Seeking a 'different reality principle'

The Rotten Elements was the second part of the trilogy of autobiographical novels that Edward Upward called The Spiral Ascent. Published in 1969, the novel looks back to the late ‘40s, when Upward and his wife Hilda were driven out of the Communist Party of Great Britain because of their hostility to key policies adopted by the party leadership at the end of World War Two. The Upwards were hostile to the party’s post-war programme, The British Road to Socialism, because it claimed that the revolution could be achieved peacefully through parliament, and they were sympathetic toward the government of Yugoslavia, which had broken from the orbit of Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1948.

The Rotten Elements is perhaps most remarkable for the sheer dourness of the prose in which Upward tells his all-too-familiar story of dissent and bureaucratic excommunication. The man who helped to bring surrealism into British literature with the wild stories of his youth fills this novel of his middle age with plodding compound sentences and banal imagery. He deliberately avoids sensationalising his story, passing over several opportunities to stage dramatic confrontations. Upward refuses to simplify or even summarise the controversies in his novel, and is thus forced to subject readers to page after page of explanation of the minutiae of Communist Party politics. Scenery is avoided: almost all of the action – I use that word guardedly – of the novel takes place in meeting rooms and shabby working class homes. (Upward does allow his characters a visit to the seaside near the end of the book, when all the important events in his narrative have already occurred.)

Like Orwell’s 1984, which shares some of its targets, The Rotten Elements can be read today as a portrait of the run-down, austere Britain of the years immediately after World War Two. Rationing remained in force, rubble still lay in the streets, and nobody could have anticipated the long economic boom that lay ahead. For many readers, though, The Rotten Elements symbolises the damage that Edward Upward’s political commitments did to his writing. The swirling fantasies that had inspired Auden and Isherwood in the 1920s and ‘30s had been replaced by a dour, didactic realism, as the apolitical public school aesthete had given way to the convinced Marxist.

And yet The Rotten Elements and The Spiral Ascent did not mark the end of Upward’s development as a writer. In a series of novellas and short stories published in the 1980s and ‘90s Upward brought the two previous phases of his career together to create a very English instantiation of magical realism. Late Upward stories like ‘An Unmentionable Man’ and ‘The Coming Day’ are characterised by carefully controlled but nevertheless unnerving transitions from almost naïve political tubthumping to intricately described fantasy:

Mary often daydreamed of a future in which all discrimination against women was brought to an end. When her three children were grown up and had left home she felt she had the time and the duty to do something to help the cause of women's 'liberation'. She found several local women who were willing to co-operate with her in arranging public meetings. Their heroine was Mary Wollstonecraft, who wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women.
Andrew was entirely in favour of Mary's work, but he thought he'd better not show this, because some patients if he did might suspect him of caring a bit less for them than for politics.

And what about Clem Marsden? Did he still say wars would go on till most humans were extinct? Yes, but his wife found out he was daydreaming of being in a space vehicle travelling far faster than light and arriving outside the supposedly finite 'universe' at a place where life existed in a physical form much less disadvantaged than the human body, and where he would be far happier than he ever could have been on earth.

At the age of 103, Upward has outlived famous friends like Auden, Isherwood, and Spender, and it is beginning to look like his work might outlive some of their productions, too. Where The Spiral Ascent was ignored by most critics, the late stories have garnered considerable attention, most it favourable.

Perhaps more significantly, a gang of Bolshie young British writers have set up an online journal and blog named after Upward’s most austere novel. The co-founder of the journal, who goes by the name 'the poet duster' (what does his mother call him?), explains the connection:

I started reading Edward Upward in 1997. He wrote a book called The rotten elements. Bits of him are in us, but probably more me. He’s still alive in a nursing home. The Guardian wrote nice things about him being friends with Isherwood and Auden but they don’t know. The ‘rotten elements’ were the pus, the canker in the Communist Party 1950s-style. They sat in meetings and said the wrong things. They asked too many damn questions. They fucked it up. Upward had tried. Cauterised himself. Fred West patio over surrealist corpse. Zhdanov jelly-tot for kiddies. Joined the Communist Party to escape from suicide because couldn’t write but ends up with nervous breakdown from Communist Party that wouldn’t let him write. So if you want threads for us, you can find them here in abundance. The rotten elements live to write another day while it all hangs in the balance as the left puts another gang of surrealists on the gibbet. I went to a Communist Party meeting last week. I said the words “Jimmy Saville will be fucked”. Peck my eyes out now.

I'm not sure I understand all that, but I think the title of the journal is appropriate: like Upward, the proprietors of The Rotten Elements are asking important questions about the relationship between politics and art. The journal’s homepage poses the question: ‘Art and revolutionary politics – married, single, or divorced?’, and asks each visitor to provide an answer, ‘in the form of a critique, a poem, a play, a story, photoshopped, a rant, a film, sound paintings…’

In a recent article for The Rotten Elements, Lawrence Palmer ventures his own answer to the question by discussing Land and Freedom, Ken Loach’s 1995 film about the experiences of British fighters in the Spanish Civil War. Parker’s article, which was also published in a recent issue of the Weekly Worker, argues that Loach produced a historically accurate film that works strongly on viewers’ emotions, but which lacks intellectual depth:

[W]hen I get down to analyse exactly why I like this film, I find that it appeals to my emotions. In other words, its reception primarily revolves around a spontaneous reaction...Land and freedom is...a film that brilliantly constructs a series of spontaneous outbursts of emotion - reaching through its characters and on to its audience - beneath a surface veneer of revolutionary politics. As indicated above, this either (cynically) suggests that Loach (just re-elected onto Respect’s national council) and scriptwriter Jim Allen know the contemporary left rather well and are feeding it what it wants to see; or, more probably, that Loach’s art is the product of this background.

Incidentally, no one is suggesting that anger, emotion and gut feeling are not important in changing the world. But if they are an overriding motive for action, they become abstract, brittle and burnt-out (as with the Socialist Workers Party, which has to cope with this lack of intellect by cynically inventing its own and others’ self-righteous ‘anger’ at whatever the government is doing this week). Emotion only truly becomes a force when it is riddled with pertinent questions.

Reading these words we may recognise the same dilemma that Edward Upward tried to face up to in The Rotten Elements. We might perhaps see Upward’s novel and Loach’s film as offering opposite – and oppositely flawed – solutions to the problem of how to bring the difficult and dense world of political analysis and debate into artforms which have traditionally relied on dramatic action and sensual detail for their success. To put it more bluntly: how can one make a film or write a book about politics without either patronising or boring the audience?

Of course, the increase in apathy and decline in the sophistication and scope of even bourgeois political discourse since the end of the Cold War makes the task of politically committed artists like Upward, Loach, and Parker even harder, because it means that audiences will have even less interest in ‘political lectures’. In a review of The Wind that Shakes the Barley, Loach’s recent movie about the Anglo-Irish and Irish Civil wars, the New Zealand Herald’s Peter Calder takes Loach to task for putting too little emotion into his art. Calder bemoaned what he considered an excess of political detail in the film, picking out a scene where characters thrash out their political differences in a meeting room as a low point of the film. For Parker, a similar scene was a high point of Land and Freedom:

The difference with this passage is that it is one of the few parts of the film that is intellectually compelling, as we hear the arguments for and against collectivisation - it basically boils down to the issue of whether the protagonists are for or against revolution. The decision for collectivisation carries the viewer, because Loach makes us feel that it is the outcome of a living process, a debate, where difficulties have been looked squarely in the face. Yes, the actors are impassioned in the debate, but this passion feeds off their intellectual coherence and vice versa.

It seems to me that both Lawrence Parker and the Edward Upward of The Rotten Elements have been victims of an unrealistic conception of the relationship between art and politics. Both seek the fusion of the discourse of politics and the discourse of art, without asking whether that fusion is either possible or desirable in the world they inhabit.

In The Aesthetic Dimension, his last and best book, Herbert Marcuse argued that the fusion of politics and art was a fool's game, and a dangerous one at that. Marcuse inveighs against any form of 'socialist' realism, insisting that art should always be out of sync with reality, because it showed up the gap that exists between our real lives and the lives we can imagine living. This gap is the place where a critique of reality, including the reality of capitalist society, can begin:

art is 'art for art's sake' inasmuch as the aesthetic form reveals tabooed and repressed dimensions of reality: aspects of liberation. The poetry of Mallarme is an extreme example; his poems conjure up modes of perception, imagination, gestures - a feast of sensuousness which shatters everyday experience and anticipates a different reality principle.

Or, as EP Thompson was known to say, 'a poster and a painting are two different things'. A lot of the writing in The Rotten Elements seems to rely on 'a different reality principle'. With its lower case fetish and fast unpunctuated lines, the poetry of Anne Eade recalls the work of earlier Brit scribblers like Tom Raworth and Bob Cobbing, but activists and hapless postgraduate students unfamiliar with avant-garde lit will be able to identify snatches of the sacred texts of Marx and Lenin:

thought a war machine minces inorganic state
act rushes empty secret distinct intuition
apercus cluster hollows force split from within
rational kernel from mystical shells
mothers teat forms a kind of crime whoosh
watch out fucking cynic statement
as he dies bomb barges in take the mask off
can’t hear you surgeon operates on private advantage
slum drives optimistic imperialism eclipse of reason
basically on our side that is all
we should expect explosive young men
recruit powder kegs exploding fellows
who follow demolition experts
empires twinned prophylactic
tears tiers of vivid excess cognition
between you & me today utter instant
fuck nose trumpet in ear wakes up daddy
as he rolls off mummy
brain picked fundamental multinational entry
into national back waters
the cut & thrust ripped up cordoned off
hairy arsed hybrid overload
motherload rimes polonium life

One problem with Marcuse's argument against realism is the way that it can be used to give automatic 'progressive' credentials to any artwork with a radical style or a fantastic setting. I think that some of the defences of the Lord of the Rings that have been discussed here recently make this mistake.

In the stories of his old age, Edward Upward seems to be searching for a balance between fantasy and realism. The juxtaposition of political polemic with outrageous fantasy discomforts the reader, and perhaps keeps Upward out of the pigeonholes that imprison more orthodox writers. The politics in Upward's late stories are there as part of the text - as an ingredient in the composition - rather than as some interpolated party political broadcast. In their different ways, both Upward's flights of imagination and his Marxist lectures must elude the comprehension of most of his potential readers. Placed alongside one another, though, they 'charge' each other, in the way that two individually incomprehensible lines in a poem can somehow resonate with one another, without exactly making sense. Ask Mallarme or Anne Eade how it happens.

Remembering Edward Upward

There has been a lot of debate on this blog lately about whether or not there is such a thing as a distinctively 'left-wing' form of culture. The life of Edward Upward, the English writer who has just died at the age of 105, suggests that there are no easy answers to this question. Upward studied at the same Cambridge college as Christopher Isherwood, and the two filthy-minded young men invented a violent, bizarrely erotic world called Mortmere, where all the pieties of the Home Counties were mocked. Although the many stories Ishwerwood and Upward wrote about Mortmere remained unpublished for decades, they were read in manuscript by WH Auden, who credited them with inspiring the disturbing portraits of 'England, this country where noone is well' in his poems of the early thirties.

By the time he had won a cult folowing as a homegrown surrealist, Upward had come into the orbit of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which had by the mid-thirties embraced a set of moderate 'Popular Front' policies and begun to sell itself to intellectuals as a supporter of the arts and the guardian of the best parts of Britain's cultural heritage in an era of philistine capitalism and nihilistic fascism. Many of the intellectuals who were drawn towards the party's pose as a defender of civilisation against barbarism were fairly quickly disillusioned, but Upward was soon far more than a 'fellow traveller'. In his 1937 essay 'Sketch for a Marxist Interpretation of Literature', the young communist advocated the strict subordination of art to politics: only by serving the party and the proletariat could the writer prosper.

Upward himself published nothing literary between 1938 and 1962, when the first volume of his autobiographical trilogy of novels The Spiral Ascent appeared. He appears to have stopped writing altogether in the forties, when he frequently felt uncomfortable with the direction in which the Communist Party was moving. In 1948 Upward and his wife Hilda left the party, after accusing it of abandoning Leninism. The Upwards were unhappy that the party had renounced the notion of seizing power by force. The Spiral Ascent was followed by a trickle of short stories in the eighties, nineties, and noughties, and by the time he turned one hundred in 2003 Upward was being hailed as 'Britain's oldest living writer'.

As someone who admires writers who are unable to toe party lines, I'm honoured to find that the obituary for Upward in the present-day Communist Party of Great Britain's paper includes a lengthy criticism of me. The Weekly Worker's Lawrence Parker doesn't agree with some remarks I made in a review of The Rotten Elements, a literary grouping inside today's Communist Party which takes its name from the second instalment in The Spiral Ascent trilogy. In my review, which appeared on this blog and in the 36th issue of the literary journal brief, I contrasted the dour realism of The Spiral Ascent with the wild and weird Mortmere stories, and suggested that the two styles are brought together in an effective way in Upward's late work. Parker thinks I have missed a strong undercurrent of surrealism in The Spiral Ascent:

Hamilton (who should really know better) has, I think, been misled by a very traditional ‘leftist’ mistake. A surface of politics has been perceived, and as this surface is unattractive to the interlocutor, there is then the attempt to read from this a set of aesthetic judgements. What, after all, could be worse than “page after page of explanation of the minutiae of Communist Party politics”. And, in reality, the book is full of terse confrontations between revolutionaries and CPGB leaders, and rank and filers who want to defend the party’s reformism.

The point that struck me first on reading this is that Hamilton had read a different book. Where in all this is the developing paranoia and claustrophobia, the nightmare world of the CPGB bureaucracy and the struggle for an aesthetic relevant to a party that can only think in terms of deadening abstractions? By my judgement, The rotten elements is possibly the weirdest (and most remarkable) political novel ever produced...

Upward’s poetic imagination, seen through the eyes of his semi-fictionalised self, Alan Sebrill, constantly threatens to overturn the lead character’s Zhdanovite denial of an aesthetic in the cause of writing a political poem for the CPGB. Thus, in the first chapter, which begins after a CPGB branch discussion on Lenin’s State and revolution, there is an intensification of the narrator’s intimate perceptions of the view from his back garden, which he eventually sees as a “huge illuminated stage on which episodes from the days when his imagination had been creatively awake were about to be re-enacted”...The rotten elements is thus the heir of Mortmere and the interpreter ignores this at his or her peril.

Whereas I prefer the stories of Upward's last decades, Parker thinks that The Spiral Ascent is the apex of his achievement. But I enjoy some of the very qualities that Parker dislikes in the late stories - the slightly awkward way realism and fantasy are mixed, the unconvincing nature of some of the author's attempts at political self-justification, and Upward's bouts of wish-fulfilment (in one story the narrator escapes from a home for the aged and infirm, and after a series of lucky accidents takes up with a nubile young woman who suffers from gerontophilia). For me, a large part of the appeal of Upward's late work comes from the failure or refusal of the author to integrate his imagination and his political sympathies.

Perhaps the lesson of Edward Upward's long life is that there is a danger in trying to turn aesthetics into a political programme with the sort of dogmatic statements that mar 'Sketch for a Marxist Interpretation of Literature'. Art, by its very nature, is always opposed to such dogmas. The imagination can't be bound by political prescriptions - it has to have the freedom to wander where it wants. The artist should be like Shakespeare's clown - an odd man (or woman) out, not a follower.

Better late than never?

From some news report lost in cyberspace...

"Better late than never: aged 101, Edward Upward has been awarded the Royal Society of Literature's Benson Medal, in recognition of a lifetime's service to literature. Upward was the inspirational "fourth man" in the group that also boasted Auden, Isherwood and Spender. He was, like them but more durably, radicalised by the 1930s. Together, Upward and Isherwood invented the surreal imaginary world of "Mortmere", as featured in the former's The Railway Accident and the latter's Lions and Shadows. His autobiographical trilogy of novels, The Spiral Ascent, shows why he moved left and stayed there. More recent work, which includes memorable short stories, has been published by Enitharmon Press. Previous recipients of the medal include Tolkien, Burgess and Strachey."

And now he even has his own page at wikipedia!

More on the Shore

My proposal for a Community Ed course on North Shore writing and history has been given the green light, subject to enrolment levels. One of the purposes of the course is to continue the canonisation of Jack Ross, one of the finest North Shore scribblers of his generation and a man who has bought me a good many drinks over the years. Here's an essay on Jack and North Shore lit which was published in brief last year, and which I'm sure I'll end up cannibalising for the Community Ed course.

After the Golden Weather: Jack Ross and the New North Shore

Monkey Miss Her Now, Jack Ross, Danger Publishing, 2004

Jack Ross is a Shore Boy. The blurb on the back of his fabulously rare first collection, City of Strange Brunettes, tells us that he ‘grew up in Auckland’s East Coast Bays, where he continues to live’, and Monkey Miss Her Now hits the bookshelves at the same time as Golden Weather, an anthology of North Shore writing he has co-edited with Graeme Lay.

The Shore is a strange place. The golden sand, pohutakawas, and island views of those East Coast Bays are still keeping bad watercolourists busy, but the vistas looked prettier thirty or forty years ago. Sargeson and his acolytes colonised a Ruritarian paradise, but for more than three decades the Shore has been a developer’s dream, one of the fastest-growing parts of New Zealand.

Jack’s home suburb, Mairangi Bay, offers an especially sharp lesson in the dialectics of development. Thirty years ago it was a hippy paradise, complete with dirt roads and fields of mushrooms. In the eighties the hippies became yuppies, swapping Values for Lange-Labour, and potholed right-of-ways for smooth concrete drives. Today’s boom town is nearby Albany, where streets lined with half-built houses make for a boy racer’s paradise at night.

It is possible to argue that, in the very extremity of the juxtapositions it now presents, the North Shore exemplifies changes seen across New Zealand society over recent decades. In his introduction to the poetry section of Golden Weather, Jack talks about the ‘two sides’ of the Shore – the fragments left over from a ‘golden, relaxed, Mediterranean’ age, and the ‘coarseness’ and ‘realism’ of the new ‘mortgaged suburbs of modern homes’. Most of the writers in Golden Weather are noticeably keener on the Old Shore – at least, when choosing their subject matter, they prefer baches and fresh-caught snapper to boy racers and concrete drives. Frank Sargeson, the godfather of them all, waged a famously stubborn rearguard action against the New Shore, refusing to abandon his Takapuna bach to an advancing motorway.

Today Sargeson’s home stands as a sort of monument to the Old North Shore, mocked by the hiss and roar of a nearby on-ramp. Many of the stories and poems in Golden Weather make a similar stand. In the anthology’s first piece of prose, for instance, Michael King grits his teeth and turns his back on the ‘nascent urban centre’ of Browns Bay, with its ‘seven banks and seven real estate agents’, and comforts himself with the indifference of the sea. It seems a remarkably nihilistic gesture, from a man so identified with a feel-good flavour of liberal nationalism, until one realises that the whole aesthetic of the Defiant Old North Shore – of snapper caught beside rush-hour traffic, and remembered baches blotting out beachfront apartments – is predicated upon a fear and loathing of most of the real inhabitants of the New North Shore.

I wish that Jack and Graeme had thrown a few of the stories in Jack’s book into their anthology, because Monkey Miss Her Now is a determined attempt to come to grips with the place Michael King rejected. Jack’s unusual achievement is to treat the subject matter of this ‘new’, if not improved, New Zealand – language schools, suburban swing parties, boy racers, text message pests, and the rest – using a style and sensibility that hark back to the ‘classical’ New Zealand literary tradition that the best writers of the Old Shore did so much to establish. Sargeson has left his bach-fortress, forded that motorway off-ramp, and discovered a strange new world.

Admittedly, there are no concrete drives or boy racers in ‘Robinsonade’, the first story in Monkey Miss Her Now. Jack offers us, instead, a resourceful castaway, on a well-resourced tropical isle – building blocks, one might think, for a classical adventure story. On Jack’s isle, though, nothing happens. The tokens of Crusoe’s industrious self-improvement – the raft, the vegetable plot, the windmill, the hut – are judged ‘singularly futile and pointless’, and the closest we get to Man Friday is a rather diffident ghost. Like Valery and Wittgenstein before him, Jack has created his Crusoe not to justify a plot, but dramatise certain traits of the human beings who live inside a real society. Crusoe is isolated in the way that a scientist’s sample is isolated. His sense of boredom and futility is all the more affecting, because it seems to have its source in something deeper than mere loneliness. Reading this Crusoe’s response to a random epistle from the offshore world, we sense that his isolation is existential, as much as geographical:

This morning, walking on the beach, I found a little glass bottle...As I had hoped it contained a note...Why did it anger me so much, I wonder? Was it the idea that of all the people in the world, I should pick up a portion of this one’s private correspondence? The triviality, the banality of it all! Why should anyone even dream of writing such a letter?

In the first volume of Edward Upward’s trilogy The Spiral Ascent, the protagonist leaves his job and settles on the Isle of Wight, determined to live the perfect ‘poetic life’ in seclusion. All too soon, though, he becomes tormented by a feeling of futility, and decides to jump off one of the island’s many cliffs. Only a decision to join the Communist Party and live a ‘meaningful’ (read: political) life keeps Upward’s hero in one piece. Jack’s Crusoe actually makes it off his cliff, but his ‘tentative crab-like tumble’ suggests that ‘my body, the house of my life’ has ‘decided to stay’. Jack’s resolution is less dramatic than Upward’s: ‘back to the kelp beds, I suppose’ is as much as he seems able to manage. This sort of dour stoicism belongs, of course, to Sargeson’s isolated anti-heroes.

‘Robinsade’ is a good introduction to Monkey Miss Her Now: its faux-exotic, almost abstract setting dramatises themes that will appear in more quotidian surroundings through the rest of the book. In the second story, 'ADIOS DOS', the theme of alienation relocates to an English language school, where a bereaved teacher’s exact observations of his surroundings only dramatise his emotional isolation. Jack weaves students’ exercises into his text with a sensitivity that recalls Michael Henderson’s anti-Vietnam war masterpiece Log of a Superfluous Son:

He is very kindly and friendly. Everyday he wears difference quite nice dress. He always wear a pair of nice glass. I think he is more tolerant person. Sometimes he likes sociable, but a lot of time he keeps his life alone. He is very knowledge.

Again and again, the protagonist of ADIOS DOS returns to a ravine that seems to symbolise his own wound. But the hole that Jack digs can’t offer the succour his hero requires:

[I]t was no friend of his. It was no friend of anyone’s. It was just a big black hole – a meaningless feature of the landscape.

Ultimately, ‘furniture, clothes, books’ and ‘a new living room purged of negative associations’ seem a better bet. (Perhaps some Walpole novels would look good on those shelves?) Jack’s theme may come straight from Sargeson, but the formal structure of 'ADIOS DOS' is far removed from the austere manner of Takapuna’s last horticulturalist. A better reference point is Sargeson’s one-time acolyte, Maurice Duggan, who lived for many years in Forest Hill, just a gentle stroll from Mairangi Bay. Written through the mists of morphine in the summer of 1974, Duggan’s late, great story ‘The Magsman Miscellany’ reads like a rough blueprint for the episodic, allusive, yet compulsively observant style of Monkey Miss Her Now.

The three pieces which follow ADIOS DOS – ‘Summer Tango’, ‘On Love’, and ‘Tahiti’ – push Duggan’s form to breaking point, coming close at times to collage. ‘Summer Tango’ and ‘On Love’ organise their fragments with overarching themes, while ‘Tahiti’ appears autobiographical. These stories’ cut and paste method helps Jack to make extensive use of what was once rather delicately called ‘vernacular language’.

But Jack’s dirty language often lies down beside highfalutin’ registers and references – the sort of stuff that’d make Jake Heke blush – so that we are aware of the author’s distance from his subjects. Is anyone else reminded of Sargeson, who sat alone in a corner of a 1930s pub, scribbling down and annotating ‘authentic working class dialogue’?

‘On Love’ and ‘Summer Tango’ are clever, and frequently entertaining, but they seem a retreat from the seriousness of ‘ADIOS DOS’. Is the real impetus for Jack’s writing being disguised here? Is the author valourising rather than exploring his alienation? In some of his other books Jack has given himself a sort of bumbling, pedantic ‘Doctor Watson’ persona, in an effort to dramatise the distance he feels from his subject matter. In Chantal’s Book, the cycle of poems issued last year by HeadworX, a pedantic narrator manages to erase the real personality of his girlfriend and ostensible subject by continually taking his eye off her to scribble learned and irrelevant notes. In the novel Nights with Giordano Bruno, Doctor Watson makes a rather awkward visit to Showgirls. The same comic persona can be found in ‘On Love’, and I am not sure whether he dramatises or trivialises the author’s alienation:

“We’re all hairdressers” they say, and start to rattle off names. There are five girls and one boy (his name you do catch). They’re all dressed alike, in black, and are probably around seventeen or eighteen, from what you can judge.
“Hey driver man, do you have a stereo?” You do, and turn it on to Classic Hits, indulging itself with Abba revivalism.
“Mind if we change the channel?” You don’t, particularly.

The most important text in Monkey Miss Her Now is ‘A Strange Day at the Language School’, which won Jack second place in Landfall’s 2002 essay competition. Jack’s dry observations of an outpost of Auckland’s flagship ‘postmodern industry’ are interrupted by the sudden death of one of his students, In-Jae Ra. I remember reading Michael Schmidt condemn Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’ for burying the real human being who was its ostensible subject under an avalanche of resonant obscurities, rhetorical sleights of hand:

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death

Reading these lines, I am lost in a verbal facility that exploits and obscures the tragedy Schmidt wants to remember. ‘A Strange Day’ takes a stand against such dishonesty, as Jack remains attentive to his own confusion, and to the limits of his empathy for a student he knew only fleetingly and superficially. He has no truck with easy eloquence, let alone easy answers:

It was a moment which called for something extraordinary from each of us, and afterwards it was impossible to know how well one had performed. Simple human gestures were what was required, yet they didn’t seem enough. The gulf between us and the students, between them and poor In-Jae, could not be bridged.

With its radical reticence, ‘A Strange Day’ shows Jack’s debt to the earlier generations of Shore Boys who occupy such canonical places in our literature. The ghost of Sargeson’s deeply feeling yet confused and inarticulate protagonists haunts Jack’s language school.

A highlight of the launch party for Monkey Miss Her Now was a generous and amusing talk by Roger Horrocks, who located Jack’s scribblings in the ‘exciting alt. lit tradition of local writing’. Horrocks’ opposition of ‘alt. lit’ to ‘mainstream literature’ took me back to Alan Loney’s theory of two warring and irreconcilable traditions of New Zealand writing – the one formally innovative, and influenced by American modernism and postmodernism, and the other local, parochial, and formally conservative. More than any other living writer, Jack Ross shows us the inadequacy of Loney’s schema. As postmodern as it is parochial, Monkey Miss Her Now drags a venerable tradition into the strange new worlds of twenty-first century New Zealand.

Slow reading, and slow tweeting

I've added a widget to the front page of this blog which shows my most recent posts to twitter, that overcongested superhighway of the internet.

I don't think that Michael Lambek has a twitter account. An anthropologist who divides his time between the London School of Economics and the University of Scarborough, Lambek has written an essay for Savage Minds to lament the decline of 'slow reading' in twenty-first century universities. Lambek argues that many of today's students are either struggling with or avoiding altogether the heavy and heady books that excited earlier generations of scholars.

Lambek explains that, in many anthropology departments, instructors have stopped prescribing classic texts of ethnography, or else have offered these works to students in measured doses. EE Evans-Pritchard's Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Amongst the Azande, for example, is given in an abridged paperback edition. Distracted by social media and other epiphenomena of our digital age, students apparently find it difficult to penetrate the forests left behind by scholars like Evans-Pritchard and Malinowski. They cannot do the sort of careful, reflective reading that generates ideas and helps get essays written.

Lambek blames not only social media but the 'substitution of images for text' for the decline in students' reading. He notes that many students are now more accustomed to powerpoint displays, with their reassuringly steady flow of easily identifiable images, than to purely verbal seminars and lectures. The 'traditional classroom arts' of 'listening and note-taking' are, he fears, disappearing.

When I feel the same sort of melancholy as Lambek, I try to banish it by visiting Hookland, the twitter feed run by David Southwell, a British journalist known for his interest in conspiracy theories, gangsters, and the Angry Brigade. Southland's tweets pose as despatches from a sort of alternative England, a place of restless gargoyles, blood-stained power pylons, babbling vicars, and overfriendly UFOs. Like Mortmere, the alt-England invented by boarding schoolmates Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward in the 1920s, Hookland seems simultaneously celebratory and satirical.

I was excited when I discovered Southwell's tweets, because they suggested to me that twitter could be used to create mystery, and to detain a reader's attention, rather than as a lubricant for what Michael Lambek calls 'rapid fire and simultaneous online communication'.

Southwell's tweets frequently combine a text and an image, but the relationship of these parts is not always straightforward. Where the images in a powerpoint presentation normally exist as mere illustrations of the presenter's argument, the blurred or broken photographs, scraps of old maps, and covers of imaginary books that Southwell tweets often seem to contradict, or at least qualify, the lapidarian fragments of text that accompany them. In the space between their meanings an ambiguity alien to much of the twittersphere, but familiar to anyone who understands modernist and postmodernist poetry, appears and prospers.

Sometimes Southwell takes photographs of pages of books or magazines and posts them, alongside cryptic commentaries. Devoid of their contexts, these pages become artefacts that ask to be examined and catalogued. They can only be read slowly.

Hookland is an almost hermetic twitter feed. Its author never joins the high-velocity debates that regular shake the twittersphere, and seldom even acknowledges the twenty-first century world. And yet his tweets are often reposted scores of times. I'm obviously not the only one who thinks David Southwell is inventing a new artform, and suggesting a new and more intellectually important role for social media.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

Tomas holds his lead

Despite a charge by Harold Pinter, the Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer is holding on to his lead in our 'Greatest Living Writer' poll. John Ashbery, Margaret Atwood, and Bob Dylan are making respectable showings, Jack Ross has lost his mojo, JK Rowling appears to have attracted some pity votes, and one hundred and four year old Edward Upward is helping Stephen King bring up the rear.

What is the secret of Tomas' success? How has this retired psychologist, who writes sparingly in a minor European language, managed to overtake and then hold off some of the most glittering names in world literature, not to mention Jack Ross, who has apparently been buying beers for Richard Taylor in return for a daily vote?

I made a couple of tentative suggestions in an earlier post, but I think that this appreciation of one of Transtromer's poems probably gets to the heart of the man's appeal. The author of the appreciation is not some academic or professional writer, but simply a sufferer of that wonderful state of evangelism that great works of literature can inflict on readers. And as for the turkey who complained that the Transtromer piece being discussed is 'quite simply, not a poem', presumably because it is written in prose, all I can say is get with the programme, comrade! Baudelaire was writing poems in prose one hundred and fifty years ago!

Bad commies and good boys

I'm grateful to Mike Beggs for giving my book on EP Thompson a plug in Jacobin, an online journal of left-wing thought founded recently by a group of bright young students and academics in America, Britain, and Oz.

In his contribution to a survey of the reading habits of contributors to Jacobin, Mike confesses not only to consuming The Crisis of Theory, but to reading the excessively annotated selection of Kendrick Smithyman's poems that I brought out last year. EP Thompson always insisted that social scientists should be as interested in literature as they are in statistics, so he'd be delighted that a hardboiled Marxist economist like Mike was reading a notoriously recalcitrant poet like Smithyman.

My study of Thompson also rates a mention in the new issue of the Socialist Standard, the publication of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and its sister parties in various parts of the world. I had a bit of a crack at the Socialist Party a year or so ago on this blog, after encountering a wonderfully utopian piece of their propaganda in an old railway station on the bushy edge of Auckland. I objected then, and still object now, to the party's refusal to dirty its hands with involvement with any real-world political issues.

Where other Marxist groups, no matter how tiny and marginalised, tend to join in campaigns against war and imperialism and in favour of workers' wage and salary demands, the SPGB has earned itself the nickname 'the Small Party of Good Boys' by confining itself to calling in completely abstract terms for the replacement of capitalism by socialism.

The party's strategy, which it has pursued without noticeable success for more than a century, is to win workers over one by one to the cause of socialism, and to get them to vote for the SPGB in such numbers that parliament can pass some sort of legislation enabling the 'legal' dissolution of capitalism and the peaceful passing of the economy from the hands of the bosses to the hands of the workers. Any socialist organisation which rejects this rather utopian road to the future, and instead takes to the streets or the picket lines with anti-war demonstrators or striking workers, is denounced by the SPGB for 'reformism'.

During the short debate which followed my earlier crack at the SPGB, I noted that the party's sister organisation in New Zealand had refused to take part in the massive protests against the 1981 Springbok tour of this country. While tens of thousands of New Zealanders were putting their bodies on the line to stop a tour by the sporting representatives of apartheid, and inspiring the people of Soweto and the inmates of Robben Island with their courage, the SPGB's local followers published a denunciation of the 'reformism' of anti-apartheid protests.

The rather sniffy review of my book on Thompson in the new Socialist Standard reflects the same detachment from reality which kept the SPGB away from the action in 1981. The Standard's reviewer concedes that Thompson was a fine historian, but he can't forgive the great man for belonging to the Communist Party between 1942 and 1956:

Thompson's own politics however are less admirable. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1942 and was an active member until 1956 when he resigned as a result of the Russian military invasion of Hungary and Khrushchev’s 'secret speech' which denounced Stalin. To a significant extent, the rest of Thompson's political career can be seen as distancing himself from Stalinism. He later tried to justify his CP membership by claiming it was part of a 'Popular Front' against fascism. But Thompson did not appreciate that his CP membership would lend legitimacy to Stalin's reign of terror. His concern for the lives of ordinary workers did not extend to the Russian working class.

These charges seem to me unjust, because they do not take into account the context in which Thompson joined the Communist Party, and the reasons why he delayed leaving the organisation. Growing up in the 1930s, Thompson had seen the unwillingness of Britain and other Western powers to challenge fascism in Spain and Germany. While Thompson's friends went off to Spain to fight Franco's fascist insurrection, the British government refused even to sell arms to the country's Republican government.

The Soviet Union seemed to Thompson the only ally of anti-fascist fighters. Faith in the Soviet government's anti-fascist credentials might have been shaken by the Hitler-Stalin pact, but it was renewed in 1941, when the Soviet Union became the main front of the Second World War. Thompson fought fascism from the inside of a British tank in the last years of the war, but he knew that the defeat of Hitler was largely the work of the Soviets.

Thompson was disoriented by the beginning of the Cold War, and distressed by the increasingly heavy hand that Soviet bureaucrats laid on the British Communist Party in the late '40s. As he explained later, though, it was hard for him and for thousands of other young men and women to leave the organisation, because the communists seemed the only people in Britain willing to stand up for a range of vital causes.

It's easy to remember the depredations of Stalin in the 1940s and early '50s, but harder to remember that during the same period the British Empire was locking up thousands of political opponents in its far-flung and restive possessions, and fighting half a dozen small but dirty wars against local peoples who wanted to take down the Union Jack. For Thompson and for many other idealistic men and women, the Communist Party's steadfast and - in the imperial homeland at least - very unpopular stand against the British Empire was an inspiration. (For its part, the Communist Party of New Zealand was the only majority-Pakeha organisation to support tino rangatiratanga and Samoan national independence in the 1930s and '40s.) It is perhaps significant that Thompson's departure from the Communist Party came when the Soviet Union showed its own imperial, or at least expansionist, qualities by invading Hungary in 1956.

It is reasonable enough to criticise Thompson for his membership of the Communist Party. We might plausibly ask why he did not learn something from the Hitler-Stalin pact, or why he didn't follow Edward Upward and others out of the party in the late '40s, when Stalin was showing his true colours by purging Tito and the Yugoslavs from the Comintern.

To present Thompson as some sort of unthinking Stalinist simply because of his time in the Communist Party, though, is to miss the complex reasons people became communists, and the equally complex factors that kept them communists. It seems to me that the Socialist Standard's criticism of Thompson is as abstract and pedantic as its supporters' criticisms of the anti-apartheid campaigners of 1981.

The distinguished British historian and old friend of Thompson Penelope Corfield has written a long response to my book which will be published shortly in the online journal Reviews in History.

From Masada to Matakaoa: three notes on Paul Celan and Vaughan Rapatahana

1. A remote location? 

During her talk at the recent launch of Celanie, a volume of Jack Ross' translations of poems by Paul Celan, Michele Leggott praised Ross and his publisher, Pania Press, for 'airlifting' Celan to New Zealand.

Leggott's metaphor can be interpreted in at least two ways. We airlift personnel and supplies to disaster zones - to villages surrounded by floodwaters, for instance, or to listing ships. But we also airlift people and precious objects out of disaster zones - we helicopter fishermen off wrecks, and sacred icons out of besieged cities.

Michele Leggott didn't explain whether Celan was a precious piece of literary equipment, being flown to a New Zealand in need, or whether his poetry was being evacuated from Europe to this end of the world. What her image of an airlift undeniably evoked, though, was a sense of distance. Whether New Zealand is a place of safety or a zone of distress, it is, the image insists, remote from Europe, and from the world of Celan's poetry.

Paul Celan was raised in a German-speaking household in Bukovina, before the Shoah killed his parents and destroyed the region's Jewish community. He settled in Paris in 1948, and lived there until his suicide in 1970. Celan was a polyglot, but he always wrote his poetry in the German language, despite or because of the terrible events of the 1940s.

Celan's poems evoke not only the Shoah but the wider history of Europe. They allude to other great European writers, like Osip Mandelstam and Rainer Maria Rilke. It is natural, given all this, that Celan might seem like a writer whose concerns are remote from us here in the South Pacific.

The subject matter and texture of Celan's writing might seem to exacerbate the sense of his remoteness from us, and indeed from all his readers. Because his works deal with such extreme events, and use such fragmented, intense language, many literary critics, and a few philosophers as well, have avoided treating him as anything so commonplace as a poet. Charles Bernstein has warned of the consequences of secluding Celan in this way:

Perhaps the greatest risk for the reading of Celan in our time...is that we have venerated him, in the process of removing him not only from his own time and place, but also from our own poetic horizon. . . . [A] crippling exceptionalism has made his work a symbol of his fate rather than an active matrix for an ongoing poetic practice.

Underlying the view of Celan as a very unusual, perhaps incommensurable writer is the notion that the genocide the Nazis perpetrated against Jewry was an event completely unparalleled in human history. It would be wrong to deny the many unique features of the Shoah. The location of the genocide in Europe, the enormous resources devoted to the task, and the deliberate, calculating way in which death machines like Auschwitz operated - all of these were exceptional as well as terrible.

And yet there are many scholars who have found parallels between the Shoah and events in places distant from Europe during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In their recent books Hitler's Empire and "Exterminate All the Brutes", Mark Mazower and Sven Lindqvist argue convincingly that the Nazi conquest of Europe marked the irruption into the Old World of a violence that European powers had practiced for decades in their colonial possessions. In his passionate, precisely written book, Lindqvist showed that the dehumanising rhetoric of the Nazis echoed the discourse of colonial administrators in places like the Belgian Congo and German Namibia. Mazower documents Hitler's admiration for and envy of the British Empire, and shows how he dragged veterans of Germany's fin de siecle tropical empire out of retirement and put them in charge of swathes of Eastern Europe.

It would be very wrong, of course, to suggest that colonisation always involved genocide. The European acquisition of Africa, the Americas, much of Asia, and the Pacific was a long and uneven process, which involved many different strategies and produced widely differing outcomes. Here in the Pacific a single colonial power could behave very differently in different places, depending on its needs and on the situations it faced on the ground. France, for example, wiped out half of the indigenous population of New Caledonia and poured colonists into the territory, while at the same time running a low-profile, laissez-faire administration on the nearby islands of Wallis and Futuna.

Nor was the reaction of indigenous peoples to the coloniser always the same. Here in New Zealand some iwi, like Waikato, Atiawa and Tuhoe, resisted the invasion of their rohe and were expropriated, while others, like Ngati Porou, allied themselves with the expropriators and were able, through a mixture of cunning and luck, to hold most of their lands. No iwi suffered a fate as terrible as that of the Kanaks.

But qualifications like these should not stop us from recognising the links between colonisation and the machinery and ideology of genocide. If he were to turn his attention to New Zealand's colonial past, Sven Lindqvist would recognise the rhetoric of exasperated colonial politicians like Edward Traeger, who demanded the 'extermination' of recalcitrant Maori; the balmy predictions by pseudo-scientists like Ferdinand Hochstetter, who looked forward to the extinction of Maori; and the sinister talk about 'smoothing the pillow of a dying race' which became popular in late nineteenth century New Zealand, when the indigenous population was in temporary decline.

2. Drinking dirty water

In the 46th issue of the New Zealand literary journal brief, which was launched at the same time as Celanie, guest editor Bronwyn Lloyd has placed a poem by Vaughan Rapatahana directly before an essay by Jack Ross called 'Interpreting Paul Celan'. In 'he whatinga', which translated roughly as 'an escape', Rapatahana attacks the English language which his ancestors were obliged to learn during the colonisation of their rohe. Rapatahana calls English a 'hybrid bastard' tongue, which is incapable of expressing his thoughts and feelings:

with its preternatural
splays
of spelling
and stupidities
of 'style'

In the essay that follows Rapatahana's poem Jack Ross discusses the difficulties that Paul Celan had in expressing himself in the German language. After the Shoah, Celan once said, language seemed like the only part of his heritage which was unbroken. It was a link to the extinguished world of pre-war Bukovina, and to the poet's beloved mother and father. But German had also been the language of the men who had killed Celan's parents, and deported Bukovina's Jews.

The famous obscurity of Celan's poems comes partly from his mistrust of the language in which they were written. Celan had a fuming desire to write, and perhaps hoped by writing to make some sort of sense of the traumas of his youth. At the same time, he feared that by setting down words and lines and stanzas in a contaminated language he was falsifying or dishonouring his experiences, and the experiences of his people. Celan was like a man lost in a desert who came across a pool of filthy water. He had to drink, but feared that the deep, desperate draughts he took might kill him. To read the poems in Celanie, with their gnomic images, oxymoronic maxims, strange neologisms, and dizzyingly sudden line-breaks, is to see Celan both slaking his thirst and sickening himself:

If one of these stones could
let us know
what keeps it silent
here
near the old man's Zimmer-frame
it would open like a wound
into which one dives
alone
far from my voice
from all our redrafts
white

During his childhood in the 1960s, Vaughan Rapatahana attended schools where Maoritanga was a matter of indifference, if not contempt; as an adult, he has taught the Maori language in a series of schools and universities, and has argued aggressively for the importance of other Polynesian and Pacific languages. Rapatahana is one of the editors of English Language as Hydra, a new book in which a collection of anti-imperialist scholars berate the influence of English on their societies with a ferocity rarely encountered in academic texts.

Rapatahana's poems, which have been published in large numbers inside and outside New Zealand in recent years, are a mixture of elegy and invective. Even as he mourns whanau, friends, and old classmates who have suicided, taken up semi-permanent residence in prisons, or dedicated themselves to the harsh disciplines of alcoholism, the poet links these tragedies to the colonisation of his country in the nineteenth century, and to continuing indignities:

'typical bloody Maori'

she snitched,

assuming
me
one
of her kind:

'you don't look like a Maori'

her brazen
shibboleth,
when 
I protest...

she
didn't intuit

my 
own 
inner
tube,

swell
fulminating,

just
about
ready to rupture,

r e a c h   o u t

& strangle her
in irredentist fury...

And yet Rapatahana writes most of his poems in English, was awarded a PhD for a thesis on the massive oeuvre of Colin Wilson, the eccentric English mystic and novelist, and has, for the past few years, made a living teaching the hated English tongue to young Hong Kongers. Like Paul Celan, Vaughan Rapatahana is unwilling or unable to abandon the language he distrusts so intensely.

Rapatahana's tormented relationship with English is evident in the surfaces of the poems in his recent books Here, Away, Elsewhere and china as kafka. In his introduction to Home, Rapatahana says that his short, tight poems are 'an attempt to impose some form' on the 'massive chaos' of the world. A typical Rapatahana poem describes and discusses an experience concretely and rapidly, in lines that are rarely more than four syllables long. As he writes, Rapatahana frequently finds his feelings - his anger, his sadness, and sometimes his hope - chafing against his short lines. In apparent frustration, he begins to give words a bold type, or to capitalise them, or to tear them apart. Sometimes Rapatahana tries to make the shapes of his words embody their meanings. The letters of 'long-winded' are spaced out; the last letter of 'end' is capitalised. It is as though the poet is trying to break with language, and to communicate in some primordial and direct way with us.

Rapatahana has written often about his current life as an expatriate in China. Earlier New Zealand writers like James Bertram and RAK Mason reacted excitedly to China, seeing its vastness and wild complexity as a relief from the tight little towns of their homeland, but Rapatahana has found in the Middle Kingdom an elaboration of much that he detests about New Zealand. In the title poem of china as kafka he complains about the relentless brume/ of shale-shroud cities', and 'suited goons' who do the work of a neo-colonial gangster state, giving 'show trials/no trials' to ordinary Chinese who object to the theft of their land by mining companies and developers.

Bronwyn Lloyd's inspired juxtaposition of Rapatahana and Celan suggests new ways of reading both men. Instead of treating Celan as a poet sui generis, and a remote monument to a unique tragedy, we can perceive continuities between his work and that of an explicitly postcolonial writer like Vaughan Rapatahana. To say this is not to try to equate the lives and work of Rapatahana and Celan, or the colonisation of New Zealand with the imperialist rampages of Nazi Germany in 1940s Europe.

3. Fortresses and sieges

Neither Rapatahana nor Celan can ever take words or history for granted; both forsake the surface elegance and easy clarity that a more secure linguistic and cultural identity can give a writer. And yet there is a romantic strand in the poems of both men, a desire for security - personal, historical, linguistic - which is perhaps impossible. Celan and Rapatahana offer their readers symbols of safety and tranquility which stand like high islands above the storms of their texts.

Both poets celebrate territories which they believe offer sanctuary to their peoples. In a number of his later poems, Celan presented Israel, a nation he visited in 1969, as a site where Jewry could be saved and renewed. Celan was fascinated by Masada, the fortified rock where Jewish rebels had committed suicide en masse rather surrender to a Roman siege in 72 AD. When Israeli soldiers recaptured the Old City of Jerusalem during the Six Day War of 1967, Celan celebrated with a poem that invoked the ancient fort:

Imagine it:
Masada’s swamp soldier
hauling himself home
ineradicably
against the wire’s every thorn.

Imagine it:
the eyeless, the shapeless
rousing you to freedom
with their furious digging
until you strengthen
and rise.

Imagine it: your
own hand
has held a scrap
of earth,
more habitable, that
suffered upward again
into life.

Imagine it:
this was borne over to me —
a name awake, a hand awake
forever —
from the ones who will never be buried.

If Israel was the fortress of the Jewish people, then Masada was, for Celan, the fortress within the fortress. Its tragic history only seemed, in some mysterious way, to reinforce its inviolability.

Vaughan Rapatahana's sanctuary is the East Coast of Te Ika a Maui, where Te Whanau a Apanui and Ngati Porou have held most of their land, and the Maori language is still often heard in pubs and churches and at cattle sales. Although he lacks close blood ties to Ngati Porou, Rapatahana has bought a house in Te Araroa, a small town built where a gravel road turns off to the East Cape. In a comment on Reading the Maps, he explained that:

I also believe there are already semi-autonomous 'Maori states' anyway - Matakaoa [the district around the East Cape] and Urewera are just two examples - which is why my kainga is Te Araroa! Koro Dewes was never joking when he said there should be toll gates at the entry points up to the East Coast!

If the East Coast is Vaughan Rapatahana's fortress, the place of safety and beauty he counterposes with the chaos and ugliness of the wider world, then Whetumatarau, the mountain that stands over Te Araroa, is the fortress within his fortress.

Pressure from contending tectonic plates pushed Whetumatarau out of the Pacific, and the mountain's cliffs are sown with the fossils of vast extinct sea creatures. The pa on the summit of Whetumatarau was considered impregnable; any army trying to take it would have had to advance on its knees, in single file, up a crumbling parody of a track. Ngati Porou hapu from up and down the East Coast would shelter on Whetumatarau during wartime, and in 1821 hundreds of fighters and civilians took refuge there from Hongi Hika's fleet of musket-waving raiders. Rather than storm Whetumatarau, Hika pretended to retreat back up the coast, then slaughtered his enemies when they had deserted the safety of their pa.

For Rapatahana, Whetumatarua is a symbol of invulnerability and of cultural pride. In china as kafka, he juxtposes a tribute to the 'elemental.../ embedded inviolate' mountain with an account of a visit to the 'sagging...stuttered stone' known as Angkor Wat. Whereas Whetumatarau is pure and impregnable, the tourist-ridden, pockmarked Angkor Wat is a depraved place, both 'phallic' and impotent, self-aggrandising and violated.

There is irony in Celan's celebrations of Israel and Masada and Rapatahana's odes to the East Coast and Whetumatarau. The Israelis took control of Masada in a war which deprived another people, the Palestinians, of much of their rohe; Ngati Porou, the iwi Rapatahana idealises, fought with the Pakeha invaders of Aotearoa against more recalcitrant tribes.

Paul Celan did not live long enough to reflect on the wars Israel would fight after 1967, and the transformation of a nation founded as a sanctuary from colonial violence into a colonial power. Vaughan Rapatahana, the English-hating English teacher and anti-imperialist idealiser of a kupapa iwi, will have to deal with some of his contradictions in the years ahead. We should look forward to the next book from this difficult and important poet.

[Posted by Scott Hamilton]

EP Thompson, Marxism, Britishness, and missing footnotes

When it comes to academic writing I can be very lazy about references and footnotes. One of the advantages of putting a draft of a piece of work on a blog, then, is that sheer fear of being exposed as a purveyor of falsehoods will motivate me to check my references and write up my footnotes! That's the theory, anyway...This is the first half of a draft chapter from my thesis on EP Thompson. It takes the reader on a bit of a tiki tour, to use a Kiwi expression. There are some unresolved problems on show here - for example, there's my tendency to slide between the concepts of Englishness and Britishness, which is not such an easy thing to do when one is talking about EP Thompson. But, what the hell, it's a draft, and if it'll motivate me to write those damn footnotes...

EP Thompson, Marxism, and Britishness: part one


How British was EP Thompson?

In a letter he sent to the Times Literary Supplement last year, Peter Linebaugh criticised some recent interpretations of EP Thompson's life and work. 'Thompson is being recaptured by the establishment, and reinserted into a conventional English context' Linebaugh complained. On the face of it, Linebaugh's second charge might appear odd. EP Thompson was, after all, a scholar of English history and literature who spent most of his life in England, and became famous for his advocacy of what he considered distinctly English political, literary, and scholastic traditions. But Linebaugh's charge is not as quixotic as it might at first seem. By refusing the cliched view of the man he knew as a teacher and a friend, Linebaugh asks us to ponder the possibility of a more complex relationship between Thompson and his native country. And the longer we ponder it, the more problematic Thompson's 'Englishness', or for that matter 'Britishness', becomes.

Consider, for instance, the odd relationship between the subject matter of Thompson's major works of history and their critical reception. The Making of the English Working Class made Thompson an impressive reputation by mining new veins of English history, yet it has enjoyed more long-term influence overseas than it has in Britain. Thompson's immense popularity with historians, sociologists, anthropologists, geographers, and literary scholars in North America, South Asia, and parts of Africa belies the fierce particularism of The Making of the English Working Class and its successors. A useful contrast can be drawn with Eric Hobsbawm, another left-wing English historian to win a vast international audience. Unlike Thompson's works, Hobsbawm's ouevre treats aspects of the histories of many societies. Where Thompson used primary sources to delve into the minutae of often-forgotten aspects of eighteenth and nineteenth English history, Hobsbawm's histories typically rely upon the synthesis of an extraordinarily wide range of secondary sources. The international success of texts like Hobsbawm's A Short History of the Twentieth Century is far easier to explain than the rapturous reception that Thompson's excavations of obscure events in English history have received in faraway countries.

A similar paradox can be seen in Thompson's long career of political activism. Thompson tended to relate the political positions he took to a long tradition of 'radical dissent', and often compared the political struggles he was involved in to heroic parts of English working class and radical history. Yet Thompson was notably unsuccessful in his attempts to effect radical changes in British society. With the exception of a couple of years at the beginning of the '60s, he was unable even to gather a substantial local following for his 'distinctively British' brand of left-wing politics. He spent long periods feeling alienated from the British left, and and found himself unable to play a constructive role in the big political battles that shook his native country in the 1970s. But a lack of local success did not prevent Thompson's political ideas receiving wide circulation overseas. The leftist dissidents of Eastern Europe and Indira Gandhi's India often seemed more interested in Thompson's politics than either the British labour movement or Britain's left-wing intellectuals.

How can we explain these paradoxes in the reception of EP Thompson's work as a historian and as a political activist? Has Peter Linebaugh opened a can of worms with his unusual observation? In my view, some of the paradoxes in Thompson's relationship with Britain are rooted in much older contradictions. I want to try to put the problems we have been discussing into some sort of context by taking a sort of 'tiki tour' through the history of Marxism's often-troubled relationship with Britain and the British left.

Marx's Faustian Pact with Capitalism

Marx's relationship with the world's first industrial capitalist society was complicated. In some ways, the tensions in Marx's attitude towards Britain highlight the key unresolved tensions in his thought as a whole. In his entertainingly unsympathetic biogaphy of Marx, Robert Payne notes that one of his subject's favourite works of literature was Goethe's Faust. Marx could talk about the play endlessly, and when he was drunk he liked to disturb the other patrons of London bars by loudly chanting its lines in his 'rough, guttural, unlovely German'. It is easy to see how Marx might have been fascinated by the character of Faust, who makes a deal with the Devil in an effort to attain knowledge and power and change the world to his liking. For Marx - the pre-1871 Marx especially - capitalism was a Devil was both hated and necessary.

The contradictions in Marx's attitude to capitalism are perhaps most clearly evident in The Communist Manifesto, a work whose structure was modelled on Goethe's Faust. The Manifesto has often been remembered only for the rousing call to revolution in its final sentence, but its first few pages are devoted to a paean to capitalism. Marx and Engels see capitalism as an engine for progressive change - for drawing 'even the most barbarous of nations into civilisation' and abolishing 'the idiocy of rural life' - yet they also believe that, once established, it became an obstacle to historical progress. For the Marx of 1848, capitalism had strong positive as well as negative qualities. It was a necessary Devil.

When Marx arrived in London in 1850, Britain was the world's pre-eminent economic power, and the stronghold of the industrial revolution. Marx was the fleeing the failure of the so-called 'springtime of the peoples', a Europe-wide revolt by shifting alliances of capitalists, peasants, and plebians against some of the more obviously reactionary features of feudalism. The Communist Manifesto had related this revolt to the development of capitalism and the usurpation of old fedual classes by their capitalist offspring. Britain in 1850 was a much more capitalist society than Germany, or France, or Belgium. It had a far larger industrial sector and a more organised working class than any of these countries. It was not unreasonable, then, for Marx to see good prospects for social revolution in his new home. In the first decade of his residence in England, Marx made a string of optimistic pronouncements about both the English bourgeoisie and the English working class. But optimism gradually gave way to pessimism. Marx came to feel that the English bourgeoisie was incapable of confronting the backwardness that the incomplete revolutions of the seventeenth century had bequeathed to much of England and Britain's cultural and political superstructure.

Marx took longer to become disillusioned with the English working class. In the years after the foundation of the First International in 1864 he established close relations with some of the leaders of this class, and came to exercise a profound influence over one or two of them. The initial growth of the British section of the International encouraged Marx to believe that the local working class might become radicalised on a mass scale. In the late 1860s, though, the British section of the International stopped growing. Historians have argued that the extension of the voting franchise in 1867 and the positive report of a parliamentary inquiry into trade unionism in 1869 made many trade unionists believe that radicalism was unecesary in oursuit of their ends. In the 1870s a sustained economic upturn would reinforce this belief. In 1871, Marx was greatly angered by the failure of the English working class to act in solidarity with the Paris Communards. Shortly after the destruction of the Commune Marx effectively wound up the First International, and virtually retired from politial activism. He no longer held out hopes that working class revolution was in the offing in Britain or in the other advanced countries of Europe.

Disillusionment with the Devil

It can be argued that the 'failure' of the English bourgeoisie and more importantly the English working class to live up to Marx's expectations helped to create a crisis in his thinking in the years after 1871. Between 1871 and 1883 Marx published little, despite having more time than ever before for research and writing. Despite the urging of Engels and other admirers, Marx never finished the second and third volumes of Capital, the work he had envisaged as his masterpiece. In 1867, Marx had told a supporter that he was prepared to sacrifice his life to finish to Capital; after 1871, though, he did relatively little work on the second and third volumes. Instead, he accumulated tens of thousands of pages of notes on subjects that were mostly outside the scope of Capital. Instead of elaborating his theory of capitalism, Marx spent thousands of hours studying mostly pre-capitalist societies. He became so interested in Russia that he learnt the country's language. He also made extensive notes on Turkey, India, North Africa, the Iroquois Federation, and hunter gatherer societies like those of the Australian Aboriginal peoples.

Scholars like Teodor Shanin and Haruki Wada have argued that Marx's new interests after 1871 suggest a disillusionment with the more of less unilinear model of history that had been put forward in texts like The Communist Manifesto. Citing the 1881 preface to the second Russian edition of the Manifesto, Shanin and Wada argue that Marx had lost some of his faith in the ability of capitalism to generate progressive historical change by destroying reactionary ideas and practices and creating a revolutionary working class. The Manifesto's blithe approval of the encroachment of capitalism into pre-capitalist societies had not been absent from parts of the first volume of Capital. In a footnote to the original 1867 German edition of the book, for example, Marx had celebrated the attacks by capitalism on the Russian commune. By 1881, though, Marx was sympathetic to the Narodnik claim that the Russian peasant commune could become the basis for a post-capitalist Russia.

In one of the famous letters to Vera Zasulich he drafted but did not post in 1881, Marx stated that the 'historical inevitability' of the path of development outlined in Capital is 'expressly restricted to the countries of Western Europe'. Marx went on to say that his research in the years since Capital was published had convinced him that 'the Commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia'. Shanin sums up the change he sees in Marx's view of history when he writes that Marx moved from 'a sophisticated version of unilinearism' to 'the acceptance of multidirectionality' in history. Eric Hobsbawm talks of the late Marx's 'growing hatred of and contempt for capitalist society' and relates this attitude to the course that history had taken in the advanced countries of Europe:

It seems probable that Marx, who had earlier welcomed the impact of capitalism as an inhuman but historically progressive force on the stagnant pre-capitalist economies, found himself increasingly appalled by this inhumanity.

As he lost hope that revolution was on the horizon in Britain and other economically advanced countries, Marx became increasingly hopeful about the prospects for revolution in economically backward Russia. Revolution is likely in Russia because it is less advanced than countries like Britain, Marx suggests in a number of places in his late writing. The Communist Manifesto's equation of capitalist development with historical progress, via a progressive bourgeoisie and the revolutionary working class, is absent from the late Marx.

It should be remembered, of course, that Marx in his last years did not produce any sweeping new restatement of his ideas. Texts like the 1881 Preface and the Zasulich drafts offer us only hints about what such a reorganisation might involve. And the Faustian contradiction that was so apparent in The Communist Manifesto still lurked beneath the surface in some of Marx's very late work. The 1881 Preface, for example, tempers its enthusiasm for a Russian revolution with the warning that such a revolution could not succeed unless it inspired parrallel revolutions in the advanced countries of Western Europe. Intensive capitalist development and the mass working class it creates are still, in the final analysis, prerequisites for socialism.

Reorientation in Russia

After Marx's death the unresolved tensions in his thinking were dispersed amongst different factions of his followers. Second International theoreticians like Georgi Plekhanov and Karl Kautsky championed and extended the unilinear model of history and optimistic view of capitalist development found in works like The Communist Manifesto. The Second International's famous 'heretic' Eduard Bernstein took this optimism to an extreme by denying that capitalism was naturally inclined to crisis and needed to be sharply distinguished from socialism at all.

It was from Russia that the most creative response to the contradictions in Marx's thought emerged. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Britain was no longer the world's most dynamic capitalist economy. Industrial capital was becoming less important than finance capital, as the grandchildren of mill owners and coal barons found investment abroad increasingly attractive. Russia was one of the semi-developed countries that were targets for investors from the advanced nations of the West, and the encroachment of industrial capitalism on the country created all sorts of peculiarities. By the time the 1905 revolution erupted, Russia had some of the largest factories in the world along with a huge peasantry, a tiny and weak indigenous bourgeoisie, a set of political and legal institutions that reeked of feudalism, and a relatively small and isolated yet concentrated and extremely combative working class. The revolutionary bourgeoisie, routed feudal class, shrinking peasantry, and massive working class of The Communist Manifesto could not be easily located in this strange new world.

The extreme conditions that existed in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century threw down a gauntlet to local followers of Marx. Plekhanov and many others failed the challenge, and continued quixotically to expect their country to follow a path of development not dissimilar to that trod by Britain and other advanced countries. By the time of the 1905 revolution, though, Leon Trotsky was rejecting this dead end by developing the first draft of his theories of combined and uneven development and permanent revolution. Eventually these would become 'general' theories, supposedly applicable to every developing country, but in 1905 they were primarily exercises in Russian particularism. Trotsky counterposed the new conditions in Russia to the unilinear model of development beloved of Plekhanov and the majority of the Second International's theorists. He insisted that the development of capitalism on a global scale - a development that Lenin would later explain to Trotsky's satisfaction with his theory of imperialism - had played havoc with the unilinear model of historical development, and ensured that societies like Russia could develop in a manner very different from the model outlined in Capital. Russia could not be Britain.

By arguing that features of the recent development of capitalism had invalidated unilinearism, Trotsky avoided a confrontation with the authority of Marx. He was able to argue that he was complementing rather than revising classics like Capital. Yet Trotsky's claim that the 'new' conditions he described meant that a socialist revolution could break out in Russia before it succeeded in the West was even more iconoclastic than Marx's 1881 Preface, which had suggested that a Russian revolution would have to be accompanied by revolution in the West.

In 1917 key parts of Trotsky's theories were by adopted Lenin and, eventually, the rest of the Bolshevik leadership. Kautsky, Plekhanov and other aged leaders of the Second International were outraged when the Bolsheviks took power and declared their revolution socialist. They still insisted that socialism could only exist in nations with highly advanced economies, like Britain or Germany. Even the young Italian iconoclast Antonio Gramsci was initially puzzled by the Bolsheviks' seizure of power, declaring it 'the revolution against Capital'.

After the Bolsheviks took power Trotsky spent considerable energy clarifying and generalising the theories of combined and uneven development and permanent revolution. By the mid-1920s he was engaged in a bitter struggle with Joseph Stalin, whose doctrine of socialism in one country clashed sharply with the internationalism of the theory of permanent revolution. Yet, viewed from one perspective, the two theories have some important similarities. For instance, they share a rejection of the notions that socialism can only exist in an advanced country, and that socialist revolution in the advanced countries is a prerequisite for socialist revolution in less advanced countries. Trotsky's rejection of these notions is explicit, though it is qualified by his argument that a revolution in an isolated and backward nation like the Soviet Union can only survive by exporting itself, preferably to the advanced countries of the West.

Stalin's views are complicated by his argument that in backward countries a 'stage' of capitalist development featuring a 'progressive' indigenous bourgeoisie is a necessary prerequisite for a transition to socialism. Yet his insistence that socialism could be built 'in one country', ie in the Soviet Union, is an unmistakable rejection of the applicability of Kautsky and Plekhanov's views to at least one backward and isolated country. Whatever faction of the party they belonged to, the Bolsheviks were emphatic in their affirmation of the socialist nature of their revolution, and in their belief in the importance of this revolution to world history. The success of their party in taking and holding on to power led to a rapid 'Russification' of Marxism, as Marxists in both the developed and developing countries looked to Moscow for inspiration and in many cases leadership.

The Russification of British Marxism

British Marxism was thoroughly Russified in the years after 1917. In the early 1920s, Moscow was instrumental in the fusion of a number of Britain's small Marxist groups into the Communist Party of Great Britain. The centralised, disciplined new party soon took control of or marginalised many of the traditional instititutions of British Marxism. Importantly, the formerly decentralised institutions for workers' education in Marxism and related subjects were quickly absorbed into the party or marginalised.

Lenin was personally involved in debates about the new party's programme and organisational structure. Left-wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder dwells for many pages on his differences with 'ultra-left' members of the new party like Sylvia Pankhurst, who opposed work in the trade unions and the giving of critical support to Labour candidates at election time. The prestige that the Bolsheviks enjoyed as leaders of a successful revolution ensured that Lenin's criticisms were taken very seriously by British Marxists. But Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders like Trotsky were not only interested in Britain's relatively small Communist Party: they analysed British society as a whole, and urged British Marxists to accept their analyses as well as their tactical advice. In 1926, for example, Trotsky published Where is Britain Going? a book that ranged the length and breadth of British history to explain the crisis that produced the failed 1926 General Strike.

Lenin and Trotsky's Britain was radically different from the society Marx had perceived. Marx had observed in Britain the world's most dynamic economy, and come to link that dynamism with first the great potential and later the general apathy of the British working class. In the third decade of the twentieth century Lenin and Trotsky saw Britain as a declining power with an increasingly moribund economy. They believed that the country was ripe for revolution, but only if an increasingly immiserated working class broke with the Labour Party and the gradualist policies that had characterised British trade unionism since the end of Chartism. Lenin and Trotsky were fierce critics of the assimilation of Marx to this gradualist tradition by left-wing supporters of the Labour Party and the Independent Labour Party.

Lenin and Trotsky's interventions into British politics were widely regarded, even on the non-communist left, as hostile incursions by an alien and rather barbaric political tradition. In his introduction to the London edition of Where is Britain Going?, AN Brailsford called Trotsky 'a man from another world' and expressed unease at his 'Russian methods' of polemic. In his review of Where is Britain Going? John Maynard Keynes expressed the same attitude:

Trotsky sees, what is probably true, that our Labour Party is the direct offspring of the Radical Non-conformists and the philanthropic bourgeois, without a tinge of atheism, blood and revolution and revolution. Emotionally and intellectually, therefore, he finds them intensely unsympathetic.

Bertrand Russell was more sympathetic to Trotsky's book, but nevertheless felt that its author was 'a patriot when it comes to the pinch' and wanted to subordinate a Soviet Great Britain to the objectives of the Soviet Union. Brailsford, Keynes, and Russell were members of the left who held to liberal and gradualist views, and smarted at the idea that a backward nation like the Soviet Union could offer its revolution as a model to advanced Britain. Many of Marx's most famous writings had seemed to make Britain the model for the developing world; now the Bolsheviks seemed intent on reversing things. In his response to Keynes' review, Trotsky commented on the irony of the situation:

The majority of British critics of my book see its chief failing in that the author is not British and that consequently he is incapable of understanding British psychology, British traditions and so on...

Today, when we are victorious, British and European. socialists in general are inclined to permit us to be left alone in view of the peculiarities of our country and its national culture. They want in this way to erect an essentially ideological barrier along the same frontiers where Lloyd George, Churchill, Clemenceau[6] and others attempted to set up a material barbed wire blockade. 'It may be all right for Russians', so the 'lefts' say to all intents, 'but just let the Russians dare to cross the Russian frontiers with their experience and their conclusions'. The peculiarities of the British character are introduced as a philosophical justification for the theory of Bolshevik 'non-intervention'. Fabian and other critics do not know that we have been well tempered by all our past against arguments of this brand. But the irony in it is that while the Fabians are agreed nowadays, that is after our victory, to recognize Bolshevism, that is Marxism in action, as corresponding to the national peculiarities of Russia, the old traditional Russian ideology and not just that of the government but that of the opposition, invariably regarded Marxism as a creature of western culture and would proclaim its total incompatibility with the peculiarities of Russian national development.

My generation can still remember how the overwhelming majority of the Russian press declared the Russian Marxists to be ideological aliens who were trying in vain to transplant Britain's historical experience on to Russian soil. On every pretext we were reminded that Marx created his theory of economic development in the British Museum and through observing British capitalism and its contradictions. How could the lessons of British capitalism have any relevance to Russia with its enormous 'peculiarities', its predominantly peasant population, its patriarchal traditions, its village commune and its Orthodox Church? Thus spoke the Russian reactionaries and the Russian populists with appropriate right and left variations.

Thanks largely to the influence of Bolshevik leaders like Lenin and Trotsky, Marxism came to be identified in 1920s Britain with the October revolution and the society that it had created.

A Deeper Shade of Red

The era from the end of the 1920s to the mid-30s is known to historians of communism as the 'Third Period', and regarded as a time of unparralleled sectarianism and ultra-leftism on the part of communists loyal to Moscow. It is certainly true that, under the self-interested leadership of Stalin, the Communist Parties of the West, in particular, often behaved in an extreme, almost hysterical manner during the Third Period. Lenin's lessons in Left-wing Communism were forgotten, as parties rushed to condemn their social democratic rivals as 'social fascists' and to scorn even left-wing trade union leaders as 'lackeys of capitalism'. In Britain and most of the other countries of Western Europe, Third Period Communists stood candidates against social democratic rivals, even when they were bound to receive derisory votes, and struggled to build 'red' unions independent of the mainstream workers' movement. An almost religious belief in the imminent collapse of capitalism replaced analysis. The best-known result of Third Period policies was the refusal of the German Communist Party to form an alliance with their rivals in the Social Democratic party to keep Hitler out of power in 1933. Using the slogan 'First Hitler, then us' the German communists condemned themselves to disaster with their sectarianism and hyperoptimism.

If the Third Period was in important respects a departure from the policies urged on Marxists by Lenin and Trotsky, it also had certain intriguing connections with the ideas in texts like Where is Britain Going? and Left-wing Communism. For example, the frenzied dismissal of Britain's gradualist left and its trade union and Labour Party leaders by the Third Period Communist Party is in certain respects only an intensification of the attitudes Lenin and Trotsky had struck during their interventions in British politics. While Lenin had urged communists to make certain alliances with the Labour Party, he had made no secret of his complete contempt for its politics. Trotsky had accepted the need to work within the traditional trade union movement, but he had made no secret of his desire to see that movement 'Bolshevised' as a step towards a 'Soviet Britain'. With its aggressive dismissal of the Labour Party and the trade unions and its counerposition to them of 'Soviet communism', the Third Period party took some of the tendencies in Lenin and Trotsky's polemics to an extreme. Recent 'revisionist' histories of the Third Period have shown that ultra-left policies commanded considerable support amongst long-time Communist Party members, who clearly did not see its policies as a bolt from the blue.

Back to Britain

Third Period policies were no more successful in Britain than they were in the rest of Europe. Despite the beginning of the Great Depression and a sharp rise in unemployment, Communist Party membership dropped steadily in the early '30s. By the middle of the decade, Moscow was intent on ending the Third Period and inaugurating a new policy of the Popular Front, or the 'Popular Front against war and fascism' as it was often called. During the Popular Front era, which is usually dated from the Seventh and last Comintern Congress in 1935, Communist Parties sought to create alliances with social democrats and 'progressive bourgeois' parties, and tried to focus attention on 'progressive national history' as well as the October revolution and the achievements of the Soviet Union. The French Communist Party, for instance, revivied the slogan 'Liberty, Equality, Fraternity', and began waving the tricolour rather than the red flag at demonstrations. I have noted elsewhere how Britain's Communist Party used the Popular Front era to 'rediscover' its country's non-Marxist radical history, and to attempt a rapproachement with the Labour Party and with liberals like Russell and Keynes.

The turn to the Popular Front saw the Communist Party encouraging its intellectual members and sympathisers to see a continuity between the best parts of Britain's intellectual tradition and Marxism. The great Marxist thinkers were related to some of the great British non-Marxist intellectuals; for instance, the party rediscovered the comparison Engels had made between Capital and The Origin of Species in his eulogy for Marx. The Popular Front era saw, then, a reversal of attempts to 'Russify' the British left. Instead of making the October revolution and Bolshevism the sole relevant models for the British left, the Communist Party began to draw upon an indigenous tradition of radical and democratic politics and talk of a unique 'British road to socialism' that passed through institutions like Westminster. After World War Two, some Popular Front policies were tempered, but others were institutionalised, and became virtually unquestionable parts of party doctrine. The British Road to Socialism, for instance, became the title of the permanent programme the party adopted in 1951. The small minority of party members who rejected the institutional legacy of the Popular Front era were forced out of the party. Edward Upward, who got his marching orders at the end of the '40s, made a reasoanble point when he claimed that Lenin would not have recognised the Communist Party of the postwar era.

Lenin and Marx may not have recognised the mid-century Communist Party of Great Britain, but some of the old tensions in Marxist thought still lurked in the organisation. There was, for instance, an incorrigible tension between British particularism and British universalism which harked back to some of the conflicts in Marx's thought about the country. The Communist Party's programme held that Britain's unique history meant that it could advance toward socialism on a road different to that travelled in many other places. Yet the party often offered its own experience and the history of its own country as guidelines for comrades overseas. The British party was a particularly powerful influence on sister groups in the British colonies or ex-colonies - for many of the leaders of these parties, the British organisation's headquarters on London'd King St were a sort of 'mini-Kremlin', and British communist leaders sometimes had an authority that rivalled that of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

The detailed advice that emanated from King St would frequently draw upon the peculiarities of British history. When the British urged their comrades in India to remake their alliance with the Congress Party after World War Two, for instance, they claimed that there were important similarities between the Indian independence struggle and the fight of the working class, middle class, and 'progressive' bourgeoisie for democratic reform in nineteenth century Britain. A Communist-Congress alliance would parallel the alliance the Chartists had struck with the 'progressive' parts of the middle class and bourgeoisie, the British claimed.

EP Thompson and the British commoner

I have described elsewhere how EP Thompson's mature political convictions were formed during the Popular Front era, a time when William Morris and the young Coleridge as well as Marx and Lenin were lauded by the Communist Party, and the Levellers and Chartists were allotted places in the same pantheon of heroes as the Bolsheviks.

From the beginning of his career as an activist and as a scholar - as I've noted elsewhere, the two pursuits were for him indissolubly linked - EP Thompson seems to have been convinced of both the interest and the importance of British history and culture, and of the relevance of this history and culture to contemporary political practice. Thompson's first important work of scholarship, his monumental biography of William Morris, was intended partially as a political intervention. In the best Popular Front tradition, Thompson wanted to reclaim an indigenous radical from his admirers on the right; he also believed that Morris' 'revolutionary romantic' politics could help counter certain tendencies toward economism and philistinism in the postwar British left. By the time he had become a leader of the Old New Left, Thompson had begun to assert that the tradition that included William Morris was important not just to the British left but to the left everywhere. At the end of 'Revolution', a text that was widely read in the Old New Left, Thompson asserted that:

It would be foolish...to underestimate the long and tenacious revolutionary tradition of the British commoner. It is a dogged, good-humoured, responsible, peaceable tradition: yet a revolutionary tradition all the same. From the Leveller corporals ridden down by Cromwell's men at Burford to the weavers massed behind their banners at Peterloo, the struggles for democratic and for social rights have always been intertwined. From the Chartist camp meeting to the dockers' picket line, it has expressed itself most naturally in the language of moral revolt. Its weaknesses, its carelessness of theory, we know too well; its strengths, its resilience and steady humanity, we too easily forget. It is a tradition which could leaven the socialist world.

When he published The Making of the English Working Class in 1963, Thompson prefaced the work with a famous assertion of its heuristic value for both scholars and political activists in the developing world:

[T]he greater part of the world today is still undergoing problems of industrialsation, and of the formation of democratic institutions, analogous in many ways to our own experience during the Industrial Revolution. Causes which were lost in England might, in Asia or Africa, yet be won.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this passage is suggesting British history, or at least a certain period in English history, as a model for the development of large parts of the developing world. English history and the situation of 'the greater part of the world' are being made commensurable. Thompson's claim for the relevance of his book to the situation of many developing countries is one of the reasons for the tremendous popularity it has enjoyed, not only amongst scholars in the Third World but amongst First World social scientists and political activists concerned with the problems thrown up by capitalist development in the Third World. For many readers, Thompson is not just describing the distant history of the world's first industrial power; he is saying something about the situation of hundreds of millions of people alive today.

[part two in a few days...]