"Fiesta." — An essay in futility (1949)

From the October 1949 issue of the Socialist Standard

A King was once injured in the loins, and as he lay in his bed, he watched his kingdom decline. It is upon this mythological theme that Ernest Hemingway based his recently republished novel, “Fiesta.” His king is an American journalist, his kingdom, vividly portrayed with neither comment nor condemnation, is the degenerate world of the reckless twenties.

Much has already been written about the political and industrial conditions of this decade. Black Friday and the general strike have been analysed and discussed, and with them the miserable failure, so far as the working class were concerned, of the first two Labour Governments; but so far as the social relativity to economic conditions is concerned, another aspect has been largely neglected.

The first world war had resounding effects upon the social set up of capitalist society. By compromise, or in many cases, by complete surrender, many members of the landed aristocracy had managed to retain a great deal of their wealth and power. Still was it largely their prerogative to send their sons to the universities and thence into the diplomatic corps, the army or the church. Still the sons of the bourgeoisie were found a place in the family business. In both cases the daughters were taught to sing or play, “ finished,” “ brought out ” and used as “ pawns ” or even “ queens ” on the social chessboard.

But the war, which introduced many scientific discoveries, with all accompanying horrors, brought a great step up in production. Thousands of pounds were made overnight. New powers rose in the land. The little fish were swallowed by the sharks. And the war had to be paid for. Taxes rose. The landed aristocracy, living upon ground rents and family fortunes, suffered at the hands of the industrial capitalists. Many of them were uprooted.

The post war world revealed social changes. School, the army, the family estate or business was a sequence broken. The school, alright—the army, too true—but then what? The family estate was now the business of the “nouveau rich” or even the National Trust, and where was the place of the “master’s” son in a vast industrial organisation?

And the position of the daughters had changed as well. This war, dwarfing its predecessors in intensity, had called for the participation to some degree of every human being. The sea barrier, crumbling all the time under capitalism, broke down almost completely. So far as the women of the working class were concerned it merely meant that they became more competition for their jobless menfolk, but for the women of the capitalist class it made them as independent as their parasitic brothers.

This collapse of tradition made their world seem hopeless. Those things that had previously existed to occupy their minds had vanished. Pleasure became their sole pursuit. The social columns were filled with details of extravagant parties. Hostesses were judged by the lavishness and originality of their balls. One achieved passing fame by ordaining that all her guests turn up in baby clothes. The rag-time band, the bottle party, the night club, the stunt, Paris, the Riviera, Eastern tours, was the fad of the layabouts. Drug addiction and immorality reached their highest peak. They dabbled in Freudian psychology and psycho-analysis. Fantastic behaviour was excused as “ self-expression,” perversion as reflexes. “The colonel’s lady and Rosy O’Grady,” as Hemingway parodies icily, “are lesbians under the skin.”

Such conditions and ideas are bound to reflect themselves in the art of the generation. New schools in literature and art portrayed the expensive futility of this generation. The harsh sexuality of D. H. Lawrence, the infathomability of James Joyce, the fatuous writings of unmourned contemporaries, the cubist, surrealistic and futuristic schools of art are all evidence of these trends. “I should have been a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas ”—these stark horrible words of T. S. Eliot, the era’s major poet, are typical. "I have measured out my life with coffee spoons"—again Eliot.

Forever seeking something new their hungry eyes turned to Russia. What was taking place there? Bolshevik propagandists spoke glibly of the intellectual, of the intelligentsia, of the new culture. Did these words not apply to them? Many of them thought so, and from this womb of jargon emerged one of the most pernicious creations of our time—the left wing intellectual who was going to lead the suffering workers by their noses to what they vaguely referred to as “emancipation.” To further this aim they founded little magazines, not to propagate understanding but to dangle cultural carrots, and under the heading of “reviews” to flatter their own authors’ uselessness.

These were the 1920’s—for the working class a period of unemployment, industrial dispute and lockout; to the capitalist class, especially its younger members, a period of re-organisation and re-settlement. The slump of 1931 put a brake on their activities. So ignorant are they of their own system of society that they were severely shaken and many of them even believed that the system which kept them idle was on the verge of collapse. Many workers, by the way, thought so too. The Socialist Party of Great Britain was not so optimistic. We pointed out that the system would not just collapse, that a force was operating within it that would not only bring about its downfall, but be ready with a new system of society to replace it; that as that force was not ready yet the system would eventually right itself. Time has proved us correct.

But in retrospect we can draw useful lessons from this age. The working class are slated by the bishops and told by the Bible bashers that their licentious habits and immoral practices are the root cause of their poverty. These people do not, or at least do not want, to recognise that it is the working class who are most obedient to the morality of this system of society. After earning or seeking to earn a living they have in the main neither the time nor the energy to do otherwise. It is only when a class is completely divorced, as were they also in ancient Rome, from all useful work that their minds turns to these excesses.

And it is the working class who by their lack of political understanding keep these people idle. Contrast this sterile opulence with your poverty and usefulness. They are linked. Ask yourselves why? The Socialist Party of Great Britain can provide the answer. This is capitalism wherein a small class own the means whereby you live. They neither toil, nor do they spin. You do that! They reap the benefits. The solution? A new system of society wherein these things are the property of all mankind. Under such a system not only would your material needs be satisfied but your culture would be a reflection of happiness instead of misery. It can come just when the working class desire it. So read, learn, realise and band with us.

Overthrow this sterile curse!

Ronald.

A word in season. (1927)

From the October 1927 issue of the Socialist Standard

The London society season is in full swing. It is an event of importance to the ladies and gentlemen of the class we work for—when permitted. It is an event by which we can measure their prosperity and our poverty. In that respect it is of importance to you : as working men and women you have been taught to believe from childhood that they are so very clever, and brainy, working with their brains sort of thing (sic). There is, therefore, reason to believe that in your simplicity the following will appear to you evidence of their ability. The event, it says :—

“Is one which promises to be the most brilliant, and crowded, and interesting of any since prewar days. . . 300,000 people are coming to London. . . . They will be doing Henley, which is so very gay, and Ascot, which is so very smart, The Derby, the Horse Show, the Royal Tournament, all the fetes and functions, until they run off to Goodwood in tailor-mades and leave those green woods and scented Downs for Cowes and the “white wings” on the Solent” (“Sunday News,” May 8, 1927).

And very nice, too ! And what of you fellow workers? You will be doing the same old round of toil which makes such luxury possible. When, with the passing of the summer months, your masters and their ladies depart for the moors, the country house, or the Riviera, you will remain the occupants of the murky, mud-plastered cities of industry. Still, you will argue, who are we, anyway? They’ve got the brains. What is the real contrast? Indolence and parasitism—revelling in splendour. Usefulness and skill exercised in every department of wealth production rewarded with penury, insecurity, and often premature death. Chasing the seasons around the earth in a mad whirl of never-satisfying pleasure may exercise these people in many directions ; it is obvious that, miles from the seat of operations, they can play no part in wealth-producing processes. That part is the workers’ part, including the real directing, the organising, and even the collecting of the profits which flow on during their absence. Still, some sort of excuses have to be made as these contrasts become more pronounced. The contempt that the master class have for your political intelligence is shown from the following clap trap which appeared in a leading article (Westminster Gazette, June 13th, 1927) in the very midst of this welter of wealth. They say :—

“The fact is that no policy other than strict economy is possible for a country such as ours.”

One wouldn’t have thought it, would they ? Some may think that we overdraw the picture: that though there may be a greater flaunting of wealth, the worst forms of squalor have been removed from the workers’ life. Have they? Not a stone’s throw from London’s fashionable and wealthy centre are conditions that would disgrace savages. Seven Westminster citizens, headed by a gentleman who preaches the blessedness of poverty, visited 490 houses in the Victoria Ward (Rev. Francis Boyd, report Evening News, June 6th, 1927). Here are a few of the things that they saw in this rich residential area :—

“In Aylesford Street a woman, her son, his wife, and their boy of 14 were found all living in one room. In another house where four families shared eight rooms there were 14 adults and 10 children. In a court in Wilton Road a husband, wife, five daughters aged 20, 16, 15, 13 and 5 and a son aged 18, had only two rooms in which to live and sleep. Yet another instance in Gray’s Inn Court is given where, in two rooms were a grandmother, man and wife, girls aged 14, 13 and 7 and boys aged 10, 3 and 1.”

“The list could be extended indefinitely,” says the report. “Particularly numerous are the families of six, seven, and more members living in two rooms in tenement houses.”

Of an address in Alderney Street it says :—

“There are sewer rats so numerous that within 24 hours of the laying of a new board it was eaten through. The children are terrified of the rats and refuse to go to bed. One boy was sent to Westminster Hospital suffering from nervous exhaustion.”

And this after one hundred years of reform, within the precincts of the Houses of Parliament. Every London district and every large town could show similar plague spots. The workers being content with the scraps and the offal, the gloomy hovels, and excluded from life’s real pleasures, have allowed their masters to take full advantage of their contentment. Blame or sympathy in either case is waste of time : nothing but the recognition that the removal of all social evils is their mission, and theirs alone, can rid society of such glaring contrasts in wealth and squalor. Experience is a hard and often a slow teacher, but there are signs that it has slowly but surely been doing its work. Awaken, workers, to the possibilities of Socialism, so that you may join with us for the Social Revolution.

W. E. MacHaffie

100 Years Ago: What We Said Then (2020)

From the May 2020 issue of the Socialist Standard

In 1920 a Coalition government was in office under Lloyd George between the Tories and the Liberals who supported ‘Liar George’ and the ‘Welsh wizard’ as even the Socialist Standard called him. Labour was the official opposition. Their leader was a now obscure Scottish trade unionist, William Adamson, who was described as ‘the Leader of the Lib-Labs in his comic-opera role as leader of the Opposition’ (March). Also in opposition were those Liberals who remained loyal to Asquith, the pre-war Liberal Prime Minister.

The Labour Party had reorganised itself in 1918 as a conventional political party which individuals could join. Many former Liberals were beginning to take up the offer. A review in June of a book on nationalisation quoted its author as saying that the Liberal Party was breaking up and that Liberals of the ‘strongly individualist type will go over to the Tories, the rest will form the right-wing of the Labour Party’. A columnist the previous month had already asked: ‘Why this sudden conversion to the ranks of Labour? Why this new-found interest on the part of Sir Leo [Money], Lord Haldane, and others of their kind in the ability of Labour to govern?’, answering ‘Methinks the wind has shifted slightly and sails are being trimmed accordingly.’ This was a shrewd observation. It was also a shrewd move on the part of the former Liberals, as Labour did come to replace the Liberal Party as Tweedledee to the Tories’ Tweedledum and provide better career opportunities for career politicians.

On nationalisation itself, the review wrote that ‘nationalised industries competing with each other on a world market and paying interest to a class of idlers is merely a modified form of capitalism,’ concluding ‘the absurdity of working-class action for Nationalisation is apparent … the supreme objection remains: the wages system is to be retained’.

The Communist Party had not yet been formed, but there were groups and individuals who supported the Bolsheviks. Some of them denounced the Labour Party in the same sort of terms as the Socialist Standard did, as ‘labour fakirs’, ‘misleaders’ and ‘capitalist agents’. They were in for a shock. At the 2nd Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in July, the Bolshevik leaders, realising that the anticipated revolution in Western European was not going to come to their aid, changed tack and called for their followers to form a ‘united front’ with parties like Labour. An article in August, headed ‘The Super-Opportunists’, analysed:

  ‘Now that it is plain that the workers do not understand Socialism and fight for it, Lenin is pandering to the ignorance of the world’s workers. In defence he says that by supporting the pro-capitalist Labour Party and helping to establish a Labour Party government, the workers will learn the uselessness of Labour parties’.

The author commented that ‘if that policy is to be adopted, then it is necessary for the workers to follow every false road … Such nonsense as supporting parties and Governments to gain power to learn their misdeeds is not the way to socialism.’ Such nonsense, however, persisted for the next hundred years and is still heard today.

Earlier that year, a speech that Lenin had made in 1918 had been translated into English as a pamphlet. In it, Lenin had declared that ‘reality says that State capitalism would be a step forward for us; if we were able to bring about State capitalism in a short time it would be a victory for us’. The July issue commented: ‘That Socialism can only be reached through State capitalism is not true’ and that it was only being adopted in Russia ‘because the Bolshevik government find their theories of doing without capitalist development unworkable – hence they are forced to retreat along the capitalist road’.

There were clashes in the letters column with defenders of the Bolsheviks over whether or not Marx had said that the state could not be taken over but had to be smashed, or held that a socialist revolution could not happen in an economically backward country, or whether he stood for democracy or dictatorship in the literal sense – arguments that have gone on ever since, but which were set out for the first time in this period.

The Socialist Standard was more opposed to the Bolsheviks’ supporters in Britain, with their demands to set up ‘soviets’ and their claim that socialism was being established in Russia, than to the Bolsheviks themselves. The Bolsheviks were of course denounced for ignoring Marx’s views and for being a minority dictatorship, but their working class and even socialist credentials were not challenged. Another article in the same issue said that ‘in the special conditions and chaos caused by the war’, a ‘resolute minority’ was able to seize power in Russia despite a majority of workers there not understanding or wanting socialism. They could not establish socialism, but:

  ‘The new ruling minority promised peace and – to their highest credit – established it’. Despite ‘the appalling chaos in which they found Russia, they have … done wonders in the way of reconstruction and reorganisation.’

Reading between the lines, Socialist Party members of the time expected the Bolshevik regime to be overthrown. The concluding paragraph of the article certainly reads like the sort of obituary Marx had written after the suppression of the Paris Commune in 1871 – only fifty years previously. When the real socialist movement takes off, it said, ‘the rule of the Russian Bolsheviks will be a splendid lesson, not on the value of “Soviet” or “Dictatorship,” but on the ability of the working class to manage its own affairs’.

We wouldn’t say this today (and didn’t by 1929), partly because we wouldn’t need to, but in 1920 there had never been a government made up of workers let alone of people who claimed to be socialists. There had not yet been a Labour government in Britain. Governments everywhere were managed by capitalists or by politicians who looked, dressed and spoke like them. So, the point needed to be made that workers were capable of running society. Not that the aim was to establish a working class government. An article in February on ‘Government by Labour’ distinguished between ‘administration’ and ‘government’: ‘the first serves the people and the other represses them.’ The article concluded that, once the workers had made the means of production the common property of the whole of society, they would ‘proceed to administer them for the common welfare of all’. ‘Then’, it added, ‘the need for the State, for government – ‘Labour’ or otherwise – and the “keeping in due subjection” will vanish, and mankind will at last be free’.

The main problem facing workers at the time was growing unemployment, which was attributed to overproduction (and, sometimes, to underconsumption). Labour and trade union leaders were bitterly denounced for telling the workers to work harder and produce more and for going along with the capitalist argument that waste should be eliminated (if the capitalist class wasted some of its surplus value that wasn’t bad, it was argued, as this meant work for workers). But the real bitterness was reserved for the capitalist class who were denounced as arrogant, callous and useless parasites living off the backs of the workers and causing them to suffer. It wasn’t just class antagonism that was expressed but class hatred.

Adam Buick

All the articles from the Socialist Standard for the year 1920 are now online at the following link. 

The Great Crash of 1929 (1969)

From the October 1969 issue of the Socialist Standard

The events of October 1929 which have become known as the Great Crash have been written not only into capitalism’s history but also into the system’s mythology. There are still plenty of people living who remember it, who recall with bitterness the seemingly endless unemployment, the contemptuous clerks at the Labour Exchange, die indignities of the Means Test. Many political prejudices were set solid in those dark days, forty years ago.

The economists also remember and promise us that 1929 will never happen again—which might have more force, were it not for the fact that in 1929 the economists were confident that the Crash could not happen in the first place. The promise, in any case, is always conditional on our doing as the economists say, with 1929 held over our heads much as Napoleon held the threat of Jones' return over the animals in Animal Farm. This, for example, was Harold Wilson’s warning to the 1966 TUC about what would follow a rejection of the government’s policy of wage restraint:

  . . . one false, careless, regardless step . . . could push the world into conditions not unlike those of the early Thirties.

Wilson is here making the familiar claim that the economy is now under control, even if sometimes it needs drastic measures like wage freezes and devaluations to remind it of the fact. And behind this lurks the notion that the economists of capitalism have learnt something from the Great Crash which they will never forget.

As 1929 started, the world was not entirely empty of optimism. Since the last great depression of the 1890’s there had been many developments in fields like electricity, the motor car and telecommunications and these were widely assumed to be bringing in their train greater freedom and equality. It was true that in Britain there was a chronic unemployment problem but the United States was in the midst of a prolonged stock exchange boom which convinced millions of people that mass production, credit trading and private enterprise were among the best things ever invented by man.

At the year’s opening the Conservatives in Britain were looking back with satisfaction on the work Parliament had just finished on amendments to the Book of Common Prayer; if there was an unemployment problem, they were confident they had dealt with it in their Derating Bill and Tory politicians toured the country telling everyone that prosperity was on the doorstep. This hilarious tone was kept up by Stanley Baldwin during the general election that year, when he managed to forget that basic industries like coal, steel and shipbuilding were depressed and pointed joyfully to the unmistakable signs of recovery to be found in the export of Cornish broccoli to Europe. Perhaps it is not surprising that the Tories lost the election.

The unpalatable fact was that Britain’s economy had been in decline for something like sixty years and in particular had emerged from the war to find the tendencies which had previously undermined British dominance — foreign competition, tariff barriers and the growth of home industries in former markets abroad-—were all accentuated. Soon after 1918 there was a surprise boom, largely due to the replenishment of war-depleted stocks. Prices shot up to impossible heights and, despite the demobilisation of 4 million servicemen, there was virtually full employment. But as raw materials which had been held up by the lack of shipping began to come onto the market the boom collapsed. By early 1922 prices had been halved; in 1921 unemployment exceeded 2½ million.

The slow recovery from this recession was probably due to the British government’s decision, in 1925, to return to the Gold Standard. The government were aware of the possible effects of this, but they found themselves in something of a cleft stick, having to choose between slowing down a possible recovery and risking contamination by the inflation which was destroying so many European currencies. (At the end of that inflation, prices in Poland had risen 2½ million times their pre-war level; in Russia 4,000 million times; in Germany one million million times.)

In America, where the Great Crash was first heard to rumble, things were rather different. The American capitalist class had had a lot to win in the 1914/18 war and came out of the peace talks as an exceedingly strong power. Their exports were increasing in trades which were expanding—in contrast to those of Britain, Which made most ground in declining trades. America suffered a few short recessions during 1920/21, 1924 and 1927 but always recovery followed quickly and taken as a whole the period from 1922 to 1929 was one continuous boom.

These conditions were of course registered on Wall Street, where the New York Times index of 25 industrial stocks rose in a smooth curve from 110 in early 1924 to 338 in January 1929. Just before the Crash, in September, it reached 452. This was the sort of evidence which persuaded many people, anxious to make their own paper fortune, that eternal prosperity had arrived. The monetary authorities seemed to be alone in their concern at the hectic activity on the stock exchanges —on one day just before the Crash over 12 million shares were traded and during the period 1927 to 1929 the bank borrowings of stock brokers rose from $3,500 million to $8,500 million—and when the slide started in October they welcomed it, in mistake for a minor adjustment which would quickly be followed by another bout of expansion.

Early in the New Year there was indeed a slight recovery and the experts announced the recession’s end. But then agricultural and raw material prices nosedived and this was followed by three waves of bank failures between the end of 1930 to mid 1932 which destroyed deposits, caused a panic-stricken contraction of bank loans and finally brought paralysis in the winter of 1932/3.

The bank failures revealed a new and poignant aspect of the Crash. Now it was not only the unemployed industrial and agricultural workers who were queueing and begging; they were joined by small businessmen, shopkeepers and stockholders who had seen their life savings disappear and who, when ruin stared them in the face, sometimes chose to end it all with a bullet or a jump from an apartment window.

The American government, following the customary policy of treating symptoms rather than deal with causes, tried to force prices up by cutting back production and restricting competition. In many cases this policy was superfluous; producers who were faced with a glutted market needed no official prompting to destroy food, and industrialists who found that they could not sell their goods had no alternative to closing their works. From the point of view of capitalism, it was all very logical but it meant that the world was presented, in what was supposed to be a great age of freedom and prosperity, with the spectacle of millions of underfed people while wheat was being burned; of men searching desperately for employment while factories were shut, while the winding wheels stayed still at the pit shafts and the great cranes hung silent and motionless in the almost tangible gloom of the shipyards.

Yet even these drastic and inhumane measures did not work. Tom Johnston, who was one of the Labour ministers given the job of ending unemployment in Britain, spoke about them with grim realism:

  It is in vain that the United States keeps 250 million bushels of wheat, or contact wheat, off the market in an endeavour, by a limitation of supplies, to peg or to stabilise prices. Only the other day wheat sold in Liverpool at a lower price than it has been sold since the days of Charles II. lower than it had been for two and a half centuries. (House of Commons. April 16 1931).

The Great Crash, and the slump which followed, have been subjected to innumerable autopsies and inquests. Perhaps the most familiar has been the theory of overproduction, that the world had simply made much more than it needed. At the time, some experts believed that the developing productive techniques were held back from exerting their full effect by the 1914/18 war, and afterwards made themselves felt in a more concentrated manner. As a result of these developments, productivity increased faster than real wages—one estimate for new manufacturing industries was three times as fast—which led to a surplus of goods on the market with no wages to buy them. (It is worth commenting that nowadays the explanation for economic crises is exactly the opposite — real wages increasing faster than productivity.)

Undeniable as it is that people without money cannot buy anything, the overproduction theory does not explain the fact that the “surpluses” existed while people were literally starving and only too anxious to consume more. It is a theory which only meddles with the symptoms of the crisis and does not touch the cause, nor the stupidity and inhumanity of it.

Then there were the financial theories, which blamed the Crash onto the wild antics on Wall Street and the subsequent slump onto a loss of confidence in investing in production, public works and so on. These ideas cannot tell us why it affected so many countries, whether they had had a stock exchange spree or not; they do not explain why an investment flood should so mechanically bring an investment drought, nor why both these opposite conditions should be blamed for having a similar effect. It is true that capitalism's financial machinery, which is supposed to be such a model of efficiency and such an aid to production can often aggravate a recession. But it cannot produce one—at the most a stock exchange, like a barometer, registers conditions but does not alter them.

What the Great Crash did illuminate was the impossible anarchy of capitalism, the basic contradiction in a system where wealth is socially produced but privately owned. The Thirties might have been years of productive advance but they turned out to be a decade of collapse and stagnation, when capitalism was in the throes of a crisis which hit all states, whatever surface differences there were between their political and economic organisations and whatever remedies they tried.

The political results of the Crash were varied. In some countries the working class opted for what they thought was change; in others they turned for assurance to the more traditional parties. In America, Roosevelt defeated Hoover in the 1932 election by the staggering margin of 472 electoral college votes to 59 and the Democrats won large majorities in both House of Congress. Roosevelt’s New Deal was later given much of the credit for the end of the slump but in fact it was a matter of luck. He had campaigned on a promise to cut Federal spending by 25 per cent and to balance the Budget. But he was as impotent to control events as anyone else and when a policy of deficit financing was forced upon him this happened to coincide with the beginnings of the recovery.

In the same way, the Nazis were lucky in Germany. The recovery started as they came to power, allowing them to spend on armaments and communications and this was enough to convince many people that Hitler also had a magic formula, which included replacing parliamentary democracy with a “strong man” dictatorship and crushing the trade unions.

In Britain the workers took shelter with the established parties. One of the first acts of the 1931 National coalition was to cut unemployment pay but this did not prevent the working class gratefully voting for them in 1935, running up big Tory votes in industrial centres like Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle and Sheffield.

The Great Crash, then, did nothing to undermine capitalism and it did not. as many left-wingers expected, cause the system to collapse. It merely contributed another chapter to capitalism’s mythology, in which one set of politicians were stubbornly blind to remedies which were obvious to another. And this leads on to the other myth—that the new enlightened experts have learned how to control the system and we should all be grateful to them and if we’re not—why, then, we will have Jones back and 1929 will happen all over again.

As if those were the only two choices.

Ivan

[In a future issue we shall be serialising an abridged version of our pamphlet "Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse." This pamphlet, which w'as published in February 1932, examines the after-effects ,of the Great Crash and showed what influence they had on capitalism,]

Help to Save. (1922)

Party News from the July 1922 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have frequently drawn the attention of members of the working class, through our literature and from the platform, that, with the introduction of new machinery, the capitalist class are able to extract more wealth from the workers. The latest device of this character which the capitalist has obtained a monopoly of, is called a "Flapper." It is an attractive looking machine, and has become very popular amongst members of the working class. So whenever the capitalists want to "Raise the wind" for the purpose of maintaining some of those institutions which are necessary under capitalism, such as Hospitals, Orphan Homes, Churches or Famine Funds, they have only to set a few "Flappers" in motion and the trick is done.

At the present time the Socialist Party of Great Britain is in URGENT NEED of FUNDS for the purpose of carrying on our propaganda, including the publication of the "Socialist Standard" (which is being sold at a loss) and some new pamphlets which we are anxious to publish as soon as we can obtain the needful. Having no "Flappers" at our disposal, we have to fall back upon the goodwill and intelligence of our readers and also those sympathisers who wish us to carry on the work for SOCIALISM. We therefore appeal to all those persons who desire to see the knowledge of Socialism spread far and wide, to assist us by sending a DONATION (however small or large) to 17, Mount Pleasant, W.C.1.

Wrong Note (1977)

From the May 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have been sent a publication called Socialist Voice, issued by the “Workers’ League”, with a request for an opinion. This is easy. It is rubbish. It is a re-hash, a dreary repetition of the same old Leninist-Trotskyite nonsense of the CP in 1920. Its pages are filled with reports of the “industrial struggles” in the mistaken notion that strikes lead to Socialism.

Even one of its own contributors, Mr. Collard, points out that: “The view held by many on the left that industrial militancy by itself raises the level of class-consciousness fails to recognise that sectional struggle generates sectional interest”.

These lefties usually reveal a poor knowledge of facts. Thus, R. Kirkwood’s article on “How they built the Party in 1920” is a Stalinist fairy-story. We are told that there has only been one “partly successful” attempt “to build a revolutionary party in Britain”. This, says Kirkwood, was the Communist Party. He could not be more wrong. From the day of its inception the British CP was reformist through and through. Grovelling pathetically to the Labour Party to be allowed in, with the longest list of “immediate demands” (reforms) ever put before the British electorate. It was completely corrupt, run on Russian roubles.

What R. Kirkwood and the Workers’ League have never understood is that unemployed marches do not lead to Socialism. If they did, we should have had it round about 1930. A revolutionary party is committed exclusively to Revolution and cannot support reforms — which are anti-revolutionary.

May we suggest that the Workers’ League, which wishes to “contribute to the debate”, obtain a little more knowledge before doing so? A good start would be The Communist Manifesto and Value, Price and Profit. Although good old Marx said in the C.M. that “the real fruit of their battles lies in their ever-expanding union” (i.e. the workers), he obviously expected them to learn from their defeats enough to form a political party with the watchword “Abolition of the wages system”.

So far this “Socialist Voice” is a bad case of laryngitis.

Horatio

Dissatisfied Customer (1973)

Book Review from the March 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Chronicles of Wasted Time, Part I, by Malcolm Muggeridge, Collins, £3.00.

Fourteen years ago Walter Allen's novel All in a Lifetime created a stir by depicting the formative years and ripeness of the Labour Party, and then conveying that a misjudgment of society had been made and it had turned out irrelevant. This first volume of Muggeridge's autobiography covers the same ground, but is different in that the recollections are real not fictional and the result is not perplexity but animated sourness.

Muggeridge's father was a Fabian who became an early Labour Councillor and, eventually, an MP, and the book gives an account of home life in that atmosphere—parlour discussions, meetings with MacDonald, Dalton, etc., and a Tolstoyan "colony" at Stroud. Muggeridge recalls it all subjectively and, to a large extent, derisively. "It was a kind of revivalism without tears; sinful men were to be washed, but not in the blood of the Lamb; in, as it were, municipal water, with carbolic soap purveyed by the co-op." Later, visits to Five-Year-Plan Russia are described as if it were a crude but fortunately transparent attempt at personal fraud on the writer.

These reactions are common. One can meet anywhere men of Muggeridge's generation who shared the faith that beneficent reform would conquer all society's ills. The hopes of an "intellectual, moral and aesthetic transformation" through universal State education, and slums "transformed into garden cities" by Planning Acts; what has been produced is not so much disappointment as a sense of having been swindled. Recalling pacifist talk in his youth, Muggeridge writes of their conviction that the arms manufacturers were the cause of all the trouble: "how surprised we should have been," he says, to know that trading in arms by Labour governments would far exceed the evils of private enterprise.

Yet the illusions were self-created by those who believed all this. The choice between reform and revolution was put before the social-democrats at the beginning of this century, and the majority elected for reform. No notice was taken of Socialists pointing out the all-too-obvious fallacy of—to use one of Muggeridge's own metaphors—"building a housing estate on the slopes of Etna". Despite everything a century's experience should teach, reformists go on being hopeful like bingo-players that the next try will be lucky, afterwards to sit chewing peevishly on "a civilisation dropping to pieces" and "credulous armies of the just".

What is notable also is Muggeridge's lack of contact with workaday life and people. He acknowledges this in speaking of some earthy-proletarian relatives in the North, tries to dismiss it by calling the working class a fantasy invented by Marx, Engels, Morris and D. H. Lawrence, but without showing comprehension of what it really means. Thus, he writes of the start of married life: "We had very little money . . . certainly not more than £100" . . . in the early 'twenties when £100 was a year's pay to many working men! The remark echoes one made in a TV programme a year or so ago when, denouncing birth control and answering a woman who supposed he had always been comfortably-off, Muggeridge said indignantly: "It's quite untrue. It was 1939 before I earned even £1,000 a year"—and appeared oblivious to the thrill of half-amused astonishment in the audience.

And one other curiousity, considering Muggeridge's prominence in crusades against what they call the permissive society. He relates weightily the sexual preoccupation of his marriage in its early days: "Rolling about, now one on top, now another; grunting, coaxing, sweating, murmuring, yelling  . . . We looked to our bodies for gratification, which we felt they owed us." But that was fifty years ago, before pornography and the pill and Oh, Calcutta! had come to make satyrs of us all. Doesn't that give away the whole present case for Muggeridge!

Robert Barltrop

Day of Remembrance For What? (1973)

From the November 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

Early on the morning of July 1 1916 the barrage which had been crashing down upon the German lines on the Somme lifted and, in a short eerie silence, waves of British soldiers left their trenches and began to. walk across No Man's Land. They had been told to do that — to walk across because the guns would have cut all the wire, wiped out all the defences, killed all the Germans. They had only to walk across and wait for hot food from the field kitchens which would be rapidly following them. 

It was not like that at all; before the day was out something like twenty thousand of the men who had climbed out of their trenches in such optimism in the morning had been killed. The battle dragged on for same weeks more, eventually to be disguised in history as a general's blunder, as if the "correct" decisions had any more to recommend them, as if it were better to kill twenty thousand German workers than the same number of British. 

The First World War was a succession of such horrors, marking out like grisly milestones the long road of murder among the deadlocked trenches. To the people on both sides who, drunk with patriotism, had cheered the start of the war, the slaughter was a shock they could barely absorb. They had gone to fight in such heroic style; now there was only the mud and the guns and the rats and lice —and finally, all too often, a line in the casualty lists. The war reached out beyond new frontiers of terror, with the aerial bombardment of civilians, There had been nothing before to prepare the workers for this sudden experience of total war. 

For decades afterwards Europe lived in a state of shock, a massive grief and bewilderment that the frantic response to the war propaganda — the songs, the posters, the white feathers — could have contributed to this. At the same time as the war had spawned more powerful weapons to smash human bodies it had also developed better medical services to patch up and send them back onto the streets in wheelchairs, on crutches, or to keep them only part alive in perpetual hospital. There were political dangers in this situation and to avert it something had to seem to be done to redeem the many promises to make the land fit for such heroes to live in. 

This was all happening in an atmosphere of deep disillusionment, Post war Britain, unexceptionally, was a country of unemployment, bitter poverty and cynicism. Disabled ex-servicemen who were naive enough to expect same recompense for what they had suffered found instead that their claims for pensions were met with delay, muddle, niggardliness and sometimes blank refusal. Those who had come through the war in one piece tacked themselves onto the end of their local dole queue. This is the story of one man, whose unit was badly cut up in machine gun fire on July 1 1916: 

When I was out of work, I had to go before a Means Test Panel. There was a very fat lady on the Panel, cuddling a Pekinese on her lap. She said, "We've all got to pull our belts in a hole or two these days." I was fed up and told her, "Your words belie your appearance. That bloody dog's had more to eat today than I've had." There was a lot of argument and it ended in a row. My chair went over; papers and inkwells went flying and the dog was yapping and squealing. I was charged with common assault and got three months in Wormwood Scrubs. (The First Day on the Somme — Martin Middlebrook.) 

Such men often found their way into one or other of the organizations which were springing up with the aim of fighting the case of the ex-servicemen. At first these split on political lines, with one linking with the TUC and another - the grandly titled Comrades of the War - attracting ex-officers and therefore considered fit for a good Tory patriot to join. There was some rivalry between the organizations, which did not inspire any confidence in their ability to improve matters, as Europe slid into the first slump of the post-war years. 

It was to stem this despair, to sell the ex-servicemen the idea that there was more to the life of a returned hero than the dole queue and the Means Test, that a movement began to unite the opposing organizations. Leader of this movement was none other than Douglas Haig, the general who had organised that slaughter in July 1916, a man famous for his trust in God and who was ready to blame his soldiers for not being able to survive a simple walk across No Man's Land. Haig was still, then, wallowing in the glamour of the super returned warrior; for organizing the killing of all those men he had received a title and £100,000. He supported the move for unity among the ex-servicemen because he hoped this would be a stabilizing influence which would avert what he saw as the threat of social revolution. In May 1921 the British Legion was formed. 

The Legion declared — as it had to — that it was non-political, politics being associated with nasty squabbling over sectional interests at the cost of humane rescue work. It is not surprising, though, that they saw no inconsistency in adopting distinctly political attitudes — their patriotism, their servile royalism (they have always been unable to refer to any aristocrat without stringing out the full title and when mentioning royalty they never miss a Royal Highness or a Majesty), their assumption that capitalism is basically a decent society with just one or two problems which any well-intentioned person can sort out. 

In the General Strike the Legion advised its members " ... to come forward once more and offer their services in any way that may be needed by the authorities." This caused something of a row, since many of the strikers were ex-servicemen who had been driven into it by desperation at the conditions they had faced when they came back from the war. "Non-political" attitudes were also evident when the Legion sent a delegation to Germany in 1935. They saw the concentration camp at Dachau, where the Nazis were holding their political prisoners, and then they had a "quiet family supper" with Gestapo chief Himmler who was, they thought, "...an unassuming man anxious to do his best for his country." 

The first Poppy Day was in 1921, with the Legion hesitant about its chances of success, However it pulled in so much money that a year later the Legion were making the flowers themselves. They now have a factory in Richmond, Surrey, where disabled ex-servicemen turn out something like forty million of the flowers each year. Selling the poppies is the Legion's main source of income. 

Between the wars the effect of Poppy Day was immense. To begin with, it was always on the anniversary of Armistice Day — November 11, which often meant that the working day was interrupted by the two minutes' silence. Schools, factories, transport, offices — they all marked the occasion in this way and the sombre ritual became established. It was very powerful and it was no unusual sight, to see people in tears as the maroons sent out their melancholy booms into the cold mists of a November morning. 

But since the Second World War the occasion has been moved to the first Sunday in November, which has deprived it of much of its effect but which means that there is the minimum interruption of the steady exploitation of workers, ex-servicemen and all. As Poppy Day has declined, the British Legion has felt itself losing some of its relevance, its style of patriotism as much of a joke as Colonel Blimp, (There is, alas, no evidence that current attitudes are any less patriotic than those they have modified, that there is no longer a well of patriotism waiting to be tapped by the appropriate war propaganda, at the appropriate time.) But the Legion was slow to grasp this; it continued to live in its heyday of the Thirties. When eventually realization dawned, they made frantic efforts to catch up, with a campaign bearing all the signs of having been designed by a slick advertising agency. 

The collecting boxes were revamped into the plastic age, a dolly bird showed her legs beneath a tray of poppies and the slogan Wear Your Poppy With Pride was coined, aimed at the doubters who were wondering whether a CND march was a better use of their time. Last November the Cambridge University Rag Day decided to cut the Legion out of their list, on the grounds that it was an "unpopular charity with the students". At the time the Daily Telegraph, in a check on British universities, found this attitude to be widespread; the British Legion, with its image of old soldiers, has been replaced by more trendy appeals for community action trust funds. 

There was some anger in the Legion at this slight, which probably confirmed many members in their prejudices against the alleged laziness and ingratitude of students and there must have been many a call, over the glasses of bitter at local British Legion clubs, for the re-introduction of conscription to shorten these students' hair and teach them to act like men. They need not have worried for, in whatever shape, the ethos of rehabilitation lives on, with its implicit support for capitalism. This ethos interprets the casualties of capitalism as unfortunate, unavoidable accidents who, after the event, need to be patched up and helped to cope with their disabilities. It is difficult to imagine a more insidious bolster to capitalism than this avoidance of reality. For capitalism is not a succession of accidents; wars are not mistakes and poverty is only one segment of the many in capitalism's mosaic of social malaise. There are numerous organizations wearily trying to deal with separate problems in isolation from their common basis. They make appeals, they sell their paper flags and flowers and they claim their successes. They are convinced that they appeal to something they call our better nature when in reality they are a persuasion to avoid the issue. 

There were poppies growing in the fields of Flanders when the war started in 1914 and they clung on as the devastation became complete; they were in the ground and poking out of the soil of the trenches when the men went over the top that day in July 1916. But there is more to it than the popular symbolism, for the poppy is the colour of blood and it has its association with opiates. Those who buy a poppy are helping the workers to deaden their senses to the facts. War is not to be remembered with pride; it is to be feared and hated. Capitalism kills workers in their millions, then lays them out in regimented cemeteries, raises huge monuments to tell us they are dead. And all this to protect the position of the ruling class, to keep in being the very society which ensures the next bloodbath.

Ivan

Stalin Turns Left (1972)

From the February 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

The second in our series on the early history and ideas of the British Communist Party.

In 1930 The Communist Party of Great Britain had just entered the period of "independent leadership" in accordance with the tactical turn made by the Communist International. The new tactics involved the end of working within the Labour Party and the trade unions in favour of outright opposition to them. When the change of tactics was being discussed in 1928 and 1929 a majority in the leadership of the British Party was opposed to them, arguing that the time had not yet come to give up work in the Labour Party and the unions.

In 1920 Lenin had argued that the CPGB should try to affiliate to the Labour Party since this was not an orthodox Social Democratic party but rather a federation of workers' political and industrial organisations; as one such organisation the Communist Party had every right to be in the Labour Party without any compromise of principle. In 1922, in accordance with a Comintern decision of the previous December in favour of "united front" tactics, the CPGB raised the slogan of a .'Labour Government' and began to work, as best it could, through the Labour party and the unions to achieve this.

Seeing that they were only a small party this tactic can be said to have been fairly successful. Through the Minority Movement, set up in 1924, they were able to rally any Leftwing trade unionists behind their slogans. In 1925 the British TUC even agreed to establish with the Russian unions an Anglo/Russian Trade Union Committee. The leaders of the Labour Party, however, hit back. The 1924 and 1925 Party Conferences carried a number of anti-Communist motions barring members of the Communist Party from being candidates or even individual members of the Labour Party. Affiliated unions were urged not to include Communists in their delegations to the Labour Party Conference. Some local Labour parties, already under Communist influence, refused to accept these decisions and were disaffiliated. These local parties, together with others still in the Labour Party, were organised by the Communist Party into the National Leftwing Movement.

The Anglo/Russian Trade Union Committee broke up in mutual recriminations after the raid in 1927 on the London offices of the Russian trading firm Arcos. But, through the Minority Movement and the Leftwing Movement the Party was having some success with its tactic of boring from within the reformist organisations.

However, the end of the General Strike and then the Mond-Turner talks on "industrial peace", together with the anti-Communist rulings of the Labour Party, made co-operating with the Labour and TUC leaders unpopular with a section of the CPGB membership. They found a spokesman in R. Palme Dutt, who had been the founder and editor of Labour Monthly, and was one of the CPGB's leading theoreticians. He, with Harry Pollitt, had played a key role in the committee which had recommended major changes in the organisation of the Communist Party, leading in 1922 to the replacing of the old federal structure by one (involving 'cells' and the like) more suited to the CP tactic of boring-from- within and controlling other bodies by secret caucuses. Trotsky, too, who had fallen out of favour in Russia, was criticising the Stalin leadership for relying too much on alliance with people like the Left in the British TUC and not enough on working class militancy. There is evidence that Dutt sympathised with some of Trotsky's criticisms. In any event his Where is Britain Going? was favourably reviewed.

Dutt became the spokesman of those in the Communist Party dissatisfied with the boring-from-within tactic which, in their view, meant that the Party acted merely as a leftwing ginger group for Labour. These critics, mainly among the younger members, were calling for what in Bolshevik terminology was a "left" turn. They wanted the Communist Party to come out in open opposition to the Labour Party.

The Communist Party leaders, and probably a majority of the members, were quite content with the old tactic. Indeed, some of them obviously thought that being a ginger group for Labour was their party's role. Thus, again in Bolshevik terminology, '.opportunist" trends were strong in the British party.

It so happened that the Stalin group was also planning a "Left" turn in 1928, both in its domestic and in its foreign (and so Comintern) policies. In Russia forced collectivisation began. The Comintern changed its tactics. However, as we saw, tactical changes should only take place in Bolshevik theory when the situation changes. Thus the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International in 1928 proclaimed the end of the period of partial capitalist stabilisation which had existed almost continuously from 1921 and the beginning of another "crisis of capitalism". This meant that the old pre-1921 slogans, suited to “revolutionary situations", were brought out again.

Once again the Social Democratic parties were seen as openly counter-revolutionary outfits pledged to help maintain capitalism by confusing workers and diverting their discontent into peaceful reform rather than into civil war and revolution. For this the notorious phrase “social fascists" was coined. But the turn went further than this. Not only were the Social Democrats “social fascists" but the “main blows" ought to be directed against them since they had more influence over the workers than the ordinary fascists. The most dangerous kind of Social Democrat, said the Comintern, were the "Lefts" who mouthed revolutionary phrases to cover up their treacherous role of diverters of the workers' discontent into reformist channels. The ILP in Britain fell into this category and among the first to receive the main blows were Cook and Maxton for their 1928 Manifesto.

Naturally, such a sharp turn caused misgivings amongst those who had joined the Communist Party thinking it was just a part of the Labour Movement. The leadership of the Party tried to resist the change but, once the Comintern had decided, they had to abide by it. Then they tried to interpret it in a not so anti- Labour manner: Did it really mean that Communists in the unions should no longer pay the political levy to the Labour Party? Yes, it did, replied the Comintern. Gradually the leaders of the British party were driven further and further to the left till they had to publicly proclaim before the 1929 election that Labour was "the third capitalist party" and to put up their own candidates in opposition to Labour. This clearly went against the grain for some and the Comintern knew it. They resolved that a new, more reliable leadership was required to carry out the new policy faithfully.

In the British Communist Party there were those who had criticised the old line and were enthusiastically in favour of the changed tactics. It was from their ranks that the new leadership would be drawn. The Tenth Party Congress in January 1929 was the last more or less democratic Communist conference. It elected the same old names to the Central Committee. After pressure from both the Comintern and the Left in the party another Conference was held in Leeds in December of the same year. This time the delegates were given a recommended list to vote for, a list which omitted several of the old leaders. Not all of them were dropped since it was recognised that they had the political experience that would be a valuable aid to the inexperienced new men who were being brought in. The post of Secretary was up-graded so that the man who filled it would be the recognised "Leader" of the Party.

The man chosen by the Comintern was Harry Pollitt. He had all the qualifications: an industrial worker (Pollitt was a boilermaker by trade), with a record of militancy (the Jolly George incident in 1919), reasonably well-known at Labour and TUC Conferences, an experienced party official of many years standing, tough-minded and, finally, thoroughly reliable. Till 1929 the CPGB had had what amounted to a collective leadership. After the Eleventh Congress of December 1929 Pollitt was the recognised Leader with Dutt as his deputy in charge of theory.

The names of Dutt and Pollitt had in fact already been linked in the title of a document calling for and justifying a change to open opposition to Labour. This was the Dutt/Pollitt Thesis, though it was obviously mainly the work of Dutt.

There were two reasons why the Communists had been pro-Labour: (1) Lenin's view on the federal nature of the British Labour Party. (2) A dose of Labour government would rid workers of their reformist illusions.

Dutt, therefore, had to refute both of these. Naturally, he was not going to challenge them head on (though of course he could have said they were mistaken all along). He merely argued that conditions had changed.

First, the Labour Party had changed from a federation of workers' organisations into a disciplined party of the Social Democratic type. Dutt brought forward as evidence the anti-Communist rulings and the con- sequent expulsions and disaffiliations. Thus he was saying here that it was no longer possible for Communists to bore-from-within the Labour Party, at least not very effectively.

Second, the failure of the 1924 Labour government had disillusioned the workers who were now looking for revolutionary leadership. This was a more dubious proposition, but Dutt justified it by reference to the General Strike and, oddly, to falling Labour votes at national and local elections. The Labour Party, the thesis was saying, was finished and on the way out.

We need not say much on the first point except that when after 1935 the Communists returned to the pro- Labour tactic they were quite successful in getting into the Labour Party, the "bans and proscriptions" not- withstanding.

But the second point was patently wrong and could have been seen to be so at the time. Labour was by no means finished (and, if it was, why wait till 1928 to change tactics, why not 1925 or 1926?). Indeed they emerged from the 1929 election as the largest Party (despite Communist opposition) and once again took over the administration of capitalism. This miscalculation meant that, from the viewpoint of Bolshevik tactics, the CPGB zigged while the masses zagged. The "revolutionary vanguard" was moving in the opposite direction to the workers and as a result became “isolated" from them, a terrible fate to befall a Bolshevik party.

Of course, it is not quite correct to say that this was a "miscalculation" for what was happening in Britain was not the only relevant factor for the Communists. What was happening in Russia was just as important and the Stalin government had its reasons for turning to the left-collectivisation, fear of growing hostility towards Russia by other States.

Adam Buick

 Next month: how the Communist Party used revolutionary phrases to disguise its reformist practice.

Writers and Society—4: Scott Fitzgerald (1956)

From the Writers and Society series published in the October-December 1956 issue of Forum

It is a convenient fact that American outlook in recent years, and consequently American Literature, can be divided fairly accurately into decades—the 'twenties, the 'thirties and the 'forties. After the first world war, the first period takes us to the financial crash and the depression, and the next lasts until the beginning of the second world war.

The 'twenties were remarkable years in American history, and the films, plays and books of the period bear convincing testimony of the post-war disillusionment, the denial of former moral values, and the gangsterism and political corruption of the time. It was an age of bitterness and frustration, but a frustration that was expressed, at least among the middle and upper classes, by wildness and irresponsibility. Hip flasks, cocktail parties, speakeasies, petting parties, flappers and jazz-mania were all aspects of this breakdown of pre-war values.

As far as literature is concerned, the most significant spokesman of the age was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who actually gave the period its name — "the Jazz Age." Fitzgerald himself was one of that class fresh from Princeton or Yale, who found themselves pushed into a war whose cause they were unable to appreciate. The war over, they found life unreal and purposeless. The sons of the rich families, or poorer boys infected by the easy money ideology, they had not time for the outmoded doctrines of Carnegie or Rockefeller exhorting them to "win wealth by hard work." The pace of life for them quickened until it became a crazy merry-go-round that crashed to the ground with the stock market in 1929.

Fitzgerald's earlier novels, "The Beautiful and Damned" and "The Far Side of Paradise," are skillful and often moving accounts of the emptiness and pointlessness into which these people's lives were channeled. They do show, on Fitzgerald's part, a struggle to express himself and also to express the frustration of his age. Although not a "social critic" in the direct sense, he became a far more important social critic in the sense that he accurately presented the lives of people in this situation, of whom he was one, and consequently made the greater impression. The first novel is an account of the childhood, schooling, and college days of one of these sons of the rich, and the second is almost a continuation, dealing with the lives of a young man a flapper, and their hardening by the conditions of the futile world they knew.

The focal point in Fitzgerald's career was "The Great Gatsby." Although some might argue that it is not his best novel, it is certainly the hub of his work. The early works look forward to it, and the latter ones seem to refer back to it. It is the story of an ambitious nobody, Jay Gatsby, who achieves his riches by racketeering, and becomes almost a legend in the display and extravagance of his parties and style of living. His tragedy is basically that of all the people around him-they have not what they want, and do not even know what it is they want.

The irony of the novel is that in spite of Gatsby's lavish hospitality and the enormous parties that he gives, he is almost completely friendless, and his funeral produces only two mourners—the one friend who tries to help Gatsby find his desires, and one out of the thousands of people who had taken Gatsby's hospitality.

The novel is much tighter in construction than the earlier works, and has a much more stimulating plot. The narrator is Gatsby's  friend, and, because it is the view of an outsider looking in, the tragedy is made the more intense.

This was a period when current psychological thought had a considerable effect on American, and other literature. Fitzgerald himself, although sufficiently interested in Freudian psychology to make extensive use of it in his novel "Tender Is The Night," never closely examined the background of the life of his characters, and never enquired into the basic motives and causes that gave rise to them. It could be said that this is the secret of Fitzgerald's success as a writer. He does no more than honestly and skillfully depict the lives of people as he knew them, and for this reason his characters and situations have far more conviction and applicability to life that the intentional propaganda works of writers such as Upton Sinclair and Jack London.

"Tender Is The Night," has been regarded by many literary critics as a failure, although Fitzgerald himself thought highly of it. In order to overcome what he considered to be the main flaws in construction, he revised the form of the novel in 1940, and it was subsequently published in this form (it is available in Penguins). The latter version certainly seems to have gained clarity and interest, but the basic faults remain, that is, the veering between an onlooker's view and the writer's omniscience, and a tendency to over-complicate the story by an unnecessary wealth of characters and incident.

This novel takes us from the world of flappers and speakeasies to the world of the older rich expatriates at play on the Riviera, and having their psychological problems sorted out at the clinics of Zurich. Even if it does not come up to Fitzgerald's intention of making it the best American novel of the century it certainly presents a superb and engrossing picture of the lives of these people.

Fitzgerald's last and unfinished work, "The Last Tycoon" (published in 1941 in a form edited by Edmund Wilson), reverts to the earlier successful method of "Gatsby" and the story is told through the eyes of Cecelia Brady, a daughter of a Hollywood producer. Here also, we have a story of tragic failure, this time of a "wonder-boy" producer of the order of Irving Thalberg. Many of the characters are recognizably real-life Hollywood titans, and the book represents the most convincing and authentic account of Hollywood in literature (with the possible exception of Nathanael West's satire, "The Day Of The Locust"). In possessing this authenticity, it becomes a damning indictment of the American film factory, and clearly indicates that the horrors of "The Big Knife" and "The Day Of The Locust" are no exaggerations.

Some of Fitzgerald's short stories, too, well repay attention. Many of them are trite and banal, and were produced not as a labour of love, but merely as a means to provide the wherewithal to pay for an extravagant existence. On the other hand, some of them are brilliantly contrived, and rank with the novels as examples of efficient and persuasive writing. "May Day" or "The Diamond As Big As The Ritz" are stories which favourably bear comparison with any American short story writing of the period. The best of the stories are published in a collection entitled "Borrowed Time."

As with many other novelists, much of Fitzgerald's work is plainly autobiographical. The first two novels are apparently based on his early life at Princeton and after, and even in his later works, the echoes of his own existence are apparent. Dick Diver's failure in "Tender Is The Night" is a reflection of Fitzgerald's own failure in life, and even the reference to Diver's publication of a "popular" work on psychology and the perennially unfinished treatise, seems to indicate a conscience troubled by the glib short stories that Fitzgerald turned out in order to raise easy money, at the expense of his serious work.

"The Last Tycoon" too, reflects Fitzgerald's own experiences in Hollywood. With regard to this part of his life, "The Disenchanted" by Budd Schulberg, is based on Scott Fitzgerald's experiences as a script writer, and is well worth reading as a novel, in addition to the light that it throws on Fitzgerald's life and Hollywood generally.

A competent biography of Fitzgerald—"The Other Side of Paradise" by Arthur Mizener, also makes interesting reading, and helps considerably in an appreciation of Fitzgerald's work, as does a collection of notes and observations entitles "The Crack-Up," which also gives an insight into the tragedy of Fitzgerald's last days. Fitzgerald's life, like those of his heroes, was a failure. Like so many of his contemporaries, he saw his age, tied to a thriving industrial and financial giant, come crashing down in 1929, and after this he never again really got to grips with the world. He suffered nervous breakdowns, mainly caused through heavy drinking, and eventually died in 1940.

So much then, for the work of an absorbing writer, who in the words of Frederick Hoffman in "The Modern Novel in America," was successful beyond all of his contemporaries in keeping his work free of the pretentious intellectual faking that has handicapped so much of American fiction since Norris and Dreiser." In spite of all his flaws, Fitzgerald sums up an age of capitalism in an entertaining and stimulating way, which is more than be said for nine-tenths of the so-called social historians.

Albert Ivimey

Blogger's Note:

Other writers featured in the Writers and Society series:

• William Faulkner
• Carson McCullers
• John Steinbeck