26.07.2006
Identity and class
After watching the repeat of the BBC series, Lefties, Gordon Downie discusses how the capitalist media misrepresents radical movements of the left
Writing at the launch of BBC Four in 2002, BBC broadcast creative director Ruth Shabi asserted that the new channel's marketing slogan, 'Everybody needs a place to think', reflected the channel's aim to "give viewers access to big ideas and brilliant people" (www.redbeemedia.com/press/archive/BBC4.pdf), whilst the channel's head of marketing, James Pestell added: "We are positioning BBC Four as the most intellectually and culturally rewarding channel on television" (ibid).
These lofty ideals were already being qualified in 2004, when the channel perceived the need to "develop a more welcoming tone" (www.bbc.co.uk/info/statements2004/docs/television.htm). But, given the intellectually emaciated and aspirationally attenuated terrain that constitutes the vast bulk of television broadcasting, within this context BBC Four's claim is in many ways difficult to contest.
Having been test-driven on BBC Four earlier this year, and thus certified as sufficiently harmless and intellectually undemanding to qualify for wider distribution, the selective analysis of 1970s and 1980s left politics, Lefties, has just been repeated on BBC2. Over the past 35 years, BBC2 has also echoed and paid lip-service to those founding statements that commit the BBC to "inform and educate" (www.bbc.co.uk/info/purpose/). Unfortunately, both of these goals seem perpetually to be in conflict with the other mission: to "entertain" (ibid).
A cursory analysis of BBC Four's output illustrates the extent to which the need to entertain, and thus the need to maintain its share of the viewing audience, dominates and determines its scheduling. Quite how Kenneth Williams: desperately funny, The lost world of Mitchell and Kenyon, The Britpop story, and Paul Merton's silent clowns make people think is unclear, unless the process here is a redefinition of what constitutes critical enquiry or a repositioning of what is deemed intellectually legitimate.
But if the diversionary function of output of this kind is incontestable, we should also be aware of the extent to which such commissioning directives infect and determine the content and structure of other, less obviously unambitious programming, whether factual, cultural or historical: how else can a "more welcoming tone" be achieved? As Pierre Bourdieu noted, it is through its enslavement to "audience ratings [that] television imposes market pressures" (P Bourdieu On television New York 1998, p67).
Thus, given the complex history of the left during the 1970s and 80s, one may be forgiven for suspecting that the first two instalments of Lefties, 'Property is theft' and 'Angry wimmin', were in significant measure devised to enable the examination of those political tendencies that, when prevalent, lent themselves most easily to media ridicule, derision and mockery. Given the small distance that separates the ridiculous from the entertaining, such a focus enables BBC Four to claim that its mission to stimulate the mind has been fulfilled, whilst simultaneously maintaining a healthy audience share.
Having its origin in the rightwing tabloid press, the pejorative phrase, 'loony left', could readily be interpreted as nothing more than the invention of semi-literate hacks, and just as easily dismissed. But in common with other rightwing media propaganda of the time, the chirpy and cheeky tenor of the phrase should not distract us from its function to smear, discredit, and trivialise radical, left and socialist political programmes, ideas and philosophies, its alliterative structure making it an easily memorable slogan for poorly or barely educated, proletarian and petty bourgeois Sun and Daily Mail readers to assimilate.
As 'Angry wimmin' illustrated, this process reached its most relentlessly savage when many of the ideas of the separatist faction, Revolutionary Feminism, were adopted and incorporated into Greater London Council policy with the formation of the GLC women's committee in 1982. One of its first actions prohibited the London underground network from displaying any advertisement deemed sexist or offensive to women. Thus, within a few years, the tactics of direct action which saw the torching of sex shops in Leeds, achieved their formal legitimation and application in local government policy. But with the abolition of the GLC in 1986, these developments were short-lived.
The casual and informal quality of the term 'lefty' captures well the ad hoc nature of those disparate groupings that occupied and established squats in housing scheduled for demolition in Brixton during the early 1970s. As 'Property is theft' illustrated, they included various anarchist factions, members of the International Marxist Group, and a collection of other left grouplets - an assortment in keeping, perhaps, with the anarchist origins of the slogan itself.
But for Marxists of a firmly economistic or materialist persuasion, the problems associated with political eclecticism of this kind reached their zenith with the establishment of collectives that appeared to invert one of the most central tenets of historical materialism: namely that "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life" (K Marx and F Engels The German ideology London 1970, p38). For Jenny James, who arrived at Villa Road in 1974, change had an internal, psychological dimension. For her, it was "not all out there - it's also inside", whilst for ex-IMG member Peter Cooper, who joined the commune in 1976, "There was a view that the personal is political, and the way that you have relationships with other people is as significant a part of social transformation as the institutions of the state."
This bottom-up strategy emphasised self, rather than social analysis and transformation, through the adoption and exploration of various strands of psycho- and cognitive therapy, most significantly those theories associated with Wilhelm Reich and the primal therapy of psycho-therapist Arthur Janov. Both concentrated on the release of repression in order to recalibrate human psychology and instinct.
Reich offered theoretical underpinning to this politico-psychological strategy of social transformation when he observed that "vulgar Marxists completely separate economic existence from social existence as a whole, and state that man's 'ideology' and 'consciousness' are solely and directly determined by his economic existence. It makes ideology rigidly and one-sidedly dependent upon economy" (W Reich The mass psychology of fascism London 1972, p14). In addition, the vulgar Marxist "considers himself to be 'materialist' when he rejects facts such as 'drive', 'need' or 'inner processes' as being 'idealistic'" (ibid p15).
For Reich, only analyses that embraced primary psychological and biological processes such as these, analyses that recognised the role of sexual repression in the formation of the authoritarian personality, could explain why "broad masses living in utter poverty could become nationalistic" and assist "fascist, extreme political reaction, into power" (ibid p10).
Had 'Property is theft' explored and analysed theories such as these, the actions and motivations of the occupants of the Villa Road commune may have been more effectively elucidated. Our understanding would have been significantly enhanced if the extent to which they had adequately theorised their actions, or attempted to place them within the context of a broader process of revolutionary social change, had been critically examined.
But, rather than addressing this, the programme took the easier, more sensationalist and potentially entertaining route, and chose to devote its analytical energies to the examination of the 'primal scream' therapies of Arthur Janov. This enabled the inclusion of contemporary video footage of experimental subjects and commune inhabitants either weeping in a foetal position or violently screaming and gesticulating in order, as the programme informed us, "to relive the experiences of their own birth". By focusing analytical attention on primal therapy, the documentary portrayed the actions of the residents as motivated more by self-absorption than revolution. And in so doing, not only was the residents' commitment to a broader political programme put into question, but so too was the political programme itself.
'Property is theft' and 'Angry wimmin' illustrated how both social movements eventually fragmented and dissolved. In the case of radical feminism, the series director and narrator, Vanessa Engle, described how the women's movement increasingly fractured into ever tinier interest groups. If, for members of Revolutionary Feminism and Women Against Violence Against Women, men and not class or capital were the main enemy, for their successors the women's movement was too dominated by a mainly white, university-educated petty bourgeoisie. For the new activists, there were important differences between women that needed to be addressed and acknowledged, so that the extent to which Jewish and black women were oppressed could be recognised and included in any revolutionary programme. As blind activist Kirsten Hearne remarked, "Sisters Against Disablement was formed because we felt excluded by the women's movement".
A Marxist analysis of class has significant consequences for how Marxists relate to the politics of identity and those movements of liberation associated with gender, race, ethnicity and sexuality, or those movements associated with the personal politics of emancipatory psycho-therapy. Though Marxism supports liberation movements of this kind, the inherent danger in this process of fragmentation is that capital is viewed as simply one form of oppression and domination among many others. In this account, all oppressions have equivalent status and class has no significance greater than any other. However, as Ellen Meiskins Wood asserts, though it may be democratic to "celebrate differences in gender, in what sense is it democratic to celebrate class differences?" (E Meiskins Wood Democracy against capitalism Cambridge 1995, p258).