Raymond Williams
By Fred Inglis
Routledge, 1995. 333 pp., $44.95 (hb)
Reviewed by Phil Shannon
As Cambridge professor of drama as well as political activist, Raymond Williams, who died in 1988, truly earned the respect that most of the left have for him. His prodigious body of writings, if often more venerated as icons than easily read or understood, attempted to grapple with "culture", a concept as profound as it is slippery, from a broad commitment to Marxism, albeit one with his own special gloss.
Williams now has his first biographer in Fred Inglis, whose book opens some windows on Williams but clouds over others. Biography is as much about the biographer as the biographee and Inglis, a political reformist, highlights this side of Williams at the expense of the revolutionary elements of Williams' socialism.
Williams was born in 1921, the son of a railway worker in a Welsh village. He became a young and idealistic socialist, reading the Communist Manifesto at age 16. In 1939 he joined the Communist Party at Cambridge University but left the Party during World War II, rejecting Stalinism in politics and culture, and the party's political screening of his proposed wife.
After commanding a tank corps in the D-day invasion of Europe, he returned to adult education as a WEA tutor and to writing, producing his monster hits, Culture and Society in 1958 and The Long Revolution in 1961.
In these works, Williams reclaimed culture as a "whole way of life", the property of all classes, not just an educated elite. He showed that fine and noble lives could exist in the working-class household along with awful newspapers and bad novels. He gave the cultural struggle a prominence that many economistic Marxists have often downgraded.
His concept of "cultural materialism" located the production of ideas and cultural products in the social world. He firmly rejected the view that literature, for example, deals with "timeless" or "universal" truths, maintaining that literature, whilst not reducible to politics or sociology, is ideological in that it communicates, no matter how subconsciously, ideas arising from and serving the material interests of a class or group.
In rejecting Stalinism, however, Williams had also distanced himself from Marxism, and his early works rested on the framework of romantic socialism and liberalism. He replaced the Marxist concept of "mode of production' with "mode of information" as the dynamic core of society, and he redefined revolution as a long process of cultural change rather than a class struggle for political power.
His practical proposals were the anodyne stuff of liberal reformists everywhere — political change through the dissemination of good ideas, and administrative reforms for improving the school curriculum and fostering an independent press. This was socialism by stealth rather than insurrection and reflects Williams' reformist side.
As Inglis notes, Williams wavered between the revolutionary socialism of the radical dissident and the gradualist political perspective of the ambitious public policy-maker working through the state institutions. Williams resented the failure of the state to involve him in its affairs — a TV columnist for the BBC house weekly The Listener from 1968 to '72, and a member of the Arts Council 1976-78, being the only calls he received from the state.
During the '60s, however, Williams' revolutionary side came to the fore. He was a founder member of New Left Review, he resigned from the Labour Party and was the main author of the May Day Manifesto in 1967, a left regroupment initiative.
This latter foundered, however, because of Williams' reticence about key aspects of Marxism such as overthrowing the capitalist state and the necessity of revolutionary organisation. The Manifesto was full of good intentions and descriptions of capitalism's ills but it did not ask "What is the state?" until Chapter 35 (and then conspicuously failed to answer it). It dodged the central question of power, and did not propose a political program of action. It offered newly radicalising youth nothing but seminars and study circles.
But if Williams did little for '68, '68 did much for him. He dropped his explicit opposition to Marxism in his theoretical work. He pursued the perennial conundrum of the relationship between economic base and cultural superstructure, rejecting the crude determinism that base determines superstructure in favour of a more interactive approach.
He tended to overcompensate for the reductionists, however, by dissolving base into superstructure, losing the primacy of the economic. He also relied on a reformist reading of Gramsci, stressing the priority of cultural struggle via the state over "narrow" economic struggle as the key site of political struggle.
By 1974, Williams was campaigning for the Labour Party again, having rejected the building of an organised political alternative, whilst another of his regroupment efforts, the Socialist Society in 1982, fell foul of its evasiveness on questions of the state and the revolutionary party.
Williams' political legacy lies not in his big-hearted but ineffective public political activities, but in his theoretical work. He attempted to restore the cultural dimension to the project of human emancipation, and took up earlier than many Marxists the central role of new issues such as ecology in this project.
Williams' attempts to communicate his life's work, however, were hampered by his style, which shares much with the appalling stylistic tradition of academic Marxism. Williams' prose suffers from such ailments as "frequent generality and vagueness" and "cloudy and polymorphous sentences", and is "over-elaborate and complicated", "dense and impenetrable", "murky and abstract", "thick and at times downright dreary". This is bad enough in his theoretical work, but in his novels it is a killer (Border Country is the best of them, saved by the drama of the 1926 general strike).
Inglis' own style doesn't help matters — it is stricken with polysyllabic excesses such as "ambitiousness" and "exemplararily" along with august, airy and ethereal ruminations aplenty.
However, it is Inglis' reformist political agenda and defence of the Labour Party which really sets the teeth on edge. He seeks to scorn and belittle the revolutionary socialism which Williams, however inconsistently, was attracted to.
Inglis butters up revolutionaries — they are "heroic", "principled", "honourably idealistic" and all the rest — merely to shoot them down as "fundamentally unrealistic" and "self-deceptive" fantasists. There was no revolutionary crisis in the '60s, according to Inglis — the student and mass worker revolts which seduced Williams were but "small signs and twinkling wonders". Leninists, of course, get a drubbing — if the "tough eggs of the Marxist sects" ever got power in the manner of "the ruthless bandits of October 1917", then all would be "blood and terror".
Compared to this simplistic polemic, the political ambiguity and complexity of Williams positively glows. Williams had his theoretical and political faults, but there is more than enough in his life and work to repay study by those who want to advance the project of cultural, and political, revolution.