Review
By Andy Brooks
British Communism and the Politics of Literature 1928-1939: Philip
Bounds, 320pp, Merlin Press 2012, £18.95.
OTHER people’s PhD dissertations
seldom make for easy reading and Philip Bounds’ book, based on his thesis
submitted to Swansea University
in 2003, is no exception. Nevertheless this comprehensive and well-researched
study of the role of communist intellectuals during the hey-day of the old
Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) is a must for all serious students of
our movement and the literature that it produced.
The
works of three key communist writers – Alick West, Ralph Fox and Christopher
Caudwell, are analysed in depth to
demonstrate the impact, one way or the other, of the Soviet Union and the
Communist International on the progressive avant-garde during what the writer
and former Daily Worker journalist,
Claud Cockburn, would later call the “devil’s decade”.
The study
begins with the disastrous sectarian “class against class” period, which began
in 1928 and carried on until 1934. That was the year when the CPGB began to
implement the new Comintern policy of broad alliances and popular fronts. The
year 1934 was also when the first Congress of the Union of Soviet Writers was
held – a mammoth two weeks of art and ideas presided over by Maxim Gorky – and adopted the
much misunderstood concept of Socialist Realism.
Bounds uses an
impressive number of original sources to challenge the conventional Trotskyist
and bourgeois academic mantra that communist writers simply echoed whatever was
favoured by the Stalin leadership at the time.
The author
maintains that, on the whole, the Party intelligentsia were developing a line
based on the realities of life in Britain
itself. He points out that some challenged the popular view amongst within the
CPGB that reduced art to a propaganda tool or another “weapon in the
struggle”. Some said that the cultural
front was, in fact, as important as the industrial struggle or any other arena
in revolutionary politics.
Alick West,
who was an early critic of the revisionist British
Road to Socialism, was one of them.
West argued that matters were compounded by the fact that communists were so
intent on seeing culture as an instrumental force (that is, as something that
could be used in the struggle against existing social relations) that they had
become virtually incapable of seeing it as an end in itself.
West says: “I said that culture (at a CPGB school on
culture in 1953)…heightens our consciousness of the world we want to win and
our energy to win it. In this sense it was true that culture is a weapon in the
fight for socialism. But the truth depended on the recognition of the greater
truth that socialism is a weapon in the fight for culture.
“For our final aim was not the establishment
of a political and economic structure, but the heightening of human life.
Without this recognition, the slogan became a perversion of the truth, since it
degraded culture into a means to a political end. It seemed to me that the
political end itself was thereby perverted, and that this was the weakness of
The British Road to Socialism…At a meeting of the Cultural Committee, of which
I was a member, I said that since the enrichment of human culture was our final
aim, the Cultural Committee should have equal standing with the Political
Committee in the leadership of the Party. The proposal met with no response,
and I said no more.”
Though this
study centres on the 1930s it also looks at post-war developments in the
British communist movement. A whole chapter is devoted to the efforts to
popularise the Marxist analysis of history and the class struggle in Britain
down the ages. Historians like A L Morton and Christopher Hill and novelists
like Jack Lindsay challenged the received wisdom of bourgeois academia and the
Establishment literati and the struggle to counter the bourgeois narrative of
British history continues to this day.
The bourgeoisie
work constantly to deride anything that doesn’t conform to their own class
outlook on the world. Social realism is dismissed as propaganda while those who
produce anti-working class novels or drama like George Orwell or the spate of
“kitchen-sink” dramatists are hailed as the cutting edge of British literary
society.
Marxist
historians are dismissed as dogmatists and humanity’s advance is portrayed as
culminating in bourgeois democracy. And it’s not just in books or the media. This
book makes the point that one of the main functions of the heritage industry is
to reinforce the belief that history has somehow come to an end by presenting
the past through the medium of museums, stately homes and ruins, to persuade us
that significant historical change is now impossible.
But Bounds
says: “However anachronistic their
politics may otherwise seem, organisations such as the Communist Party, the New Communist Party of Britain and the Communist Party of Great Britain deserve some credit for challenging this curious
blend of postmodern pessimism and conservative triumphalism. With their flow of
articles on the periods in British history when the class struggle was at its
most intense, most of them published in newspapers and magazines whose low
production values make them seem anything but remote, they remind us that
history has yet to reach its Hegelian terminus and that popular revolt is still
one of the main sources of social progress. More than 70 years after the
Seventh Congress of the Communist International, Dimitrov’s legacy is still
alive – just.”
Whatever we
might think about Bound’s conclusions they can be little doubt that this book
is an important contribution to the study of the history of the communist
movement in Britain and the role of many of its leading intellectuals during
its formative years. It can be obtained from any high street bookshop or
web-based bookseller.
