Much ado about nothing

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TERRY EAGLETON reviews Culture and Crisis in Britain in the 30s, ed. Jon Clark and others; Lawrence and Wishart, £7.50 "almination of the Ponular Front: the 1939 Stalin-Hitler Paci The British Stalinists' long struggle for respectability has taken a number of curious forms over the last decade or so.

First it was religion. Back in the mid-1960s, small groups of CPers and Christians, often from the same public schools, met in smoke-filled rooms to ponder the parallels between socialism and the • Second Coming, redemption and revolution.

This dialogue, for some unaccountable reason, proved less than politically fruitful; and the early 1970s saw the Stalinists in hot pursuit of the rather more alluring bandwagon of women's liberation.

Their gentlemanly openmindedness on this topic was enough to hi-jack a few leading feminists into the party: and encouraged by this success, they launched into even • more ambitious terrain.

The 'Communist University of London' was established, an annual jamboree of Marxist theory abuzz with seminars on everything from pop culture to the Popular Front Rosa to radio Luxembourg:

Wander No tiresome political commitment was demanded; you could just wander meditatively from lecture hall to lecture hall, filling your notebook as you went with scraps of Gramsci and fragments of counter-culture.

The two intellectual stars of the show, 'Marxist' sociologists returned each year o dismanst Paul Hirst, yet another central doctrine of historical materialism.

One year they would disprove the existence of modes of production, the next year they were back to demonstrate that only vulgar Marxists believed that ideology had anything to do with class interests.

Meanwhile, things were hotting up on the "cultural' The British Stalinists had spotted that 'culture' was an area thronged with a number of glamorous new theories and free-floating left students, which like religion and feminism might repay moving in on.

A literary journal, Red Letters, was accordingly launched by a group of younger party members enamoured of the French theorist Louis Althusser.

This was doubtless a' little disturbing for the party leadership, who had just pushed forward one of their well-tried hacks, John Lewis, to counter Althusser's positions.

Just as the British CP had been growing respectable, reas onable and pro-religious, along had come Althusser with his high-flown French abstractions and ferocious "anti-humanism' to upset the applecart.

It was clearly advisable, however, to give the young people a little rope: theoretically and politically bankrupt as they were, the Stalinist leaders badly needed an intellectual boost and a cultural show-piece, and if it had to be the alien French jargon of Red Letters, then so be it.

Perhaps the young people would leave the party if they weren't granted an intellectual playground, or perhaps in time they would ditch Althusser for Teilhard de Chardin.* The 'cultural' Stalinists had an important card up their sleeve. Had there not been, in the 1930s, a mighty outbreak of *A mystical Christian writer of whom several leading Stalinists are greatly enamoured. Communist cultural activity, all the way from the literary criticism of Christopher Caudwell to the Workers Theatre Movement?

No, there hadn't actually, but you could always pretend there had-pretend that the ings of the 'cultural' British CP in the 1930s constituted a rich and fertile heritage.

This is precisely what the book under review sets out to do.

An Introduction by veteran Stalinist James Klugmann, himself author of an almost illiterate history of the CPGB riddled with distortions and omissions, sets the tone: the Popular Front, he tells us, showed that:

"genuine, progressive national feelings and patriotism were the other side of the medal of popular and proletarian internationalism."

And so Klugmann, along with his fellow Stalinists of the 30s, managed to bring himself Using 'God Save the King' along with The Red Flag', a cultural feat which "repossessed for the Marxist revolutionary. of today his or her cultural heritage of the past"

It is, indeed, an impressive dialectical synthesis opposites: while the Stalinists were fervently practising 'proletarian internationalism' by collaborating with anti-proletarian governments, slaughtering Trotskyists in Spain, and concluding a non-aggression pact with fascism, they managed at the same time to stir up a little orgy of public-school chauvinism as a kind of cultural bonus.

Not that the CP was entirely without achievements: Klugmann tells us proudly that 'at one stage 60% of CP students got Firsts at Cambridge' The book then proceeds retrieve from the obscurity of history a number of resounding cultural non-achievements.

We are whipped through the literary criticism of such inferior 'thinkers' as Ralph Fox, author of the crudely populist The Novel and the People, treated to a celebration of the dismally third-rate theoretical journal Left Review, asked to admire the exceedingly thin poetic informed that informed by a counter-revolu- offerings of the Romantic young John Cornford, and tionary that Walter Greenwood's Love on the Dole is counter-revolutionary.

There are, surprisingly, one or two excellent essays in this book, wedged uncomfortably between disgusting apologies for class betrayal.

lain Wright's fine dissection of the most important literary critical movement in Britain in the century-F.R. Leavis's journal Scrutiny-should have found itself a more congenial home; and Peter Widdowson, unlike most of the contributors, is actually a sensitive literary critic with some valuable insights into the fiction of the 1930s.

There is also an informative essay on the Workers Theatre Movement, centred on the London Unity theatre, which for all its political delusions still offers some important lessons to revolutionaries today concerned with political theatre.

Culture-the lived experience of a class in song and symbol, memoir and myth, book and ballad-is too vital a component of the class struggle to be abandoned to the betrayers of the working class.

But perhaps we don't need to worry; perhaps next year the Stalinists will have moved on to the rich revolutionary potential of do-it-yourself roof installation.

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FOCIALISI PRESS heateres Embarkation of the The two most advertised exhibitions of paintings in London at the present ime could hardly be more different experiences. Queen of Sheba from Building Carthage HENRY Piger IPS reviews two important ons: Post Impressionism (Royal Academy: admission £2) and Second Sight • (National

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'extremely partial, politically dis- torted, theoretically thin offer-