TWO CONCEPTS OF GREENERY

Paul Anderson, review of of Green Political Thought by Andrew Dobson (Unwin Hyman, £7.95), Tribune, 8 June 1990

At the core of Andy Dobson's lucid account of the political thinking of the Green movement is a distinction between environmentalism and ecologism. Environmentalists are "light 'Green": although enthusiastic about banning chlorofluorocarbon-emitting aerosols, encouraging bottle banks, taxing polluters and so forth, they believe that solving environmental problems doesn't require a particularly drastic change in the way society is organised. Ecologists. on the other hand. are "dark Green": although they normally support many of the policies and actions of environmentalists, they have a deeper critique, believing that only a truly radical transformation of industrial society can possibly save the planet from disaster.

Dobson's book is about ecologism, which he considers as a distinctive ideological current of the past 20 years ( although it draws on older ideologies, notably anarchism and other libertarian socialisms). It is characterised by its critique of Industrialism" and instrumental rationality, and by its assertion that there are natural limits to economic growth that make the creation of a "sustainable society" imperative.

"While most post-industrial futures revolve around high growth, high-technology, expanding services, greater leisure, and satisfaction conceived in material terms. ecologism's post-industrial society questions growth and technology, and suggests that the good life will involve more work and fewer objects."

Much of the Green Political Thought is taken up with exegesis of this world view, but there are also ,excellent passages on the relationships between ecologism and other radical ideologies, notably socialism and feminism. Dobson shows that, with very few exceptions. British encounters between ecologism and its rivals — particularly the red-green debate — have so far been disappointingly superficial and inconclusive.

On one hand, very few ecologists have recognised that much of their critique of modern society owes a lot to some sorts of socialism. More important, even fewer self-styled socialists have gone beyond accusing ecologists of lacking "class analysis". Economic growth is assumed to be an uncomplicatedly good thing by the overwhelming majority of socialists. Despite the current fashion for concern for the environment. ecologists' ideas still aren't taken seriously.

One reason for this. Dobson believes, is that ecologism is actually marginalised by the growth of environmentalism. Just as democratic socialists are torn between endorsing social democracy as a better evil than Leninism or unfettered capitalism and denouncing it as a means of propping up capitalism, so ecologists have the choice of working for environmentalist goals or denouncing environmentalists as a palliative for the cancer of industrialism. Most ecologists take the option of backing environmentalism, on the principle that small successes are better than none. But the result is that the voice of ecologism is submerged by the clatter of environmentalist tinkering.

So what can the ecologists do? Dobson doesn't say. But I have a feeling that a little study of the past hundred years of socialism might be a pretty good start — if only as a source of warnings of how not to proceed.

GRIPPING REVIVAL

Paul Anderson, review of The Crucible by Arthur Miller (National), Tribune, 8 June 1990

Howard Davies’s National Theatre revival of Arthur Miller's The Crucible is a delight. Some have said that the play, which uses a seventeenth century witchcraft panic in the Massachusetts village of Salem as an allegory of the anti-communist hysteria whipped up by Senator Joseph McCarthy in fifties America, hasn't worn well, but I can't agree.

This production, the first of several Miller revivals on the London stage to mark his 75th birthday, is gripping from beginning to end, with some extraordinarily energetic acting all round. Tom Wilkinson is particularly good as John Proctor, the honest farmer whose one-time lover, Abigail Williams (Clare Holman), starts the whole process of denunciations and trials; while Zoe Wanamaker puts in a sterling performance as his wife, Elizabeth.

William Dudley's sets are a little too fussy at times, and the West Country dialects of a few of the cast somewhat rocky, but these, I feel, are minor quibbles. Most of the other members of the audience on the second press night seem to have had no quibbles at all: I haven’t seen a standing ovation quite so enthusiastic for ages.

A VERY BRITISH SOCIALIST

Paul Anderson, review of Political Thoughts and Polemics by Bernard Crick (Edinburgh, £25), Tribune, 1 June 1990

Richard Hoggart's foreword describes Bernard Crick as "a very British type of socialist; a liberal socialist for whom the state's first duty is to make us free, not to try to make us virtuous according to its own model", and that's pretty accurate.

 Crick's socialism is not of the statist kind — he has no time for Leninism or any other dirigiste fantasy — but is by no means anarchist. "Liberal socialist" suits him well.

This collection of his political essays and journalistic polemics from the past decade-and-a-half is immensely readable: like George Orwell, of whom he has written the so-far definitive biography, Crick has a remarkable capacity for plain speaking against the cant of the day, for saying what no one else says but plenty feel. Unlike many academics, he can write without recourse to jargon.

He is merciless with hypocrisy and sloppy thinking wherever he finds them, but is particularly hard on the left — usually with justification. A 1986 essay from The Irish Review complains: "All my adult life I have found that my fellow English left-wing intellectuals are suckers for anybody else's nationalism and contemptuous of their own. Instead of being critical friends of liberation movements, occasionally asking whether one-party states always make the best decisions, whether autocracy is always efficient, whether bombs are always the best persuaders and terror always the best answer to terror, they tend almost to revel in justifying other people's violence."

Quite so, and there are similarly knockabout passages on left attitudes to "bourgeois" freedoms of expression, structuralist Marxism and a whole lot more besides.

Crick has long been a sceptical supporter of the Labour Party, but his most recent writings show a growing impatience at the vacuity of its leaders and their failure to grasp the nettle of constitutional reform. This is how he reacts to the reheated undergraduate political theory served up by Roy Hattersley in Labour's 1988 Aims and Values statement:

"The document has no core: it is a series of surface compromises between democratic socialism and social democracy. It has no sense of history. The party apparently has no paternity, or, if so, no pride in it. There is not even an evocative list of the party's great achievements, thinkers and heroes."

Since writing that, Crick has thrown in his lot with Charter 88, and there's plenty of intelligent commentary here on constitutional issues, from Northern Ireland through parliamentary sovereignty to electoral systems. I'm convinced by parts of his case, unconvinced by others — but that's hardly the point.

Crick is a great controversialist, and his arguments are always worth reading. If there were a few more mavericks like him, British politics would be a lot less tedious than they are today.

THE PROBLEM WITH LABOUR

Paul Anderson, Sanity column, June 1990

For a couple of weeks this spring, the liberal media were swamped by supporters of Charter 88, the constitutional reform pressure group. Clearly in better health than the magazine that spawned it, New Statesman & Society, Charter launched a prospectus outlining an ambitious programme for the nineties. The list of demands included a written constitution incorporating a bill of rights, a freedom of information act, proportional representation, reform of the House of Lords, parliaments for Scotland and Wales. Lord Scarman predicted a written constitution by the end of the decade; Salman Rushdie gave his blessing to Charter 88 in a Today interview, the first since he went into hiding. The Guardian ran a series of feature articles by big-name Charter 88 writers.

But not everyone was completely convinced. Notably, in a biting piece in the Sunday Correspondent, David Blake trashed Charter 88's prospectus as 'a reminder of the depths of despair and nonsense being plumbed by people who do not like Mrs Thatcher but who do not believe that the Labour Party can be made into a sensible party of government. The document could thus achieve cult status, the political equivalent of watching Baywatch on television and saying how dreadful it is.' He described the supporters of the Charter as 'an odd mishmash of people who were excited by the Alliance, and people around the fringes of the Labour left - what some might call a bloc of Rightists and Trotskyists'.

The echoes of Stalinist denunciation in Blake's turn of phrase are a particularly nice touch: Kinnock loyalism in today's Labour Party has a strong resemblance to the cult of the leader found in the old Comintern parties. He does, however, have a serious point. Charter 88's most prominent supporters are either members of the 'great and good' centre-left establishment or forty-somethings who were part of the far left of the sixties and seventies. And they do share an antipathy to boring old mainstream Labourism, one upshot of which is that they are unenthusiastic about (and peculiarly inept at) organising in the Labour Party and its milieu (unlike, for example, CND).

In return, the Labour leadership, along with many ordinary party members, sees Charter 88 as no more than a front for proportional representation in which the usual self-interested liberals, nationalists, greens and social democrats are joined by a group of madcap Leninist intellectuals who want to start a 'proper' electoral socialist party to the left of Labour but realise that it wouldn't stand a chance under the present system.

This is, of course, something of a malicious caricature. There are good democratic arguments for introducing proportional representation and for proliferation of parties, and there is a very strong case for freedom-of-information legislation, reform of the Lords and devolution of power. (The case for a written constitution which sets out our rights is much weaker - it could easily result in an increase in the power of the judiciary, God preserve us.) What's more, most of the far-leftists now hanging around Charter 88 have long renounced the sins of their Leninist pasts (at least in private). And nobody admits to having once supported the Social Democratic Party these days.

But the fact that so many of its leading lights are compromised in Labour leadership eyes by their past associations (however unfairly) puts Charter 88 in a near-impossible situation. On one hand, it doesn't have a hope of persuading Labour to adopt its programme this side of a general election. On the other hand, there is no chance of a government implementing its programme unless it converts Labour. In short, in the nasty world of realpolitik, Charter 88 would seem to be wasting its breath unless it is banking on a Tory victory in 1992, forcing Labour to rethink its position.

This doesn't mean that Charter 88 can't influence public opinion or that Labour is impossible to budge with patient work. But Charter 88's predicament does provide an important lesson for the peace movement and every other social movement that wants a government to legislate change. Devoting effort and resources to the slow, boring and often frustrating work of keeping up pressure within the Labour Party is not an optional extra, and it can't be abandoned when the going gets tough. It's absolutely essential, even when Labour seems intent on moving in precisely the wrong direction. Sticking two fingers up at the Labour Party – which has seemed very tempting for CNDers in the past year or so – solves nothing at all.

NO SURPRISES

Paul Anderson, review of Vanilla by Jane Stanton Hitchcock (Lyric), Tribune, 25 May 1990

The thought of Harold Pinter directing a black comedy about the super-rich is rather appealing, but Vanilla doesn't work at all. Not that it's Pinter's fault: it's simply that Jane Stanton Hitchcock's play, although based on some quite good ideas, is third-rate.

Vanilla is essentially an attempt at setting Restoration comedy in contemporary New York. Clelia Climber, a whore who has married a billionaire, is throwing a megabuck party. The guests include Lucy Lucre (the world's richest woman), Amanda Tattle (a lesbian society gossip columnist), and Miralda Sumac (a sex symbol whose husband has just been overthrown as the dictator of Vanilla, a small third world country). As a novelty, Clelia has decided that the after-dinner entertainment at the party should consist of poor people - but the poor people riot, led by her servants Maria and Jesus, both Vanillans determined to avenge their families' treatment by the vicious Sumac regime.

This could have been the opportunity for some wicked satire, but Hitchcock's writing just isn't up to it. Her dialogue is at best pedestrian, the gags are lame, and there are no surprises. The star-studded cast struggles valiantly, particularly Joanna Lumley as Miralda and Sian Phillips as Lucy. But the best thing about Vanilla is the interval icecream.

BEYOND AGITPROP

Sanity, May 1990

           

British playwrights are still producing radical drama, writes Paul Anderson, but what they’re doing has changed

The other week, browsing in the bookshop at the National Theatre before going to a play, I came a across Catherine Itzin's study of political theatre in the seventies, Stages In the Revolution, first published in 1980 and now reprinted. Someone had 'borrowed' mine five or six years ago, and because it's a useful reference book for anyone writing about contemporary British drama, I'd been looking for a replacement for some time. So I bought it, without, however, much intention of reading it again.

Instead, after a week of increasingly serious flicking through its pages, I read it from cover to cover, drawn by Itzin's portrayal of a theatrical world that only a decade on seems strangely exotic.

It's not so much that the big names of seventies radical theatre writing have disappeared from view. Indeed, it's remarkable how many of the playwrights interviewed by Itzin still dominate the scene. David Hare (The Secret Rapture, Racing Demon) and Caryl Churchill (Serious Money) have had their greatest successes in the past couple of years. Howard Barker's critical reputation has never been higher, with productions of Seven Lears and Scenes from an Execution two of the highlights of the London fringe this year (if the Royal Court and the Almeida can properly be described as 'fringe' any more). There have been new plays staged in the past year by Howard Brenton (Hess is Dead), Edward Bond (Jackets II), John McGrath (Border Warfare, John Brown's Body) and Barrie Keeffe (My Girl, Not Fade Away).

Nor have all the institutions of British radical theatre gone. The spirit of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop is still very much alive, both at its home, the Theatre Royal Stratford East (at the time of writing showing Patrick Prior's madcap anti-poll tax farce, Revolting Peasants) and elsewhere - the Kilburn Tricycle, Hull Truck, and Cheek by Jowl spring immediately to mind. The Royal Court continues to stage provocative new work, much of it by Women writers. The Almeida in Islington, the Leicester Haymarket, the Glasgow Citizens' and a host of other theatres throughout the country, many of them small studios, remain committed to experiment. The Edinburgh fringe goes on, albeit somewhat shakily at times. The two big subsidised flagships, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, regularly put on radical interpretations of plays from the canon, revivals and translations of past radical drama, and contro­versial new work, particularly, but not only, on their smaller stages.

But the Thatcher decade has changed the sorts of plays that play­wrights are writing and theatres are staging, and it has killed off many of the smaller theatres and companies, particularly touring outfits and those most involved in radical politics. Edward Bond is still turning out dour far-left polemics (Jackets II is a hysterical sub-Brechtian tale of proletarian insurgency); John McGrath is as committed as ever to class politics.

But whereas in 1978 David Hare could almost seem shockingly iconoclastic when he complained of the 'demeaning repetition of slogans' favoured by the 'slaves of Marxist fashion' in the theatre, today simplistic didactic leftism is the exception rather than the rule. The theatrical generation of 1968 has abandoned its view of theatre as a tool of the class struggle in the face of declining public subsidy and other intractable realities – not least that the proletarians of Britain show no desire to be proselytised by them. 

Meanwhile, younger playwrights (all too few of them because of the tiny number of stages prepared to put on new writing) show no sign of being seduced by their elders' one­time stances. It's not that they're a bunch of reactionaries – no one who has seen anything by Timberlake Wertenbaker, Neil Bartlett or Clare Mclntyre would ever think that. It's just that agitprop, like all things Leninist, seems these days to be a fraudulent delusion.

AT ODDS: INTERVIEW WITH CORNELIUS CASTORIADIS

Paul Anderson, Sanity, May 1990

Cornelius Castoriadis is a thinker who defies the categories – a leftist who has criticised the peace movement for pro-Soviet naïveté, yet insists he is not a cold warrior.

“Gorbachev is so preoccupied with his crisis domestically that he's incapable of acting on the international stage. He's lost the initiative...”

Cornelius Castoriadis is talking with some animation, with a strong French accent, jabbing the air with a cigarette for emphasis. It is the first time I have met him, and the circumstances, a coffee break in a noisy student canteen during an Essex University philosophy seminar, are not ideal for serious discussion with one of the most highly regarded of contemporary French intellectuals, a man whose writings I've admired for years and years.

But Castoriadis seems quite at home. He is refreshingly candid, with a mischievous sense of humour, very rude about academic seminars (“They always turn into a series of monologues”) and the intellectual star system. He is never patronising. The incisive thinker, it seems, is also an engaging human being.

This surprised me only because Castoriadis has something of a reputation as an awkward character. By all accounts, his enthusiasm for accuracy in translations of his work is boundless: he broke off relations with the American journal Telos, which published much of his political writing of the late seventies and early eighties, after a series of rows over the way it had rendered his key concepts into English.

But perhaps such apparent awkwardness is to be expected from someone who has spent his adult life writing against the intellectual fashion of the times. Now 67, Castoriadis left his native Greece for France in the mid-forties, a convert to Trotskyism from Stalinism, on the run from civil war. He rapidly became disillusioned with Trotskyism, and in 1948, together with Claude Lefort, then a young student of the existential philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, founded the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie.

S ou B ceased publication in 1965, was plagued by schism, and never sold more than a few hundred copies each issue. But the anti-Leninist, post-Marxist libertarian revolutionary politics it developed, largely through Castoriadis' essays under the pen-names Paul Cardan and Pierre Chaulieu, were enormously influential on the post-1968 new left in continental Europe, which was characterised by a commitment to non-bureaucratic, self-managed political activities. In Britain, Paul Cardan's essays were published as pamphlets by the libertarian socialist group Solidarity.

Castoriadis today is unrepentant about his advocacy of revolutionary seizure of power by self-managed workers' councils. “In broad outline, I'm still committed to the emancipatory project which I outlined in the fifties. I still stand by the principle of the self-management of production and the maximum possible decentralisation of decision-making. Autonomous society is about self-management, and we need to start with the places people gather – the firm, the school, the university, the hospital,” he says, although he'd drop the idea of the “centrality of the industrial proletariat” if he were sketching a possible future society today.

Castoriadis's commitment to autonomous “self-activity” as the means and end of fundamental social change, which he developed in his magnum opus, The Imaginary Institution of Society, published in 1975, was equally at odds with both major seventies Parisian intellectual crazes-the Stalinist structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and others, and the 'god-that-failed' polemics of the ex-Stalinist nouveaux philosophes. But the furore created by his attacks on these shooting stars was as nothing to the impact of his assault on the western peace movement in his 1981 book Devant la guerre (Facing War).

The core of the book was an argument that the Soviet Union was becoming a “stratocracy”, a society ruled by the military. This was a matter not of generals taking over in a coup, but of something much more profound. The only efficient economic sector in the Soviet Union was military; the only effective state ideology was military. And the Soviet Union was multiplying its military capacities at an alarming rate. Meanwhile, the west gave every impression of caving in to the first sign of Soviet pressure. The peace movements of western Europe, with their concentration solely on western nuclear arms, were a symptom of the West's loss of nerve.

Unsurprisingly, the ferocity of this polemic lost Castoriadis many friends, particularly in Britain and West Germany. But he dismisses accusations that he adopted a cold war position, and feels that his analysis of Soviet militarism has been to a large extent vindicated. “What has been revealed in the past couple of years show that I underestimated the extent of military domination of the Soviet economy,” he says.

Which is not to say that he's not been forced to adapt his opinions by developments since Gorbachev came to power, particularly since the revolutions last year in eastern Europe. His most recent essay on the Soviet Union, "The Gorbachev Interlude”, marks a significant softening of his opinions on the role of the Soviet military, even if it is extremely pessimistic about the likely success of Gorbachev's reforms. As for eastern Europe: ”I was taken by surprise, as was everybody else.”

But what of the future? He shrugs. “The recent events in eastern Europe show that people can be extremely active in overthrowing a tyrannical regime but are not necessarily so active in creating their own order. There's a general misconception that what we have in the west is the best of all possible worlds – which I'm sure will remain dominant in eastern Europe for a few years. But a democratic society requires active participation, a degree of passion for common affairs. Today in the west, that is absent.”