Raymond Williams’ new book, The Long Revolution (Chatto & Windus), develops the important themes of Culture and Society—the study of the theory of culture, and an analysis of the stage reached in the development of a “common culture.”
Within two months of the publication of The Long Revolution the reception of the book is so well assured that I am released from the usual inhibitions upon a socialist reviewer—the need to repair the hostility of the general press. I have no need to insist upon the importance of Raymond Williams’ achievement. Even a brief passage of his writing has something about it which demands attention—a sense of stubborn, unfashionable integrity, a combination of distinction and force. His work, over the past ten years, carries an authority which commands the respect of his opponents; and the positions which he has occupied must be negotiated by critics and by historians, by educational theorists, by sociologists and by political theorists.
This is to say that his work is very important indeed, and that—so far as we can speak of a New Left—he is our best man. But, paradoxically, his influence as a socialist critic has been accompanied by—and has, to a certain degree, been the consequence of—his own partial disengagement from the socialist intellectual tradition. It is this problem which I wish to discuss. The greater I may start by mentioning that I have a real difficulty with Raymond Williams’ tone. At times, in Culture and Society, I felt that I was being offered a procession of disembodied voices—Burke, Carlyle, Mill, Arnold—their meanings wrested out of their whole social context (that French Revolution—is its full shock and recoil really felt behind Mr. Williams’ treatment of the late romantic tradition?), the whole transmitted through a disinterested spiritual medium. I sometimes imagine this medium (and it is the churchgoing solemnity of the procession which provokes me to irreverence) as an elderly gentlewoman and near relative of Mr. Eliot, so distinguished as to have become an institution: The Tradition. There she sits, with that white starched affair on her head, knitting definitions without thought of recognition or reward (some of them will be parceled up and sent to the Victims of Industry)—and in her presence how one must watch one’s LANGUAGE! The first brash word, the least suspicion of laughter or polemic in her presence, and The Tradition might drop a stitch and have to start knitting all those definitions over again.
THE TONE IN WHICH one must speak in the presence of The Tradition has recently been indicated by Mr. Williams (during the course of a review in the Guardian) in a comment upon the nature of “genuine communication”: “You can feel the pause and effort: the necessary openness and honesty of a man listening to another, in good faith, and then replying.”
The point, as Mr. Williams would say, is taken: genuine communication can be like this, and this also tells us much about the strength of his own style. But The Tradition has not been like this at all: Burke abused, Cobbett inveighed, Arnold was capable of malicious insinuation, Carlyle, Ruskin and D. H. Lawrence, in their middle years, listened to no one. This may be regrettable; but I cannot see that the communication of anger, indignation, or even malice, is any less genuine. What is evident here is a concealed preference—in the name of “genuine communication”—for the language of the academy. And it is easy for the notion of “good faith” to refer, not only to the essential conventions of intellectual discourse, but also to carry overtones—through Newman and Arnold to the formal addresses of most Vice Chancellors today—which are actively offensive.
I am suggesting three things. First, through a great part of the history covered by Mr. Williams’ “tradition,” the tone of the academy has seemed less than disinterested to those millions who have inhabited the “shabby purlieus” of the centres of learning. When Jude and Sue finally came to rest at Christminster, Hardy offers us a view of at least one part of “the tradition” through their eyes;
At some distance opposite, the outer walls of Sarcophagus College—silent, black and windowless—threw their four centuries of gloom, bigotry, and decay into the little room she occupied, shutting out the moonlight by night and the sun by day. . . . Even now (Jude) did not distinctly hear the freezing negative that those scholared walls had echoed to his desire.
It may seem strange for me—and I was born and bred at Christminster—to remind the author of Border Country of the “freezing negative” which has become associated with the academic tone, but I think that the reminder is needed. My second point is that men communicate affirmations as well as definitions, and in certain situations one may feel that indignation is a more appropriate response than discrimination. Third—and this is a more substantial objection—I am very doubtful as to whether The Tradition is a helpful notion at all; indeed, I am of the opinion that there is not one but two major traditions under review in Culture and Society, with sub-traditions within both, and that the extraordinarily fine local criticism from which this book is made up becomes blurred just at those points where this notion of The Tradition obtrudes.
I will return to these points. Indeed, The Long Revolution forces one to do so. If there is a revolution going on, then it is fair to suppose that it is a revolution against something (classes, institutions, people, ideas) as well as for something. Mr. Williams’ answer would appear to be that it has been against “a familiar inertia of old social forms,” “the pressures and restrictions of older forms of society,” “non-democratic patterns of decision,” “older human systems,” “authoritarian patterns” and “the dominative mode.” What he has to say about all these is always important and sometimes outstandingly so. But a sense of extreme fastidiousness enters whenever logic prompts us to identify these “patterns,” “systems” and “forms” with precise social forces and particular thinkers. If we are against these institutions and forms (but Mr. Williams does not use “we” in this sense), then we can scarcely fail to notice that Mr. Eliot (for example) has defended them. It might follow that the long revolution is, at this point, a revolution against Mr. Eliot’s ideas; and it is difficult to see in what sense William Morris or D. H. Lawrence belong to the same tradition as Mr. Eliot, unless we are using “tradition” in the sense in which we can describe both Calvin and Ignatius Loyola as belonging to a common “Christian tradition.” But once we include both Reformation and Counter-Reformation within one common tradition, we must recognise that we are in danger of becoming so aloof that the energies of the disputants cannot be seen through the haze.
This is not the only tone which Williams employs. There is another, emergent, tone, most evident in the final sections of both books, which conveys the stubborn democratic passion, the sense of human worth and dignity, of Jude himself. Characteristically, it is a passion so well controlled that it is most often expressed in negative clauses: “there are in fact no masses,” “it is difficult to assent even in passing to . . . ,” “this does not even sound like democracy,” “but the actual men and women, under permanent kinds of difficulty, will observe and learn, and I do not think that in the long run they will be anybody’s windfall.” What a sense of the tenacity of the common people is conveyed in that last (negative) clause! And yet, in The Long Revolution, I find altogether too many constructions of this order:
The 19th-century achievement . . . shows the re-organisation of learning by a radically changed society, in which the growth of industry and of democracy were the leading elements, and in terms of change both in the dominant social character and in types of adult work. (140)
. . . a society which had changed its economy, which under pressure was changing its institutions, but which, at the centres of power, was refusing to change its ways of thinking. (143)
It seems obvious that industrial democracy is deeply related to questions of ownership; the argument against the political vote was always that the new people voting, “the masses,” had no stake in the country. The development of new forms of ownership then seemed an essential part of any democratic advance, although in fact, the political suffrage broke ahead of this. (313)
WHAT IS EVIDENT in all these passages is that certain difficulties in Mr. Williams’ style (that “density” of which some reviewers have complained) arise from his determination to de-personalise social forces and at the same time to avoid certain terms and formulations which might associate him with a simplified version of the class struggle which he rightly believes to be discredited. But I think that he has evaded, and not circumvented, the problem. The first example says a great deal less than might be supposed upon a rapid reading—in the 19th century society changed, and so did education, and there is some correlation between them. The phrase “the growth of industry and of democracy” conceals more than it reveals about the crucial social conflicts. The second example is a contortion, almost like mirror-writing, which avoids identifying the points of conflict: if Dame Society was changing all these garments, who or what bewhiskered agent was standing outside the boudoir and forcing her to this exercise? And in the third example I am simply lost. Whose argument against the political vote? To whom did the question of ownership seem bound up with that of political democracy? In answer to the arguments of Ireton, Burke, and Bagehot, those who represent the majority tradition in the fight for the franchise until 1884, were at pains to separate the questions of political democracy and of social ownership. The political suffrage had already “broken,” in 1867 and 1884, before British socialism emerged as a significant force. But why “broke”? Is it not another example of a term chosen according to some principle of selection which prefers the impersonal to the personal and the passive to the active construction? If he had said, “the political suffrage was won,” it would have implied the questions by whom and against whom, and this would have entailed rewriting the entire passage. Nor do I think this to be a quibble. Behind the words “broke” and “won” one might detect two very different statements about history: “history happened like that” and “men have made history in this way.”
I DO NOT THINK that Mr. Williams makes either statement in The Long Revolution: this is the central ambiguity which the book, despite all its great merits, does not finally resolve. The tone of Mr. Eliot and Mr. Williams’ own constructive sense of democracy are at odds to the very end. To make his meaning finally clear I think he must remake his style. He must resist the temptation to take his readers and himself into the collective “we” of an established culture, even when he uses this device to challenge assumptions which “we” are supposed to hold (and yet which have been under challenge from a minority for over 100 years). And I must plead with him to erase such sentences as this:
Few would now regard [Chartism] as dangerous and wicked, as it was widely regarded at the time: too many of its principles have been subsequently built into the “British way of life” for it to be easy openly to agree with Macaulay, for example, that universal suffrage is “incompatible with the very existence of civilization.” (58)
Oh, the sunlit quadrangle, the clinking of glasses of port, the quiet converse of enlightened men! And Jude and Sue in their lodgings across the way, which have now been “built into” our way of life. And what about their way of life, the way of the common people? Is it not relevant that they also had opinions, and regarded Macaulay as dangerous and wicked in their turn? And how wide (or narrow) must an opinion be to be handled with this deference—does it become a part of The Tradition only when it can be washed down with port?
BUT I HAVE STOPPED listening “in good faith.” And this reminds me that Mr. Williams is no more of a disembodied voice than those voices he has interpreted to us. His problems were set, and his tone has been conditioned by, a particular social context: and it is in relation to this context that we can appreciate the size of his achievement. Mr. Williams tells us that he set himself ten years ago the body of work which is brought to its completion in The Long Revolution. Ten years takes us back to the aftermath of Zhdanovism; the onset of the Cold War; the enfeeblement of the energies which had brought Labour to power in 1945; the rapid dispersal of the Leftist intellectual climate of the war years, and the equally rapid assertion over a wide field of the authority of Mr. Eliot.
Eliot—Raymond Williams was to write in Culture and Society—”raised questions which those who differ from him politically must answer, or else retire from the field.” I do not myself think that it was Eliot who asked these questions: I still think that Notes Towards the Definition of Culture is a mediocre book. It was the context which insisted that the questions be asked, and it now seems inevitable that Eliot should have come forward as the questioner. But a part of his book is made up of assertions which are so little supported in the text that they could not possibly have carried influence unless there had been a general pressure of experience forcing assent:
We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline; that the standards of culture are lower than they were 50 years ago; and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity.
It is the “confidence,” supported by nothing more than a footnote citing a work by Mr. Victor Gollancz, which was new. And the confidence was not misplaced. By the end of the decade the intellectual Left was in evident rout: “progress,” “liberalism,” “humanism” and (unless in the ritual armoury of cold war) “democracy” became suspect terms: and all those old banners which the Thirties had too easily assumed to be stowed away in ancestral trunks were raised in the wind again.
Raymond Williams stayed in the field. I find it difficult to convey the sheer intellectual endurance which this must have entailed. Looking back, I can see the point at which I simply disengaged from the contest; and I can recall friends who were actually broken (as many of their analogues in the Labour movement were broken) by the experience of this period. There were so many ways to retire—into mere apathy, into erudite specialisms, into the defensive rhetoric of Communist dogma, into Parliament or antique shops or academic careerism. Some insight into the stress of this time—and also, perhaps, into Williams’ own sense of isolation—may be found in the conclusion to his essay on Orwell:
We have . . . to understand . . . how the instincts of humanity can break down under pressure into an inhuman paradox; how a great and humane tradition can seem at times, to all of us, to disintegrate into a caustic dust.
And—at the end of the essay on Eliot—“The next step, in thinking of these matters, must be in a different direction, for Eliot has closed almost all of the existing roads.”
Again, he gives too much credit to Eliot: the roads forward had been closed by the general impasse of the international socialist movement, and Eliot was ready to point this out. Worse, the major intellectual socialist tradition in this country was so contaminated that Williams could not hope to contest with reaction at all unless he dissociated himself from it: the follies of proletcult, the stridency and crude class reductionism which passed for Marxist criticism in some circles, the mixture of quantitative rhetoric and guilty casuism which accompanied apologetics for Zhdanovism—all these seemed to have corroded even the vocabulary of socialism. With a compromised tradition at his back, and with a broken vocabulary in his hands, he did the only thing that was left to him: he took over the vocabulary of his opponents, followed them into the heart of their own arguments, and fought them to a standstill in their own terms. He held the roads open for the young, and now they are moving down them once again. And when, in ’56, he saw some of his socialist contemporaries coming back to his side, his smile must have had a wry edge.
As one of these contemporaries I wish to salute his courage. It is an achievement of the order which reminds us that in intellectual contest it is not numbers but sheer quality which wins in the end. Raymond Williams is one of the very few intellectuals in this country who was not broken in some degree during that decade; and who maintained his independence from the attractive poles of cold war ideology. The first part of this achievement was defensive: in Culture and Society he contained the intellectual counterrevolution at crucial points, confronted the force of obscuranticism and social pessimism and in doing so reasserted the values of the democratic tradition. The second part, in The Long Revolution, is to offer new directions and “creative definitions”; and to develop a theory of culture “as a theory of relations between elements in a whole way of life.” There can be no doubt that many of his definitions clarify problems and point towards their solution. But I must record my view that he has not yet succeeded in developing an adequate general theory of culture.
FOR MR. WILLIAMS DID NOT emerge unmarked from the pressures of that decade. I am reminded of George Orwell’s comment upon a certain type of Labour leader: “not merely while but by fighting the bourgeoisie he becomes a bourgeois himself.” I do not only mean that tone and those mannerisms of style which are derived from Eliot. It is also that Mr. Williams has accepted to some degree his opponent’s way of seeing the problem, and has followed them into their own areas of concern, while at the same time neglecting other problems and approaches which have been the particular concern of the socialist tradition.
I will take two examples of the way in which the pressures of the past decade can be seen as a limitation upon The Long Revolution. In his chapter on “The Growth of the Popular Press” Williams is at pains to demolish the 1870 Education Act=Titbits=Daily Mail myth. This he does effectively—so much so that the business of demolition can be seen as the active principle according to which his evidence is selected. But as a consequence a number of questions highly relevant to the historian of the working-class movement are never asked at all—questions of quality, of the relation of the press to popular movements, and of the relation of ownership to political power. While the struggle to establish an alternative popular press is mentioned, it is done so in an annexe [appendix] apart from the main narrative—it is not seen as a continuing part of the same story, where power, the pursuit of profit, and the response of democracy interlock. The Northern Star—the most impressive 19th-century working-class newspaper—is not mentioned here, nor in the analysis of culture in the 1840s, although it offers substantial evidence on the other side of the story. The collapse of this press—and the decline in quality when contrasted with Reynold’s or Lloyds two decades later remain unexplained. As the story proceeds into this century, the quantitative narrative passes by all those points at which power intervened or at which choices were involved which might have led to a different outcome. We are left with an impression of a great “expansion” and of a concentration of ownership, and if this was the story then it had to be so. This must lead on—as it does in the final section of the book—to the conclusion that if there is to be a remedy it must come through far-reaching administrative measures which will ensure a newly independent press. But I hold this to be utopian. We shall never develop an opinion strong enough in this country to force such measures, which oppose at a critical point the interests of the capitalist class, unless we are strong enough to found an independent socialist press which can voice and organise this opinion. It is one of the paradoxes of the critical younger generation, that one may hear on every side voices deploring the effects of advertising and of the centralised media, but scarcely a voice which goes on to say: we must combine to produce, finance, and sell an independent paper. Sooner or later the attempt must be made once more; and if it should be made I have no doubt that Mr. Williams would give it immediate support. But my point is that his analysis does not lead people towards this kind of active confrontation, because he has given a record of impersonal forces at work and not a record of struggle.
In this case I think he has asked the wrong questions. In his analysis of culture in the 1840s, and of the growth of the reading public, I think he has excluded a whole area of relevant evidence. Both studies abound in new insights, and it would be ungrateful to quarrel with them if this is all that is being claimed. But Mr. Williams makes a greater claim: “Cultural history must be more than the sum of the particular histories, for it is with the relations between them, the particular forms of the whole organisation, that it is especially concerned.”
And the analysis of the 1840s is offered as a paradigm in application of “the theory of culture as the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life.” (46) I have spent a good deal of time in the 1840s, and his 1840s are not mine. He deals splendidly with the popular novel and reveals unsuspected connections: with the Chartist press and the teeming political theory of the time he deals scarcely at all. The seven “factors” which he offers as dominating “the general political and social history” of the period are an arbitrary selection; and to abstract factors in this way is the first step towards muddling problems of relationship and causation. Points of conflict are blurred: defeats and failures are minimised: the dominant social character is tricked up in its Sunday best, and the charges against the middle-class (brought by Dickens or Oastler or Fielden or any Chartist branch) of hypocrisy, dual standards, and self-interest, go unexamined—there are no good or bad men in Mr. Williams’ history, only dominant and subordinate “structures of feeling.” In the result, we are left with a general euphoria of “progress”; whatever has happened the emphasis lingers upon “growth,” “expansion,” “new patterns.” All three social characters (he tells us): “contribute to the growth of society: the aristocratic ideals tempering the harshness of middle-class ideals at their worst; working-class ideals entering into a fruitful and decisive combination with middle-class ideals at their best.” (63)
This is indeed a complacent judgment upon a decade which saw the Duke of Wellington (aristocratic ideals?) commanding a mob of middle-class specials against a Chartist demonstration; and which ended (to mention some of the negative evidence which is not considered) with scores of gifted working-men in jail, transported, or emigrating from tyranny—with tens of thousands of hand-loom weavers starved out of their “whole way of life” at home and with millions starved out of theirs in Ireland—and with the first great working-class party in Europe in total defeat. For such a decade as this (and I do not mean to deny the positive evidence) “growth” can be a misleading term. Suffering is not just a wastage in the margin of growth: for those who suffer it is absolute.
THE “READING PUBLIC” is another misleading term. Given this simple undifferentiated notion we become committed to a simple quantitative narrative. But in fact there have always been a number of reading publics, differentiated not only according to educational and social levels, but, crucially, in their manner of production and distribution of the product and in the relation between the writer and his audience. It is not enough for Mr. Williams to note a rise in the number of pamphlets, etc., during the Civil War which can be correlated with “a rise in social and especially political interests.” We miss the understanding of a new kind of reading public, hinted at by one Puritan divine:
When I came to the Army, among Cromwell’s soldiers, I found a new face of things which I never dreamed of. I heard the plotting heads very hot upon that which intimated their intention to subvert both Church and State. . . . A few fiery, self-conceited men among them kindled the rest and made all the noise and bustle, and carried about the Army as they pleased. . . . A great part of the mischief they did among the soldiers was by pamphlets which they abundantly dispersed. . . . And soldiers being usually dispersed in their quarters, they had such books to read when they had none to contradict them.
And the same inadequacy is even more marked in Williams’ treatment of the 1790s, where he notes the extraordinary sale of Paine’s Rights of Man, and adds as his only comment: “It seems clear that the extension of political interest considerably broadened the reading public by collecting a new class of readers, from groups hardly touched by the earlier expansion.” (163)
Notice once again the impersonal construction: it is the “extension” of interest which “broadens” the public and “collects” a new class of readers. This enables us to side-step the fact that we are considering an alternative reading public and an alternative press, created by the initiative of a “few fiery, self-conceited men” in the face of Church, Commerce, and State. Everything is different. So far from being rewarded or held in esteem for their work, the writers—Lilburne or Paine—were jailed or driven into exile; their work was circulated by illegal, voluntary means in the face of many hazards; and the very manner of reading was different—in the London Corresponding Society and among Sheffield cutlers it was the common procedure that a chapter of Paine’s work would be “set” and then it would be read aloud and discussed at the next week’s meeting. Perhaps there are over-dramatic examples: but the “few fiery, self-conceited men” have been at their work of kindling an alternative public for several centuries now, and they constitute a tradition which is not sufficiently taken into Mr. Williams’ survey of the evidence.
I would not make so much of these criticisms if I did not think them pertinent to Mr. Williams’ main claim—to have offered a new general theory of culture. These criticisms might be merely local, and indicate some deficiency, at these points, in Mr. Williams’ equipment.
A comparison between the inadequacy of his treatment of the popular press and the superb chapter on “The Social History of Dramatic Forms” is instructive; in the latter there is a sense of conflict, paradox, of cultural “lag” and contradiction, which his own expert knowledge and sense of the medium has brought into the very texture of his style, and which is so signally absent from the former. And yet I am convinced that these deficiencies are not only local, but are symptomatic of general limitations in Mr. Williams’ method.
We may start by noting the limitations of the tradition out of which Mr. Williams’ work arises. The Tradition (if there is one) is a very English phenomenon: it is comprised in the main of publicists, writers, critics and philosophers (of an English variety); throughout Culture and Society there is no frontal encounter with an historian, an anthropologist, a sociologist of major stature. If Williams had allowed himself to look beyond this island, he might have found a very different eleven of Players fielding against him, from Vico through Marx to Weber and Mannheim, beside whom his own team might look, on occasion, like gentlemen amateurs. Even within this island there are other traditions which he might have consulted: I think of the life-long engagement with the problem of culture of Professor Gordon Childe. And the omission is significant: the archaeologist, or the student of primitive society, in his consideration of the idea of culture, must be governed by peculiarly stubborn material which resists the tendency towards idealist speculation—or, frankly, talking “out of the top of one’s head”—which is the vice of the amateur gentleman tradition. Moreover, in common with the conceptual historian, he must be aware that definitions alone are sterile. False definitions will certainly lead on to bad history, bad sociology, bad archaeology; and Raymond Williams’ patient work of clarification has cleared away a great deal of litter of the past two decades. But to adumbrate a theory of culture it is necessary to proceed from definitions to evidence and back from the evidence to definitions once again; if the anthropological and historical evidence is not fully consulted, then we may not know what it is that we should ask, nor what it is that we must define. And for an adequate theory of human culture, the evidence to be consulted is very wide: we must be able to think of a Mesolithic or an Aztec culture, and of feudal and capitalist culture in their epochal (not their pejorative) sense.
WHEN THE PROBLEM is seen in this perspective it is self-evident that its solution is beyond the reach of any one man: this must be the work of many men, contributing to a tradition. But such traditions exist, and notably that tradition which originates in Marx. It is here that I find a curious ambiguity in all of Mr. Williams’ work. In one sense, a great part of both books can be seen as an oblique running argument with Marxism: in another sense Marx is never confronted at all. In Culture and Society there is a chapter in which the confusions of certain English Marxist critics are exposed: as one of those pilloried I may take the opportunity of saying that I found the criticism wholly constructive and helpful. But by abstracting some Marxist criticism from the main tradition (“the validity of his [Marx’s] economic and political theory cannot here be discussed”) Williams evaded the point that what Marx offered was not a theory of art and a theory of politics and another theory of economics but a theory of history, of the processes of historical change as (in Williams’ own notion of “culture”) “the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life.” Now the point here is not whether Marx’s theory was essentially right: it is evident that Mr. Williams is critical of its tendency towards economic and technological reductionism (although it is not always clear whether he is arguing here with Marx or with his vulgarisers), and that he holds—as I do—that the imagery of basis and superstructure is far too mechanical to describe the logic of change. The point is, rather, is there a tradition there to which—despite all that has happened, all that must be revalued, and all the new evidence that must be taken in—we can return? Or must we start at the beginning again?
It is this tendency to “write off” the socialist tradition which is so disturbing in The Long Revolution. It can be noted in a dozen ways, and it is evident throughout the four conceptual chapters with which the book opens. For a socialist thinker Mr. Williams is extraordinarily curt with the socialist tradition—and indeed in his reference to any minority radical tradition. One might never suppose that socialism, in the 19th and 20th centuries, is a major direction of European thought. The Labour movement is credited from time to time with the creation of new institutions, but it is never credited with a mind. On the one side the “older human systems,” on the other side “expansion,” “growth,” and new institutions, and in the middle The Tradition, savouring the complexities dispassionately and trying to think out the right thing to do in response to “industry” and “democracy.” At times Mr. Williams seems to lean over backwards in the attempt to evade making an obvious connection with Marx; for example, his enlightening discussion of exiles, vagrants and rebels (90–94) demands but does not receive some correlation with Marx’s notion of alienation: and in his attempts to break down the subject/object antithesis (23, 99) one feels impelled to scribble Theses on Feuerbach in the margin. At other times Mr. Williams’ self-isolation from any tradition leads to statements so portentous as to appear arrogant, as in his initial discussion of creativity where (as it seems to me) he is not upsetting our whole received outlook but is bringing important new evidence to support a way of looking at the problem which has already been reached independently by some anthropologists and historians: “To take account of human creativity the whole received basis of social thinking, its conception of what man in society is, must be deeply revised.” (115)
Yes, but Marx wrote something of this sort, in relation to Promethean man, back in the 1840s; and the renewed interest—in Poland, France and this country—in the 1844 MSS indicates that Mr. Williams is not as isolated at this point as his claim implies.
THE EVASION OF THIS confrontation involves him at times in thinking which I would almost describe as shoddy: as, for example, his reference to “socialists such as Marx” who related “the system of decision (politics) to the system of maintenance (economics)” but who excluded from their thinking “the system of learning and communication” and relationships based on “the generation and nurture of life.” (114) This is a strange accusation against the authors of The German Ideology and The Origin of the Family. The point, once again, is not whether Marx and Engels saw these “systems” in the right relationship—nor whether, in the state of knowledge then available to them, it was possible for them to do so. There is room for argument here, but Williams refuses to retrace the argument. It seems evident to him that in the later Marxist tradition “art is degraded as a mere reflection of the basic economic and political process, on which it is thought to be parasitic. . . . But the creative element in man is the root both of his personality and his society; it can neither be confined to art nor excluded from the systems of decision and maintenance.” (115) Amen to this: an amen which found dramatic expression in the squares of Warsaw and Budapest in 1956. But we do not owe this insight to the discoveries of Professor J. Z. Young, however valuable his supporting evidence may be. It is also explicit in Marx’s view of homo faber:
We presuppose labour in a form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality. (Capital, I, iii, VII)
Oh, that book! Do we really have to go over all that old nineteenth-century stuff again? We have all felt this response: Marx has become not only an embarrassment but a bore. But The Long Revolution has convinced me, finally, that go over it again we must. If Mr. Williams had done so—if he had had any frontal encounter with historical materialism—I cannot believe that he could have left his chapter on “Images of Society” unrevised, nor that he could have discussed “the crucial question of the nature and origin of change” in the space of four pages (118–21), without stumbling upon the crucial arguments of agency and determinism. His conclusion (if it is a conclusion)—”people change and are changed”—is of course the beginning of the problem: and it is exactly here, in 1844, that Marx began. I can understand only too well the temptation to avoid a discussion in a field so confused and so highly charged with irrelevant emotion. But the fact is that we need a book as good as Culture and Society discussing the Marxist and marxisant tradition in the same definitive way. The alternative for which Williams has opted demands no less than the creation of a new vocabulary; and the danger here is that Williams is making a dialogue between himself and (among other) historians and economists extraordinarily difficult. I think that his terms for “politics” and “economics”—the “system of decision” and the “system of maintenance”—are misleading in a number of ways, and contribute to a fragmented view of the social process which makes more difficult his own avowed intention of synthesising “an adequate sense of general human organisation”; they make it more difficult, for example, to conceive of relationships of power, property and exploitation as co-existing simultaneously within all the “systems.” Further, if we segregate these four activities as co-equal “systems” (politics, economics, communications, and the family) then we must look to some other discipline to examine the manner according to which the systems are related to each other; and this synthesising discipline will very soon make imperialist claims. These claims are commonly made today by sociology, and Williams has now staked a counter-claim in the name of “cultural history”: “I see this cultural history as more than a department, a special area of change. In this creative area the changes and conflicts of the whole way of life are necessarily involved.” (122)
I must dispute this claim. Now if Williams by “the whole way of life” really means the whole way of life he is making a claim, not for cultural history, but for history. The fact that this claim can now be made, with some colour, against history by both critics and sociologists is a devastating comment upon the relegation of history to an inferior status in this country. I can only speculate here upon the reasons for this: one part may be found in the failure of Marxist historians to take into account whole areas of concern disclosed by sociologists and critics (although there is a sturdy minority tradition associated with Dona Torr, Mr. Christopher Hill, and contributors to Past and Present which may assume greater importance in the future). Another part is analysed in Mr. E. H. Carr’s splendid Trevelyan Lectures, whose quality serves to emphasise the absence of conceptual historical thinking of this order in this country for some years. A further part lies in the eagerness with which academics in the empirical tradition have taken upon themselves the role of narrative drudges, making whole history schools into a kind of piece-meal baggage train serving more ambitious departments. And yet another, I suspect, can be attributed to a mere shift in fashion and a recrudescence of the amateur gentleman tradition (you have to slog at economics or philosophy but anyone’s opinion about “culture” or “society” is as good as anyone else’s).
I do not dispute, then, that Mr. Williams may have been provoked into making his claim by the eagerness with which historians, under the chiding of Sir Lewis Namier and Professor Popper, have abandoned theirs. The place has been widely advertised as being “To Let.” But before we accept the new occupant we must first look at the references of a “whole way of life.” This is Mr. Williams’ talisman. It is being suggested that society is constituted of elements (or activities or systems) which, when taken together in their mutual interaction, constitute “a whole way of life.” At this point we become involved in abstractions which teeter again and again on the cliffs of tautology. If way of life equals culture then what is society apart from way of life: does society equal culture also? We are dragged from the edge by the word “organisation”: “The “pattern of culture” is a selection and configuration of interests and activities, and a particular valuation of them, producing a distinct organisation, a ‘way of life.’” (47)
The point, then, is that culture is more than the elements or activities in inter-relation: it is the way in which, in a given society, these elements are related, giving rise to a distinct organisation or meaningful form to the whole society. “The analysis of culture is the attempt to discover the nature of the organisation which is the complex of these relationships.” (46) But we are now surrounded with cliffs: I find it difficult to conceive of a society apart from the complex of its relationships or apart from its organisation, and I had supposed that historians, sociologists, anthropologists, in their different ways, were—or ought to be—concerned with exactly these questions of relationship between elements and principles of organisation. If Mr. Williams wishes to colonise all this in the name of culture, we need not argue about the name. And yet it is obvious that something more than this is being claimed, both in Mr. Williams’ own practice and in the manner in which the claim is phrased—“. . . is the attempt to discover the nature of . . .”—this surely suggests a process so delicate, a responsiveness to “social character” and “structures of feeling,” for which the discipline of the critic will be more appropriate than the blundering discipline of the historian? What then is the “cultural historian” who (we must remember) is specially concerned with the “creative area” where “changes and conflicts . . . are necessarily involved”? He cannot be a whole-way-of-life historian or we are back in a tautological teeter. He must have the equipment of a critic with that kind of literary-sociological flair which is so interesting (and so refreshing) a phenomenon of contemporary American and British writing. Good: I am ready to root for Richard Hoggart as King and David Riesman as President USA. But there is a simple assertion: in all those coils of abstraction nothing has been proved.
RAYMOND WILLIAMS IS OFFERING creative definitions, and I am asking questions, and mine is the easier and less worthy task. But I think he has tried to take in too much, over-reached himself, and is in danger of losing some of the ground he has really gained. If he had argued that the social “sciences” had neglected a crucial area of culture which cannot be evaluated or interpreted without the equipment of the critic, I would have fought by his side. But this “whole way of life” is suspect for several reasons. It derives from Eliot: and in its first assertion is associated with religion: “There is an aspect in which we can see a religion as the whole way of life of a people, from birth to the grave, from morning to night and even in sleep, and that way of life is also its culture.”
Mr. Williams noted of this, in Culture and Society, that in this sense of “culture”—“Eliot, like the rest of us, has been at least casually influenced” by anthopology and sociology. One might wish that the acquaintance had been less “casual.” For Eliot went on, in a well-known passage, to argue that the term “culture”
includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the 12th of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, 19th-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list.
The point, of course, is that while “the reader” may make his own list the serious student of society may not. To decide which activities are characteristic implies some principle of selection and some theory of social process. Mr. Williams, in his essay on Eliot, notes that he has here selected examples of “sport, food and a little art”; and suggests that characteristic activities should “also include steelmaking, touring in motor-cars, mixed farming, the Stock Exchange, coalmining, and London Transport.” And this is the only serious qualification which he offers to Eliot’s piece of sloppy and amateurish thinking. The reader can still make his own list: but it ought to take in rather more.
There are a lot of points here. To begin with, despite the qualification, Eliot’s ghost haunts Mr. Williams—and other NLR writers—whenever they mention the “whole way of life.” Whatever is claimed, the predominant associations are with leisure activities, the arts and the media of communication. “Whole” is forgotten (unless in the sense of the integrating ethos) and we slide from “way of life” into “style of life.” When we speak of an individual’s way of life, we usually mean to indicate his style of living, personal habits, moral conduct, and the rest, rather than his position, work, power, ideas and beliefs—and the same range of associations has become attached to the term in the literary-sociological tradition. But if Mr. Williams is serious about including steelmaking, coal mining and the Stock Exchange in his list, then we are back at the beginning again (culture equals society) or still searching for a principle of selection. The way of life associated with coal mining cannot be considered apart from the “elements”: we must know a lot about technological conditions (are women chained to tubs or is there an automated coalface?), about who owns the pits, and whether the miners are tied in conditions of servitude or have the vote and a strong trade union. I am sorry to be so obvious, but we are concerned with definitions, and this phrase must be cross-examined in its turn.
But we must be more obvious still. Why must the list stop here? Why not also include, as “characteristic activities,” strikes, Gallipoli, the bombing of Hiroshima, corrupt trade union elections, crime, the massive distortion of news, and Aldermaston marches? Why not indeed? The “whole way of life” of European culture in this century (as the Eichmann trial reminds us) has included many things which may make future generations surprised at our “characteristics.” But not one example is included in Eliot’s nor in Mr. Williams’ list which forces to the front the problems of power and of conflict. If such examples had been there we might have been impelled to go on and question the word “life.” I am not being flippant—“life” is a “good” word, with associations of unconscious vitalism: life “flows,” it is “ever-changing,” in “flux,” and so on—and so indeed it is. But I think it has flowed through chinks in Mr. Williams’ reasoning into a pervasive euphoria of “expansion” and “new patterns.” It is perhaps the mindless force which has built the institutions of the Labour movement and which is there behind his impersonal constructions. I wish that he had remembered of “life,” as (Mr. Carr has just now reminded us) Marx insisted of “history”: “History does nothing, it possesses no immense wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, real living man who does everything, who possesses and fights.”
We might note a tentative definition from the archaeologist, Professor Grahame Clark: “Culture . . . may be defined as the measure of man’s control over nature, a control exercised through experience among social groups and accumulated through the ages.”
I do not offer this as a final definition: it is formulated in reply to different questions. But it seems to me to have two merits which are not to be found in the amateur tradition. First, it is a definition in terms of function: it raises the question of what culture does (or fails to do). Second, it introduces the notion of culture as experience which has been “handled” in specifically human ways, and so avoids the life equals way-of-life tautology. Any theory of culture must include the concept of the dialectical interaction between culture and something that is not culture. We must suppose the raw material of life experience to be at one pole, and all the infinitely complex human disciplines and systems, articulate and inarticulate, formalised in institutions or dispersed in the least formal ways, which “handle,” transmit, or distort this raw material to be at the other. It is the active process—which is at the same time the process through which men make their history—that I am insisting upon: I would not dare, in this time of linguistic hypertension, to offer a new definition. What matters, in the end, is that the definition will help us to understand the processes of social change. And if we were to alter one word in Mr. Williams’ definition, from “way of life” to “way of growth,” we move from a definition whose associations are passive and impersonal to one which raises questions of activity and agency. And if we change the word again, to delete the associations of “progress” which are implied in “growth,” we might get: “the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of conflict.” And a way of conflict is a way of struggle. And we are back with Marx.
To pass from a “way of conflict” to a “way of life” is to pass out of the main line of the socialist intellectual tradition. I don’t mean that Raymond Williams has “broken” with socialism: at many points he has a more constructive insight into the possibilities of socialism in this country than anyone living. But in his first conceptual chapters he has cast loose his moorings; and some of his insights in the last section, “Britain in the 1960s,” do not arise so much from his stated conceptual framework as from unstated allegiances or traditional assumptions—derived from Marx or Morris or evoked in Border Country. Indeed, they often contradict what has gone before. At the end of his interesting discussion of problems in the field of publishing he comments: “We should be much clearer about these cultural questions if we saw them as a consequence of a basically capitalist organization, and I at least know a better reason for capitalism to be ended.” (33)
But “culture” is being used here in a different—and more limited—meaning from the one which we have been discussing; and “capitalism” carries implications which might conflict with a “system of maintenance.” Again and again in these pages unsuspected connections are revealed which throw light upon contemporary capitalism as a social system, or “way of conflict,” which call in question his own unsatisfactory definition of capitalism as “a particular and temporary system of organising the industrial process” (by whom? for whom?).
It may be that Mr. Williams’ originality demands free play outside a tradition within which so much is now confused. But if others accept his vocabulary and his conceptual framework, without sharing his allegiances, they may come up with very different results. For between these “systems” and that “way of life” I fear that they may forget that at the centre there are men in relation with one another: that “organising the industrial process” involves ownership, that ownership involves power, and that both perpetually feed property-relationships and dominative attitudes in every field of life. And that, between this system and a human system there lies, not just a further long episode of “expansion” and “growth,” but a problem of power.
Power, indeed, does not seem to find an easy [way into this discussion]. Lawrence “was very much more rich and exciting than the usual accounts infer.” But their inference still stops short at the inference of socialism—Edward Carpenter at Milthorpe and his many working-class disciples do not enter the picture, and we scarcely see that group of ILP activists who were among young Lawrence’s closest friends and of whom one witness told Mr. Harry Moore: “England was almost remade by groups such as ours in that Midland town.” And this process of remaking was a way of struggle against, or in spite of, the bourgeois tradition. And so we come back to “Miriam”:
In the drawing-room Violet Hunt said she thought she had seen my handwriting—hadn’t I sent some poems of Lawrence’s to the English Review? I said I had, and how delighted we were to have Mr. Hueffer’s reply. Then she exclaimed: “But you discovered him.” To which I replied that we had been acquainted with one another ever since we were hardly more than children.
The two traditions are there, in a moment of poignant contrast: for Miriam it is the final loss of Paul, and her own return to the other tradition, ending—Mr. Moore accusingly throws out—in the “pilgrimage to Russia.” In Lawrence the traditions continued to argue within him all his life. But—this is surely Miriam’s point?—her tradition had discovered itself.
I HOPE IT IS CLEAR that I am not arguing for some crude reductionism. I am arguing that Mr. Williams has lost the sense of the whole way of conflict in which the two traditions are involved. I cannot help seeing Mr. Williams sometimes as the inheritor of Jude. The gates of Christminster have opened at last and have let him in. He maintains to the full his loyalties to his own people—and as 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:
“Of course”—Sue is speaking—“Christminster is a sort of fixed vision with him, which I suppose he’ll never be cured of believing in. He still thinks it a great centre of high and fearless thought, instead of what it is, a nest of commonplace schoolmasters whose characteristic is timid obsequiousness to tradition.”
I know well enough the difficulties. To see “bourgeois culture” in this way is to encourage a cheap intellectual sectarianism, which alienates the uncommitted, and which leads on to exactly that kind of intellectual disengagement and retreat into dogma which left Mr. Williams to fight it out on his own in the last decade. But what Mr. Williams has never come to terms with is the problem of ideology. We cannot be satisfied with his definition of man as “essentially a learning, creating and communicating being” (100), together with the insistence that the “central fact” of the social process “is a process of learning and communication” (99). This is taken so far that “communication” becomes a new reductionism: “the process of communication is in fact the process of community” (38), “sexual relationship . . . is our fundamental communicating process” (34), and—”Everything we see and do, the whole structure of our relationships and institutions, depends, finally, on an effort of learning, description and communication.” (37)
If this is left here, then the central problem of society today is not one of power but of communication: we must simply overcome barriers of élites, status-groups, language, and divisive cultural patterns, and expand into a common culture. And this is, indeed, exactly where sections of the NLR evidence to the Pilkington Committee (NLR 7) left it:
We are not simply concerned with the rights and aspirations of minorities and dissenters (though these rights are crucial) but with the idea of cultural growth through universal participation which, being universal, would cut across and help to dismantle the barriers of class, work activities and the rest of the apparatus of the divided society.
Raymond Williams may not be responsible for the confusion of such passages as this. But since he is cited in the text at this point as the authority on a “common culture” it is reasonable to suppose that the confusion in his notion of “communication” is a contributory cause. The objection is not only that this is the only place in the NLR evidence where the rights of minorities are discussed. It is also that the role of minorities is crucial if “the idea of cultural growth through universal participation” (can 50 million people gain access to TV?) is not to be mere wishful rhetoric. Cultural or social “growth” is a far more strenuous process, fraught with far more conflict and tension, than such formulations allow; ideas and values are not made by the “full democratic process” but by individual minds at work within this process. Whether we start from Marx or from Mill, from Arnold or from Morris, we must see that procedures appropriate to democratic institutions cannot be taken over wholesale into the republic of ideas. Questions of truth and value will never be settled through some kind of majority vote in a condition of intellectual universal suffrage, any more than they can be settled by decree or patronage of Party or State.
This should be clear enough in a capitalist society, where the rights of minorities are “crucial” not only to socialists but also to any minority, in ideas or the arts, which is an irritant to the status quo. But it is not clear to me how “universal participation” or a “common culture” can “dismantle the barriers of class” which are also barriers of interest: if improved communication enabled working people to understand better the way of life of the corporate rich they would like it less, and feel the barriers of class more. Only Dr. Buchman would disagree. The aspiration for a common culture in Raymond Williams’ sense (“common meanings, common values”) is admirable; but the more this aspiration is nourished, the more outrageous the real divisions of interest and power in our society will appear. The attempt to create a common culture, like that to effect common ownership and to build a co-operative community, must be content with only fragmentary success so long as it is contained within capitalist society.
BUT IT DOES NOT FOLLOW that in a socialist society intellectual and cultural conflict will become any less strenuous or less diverse. In a co-operative society one might suppose a wide area of shared values and meanings; and another, expanding, area of fruitful conflict—diversity of experience and of artistic modes, diversity in relationships and in the organisation of factories and of different kinds of community. If we reject (as we should) the equation socialist “base” = a given cultural “superstructure,” then the culture will be (within certain limits) the whole way of life which people make for themselves; and unless we insist upon the role of minorities and of conflict in the process of making we might get an unpleasantly conformist answer. In allowing this suggestion, of organic uniformity, to gain currency, Mr. Williams has exposed the New Left to the pamphlemic of Mr. Richard Wollheim, under the sustained mediocrity of whose assault I am still reeling. (Richard Wollheim, Socialism and Culture, Fabian Society: 4s. 6d.). I was repeatedly reminded, when reading it, that the Fabians too can draw upon a long heritage of literary criticism, and that the original utilitarian reformist, Jeremy Bentham, once tried his hand at the art, coming up with the following result: “Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.”
Mr. Wollheim’s prose does indeed go on, right to the end of the amateur gentleman tradition; and he proves himself to be a veritable Sidney Webb of cultural theory, offering educational gradualism, the mild permeation of the working class with middle-class values, and piecemeal artistic reform. “The historical mission of Socialism,” we learn from Mr. Wollheim: “is to introduce to the world a form of society where the individual may realise himself by drawing at will upon the whole range of human culture which is offered up for his choice freely and in its full profusion.”
The world will thank Mr. Wollheim for being introduced to something so nice: the imagery is that of the prospectus of a new self-service store. Mr. Wollheim will draw Proust and Mr. Jones will draw Seventy Splendid Nudes and Mr. Brown will draw the Book of Revelation and I will draw the Niebelungenlied and what the hell shall we all do with what we draw? How shall we live? Will we be there at all, or some other kind of person with different values and tastes? And what shall we add to the store of our own? This facile vision of the eclectic consumer in an “affluent” culture evades the point at which the real discussion starts—that a culture is lived and not passively consumed. We are concerned with the whole way of life of a socialist society, and that area of shared values and meanings which might distinguish a socialist from a bourgeois culture.
Is it worth going on? Does anyone listen? After all that has been written by Hoggart and Williams in the effort to engage in a serious discussion of culture, Mr. Wollheim comes up with his homilies and the New Statesman gives him a four-barreled salute. I fear that we may continue to wade knee-deep in these commonplaces until Mr. Williams does three things. He must meet Mr. Wollheim’s objection that “common meanings, common-values” express “two quite different ideals.” He must make clear the distinction between communication and human relations. And he must bring closer together the notions of a common culture and of the common good.
The questions are not easy. But what has been left out of Mr. Williams’ notion of “communication” is (from one point of view) power and (from another) love—or hate. To say that sexual relationship is “our fundamental communicating process” is to say something and nothing, unless we go on to consider that vast spectrum, from aggression to all the notations of love, of what is being communicated. The partner in this communication may be no more than the instrument of the others’ satisfaction: or, reduced still further, we may say that the copulation of animals is also a fundamental act of communication. What makes the difference (although advertisers may forget this) is human culture on the one hand and the attitude of the partners to each other—of love, or spite, or boredom—as mediated by their culture, on the other. While attitudes may only find expression through a system of communication, the two things are not the same: and to assimilate all this to the term “communication” is in fact to smudge many of the distinctions which our culture has made available. And we may be instruments or things, consumers or users, exploited or valued, in other forms of communication too. I would add to Mr. Williams’ list of the “essential” attributes of man that he is a creator of moral values. And one might go on to claim that “the whole structure of our relationships and institutions depends, finally, on an effort” not only of communication but of love. Mr. Williams (and he is not alone in this) again and again attempts to annex the sense of value-making to the customary sense of communication: “our descriptions of our experience come to compose a network of relationships,” “our way of seeing things is literally our way of living” (38). But he has no warrant to do this, and I find in this not so much a central cause for dispute as a central confusion.
It is this confusion which enables him to lose sight of power; and it is only when the systems of communication are replaced in the context of power-relationships that we can see the problem as it is. And it is the problem of ideology. I think this is the crucial question which those who think like Mr. Williams and those in the Marxist tradition must find ways of discussing together. Mr. Williams gives glimpses of the problem; but he never considers how far a dominant social character plus a structure of feeling plus the direct intervention of power plus market forces and systems of promotion and reward plus institutions can make and constitute together a system of ideas and beliefs, a constellation of received ideas and orthodox attitudes, a “false consciousness” or a class ideology which is more than the sum of its parts and which has a logic of its own. He does not consider how, in a given cultural milieu, there may be an impression of openness over a wide area and yet still at certain critical points quite other factors—of power or of hysteria—come into play. Nor does he consider the contrary problems of “utopia” (in Mannheim’s sense); and of an intellectual tradition associated with social groups opposed to established interests—which must make its way without the benefit of institutions or cultural apparatus of its own, and which is exposed to the dangers of sectarian aridity or of losing its best men in the institutions of the “other side.”
I hope that we can give this problem of ideology more thorough examination. Meanwhile I may offer a more personal suggestion. It may be that the “scholarship boy” who comes to Christminster undergoes quite different intellectual experiences from the middle-class intellectual who enters the socialist movement. In the first, there is a sense of growth into the institutions of learning, with less of a crisis of allegiance than is sometimes suggested: the sense is that of Jude entering into his inheritance on behalf of his own people. The dangers besetting the middle-class socialist intellectual are well enough known. But he may, nevertheless, in joining the socialist movement experience more sense of intellectual crisis, of breaking with a pattern of values: there is still a rivulet of fire to be crossed. For this reason his tendency is towards intellectual sectarianism, or—as Hardy noted in Sue—the sudden relapse into former patterns of response. But the working-class scholar may tend to persist in the illusion of Jude: the function of bourgeois culture is not questioned in its entirety, and the surreptitious lines of class interest and power have never been crossed.
MY COPY OF The Long Revolution is marked at many points, with queries and with marks of admiration or assent. In developing a critique I have followed the line of the queries: I might have written another and very different article along the line of assent. I have developed the critique because I hope it may throw light on a certain confusion of traditions in the New Left. Too much of our thinking has been simply a flux of ideas and attitudes: year by year names come forward, are cheered, are dropped, and are replaced by new names; themes are taken up and drop from our hands while half-understood and while still not broken down into policy and into programmatic form. The flux of ideas is good; but there is also the suspicion of the jargon of a coterie, and at a certain point the desire for “openness” can become an excuse for unprincipled thinking.
In this flux there have been two consistent themes: the writing of Raymond Williams (and of those most close to him) and the attempt to revalue the Marxist tradition. If these themes are to come together, and the New Left is to gain in intellectual coherence, then there must be a dialogue—about power, communication, class, and ideology—of the kind which I have tried to open. Mr. Williams is a thinker of such force and principle that he has made it inevitable that the argument should be taken up.
He is in command of the field and deserves to be so. But I am concerned at the fact that in the past few years so much stimulating writing has burgeoned in the field of criticism and of literary sociology: so little in the sciences and in traditional social studies; and so very little in the field of political theory. Concern with the “popular arts” and with status is great; concern with wages and with welfare more slight; while “technology” and “politics” are bad names. Mr. Williams and others have greatly enlarged our whole view of socialist politics: they have diagnosed a manifest crisis in social consciousness which many traditional theorists had neither the equipment nor the language nor—one feels—the sensibility to analyse. It would be unfair to criticise him for leaving undone work which other specialists should do.
But a problem of synthesis remains: these new areas of concern must be related in new ways with other areas of experience which are part of the working people’s daily “way of conflict.” Wages, after all, are for the millions very much a matter affecting the “whole way of life,” but for some time New Left Review has overlooked the point. Moreover, certain of Raymond Williams’ ambiguities in this book seem to me to offer sustenance to the weaknesses, rather than the strengths, of our movement. The sociological pluralism by which priority is given to none of the “elements” in society, together with the emphasis on impersonal “growth” and the underplaying of minorities,—all these seem to lead on to a pluralistic—even an anarchistic—attitude to problems of political organisation and leadership. We need only work for health in our own way in whatever bit of the cultural or political milieu we happen to find ourselves, and life itself—or Labour institutions—will knit all our efforts together without the hard drudgery, the propaganda, the creative organisation, at which the New Left, with honourable exceptions, is so bad.
And yet are we really so far from a synthesis as my critique suggests? For when we come to the final section of The Long Revolution, time and again my own criticisms appear to be answered. Eliot is no longer in evidence, and Raymond Williams comes through in a more authentic and more committed tone, “for and with the people who in many different ways are keeping the revolution going.” There is much splendid—and splendidly constructive—writing, teaching throughout an understanding of the processes of social change, and with successive insights into tensions in contemporary consciousness. It is also splendidly compressed: old muddles are cut through and new approaches summarised—whether in the distinction drawn between “consumers” and “users,” or the proposals in the field of publishing, or in the earlier discussion of education (153–54) where in the course of two pages proposals are offered so bold and condensed that one can see in them new institutions in embryo and opportunities a generation ahead.
How can I disagree so radically with his conceptual system, and assent so warmly to so many of his conclusions? It seems to me that Mr. Williams, in this final section, is drawing less upon his own system than upon an understanding of the dialectics of the social process—of the logic of change—which is loosely derived from the Marxist tradition, but which he has so much made his own that he is scarcely aware of the derivation. And since so much of this critique has been negative I wish here to offer a suggestion as to the ground upon which a parley might take place. I believe that George Lichtheim’s Marxism and Wright Mills’ forthcoming study of The Marxians provide the basis for a complete revaluation of the Marxist tradition. Meanwhile, if Mr. Williams will abandon his vocabulary of “systems” and “elements” and his diffuse pluralism, and if the Marxists will abandon the mechanical metaphor of base/superstructure and the determinist notion of “law,” then both might look once more at a phrase of Alasdair MacIntyre: “What . . . the mode of production does is to provide . . . a kernel of human relationship from which all else grows.” (“Notes from the Moral Wilderness”—New Reasoner 7.) Both might then accept that the mode of production and productive relationships determine cultural processes in an epochal sense; that when we speak of the capitalist mode of production for profit we are indicating at the same time a “kernel” of characteristic human relationships—of exploitation, domination, and acquisitiveness—which are inseparable from this mode, and which find simultaneous expression in all of Mr. Williams’ “systems.” Within the limits of the epoch there are characteristic tensions and contradictions, which cannot be transcended unless we transcend the epoch itself; there is an economic logic and a moral logic and it is futile to argue as to which we give priority since they are different expressions of the same “kernel of human relationship.” We may then rehabilitate the notion of capitalist or bourgeois culture in a way that owes much to Marx but also much to Weber, Morris, Veblen, Tawney and others who have studied its characteristic patterns of acquisitiveness, competitiveness, and individualism. We might then go on to rehabilitate the notion of a socialist culture, again in the epochal sense, growing from (and being sustained by) a co-operative mode of production for use and a corresponding kernel of co-operative productive relationships. This is more than a “common culture” since it insists (what Mr. Williams stresses too little) that we cannot have such a culture—unless as an aspiration pitted against the private evil of capitalism—unless we achieve at the same time the common good: only in this way can common meanings and common values come together. Once again, this socialist culture will not make itself any more than socialist communities or political institutions can safely be left to make themselves: the making will be strenuous and will offer many choices. But we have reason to hope—and some grounds for this in working-class life and institutions—that from the kernel of human relationships characteristic of the socialist mode of production, a co-operative ethic and new patterns of communal values will grow. And if Mr. Williams could accept some such adjustment in his system, then the way would be open for him to bring back into his thinking a rich heritage of speculation, from More and Winstanley, from the Owenite socialists and the “Utopians,” as well as from Morris and Marx, as to possible socialist ways of life.
THIS MIGHT ALSO enable us to clear up a crucial point of ambiguity. The two poles, of “culture” and “not culture,” to which I have referred, were described by Marx as “social consciousness” and “social being” (or existence). While the two are seen in dialectical interrelation, it was Marx’s view that in class society “social being determines social consciousness.” Not the “pattern of culture” but class relationships have been the final determinant of that “distinct organisation” which Mr. Williams calls a “way of life”; and for this reason we must see history as a way of conflict. It is this condition which socialists are working to end. Only in a free and classless society will history become the history of human culture because only then will social consciousness in the end determine social being.
I know the world of argument contained in “determine,” “free,” and “classless.” But I am suggesting that Mr. Williams, in his claim for the primacy of “cultural history,” is making a contrary proposition: “culture” determines “social being.” And I would claim, with Marx and against Mr. Williams, that this is not, in the final analysis, the “creative area”—yet. For this reason I am held back from final assent to “Britain in the 1960s,” and the obstacle is in the title of the book. My own view of revolution (I am often assured) is too “apocalyptic,” but Mr. Williams is perhaps too bland. His three revolutions—democratic, cultural, industrial—are by his own admission all parts of one. And can one revolution go on—and for how long—without either giving way to counter-revolution or coming to a point of crisis between the human system of socialism and capitalist state power?
The crisis, as Mr. Williams insists, is a crisis of consciousness and of human relationships. The human system of socialism is manifest on all sides, in our means of social production, in new patterns of feeling, in fragmentary institutional forms, so that it seems necessary and inevitable that we shall grow into it any day now. But for societies, as well as individuals, there may be a “river of fire”: an epochal transition in which men become aware that they are making history and in which institutions are broken and remade. “Revolution” and “growth” become incompatible terms at this point. Which term will Mr. Williams choose?
It is his greatest service that he has, more than anyone, made articulate the potential of the common good, as a general aspiration and in particular constructive ways. It is because this good is the common good that he avoids polemic and the language of class-power. I think of such passages as this:
If socialism accepts the distinction of “work” from “life,” which has then to be written off as “leisure” and “personal interests”; if it sees politics as “government,” rather than as the process of common decision and administration; if it continues to see education as training for a system, and art as grace after meals (while perhaps proposing more training and a rather longer grace); if it is limited in these ways, it is simply a late form of capitalist politics, or just the more efficient organization of human beings around a system of industrial production. The moral decline of socialism is in exact relation to its series of compromises with older images of society and to its failure to sustain and clarify the sense of an alternative human order.
This is what we are working for; and this, in a sense, is what makes all of us, from different traditions, distinctively New Left. At points like this I have felt, again and again, that the gap between the two notions of “revolution” is narrow indeed. Can a junction be effected between the two? Or will it continue to be a dialogue along the way?
“WHERE ARE WE NOW?” WAS NEVER PUBLISHED. IT WAS written in April 1963 as a memo to the new Editorial Board of the New Left Review. In it, Thompson defends the New Left, or what came to be known as the “first” New Left, in a criticism of the editor, Perry Anderson, and the new board, which he refers to as the “Team.” Much of it is in response to what Thompson sees as the adoption of a “Third Worldism,” with reference in particular to an NLR article, “The Third World” (I/18, January–February 1963) by Keith Buchanan, but also with reference to Sartre and Fanon. This shift seems to include, he suggests, abandoning both the revolutionary traditions in the “West” as well as any commitment to present practice. “Where Are We Now?” also includes a brief discussion of Marxism as interpreted by the Team and a defense of “socialist humanism.” This is just one of what would become a number of exchanges between Thompson and Anderson. Thompson would return with the “Peculiarities of the English” (Socialist Register, 1965), Anderson with “The Left in the Fifties” (NLR I/29, January–February 1965) as well as Arguments within English Marxism (London: Verso, 1980).