Letters: Love on the Dole (2000)

Letters to the Editors from the February 2000 issue of the Socialist Standard

Love on the Dole

Dear Editors,

In his review (Socialist Standard, November) of Love on the Dole, Michael Gill alleges that the British Board of Film Censors would not allow the play to be filmed. The Board existed only to censor films once made but had no powers to prevent a film being made. In fact the film of Love on the Dole was made in 1941.

Denham Ford, 

Westcliff-on-Sea, Essex

Reply: 

You are quite right, the British Board of Film Censors has no power to prevent a film being made. However, since in practice all films shown in public places must have a certificate from the Board, it is regularly consulted by film makers before and whilst films are being made. You will find interesting details of how the process is managed, for instance, in the material for Open University Course A420, Cinema and Society: Britain in the 1950s and 1960s. It is very revealing.

And you are quite right that Love on the Dole was filmed in 1941. Ironically, the production company’s stated aim was “to show the public the true state of affairs which arose after the last war in the industrial areas and which must not be allowed to flourish when the immediate conflict is over”. So whilst, as we said in our review, the BBFC effectively “prevented this ‘very sordid story in very sordid surroundings’ from being filmed in the 1930s” (NT programme), when the Second World War began the same story was made in support of the war -Editors.

Pure chance?

Dear Editors,

I take it from your letter column (December) that you socialists are all firm believers in Dawkins’s blind watchmaker operating in evolution without any purpose at all.

That being so I wonder where you socialists draw the line between Darwin’s natural selection and human beings as producers of many civilisations in the past 6,000 years.

If human beings are a product of a blind mindless watchmaker surely you should accept this belief as being a miracle of nature even as much as the divine miracles that appear in the pages of the bible.

One could easily say that evolution from lifeless matter brought about by a blind watchmaker is a supreme miracle which one could also interpret as a miracle of matter.

As the bible is not the only book to look for miracles as evolution has plenty of them.

Nevertheless, Darwin did not explain the mutation in evolution which produced the consciousness of human beings who managed to produce civilisations.

Are we to believe civilisations are also a product of a blind watchmaker?

R. Smith, 

Dundee

Reply: 

No, human civilisations are not produced by the same blind, biological processes that led to the evolution of all the various species of life on Earth, extinct and extant, including homo sapiens. Once humans had been evolved (by the “blind watchmaker” process) then, thanks to their biologically evolved ability to think abstractly and make conscious, purposeful, decisions as well as their ability to extend their anatomy by means of tools, human evolution ceases to be biological and becomes social and cultural, reflecting the development of the tools humans make and use.

Because human action is always purposeful, an element of purpose is indeed involved in this type of evolution (but it is of course, human purpose, or rather the different purposes of different humans, not that of some supernatural, miracle-working being). However, humans do not have a complete free hand here. As one well-known 19th century materialist put it, “Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past” (Karl Marx). This means that the evolution of human societies is subject also to the working of objective, non-purposeful processes which can be found by study and research, but these are not at all the same as those that governed biological evolution.

And yes, the biological evolution of life, consciousness and the self-consciousness which humans alone possess can be explained without having recourse to the concept of “miracles”, i.e. the intervention of some supernatural being(s). We don’t yet know enough to state definitely how life first evolved, but we will get there eventually. For the present state of knowledge and study of this matter see the collection of articles in Skeptical Inquirer (Sep/Oct 1999) “Where Do We Come From? The Biology Of Life’s Origin”-Editors.

World solution

Dear Editors,

Whilst I do not have a problem with much of Simon Wigley’s “Open Letter to Reclaim The Streets” (Socialist Standard, January), I would be interested to understand how the statement: “we are glad to see the emergence of organisations attacking capitalism as a system rather than merely its particular evils” is compatible with Clause 7 of our party’s Declaration of Principles, namely: ” . . . the party seeking working class emancipation must be hostile to every other party”?

Simply being opposed to capitalism does not make a person or an organisation socialist i.e. one seeking working class emancipation.

Being a socialist surely implies agreement with:

• Our class and economic analysis of capitalism,
• The need to replace that social system by one based on the common ownership and the democratic control of the means of production and distribution by all society,
• The need to establish socialism through democratic political action, that is, by winning control of the state apparatus.

I see no evidence from Simon Wigley’s letter that the anarchist organisations he wishes us to welcome share the conclusions which make the Socialist Party contribution to political and economic thought so distinctive and clear.

Associating ourselves, albeit fairly critically, by expressing general words of support and identifying alleged common ground with non-socialist organisations can only create confusion amongst those we are trying to win to the socialist case and thus puts back the achievement of socialism itself.

Andrew C. Northall, 

Kettering, Northants

Reply: 

We never went that far, nor meant to. We were not seeking common ground with non-socialist organisations nor saying that people should join them but welcoming the fact that some people were moving towards identifying capitalism as the cause of problems they had previously sought to deal with on a single-issue basis, and urging them to take the next step and join us in the struggle for socialism as the only practicable alternative to capitalism.

“Recognition that the global capitalist system, based on the exploitation of people and the planet for the profit of a few, is at the very root of our social and ecological troubles” (as a leaflet for J18 put it) is, as you point out, not the equivalent of socialist understanding but it is a step—indeed, an indispensable step—towards it and the more widespread it is, the easier it must be for us to put our case across. So how can we as Socialists not welcome its emergence? And where else, if not amongst such people, are we to find “those we are trying to win to the socialist case”? -Editors.

The Scene of the Crime (4): Love on the Dole (1975)

From the February 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard

The City of Salford, to the west of the city of Manchester, covers an area which in 1844 was described by Frederick Engels as "The Classic Slum". Almost a hundred years later, Walter Greenwood's novel and play Love on the Dole (1933), depicted a part of Salford close by the Parish Church of Pendleton known as Hanky Park which had changed very little since the time of Engels.

The novel Love on the Dole has a quotation on the flyleaf from James Russell Lowell — "The time is ripe, and rotten ripe, for change; then let it come . . . " But the right time for change for capitalism is when the competitiveness of the system demands a change in the overall pattern of industrial production. New productive methods, re-siting of industrial areas, new methods of transportation, improvements in shipping, railways and road transport.

Salford in 1933, like other industrial areas in Britain, was suffering from unemployment which had begun in the early 1920s. Love on the Dole like many novels of its kind deals with the lives of working people, their personalities shaped and fashioned by the full-time commitment of working for wages, that is when work was available; when it was not, they spent their time on the dole, an experience made as uncomfortable as possible, since society's attitude to the unemployed had changed very little from the days of the "Poor Relief" of earlier years. From birth, expectations of the working class are tied to a period of socialization in slum conditions. The environmental influences of education and deprivation develop personalities suitable only as replacements for those workers who physically and mentally are no longer considered suitable for exploitation.

This at its best; at its worst the economic system based on capital and wage-labour plumbs the degradative depths, denies any flowering of the creative potential that lies stagnant and rotting in personalities shaped by its greed for profit and which under the more humane conditions of a free, Socialist society, would blossom beyond present-day experience.

The Salford of 1933 was becoming less and less influenced by the cotton and mining industries. A greater effect upon it was being made by the industrial area of Trafford Park, which claimed to be the heaviest concentration of industry in Europe, and of course the Manchester Ship Canal developed for the transportation of manufactured goods. Such concentrations of industry kept a large working population tied to within easy reach of its source of life, employment for wages. The homes available for working people of the area had been built a century before. They could hardly be described as dwellings, they were merely places of refuge in which human beings rested between periods of being in work or on the dole.

Love on the Dole successfully portrays its characters and their behaviour in an environment of poverty. One of the novel's main characters, Larry Meath, is a skilled workman who spends his leisure time in reading and political activity. Political activity for Larry Meath is of course the reformism of the Labour Party, as of course was the author's. In 1933 the Labour Party was engaged in attracting the working class of Salford from its support of the Conservative and Liberal Parties. Such colourful characters as Joe Toole, who represented South Salford in 1924 and himself a product of the salford slums, spread confusion in the minds of the working class since they began to identify Socialism with reforms, particularly better housing conditions — they had even begun to notice that (see Our Old Man, Millie Toole, 1948).

To-day Salford can boast of two Labour MPs who for all intents and purposes might as well not exist. But since Love on the Dole raises the question of the need for social change we might turn our thoughts to the Salford of to-day particularly in the area once known as Hanky Park.

Hanky Park, the area of terraced slums, has given way to the modern interpretation of high-rise slums, because to the Socialist what defines a slum is comparison with that which could be a reality under the prevailing technological possibilities of the times. A few hundred yards from this great social experiment of high-rise flats and modern shopping precinct is an area known as Lower Broughton picturized in the BBC's Man Alive programme entitled "Get us out of here" (Saturday 9th November, 1974). In housing conditions which would make the Classic Slum look like a description of lordly estates, working men and women still live and cry out for a place in the sun.

But what about the motorway system which has made Salford and Manchester perhaps better served than anywhere in the country? These modern roads for the purpose of transporting manufactured goods, quick returns on capital investment, are the last word in technological innovation. In planning the new Salford and its industrial estates, places like Hanky Park, if they were in the way, had to come down. Lower Broughton and the other areas of Salford like it will have to wait; the needs of industry come first. A Labour government has shown that it can reform no quicker than any other Government since the system to which it can only act as handmaiden will determine how quickly and in whose interests social reform will take place.

A truer historical perspective of the Classic Slum is a book with that title written by Robert Roberts (1971). The author writes:

Through a familiarity so long and close, this district must have become for Engels the very epitome of all industrial ghettoes, the classic slum itself. He died in 1895 having seen that little world change, develop, prosper even, yet stay in essence the same awful paradigm of what a free capitalist system could produce. By 1900 the area showed some improvement; his cow stable had doubtless been demolished together with many other noisome den, but much that was vile remained.

In 1974, a Socialist revisiting the Salford in which he was born and lived in childhood has to admit that change has undoubtedly taken place. But much that was vile in the time of Engels and in the time of Walter Greenwood still remains and will remain until with purpose and the correct understanding, men and women create a new society which they will manipulate in their own interest and not in the interest of an economic system which, as cities like Salford glaringly illustrate, has outlived its usefulness.

Alf Atkinson

Literary lefties in the 1930s (1980)

From the May 1980 issue of the Socialist Standard

Although the furore over Anthony Blunt has died down the question still remains: why did people like him swallow the "Russian Myth" so easily? We might ask this especially about other members of Blunt's generation and social background who were involved not in the visual arts but in the literary world. The pro-Communist sympathies of the literary left-wing did not amount to sustained and covert acts of treason but they allowed their ideology to govern their lives and work for the best part of a decade - and this did not stop at deception and the telling of lies.

In order to explain why these writers mistook Russian Nationalism for socialism it is necessary to appreciate the peculiarities of their approach to politics on the one hand, and the common characteristics of their background and culture on the other. First, who were the protagonists in this political tragedy and what was their contribution to the history and literature of the nineteen-thirties?

At the heart of the 'thirties literary movement, which comprised writers born during the first two decades of the twentieth century, was the Auden Group which emerged from the atmosphere and tradition of Bloomsbury. The group included the poets, Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis and Louis MacNeice, along with the novelists, Christopher Isherwood and Edward Upward who were attracted to the most promising poet of the period, Wystan Hugh Auden. Malcolm Muggeridge and Kingsley Martin also had strong connections with a definite intellectual tradition, that of the eminent Fabians. Muggeridge by virtue of his marriage to Beatrice Webb's niece, Kitty, and Martin through his position as Editor of the "Staggers and Naggers" - The New Statesman and Nation. Theoreticians such as the Labour politician John Strachey and the bright young Communist Christopher Caudwell contributed to the ideological justification of Communist politics in Britain; the former in his The Coming Struggle for Power and other theoretical works published by the Left Book Club of which he was a leading light, and the latter in Illusion and Reality, which attempted to apply Historical Materialism to the evolution of poetry. Claud Cockburn and the Hungarian journalist Arthur Koestler were hard-headed Communists who, under the orders of their Russian masters, sent fabricated news-stories to England during the Spanish Civil War. Indeed, Cockburn wrote under the slightly more proletarian name of Frank Pitcairn, while Koestler kept his membership of the Communist Party a complete secret while working as a reporter for the right-wing Hungarian paper Pester Lloyd. The two heretics of the literary left-wing were Julian Symons who became a Trotskyite during the 'thirties and George Orwell who viewed Stalin and Trotsky in the same critical light and described Russian Commissars as "half gangster, half gramophone".

The key to their left-wing sympathies can be detected in the official statistics of the period. It was a decade in which unemployment peaked at nearly three million in 1933; the Ministry of Agriculture revealed that 20 per cent of the nation's children were badly fed and Seebohm Rowntree claimed that 30 per cent of the city of York were living below the poverty line. The social conditions of the 'thirties are more poignantly illustrated in the following three extracts. Greenwood's piece from Love On The Dole was written by someone who was brought up in the conditions described; Orwell was fortunate enough to be a mere visitor to the industrial North; Day Lewis' poem could easily have been constructed by someone who had only read about such things in the press.

" . . . and to find the cost of this present system you only have to at our own lives and the lives of our parents. Labour never ending, constant struggles to pay the rent and to buy sufficient food and clothing. And the houses in which we are compelled to live are as though they have been designed by fiends in hell for our especial punishment. Even at best I say it is not a life." Love On The Dole by Walter Greenwood 

"She looked up as the train passed and I was almost near enough to catch her eye. She had a round pale face, the usual exhausted face of the slum girl who is twenty-five and looks forty, thanks to miscarriages and drudgery; and it wore, for the second in which I saw it, the most desolate hopeless expression I have ever seen." The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

"The hooters are blowing,

No need let them take;

When baby is hungry

'Tis best not to wake.

Thy mother is crying,

Thy dad's on the dole;

Two shillings a week is 

The price of a soul."

A Carol by C. Day Lewis.

The nineteen-thirties was the decade of social surveys and "Urban Rides" undertaken by a variety of writers, political activists and social scientists including Orwell, Rowntree, Wal Hannington, J. B. Priestley and Aronld Zweig, to name a few.

Running throughout the work of the literary left-wing - almost without exception - is a pervading sense of guilt which has three elements. The dominant of the three was the over-riding belief that they, born into the homes of small businessmen, shopkeepers and civil servants, educated at public school and in most cases Oxbridge, were, to use Upward's phrase, "Living off the backs of the workers". Somehow they were responsible for the worst features of the capitalist system. It was almost as if one particular phrase of Lenin's was taken to heart above all others.

"How could they be so blind as not to see that our enemy is the small capitalist, the small owner? In the transition period from Capitalism to Socialism our chief enemy is the small bourgeoisie, with its economic customs, habits and position."

The Chief Tasks of Our Times

Lenin, of course, was referring to Russia in an attempt to direct attention away from the bigger and more powerful capitalist institution - the State. here is an example of a political expedient in one country becoming a precept of political theology in another. This aspect of Communist propaganda implanted itself on the already guilt-stricken consciences of the literary intellectuals. For they had already inherited from their school days a sense of shame that they had been too young to test their manhood in the Great War. In addition their childhoods had been scarred by sexual and emotional trauma.

Upward described Repton School - unaffectionately referred to as "Reptile" - as being rotten with "a foul and vicious kind of sexuality" during his time there as a pupil. Orwell recounts the mental and physical cruelty of his Eastbourne prep school in Such, Such Were The Joys. Spender says that his parents might just as well have had him "educated at a brothel for flagellants" and Isherwood claims that his "middle class" upbringing denied affection and taught that sex was "the loathsome charnel house, the bottomless abyss and its natural outcome was paralysis". The political implication of these experiences is succinctly expressed by W. H. Auden:

"The best reason I have for opposing Fascism is that at school I lived in a fascist State."

The lure of Russia, the call of the Popular Front and the fight against Fascism took on a new and personal perspective. The literary left-wing chose a number of ways to try to expiate their class-guilt (for example Orwell became a tramp), but most chose to join the Communist Party or become fellow travellers. This was far from an easy defection as they all experienced particular inhibitions in their dealings with the "working class". Muggeridge compares the fascination of the intellectuals with the workers to a small dog passing a big dog, half wanting to smell its bottom, and half afraid. It is worth commenting that their political needs were largely emotional rather than intellectual. They felt guilt but they did not "feel" Communism. It was an uncomfortable veneer which did not fit easily, and it required a great deal of their mental effort to convince them that it did.The contradictions inherent in Russian Communism were mentally accommodated but without realising that the paradoxes originated with Lenin not Marx. Therefore when they finally cast off the ill-fitting Communist mantle it was "human nature" that got the credit for the failure of this political exercise, and Marx who got the blame. This conventional conclusion is presented in Martin's autobiography under the heading of "Left Illusions" and in the infamous compilation by ex-Communists, The God That Failed. However their excuses are not historically accurate.

The anti-marxist foundations of Bolshevism have been highlighted in some detail by revolutionaries like Rosa Luxembourg and more recently by academics like Maximilian Rubel[1], Frederick Bender[2], and Paul Mattick[3]. Even raymond Willaims in Culture and Society and Robert Conquest in The Great Terror have been referred to the expedient innovations of Leninism. Yet it is precisely the flawed assumptions of the Bolsheviks which ensured the political betrayal and eventual disenchantment of individuals who could not stomach the rigours of power politics.

Lenin differed fundamentally from Marx, in his insistence that socialism could be established in a pre-industrial economy and that a socialist revolution could be initiated without the participation of the working class as a whole. These modifications required the redefining of socialism and the economic criteria of class so as to fit in with the economic conditions of Russia. It was this last alteration which enabled the Russian Communists to successfully dupe the literary intellectuals.

In the Communist Manifesto Marx declared:

"By the bourgeoisie is meant the class of modern Capitalists, owners of the means of social production and employers of wage-labour. By proletariat the class of modern wage-labourers who having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labour-power to live."

If they had read Marx the literary left-wing would have realised that they too were workers by virtue of their occupations as journalists and teachers. Their bourgeois "customs and habits" were not sufficient in themselves to constitute membership of the capitalist class. Like all other workers they stood as "non-owners" in relation to the social means of production.

Lenin insisted that the working class consisted only of industrial labor, a mere section of all wage-earners, and the party that represented their true interests did not consist of "the working class itself" but a minority of professional revolutionaries - Lenin's vanguard of the Proletariat. Lenin's contrived view of class gave rise to further inaccuracy and confusion in the writing of the literary left. In the work of the most promising young neo-Bolshevik, Christopher Caudwell, this revised view of class is taken to its most illogical extreme.

"All classes injured by the final explosion of capitalism - workers, peasants, small farmers, shopkeepers, artisans, artists, specialists, technicians - compose that rebellious mass . . . but only one class is organised by its conditions of life to overthrow the old system and build a new."

Illusion and Reality

The literary left-wing believed for a time that capitalism would finally collapse and that their own involvement was of little importance in the face of the inevitable, but at least they were on the side of history.

It is ironic that contained in the speech that was to shape the political commitment of a whole generation of young artists was the admission that should have exposed Lenin's opportunism for what it was - not the way to socialism, but a road to disenchantment and despair.

"State capitalism would be a step forward for us."

The Chief Tasks of Our Times

 Richard Hales

Footnotes:

1. Pipes (Ed) Revolutionary Russia. 1968.
2. Bender F.L. The Betrayal Of Marx. 1975
3. Mattick P. Marx And Keynes. 1974

The Hell That Is Poverty (1999)

Theatre Review from the November 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

Love On The Dole by Ronald Gow and Walter Greenwood. National Theatre.

I remember my mother telling about Love on the Dole when I was growing up in Manchester. Walter Greenwood had pitched his novel about the evils of unemployment, and the grinding poverty that is its inevitable accompaniment, in Hanky Park in Salford. The family home was still in Salford, close to Hankinson Park where Greenwood was born, and when I read the novel as a young man there were still dozens of Hanky Parks in the grimy old town: the night school I attended three times a week was close by one such example; Lowry used others as the subject material of his paintings; and Granada TV identified and tarted up another which became Coronation Street. But until a few weeks ago I had never seen Ronald Gow's play of Greenwood's novel. It was revelation.

Throughout the year, under the banner of NT 2000, the National has been "charting and celebrating the progress of drama through the 20th century, as represented by 100 plays". In the main these celebrations have been, regrettably, modest in nature, typically consisting of a couple of extracts from the chosen play, and conversations perhaps involving the author and original cast members. But now three plays which had proved popular earlier in the series, and which had never been produced at the National, had been chosen for "full readings" on the stage of the Lyttleton. Love on the Dole was one of these.

I confess I was unprepared for the impact of Greenwood and Gow's play. With only a few props and with scripts to hand the cast quickly transported us to the early 1930s and to events which on the one hand appeared as though through the mists of time, and yet on the other seemed achingly familiar. "Aw, God, just let me get a job," pleads Mr Hardcastle, with furniture pawned and his daughter about to sell herself as a prostitute. And later in total despair, as he dropped to his knees and beat the floor in helpless frustration, crying "God, gimme a job," I couldn't but remember Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff, and Yosser's plaintive catechism which somehow summed up the 1980s, "Gissa job, Mister. Gissa job."

It says much for the power of the play that actors like Alison Steadman and Jack Ellis, Kathy Staff and Julie Legrand, were prepared to invest time, energy, and commitment in a single performance on a wet Monday evening. A couple of weeks later when I returned to the National to buy a copy of the script I discovered that the man at the cash desk had taken a small part in the production. He told me that the actors had been amazed at the impact of the play on both themselves and the audience. "We could see that people were clearly moved by the reading, as we were ourselves."

Love on the Dole may be belittled because it was written as a novel rather than as a play, but on the evidence of this reading it is one of the most important pieces of drama of the century. Its authenticity is clear. Its characters are real, and their concerns are our concerns. It speaks to people because it paints a picture of life as it is; life as it will continue for as long as the mechanics of capitalism hold sway, and periodically determine that countless millions of people will be thrown on the dole.

And one final note. Not for the first time the programme is revealing. First performed in 1934, by the end of the following year Love on the Dole had been seen by more than one million people on stages up and down the country. But the British Board of Film Censors would not allow "this very sordid story in very sordid surroundings" to be filmed in the 1930s. Two years after the Board reached its decision the same members of the working class whose sordid story had been so powerfully described in Love on the Dole, but seen as unsuitable for filming, were being invited to volunteer to fight in the Second World War—in defence of freedom and democracy, of course.

Michael Gill