The Responsibility of Intellectuals: Selected Essays on Marxist Traditions in Cultural Commitment
By Alan M. Wald
Humanities Press, 1995. 250 pp., $29.00 (pb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
In these times of post-modernist malaise, the notion of the politically committed writer is all too often consigned to the historical attic along with "clapped-out" ideologies such as Marxism.
Fortunately, there are some Marxist intellectuals such as Alan Wald who are able to rescue the heirlooms of Marxist traditions in cultural commitment, celebrate their virtues, critically appraise their weaknesses and produce relevant guidelines for today's political and cultural activists.
His latest collection of essays includes an examination of the attempt to marry cultural practice and political radicalism in the works of radical writers such as Victor Serge, Howard Fast and Nadine Gordimer.
Serge, "a man of extraordinary intelligence, integrity and artistic sensibility", wrote some of the best novels to deal sympathetically with the difficulties of the Russian Revolution and the contradictoriness of its makers — the elation and despair, the heroism and mistakes, the principle and pragmatism of revolutionaries forced to defend, often with harsh policies, a democratic revolution under siege.
In his later personal political development, however, Serge increasingly moved to the right. Although he never abandoned his defence of the October Revolution, in the mid-'40s he had become associated with social democratic journals which promoted the views of "exhausted ex-leftists". Like the once quasi-Trotskyist New York intellectuals such as Sidney Hook, Max Eastman, Irving Howe and Dwight McDonald, Serge occasionally let his anti-Stalinism lose its revolutionary Marxist moorings and become anti-revolutionary.
For example, in 1947, the year of his death, Serge denounced Ho Chi Minh as a Kremlin tool, saw the Vietnamese revolution as a Moscow play for "the expansion of totalitarianism" and concluded that national liberation struggles (and other democratic struggles) which had communist involvement were more dangerous than imperialism or capitalism and therefore to be opposed.
Although politically disoriented by the horrors of Stalinism and the ineffectiveness of Trotskyism as a viable alternative, Serge did not go nearly as far towards embracing the capitalist status quo as the other ex-Marxist renegades, but his devolution from consistent revolutionary to social democrat, vacillating between its left and right wings, was genuine.
Howard Fast, on the other hand, had less of a political distance to fall, always mooching about the liberal-left centre. His artistic fall was more pronounced when he did move away from his '30s radicalism. From his creative treatment of rebels such as Tom Paine and Spartacus, Fast, by the '70s, was turning out two-dimensional historical sagas, "lightweight page-turners" which were the novelistic version of Hollywood spectaculars, based on a conception of history that owed more to Cecil B. De Mille than to Marx.
Fast's attempt to reach a mass audience by diluting his political message is an example of the cultural practice common to the Communist parties' popular front days of the mid-'30s. Wald traces how liberal, patriotic and anti-fascist themes came to dominate left-wing culture during this period, how the CPUSA switched from harsh criticism to praise of writers such as Hemingway as the official cultural line swung away from "proletarian literature".
One negative effect on worker-writers was the "manipulation of form and content to communicate an immediate political message", producing flat, unconvincing literature.
Wald notes, however, that a committed literature that did not degenerate into sloganising was kept alive by a few radical writers who portrayed progressive heroes who were not without their flaws, contradictions and mysteries. He argues that not all left-wing writers were "ideological fanatics drenched in the sectarianism of Marxist doctrine" as the crude ant-Marxist myth has it, but that they could be, and often were, flexible, imaginative and principled, however constricted by Stalinist orthodoxy.
Wald's essay on Nadine Gordimer likewise stresses her artistic ability to rise above political simplicities. Her characters are "memorable, human and complex, distinguished by a blend of foibles and virtues, not mere mouthpieces for ideologies". This subtle portrayal indeed lends more credibility to the anti-apartheid and anti-racist politics of her novels.
Wald's political and artistic sensitivity, within his own commitment to Marxism, is also ably demonstrated in other essays on such political/cultural figures as C.L.R. James, Pete Seeger and lesser-knowns such as the Trotskyist sculptor Duncan Ferguson. The collection is rounded out with partisan but never simplistic essays on the literature of racially oppressed minorities, the "political correctness" and "free speech" debate and Trotskyism.
A focus of Wald, unlike many other cultural critics, is the activist element of being left. Unlike the post-Stalinist New Left academics who have junked the entire legacy of socialist organisation, Wald, an editorial board member of Against the Current and a member of Solidarity (a broad left organisation of Trotskyist origin) argues for the importance of socialist political organisation — building on what is viable in that legacy whilst safeguarding against the repetition of past errors.
Wald allocates some key aspects of the revolutionary party such as "vanguardism" to the "past errors" category, with too little elaboration on whether its sinister connotations are fully deserved, whilst the offhand promotion of C.L.R. James as a prophet of "post-Leninist revolutionary non-party workers' councils and a brand of spontaneism that will be central to coming transformations" begs a further essay or two.
But these quibbles are like sandflies at a picnic — a mere annoyance. What matters is the feast, and Wald offers up a tempting and varied Marxist spread of essays on the history of political commitment in culture.