What's Left?

Women in Culture and the Labour Movement

Julia Swindells, Lisa Jardine

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138334342
• eBook ISBN: 9780429817939
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1990. What had been left out of Left thought? What had allowed the Left to substitute nostalgia for programme and action, and to continue to address itself exclusively to labouring men, despite insistent demands for inclusion from others – notably women – who recognised themselves as belonging to the Left? What's Left?, a feminist challenge to the male-dominated ideology of the Labour Party, took shape under the pressure of two crucial events: the third successive election defeat of Labour by the Conservative Party, and the death of Raymond Williams.

Swindells and Jardine analyse the difficulties the Left had including women in its account of class, to clarify general problems in British Left thought. They conclude that there was a serious and widely-perceived discrepancy between the Labour Party's model of working-class consciousness and the experiences of the contemporary workforce as a whole. An important exploration of the intellectual history of the Labour Movement, What's Left? looks critically at the Left from within the Left. It will be fascinating reading for students of cultural studies, history, politics and women's studies.

Chapter One

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Homage to Orwell

The dream of a common culture and other minefields

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In the Britain of the fifties, along every road that you moved, the figure of Orwell seemed to be waiting. If you tried to develop a new kind of popular cultural analysis, there was Orwell; if you engaged in any kind of socialist argument, there was an enormously inflated statue of Orwell warning you to go back. Down to the late sixties political editorials in newspapers would regularly admonish younger socialists to read their Orwell and see where all that led to.

(Raymond Williams, ‘Orwell’, Politics and Letters)¹

The first question that arose in my mind was: what have I to do with Orwell?

(Bea Campbell, Wigan Pier Revisited)²

This opening chapter is inspired by Bea Campbell’s question, as it is, in the end, by her whole book – her (as the jacket blurb tells us) ‘devastating record of what [she] saw and heard in towns and cities ravaged by poverty and unemployment’, as she travelled in the footsteps of Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. We, socialists and feminists, found ourselves driven by our delight at her posing that question, on which the book hangs (what, indeed, have any of us to do with Orwell?), to want to explore it further. At this point, at the outset, she answers: ‘Only a point of departure. Though nearly fifty years later I have followed a similar route to Orwell’s, his book is all that we share.’³ But when she asks the question again, at the end of the book, after she has struggled to put the reality (and that’s a crucial matter) of urban poverty before the reader, she answers: ‘The question isn’t simply academic – George Orwell is part of our political vocabulary, he changed the very language we speak, and he is a prize in the contest for our culture between the Right and the Left.’⁴ We seek here to build on both these answers to that original question, because we believe that they focus a crucial area of difficulty in any encounter between feminists and the Left, concerning culture, and socialism, in a tradition which we shall argue is shared by Orwell and Raymond Williams, as they cast their long, overlapping shadows over debates on the Left.

One Left reviewer called Campbell’s book ‘a flawed but in parts brilliant piece of reportage depicting a journey through the depressed towns of the North and the Midlands, written from a feminist and socialist perspective’.⁵ And he went on (let’s leave the ‘flawed’ for a moment): ‘Her chapter on the “Landscape”, a graphic evocation of the physical environment of jerry built high rise council estates, with their sweating walls, uninsulated rooms and concrete flaking off like snow … deserves to stand comparison with the most memorable of English journeys from Cobbett onwards, and if only for this reason should be read by anybody concerned about Britain today.’⁶ So there is a pretty positive response of the Left to Wigan Pier Revisited too … apart from that ‘flawed’. The flaw is in relation to Williams (whose Towards 2000 is the subject of the same review):

Williams [suggests] a new form of socialism which might be built around the ecology movement, the feminist movement and the peace movement. Such a change might occur ‘when we have replaced the concept of society as production with the broader concept of a form of human relationships within a physical world: in the full sense a way of life.⁷

Campbell apparently fails in this enterprise: ‘What Bea Campbell’s book highlights is how much more difficult it will be to achieve a new form of alliance between socialism and feminism – let alone between men and women who aspire to be socialist and feminist – than is evoked by Raymond Williams.’⁸

We shall argue here that the tension between this version of Williams and Campbell’s enterprise (complete with its invoking of Orwell) lies at the heart of the Left’s persistent failure to take socialist feminism to heart. Which is a polite way of saying that it allows men on the Left to explain to feminists on the Left that their approach (whilst interesting – political, even) is marginal, tangential to mainstream socialism, flawed, partial. We aren’t speaking the male Left’s language, we don’t share the certainties (that confident ‘writing well’ on the issues), of the English male socialist. Or, to quote Stedman Jones again: ‘One of the things now lacking within the feminist movement is male speech. Only when men, sensitive to a feminist case, begin to speak out their own difficulties more candidly, can there be a real chance of constructing the socialist and feminist vision of which Williams speaks.’⁹ The desire for male speech, the desire to author the case – in other words, to write well about it – is pre-emptive. It seeks to compensate for something seen to be lacking in terms of the ‘candid’ and the ‘visionary’, when, as Williams suggests, the absence is fundamental to the socialist movement through that very commitment to masculinity. The argument tends inexorably towards the ‘literary’, towards a particular version of class-consciousness (the authorized account), at the very moment at which it is clearest that key assumptions there are profoundly damaging to any attempt to narrate women in relation to the Labour movement (like Campbell, ‘his book is all that we share’).

Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier belongs to ‘the literary’, as a key component in the formation of the narrative of English socialism.¹⁰ As soon as we turn our attention, as feminists, to class politics and the Labour movement, we find ourselves negotiating texts steeped in the traditions of the English novel, in versions of authentic working-class experience formed within the dominant culture by an intelligentsia immersed in a late-nineteenth-century ideology of work and (in particular) of the domestic/the family. ‘Authenticity’ is problematically consolidated between the narrator and his narrative. If the romanticizing of the English working man is a failing of English socialism, it is so in part at least as a result of socialism’s having claimed both a set of fictions (late-nineteenth-century versions of work and experience) and an authoritative voice (the voice of the author) in which to speak about them. The question we begin to ask here is: why has the Labour movement allowed nineteenth-century paternalistic fiction to mediate its class history? And the reason why this question is crucial for us is because, within this account, gender is not, and cannot be, recognized as an issue. As soon as gender becomes an issue, the bond with socialism’s language of class is inevitably broken (which is why Gareth Stedman Jones’s review of Campbell finds her account so fraught with difficulties).

It is clear that there are many converging accounts to be given of the English Labour movement’s involvement with a representation of working-class life as a life of ‘worth’ in the fictional terms of the classic realist novel.¹¹ For our present purposes we choose to focus on some of the consequences of this in the discourse of the left-wing intelligentsia in England in the 1960s – and specifically the debate around Raymond Williams, concerning the relations between class and culture.

Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society belongs to the Left ‘revival’ of the 1950s, alongside Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, E. P. Thompson’s William Morris, Romantic to Revolutionary,¹² and The New Reasoner’s metamorphosis into the politicized New Left Review.¹³ In fact, Perry Anderson identified the 1950s as the period when the word ‘culture’ came to stand for a central, unifying preoccupation in English socialist thought.¹⁴ Significantly, Anderson also goes on to argue that, in the 1950s, English studies was the only discipline in which a coherent account of English society and its class and culture formations could be given; the only area of intellectual debate in which the boundary demarcations of the subject did not fragment the discussion beyond the point of coherent analysis:

It is no accident that in the fifties, the one serious work of socialist theory in Britain – Raymond Williams’s The Long Revolution¹⁵ – should have emerged from literary criticism, of all disciplines. This paradox was not a mere quirk: in a culture which everywhere repressed the notion of totality, and the idea of critical reason, literary criticism represented a refuge. The mystified form they took in Leavis’s work, which prevented him ever finding answers to his questions, may be obvious today. But it was from within this tradition that Williams was able to develop a systematic socialist thought, which was a critique of all kinds of utilitarianism and fabianism – the political avatars of empiricism in the labour movement. The detour Williams had to make through English literary criticism is the appropriate tribute to it.¹⁶

It wasn’t a detour; the pivoting of Left history and Left criticism around that keyword ‘culture’ (in a silent agreement) has proved to be an enduring source of confusion. In the 1960s it lay behind the confrontation between Anderson and Nairn on the one hand, and Williams and Thompson on the other, over the place of theory in English Left thought:

In The Peculiarities of the English [writes Anderson in 1966] Thompson indignantly rejects Tom Nairn’s remark that: ‘Actual consciousness is mediated through the complex of superstructures, and apprehends what underlies them only partially and indirectly.’ He comments virtuously: ‘The mediation … (is) not through Nairn’s “complex of superstructures”, but through the people themselves.’ This ‘humanist’ affirmation is followed by a trumpet-call to abandon the notion of a superstructure, and to rely instead on a ‘subtle, responsive social psychology’. What this amounts to is beautifully evoked by this account of historical causation working through the people themselves, unmediated by social structure, political formations, ideology – or anything more than a moralistic psychology: ‘the working people of Britain could end capitalism tomorrow if they summoned up the courage and made up their minds to do it’.¹⁷

As we shall see, Thompson does tend not to notice the theoretical base on which his invoking of a particular version of history and culture depends. But equally, Anderson fails to register that there is a context within which Thompson’s calling up of individual spokesmen for an alternative cultural tradition is certainly not ‘pure afflatus’ (‘A young left-wing journalist cannot be discussed without evoking William Morris; the comparison is no more than a slovenly gesture’).¹⁸

Williams himself later acknowledged that readers consciously positioned themselves in relation to his early writing, in ways which he had not anticipated (but which we are suggesting was a particularly important moment in socialist thinking in the 1960s). Interviewed by Perry Anderson, Anthony Barnett, and Francis Mulhern (and that matters; Williams is speaking to them and to a recognizable tradition of politics and letters in New Left Review) in 1979, Williams returned to the way in which Culture and Society had been ‘taken up’ in unexpected ways at the time of writing:

My primary motivation in writing the book … was oppositional – to counter the appropriation of a long line of thinking about culture to what were by now decisively reactionary positions… . It allowed me to refute the increasing contemporary use of the concept of culture against democracy, socialism, the working class or popular education, in terms of the tradition itself. The selective version of culture could be historically controverted by the writings of the thinkers who contributed to the formation and discussion of the idea. Secondly, the possibility had occurred to me – it was very much in the back and not in the front of my mind – that this might also be a way of centring a different kind of discussion both in social-political and in literary analysis. What happened, I think, was that the second part of the project, which I had always seen as subsidiary, belonging much more to the sequel of The Long Revolution I was planning, assumed because of the moment of its publication a more important function than I had originally intended. The book was not primarily designed to found a new position. It was an oppositional work.¹⁹

What Williams is registering here is that he wrote in one sense, and was taken in another. That is to say, he wrote from within the ‘tradition’, an ‘oppositional’ work, which challenged the coherently reactionary account of ‘culture’ as art...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Homage to Orwell
• 2 ‘In a voice choking with anger’
• 3 Writing history with a vengeance
• 4 Talking her way out of it
• 5 ‘Who speaks for history?’
• 6 Culture in the working classroom
• Postscript
• Notes
• Index