Letters

Confused camouflage

John Pearson seeks to play the silly game of 'practical revolutionary philistine' versus 'elitist art snob' (Weekly Worker January 11). Now from personal experience I know that John is the very opposite of a "mature philistine". So why the camouflage?

I remember the penultimate months of 1999 when comrade Pearson defended the decision of his faction not to present an introduction on the British-Irish at a Party school, with the rejoinder that Manchester CPGB was composed of real flesh-and-blood proletarians and not the 'intellectuals' ranged against them. Therefore, I do not take John's counterposition very seriously. As in 1999, all it means is that comrade Pearson feels confused and defensive on a particular issue.

Comrade Pearson destroys any residual case he might have by his 'revolutionism': "But why should it be the case that Marxist art is circumscribed by boundaries that do not exist in Marxism as a whole?" I'm sorry to break it to you, John, but such "boundaries" do extend to Marxist political practice. But then you never see them. You still cannot recognise that the British-Irish question represents a democratic problem (the 'class struggle' is apparently enough to solve this one). This is the whole basis of your sterile politics, which you have deemed sufficient to transpose into a theory of art.

When such abstraction allies itself to an oppressive bureaucracy which has divorced itself from society, you end up with ... Stalinism. But then John tells comrades he considers himself a Trotskyite. If so, why defend a Stalinist theory?

Apparently, I am guilty of the unsubstantiated allegation that Darrell Goodliffe has a Stalinist view of art. Oh, really? Read Goodliffe's irksome drivel about creating new societies, being "positively expressive" about our class identity, etc, and John's equally vacuous garbage about "uplifting visions". Then read the 'Stalinised' Radek at the 1934 Soviet Writers Congress: "We will put into this literature the very soul of the proletariat, its passion and its love, and it will be a literature of mighty pictures, of great consolations. It will be a literature of the struggle for socialism, of the victory of international socialism."

Comrades Goodliffe and Pearson have not only absorbed the theory of socialist realism; they have begun to parrot its bloody rhetoric as well!

Before comrades go into print on complex issues such as art, they really ought to consider the impact of Stalinism on the left's culture, and the fact that most artists find the British revolutionary left an unattractive proposition. Until then, comrades Pearson and Goodliffe will go on being prisoners of their political background - what was all that about 'scratching a Trotskyite' and 'getting a Stalinist'?

Confused camouflage
Confused camouflage

Boris Elliotov

Zhadanov lives! Or so it seems, after reading comrade John Pearson's rather depressing exercise in neo-Stalinist aesthetics.

Comrade Pearson is keen to defend Darrell Goodliffe's assertion, "We want a working class culture which is positively expressive about its class identity, one that draws the best from its history and celebrates that, not one that reflects life as a slave" (Weekly Worker December 7). Angered by Phil Watson's "vitriolic attack" on this position, comrade Pearson tells us that the role of art is to provide "inspirational, uplifting visions of the potential of the universal class and of the new society", and that the prime, if not only, function of artists is to jolly us along "by envisaging the realisation of that maturing potential" in contrast to the "individualistic, nay nihilistic, miserabilism" of writers like Irvine Welsh and James Kelman (Weekly Worker January 11).

I can almost hear the Soviet national anthem in the background as I read these words. They are also alarmingly reminiscent of the notorious declaration by Julie Waterson in Socialist Worker that the works of Irvine Welsh were "anti-working class". Read Zola or Shelley instead.

Remember, this very interesting controversy was sparked off by comrade Goodliffe's ideological critique of the film, Billy Elliot, which presents the story of a 12-year-old working class boy who discovers a talent for ballet dancing. The comrade criticised the film as it "portrayed [the miners] as little better than an ugly mob in contrast to Billy's gracefulness".

Lamenting how "the collective expression of the class is defined as negative in opposition to the self-expression of Billy", comrade Goodliffe sternly adds: "Indeed the notion of collectivity is depicted as crushing the individual. Billy is under constant pressure to conform to expected norms by his father, who in turn is subject to similar pressure on the picket lines." In the end, "the only solution for Billy is to abandon his class" ... and pursue his ballet training, rather than participating in the "potentially liberating experience" of the miners' Great Strike of 1984-85, which would presumably put Billy back on track and see him right again (Weekly Worker November 23).

In other words, Billy is an insufficiently heroic figure, who has been corrupted by what is an essentially silly, and ultimately diversionary, artistic activity: ie, ballet dancing. Comrade Goodliffe makes this fairly clear in his letter defending his review, where he writes: "It is my opinion that Billy's family is changed not by any act of self-emancipation, but by what can loosely be termed bourgeois influences, especially Billy's ballet teacher."

I can only agree with comrade Watson that this is an "antiquated 'official communist' message" which merely makes "an alienated demand on reality" (Weekly Worker December 14). For comrades Pearson and Goodliffe, the 'correct' version of Comrade Billy Elliot would have had our 12-year-old class warrior enthusiastically laying into the police on the picket lines, muttering: 'I love the smell of burning pig vans in the morning.' In a different place, at a different time, of course, we would have found ourselves watching the "inspirational" and "uplifting" exploits of Boris Elliotov, the superhuman tractor driver or invincible Red Army tank commander, "dizzy with success" as he builds "the new society".

Boris Elliotov
Boris Elliotov

Means and ends

Oh dear. Someone has not been paying attention.

Comrade Peter Radcliff writes: "Economism was the term Lenin used to describe the policies and approaches of revolutionaries who excluded themselves from the political struggle in Russia at the turn of the century and merely concentrated on trade union agitation" (Weekly Worker January 11).

Not true, of course. Take my copy of Lenin's, What is to be done? (Peking 1973). He explicitly states that economism "does not at all exclude 'politics' altogether, as some would imagine. Trade unions have always conducted some political (but not [communist]) agitation and struggle" (p38). In other words, writes Lenin, "the 'economists' do not altogether repudiate 'politics', but ... are constantly straying from the [communist] to the trade-unionist conception of politics" (p68).

The 'classic' definition of real economism was expressed by Martynov and quoted endlessly with much delight by Lenin: "The [communists] are now confronted with the task of, as far as possible, lending the economic struggle itself a political character" (p72). For Lenin, "the pompous phrase about 'lending the economic struggle itself a political character' ... serves as a screen to conceal what is in fact the traditional striving to degrade [communist] politics to the level of trade union politics!" (p77).

In other words, Lenin is decrying that trend in the revolutionary movement (economism) which bowed to spontaneity and hence ended up tailing the existing 'consciousness' of the masses (the "tailists", as Lenin called them). Today's tailists, of course, do exactly the same. We keep going on about the monarchy and the House of Lords? Forget high politics: we should confine ourselves to essentially defensive and trade unionist demands (save Vauxhall jobs, oppose PFI, etc).

Like many Trotskyists and semi-Trotskyists, comrade Radcliff peddles - whether knowingly or not - this thoroughly false understanding of economism, so when accused of the very same sin, they can reply in mock-injured tones, 'Us? Economists? Absurd! We believe in conducting the political struggle as well as the trade union struggle. You see it's just you in the CPGB being ultra-leftist again.'

In What is to be done?, Lenin ridicules the economists for wanting "the revolutionaries" to "recognise the 'sovereign character of the present movement', to "recognise the 'legitimacy' of what exists", because "they want recognition of the desirability of that struggle 'which is at all possible for the workers under the present conditions', and they want it recognised as the only possible struggle, the one 'the workers are actually conducting at the present time'" (p26).

Sounds awfully like comrade Radcliff's "orientation to the working class and their concerns and consciousness" and his "transitional demands, a programme that starts from where workers are, instead of where you wish them to be".

So it is left Labourism and left reformism today (as that is where the "workers are") and the marvellous revolutionary programme tomorrow. Can comrade Radcliff please tell us exactly how many schools, hospitals, etc have to be 'saved' before the working class has a miraculous leap of consciousness and becomes able to grapple with ideas concerning the need to "overthrow the bourgeois state machine and replace it with a workers' state"?

Or has he, like all those wedded to the 'transitional programme' method, made a radical rupture between means and ends?

Means and ends
Means and ends