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British Communism and the Politics of Literature, 1928-1939
This PhD thesis was successfully completed at the University of Wales Swansea in 2003.
This thesis examines the work of the most important literary critics and theorists who were either members of, or closely associated with, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in the period between 1928 and 1939. Its main concern is to provide a systematic and critical account of the communist understanding of the politics of literature. Its wider objective is to assess the ways in which the 'Party theorists' were influenced by the CPGB's relationship with the world communist movement. The basic argument is that the work of the party theorists had its roots in (1) the political strategies imposed on the CPGB throughout this period by the Communist International, and (2) the body of cultural doctrine enunciated by Soviet intellectuals at the famous Writers' Congress in Moscow in 1934. I argue that the party theorists responded creatively to these external influences, usually (though not always) by drawing on ideas from the British tradition of cultural criticism to develop Soviet doctrine in distinctive ways. Moreover, in spite of its debt to Soviet theory, much of the British work on literature and culture was noticeably unorthodox - sometimes consciously so, sometimes not. I argue that these ideas are consistent with the main principles of the so-called 'revisionist' school of CPGB historiography which has emerged over the last 15 years.
The Introduction tries to relate the argument of the thesis to recent revisionist scholarship on the history of the CPGB. It begins by suggesting that the main conclusions of such revisionist historians as Andrew Thorpe, Matthew Worley and Kevin Morgan can roughly be summarised as follows: (1) the CPGB was never entirely subordinate in its relationship with the Communist International (CI) and the Soviet government, (2) the CPGB sometimes played an important role in determining CI policy and always worked creatively to adapt CI policy to British circumstances, and (3) the CPGB was sometimes capable of openly defying the CI, on at least one occasion helping to change its policy as a consequence. I then outline the ways in which these conclusions can be applied not merely to the political history of the party but also to its cultural history. The Introduction is rounded off by a brief account of the origins of British Marxist criticism in the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, specifically in the work of William Morris, Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx Aveling.
Chapter One examines the period between 1928 and 1933 when the CPGB adhered to the CI's notorious 'Class Against Class' policy. It argues that the work of the most important communist critics of the time was strongly influenced by Class Against Class, which isolated communists from the wider labour movement by promulgating a sectarian attitude towards the mainstream trade unions and the 'social-fascist' Labour Party. Section One examines the work of the Anglo-Australian critic P R Stephensen, and considers the claim of his friend Jack Lindsay that he 'founded Marxist literary criticism' in the articles he wrote for The London Aphrodite between 1928 and 1929. I argue that Stephensen's eccentric blend of elitism, negationism and Nietzscheanism reflected the mood of extreme revolutionary febrility which settled on the CPGB as a consequence of Class Against Class. Section Two examines the shared concern with the idea of 'cultural crisis' in the work of John Strachey and Montagu Slater, relating it to the CPGB's attempt to justify Class Against Class by claiming that world capitalism had entered a downturn from which recovery was simply impossible. Section Three examines the communist response to the contemporary fashion for cultural conservatism, relating it to the anti-intellectualism which infected the CPGB in the five years after 1928. After surveying the famous debate between F R Leavis and A L Morton in the pages of Scrutiny (1932-1933), I examine the transitional work of the three important literary intellectuals (Edgell Rickword, Douglas Garman and Alec Brown) who converted to communism in the early 1930s after previously siding with the cultural conservatives.
Chapter Two outlines the main principles of Soviet cultural policy in the 1930s. Its particular focus is the ideas enunciated at the Soviet Writers' Congress in Moscow in 1934, since these provided the intellectual framework within which the British communists had to operate for the rest of the 1930s. I suggest that Soviet doctrine at this time contained a 'prescriptive' element (ie. a description and defence of 'Socialist Realism' in the arts), an 'aesthetic' element (ie. a reflectionist, anti-Kantian and anti-Formalist account of art which aimed to justify a political conception of literature), a 'historical' element (ie. an attempt to justify Socialist Realism by pointing to prestigious cultural precedents) and a 'comparative' element (ie. an attempt to argue that the culture of the USSR was infinitely superior to that of the capitalist nations, which had long since descended into 'decadence'). The chapter concludes with an account of published British responses to the Writers' Congress, specifically those of Amabel Williams-Ellis and Montagu Slater.
Chapters Three, Four and Five examine the work of Alick West, Ralph Fox and Christopher Caudwell, the three men who are usually regarded as the founders of marxist literary theory in Britain. Chapter Three describes West as a communist of semi-dissident instincts who believed that the world communist movement had tragically lost sight of the cultural aspirations (particularly a yearning for community) which draw people towards revolutionary politics in the first place. The chapter opens with a reading of West's great autobiography One Man in his Time (1969) in which he traces his preoccupation with the idea of community to the experiences of his childhood. I then provide an account of West's seminal work Crisis and Criticism (1937), focusing on the innovative ways in which it responded to Soviet ideas about the nature of cultural crisis and the relationship between form and content. A related section suggests that West's briefer writings of the 1930s can be seen as a veiled expression of opposition to the CI's 'Popular Front' strategy. The chapter concludes with a brief account of West's work in the post-war period, arguing that much of it deepened the dissident perspective of the earlier writings. Chapter Four examines the literary writings of Ralph Fox, especially the posthumously published The Novel and the People (1937). My argument is that Fox's account of the novel can only be understood in relation to the Soviet demand for the portrayal of 'positive heroes' in socialist art. The chapter therefore provides an overview of (1) Fox's attempt to define the novel as an 'epic' form, (2) his attempt to trace the history of the individual hero in the bourgeois novel, and (3) his influential remarks about the aesthetic strategies which socialist writers ought to employ. I argue throughout the chapter that Fox should basically be regarded as a sort of unconscious dissident, in the sense that he often invoked ideas from the liberal tradition which were incompatible with the main principles of marxism. Since the work of Christopher Caudwell has been exhaustively analysed in a number of distinguished essays and monographs, Chapter Five is a brief inter-chapter which sketches a new interpretation of Caudwell's writings. My argument is that Caudwell took his lead from the main principles of Soviet theory (something which has not always been acknowledged in the past) but that he processed them in a way that throws considerable light on the nature of the autodidactic mind. I focus in particular on Caudwell's theory of poetry and his theory of cultural crisis.
Chapter Six explores the consequences for British cultural marxism of the CI's 'Popular Front' strategy against fascism. Its particular focus is the attempt of British communists to combat the influence of fascism by tracing the history of the 'English radical tradition' — a project which had its roots in a famous speech by Georgi Dimitrov at the Seventh Congress of the CI in 1935. After identifying the general principles which informed the communist understanding of English radicalism, I provide a broadly chronological account of the development of the radical tradition at the levels of both politics and culture. There are separate sections on (1) the outbreak of peasants' revolts at the end of the Middle Ages, (2) popular responses to enclosure in the sixteenth century, (3) plebeian radicalism during the English Revolution, (4) the 'Swiftian subversions' of the eighteenth century, and (5) the emergence of modern socialism in the nineteenth century. Each section shows how a range of writers, including Shakespeare, Milton, Bunyan and Blake, tried to express the outlook of the radical movement in some of their most important works. The final section of the chapter asks whether the investigation of English radicalism was conducted along orthodox lines (that is, whether it conformed to the principles outlined by Dimitrov in 1935), and examines two theoretical initiatives which grew out of it — one by Edgell Rickword, the other by Jack Lindsay.
The Conclusion of the thesis argues that the communist criticism of the 1930s has exercised an unacknowledged influence on many subsequent developments in British radical criticism, including (1) the emergence of the New Left and the birth of Cultural Studies, (2) the attack on the category of 'literature' in the work of such writers as Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton, and (3) the emergence of Althusserian and Gramscian strains in literary studies. I finish with a brief attempt to evoke the ethos of the world communist movement's internal culture.
