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Letters

Vol. 11 No. 22 · 23 November 1989

From David Howarth

Apart from the political and moral objections that could be made to it, Mary Beard’s review of Paul Hirst’s After Thatcher (LRB, 26 October) contains some very questionable assertions. Dr Beard speculates that under a system of proportional representation Britain would never have had ‘any semblance of the Welfare State’. This is a very peculiar claim, not only because of the existence of welfare states in all Western European countries regardless of electoral system (and also the weakness of the welfare systems of the two countries that follow the British electoral system – the USA and South Africa), but also because the historical evidence suggests otherwise.

The Welfare State in Britain was largely the creation of two governments, the Liberal Government elected in 1906 and the Labour Government elected in 1945. In 1906 the Liberals won 49 per cent of the vote: admittedly not an absolute majority, but we can assume that their welfare legislation would have been safe, since it was supported by the Labour Party, who had received 6 per cent. In 1945 Labour got 48 per cent. The Liberals, whose main electoral asset was William Beveridge himself, won 9 per cent. Even without Liberal support, Labour’s programme would still have passed the House of Commons, since Labour would have been able to rely on the smaller Left parties, such as Common Wealth and the Communists, who had the support of 2 per cent of the voters.

Dr Beard is also wrong about how proportional systems work. It is not true, for example, that PR would prevent Dr Beard from supporting a woman candidate. Even list systems, such as the Italian, can allow for votes for individual candidates on the party list. Under the system supported by many British electoral reformers – namely, the single transferable vote – Dr Beard would be far better placed to support women candidates than she is now. First, because of multi-member constituencies, she would have a much better chance of having a woman to vote for, especially a woman of her own party. Secondly, she would be able to express a preference for other parties’ female candidates over their male candidates, and could even, if she wanted to, prefer women from other parties to men from her own party.

One last point. Dr Beard implies that democratic reform must always take second place to economic redistribution. Does she really believe this? One should note that women in Britain have generally been more likely to vote Conservative than men. Are we to conclude that Dr Beard opposes women’s suffrage?

David Howarth
Clare College, Cambridge

Mary Beard writes: Maybe it is predictable that as an opponent of Proportional Representation I should be unmoved by percentages. But I am surprised at David Howarth’s certainty in assuring a retrospective safe passage to social reforms under a proportional system. Practical coalitions do not follow simply from the figures – as the experience of many recent European governments shows. Besides, who could say that the Labour Party in 1945 would still have achieved its 48 per cent if the voting had been conducted under a proportional system? Is it not partly the point of electoral reform that it changes voting habits and allegiances as well as the system of counting? David Howarth is, of course, correct in stating that some list systems (‘open lists’) allow the individual voter considerable choice of candidate within the overall party slate, or even across slates. But this is not the case with the so-called ‘closed-list’ system (such as Norway’s), where the voter must opt for a party and all its candidates en bloc. It is in fact this system that seems to have most effectivley advanced the political careers of women. Why? Because (as I said in my review) the ‘closed list’ prevents voters from following their prejudices and not voting for the female candidates on the list. To advocate PR means more than simply offering the voter greater freedom to vote for a woman candidate. It raises the far more uncomfortable question of how far a democratic voting system should erode the ‘freedom’ not to vote for a woman – or anyone else, for that matter.

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Vol. 11 No. 23 · 7 December 1989

From Keith Flett

I found Mary Beard’s review of Paul Hirst, Bernard Crick et al (LRB, 26 October) frustrating. It hedged about the subject, made some interesting points but missed some significant connections. Start with the early Sixties New Left. A revolt against Stalinism and the stultifying Fabianism of the Fifties Labour Party, it was a movement which went much further than Labour but failed to organise itself and was in the end subsumed by Harold Wilson and the promise of 1964. Paul Hirst descends from the successor to that New Left, a New Left led by Perry Anderson which saw the old New Left as hopelessly untheoretical and imported large chunks of European Marxist theory to solve the problem. The key is the failure to organise independently of both Stalinism and Fabianism. So, twenty years on much of both Old and New Lefts would probably agree with Mary Beard’s support for a philosophy based on ‘New Times’ and Charter 88.

In the abstract, there is nothing too terrible about the premises of Charter 88. Except that there is all-pervading pessimism about the possibilities of real change in society. Of course since ‘New Times’ and the Charter were conceived we have had Hungary, East Germany, another Stock Exchange crash, Labour’s victories in the European Elections, the release of the Guildford Four and victories for rail and local government workers. Quite a list. As Marx said, and as our potential Chartists might have noted, ‘all that is solid melts into air.’ The world is still there to be changed even if some sections of the erstwhile Left have other ideas.

In the meantime history is busy repeating itself as farce. The New Left which started as anti-Stalinist has recently signed a publishing deal with the Moscow State Publishing House.

Keith Flett
London N17

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Vol. 12 No. 2 · 25 January 1990

From Phil Edwards

I was puzzled to see Keith Flett (Letters, 7 December 1989) ascribe to Charter 88 – and Mary Beard – an ‘all-pervading pessimism about the possibilities of real change’. Consider its demands: PR, a Bill of Rights, a democratised second chamber; consider its achievement of, as Beard wrote, ‘involving women and men in a new set of discussions about what the ingredients of politics should be’. How ‘real’ do changes have to be? Granted, pessimism sets in when we survey the political landscape which Charter 88 will have to traverse. Here Flett is acute, noting the Left’s historic ‘failure to organise independently of Stalinism and Fabianism’. The Left’s ability to achieve this independence will be crucial to the success of Charter 88’s radical democratic project, which is unfamiliar territory to Fabians and anathema to Stalinists (and most Leninists). I must, however, dissent from Flett’s apparent belief that organising independently of (etc) is a simple matter of paying adequate attention to one’s Marx, and that it has never yet been done. To criticise the legacies of Fabianism and Bolshevism from the standpoint of a commitment to both democracy and socialism, and to win significant numbers of people to that critique, is a long and difficult task. It is, however, a task which has occupied years of many people’s lives, from the first New Left on.

Keith Flett should take heart. There is much about Charter 88 which we, as democratic socialists, find immensely positive – not least the fact that a ‘campaign for real democracy’ can gain such wide support. Charter 88 is not an agenda for socialism, but that should not lead socialists to deride it as meaningless, reformist, bourgeois. The line of Marx’s which Flett quotes – ‘all that is solid melts into air’ – referred to the transformation of society by the bourgeoisie.

Phil Edwards
Socialist Society, London Wl

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Vol. 12 No. 5 · 8 March 1990

From Robin Blackburn

Publishers are usually well-advised not to complain about reviewers, but I would like to breach this convention to vindicate not so much the two Verso books concerned as the political experience and thought which has received such cavalier treatment in your pages. Mary Beard (LRB, 26 October 1989) and R.W. Johnson (LRB, 8 February) are united in dismissing the thinking of the British New Left as of little account, reviewing, respectively, Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left, edited by the Oxford University Socialist Discussion Group, and the posthumous collection of Raymond Williams’s essays and lectures, Resources of Hope, edited by Robin Gable. In both instances your reviewers dwell on real or supposed flaws as a device to avoid a substantial engagement either with the books they were meant to be reviewing or with the New Left politics at stake in them.

Mary Beard criticises the early New Left for its failure to anticipate feminism, and uses this – a failing noted and discussed in Out of Apathy itself – as an excuse simply to ignore any other claim that the early New Left might have on the attention of your readers. If the record was so blank why did it attract the interest of several hundred Oxford graduates and undergraduates, including many feminists, three decades later? Indeed it is fascinating to see the contemporary resonance of Raphael Samuel’s exploration of ‘the sense of classness’ or the continuing debate among philosophers of ethical and political issues first broached in the debates between Edward Thompson, Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor in the late Fifties. The early New Left’s rejection of Stalinism, and critique of Labourist statism, was salutary ground-clearing, while the new approaches to culture and the mass media decisively widened the agenda of political analysis and prescription.

Even the gender-blindness of much early New Left thought can be exaggerated, since it was this milieu which produced writing by Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook), Juliet Mitchell (The Longest Revolution) and Sheila Rowbotham which helped to inspire Sixties feminism. Surely there was some link between the cultural politics of the early New Left, or the categories of Raymond Williams’s thought in The Long Revolution, and at least some of the characteristic concerns of this feminist writing?

Mary Beard had several books to review and so her skimpy treatment of Out of Apathy probably just reflects her lack of interest in that particular chapter of intellectual and political history. Less forgivable is Johnson’s unbalanced and philistine polemic, offered as an assessment of Resources of Hope, and of five other books about Williams, most of which are not even mentioned by name in this ‘review’. Johnson confesses himself puzzled by my claims for Williams’s stature and originality as a socialist thinker, and prefers to attack him for ‘wooziness’ and ‘muzziness’ and the affectations of a ‘literary gent’. According to Johnson, Williams ‘was not a major or even a very coherent theorist’, his early books ‘do not really sustain the large ideological weight later placed upon them’, and his book on Orwell is the ‘one good book’ he wrote after 1961. We are told that Williams’s work aimed simply to make his left audience feel good and has nothing of value to offer those who wish to address the issues of the Nineties. These perverse judgments are offered up with an evident zest to shock the bien pensant but with nothing by way of argument. Someone who can dismiss The Country and the City, or Modern Tragedy, or Marxism and Literature, or the book on Cobbett, so thoughtlessly does more damage to himself than to the intended target of such shallow jibes. Perhaps Johnson felt that he would be out of his depth if he engaged in real discussion of Williams as cultural theorist or critic. But he scarcely fares better when tackling his essays or his practical and political interventions.

The Resources of Hope collection contains such key texts as ‘Culture is ordinary’, ‘Communications and Community’, ‘Socialism and Ecology’ and ‘Parliament and Democracy’. Discussion of any one of these would have given Johnson something of real substance to reflect upon. The first was an early statement of Williams’s cultural position which was to include such highly practical, specific and influential works as Communications – a work which not only helped to open up the whole field of cultural studies but probably had a direct, practical impact on institutions such as the Open University and Channel Four. Thus his 1961 lecture on ‘Communications’ is attractively discursive, but not at all the woozy rambling of Johnson’s ‘literary gent’. And it concludes with proposals for a democratic, decentralised broadcasting structure which would lease facilities to independent producers.

The essays on ecology reflect a sensibility that long pre-dated the rise of Green politics and which had already achieved a major statement in the The Country and the City. If Johnson was really looking for relevance and immediacy he could have discovered it here. Likewise, the 1982 essay on Parliament is a practical political intervention which has lost none of its timeliness. Its critique of the undemocratic features of the Palace of Westminster – with its first-past-the-post electoral system, its secrecy and hierarchy – is accompanied by the sort of highly specific proposals which have inspired Charter 88: notably a commitment to citizen’s rights, proportional representation and executive accountability. It is not Williams who is ‘vacuous’ but your reviewer if he fails to see the effort to spell out alternatives in these essays or in Towards 2000.

The Verso collection included some informal talks or occasional articles together with ‘classic’ essays of the sort that I have referred to. This editorial decision, which I still think justified, allows Johnson to concentrate such rational argument as he can muster on a couple of lesser pieces which are treated as if they somehow sum up Williams’s work. The article entitled ‘Mining the meaning’ was commissioned as a critique of the ‘keywords’ used by the Coal Board, Government and press to justify the pit closure programme as well as Government conduct of the dispute. It was not meant to be a general article on the miners’ strike or an assessment of NUM strategy. Nevertheless Williams did append a concluding paragraph indicating his reservations concerning NUM ‘tactics, timing and personalities’. Had he been asked for an article on the strike as such, these reservations would have been spelt out in a more direct and detailed manner. Even so, they would not have coincided with Johnson’s own gloss to the effect that the strike was the last kick of an old order, and that Scargill was an autocrat who enjoyed no democratic sanction from his members. Scargill, unlike MacGregor, had been elected to the post he held – elected by a huge majority after a campaign in which he toured the coalfields arguing that massive closures were imminent and would have to be met by strike action. Nevertheless, I believe the failure of the NUM executive to hold a ballot on the strike to have been a bad mistake.

Johnson supposes that a misplaced loyalty to his friends in the NUM led Williams to mute his criticisms. Yet his friends among the South Wales NUM were precisely those within the union who had argued for a ballot and against the use of Yorkshire pickets in Nottinghamshire. As it happens, this position was spelt out – while the strike was still in progress – by Williams’s friend Kim Howells (of the South Wales NUM) in the Verso collection Digging deeper. But when Howells, or for that matter Anthony Barnett or myself, argued for a ballot – as we did in the very pages where Williams was also writing – we did so from the perspective of wishing to see the strike succeed. For reasons clearly spelt out by Williams, we believed that the resistance of the mining communities had exemplary qualities – and that a humane economic policy would have worked with rather than against the people of the coalfields.

Johnson’s second lengthy admonition concerns the supposed vagueness in Williams’s advocacy of the need to cultivate a new sense of the ‘general interest’. Johnson thinks there was not enough ferocity in Williams’s critique of ‘militant particularism’. He finds this latter notion altogether too mild, and would have preferred to see Williams launch a broadside against the Unions and Labour Movement as neanderthal formations richly deserving any drubbing that they received from the likes of MacGregor or Murdoch (no mention in Johnson’s discussion of the print workers of the need for strike ballots, since those ballots were held and resoundingly supported strike action).

In these passages R.W. Johnson sounds uncomfortably like his namesake Paul, evoking a distempered animus against the unions. While Williams warned of the dangers of ‘militant particularism’, he was also aware that British trade unions were capable, as in 1975-8, of incredible and even ill-advised restraint, allowing their members’ living conditions to deteriorate in the name of a quite nebulous ‘social contract’. And while the print workers were capable of an ugly egoism and exclusivity, Johnson’s claim that they are to blame for the power of the media empires fails to explain how the latter flourish even more when unions are weak. Johnson’s polemical trick is to construe Williams as an accomplice of sectionalist practice which he never condoned and which he criticised in the fashion he thought most effective.

Williams did advocate a different unionism, but he also believed in the capacity of ‘the movement’ to learn from its experience. This belief intensely annoys Johnson, for whom it is another sign of vacuousness and the Welsh or Nonconformist penchant for lugubrious uplift. Yet, interestingly, Williams’s patient pleas for a new unionism no longer seem so unrealistic – the tactics of the Ambulancemen’s strike are certainly much closer to those he believed were necessary. And whatever the failings of Brenda Dean’s SOGAT I don’t think that any fair-minded critic would include bloody-minded machismo amongst them.

Williams’s critique of ‘militant particularism’ was not directed solely at the sectionalism of trade-unionists: Resources of Hope also warns against lack of preparedness to negotiate a new ‘general interest’ in necessarily and rightly particularist social movements, such as Welsh nationalism or feminism. Similarly he argues in one of the essays that the new struggle for nuclear disarmament in the Eighties must also be a struggle for democracy, human rights and social justice. ‘To build peace, now more than ever, it is necessary to build more than peace’ – an argument taken up, in his own way, by Vaclav Havel on ‘the other side’.

Williams’s discursive style – target of such heavy sarcasms – aimed to bring out complexity, to avoid intimidation and to encourage people to interrogate their own experience. Unlike the great majority of academics, Williams was concerned to reach, and did reach, an audience of working-class activists and autodidacts. The tact and restraint with which he addressed this audience does not seem to me to have been lacking in truth-telling, unless one believes, as Johnson appears to do, that spades must always be called bloody shovels. This characteristic moderation meant that a rebuke from Williams had far more force than the ritualised political abuse we hear from Front Bench politicians – or, if I may say so, than the polemic to which Johnson has descended.

Williams did not address himself, as Johnson supposes, to trade-union leaders but to a general readership which he hoped would include Labour Movement activists and intellectuals. As a Cambridge professor, reasonably rewarded for a job he liked doing, he did not feel it right to attack the militant representations of miserably-paid dinner-ladies or refuse collectors, or moderately-paid miners or car-workers, though he did urge the necessity of linking trade-union action to a wider concern for social justice.

Johnson’s real animus is directed at Williams’s intense and reflective concern with values and with the social settings needed to sustain them. He belabours Williams for a ‘style rich in reference but largely empty of fact’. Certainly there is a ruminative and reflective quality to Williams’s prose and an absence of statistics. But there is such a thing as a moral fact: consider the import of Havel’s writings, for example, with their appeal to existential authenticity. Using the Johnson approach a year ago, Havel could well have been dismissed as a vague dreamer whose ideas lacked the necessary purchase to be politically significant.

Williams knew that his own cultural politics was only one component of the radical renewal of socialism for which he was working: he pointed to the need, for example, for a feasible economics of eco-socialism and self-management. But the example and advocacy of his own work will continue to be a source of inspiration and argument to those who try to democratise the UK state, to resist the pincer grip of government and commercialism on the broadcasting media, to reverse the philistine assault on education, or more generally to challenge the misery caused by the callous workings of capitalism in Britain and the wider world.

Robin Blackburn
Verso, London W1

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Vol. 12 No. 7 · 5 April 1990

From Doris Lessing

In your issue of 8 March Robin Blackburn claims The Golden Notebook as a product of the milieu of the New Left. This is quite untrue unless the New Left is now retrospectively to be expanded to include ideas which in fact it was impossible to discuss with any of the people I knew, most of whom were much younger that I was, and who I thought of as intellectual socialists. The Golden Notebook was not reviewed in the New Left Review. The young woman who asked to review it and was refused complained for several hours of a long wet journey to Wales about the attitudes to women in this milieu, particularly the New Left Review.

Doris Lessing
London NW6

From Peter Cadogan

Raymond Williams saw himself, inter alia, as a political activist. He can be so judged. I well remember an occasion in the Sixties, in the Town Hall in Cambridge, where he was the main speaker at a big meeting. He spoke in inspiring style about democracy, the people’s future, Jerusalem and all the trimmings, and ended with a rhetorical question: ‘What, then, shall we do?’ We waited in euphoric expectation for the answer and it came: ‘Vote Labour at the General Election.’ The anti-climax! All he had to offer was brilliant rhetoric. Lloyd George, Bevan, Griffiths, Williams, Kinnock – how well the Welsh beguile the English! And how we seem to love it!

Years later, in London, I joined his post-1968 enterprise – Mayday Manifesto – an exercise in injecting some new life into the then ageing New Left. I soon found out that he was being serviced by King Street (then the headquarters of the CP) and tried to warn him about that kiss of death. As an ex-CP member I knew just what was going to happen. He took no notice and I quit, but not before writing to him to underline the message that if he didn’t stand on his own two feet, his brave enterprise would be as dead as the dodo in no time. And it was.

Might he and others like him have done anything else? The answer has to be affirmative. The period 1956-68 saw the birth and decline of the New Left as a strictly parliamentary exercise and of non-violent direct action, of the genus of people’s power, in the form of the Committee of 100. Reinforced by Bertrand Russell’s name and personal example the idea went round the world, but Raymond Williams and the leaders of the New Left (with one or two honourable exceptions) passed by on the other side. The thing eventually collapsed because the circumstances of Britain have been such that non-violent direct action has never had occasion to develop into non-violent insurrection and the displacement of an existing government in the fashion that has become commonplace over the last six months in Eastern Europe. The subject was born in Britain in the Sixties, but perished in its infancy. In the USA it was different. The civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King took to non-violent direct action in historic fashion. John Rawls wrote a theory of civil disobedience, in a near-free and near-just society, into his A Theory of Justice and Murray Bookchin made post-scarcity anarchism respectable.

Raymond Williams was one of a special breed. Others are, or have been, Fenner Brockway, Stuart Hall, Eric Hobsbawm and Bruce Kent – good people who have a genius for human relations and consensus, an ability to use language beautifully to tell people what they want to hear and so send them home with their batteries charged and a song in their hearts. But everything is left exactly as it was. Eventually, politically at least, they get found out. The sad thing is that in this century we have not produced a single political thinker of commanding stature since 1945. Raymond Williams, licensed rebel and excellent teacher, was never a candidate.

Peter Cadogan
London NW6

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Vol. 12 No. 8 · 19 April 1990

From John McMurtry

I wonder if ‘militant particularism’ (Raymond Williams’s resonant expression – LRB, 8 February) is not the deep flaw of the British character, with those most militantly particular about capital accumulation on the top.

John McMurtry
University of Guelph, Ontario