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DR. ABRAMS AND THE END OF PO LITI CS by Ralph Samuel DR. MARK ABRAMS’

survey of political attitudes, “Why Labour Has Lost Elections”, published in four consecutive issues of Socialist Commentary, and shortly to achieve wider distribution as a Penguin “Special”, does not tell us anything new about the reasons for Labour’s defeat, nor does a close reading support its claim to offer a “reliable understanding of contemporary British political loyalties”. Its importance lies rather in the underlying approach to man and politics which it reveals and which, in turn, it supports. This might be summed up as a species of status determinism, supported by a behaviourist psychology of opinions and informed by the assumptions of motivational and market research. Dr. Abrams, in a general statement of his views published in the May issue of Encounter, advances what he calls a “functional view” of the nature of human opinion. A man, so he believes, holds a certain opinion not because he thinks it to be true, or considers it to be important, or because he holds that its consequences would be just, but rather because “holding it serves certain functions in life”, the principal one being that it “helps him to establish his identity—partly to the outside world, but primarily in his own eyes. Sometimes this identity is reached by indicating affinity with a social type, sometimes by indicating dissociation”.

Starting from this “functional” definition of political behaviour, Dr. Abrams would have us revolutionise the traditional picture of the reasons why people support Labour. Working class people who vote Labour, in his description, do not do so because of material conditions—since many people in the same situation vote Conservative— nor yet because they think Labour policy better for the country, or for their class, or even for themselves, but rather: “Because of their concern to see themselves as people moved by social generosity . . . prosperous working class adults vote Labour because in this mirror they can see themselves as humanitarians beyond the reach of (Conservative) selfishness”.

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Nor are their Conservative neighbours accorded much more respect. They do not, in Dr. Abrams’ model of political behaviour, vote Conservative because they actively prefer that Party’s policies —thinking them more “national” or more “efficient”, crediting them with responsibility for the new prosperity or, deferentially, holding that “they’re born to rule”, “they’ve got the money”, but rather that the act of voting Conservative:

“establishes them (in their own eyes) as patriotic and intelligent . . . prosperous working class adults vote Conservative because ‘buying’ this label, they are able to recognise themselves as intelligent (i.e. clever, educated, sensible) and altruistic (patriotic and non-Labour)”.

Dr. Abrams does not explore all the consequences of his “functional view” of the human mind, but he does propose it as a general theory of opinion, and indeed sets it forth as a selfevident truth which requires no justification. The Labour voter—to translate his analysis into everyday terms—does not support Labour because he is moved by a desire to help the old, or give aid to the poor, or because he would like to see the country more socialist or more just, or because he wants to improve life for the people of the country: his real purpose—since no generous impulse or objective convictions are allowed to exist—is merely a “concern to be seen to be a person moved by social generosity” both in the eyes of others and in his own status mirror. He is “buying” a “label” to support his self-image. He is not so much committed to supporting the Labour Party as enmeshed in a pattern of compulsive role-playing, in which a desperate concern to validate his own self-image is matched only by his desire to win the esteem of his neighbours (which neighbours, Dr. Abrams does not say: it is a curious departure from his theory that Dr. Abrams’ Labour voters do not seem troubled by the image they present to their Conservative neighbours, whose pursuit of egoidentification has led them down such very different paths).

In Dr. Abrams’ description of man, there are no substantive emotions left at all: neither generosity nor selfishness, altruism nor selfseeking, kindness nor cruelty, but only their pallid reflections which flicker in the universal mirror of status. If we were to follow him we should have utterly to revise our view of history, for so low a view of human behaviour would allow none of the great passions to have any independent existence of the structure of prestige. History, on this view, could not be seen as the product of human reason, human will or human passion; it would have to be re-written as a commentary on the changing patterns of prestigeranking, a giant superstructure erected around the edifice of esteem. No movement would be large enough, no conviction powerful enough, no purpose transcendent enough, to escape the dictates of the status mechanism. When Latimer and Ridley were burning in St. Giles—so the argument would run—they were sustained not (as they appeared to believe) by the conviction that “We shall light this day such a candle, by God’s grace, in England as shall never be put out” but rather by an overwhelming desire to secure approval according to the culturally-approved mores of early Tudor England, in which martyrology occupied so disproportionate and distressingly prominent a position. The ringing declartion of the Norfolk peasants in 1549 that “Christ made all men equal, with his precious blood shedding” would be seen as no more than conformity to the norms of a plebeian subculture which validated egalitarianism as a “label” it was approvable to “buy”. And, faced with Colonel Rainboro’s famous declaration in the Putney Debates of 1647 that “the poorest hee that is in England hath as much right to a life as the greatest hee” it would no doubt insinuate that he was not so much moved by this belief, as by the desire to see himself (and be seen by his fellow Leveller officers to be) a person “moved by social generosity”.

The Status Mirror Nor are these conjectures entirely fanciful, for, although Dr. Abrams does not speak of the past (how could he, since his is a view which denies the very spirit of man, and debases the meaning of history?), it is clear that this is how he expects us to judge the present and envisage the unfolding of the future. “In post-war Britain”, he asserts, “intelligence and higher education have achieved a social prestige which overrides almost all other day-to-day values”, and, in consequence, “onethird of prosperous working-class people prefer

to think of themselves as intelligent rather than generous”. “The heart of the problem facing Transport House”, he concludes from this, is that the Labour Party must offer an image and an object of identification which will be, for its supporters, “a mirror which shows them to be intelligent as well as generous”, in this way giving them the assurance that: “in voting Labour they will not automatically rob their self-image of one of these traits at the expense of the others”.

It is a gloomy characterisation of contemporary British man; one which allows him no core of conviction or steady centre, but only a moral vacuum in which the fast-flowing streams of status deposit their sediment. He sees people as consumers of politics, behaving in politics much as they would—in the motivational research imagination—when confronted with massmarketed commodities: they “buy” political labels and allegiances as they would any brandimage—because of the pleasurable associations it promises to afford. Thus Dr. Abrams leaves no standard by which to judge the relationship between Labour and its supporters, beyond the injunction that they must stand—as Mr. Crosland expresses it—in “rapport” with each other. Labour, on Dr. Abrams’ view, should renounce its historical role as a Party changing the ways in which people look at their society and giving form and voice to the demands they make of it. Instead, its principal concern, it seems, should be to give off a favourable pattern of “associations”. These associations may have an organic or only an accidental connection with people’s desires; they may bear a real or only a fancied relation to people’s genuine needs; but for this political philosophy, it does not matter at all. It is enough that, as in subliminal advertising, the associations should “connect” in people’s minds, and that the image they give off be assimilated into the pattern of self-identification. Dr. Abrams is not, therefore, concerned with the real nature of peoples’ needs and desires—since on his view they cannot be said to have any that are truly autonomous—nor with the quality of Labour policies, since these have no validity independent of the “identifications” they offer—but solely with “associations”, both personal (“ego-identification”) and political (Party “image” and Leader “personality”), and it is with these that his survey is principally concerned. It would be pedantic to dwell at length on the more obvious deficiencies of Dr. Abrams’ sociological methods. But since his survey purports (large claim!) to reveal the “underlying attitudes” determining political allegiances, and carries an unmerited aura of objectivity objectified something at least needs to be said of its limitation.

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For one thing, his sample of 724 people, while it would pass muster for the study of a local community, can scarcely stand as representative for the country as a whole (it is, in fact, nine times smaller than that used by the Gallup Poll on their election survey). What is more, it is a “quota sample”, which is generally recognised to be a less reliable way of choosing respondents because it leaves this to the whim of the interviewers. Moreover his results suggest that the survey has in fact suffered from the biases this could be expected to induce. Dr. Abrams has never satisfactorily explained why his statistics show only a 35 per cent Labour vote compared with 43 per cent in the October election and the only slightly lower level than that which the Gallup Poll has shown throughout this year. Nor does he attempt to explain the startling discrepancy between a Survey he conducted in the months preceding the October election— which showed “prosperous workers” dividing 2 to 1 in favour of Labour—and the present survey which shows the upper half of the working class dividing 6 to 4 against Labour.1 These doubts about the authority of the survey are intensified by Dr. Abrams’ readiness to base important assertions upon the most miniscule of sub-samples. When, for example, you read that “a half of Labour’s middle-class supporters favoured more nationalisation” (compared with a fifth among the working class), it is necessary to remind yourself—for Dr. Abrams, beyond a preliminary word, says nothing of the magnitudes behind his tables—that he is talking about a sub-sub-sample, and that his percentage represents no more than 10 actual people, just as it is sobering to remember that the 2 per cent of young people, who solemnly appear at the foot of the table of self-identifications as “identifying” with “people who ‘fiddle’” can refer to no more than three actual boys. The smallness of the Survey’s scale would be somewhat less alarming, were it not for the large and confident claims—owing more to the idiom of salesmanship than of serious sociology—which Dr. Abrams advances for his findings. Not one single doubt is permitted to disturb the symmetry of his analysis, nor any hesitation to interrupt a relentless progression from statistic to conclusion which gives the series the stupefying quality of 1 Here, as elsewhere, explanation is made impossible because Dr. Abrams feels under no obligation to reconcile apparently contradictory findings. It may be that those he refers to as “prosperous working class” in the pre-election survey (reported in Encounter) included some of those he is pleased to call “labouring working class”; but it could scarcely have included a majority of them; and in the present survey even the two groups together show only a bare Labour majority. My own guess is that both surveys were probably innaccurate, though in opposite directions.

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a prolonged demonstration of geometrical theorems.2 Even when he is making novel assertions about absolutely fundamental attitudes and values, he is burdened by none of the uncertainties which afflict sociologists covering much less ambitious themes, and offers the reader neither caution nor qualification.

Conjuring Up Majorities What is worse, Dr. Abrams shows a facility for conjuring majorities out of minorities which, while no doubt the envy of every Constituency agent who reads him for guidance, suggests a rather less than complete candour. To take one example of the illegitimate extensions he finds for his statistics: it is enough that 25 per cent of his young people pick “middle class” on his card of identities, for Dr. Abrams to infer that “young people identify themselves in the main with the middle class”. “In the main”, like its opposite “only”, is a phrase which, in Dr. Abrams’ vocabulary, is capable of considerable manipulation: on page nine of the first instalment, we learn that “only 30 per cent of Labour supporters used one of their three votes to identify with Old Age Pensioners”; two paragraphs later Dr. Abrams uses the 35 per cent of Conservative supporters who identified with “fair play and justice” to support the assertion that “Conservative voters concentrated on fair play and justice” and, still more surprising, to prompt the somewhat extraneous reflection that they “saw themselves as ‘average people’ and not as ideologists”. On the same page, the 28 per cent who thought young people more likely to vote Conservative (compared with 13 per cent who thought them more likely to vote Labour, and 49 per cent who thought they would vote for either Party), are deemed sufficient to warrant the claim—one of the most widely publicised of Dr. Abrams’ “findings”—that “the electorate” sees the Conservatives as “the Party of young people”. Dr. Abrams’ treatment of young people themselves is even more cavalier. Teds and Mods, Beatniks and Ravers, Aldermaston Marchers and Nuclear Campaigners, they all disappear amidst the whirrings of his Hollerith Machines, to reemerge, on his Punch Cards, an almost undifferentiated mass whose principal “identification” is with “middle class progressive ‘optimists’ ” (!) Dr. Abrams says nothing about the 2 This is not rhetoric, either. Of 12 people I know who attempted to read the Survey only one (8 per cent) was able to complete it. The Survey cries out for the sound of a solitary human voice, for a single personal insight to illumine the dreary wastes of statistics.

characteristic attitudes and values of the different groups of young people he is claiming to describe, and, dismissing at the outset the 10 per cent of his sample, “whose political views were so unformed that they could not be described even as ‘leaning’ towards any Party”(how one would like to know what they actually said to his interviewers), he then proceeds to the startingly insensitive conclusion that: “the young people of today have, in political matters, very much the same attitudes, assessments and values as their elders”.

Dr. Abrams seems intent on proving—against such weight as his own statistics may be allowed to possess—that young people see themselves as middle class in values and Conservative in sympathies. Only when answering criticism on this, has he shown any respect for his own percentile scores: “‘It is true’, he wrote in reply to a correspondent in Socialist Commentary, ‘that a slightly higher proportion of young people, according to the Survey, believe that Labour is the Party that will benefit young people most; but does this really bring much consolation when in fact young people holding this view amount to only 27 per cent of the total sample’ ”.

This is almost the only time, on this subject, when he is prepared to admit that a minority is, in fact, only a minority. Elsewhere he allows nothing to impede the monotonous predictability of his conclusions. In face of statistics which show that young people “attach very little importance” to a party standing “mainly for the middle class” (this actually came bottom in the Party attributes his young people thought important) and that only 1 in 4 “identified” themselves with middle-class people (though if the magnitudes were the same as in the adult survey one-third must themselves have been middle-class), he nevertheless advances, undismayed, to the proposition that “tomorrow’s voters identify mainly with middle-class people”. Confronted by such strained interpretations as these, the reader would do well to bear constantly in mind Disraeli’s still relevant typology of the three kinds of lies: “lies, damned lies and statistics”. Nor is the conversion of minorities into majorities the only kind of glossing in which Dr. Abrams indulges. Less obvious, but no less important, is his habit of projecting living sentiments—predictably akin, however, to his own—on to statistics which will scarcely bear the emotional weight he so freely thrusts upon them. The 91 per cent affirmative replies by the young on “job satisfaction” enable him to discern, from the fastness of St. Martin’s Lane, a picture of “solid contentment” (!); the 29 per cent of young

people who, on income levelling, chose the soubriquet “strongly disagree” (in preference to “disagree, but not strongly”, “agree, but not strongly”, “strongly agree”) are thought—such is the sensitivity with which he endows his attitude scales!—to have displayed “considerable intensity” on this subject, just as the small number of people spontaneously mentioning “nationalisation” as a hoped-for outcome of a Labour victory are judged sufficient for him to declare that nationalisation “bores” Labour voters.

Bewildering Set of Choices In this sense Dr. Abrams is probably right to suggest that had he used a much larger sample his results would not have been very different. It is not only his remarkable dexterity in handling statistics which makes one suspect that, whatever they had shown, his conclusions would hardly have altered. It is also that many of the “answers” were plainly determined by the questions themselves. Dr. Abrams ponderously reminds us that the statements offered respondents were “systematically rotated to eliminate all possible bias”, and insists that their “choice” was, in consequence, entirely “free”. But there is a threshold after which choices can be so numerous and so trivialised as to be meaningless, and Dr. Abrams’ questionnaire must have passed well beyond it. Faced with so bewildering a variety of choice— 15 possible attributes of the Party leaders, 16 characteristics of the Party image, 20 different types of personal identification—confronted by the bottomless character of Dr. Abrams’ categories, and the relentless profusion in which they were offered, one suspects that the mind must have wandered and the spirit wearied in face of it all. How else is one to account for the 30 per cent of Dr. Abrams’ Labour respondents who picked “has a sense of humour” as one of Mr. Gaitskell’s personality attributes, a claim which even his most ardent partisans have never advanced for him? And by what strange alchemy, to take another example, did 89 per cent of Labour supporters believe the Party stood “mainly for the working class”, while 37 per cent of them held simultaneously the opposite view that it stood “mainly for the middle class”? And how else—to pursue this line of enquiry— can we account for some of the more startling statistical differences, unexplained by Dr. Abrams, which so insistently confront us? Why do 20 per cent of Dr. Abrams’ young people rate Mr. Gaitskell more “straightforward and frank” than Mr. Macmillan, but only 9 per cent more “honest and sincere”? Or 20 per cent of their

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elders prefer Mr. Macmillan as the more “friendly personality”, but only 10 per cent as the more “kindly and humane”? One is pleased, though puzzled, to learn that, among Conservative voters, 15 per cent believed the Conservatives stood “mainly for the working class” and 7 per cent believed they “had most in common with underdogs” (whoever they might be), but then disconcerted to find that, amongst the young, only 56 per cent were prepared to identify themselves with young people, and not at all reassured (in looking for the missing 44 per cent) to find that 8 per cent identified themselves with Old Age Pensioners! It is, of course, possible, that these statistical variations represent subtle and deeply personal discriminations on the part of Dr. Abrams’ respondents; but it seems more reasonable, if uncharitable, to assume that they were determined by the emptiness of the choices made available in such paralysing multiplicity. Where the replies do not obviously support one of his hypotheses—and above all where they make nonsense of the whole method— Dr. Abrams does not feel obliged to evaluate their meaning, for he seems hardly aware that his survey is about attitudes. Instead of trying to search out the cluster of opinions that make up a genuine “attitude”, he is content to display them as percentage scores—“united team of leaders” near the top, “help for the underdog” near the bottom—rather in the manner of a Football League table. He does not so much relate his findings to each other, as engage in elegant permutations to pick the probable winners. For example, he tests 15 possible attributes of political leaders, and then compares them against the Party leaders to announce that: “Mr. Gaitskell’s three highest outright scores were on ‘in touch with ordinary people’, ‘practical, down to earth’ and ‘friendly personality’”.

And as if this were not enough he then proceeds solemnly to remind us that: “the first of these had been judged by the whole sample as the fourth most important characteristics of a good Party leader”.

Now this “first” attribute—“in touch with ordinary people”—is a traditional Labour and working-class attitude, which has rather more significance than the other choices offered, and so it is interesting to learn that this was the one single point on which 21 per cent of Dr. Abrams’ Conservative voters gave Mr. Gaitskell a preference over Mr. Macmillan. Perhaps, behind this statistic, lie those working-class Conservatives who—like the Coventry motor worker described by Dennis Butt in NLR 3— are “really Labour men at heart”? But when Dr. Abrams pauses, it is not to consider their

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possible significance but only to dismiss them rapidly from mind:

“it should be remembered that only 30 per cent of all Conservatives nominated this when asked to name the four most important characteristics of a good Party leader” .

But if the 21 per cent were drawn from the 30 per cent (something Dr. Abrams does not examine), then we might have here two “scores” which had at last actually jelled into something that could, recognisably, deserve the name of an “attitude”. The reader is not allowed to consider this, for Dr. Abrams intervenes rapidly again, recalling that “judged on the whole sample”, the quality of being “in touch with ordinary people” had been rated only the “fourth most important characteristic for a good Party leader”.

No Room For Greatness If it is possible to talk seriously of the “fourth most important” characteristic of Party leaders we must wonder whether we have not, unwittingly, been translated into the realm of some higher irrationality. For what are we going to say about the thirteenth “most important characteristic for a good Party leader”: “having some qualities of greatness”? No place here, evidently, since it rates a mere 12 per cent, for Mr. Bevan (or for Mr. Churchill, or for that matter—since a “united team of top leaders” is rated second on the score card of Party attributes —for Mr. Fox or Mr. Gladstone or Sir Robert Peel). And what about the fourteenth, “humane and kindly”? Clearly these are qualities which any putative Party leader can dismiss from his mind as statistically so negligible as to be safely ignored. Even so, it is difficult to see how Mr. Gaitskell can find in Dr. Abrams’ table the prescription for successful political leadership it is obviously, in part at least, intended to provide. It is clear enough that he must be a “strong leader”, since this comes top with 58 per cent. But what is he to make of “strong enough to make unwelcome decisions”, which runs it a close second at 48 per cent? What it is that he must be “strong enough to make unwelcome decisions” about? Should he fly in the face of all received opinion? Demand the division of England into Heptarchical kingdoms? Proclaim himself King of Wessex? Disinter the bones of Edward the Confessor? Or will the electorate deem it sufficient if he horsewhip Mr. Cousins on the steps of Transport House? Alas, Dr. Abrams leaves him only with the recipe to mix 37 per cent of honesty with 17 per cent of cleverness and 12 per cent of greatness, and nowhere says how unpopular he would need to be in order to become popular once again.

It is when he comes to discuss social class that Dr. Abrams’ way of discussing things becomes most misleading. Some of the more obvious deficiencies of his approach come into play: his unwillingness to allow for the extreme limitations of this type of survey, his capacity for committing himself to improbable conclusions based on inadequate data, a refusal to evaluate the meaning of his statistics or to consider what, in the minds of the respondents themselves, their different replies actually meant. In his treatment of “prosperity and politics” there is again the suspicion that the reader is being treated with rather less than complete candour. His statistics show that between Labour and Conservative working class voters, there is no difference at all in their ownership of washing machines, refrigerators, television sets and CARS. Since this appears to contradict the general drift and tenor of his Survey, and since it places in question some of the more crucial assumptions both of Dr. Abrams’ own previous work (notably his much discussed “Home-Centred Society”), as well as Mr. Crosland’s Can Labour Win? (which leans heavily on Dr. Abrams’ earlier “findings”) it might be expected that Dr. Abrams would have a good deal to say about this. But apart from a brief gesture in the direction of a halting selfcriticism—political loyalties, he allows may, on this showing be based on “considerations other than the ownership or non-ownership of durable consumer goods”—Dr. Abrams pursues the one index—“house ownership”—that has not entirely failed him, endowing it with vote-producing propensities previously ascribed to the whole range of “durable consumer goods”. His statistics cannot really support the burden so suddenly borne upon them: the differential of 30 per cent: 20 per cent which separates Conservative from Labour working class home owners, scarcely explains the political allegiances of even the 25 per cent of his working class respondents who owned their own home, and tells us nothing at all about the remaining 75 per cent.3 Nor is it easy to understand the support for his thesis Dr. Abrams affects to discern in differential ownership of the telephone, since here the gap (a ratio of 14/7 per cent), dividing Conservative and Labour voter is still narrower. None of this, perhaps, should be very surprising, since neither houses nor telephones—nor, for that matter, as his statistics prove, refrigerators, or washing machines, or vacuum cleaners, or spin3 Dr. Abrams might have been on slightly safer ground had he concluded—from the fact that 39 per cent of his working class “Others” owned their own home—that home ownership is a critical determinant of ” deviant electoral behaviour among the working class” .

driers, or even cars—but, in the end, only people have the vote. In discussing class identification more directly than this, Dr. Abrams introduces a characteristic confusion by projecting on his respondents, distinctions and meanings which are entirely his own, forcing them to assign themselves to “labouring working class” or “skilled working class”, and then foisting on them the responsibility for making it, to triumphantly observe that: “one-quarter of Labour supporters, while admitting (!) their working class general status, distinguish themselves clearly from the labouring working class”.4

Self-assignment This does not exhaust, however, Dr. Abrams adeptness at discovering crucial divisions in the working class, nor his capacity to confuse sociological referents with political determinants. He seems quite unaware that “self-assignment” to a class—even in answer to an open-ended question, let alone in so circumscribed and rigidly pre-coded a questionnaire as he offers— provides no more than a clue to the whole complex of values and opinions which go into the making of “class attitudes”. Thus it is sufficient for him, that many of his working class respondents picked a middle-class selfassignment, and that a “statistically significant” difference separated Conservative and Labour (50 per cent: 30 per cent) for him to argue that: “upgrading oneself is one of the most important characteristics which in the working class separates Labour from non-Labour supporters” .

Now if there is one thing his statistics do not show, it is surely this. For, though it is true that there have always been, among working class Tories, people whose vote was influenced by the desire to “upgrade themselves”, there is no evidence that this group have notably increased in number. “Self-assignment” may have nothing to do with “self-upgrading”. In the NLR Stevenage Survey, for example, there was an actual majority of Labour voters among “objectively” working class people who, when asked about class, described themselves as “middle class”, some to distinguish themselves 4 Defending this forced choice in Socialist Commentary Dr. Abrams has claimed that to deny its general usage is to show “ignorance of the working class: it is a concept and a phrase widely used by them”. It would be truer to see it as a figment of his imagination, deriving—like his other addition to our political vocabulary: the invention of a class of people he names “underdogs”—from that rather older tradition which was in the habit of distinguishing the “respectable artisan” and the “loyal servant” from the mass of “common” labourers. Perhaps it should be added that not one of the people interviewed in the NLR Stevenage Survey described themselves as “labouring working class” when asked what class they would say they belonged to.

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from “the poor”, “the down and outs”, and many whose attitudes and “identifications” were generally “working class”, and who, describing Labour as “the Party of the working man”, gave as their main reason for supporting Labour that “it stands for working class people”. In any event, the difference between one third and one half cannot stand as a crucial dividing line, nor can “self-upgrading” be equated with “middle class self-assignment” where one third of Labour voters are perfectly able to reconcile this with supporting the Party for “working class” reasons. Dr. Abrams’ treatment of working class consciousness is, indeed, capricious and, at times, almost frivolous. Although, as he himself says, the overwhelming majority of Labour supporters identify Labour with the working class, and give this as the main reason for their vote, the one third who assigned themselves to a middle class category enable him to pronounce this a “fragile bond” and from there—ignoring the decades of struggle and achievement that has made “Labour stands for us” a phrase so pregnant with meaning—to infer that: “present support for Labour stems largely from an unconsidered identification with the working class!”

To dismiss as “unconsidered” the matured experience of generations of working people is to show a peculiar insensitivity to perhaps the most important “underlying attitude” which shapes British politics, even to-day: the conviction (in the words of a Stevenage man) that “Labour stands for me, and the bloke next door, and the people down the street”. This attitude is weaker than it was in the ’Forties and early ’Fifties, but it would take more than Dr. Abrams luxuriant display of “identification” selfdesignation” and “image” tables to deny its continuing relevance. These weaknesses are the more unfortunate in that Dr. Abrams is touching on important problems and genuine issues which the Labour Party has not yet been willing seriously to face: the changing composition of the working class, the expansion of white collar and service occupations, the changed outlook of the younger generation, the growth of “classlessness”. There are attitudes here at once fundamental and changing: the matrix of values where politics are formed. Their discussion—a difficult, exploratory and always strenuous task—cannot be shortcircuited by relying uniquely on so inadequate an index as the score of “self-assignments”, nor should it be frozen at the points where it must surely begin, by endowing possible, but wholly inadequate “hypotheses” with a spurious appearance of scientific validation.

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In the end it is because of the way he sees people that Dr. Abrams is unable to conduct that serious examination of underlying attitudes the Labour Party so urgently needs. His voters do not decide how they will vote; they do not choose between the alternatives available, nor do they genuinely prefer the policy of one Party to that of another. They drift—by the ineluctable pressures of the status machine into their political allegiances; they are driven, by the anxious promptings of ego-identification, to sustain a self-image which, through voting, they validate for themselves and legitimate in the eyes of their neighbours. Just as for Mr. Crosland—whose analysis is otherwise more subtle—it is the “cross-pressured” the “socially ambivalent”, the “shifters” and the “crystallisers” who dominate the political map, so for Dr. Abrams it is the unthinking, the inert and the pathetically dogmatic: “A great many people manage to hold opinions quite dogmatically without being either clever or well-informed, and usually it is the opinion of these people which dominate political life”.

A Responsible Sociology? Dr. Abrams’ Survey, in fact, does violence to the best tradition of sociology. He respects few of the limitations which any sociological enquiry— above all one so restricted as this—must accept. He shows neither caution nor candour in presenting his results and not only transcends the limits of his statistics, but is even prepared, at times, to contradict their plain meaning. He is ready to father respondents with his opinions, forcing them to accept distinctions that are his own, and enmeshing them in the banal rigidities of his categories. Nor is this all. There is a condescension in Dr. Abrams’ contemptuous dismissal of matured allegiances and convictions as “dogmatic” and “unconsidered”, which departs from that profound respect for the human individual which is the distinguishing feature of any serious sociology and which it must retain if it is not to default from its responsibilities. His is also an approach which stands in polar opposition to everything that socialism has meant. For it is indeed a sad picture of people with which we are presented. Floater and shifters, socially ambivalent and cross-pressured, anxiously examining themselves in their status mirror, seeking duly to validate their self-images, “admitting” their working-class general status and making their “unconsidered” identification, they are miserable creatures indeed. But of course behind the image scores, and the identity tables which here encapsulate them, there

are real living, breathing, thinking, feeling people: Tredegar steel workers and Cannock miners, Blackheath teachers and Suffolk farmers, Kentish Town mothers and Wythenshawe clerks: the common people; not all of them with Labour, and not as many as in the past, but still, Radical England, us and not them. A Labour Party that forgot this, that abandoned—as in some directions it already has—the active, serving, learning relationship which ties it to the people from whom it came, would not deserve to retain their support, nor to win back those it has lost, nor to represent the aspirations of the new generation that has arrived. For more than a century, the Labour movement has been sustained by a generous belief in the capacity of people to triumph over the adversity of circumstance and the cramp of necessity: it is a belief embodied in all the institutions of working class self-help—the friendly societies and the savings clubs, the co-operatives and the trade unions and, above all, in the Labour Party itself, shaped as a great engine of working-class emancipation, designed to impose on a wilful and heartless industrial machine, and secure in an elite-bound society, the common decencies with which people conducted their everyday lives, respecting each other and helping each other. Socialism has always been a way of measuring the actual against the potential, the immediate as against the possible condition of man. In the past it was always the cry that the fallen should rise. “Eh, love, you cannot understand now”, one Chartist grandfather said to a little girl who was to become a leader of the Bradford textile workers, “but when you get to be a big girl, I want you always to think for the people, and live for the people, for it will be a long time before they can do it for themselves”. But now that the fallen have risen—to more power, more wealth, more dignity, more choice in their lives than at any

time since the coming of the industrial way of life—socialists cannot discard their fundamental belief in the ability of ordinary people—thinking, choosing and organising—to embody their highest values in the life of society. This is not, as Mr. Crosland seems to imply, “messianic” or “chiliast”, nor is it, in the favoured phrase of the Spectator and the Guardian, an “apocalyptic” vision, nor is it the special property of any particular wing of the movement, or uniquely tied to any particular programme of change. “I wish to treat all the poor as I would my own father, mother, sister, brother”, “Educate every child as if it were your own”: the convictions of the early socialists were formed under the impress of conditions vastly different from our own, but they express an ethic of human brotherhood— and propose an “identification” of the highest moral order—which has lost neither its relevance nor its validity. For socialism, before all else, has been a way of thinking about people, of how to serve them, of how to speak for them, of how to learn from them; in the words of Tom MacGuire, a founder of the Yorkshire ILP, “it is of the people—such will be the secret of its success”. If that success now seems less assured than it did to the founders of the Movement, it is in part, at least, because we too often ignore this lesson which they taught. If the Labour Movement were finally to abandon its traditional way of thinking about people—and that alone is truly fundamental —to lose its faith in the power of the word to move people, and of the idea to change them, if it were to let go its conviction in the capacity of human beings rationally to choose between the alternatives which face them, and purposefully to re-shape the society in which they live, then it would be finished, and would find itself trapped in that limbo of the political imagination whose features Dr. Abrams has so meticulously outlined.

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this will take a little more effort than buying it occasionally from a newstand. For several reasons—shortage of numbers for distribution, the colour of our politics, and so on—NLR is, in any case, in far fewer book-stalls than we would wish. You could help by asking for it regularly from your local newsagent or bookstore, or urging your local library to take out a copy. But our most urgent need is a large, steady and expanding subscription list, and something regular besides in the form of a donation. There’s a subscription and donation form in this issue. Will you use it? And pass one on to a friend? Independent socialist journals only keep going if their readers value independence enough to help pay for it. . . .

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SOCIALISM and AFFLUENCE

by Harry Hanson

AS TRADITIONALLY,

and—I think—correctly understood, the purpose of socialism may be defined as follows: “That the government, democratically responsible to the electorate, should assume ownership of the ‘commanding heights’ of the economy and, in association with subsidiary agencies of a democratic character, take effective control of the economy as a whole; that it should use the power thus obtained (a) to ensure a rapid development of total productivity in accordance with certain centrally-decided priorities, (b) to redistribute both income and leisure in favour of the ‘under-privileged’ and (c) to place greater emphasis than is possible in a society where the main criterion of economic decision is private profit on the provision of communal facilities designed to raise the general level of material and cultural well-being.”

The adaptation of these principles to midtwentieth century conditions can be either of two kinds: (1) adaptation to the needs of our time; (2) adaptation to the views, existing or predicted, of the electorate. These two kinds of adaptation do not necessarily coincide. In fact, their coincidence is now becoming not more but less close. Up to quite recently there was at least no glaring contradiction between vigorous campaigning for Socialism, as thus defined, and the winning of electoral victories. Today, as a result of the very

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real achievements of “welfare capitalism”, that contradiction is obvious. Ultimately, people judge political policies and programmes on the basis of experience, and to an ever-increasing extent the significant and politically-decisive experience is of the prosperous fifties, not of the hungry thirties. Where comparisons are consciously made, they are between the free flow of consumer goods characteristic of the recent period of Tory rule and the “restrictionism” characteristic of the immediate post-war years when Labour was in office. Both, of course, were periods of almost-full employment, but the first was one of full employment plus rationing, the second one of full employment plus hire-purchase. This is not to suggest that satisfaction with the record of “welfare capitalism” is almost universal. Clearly, there are many groups of people, such as old age pensioners and families on the waiting list for municipal housing, who have the most obvious reasons for dissatisfaction. The so-called consumer revolution, moreover, cannot develop its full ideological impact in areas where unemployment is well above the national average. Marginal dissatisfactions, however, are a very poor bag of electoral assets.

But if Labour cannot mark these up on the credit side, nor can it count on the much more serious contrast between “private opulence and public squalor”. This offends some of the people (e.g. the radical intellectuals) all of the time, and all of the people (e.g. when they are being educated, hospitalised or mechanically transported) some of the time. But the frustrated plans of educationists, public health experts, town planners and road builders can all too easily be dismissed as “utopian”. The flood of consumer durables is real, and the consumer revolution, as the authors of Out of Apathy have emphasised, is tending to produce an atomised society, peopled by competitively-acquisitive individuals who have ceased to feel a sense of responsibility for communally-provided services. Hence, although they grumble freely about deficiencies of all kinds, they no longer think in terms of collective action to effect or demand improvements, particularly if these would involve higher taxation. But what of equality? The question almost answers itself. You can choose equality, as Socialists understand it, or you can choose the acquisitive society. You cannot choose both. This is not to say that there is no real demand for equality in the sense of “the career open to talents”, nor resentment at obstacles to personal advancement built into our social system. But such obstacles are not all part of the essential nature of capitalism. Capitalist institutions, in fact, might benefit considerably if the “public” schools were abolished, the “eleven plus” discarded, secondary education made “comprehensive”, and the narrow bottleneck of university entrance widened. We should be more like America—that is all—i.e. less “backward” by twentieth-century capitalist standards. It is far otherwise with the conception of social equality. Of all ideas, this can become the most potent of anti-capitalist forces, once it has gripped the masses; for from it flows nearly everything else that is distinctively socialistic: the abolition of private ownership, the extinction of unearned income, and the extension of freely-available communal facilities. Yet it is precisely this idea that today has almost no electoral appeal. Equality has fared perhaps worse than any other socialist principle in the prevalent “Damn you, Jack” climate of opinion. The current attitude towards the rich and comfortable is one that combines envy with admiration. And the rich themselves, confident that the “levelling” sentiments of earlier years have now evaporated, can again safely flaunt their wealth. This new selfconfidence among the rich is the best evidence of the decline of egalitarian aspirations.

Every socialist knows, to his cost, that these tendencies are growing stronger rather than weaker. Indeed, in a society which has both “affluence” and the Bomb, it is surprising that they are not still more marked. For, while the nuclear threat stimulates the spirit of carpe diem, the consumer revolution provides us with an unprecedented number of aids to more-or-less blissful oblivion. To talk of “adjusting” socialism to this climate of opinion is plainly nonsensical. It cannot be brought into line with an acquisitive, class-dominated, inegalitarian, Bomb-threatened society. Hence the force behind the accusation that Gaitskell, Jay and Crosland are in point of fact abandoning socialism. Yet few of their “left” critics seem sufficiently aware of the dilemma that these political leaders face. They are concerned, as professional politicians are bound to be, with the winning of office. To succeed, at least in the short run, they must simultaneously attract a mass of “prosperity-corrupted” electors by giving Labour a new and essentially un-socialist “face”, and retain the support of the many who still call themselves socialists. This is a difficult assignment. From their point of view, it is the old-fashioned type of socialist that currently constitutes the main problem. Some kind of satisfaction has to be given to the rank-and-file electioneer, who is not unnaturally suspicious of the “new look”, and also to the active trade unionist, who may have the vaguest ideas about what socialism is, but associates a vigorous socialist language with industrial militancy. The trouble is, obviously, that the more attractive the new face becomes to militants and traditionalists, the less attractive it seems to the rest of the electorate.

Political Arithmetic The revisionists calculate, no doubt, that Old Guard socialism is a waning force, and that their victory is therefore guaranteed by the passage of time. The premise of this calculation is almost certainly correct; but the conclusion does not necessarily follow. For side by side with the Old Left—and, at the present moment, “objectively” reinforcing it—is a New Left, growing in strength. Young, vigorous and intelligent, its members have already completed their initial and basic task of re-stating socialism in mid-twentiethcentury terms, and are now beginning to organise themselves. For them, the Gaitskellian and Croslandian political arithmetic is irrelevant. The more realistic are thinking far beyond the next election. It would be wrong to say that they

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do not care whether Labour wins in 1964; but they do not regard this as of decisive importance. The less realistic are emotionally incapable of accepting the well-authenticated conclusions of the psephologists, and continue to persuade themselves that a vigorously-promoted “left” policy could not fail to elicit an equally vigorous electoral support. Even if this basic contradiction were solved there remains the difficulty of persuading a sceptical, television-attuned electorate, that a party led by a combination of “selfish and irresponsible” trade unionists and “theorising” intellectuals (mutually suspicious) could run the Opportunity State and Welfare Capitalism more effectively than those already at the wheel. “Tory freedom works—don’t let Labour ruin it” was a brilliantly-conceived and exceptionally effective slogan of which we are likely to hear more. It is for these reasons that the Labour Party is now displaying signs of decay. How can that decay be arrested? It is no answer at all to say that everything would be all right if the leadership adopted “leftist” policies and became inspired with a vigorous, crusading spirit. To capture the “commanding heights” of the economy, to impose sensible and humane economic and social priorities, to refurbish and use the machinery of economic planning, to replace “state capitalist” industries with genuinely socialised ones, to slash unearned and undeserved rewards, to cut the arms bill and abandon the “deterrent”—all are essential socialist measures. But they are not going to cut much electoral ice, so long as “Tory freedom works”. Nor is it an answer to say that a new leadership could do the trick; for the assumption that such a leadership could simultaneously unite the Party and give it a more attractive “image” is unrealistic, depending as it does on the false belief that the Gaitskells, Jays and Croslands represent no-one but themselves, and retain their power simply by controlling and manipulating the Party machine. It is true, of course, that they are skilled in the arts of political manipulation. But fundamentally, they derive their strength from the fact that they represent a body of opinion. Such alternative leadership as one can see is no more firmly rooted in inner-party and much less firmly rooted in extra-party opinion. That certain “leftist” leaders are popular with the constituency parties means little, for the constituencies are well out on the left of the main body. Nor is it very significant that Frank Cousins has “won” the T and GWU for his policies. The power and prestige of the General Secretary of the Union ensure that, in the long run, his views prevail. The fact is that the proposed new leadership

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would divide the Labour Party as thoroughly as the old one does. Perhaps this would not matter if the new image were electorally more attractive than the old. But there is no reason to suppose that it would be. If “leftism” were a current electoral asset, even the sedate Mr. Gaitskell would be carefully studying the oratorical techniques of Harry Pollitt and Gerry Healey. By using such techniques, the revisionists might be able to win over, at least temporarily, an assortment of nuclear disarmers, ex-communists, trade union militants, and the like; but electorally it would be a non-starter. The dilemma of the left, therefore, is in some ways more serious than that of the right. The rightist, baulked of the prospect of political power, can easily take refuge in cynicism or retire to private life. After all, he has no very fundamental quarrel with society as it is. The leftist, on the other hand, is more likely to be emotionally involved in the causes that he has espoused. For him, it is essential to communicate to others something of his vision of a New Social Order. It is for this reason that the left is even more tempted than the right to part company with reality—to over-estimate the power of the word, to mistake the marginal discontents of a minority for the first stirrings of the great mass, to see revolution, if not just around the corner, at least a measurable distance ahead on the road. As far as the New Left is concerned, this dangerous tendency has been, so far, held in check. The authors of Out of Apathy are certainly no facile optimists. But all too often their aspirations get in the way of their analysis. Fairy Wish-Fulfilment is never very far away, and lurking somewhere around is the Janus-faced daemon of Historical Necessity.

Day of Judgment? Rational hope has become so difficult to sustain that we are strongly tempted to substitute the irrational variety. In some cases, the result is a complete break with reality, as in current Trotskyism. In others, the disease is not so advanced, but nevertheless its symptoms are ominously present. Already, among the members of the New Left, there is a tendency to accept— albeit in a very much modified form—one of the essential elements of Trotskyist (and also orthodox Communist) thought: the conception of a Day of Judgment. This idea is attractive because it offers a semi-automatic, if long-term, solution to political frustration. It guarantees the defeat of the “right”, ensures that the popular support necessary for making the transition to socialism will eventually be forthcoming, and has the great

advantage of making the question of whether Labour will win the election of 1964 or 1969 or 1974 an almost irrelevant one. At this point in my argument caution is needed. It is easy to dismiss what seems an apocalyptic view, and thus absolve oneself from the inconvenience of inquiring whether the Day of Judgment is really at hand. Although I take it for granted that the Proletarian Revolution, as conceived by the Trotskyists, is a work of the imagination, that does not rule out a Day of Judgment of another kind. British capitalism appears to have escaped from the classical Marxist contradictions—but may it not have acquired another set? Most members of the New Left appear to think so; but so far they have been pretty vague about the nature of these contradictions. Neither in Out of Apathy nor in New Left Review can we find anything to compare with that precision which gave classical Marxism its strength. The tendency has been to argue that people cannot possibly continue to remain satisfied with a society as bad as ours once they have been convinced that they can create a better one; socialism will then re-appear on the historical agenda. The latest recruit to “leftism”, R. H. S. Crossman, in his recent Fabian pamphlet, has attempted to popularise these “new contradictions”. He argues, in New Left manner, supported by references to Galbraith, that in a capitalist society the maintenance of public services “must always take second place to the satisfaction of consumer needs” and that “the price which the modern, managed capitalism pays for avoiding the old-fashioned crisis of mass unemployment is the continuous sacrifice of public service, community welfare and national security to private profit”. In what sense is this a contradiction? Certainly not in the Marxian sense, for one can hardly conceive that a capitalism which deliberately stimulates mass consumption to keep itself alive will be brought to its doom by the revolt of the poor and oppressed. The crisis, in Mr. Crossman’s view, will be the product of factors external to capitalism as well as those internal to it. For the essential nature of the system ensures its defeat in “peaceful competition” with the communist countries. Only democratic socialism, involving the dominance of the public sector in our economy, can stand up to the challenge of totalitarian socialism.

“What is wrong with the revisionists is that they misjudge altogether the times in which we are living and, in particular, the stability and strength of the Affluent Societies in which we have lived for under a decade.”

The Day, therefore, is not very far ahead. There

will be a “creeping crisis” in the 1960s and 1970s. For this, the revisionist policy of “coming to terms with the Affluent Society” is no preparation, even if it does succeed in the winning of an election. On the contrary, the leadership of the Labour Party “should hold itself in reserve . . . warning the electorate of the troubles that lie ahead and explaining why they can only be tackled by ensuring that public enterprise dominates the whole economy and creates the climate in which private enterprise works.”

If the analysis on which these “harsh predictions” are based is well-founded, it is difficult to see how even Gaitskell and Crosland can resist the cogency of Crossman’s argument. But is the argument a valid one? “Judgment Day” horses ought always to be examined critically. When the revolution against mid-nineteenth century capitalism failed to materialise, as Marx and Engels predicted, the explanation offered was that a phase of temporary industrial monopoly enabled the capitalists to “bribe” and “bourgeoisify” the working class. When this ended, “there would be socialism again in England”. It did, and there was—but only of a decidedly “reformist” kind. The successors to Marx and Engels then argued that the revolution had been postponed by another kind of monopoly based on profits from colonial exploitation. The crisis would now come when the colonies revolted or the imperialist powers reduced the world to a shambles through their competitive feuds. The slaves did revolt, and the world was reduced to shambles—twice. But the socialism which emerged took place where the countries were least “ripe” for it. Even the Great Depression led no further than The New Deal. In England it temporarily crushed the Labour Party and in Germany it was succeeded by “national Socialism”. Since the war British capitalism, shorn of most of its colonial “tribute” and deprived of all its more important overseas possessions, has succeeded in employing, feeding, housing, doctoring, educating and entertaining its workers better than ever before—even if not nearly well enough by the standards that we now set.

Mr. Crossman’s Predictions What evidence is there that Crossman is any better at predicting “Judgment Day” than the distinguished but unreliable prophets of old? None whatever that he himself has provided. Of course, the fact that several prophesies of Judgment have turned out to be false alarms does not mean that this one cannot possibly be genuine.

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After all, civilisations have decayed, revolutions have occurred: never more so than during the twentieth century. That British democracy has an unusually high assimilative capacity is undoubted. But there are limits. As the authors of Out of Apathy emphasise, it would be very strange if Britain and a few other countries of advanced disorderly and menacing forces of political change that are sweeping the mid-century world. However, this type of broad speculation is no substitute for serious analysis. One must carefully examine the forces that are supposed to be propelling us towards the crisis. Is British capitalism permanently stuck in the familiar inflationary-deflationary, upturn-downturn impasse? Possibly it is; but a few years are hardly enough to provide the basis for confident judgment. It has looked that way before, but then proceeded to confound those who came to cheer at its funeral. There is certainly much to suggest that the economy may be incapable of recovering its dynamism without undergoing basic structural changes. But this would seem to be more true of the specifically British form of capitalism than of capitalism in general. Are we not always pointing to the contrast between the high-investment dynamism of Western German (and even French and Italian) capitalism and the low-investment stagnation of our own? Is it true that British capitalism, being based upon the pursuit of profit, is inherently incapable of creating or radically improving our transport system, educational and medical services, housing and the state of our cities? No-one can reasonably doubt that these things could be done very much faster and better in a planned, socialist economy. But capitalist European countries have at least vigorously tackled some of these problems. Is it totally impossible for British capitalism successfully to imitate them? The stock reply is that there are narrow limits to “fiscal socialism”, owing to the resistance of big business and the effect of high taxation on capitalist incentives. But where are the limits? To pay for wars and war preparations, taxation has already been pushed up to levels that would have caused a sit-down strike among the capitalists of former days. Could not the proceeds even of existing taxes, diverted to constructive purposes, effect a marked improvement in Britain’s basic equipment? And what evidence is there that any further increase would be the last straw? The reason why rapid improvements are not being made may be that capitalism is involved in certain inescapable contradictions; but we should at least inquire whether some less “fundamental” explanation may not be found, e.g. that British capitalism (a) has neglected, through sheer inertia and short-

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sightedness, to develop productivity fast enough, and (b) has not been “pressured” with sufficient vigour by the working class movement. It is at this point that our doubts about a quasirevolutionary socialist perspective are stilled by the entry of the Monstrous Crow. All this may be true, it is said, but however fast British capitalism expands it will be outpaced by the Soviet Union and the other totalitarian countries with planned, socialist economies. Unless we ourselves go socialist, we shall be beaten in “peaceful competition”. For Crossman, this is evidently the conclusive argument. But is it so conclusive? What is the nature of the beating we are going to take? Does Mr. Crossman mean that the Soviet Union, by entering the competitive struggle for foreign markets, is going to deprive us of our outlets and supplies? Or is his emphasis on the “demonstration effect”, whereby the Russians, through well-publicised successes of socialist construction, will convince the people of this country that a planned economy with a large public sector is the only way of keeping up with the Ivanovs? Or is it that Communism will win the battle for the underdeveloped and developing countries, thereby isolating the comparatively small area of the world remaining to capitalism, preparatory to destroying it? Or is there to be some combination of all three?

Socialism By Competition? On the issue of straight economic competition it would be unwise to be dogmatic, for no-one knows precisely what the intentions of the Soviet Union—still less those of China—are in this field. But even if our worst fears materialised, it is possible that our position as a trading nation would remain basically unchanged. Is market competition from a socialist country any different than from a capitalist one? Perhaps—if that country is intent on forming a closed trading bloc. If, however, we are faced with ordinary competition for the economic favours of a group of “uncommitted” countries, the situation may be much less dangerous. Of course, a socialist country has the advantage that it can disregard, if need be, normal “commercial” considerations. But capitalist governments are not incapable of subsidising exports and of granting credits on easy terms, if they see advantage in doing so. When the full blast of Russian competition is turned on, it will certainly seriously reduce our share in the world market. But that in itself does not matter. Our share has been declining ever since the beginning of the century. If the world economy continues to expand, then the absolute

magnitude of our foreign trade can continue to increase. The effect of Russian trading competition, therefore, cannot be clearly foreseen. As for the “demonstration effect”, this indeed may become serious by the 1970s. But even then, what will be demonstrated is a whole way of life, not necessarily acceptable simply because it capitalism could insulate themselves from the embodies a higher standard of living. At present the Americans have standards which, on the average, are twice as high as ours, but resistances to the adoption of the American way of life —which is less alien to us than the Soviet way— are still considerable. It is curious and typical that those who emphasise the demonstration effect tend to assume that capitalism will be quite unable to respond to the challenge of the Soviet Union in any constructive way. This is a product of the belief that it is enmeshed in its own internal contradictions. “Whatever the bourgeoisie does, it is bound to be wrong; it cannot escape its inevitable fate”. Strange how this dogmatic belief survives! Capitalists are presented as, on the one hand, infernally clever and cunning; on the other, as virtually helpless. Is it not possible that they will find new ways of responding to the Soviet challenge, that they will be stimulated by it to put their untidy house in order? Must they become mere asphalt under the Soviet steamroller? And are there not indications that, by a process of parallel if uneven development, capitalist and Communist societies, in the long run, will begin to look very much alike? It is the third form of competition that looks most serious. Russia and her allies, assisted by “western” foreign policies, have already gone far towards isolating the countries of advanced capitalism. But how much further they will go is difficult to predict. Russia’s leaders, no longer believing that only the capitalist world would perish in a nuclear holocaust, have become cautious. They are also influenced, no doubt, by the growing “maturity” of Soviet society, and by the slackening of its internal tensions as easy living becomes more widespread. China, of course, is still in her “heroic” phase, and the Americans appear determined to ensure that she shall remain there. One can only hope that the Chinese reach calmer waters before they have done irreparable damage. If this comes to pass, there is some chance of a modus vivendi between the capitalist sector of the world and the communist. Possibly most of the underdeveloped countries, having ceased to hope that “western” aid will ever be given, on an adequate scale, to other than corrupt and reactionary governments, will choose the communist path. It certainly looks

the safer bet. This will increase the difficulties of the remaining capitalist powers. But the door to mutually beneficial economic relations between the two sectors has not yet been closed, and the Russians at least seem still anxious to keep it open. What only a few people on this side of the fence seem as yet to realise is that the menacing behaviour of the Communists is very largely a product of “western” policy. I am not attempting to disprove the “Judgement Day” perspectives, but simply indicating that it is not only the possible one. Nor am I trying to spread complacency. Believing that the odds are pretty heavy that we shall all be killed, either swiftly and mercifully by thermo-nuclear blast or slowly and excruciatingly by atomic radiation, I feel anything but complacent. Nor, except by way of contrast with this “apocalyptic” vision, do I feel any marked enthusiasm for a lengthy epoch of capitalist “affluence”. What I am suggesting is that, if the Labour Party adopted the policies of which Mr. Crossman, the New Left and I approve, there is no guarantee that by the 1970s or 1980s a sadder but wiser electorate will be saying “You were right after all”. It is therefore not surprising that, despite the menacing appearance of the shape of things to come, Mr. Gaitskell and Mr. Crosland should continue to do their political arithmetic, calculating that if they can get the old men off their backs and stop the newleftist dogs from yapping round their legs, victory and the fruits of office will be theirs by 1964 or 1969.

Cassandra In The Wilderness? The calculation is probably false, but at least it seems to them a better bet than waiting, Cassandra-like, for the contradictions of capitalism to reach their bursting point. A major political party, working within the framework of parliamentary democracy, cannot in these days prosper by predicting and preparing for disaster. It must present itself as an alternative government, with reasonably short-term expectations of coming into office. Only if it is reasonably certain that some distance ahead looms a crisis from which it alone can extricate the country will it consent to go out, temporarily, into the wilderness. Such a crisis, may indeed, be looming now, but neither its causes nor its lineaments are sufficiently sharp to compel the leaders of the Party to concentrate their attention on it. To be realistic politicians, we must make allowance for several different sets of possibilities. We must be prepared, for instance, for the failure of the expected crisis to materialise, and consider the implications of this for socialism. In such

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circumstances, we can expect a further strengthening of the relationship between government and big business, and further advances towards a managed and managerial economy. We shall simultaneously become more “socialised”, in Lenin’s sense of the word, and more affluent, but no less class-divided. We may, indeed, become considerably more class-divided, as successive injections of the “merit” vaccine will give class a new and more “rational” justification. Society will be “objectively ripe” for socialism but will lack the “subjective prerequisites” for the transition. The trade union movement will concentrate more and more upon ensuring that a “fair share” of an increasing national income shall accrue to its members. The Labour Party will then either make way for or transform itself into a new type of party, providing a periodical change from but no real alternative to Conservatism. What of socialism in this context? I do not believe that a distinctively socialist movement will disappear, but I do think that it will be reduced, at least for the time being, to a comparatively small group of determined left-wingers. I also believe that this group, although without any immediate hope of achieving political power, will have an immensely important role to play. Intent on keeping the socialist idea alive, it will unceasingly expose the “negative” features of the new society, use every advantage to popularise its aims, and perhaps secure, by some process of “encroaching control”, the partial realisation of some of them. It will watch, in a positively Fabian manner, for the “objective possibilities” of making new advances, constantly bring all forms of pressure to bear on the two main parties, and —if possible—maintain a small but vigorous and disciplined group of Members in the House. Its nucleus, obviously, will be the present “left” in the Labour Party, which would probably be well advised, if it feels that the above perspective is the likely one, to seize the first suitable opportunity to make a clean break and start a separate and distinct political organisation. What I should not relish, in these circumstances, would be the virtual elimination of a “normal” parliamentary opposition, which is what would happen if the exacerbation of factional struggle within the Labour Party caused its complete disintegration. An effectively-operating two-party system is one of the most valuable features of an advanced capitalist (or socialist) society. The difference may be that between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, but the Government is nevertheless compelled to defend and justify its policies, everconscious that its tenure of office is a conditional one. I would rather, of course, have a socialist opposition; but if this is impossible, any sort of

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“progressive” opposition which is capable of taking over the government will do. In such an opposition, our right-wing friends in the Labour Party could play a useful if unspectacular role. I myself would prefer to remain with the “left”. If however, the prospect is that in the near future the capitalist world is going to undergo a deep crisis, socialists may find it desirable to adopt a different strategy. In such circumstances, one need not worry about the normal working of the two-party system. The important thing will then be to get the socialist movement in the best possible shape to cope with the crisis when it comes. Boldness and resolution should therefore be the watchwords of the “left”. It must make a bid to capture power in the Labour movement, irrespective of whether, in doing so, it splits the Party and destroys the possibility of any immediate appeal to a majority of the electorate. I do not know whether this is the course of action that Mr. Crossman is now advocating, but I am sure that, if he maintains his present position, he will be driven to advocate it sooner or later. I must admit that the alternative here presented is a schematic one. It implies the existence of a coherent “left” capable of making up its collective mind about perspectives and adjusting its strategy accordingly. But the “left” is in fact an amorphous and disorderly assortment of groups. One can hardly conceive of the taking of any decision by this miscellaneous collection, even if the data on which it ought to be based were a good deal clearer than they are. The Labour Party, I believe, will split, but how and with what result will not be determined by anyone’s precise and far-seeing political decision. What I am fundamentally interested in is the formation of a more coherent socialist group, which can either come to the rescue of Britain during a crisis or keep alive the cause of socialism during a long period of “affluent” apathy. The left, I believe, must keep both tasks in mind. It may be, of course, that Labour will not split, but will continue to lurch along an erratic course, holding together the rival factions by means of a series of semi-intelligible verbal compromises. But this, surely, is a situation which no-one can want. Moreover, it does not seem to me likely. Admittedly, the Party has tended to behave like this in the past. But the tensions were then less serious, and the Party showed a remarkable capacity to recover from its electoral defeats. Nothing like the losing of three successive elections, by steadily increasing margins, has happened before. This, like “affluence” itself, is a new situation. Socialists have only just begun to wake up to what it means.

LETTER TO THE NEW


LEFT settle down to write to you, I feel somehow “freer” than usual. The reason, I suppose, is that most of the time I am writing for people whose ambiguities and values I imagine to be rather different from mine; but with you, I feel enough in common to allow us “to get on with it” in more positive ways. Reading your book, Out of Apathy, prompts me to write to you about several problems I think we now face. On none of these can I hope to be definitive; I only want to raise a few questions. It is no exaggeration to say that since the end of World War II in Britain and the United States smug conservatives, tired liberals and disillusioned radicals have carried on a weary discourse in which issues are blurred and potential debate muted; the sickness of complacency has prevailed, the bi-partisan banality flourished. There is no need—after your book—to explain again why all this has come about among “people in general” in the NATO countries; but it may be worthwhile to examine one style of cultural work that is in effect an intellectual celebration of apathy. Many intellectual fashions, of course, do just that; they stand in the way of a release of the imagination—about the cold war, the Soviet bloc, the politics of peace, about any new beginnings at home and abroad. But the fashion I have in mind is the weariness of many NATO intellectuals with what they call “ideology”, and their proclamation of “the end of ideology”. So far as I know, this began in the mid-fifties, mainly in intellectual circles more or less associated with the Congress for Cultural Freedom and the magazine Encounter. Reports on the Milan Conference of 1955 heralded it; since then, many cultural gossips have taken it up as a posture and an unexamined slogan. Does it amount to anything? * World Copyright Reserved.

WHEN I

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Its common denominator is not liberalism as a political philosophy, but the liberal rhetoric, become formal and sophisticated and used as an uncriticised weapon with which to attack Marxism. In the approved style, various of the elements of this rhetoric appear simply as snobbish assumptions. Its sophistication is one of tone rather than of ideas: in it, the New Yorker style of reportage has become politically triumphant. The disclosure of fact—set forth in a bright-faced or in a dead-pan manner—is the rule. The facts are duly weighed, carefully balanced, always hedged. Their power to outrage, their power truly to enlighten in a political way, their power to aid decision, even their power to clarify some situation—all that is blunted or destroyed. So reasoning collapses into reasonableness. By the more naive and snobbish celebrants of complacency, arguments and facts of a displeasing kind are simply ignored; by the more knowing, they are duly recognised, but they are neither connected with one another nor related to any general view. Acknowledged in a scattered way, they are never put together: to do so is to risk being called, curiously enough, “one-sided”. This refusal to relate isolated facts and fragmentary comment with the changing institutions of society makes it impossible to understand the structural realities which these facts might reveal; the longer-run trends of which they might be tokens. In brief, fact and idea are isolated, so the real questions are not even raised, analysis of the meanings of fact not even begun. Practitioners of the no-more-ideology school do of course smuggle in general ideas under the guise of reportage, by intellectual gossip, and by their selection of the notions they handle. Ultimately, the-end-of-ideology is based upon a

disillusionment with any real commitment to socialism in any recognisable form. That is the only “ideology” that has really ended for these writers. But with its ending, all ideology, they think, has ended. That ideology they talk about; their own ideological assumptions, they do not. Underneath this style of observation and comment there is the assumption that in the West there are no more real issues or even problems of great seriousness. The mixed economy plus the welfare state plus prosperity—that is the formula. US capitalism will continue to be workable; the welfare state will continue along the road to ever greater justice. In the meantime, things everywhere are very complex, let us not be careless, there are great risks . . . This posture—one of “false consciousness” if there ever was one—stands in the way, I think, of considering with any chances of success what may be happening in the world. First and above all, it does rest upon a simple provincialism. If the phrase “the end of ideology” has any meaning at all, it pertains to self-selected circles of intellectuals in the richer countries. It is in fact merely their own self-image. The total population of these countries is a fraction of mankind; the period during which such a posture has been assumed is very short indeed. To speak in such terms of much of Latin-America, Africa, Asia, the Soviet bloc is merely ludicrous. Anyone who stands in front of audiences—intellectual or mass—in any of these places and talks in such terms will merely be shrugged off (if the audience is polite) or laughed at out loud (if the audience is more candid and knowledgeable). The end-ofideology is a slogan of complacency, circulating among the prematurely middle-aged, centred in the present, and in the rich Western societies. In the final analysis, it also rests upon a disbelief in the shaping by men of their own futures—as history and as biography. It is a consensus of a few provincials about their own immediate and provincial position. Second, the end-of-ideology is of course itself an ideology—a fragmentary one, to be sure, and perhaps more a mood. The end-of-ideology is in reality the ideology of an ending: the ending of political reflection itself as a public fact. It is a weary know-it-all justification—by tone of voice rather than by explicit argument—of the cultural and political default of the NATO intellectuals.







All this is just the sort of thing that I at least have always objected to, and do object to, in the “socialist realism” of the Soviet Union. There too, criticism of milieux are of course

permitted—but they are not to be connected with criticism of the structure itself: one may not question “the system”. There are no “antagonistic contradictions”. There too, in novels and plays, criticisms of characters, even of party members, are permitted —but they must be displayed as “shocking exceptions”: they must be seen as survivals from the old order, not as systematic products of the new. There too, pessimism is permitted—but only episodically and only within the context of the big optimism: the tendency is to confuse any systematic or structural criticism with pessimism itself. So they admit criticisms, first of this and then of that: but engulf them all by the long-run historical optimism about the system as a whole and the goals proclaimed by its leaders. I neither want nor need to overstress the parallel, yet in a recent series of interviews in the Soviet Union concerning socialist realism I was very much struck by it. In Uzbekistan and Georgia as well as in Russia, I kept writing notes to myself, at the end of recorded interviews: “This man talks in a style just like Arthur Schlesinger Jr.” “Surely this fellow’s the counterpart of Daniel Bell, except not so—what shall I say?—so gossipy; and certainly neither so petty nor so vulgar as the more envious status-climbers. Perhaps this is because here they are not thrown into such a competitive status-panic about the ancient and obfuscating British models of prestige”. The would-be enders of ideology, I kept thinking, “Are they not the self-coordinated, or better the fashion-coordinated, socialist realists of the NATO world?” And: “Check this carefully with the files of Encounter and The Reporter.” I have now done so; it’s the same kind of . . . thing. Certainly there are many differences—above all, the fact that socialist realism is part of an official line; the end of ideology is self-managed. But the differences one knows. It is more useful to stress the parallels—and the generic fact that both of these postures stand opposed to radical criticisms of their respective societies. In the Soviet Union, only political authorities at the top—or securely on their way up there— can seriously tamper with structural questions and ideological lines. These authorities, of course, are much more likely to be intellectuals (in one or another sense of the word—say a man who actually writes his own speeches) than are American politicians (about the British, you would know better than I). Moreover, such Soviet authorities, since the death of Stalin, have begun to tamper quite seriously with structural questions and basic ideology—although for reasons peculiar to the tight and official joining

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of culture and politics in their set-up, they must try to disguise this fact. The end-of-ideology is very largely a mechanical reaction—not a creative response—to the ideology of Stalinism. As such it takes from its opponent something of its inner quality. What does it all mean? That these people have become aware of the uselessness of Vulgar Marxism, but not yet aware of the uselessness of the liberal rhetoric.







But the most immediately important thing about the “end of ideology” is that it is merely a fashion, and fashions change. Already this one is on its way out. Even a few Diehard AntiStalinists are showing signs of a reappraisal of their own past views; some are even beginning to recognise publicly that Stalin himself no longer runs the Soviet party and state. They begin to see the poverty of their comfortable ideas as they come to confront Khrushchev’s Russia. We who have been consistently radical in the moral terms of our work throughout the postwar period are often amused nowadays that various writers—sensing another shift in fashion—begin to call upon intellectuals to work once more in ways that are politically explicit. But we shouldn’t be merely amused—we ought to try to make their shift more than a fashion change. The end-of-ideology is on the way out because it stands for the refusal to work out an explicit political philosophy. And alert men everywhere today do feel the need of such a philosophy. What we should do is to continue directly to confront this need. In doing so, it may be useful to keep in mind that to have a working political philosophy means to have a philosophy that enables you to work. And for that, at least four kinds of work are needed, each of them at once intellectual and political. In these terms, think—for a moment longer— of the end-of-ideology: (1) It is a kindergarten fact that any political reflection that is of possible public significance is ideological: in its terms, policies, institutions, men of power are criticised or approved. In this respect, the end-of-ideology stands, negatively, for the attempt to withdraw oneself and one’s work from political relevance; positively, it is an ideology of political complacency which seems the only way now open for many writers. to acquiesce in or to justify the status quo. (2) So far as orienting theories of society and of history are concerned, the end-of-ideology stands for, and presumably stands upon, a fetishism of

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empiricism: more academically, upon a pretentious methodology used to state trivialities about unimportant social areas; more essayistically, upon a naive journalistic empiricism—which I have already characterised above—and upon a cultural gossip in which “answers” to the vital and pivotal issues are merely assumed. Thus political bias masquerades as epistomological excellence, and there are no orienting theories. (3) So far as the historic agency of change is concerned, the end-of-ideology stands upon the identification of such agencies with going institutions; perhaps upon their piecemeal reform, but never upon the search for agencies that might be used or that might themselves make for a structural change of society. The problem of agency is never posed as a problem to solve, as our problem. Instead there is talk of the need to be pragmatic, flexible, open. Surely all this, has already been adequately dealt with: such a view makes sense politically only if the blind drift of human affairs is in general beneficent. (4) So far as political and human ideals are concerned, the end-of-ideology stands for a denial of their relevance—except as abstract ikons. Merely to hold such ideals seriously is in this view “utopian”.







But enough. Where do we stand on each of these four aspects of political philosophy? Various of us are of course at work on each of them, and all of us are generally aware of our needs in regard to each. As for the articulation of ideals: there I think your magazines have done their best work so far. That is your meaning—is it not? —of the emphasis upon cultural affairs. As for ideological analysis, and the rhetoric with which to carry it out: I don’t think any of us are nearly good enough, but that will come with further advance on the two fronts where we are weakest: theories of society, history, human nature; and the major problem—ideas about the historical agencies of structural change. We have frequently been told by an assorted variety of dead-end people that the meanings of Left and of Right are now liquidated, by history and by reason. I think we should answer them in some such way as this: The Right, among other things, means—what you are doing, celebrating society as it is, a going concern. Left means, or ought to mean, just the opposite. It means: structural criticism and reportage and theories of society, which at some point or another are focussed politically as demands and programmes. These criticisms,

demands, theories, programmes are guided morally by the humanist and secular ideals of Western civilisation—above all, reason and freedom and justice. To be “Left” means to connect up cultural with political criticism, and both with demands and programmes. And it means all this inside every country of the world. Only one more point of definition: absence of public issues there may well be, but this is not due to any absence of problems or of contradictions, antagonistic and otherwise. Impersonal and structural changes have not eliminated problems or issues. Their absence from many discussions—that is an ideological condition, regulated in the first place by whether or not intellectuals detect and state problems as potential issues for probable publics, and as troubles for a variety of individuals. One indispensible means of such work on these central tasks is what can only be described as ideological analysis. To be actively Left, among other things, is to carry on just such analysis. To take seriously the problem of the need for a political orientation is not of course to seek for A Fanatical and Apocalyptic Vision, for An Infallible and Monolithic Lever of Change, for Dogmatic Ideology, for A Startling New Rhetoric, for Treacherous Abstractions—and all the other bogeymen of the dead-enders. These are of course “the extremes”, the straw men, the red herrings, used by our political enemies as the polar opposite of where they think they stand. They tell us, for example, that ordinary men can’t always be political “heroes”. Who said they could? But keep looking around you; and why not search out the conditions of such heroism as men do and might display? They tell us we are too “impatient”, that our “pretentious” theories are not well enough grounded. That is true, but neither are they trivial; why don’t they get to work, refuting or grounding them? They tell us we “don’t really understand” Russia— and China—today. That is true; we don’t; neither do they; we are studying it. They tell us we are “ominous” in our formulations. That is true: we do have enough imagination to be frightened—and we don’t have to hide it: we are not afraid we’ll panic. They tell us we “are grinding axes”. Of course we are: we do have, among other points of view, morally grounded ones; and we are aware of them. They tell us, in their wisdom, we don’t understand that The Struggle is Without End. True: we want to change its form, its focus, its object. We are frequently accused of being “utopian” —in our criticisms and in our proposals; and along with this, of basing our hopes for a New Left politics “merely on reason”, or more con-

cretely, upon the intelligentsia in its broadest sense. There is truth in these charges. But must we not ask: what now is really meant by utopian? And: Is not our utopianism a major source of our strength? “Utopian” nowadays I think refers to any criticism or proposal that transcends the up-close milieux of a scatter of individuals: the milieux which men and women can understand directly and which they can reasonably hope directly to change. In this exact sense, our theoretical work is indeed utopian—in my own case, at least, deliberately so. What needs to be understood, and what needs to be changed, is not merely first this and then that detail of some institution or policy. If there is to be a politics of a New Left, what needs to be analysed is the structure of institutions, the foundation of policies. In this sense, both in its criticisms and in its proposals, our work is necessarily structural— and so, for us, just now—utopian. Which brings us face to face with the most important issue of political reflection—and of political action—in our time: the problem of the historical agency of change, of the social and institutional means of structural change. There are several points about this problem I would like to put to you.







First, the historic agencies of change for liberals of the capitalist societies have been an array of voluntary associations, coming to a political climax in a parliamentary or congressional system. For socialists of almost all varieties, the historic agency has been the working class—and later the peasantry; also parties and unions variously composed of members of the working class or (to blur, for now, a great problem) of political parties acting in its name— “representing its interests”. I cannot avoid the view that in both cases, the historic agency (in the advanced capitalist countries) has either collapsed or become most ambiguous: so far as structural change is concerned, these don’t seem to be at once available and effective as our agency any more. I know this is a debatable point among us, and among many others as well; I am by no means certain about it. But surely the fact of it—if it be that—ought not to be taken as an excuse for moaning and withdrawal (as it is by some of those who have become involved with the end-of-ideology); it ought not to be bypassed (as it is by many Soviet scholars and publicists, who in their reflections upon the course of advanced capitalist societies

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simply refuse to admit the political condition and attitudes of the working class). Is anything more certain than that in 1970— indeed this time next year—our situation will be quite different, and—the chances are high— decisively so? But of course, that isn’t saying much. The seeming collapse of our historic agencies of change ought to be taken as a problem, an issue, a trouble—in fact, as the political problem which we must turn into issue and trouble. Second, is it not obvious that when we talk about the collapse of agencies of change, we cannot seriously mean that such agencies do not exist. On the contrary, the means of historymaking—of decision and of the enforcement of decision—have never in world history been so enlarged and so available to such small circles of men on both sides of The Curtains as they now are. My own conception of the shape of power— the theory of the power elite—I feel no need to argue here. This theory has been fortunate in its critics, from the most diverse points of political view, and I have learned from several of these critics. But I have not seen, as of this date, any analysis of the idea that causes me to modify any of its essential features. The point that is immediately relevant does seem obvious: what is utopian for us is not at all utopian for the presidium of the Central Committee in Moscow, or the higher circles of the Presidency in Washington, or—recent events make evident—for the men of SAC and CIA. The historic agencies of change that have collapsed are those which were at least thought to be open to the left inside the advanced Western nations: those who have wished for structural changes of these societies. Many things follow from this obvious fact; of many of them, I am sure, we are not yet adequately aware. Third, what I do not quite understand about some New-Left writers is why they cling so mightily to “the working class” of the advanced capitalist societies as the historic agency, or even as the most important agency, in the face of the really impressive historical evidence that now stands against this expectation. Such a labour metaphysic, I think, is a legacy from Victorian Marxism that is now quite unrealistic. It is an historically specific idea that has been turned into an a-historical and unspecific hope. The social and historical conditions under which industrial workers tend to become a-classfor-themselves, and a decisive political force, must be fully and precisely elaborated. There have been, there are, there will be such conditions; of

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course these conditions vary according to national social structure and the exact phase of their economic and political development. Of course we can’t “write off the working class.” But we must study all that, and freshly. Where labour exists as an agency, of course we must work with it, but we must not treat it as The Necessary Lever—as nice old Labour Gentlemen in your country and elsewhere tend to do. Although I have not yet completed my own comparative studies of working classes, generally it would seem that only at certain (earlier) stages of industrialisation, and in a political context of autocracy, etc., do wage-workers tend to become a class-for-themselves, etc. The “etcs.” mean that I can here merely raise the question.







It is with this problem of agency in mind that I have been studying, for several years now, the cultural apparatus, the intellectuals—as a possible, immediate, radical agency of change. For a long time, I was not much happier with this idea than were many of you; but it turns out now, in the spring of 1960, that it may be a very relevant idea indeed. In the first place, is it not clear that if we try to be realistic in our utopianism—and that is no fruitless contradiction—a writer in our countries on the Left today must begin there? For that is what we are, that is where we stand. In the second place, the problem of the intelligentsia is an extremely complicated set of problems on which rather little factual work has been done. In doing this work, we must—above all—not confuse the problems of the intellectuals of West Europe and North America with those of the Soviet Bloc or with those of the underdeveloped worlds. In each of the three major components of the world’s social structure today, the character and the role of the intelligentsia is distinct and historically specific. Only by detailed comparative studies of them in all their human variety can we hope to understand any one of them. In the third place, who is it that is getting fed up? Who is it that is getting disgusted with what Marx called “all the old crap”? Who is it that is thinking and acting in radical ways? All over the world—in the bloc, outside the bloc and in between—the answer’s the same: it is the young intelligentsia. I cannot resist copying out for you, with a few changes, some materials I’ve just prepared for a 1960 paperback edition of a book of mine on war: “In the spring and early summer of 1960—more

of the returns from the American decision and default are coming in. In Turkey, after student riots, a military junta takes over the state, of late run by Communist Container Menderes. In South Korea too, students and others knock over the corrupt American-puppet regime of Syngman Rhee. In Cuba, a genuinely left-wing revolution begins full-scale economic reorganisation—without the domination of US corporations. Average age of its leaders: about 30—and certainly a revolution without any Labour As Agency. On Taiwan, the eight million Taiwanese under the American-imposed dictatorship of Chiang Kaishek, with his two million Chinese, grow increasingly restive. On Okinawa—a US military base—the people get their first chance since World War II ended to demonstrate against US seizure of their island: and some students take that chance, snake-dancing and chanting angrily to the visiting President: “Go home, go home— take away your missiles.” (Don’t worry, 12,000 US troops easily handled the generally grateful crowds; also the President was “spirited out the rear end of the United States compound”—and so by helicopter to the airport). In Great Britain, from Aldermaston to London, young—but you were there. In Japan, weeks of student rioting succeed in rejecting the President’s visit, jeopardise a new treaty with the USA, displace the bigbusiness, pro-American Prime Minister, Kishi. And even in our own pleasant Southland, Negro and white students are—but let us keep that quiet: it really is disgraceful. “That is by no means the complete list; that was yesterday; see today’s newspaper. Tomorrow, in varying degree, the returns will be more evident. Will they be evident enough? They will have to be very obvious to attract real American attention: sweet complaints and the voice of reason—these are not enough. In the slum countries of the world today, what are they saying? The rich Americans, they pay attention only to violence—and to money. You don’t care what they say, American? Good for you. Still, they may insist; things are no longer under the old control; you’re not getting it straight, American: your country—it would seem—may well become the target of a world hatred the like of which the easy-going Americans have never dreamed. Neutralists and Pacifists and Unilateralists and that confusing variety of Leftists around the world—all those tens of millions of people, of course they are misguided, absolutely controlled by small conspiratorial groups of trouble-makers, under direct orders straight from Moscow and Peking. Diabolically omnipotent, it is they who create all this messy unrest. It is they who have given the tens of millions the absurd idea that

they shouldn’t want to remain, or to become, the seat of American nuclear bases—those gay little outposts of American civilisation. So now they don’t want U-2’s on their territory; so now they want to contract out of the American military machine; they want to be neutral among the crazy big antagonists. And they don’t want their own societies to be militarised. “But take heart, American: you won’t have time to get really bored with your friends abroad: they won’t be your friends much longer. You don’t need them; it will all go away; don’t let them confuse you.”







Add to that: In the Soviet bloc, who is it that has been breaking out of apathy? It has been students and young professors and writers; it has been the young intelligentsia of Poland and Hungary, and of Russia too. Never mind that they’ve not won; never mind that there are other social and moral types among them. First of all, it has been these types. But the point is clear— isn’t it? That’s why we’ve got to study these new generations of intellectuals around the world as real live agencies of historic change. Forget Victorian Marxism, except whenever you need it; and read Lenin again (be careful)—Rosa Luxemburg, too. “But it’s just some kind of moral upsurge, isn’t it?” Correct. But under it: no apathy. Much of it is direct non-violent action, and it seems to be working, here and there. Now we must learn from their practice and work out with them new forms of action. “But it’s all so ambiguous. Turkey, for instance. Cuba, for instance.” Of course it is; historymaking is always ambiguous; wait a bit; in the meantime, help them to focus their moral upsurge in less ambiguous political ways; work out with them the ideologies, the strategies, the theories that will help them consolidate their efforts: new theories of structural changes of and by human societies in our epoch. “But it’s utopian, after all, isn’t it?” No—not in the sense you mean. Whatever else it may be, it’s not that: tell it to the students of Japan. Isn’t all this, isn’t it something of what we are trying to mean by the phrase, “The New Left?” Let the old men ask sourly, “Out of Apathy— into what?” The Age of Complacency is ending. Let the old women complain wisely about “the end of ideology.” We are beginning to move again. Yours truly, C. Wright Mills.

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THE AMERICAN CRISIS 앲앲앲 by David Riesman & Michael Macoby THERE HAS never been in American life anything comparable to the Fabian Society. Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt gathered around them an ad hoc team of advisers who included a number of bright lawyers, economists, and political scientists, but neither these nor their journalistic and academic allies created anything like an ethos or a basis for interpreting the relation between specific pragmatic measures and overall social and political change. Moreover, both the Wilson and Roosevelt administrations soon ran dry of ideas for domestic reform, and were, so to speak, rescued by World Wars from the necessity of demonstrating their weakness. Although in part thanks to them Washington, D.C., has become somewhat less of a cultural and intellectual colony, it still remains a city dominated by middle-level civil servants, the military, the lobbyists, and the service trades dependent on all of these, and not a city tied in to avantgarde ideas in American life. Several of the state govenments have been in this respect somewhat less badly off in recent history. The University of Wisconsin has been a kind of unofficial Fabian Society for the state government, or at least this was the case during the Progressive Era; and the state government and state university of Minnesota have had somewhat analogous relations. But neither locally nor nationally has there been a disinterested intellectual stratum tied in any systematic way to government activity. In the Congressional elections of the fall of 1958, however, a group of Democrats were elected to the House of Representatives who have banded together as the Liberal Project in an effort to change the state of affairs. Some of them had in fact attended the University of

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Wisconsin, or fallen under the influence of men trained there. They were frustrated to discover that the Democratic victory in the elections was not to be translated into public policy; but they also realised that, even if they were to have a larger voice in affairs, there was no substantial seedbed of ideas on which they could draw for measures that went beyond what might be regarded as the mopping-up operation of the New Deal: while these men were sensitive to the large residual areas of deprivation in American life, they did not believe that a policy could be based on this alone. For one thing, they had a concern, unusual for members of the House of Representatives who are supposed to leave foreign policy to Senators, with foreign policy; they were, for instance, among the small group of Congressmen who opposed the sending of nuclear information to the Adenauer government (in spite of the fact that some of them came from districts with a heavy German population). Others were concerned with the lack of preparation, either economic or psychological, for possible disarmament. At one discussion the question came up for example as to what redeployment there could be for ex-Air Force generals when they could no longer go into the business of weapons-making, and when they had filled all the posts in the military academies and secondary schools that might still be looking for “tough” headmasters. Plainly, the members of the Liberal Project were out of sympathy with the TrumanAcheson wing of their own party, which has still not given up the effort to prove, over the dead body of Senator McCarthy, that it is even more ferociously anti-Communist than any Republican. Such dissatisfactions, however, did not constitute a new policy; and for this the Congressmen

turned to a group of university professors and writers whose books and articles they had read, and who they thought might furnish them, not only with specific proposals that would point in a new direction, but also with a philosophy of liberalism that would locate the specific measures in an ideological context. In seeking such contact, the members of the Liberal Project had to overcome the characteristic attitude of American scholars and intellectuals towards Congressmen —and towards politicians in general—who tend to be regarded either as cynical opportunists or as stupid windbags.

The Liberal Project At Work Now that these exchanges have been going on for a year or so, we have talked to a number of intellectuals who are astonished to discover how academic in the best sense is the intelligence of the group of Congressmen and with what integrity and dedication they approach their work. Except for James Roosevelt of California (who is in his third term in the House), none of the members of the Liberal Project is well known outside his home state in the United States, let alone abroad; a scattering of people are familiar with Charles Porter of Oregon who has been a notable critic of the Atomic Energy Commission and of American policy vis-à-vis Latin America. (There are a few Congressmen, of whom Chester Bowles is best known, who are close to the Liberal Project, although not active members, and who possess a wider reputation and influence.)1 The majority of the dozen or so Congressmen who make up the Liberal Project, including William Meyer, the first Democratic Congressman from Vermont since the Civil War, hold their seats by the barest majority and face close contests for reelection in the fall of 1960; all of them have been told by sager heads that there is no political “mileage” in what they are doing. Certainly the intellectuals they have recruited to meet with them and to write papers on assigned topics for a volume to be modeled in some measure after Conviction, coming as they very largely do from New York, Boston, and Chicago, cannot help the election campaigns of men scattered over the Congressional districts of the North. And it should be remembered by British readers that American Congressmen are virtually on their own—a better example of “free enterprise” than is to be found in most businesses—dependent on local support rather than on any overall party effort on their behalf, though to be sure they can be greatly helped or hurt by the way the national Presidential campaign goes down in their home districts. Moreover, the inevitably bureaucratic management of this flock of 535 independent

entrepreneurs in the House makes it very difficult for any one member to attract attention comparable to that of a Senator. Hence, few Americans realise that the Congressmen of the Liberal Project, as well as a number of others who are potential recruits, are on many specific issues and in general outlook far to the “left” of wellknown Democratic senators such as Humphrey. Indeed, the Congressmen would probably feel that the tag, “left”, is one of those dated legacies they hope to surmount. The essay that follows was prepared for the Liberal Project, and reflects the concern of the Congressmen with an American political climate that makes it difficult for them to develop a coherent programme—far more difficult, we would gather, even than for the Labour Party after three successive defeats. It was discussed in June with the Congressmen, their staff assistants (one of whom, Marcus Raskin, has taken a leading role in the development of the Project), and a few newspapermen. In addition, our essay reflects the preoccupations of an organisation which is at the moment even more embryonic and powerless than the Liberal Project itself, namely, the Committees of Correspondence, a sm all group which hopes to enlist intellectuals in realising an inventive and radical response to the problem of war and its implications for American culture. The name, “Committees of Correspondence”, is taken from the American Revolution, and reflects the desire for a very loose affiliation of groups in different university communities; the original leadership, in which we ourselves have taken an active hand, includes some leading pacifists who are members of the American Friends Service Committee or the Fellowship of Reconciliation, one or two labour intellectuals, Marc Raskin of the Liberal Project, several Socialists including Erich Fromm, our colleague, Stuart Hughes of the Harvard History Department, and a growing group of academicians. A number of us who founded the Committees of Correspondence have also been active in the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy; but this American equivalent of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, confined as it has primarily been to asking for the cessation of nuclear tests and a successful Summit, has provided no adequate basis for a critique of American foreign policy, let alone of the domestic consequences and concommitants of that policy.2 The Committees of Correspondence have begun operation only in the last few weeks. They have 1 For a fuller description of the group, its membership and its plans, see Harris Dienstfrey, “ ‘Fabianism’ in Washington,” Commentary, Vol. XXX (July, 1960), pages 22–28. 2 Cf., André, Schiffrin “Protest in America,” Socialist Commentary (July, 1960), page 13.

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held seminars in Cambridge, Massachusetts to discuss the consequences of disarmament; and American policy vis-à-vis Cuba at the University of Illinois; they are issuing a “Political Correspondence” by various hands that might be compared to the excellent newsletter issued by Sir Stephen King-Hall; the paper that follows has grown out of such discussions, and has in turn been an effort to contribute to them. I Although America has been for much of its history a belligerent and expansionist country, it has not been a militaristic one, and up until the present, it has resisted military control of political policy. While this encapsulation of the military might have been a protection for the peacetime life of the country, for only rarely did generals as such get involved in politics, one consequence has been that during wartime America has lacked a politically sagacious military elite. With a few famous exceptions, our generals have considered destruction of the enemy at the least immediate cost in American lives, or even the least budgetary cost, to be their sole concern. In the Second World War, this outlook gave a mindless justification for the mass bombings of German cities (also participated in by the British) and for the terrible and unnecessary destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (when in fact the Japanese had given much evidence that they were prepared to surrender). Only as the Second World War progressed, did the American military begin to enlist advisers from civilian life, and a large number of intellectuals (a number of them ex-New Dealers) became involved in its planning and execution, while the physical scientists were of course heavily engaged. At the end of the War, in order to maintain this link, the Air Force set up the Rand (Research and Development) Corporation; the Army has a similar “brains trust” in the Operations Research Office of Johns Hopkins University; and the Central Intelligence Agency, while not outside the government in an Exchequer sense, has a somewhat similar immunity from immediate federal supervision. Science and social science departments in a number of major universities have close personal and professional ties with these agencies. It would not be accurate to say that all these men have been mobilised on behalf of the policy of deterrence through the threat of mass destruction; indeed, there are probably men working for Rand who have done as much to subject that policy to rational scrutiny as have men who are known to be dedicated workers for peace.3 Nevertheless, these agencies and their ancillary

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groups, along with the armed services themselves and the Atomic Energy Commission, have recruited many exceptionally intelligent men whose full time task it is, not only to maintain the deterrence policy, but to find objections to any limitations on it. From this group of men have come many of the scientific efforts to discover holes in any possibility of a test ban which could be negotiated with the Russians.

Recruits For The Deterrent Take, for example, the fantastic idea, developed in Edward Teller’s Livermore Laboratory, that deep holes might be dug in salt mines and bombs exploded therein without anybody’s noticing—a notion that is fantastic, not because the Russians couldn’t do it, but because it would take a long time, require immense commotion of men and machines, and would therefore be very hard to keep secret, if not from us, then from the Russian people themselves. Moreover, there are numerous indications that the Soviet Union has little interest in testing small or “clean” nuclear weapons, and that many Soviet citizens have a better sense of the dangers of a spread of nuclear weapons than is often found on the American side. Once upon a time, the Navy in its own interest opposed reliance on massive retaliation, and its experts were therefore free to explore the dangers of this doctrine. But then, faced with a declining strategic role, the Navy traded doctrine for budget—reaping a harvest in big carriers and atomic submarines—and joined the Air Force in alliance against the remaining Army men (such as Generals Ridgway, Gavin, and Taylor) whose recurrent protests have usually led to their leaving the intra-service battlefield altogether.4 For reasons we hope to explore in this paper, there is no organisation comparable to the Rand Corporation, dedicated to disarmament; in fact, only a few journalists (among whom Walter Lippmann is outstanding), some university professors, and in the government the members of the Liberal Project and a few others, are free to explore the risks of current military policy and the foreign and domestic policies to which it is tied. The authors of this essay are neither experts on defence nor on foreign policy. At the same time, we have had some experience in seeing the experts make mistakes by virtue of their expertise. This does not mean that amateurs are necessarily 3 See, for a sympathetic account. Joseph Kraft, “Rand: Arsenal for Ideas,” Harpers, Vol. CCXXI (July, 1960), pages 69–76. 4 Our understanding of these matters owes much to Eric Larrabee’s work on post-War military policy.

better than professionals; but until a serious effort is mobilised for peace, amateurs will probably have to be relied upon for new ideas in the field of defence and foreign policy. Among the most important and interesting problems of education is that of exploring the means by which people can learn to make a proper judgment of expert opinion. One way is to become expert in a particular field oneself. Another approach is to gain some sense of the kind of perspective or style of perception that the experts Use, as a basis for seeing what might be the possible limitations of their view in a given instance. Thus one can find experts privy to discussions concerning deterrence who talk about the American ability to “accept,” let us say, ten or thirty million casualties—experts who are familiar with the post-World War II disaster studies but who fail to ask what sort of backwoods reactionaries would take over whatever would be left of America if our major urban centres were destroyed in a nuclear (or biological or other mass) war.

Nuclear Speculations So, too, there are other men, intelligent enough to grasp some of the inherent weaknesses in the strategy of deterrence, who have speculated about an automatic deterrent, protected from the possibility of human frailty on our side. One mechanism that has been proposed for achieving this is a cobalt bomb, aimed at all countries having nuclear power themselves and primed to go off without reference to a human chain of command the moment any nuclear weapon is fired at us. The argument for such a scheme is that if a potential enemy thinks that we, as human beings, might decide for some reason or other not to hit back (despite the fact that we are equipped to do so) then our deterrent, though still terrifying, loses its absolute value; therefore we must try to set up a system over which none of us has any control. This reasoning, logical as far as it goes, typically leaves other variables out of account altogether—like the fact that becoming the prisoners of our own mechanisms would intensify the dangerous feelings of helplessness which the policy of deterrence has already succeeded in producing. It would mean surrendering the hope that the human race can get control of the arms race—even though it has been argued that once the automatic cobalt bomb was known to exist, no one would tempt fate. One further point about experts: they have fended-off outsiders, including many intelligent Congressmen, by establishing as a condition of entering the debate on armaments a knowledge of highly technical matters (frequently “classified”)

and the possession of a polished rationality of the game-theory sort. Many of the traditional pacifist groups can make no headway in this situation—they are regarded, if not as unAmerican, then as all heart and no head. Especially perhaps for a British audience, such a complaint about the role of experts may sound snobbish—as if we supposed that the gentlemanly amateur was really better at these things, and that one could still muddle through, without taking disciplined thought. This is not our point, nor are we contending that the experts have purposely maintained a monopoly on discussion. Indeed, if we had to choose we would surely prefer to trust our fate to the experts of Rand than to some of the blustering generals (or senators) who have enjoyed talking tough (a great help, no doubt, to their opposite numbers in China and the USSR). Our hope is that the practicality of ethical considerations may become more widely understood, and that discussion of deterrence and its alternatives can be enlarged, and more differentiated modes of thought encouraged. Intellectuals in Britain are certainly not happy with their nation’s political life after the recent Conservative electoral victory, and the journals of the Left, including the New Left Review, have been full of re-examinations. As it looks to Americans, however, the situation in Britain appears much healthier. For example, George Kennan’s BBC lectures of a few years ago excited much greater response than any comparable talks he has given in this country. While the British government in power has been somewhat less effective as a restraining force on the Americans and the Soviets than would have been salutary for both, and while the Suez adventure showed that the British blimps had enough air left for another flotation, the Americans can indeed envy the ease with which Englishmen discuss alternatives to nuclear war, ranging from unilateral disarmament to diplomatic manoeuvres aimed at easing particular points of tension in the Cold War, whether in China or in Germany. As against the tiny handful of American university students who feel anything can be done about the Bomb (a far larger number are concerned with the struggle for racial integration), Americans look on the Aldermaston marchers as something quite inconceivable at present in this country. What accounts for this difference between Britain and America? The problem of dealing with experts is the same in both countries, although in Britain—which is smaller and still partially aristocratic in nature—political leaders are less cut off than ours are from intellectuals, literary men, and scientists. It may be that people feel

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safer in this country because it is big and powerful and seemingly remote from the traditional areas of danger. This is an irrational feeling in the modern world of deterrence, since our fearful power and our weapons themselves become a lightning rod inviting attack; nevertheless the feeling does seem to exist. A Gallup poll in January roughly mirrored the results of a poll taken by Samuel Stouffer a few years ago: when people in a national cross-section are questioned about their worries a large proportion of them mention health and family troubles, and another fraction money troubles, but only one in fourteen allude to the international situation.5 Yet half the Gallup sample also thought that there would be another war before too long—a war that, as the general texture of their answers indicates, has very little reality for them. Mothers, for instance, said that they didn’t want their sons to serve overseas—evidently still unaware, despite the headlines, that in effect there is no “overseas” in modern war. Another, and related difference between this country and Britain, is that on the whole Americans have not suffered much from recent history. Whatever suffering the Second World War involved for a few was more than matched, for millions, by the fact that the war brought the great depression to an end. Besides, the war left a legacy of wild Keynesianism that continues in a new war economy to sustain prosperity: as Gerard Piel points out in the current (April) issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, it is the war economy which during the last fifteen years has brought a full third of the population into relative affluence. Americans are famously generous. There is great and admirable concern for individual life, as when somebody falls down a well or into the sea, or is captured by the enemy. In recent decades, Americans have become less cruel, enjoying less barbaric sports and appreciating gentleness in personal relations. Still, the lack of suffering leads to a certain callous lack of sympathy for the suffering of others, particularly when this can be rationalised in terms of American ideals and explained as not the result of visible injustice. There is still another difference which Edward Shils has noted in his book, The Torment of Secrecy. The British, protecting their privacy better, fear spies, secrets, and invaders less than we do, and have never been as hysterical about Communism. Even after the Klaus Fuchs case, they in effect decided that they would rather risk losing a few secrets to a few spies than turn the country upside down in the alleged hope of 5 Stouffer, Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties (Doubleday, 1955). The Gallup poll is reported in Look, January 5, 1960.

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flushing all enemy agents out. One result is that the ex-Communists in Britain are not nearly so eager to prove their virtue as the ex-Communists in this country—and it is perhaps the exCommunists in this country who above all justify Silone’s remark that the next war would be fought between the Communists and the exCommunists. Not only does much of the brains trust of anti-Communism in America consist of ex-Communists, but a number of them are refugees who have perhaps grown hysterical in their effort to make an impact on their new country—a country so big and unmanageable that it often seems to drive people into fits of shouting, while providing in its political life room for the entrepreneurially-minded who could not move so rapidly in the managerial world of the large corporations.

The Fear of Unmanliness Though McCarthy is dead, the fear of invasion by spies and secret agents on which he played is endemic in American life and operates locally even when it is quiescent nationally. In the last decade, for example, a great many municipalities have been aroused against the chimerical and imaginary dangers of fluoridation in their water supplies (chlorination as a safe-guard against the pollution of American streams and sub-surface waters is already an accomplished fact); the doctors and dentists and local civil servants who have proposed fluoridation have met a barrage of suspiciousness and have been regarded as poisoners, alternately puppets of the Aluminium Company (which manufactures fluorides), or the Communist Party. Of course it is safe and even patriotic to attack these men, who have no great vested interests behind them, either contractual or ideological; and correspondingly it has been extraordinarily difficult to rally people in America against the real poisons of fall-out or the dangers of chemical and biological warfare. For in the latter case, fear of realistic dangers, if openly expressed, might invite the accusation we ourselves have often met from student audiences when we have discussed these matters, as to whether we would rather live on our knees (as appeasers of world Communism) than die on our feet. The trail-blazer attitude behind this rhetoric was well expressed a few months ago in a conversation with a nine-year-old and very bright little boy. We had been talking with his parents about the news that day in the paper that Khrushchev would come to America, and were expressing our hope that perhaps there would be a detente in the Cold War. The boy piped up to say, “They’re both chicken,” meaning by this that both the US and the USSR were afraid. We asked him if it was chicken to fear the end of

the world, and he said, “Well, we all have to die sometime”; and then after a moment added, “Anyway, I’ll go live on the moon.” It is along just this line that we see perhaps the deepest difference between ourselves and the British, namely that American men seem constantly pursued by the fear of unmanliness, and therefore feel the need to present themselves as hard and realistic. This way of being realistic may have nothing to do with reality. Often, “realism” becomes no more than the opposite of idealism, reasonableness, or morality. Many men of an older generation, having witnessed the excesses to which sentimentality and selfrighteousness can take us, and completely sure of their own morality and dedication, are sometimes unwitting heralds for what is only a seemingly similar realism in others, a pseudorealism that springs from fear about masculinity. The British seem less obsessed than we are on this score. Nor do they have a proponent of tragic realism so brilliant as Reinhold Niebuhr. What produces the difference? What is the aim which in America has been distorted into a need to feel tough?

End Of The Frontier? One possibility is that for those to whom being American means being a pioneer—a trail-blazer and producer—the lack of new frontiers creates a fear (felt within and reinforced from outside) that the country is going soft. Perhaps, having escaped the bombing and much of the suffering of the Second World War, many Americans have never established their courage in their own eyes, and this may be another reason why the fears of being “soft on Communism” or just soft, are far stronger here than in Great Britain.6 To recognise and admit the enormous dangers that grow every day the cold war continues would feel like weakness to these people; it would seem but another step leading to a retreat from the heroic stand against nature, a stand that makes sense when, in order to survive physically, man must fight, but which now becomes merely a “posture”—a term that is increasingly and symptomatically coming into use in describing American policy (along with the somewhat analogous word, “position”). This “posture” which so many people insist upon becomes self-destructive in a world of fantastically rapid change, where survival depends on flexibility and on willingness to accept some responsibility 6 Obviously, we are not here proposing that the British lack problems of their own, including those in the area of masculinity and sex! But British society does provide people with a structure against which to rebel and within which to define oneself; correspondingly, even some ex-Communists can feel at home a bit more readily there than in this country, without having to rush into a new dogmatism. However, by the same token, certain utopian possibilities in America, presented by abundance and the absence of class conflict, are less available in Britain.

for what is happening in the world as a whole. Such people have been brought up to feel that worthwhile national action is to be defined mainly in terms of military or semi-military attacks on obstacles, either physical or human. They view with horror their countrymen who, captured by the ideology of consumption, have none of the spartan virtues, and in fact seem drones heralding the collapse of the state. A number of these men are the American analogues of Tory patricians (or in some cases, would-be patricians) who since Theodore Roosevelt’s day have seen war and preparation for war as the condition of national health.7 Having no goals for America in its own terms and (like most of us) more attuned to what they despise in their countrymen than to what they hope for, they cannot help being preoccupied with the Communists as a possible barbarian threat (often failing to realise how necessary we in turn are in the Soviet Union as a model for emulation, frequently for our worst Victorian excesses). So much, in fact, do these Americans depend on frightening their own countrymen with the not entirely fanciful bogey-men of a Soviet take-over, and so much do they rely on generating and maintaining a mood of crisis, that we ourselves are troubled lest the title and themes of this paper, too hurriedly read, add to the image of menace, when our own spirit, though no less critical, looks further and more hopefully ahead. It is one of the many ironies of the current situation that people who fear the missile gap (a presently unrealistic fear, as the U-2 flights have helped to show) and those like ourselves who fear the arms race as the gravest danger have virtually cancelled each other out, thus creating a climate of middle complacency and fringe hysteria. These contradictory images of our hardness and of our softness cannot help but cloud the vision of those military men and political leaders who are charged with the national defence. Because they fear softness, they seek to maintain a climate in which only hardness can thrive—so much so so that perhaps a general is best able to move toward peace, since a general is less vunerable tol accusations of softness. Correspondingly, many people who have different goals in mind seek to hitch them to the defence star, with the result that something so magnanimous in conception as the Marshall Plan becomes from the very start a cold 7 Senator Kennedy was quite in the patrician tradition when he concluded a Senate speech, “An Investment for Peace,” of February 29, by saying, “I urge that this Congress, before the President departs for the summit, demonstrate conclusively that we are removing those doubts (about the missile gap and like weaponry) and that we are prepared to pay the full cost necessary to insure peace. Let us remember what Gibbon said of the Romans: ‘They kept the peace—by a constant preparation for war; and by making clear to their neighbours that they are as little disposed to offer as to endure injury.’ ” In fairness it should be added that Senator Kennedy in this and more explicitly in other speeches has called for active steps towards disarmament and for something comparable to a Rand Corporation for peace.

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war weapon, and find a good deal of its legacy in propping up or even creating military regimes in places like Pakistan whose officials can persuade us that they are real made-to-order antiCommunists. II Obviously, it is not so hard to be antiCommunist if that is the way to build up one’s military faction in a still emerging nation. But as the cold war continues, it becomes increasingly difficult for decent Americans, humane enough to prefer peace to an egocentric national honour, to be outspokenly and genuinely anti-Communist. For example, we had very mixed feelings about the idealistic and dedicated Americans, some of them our colleagues, who last summer went to Vienna and set up shop to oppose the propaganda of the Communist Youth Festival. We had misgivings because it was impossible to escape the fact that, whatever their personal motives, these students became, in effect, emissaries of our State Department and our national cold war line. While this is the last thing many of these students wanted, the Iron Curtain creates just such ironies. And the problem is equally grave for the radical opposition. As Margaret Mead observed in an address last year, a student in this country a generation ago who had radical ideas had the advantage of being powerless: of being on the side of a future which did not yet exist. Today, however, such a student may find that his particular idea happens at the moment also to be part of the Communist party line, in which case he is not in alliance with a non-existent and therefore uncontaminated future, but with an extremely menacing, and totally unwelcome power. On the reverse side, someone like Pasternak, or many young Polish writers who are acclaimed in this country, may feel themselves betrayed by their very courage and virtue. Thus, as long as the cold war goes on, we lack an uncorrupted political debate. Under such conditions, it is not surprising that so many people prefer to withdraw from the field altogether. Although they are willing to countenance arms spending, a large number of Americans cannot bring themselves to contemplate the true horror of war, and so they simply go to sleep when they are asked to “wake up” to the dangers that face them. They have learned that the thing to do with anxiety (whether based on real danger or not) is to rid oneself of it through drink, drugs, or canned fantasies. There are other Americans, however, whose anxiety and escape take more productive forms. Like many of the Soviet intelligentsia who hate the system but feel powerless to change it, certain American elite groups have chosen the road of

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“inner emigration,” retreating from social responsibilities into, at best, a concern with their immediate surroundings, family, and friends. Though such people are often aroused by issues like education, urban renewal, or mental health, they are estranged from the system because it seems to them run for political motives in the narrowest rather than in the best sense. Unlike the escapist security seekers, they are not alienated from themselves as human beings, yet the fact that they remain without political purpose beyond their small civic circles limits their vision and hence their growth. It is for this reason that they may today be ready to give enthusiastic support to a far-reaching idealistic political movement that will provide them with a way of reasserting their faith in democracy. Still others who are intelligent enough to be concerned with the world have escaped into cynicism, considering the system as corrupt and finding a sense of purpose in expertise, even if this means selling themselves to the highest bidder. Such people, amorally working for personal gain within the system, have in fact supported many of its worst elements. But perhaps “support” is too strong a word, for one often finds in talking to them that they have a streak of buried idealism hidden as much from themselves as from others by this mask of cynicism. Whereas the hypocrisy of the Victorians consisted of concealing mean motives under noble rhetoric, our own hypocrisy often conceals a cankered decency beneath a cloak of Realpolitik. Sometimes the decency manifests itself only in the family and in intimate relations, sometimes in the restlessness that underlies the purposive exterior, sometimes merely in the aggressive defence that is put up by these people against any suggestion that their public and private selves need not always remain so completely at odds.

Inadequate Alternatives Whether in foreign policy, or in personal life, Americans appear today to suffer from an inadequate formulation of their alternatives. It has become extremely common among the welleducated to denounce “blind conformity” and “mass society”, often symbolised by such minor irritants as tail-fins, TV, or grey-flannel suits. But the only alternatives many people see to the organisation man is the nostalgic image of the cowboy or the rebellious artist; hard-shelled individualism and a rejection of human solidarity are mistaken as signs of strength and independence. Even the best students in our colleges tend to assume that they must eventually make their peace with “the system”—which they see as even more monolithic than in fact it is—and they

will then often become vicarious fellow-travellers of the Beats whose passive and almost entirely non-progressive defiance serves to publicise a private helplessness. Students in recent years have frequently said that helplessness is realistic: “What can you do about nuclear war?” Searching for a guarantee that life never provides, a guarantee not only that action will be effective but that all its consequences will be good, such young people never get started and therefore never gain the realistic political experience necessary to make them less helpless. Again, there is a tendency to jump to extreme alternatives: either total control of the total weapons, or total inaction. The sit-in strikes in the South and their support in the North may be the first sign of a change in these attitudes, for they have shown how much can be done even by relatively powerless and unorganised students. We ourselves have a very vivid sense of the rapidity of this change, for a few years ago we visited briefly several of the Southern Negro colleges that have been in the forefront of activity; and at that time they appeared to be quite somnolent institutions, run by despotic Negro patriarchs who were used to wheedling support from white leaders, at the same time dominating their own faculty and student bodies, while the students themselves appeared to hope for a safe passage into the world of the black bourgeoisie behind the wall of segregation. No doubt, recent visitors to West Africa are equally struck with the speed with which things can change: at the very moment when the ‘system’ appears impregnable to the realist, it oftens turns out to be vulnerable to the quixotic. Of course, we are not saying that “where there’s a will, there is always a way,” but we are saying that many of the most gifted and sensitive American students have been oversold on cultural and historical determinism—in which, incidentally, there may be self-serving elements, since determinism allows us publicly to accept the existing political structure while we privately deplore conformity, perhaps even showing by minor and irrelevant rebellions like sexual promiscuity or wearing a beard that we are rebels at heart. III If we see only two choices in our personal behaviour, such as conformity as against individualism, or adjustment as against neurotic loneliness, then it is likely that a similar dichotomising tendency will capture our political life. Thus, the American is asked to choose between democracy and communism, when in fact neither system is monolithic, and both have many things—literally things—in common, in contrast with the less industrialised and bureaucratised parts of the

world. As already implied, our relationship with Russia is similar to that of a big brother who is obsessed with the fear that his little brother will overtake him, and this over-concern keeps us, the older brother, from realising our unique potentialities. In this case, the sibling rivalry runs both ways, for the Russians gear their system to show that they are as good or better than we in those areas we most prize—technology, sports, and education. The tragedy is not only that because of our obsession we are rejecting utopian possibilities and ignoring more pressing problems (at the lowest level the much greater threat of Red China) but also that we are missing a chance to provide a better goal for Soviet growth. We may hope that the Russians will get rich enough to be preoccupied by the problem of national purpose which currently plagues us; and in the Americanlike desires of the Soviet elite, we find signs of this development. Conceivably if we were to show that our system can be mobilised to produce a better life, drawing its meaning from activity rather than from consumption per se or from national might, we would eventually shift the emphasis of Soviet emulation. In fairness it should be added that a surrender to apocalyptic alternatives is sometimes found on the more humane side of current American debates concerning deterrence. It would be surprising if this were not the case, for the dominant ways of perceiving in a culture generally turn up, sometimes in a disguised form, in the very models of opposing such ways. Thus, there are some pacifists, among the many different schools of pacifist thought, who see the present situation as demanding either preparation for total destruction or a complete cessation of all military measures through unilateral action. We believe that if the world survives these next critical years and becomes less uncivilised, we shall move away from the anarchy of nationalism, reducing arms to the level of police forces and handling as imaginatively as we can the problem of coping with despotic governments—in part by the remarkable invention of Gandhian nonviolent resistance, a manlier and far more difficult political weapon than trading blow for blow. Naturally, it is hard to see how the transition from the fully armed nation-state to the fully disarmed nation-state can be accomplished. It is easier to envisage a diplomatic give-and-take between ourselves and the Soviet Union that (without complete disarmament) would settle outstanding conflicts of interest in Europe and Asia—even though attempts at such a settlement would encounter the opposition of Adenauer and Ulbricht, Chiang and Mao, American Cold Warriors and their Stalinist opposite numbers in Russia. Efforts at disarmament not coupled with

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diplomatic moves to settle the cold war will make Americans as uneasy as high-flying spy planes must make the Russian people, and hence may boomerang. In our judgment, one must work simultaneously on both fronts, diplomacy and disarmament, keeping in mind the long-run pacifist goal of a world in which conflict is settled without weapons and war. What we wish to emphasise here, however, is not the details of the various positions, but rather the way in which the American style of thinking has suffered from a tendency to oversimplify alternatives and to leap always to absolute positions. It is wrong to insist that one must choose between conformity and individualism, slavery or freedom, absolute toughness or unilateral disarmament. Our need to plan distant as well as short-run goals, to work out the full implications of alternative actions, is confused with simplistic self-definitions, and thus we militate against graduated approaches. Where the arms race is concerned, a graduated approach would start with a definition of the goal as disarmament and would continue with a step-by-step attempt to find ways of overcoming our fears on the one hand and Russia’s distrust of inspectors on the other. A good illustration of the kind of imaginative plan that is needed is Leo Szilard’s idea of an inspection game.8 Recognising the reality both of our fear of secret Soviet operations (and of the unreliability of any government’s promise, including our own) and theirs of foreigners poking around, Szilard would allow inspection in detail any time that either party suspected clandestine atomic activity or decided that a tremor might not merely be an earth-quake. However, if we turned out to be wrong we would have to pay the Soviets a huge indemnity and vice versa. The goal of such a game is greater trust through experience rather than an idea of security through armaments which suggests either a statuesque posture or a swaddled, unrealistic existence, perhaps lived underground in concrete shelters. IV How does one begin the effort to change this pattern of thinking about security through armament? Because different people in the United States are at different stages of alertness and health or flight and cynicism, the answer will vary depending on which group in the population one addresses. When a man is being over-manipulated to the point where his very existence has become unreal, he cannot be “made” human by more and better manipulation from the “right” direction, by mere 8

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Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, April, 1960.

bombardment with pressures and appeals. It is this very habit of ignoring the human qualities of men in order to get them to run smoothly that has caused much of our trouble. Manipulation “downward,” from the elites to the public, inevitably intensifies apathy and saps the strength of an alert public just when it is most needed. Thus—to return to an earlier point—by a propaganda campaign which persuaded people to view the Marshall Plan as a semi-military stroke against Communism rather than as an idealistic and ultimately practical acknowledgement of our new world responsibility, we increased the chances of a quick acceptance of the programme at the expense of setting a pattern in which all economic development of underdeveloped countries would carry the imprimatur of our particular sort of idealism. By reinforcing the ideology of cageyness, we have been killing the very quality in ourselves which might save us from a moral disintegration that armaments can never arrest.

Lobbying From Below However, while manipulation downward or sideways leads to dysfunctional precedents which narrow future alternatives, lobbying “upward” is necessary and in the best traditions of keeping our leaders responsible. Today, as free citizens, we need energetically to influence the military, industrial, political, and educational elites into letting go of their investments in the cold war and into working not only for a safer but for a better world. This might involve setting up programmes for the economics of disarmament, as Seymour Melman says in a study in progress. For example, part of Raytheon might be deployed into a government-supported project for the renewal of down-town Boston, thereby insuring the managers that the cessation of arms stockpiling will not leave them and their industries holding the radioactive potato. Or, to take another example, programmes might be developed for the retraining of officers of SAC and other agencies whose existence depends on the cold war. Some of these men can certainly be deployed into inspection for disarmament; but in a less bellicose climate, they will not find jobs with defence contractors, nor even perhaps as headmasters of military schools. Still, their organisational ability and their dedication should be useful. Many people do not take even the small opportunities to lobby for human interests, encouraging elements of idealism in even the most cynical, and thereby supporting the faction of peacemakers in Washington and perhaps indirectly in the Kremlin, too. The paradox is that in an age when many feel so powerless a single irate letter can often have a totally unanticipated impact. With an elite like ours that

is both divided and confused, a “grass roots” complaint about a TV show or a Congressional measure can, as often for worse as for better, show the fallacy of those who believe that there are no channels left for effective political action. V Yet, if we get out of the immediate crisis, we shall still be faced with the underlying disorder in a society in which—partly as the result of its great past achievements—people feel there is plenty for all, but little joy in using the things we have made. In order to assuage the managerial fears, often less than conscious, that the end of the cold war would bring us face to face with a problem quite unlike that of 1945 (when the demand for consumer goods had not yet been fulfilled), we need a programme which would provide alternatives both to spending for defence and spending for spending’s sake. For the Russians, a decrease in defence spending means the beginning of television and toasters for all, and perhaps a slight loosening of despotic controls. For us, much more is involved, and more difficult problems—those of “abundance for what?”9 Indeed, no society has ever been in the American position before or anywhere near it (although the Scandanavians and West Germans are close, and the British not too far away), and thus the dream of plenty until our time has remained unsullied. We cannot look to the experience of other times and other countries for models for the American future. Neither can we discover much relevant wisdom in earlier prophets of abundance. Very few of these prophets foresaw the actual cornucopia of even so modestly efficient an industrial plant as ours (a plant which, if we were not so afraid of productivity or of controlling waste, would produce in a manner truly comparable to the myth of American efficiency).10 For example, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, which had an enormous impact on the Gilded Age, envisaged an industrial utopia whose amiable and genteel standard of living has long since been attained throughout a large American middle-income belt —though the inner peace and spaciousness that was supposed to go along with this prosperity has scarcely been approached. Even the most devoted apostles of capitalism in previous generations seldom foresaw that it would outrun their grandest hopes (though Schumpeter did grasp this)—while enemies of capitalism like Karl Marx, who acknowledged its power to 9 We have drawn in what follows on Riesman, “Abundance for What?” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Vol. XIV, No. 4 (1958), pages 135–139. 10 This myth remains unpunctured because most other countries not only have fewer resources, but are even less efficient,

surpass all earlier levels of production and consumption, never predicted its chastened managerial form nor indeed its bounteous exploitability. We are a generation who, prepared for Paradise Lost, are afraid that if we enter Paradise Regained, we shall deprive ourselves not merely of the incentive to produce but even of the incentive to live. We therefore resist such a predicament as a temptation of the devil, and in the process fail even to take the necessary steps, first toward peace, and then toward improved social conditions, and better education and medical care. We have been trained for a world of scarcity and we have developed an image of man under the psychology of scarcity. The maturation of America and correspondingly of world civilisation requires that we begin a programme for abundance with a new view of man and his potentialities: neither the inherently weak and sinful puritan nor the self-indulgent consumer, but instead a being whose nature is fulfilled through work that truly engages him, both because it draws upon his creative power and because it gives him the responsibility for helping to decide the form and use of what he makes. In this way we would be able to consider human destructiveness as the manifestation of a thwarted need to create and to initiate—a need thwarted by inadequate education and opportunity (as Paul Goodman declares in his forthcoming book, Growing Up Absurd). In Man for Himself and later writings, Erich Fromm argues that man does not live merely for the release of tensions (as Freud’s writings often suggest), but that when this is all society asks of him, his passive-receptive orientation to life can fill him with a nagging self-doubt—which may in turn be exploited in the fantasies of omnipotence that virulent nationalism demands. These conflicting ideas concerning man’s nature are dramatised in contemporary American arguments about the educational system. A belief in the spontaneous potentialities of human nature, and in the relevance of schooling to those potentialities, animated some of the original leaders of the progressive education movement, notably, of course, John Dewey. In practice, however, many followers of this movement simply came to terms, as new social strata swamped the schools, with the latter’s diluted demands for a laying on of educational hands. Now, in reaction against this laxity, many American leaders have found in the Cold War an opportunity to “tighten up” education. Men like Admiral Rickover espouse a climate of rigour, based not on the intractable tasks set both by knowledge and by life, but by a need to keep up with the Russians. One of the most profound lessons a child learns in school is how he is to feel about his later life-

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work, and if he is taught to approach the idea of work only with a sense of duty, competitiveness, and fear of failure, he will never develop the capacity to impose meaning on whatever tasks he comes to undertake.11 The problems, political and technical, of reorganising work along lines we can now only dimly envisage, are so enormous as to be almost inhibiting. If one ponders on these matters, one finds oneself facing into a new frontier that is neither physically nor politically simple, but that requires as much resourcefulness and tenacity as the older frontiers did. For example, one might consider the changes involved if every job in America were re-analysed, not with an eye only to its efficiency in terms of traditional output, but in terms of its long-run effect on the worker, his family, his friends, and his political life. We now assume that production will go on as usual, and that humane progress demands only ancillary adjustments, fringe benefits, which repair some of the ravages of work, on the one hand by making the work place less physically exhausting and despotic, and on the other by trying to shore up the leisure life of the worker with a variety of welfare measures. It is difficult to change this pattern, even if management is willing to initiate the attempt. Edwin Land has found that workers in his Polaroid factory are not eager to leave the assembly line, to whose routines they have become accustomed, for an unspecified job in a laboratory. They doubt their ability to cope with a larger untried situation, just as some students prefer rigid routines, which give them the assurance they are learning something, to less predictable programmes of self-directed study. In Dr. Land’s experience, workers, like students, need support and encouragement to attempt new tasks. Another example of inertia is provided by Professor Chris Argyris of the Yale Department of Industrial Administration. The president of a small corporation, Argyris reports, decided that 11 Of course, many people today will say that while they may not be “mad” about their work, neither do they mind it. In The Lonely Crowd, (1950), the senior author took a sanguine view of the attenuation of “meaning” in work, arguing that in an affluent society, arduous and demanding work would become increasingly unnecessary, and that the productive impulse would have to be expressed in leisure and play. Further reflection has convinced us that here we are not necessarily the prisoners of our technological fate, of our given forms of mass production and of the organisation of work. We now believe that a rich, heavily automatised society is precisely one that can afford to reorganise work so that attention is focused no longer exclusively on the product, but on the worker himself as a product of his work. We have been greatly excited and impressed by a few pioneering examples, like Edwin Land’s Polaroid factory. There, deep involvement in work and a concept of the factory that continues the process of education for the workers, have significantly enlivened many workers (without any loss in productivity when measured by the traditional standards of the balance sheet, although this must not be the sole or even the crucial measure of success). To be creative in leisure while mindless and passive in work demands a schizoid attitude which even if psychologically possible would put too great a burden on leisure, just as the family bears too great a burden when it becomes the only reservoir of decency in a disordered civic and national life.

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all foremen should determine their own rates of reimbursement. One day he announced that there was a payroll of so many dollars to which he would add an annual increment, and that the workers should divide it among themselves as seemed equitable to them. At first, they jumped at the chance, but not long after they asked to be relieved of the responsibility. The president, however, did not give up. It took him seven years to create a work milieu in which the foremen could develop respect for themselves and one another. In the course of making his innovations, the president discovered how deep were the feelings of alienation, of separateness, and how low was the sense of self-esteem among the foremen. He found also that these feelings could not be changed by propaganda, that such persuasion merely increased self-hate and alienation. The foremen preferred paternalism until they had developed a confidence in themselves based on an altered work situation in which they made decisions about style and methods of production. And the president was secure enough not to feel that he had to hang on to traditional prerogatives; as the workers took over more activities, he was freed for new ones. VI When in discussion we have stressed hopeful illustrations like these as models for social change, we have sometimes found them quickly dismissed by people brought up in the shadow of Marxism. Such people believe that the coming of abundance does not change the vested interests, and that political commitments will continue to reflect economic advantage.12 They look to what is left of the American disinherited as the potential cadre to displace the power elite, and they see hostility rather than hope as the principal lever of political change; therefore, they do not even try to move men by rational appeals. One might ask whether they are in fact good Marxists. However, one need not be entirely theoretical: recent student rallies for Negro rights at leading universities, and the response of a few students to the Committees of Correspondence, suggest what seems to us to have been generally the case in historical development, that it is not the most under-privileged who are most concerned about justice and about the future. Even the hangovers of scarcity psychology—for example, the prevalent notion that, even if there should be enough of the good things of life for all, there would always remain a short supply of status—do not alter the fact that those who worry least about having enough (including enough status) frequently show the clearest sense of responsibility. This is true not only for the Tory patricians referred to

earlier, but also for many of their opponents in politics and in intellectual life. What is lacking today is an audience of restless poor (save among Negroes) awaiting the leadership of the better-off. As higher education expands and as blue-collar work gives way to white-collar work, the often denigrated bourgeois idealist, the pilot fish of the Marxian theory of revolution, becomes a member of a class quite as large in number as the factory workers. This group is only residually a “class” in the traditional sense, for it lacks any sense of identity of interest and any large reservoir of hatred or of solidarity. Unlike the well-to-do of other times, it is not supported by servants— indeed, its lack of the habit of command is one of its present political weaknesses. On the whole, its members, children of the industrial revolution, have thought that any increase in productivity automatically spells progress; but today this has become a tarnished belief, and little as yet exists to take its place. The answer for which many radicals look is the highly unlikely prospect of another depression. In our judgement, a depression is unlikely at present, less because the Keynesian weapons of fiscal and other governmental intervention are well understood and politically available, than because, as we have already argued, an increase in “defence” expenditures can again be used, as it was in the recession of 1957–58, to maintain the flow of income. But even if such measures should fail and another depression would threaten, the result at best would be another New Deal—if one could imagine such coasting on inherited ideals which were barely adequate in their own day, let alone in our era of potential abundance. Another formula, occasionally suggested by the engineering-minded is to regard the race for outer space as a safety valve for the arms race, furnishing an outlet at once for imperialistic energies and cowboy imaginations. While it goes without saying that this latter “solution” is preferable to the arms race, it seems to us a fictional frontier, reflecting a nostalgia for a long-past day when the West had to be settled, the industries developed, the cities built, the immigrants “Americanised”. To summarise our argument: many Americans think that the only changes needed in our national life are minor ones, or choices between starkly 12 There is no question that there are vested interests in armaments and against radical innovation in nearly all our industries. However, Americans differ from perhaps any other people in that all accept a classless ideology. The weapons makers in America are not evil plotters, who cynically take the risks for the gain. Rather, they often consider themselves “realistic idealists” and are usually men of good will, whose economic advantage makes it easier for them to rationalise by putting full blame on the Russians and by parading the horrors of Communism; in effect, they want the debate to remain polarised and the proponents of pacifism to seem religious odd-balls.

stated alternatives. In this, they are like patients who come to a psychiatrist and say, “There is nothing basically the matter with me except that I have this ulcer.” So it is with the ulcer of the cold war which exposes the failure of a style of life. Though the immediate peril demands the beginning of disarmament as one first step toward ending the cold war, in doing this, we only patch a symptom. Disarmament is not the end of therapy, and true peace is not merely the absence of war but a state in which the quality of existence becomes humane and generous rather than destructive. The analogy goes further. Just as no therapist can cure anyone but merely provides the support for another’s steps toward health, so our leadership cannot manipulate us into utopia. In order for us to live with our abundance there must be greater participation in the political life of the United States and of the world. The traditional American ideology which is concerned only with equality of economic and political opportunity and freedom from control—in other words with the major problems of scarcity alone—must readjust to face the problems that have suddenly become visible because of abundance: lack of participation in life and lack of opportunity and education for self-expression. Once these problems can be faced, a people of plenty may be able to use its power for helping other people toward economic prosperity (as an essential step toward further difficult alternatives). When we can overcome our embarrassment a being frankly idealistic in our actions, we will no longer be slaves to an ideology that demands the continual creation of pseudo-needs as a basis for production and continued “prosperity”, an ideology which leads the American people to doubt the possibility of any growth beyond comfortable survival, protecting the nest egg. Our imagination must focus on other frontiers, work at bringing more people into participation by forming many small groups, by decentralising industry, by creating better means for continued education not merely for children but for adults throughout life. To be sure, none of the problems of scarcity has been dealt with in a wholly satisfactory way: not all Americans are affluent, many are destitute, and many of the traditional issues of welfare and social justice—markedly, of course, the race issue—remain exigent. But a movement of renewal dedicated only to these issues is not conceivable. We shall move faster on these older fronts if they do not usurp all our attention and if we can invent an American future which is exciting, active, and responsible, but neither murderous nor imperialistic. It is for this that political programmes are needed which transcend the details of the present.

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THE DEMOCRATIC CONVENTION앲

앲앲앲

Based on Convention notes from Los Angeles by Emmanuel de Kadt. NO DEADLOCKS, no switches, no Southern breakaways, no second ballot. Smooth as a transcontinental express, the Kennedy machine rolled through the Democratic Party’s Convention, carrying everything (including 806 votes) before it. Its progress marked the rise and triumph of the college-cut button-down-collar business technicians in politics: the new men of power, Jack Kennedy’s “boys”, made the old professional machine men look like a crew of provincial hicks. There was something of a self-fulfilling prophecy about the Kennedy success. While he consistently underestimated his strength, appearing hopeful and calm but never over-confident, his “team” consistently utilised the highest figures of support, to induce a feeling among delegates that whoever wanted to wave from the window when the Presidential train rolled in in November, had better climb aboard early. They did. While the processions and acclamations for “favourite sons” went on, the Kennedy professionals could be seen, moving across the floor of the Convention, smoothing the way. The headquarters of the Convention, the Biltmore Hotel, saw many a wild-cat demonstration. At one point, a mob of bigoted segregationists invaded the lobby with placards for Orval Faubus, famous for his stand at Little Rock. Their placards demanded, “A Christian In The White House”, “Faubus For President”, “States Rights vs. Communism”. At another time, two or three Nazis, with swastika armbands, distributed leaflets saying, “A vote for Stevenson is a vote for Khrushchev”. But all this was just part of the political mardi-gras. The only two real alternatives to Kennedy were Stevenson and Lyndon Johnson, leader of the Senate and the Southern hope. Johnson remained confident until the end. With his smile

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and his studied friendliness, he tried to navigate his way round all the cliffs. Asked about Cuba, he said “Foreign policy is the prerogative of the President!” Pushed by the creeping crisis in Cuba, he retreated behind the Monroe Doctrine and the Caracas Agreement. He failed to find the appropriate tone for the Convention, and the South did not feel strongly enough about his allegiance to segregation to threaten to break the Party in order to let him through. The Stevenson movement had unsuspected “grass-roots” strength, in New York and California particularly, and enclaves of liberal support around the country: but it lacked organised power. The inner contradiction of Stevenson’s position—he remained aloof, unwilling to campaign, and yet was obviously anxious to be “drafted”—made it difficult for his supporters. Finding themselves largely outside the machines, often in blatant opposition to them, they had to rely upon public demonstrations. In New York alone, more than 500,000 signed the “Draft Stevenson” petitions, and when he appeared at the Convention, the demonstrations in favour of his candidature interrupted the proceedings for twenty minutes. “Do not leave this prophet without honour in his own party. Do not reject this man”.

That was precisely what the Convention did. The Kennedy team worked tirelessly, promoting the young Senator from Massachusetts. At one stage, the candidate was so tired that he said,

“I wonder whether I’m exuding the basic confidence?” He was. The Kennedy magic had three component elements. First, he found exactly the tone appropriate to the Democratic mood. “Private opulence and public squalor”—of course, “within the free enterprise system”: national sacrifice and responsibility. “The New Frontier is not a set of promises; it is a set of challenges. It sums up not what I intend to offer the American people, but what I intend to ask of them”. Secondly, he commanded the slickest, youngest, smoothest team of professionals of any recent Presidential candidate. Compared with these cultivated but tough operators, even the Nixon Republican machine, which rolled to success a few weeks later, looked a little obsolescent. Thirdly, Kennedy said just enough to distinguish himself as someone with his own “slant” on affairs, and offered just enough in private to keep warring delegations sweet. There must have been scores of Governors, Senators and politicians on the floor who had dangled before them, during the Convention, the prospect of key Cabinet or Convention jobs if Kennedy won. Several of these men bull-dozed their delegations into the Kennedy camp in the hope of winning some important post of loyalty, not excluding the Vice-Presidency.

Yet as soon as the Convention closed, the Senator proceeded to tie up the loose ends. The loosest of these was the Southern vote: so, with a ruthlessness which left many delegations gasping for breath, Mr. Kennedy chose for his running mate as Vice-President, Lyndon Johnson— thereby appearing to make nonsense of the “liberal” noises, particularly on segregation, which he had been making. The problem is that the Conventions give little or no indication of what kind of administration we shall have after November. The two candidates, Nixon and Kennedy, are such massproduced men that very little but their public personae has been permitted to appear. Indeed, the only reason for thinking that something must be done is the fact that, at the moment, there is no policy at all. The caretaker Eisenhower-Herter government has done nothing for months but collect the back-wash from the disintegration of Dulles’ foreign policy. Since the death of the Old Warrior, the Administration has been sitting tight

above the most dangerous yawning vacuum in “Western” policy. Even Mr. Nixon, anxious not to be hit on the head by the President’s backswing, has been busy dissociating himself from what has not been going on in the White House. But what would the candidates do, if elected? Both Party platforms reflect what must now be a decisive popular swing with history on the subject of segregation. Nixon, supported by Rockefeller, defied the Republican backwoodsmen on the subject: so did Kennedy. On the other hand, the selection of Lyndon Johnson does suggest that Mr. Kennedy in the White House might not be so ardent a crusader against segregation as he appeared previously. On such questions as schooling, housing and welfare (the “Galbraith” issues), the Democrats are far more committed than the Republicans to public spending. But the crucial question is defence and foreign policy: and here, the glass is very dark. Nixon forced the Republican Convention, including the President, into the Rockefeller camp on the defence issue: the Party is committed to “intensify”, “accelerate” and “increase” defence spending. And the recent tests of Polaris suggest that, armed with this massive new weapon, a Republican administration would take a “hard nuclear line” against what is now regarded as Soviet intransigence. Kennedy, on the other hand, has taken the more temperate line of increased economic aid—but that is not quite enough. If Symington becomes his Secretary of State, his will undoubtedly be an Administration of “Big Bombardiers”—for Symington represents the Truman-Acheson wing of the Democratic Party, and they are traditional anti-communist wielders of the massive deterrent. If, however, he chooses Stevenson, that would strengthen the influence of Chester Bowles and George Kennan, who are both strongly ranged behind a policy of disengagement and disarmament. This could have the greatest possible significance for the conduct of American policy—and is, therefore, what really interests anyone watching the Presidential carnival from afar. If Kennedy were to be elected, it could be either a Truman or Kennan line in foreign policy: and the fate of the world could depend on which it was. What is even more frightening —American politics and Parties being what they are—it could easily be both!

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STUDENTS TAKE


OVER by Kenneth Rexroth NOT LONG after the last war, Bayard Rustin got on a bus in Chicago and headed south. When they crossed the Mason-Dixon Line, he stayed where he was. The cops took him off. He “went limp.” They beat him into unconsciousness. They took him to jail and finally to a hospital. When he got out, he got on another bus and continued south. So it went, for months—sometimes jail, sometimes the hospital, sometimes they just kicked him into the ditch. Eventually he got to New Orleans. Eventually Jim Crow was abolished on interstate carriers. Individual non-violent direct action had invaded the South and won. The Southern Negro had been shown the only technique that had any possibility of winning. Things simmered for a while and then, spontaneously, out of nowhere, the Montgomery bus boycott materialised. Every moment of the birth and growth of this historic action has been elaborately documented. Hour by hour we can study “the masses” acting by themselves. It is my modest, well considered opinion that Martin Luther King, Jr., is the most remarkable man the South has produced since Thomas Jefferson— since, in other words, it became “the South.” Now the most remarkable thing about Martin Luther King is that he is not remarkable at all. He is just an ordinary minister of a middle-class Negro church (or what Negroes call “middle class,” which is pretty poor by white standards). There are thousands of men like him all over Negro America. When the voice called, he was ready. He was ready because he was himself part of that voice. Professional, white-baiting Negroes who thrill millionairesses in night clubs in the North would call him a square. He was a brave square. He is the best possible demonstration of the tremendous untapped potential of humanity that the white South has thrown away all these years. He helped to focus that potential and exert it. It won.

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. . . The Montgomery bus boycott not only won where Negro Zealotism, as well as Uncle Tomism, had always failed, but it demonstrated something that had always sounded like sheer sentimentality. It is better, braver, far more effective and far more pleasurable, to act with love than with hate. When you have won, you have gained an unimpeachable victory. The material ends pass or are passed beyond. “Desegregated” buses seem natural in many Southern cities today. The guiltless moral victory remains, always as powerful as the day it was gained. Furthermore, each moral victory converts or neutralises another block of the opponents’ forces. Before the Montgomery episode was over, Bayard Rustin and Martin Luther King had joined forces. Today they are world statesmen in a “shadow cabinet” that is slowly forming behind the wielders of power, and the advisers and auxiliary leaders in the councils of Negro Africa. At home in America, the Montgomery achievement has become the source from which has flowed the moral awakening, first, of Negro and, following them, of white youth. Everything seemed to be going along nicely. According to the papers and most of their professors, 99 44/100 per cent of the nation’s youth were cautiously preparing for the day when they could offer their young split-level brains to G.M., I.B.M., Oak Ridge or the Voice of America. Madison Avenue had discovered its own pet minority of revolt and tamed it into an obedient mascot. According to Time, Life, M.G.M. and the editors and publishers of a new, pseudo avant-garde, all the dear little rebels wanted to do was grow beards, dig jazz, take heroin and wreck other people’s Cadillacs. While the exurbanite children sat with the baby sitter and thrilled to Wyatt Earp, their parents swooned in the aisles at The Connection or sat up past bedtime reading switch-blade novelists. The psycho-

logical mechanisms were the same in both cases— sure-fire, time-tested and shopworn. But as a matter of fact, anyone with any sense travelling about the country lecturing on college campuses during the past five years, could tell that something very, very different was cooking. Time and again, hundreds of times, I have been asked by some well-dressed, unassuming, beardless student, “I agree with you completely, but what shall we, my generation, do?” To this question, I have never been able to give but one answer:” I am fifty. You are twenty. It is for you to tell me what to do. The only thing I can say is, don’t do the things my generation did. They didn’t work.” A head of steam was building up, the waters were rising behind the dam; the dam itself, the block to action, was the patent exhaustion of the old forms. What was accumulating was not any kind of programmatic “radicalisation,” it was a moral demand. And then one day four children walked into a dime store in a small Southern city and pulled out the plug. Four children picked up the massive chain of the Social Lie and snapped it at its weakest link. Everything broke loose.







From the first sit-ins, the young have kept the command in their own hands. No “regularly constituted outside authority” has been able to catch up with them. The sit-ins swept the South so rapidly that it was impossible to catch up with them physically, but it was even harder for routinised bureaucrats with vested interests in race relations and civil liberties to catch up with them ideologically. The whole spring went by before the professional leaders began to get even a glimmering of what was happening. In the meantime, the old leadership was being pushed aside. Young ministers just out of the seminary, maverick young teachers in Jim Crow colleges, choir mistresses and school marms and Sunday school teachers in all the small cities of the South, pitched in and helped—and let the students lead them, without bothering to “clear it with Roy.” In a couple of months, the NAACP found itself with a whole new cadre sprung up from the grass roots. The only organisation which understood what was going on was CORE, the Committee On Racial Equality, organised years ago in an evacuated Japanese flat, “Sakai House,” in San Francisco, by Bayard Rustin, Caleb Foote and a few others, as a direct-action, race-relations offshoot of the Fellowship of Reconciliation (the FOR) and the Friends Service Committee. CORE was still a small group of intellectual enthusiasts

and there simply weren’t enough people to go around. To this day, most Negroes know little more of CORE than its name, which they have seen in the Negro press, and the bare fact that its programme is direct, non-violent action. This didn’t deter the high school and college students in the Jim Crow high schools and colleges in Raleigh and Durham. They set up their own direct non-violent action organisation and in imitation of CORE gave it a name whose initials spelled a word COST. Soon there were COST “cells” in remote hill-country high schools, complete with codes, hand signals, couriers, all the apparatus of youthful enthusiasm. Needless to say, the very words frightened the older Negro leadership out of its wits. The police hosed and clubbed the sit-inners, the Uncle Tom presidents of the captive Jim Crow colleges expelled them in droves, white students came South and insisted on being arrested along with the Negroes, sympathy picket lines were thrown in front of almost every chain variety store in almost every college town in the North. Even some stores with no branches in the South, and no lunch counters anywhere, found themselves picketed until they cleared themselves of any implication of Jim Crow. The effect on the civilised white minority in the South was extraordinary. All but a few had gone on accepting the old stereotypes. There were good Negroes, to be sure, but they didn’t want to mix. The majority were ignorant, violent, bitter, half-civilised, incapable of planned, organised action, happy in Jim Crow. “It would take another two hundred years.” In a matter of weeks, in thousands of white brains, the old stereotypes exploded. Here were the Negro children of servants, sharecroppers and garbage men—“their” servants and sharecroppers and garbagemen—who had always been content with their place, directly engaged in the greatest controlled moral action the South had ever seen. They were quiet, courteous, full of good will to those who abused them; and they sang, softly, all together, under the clubs and firehoses, “We will not be moved.” Long protest walks of silent Negroes, two abreast, filed through the provincial capitals. A major historical moral issue looked into the eyes of thousands of white spectators in Southern towns which were so locked in “our way of life” that they were unaware they lived in a great world. The end of Jim Crow suddenly seemed both near and inevitable. It is a profoundly disturbing thing to find yourself suddenly thrust upon the stage of history. . . . The response on the campuses of the white colleges of the South was immediate. There had

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always been inter-racial committees and clubs around, but they had been limited to a handful of eccentrics. These increased tremendously, and involved large numbers of quite normal students. Manifestations of sympathy with the sit-ins and joint activities with nearby Negro schools even came to involve student government and student union bodies. Editorials in college papers, with almost no exceptions, gave enthusiastc support. Believe me, it is quite an experience to eat dinner with a fraternity at a fashionable Southern school and see a can to collect money for CORE at the end of the table.







More important than sympathy actions for and with the Negroes, the sit-ins stimulated a similar burst, a run-away brush fire of activity for all sorts of other aims. They not only stimulated the activity, they provided the form and in a sense the ideology. Non-violent direct action popped up everywhere—so fast that even the press wire services could no longer keep track of it, although they certainly played it up as the hottest domestic news of the day. The actions dealt with a few things: compulsory ROTC, peace, race relations, civil liberties, capital punishment—all, in the final analysis, moral issues. In no case were they concerned with politics in the ordinary sense of the word. Here the ROTC marched out to troop the colours and found a line of students sitting down across the parade ground. In another school, a protest march paraded around and through and between the ranks of the marching ROTC, apparently to everybody’s amusement. In other schools, the faculty and even the administration and, in one place, the governor joined in protest rallies against ROTC. There were so many peace and disarmament meetings and marches it is impossible to form a clear picture—they seem to have taken place everywhere and, for the first time, to have brought out large numbers. Offcampus, as it were, the lonely pacifists who had been sitting out the civil-defence propaganda stunt in New York, called their annual “sit out” and were dumbfounded at the turn-out. For the first time, too, the court and even the police weakened. Few were arrested. The Chessman execution provoked demonstrations, meetings, telegrams, on campuses all over the country. In Northern California, the “mass base” of all forms of protest was among the students and the younger teachers. They provided the cadre, circulated petitions, sent wires, interviewed the Governor, and kept up a continuous vigil at the gates of San Quentin. All this activity

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was unquestionably spontaneous. At no time did the ACLU or the regular anti-capitalpunishment organisations initiate, or even take part in, any mass action, whatever else they may have done. Chessman, of course, had a tremendous appeal to youth; he was young, he was an intellectual, even an artist of sorts; before his arrest he had been the kind of person they could recognise, if not approve of, among themselves. He was not very different from the hero of On the Road, who happened to be locked up in San Quentin along with him. As his life drew to a close, he showed a beautiful magnanimity in all he did or said. On all the campuses of the country—of the world, for that matter—he seemed an almost typical example of the alienated and outraged youthful “delinquent” of the postWorld War II era—the product of a delinquent society. To the young who refused to be demoralised by society, it appeared that that society was killing him only to sweep its own guilt under the rug. I think almost everyone (Chessman’s supporters included) over thirty-five, seriously underestimates the psychological effect of the Chessman case on the young. At all points, the brutal reactionary tendencies in American life were being challenged, not on a political basis, Left versus Right, but because of their patent dishonesty and moral violence. The most spectacular challenge was the riot at the hearing of the Un-American Activities Committee in San Francisco. There is no question but that this was a completely spontaneous demonstration. The idea that Communist agitators provoked it is ludicrous. True, all that were left of the local Bolsheviks turned out, some thirty of them—Stalinists and the two groups of Trotskyites. Even the “youth leader” who, twenty-eight years before, at the age of thirty, had been assigned to lead the Y.C.L., showed up and roared and stomped incoherently, and provided comic relief. Certainly no one took him seriously. There was one aspect about the whole thing that was not spontaneous. That was the work of the committee. They planned it that way. Over the protests and warnings of the city administration, they deliberately framed up a riot. When the riot came, it was the cops who lost their nerve and rioted, if rioting means uncontrolled mob violence. The kids sat on the floor with their hands in their pockets and sang, “We shall not be moved.” Spectacular as it was, there are actions more important than the San Francisco riot. Here and there about the country, lonely, single individuals have popped up out of nowhere and struck their blows. It is almost impossible to get information about draft resisters, non-registrants, conscien-

tious objectors, but here and there one pops up in the local press or, more likely, in the student press. Even more important are the individual actions of high school students whom only a hopeless paranoiac could believe anybody had organised. A sixteen-year-old boy, in Queens, and then three in the Bronx, refused to sign loyalty oaths to get their diplomas. As kudos are distributed in a New York suburban high school, a boy gets up and rejects an award from the American Legion. Everybody is horrified at his bad manners. A couple of days later two of his prizes are offered to the two runners-up, who reject them in turn. This is spontaneous direct action if ever there was. And the important thing about it is that in all these cases, these high school kids have made it clear that they do not object to either loyalty oaths or the American Legion because they are “reactionary”, but because they are morally contemptible. The Negro faculties and presidents of the Jim Crow colleges who not only opposed the sit-ins, but expelled dozens of the sit-inners, now found themselves faced with deserted campuses. They were overtaken by a tremendous groundswell of approval of their youngsters’ actions from Negro parents, and were dumbfounded by the sympathy shown by a broad strata of the white South. One by one they swung around, until Uncle Toms who had expelled students taking part in sit-ins during their Easter vacations in other states, went on public record as saying, “If your son or daughter telephones you and says he or she has been arrested in a sit-in, get down on your knees and thank God.”







Not only did the New Revolt of Youth become the hottest domestic copy in years, but it reached the ears of all the retired and semi-retired and comfortably fixed pie-card artists of every lost and every long-since-won cause of the labour and radical movements. Everybody shouted, “Myself when young!” and pitched in with application blanks. The AFL-CIO sent out a well-known leader of the Esperanto movement who reported that the kids were muddled and confused and little interested in the trade-union movement which they, mistakenly in his opinion, thought of as morally compromised. YPSL chapters of the Thomasite Socialists rose from the graves of twenty years. Youth experts with theories about what their grandchildren were talking about went on cross-country tours. Dissent had a subscription drive. The Trotskyites came up with programmes. Everybody got in the act—except,

curiously, the Communists. As a matter of fact, back in a dusty office in New York, they were grimly deadlocked in their last factional fight. Although the movement was a spontaneous outburst of direct non-violent action, it didn’t quite please the libertarians and pacifists. They went about straightening everybody out, and Liberation came out with an article defining the correct Line and pointing out the errors of the ideologically immature.







As the kids go back to school this fall, this is going to be the greatest danger they will face—all these eager helpers from the other side of the age barrier, all these cooks, each with a time-tested recipe for the broth. All over the world this kind of ferment is stewing on college campuses. In Korea and Japan and Turkey the students have marched and brought down governments and humbled the President of the greatest power in history. So far the movement is still formless, a world-wide upheaval of disgust. Is this in fact a “political” upsurge? It isn’t now—it is a great moral rejection, a kind of mass vomit. Everybody in the world knows that we are on the verge of extinction and nobody does anything about it. The kids are fed up. The great problems of the world today are immediate world-wide peace, immediate race equality, and immediate massive assistance to the former colonial peoples. All of them could be started toward solution by a few decisive acts of moral courage amongst the boys at the top of the heap. Instead, the leaders of the two ruling nations abuse each other like little boys caught out behind the barn. Their apologists stage elaborate military and ideological defences of Marxian socialism and laissez-faire capitalism, neither of which has ever existed on the earth or ever will exist. While the Zengakuren howls in the streets, Khrushchev delivers a speech on the anniversary of Lenin’s “Leftism, an Infantile Disorder” and uses it to attack—Mao! Meanwhile a boy gets up in a New York suburban school and contemptuously hands back his “patriotic” prize. He is fed up.









Reprinted in part from The Nation, by kind permission of the Editors.

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• IMPERIALISM YESTERDAY AND TODAY Michael Barratt Brown

AS MR. MACLEOD

makes arrangements for the granting of independence to each of Britain’s African colonies, socialists and radicals are bound to try once more to take their bearings. In the past 15 years almost all of the 1,300 million people who lived in 1945 under colonial rule have won the right to govern themselves. What, then, is left of imperialism? In this article, it is proposed to review some of the connections between the history of capitalism and empire; then to examine the special connections between imperialism and the monopoly stage of capitalism; and finally to see how far something that may be called imperialism still exists today. This subject has recently received close examination by John Strachey in his new book, The End of Empire, the second of his projected studies in the Principles of Democratic Socialism (Gollancz, 1959). Points where his analysis differs from that presented here will be referred to in footnotes throughout.1 What started Britain on the road to Empire? Innate superiority, absent-mindedness, a semimystical will to rule, our island geography?2 None of these stock answers can be satisfactory for a Marxist. We shall look for a technological basis for understanding the social relations of any human culture, but we shall not forget that social relations gain a life of their own. Nonetheless, over broad sweeps of history, one may follow Marx’s divisions of human history into Slave. Feudal and Capitalist Societies, and Marx’s subdivisions of Capitalist society into the periods when merchant capital, industrial capital and finance capital were uppermost. Each of these societies has been a class society, in the sense that a dominant group or class has been able to get others to work for them in various forms of servile labour. Empires historically have been an extension of the area of domination of the ruling group or class from its

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own people to other peoples. The fact that this group may have shared with its own people some part of the advantages accruing to them—the free bread and circuses of Imperial Rome, for example—should not blind us to the central class, rather than national, character of the exercise.3 Some distinctions must be drawn between the drives to empire of merchant capital, industrial capital and finance capital. In the first stage, merchant capital looked mainly to buy cheap and to sell dear, if possible to plunder— silks, spices, sugar, precious metals and other rare luxuries from overseas lands for sale at home and in Europe. Trading posts and plantations were established to this end. However, different developments followed in North America, where the empty land was settled by European immigrants and a new capitalist society established, and in Africa, India and South America, where no such settlement was possible. There can be no doubt that this first stage of conquest and plunder, though small, did much not only to set back economic development in the plundered lands, but to nourish the early years of Britain’s industrial revolution. But the first stage of plunder had to be ended. If markets were to be opened up for British goods all over the world, the competition of Indian and Chinese textiles and handicrafts had to be destroyed. It is from this period that the division of the world into rich advanced industrial lands and poor under-developed lands may be dated. 1 Strachey’s important book is discussed in footnotes because the stimulus of his work demands a self-consistent statement of one’s own views, without too many side glances. This article is a tribute to his thought-provoking contribution to the discussion. 2 Strachey rather surprisingly advances the theory of a “daemonic” will to empire, “which is now leaving us”, in his discussion of the East India Company. Yet elsewhere he appears to accept an extreme economic Marxist explanation for the later stages of Empire. 3 Although Strachey gives many examples of this class character of empire—pp. 90, 156, 180, 188, 216, 292, 318–9, 321, 327, 329, 334, 340–1—he nevertheless makes his definition of empire “the conquest and domination (de jure or de facto) of one people by another people”.

But even then, only in India was direct colonial rule extended. In this second stage, so supreme was Britain’s naval and military strength after the Napoleonic wars, and so superior was British industry, that the whole world was Britain’s colony. In the first years of British industrial development, the object of foreign trade was to widen the markets for consumer goods. But industrialisation led to a large capital goods industry. When the railway boom at home ended, overseas markets for rails, locomotives and wagons became as important as for textiles. But capital equipment cannot be sold, like textiles, through native merchants to individual buyers. Capital goods required overseas loans and investment. Britain’s regular and large annual export surplus in the 15 years or so after 1855 provided just such investment-funds—in Europe, the United States, South America, Australia and India. Increasingly, the British state became involved in defending the interest of the British oversea bondholder. The major extension of direct rule after 1880 took place because Britain was committed to defend bondholders’ interests, and the bases of her world power, against the claims of new industrial competitors. By 1880, both the United States and Germany had overtaken British basic steel production, and had begun to look for overseas colonies. Support therefore grew for Britain to secure herself against competitors in those parts of the world, outside North America, not yet nominally under British rule. This expansion of Empire was pushed by Empire builders on the spot, like Rhodes, and industrialists at home like Joseph Chamberlain. This period of rivalry and partition, from the “scramble” for Africa to the First World War and after, was the period of high imperialism, and an important debate raged in the early years of this century on the drives to Empire, and the relation of imperialism to capitalism, in this period. (Hobson, Lenin, Kautsky and Hilfreding, among others, were involved.) It is to this discussion that we turn next.

Hobson and Lenin How much, and in what ways, was imperialism part of the structure of British capitalism after the turn of the century? Hobson argued that the drive behind the new imperialism at the end of the nineteenth century was the pressure of capital frustrated of profitable investment opportunities at home and looking for employment overseas. The cause of the frustration of capital at home Hobson saw in the lack of consumption power among the masses of Britain’s workers. This was the “economic taproot of imperialism”. (Strachey

accepts this analysis and builds upon it the whole thesis of his book.) There are two weaknesses in the Hobson position, however. The first is the under-consumptionist argument, which does not explain why the workers’ consuming power was low in the first place. This part of Hobson was largely rejected by Lenin, who emphasised the increasing pressure of monopolies to maximise profit. In the second place, there is no simple correlation between the outward pressure of capital and goods for overseas markets, and the expansion of empire. There was little or no increase, in fact, in the Empire share either of British overseas investment or of British overseas trade after 1880, in the very period when the main expansion of direct rule took place. The huge flow of British investment overseas in the years up to 1913 went largely to North America and Australia with some to Europe and South America. Over-emphasis on the outward pressure of capital, however, may lead to two wrong impressions: first, that a great deal of capital flowed into the colonies, It didn’t, and they would be much better off today if it had. (Hobson himself was the first to point out that the new lands were quite unsuitable for emigration and too poor for markets.) Secondly, imperialism, at least in Britain, has never been a purely economic affair. Posts as colonial governors, especially in India, had become, in the nineteenth century, like Army commands—the preserve of the great aristocratic families. Though no longer providing the same wealth that Clive enjoyed in India, these positions nevertheless carried immense power and prestige. In many ways, the Empire was the way to the top for the adventurer and self-made man. In the case of Africa, the pressure to extend direct rule came either from the man on the spot—an individual speculator playing for the lucky strike, like Cecil Rhodes—or as a direct reflection of the European power game. In fact, by the 1890s (the years of Kipling and “jingo”) British imperialism was already established as part of the social system, though the outward pressure of capitalism had only just begun. Lenin, following 16 years after Hobson, seized primarily on what had happened in the development of German capitalism. In his view, imperialism began with the period in capitalism when “the enormous growth of industry and the remarkably rapid process of concentration of production in ever larger enterprises” had led to the growth of monopoly. He then drew a distinction between the earlier phase of “old capitalism, under which free competition prevailed, the export of goods was typical” (roughly, our second stage of imperialism), and the “newest

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capitalism, when monopolies prevail, the export of capital has become typical”. Thus, he wrote, “Imperialism is capitalism in that stage of development in which the dominance of monopolies and finance capital has established itself; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun; in which the division of all the territories of the globe among the great capitalist powers has been completed”. (Imperialism, Little Lenin Library, p. 77).

Lenin’s vision certainly seemed true enough of the First World War. His vision of the future of capitalism after 1918 was that of a moribund system, parasitic on imperial tribute, stagnating at home while investment flowed overseas. Lenin believed that the workers—“the grave-diggers of capitalism”— were held back only by the bribery of their leaders, and that this bribery was derived from the tribute exacted from exploited colonial workers. Was this really how it worked?

Was Capitalism “Moribund?” By 1870, the flow of investment overseas had resulted in a great reduction in the cost of imported food and this, together with increased productivity at home, made for a considerable improvement in the standard of living of the British working class. Defeated in their claim to share fully in the political life of the nation, they began to enjoy at least some of the benefits of industrialisation. But this was not due to tribute or colonial exploitation. Before 1900, the “tribute” (that is, the income from overseas investment) was quite a small proportion of the national income—a little more than 4 per cent. And when it was more than twice as large as that—in the years before 1913—it did not obviously hold back the militancy of the working class. The clear correlation between the willingness of the workers to “dig capitalism’s grave” and the size of imperial “tribute”, is not in fact borne out, as Lenin apparently thought. What was true, was that—given the latent jingoism and arrogance of the British people before 1914—it hardly seemed necessary to offer bribes. When the war threatened in 1914, chauvinism easily asserted itself over international working class solidarity. Moreover, the years after 1917 were revolutionary years in Britain, ending only in the debacle of 1926: and although the corruption of empire and bribery too played their part, they were not the whole story. To what extent was capitalism, in this period, (as Lenin argued) “moribund”? The advance of British industry had certainly been halted after 1870, and this was directly related to the orienta-

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tion of capital towards overseas enterprise. Industrial enterprise at home remained inflexible, manufacturing units small, and technical education almost non-existent. Throughout this period, great industrial opportunities in electricity, chemicals and the application of the internal combustion engine, were neglected. Savings from rentier incomes were increasingly attracted into further overseas investment. Some part of this neglect and decay in British industry may be associated with the interest in empire. That British industry remained stagnant for so long between the wars certainly can be attributed in good part to the preoccupation of the City with empire and overseas finance. The policies which led up to the re-establishment of the Gold Standard in 1925 were closely related to this emphasis—to give the £ strength to face the $. The resulting high prices had a deflationary effect at home and nearly ruined British exports abroad. Nevertheless, real incomes of the employed did grow all through the slump years thanks to cheap imports, and this did finally enable British industry to develop the new techniques that science had been offering so long. But the basis for this was that very concentration of production units, by means of the mergers of the 1920s and the takeover of bankrupt firms in the early 1930s, which Lenin characterised as “monopoly capitalism”. This process of concentration into giant semimonopolies took place at home and among the overseas concerns as well. It was the period of the rise of Unilevers, Tate and Lyle, Consolidated Zinc, United Molasses, Brooke Bond Tea, London Tin Corporation, Cadbury, Distillers, and the tobacco, rubber and oil companies. The City of London retained its power throughout in its role as bankers, helping to effect the mergers of the giant companies. British capitalism thus came to resemble more the German model which Lenin examined. In that way, despite the inefficiencies and wastages and the desolation of whole regions, British capitalism made the adjustment to the modern world.

The Changing Situation What had saved the system was not direct colonial exploitation or tribute, but the exploitation of the terms of trade the world over between manufactures and primary products. This itself followed from the earlier division which capitalism established between industrial and agricultural countries. The colonial economies showed—and, as we shall see, continue to show—the extreme form of this relationship because they were least able to climb out of it. In summary, then, we can see that Hobson and the extension of Empire pressures did

underpin the whole structure and psychology of Empire. Lenin, too, was right in his analysis of the relationship of imperialism to the “moribund” capitalism. Where he was wrong was in his estimate that capitalism would continue to depend upon imperial tribute until it was destroyed. How much, then, has imperialism mattered since the period of rationalisation? The search for capital outlets has gone on, but foreign investment has none the less played a subordinate role in post-war capitalism. To commentators, like Mr. Shonfield, annual overseas investment has seemed too high: but it is now barely 2 per cent of the national income. (This figure must be compared with the nearly 10 per cent of the national income being invested overseas in 1913.) Income from overseas adds a bare 4 per cent to Britain’s national income annually. Secondly, modern industry is much less concerned with the price of raw materials. With the one exception of oil, imported raw materials are being gradually replaced by synthetics. Thirdly, technological changes involved in automation and the scale of state expenditures on transport, power and welfare, but chiefly on armaments, have made the home market a much more important one for capital equipment than it was. In addition, there is the question of the search for overseas markets. This is an important factor, and more than once in the post-war period a falling away of overseas demand has triggered off or aggravated a recession at home. However, with the remarkable growth in trade between developed industrial countries, Britain has come to rely rather less than previously upon securing markets in developing countries. These are general trends, of course. The imperial connection remains, and it is still very much worthwhile to the City and the overseas corporations. Today, the earnings of the companies operating overseas amount to one-fifth of those of all companies quoted on the Stock Exchange (more than half of that being accounted for by the two main oil companies alone). This is a tidy sum, bringing a good reward to those directly involved; but it is no longer the crucial factor which Lenin believed. It would be a mistake to believe that capitalism could not survive even the total loss of the present control that it exercises over ex-colonial and less-developed lands.4 Nevertheless, the long historical connection between imperialism and British capitalism had 4 This is still, of course, the official Communist view. R. P. Dutt, in his review of Strachey’s book for the Daily Worker, gives us the most recent example of this view; “The blood of the imperialist tribute (in a hundred more forms than simply the overseas investment income) courses through all the veins of the British economy and gives it the feverish glow of a spurious and transpient prosperity”.

a direct bearing upon its behaviour after the end of the Second World War. In a world dominated by the dollar, the City’s first concern after 1945 was to re-establish the strength of the £. With a large American loan to fend off immediate creditors, the major step in the operation was the creation of a tighter Sterling Area out of the old Sterling Bloc. This was achieved by continuing the war-time system of banking foreign exchange earnings—dollars in particular—in London. At the same time, currency boards insisted on retaining these balances as £ for £ backing for local currency issues. Big dollar earners (e.g. Malaya and Ghana) thus contributed far more dollars than they spent. As Professor Arthur Lewis and Professor Paish emphasised, the colonies were in fact financing Britain. As Mr. Robarts of Flemings Merchant Bank, Chairman of National Provincial, put it, “on such small financial foundations . . . the enormous achievements of the post-war years were built”. But today, independence carries the right to spend their own foreign exchange, to make fiduciary issues to expand the economy, and to invest their savings where they choose. The freedom may, for a time, be limited by the continuing influence of central bankers trained by the Bank of England, and by the operation of local banks which are in fact branches of London banks. But in principle, the ex-colonial peoples are out in the open, with the right and duty of standing up to the imperial banks and the imperial companies as best they may. While it lasted, the success of the Sterling Area operation can scarcely be underestimated. It established the dominant role of the City over British industry and Conservative Governments since 1951. It induced both Labour and Conservative Governments to hold back imports and encourage exports. Indeed, to achieve the annual surplus for overseas investment, each wave of home investment has been cut back by deflationary policies, Once again. overseas investment has been at the expense of development at home.

What Of Imperialism Remains? But the attempt to build imperialism back into British capitalism after the war by means of the Sterling Area was frustrated by the irreversible post-war tide of colonial liberation and independence movements. This process has transformed the picture. The question then is, what now remains of imperialism? This question can only be answered by looking at the relationship which now exists between developed and less-developed countries.

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The first aspect of this relationship is the effect of the terms of trade between them. Though the release of balances will help to finance colonial development plans, the effects of deflation in Britain, and the reduction of the capacity of these territories to purchase British or other exports, are part of a vicious spiral which still remains. An economic dependence between rich and poor countries, maintained at an earlier stage by direct rule, continues today as part of the pattern of trade. The result of the “favourable” movement since 1951 in the terms of trade for Britain’s manufactured exports (compared with the prices Britain has been paying for imports of food and raw materials) has, undoubtedly, been to raise the national income of the British people at the expense of primary producers. And this time, farmers at home have not suffered along with those overseas, because of subsidies which many of them have been enjoying. This movement has certainly worked almost wholly to the detriment of less-well organised primary producers overseas. Of course, the impoverishment of primary producers begins to work back into the more industrialised economies, for poor producers, like poor colonies, make poor markets. For a country that lives as we do by processing raw materials and exporting manufactured goods, this is a dangerous procedure. Nevertheless, so far, British capitalism has solved its problems at the expense of the less-favourably placed peoples.

The Vicious Circle This polarisation of wealth and poverty between advanced and under-developed lands through the working of the terms of trade, is but one aspect of the general process which Dr. Gunnar Myrdal has seized upon in his recent books. The other aspect of it is the vicious circle of rich lands attracting capital and poor lands repelling it. Dr. Myrdal sums this up in the Biblical words: “Unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” In the period before 1913, it was precisely in colonies and under-developed lands that investment did not take place (except, as Nurkse points out, in “enclaves” of plantation and mineral exploitation).5 Similarly, since the war, capital has not gone, as the textbooks would have it, where it was scarcest, but largely to places where development was taking or had already taken place— principally Canada, Australia and South Africa. There has, of course, been some investment to provide the infra-structure for industrial development in the colonies (ports, railways, transport,

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etc.): but the scale has been small, and directed almost entirely to the export of raw materials. Secondary and refining industries have continued to be situated mainly in the metropolitan countries. There is very little spread from the investment to the rest of the colonial economy, and what there has been has not gone further than encouraging small-shopkeeping, trading and those “comprador”6 activities, associated with the raw material export business. This has had a crucial effect on the development of a native middle class.7 Successors to Imperialism The favouring of “comprador” development has a critical importance for under-developed countries. Imperial rule has everywhere been associated with the preservation of rule by local princes, landlords, chiefs and sheiks. This is the key to the distinction between the development of empty lands settled by Europeans and the stagnation of older inhabited lands colonised by European influence or rule. For merchants and compradors do not develop industry. In this sense, as well as others, the relationship of a colony to the imperial power has been one of absolute distortion, so that the colonies do not start off on their economic advance now at the point reached by, say, Britain 150 years ago. They still have to break the grip of feudal lords and town merchants which have maintained their power because of the very nature of imperial rule. The second effect follows on closely from the first. Independence has taken place, since the War, in very special circumstances, against the background of “comprador” native classes already in existence, and with great care taken by imperialist powers to ensure sympathetic and appropriate successors to their rule in countries which were liberating themselves. What has happened since 1945 is that independence has been granted to just such feudal and comprador groups as we have been discussing, in most of the British colonies. Where rival claimants to the succession (from trade union movements, or communist or socialist intellectuals) have been too strong to allow this, colonial wars have been fought to guarantee protection of imperial 5 Strachey says that Myrdal’s thesis is the “theoretical crux of the whole argument” of his book. He does not make it clear that Myrdal is contradictory to that part of the Hobson-Lenin view which relied upon the outward pressure of capital, and which Strachey seemed, earlier, to accept. 6 Comprador was the name given to the Chinese merchants who operated European factories in the Chinese treaty ports. 7 This is the essential truth in the argument of Paul Baran’s book, Political Economy Of Growth, which a reader of Dr. Myrdal’s book alone might miss. Strachey grossly underestimates its importance in his discussion of Baran, pp. 197–9.

interests (in Malaya and Indo-China, for example). Furthermore, everything has been done— constitution-mongering, knighthoods, scholarships for the colonial elite, the paraphernalia of Judges wigs, gowns and Parliamentary ceremonial, and the services of British advisers and civil servants—to ensure continuity from colonial to post-colonial rule. Much has also been made of religious or national divisions to weaken successor governments (India, Palestine, Malaya). The fact is that the granting of independence has rarely been an act of grace, and where communist-led parties appeared as successors, as in British Guiana, the act has not taken place. Has this careful selection of successor governments by imperial powers been, as the Communists assert, to obtain reliable “custodians” of their investments? The answer to this question must lie in the Cold War context in which colonial liberation has taken place.

The Cold War Context In one aspect, the cold war is precisely concerned with the defence of capitalist positions against communist encroachments. Colonel Nasser, with his jails full of communists, should be enough to prove that colonial liberation and communist encroachment are not the same thing, but the imperial powers have often based their policies on this misapprehension. Moreover, the cold war is concerned with the overall position of capitalism—the “way of life” of the so-called “free world”—and as such falls very much under the leadership of the United States. Thus individual imperialist positions may be abandoned (e.g. in Indonesia or Suez), but the overall strategy of the West must be maintained (e.g. in South Korea, or Southern Viet Nam). Furthermore, the military moves of the cold war have developed a logic and momentum of their own, only distantly related to the economic considerations from which they may derive. Thus, the United States continues to defend the Chiang Kai Shek regime in Formosa long after its possible effect upon the economic development of mainland China has ended. It is only in the cold war context that we can understand the aid granted, mainly by the US, to under-developed lands. As much as a quarter of the total British Government loans and grants to the Commonwealth between 1954 and 1959 was for the colonial armed and police force. Over half the total US aid between 1945 and 1960 has been military; and it has gone mainly to South Korea, Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos, Turkey, Pakistan, Formosa, Thailand, Spain and West Berlin—in that order.

The major part of United States aid has helped to maintain in power just those governments (grouped in the anti-communist alliances NATO, CENTO and SEATO) of a feudal or comprador type which, we saw earlier, had a hampering effect upon economic development. It is not so much, as Baran argues, that the capitalist powers want to check development in order to keep down wages in the mines and plantations. But the general defence of capitalism has kept alive Synghman Rhee, Nuri es-Said, Firoz Khan Noon and Adnan Menderes, and other governments of that kind. This special cold war form of imperialism is another crucial aspect of the relationship between advanced and under-developed lands. The cold war attempt to defend capitalist positions in an overall East-West strategy has, in addition, a hard core of economic interest. This is to be seen in the economic role of the great imperial corporations, functioning within the general cold war context. In many cases, the influence of the overseas corporations has extended beyond independence. Many “emergent” economies, after all, are still dependent upon the operation of these companies, particularly during the transition period. For example, the net profits of Unilevers in 1959 was £113 million on a turnover of £1,800 million: the national income of Ghana and Nigeria together are not much more than £1,000 million. Its influence in West Africa is still, clearly, enormous.

“Off-Shore” Imperialism The case of oil is an instructive example of “off-shore” imperialism. The Middle Eastern countries are nominally independent. But any threat to the oil companies has provoked the sharpest reaction in the area. Dr. Moussadek’s nationalisation of Anglo-Iranian was frustrated by boycott and then by military coup from outside. Colonel Nasser only succeeded in taking over the Suez Canal because Anglo-French and American policies were divided. General Kassem’s revolt in Iraq provoked the American and British landings in Lebanon and Jordan: and he has not nationalised Iraq oil. Of course, Kassem has used his share of the profits to develop the Iraqui economy. But the effects of foreign exploitation cannot be overcome wholly in this way. Because of the cartelised oil monopolies and their price-fixing power, oil prices to consumers in Europe are bound to be inflated, and huge profits made available for oil companies and the ruling groups who share them in oil-bearing countries. The air-conditioned palaces of the Arab sheiks, banquets delivered from New York by jet plane, and so on, are but a few examples. The result of the continuing interests

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of the overseas corporations is both to exploit the producing country, to support in power those feudal and comprador-based governments, and to oppose any attempts to replace them. Even where overseas corporations have taken a more enlightened attitude towards independence, or been forced to come to terms with it, their priorities still remain opposed to the priorities of the countries where they operate. Where they own mineral resources or large plantations, they will tend to favour single-crop or single-mineral economies, with high profits from migrant labour, whereas the countries will want to oppose both the extraction of profits, and the exploitation of cheap labour, and favour balanced economic development. This they must do to strengthen their terms of trade position. Apart from the new oil empires, there is one other new development in imperialism: that is the considerable increase in the investment overseas by manufacturing companies. The motor firms, cement companies, electronics manufacturers like AEI and EMI, drug companies like Beecham and Glaxo, artificial textile makers like Courtaulds and Turner & Newall, have all been developing overseas subsidiaries, mainly in the old dominions, but also in the new. Metropolitan capitalism is not now so much extending throughout the world its marketing and raw-material sources, as spreading its industrial undertakings, even into under-developed lands.

The Imperial Companies The influence of the imperialist companies is, therefore, still very important. And even those “progressive” firms which support the emergence of local capitalists against the more backwardlooking feudal rulers, reach the frontier of their tolerance as soon as there is any threat of the territory being withdrawn from the sphere of capitalism itself. Thus the cold war alliances, Suez, the Lebanon and Jordan landings, gun boats in the Persian Gulf and off Honduras and British Guiana, economic sanctions against Cuba—these are only the most open demonstrations of a steady pressure that goes on all the time to retain governments throughout the world favourable to capitalism. The effect of the cold war and the economic interests of the imperial companies have run very close indeed. Empire, as we discussed earlier, is the extension of the power of a class, of an economic and social system, from one country to another: direct political rule is only one way of achieving this. What, then, is the balance of forces in the postwar period? The old factors are no longer so important as they were: the outward pressure of

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capital and goods, the reliance upon tribute, the interest in direct colonial rule. But is a similar imperialist effect achieved by the other factors— particularly the imperial companies and the Cold War? Imperialism remains but we must not forget that new factors have entered the scene—particularly the growth of the Soviet bloc, and the rise of the emergent territories to independence.

Pattern of External Power In spite of this, imperialism still remains. It is that vicious circle of poverty to which the under-developed territories are bound. This pattern or relationship between the “haves” and “have-nots” is held in place by certain historical distortions which still obtain: the terms of trade, the distorted single-crop or single-mineral dependence of their economies, the entrenched position of feudal and comprador governments which hold back development. This pattern is further aggravated by two powerful factors: the cold war, which has drawn the less-developed territories within the Western strategy of a general defence of capitalist positions against communism; and the deeply-embedded influence of the imperial companies, even in so-called “independent” countries. This is a system of external power, no longer resting—except in the settler territories—on direct rule, but an indirect system of power whose influence lies directly athwart the path to development. How can this structure of power and influence be broken? We have to convince the British people that they have every possible reason to encourage the economic development of the poor lands of the world, not only as a moral question to make up for past neglect but from sheer selfinterest. We are above all a trading nation and the greatest amount of trade is carried on between economically developed nations. We have the skills and engineering capacity which the whole world needs to carry through its industrialisation. But to do this the under-developed lands will need not only economic aid and long-term agreements on trade exchange and price stabilisation; they will need support of every kind for progressive governments, including those that are led by communists, who are trying to modernise their countries. We have to give the United Nations funds to develop as well as power to police. We have nothing to lose from the demise of imperialism and everything to gain from ending the cold war. It is a smaller and smaller number of people—it was never large—who gain from the remaining imperialist relationships of the great imperial companies. For many years now infinitely greater

benefits have accrued to ordinary people from the application of man’s growing knowledge of how his natural environment may be controlled than ever came from plunder and exploitation. But this control involves man in ever widening interdependence. The advance of one is conditional upon the advance of all. What men can do by co-operating exceeds by far anything that was won in the past by conquest and war. The possibilities of man’s fullest personal development, free from cold and hunger, ill health, insecurity and heavy toil, unite us together as never before. This is the alternative vision to capitalism that we have to propagate. There is much, however, in our imperialist past that prevents our doing this. It will take a positive act of will, which we each

must make, for Europeans to bring themselves to think of Africans, Asians, Arabs and American Indians as not only deserving of our aid but as comrades with whom to build a new co-operative commonwealth out of the old corrupt and unjust empire of capitalism and its feudal and comprador allies.8 It will also take a major shift of economic and political power at home. It should help that the same capitalist companies that distort our lives for profit are frustrating theirs too. 8 Strachey’s emphasis of the need to give aid, as a palliative to an uneasy conscience, misses the point that Keynesian remedies will not carry through the industrialisation of the world. Only fundamental changes in class relations inside the under-developed lands will make it possible to do the job.

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Extract from Fidel Castro At dawn, July 26th, 1953, Fidel Castro and a small band attacked the Military Barracks at Santiago, a stronghold of the Batista dictatorship. This attack, though unsuccessful, succeeded in awakening the conscience of the Cuban people: it marked the birth of the revolution. The following is an Extract from the speech, History Will Absolve Me, which Fidel Castro delivered to the military court. . . . As a result of low and illegal tactics by the will of those who rule today, and the weakness on the part of those who judge, here I am in this little room in the Civil Hospital, where I have been brought up to be judged in secret so that I might not be heard, so that my voice be muffled, and that no one might learn the things I am going to say. Why then not have an imposing Palace of Justice where the judges, no doubt, would be much more comfortable? It is not wise, I warn you, to impart justice from a room in a hospital surrounded by soldiers with fixed bayonets, because the people might believe that our justice is sick . . . and that it is a prisoner . . . . . . . I listened to the Dictator on Monday, July 27, while I was in a shack up in the mountains, when there were still eighteen of us under arms. Those who have never before lived such moments will never know the meaning of bitterness and scorn. Just as the long-cherished hopes of liberating our people came tumbling down, we saw the despot loom over them haughtier than ever. The flood of stupid, hateful and repugnant lies and calumnies that gushed from his mouth were only equal to the flood of youthful and clean blood being spilled since the night before, with his full knowledge, complicity, consent, and applause, by the most heartless gang of assassins that a human mind can conceive. To have believed what he said even for one second, would have been sinful enough to make a conscientious man live repentant and ashamed for the rest of his life. With a ring of more than a thousand men closing in on us, carrying weapons of longer range and greater power than ours and with orders to return with our bodies, I didn’t even have the hope then of ever tattooing on his miserable forehead the truth which would stigmatise him for the rest of his days and unto eternity. But on this day with the truth beginning to be known, when I finish the mission which I imposed upon myself I can die a peaceful and happy death. Therefore, I shall withhold no blows against those furious murderers. . . . The Prosecutor seemed very interested in knowing what our possibilities of success were. Our possibilities were based on technical, military and social reasons. Some have tried to establish the myth that modern arms make impossible an

open and frontal fight of the people against tyranny. Military parades and pompous exhibition of war equipment have, as a primary objective, the fomenting of this myth, thus creating among the citizens a complex of absolute impotence. But no weapon, no force is capable of overcoming a people who are determined to fight for their rights. . . . When we speak of people, we do not mean the well-to-do, conservative segments of the nation always ready to reap some advantage from any regime of oppression, from any dictatorship, and from despotism, kneeling down, if need be, before each master in turn. When we mention the people in connection with a struggle we mean the unredeemed masses to whom everything is offered but nothing given except deceit and betrayal; the group that longs for a better and more worthy and just country; the group with ancestral longings for justice, having suffered injustice and mockery for generations untold; the group that desires great and wise changes in all the order of things, being ready to give the last drop of blood in order to attain them once it believes in something or in someone and, especially, when they believe sufficiently in themselves. . . . When we speak of battle and we refer to the people, we mean the six hundred thousand Cubans who are out of work and who want to earn an honest living here instead of having to emigrate in search of a better opportunity; we mean the five hundred thousand farm workers who live in miserable huts, working four months and going hungry with their children the rest of the year, with not an inch of land to farm, and whose existence would move us to compassion were it not that we are so stony-hearted; by people we mean the four hundred thousand industrial workers and labourers whose retirement funds have been robbed, and from whom all benefits are being taken away, whose housing consists of single rooms in tenement houses, whose salaries go from the hands of the employer to those of the money lender, whose future is a cut in wages and dismissal, whose life is one of never-ending work, and whose only hope for rest lies in the grave; by people we mean the hundred thousand sharecroppers who live and die working a land that is

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not theirs, contemplating it as Moses did the Promised Land, only to die before managing to own it, and, like feudal slaves having to pay for the use of that land with a large part of the crop; and who can neither love that land nor improve it nor beautify it by planting a cedar tree or an orange tree, because they know not when the bailiff will come around with the rural guard to tell them they must leave; by people we mean the thirty thousand self-sacrificing teachers and professors, so indispensable for the better destiny of future generations, who are so badly treated and poorly paid; by people we mean the twenty thousand debt-ridden small merchants, ruined by the economic crisis and to whom venal public officials are dealing the finishing blow; by people we mean the ten thousand young professionals; doctors, engineers, lawyers, veterinarians, dentists, teachers, pharmacists, journalists, painters, sculptors, etc., who leave the universities with their degrees willing to fight for a living and full of hopes only to find themselves in a dead-end alley, with all doors closed to their clamour and pleas. Those are the ones I call people, those are the ones I mean when I say people, the ones that suffer all the misfortunes and because of it are capable of fighting courageously! To these people, whose road of anguish is paved with deceit and false promises we would not say: “We are going to give”, but rather, “Here you are; now fight with all your might so that you may be happy and free!”

A Revolutionary Programme . . . A revolutionary government counting on the support of the people and the respect of the Nation, once it makes a complete sweep of all venal and corrupt office holders, would proceed immediately to industrialise the country, to mobilise all inactive capital through the National Bank and the Bank for Industrial and Agricultural Development, submitting that giant task to the study, organisation, planning and final realisation of and by technicians and men of absolute capability, free from political meddling. After making the hundred thousand small farmers owners of the land for which they now pay rent, a revolutionary government would proceed to end the land problem once and for all time. This would be done first, by establishing—as the Constitution says—a limit to the extent of land a person may own for each type of agricultural undertaking, acquiring any excess by expropriation; by recovering the lands usurped from the State; by drying swamps; by setting aside zones for tree nurseries and reforestation. Secondly, by distributing the rest of the land

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available among the rural families preferably to those large in number; by setting up co-operatives for farmers for the common use of costly farm equipment, cold storage, etc. with technical guidance by experts in cultivation of crops and the breeding of livestock. Finally, by making available all resources, equipment, protection and know-how to farmers. A revolutionary government would solve the problem of housing by lowering rent fifty per cent; by giving tax exemptions to houses inhabited by their owners; by tripling the taxes on houses built to rent; by replacing the ghastly one-room flats with modern multi-storey buildings; and by financing a housing project to cover the Island on a scale never before seen, which would be based on the principle that if in the rural area the ideal is for each family to own its land, then in the city the ideal would be for each family to own its house or apartment. . . . Finally, and in order to properly prepare the generation who are to live in a happy Nation, a revolutionary government would proceed to a total reform of our educational system, placing this reform at the same level of importance as other problems to be solved. Don’t forget the words of José Martí: “A big error is being committed in Latin America. In nations which live almost completely off the products of their land, the people are educated exclusively for urban life and are not prepared for life on a farm.” “The happier people are those who educate their children on how to think for themselves and on how to guide their sentiments.” “An educated people will always be strong and free.” . . . Even though this trial, as you have said, is the most important ever held since the establishment of the Republic, what I may say here shall probably get lost within the plot to silence me. Think not that you are judging a man now, but that you shall be judged over and over again when the present will be submitted to the crushing criticism of future times. Then, what I may have said here will be often repeated, not because I was the one who said it, but rather because the problem of justice is eternal, and the people have a profound sense of it over and above the opinions of jurists and theoreticians. The people have and make use of a sound simple logic implacably at odds with all which is absurd and contradictory; and if any people heartily hates privilege and inequality, it is the Cuban people. They know that Justice is represented by a blind-folded woman holding a scale and a sword. If they see her kneeling before some and furiously brandishing the sword against others they will imagine her a prostitute holding a dagger in her hand. That is the simple logic of the people.

Raymond Williams

FREEDOM & OWNERSHIP IN THE ARTS

This is part of the final Chapter of The Long Revolution, which will be published by Chatto and Windus later this autumn.

of culture has to be considered within the real social context of our economic and political life. All studies of the growth of particular cultural institutions show a real expansion, which of course is continuing, but show also the extent to which this is affected or determined by other facts in the society. In the 1960s, the rate of growth seems promising, and we are busy with plans to maintain and increase it. Yet here, very clearly, is a major contradiction easily overlooked by following a simple rising graph. For while real art and argument are being more widely enjoyed, the distribution of a bewildering variety of bad art and bad argument is increasing even more rapidly. We are reaching the point where the contradiction between these different lines and rates of growth is serious and inescapable, yet even those who see this situation feel particularly uncertain about what can be done. We must look first at a particular and local contradiction which can quickly confuse any such discussion. If someone proposes ways of extending good art and argument, and of diminishing their worst counterparts, someone else usually answers that we mustn’t be snobs: that football, after all, is as good as chess; that jazz is a real musical form; that gardening and homemaking are also important. Who exactly is someone like this arguing with, since it is usually obvious that he is not really arguing with the man to whom he replies? Unfortunately he is arguing with actual people and a familiar way of feeling. It is true that certain cultural forms have been used as a way of asserting social distinction, and that much wholesale condemnation of new forms has been a way of demonstrating the inferiority of those two groups who have regularly to be put in their (lower) place: the masses and the young. This habit has to be resisted, but there is equal danger in a popular form of demagogy which, by the use of selective examples, succeeds in avoiding the problem of bad culture altogether. Can we agree, perhaps, before passing to the more difficult questions, that football is indeed a wonderful game, that jazz is a real musical form, and that gardening and homemaking are indeed important? Can we also agree, though, that the horror-film, the rape-novel, the Sunday strip-paper and the latest Tin-Pan drool are not exactly in the same

THE EXTENSION

world, and that the nice magazine romance, the manly adventure story (straight to the point of the jaw) and the pretty, clever television advertisement are not in it either? The argument against these things, and the immense profits gained by their calculated dissemination, cannot afford to be confused by the collateral point that a good living culture is various and changing, that the need for sport and entertainment is as real as the need for art, and that the public display of ‘taste’, as a form of social distinction, is merely vulgar. In a rapidly changing and therefore confused society, in which cultural forms will in any case change but in which little is done by way of education to deepen and refine the capacity for significant response, the problems that confront us are inevitably difficult. Two parallel efforts are necessary: on the one hand the maximum encouragement of artists who are seriously trying to create new forms or do significant work in traditional forms; on the other hand, the steady offering and discussion of this work, including real criticism and therefore its distinction at least from calculated and indifferent manipulation. It would be wrong to say that these efforts are not being made: some help, though still inadequate, is being given to the arts; some responsible offering and discussion are publicly underwritten. These policies fall within the evolutionary conception: a steady encouragement of elements of valuable growth. But while supporting them, and certainly wishing to see them extended, I find it difficult to feel that they go to the root of the problem. For it is usually not recognised that inferior and destructive elements are being much more actively propagated: that more is spent, for example, on advertising a new soap, and imprinting a jingle attached to it, than on supporting an orchestra or a picture gallery; and that in launching two new magazines, one trying to do a serious new job, the other simply competing to capture a share of a known popular market, the ratio of comparative investment is ludicrous, for hardly anything is behind the former, while huge sums of money are poured out on the latter. The condition of cultural growth must be that varying elements are at least equally available, and that new and unfamiliar things must be offered steadily over a long period, if they are to have a

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reasonable chance of acceptance. Policies of this degree of responsibility seem impossible in our present cultural organisation. The encouragement of valuable elements is restricted to what is little more than a defensive holding operation, which of course is better than nothing but which is hardly likely to make any general change. The rest of the field is left to the market, and not even to the free play of the market, for the amounts of capital involved in financing our major cultural institutions restrict entry to a comparatively few powerful groups, so that both production and distribution are effectively in very few hands. The serious new magazine referred to, usually the result of a major voluntary effort by a group of dedicated people, is unlikely to be even available for buying, in the sense of lying ready on the average bookstall where somebody might try it, while the new commercial magazine will be so widely displayed that it can hardly be avoided. It is then stupid and even vicious, when it is clear that no real competition exists, to use the evidence of immediate results as proof of the unalterable vulgarity of the public. Instead of the ritual indignation and despair at the cultural condition of ‘the masses’ (now increasingly uttered even by their supposed friends) it is necessary to break through to the central fact that most of our cultural institutions are in the hands of speculators, interested not in the health and growth of the society, but in the quick profits that can be made by exploiting inexperience. True, under attack, these speculators, or some of them, will concede limited policies of a different kind, which they significantly call ‘prestige’; that is to say, enough to preserve a limited public respectability so that they will be allowed to continue to operate. But the real question is whether a society can afford to leave its cultural apparatus in such irresponsible hands.

Conceiving An Alternative Now I think many people feel the strength of this question, but feel even more strongly the difficulties of any possible alternative. Steady and particular encouragement, in the obvious limited fields, is quite widely approved, but any attempt to tackle the whole situation runs into major difficulties. For it is obvious that the amount of capital and effort required , to make any substantial change, can come only from public sources, and to this there are two objections. The first is the question whether such resources are really available, on the scale required. This goes back to the difficulty discussed earlier: that we find it almost impossible to conceive the financing of

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social policy out of the social product, and have never learned a system of accounting which would make this possible or even visible. For it is true, of course, that the present investment comes from the society and economy as a whole. The supply of advertising money (the contemporary equivalent of manna) can only come in the end from us, as workers and buyers, though it is now routed through channels that give control of this social capital to very limited groups. If we can realize that we are paying for the existing cultural system, by one kind of organisation of the economy, we need not be frightened by the scale of resources required, since that organisation is in fact subject to change. We should be much clearer about these cultural questions if we saw them as a consequence of a basically capitalist organisation, and I at least know no better reason for capitalism to be ended. It is significant that the liveliest revolt against the existing system, particularly among the new young generation, is in precisely these cultural terms. But then the second objection is deeply involved with this point. What is the alternative to capitalism? Socialism. What is a socialist culture? State control. There are many good liberals, and many anxious socialists, who draw back if this is the prospect. Better even the speculators, they say, than the inevitable horde of bureaucrats, official bodies, and quite probably censorship. This difficulty has a representative significance. It is not only in cultural questions, but in the whole area of thinking about change in our society, that this knot is tied. Here is the deepest difficulty in the whole development of our democracy: that we seem reduced to a choice between speculator and bureaucrat, and while we do not like the speculator, the bureaucrat is not exactly inviting either. In such a situation, energy is sapped, hope weakens, and of course the present compromise between the speculators and the bureaucrats remains unchallenged. Democratic policies are made by open discussion and open voting. In relatively small bodies, contact between members and policies can be close, though even here some responsibility for decisions will be passed to elected representatives rather than to members as a whole, and where much administrative work is necessary will also be passed to officials. The principle of the official in a democratic organisation is quite clear: he administers within an elected policy, and is responsible to the membership for his actions. The practice, we all know, can be otherwise, but given an adequate constitution and genuine equality of membership it is still the best and most responsible system known. There are strong arguments for the national

organisation of the means of cultural exchange, but the persistent danger, even in a democratic country, is that too large an organisation becomes rigid and in a sense impenetrable. Any adequate cultural organisation must be open, flexible and committed to genuine variety of expression. It would seem simple to say that the best people to run the various cultural organisations are those who use them for the production of their own work, for here is the deepest and most practical interest in keeping the organisation flexible and open. Yet it is equally clear that the actual producers of cultural work cannot, from their own resources, command the ownership of any but the simplest means. Where indeed they can do so, no change is necessary. But in the press, in broadcasting and television, in the cinema and theatre it is obvious that this simple co-operative ownership is impossible. This ought not then to mean, however, that the control of these expensive means should be made available to the highest bidder, especially when he is not even particularly interested in the actual work but mainly in its financial possibilities. The signs are, in contemporary Britain, that this worst of all arrangements is becoming normal, with a dominant policy criterion of profit and with the producers turned into employees within this emphasis. In press and television this is especially the case, and powerful interests are working to extend the same system to broadcasting. It is urgent to define the alternative principle, which I think can only be that when the producers cannot themselves own the means of their work, these must be owned by the community in trust for the producers, and an administration set up which is capable of maintaining this trust. The difficulties here are obvious, but all administration and constitution-making in fact proceed from an emphasis of what is desirable, and I believe that if we can agree that this end is desirable, no society is better qualified from experience to devise adequate practical methods.

Publicly-Owned Theatres In the drama, for example, it would be possible for most theatres to be publicly owned, preferably by local authorities though perhaps with a small national network in addition, and then licensed to companies of actors. It would then be possible for these companies, through open regional and national organisations which they would be free to join or not as they decided, to pursue resonably long-term policies by the guarantee that a particular production would go to a series of theatres, when financially necessary. Similar arrangements could be made, through permanent and regular

liaison, with the broadcasting and television services. The advantages to the drama of permanent companies creating their own varying traditions, in a context of adequate professional security, would undoubtedly be great: almost all the good work we have now in the theatre comes from such companies, which are left, though, to struggle on as they can with the hope of being eventually hired by the speculators who control the big national theatres. If we are serious about freedom in the arts, we can give it, in this way, to actual artists.

Publishing and The Cinema In the cinema, a related system is possible. As things now are, the makers of films are almost wholly in the hands of the distributors, who decide, by certain crude tests, whether a film is worth making before it is made. This is the freedom of the artist which our liberals so complacently defend. It is clear that the number of cinemas is in any case going to decline. The opportunity this presents of a sensible reorganisation ought not to be missed. The cinemas should become publicly owned and vested in an independent public authority. There should be at least two or three circuits, including one specialised circuit, to ensure alternatives. Production should be in the hands of independent permanent companies, which as in the case of the theatre would have to satisfy the public authority of their professional competence. Public money should then be made available to these companies, for the making of films which would be guaranteed exhibition on one of the circuits. The more independent companies there are the better, and it would be encouraging to see some links between some of these and the theatre companies already referred to. A possible organisation of the independent authority would be joint representation between officers appointed by and responsible to Parliament and representatives elected by the permanent companies. In the case of books, we already have a good range of independent publishers, though the pressures on them to surrender independent policies are severe. A rapid process of amalgamation (often retaining apparently independent imprints) seems to be under way, and new kinds of owner, often little concerned with literature, are becoming more common. With high costs, and the wide opportunities of the “paperback revolution”, it seems that a stage has been reached very similar to that in newspapers at the turn of the century. The quantitative thinking

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that can follow from such a system would be disastrous to publishing, past a certain point, and I think the time has come for an enquiry into the facts of recent changes, and possible courses of action. Meanwhile it is of vital importance that publishers who pursue, as now, responsible and therefore varying policies should be given all possible help. This can probably best be done in the now chaotic field of distribution. It is a standing disgarce that there should be hundreds of towns without anything that can be called a decent bookshop. The good independent bookseller performs an especially valuable service, but unless he is lucky in his locality he will often go under. The existing chain shops apply to books and periodicals simple tests of quantity: below a certain figure they do not consider particular items worth handling. Is this any kind of freedom, or free availability? I think we could set up a Books Council, representative on the one hand of publishers, booksellers and authors, on the other hand of Parliament, which would have the duty of ensuring the continued independence of publication, and at the same time the best possible distribution of books and periodicals here and overseas. The pressure to reduce publications to a limited number of standard items, easily sold in quantity, should be resisted as a matter of public policy. Such a Council could review existing bookselling arrangements, and wherever it found (as it would now widely find) that the real range of books and periodicals is not offered, it would have power to establish and guarantee independent enterprises committed to the policy outlined. It is very odd that we have accepted this principle, in the public library service, for the borrowing of books, but are still so far short of it in terms of books that readers can buy and keep.

Newspapers and Magazines In the case of newspapers and magazines, we have to deal with a situation in which control is passing into fewer and fewer hands, within a policy dedicated not to the quality of newspapers and magazines but to their profitability. The criterion of profitability is being raised to absurd levels, in which for example a daily newspaper may have to cease publication if less than a million people buy it, and in which a steady decline in the number of newspapers and magazines seems assured. Again, is this freedom, or free availability? The quality of newspapers is unlikely to be raised either by exhortation or censorship. Experience in all other fields suggests

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that standards in a profession rise when they are in the control of members of that profession. Such professional responsibility is now virtually impossible, as a permanent and consistent policy, since the whole organisation of the press (like the organisation of the cinema and the theatre) creates a different atmosphere, in which standards are set by the controllers, on an estimate of likely profit, and the actual producers instead of feeling a common responsibility to their work are encouraged, in far too many cases, to compete with each other in supplying a predetermined article. Personal standards will always vary, but it is a poor society which creates institutions that give success to the least scrupulous and the least concerned. Any attempt to reform these institutions, though, is met with prolonged abuse and misrepresentation. Obviously we do not want a state-owned press, but I think we have reached the point where we need a new Press Council, including public and elected journalist representatives, charged with the maintenance and extension of genuinely independent newspapers and magazines. We need in particular to ensure the survival of local newspapers, and I think it is essential that these should become locally owned and managed, as very few of them now are. There are serious objections to involving local authorities in the ownership of local newspapers, though in certain cases this might be done. More generally, the guarantee of independence, and any necessary provision of capital, should be accepted as a public service at national level, through a Press Council including, as defined, journalist representatives. The same public service principle should be applied to magazines, on terms guaranteeing independence to professionally recognised editorial bodies. With experience, this principle could be extended to the national press. I do not see why the editorial bodies of any newspaper or magazine should not be free, by their own democratic decision, to apply to such a Press Council to be recognised as an independent enterprise, which would then be guaranteed freedom from any external private financial control. The terms on which this recognition and support would be granted would be the producers’ own definition of policy. There might be cases when the Council, including public and professional representatives, would be unwilling to underwrite a particular policy proposed, but in such cases we should be no worse off than we are now: such a policy could be tried on the market, or financed much as now, for of course there can be no question of any newspaper or magazine being forbidden to publish. I think that with experience and goodwill a majority of professionally responsible independent papers could be built up, and

even if we did not achieve a majority, we should at least have ensured that no newspaper or magazine could be killed by a financial organisation indifferent to quality and interested only in immediate profit. Reform can only come from within, in such a field, if it is publicly supported.

Broadcasting and Television In broadcasting and television we see an imperfect but still generally responsible public authority, the BBC, powerfully challenged by new kinds of organisation. It is obvious, as these services extend, that we need the continual extension of choice, but it is doubtful if we shall get this, on any responsible basis, if we construe independence as the possession of working capital from elsewhere (mainly, as now, from advertising). There might well be two or more public authorities owning the technical means of distribution, but the same principle holds as before: policy can be generally defined by the public authorities, but the provision of actual work must be in the hands of the real producers. Practical networks exist, and their wide use is clearly desirable, but what one would like to see serving them is a variety of independent groups, with genuine local affiliations and alternative policies. The existing programme companies, in commercial television, are hardly ever of this kind, but are essentially a congeries of financial interests employing the real producers. It should be a matter of public policy to encourage the formation of professional companies to whom the technical means of distribution would be made available by the public authorities. The core of such groups would be the professional broadcasting and television producers, who would work out means of association with other professional companies in the theatre, the cinema and the press, with orchestras and other similar institutions of their region, and preferably with wider local organisations, including education committees and the great voluntary societies. In this way the dangers both of a central monopoly and of simple surrender to the speculators could be avoided. I am very much aware, in putting forward these outline proposals, that much remains to be done in detailed planning and in improvement, by discussion between all those with relevant experience. I do not suppose that any of these measures of reorganisation would be easy, but I do claim, emphatically, that we can envisage a cultural organisation which would greatly extend the freedom of the cultural producers, by the sensible application of public resources to cut

out their present dependence on dominant but essentially functionless financial groups, and by forms of contract which, while preserving responsibility in the spending of public money, would give the producers control over their actual work. This is surely a hopeful way forward, and constitutions can in fact always be devised if there is substantial agreement on principles. The matter is now urgent, for while some liberals still shy away from reform in the name of the freedom of the artist, or argue that culture in any case can never be organised (the spirit bloweth where it listeth), a very rapid reorganisation of a different kind is in fact going on, with the area of real ownership and independence shrinking in every part of our culture, and seeming certain to continue to do so. I must plainly ask such liberals what they are really defending, for there seems little in common between the freedom they value and the actual freedom described recently by an owner of a television service and a great chain of newspapers as “a licence to print your own money”. We have reached a crisis in which freedom and independence can only be saved if they are publicly assured and guaranteed, and the ways I propose seem a working basis for this, taking care as they do to avoid or minimise the real dangers of bureaucracy and state control. Would the quality of our cultural life be improved by such measures? I feel certain that it would, in the real energies that would be released, but I am not thinking in terms of any overnight transformation. I say only that the channels would be more open, that the pressure for quick profit would be lifted, and that a more genuine range of choices would be made available. My whole case about social change is, moreover, that the interdependence of elements which I described as a matter of theory is an argument for conceiving change on the widest possible front: the changes in emphasis in our economy, in our ordinary working relationships, in our democratic institutions, and in education are all relevant to cultural change in this more explicit field. I would repeat my emphasis on the over-riding educational problem: the provision of new kinds of education for the now neglected majority between 15 and 21. The growth of adult education is also relevant: much more could be done to house this increasing work properly, at the centre of its communities and to improve its connections with wider cultural services. The more all this new work could be brought together, so that these new kinds of community service could be seen as factually linked—buying and learning, using and appreciating, sharing and discriminating—the more likely a healthy cultural growth would be.

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COMMENT Three of the many comments we have received on Edward Thompson’s Chapter from Out Of Apathy published in NLR 3. His reply to comments, and further thoughts on the “Revolution” theme will be in the next issue.

from JUDITH HART, M.P. “GROUPS HAVE never thirsted after truth,” said Freud. “They demand illusions, and cannot do without them. They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real.” If Labour’s electoral losses are seen as the sharp death of an illusion that had gripped a decade—an illusion that electoral success must reward patience and zeal and devotion, and that the nation must surely set socialist logic against capitalist myth—then the General Election of 1959 provides as good a starting-point as any for the analysis of apathy. But we deceive ourselves dangerously once more if we think that political failure is the only motive which should prompt a search for a “new dynamic”. That way lie the temptations and enticements of Mr. Crosland and Mr. Jenkins and the other sirens of revisionism. If the search for truth in a new social situation is once accepted as merely a means to a 1965 election victory, we shall again be lost in the myths of the collective unconscious and corrupted by the search for an easy route to power. The need to restate socialist truths on the basis of up-to-date analysis, is, of course, an end in itself. Indeed, there is a considerable acceptance of the view that our present troubles beset us because we lost sight of the urgency of the need for constant reappraisal of a rapidly-changing society between 1945 and 1951. We have good excuses for our intellectual stagnation. It was our misfortune that a Labour government’s economic policies, restricting conspicuous consumption and establishing a social minimum, inhibited the crystallisation of the new economic and social pattern so comprehensively and vividly described by Ralph Samuel and Stuart Hall. Nor could we know until 1951 how far British capitalism was ready to accept Keynsian doctrine to make its system more workable and more acceptable. Now we accept and urge the need for new social analysis. On this at least Socialist Commentary and Victory for Socialism can agree. Out of Apathy does the movement real service in offering one which is sound in its generalisations and often brilliant in its detail. Does it do more than this? I am not sure that it intended to answer the question posed by E. P. Thompson in his last chapter, “Revolution”: he

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asserts the “positives” on which the socialist community is to be built, and asks “How is this to be done?” His only answer seems to be that we must “place the transition to the new society at the head of the agenda,” “make the context” within which Parliament legislates, and organise a breakthrough in foreign policy. With all of this, of course, one wholeheartedly agrees (and I am inclined to believe him right in judging the foreign policy issue to be the most likely early point of breakthrough) but is not seized of any sudden revelation of hidden truth. Perhaps the real truth is that there is little new to be said about how the labour movement is to achieve power. We know it all so well: we know that we must persuade and convince and arouse and that the way is hard. To this extent, E. P. Thompson’s preoccupations with the distinctions between revolution and evolution is unconstructive, and poses an artificial dilemma. The violent proletarian revolution demands moral indignation on a wide and passionate scale; so does the democratic seizure of political power. “Popular pressures of great intensity” are a precondition of either. If they are absent, to postulate a choice between the two is academic. If they are present, they can act effectively within the framework of western democracy and create the revolution by parliamentary means. But it is certainly true that “the breakthrough is not one more shuffle along the evolutionary path which suddenly sinks the scale on the socialist side.” The programme on which the parliamentary revolution is based must so take account of the society which has produced moral indignation that it transforms it as dramatically as possible within the time-scale of parliamentary limitations. Because these are important limitations, the need to assess new priorities is acute. And it must certainly take account of many fields of political decision outside Parliament, as E. P. Thompson points out. The assessment of priorities, however, can only be made on the basis of an integrated philosophical approach. It seems to me that E. P. Thompson, in his discussion of social class antagonisms, draws very close to the kernel of this—and then runs away from it when he has it almost in his grasp. “The making of socialists”,

he says, “cannot and must not rely exclusively upon the explosive negatives of class antagonism.” It is not class consciousness, he believes, which prompts teachers and actors and scientists to want better schools and a National Theatre and greater emphasis on research. But incorrect subjective identification of social class interests does not establish a new fact: it merely shows how wrong people can be. Class antagonism is, in fact, the root of our social disorders, now as always. The better schools and the National Theatre are absent not merely because capitalism has not yet completed its social reforms, but because they do nothing to serve the direct class interest of capitalists. Our task is to widen the definitions of social class, to mark out the social consequences of class antagonisms, and to demonstrate to the scientist and the welfare worker and the bank clerk that the reason for their discontents and for the extensive waste of intellectual and technological resources of which they are symptomatic, lies rooted in the inevitable opposition of their interests, as workers in a society organised for the greater profit of the profit-makers, to those of the new entrepreneurs of monopoly state-subsidised capitalism. We shall no doubt need to revise the vocabulary of the class struggle: but in doing so we must reemphasise, and not doubt, its theoretical validity. If we should fail to do this, how could we define our point of departure from the new theories of political opportunism? Transport House has just issued a brand-new propaganda leaflet: “A decent life for all. A decent chance for all. That’s the Labour philosophy in a nutshell.” We have to demonstrate that the nutshell has a good deal more in it.

from JOHN KEENAN that socialism will come along, without putting anyone unduly out of joint, as simply an inevitable series of links in the evolutionary chain, is about as useful as a torn cartilage. The day of piece-meal reformism, considered as a total philosophy designed to bring about a society of equals, is over. This is not to deny the solid contribution made in the past by those men and women who, impelled by its dynamic, dedicated to its humanistic content, were responsible for a great deal of enlightened reform. But to-day it is obvious that it is incapable of dealing capitalism a mortal blow. It is able merely to force accommodation to its demands in any given favourable period, leaving practically untouched the ancient and in-

THE NOTION

supportable evils of poverty, inequality, and the flabby decadence of a corrupt society wondering desperately where its next gimmick is coming from. Thompson focuses attention on the only question which matters in this context—“. . . how, and by what means, is a transition to socialist society to take place?” In reply he himself says four clear things: (a) a total abandonment of Fabian reformism as a means, complete in itself, capable of ushering in a socialist society; (b) the formulation of a democratic revolutionary strategy designed to draw into a common strand all forward and upward pressures; (c) the tactical implementation of such a strategy at every possible point where the conflict may be joined; and (d) that he doesn’t know, or at least isn’t too sure, how things might go on from there, but thinks a new volume might usefully be written around this area. As far as this goes, all this is clear. But does it go far enough? Does it take us as far as we need to go? I do not think it does. It seems to me that the author, with a fine display of logic, builds up an unassailable case in favour of revolution as the only way by which socialism can be achieved, to spoil it finally by appearing unable or unwilling to look the fact of “bloody” revolution in the face. He maintains that we can have a bloodless revolution. So we can, for that is possible; but, in my view, it isn’t probable, and it is no use, as well as being quite wrong, to wax derisory about the “Statist’s” supposed attitude, for that doesn’t remove the difficulty. The function of an analysis of the contemporary situation which has in view the creation of at least the outline of a democratic revolutionary strategy, is surely to make some provision for every forseeable contingency. Well then, what about the contingency which is the most easily forseeable, a resort to the use of force by the enemy in order to keep their “Way of Life” extant? Is there to be no provision for this? This is something that cannot be left to chance. It has to be catered for in advance. The dictum that “ . . . one choice would disclose another” can be permissible only within the framework of the larger picture. It may well be true that “events themselves would disclose to people the possibility of the socialist alternative, and if events were seconded by the agitation and initiatives of thousands of convinced socialists in every area of life the socialist revolution would be carried through.” One certainly hopes it would, for as Thompson correctly points out, the “smashing” process is a double-edged sword. But setting in motion revolutionary processes and leaving the possibility of their successful conclusion to the

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he says, “cannot and must not rely exclusively upon the explosive negatives of class antagonism.” It is not class consciousness, he believes, which prompts teachers and actors and scientists to want better schools and a National Theatre and greater emphasis on research. But incorrect subjective identification of social class interests does not establish a new fact: it merely shows how wrong people can be. Class antagonism is, in fact, the root of our social disorders, now as always. The better schools and the National Theatre are absent not merely because capitalism has not yet completed its social reforms, but because they do nothing to serve the direct class interest of capitalists. Our task is to widen the definitions of social class, to mark out the social consequences of class antagonisms, and to demonstrate to the scientist and the welfare worker and the bank clerk that the reason for their discontents and for the extensive waste of intellectual and technological resources of which they are symptomatic, lies rooted in the inevitable opposition of their interests, as workers in a society organised for the greater profit of the profit-makers, to those of the new entrepreneurs of monopoly state-subsidised capitalism. We shall no doubt need to revise the vocabulary of the class struggle: but in doing so we must reemphasise, and not doubt, its theoretical validity. If we should fail to do this, how could we define our point of departure from the new theories of political opportunism? Transport House has just issued a brand-new propaganda leaflet: “A decent life for all. A decent chance for all. That’s the Labour philosophy in a nutshell.” We have to demonstrate that the nutshell has a good deal more in it.

from JOHN KEENAN that socialism will come along, without putting anyone unduly out of joint, as simply an inevitable series of links in the evolutionary chain, is about as useful as a torn cartilage. The day of piece-meal reformism, considered as a total philosophy designed to bring about a society of equals, is over. This is not to deny the solid contribution made in the past by those men and women who, impelled by its dynamic, dedicated to its humanistic content, were responsible for a great deal of enlightened reform. But to-day it is obvious that it is incapable of dealing capitalism a mortal blow. It is able merely to force accommodation to its demands in any given favourable period, leaving practically untouched the ancient and in-

THE NOTION

supportable evils of poverty, inequality, and the flabby decadence of a corrupt society wondering desperately where its next gimmick is coming from. Thompson focuses attention on the only question which matters in this context—“. . . how, and by what means, is a transition to socialist society to take place?” In reply he himself says four clear things: (a) a total abandonment of Fabian reformism as a means, complete in itself, capable of ushering in a socialist society; (b) the formulation of a democratic revolutionary strategy designed to draw into a common strand all forward and upward pressures; (c) the tactical implementation of such a strategy at every possible point where the conflict may be joined; and (d) that he doesn’t know, or at least isn’t too sure, how things might go on from there, but thinks a new volume might usefully be written around this area. As far as this goes, all this is clear. But does it go far enough? Does it take us as far as we need to go? I do not think it does. It seems to me that the author, with a fine display of logic, builds up an unassailable case in favour of revolution as the only way by which socialism can be achieved, to spoil it finally by appearing unable or unwilling to look the fact of “bloody” revolution in the face. He maintains that we can have a bloodless revolution. So we can, for that is possible; but, in my view, it isn’t probable, and it is no use, as well as being quite wrong, to wax derisory about the “Statist’s” supposed attitude, for that doesn’t remove the difficulty. The function of an analysis of the contemporary situation which has in view the creation of at least the outline of a democratic revolutionary strategy, is surely to make some provision for every forseeable contingency. Well then, what about the contingency which is the most easily forseeable, a resort to the use of force by the enemy in order to keep their “Way of Life” extant? Is there to be no provision for this? This is something that cannot be left to chance. It has to be catered for in advance. The dictum that “ . . . one choice would disclose another” can be permissible only within the framework of the larger picture. It may well be true that “events themselves would disclose to people the possibility of the socialist alternative, and if events were seconded by the agitation and initiatives of thousands of convinced socialists in every area of life the socialist revolution would be carried through.” One certainly hopes it would, for as Thompson correctly points out, the “smashing” process is a double-edged sword. But setting in motion revolutionary processes and leaving the possibility of their successful conclusion to the

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magic hand of chance is something that cannot be justified. If the declared purpose is to change completely the nature of our society then there must be preparation and provision for the worst that can happen. Revolution requires careful and detailed planning. It requires resolute and effective leadership of the kind that will not baulk at “smashing” (regrettable though that would be) should it become necessary. “Popular pressures of great intensity” may indeed heave us forward much nearer to the goal, to make subsequent work that much easier. Even if, however, such popular pressures were to bring us up to the point where the public sector of the economy had gained a firm dominance over the private sector, and supposing a similar rate of advance ethically and culturally, this, contrary to what Edward Thompson asserts, would not be revolution. It would, I maintain, merely take us up to the point of a revolutionary situation: an intensified Fabianistic process, part of a revolutionary strategy which, without the committed will, the total dedication, would stand in the gravest danger of being rolled back so long as capitalism had any kind of foothold.

from ERIC HEFFER IN THE past, the apparent basic division in the socialist movement was between those who accepted the evolutionary path, and those who advocated revolution, usually associated with a measure of violence. I use the word apparent, because, beneath the surface, the two concepts of a socialist society were similar, both the evolubecause underneath, the concepts of a future socialist society were similar, both the evolutionists and revolutionists advocating a society organised from the top down, with an elite as the centre of political direction. The methods of achieving the new society may have been different; the result was the same. This is underlined by the enthusiasm with which the Webbs greeted the Soviet system after a visit to the Soviet Union. For many years after my break with Stalinist thinking, I was confused by the enthusiasm of the Webbs, until I realised that what the Webbs saw was an embodiment of their élitist ideas. Amongst both “Evolutionists” (I put G. D. H. Cole in this category) and “Revolutionists” (here I place Rosa Luxembourg), great stress has been laid on the need for a concept of Socialism, which places faith in the self-activity of the masses. Luxembourg said, “Socialism cannot be introduced by decree”, whilst Cole in his earlier and

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later works raised the need for industrial democracy. The emphasis of both was on control from below, cutting across both the Bolshevik and Fabian attitudes. The real division then, was not so much between the “Evolutionists” and “Revolutionists” but between the State Socialists, and non-State-Socialists, a division which to-day has great practical significance, and which must exercise much of our thinking if we are to evolve a new point of departure. The non-State conception (except for a few small groups and individuals) went out for all practical purposes, with the rise of the Soviet Union and the election of Labour and SocialDemocratic Governments in Europe. Now the wheel has turned full circle, and the inadequacies of State Socialism are there for all to see. To-day the first tentative and faltering steps are being taken towards a re-evaluation of the non-State concept. Thompson fails to get to grips with this problem, the State being dealt with in a passing reference. I raise these issues because it is important in discussing revolution to have clearly in view the type of society we want the revolution to usher in. If it is to be a society dominated by a political élite, with the position of the worker basically unchanged, then all that has been achieved is the creation of a new class (to use Djilas’s term) based on state-ownership, with the State as the collective capitalist taking the place of the old ruling-class. The fact that the new class stems directly from the workers, and was put there either by evolutionary means or by a revolutionary overthrow, does not change the fundamental class position of the workers. Yet this is what socialism is about, if it’s about anything at all. Therefore, to argue, or re-argue the question of force versus non-force, seems to me to be rather meaningless. We surely should support evolution, as far as it is possible, and revolution (meaning force) when it is necessary. We can, within the framework of the capitalist system, extend the frontiers of socialist control. If we are to gain the support and sympathy of the mass of the workers, both “blue-collar” and “whitecollar”, then we must introduce a policy which gives them responsibility and, in a practical way, brings them up sharply against the limitations imposed by capitalism. For example, even now, in all Labour-controlled local authorities, a system of workers’ control could be introduced in all departments. In such a way, Social Ownership, in this case by the Municipality, takes on a real meaning, and the frontiers of socialist consciousness are immediately extended. Equally, a campaign should be commenced for workers control and management in the nationalised industries.

magic hand of chance is something that cannot be justified. If the declared purpose is to change completely the nature of our society then there must be preparation and provision for the worst that can happen. Revolution requires careful and detailed planning. It requires resolute and effective leadership of the kind that will not baulk at “smashing” (regrettable though that would be) should it become necessary. “Popular pressures of great intensity” may indeed heave us forward much nearer to the goal, to make subsequent work that much easier. Even if, however, such popular pressures were to bring us up to the point where the public sector of the economy had gained a firm dominance over the private sector, and supposing a similar rate of advance ethically and culturally, this, contrary to what Edward Thompson asserts, would not be revolution. It would, I maintain, merely take us up to the point of a revolutionary situation: an intensified Fabianistic process, part of a revolutionary strategy which, without the committed will, the total dedication, would stand in the gravest danger of being rolled back so long as capitalism had any kind of foothold.

from ERIC HEFFER IN THE past, the apparent basic division in the socialist movement was between those who accepted the evolutionary path, and those who advocated revolution, usually associated with a measure of violence. I use the word apparent, because, beneath the surface, the two concepts of a socialist society were similar, both the evolubecause underneath, the concepts of a future socialist society were similar, both the evolutionists and revolutionists advocating a society organised from the top down, with an elite as the centre of political direction. The methods of achieving the new society may have been different; the result was the same. This is underlined by the enthusiasm with which the Webbs greeted the Soviet system after a visit to the Soviet Union. For many years after my break with Stalinist thinking, I was confused by the enthusiasm of the Webbs, until I realised that what the Webbs saw was an embodiment of their élitist ideas. Amongst both “Evolutionists” (I put G. D. H. Cole in this category) and “Revolutionists” (here I place Rosa Luxembourg), great stress has been laid on the need for a concept of Socialism, which places faith in the self-activity of the masses. Luxembourg said, “Socialism cannot be introduced by decree”, whilst Cole in his earlier and

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later works raised the need for industrial democracy. The emphasis of both was on control from below, cutting across both the Bolshevik and Fabian attitudes. The real division then, was not so much between the “Evolutionists” and “Revolutionists” but between the State Socialists, and non-State-Socialists, a division which to-day has great practical significance, and which must exercise much of our thinking if we are to evolve a new point of departure. The non-State conception (except for a few small groups and individuals) went out for all practical purposes, with the rise of the Soviet Union and the election of Labour and SocialDemocratic Governments in Europe. Now the wheel has turned full circle, and the inadequacies of State Socialism are there for all to see. To-day the first tentative and faltering steps are being taken towards a re-evaluation of the non-State concept. Thompson fails to get to grips with this problem, the State being dealt with in a passing reference. I raise these issues because it is important in discussing revolution to have clearly in view the type of society we want the revolution to usher in. If it is to be a society dominated by a political élite, with the position of the worker basically unchanged, then all that has been achieved is the creation of a new class (to use Djilas’s term) based on state-ownership, with the State as the collective capitalist taking the place of the old ruling-class. The fact that the new class stems directly from the workers, and was put there either by evolutionary means or by a revolutionary overthrow, does not change the fundamental class position of the workers. Yet this is what socialism is about, if it’s about anything at all. Therefore, to argue, or re-argue the question of force versus non-force, seems to me to be rather meaningless. We surely should support evolution, as far as it is possible, and revolution (meaning force) when it is necessary. We can, within the framework of the capitalist system, extend the frontiers of socialist control. If we are to gain the support and sympathy of the mass of the workers, both “blue-collar” and “whitecollar”, then we must introduce a policy which gives them responsibility and, in a practical way, brings them up sharply against the limitations imposed by capitalism. For example, even now, in all Labour-controlled local authorities, a system of workers’ control could be introduced in all departments. In such a way, Social Ownership, in this case by the Municipality, takes on a real meaning, and the frontiers of socialist consciousness are immediately extended. Equally, a campaign should be commenced for workers control and management in the nationalised industries.

notebook Tokyo Against The Alliance THE STORMS of June are over: but the Japanese sky is still full of clouds. The recent high-tide of the anti-Kishi movement, whose crest was the massive resistance to the new US-Japan Security Treaty, washed away the visit of President Eisenhower. Nevertheless, the Premier and his Liberal-Democratic Party won the summer. The ever-increasing petitions (signed by more than ten million people, and endorsed by almost all the major commercial newspapers) that the Lower House should be dissolved before the ratification, were disregarded. The new Treaty became effective, though the Opposition declared it null and void. Kishi has gone, but the Kishi-policy has survived. It is too early to estimate the general political significance of the resistance. The new Security Treaty was intended to tie Japan down for another ten years as a military base against the Communist camp in the Far East. Mr. Kishi, adhering to the familiar logic that the Cold War is “reality” and Neutralism “the nightmare”, insisted that the new Treaty would give more equal terms to Japan than the old one, which was nothing more

than the bastard child of the American Occupation. The Opposition proposed that Japan should renounce, rather than revise, the old Treaty. At one point, there seemed to be a compromise emerging between these opposing viewpoints. But in the debates of the Special Committee, the Kishi Government, by its inconsistent and unconvincing replies, failed to vindicate its claim that the new Treaty was purely defensive in character. This was the beginning of popular suspicion and anxiety. Seizing this opportunity, the recently-formed People’s Council Against The Revision of the Security Treaty rapidly extended its influence by petitions and demonstrations. The dominant organisations in this Council were the Socialist Party and the Sohyo (General Council of Trade Unions), but it also included the Communist Party and the Japan Council Against Nuclear Weapons. At the same time, the National Federation of Students (Zengakuren), split between pro-Trotskyist and pro-Communist factions, staged massive demonstrations. May 20 marked the turning point of the whole movement against the Treaty. On that day, the

Government moved the resolution ratifying the Treaty, without any warning, and they used force to remove the Socialist members who tried to block the ratification. These measures, adopted by Kishi and his followers to force the Treaty through, roused considerable anger. The common slogans became, “The dissolution of the Lower House”, “The invalidity of passing the new Treaty”, and “The postponement of the Eisenhower visit” . The Treaty was, indeed, generally unpopular. The Liberal-Democratic Party had deliberately avoided it as an issue at the last General Election. According to the Asahi sample survey at the time, only 12 per cent of the population supported Kishi. Now many people of different classes and occupations—trade unionists, unorganised employees, professors and teachers and intellectuals, housewives and business girls—rallied to the demonstrations organised by the People’s Council. The Zengakuren demonstrations were reinforced by numbers of students, many of whom held to no extreme ideologies. These demonstrations were the ones which enveloped Mr. Hagerty so dramatically on June 10, and which led to the bloody incidents of Juns 15. On the 19th, however, the Treaty became automatically valid. “What shall we do, now that all legitimate attempts at protest have been ignored?” one student asked me in a desperate tone that midnight, as we sat with countless other student demonstrators on the chilly pavement outside the Diet building. It is clear that the recent tension has been no violence inspired by international Communism, the excuse most commonly offered. The fact is that any popular opposition to US Far Eastern diplomacy will always be explained in this way. There is no hostility to the Chinese from the Japanese nation as a whole: and they have reason to know better than any people on earth the human consequences of nuclear strategies. On the other hand, the reconstruction of the Japanese economy has gone hand in hand with the American economy, particularly in the sphere of foreign trade. And the Government is in many ways a post-Occupation government. It is no wonder, then, that Mr. Kishi firmly backed the Treaty, and that Japanese big business firmly backed Mr. Kishi. And although the anti-Kishi movement was centrally organised by the Left, it was not a general movement against the existing economic system. The anti-Kishi resistance gained a great deal of strength from the Government’s intrigue: the Government itself has not fallen. Perhaps the greatest legacy of the recent events is the establishment of a tradition of civil disobedience, a form of political action which would scarcely have been expected in pre-War Japan. H.Y.

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C. P. Sleet

The Racket

(This is the seventeenth in the sequence of novels related by Lewis Elsberger. The complete work, in 30 or 40 volumes, will have the title of Newcomers and Old-Timers.) PART NINE: THE PLAN MATURES Chapter 46: Offer Of A Cigarette I WAS mildly surprised when Artie Brown invited me for what, in his rather dated slang, he described as “a natter”. I knew, of course, that he was out again—news travels rapidly in the closely-knit environment with which I had not entirely lost touch—but I assumed that, since I had ceased to be a professional burglar, my company might have lost some of its attraction for a man of such single-minded purpose as Artie. Before accepting, I mentioned the matter to Daisy, who was now sleeping at my flat when her work kept her too late to find a taxi. “I should go,” she said, sipping an early afternoon gin. “There might be—well, shall we say, something in it for you.” “There might be a complication,” I demurred. We were interrupted by the ringing of the telephone, its note peculiarly high and shrill in the small room. When Daisy had completed her arrangements for the evening, I said: “Should you go, nevertheless?” “You should go,” she smiled. I smiled in return. She smiled in response. We understood each other rather better than if we had been married. The cloud from the tea-urn obscured my view for a moment as I pushed open the door of the caff. Outside, the air was not cold, but cool, with the familiar dampness of Frith Street on a November evening. Inside, however, it was not hot, but warm. Artie was not alone. In fact, there was someone else with him. Their heads were close together and their lips were moving. It was evident that they were holding a conversation. As I moved to their table, Artie looked up, with his characteristic trick of raising his head. “Take a chair, Lewis,” he said. Curiously, he had never addressed me as Elsberger. “You know Frank, don’t you?” He knew, of course, that I knew Frank. Indeed, Frank knew that I knew him. We had never been close friends, but we had been associated in the Bravington job which had been among the first of my successful undertakings when I had come from the town I came from.

“Lewis knows everybody,” said Frank, in the odd American accent which he had acquired— so I suspected—during his childhood in the United States. Since I saw no reason to contradict this statement, he improved on it. “Everybody knows Lewis,” he added. “Starling will be here in a few minutes,” Artie continued. “I have been planning this reunion for—oh, about five years with remission.” I made an appropriate answer. I had a feeling, despite Artie’s deceptively convivial air, that this was not merely a reunion, but very probably something more than a reunion. The impression deepened as Artie, opening what I recognised as the Duchess of Suffolk’s gold case, said “Will you have a cigarette?” I hesitated, remembering what I had said to Daisy. Then, unable to remember what Daisy had not said to me, I accepted. The cigarette which appeared to have been made in a factory, tasted agreeably of paper. Frank struck a match, and the flame burned strongly, then flickered until it went out. Starling arrived and took the remaining chair, so that we sat on all four sides of the table, making the pattern that was as old as the caff itself and had indeed become traditional at other caffs. It struck me, as Starling pierced the end of a cigar with a chased metal tool for piercing the end of cigars, how completely he had lived down his beginnings. When he had first joined our society, he had been no more than a hospital surgeon. Now, you would never have imagined him as anything but a prosperous abortionist with a Chelsea practice. “It must be years since we were all together,” Starling said. “More years than I care to think about. With your permission, Chief, I should like to honour the occasion and our guest by presenting tea.” “That is most generous of you, Doctor,” Artie replied. Serious matters were deferred until the tea arrived. It was an Indian growth, blended generously with milk. The sugar, in its customary place on the table, gave off a quiet glitter that reminded me of whitened sand. I was thinking that Artie looked, if not older, certainly not younger. His hair, which had long been partly grey, was now only partly black. It Labour Party Conference . . . for details of NLR and Left Club plans for Scarborough during the week of the Labour Party Conference, see Letter To Readers in this issue, p. 68.

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was too early yet to tell whether he had been mellowed or, like so many I had known whose careers had followed the same course, embittered. At all events, he could look back on a solid record of achievement. He had done good work —nothing, perhaps, so outstanding as Alf or Toby, but what most of us would recognise as good. Did he, now, want something else? It was difficult to say what that something could be. Even money was possible. Here, however, I was wrong. When our teacups were empty and the cigarette butts quietly soaking in the saucers, Artie said in his subtly forceful way: “Shall we come to business?” Frank gave his low, impenetrable laugh. “I had supposed, Chief,” he said, “that this was not entirely a social occasion.” Artie was frowning. “Can any of you tell me,” he inquired, “where Flash Andy is?” It was a good five years, with remission, since I had heard the name. Occasionally I had wondered why Flash Andy had never been present at the caff, even on commemorative occasions. I waited, confident in Starling’s sources of information. Here, indeed, I was not wrong. Laying his cigar carefully on an ancient stain on the cloth, Starling said: “He’s working the Span flats.” “Indeed,” said Artie. “A new line, I believe. Should you have called that a remunerative occupation?” “I should have, Chief.” There was a silence, during which the sounds from St. Anne’s Court reached us with the clarity bestowed by expectation—a patter of running steps, the tinkle of a breaking milk bottle, a scream or two. Then Artie, examining the patina on his spoon with a deceptively casual air, said: “Do you know, I rather imagine that he put me inside.” So that was it. I glanced at the others. They would immediately recognise a matter of justice —indeed, of honour. “That is your considered view, Chief?” asked Frank. “I should say he was responsible. Put it another way: I don’t see how he could not have been responsible.” “In that case,” said Starling, “what should you say we should do?” I knew, of course, the turn that the conversation was taking. In the Thirties, very likely, it would have been more direct. Yet in essentials there had been no change. Artie rapped the table. His mind, at all events, was as clear as ever. “Do you know,” he said, “I rather think that we should do him.”

THE NEW DRAMA by Michael Kaye FRANCOIS VILLON—that mad fifteenth century Frenchman—concludes his Brechtian Ballad, Counter-Truths, with the verse: You want the truth from me? There is no joy save in illness Nor truth in literature save tragedy Nor cowardice save in being a gentleman Nor sound more horrible than melody Nor wisdom save in the folly of lovers. In a recent paper-back of his complete work (Bantam classic, 4/6, translated by Anthony Bonner with French text vis-a-vis) the third line is helpfully mistranslated—“nor truth outside the theatre”. It is with this idea I want to begin. Life has hit the London stage at last. And with real

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was too early yet to tell whether he had been mellowed or, like so many I had known whose careers had followed the same course, embittered. At all events, he could look back on a solid record of achievement. He had done good work —nothing, perhaps, so outstanding as Alf or Toby, but what most of us would recognise as good. Did he, now, want something else? It was difficult to say what that something could be. Even money was possible. Here, however, I was wrong. When our teacups were empty and the cigarette butts quietly soaking in the saucers, Artie said in his subtly forceful way: “Shall we come to business?” Frank gave his low, impenetrable laugh. “I had supposed, Chief,” he said, “that this was not entirely a social occasion.” Artie was frowning. “Can any of you tell me,” he inquired, “where Flash Andy is?” It was a good five years, with remission, since I had heard the name. Occasionally I had wondered why Flash Andy had never been present at the caff, even on commemorative occasions. I waited, confident in Starling’s sources of information. Here, indeed, I was not wrong. Laying his cigar carefully on an ancient stain on the cloth, Starling said: “He’s working the Span flats.” “Indeed,” said Artie. “A new line, I believe. Should you have called that a remunerative occupation?” “I should have, Chief.” There was a silence, during which the sounds from St. Anne’s Court reached us with the clarity bestowed by expectation—a patter of running steps, the tinkle of a breaking milk bottle, a scream or two. Then Artie, examining the patina on his spoon with a deceptively casual air, said: “Do you know, I rather imagine that he put me inside.” So that was it. I glanced at the others. They would immediately recognise a matter of justice —indeed, of honour. “That is your considered view, Chief?” asked Frank. “I should say he was responsible. Put it another way: I don’t see how he could not have been responsible.” “In that case,” said Starling, “what should you say we should do?” I knew, of course, the turn that the conversation was taking. In the Thirties, very likely, it would have been more direct. Yet in essentials there had been no change. Artie rapped the table. His mind, at all events, was as clear as ever. “Do you know,” he said, “I rather think that we should do him.”

THE NEW DRAMA by Michael Kaye FRANCOIS VILLON—that mad fifteenth century Frenchman—concludes his Brechtian Ballad, Counter-Truths, with the verse: You want the truth from me? There is no joy save in illness Nor truth in literature save tragedy Nor cowardice save in being a gentleman Nor sound more horrible than melody Nor wisdom save in the folly of lovers. In a recent paper-back of his complete work (Bantam classic, 4/6, translated by Anthony Bonner with French text vis-a-vis) the third line is helpfully mistranslated—“nor truth outside the theatre”. It is with this idea I want to begin. Life has hit the London stage at last. And with real

drama has come the truth. It has come with Orson Welles’ production of Ionesco’s Rhinoceros; with the Lunts’ magnificent performance in Friederich Dürenmatt’s The Visit, which combines the insights of Kafka and Marx in the form of Greek Tragedy; and in the method-acted Tomorrow With Pictures, which begins as a straight comedy-attack on British stagnation and ends up on the level of Eugune O’Neill, with an exposure of the social and psychological pathology of a Rothermere or Kemsley-type family empire. It has come in the shape of John Fernald’s magnificent production of Brecht’s Good Woman Of Setzuan by the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art which was done at the York Festival: a play which enacts just how the Gods (if there are any) fail to understand that to love and be good is impossible without at the same time surviving as a tough businessman. It is there too in Harold Pinter’s Caretaker and Brecht’s Galileo—the latter given the rough-and-ready performance Brecht would have liked, at the Mermaid: a play about the sempiternal struggle of reason against the complacent, the bureaucratic, the Tory and the brain-washers. In Galileo, Bernard Miles frees himself of all suspicion of veniality in taking over the businessman-sponsored Mermaid Theatre by showing his sponsors just what they would have done with Galileo. I hope his toff audience is getting the message. Finally, it has come—and the New Left has been waiting for it, because it is probably the one it thinks most worth seeing—in the Wesker Trilogy, whose Centrepiece, Roots, I want to discuss first.

Roots and Us Roots tells us the truth about ourselves in the New Left. Dramatically, it is a triangle play. There is us, which is Wesker or you or me. There is Beattie, the girl who has left her working-class agricultural background, and who is that Trade Unionist we might be trying to address or that Labour voter we may be trying to convert. And there is Beattie’s family, the mass, the cause of our moments of despair. And what does Roots tell us? It tells us that we are both to blame—both Them and Us. It tells us more—that, such as things are, we cannot love Her because she is still one of Them. And for all our talk (and I include Wesker as one of Us), when the time comes we are still liable to stand Her up. But it tells us also that there is still hope, for she might become one of the salt of the earth, one of the transformatory minority, one of the leaven that will lift the loaf. Dramatically, Wesker gets away with murder. Were I not of the New Left I would tell him to rewrite the play so that Ronnie appears in Act One

and stands Beattie up in Act Three. Only then would the centrepiece of the Trilogy make sense to my friends not intimately acquainted with Britain. For after all, I should add, Beattie is not exactly waiting for Godot, nor indeed for Lefty. But being of the New Left, I think I know why Wesker-Ronnie did not want to appear in the play. It is because we are still ashamed of ourselves, still unsure of how to appear in that Norfolk set-up. We do not know whether in the long run we shall have stood-up Beattie too. We do not know whether the Revolution Edward Thompson has spoken about has really begun. If it has, we may go on to speak about “Jerusalem”. If it has not, then we may as well have the courage to portray ourselves and show up Ronnie for what he is. If it has, we can forgive Arnold Wesker his technical faults, for he is our Gorki. But woe to the Gorki of the Revolution that is never to come! I do not want to leave Roots without saying something of the love and care with which it is acted and produced. It has grown since its first production, and Joan Plowright has flowered into something that promises more than Vivien Leigh was ever to attain. From the love with which Roots was acted, I want to turn to the commercial professionalism of Peter Brook’s production of The Visit at the Royalty. On the sad Sunday on which The Critics discussed this play on the BBC, they dismissed it as “German expressionism” that “works on several levels”, and went on to say that this was a thing alien to us Englishmen. They said the production made the play. Well, Peter Brook is British and Dürenmatt is Swiss, but doesn’t Shakespeare or Britten “work on several levels?” The characters, they said, were not “real”: everything was forseeable (Read Oedipus?): the play belonged to “the nightmare world of expressionist drama”.

The World of The Visit “The world” of The Visit is one in which a love betrayed can turn into a vengeful hate; in which a millionairess’s promise of a billion marks gift provokes a hire-purchase spree amongst the voters of a bankrupt town, which leads them to complete their down-payments on TV sets and furs at the price of a man’s life—the price the rich woman demands. It appears that the stagnant little dream world of the BBC Critics leaves little room for even the aesthetic appreciation of the nightmare of our psycho-social reality. The production? The effects, I must admit, were marvellously contrived. The performance of the Lunts, who have given their lives to the theatre, was past reproach. But the cast, with the

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exception of a few individuals who put in a certain amount of private enterprise (particularly Brian Wilde as the intellectual who sees and sells out, and Richard Dare as the pastor who consoles) lagged miles behind. But what does one expect, with a fortnight’s rehearsal time? Given a fortnight, the most Peter Brook could do was arrange the effects and leave the rest to individual actors. They take the chance, or they do not. And the audience comes away with the usual, “Wasn’t so-and-so good?”, but never with “What a production!” Without proper rehearsal facilities, we never see the whole of a play brought to life in the way the Moscow Arts Theatre did Tshekhov. We are doubling our standards of living so fast that we are willing to sacrifice our Stanislavskys. (Wasn’t that partly what The Visit was about?) We can only afford Klemperers by doubling the price of the seats. (“No one wants a good conductor”, a friend of mine used to say, “he might ask for an extra rehearsal”). Dürenmatt’s The Visit is one of the great plays of all time. It re-creates the vengeance theme of Euripides’ Medea. A woman got with child uses her money to avenge herself on the man who betrayed her. At first, the people of the town refuse to accept her bribe and sacrifice the man: but in the end, they are so much in her debt that they can do nothing else. The tragic victim of the play dies the death of Kafka’s Joseph K in The Trial—“like a dog”. But the moral is not just, “see how vengeful a woman can be”. The Visit demonstrates what Brecht meant by the epic play, when he wrote: “The spectator of the dramatic theatre says, ‘Yes, I have felt the same—I am just like this—This is only natural—it will always be like this—This is great art: it bears the mark of the inevitable.’ The spectator of the epic theatre says, ‘I should never have thought so—This is not the way things should go—This will have to stop—This is great art: nothing here is inevitable’.”

Roots, I fear, is in Brecht’s sense, dramatic, though it may be too early to tell. The Visit is epic: it is more like, “Justice without mercy is a Kafkan nightmare—we live in a society in which it exists—capitalist democracy provides legal means for the perpetuation of monstrous private vengeances—the world we live in conceals a hideous potential”. Of course, Brecht’s Galileo made some of these points too—but then, as the Critics would say, “We all know Galileo was right”. Living in an ex-Protestant country, we all know how wrong it was for the Popes to use torture. But Dürenmatt! He showed that a hire-purchase spree in a little town could have the same illiberal effects as papal instruments of torture, the mere sight of which

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made Galileo recant. The BBC Critics could not forgive that. After all, hire-purchase is part of our doubling standard of living. Moreover, Dürenmatt showed good decent folk—Labour people, Tories and Liberals, intellectuals and pastors—doing a man in “like a dog” because they had got terribly in debt to capitalism. And yet. . . . Are not, on perhaps a slightly larger scale, the finance ministers of, say, India doing in a lot of their fellow citizens by letting them go on living like dogs? I am thinking of the way plans are cut down for lack of hard currency in several under-developed countries. It is uncomfortable to be forced to connect the vengeance of the Medea with certain Western agencies for the aid of underdeveloped territories. Irrational? Nightmare expressionism? Well, yes. “Only connect”, E. M. Forster once wrote. Dürenmatt has forced us to make some connections. In certain of his later writings, Brecht put in place of his term epic theatre, the term dialectical. Oh yes, The Visit works, all right, and “on several levels”. But it is not I who make the connections. You have to see how they are enacted in the play.

Connections . . . Which brings me back, inevitably, to Roots. The second point of criticism about Roots is that the connections are spoken about, not enacted. Of course, that is partly because they have yet to be made. The Revolution may be only about to begin. But still, even if we do suffer—and the protagonists in Roots do—from a lack of connections, this should be enacted, not talked about. A large part of the point of the play is conveyed in Beattie’s great speech in the final scene—a ULR Editorial to end all ULR Editorials. But how can this speech be enacted with Ronnie left out? After all, that is the locus of the connection in Roots—Ronnie and Beattie making love; Ronnie talking—Beattie silent; Beattie inhibited by Ronnie, and Ronnie getting annoyed at Beattie’s obtuseness. The two have still to go their own ways. It is too early to “talk about Jerusalem”. Aristotle is right. Speeches in drama ought to be verbal actions, to subserve the action of the play. The action is the interaction. But the interaction must be shown, not spoken about. That is where Dürenmatt wins. He does not tell you what is the matter. He shows it. And he shows it to the whole world, not merely to England. Longinus said that great art should move all men at all times. I am not a tremendous believer in another purely English Revolution. Things interconnect a little too much. What with NATO and Kafka, Euripides and South Africa. . . .

trade unions and the arts by Arnold Wesker

on The Nature of Gothic by Ruskin apparently was a revelation for his contemporaries. I tried to buy this in Charing Cross Road the other day and was informed that many people were buying Ruskin and the book of essays I wanted was unavailable. To quote from an essay by Furneaux Jordan, this was the first writing “to see a link between art and labour, to see that the savage ruggedness of a northern cathedral might be humanly—and therefore aesthetically—a more tender, a nobler thing than the classical formulae of the Mediterranean styles: the one produced by men and the other by slaves.” This is as exciting a conception today as then. That an age reveals itself by its culture we are learning from our own times. What, however, I am personally not certain of is whether that culture appears inevitably or whether artists are aware that an age is marked culturally and therefore they must make that mark. What comes first? One is tempted to say, and no doubt history can prove, that artists unconsciously reflect the age. But this means: God help the joyous artist in a sordid age! On the other hand someone once said “truth is not merely what is but what can be.” There is hope. As artists, we would like to think we were either reflecting our times or pointing to new worlds; but if a people is not aware that the culture it produces is a reflection of itself (if

THE ESSAY

it did it might take its arts more seriously), and if a people is not around to whom we can show our new worlds (that is to say the theatres are empty), then neither of these two observations can be applied with any weight. Unless culture is the shared experience of a whole nation these observations remain frustrated tools. Yet tools they certainly are, but for what? Bill Holdsworth and myself have started a campaign to urge the Trade Union Movement not only to spend money on the arts but, in doing so, to make it a natural part of its members’ life. They have succeeded to a large degree in sharing out the nation’s economic wealth, why can they not do the same for its cultural riches? We are not asking them to create a particular kind of art but rather to make sure that art is, in fact, a nation’s shared experience. Our aims and suggestions are outlined in two pamphlets which were sent to every trade union in the country and the response was exciting. Now comes the time to organise it. New Left Groups throughout the country can assist in this way. At this year’s congress the ACTT have put forward a resolution. We do not know at the time of going to press what will happen to it—we are assuming it will not be passed. This whole campaign, therefore, must be an attempt to get it passed next year, or the year after. We are aiming to organise a big, professionally run, festival of the arts specially for Congress delegates during their week of meeting, but what is needed is a softening up process. Before they arrive at their week’s conference, it would be a great help if campaign committees all over the country could have been responsible for smaller festivals specially for delegates and trade unionists. BUT—the festivals must not be esoteric little gatherings on the one hand or weak, amateurish efforts on the other; they must be robust, exciting and as professional as possible. The ACTT resolution must be demonstrated and proved relevant. So far NLR groups have centred round the CND campaign; here could be another focal point of activity, here in fact could be a further means of knocking down that barrier between the worker and the artist that breaks us all. NLR groups, together with university groups and local reps, could all combine on this project. Because he has not the millions to compete with the commercial world, the artist must go out and pull in his public by the hair. I cannot see another way. The ACTT resolution is the piece of paper around which we could change the whole cultural climate of this “dead behind the eyes” society, and every trade unionist should know of its existence.

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book reviews The Communist Party of the Soviet Union

by Leonard Schapiro Eyre & Spottiswoode, 63s. LEONARD SCHAPIRO’S recent book is the first general history of the Soviet Communist Party by a Western scholar, and it contains a great deal of information not previously available in English. It is the only place, for example, where the names of Politburo members between 1917 and 1958 are fully listed. The author has enriched his work with interesting material from unpublished studies by competent scholars such as J. L. H. Keep and T. H. Rigby. But the publisher’s claims for this study are very large. “The author’s treatment is factual and nonpartisan”, and the history is “fully documented”. “Its purpose is to show, against the background of the social, economic and intellectual history of the country and of its foreign relations, the evolution of the ideas, aims, structure and social composition of the party; its relations with the life of the population; and, especially, the effects upon the party of the circumstances in which it grew up, seized power and stayed in power”. These claims have been endorsed by most reviewers so far, so much so that the Economist’s reviewer, in expressing dissatisfaction with the book, described himself as “a dissentient voice”. I believe that the book does not come near fulfilling the publisher’s claims, and that the consensus of expert opinion will prove to concur with this view, after the year or so which the academic world requires to absorb and think over a book of this size. It is strongly to be deplored that journals such as the New Statesman (unlike the Economist) should be so unserious in their attitude to Soviet affairs that they should employ reviewers who failed to note even the more obvious weaknesses in Mr. Schapiro’s study. In the first place, the author’s canvas is so large that he could not and did not make an adequate examination of the rich source-materials. This subject required a decade’s or a lifetime’s study to be covered by one man; not three or four years. The author has made little use even of some of the key debates and reports at Party Congresses on party organisation (Kuibyshev’s reports on the work of the important Central Control Commission, for example, are virtually ignored). This means that even on his central theme of the party itself the author’s materials are inadequate. And when he deals with the economic and social background, his treatment is often deplorably thin. An example: it is his merit that he raises the central question of the relationship of the party to the working-class movement at different stages of Soviet history, but we get only glimpses of an answer —there are for instance only 16 lines (p. 151) on the work of the Bolsheviks within Russia between the outbreak of the first world war and the end of 1916. Or again, because Mr. Schapiro tells us so little about the complex history of economic policy between 1925 and 1928, Stalin’s collectivisation policy pops up

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somewhat miraculously in 1929, although its relationship to the economic background is a cardinal issue for this book. Moreover, the author’s handling of the source materials he does use is somewhat cavalier and often unreliable. A few minor errors are bound to be made in a book of this length, but a quick check of the chapter on “The Defeat of Bukharin” revealed a dozen major and minor errors in that chapter alone. But the trouble with this book is not simply that its theme is too ambitious. Its biggest weakness is in its analysis. There are certainly omens of the beginnings of a break-through into a fresh approach to an historical critique of the Stalin period. The author rightly rejects the (mythical?) students of Soviet history who assume that “because things happened in a certain way therefore they had to happen in this way, irrespectively of the political actions of men”. Throughout his study he therefore raises the question of political motives as a factor in Soviet evolution. His concern is particularly with the motives and actions of prominent individuals: in fact his general picture of Lenin’s days is of a determined man wielding a party round himself, seizing power, and then refusing to compromise, so that the Bolsheviks have a monopoly of power but a permanently precarious hold on the country. And of the Soviet industrial revolution, Mr. Schapiro writes: “I see no valid reason for assuming that it had to take place at the time and in the manner which Stalin determined, other than the reason that Stalin so determined it and was able to put his determination into effect” (p.x). The ideas of individual men are the key, then, in Mr. Schapiro’s analysis. But these ideas are nowhere fully or carefully presented (compare Schapiro’s exposition of Soviet marxism with, say, Herbert Marcuse’s); and the critique of them is clumsy. Thus his ground for rejecting the view that the need for a defence industry was a major motive pushing Stalin to rapid industrialisation is that the defence industry could have been established more easily by less drastic means (p. 383): he does not even discuss whether Stalin may have been motivated by a wrong assessment of the likely effects of his policy. Elsewhere we are told that the party was unable to compromise in policy between economic freedom for the peasants and exploitation of them because in the prevailing conditions “there could be no middle way between submission to the Secretariat and rebellion” (p. 291): incredible as it may seem, Mr. Schapiro fails to discuss in this connection why Stalin and the party Secretariat did not themselves adopt a compromise policy. At times, it is true, Mr. Schapiro does seem to be groping towards such questions. He links centralised party discipline and Stalin’s emergence in the 1920s to the precarious position of the party in the country; he sees collectivisation as partly motivated by the need to control the peasants politically; and he suggests that the purges may spring out of Stalin’s need to consolidate his personal position by breaking up any cohesion or solidarity and restocking the élite with a new generation dependent on himself (pp. 291, 382f., 429f.). But in his rare analytical passages, Mr. Schapiro is usually very confused; there is, in fact, no serious

attempt to examine the sociology of Soviet ideas in his book. Why did Stalin hold the views he did when he did? Why did his thought move towards forced collectivisation in the years 1926 to 1929? Such questions are never clearly posed. If posed, they would need to be answered in terms of the views of Stalin’s colleagues and the influence exerted on him and them by the ideas of their time and place and by the problems with which they were faced. Even within the limits of his own rather naive conception of history, Mr. Schapiro would then need to bring in much more than he does the “background of the social, economic and intellectual history of the country” referred to by the publisher, and to relate this background to the evolution of the party and its ideas.

R. W. Davies

Mr. Love and Justice by Colin Maclnnes, MacGibbon & Kee, 15s. Mr. Love and Justice is an attempt at an objective novel, in which implicit values are realised through character and action instead of being expressed directly by their author in first person narrative, as in his previous books. It is about a seaman turned ponce, Frankie Love, and a policeman, Edward Justice, who come into contact through the latter’s duties as a vice detective. It is in the form of a moral antithesis of Love and Justice, with a central paradox by which Edward Justice leaves the police for love of his girl, and Frankie Love defends his profession with his sense of natural justice. The novel is set in a no-man’s land, somewhat cut off from normal social references. On one side is Edward, his girl, her Dad, and a star-sleuth, and on the other Frankie, his girl, her Mum, and a starponce. But despite this elaborate symmetry a world of ponces and the police is created in terms of the experiences of the characters, and on the ponce’s side of it Mr. MacInnes does not impose any judgements. Frankie, for example, breaks down his own conventional repugnance for ponces when he becomes one, and crosses a barrier of attitudes on the other side of which he has to get used to being disliked. The author is also giving us a very personal and documentary view of London after the Street Offences Act, with his usual flow of acute and lively observation. But through this comes a weight of feeling against the police and their authoritarianism, as a main emphasis of the novel. The two main characters represent the contrasted values of the book. Frankie has something in common with Mr. MacInnes’s earlier heroes, with a generous, unmoralistic nature, and an integrity of response to experiences which is the essence of his sense of justice. Edward is less likeable. “The profound solitude that lay at the centre of his personality” is in sharp contrast to the vitality at the centre of Frankie’s, and the deep attachments to his girl and the Force which derive from this solitude are ones of self-centred need. His beliefs in Love and Justice are therefore mere moralisings, necessary to reassure his sense of being. The novel evolves by alternate chapters devoted to Mr. Love and Mr. Justice and their concerns. It is carried at a balanced pace, mostly on a lightly-

loaded and responsive dialogue, until the two men come into conflict. But here it loses its poise, and there is some confusion and arbitrariness in the final rush of events when Frankie is arrested, in which Frankie and Ted lose their central emphasis to the details of the events themselves. It recovers its balance when the two become friends in hospital, but the resolution of the plot is too schematic, and not sufficiently related to the attitudes of the two men. There are two explicit debates in the book, one on justice and one on love. In the first Frankie opposes the Law, because he says a real law is different, something you can respect and live for, like it is on a ship. The community has thrown all its responsibility for justice on to the police, but the police have only authority, and no real sense of justice at all. This feeling underlies the race-riot scenes in Absolute Beginners, and relates to the structure of the books— a viewpoint of minority groups on the edges of both the community and the law. There is not the same explicit sympathy for one side expressed in the debate on love, as there is for Frankie’s natural justice. Where Ted’s formal view of justice is shown up by his misuse of police power, Frankie’s disbelief in love is not discredited by his actions. His relationship to his girl, sexual and sisterly as he describes it, makes up in vitality what it lacks in constancy by comparison with Ted’s, and his disbelief is felt more as an assertion of freedom than as a denial of feeling, not damaging the implicit sympathy for him. The book has an off-centredness and lack of intensity which is perhaps due to Mr. MacInnes’s technical pre-occupations. The formal scheme serves to define a limited area within which the realisation can be managed, and if it restricts what can be expressed, this may be a necessary sacrifice to experiment. Mr. MacInnes’s books have a vitality which makes them among the most important affirmations of life in recent literature, in their responsiveness to the present scene and the genuine centre of feeling to their characters. But the books have a limited area of expression, missing experiences of real tension, and feelings involving a more than humorous intensity. The social perspective is also confined—the extrasocial heroes maintain a bombardment of the wider world out there, “the great world of the mugs, the millions who pay their taxes by the pea-eh-why-ee”, through an observation that is always humane, but there is little realised sense of the pressures of that world. The enlargement of these two horizons by Mr. MacInnes is something one deeply wants to see, and one hopes that Mr. Love and Justice, an essential advance in form, will be a step along this road.

Mike Rustin

NLR SIX In the next issue, E.P. Thompson replies to critics with some further thoughts on the “Revolution” theme . . . Ron Meek reviews Deutscher, Dobb and Rostow . . . an essay on Work And Its Discontents by David Armstrong . . . on Scandinavia by Perry Anderson . . . and on Lady Chatterley’s Lover and a Photo-supplement

on the Algerian war.

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attempt to examine the sociology of Soviet ideas in his book. Why did Stalin hold the views he did when he did? Why did his thought move towards forced collectivisation in the years 1926 to 1929? Such questions are never clearly posed. If posed, they would need to be answered in terms of the views of Stalin’s colleagues and the influence exerted on him and them by the ideas of their time and place and by the problems with which they were faced. Even within the limits of his own rather naive conception of history, Mr. Schapiro would then need to bring in much more than he does the “background of the social, economic and intellectual history of the country” referred to by the publisher, and to relate this background to the evolution of the party and its ideas.

R. W. Davies

Mr. Love and Justice by Colin Maclnnes, MacGibbon & Kee, 15s. Mr. Love and Justice is an attempt at an objective novel, in which implicit values are realised through character and action instead of being expressed directly by their author in first person narrative, as in his previous books. It is about a seaman turned ponce, Frankie Love, and a policeman, Edward Justice, who come into contact through the latter’s duties as a vice detective. It is in the form of a moral antithesis of Love and Justice, with a central paradox by which Edward Justice leaves the police for love of his girl, and Frankie Love defends his profession with his sense of natural justice. The novel is set in a no-man’s land, somewhat cut off from normal social references. On one side is Edward, his girl, her Dad, and a star-sleuth, and on the other Frankie, his girl, her Mum, and a starponce. But despite this elaborate symmetry a world of ponces and the police is created in terms of the experiences of the characters, and on the ponce’s side of it Mr. MacInnes does not impose any judgements. Frankie, for example, breaks down his own conventional repugnance for ponces when he becomes one, and crosses a barrier of attitudes on the other side of which he has to get used to being disliked. The author is also giving us a very personal and documentary view of London after the Street Offences Act, with his usual flow of acute and lively observation. But through this comes a weight of feeling against the police and their authoritarianism, as a main emphasis of the novel. The two main characters represent the contrasted values of the book. Frankie has something in common with Mr. MacInnes’s earlier heroes, with a generous, unmoralistic nature, and an integrity of response to experiences which is the essence of his sense of justice. Edward is less likeable. “The profound solitude that lay at the centre of his personality” is in sharp contrast to the vitality at the centre of Frankie’s, and the deep attachments to his girl and the Force which derive from this solitude are ones of self-centred need. His beliefs in Love and Justice are therefore mere moralisings, necessary to reassure his sense of being. The novel evolves by alternate chapters devoted to Mr. Love and Mr. Justice and their concerns. It is carried at a balanced pace, mostly on a lightly-

loaded and responsive dialogue, until the two men come into conflict. But here it loses its poise, and there is some confusion and arbitrariness in the final rush of events when Frankie is arrested, in which Frankie and Ted lose their central emphasis to the details of the events themselves. It recovers its balance when the two become friends in hospital, but the resolution of the plot is too schematic, and not sufficiently related to the attitudes of the two men. There are two explicit debates in the book, one on justice and one on love. In the first Frankie opposes the Law, because he says a real law is different, something you can respect and live for, like it is on a ship. The community has thrown all its responsibility for justice on to the police, but the police have only authority, and no real sense of justice at all. This feeling underlies the race-riot scenes in Absolute Beginners, and relates to the structure of the books— a viewpoint of minority groups on the edges of both the community and the law. There is not the same explicit sympathy for one side expressed in the debate on love, as there is for Frankie’s natural justice. Where Ted’s formal view of justice is shown up by his misuse of police power, Frankie’s disbelief in love is not discredited by his actions. His relationship to his girl, sexual and sisterly as he describes it, makes up in vitality what it lacks in constancy by comparison with Ted’s, and his disbelief is felt more as an assertion of freedom than as a denial of feeling, not damaging the implicit sympathy for him. The book has an off-centredness and lack of intensity which is perhaps due to Mr. MacInnes’s technical pre-occupations. The formal scheme serves to define a limited area within which the realisation can be managed, and if it restricts what can be expressed, this may be a necessary sacrifice to experiment. Mr. MacInnes’s books have a vitality which makes them among the most important affirmations of life in recent literature, in their responsiveness to the present scene and the genuine centre of feeling to their characters. But the books have a limited area of expression, missing experiences of real tension, and feelings involving a more than humorous intensity. The social perspective is also confined—the extrasocial heroes maintain a bombardment of the wider world out there, “the great world of the mugs, the millions who pay their taxes by the pea-eh-why-ee”, through an observation that is always humane, but there is little realised sense of the pressures of that world. The enlargement of these two horizons by Mr. MacInnes is something one deeply wants to see, and one hopes that Mr. Love and Justice, an essential advance in form, will be a step along this road.

Mike Rustin

NLR SIX In the next issue, E.P. Thompson replies to critics with some further thoughts on the “Revolution” theme . . . Ron Meek reviews Deutscher, Dobb and Rostow . . . an essay on Work And Its Discontents by David Armstrong . . . on Scandinavia by Perry Anderson . . . and on Lady Chatterley’s Lover and a Photo-supplement

on the Algerian war.

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Experiencing Architecture,

by S. E. Rasmussen, Chapman & Hall a very good, and possibly dangerous, book about architecture. It is good, above all, for three reasons. In the first place, it is not written in professional jargon—neither the academic jargon of “architraves” and “curtain walls”, where structural technicalities become an excuse for lack of discrimination; nor the matey jargon of the architectural magazines, where every building is a “neo”-movement, and everybody “Bill” or “Ted” or “Corb”. It avoids the parochial professionalism of most architects, to whom the “layman” is either client (i.e. nuisance or bore) or a vague abstraction (i.e. “peopling the perspectives”). Secondly, it never deals in the sort of historicism where either “everything leads up to the modern movement” or “each period has its own style appropriate to the age”. Thirdly, it is not angry about “modernism”, nor “subtopia”, nor telegraph poles, and consequently does not label everything “good” or “bad” on grounds of external appearance alone. This is, in fact, a book about buildings as we see, use, enjoy and even find them annoying all the time. Professor Rasmussen’s criticism of architecture is essentially “functional” in the true unlimited sense of the word. He considers every building as an organism created by many things: the site and the use to which it is to be put; the ideals and the taste (two different things) of the age or of the client; the creative genius or otherwise of the architect; the craftsmanship of the builder; and the accident of the events that can occur while it is being conceived or erected. He is absorbed in the effect of buildings on everyday life; perhaps his main aim is to bring to our notice—in a far subtler way than the cries against “subtopia”—the created environment in which we spend nearly all our lives. He does not describe any buildings he has not himself visited. Because of this first-hand experience he can say—as the apologists for the modern movement and the shout-ugly boys cannot—that this doorway in a mediocre house is superb, this detailing is poor in a well conceived whole; he can say that so-and-so is “trying” to do something, not necessarily either wholly succeeding or wholly failing. He is genuinely critical because he is genuinely alive and interested in why and how—in the widest sense—any building is as it is. This kind of critical education is the only kind that will ever produce a real appreciation of architecture that will demand the environment that could—because of technology—and should be ours today. The “good” v. “bad”, “modern” v. “fake” notion of architectural education for the “layman” is useless. A thorough examination of where, for example, Span at Blackheath and Churchill Gardens, Pimlico (to take two widely accepted canons of contemporary taste) are successful as places to live in and as expressions of a modern way of life, and where they are not, where every detail is examined as an experience that must be felt daily, would be of far more value than putting them upon a pedestal for lesser designers to copy inadequately. Let us criticise the best, find out where the best has created richness and where flatness, ask what the best have forgotten, down to the smallest detail. Then we might have the basis for some “good” architecture and some criticism which might keep architects in touch with the reality of their job. This THIS IS

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book is an example of the way this criticism might be carried out. Yet I have said that this might be a possibly dangerous book, and so it might. For two reasons: the first is that it has an eclecticism of its own, which seems at times to be able to separate buildings from the quality, as opposed to the kind of life for which they were designed. If that appears a little unfair let me put it in another way. Professor Rasmussen sees life, it seems to me, as inexhaustibly different and varied, which is true enough; but he does not draw the necessary distinction between what, in the inexhaustible pageant of culture, is a valuable expression of real life and what is merely a stultifying ritual. And at times he is satisfied with and praises architecture which is only the ritual, the facade, instead of the embodiment of a living idea. He cannot say that the ritual architecture of old Peking or of Versailles is unbearably repressive, or that the Spanish Steps in Rome are grandiose and mundane. This is a weakness in a man who sees the task of architecture to be that of bringing “order and relation into human surroundings”. And this is the second danger of this book. For this is a large aim and I feel a mistaken one. We must be aware of the limitations of architecture. It is a truism to say that good buildings alone are not an assurance of contented people and happy lives. It is not perhaps such a truism to say that to impose a false sense of order upon people, an order they do not understand, is to ask for swift revenge. Many architects find out too late what the people who are put to live in them will do to the formal layouts that look so impressive on the drawing-board. We are mostly humane enough now to know that the solution is not a return to the concept of the barrack-room—“they can’t damage this!” But we must also escape from the idea of imposing the order of an architectural formality based upon the existing social patterns and class ideals. I suspect that Professor Rasmussen is unconsciously expressing the emergence of a truly new conception of architecture in his occasional comparisons of baroque and modern. This is not a retreat from “functionalism” into a new “style”. Functionalism should—as I understand it—be able to embody the living culture of the old society, the new ideas and needs that are arising, in buildings that can freely, undogmatically, without the necessity of formal order, express this superabundant life. But this can only happen so long as the architect himself has ideals of what social life can and should be firmly embedded in his own consciousness, and if he is artist enough to be able to express them. The real fact about “good” architecture (especially good housing, but it also applies to more standard forms of building such as offices) is that people always recognise when a building or a housing scheme has been designed with this kind of feeling—a feeling for people and for living needs, not for shapes on the drawing-board or ideas of community culled from the latest sociological study. The only “order” is then the underlying feeling for what life can be in the present; this is the only “order” which will ever make architecture live. The difference between formal “order” and this other concept, to return belatedly but necessarily to buildings, is the difference between the winning design for Churchill College, Cambridge, and the scheme placed second by the judges.

P. M. Aldis







Trade Unions and the Government,

by V. L Allen, Longmans, 35s. DR. ALLEN writes in a dry, flat, matter-of-fact style, oddly reminiscent of Lord Attlee’s. There are occasions, such as the 1921 Coal Dispute or the 1926 General Strike, when this heightens the drama of his narrative. Elsewhere the unadorned, almost colourless prose makes needlessly heavy going of the intricacies of collective bargaining or of labour relations in nationalised industries. The book deals with the relationship of trade unions to the central government in Britain in an attempt to assess their influence and power. The author exercises a masterly control over his facts, and carefully cultivated legends about the irresponsible power of trade union oligarchs will not survive a study of his evidence. Under Conservative governments, the unions’ influence on legislation is marginal and with Labour in power it is sometimes even less than that. Indeed, the uneasiness of the relationships between Labour ministers and their industrial allies is still, after four Labour governments, one of the dozen major unsolved problems of the British working class movement. Like so many assiduous research workers, Vic Allen sometimes suffers from the defects of his merits. He tends to ignore the realities of power in favour of the constitutional and procedural formalities in which they are cloaked. While influence is an elusive concept, power is not. It depends upon the possession of sanctions. Trade unionists have two—the ability to vote and the ability to strike. So long as the Labour Party remains a possible alternative government and while the general level of employment remains high, trade unions wield a great deal of negative power. They can hardly hope to sponsor pieces of class legislation as blatant as—for example—Commercial Television or the Town and Country Planning Act of 1958. But they have so far successfully blocked proposals for worsening their own legal status, while attacks on the social services have been delayed by the probability that they would provoke vigorous compensatory wage claims. In rightly demonstrating the inability of the unions to exercise much direct

influence on legislation, while neglecting their considerable negative powers, Vic Allen presents too gloomy a picture of the prevailing balance of class forces. One could question, too, the author’s treatment of the political element in strikes. He is right to show the negligible importance of political strikes in Britain’s industrial history. But when the workers in a nationalised industry go on strike against the consequences of Government policies, it is hardly possible to keep political factors out of the campaign. Allen criticises, by implication, the leaders of the London Bus Strike in 1958 for “mixing their industrial claims with political issues”. Yet the miners and railwaymen are now facing the threat of decentralisation. While this can be presented as a matter of economic and political policy, it can also affect the wages of a million workers. If the NUM and the NUR decide to throw their full weight against the change, it will hardly be possible to avoid the “mixing” which Allen appears to deprecate. This is a valuable book because it provokes more questions than it answers, because it gives rise to a discussion of neglected topics and because, above all, it provides so many of the facts which we must have if our “new thinking” is to become more than a joke gone sour.

Henry Collins

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letter to readers WE HAVE had a steady flow of comments from readers and critics on Out of Apathy, and particularly Edward Thompson’s Chapter on “Revolution” (NLR 3). He will discuss some of the points raised, and develop the theme in a follow-up essay in our next issue. In the meanwhile, the second in the series of New Left Books will be out later this year. This will be Irving Howe’s excellent study, Politics And The Novel, which has received a good deal of critical attention in America, but has not previously been published in this country. Howe’s book begins with the arresting quotation from Stendhal: “Politics in a work of literature is like a pistol shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar, and yet a thing which it is not possible to refuse one’s attention”. He pursues this theme through several detailed and sympathetic studies of Stendhal’s own Red And The Black, Dostoevsky, Conrad, James, Malraux, Silone, Keostler and Orwell. This is an extremely provocative book, and the relationship between politics and literature is brilliantly handled. We are pleased to have the book in our series, and we hope readers will enjoy it. In the meanwhile, two new books written specially for the New Left series are already on the stocks for early next year: a book on Advertising And Society edited by Raymond Williams, and Michael Barratt Brown’s Imperialism Yesterday And Today, which is the basis for the essay on Imperialism published in this issue. Somewhere in the back rooms, John Hughes is preparing a manuscript for us on Nationalisation and Social Ownership, David Ross is ransacking the files for a History of the Cold War, and Paddy Whannel and Graham Martin are pasting up filthy pictures for a book on The Visual Persuaders! * * * Now that the Left Clubs are better organised and stronger, they are planning the steady production, over the year, of a series of pamphlets, aimed at particular targets, but written for a wide and differing audience. Some of these will be informative—a pamphlet on What Is The New Left, and a pamphlet on Why You Should Be A Socialist In The Sixties (especially for use among Young Socialists and younger people) are already in preparation. Several of the Left Clubs have been doing detailed work in Study Groups—Nottingham has framed an exciting and challenging scheme for comprehensive education in Nottingham, Edinburgh has made a detailed study of Central African Federation, the London Club has done important work in Notting Hill and on Education; and all of these deserve to be written up and more widely circulated. There is talk of a pamphlet on the New Towns by the New Left Club in Stevenage and the VFS group in Harlow. Indeed, it would be quite feasible for the London Club, say, to launch a campaign—A London Project, if you like—based on a series of pamphlets on the “affluent issues”—housing, municipalisation, rents, comprehensive planning,

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traffic and transport, etc.—which could be used to rally Left Clubs and Constituency Parties in a Campaign For Local Socialism which would put some heart back into depressed Labour minorities on Tory Councils, and some fire beneath the seat of complacent Labour majorities on Labour Councils. Given the present discontents about traffic or education or speculative building, such a Project could rouse immense support from the condemned and the apathetic. * * * The Northern Regional Committee of Left Clubs, anxious to pick off, one by one, the flabby Southern metropolitan intellectuals, proposed that the Editor and volunteers from NLR should be drafted into Scarborough for the Labour Party Conference, to produce a daily news-sheet—The Week With The New Left?—of the momentous events. The idea was that the Editor should be installed, with a delapidated duplicator, in the window of a prominent coffee-bar, and made to produce a stinging indictment of Reformism with every sip of his expresso. Provincial readers will be happy to know that the scheme—in a somewhat modified form—is actually to take place. Volunteer troops will arrive, with duplicating paper, in Scarborough on Saturday, and set up camp in suitably central quarters. The Left Clubs Committee are preparing a special brochure, describing the work and aims of the Left Clubs and NLR, which will be given away to delegates to help spread the word. A daily edition of NLR—special Conference issues—will be published, and we are anxious to have teams of helpers to supply us with those interesting tit-bits from the Compositing Room, and to assist us produce and distribute the libellous sheet. We hope that Left Clubs in the area will make a special effort to bring a contingent and a Club banner in to Scarborough for the CND March and Demonstration on the Sunday preceding the Conference, and stay around to watch the fireworks. Typists, expert duplicators, accredited news-vendors, urgently required. Seriously, if you are going to be in Scarborough as delegate or “visitor”, please make sure you find out early where the People’s League For The Defence of A New Left Press has established its GHQ. This may be the last Conference which you have a chance to attend: by next year, you may need a do-it-yourself atomic stockpile and a year’s subscription to Encounter or The Spectator to get within spitting distance of the National Executive . . . * * * Contributors to NLR 5: C. Wright Mills, who is working on a study of the Soviet intelligensia, is probably at this moment taking socialist greetings to Castro in Havana . . . David Riesman, sociologist and author of the extremely popular book, The Lonely Crowd, is now teaching Social Sciences at Harvard . . . his co-author, Michael Macoby has taught at both Harvard and Chicago . . . their article was prepared for a collection of Essays entitled The Liberal Papers and originally appeared in the American journal Commentary . . . Kenneth Rexroth, distinguished poet, has been both mentor and critic of the “beat” generation . . . his article was written on the basis of an extensive tour of American universities . . . Judith Hart is an MP for Lanark . . . Eric Heffer is a leading Liverpool socialist, and has been Chairman of the Liverpool Trades Council . . . John Keenan is a Fife Miner, and a member of the Fife Socialist League . . . R. W. Davies lectures at Birmingham and Harry Hanson at Leeds . . . Mike Rustin is, among other things, secretary of the Oxford Labour Club.