Category Archives: Journalism

Paul Anderson, Sanity, May 1990

Cornelius Castoriadis is a thinker who defies the categories – a leftist who has criticised the peace movement for pro-Soviet naïveté, yet insists he is not a cold warrior.

“Gorbachev is so preoccupied with his crisis domestically that he’s incapable of acting on the international stage. He’s lost the initiative…”

Cornelius Castoriadis is talking with some animation, with a strong French accent, jabbing the air with a cigarette for emphasis. It is the first time I have met him, and the circumstances, a coffee break in a noisy student canteen during an Essex University philosophy seminar, are not ideal for serious discussion with one of the most highly regarded of contemporary French intellectuals, a man whose writings I’ve admired for years and years.

But Castoriadis seems quite at home. He is refreshingly candid, with a mischievous sense of humour, very rude about academic seminars (“They always turn into a series of monologues”) and the intellectual star system. He is never patronising. The incisive thinker, it seems, is also an engaging human being.

This surprised me only because Castoriadis has something of a reputation as an awkward character. By all accounts, his enthusiasm for accuracy in translations of his work is boundless: he broke off relations with the American journal Telos, which published much of his political writing of the late seventies and early eighties, after a series of rows over the way it had rendered his key concepts into English.

But perhaps such apparent awkwardness is to be expected from someone who has spent his adult life writing against the intellectual fashion of the times. Now 67, Castoriadis left his native Greece for France in the mid-forties, a convert to Trotskyism from Stalinism, on the run from civil war. He rapidly became disillusioned with Trotskyism, and in 1948, together with Claude Lefort, then a young student of the existential philosopher, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, founded the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie.

S ou B ceased publication in 1965, was plagued by schism, and never sold more than a few hundred copies each issue. But the anti-Leninist, post-Marxist libertarian revolutionary politics it developed, largely through Castoriadis’ essays under the pen-names Paul Cardan and Pierre Chaulieu, were enormously influential on the post-1968 new left in continental Europe, which was characterised by a commitment to non-bureaucratic, self-managed political activities. In Britain, Paul Cardan’s essays were published as pamphlets by the libertarian socialist group Solidarity.

Castoriadis today is unrepentant about his advocacy of revolutionary seizure of power by self-managed workers’ councils. “In broad outline, I’m still committed to the emancipatory project which I outlined in the fifties. I still stand by the principle of the self-management of production and the maximum possible decentralisation of decision-making. Autonomous society is about self-management, and we need to start with the places people gather – the firm, the school, the university, the hospital,” he says, although he’d drop the idea of the “centrality of the industrial proletariat” if he were sketching a possible future society today.

Castoriadis’s commitment to autonomous “self-activity” as the means and end of fundamental social change, which he developed in his magnum opus, The Imaginary Institution of Society, published in 1975, was equally at odds with both major seventies Parisian intellectual crazes-the Stalinist structuralist Marxism of Louis Althusser and others, and the ‘god-that-failed’ polemics of the ex-Stalinist nouveaux philosophes. But the furore created by his attacks on these shooting stars was as nothing to the impact of his assault on the western peace movement in his 1981 book Devant la guerre (Facing War).

The core of the book was an argument that the Soviet Union was becoming a “stratocracy”, a society ruled by the military. This was a matter not of generals taking over in a coup, but of something much more profound. The only efficient economic sector in the Soviet Union was military; the only effective state ideology was military. And the Soviet Union was multiplying its military capacities at an alarming rate. Meanwhile, the west gave every impression of caving in to the first sign of Soviet pressure. The peace movements of western Europe, with their concentration solely on western nuclear arms, were a symptom of the West’s loss of nerve.

Unsurprisingly, the ferocity of this polemic lost Castoriadis many friends, particularly in Britain and West Germany. But he dismisses accusations that he adopted a cold war position, and feels that his analysis of Soviet militarism has been to a large extent vindicated. “What has been revealed in the past couple of years show that I underestimated the extent of military domination of the Soviet economy,” he says.

Which is not to say that he’s not been forced to adapt his opinions by developments since Gorbachev came to power, particularly since the revolutions last year in eastern Europe. His most recent essay on the Soviet Union, “The Gorbachev Interlude”, marks a significant softening of his opinions on the role of the Soviet military, even if it is extremely pessimistic about the likely success of Gorbachev’s reforms. As for eastern Europe: ”I was taken by surprise, as was everybody else.”

But what of the future? He shrugs. “The recent events in eastern Europe show that people can be extremely active in overthrowing a tyrannical regime but are not necessarily so active in creating their own order. There’s a general misconception that what we have in the west is the best of all possible worlds – which I’m sure will remain dominant in eastern Europe for a few years. But a democratic society requires active participation, a degree of passion for common affairs. Today in the west, that is absent.”

Paul Anderson, review of Not Fade Away by Barrie Keefe (Theatre Royal Stratford East), Tribune, 27 April 1990

Miriam Karlin takes the lead role of Grace Webb in Barrie Keeffe’s latest play at the Theatre Royal Stratford East, Not Fade Away. Grace is an old lady, the widow of a communist who “jacked it in and took up fishing” after the Hungarian revolution.

She escapes from incarceration in the old people’s home in Essex where she has been put by her rich son, and goes back to Forest Gate in East London, her home for 60 years. There she befriends Bonner (Paul Barber), a young black man, after he is beaten up by football supporters outside the pub.

He takes her home and she gets stoned on his grass. Bonner and his sister Marie Louise (Angela Bruce), who is on the game, let her stay to look after Marie Louise’s two daughters – until their place is raided for drugs.

In the sixties, Grace had played the piano in the local pub, and the play is punctuated by some marvellous Cockney renditions of sixties hits. It’s a simple sentimental tale with a simple message – that racism stinks and that we write off the old – but it is well told with considerable wit and energy. Karlin’s performance is superb. She is on stage for almost the whole play, and her presence is absolutely commanding. All in all, a great night out: the Theatre Royal has done it again.

Paul Anderson, review of The Socialist Debate by Bogdan Denitch (Pluto, £19.95), Tribune, 20 April 1990

Paul Anderson, review of Marya by lsaac Babel (Old Vic), Tribune, 13 April 1990

Isaac Babel died in 1940, a victim of Stalin’s purges. He never saw a production of his short play Marya, written in the early thirties. Performances were banned immediately after its publication in 1934.

It’s not hard to see why it attracted the wrath of the party censors: its view of the hardships of the civil war is emphatically not the stuff of Stalinist myth, even if its heart is firmly on the side of the revolution.

Marya is set in Petrograd in the winter of 1919. The war is raging just outside the city. There is a curfew every night. Food and fuel are scarce. The black market, prostitution and drunkenness are flourishing. The once wealthy Mukovkin family is attempting to adapt to post-revolutionary life in much-reduced cir­cumstances.

The father of the family, once a Tsarist general, is gradually reconciling himself to the Reds. One of his daughters, Ludmilla, tries to combat poverty by holding out the promise of marriage to a Jewish black marketeer; the other daughter, the Marya of the title, is nursed by his niece and the women’s old nanny. In a series of vignettes of everyday life, Babel traces the family’s history to the rape of Ludmilla, her subse­quent arrest for prostitution, the old man’s death and the allocation of their rooms to a pregnant working girl and her man. Marya never appears on stage.

Babel’s writing is understated, with much left to the imagination, yet the play is extraordinarily evocative of a society in crisis. Christopher Hampton’s adapta­tion is well served by the actors, with Geoffrey Bayldon as the old general and Allan Corduner as the black marketeer particularly good. Roger Michell’s production turns the scene-changes into spectacular Futurist happenings with crowds of workers toiling away in clouds of steam amid the clatter of machinery.

This is no twentieth-century masterpiece, but it does give a taste of what might have developed had the dark night of Stalinism not descended on Soviet culture.

Paul Anderson, review of Socialism in Britain by John Callaghan (Blackwell, £11.95), Tribune, 27 April 1990

John Callaghan’s previous work includes one of the best critical studies of British Leninism, The Far Left in Britain, so perhaps it should be no surprise that the crucial event in Socialism in Britain, an overview of organised socialism since the 1880s, is the Russian revolution of 1917.

Before the Bolshevik seizure of state power, the running among British socialists was being made by proponents of a participatory democratic socialism with workers’ control at its core, notably the guild socialists and syndicalists, “Leninism changed the radical socialist catechism,” writes Callaghan. “Henceforward the focus of Marxist activity was party building for the purpose of smashing the bourgeois state, crudely understood as ‘bodies of armed men’.”

Meanwhile socialism rapidly came to mean the system of power in the USSR, which, it was noted, was perfectly compatible with the most barbarous practices developed in capitalist industry. “Now it was possible for British Marxists to argue that as long as the Bolshevik party-state existed these ‘superficially capitalist’ industrial forms were of no consequence.” It was not until the sixties that the radical democratic themes of socialism in the 1910s were to reemerge. In the intervening half-century, the fortunes of the Communist Party ebbed, flowed and ebbed again, while the Labour left veered between wooing the CP and denouncing it as a tool of totalitarianism.

Callaghan picks his way through the complexities of the British left’s relationship with the Soviet Union and its proxy with great skill and without making sweeping judgements. But it is clear that he believes British socialism to have been severely handicapped by its failure to conceive of any alternative to left management of capitalism other than bureaucratic command — a failure mirrored in the post-war years by the rapid collapse of left  pressure on the Attlee government for a foreign policy that was neither Atlanticist (and Empire loyalist) nor pro-Moscow.

Callaghan’s chapters on the sixties, seventies and eighties are the weakest in the book, largely because (despite his best efforts) he underpays the importance of social movements and overestimates the role of Leninists in -setting the left agenda.

Nevertheless, it is difficult to argue with his assessment of the contemporary Labour Party: “Although the Labour Party can still have its uses, the party is slow to adapt to changing values and ideas and can easily lose touch with its constituency. Labour’s fixation with parliament and government has always functioned to the neglect of social struggles which form popular consciousness, and in the last 20 years in particular it has ceased to be the major source of the socialist, or indeed any other, radical vision.”

This book, with its reminder of just how weak British socialism has been for most of its life, is a worthy supplement to Henry Pelling, G D H Cole, Ralph Miliband, James Hinton and the rest. It deserves a wide readership, not least because it buries once and for all the traditional Labour left illusion that socialism has mass support in Britain and has failed to make headway only because of the treacherous behaviour of Labour leaders.

Paul Anderson, review of All’s Well That Ends Well by William Shakespeare (Royal Shakespeare Company, Barbican), Tribune, 6 April 1990

Barry Kyle’s production of Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well has its moments, but is for the most part rather uninspiring. All’s Well works only if plebeian Helena’s rejected passion for aristocratic Bertram is credible, but Patricia Kerrigan and Paul Venables don’t quite pull it off.

He is bland and plain rather than haughty and dashing, and it’s difficult to understand either what she sees in him or why he runs off after the King of France has made him marry her. That, in turn, makes it hard to make sense of her willingness to go to near-absurd lengths to trick him into bed.

Nevertheless, the main comic action is well done, and there is some excellent acting on display, particularly Bruce Alexander’s Parolles, all swank and bluster, and Geoffrey Fishwater’s Lavatch, the unhappy fool.

Paul Anderson, review of Resources of Hope by Raymond Williams (Verso, £9.99), Sanity, April 1990

Raymond Williams, who died last year, was undoubtedly one of the most important and serious British left-wing writers of the post-war years. He was a man with the intellectual range of Jean-Paul Sartre or George Orwell, and he deserves the international readership that Sartre and Orwell enjoy. He was as interesting and elegant a novelist as he was a cultural theorist and occasional political essayist.

Paul Anderson, review of Revolting Peasants by Patrick Prior (Theatre Royal Stratford East), Tribune, 23 March 1990

The most extraordinary thing about the poll tax is not its unfairness – that’s what we’d expect from a Conservative government – but its stupidity. In a society with a high level of geographical mobility, it’s almost designed to be evaded on a massive scale. And evaded it will be, regardless of noisy “campaigns of non-payment” (who’s going to be a martyr if quiet avoidance is possible?) or the pleas of Labour politicans for “civic responsibility” and patience until Neil Kinnock gets to Number Ten.

As Merlin Jenkins, the poll tax registration officer in this wonderful farce, puts it before announcing his resignation: “People just disappear. There’s estates round here like the Marie Celeste.” The humour of Revolting Peasants relies on the absurd failure of the political class – represented here by George, a Kinnockite Labour Party stalwart (complete with red tie but often without trousers) to recognise that, like it or not, no one who can get away with it is going to cough up.

George has nothing but platitudes to spout. “The law is the law and you get nowhere by breaking it!” he exclaims after being mauled by a police dog; “There’ll be a few expulsions down the Walworth Road, eh Neil?” he asks his picture of Kinnock after his Labour Party branch passes a non-payment policy.

Meanwhile, his wife Mary has falsified their poll tax form (claiming that George is dead and she has a babyt her neighbour takes a fancy to the poll tax man and the police suspect a drugs ring…

This is superb popular  theatre, with an amazing eye for bad jokes, lewd suggestions and crazy predicaments. Bill Thomas is suitably hassled and useless as George, Yvonne Edgell wonderfully competent as Mary. All in all, it’s one of the best comedies on the London stage this year, ranking with Brian Behan’s Boots for the Footless at the Tricycle. It particularly deserves to be seen by anyone standing for a council seat in May.