Red Flag’s summer suggestions
Another summer rolls along, and it is time to think once more about what we’re all going to do with our extra time. Below are some projects readers of Red Flag might like to undertake over the Christmas period.
Last year, I suggested works around a theme of structure and agency: do social groups like the working class forge society, or are they forged by it?
This year, I’m proposing projects that relate to the individual in society. What does it feel like to live under contemporary capitalism? What are our responsibilities as individuals, both politically and ethically? How do we understand ourselves and our place within broader history? How might we negotiate our own personal problems in a world that makes a political or ethical life so difficult?
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Film
Ken Loach is rightly considered the greatest left wing filmmaker of the last 30 years. Again and again he returns to examine the trials and satisfactions of working class life.
In his early Kes, a young and troubled working class boy finds meaning through the training of a kestrel; Riff Raff depicts the plight of Britain’s itinerant builders; his historical Land and Freedom tells the story of a young man’s experience in the international brigades during the Spanish Civil War; and the recent It’s a Free World shows a mother setting up a business aimed at employing illegal immigrants, and the tragic human consequences of accepting the neoliberal vision.
Loach is primarily a social realist, and his films work in the way that the Hungarian revolutionary György Lukács understood that genre. His characters are “typical”: they stand in for social groups or forces. In this way, a piece of art can build up a picture of the driving forces of society.
Loach is prolific, so there are plenty of films to choose from. If you’re unsure, I’d recommend any of the above to begin with, and though he can be uneven, each of his films has something to offer.
Novel
Hilary Mantel has rightly become famous for her novels about Thomas Cromwell and the English reformation, when the rising English bourgeoisie broke the power of the Catholic Church and reconstructed religion on the basis of individualism.
But for my money, her early novel A place of greater safety has a more incendiary power. Mantel’s study of three key leaders of the French Revolution – Desmoulins, Robespierre and Danton – presents that momentous event with localised intensity.
Mantel takes a very personal angle, and much of her rendition occurs in drawing rooms and other localised spaces. Great events are seen only from afar or at oblique angles. Like all great books, it’s also flawed. A place of greater safety certainly lacks the smoothness of Wolf Hall, and its density can be at times challenging.
We can also quibble about the way the characters banter as if they were in the London Review of Books coffee shop. But Mantel knows her history. Written when she was still in her 20s and, from what I can tell, still a socialist, Mantel’s novel is an extraordinary book, dense and visionary.
Memoir
There’s been a slow-burning interest in women’s liberation of late, especially on the left around such works as Lise Vogel’s recently reprinted Marxism and the oppression of women and Heather Brown’s Marx on gender and the family.
Sheila Rowbotham’s Promise of a dream gives us a picture of the second wave in its early days, as well as a lively memoir of the British left in the 1960s. Rowbotham spent an early year in Paris as a beatnik, fell under the tutelage of historians Edward and Dorothy Thompson, became friends with Tariq Ali, Sally Alexander and Robin Blackburn and many other significant figures, and was deeply involved in the radical left.
Her particular version of socialism was finely attuned to the importance of personal experience and exploration – in this it reflected its time. It was also open and self-attenuating. Rowbotham is an attractive personality, partly because she is so prepared to emphasise her own frailties and insecurities: she suffered from low self-esteem and would, for example, feel sick before public speaking.
She was also deeply engaged in the counterculture, which so closely cleaved to the radical political movements of the time. We might not agree with all her political positions, but to my mind, the most interesting writers tend to be those with whom we have much agreement, but with whom there remains a frisson. How else might we interrogate our own ideas?
As a picture of the British left in the 1960s, together with Tariq Ali’s Street fighting years, Rowbotham’s memoir is essential reading.
Theory
Long before Marx wrote his magnum opus, Capital, he composed an unfinished masterpiece that has been called The economic and philosophical manuscripts of 1844. Still in his most Hegelian and humanist phase, Marx’s focus on alienation drew him closer to the concerns of the individual than in later, more structuralist works.
In the manuscripts, he explains that the modern worker is alienated from the object of his/her work. Instead of being the master of that object, the worker becomes a slave to it. This alienation, Marx argues, means that workers are alienated from their own humanity, and hence from each other.
When they were rediscovered in the 20th century, the manuscripts made an immediate impact on socialists, especially those who wanted to develop a critique of dehumanising Stalinism. While the philosopher Althusser is probably right to draw a distinction between the early and the later Marx, The economic and philosophic manuscripts remain a brilliant contribution to social thought. Like most of Marx, they can be at times challenging, but the rewards are worth it.
Literature and culture
When Marshall Berman discovered Marx’s Economic and philosophical manuscripts, it was as if a light bulb went off in his head. For Berman, the manuscripts presented an unexpected and deeply human Marx.
Indeed, he was so excited that he bought a handful of copies for friends and family, who looked at him with incomprehension. Berman later went on to write one great book of humanist Marxism: All that is solid melts into air.
Magnificently written (for both scholars and a general audience) and warm, the book surveys what Berman considered “modernism”, a condition of humanity that emerges under modern capitalism, best encapsulated by Marx’s famous phrase, “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”
For Berman, capitalism is a system which is both deeply creative and profoundly destructive. To live inside that system means to live with these two possibilities inscribed into one’s soul.
Tracing this new sensibility through literature and culture, All that is solid melts into air contains wonderful chapters on Goethe, Marx, Baudelaire, St. Petersburg and New York.
Berman’s book was wildly influential but also controversial. For those keen to continue with this line of thought, Perry Anderson’s critique, “Modernity and revolution” (in Zones of Engagement) and Berman’s response (an essay available in his lovely collection of essays, Adventures in Marxism) are worth reading.
