Letters
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 (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
Vol. 12 No. 6 · 22 March 1990
From R.W. Johnson
I’m sorry to have offended Robin Blackburn by my article on Raymond Williams (Letters, 8 March). Robin is wrong to talk of my ‘animus’ against Williams. I had and have none. As I said in my review, he was clearly a nice, gentle and generous man, and I have no doubt that his political writings, defective though I think them, stemmed from noble instincts, that his heart was, as they say, in the right place. The point of my review was rather different. Great claims have been made for Williams as a political writer. This is not an easy thing to be. It calls for a combination of literary and analytic skills with real political nous, a popular touch and an often unpopular desire to get to the truths behind the flim-flam. I had recently come across Michael Walzer’s judgment that Williams was not only an example of ‘the failure of English political writing’ but actually personified it. I reread much of Williams’s work before writing my review and felt, in the end, that Walzer was right. What seemed to me interesting was how a man of such evident gifts, energy and commitment could fail in that way – and how others could hail that failure as a great success. The reason, I felt, was that Williams became trapped – as so many of us do – within a closed rhetorical universe, partly of his own construction. Like all such universes, it became predictable, with its ritual mentions and silences, its key words and, sadly, its evasion of unpalatable truths. It is, I think, impossible to be thus trapped and also to be a good political writer.
Robin thinks I would have liked Williams to ‘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’. Not at all. I would far rather that left intellectuals like Williams had spoken out openly and truthfully about, for example, the inherited nature of jobs in the printers’ union in the Fifties, Sixties or Seventies. If they had done that more effectively – or even at all – there might have been no sitting ducks for Murdoch et al to slaughter in the Eighties. But the truth is not just an instrumentality: inherited jobs, like inherited peerages, deserve to be denounced in themselves, for they are simply wrong.
The real point at issue between Robin and myself is, I think, the question of solidarity politics. Solidarity politics means that in the last analysis one places a higher value on the solidarity one feels with a class or group than on speaking the truth about it. Working politicians and polemicists do this all the time and quite naturally so. We’re all used to that and we don’t look to them as searchers after truth on anything. But I don’t think anyone who wants to set up as a political writer can afford to allow anything to count higher than the truth. This does not, of course, mean that such a writer is not allowed his own commitments. Eric Hobsbawm is a fine example of a political writer who does not allow either his own commitments or a sense of overweening solidarity to get in his way. Reading Hobsbawm, you know he’ll go where the argument takes him, even against his own prejudices if that’s how it turns out. He’s quite capable of describing both how Communism failed definitively as a historical movement and yet also how determined he is to remain a CP member. This level of detachment seems to me both splendid and essential. Robin provides a good example of what I mean in the way he talks of his own advocacy of a ballot in the miners’ strike, emphasising that this advocacy was performed ‘in the perspective of supporting the strike’, as if somehow this alone made it right to mention the embarrassing fact of the denial of democracy within the NUM. I don’t accept that. (I didn’t accept it at the time either. I contributed what I could to help miners’ families – groceries not money because I didn’t trust the NUM with cash. As I handed over the food I also made clear my views about the denial of a ballot. Both were received in silence.) I think that the NUM’s refusal to allow its membership to vote was simply wrong in itself, irrespective of any sort of perspective on the strike. It deserved to be denounced as such, and the truth of that denial of democracy should not have been subordinated to any feelings of solidarity with the miners.
That truth was, moreover, so important – it doomed the strike from the outset – that I fail to see how Williams could write about ‘key words in the strike’ and fail to mention it; at least, not if he was to justify a reputation for ‘a special sort of truthfulness’. The problem with Williams was that with him it was a matter of solidarity first and last, so that where he started was also bound to be the point at which he ended up – thus giving his writing a circular and ritual quality. It is, I suspect, for those reasons that solidarity politics have always slid so naturally into an older, religious tradition – in that repetitive ritual sound one cannot but hear the cadences and incantations of the Chapel. This sort of rhetoric has a long and honourable tradition in our political life, but personally I do not look to it to provide guidelines for the future. There is, of course, room for two views about this and I am sorry if mine has given offence.
R.W. Johnson
Magdalen College, Oxford
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
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
