British Marxism and Cultural Studies

Essays on a living tradition

Philip Bounds, David Berry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317171812
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: Social Sciences

A comprehensive exploration of the profound influence of Marxist ideas on the development of Cultural Studies in Britain, this volume covers a century of Marxist writing, balancing synoptic accounts of the various schools of Marxist thought with detailed analyses of the most important writers. Arguing that a recognisably Marxist tradition of cultural analysis began in the last two decades of the nineteenth century and continues unbroken to the present day, British Marxism and Cultural Studies traces the links between contemporary developments in the field and the extended tradition of which they form a part. With discussion of figures such as Jack Lindsay, C.L.R. James, Julian Stallabrass and Mike Wayne, as well as the cultural thinking of the New Left, Gramscian, Althusserian and Political Economy schools, this book shows that the history of British cultural Marxism is broader and richer than many people realise. As such, it will be of interest to scholars and students of sociology, cultural studies, intellectual history and the history of the Left.

1
Science, art and dissent

Jack Lindsay and the communist theory of culture

Philip Bounds

Opinions differ as to which writers should be included in any historical survey of British Cultural Studies. Many people still believe that Cultural Studies in Britain only really got underway in the late 1950s with the work of Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams. Others argue that the tradition began much earlier – perhaps with the work of Eliot, Leavis and Richards in the inter-war period or with the prophetic writings of Ruskin and Morris in the late nineteenth century. Indeed, one of the most stimulating characteristics of recent work on the history of Cultural Studies is that it often identifies ‘neglected’ figures from the past who have been unjustly excluded from the subject’s hall of fame. Scarcely a year goes by without historians identifying a crop of new writers – some well known in other fields, others utterly obscure – whose insights into culture make it necessary to expand our sense of what Cultural Studies has been and where it is going.

Over the last few years a number of scholars have argued that British communism played a much bigger role in the development of Cultural Studies than most people realize. The most persuasive exponent of this line is probably Francis Mulhern, whose essay ‘Culture and Society, Then and Now’ (2009) se eks to reshape our understanding of the early work of Raymond Williams. Rejecting the idea that books such as Culture and Society and The Long Revolution should essentially be seen as examples of ‘Left Leavisism’, Mulhern insists that it was writers associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) who exerted by far the biggest influence on Williams’s early work. In no sense is he suggesting that Williams simply imported communist ideas into Cultural Studies in a slavish or uncritical fashion. His point is that Williams forged a new style of cultural criticism by entering into a sustained dialogue with communist orthodoxy, refurbishing some of its central precepts while rejecting others. The passage in which he initially floats this idea is so important that it deserves to be quoted at length:

The book’s most telling associations, its formative associations, were with the Communist Party. This was something already fading from wider recognition by the middle 1950s, as Atlanticism consolidated its hold. With the adoption and re-narration of Culture and Society by the early New Left, it became hard to imagine. The cultural vision corresponding to the Communist Party’s new political programme, The British Road to Socialism, was a concerted rally of the national culture. In the literary journal Arena, which had been founded for the purpose, this took two related forms: a polemical rejection of ‘the American threat to British culture’ and, in direct continuity with the inter-war Popular Fronts, a systematic effort to define a legitimating national past for communism. Thus, Jack Lindsay’s Coleridge, the subject of the longest study in the record of the journal, was presented emphatically as both an English thinker and – with specific reference to Hegel – a dialectician. Edward Thompson looked back to William Morris for illumination of ‘the moral issues today’. Here was one of the intertexts of Culture and Society and, oddly enough, a warrant for everything in the book that supports the familiar continuist reading of it. It is odd indeed that the Englishness of Culture and Society, so often mistaken as the trace of Leavisian discourse, should turn out to be the sign of rather more substantial communist affinities.

(Mulhern 2009: 35–36)

A comprehensive examination of the influence of British communism on Cultural Studies would be a major intellectual undertaking, not least because the CPGB’s impact on British cultural debates did not end in the 1950s. There were various occasions in the subsequent three decades when British communists either anticipated or played a major role in formulating the most important trends in cultural analysis. The purpose of the present chapter is a relatively modest one. Prompted in part by Mulhern’s recognition of the importance of the Anglo-Australian communist Jack Lindsay (1901–1990), I attempt to outline the main principles underpinning the extraordinary theory of culture which formed the basis of Lindsay’s gargantuan literary output. There are two reasons in particular why Lindsay’s work singles itself out for examination. The first is that it is highly representative of communist cultural thinking in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Although Lindsay was not the best known or most widely read communist critic of the age, his work gives peculiarly vivid expression to the CPGB’s most important cultural shibboleths in the period between the rise of Hitler and the onset of the Cold War. It thus embodies in capsule form the sort of intellectual culture in which Williams and other pioneers of Cultural Studies cut their teeth. The other main reason for engaging with it is that it still stands up in its own right. Totalising, polymathic and suggestive – traversing continents and historical epochs with enviable ease – Lindsay’s theory of culture sometimes makes the work of Eliot, Leavis and other contemporaries seem drab and unambitious by comparison.

There is a sense in which Lindsay has been a victim of his own productivity. The author of more than 150 books as well as hundreds of articles, he wrote so much that his contemporaries tended to ignore his work rather than engage with it. It was only towards the end of his life that a handful of scholars began to recognize him for what he was: one of the most important members of the talented generation of literary intellectuals associated with the CPGB in the 1930s.¹ The current scholarly consensus, exemplified by the writings of Joel R. Brouwer and Victor N. Paananen, holds that the most significant aspect of Lindsay’s work is his attempt to theorize culture as a form of ‘productive activity’ (Brouwer 1994; Paananen 2000: 51–1 00). Impatient with the crude Marxist habit of segregating the economic ‘base’ from the ideological ‘superstructure’, Lindsay allegedly anticipates the theoretical breakthroughs of the 1970s by showing how cultural activity not only ‘reflects’ economic production but also plays a direct role in pushing it forward. It is this which makes him what Paananen has called ‘the major British Marxist thinker between [Christopher] Caudwell and [Raymond] Williams’ (Paananen 2000: 56).

This chapter focuses on Lindsay’s cultural writings in the nine years between his conversion to Marxism in 1936 and the end of the Second World War in 1945.² Nearly all the most important ideas of his maturity received their initial formulation at this time. Its aim is to build on the pioneering efforts of Paananen, Brouwer and others by providing a detailed examination of the origins of Lindsay’s theory of culture. Its main argument is that the theoretical system for which Lindsay is currently best known was actually a drastic condensation of a much more ambitious (and in many respects much more impressive) theory of culture first formulated in the overlooked text A Short History of Culture in 1939.³ In effect, Lindsay disseminated his ideas about culture in two distinct but related versions. The first version encompassed the entire history of human society and was rooted in a complex argument about the nature of primitive communism. The second version extracted a number of simple ideas from the first version and reformulated them in language that owed a clear debt to the wider critical movements of the day. Moreover, Lindsay’s ideas were heavily influenced by contemporary trends in British communist ideology – something that has not always been recognized in the scholarly literature, which tends to portray him as a sort of isolated pioneer. Quite apart from drawing on the theoretical insights of some of the major communist thinkers of the day, Lindsay was deeply affected by the CPGB’s cultural policy in the second half of the 1930s and much of his work can be seen as a response to it. Any attempt to understand his theory of culture must relate it to this wider intellectual and political context, even if this means acknowledging that not all his ideas are necessarily as original as they seem.

Culture and the Popular Front

Jack Lindsay announced his conversion to Marxism in 1936, nearly ten years after establishing a minor role for himself in British cultural life as a critic and historian of Nietzschean persuasion.⁴ Although he delayed joining the CPGB until 1941, he immediately began contributing to Left Review and was soon regarded as an authoritative exponent of communist cultural doctrine. The single biggest influence on his work in the three or four years before the outbreak of the Second World War was the so-called Popular Front strategy. First adopted by the Communist International or ‘Comintern’ at its Seventh Congress in Moscow in 1935, the Popular Front strategy broke decisively with the highly sectarian policies which communists had pursued in the first half of the 1930s. Its cardinal principle was that the world communist movement should resist the rise of fascism by entering into alliances not merely with other forces on the left but also with liberals, progressive conservatives and anyone else who had an interest in defending democratic politics. In a highly influential address to the Seventh Congress entitled ‘The Working Class against Fascism’, the Comintern’s president, Georgi Dimitrov, insisted that fascism had to be defeated in the sphere of culture as well as the sphere of politics. His argument was that fascist organisations in Europe and elsewhere had gained an advantage over the left by portraying themselves as the sole legitimate inheritors of their respective national traditions. For example, Mussolini had won the support of ordinary Italians by claiming the mantle of Garibaldi, while the French fascists continually identified themselves with Joan of Arc. The only option for the communists was to try to outflank the fascists by launching a sort of parallel project from the left, or so Dimitrov claimed. Instead of allowing the likes of Hitler, Mussolini or Pilsudski to bend symbols of national identity to their own advantage, communists should try to show that the historical instincts of ordinary people had always had more in common with the politics of the radical left than with those of the authoritarian right. The best way of doing this was to draw public attention to the entrenched traditions of popular radicalism in every major country in the world. Moreover, in order to strengthen their reputation as defenders of democracy, communists should emphasize the crucial role of popular radicalism in establishing such things as free elections, freedom of speech and the rule of law.

Communists who do nothing to enlighten the masses on the past of their people… voluntarily hand over to the fascist falsifiers all that is valuable in the historical past of the nation.… The proletariat of all countries has shed much of its blood to win bourgeois-democratic liberties, and will naturally fight with all its strength to retain them.

(Dimitrov 1935: 70/98–99)

Dimitrov’s speech had a dra matic impact on the British communists.⁵ The last few years of the 1930s witnessed an outpouring of work on what was usually called the ‘English radical tradition’, some of it concerned with the history of plebeian revolt and some of it with the work of anti-establishment writers, thinkers and artists. Important monographs on Bunyan, Dickens and William Morris accompanied a flurry of lengthy essays in Left Review and a flood of shorter articles in the Daily Worker.⁶ The role of Jack Lindsay in this collective effort to reshape public understanding of British history was especially important. Along with the poet and essayist Edgell Rickword, with whom he edited the seminal anthology Volunteers for Liberty (1939),⁷ Lindsay did more than anyone else to define the general principles by which the history of the English radical tradition was interpreted. His efforts in this regard culminated just before the outbreak of the war with the publication of a sixty-page pamphlet entitled England, My England (1939a). Written in an openly propagandistic style, Engla nd, My England sketches the history of plebeian radicalism in Britain from the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 through to the founding of the CPGB in 1920. All the movements it examined are held to have a few important features in common. The first is that their ultimate goal was the establishment of communism – something which Lindsay sums up epi-grammatically with his claim that ‘Communism is English’ (Lindsay 1939a: 64). While Lindsay acknowledges that movements such as the Levellers, the Diggers and the Chartists were spurred into action by a range of historical injustices, he insists that their favoured solution to poverty, oppression and cultural deprivation was the institution of a classless society based on the common ownership of the means of production. This thesis is linked to an equally startling claim about the historical effects of plebeian revolt. Echoing Dimitrov’s point about the origins of ‘bourgeois-democratic liberties’, Lindsay admits that the English people had failed to establish communism but argues that the long-term result of their efforts was the emergence of political democracy. Contrary to what the purveyors of the so-called Whig interpretation of history might have said, Britain’s parliamentary system had not been created by feudal or bourgeois elites. The sole responsibility for its existence lay with the labouring masses, who knew instinctively that they could only advance the cause of communism by first securing such elementary safeguards against tyranny as free elections, the rule of law and the right to free speech. Many people believed that the CPGB could not entirely be trusted in its new role of defending parliamentary democracy against fascism. When Lindsay ascribed the very existence of ‘English freedom’ to the enduring tradition of popular revolt, he was trying to prove that their anxieties were misplaced.

If Lindsay’s basic arguments about popular radicalism are gross oversimplifications of a sort which no modern historian would endorse, England, My England also contains some slightly more sophisticated ideas. The most interesting of these concerns the role of ideology in history. Although Lindsay is careful to identify the material causes that had provoked ordinary people into rising up against their rulers, he seems inclined to explain their adherence to communist principles in terms of their response to ideas. His implicit point is that the masses had sustained their communist faith by reading society’s dominant ideas against the grain. A range of belief systems had been used over the centuries to inculcate support for the status quo, but each of them (or so Lindsay appears to believe) contained ambiguities that allowed radical thinkers to inflect them to the left. The most obvious example was Christianity. Although the British elite had persistently justified the miseries of class society by invoking the hierarchical dimensions of Christian thinking, the scriptures contained enough egalitarian sentiment to be readily susceptible to a more radical reading. As Lindsay pointed out, John Ball had skilfully co-opted Christianity’s main creation myth at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt by posing the legendary question ‘Are we not all descended from the same parents, Adam and Eve?’ (quoted in Lindsay 1939a: 10). Subsequent English radicals drew attention to Christ’s contempt for the Roman elite and his love of the common people. It is this emphasis on what cultural theorists would call the ‘polysemic’ nature of ideology – an emphasis shared by many other communist writers in the 1930s – that has prompted certain commentators to detect a quasi-Gramscian strain in the CPGB’s brand of cultural Marxism.

England, My England provides a rare example of Lindsay functioning more as a propagandist than as a serious scholar. While its simplistic vision ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Introduction: notes on a living tradition
• 1 Science, art and dissent: Jack Lindsay and the communist theory of culture
• 2 The New Left and the emergence of Cultural Studies
• 3 C.L.R. James: dialectics and the fate of the creative individual
• 4 From folk to jazz: Eric Hobsbawm, British communism and Cultural Studies
• 5 The Gramscian turn in British Cultural Studies: from the Birmingham School to cultural populism
• 6 Blind spots: re-reading Althusser and Lacan in Cultural Studies
• 7 Profit and power: British Marxists on the political economy of the media
• 8 Them and Us in contemporary Cultural Studies: Julian Stallabrass, Mike Wayne, Ben Watson
• Index