Author Archives: Paul Anderson

Paul Anderson, Tribune, 3 November 1989

Ewan MacColl, who died last week at the age of 74, was at the centre of two of the most significant developments in the arts in post-war Britain: the rise of a populist political theatre and the “folk revival”.

From the vantage point of the late eighties, both phenomena seem past their peak. Indeed, folk music today is for the most part back underground, its place in the affections of young people long ago taken by commercial pop, most (at least until the current world music craze) of it rooted in black America.

Populist political theatre is rather more visible, but it has been severely curtailed by the financial rigours and political exhaustion of ten years of Thatcherism.

Still, both have been crucial in moulding the cultural landscape of our times, and neither would have been anything like as important had it not been for the contribution of Ewan MacColl.

Born James Miller in Auchterander in 1915, MacColl joined the Young Communist League at the age of 14. In thirties’ Manchester, as a member of a street-corner agitprop group, he was discovered by a young stage designer who was working at the local Gaiety Theatre with the exiled German playwright Ernst Toller. The young designer was Joan Littlewood, and the meeting was the start of a long and fruitful creative relationship that was to culminate in the creation of Theatre Workshop in 1946 which, after years of touring, settled in the Theatre Royal Stratford East in 1953.

It is no exaggeration to say that Theatre Workshop revolutionised British theatre, introducing an exuberant style of ensemble playing, often involving song and dance, that was in its own way as deeply subversive of stuffy theatrical convention as Look Back in Anger or anything else put on by the Royal Court in the fifties. Its spirit lives on, not just in the populist radicalism that still informs the Theatre Royal and many other companies, but even in the mainstream. MacColl’s contribution included the authorship of Theatre Workshop’s biggest pre-Stratford hit, Uranium 235, an anti-bomb drama performed at the Edinburgh People’s Festival (a precursor of the Fringe) in 1951.

The fifties saw MacColl increasingly making his mark as a folk musician, performing and recording the “lost” music of ordinary British people as well as songs by his own hand.
MacColl’s discoveries came particularly from the urbanindustrial working class and from Scotland and Ireland: not for him the celebration of a mythical English rural idyll, His own compositions were songs of struggle — as often bleak and harsh as they were tender, and often intensely political. More than anyone else, MacColl was responsible for making folk the soundtrack of the Aldermaston generation.

The folk revival burned itself out by the late sixties, unable to compete with the pop music that the folkies hated so much. Increasingly, MacColl and his wife, Peggy Seeger, herself an accomplished musician, ploughed a lonely furrow, their work appreciated by an enthusiastic following (particularly on the left, for whose causes MacColl was such a great benefit performer to the very last) but never gaining the mass audience it undoubtedly deserved.

All that may be changing again now, as boredom with recycling of rhythm and blues prompts young musicians to look at other popular music styles and traditions. Most obviously, MacColl’s work has been a major influence on the best band to have come out of Ireland in recent years, The Pogues, who had a hit a couple of years back with MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town”; but there are plenty of others in his debt.

His death is a great loss for everyone on the left, and it is difficult to believe that we’ll see his like again.

Paul Anderson, review of Negotiating the Rapids: Socialist Politics for the Nineties by the Socialist Society (£2.95), Tribune, 27 October 1989

And now, after all the military metaphors – the “forward march”, the “war of position”, the “fight back” – something that really fits eighties Britain.

Yes, we’re canoeing. It’s unclear whether this is some local government-funded youth-club scam or the real thing, self-managed by autonomous creative subjects, but the Socialist. Society is out for adventure in the mountains, paddling dynamically through the white water of our political predicament.

It certainly makes a change from the rooms filled with smoke and fat trade union fixers, and the pacifist in me cannot help but applaud the scrupulous avoidance of the left’s traditional rhetoric.

The metaphor is telling none the less: canoeing down mountain streams is virtuoso stuff, and for most people something to be admired from the riverbank, even if the canoeist insists that it’s easy really and everyone ought to join in. If the canoeist shows all the signs of being about to capsize or founder on rocks, of course, it’s much worse than that.

Which is not to say that most of us could not do with a breath of invigorating libertaian fresh air, and there’s plenty here: denunciations of “the exhausted traditions of the Second, Third and Fourth Internetionals”; assertions that socialism is “a process of collective self-emancipation, deferring to no established authority”; insistence that any future socialism ‘ must be green.

But the canoeist’s approach to the hostile stream is unreliable. The dangers of deep right-wing social democratic currents are systematically overestimated: those of Leninist boulders are ignored unless than can be labelled “Stalinist”. The possibility that “new-look” Labourism might have just a few features that make it significantly better than Wilson-Callaghanism (its policies on the environment, transport, health and decentralisation of power, for example) is not seriously considered. Nor is the possibility that it might just be worth continuing to keep up the libertarian left pressure on the Labour leadership from within the Labour Party.

Meanwhile the near-total failure of vanguardist politics in Britain – not just Arthur Scargill’s handling of the miners’ stirke, Militant in Liverpool and Ted Knight’s Lambeth debacle, but also the way that the Trotskyist sects’ hyper-activism and megalomania have turned off thousands from any sort of socialism – is simply overlooked.

I get the feeling that, if the Socialist Society were to succeed in its long-term aim of creating a green left party, it would be immediately swamped by the 57 varieties. Then again, given that a green left party could thrive only under proportional representation, and PR is at best unlikely in the foreseeable future, perhaps that’s the sort of problem that need not exercise us overmuch.

So, although there is much sense in Negotiating the Rapids (and I’ve not mentioned some excellent critical passages on identity politics, environmentalism and Ireland), it finishes the course badly holed. The Socialist Society might be going in the right direction, but it still has a lot to sort out before its practice and its rhetoric of left renewal are fully integrated.

Paul Anderson, review of A Vain Conceit by D J Taylor (Bloomsbury, £4.99), Tribune, 13 October 1989

D J Taylor believes that British fiction is in a bad way. The big names — Margaret Drabble, Kingsley Amis, John. Fowles, Iris Murdoch — write books that ‘ fail to connect with the realities of our society. Their reputations are sustained by a literary establishment of obsequious, lazy, middlebrow, xenophobic, philistine publishers, reviewers and reviews editors. Meanwhile, iconoclastic, politically committed writers are ignored.

There’s some truth in this thesis. Many of the big names of British fiction do produce tedious, cliched, polite, petty-bourgeois drivel. Most Fleet Street reviewers are insufferably servile. Coteries abound.

The problem is that there are enough exceptions to the rules for Taylor’s argument to appear foolish. Many of Taylor’s favoured authors — Martin Amis, Kazuro Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Jeanette Winterson, Graham Swift — might be considered dangerously subversive by their stuffy elders, but they are hardly outsiders. All get serious money out of writing.

Nevertheless, in the course of his polemic, Taylor scores several direct hits. His withering critiques of Drabble and Amis senior are both amusing and apposite, and his account of the business of reviewing is, for the most part, depressingly accurate (though the nepotism is inexplicably underplayed). Taylor is suitably irreverent about the impact of structuralism and post-structuralism on both critics and novelists, and he does a wonderful demolition job on the populist anti-intellectual snobbery so widespread in Britain.

On the other hand, Taylor can’t resist the unsubstantiated assertion. In particular, he makes much of “the futility of thinking that you can satisfactorily represent in fiction the complexities of life in modern Britain”; “writers have lost the ability to describe and define the society of which they are a part”; “any attempt at the panorama effect is bound to fetch up as a queerly narrow perspective”. Really? And, if so, why?

Taylor also has little to say about the implications of the takeover of British publishing by conglomerates, and hardly mentions the growing tendency of publishers to concentrate advertising budgets solely on would-be best-sellers. Yet these changes in the publishing industry are crucially important reasons for the stagnation and exclusiveness that Taylor so deplores. It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that he has missed a golden opportunity to blow the gaff.

Paul Anderson, review of Blueprint for a Green Economy by David Pearce et al (Earthscan, £9.99), Tribune, 29 September 1989

How much is a clean North Sea worth? What price would you put on the Brazilian rain forest? What is the cost of nuclear power in the light of Chernobyl? Such questions seem strange to us, even slightly mad. Indeed, to most people the idea of giving cash values to measures of environmental quality is not just unfamiliar but wrong. The quality of the environment is the kind of thing that money just can’t buy.

Then again, there is plenty that we now habitually value in money terms that our forebears considered incapable of such treatment — most obviously work.

Many writers influenced by Marx’s critique of commodity fetishism and alienation see the history of capitalism as a seemingly inexorable process of more and more things and activities in more and more places being treated as tradeable commodities. If they are right, it could be merely a matter of time before the idea of pricing the environment is. accepted “common sense”.

Blueprint for a Green Economy, the “Pearce report” given so much publicity last month by Chris Patten, the environment minister, argues strongly that giving money values to costs of “environmental service?, in the context of a market economy, is the best way of ensuring “sustainable development”.

“While there remains a. quite warranted suspicion that the process of money valuation is illicit in some contexts, the reality is that choices have to be made in contexts of scarce resources,” the authors state blithely. “Money as a measuring rod is a satisfactory means of proceeding.” With that minor obstacle cleared, the rest of the book is taken up with discussions of how environmental costs could be calculated and how they could be passed on to producers and consumers, in the form of tax incentives, to ensure that the preservation and enhancement of the environment is taken seriously into account in economic decision-making. The obvious alternative to such a market-based system of environmental regulation, the simple setting’ and enforcing of environmental standards without the aid of market incentives, is given short shrift on grounds of its “inflexibility”.

As Henry Neuburger explained in his economic commentary (Tribune, September 1), this is not exactly a free-market position;: decisions about the standards to be encouraged by the market would be essentially political. Nevertheless, Pearce et al sail far too close to the market wind.

When the air we breathe becomes a commodity, something must be seriously amiss in our relationship to the world.

Paul Anderson, Tribune column, 29 September 1989

The journalists in the bar at the Green Party conference in Wolverhampton last week, uneasy in their cheap suits and polished shoes, grumbled that the chaos made it impossible to report anything, and the weekend’s papers were unanimous in bemoaning the Greens’ lack of a “professional” hierarchical structure — but the Greens can afford to be just a little pleased with themselves this week.

With the exception of a procedural row that lost two hours of conference time on Thursday, nothing happened in the Wolverhampton Civic Hall to put the party in a particularly bad light. The Greens came across as somewhat anarchic and eccentric, but the rabid extremists warned about by right-wing leader-writers were nowhere to be seen.

The Greens applauded warmly when Sara Parkin, the party’s number-one television star, warned that “parasites” might turn their attentions to the Greens; Jonathon Porritt, the nearest the Greens get to an intellectual figurehead, got a similar reception when he attacked those who accused the party of “authoritarianism”.

The party’s left, the Assocation of Socialist Greens, was routed in policy debates, and there was no sign of either right-wing romantics or hair-shirted Calvinists. The cleancut media professionals who believe the Greens to be “neither right or left but ahead” were in the driving seat, supported by members as reasonable, libertarian and middle class as the old Liberals.

The party’s policies belie this refusal to be situated on the left-right continium. On most issues, the Greens are well to the left of Labour. The one area where the Greens do seem to have a good case for claiming to be “neither right nor left” is their opposition to industrialism; but so vague are the Greens’ proposals that this is a matter less of policy than of attitude.

In the end, the Greens’ insistence on not being “left” is a signal that they want neither to be associated with the grim realities of social democracy and Leninism in power — nor to be submerged by manipulative Trotskyist entrists.

It has worked so far. The Greens have reached parts of the affluent south that. other left parties cannot reach, and up to now Ms Parkin’s “parasites” have steered clear. The party has an openness, enthusiasm and friendliness about it that few labour movement institutions can match, and there is none of the cloying deference before leaders that afflicts all the major parties.

The problem is what happens next. For the foreseeable future, the Greens have no hope, barring a by-election miracle, of winning seats, except in local government.

Labour will not offer them an electoral pact — which in any case the Greens decided at the weekend they did not want.

The media’s cure for the Greens’ ills is a “proper leader”, but the evidence. of Wolverhampton is that having the party represented to the media by people with little or no executive power works perfectly well.

The Greens’ problem is not their internal organisation, even if it could do with being tightened up, but the British electoral system – and there’s nothing they can do to`change that. The Greens face a long, hard voyage and, although only a fool would write them off, the wrecked hulks of the Liberals and the SDP are a terrible warning.

Paul Anderson, Sanity column, September 1989

One of the three Czechoslovaks expelled from Britain for spying in May was Jan Sarkocy, a political secretary at the Czechoslovak em­bassy. The British authorities have not said ex­actly what he is supposed to have done. For all I know, he might be a top-level StB spook who has stolen Britain’s most valuable secrets. I was hoping to ask him, but he called off a lunch date because he was busy packing. Somehow, though, I doubt he was much more than what he said he was – the junior diplomat responsi­ble for relations with peace movements in Bri­tain (and women, he would add sheepishly). Continue reading →

Sanity, September 1989

All is not as rosy as it appears for Britain’s environmentalist movement. It might be growing fast – but both the Green Party and the environmental pressure groups face hard political choices, writes Paul Anderson

Its over-rising concern is the environmental crisis threatening the globe – but the immediate problem faced by the British Green Party is the first-past-the-post electoral system.

Even if the Greens maintain or improve their current nine per cent standing in the opinion polls at the next general election, it is improbable that they will win even the small number of parliamentary seats that centre and nationalist parties have won on similarly small shares of the total vote. Unlike those parties, the Greens’ support is fairly evenly spread throughout the country.

What the Greens need to stand a chance of parliamentary representation at the next election is at least one exceptional showing in a by-election during this parliament. This is by no means impossible. The electorate is as volatile and as disillusioned with the two major parties as it was in the early eighties, when the centre parties surged in the opinion polls and won a string of by-elections: and the centre parties appear to be in terminal crisis.

But the centre parties in the early eighties benefited both from their centrism and from a significant existing parliamentary base even before the creation of the SDP by defectors from the Labour right. The leading figures in the Liberal Party and SDP, for all their rhetoric of ‘breaking the mould’, were all safe, familiar politicians who had been at, or close to, the heart of government in the late seventies. And they had plenty of cash and powerful supporters in the media.

Their Ideology was essentially that of the post-war consensus that dominated British politics until the late seventies, which they believed had been abandoned by Labour and the Tories. The centre parties were advocates of the mixed economy, with state intervention to secure low unemployment and constant high growth, supporters of the welfare state, pro-American in defence policy and in favour of the European Community.

The Greens have none of these characteristics. They are not already in parliament, their politicians are not familiar, and their policies are anything but the stuff of the post-war consensus. They don’t have much money, nor (today’s support in the European elections notwithstanding) the sort of media support that the centre parties enjoyed.

Perhaps most important, the Greens are not quite sure of their political identity. The dominant group in the party is keen to avoid accusations of being left-wing, and emphasises that the Greens are “neither left nor right but ahead”. It points, with justification, to the unpopularity of the hard left, to the environmental catastrophe of “actually existing socialism” in the Soviet bloc, and to the differences between Western social democracy and the Greens on industrial growth. The “Green Greens” believe they should be aiming to pick up votes from the centre and from hitherto apolitical “Green consumers”, mostly middle-class; and they are anxious not to attract the attentions of far-left groups as the German Greens have done.

But there is a vocal minority of Greens arguing against this approach, even If they do not envisage a conventionally left-wing party. “Red Greens'”, organised into the Association of Socialist Greens, point, also with justification, to the radical global redistributive measures at the heart of the Green programme, the Greens’ necessary hostility to market capitalism and the party’s leftist defence and foreign policies. They think that the Greens can best gain votes from disillusioned left-wing Labour voters. Many others in the party less committed to leftism (or indeed overtly hostile) are equally concerned that concentration on Green consumers runs the risk of diluting the fundamental Green message.

These groups can of course be reconciled in the short run by keeping everything vague. In the long term, however, the tension between green consumers and proponents of far-reaching political change are going to be hard to contain. Are the Greens simply a repository for the votes of rich muesli-eating professionals who don’t want a Barratt estate in their village? Or are they a party that stand for massive tax increases to aid the Third World?

None of this means that the Greens have no hope of emulating the centre parties’ early-eighties success; but it does mean that they face an uphill struggle. The tide of public opinion seems to be running in their favour. But in the absence of another Chernobyl or the defection to the Greens of disillusioned Liberal or Labour MPs, it could well be that the best the Greens can hope for is a steady increase in the Green vote both in parliamentary and local council elections, with a concomitant slow growth in membership and strengthening of organisation.

That could mean overtaking the centre parties’ share of the vote at the next general election and a better chance of by-election upsets in the next parliament, and perhaps, in the very long run, the Greens emulating Labour’s growth in the first 20 years of the century. But nothing can be guaranteed – and meanwhile the ecological crisis gets deeper. So what to do in the mean-time? One answer is to press for electoral reform to get Greens into parliament sooner rather than later. But to introduce proportional representation there has to be a majority in favour in the House of Commons. Barring an unlikely conversion to PR by the Labour Party, that won’t happen.

It is thus hardly surprising that many environmentalists are not members of or even voters for the Greens, preferring instead to concentrate their efforts on the environmentalist pressure groups that are trying to influence the established opposition political parties, the government and the media. Indeed, it is the pressure groups, particularly Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace, that have been largely responsible for the change in public perceptions of environmental issues that is behind the recent growth in the Green vote and the subsequent attempts of the established political parties to prove themselves environment-friendly.

Paul Anderson, review of A Commitment to Campaign: A Sociological Study of CND by John Mattausch (Manchester, £29.95), Tribune 25 August 1989

Back in the sixties, Frank Parkin did a study of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, Middle Class Radicals, that is still on the reading lists of political sociology students in Britain’s universities.

Parkin’s line on the first “ban-the-bomb” movement, based largely on responses to questionnaires put out well after it had passed its peak, was that it was something of an emotional prop for its deviant, alienated, highly educated adherents. It is a measure of how far this analysis hurt that books are still being written to attack it.

Mattausch starts from methodological premises: Parkin was writing before ethnomethodology and phenomenology hit British sociology: overwhelmed by positivism, he never engaged in empathetic understanding of how his “middle class radicals” perceived their project in the context of their everyday lives. In other words, Parkin didn’t spend hours and hours listening to what CNDers had to say and recording it in minute detail.

Mattausch has an important point: it is daft to make grand assumptions about what motivates people without talking to them, and in-depth interviews are undoubtedly the best way of finding out what people think.

But that’s not the end of the story. Doing sociology this way has its own problems. Which people should be chosen for interview, and how should they be chosen? How can the chosen few be considered “typical” of those not interviewed? And what should the interviewees be asked?

Mattausch chose to talk to “grass-roots” CND members and elected officers in two groups, one in a Scottish city and another in the south of England, and interviewed them in most detail about their CND activities and employment, with general political beliefs and ideas about international affairs taking a back seat. Much that comes out of the interviews is interesting, not least the heterogeneity of the CNDers’ broad political views and the disproportionate number of them who work as welfare professionals.

But the overall effect is rather frustrating. His samples are small, and are drawn from only two places, both with very particular political cultures, so it is difficult to draw many substantial general conclusions from his research. More important, the absence from his “interview schedule” of serious questions about attitudes to international affairs severely limits the value of the whole exercise.

Mattausch’s book provides some useful insights into the peace movement, but much of the picture is missing.

Paul Anderson, review of A Flea in Her Ear by Georges Feydeau (Old Vic) , Tribune 25 August 1989

Georges Feydeau was a contemporary of Alfred Jerry and Sigmund Freud, and his work, like Jarry’s and Freud’s, was much admired by later surrealists and absurdists. Eugene Ionesco, for example, described Feydeau as “the true precursor of the Marx Brothers and other American comedians, in whose work everything starts with apparent casualness, only to end up in a state of precipitation — which may well be an accurate caricature of our own agitation, our gallop towards the abyss”.

So why not go for an uncompromising modernist interpretation of A Flea in Her Ear? That is certainly what Richard Jones has tried with his Old Vic production, which goes out of its way to emphasise the serious modern core of Feydeau’s farce.

Out go the stuffy interiors and costumes normally associated with fin de siecle French vaudeville; in come some exquisite sets from the Brothers Quay (an elegant office and the seediest brothel imaginable) and some gloriously improbable over-the-top outfits (at least for the women) by Sue Blanc. Instead of presenting believable characters in an improbable situation, as Feydeau intended, the play becomes the nightmare story of Victor Emmanuel Chandebise’s fantasy of sexual impotence, peopled by ghoulish caricatures. The whole thing is taken at about half the normal farce pace.

All this works particularly well where the caricatures are particularly cruel — as with Kevin William’s psychotic hot-blooded Carlos Homenides De Histangua, Phelim McDermott’s ineffectual Camille Chandebise and Matthew Scurfield’s sadistic brothel-keeper.

There are times when no amount of clowning can make up for the (deliberate) lack of characterisation in Feydeau’s parts and times (remarkably few) when the play is simply too slow but, on the whole, Jones’s unorthodox treatment is both instructive and hugely entertaining.

Paul Anderson, review of For Anarchism by David Goodway (ed) (Routledge, £12.95), Tribune, 4 August 1989

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, anarchism had significant influence in radical peasant and working-class movements throughout the world, particularly in southern Europe, Russia and Latin America. But that influence declined rapidly after the Bolshevik revolution. In Russia, the anarchists were the first victims of the Red terror; in Italy, they were eclipsed by fascism; in Spain, they were first skewered by the Comintern then roasted by Franco.

In France and most the rest of the world they slipped slowly into the political margins, unable to compete with the partisans of a “successful” revolution for the allegiance of workers, peasants and intellectuals who wanted more drastic change than that promised by reformist social democracy. By the fifties, although the flame was kept alive by small schismatic groups of intellectuals, anarchism seemed to be finished.

But then came an unexpected revival. From the late fifties, anarchism once again established itself as a current in the radical left — not this time among peasants and workers in societies just beginning to industrialise, but among the young of the developed world, disillusioned by the banal consumerism of the west and repelled by the police states of “actually existing socialism”. In 1968, the anarchist black flag flew above the Sorbonne.

Even in Britain, anarchist groups and magazines blossomed through the sixties and seventies. Few lasted long, and the number of “self-confessed” anarchists at any one time was tiny, as it still is. Paris 1968 and the 1981 riots notwithstanding, revolution in Britain has not been on the cards for at least 60 years, and a revolutionary ideology without even the petty authoritarian organisation of the Leninist sects stands little chance of holding on to most of its adherents.

Nevertheless, libertarian ideas — about decentralisation and democratisation of power, direct action and autonomous self-organisation — have had a massive effect on the left and on wider social movements in the past 30 years. With Leninism appearing more and more bankrupt, libertarianism has been the obvious tradition to turn to for alternatives to orthodox social democracy. Even the Communist Party is saying things today that it would not have looked out of place in Anarchy in the early sixties.

The cover of For Anarchism, a book of essays from the History Workshop Anarchist Research Group, boasts that its contributors demonstrate that anarchism is a “vital, creative tradition which should once more be considered seriously”, so I was looking forward to some analysis of the post-68 impact of libertarian ideas in its pages. But I was disappointed.

David Goodway provides an upbeat introduction on the fortunes of British “true-believer” anarchism in the’past 30 years, but fails to address the question of anarchism’s broad influence; and although the book’s historical studies of turn-of-the-century anarchist thought and practice and its contributions to contemporary political philosophy are interesting enough if you like that sort of thing, they fall far short of fulfilling the blurb’s promise.

Only Tom Cahill, with a piece on co-operatives, and Murray Bookchin, putting the case for eco-anarchism as the basis for any future left, really leave the academic anarchist ghetto to engage with the concerns of the wider world. Neither, however, gets much further than clearing his throat. Give me Colin Ward any day.