Raymond Williams, who died last year, was undoubtedly one of the most important and serious British left-wing writers of the post-war years. He was a man with the intellectual range of Jean-Paul Sartre or George Orwell, and he deserves the international readership that Sartre and Orwell enjoy. He was as interesting and elegant a novelist as he was a cultural theorist and occasional political essayist.
This book collects 27 of his essays, mainly political polemics,
written over a period of 30 years on topics as diverse as state funding of the
arts, the significance of the 1926 general strike, the weaknesses of the "English parliamentary tradition" and the politics of the eighties peace
movements. Through them all runs a thread of radical democratic anti-capitalism
which has an ambiguous relationship with the established institutions of the
British Labourism. Williams was at the same time appreciative of the traditions
of the British Labour Party and trade unions and uneasy at what they had
spawned.
He was in essence a humanist Marxist New Leftist, whose
basic approach to the world was at odds not only with the bureaucratic
corporatism of Keynesian social democracy and the disaster of "actually
existing socialism" but also with the sectarian neo-Leninism of the "57
varieties" and the arid scholastic Althusserian structuralism of New Left
Review at its seventies worst. That much is clear in any one of the essays
collected here, but never more than in "Socialism and Ecology", written in
1982, one of the most cogent statements
ever of the need for a radical green politics, taking issue with some of the
conservative assumptions of the twentieth century left about economic growth.
Yet Williams backed Harold Wilson In 1964, never engaged in public criticism of the Communist Party or of other vanguardist sects, and kept contributing to NLR even at its nadir. Williams was a fine example of a man who believed that hair-splitting disputes with rivals on the left were an unnecessary and stupid diversion from attacking the real enemy. Nevertheless, some of his silences are telling.
Yet Williams backed Harold Wilson In 1964, never engaged in public criticism of the Communist Party or of other vanguardist sects, and kept contributing to NLR even at its nadir. Williams was a fine example of a man who believed that hair-splitting disputes with rivals on the left were an unnecessary and stupid diversion from attacking the real enemy. Nevertheless, some of his silences are telling.
For example, his often brilliant essay "The Politics of
Nuclear Disarmament", written in 1980 as the western peace movement was
exploding on to the scene (and still worth reading for its dissection of the
parochialism of traditional British nuclear unilateralism), barely mentions the
existence of the Soviet nuclear rearmament programme, which mirrored Nato's
plans (as they then were) to install cruise and Pershing II in western Europe.
To be sure, he argues against defending the "workers' bomb"
and says in a rather coded way that Soviet manipulation of the peace movement
would be unwelcome. And of course, the main task of the western left and peace
movement was always (and remains) to change the course of its own ruling class.
Bui there's something missing here – something that should not have been
missed, however likely it was to fuel controversy: Williams didn't grasp the
nettle of developing a critique of "actually existing socialism". Why, I'm not
sure, though it's a common enough nettle to ignore wilfully on the British
left, even since Gorbachev has admitted the failings of what the Communist
Party always said was perfect. Perhaps it's just the old maxim of making a
priority of one's own predicament – a principle that Williams certainly
followed in his concern for local community, best explored in his fiction. Or
perhaps it's all generational: most people I've met under the age of 40 find
1917 about as much an inspiration as 1688.
None of this is meant to put you off reading this book. It's
an excellent introduction to Williams's ideas, thoughtfully edited and well
produced. And Williams is essential reading. But he was not a leftist pope. His
contribution was above all to a discursive culture of opposition. He wrote to
provoke discussion and dissent, and should be read with that In mind.
