad ideas which gain acceptance in the labour movement are loudly acclaimed by their advocates as being “in the interests of the working class” (watch out next time you see Mr. Sam Watson or Mr. John Gollan using the word!). But a bad idea is not any better for being “working class,” and if one cares about the advancement of the working-class movement it is a great deal more harmful. In fact, the Right-wing usually employ the term descriptively, to commend those capitalist attitudes and values which some working people assent to when they are reading the Daily Mirror; whereas the sectaries employ it Platonically to indicate not ideas actually held by significant numbers of working people but ideas which they ought to hold, or which it would be in their interests to hold, if they conformed to an approved doctrinal system. In this case, a “working-class idea” is an idea of which Michael Kidron approves.
I am sorry to seem to pick upon contributors to International Socialism, which seems to me the most constructive journal with a Trotskyist tendency in this country, most of the editorial board of which are active (and very welcome) members of the Left Club movement. But these are additional reasons for making these criticisms: first, because a socialist dialogue is very difficult when it is conducted with people who, in one part of themselves, want to be able to “write off” the New Left as an intellectual diversion; second, because this tone can become damaging to the Club movement and can discredit whatever is creative in the Marxist tradition. I cannot forget an appalling meeting of the London Club (to discuss Out of Apathy) at which half-a-dozen Covenanting sects were present, each reaching by means of their “Marxist science” diametrically opposed conclusions. The vibrant self-consuming hatred displayed by one sect for another can have left no emotional energy over for concern with the capitalist system or nuclear war; and the air was thick with the sniff-sniff-sniff of “theorists” who confused the search for clarity with the search for heresy. The word “comrade” was employed, in six-foot-high quotation marks, like deadly barbs on the polished shaft of Leninist irony—embellishing devastating witticisms of the order of “perhaps Comrade Thompson will tell us if he supposes that socialism will come at the behest of the Virgin Mary?”
WE ARE ALL ONLY too familiar with these attitudes and with this tone—most Clubs have suffered from one or more of the hectoring prophets, heterodox or orthodox, of Diabolical and Hysterical Mysterialism. The connections are seen, but they are seen to be everything; and everything can be reduced to a few basic texts. When someone discusses NATO, he is belaboured for not mentioning a building workers’ strike; and when he is discussing the mining industry he is attacked for not bringing in a full analysis of Soviet bureaucracy. Where criticism is forceful and valid—as for example, of the failure of the New Left to develop its work in the trade union and industrial field—it is not offered constructively—how can we best improve this together?—but as an item of denunciation, a proof of the dilettante character of our movement. Marxism is conceived of, not as a living tradition, but as a self-enclosed doctrine, a means of flattening and simplifying whatever phenomena are under investigation so that certain plausible facts may be selected (and all others discounted) in order to ornament or “prove” preexisting assumptions. A great deal of what is today most stridently acclaimed as “Marxism” is no more than thinking of this order, whether it commences with the assumption that Soviet leaders are all-sinning or all-knowing. This accounts for the scholastic style in which so many “Marxist” statements are couched—theses and counter-theses so neatly sewn at every seam that reality cannot break in at any point. When I hear someone announce that he intends to “apply Marxism to” a problem, I cannot help calling up a mental picture of a Victorian headmaster with a cane: what he means is that he is going to make the facts dance to his tune whether they like it or not. At the worst, such people (and I am not thinking here of our comrades of International Socialism) can be an active nuisance within the Socialist movement, with their jargon, their conspiratorial hocus-pocus, their discussion-hogging, their dissemination of suspicion, and their willingness—from whatever motive—to wreck any organisation which they cannot hobble. But for the most part they are guilty only of a self-isolating political immaturity, which enables them to see the connections but not the people who must be connected; and which constantly drives them towards an élitist outlook and strategy since, if all existing left groupings are suspect except their own, they must look for support to an hypothetical uncontaminated working class which in some hypothetical eventuality will loom up from the docks and the mills and follow their lead.
I have gone a long way round to suggest three simple things. First, that we should cease chucking round the terms “Marxism” and “working class” in an indiscriminate and rhetorical manner. Second, that in the New Left those who reject and those who are committed to the Marxist tradition must cease to regard it as if it were a loyalty test or the demarcation line of a foot-and-mouth-disease area and (accepting the good faith of fellow socialists) bring their respective insights and disciplines to the examination of particular practical and theoretical problems. Third, that we accept the advice of C. Wright Mills, and take a long and fresh look at the whole problem of working-class “consciousness” today, resisting the inclination to cry “treason” if in the process we find that deep-rooted prejudices and assumptions come under criticism.
THE CROSS-FIRE from all sides converges on this point. How can we assume anything so ridiculous as a revolutionary working-class consciousness within an affluent society? “What,” asks Sol Encel (NLR 4) “is to provide the dynamic for the breakthrough?” How am I to convince “not the habitués of the Partisan, but the young Coventry motor worker,” asks Peter Marris, who sees working people as status-seekers caught up “in an endless search for reassurance against the fear of being looked down upon.” Michael Kidron criticises me because, in writing of a revolutionary confrontation between two systems, two ways of life, I give no precise definition of the social context:
Confrontation between whom? . . . The tiny fuzz that surrounds this question spreads rapidly: the moment Thompson directs the working class off-stage in his social confrontation, the state of that class’s political and social consciousness becomes of no immediate concern to him. It then becomes easy to Thompson to fix that consciousness: to give it goals, to . . . ignore the material factors in its development . . .
Mr. Crosland (passim) and Harry Hanson (NLR 5, “Socialism and Affluence”) found their positions upon assumptions—and some evidence—about contemporary working-class consciousness, although their conclusions are very different, Mr. Crosland taking an optimistic view of encroaching classlessness, Harry Hanson taking a pessimistic view of the corrupting influence of “affluence.” And Professor Wright Mills asks us to get outside this argument altogether:
What I do not quite understand about some new-left writers is why they cling so mightily to “the working class” of the advanced capitalist societies as the historic agency, or even as the most important agency, in the face of the really impressive historical evidence that now stands against this expectation. Such a labour metaphysic, I think, is a legacy from Victorian Marxism that is now quite unrealistic.
And he offers as an alternative “the cultural apparatus, the intellectuals—as a possible, immediate, radical agency of change.”
We should note the way in which a kind of economic reductionism disables the discussion of class, both among anti-Marxists and Marxist sectaries. In truth, the prevailing ideologies of both East and West are dominated by a debased caricature of Marxism; although, in the first case, we have a picture of the means of production spontaneously generating revolutionary activity and consciousness, with the working class seen not as the agency but intermediary of objective laws; whereas in the second place the picture is much the same, but the motor of change has been removed, and we see all men (except the “intellectuals”) as prisoners of their economic interests, social “structure,” and status-conditioning.
Both Crosland and Hanson seem to me to be victims of this fallacy: both argue from a static notion of the working class and of its characteristic consciousness which is derived from some Victorian phenomena and some from the nineteen-thirties. Both argue that “affluent” capitalism is mopping up some class grievances and is eroding traditional forms of working-class consciousness. Both conclude that therefore the “basis” for the socialist movement has been weakened. Neither of them can shake sufficiently free of traditional ways of thinking to conceive of new forms of class consciousness arising which are both more consonant with changed reality and more revolutionary in implication. But why should such a notion appear to be “utopian”?
IT CAN ONLY APPEAR utopian if we have a static concept of class: if we assume that the working class is a given entity with a “fixed” characteristic consciousness which may wax or wane but remains essentially the same thing—a working class which emerged as a social force somewhere around 1780, with steam and the factory system, and which has thereafter grown in size and organisation but has not changed significantly in form or in relationship to other classes.
In fact, “it” has never existed; what is misleading is the use of one term, “working class,” to describe so many greatly differing manifestations of class conflict in greatly differing contexts. Certainly, some continuing traditions may be observed; but when we employ a term, like bourgeoisie or “working class” which covers a whole historical epoch, we should not expect the specific forms of class consciousness in any particular segment of this epoch to have any immediate relationship to those in another segment. In this epochal sense, forms of “working-class consciousness” may be found to differ as much from each other as the consciousness of Roundheads differed from Lancashire cotton masters.
The definition of social class is notoriously difficult; and it is commonplace knowledge that Marx himself never offered any extended definition. But this presents less difficulty to an historian than to a sociologist or philosopher, since to an historian a class is that which defines itself as such by its historical agency. For Marx, a class defined itself in historical terms, not because it was made up of people with common relationship to the means of production and a common life-experience, but because these people became conscious of their common interest, and developed appropriate forms of common organisation and action. Discussing the French peasantry, Marx wrote (in The Eighteenth Brumaire):
The small peasants form a vast mass, the members of which live in similar conditions, but without entering into manifold relations with one another. Their mode of production isolates them from one another, instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse. . . . In so far as millions of families live under economic conditions of existence that divide their mode of life, their interests and their culture from those of other classes, and put them into hostile contrast to the latter, they form a class. In so far as there is merely local interconnection among these small peasants, and the identity of their interests begets no unity, no national union, and no political organisation, they do not form a class.
Thus the Marxist concept of class (to which I am personally committed) is an historical concept, which bears in mind the interaction of objective and subjective determinants.
MOREOVER, WE MUST BEAR in mind that the historical concept of class entails the notion of a relationship with another class or classes; what becomes apparent are not only common interests as within one class but common interests as against another class. And this process of definition is not just a series of spontaneous explosions at the point of production (though this is an important part of it); it is a complex, contradictory, ever-changing and never-static process in our political and cultural life in which human agency is entailed at every level.
Perhaps this would seem less abstract if we took some examples from our own history. The 1830s and 1840s are often thought of as the “classic” period of early working-class consciousness—the confrontation of the “two nations.” In 1808 a magistrate was writing: “The instant we get near the borders of the manufacturing parts of Lancashire we meet a fresh race of beings, both in point of manners, employments and subordination.” It seemed, to conservative and radical alike, as if the new instruments of production had created a new people with a revolutionary potential. The notion is repeatedly found in Engels’ early Condition of the Working Class where he refers to the proletariat as having been engendered by the new manufacture and speaks of the “factory hands” as “the eldest children of the industrial revolution,” who “have from the beginning to the present day formed the nucleus of the Labour Movement.” Hence one fixed notion of the working class entered the socialist tradition which is still influential today—the notion that the origin and growth of working-class consciousness was a function of the growth of large-scale factory production whose inevitable tendency must be to engender a revolutionary consciousness.
But if we look inside the portmanteau phrase, “working class,” it falls into a great number of constituent parts. We find not only a factory proletariat (itself subdivided among overlookers, skilled workers, women and juveniles) but a far greater number of artisans and outworkers; as well as miners, agricultural labourers, seamen, migrant Irish workers, and so on. Moreover we often find (notably in Chartist times) that the most revolutionary “shock troops” of the working class were not factory proletarians at all but were the depressed handworkers; while in many towns, including large industrial towns, the actual nucleus of the labour movement was made up largely of artisans—shoemakers, saddlers and harnessmakers, building workers, booksellers, small tradesmen, and the like. Further, so far from being vacillating “petit-bourgeois” elements, these were often (as George Rudé finds them to be in his study of The Crowd in the French Revolution) among the most consistent and self-sacrificing participants in the working-class movement. The vast area of radical London in the mid-nineteenth century drew its strength from no major heavy industries (the dockers and engineers only made their impact later in the century) but from the host of smaller trades and occupations—coachmen and coach-builders, bakers, servants, streetsellers, carters, brewers, paper-workers, glue-boilers, watchmakers, hatters, brush-makers, printing-trades . . .
WHAT I AM INSISTING upon is that the emergence of the factory system by itself does not explain working-class consciousness in Britain in the period between Peterloo and the end of Chartism. The people who created this consciousness were not “new-minted”—many of the traditions of the “Journeymen and Labourers” whom Cobbett addressed went far back into the eighteenth century. There were abundant causes for division between different members of this class—as between old skilled groups like the croppers or the woolcombers and the new factory workers or the unskilled Irish immigrants, and so on. And the most numerous groups of working people (notably the handloom weavers and many of the artisans) were actively and bitterly hostile to the new factory system, so that many features of working-class politics between 1780 and 1850 can be understood, not as a revolt for anything approaching socialism, but as a revolt against industrialism. The cry which arises from repeated agitations is not “to each according to his needs” but “in the sweat of thy own brow.” When all this is borne in mind it is all the more remarkable that the Chartist period exhibits the “classic” features of working-class consciousness. Why? Unless we are to fall in with the fashionable (and ignorant) academic game of relating it all to the trade-cycle, we must surely find that, while the movement was fueled by economic grievances, the form and the direction of the movement was decided by political and cultural influences. Chief among these, the aristocracy and middle-class, by the settlement of 1832, defined without any possibility of error their notion of class: at the crucial point of class relationship an unambiguous line was drawn, defining their common interest in preserving a monopoly of the rights of political citizenship as against the majority of the nation. It remained to the Chartists to define their common interests around the demand for the vote, which became the symbol of the dignity and worth of every man, and this they did with extraordinary skill. But this consciousness—and its appropriate forms of organisation—were made, not “generated”: and it is only necessary to glance at the Northern Star to see that it was the constant day-to-day work of the Chartist leader and organiser to weld together the most disparate elements—weaver and factory worker, artisan and Irish—and to discount divisive sectional interests in the common interest of the class. Moreover, material factors did not dictate that Charist consciousness must be such—the conditions might equally well have facilitated other class alignments, and partial suffragists, educational and temperance reformers, and Anti-Corn Law Leaguers were constantly seeking to detach sections of the workers from Chartism and attach them to the Radical, free-trading, middle-class.
THUS THIS FIRST GREAT phase of “working-class consciousness” was a creation out of diverse and seemingly contradictory elements; and it happens to have been based less upon the factory proletariat than upon miners, weavers and artisans. In the forty years after 1848 this consciousness appears to dissolve and then to take a new form; and we seem to encounter all Crosland’s and Hanson’s problems of the “erosion of affluence.” Although during these years we see little alteration in the objective relationship of working people to the ownership of the means of production, and although the factory proletariat increases both absolutely and in ratio to the rest, we find no corresponding strengthening of the subjective components of class, while the 1832 definition of relationship between classes becomes blurred in many ways. What happened was that a combination of political defeat and of economic recovery led to the disintegration of Chartist consciousness into all the disparate elements which had been contained with such skill within it. The hand-workers were too depressed, dispirited, and ageing to continue to fight: skilled workers found means to advance themselves within the existing setup: unskilled workers relapsed into “apathy.” Those factory workers who succeeded in improving their conditions directly by organisation found, ironically, that it turned them away from the dispersal of energy in grandiose class agitation and towards the politics of adaptation and class collaboration. Their very success in “militant” action (combined with their reconciliation to a capitalist work morality and work discipline, the desire to “get on” and the desire for security) gave them an increasing stake in the continuation of the “system.” Not only the politics of revolution, but also the politics of piecemeal reform, find their origin in the “dark, Satanic mills.”
But this is only one part of the story, since beneath the dominant political consciousness of collaboration or “Lib-Labism,” processes were at work in the industrial communities which were laying the basis for a new kind of “working-class consciousness.” This above all was the period of the creation of the values of working-class community around the mines, the factories and docks—the independence of “Labour” found expression in scores of class organisations (trade union, religious, social, educational, co-operative, etc.) which preceded the actual emergence of the Independent Labour Party and the New Unionism. Working people talked, dressed, worked, shopped, worshipped, and thought differently from people of other classes. For this reason Marx and Engels tended to discount the political consciousness of “Lib-Labism” as a temporary phase of “bourgeoisification” (their word for the “corruption” of the skilled workers by “affluence”) which would end when the specially favoured position of Britain in the world market came to an end. Engels lived to see, in the dock strike of 1889 and the first successes of the I.L.P., a new potentially more revolutionary political consciousness which (he thought) confirmed their predictions.
I AM CONCERNED to stress that the problems of “affluence” are by no means new; and that divisive, sectional and adaptive pressures have always been found in working-class experience, asserting themselves in different contexts according to the economic and social conditions, the skill or blunders of Labour leaders and organisers, and the way in which capitalist politicians have “handled” the grievances of working people.
These pressures towards adaptation appear to have been greatly strengthened in the past fifteen years, for reasons which are familiar to us all: the diminution of primary poverty and unemployment: the provision of educational and other “ladders”: the strength of organised Labour in its “countervailing” roles: the influence of the mass media and the prevalence of the ideology of “opportunity”; new methods of manipulating the worker in his consumer role, and so on. Moreover, Crosland and others have laid great stress upon factors which appear to be making for an actual “shrinking” in the “working-class” itself—the changing ratio of the numbers of people employed in industry and in the services, technological changes within industry itself which alter the ratio of “primary” and “secondary” productive workers, and the growth of the ideology of “classlessness” whereby according to subjective criteria a growing number of people (especially young people) do not regard or do not wish to regard themselves as “working class.”
I THINK IT IS FOOLISH to dispute the general weight of this evidence. But what is at issue is whether we are really living through a period in which working-class consciousness as such is disintegrating, or whether it is changing its form—whether certain traditional values and forms of organisation are dying, so that we are—just as in 1848—at the end of a particular phase of working-class history; and whether a new kind of consciousness may not be arising which it is our business to define and give new form. If the characteristic workingman of the 1830s was the handloom weaver or artisan, so the characteristic Labour man of the 1930s may be thought to have been the miner or the worker in heavy industry—and we may have come to identify all working-class traditions with his traditions, and see cause for dismay in the decline of his influence. But there is nothing inherently socialist in the production of coal or machine-tools as opposed to services or cultural values, apart from the rich traditions of struggle which the workers in the former industries inherit. As automation advances we should expect to find that the ratio of primary to secondary productive workers will change, and socialists should only welcome this change if it leads to more and more people being involved in the exchange of valuable human services (welfare, education, entertainment and the like) and not (as at present) in salesmanship, packaging, and bureaucratic administration. What this change will shatter (and is already beginning to shatter) is not “the working class” but traditional notions of the working class as a fixed, unchanging category with a fixed consciousness and unchanging forms of expression. It is certainly true that the conditions out of which the characteristic Labour movement of the first half of this century was formed have changed. The dominant ideology of this movement has consisted not in the expression of revolutionary class consciousness, but in harnessing class grievances to a liberal-radical programme. The characteristic appeal of Labour has been not for a new system but for a “fair share” within the existing system, a “fair deal” and “equality of opportunity.” The definition of class relationship fell less along the line of ownership than upon the line of class privilege: it was Tory exclusiveness, heartlessness, and social advantage which aroused the most bitter attack. But this line of relationship has become blurred by recent adjustments of capitalist class consciousness to the experience of the war and of defeat in 1945. The modified Tory “image,” with its accent on humane industrial relations, sound public administration, and the “Opportunity State,” has robbed the traditional Labour appeal of its traditional foil. The cry of “equality of opportunity,” while an effective challenge to the old Tory privilege, is today met half-way by the new ideology of “classlessness” propagated by the media of the Business Society: “Get on, get ahead, get up!” Labour, so far from opposing, finds itself deeply implicated in “the system”; as the ladders of educational and technical opportunity are let down, so some of the traditional fuel of class grievance is used up.
Moreover, the traditional Labour politician who hawks over the grievances of the Thirties begins to appear increasingly hollow and insincere; and can be presented, as the trade unions are presented in the mass media, as speaking not for “all,” or for the “common man,” but for selfish vested interests. And the traditional appeal even loses its force for the real underprivileged—if Labour speaks on behalf of “opportunity” then it has less to say for the millions who “fail” the intitiative tests or the eleven-plus and who don’t “get on.” The cry for “equality of opportunity” merges with the myth of classlessness and provides—as did “Self-Help” before—an ethical legitimisation of the system.
All this is apart from the actual corruption of institutions of the Labour movement—and of people within it—which all socialists know a great deal about but which we rarely speak of frankly. I am suggesting that we should be grateful to Crosland for forcing us to look at certain facts in contemporary working-class consciousness, even if we read the facts differently and draw opposite conclusions. There is a real—and perhaps growing—danger of “the working class” (in its epochal connotation) splitting down the middle. On the one hand we will have the “old” working class, grouped round the pits and heavy industries of the North and of Scotland, which holds to its traditional values and forms of organisation. On the other hand, the “new” working population—with which most younger workers will identify themselves—which accepts the ideology of “classlessness” and is uninterested in or hostile to the traditional Labour movement. It is perfectly true that the traditional class appeal of the “old” not only has virtues which deeply move us but also has narrow, impoverishing features—a defensiveness and exclusiveness which many young working people resent. It is true also that if fewer people think or affirm that they are working-class, this expresses a cultural reality which cannot be argued away by dragging in the term “false consciousness”; it indicates an important fact about the consciousness of people who—so far as objective determinants are concerned—remain working people. Socialists may argue that the common interests which unite the “old” and “new” are vastly more important than those which divide them; but the fact will remain that many working people are scarcely conscious of their class identity and very conscious of their desire to escape the narrowing features of class. And if these tendencies continue, we could see a hardening of attitudes in the “old,” coupling the defence of sectional interests with a truly Luddite obstinacy; while among the “new” the ideology of classlessness will provide a powerful reinforcement to the acquisitive society.
IT IS NOT “GIVEN” that the disparate elements must take this form. The fact that they have begun to do so indicates the failure of the traditional Labour movement to adjust to social change and to fight in new ways for the common good. It has been unable to challenge the acquisitive society because it has for so long adapted itself to it and its ideology has mirrored it. An important part of the struggle now going on in the Labour movement is in fact for the creation of a new class-consciousness, consonant with contemporary reality, with the line of relationship with the enemy redefined, with a new definition of the identity of popular interests, with a new language of politics and a new moral temper, and with new organisations and the transformation of old ones. Can we succeed, as the Chartists for a time succeeded, in binding together old and new into a movement of the overwhelming majority of the people?
It seems to me that a great deal of the work of the New Left over the past three years has been directed towards the definition and creation of this “new” consciousness. One part (for example, in The Insiders, The Controllers, and in Titmuss’ Irresponsible Society) has been in disclosing the real centres of economic and political power in the Sixties, and in indicating where we must seek to effect a cleavage in consciousness, between the great business oligarchies and the people. It is this definition of class relationship which the Labour right-wing (with their demogogic tilts at “privilege” and “snobbery” and their actual enjoyment of Parliament as a Top Person’s Club), and the Old Left (with their cloth cap nostalgia and their general air of suspicion towards the salariat, professional workers and all who are not actually employed in basic industries) have so lamentably failed to establish. But as yet our definition of the enemy (and of the common interests of the people as against the business oligarchs) has scarcely broken into public consciousness. We have got to find far more vivid ways of impressing these facts upon people, taking up example after example of the undemocratic power and the irresponsible behaviour of those who now occupy the central stronghold of capitalist authority. Rent-racking, car crises, Clore-Cotton mergers, Cunard loans, Chronicle assassinations—we must ensure that each one is seen, not as an isolated outrage, but as an expression of class power.
Another part has been in our redefinition of the common good in terms of a society of equals, rather than of equality of opportunity, with a renewed emphasis upon the values of community. And with this has gone an emphasis upon those common interests around which the social democracy (“old” and “new” working class, technicians and professional workers) can be united as against the unsocial oligarchy—demands for peace, welfare, social priorities, education, cultural values, control over irresponsible power. With this, also, has gone an attempt to feel our way towards a new language of socialist politics embodying an ethic and attitudes to labour consonant with a society of equals. Insofar as we have got on with this work we have been very much concerned with “working-class ideas, aimed at working-class power”—such notions of the common good have repeatedly found expression in working-class history. But the new “working-class consciousness” which is forming is likely to be broader and more generous than that which was dominant in the Thirties; less “class-bound” in the old sense, speaking more in the name of the whole people. To attempt to force it back into older forms might well be only to isolate sections of the working-class and to lead them into defeat. And yet, at the same time, this consciousness could well become a revolutionary consciousness, since the notion of the common good (unlike the notion of opportunity) implies a revolutionary critique of the entire capitalist system. The demands which will be made—for common ownership, or town planning, or welfare, or democratic access to control of industry or mass media—cannot be met by a wage-increase here and a ladder there. And in struggling for these demands people will learn through experience the incompatibility between capitalist irresponsibility and the common welfare, and the need for revolutionary change. It is true (as Kidron suggests) that I am arguing that we can fix this new working-class consciousness and give it its goals. More than that, I am saying that it is the constant business of socialists to endeavour to fix this consciousness, since—if we do not do it—the capitalist media will “fix” it for us. Political consciousness is not a spontaneous generation, it is the product of political action and skill. But of course this “fixing” cannot be done on paper. It is above all the function of the party of Labour to present, every day and in every field of life, this vision of the common good; to define, again and again, the line of demarcation with the enemy; to mobilise people in the struggle for particular objectives, and to relate each contest—for wages or for nursery schools or for decent cities—to each other and to the larger conflict. This is what the present struggle to transform the Labour movement is about.
TOM MANN ONCE had a vision of the Labour movement as the constructive expression of the social powers of millions of individuals, so that every worker should feel its organisations as a multiplication of himself, as the embodiment of the collective power of common people. Few workers today see the organisations of the Labour movement as the active projection, in terms of power, of their own aspirations; only too often they see them as separated from, and sometimes hostile to, their interests—a Party they vote for, a union they have to join, endless channels in which their energies are dispersed, diverted, opposed, or translated into committee-politics and bumf. If the new class consciousness is to be embodied in the existing institutions of the Labour movement, then this sense of the intimate identity between people’s needs and their organisations must be re-created; and this will entail a transformation of the leadership, policies and structure of these organisations at least as far-reaching as that which the older unions underwent in 1890–1910. Whether this is possible we shall begin to find out in the coming year. If it is not possible, then new organisations will have to be created. If it is possible—if this vast organised power can be seen to speak, act and organise in the furtherance of a new vision of the common good, then we will swiftly realise that we are living “on the edge of a revolutionary situation.”
I PREFER THE HISTORICAL concept of “revolution” to that of “a transition to socialism.” The second phrase too often implies that the objective is fixed—that there is a “given” society which can be attained by a “seizure” of power which implies, not so much a change in the system, as a change in who runs the system, not a change in ownership but a change of owners. Moreover, the sociologist’s term, which Wright Mills employs—“a major structural change”—seems to me inadequate since it suggests certain administrative measures which effect changes in institutions rather than continuing processes which arise fiom popular activity and participation.
I suspect that it may be because of this static sociological terminology that he is able to ask whether “the cultural apparatus” may not be able to displace the working class as the agency of change. The danger is, not that the “cultural apparatus” or the “intellectuals” will be ineffectual in bringing certain changes about, but that these changes, if effected, will be scarcely worth having. Although this may be far from his intention, it would be only too easy in Britain for people to deduce from his words a Fabian or manipulative tactic which would result (at best) in a socialism “for” the people but not by the people themselves. It is possible that when Wright Mills offers the intellectuals “as a possible, immediate, radical agency of change” he is thinking of them, not as the leading agents of revolution, but as the force which may precipitate a new consciousness and initiate much broader processes. In this case I am much closer to agreement with him, since it seems to me to be a crucial role of socialist intellectuals to do exactly this; and this in fact is what is happening all round the world today. But while socialist intellectuals may “trigger off” these processes, they will only defeat and isolate themselves if they assume the hubris of “main agents,” since the kind of socialism which we want is one which is impossible without the participation of the whole people at every level.
Moreover, certain of Wright Mills’ emphases (and the prevalence today of a kind of intellectual isolationism) seem to me to be the product of particular experiences of the past ten years, which have resulted from causes (of which Wright Mills has himself offered a brilliant analysis) which may be ephemeral; and one of which has been the failure of most intellectuals in America and Britain to act as anything but the agents of the status quo. A generation of younger radical intellectuals is now coming up whose experience of this period of quiescence leads them to underrate the “slumbering energies” of working people, the extra-ordinary diversity of skill and creative ability denied expression and seeking for outlets; the way in which the daily exposure of working people to exploitation contradicts the solicitations of the mass media; the way in which community values and notions of the common good survive tenaciously in industry, in social life and in working-class organisations; the way in which even “apathy” is often an active, ironic negative opposed to the celebration of “affluence.” What I think socialist intellectuals in Britain tend, above all, to forget, is what it has meant for our people to have been for so long without real political leadership. I do not mean peripatetic politicians, but the kind of leadership which is in there with the people, in the factories, the streets, the offices, taking up their grievances, articulating their aspirations, knitting together one agitation with another in a general popular strategy. The only nationwide leadership of this kind on offer during the past ten years—that of the Communist Party—has disqualified itself in so many ways that it can scarcely be used as an example; but even so, any experience of this kind of vigorous Communist leadership, in a mining village or a Sheffield engineering works or among St. Pancras tenants, reveals the richness of response awaiting to be aroused. If only the Labour Party were to be transformed into a party capable of giving this kind of direct leadership, without the élitist manipulation or the suspect strategy of the Communist Party, then the problem of agency would be solved.
The historical concept of revolution, then, is not one of this change in “structure” or that moment of “transition,” nor need it be one of cataclysmic crisis and violence. It is a concept of historical process, whereby democratic pressures can no longer be contained within the capitalist system; at some point a crisis is precipitated which leads on to a chain of interrelated crises which result in profound changes in class and social relationships and in institutions—“transition” of power in the epochal sense. Since it is a process whose very nature is derived from heightened political consciousness and popular participation its outcome cannot be predicted with certainty; it is a process not only of making but also of choosing, which makes it all the more important that socialists should know where they want to go before they start. Moreover, we cannot possibly prescribe in advance the exact conditions under which this “breakthrough” will come—around what issue, in what context, with the aid of what “external” crises. Nor can we prescribe with and certainty the institutional changes that will be necessary—although here I think that the criticism of my article is entirely justified, that I and other New Left writers have failed to discuss sufficiently the “theory of the State,” and that we need not only to think in detail about the kinds of institutional change and democratic transformation of the machinery of State which are desirable, but also to begin to press for these changes now.
But I repeat the argument of “Revolution”: in the end, we can only find out in practice the breaking-point of the capitalist system, by un relenting constructive pressures within the general strategy of the common good. I think the objection of the sectaries to this—that it is merely “reformism”—is just fatuous; it is on a level with the arguments of the anarchist zanies of the 1880s who denounced the new unionism as a “palliative.” The Socialist Labour Leaguers and the rest who try to attach “down with the boss” slogans to CND demonstrations are on a level of immaturity with those who denounced Tom Mann and John Burns for not carrying a red flag at the head of the dockers’ demonstrations of 1889. Although they rant about the “class struggle,” they are just about beginning to lisp the first letters of its alphabet. But, on the other hand, I think that those who scoff at the possibility of our people moving forward into a revolutionary situation in pursuit of “ideal” demands instead of being whipped into it by economic disaster are victims of a similar impoverished economic reductionism. I just do not know where this notion of working people as unresponsive to anything except direct economic motivations came from; it certainly does not come out of the history of the British working class. The very notion of class-consciousness entails the recognition by the individual of greater values than personal self-interest; and the values and the very language of our movement reveal this time and again.
MOREOVER, IT IS JUST not true that our working-class history shows a series of struggles around bread-and-butter demands. This history is, in fact, far more to be understood as a continual enlargement of popular demands, a broadening concept of the common good. From bread riots to agitations for the vote, for the humane treatment of the poor, for working conditions and living conditions, for the education, health and amenities of the people. There seems to me no grounds for the psephological assumption that—somewhere around 1950—all this tradition ended, and the British working class (considered in the mass) became a dessicated calculating machine. Perhaps, by a paradoxical dialectic, it is in the myth of classlessness itself that a new and revolutionary class consciousness may be maturing? The Business Society may be fostering attitudes which it is in our power to give new forms of expression incompatible with the continuance of the acquisitive society. The young workers who seem to be turning away from the traditions of their fathers are at the same time turning away from the notion of belonging to an exploited class and are asserting (in the first place, perhaps, only as “consumers,” but implicitly as citizens) the claim to full social equality. The man who does not wish to wear a working-class cap, drink in a dreary Victorian workingman’s institute, and shop at a working- class shop, may see these as insignia of class segregation. It is difficult for the socialist to regard him without a sense of nostalgia for the values of his father which he has lost; but at the same time he may be more open to an appeal to the common good than to the “interests of the working class,” more responsive to a critique of the system as such and less concerned to defend a sectional interest within it. Moreover, in particular ways the force of this general critique of the system is becoming daily more apparent, in the false and irresponsible priorities, the transport muddle, the decay of our cities, the inadequacy of social services and the rest. And in his life-experience there will be much which will impell him to question—not cultural “backcloth and fittings” and optional luxuries—but the immorality of social life and the boredom of work, and the credentials of a society which offers him a lifetime of fifty-week years of labour in a confined environment for other people’s profit and tells him he has never “had it so good.” Finally, he will be led to this critique (and is already moving in this direction) because he is living at a time of greater danger and opportunity than men have ever lived in before; one must have a curiously eccentric and debased view of human nature to suppose that the defence of peace is beyond the comprehension of—and is something separate from the interests of—the working class. If we are to arouse this common democratic consciousness, of the people as against the oligarchs and (eventually) the system, we cannot (as Kidron warns) “ignore” the material factors in existing consciousness. On the contrary, we must study far more closely these factors, and look for every occasion—whether in theory or in action—to emphasise points of common interest between miner and white-collar worker, technician and textile worker. That is why we should reject Harry Hanson’s pessimistic advice—to surrender to an inevitable split between the “affluent” and the “traditional”—but should instead work actively to splice together the strengths of the old and the strengths of the new, so that if the split comes (as now seems likely) it comes on our terms, and not on Mr. Gaitskell’s. Instead of sneering rather self-righteously at the Old Left (as some New Lefters have given the impression) we should be working hard—especially in Left Clubs—to build bridges of understanding. We should be helping the CND youth to understand the great traditions of Labour, its power and capacity for self-renewal. And by bringing the “Old Left” into contact with a younger socialist tradition we will bring encouragement which—far more than self-righteous criticism—will help it to shed some outmoded attitudes. In fashioning this new popular consciousness, which could develop so swiftly that it would leave Mr. Gaitskell and his Parliamentary caucus flapping about like fish on dry land, it may be that the Left Club movement has a crucial part to play this winter.
What we need now, to give body and practical definition to the approach of the New Left, are some examples of socialist actions which go beyond the barren resolution-mongering and parliamentary idiocy in which so much of the Labour movement is caught up. There were plenty of programmes about improving the lot of “outcast London” in the early 1880s; but it was only when the gasworkers and dockers began to do it that a realistic movement emerged. It was the force of example of determined socialist groups—Jowett at Bradford, Lansbury and Crooks at Poplar—which gave point and force to new national policies in social welfare. A thousand examples could be given. And today we can only find out how to break through our present political conventions, and help people to think of socialism as something done by people and not for or to people, by pressing in new ways on the ground. One socialist youth club of a quite new kind, in East London or Liverpool or Leeds; one determined municipal council, probing the possibility of new kinds of municipal ownership in the face of Government opposition; one tenant’s association with a new dynamic, pioneering on its own account new patterns of social welfare—play-centres, nursery facilities, community services for and by the women—involving people in the discussion and solution of problems of town planning, racial intercourse, leisure facilities; one pit, factory, or sector of nationalised industry where new forms of workers’ control can actually be forced upon management; one experimental “Quality Centre” on the lines which Raymond Williams has proposed—a breakthrough at any one of these points would immediately help in precipitating a diffuse aspiration into a positive movement which would have far more hope of commanding wide public support than any movement of journals and books can ever hope to do.
To mention such possibilities is to call up an army corps of difficult objections. How? Where? What kind of a club? Which municipal council? How much could it get away with? People wouldn’t support it! How could it be financed? There are long answers to all these questions.
But the short answer is that the difficulties are essentially the kind of difficulties which socialists have encountered before, and have sometimes overcome. Moreover, they are exactly these difficulties which we must overcome if we are to advance towards the kind of society—the socialism of democratic self-activity—which we say we want. “Apathy,” like “affluence,” has a long history in relation to our working-class movement. The problem is not one of “seizing power” in order to create a society in which self- activity is possible, but one of generating this activity now within a manipulative society.
THOMPSON REVIEWED RAYMOND WILLIAMS’ 1961 BOOK, THE instant classic, The Long Revolution, in two parts in the New Left Review: I/9 (May–June 1961) and I/10 (July–August 1961). Williams’ would become a founder and outstanding practitioner of Cultural Studies in Britain. Thompson later wrote in the New York Review of Books that the “British New Left . . . [arose from] the communist crisis of 1956; the campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which enlisted onto the margins of British political life a new generation of activists; and the far-reaching cultural criticism of contemporary society identified with the names of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams . . . [and] of the two Williams was the more searching theoretician” (February 6, 1975). Here Thompson offers his own views on culture, including a critique of Williams’ concept of “a whole way of life,” offering in its place “a way of conflict” and a deeper emphasis on class. “I cannot help seeing Mr. Williams sometimes as the inheritor of Jude. The gates of Christminster have opened and let him in. He maintains to the full his loyalties to his own people—and passage after passage of The Long Revolution show he is alert to all the specious social pretensions and class values associated with the place. But, in the end, he is still possessed by Jude’s central illusion.”