Paul Anderson, review of Icecream by Caryl Churchill (Royal Court), Tribune, 21 April 1989
Icecream, Caryl Churchill's new play at the Royal Court, is an acerbic black comedy of transatlantic misunderstanding and moral cretinism. Lance and Vera, a middle-class, middle-aged, middle-American couple, are England on vacation. They just love all the history here.
Through Lance's research on his family here, they meet his third cousins, Phil and Jaq, a pair of uncouth squatter types in their twenties. For Phil and Jaq, Americans stink, though they're hooked on American cultural cliches.
Still, they're quite happy to sponge off their new-found relatives, who in turn mistake the Brits' venality for real affection. But then disaster strikes. Phil kills the landlord, and he and Jaq persuade Lance and Vera to help dispose of the body. The Yanks' vacation is ruined, and they return home racked with guilt (which in Vera's case is hilariously mishandled by her shrink). Worse, however, is to follow: the next year, Phil and Jaq turn up to see them in America.
And after Phil is killed jay-walking, Jaq steals Lance's car and goes off on an eventually murderous joy-ride.
All the characters are outrageous caricatures. Lance (a superb deadpan performance by Philip Jackson) and Vera (a neurotic but essentially inane Carole Hayman) are too earnest by half, while Phil (David Thewlis playing a shifty, drunken yob) and Jaq (Sasida Reeves's well observed vacuous tearaway) are as nasty a pair of Ignorant louts as you'll find anywhere.
Churchill's dialogue is sharp and wonderfully funny, and Max Stafford-Clark's production races the action along at breakneck speed. Icecream is a sick, slick and enormously enjoyable expression of hatred for America and Britain that deserves the success of Serious Money, Churchill's 1987 hit.
Friday, 21 April 1989
Friday, 17 March 1989
RETURN TO THE KITCHEN SINK
Paul Anderson, review of My Girl by Barrie Keefe (Theatre Royal, Stratford East), Tribune, 17 March 1989
Barrie Keefe's new play is a gritty naturalist two-hander set in a run-down rented flat in Leytonstone High Road. Anyone who has been forced into the London private rented sector knows the sort of place: £70 a week for three damp, cold, tastelessly furnished and poorly decorated rooms, with shared bathroom and toilet and a dangerous gas water-heater in the kitchen.
The people who live here are Sam (Karl Howman), a social worker coming up to his 30th birthday, his pregnant wife, Anita (Meera Syal), and their baby daughter. Sam and Anita are broke. The baby keeps them up at night. Anita is worried that worse poverty is to come. Sam is frustrated by his work and suffers from boils. They bicker. And as the date on which the second baby is due approaches, he becomes increasingly distant from her, spending more and more time away from home with a young woman whom he claims is just another social work case but is actually a putative affair.
My Girl ends with reconciliation, after Sam: helps deliver.the baby and decides to quit his job so that the family can live outside London. But its not a simple happy ending: the reason Tor Sam and Anita's poverty is that Sam considers his job as a social worker as a political activity, helping the really poor to win small battles against the system. Getting out is an admission of defeat And what about all the poor without professional qualifications, who can't simply get out? If all this sounds grim, it's only part of the story.
Even as disaster follows disaster in the first two-thirds of the play, there is no shortage of laughs. Keeffe has an unerring ear for the language of everyday life, and Syal and Howman do his dialogue proud. Sam and Anita are not mere victims.
There are times when My Girl is a touch too sentimental, but on the whole it is a well-constructed, provocative and entertaining play about poverty. It's also refreshing to see a return to the kitchan sink in polemical political drama. The past couple of years have seen radical playwrights tending to concentrate on exploring the apparent successes of Thatcher's Britain (David Hare's The Secret Rapture and Caryl Churchill's Serious Money, to take just two examples): it's no bad thing to be reminded that the poor are still with us.
Barrie Keefe's new play is a gritty naturalist two-hander set in a run-down rented flat in Leytonstone High Road. Anyone who has been forced into the London private rented sector knows the sort of place: £70 a week for three damp, cold, tastelessly furnished and poorly decorated rooms, with shared bathroom and toilet and a dangerous gas water-heater in the kitchen.
The people who live here are Sam (Karl Howman), a social worker coming up to his 30th birthday, his pregnant wife, Anita (Meera Syal), and their baby daughter. Sam and Anita are broke. The baby keeps them up at night. Anita is worried that worse poverty is to come. Sam is frustrated by his work and suffers from boils. They bicker. And as the date on which the second baby is due approaches, he becomes increasingly distant from her, spending more and more time away from home with a young woman whom he claims is just another social work case but is actually a putative affair.
My Girl ends with reconciliation, after Sam: helps deliver.the baby and decides to quit his job so that the family can live outside London. But its not a simple happy ending: the reason Tor Sam and Anita's poverty is that Sam considers his job as a social worker as a political activity, helping the really poor to win small battles against the system. Getting out is an admission of defeat And what about all the poor without professional qualifications, who can't simply get out? If all this sounds grim, it's only part of the story.
Even as disaster follows disaster in the first two-thirds of the play, there is no shortage of laughs. Keeffe has an unerring ear for the language of everyday life, and Syal and Howman do his dialogue proud. Sam and Anita are not mere victims.
There are times when My Girl is a touch too sentimental, but on the whole it is a well-constructed, provocative and entertaining play about poverty. It's also refreshing to see a return to the kitchan sink in polemical political drama. The past couple of years have seen radical playwrights tending to concentrate on exploring the apparent successes of Thatcher's Britain (David Hare's The Secret Rapture and Caryl Churchill's Serious Money, to take just two examples): it's no bad thing to be reminded that the poor are still with us.
Friday, 20 January 1989
NOT QUITE CONVINCING
Paul Anderson, review of Working For Common Security by Nick Butler, Len Scott, David Ward and Jonathan Worthington (Fabian Society, £1.50), Tribune 20 January 1989
The authors of Working For Common Security have put together the most cogent case so far constructed for a move, away from Labour's current defence policy of abandoning Britain's nuclear arsenal and ridding Britain of American nuclear weapons. For this reason alone, their pamphlet is worthy of careful scrutiny by anyone interested in the issue — even if in the end, their arguments fail to convince.
Working For Common Security's central theme is that Labour's unilateralism has been rendered obsolete by international developments. Labour policy was formulated at the height of the Euromissile crisis, when super-power arms control negotiations were in deadlock.
Today, so the argument goes, the situation has been transformed. Mikhail Gorbachev's accession to power in the Kremlin has meant Soviet abandonment of obsessive competition in the arms race.
The Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty has removed the most destablising nuclear weapons from Europe. Super-power arms control talks (on strategic nuclear forces, chemical weapons and conventional armaments) are on the move again. Detente is here again, in short, and the key question is how a Labour government could best contribute to a deepening of detente and a quickening of the pace of disarmament.
Butler, Scott, Ward and Worthington argue that the most important element of Labour policy that needs to he reassessed in this light is not the position on British nuclear forces (although they raise the possibility of putting Polaris and Trident into the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) but the party's commitment to rid Britain of American nuclear weapons, in particular the nuclear arms of the dual-capable F-111 bombers stationed in Britain.
They believe there is a danger that, if a Labour government simply told Washington that the F-111s' arms could not be kept in Britain, the F-111s would be redeployed elsewhere in Western Europe — which in turn would lead to big arguments wherever they were to be.redeployed and disruption to the whole arms control process that otherwise might secure the departure of the F-111s from Europe for good.
Therefore, instead of calling for removal of American nuclear weapons from Britain. Labour should be pressing for a change in NATO strategy away from "flexible response" and for a (multilaterally negotiated) elimination of battlefield nuclear weapons from Europe.
This position does have its strong points. The authors of the Fabian pamphlet are quite right to point out that American nuclear forces in Britain and NATO war-fighting strategy are more important questions than the British "independent deterrent".
There would indeed be little point in pursuing a policy of ridding Britain of American nuclear weapons if its only effects were to sabotage the chances of changing NATO strategy and securing international agreement to eliminate battlefield nuclear weapons from Europe.
The authors of Working For Common Security have put together the most cogent case so far constructed for a move, away from Labour's current defence policy of abandoning Britain's nuclear arsenal and ridding Britain of American nuclear weapons. For this reason alone, their pamphlet is worthy of careful scrutiny by anyone interested in the issue — even if in the end, their arguments fail to convince.
Working For Common Security's central theme is that Labour's unilateralism has been rendered obsolete by international developments. Labour policy was formulated at the height of the Euromissile crisis, when super-power arms control negotiations were in deadlock.
Today, so the argument goes, the situation has been transformed. Mikhail Gorbachev's accession to power in the Kremlin has meant Soviet abandonment of obsessive competition in the arms race.
The Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces treaty has removed the most destablising nuclear weapons from Europe. Super-power arms control talks (on strategic nuclear forces, chemical weapons and conventional armaments) are on the move again. Detente is here again, in short, and the key question is how a Labour government could best contribute to a deepening of detente and a quickening of the pace of disarmament.
Butler, Scott, Ward and Worthington argue that the most important element of Labour policy that needs to he reassessed in this light is not the position on British nuclear forces (although they raise the possibility of putting Polaris and Trident into the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks) but the party's commitment to rid Britain of American nuclear weapons, in particular the nuclear arms of the dual-capable F-111 bombers stationed in Britain.
They believe there is a danger that, if a Labour government simply told Washington that the F-111s' arms could not be kept in Britain, the F-111s would be redeployed elsewhere in Western Europe — which in turn would lead to big arguments wherever they were to be.redeployed and disruption to the whole arms control process that otherwise might secure the departure of the F-111s from Europe for good.
Therefore, instead of calling for removal of American nuclear weapons from Britain. Labour should be pressing for a change in NATO strategy away from "flexible response" and for a (multilaterally negotiated) elimination of battlefield nuclear weapons from Europe.
This position does have its strong points. The authors of the Fabian pamphlet are quite right to point out that American nuclear forces in Britain and NATO war-fighting strategy are more important questions than the British "independent deterrent".
There would indeed be little point in pursuing a policy of ridding Britain of American nuclear weapons if its only effects were to sabotage the chances of changing NATO strategy and securing international agreement to eliminate battlefield nuclear weapons from Europe.
Friday, 30 December 1988
TOO MARXIST TO BE MARXIST
Paul Anderson, review of Political and Social Writings, volumes 1 and 2 by Cornelius Castoriadis (edited by David Curtis), Tribune, 30 December 1988
A collection of Cornelius Castoriadis's political writings is long overdue in English. In Europe, he's a major figure in the world of political ideas, as serious as Jurgen Habermas and the brains (in a weird way) behind Dany Cohn-Bendit.
In the Anglophone world, he has been taken up in Britain by iconoclastic libertarian socialists (the Solidarity group made him something of a guru in the late sixties and seventies), and in America by academics and Lacanian shrinkophiles. (The latter half-know his seventies attacks on their master.)
All we have available of his written work in Britain up to now, outside academic journals, are a series of Solidarity pamphlets, a collection of brilliant political-philosophical essays published by Harvester a couple of years back as Crossroads in the Labyrinth, and his magnum opus, The Imaginary Institution of Society, put out late last year by Polity a full 12 years after its publication in France.
Castoriadis does not deserve guru stature; he is wrong on plenty, not least his economics – time and again in these essays, almost all from the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie between 1948 and 1965, he overestimates wildly the strength of the post-war Keynesian boom in the developed world – and the workerist conception of the socialist project that was central to him until at least the late sixties.
In many ways, too, the writings here are polemics from a bygone age – when the Communist Party was a serious force in French politics, when substantial sections of the left really believed the Soviet Union to be "historically progressive", when Trotskyism and other deviant brands of Leninism could be taken seriously, when fundamentalist Marxist catastrophism was left common sense.
It's difficult to avoid feeling that you've read much of this before. But that in itself is a sign of how far the sort of perspective Castoriadis adopted in the fifties and sixties has taken hold of the way the left thinks.
These essays are the work of a man who was, and remains, too much of a Marxist to be a Marxist: as he put it recently, were all Marxists now just as we're all Darwinians.
His early S ou B Marxist-true-believer demolitions of the socialist pretensions of the Soviet state (in English here for the first time) are unsurpassed in their genre; his later critiques of the irresolvable tensions in Marx's work between determinism and an understanding of active human agency are still apposite.
Most of all, his emphasis on the centrality of autonomous self-activity to any emancipatory project is as relevant as ever. Sadly, though, I fear that these volumes won't be read for any of this but because you can't understand French postmodernism unless you read Castoriadis (the Situationists, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard were all once disciples).
What a bloody world.
A collection of Cornelius Castoriadis's political writings is long overdue in English. In Europe, he's a major figure in the world of political ideas, as serious as Jurgen Habermas and the brains (in a weird way) behind Dany Cohn-Bendit.
In the Anglophone world, he has been taken up in Britain by iconoclastic libertarian socialists (the Solidarity group made him something of a guru in the late sixties and seventies), and in America by academics and Lacanian shrinkophiles. (The latter half-know his seventies attacks on their master.)
All we have available of his written work in Britain up to now, outside academic journals, are a series of Solidarity pamphlets, a collection of brilliant political-philosophical essays published by Harvester a couple of years back as Crossroads in the Labyrinth, and his magnum opus, The Imaginary Institution of Society, put out late last year by Polity a full 12 years after its publication in France.
Castoriadis does not deserve guru stature; he is wrong on plenty, not least his economics – time and again in these essays, almost all from the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie between 1948 and 1965, he overestimates wildly the strength of the post-war Keynesian boom in the developed world – and the workerist conception of the socialist project that was central to him until at least the late sixties.
In many ways, too, the writings here are polemics from a bygone age – when the Communist Party was a serious force in French politics, when substantial sections of the left really believed the Soviet Union to be "historically progressive", when Trotskyism and other deviant brands of Leninism could be taken seriously, when fundamentalist Marxist catastrophism was left common sense.
It's difficult to avoid feeling that you've read much of this before. But that in itself is a sign of how far the sort of perspective Castoriadis adopted in the fifties and sixties has taken hold of the way the left thinks.
These essays are the work of a man who was, and remains, too much of a Marxist to be a Marxist: as he put it recently, were all Marxists now just as we're all Darwinians.
His early S ou B Marxist-true-believer demolitions of the socialist pretensions of the Soviet state (in English here for the first time) are unsurpassed in their genre; his later critiques of the irresolvable tensions in Marx's work between determinism and an understanding of active human agency are still apposite.
Most of all, his emphasis on the centrality of autonomous self-activity to any emancipatory project is as relevant as ever. Sadly, though, I fear that these volumes won't be read for any of this but because you can't understand French postmodernism unless you read Castoriadis (the Situationists, Jean Baudrillard and Jean-Francois Lyotard were all once disciples).
What a bloody world.
Friday, 14 October 1988
A GREEN REALIGNMENT?
Paul Anderson, review of Into the 21st Century: An Agenda for Political Realignment by Felix Dodds (ed) (Greenprint, £4.99), Tribune 14 October 1988
Every British politician these days wants to jump onto the green bandwagon. The reason is simple: the opinion polls show that more and more people from all walks of life are concerned about the state of the environment, and there are votes to be had in that concern.
All the same, green issues are still much less addressed here than elsewhere in Europe, not least because green opinion is so poorly organised. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace attract substantial support and funds, but are unwilling to provide forums for political discussion.
The Green Party is tiny, with little prospect of parliamentary representation in the foreseeable future. Many who, in West Germany, would find themselves at home in die Grunen are active in the Labour Party, the Social and Liberal Democrats and the various social movements.
This collection of 16 essays brings together contributors from all these backgrounds to debate values and political strategies. It is very much a mixed bag. Some of the contributions are dull and predictable: the most disappointing are those of the SLD greens who dominate the book (seven of them are represented, which is surely over-doing it), most of whom do no more than assert the continuing relevance of traditional Liberalism The collection could also have done with some heavy editing: nearly every contributor starts off by explaining why green issues are important, which results in much unnecessary repetition.
Neverthelese, Into the 21st Century contains some well argued pieces too (I particularly liked those by Peter Hain, Hilary Wainwright and Peter Tatchell) and, as a whole, it gives a good impression of the state of the dqbate. There, is clearly much common ground here. Everyone agrees that the environmental crisis facing humanity is crucially important, and there is broad agreement on the necessity of many measures for example, radical decentralisation of political power, massive redistribution of wealth (both globally and within Britain), and non-nuclear defence and energy policies.
At the same time, however, there are major obstacles that stand in the way of anything, approaching a green realignment in British politics. The most important is the continuing strength of existing party political affiliations: the contributors share a sense of being on the libertarian left and of distrusting the traditional managerialist social democrats now firmly in charge of both Labour and the SLD, but there is no agreement about how to put it into effect.
There are also unresolved differences about how the environmental crisis should be understood and what should be done about it. Is "capitalism" or "industrialism" at the root of the problem? If the former, how can we explain the ecological disaster of "actually existing socialism"? If the latter, do we really believe that a "non-industrial" economic strategy can cope with poverty at home and in the Third World? To what extent can or should a class-based politics mesh with green concerns? And so on.
Into the 21st Century provides no answers to these questions but at least its contributors are not afraid to pose them explicitly. For that, it deseves a wide readership..
Every British politician these days wants to jump onto the green bandwagon. The reason is simple: the opinion polls show that more and more people from all walks of life are concerned about the state of the environment, and there are votes to be had in that concern.
All the same, green issues are still much less addressed here than elsewhere in Europe, not least because green opinion is so poorly organised. Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace attract substantial support and funds, but are unwilling to provide forums for political discussion.
The Green Party is tiny, with little prospect of parliamentary representation in the foreseeable future. Many who, in West Germany, would find themselves at home in die Grunen are active in the Labour Party, the Social and Liberal Democrats and the various social movements.
This collection of 16 essays brings together contributors from all these backgrounds to debate values and political strategies. It is very much a mixed bag. Some of the contributions are dull and predictable: the most disappointing are those of the SLD greens who dominate the book (seven of them are represented, which is surely over-doing it), most of whom do no more than assert the continuing relevance of traditional Liberalism The collection could also have done with some heavy editing: nearly every contributor starts off by explaining why green issues are important, which results in much unnecessary repetition.
Neverthelese, Into the 21st Century contains some well argued pieces too (I particularly liked those by Peter Hain, Hilary Wainwright and Peter Tatchell) and, as a whole, it gives a good impression of the state of the dqbate. There, is clearly much common ground here. Everyone agrees that the environmental crisis facing humanity is crucially important, and there is broad agreement on the necessity of many measures for example, radical decentralisation of political power, massive redistribution of wealth (both globally and within Britain), and non-nuclear defence and energy policies.
At the same time, however, there are major obstacles that stand in the way of anything, approaching a green realignment in British politics. The most important is the continuing strength of existing party political affiliations: the contributors share a sense of being on the libertarian left and of distrusting the traditional managerialist social democrats now firmly in charge of both Labour and the SLD, but there is no agreement about how to put it into effect.
There are also unresolved differences about how the environmental crisis should be understood and what should be done about it. Is "capitalism" or "industrialism" at the root of the problem? If the former, how can we explain the ecological disaster of "actually existing socialism"? If the latter, do we really believe that a "non-industrial" economic strategy can cope with poverty at home and in the Third World? To what extent can or should a class-based politics mesh with green concerns? And so on.
Into the 21st Century provides no answers to these questions but at least its contributors are not afraid to pose them explicitly. For that, it deseves a wide readership..
Friday, 26 August 1988
CND FIRST TIME AROUND
Paul Anderson, review of Against the Bomb: The British Peace Movement 1958-1965 by Richard Taylor (Oxford, £32.50), Tribune, 26 August 1988
Insofar as it did not achieve any of the goals it set itself, the British peace movement of the late fifties and early sixties was a failure. Its rise and fall was, meteoric; it did not persuade or force the British state to give up its nuclear weapons; it did not even manage to keep Labour Party conference to a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament.
Yet it effected some of the most profound changes in British political life of the post-war era. As Richard Taylor puts it in the conclusion to Against the Bomb:
"The movement was a part of the process that broke the post-war consensus and took politics and political concerns outside the exclusive confines of Westminster and the professional politicians. For the first time since the thirties a mass extra-parliamentary movement emerged on to the political scene. And the rapidity of that growth, the size of the movement and the intensity of feeling on the issues involved was something quite new. This whole ethos of involvement and concern - and of ordinary people's right to be heard – has been a continuing theme in British politics ever since. In particular, the concepts and practices of non-violent direct action have become almost commonplace techniques of protest."
The movement, he continues, "was centrally important in creating a 'culture of protest' which grew and flourished from the late sixties onwards". It was the direct precursor of the anti-Vietnam and student movements (and the subsequent growth of far-Left groups, both Leninist and libertarian); and its echoes can still be heard, particularly in the women's movement and in the revived peace movement of the eighties.
The central theme of Taylor's history is the tension between the "respectable" leadership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (which was primarily concerned with putting pressure on the Labour Party) and more radical elements – the direct actionists of the Direct Action Committee and Committee of 100; the far-left political parties; and the New Left that emerged from the wreckage of the Communist Party after 1956.
Taylor's sympathies lie with the New Left: he believes it came closest of all the tendencies in the fifties and sixties peace movement to developing a political strategy that was neither "Labourist" – Taylor's politics are very much of the Ralph Miliband school – nor hopelessly Utopian. Yet even the New Left sank eventually into the "Labourist" swamp. In the final analysis, Taylor argues, "the various political strategies of the movement were all inadequate. The apolitical moralism of a large section was unrealistic because it side-stepped the essentially political issues; the direct actionists had neither ultimate political coherence nor sufficient human and material resources for their ambitious objectives; and the extra-parliamentary left in all its guises proved too weak to harness the movement to its politics."
Has the eighties peace movement done much better in developing a political strategy? It has certainly been larger and lasted much longer, and so far Labour has not abandoned the non-nuclear defence policy it adopted when the movement was on the rise. The eighties movement has also proved itself much more able to contain disagreements among activists. Although there have been disputes throughout the eighties, notably over the Soviet Union, there has been nothing like the sixties split over direct action. On the whole, CND in the eighties has managed dissent within its ranks effectively enough to remain an umbrella organisation for almost all peace movement opinion – the wire-cutters as well as the lobbyists – although at the cost, occasionally, of adopting bland lowest-common-denominator political positions in the interests of unity.
Whether all this adds up to a solution to the problem of how a social movement with essentially non-negotiable demands should relate to a political party whose primary goal is the achievement of office is, however, a moot point. I hope it does – but we shall see over the next year or so. Meanwhile, Taylor's book deserves a wide peace movement and left readership.
Insofar as it did not achieve any of the goals it set itself, the British peace movement of the late fifties and early sixties was a failure. Its rise and fall was, meteoric; it did not persuade or force the British state to give up its nuclear weapons; it did not even manage to keep Labour Party conference to a policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament.
Yet it effected some of the most profound changes in British political life of the post-war era. As Richard Taylor puts it in the conclusion to Against the Bomb:
"The movement was a part of the process that broke the post-war consensus and took politics and political concerns outside the exclusive confines of Westminster and the professional politicians. For the first time since the thirties a mass extra-parliamentary movement emerged on to the political scene. And the rapidity of that growth, the size of the movement and the intensity of feeling on the issues involved was something quite new. This whole ethos of involvement and concern - and of ordinary people's right to be heard – has been a continuing theme in British politics ever since. In particular, the concepts and practices of non-violent direct action have become almost commonplace techniques of protest."
The movement, he continues, "was centrally important in creating a 'culture of protest' which grew and flourished from the late sixties onwards". It was the direct precursor of the anti-Vietnam and student movements (and the subsequent growth of far-Left groups, both Leninist and libertarian); and its echoes can still be heard, particularly in the women's movement and in the revived peace movement of the eighties.
The central theme of Taylor's history is the tension between the "respectable" leadership of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (which was primarily concerned with putting pressure on the Labour Party) and more radical elements – the direct actionists of the Direct Action Committee and Committee of 100; the far-left political parties; and the New Left that emerged from the wreckage of the Communist Party after 1956.
Taylor's sympathies lie with the New Left: he believes it came closest of all the tendencies in the fifties and sixties peace movement to developing a political strategy that was neither "Labourist" – Taylor's politics are very much of the Ralph Miliband school – nor hopelessly Utopian. Yet even the New Left sank eventually into the "Labourist" swamp. In the final analysis, Taylor argues, "the various political strategies of the movement were all inadequate. The apolitical moralism of a large section was unrealistic because it side-stepped the essentially political issues; the direct actionists had neither ultimate political coherence nor sufficient human and material resources for their ambitious objectives; and the extra-parliamentary left in all its guises proved too weak to harness the movement to its politics."
Has the eighties peace movement done much better in developing a political strategy? It has certainly been larger and lasted much longer, and so far Labour has not abandoned the non-nuclear defence policy it adopted when the movement was on the rise. The eighties movement has also proved itself much more able to contain disagreements among activists. Although there have been disputes throughout the eighties, notably over the Soviet Union, there has been nothing like the sixties split over direct action. On the whole, CND in the eighties has managed dissent within its ranks effectively enough to remain an umbrella organisation for almost all peace movement opinion – the wire-cutters as well as the lobbyists – although at the cost, occasionally, of adopting bland lowest-common-denominator political positions in the interests of unity.
Whether all this adds up to a solution to the problem of how a social movement with essentially non-negotiable demands should relate to a political party whose primary goal is the achievement of office is, however, a moot point. I hope it does – but we shall see over the next year or so. Meanwhile, Taylor's book deserves a wide peace movement and left readership.
Sunday, 24 July 1988
ORWELL AS PROPAGANDIST
Paul Anderson, review of The War Broadcasts by George Orwell, edited by W.J. West (Penguin, £4.95) and The War Commentaries by George Orwell, edited by W.J. West (Penguin, £4.95), Tribune, 24 July 1988
From 1941 to 1943, George Orwell was employed by the Indian section of the BBC's Eastern Service. He wrote a weekly piece analysing the war as it happened, designed to counter Axis propaganda broadcasts to India; and he wrote and produced less regular talks and discussions, mainly on cultural themes. In 1984, the scripts of Orwell's programmes were unearthed by W. J. West, who edited them into two volumes, which are now published for the first time in paperback.
The weekly news programmes, most of which were not spoken by Orwell himself, are collected in The War Commentaries; The War Broadcasts contains the scripts of the talks and a large selection of (not particularly interesting) business correspondence between Orwell and his various contributors.
There is plenty of concise English prose in both volumes that any writer would profit from reading; but the main interest of both lies in the light they shed on British wartime propaganda and Orwell's love-hate relationship with his role as propagandist (which he eventually abandoned to write Animal Farm and become literary editor of Tribune).
Unfortunately, despite the editor's excellent introductory essays and intelligent footnotes, neither book sheds its light very directly: to get the most out of the Broadcasts and Commentaries, I found I had to refer constantly to the second volume of the Penguin Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, which covers the same period. Although the publication of the Broadcasts and Commentaries in paperback is welcome, their contents are unlikely to be appreciated as widely as they should be until they are integrated into a new edition of the Collected Essays.
From 1941 to 1943, George Orwell was employed by the Indian section of the BBC's Eastern Service. He wrote a weekly piece analysing the war as it happened, designed to counter Axis propaganda broadcasts to India; and he wrote and produced less regular talks and discussions, mainly on cultural themes. In 1984, the scripts of Orwell's programmes were unearthed by W. J. West, who edited them into two volumes, which are now published for the first time in paperback.
The weekly news programmes, most of which were not spoken by Orwell himself, are collected in The War Commentaries; The War Broadcasts contains the scripts of the talks and a large selection of (not particularly interesting) business correspondence between Orwell and his various contributors.
There is plenty of concise English prose in both volumes that any writer would profit from reading; but the main interest of both lies in the light they shed on British wartime propaganda and Orwell's love-hate relationship with his role as propagandist (which he eventually abandoned to write Animal Farm and become literary editor of Tribune).
Unfortunately, despite the editor's excellent introductory essays and intelligent footnotes, neither book sheds its light very directly: to get the most out of the Broadcasts and Commentaries, I found I had to refer constantly to the second volume of the Penguin Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, which covers the same period. Although the publication of the Broadcasts and Commentaries in paperback is welcome, their contents are unlikely to be appreciated as widely as they should be until they are integrated into a new edition of the Collected Essays.
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