Between the Lines: The Art Attack (1991)

The Between the Lines column from the April 1991 issue of the Socialist Standard

We have come to the end of a sickeningly stage-managed war. It was all a performance of ghastly hypocrisy and what is worst about it is that the TV war was but a dress rehearsal for a bigger military production yet to come.

The Labour Party spent the war seeking to appear patriotic. Kinnock went into a permanent Cenotaph mode: solemn voice and pseudo-Thatcher Britishness. Labour loyalists, whose long-term duty is to pretend to themselves and others that their leader stands for something decent, must have turned their sets off throughout The Gulf War Show in which the Kinnockite puppets danced to the dirge of the national anthem.

This disgusting Labourite Toryism is but the culmination of a decade in which the British Left has virtually collapsed. Their claim to stand for an alternative, which was never genuine when it was stated with vigour, is now hardly stated at all. The British Left is an unburied corpse. Kinnock is a Bob Hawke in waiting, the CP is full of Stalinist geriatrics and Young Liberal types, the SWP is full of anachronistic insurrectionists preaching a Leninist dogma which is not worth the paper on which it is written. Apart from the Socialist Party, it is hard to think of any claimants to the role of a genuine political opposition to capitalism. That, it seems, is pretty well beyond dispute.

But the 1980s has not been a period of complete quiescence from those who dissent from the pernicious priorities of the profit system. If so-called Thatcherism was the shrill cry of apparently victorious money men. the vitality of the dissenting arts has been the lively chorus of discontentment that things have gone as they have.

The Late Show (BBC2, 11.15pm, 11 March) took a look at what it called "Culture in the Eighties". It served as a reminder that amid all the sell-outs of the political radicals who caved in under the pressure of a packaged Iron Lady, there have been some quite remarkable writers who have shown the way. The programme showed excerpts from such great works as Boys From The Black Stuff and Pravda. It interviewed David Lodge, whose Nice Work showed the prostitution of academic minds to business agendas.

Also interviewed were Trevor Griffiths (perhaps one of the finest British playwrights of the last twenty years) whose Comedians can be seen as the definite text out of which Ben Elton and Harry "Loadsamoney" Enfield have emerged as serious social critics; Griffiths' Bill Brand, which ought to be repeated every two years in case Labour voters should forget its message, was a series about the futile reformism of Labour MPs that was more piercing than most Marxist lectures could hope to be.

The writers of the Eighties were a significant force in the struggle against Capital's intensification of its exploitative assault on Wage Labour. The likes of Griffiths, Howard Brenton, David Edgar, David Hare, Caryl Churchill and David Leland did more to point out the contradictions of capitalism than the pathetic Westminster leftist lobby fodder could ever do.

What was interesting is that most of these plays started out on television. Great though theatrical attacks on the system such as Brenton's The Churchill Play or Brenton and Ali's Moscow Gold have been, these were seen by but a few people, most of whom agreed with the writers before they went to see the plays. It might be the case that in Moscow or Leningrad a great critic of the system like Mikhail Shatrov can have queues forming outside the theatres to see his latest offering, but in Britain the medium for the art attack must be the TV screen — or, perhaps these days, cinema and video releases.

The days of lefty worker-actors performing The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists in trade-union halls and expecting the world to change are over. (I read recently Ewan MacColl's historical account of the Workers' Theatre Movement of the 1930s and was really depressed by the artistic emptiness and woodenness of what was evidently a very enthusiastic and inspired enterprise. Putting on bad plays does not make socialists).

Of course, socialists are not under illusions about the artistic militancy of the last ten years. Yes, there has been some fine writing, but it is noticeable that most of it was in the early Eighties. As the decade went on demoralisation set in. TV companies (increasingly independent, commercial ones) became more nervous and, as The Late Show pointed out, the earlier attacking drama gave way to rather hysterical works about the fear of the nuclear state — Edge of Darkness is one of the better examples of this rather defeatist genre.

Another reason not to have illusions is that most of the plays which comprise this Eighties' artistic resistance were only attacking aspects of capitalism. That is all a play can do; it is a revolutionary party which must grasp both the bull and the horns. Sometimes the radical writers of the Eighties did not quite understand what this system is that they were attacking. The rather supercilious literary critic, D.J. Taylor, was interviewed on the programme and seemed to be dismissive of the extent to which socially critical plays have made any difference. In his book, A Vain Conceit, Taylor suggests that the failure of the radical writers to have as much literary power as they would like is "that writers have lost the ability to describe and define the society of which they are part". (P. 33)

This is where the need for socialist writers becomes clear: we need to be able to shine the spotlight on the capitalist stage on which this whole social farce is being played out.

Steve Coleman

Bert Ramelson buries Lenin (1976)

From the March 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

What happened when the BBC's "Newsday" interviewed the industrial organiser of the Communist Party would have been more suitable for the Goon Show, or Monty Python. Bert Ramelson, keeping a perfectly straight face, point-blank denied everything that the Communist Party was founded on and peddled for over thirty years!

True it is, as he said in the interview, that he only joined the CP in 1936; whereas some of us knew it intimately since 1920. However, that should not prevent him (or anybody else) knowing the facts. The interviewer did not know a great deal about the subject, and questioned from a prepared brief.

But even the political department of the BBC had heard that the Communist Parties were founded on "Leninism". That is, seizure of power by an intrepid, resolute minority of "professional revolutionists", leading the working class — who would then lead the "toiling masses" (meaning peasants) to socialist victory. For thirty years a vast mass of pamphlets, books and newspapers flogged the Leninist dogma of the "dictatorship of the proletariat", meaning minority action.

Many able writes waded patiently  through Marx's work to show that, from The Communist Manifesto onward, Marx never used this then-popular French slogan to mean anything else than majority democratic methods. For instance, Lucien Laurat, who in Marxism and Democracy quotes The Communist Manifesto:

The first stage in the working class revolution is the constitution of the proletariats as the ruling class, the conquest of democracy.

No use! For thirty years CP writers and speakers denounced democracy and exhorted the workers to follow "Marx's best disciple" Nikolai Lenin. Parliament was a useless "gasworks", elections a waste of time (although they regularly took part in them, but "only for propaganda, comrade"). The state would be smashed and "bourgeois" parliaments replaced by Soviets, "the workers' democracy".

The theses of the Communist International, Third Congress, prescribed the basis of Communist Parties. They must be organized with strict military discipline, based on "democratic Centralism", meaning complete obedience to the edicts of the Central Committee, or E.C., and prepared for "heavy civil war". The Programme of the Third International included armed insurrection.

For many a long and weary year the speakers of the Socialist Party strove manfully against an avalanche of Communist falsification of Marxism and distortion of Socialism. Exploiting every possible grievance of the workers — "the Leninist tactic": especially the mass unemployment of the 'thirties. Communist-inspired Hunger Marchers were batoned by the police after the General Strike ended in disaster; to be followed by yet another "change of tactics" by the CP.

When the war broke out poor old Pollitt, not realizing that Stalin had signed a pact with Hitler, proclaimed it a "just war", wrote a pamphlet "How to Win the War, One Penny" — and was promptly sacked by Moscow. After Hitler invaded Russia, the "imperialist war" of the western imperialist powers became "a war of liberation against German Fascism" and Pollitt was reinstated, although not as General Secretary of the Party.

Stalin had wiped the "Communist International" out of existence once he had the prospect of nuclear weapons. Understandably, the interviewer politely raised the question of the CP's present policy, and its past. "Was it not the case that the CP had advocated 'the dictatorship of the proletariat' in the past?"

"Not any more", replied Bert. Not any more! And do you know why, dear reader? Let Bert tell you. Because there has been "so much misunderstanding of what Marx really meant". He actually said this. "Marx meant the action of the vast overwhelming majority", said Bert; the CP has not used the phrase in any document since 1950, to avoid any more misunderstanding.

He was then asked if the British CP is a constitutional party, now willing to obey the majority vote. Yes! said Bert. But, said the question-master, didn't the CP try to take control of the trade unions? No, said our industrial organizer, not any more — we only organize our members in trade unions to help the unions, whose job is not political but economic. He would up by saying that the CP hoped to be able to join in a Coalition Government of Left-wing Labourites, like the Communists in France or Italy.

When one considers that Stalin systematically exterminated everyone within reach, and certainly everu one of those prominent in the Russian CP prior to Lenin's death . . .  when we recall Trotsky's extravagant calls for ruthless terrorism and the wiping-out of all opponents, and that many were shot by Stalin for daring to doubt his infallibility — we can only describe Bert as the best thing since electronic ignition.

Funnily enough, in the same week that Bert did his comic turn (19th January) the BBC was running a series involving Russia, called "Fall of Eagles". It was not expertly informed, but at least tried to achieve some resemblance to the facts. It showed the famous 1903 Congress, where Lenin founded the Bolshevik faction. Bert Ramelson did not even mention Lenin's name. Poor old "Ilyitch" is dead and buried, along with the thirty-eight volumes of his Collected Works.

And yet, up to and after 1950, famous scientists in Russia did not dare try to publish reputable work without the customary sickening adulation of Comrade Stalin — "Lenin's greatest disciple". How fortunate for Bert that he wasn't the industrial organizer then. He'd have got twenty years in a labour camp — if he was lucky!

Horatio