06.12.2007

A 'people's' tragedy

Lawrence Parker reviews Ben Harker's Class act: the cultural and political life of Ewan MacColl Pluto Press, 2007, £15.99, pp360

Reading Ben Harker's study of Ewan MacColl (1915-1989) made me think that the life of this communist, singer, songwriter, actor and playwright could in some ways stand for the 'official' CPGB of which MacColl was a member. The party grouped together an important section of the advanced part of the working class that (by and large) wound itself around a cramped set of opportunist shibboleths that infected even its apparent opposites in the anti-revisionist 'Marxist-Leninist' and Trotskyist movements.

So Ewan MacColl as a political artist was a tragedy of the CPGB and, by that token, a register of the failure of the British working class movement in the 20th century. But joining the Young Communist League (YCL) around 1930 in Salford was a great intellectual spur to Jimmie Miller (he did not start calling himself Ewan MacColl until 1945). At this point the CPGB was espousing the politics of the 'third period'. Despite the revolutionary phrases of this time being partly a feint for the CPGB's immersion in the tainted politics of the Soviet bureaucracy (and, ironically, a grounding for the non-revolutionary 'unpopular front' era of the mid-to-late 1930s), it did school its activists in a set of militant class politics. It was also a time in which the party had a record of activism (for example, in relation to unemployed workers) that puts the stale routines of the contemporary left to shame.

The radicalism of these years left their political mark on MacColl. He always preferred For Soviet Britain (1935) to the parliamentary reformism of the British road to socialism (BRS - 1951), eventually leaving the CPGB and becoming a Maoist in the 1960s - although he rejected the overtures of micro-sects such as Reg Birch's Communist Party of Britain (Marxist-Leninist). MacColl despised the Eurocommunists who led the CPGB in the 1980s and was no great admirer of the opportunist trend that had manacled itself to the Morning Star (p253).

The 1930s was a clearly a decade of discovery and experimentation for the Miller. He drew around him a group of like-minded teenagers to found a Salford branch of the Workers' Theatre Movement (WTM - largely dominated by YCL and CPGB members) in 1931 and proceeded to fashion something from nothing - "a propertyless theatre of the propertyless class", in WTM parlance. Raw and inexperienced, composed mostly of unemployed activists, by 1932 the group had called itself the Red Megaphones and was taking its agitprop sketches and songs into actions such as unemployed demonstrations.

Despite the fact that groups such as the Red Megaphones were apparently somewhat crude and limited - a British WTM group took part in the Moscow International Workers' Theatre Olympiad in 1933 and came last (p23) - what was impressive about it in retrospect was its ambition to take from the most advanced forms of Marxist culture and translate it into the British class struggle. The name 'Red Megaphones' was taken from the Berlin-based communist theatre group. Miller had struck up correspondence with a German activist and followed the German movement's politicisation of the cultural arena (p24). The Russian Blue Blouses were another group admired by activists such as Miller. By 1934, clearly something of an intellectual magpie, he was an admirer of James Joyce, TS Eliot and Sigmund Freud, all writers frowned upon by the CPGB (p37).

Interviewed in the late 1970s, MacColl said this of the period: "You'd sit in a carriage with a lot of other YCLers "¦ and you'd sing songs in Russian and German and the rest of the train would be singing songs in English, but they weren't revolutionary songs. You were singing songs in German and Russian that nobody understood, including you. That's "¦ real sectarianism "¦ that's it at its final point (p33)."

Actually the example used is not one of sectarianism: rather it illustrates the decay of MacColl's political aesthetic down the years. The implication behind this is that the YCLers should have sung less revolutionary songs in English and that being clearly understood is always a prerequisite.

However, if you're serious about making a revolution, which at that point MacColl and company were, surely you must expect to confuse people (confusing yourself at times) and to show them things that may seem shocking or alien. Thus there is a link, although not 'obvious' or automatic, between, say, the most demanding, even offensive, modernist text and revolutionary politics. Simplicity and literal-mindedness can actually be an enemy.

But of course by the late 1970s, the British left - and the CPGB that MacColl had vacated - were largely mired in non-revolutionary opportunist politics and the 'common sense' of the British labour movement. MacColl had rejected the formal bearer of these politics in the shape of the BRS but had clearly been infected by the cultural context that shaped such politics. What had happened since the 1930s?

In 1945 Jimmie Miller became Ewan MacColl, an alias that in part reflected a romanticism of his Scottish family roots, but also the fact that he had deserted the British army in 1940 and had effectively been in hiding for the rest of the war. As part of this synthetic 'Scottishness', MacColl had also come under the influence of, among others, Hugh MacDiarmid, a poet in and around the CPGB who espoused a puerile Scottish cultural nationalism (p68). This also found expression in MacColl's agreement with the CPGB's Zhdanovite cultural nationalism of the immediate post-war years, whereby 'authentic' national traditions ('people's culture') were to be mobilised against the scurrilous films, comics and music of a debased US imperialism.

MacColl may well have rejected the CPGB's growing shift toward parliamentary reformism (p100), but failed to see that its cultural policy had the same reactionary assumptions. In the jargon of the party, the CPGB needed to become attuned to Britain's national traditions - hence the reversion to the gradualism of the Labour Party and parliament, forgetting about nasty, 'foreign' ideas such as the working class overthrowing the class organs of the bourgeoisie. In the realm of culture, activists were gently encouraged to explore their own national artistic traditions in line with the opportunistic concerns of the party leadership (by no means all of them were happy about this or played ball).

Although there was nothing positive or principled to be extracted from the CPGB's cultural policy, MacColl thought otherwise and translated this cultural cold war into operating principles for his involvement in the folk music revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Popular culture and its commodities were excoriated in favour of the rediscovery of "vernacular cultural traditions from the past" that would point to a more democratic culture (p155).

True, MacColl talked of bringing these traditions face to face with contemporary reality (p156), but fundamentally the main thrust was to face the future by looking backwards. Worse still, this aesthetic was even more reactionary in practice. It was a rule of MacColl's Singers' Club from 1958 that singers only sang songs from their own native tradition, with MacColl and Bert Lloyd even trying (unsuccessfully) to foist this reactionary Stalinist nonsense onto the English Folk Dance and Song Society (p160).

In a cutting passage, Harker points out the flawed and hypocritical basis of this warped aesthetic. He talks of music being "wonderfully oblivious to national boundaries" and asks why MacColl did not merely take what he needed from a particular tradition (p161). Even more damningly, Harker adds: "And weren't [Peggy] Seeger and MacColl themselves above all a fusion act who brought instruments associated with American folk music "¦ into creative tension with British traditions of unaccompanied singing?" And the icing on the Zhdanovite cake was provided by MacColl's own "dubious Scottishness" (p162).

In hindsight, the attempt to pigeonhole folk music into these national silos seems an absurd thing for a revolutionary Marxist to be propagating. Although fear (in this case a fear of being caught singing the 'wrong' national tradition) scarcely makes for good listening, there is still enjoyment to be had from listening to MacColl, but it tends to be a rather dry and academic pleasure.

So MacColl's aesthetic had moved from a cosmopolitan one - where you took what you needed from the most advanced practitioners (however 'confusing' it might seem to a fresh audience) and fused it with your own experience - to a cramped world, where you were limited to the boundaries of your 'own' national tradition. Of course, recovering the lost folk songs of a national culture could initially be a voyage of discovery and some in the 'folk revival' of the 1960s were undoubtedly inspired by MacColl's banal edicts. But ultimately this leads precisely to the stale culture of 'recitals'; a type of formalism.

Alex Campbell, a contemporary of MacColl, was once moved to write: "I deplore the bigots on the scene who cry that one shouldn't sing American or French songs" (p182). This is a sad epitaph for an artist who thought of himself as a revolutionary Marxist. But in that sense it was not entirely MacColl's 'fault': in many ways he was an artistic mirror of the intellectual decomposition of 'official' communism.