23.09.1999

Communist culture

Phil Watson reviews ‘A weapon in the struggle: the cultural history of the Communist Party in Britain’ by Andy Croft (Pluto Press 1998, pp218, £14.99)

The social and political contours of the CPGB’s past continue to be mapped apace, the latest being this rather fine collection of essays which attempt to probe some of the issues related to cultural commitments. Framed by an effective introduction from Andy Croft, this serious work attempts to highlight some key theoretical issues. In particular, one of the Communist Party’s most respected cultural theorists, Alick West, is quoted to good effect:

“I was asked in 1953 to take a weekend school on the theme ‘Culture is a weapon in the fight for socialism’ … At the school I said that culture ... heightens our consciousness of the world we want to win and our energy to win it. In this sense it was true that culture is a weapon in the fight for socialism. But the truth depended on recognition of the greater truth that socialism is a weapon in the fight for culture. For our final aim was not the establishment of a political and economic structure, but the heightening of human life” (p1).

West sums up perfectly the ambiguity at the heart of the CPGB’s cultural practice. It is this contradiction which has to be written into our understanding of its history. Certainly, the CPGB had different aspirations to your average modern-day leftwing outfit. In its time the Party has launched, or had a very close relationship to, a wide variety of cultural organisations that ranged across the spectrum of artistic and intellectual spheres.

Lewis Jones explained in 1938 that the CPGB had

“not taught workers that ... communists are concerned with and understand every phase of human existence, and all its ‘cultural’ aspects as well as the political. In other words we have not shown that communism is not a creed but that it is life”.

Such noble aims became offset by the sect-like manner in which the CPGB organised itself around the ‘line’ and the concurrent suppression of political differences. This democratic deficit was of course deeply harmful to the cultural expression of the Party. This point is graphically illustrated by Richard Hanlon and Mike Waite, who detail the inability of the Workers Music Association to develop any understanding of the flowering of ‘pop’ culture in the 1960s. The communist composer Alan Bush compared screaming audiences with voodoo in Guyana, concluding that a new low point had been reached in the development of popular culture (pp83-84).

The incursion of the political into the artistic was however much more deeply rooted in the method of the CPGB, to the point at which it showed a marked influence on its actual production and reception of artistic forms. Croft draws attention to the Party’s reception of a series of poetry in 1950. The Daily Worker featured a selection of letters denouncing this ‘modern’ poetry. The ‘unintelligibility’ of such art was rebuked; instead a more simplistic, ‘working class’ approach was urged. One writer insisted on the need for “such poems as our Chinese comrades chant on the march; satire for our pamphlets; works which might put life into a public meeting; songs our young communists could brighten a ramble or a demonstration with” (p143). Croft correctly sees this as a Zhdanovite dry run for the subsequent assault on Christopher Caudwell’s aesthetics in the Modern Quarterly (p144).

This influence spread deeper into the productive laboratory of the communist artist. Hanlon and Waite illustrate how Bush moved away from the “individual and rigorous modernism” (p75) of his 1929 string quartet Dialectic, towards a commitment to a ‘national’ musical tradition which Hanlon and Waite rather unflatteringly refer to as the setting of “leftish doggerel to simple folk tunes” (p77). Hanlon and Waite go on to cite an interview with Bush in the early 1960s, where the composer offered a Zhdanovite self-condemnation of formalism - the crime of prioritising musical form over the communication of a social content (p78).

These thoroughly dreary themes resonated through the CPGB’s involvement with British folk musicthrough the likes of AL Lloyd and Ewan MacColl, discussed here in the essay by Gerald Porter. The ‘progressive’ tradition of British radical song (traced through works such as Lloyd’s Folk song in England), relied upon closely reflective interpretations of an urban and industrial landscape, rooted in modes of collective expression - often in “resistance to the status quo” (p173). MacColl, after serving his apprenticeship in agitprop formations such as Red Megaphone, actually left the CPGB in 1953 after apparently being told by a Party official that “It doesn’t matter a toss what you sing: just pack the people in” (p172).

In fact, the ‘anti-formalist’ approach relied upon by Lloyd and MacColl could only but reinforce such philistine sentiment. The reliance on woodenly reflective social content, and the folk movement’s emphasis on group expression, impeded the CPGB’s understanding of art’s autonomy and concretisation through its own formal laws. Once art becomes predominantly a site for the utilisation of a specific social content this leaves the door open for what Alick West saw as its degradation for a political end. This approach also tends to freeze the aesthetic into national-centred narrowness, whilst specific artistic forms lend themselves more easily to a universal outlook. Once artistic practice becomes rooted in themes of political content, you allow for the indifference of the unnamed CPGB official in his above response to Ewan MacColl. After all, what is the point of a topical song if its message could just as easily be encapsulated in a political slogan?

This inability to appreciate the autonomy, or objectivity, of art is of course grounded in the subjectivism that marked the practice of ‘official communism’ during and after the Stalinist era. Such practice was unable to comprehend - in the way in which it ‘planned’ and ruled societies - the sensuous, objective world. Its practice in the cultural sphere was an extension of this outlook. Art under the bureaucracy was something to be crudely manipulated for political means, and it was this position, closely formulated by AA Zhdanov, that was transmitted into organisations such as the CPGB, down into the formal practice of its artistic protagonists. Even in tactical shifts such as the popular frontist period of the mid-1930s, which potentially offered the CPGB a broad-based means by which to grasp the dynamism of popular culture (albeit in an opportunistic fashion), the underlying subjectivism of the ‘official communist’ movement and its associated distrust of ‘formalism’ meant that such developments could be transitory at best. Art certainly does have a relationship to the political, but this can only be traced if art, and the artist, are given a real existence from the outset rather than being featured as a mere ‘weapon in the struggle’.

We have seen quite clearly above how this culture worked its way through its practitioners in the CPGB. Therefore we can be somewhat sceptical of the analysis offered by Gerald Porter who argues that, while the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s

“was strongly influenced by individual communists and the work of some branches, the Party never had a coherent or effective policy towards the political song. The role of Party activists depended less on decisions made at the centre about a ‘cultural popular front’ than on a principled response to the constantly changing field of values, beliefs and practices competing for dominance within a social formation dictated by capitalism and industrialisation” (p171).

Porter’s view may no doubt be true on an organisational level. In many spheres of the CPGB’s work - trade unionism for example - decisions were effectively taken without the ‘political’ guidance of the centre and often on the basis of sectional considerations. Nevertheless, as we have seen above, the very fact that Party activists were involved in a ‘folk’ movement can be seen as the result of certain Zhdanovite ‘national’ assumptions embedded in the CPGB’s aesthetic culture. Porter’s vision of a disaggregated Party is a rather overblown reaction to the inane pap that various Trotskyite authors have served up on the CPGB. However, it is important not to replace a ‘Moscow-centric’ version with an anarchist one. The relative autonomy that undoubtedly existed in national and regional communist organisation has to be understood as precisely that.

Similarly we must point out some of the possible misconceptions that could arise from Paul Hogarth’s ‘Afterword’.  On the foundation of Hogarth’s experiences in the Party artists’ group in the late 1940s and early 1950s he writes: “ ... communist writers, editors, musicians artists and artistes strove with incredible dedication to create the literature, the periodicals, the pageants, the music and the festivals which have since become an inseparable element in the mainstream of a popular culture committed to the heightening of human awareness” (original emphasis, p209). In a similar vein, Croft argues that “the Party’s artistic life was not always as reductive or as grim as its pronouncements on the subject” (p1).

Therefore, its seems that despite their critique of the CPGB’s cultural life Hogarth and Croft are keen to argue that legitimate art forms could still rise up unscathed. The Party produced effective art, almost in spite of itself. Whilst this is no doubt true in some cases, one could also make the point that the Party was also responsible for either alienating or mangling artistic talent in the grinder of political orthodoxy.

Again, it seems as if the likes of Hogarth and Croft want to salvage the reputation of the CPGB’s cultural practitioners by establishing some distance between their output and the more functional outlook desired by the CPGB’s subjectivist theoretical approach to artistic form. However, whilst the influence of this culture was certainly not all-embracing, the experience of characters such as Alan Bush warns us against throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The ‘autonomy’ of the CPGB and its membership only makes methodological sense if we understand its associated limitations.