Was Shakespeare in 1.s.2

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Dashed International Perspectives ¡ternational - Problems and Tasks orkers Socialist League has major with the U.S. Socialist Workers is do not prevent us speaking out aer to defend one of the leading P, Joseph Hansen, from a lying k from the press of the Workers morning conversations with such characters. We mention his past employment not in order to accuse him of anything (given the WRP's leadership's scrupulous attitude to 'security' we assume they investigated his past in the most thorough manner before recruiting him, never mind making him editor of Workers Press). The point is rather that, if other tendencies were to adopt the method of the WRP school of falsification (of whom Mr Mitchell has shown himself an able_ student), then the editor of Workers Press himself would be an obvious and easy target for slander and insinuation.

As we have said, the slanders and frame-ups of Healy and the WRP leadership are not an accident. They are part of a swift political degeneration.

Turning their backs on the fight for principles and programme in the mass movement, with a membership confused and paralysed by - for example - the WRP's participation in the corporatist' Ryder committees at British Leyland - the WRP leadership head into an insoluble political and organisational crisis. They have now publically declared that they are £50,000 in debt, and that unless a 'crisis fund' of this amount can be raised by February, Workers Press will be in jeopardy.

SLANDER FUND

But how, and from who, was this huge debt incurred? Part of it was (as is stated in Workers Press) used in the 'special fund' allocated by the International Committee to send journalists to France and the USA to prepare the special series on Security and a the Fourth International' - ie to manufacture slanders against Joseph Hansen and others!

There is another, equally serious, implication of the WRP's £50,000 'crisis fund' - if their own published figures are to be believed. At the time of the WRP conference in December 1974 at which the ¡expulsion of the opposition was rubber-stamped the leadership publically claimed 8,000 members. With an active membership of this size it should be no serious problem to raise €50,000 in two months (it would only mean £3.12½ per month each!). But the claimed membership was and is clearly a lie. This is shown also by the fact that even with the support of other political organisations and trade union contingents they mobilised only about 1,400 on the demonstration in November against the police raid on their premises -and even Workers Press claimed only 5,000!

UNCONTROLLED

But the issue is not simply how big the WRP membership is or isn't. It is that the WRl has, since at least paper members - many "signed up" ion street corners and on doorsteps in the WRP's liquidationist election campaigns. These "recruits" never really had any political agreement with the WRP, are inactive most of the time and not under the discipline of the leadership, and ‚who (as the 'crisis fund' bears witness) will not even contribute to ¡Party funds. But such 'membership' - uncontrolled and politically responsible to no-one - is precisely the environment in which police spies and provocateurs flourish.

WRP members who are being asked by Workers Press to hand over half their wage packets for six weeks have a right to know what the money is being used for. And the true answer is - not for the building of a revolutionary leadership - but to have journalists for the manufacture of frame-ups, and to give a lease of life to the politically bankrupt clique which has lead the WRP into its present acute crisis.

Shakespeare analysed the class contradictions of capitalism as early as 1604 - if you believe the collection of snippets by "Socialist Worker's" literary correspondent Paul O'Flinn entitled "Them and Us in Literature"

The booklet (92 pages of what O'Flinn describes as "accessible" writing about English literature) takes a widely varied selection of authors - centring on William, Golding, George Orwell, Forster, Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Joseph Conrad i and Shakespeare.

It then subjects them all to an "analysis" which strips their writing of any hint of depth or subtlety and is calculated to prevent anyone reading them with any enthusiasm.

The intended audience of the bookiet is clearly anyone who thumbs through serious novels simply looking for social comment and calls to revolutionary action. Since few novels set out to provide either of these, it is a fairly easy matter to "expose" how their writers, as perfidious agents of bourgeois ideology, are attacking the working class, and generally writing a load of old rubbish.

The assumption made by O'Flinn is that somehow, despite the analysis of Marx, Lenin and Trotsky, it is possible to produce a fully-fledged 'proletarian' literature under capitalism, and that any work which falls short of this or opposes it is therefore to be judged deficient.

Thus he concludes his book with a quotation from Pete Seeger's Talking Union blues (about the fight of American car workers to unionise Ford in 1941) which supposedly seals the lid on all the inadequate and counterrevolutionary literature of the past, and points. the way to future "literature" (presumably epics about strikes against Measurea Day work, "worker-participation" , lobbies of Parliament against rail closures, and other deep-going themes?)

This kind of approach is very damaging to any workers OI students intending seriously to approach literature as Marxists. It results in a bald schematic view of each writer: Thomas Hardy, we're told, was a "pessimist" , Joseph Conrad "racist" , Dickens , William Golding an agent of Toryism - and every nineteenth century male novelist, apparently, was sımply a male chauvinist pig.

O'Flinn thus virtually defies anyone to read the books he dismisses on pain of being branded a reactionary - regardless of the numerous babies that get hurled into the street along with the water from his "proletarian" zinc bath.

Indeed whole laborious sections of the book are written in the sickeningly "matey" style so typical of Socialist Worker and its expublic school editor Paul Foot. For the International Socialists the whole question is one of talking down to the level of a working class they instinctively see abysmally stupid and politically backward.

So O'Flinn sets out to "debunk" literature, scrubbing it clean of nasty bourgeois ideas which he feels might corrupt workers, [giving them a "built-in crap detector"!] - in the process reassuring them that it doesn't really matter whether they struggle to read novels, poetry and plays or not.

Trotsky specifically attacked this kind of approach:

"It is childish to think that bourgeois belles lettres can make a breach in class solidarity. What the worker will take from Shakespeare, Goethe, Pushkin or Dostoevsky will be a more complex idea of human personality, of its passions and feelings, a deeper and profounder understanding of its psychic forces and the role of the subconscious, etc. In the final analysis the worker will become richer."

More specifically, in a speech in 1924 on Class and Art Trotsky attacked those who just see literary works as historical documents or political statements:

"Dante was. of course. the the experience of his epoch to a tremendous artistic height. And if we, while today approaching other works of mediaeval literature merely as objects of study, approach the Divine Comedy as a source of artistic perception, this happens not because Dante was a Florentine petty-bourgeois of the 13th century, but to a considerable extent in spite of that circumstance. ... But in what sense can we recommend Pushkin to a worker? There is no proletarian class viewpoint in Pushkin, not to speak of a monolithic expression of Communist feelings... Shall we say to the worker: read Pushkin in order to understand how a nobleman, a serfowner and a gentleman of the bedchamber encountered Spring and experienced Autumn? This element is, of course, present in Pushkin for Pushkin grew up on a particular social basis. But the expression that Pushkin gave his feelings is so saturated with the artistic, and generally with the psychological experience of centuries, is so crystallised, that it has lasted down to our times ...

Class and Art pp 10-11.

So there is more to literature than simply a 'Proletarian class viewpoint'. Of course it is possible vigorously to dispute and discuss the relative merits of artistic work by bourgeois artists. The overwhelming majority of material published today by the capitalist printing houses is artistically and intellectually worthless - and there is no need to think too long about it. But some writers have risen above this level.

IGNORED

It is therefore questionable how much use it is for O'Flinn to assess, for example, Thomas Hardy's poetry largely on the basis of one of his worst poems, ignoring the great body of very moving lyric poetry he also wrote; and to assess his novels while ignoring the twist in nearly every one of them where the dream-like quality of romantic novels and women's magazines is thrown into reverse, so that his 'coincidences' tend always to take the form of catastrophes challenging the blithe optimism of reams of Victorian fiction.

Or does it mean much to brand Dickens as a "liberal" , when we know historically that in his period he could have been little else, and when we know that Dickens together with Elizabeth Gaskell and a small group of nineteenth century middle class writers were the first to seriously portray, even begin to confront the oppression of the working class under capitalism? Does not even this contain a germ of revolution?

O'Flinn half concedes this when he writes, on Dickens' Hard Times "What Dickens ... had sensed through the figure of Stephen Blackpool was the way that capitalism didn't need people, it only needed hands." (Chapter 8).

Yet he cannot leave the issue go, and returns to slam Dickens as "dishonest" for succumbing to his middle-class preconceptions and depicting a happy ending in the novel. (Chapter 11).

But the worst perversion of Marxism by far is O'Flinn's approach to Shakespeare, which completely abandons any attempt at historical understanding of art. Shakespeare's dramas, he tells us, have to be approached not from the sixteenth and seventeenth century standards to which they were written, but from the standards and preconceptions of the twentieth century.

One thing that obviously any new reader of Shakespeare would need aunlained io urhi hio ntoro nea each of them.Modern plays have long ago discarded such formulae. Why should Shakespeare have stuck to them?

The answer is of course because the change and eventual abandonment of such conventions was a historical process. Shakespeare's plays were written at a certain historical point in the development of English society, English literature, English theatre, and of course literature internationally They represent an enormous advance over many of the Jacobean tragedies which preceded them, and are also completely different in form and content from the Restoration drama which was written following the upheavals of the British Bourgeois Revolution of 1640.

So when O'Flinn rushes in and derides the notion that Shakespeare could have written tragedies in which a 'tragic flaw' in the character of the hero is responsible for the catastrophe which follows he has to ignore precisely these concrete conditions in which Shakespeare wrote.

His position emerges clearly when he yeese writing a tragic drama about...Christ.... Forget all the religious nonsense: you're going to take him as the usual tragic hero..."

But in the 16th and 17th centuries no writer who valued his head would openly "forget the religious nonsense" on any issue. So any such comparison is unscientific and false.

Tragedies before and tragedies after Shakespeare wrote were based on schematic "models" • This is nut, perhaps, what "Marxists" such as O'Flinn would like, but it is the situation.

O'Flinn seeks other answers. He tells us:

"To turn from this to the Marxist approach. What the Marxist tries to do is avoid lumbering the work with dogmatic categories like tragic flaw. Instead he attempts to make sense of it with analysis which is in the first place sociological."

So instead of one "dogmatic category", O'Flinn seeks to impose his own - "sociological analysis".

In general terms, and provided it is taken alongside an understanding of some of the conventions, the historical "limits" within which Shakespeare was writing, this is of course important. What Shakespeare brings to life in his plays more than any earlier writer is the interaction of individualised and complex characters who of course reflect in various ways the late sixteenth century world of Shakespeare's formative years.

But O'Flinn goes to the absurd lengths of attempting to account for King Lear purely in these abstract "sociological' terms, ano makes a nonsense of his whole approach.

NOT This play, we are solemnly told, is about the conflict between capitalism and feudalism! For some reason (not explained) King Lear, the chief feudal ruler, decides to end feudalism and set up capitalism with free market competition. The (extremely devious and obscure) form this "competition" takes is between his three daughters who have to answer best the question "Which of you shall we say doth love us most?"

According to O'Flinn (who seems to have produced his own varcinn of the old folk tale millinne "THEM AND US IN LITERATUI BY JOHN LISTER.

A 4a those who accumulate [?] with competitive ferocity ...

So with no factories, no intensive industry, no working class and only the manoeuvres of a group of aristocrats ever depicted in the play, some forty years before the British Revolution and nearer a hundred and fifty years before even the beginning of the obvious appearance of industrial capitalism, O'Flinn tells us that Shakespeare is depicting the emergence of a capitalist system, (not so much in conflict with feudalism, but set up by it!) starting the process of accumulation!

Even had Shakespeare ventured to incorporate such prophetic visions in his 1604 play, it is hard to see who in his audience would have had a clue what he was on about. Socialist Worker was not to appear for another 365 years!

O'Flinn goes the whole hog, however. Anticipating the Communist Manifesto by 233 years, Shakespeare foresaw the development of capitalism's crisis!

"I hesitate to say that Shakes peare shows the new society eventually perishing in its own contradictions because that sounds a bit glib [!], yet in fact that's more or less what happens ... What we get ... in the second half of the play is a grotesque vision of the future of capitalist society ...

O'Flinn sensibly admits that "Most teachers of English would Let accept this account of King SCHEMA No Marxist would accept it either! Read O'Flinn's account and then read the play, and see how Shakespeare's tapestry is turned into a tea-towel, and the complex development and conflict of character is cast aside in the name of imposing on Shakespeare the schema of a play which "senses and acts out the tragedy and absurdity of capitalist principles" • He of course does not say what principles Shakespeare was advocating (feudalist? socialist?), or link them in any way with his "sociological analysis" - simply assuming Shakespeare would have been a revolutionary (in I.S.?)

O'Flinn's account of Shakespeare is important in drawing out some of the results of applying the method of the I.S. group His anti-historical approach to historical questions is simply the other side of the I.S. refusal to draw the political lessons from working class history, which binds them to the counter-revolutionary role of Stalinism, and leaves them directing workers down the blind alley of spontaneous trade union militancy and 'rank and fileism' despite the many bitter lessons that have shown that this is inadequate to bring about revolution.

And the I.S. refusal to conflict with the working class, to fight for political development flows over into a refusal to fight to raise its cultural level, as shown by O'Flinn. For us the question is continuously to raise and widen workers' understanding of the political tasks and the cultural development required. As Trotsky wrote:

"The art of past centuries has made man more complex and flexible, has raised his mentality to a higher level, has enriched him in an all-round way. This enrichment is a precious achievement of culture. Mastery of the art of the past is, therefore, a necessary precondition not only for the creation of new art but also for the building of the new society, for communism needs people with highly developed minds .... If we were groundlessly to repudiate the art of the past,

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1974,, inflated its real 'active' membership with a huge 'halo' of