no writing update - kitchen sink drama, sorry
Hello there good people, and the rest of you as well,
I hope you’re all warm and well. Here in Des Moines we’re in an intense cold snap and snow fall. It’s 14 below zero at the moment (that’s 26 below for people outside the US, apparently you get penalized by 12 degrees for not living here in the home of freedom), with a wind chill of 41 below (which is also 41 below in celsius, the wind is not a respecter of national borders apparently).
I mentioned the other day that I had planned to write about English social realist movies and some leftist thought in the UK in the 50s but I didn’t get to it. I thought I’d kick that off by, being as I am someone who does everything backward and jumbled, starting with the second thing, this Brit lefty shit from the fifties. In a phrase, it’s socialist humanism.
I’ve got an essay on some of this under review, we’ll see what happens (you’ll be the first to know, have I said that? I don’t remember either but if I do remember, you’ll be the fi - ah fuck it) and having written the essay my main conclusion was that I want to know a lot more about the subject matter (that’s a lot of my argument there too really, that the 1950s UK far left remains good to think with and is more complicated and sophisticated than it’s often given credit for, because the best thinkers of that era lost some battles and losers tend to end up the misrepresented objects of history written by the winners). A little more specifically, there was a tendency in the late 1950s, or maybe multiple tendencies, that went by the name of or took as a key term of theirs the phrase socialist humanism.
Socialist humanism was a keyword shared in common by a network of people in the early days of the New Left - in the UK there were two New Lefts, a first one in the late 50s and another beginning in the late 60s to the best of my knowledge. I know the latter less well. Anyway, socialist humanism was a the term for revolutionary currents in the first new left, associated with the publications The New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review, the former being largely people loyal to what they saw as the spirit of the communist movement and who had recently left the Communist Party in response to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary, the latter being more eclectic, younger, and more representative of people newly radicalizing in response to uglier parts of life in Britain and its imperialism. The two journals quickly began to collaborate and soon merged to form New Left Review, which lasted about a year or so - twelve issues - before having an internal crisis, related to downturns in the activist milieus and, I think (I’m fuzzy on some of this) a relative restabilization of the official institutions of society and politics in the UK. That crisis led to a big change in personnel and political orientation, starting from the 13th or 14th issue, and the New Left Review of today dates from that issue, around 1962 or 1963 to present.
People around Universities and Left Review had a slogan I like a lot that gets at part of why these currents interest me, it was something like ‘socialism at full stretch,’ which is basically a version of Marx’s famous ‘ruthless criticism of all that exists.’ In context it was a criticism of the limits of the left politics on offer at the time, both Labour and the CP, and a criticism rooted in the view - or maybe it’s better to say, the strongly felt sensibility - that all facets of life in society were political and that social revolution would involve a wide-ranging remaking that touched all of those facets. I think there’s a lot of good in that and my article is basically like ‘sounds neat, eh? We should all learn more about it!’ plus an account of why it fell out of subsequent history of the left in the UK.
I mentioned Kirstin Munro’s article in that post. In her article she quotes from the pamphlet In and Against the State - a quote, if memory serves, she points out that Simon Clarke emphasized as well - saying something to the effect that while keynesian social policy might be on the outs (this was written in the late 70s or early 80s, I forget the exact year and it doesn’t matter for my purposes so I won’t look it up) the authors felt it was important to not lose the hard won criticisms of the social policy and the general way of life it was part of. That book’s been reissued recently and I’d recommend it to you, by the way. There’s a PDF of the earlier edition at Libcom here https://libcom.org/article/and-against-state and the new edition with some additions added in addition (a real plus, I math say) can be purchased here: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745341811/in-and-against-the-state/
Anyway, part of why socialist humanism matters is for the purposes of what In and the Against the State said about holding on to the hard won criticisms of keynesian social policy. (I may have mentioned this before, I think often of the Clash line in Clampdown, - ‘the men in the factory are old and cunning , you don't owe nothing, boy get running, it's the best years of your life they want to steal!’ This expresses a rejection of a life of monotonous work, and rightly so, but in retrospect at a time when having a stable long term job it’s easy to get nostalgic for that arrangement and forget that it was roundly criticized by the people subjected to it. What’s that Marx phrase? Something like ‘one form of waged labor corrects the abuse of another form, but none corrects the abuse that is wage labor.’) Socialist humanism was a critical pespective on capitalism fleshed out at one of the relative high points or so-called golden ages, which means in some respects they criticized the system at its best - if we only criticize the system at its worst and weakest we’re going to have less to say when offered a somewhat reformed capitalism.
I should say, I don’t mean everything that has gone by the name socialist humanism, just like how I’m a marxist without endorsing all marxisms. I mean specifically the ideas in the UK far left that went by that name in the late 1950s. Bits of it lived on in diminished form after a series of defeats in the early 1960s and later. Simon Clarke has a great essay on the merits of that diminished point that socialist humanism arrived at though he coould have done more to talk about that diminishment and its earlier more robust, diffuse, and chaotic versions in the 50s. Anyway that here if it’s of any interest: https://homepages.warwick.ac.uk/~syrbe/pubs/SocialistHumanism.pdf and this is an EP Thompson essay fleshing out the term in the 50s: https://www.marxists.org/archive/thompson-ep/1957/sochum.htm Thompson looms too large in the story of this stuff, to the limited degree it’s a story anyone tells or listen to (Madeleine Davis has a great article that I’d recommend to you highly related to this, looking at the breadth of this politics in the 50s rather than treating it as a footnote to Thompson: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13569317.2013.750175), but even so the essay remains a good example of what I’m talking about. I’ll add as well that some marxists have a kneejerk reaction to the word humanism, which reflects both the relative erasure of that moment and a problem on the part of those marxists in being unwilling to contextualize more and to combine charitable with critical reading - steelman, don’t strawman, comrades! Anyway, so that’s a bit on socialist humanism.
Reading about that to write that essay meant I learned a bit about the UK in the 50s generally, which included mention of some artistic trends, I think overlapping, of a group of writers called ‘the angry young men’ and ‘kitchen sink drama.’ Kitchen sink drama popped up on my radar as well because as I mentioned a while back I started binging Ken Loach films and apparently Loach was a participant in kitchen sink drama - meaning social realist tv, film, and plays focusing on the ordinary lives of working class and lower middle class people, and at least implicitly treating those ordinary lives as shot through with politics and using those depictions to make social criticism. The Loach connection and it being another facet of UK 1950s culture in a way that resonates with my interests in the left politics of the period was enough to give me the oomph to start digging around further. I’ve not read any of the plays and novels yet but I hope. What I have done is to read the wikipedia entry for kitchen sink drama or maybe it’s kitchen sink realism and start googling for freely available copies of the films listed. So far I’ve watched The Enternainer, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and Room at the Top. I’m somewhere in the middle of The Angry Silence.
It’s dark stuff, slightly existential maybe, in the sense of working class people, mostly men, not liking any of the options available to them in the society of their day, beset by a mix of monotony and friction. This totally fits with what I mentioned from In and Against the State, about criticism of the institutions of Keynesian social policy from the people who lived under it. The Kirstin Munro article I mentioned is very in keeping with this, the redistributive institutions of the state being simultaneously forms of power over the working class, forms that worked coercively in ways people chafed at and that also played significant roles in constructing some particulars of the class as a set of kinds of people (above all, I think, the gendered divisions of labor inside the working class, though I think a lot more could be said about racial divisions as well as managing the line between the parts of the class with salable labr power and the parts consigned to status as surplus to requirements).
So yeah, I like that this stuff raises some political issues I’m interested in and which are resonant with far left political perspectives in that era, and I also just enjoy realist works about working class people. The relative bleakness of the vibe suits me as well, for better and for worse - some of this stuff scratches those ‘oh woe is me I’m so put upon and world weary’ narcissitic itches that The Smiths and Joy Division scratch as well.
That said, I think the bleakness has a limitation as well, in that while it’s true to the shortcomings of what’s on offer to working class people’s lives and makes an important criticism of those shortcomings and the official institutions that pretend to offer a good life but really just are forms of living out the tensions of capitalist society, this work leaves out some of the elements of working class collective action and pockets of alternative values created - glimpses of a new world, even if only through a glass darkly, that open up temporarily in struggle.
I’ll say, this criticism applies to my work as well, which is all about how everything is bad and wrong - which is true! - but which lacks any articulation of collective action in process and the working out, in however fragmented a way, of new forms of humanity and outlooks and practices of solidarity. Basically from what I’ve seen of it so far this work from the 50s is basically this Copyrights song, the key line to which is “shit’s fucked, but what can you do?” https://thecopyrights.bandcamp.com/track/shits-fucked which has an important truth to it but would better if it included the complementary and offsetting sensibility of this Dear Landlord song, the key line to which is "we're not that hopeless, we're not as fucked as you think, in short lived moments we can do anything.” https://dearlandlord77.bandcamp.com/track/three-to-the-beach That sensibility is important to retain so that criticism remains critical, rather than just a recounting of distress understood as the product of social relations that can’t be changed. To quote the song, being sure that “I'll die penniless alone” is a something that can start “dragging me farther down, taking out all the fight, holding me to the ground” if we don’t hold tight to those “short lived moments” and the possibility they demonstrate and construct.
That is to say, there can be a tempation toward resignation, cynicism, nihilism amid the relentless grind of it all. (Joy Division’s “Digital” is a dramatization, with the repetition of “day in day out” and “feel it closing in” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qgFGqJz9yc) My impression from watching the films I have so far that I mentioned is that they can be read as about that temptation rather than as embracing it, but I’d bet that for some viewers it read more as the latter - it would have for me as an angry young man had I seen them at the time. I’d say the same of some of the earlier Loach movies, I’m thinking of Kes, Riff Raff, and Looks and Smiles. I’d argue that some of his later films have this quality as well - The Navigators and Sweet Sixteen. In some of his other films and I think moreso over time we get not quite ‘in short live movement we can do anything’ - maybe a little in the ones about the Spanish Revolution and the Justice for Janitors union campaign? - but instead we do get some real humanity that persists, whether in the form of political struggle, organization, oppositional culture, and love, like in his films set in Ireland, and in family and friendship and humor in some of his other films, including the generally very bleak (and superb) I Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You. The difference I’m fumbling for is that while the latter films are very much about people being destrored, there’s a persistent humanity in them as well and they’re always destroyed from the outside, so to speak, while the earlier films of his that I mentioned and the even earlier kitchen sink films I’ve been watching recently - The Entertainer and all that - all have themes of people internalizing the outside world, becoming destroyed by the outside world reaching into them and getting them to participate in their own destruction from the inside out, and others’ as well by doing so. (This is a theme in some Mike Leigh movies I watched, which I eventually put on hold as it got too bleak, and there was some gendered and sexual violence I found too much for my personal view comfort.)
Anyhow, yeah, all of social life is political and subject to politicization. These films reflect that in their depictions of working class life, and they’re good expressions of a critical sensibility, with some of them better on showing the continuing presence of conflict, struggle, and moments of solidarity within all of that. That latter stuff is to my mind part of what socialist humanism brings to the table.
I guess this is my little blog (I dunno why but ‘my newsletter’ stick in my craw) and I can say whatever I want, yet I feel funny when I get afield from covid, so I feel a little self conscious. Something something open mode, stay playful. Hmm. Anyhow, those are some thoughts that have been sprouting in my head lately, good to take the time here to water them. I may write more on this stuff if other thoughts sprout and I have notes for an essay about some of the presence of class and its discontents in my own life that I may eventually get around to fleshing out. For now, in case it’s any interest, I wanted to mention a few other bits I’ve written that are in the ballpark. One is this blog post on Marx and morality - https://writingtothink.wixsite.com/mysite-2/post/marx-and-morality-and-whatnot I’ve heard many marxists I admire say what are to my mind straightforwardly obviously wrong things about Marx’s views on morality and so on and I find that frankly mystifying. Socialist humanism was concerned with these matters to some degree and also tended to understand morality as embodied or enacted as much or more in social practice and crystallized in art and narrative rather than in moral philosophy texts - most people aren’t theorizing morality in living their lives, they’re reasoning via analogy and narration and emotion. Sort of related, I just heard about this book coming soon that I’m excited to read when it’s out: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/marx-s-ethical-vision-9780197688144
I wrote this blog post a while back about condescension and class: https://writingtothink.wixsite.com/mysite-2/post/talmbout-condescension. On ’short lived moments’ this is a thing I wrote in another life about my own trajectory and the moments that form the heat I carry inside me on the coldest of days: https://crashcourse666.wordpress.com/2008/08/23/do-i-want-to-say-in-a-zine-written-for-the-upcoming-protets-here/ A friend put it in a zine he did for a protest, and we lost touch and I think he later passed away, though I’m not 100% sure which is fucking weird. I’ve since learned there are more colder days than I realized back then, need that heat more than ever I guess.
Alright friends, if you made it this far, you win a prize for sheer endurance. What’s the old joke? It’s me, I’m the old joke. Okay but what’s the OTHER old joke? "Other than that, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” [Sighs, closes eyes a moment.] Right. Fine. Well. There’s also an old joke that goes something like, sorry I wrote you such a long letter, I didn’t have time to write a short one. Story of my life.
Covid connection here? Nah, not really, just what’s been on my mind, though I do think the relative lack of pandemic politicizing art is notable, though maybe I’m just in the wrong circles, and I also think pandemic and genocide is going to create a lot more temptations to resignation, cynicism, nihilism. Really those seem to be the reigning effects of the Biden administration and its base, though sometimes in the form of toxic positivity. But enough for now, I gotta finish the dishes and this movie.
Keep on keeping on my friends,
Nate