FAKE LEFT BY JACK COMMON A wORking Press reprint pamphlet INTRODUCTION Jack Common was a remarkable working class writer who had many insights into culture and oppression but who is only well known in his native Newcastle. It is from here that BLOODAXE recently republished the first half of his autobiography; "Kiddar's Luck". There are also some copies of his essay collection "Freedom of the streets still available. FAKE LEFT (This article was originally printed in Adelphi Magazine 19th March 1933) One of the distressing things about the socialist movement is the remarkable number of twisters and crooks it turns out. Not even borstal apparently produces so many ornaments of a piratical society as the movement which discovered the piracy. The biography of almost any Socialist leader is apt to be the story of a falling rocket. Why is it? The obvious answer is that socialism does at least possess an ethical purpose by which its leaders are judged so that always, in the end, you can find out whether a man is straight, a thing one would be puzzled to do in the conservative to liberal camps. That is an answer, and a true in one as far as it goes. It explains why the phenomenon of socialist "betrayal" is so noticeable, it does not explain why it occurs. We must blame leaders and their followers both. The real answer must be looked for in the nature of socialist parties. They differ from other parties in this: other parties serve class interests which are already satisfactorily established, and their programmes therefore, are mainly defensive though embellished by small advances of a technical character. They are programmes, that is, of immediate practical utility. But though socialist parties, too, serve class interest, defensive measures are a small part of the programme. Their hope lies in attack, and their programmes have always a certain utopian unreality about them because they cannot be immediately implemented. The socialist has the special problem of holding onto his vision of a world which is not yet, while maintaining himself in an environment which makes vision a handicap and tempts him to abandon it. What is behind the socialist parties and what assures their final victory in this vision of a new world; what ruins them all is that they must prove practical utility in the present capitalist day if they are to live at all. Hence to denounce the Labour Party on grounds of socialist theory is as a futile as to denounce the leaders on grounds of moral rectitude. Both actions betray a lack of responsibility, a detachment from the problem on the part of the denouncer which is unreal; they are bolts from the blue. Only of course there is no blue. No complete socialist theory can exist until its practice has become usual. Until then every social phenomenon must be studied in its relation to capitalism. The system we live by is capitalism. We cannot put ourselves artificially in vacuo because we are socialists and wish to change the world. We continue to live in it. And it continues to make use of us. It continues to make use of our organisations. The only begetter of socialism is capitalism and the child always tends to take after its parent. What was to have been an instrument for building the new era becomes a prop for the old. And that fate cannot be avoided by denunciations of persons and the production of blustering and belligerent policies. We have to understand the laws of growth which regulate these organisations. We must not expect miracles unless we have ourselves contrived them. It is quite irrational to hope for a pure party, since she cannot close a party against converts or against influences. A socialist organisation necessarily opens its doors to people who are not socialists, for socialism is an escape from the present as well as a way of looking towards the future and not all who flee the present are making for the future. It depends upon the vitality of those within whether they can make revolutionists of the newcomers before they are swamped by them. Finally, most parties are swamped and become first safety-valves for capitalism and then bulwarks of it. We need not despair at this. It merely means that we must be prepared to change parties when necessary, and not to regard the political constellations as fixed. Our loyalties are to the principal and not to any of it forms. Yet the principle must have its embodiment in some organisation. Which? There are three parties of consequence in the socialist movement. Of these, the Labour Party has been temporarily weakened by the events of last year, the ILP is shaken; and the Communist party remains as it was. Now one would expect a general move left, away from reformism and ballot box socialism towards insurrectionism. One would expect that the weakening of the right would be followed by a corresponding strengthening of the left. This movement has taken place only in the ILP why? Surely the natural thing would be for people to leave both the Labour Parties in favour of the uncompromising and uncompromised policy of the Communist Party. It would be if the Communist Party of Great Britain were a true Left. But in this case a defeat of the Right is equally a defeat of the Left, for the two wings are linked and dependent on one another, mutually consequences of the same facts, bound to live and die in the same period. For 10 years we've watched them pillow-fighting, hurling the same arguments at one another, competing for the ear of the working-man, the one with its right-wing breeziness, the other with its left-wing frightfulness, satisfying the predominant moods in their audience and themselves. The one easily winning the big unions; the other with equal ease rippling the apathetic calm of the unemployed. This is Socialist politics. We've become so use to it that we scarcely notice that neither party has anything to say. Occasionally a Labour man reads an advanced Conservative journal and gets temporarily obfuscated in the mysteries of planning; occassionaly a Communist is moved to eloquence by a reminiscence of the oratory of the pioneers; for the rest it is pillow- fighting, and the working-men know it. Hence we have in this country a nominal Left which is incapable of supplying ideas of a revolutionising character, Marxist and revolutionary though it is in its literature and in a literary way. It is not Marxism, however, to found your movement on a literature, it is Marxism to find your literature in contemporary movements. The analysis of the phase of finance-capitalism into which the world has passed was left to other minds; and this is the only solid addition to capitalist analysis which has appeared in the last 10 years. It had to be done and done badly, by professional men, engineers and chemists, because our revolutionists were too immersed in the day-to-day struggle to spare time to see how capitalism was getting on. They were content to live on the intellectual capital of their ancestors, to confront a complex and changing world with a literature of reiteration in which metaphors drawn from the Commune and the battles of pre-industrial Russia were made to do duty for the realistic understanding of world movements a Socialist needs. They still are. And because of their failure to keep in touch with reality, they fall an easy prey to right-wing tactics. For working-men are not merely passive tools and dupes. It is useless to explain away the success of the Trade-Union and Labour Leaders as the natural result of duplicity and craft. The right-wing have no monopoly of craft. Their success is made easy for them. They have only to hint that there is a certain unreality about their opponents case and they've won. The minority movement is easily circumvented, not because of the simple and angelic nature of it members, but because it cannot command the confidence of the working-classes. There is nothing to wonder at in that. This is the sort of thing the working-man is offered in place of a left-wing. The British Communist Party feverishly pursues a policy of agitation for agitation's sake, of raising a rumpus wherever possible in the hope that some echo of it will reach Moscow and ensure the supply of funds, and lull suspicion existing there that the British comrades are a bit useless. The resulting muddle is excused by pretending that a revolutionary situation is possible at any time from now (or then) on in England. However, as the revolution fails to materialise we are left with a muddle. The ability to forecast correctly the revolutionary situation is as necessary to a Communist Party as a Templegate's Naps to the Herald. But the likelihood of a revolutionary situation happening is not based upon a study of capitalism but upon a guess of what Russia would like. For the revolution visualised is an October revolution. Why? There is no necessity in English capitalism which demands an October revolution. The necessity is neither in English capitalism nor in a Marxist analysis of it, but in Russian sentiment and in the fantasies of ambitious but impotent proletarians. This picture of revolution is no real menace to the right-wing. For you have to consider that the workers of this country are not peasants, any more than the Communists of Britain are a Bolshevik party. They are predominantly town-proletarians, old in their political history who are accustomed to demagogues and the mockery of vox populi, vox dei. They have exhausted the hopes on which revolutions are made; the promise of enlightenment, for instance, which can be held before a people to whom books are still a mystery and which played so important a part in the French and Russian revolutions, is no incitement to our people. Here, what stands in the way of revolution is not the peasant apathy but the terrible urban cynicism which so easily adapts materialist teaching to personal and private ends and finally, a considerable proportion of the ablest and best of them are able to attain to the standing of a petty-bourgeois by the legitimate class- activity of trade-unionism. The Communist Party is constrained to look for support amongst the most oppressed workers. In effect it must pass the big unions by, and go to those whose oppression is not mitigated by the possession of a personal skill which can be marketed by the unions. To these, in whom the hope of winning concessions from employers is necessarily remote, the idea of a miraculous reversal of class-status in a melodramatic revolution is naturally attractive. Among the same people that the Salvation Army and the Church of Christ have won their greatest successes by preaching a blood and fire Christianity which miraculously rewards the poor and delivers the rich to everlasting damnation. If you go to the very hopeless in any fairly stable society you must go with a dream; they have all the reality they can bear. Also, of course, the interest of capitalism is very well served by any preaching which has the effect of drawing off the most discontented away from political machinery in sectarian activities which inevitably arouse the antipathy of those who would otherwise be their brothers. Thus the British Communist Party is limited in its growth by its alien roots and artificial manure. Nevertheless, it has its strength. We all know that the success of English Parliamentary democracy bred dozens of pseudo-institutions hailing Westminster as the mother of parliaments: it is equally inevitable that the success of Moscow must breed dozens of pseudo-communist parties. The fact of their being imitations is no promise of their early demise; there are still parliaments in Argentina even though it has always been the custom of that country to set them aside when any important question was to be decided. Besides, one of the ways of evading a necessary change in the structure of a society is to set up a fiction pretending that change has already been carried out. In that way the Czars were able for a long time to hold off the creative forces in the Russian masses by their policy of Westernisation, or change which left everything as it was before. We can see the folly of that but it by no means follows that we can instantly appreciate the wild romanticism of Muscovite policy for us. We have first to realise who exactly are "us". "Us" for the Communists mean the working-class. His policy is specially designed for them, and that it is a good one is proved because it is the same one which did the Russian worker so much good. The local differences don't matter! Yet in actual fact, these differences are so important that it becomes a problem to get over them by persuading the English worker to become like the Russian so that the policy will then be of some use to him. Though there is a working-class intelligentsia who read Lawrence and Aldous Huxley and Bernard Shaw as busily as Golders Green or Hampstead, they all talk as if no such thing existed; and though the low-brows of this class spend as much time at the dogs or the football as their bourgeois exploiters do at Twickenham or the theatre, they are addressed on the assumption that what they think about is bread. The idea is that you must always talk economics to a working-man because he's got this obsession about bread. While economics was still something of a novelty this was all very well. But now there is a widespread feeling that we have heard that story before. It would continue to go down if the working-man really was thus obsessed. But of course he is not. If he has brains he is in the WEA or the NCLC, or at least the Free Library getting mental indigestion on too much study which his lack of confidence prevents him making use of; if he has not, he is either fully occupied with the abstruse mathematics of the racecourse, or else gardening, and saving his cash so as to give his children a decent education. Of course, is you say to him, "what are you thinking about - bread?" He'll say yes, since his wife is always telling him he ought to and his conscience knows how seldom he does. Similarly if you ask a city-man what he is thinking of, he will hardly ever reply "Garbo", because he doesn't call that thinking and he knows he is supposed to be always scheming away. We must recognise that our working-class is semi-bourgeois and neither ignore the fact of its being bourgeois nor that it is only semi. Anyone with an appreciation of social forces will see at once how immensely important it is that there should grow up in the decline of capitalism a class that possesses some of the cultural advantages of the bourgeois without having to pay for them by allegiance to a bourgeois conception of society. The appearance of this class is of vast significance. It may yet give to the Anglo- Saxon countries the lead in the establishment of Communism. Nobody expects that, since all our eyes are on Russia. But then nobody expected that Russia would be first to get into the transition stage. In practice this is instinctively recognised by labour politicians, since in the problems of actual living, as in the problems of art, practice always comes before theory. The trouble is that Labour politicians are not Socialists and their instinctive practice cannot be stiffened and given direction by theoretical statement. The only other party which is firmly rooted in the British working-class is the ILP. The decay of socialist vigour which left the Labour Party unable to act in face of crisis, and the Communist Party beached still on the pseudo-Marxist sandbanks, finds the ILP floundering in shallow water. They were always a sensitive and flexible party quick to accept and convey new political ideas, and they alone respond to the historical moment. They alone have the courage to choose a new path to make some attempt to meet the rapid changes in capitalism. They have broken with the labour Party and chosen the narrow path between reformism and insurrectionism. What will they do now? What can they do but look at Russia and borrow the CP's dream of being a Bolshevik party; all talk to the unemployed and imagine that they are speaking to a revolutionary mob; or print pictures of Russia's tractors and hope that people will be silly enough to believe that these are products of communism; or perfect an organisation for getting in touch with the workers and then find they have nothing new to say to them; or unearth the week's fact and interpret it as though it were a fact of 50 years ago. Inevitably there must be many ILP'ers who will seek to direct the present leftward urge into those activities. It is the easiest course. It involves no new thinking. Then what necessity does it serve. It serves the immediate necessity of producing an alternative programme to that of reformism just discarded. That to a politician is a consideration. To Socialists it is nothing. For only a social necessity is worth serving. The great necessity under which the twentieth century is labouring is that of producing a satisfactory synthesis to meet and complete the analysis of the nineteenth century thinkers. From those analyses sprang Socialism; from socialism should spring this synthesis. It is no accident that the process of capitalist analysis has to be carried on now by men outside socialism who are largely inspired by a need they feel of finding an alternative to it. Those inside are weary of the analytic phase. What is happening is that the nineteenth century passion for finding things out, for tracing things to their source, is giving way to the twentieth century necessity of comprehending the inter-relation, the wholeness of things. The last century was one great flying asunder of concepts, an ever-spreading disillusionment, an endless uncovering of causes. It stood up against so much disheartening only because it got wealthier, and in counting its possessions conceived a final delusion of progress which the Great War blew to fragments. The analytic process has reached its end. What we have to perceive now is not the origin of things, but their wholeness, the infinitely delicate balance of their relations. All the absolutes are dethroned, and relativity becomes our absolute. We pushed our questions to the roots of everything; the questions meet; and the answer is their sum. What is wrong with the priest? He serves the ends of the ruling-class and is afraid of examination. What is wrong with the artist? The same. What is wrong with the ruling- class? It does not now serve the community. What is wrong with the scientist? In the name of truth he makes weapons for a class. Their lives are all lies because they turn a blind eye on a part of their lives, that part where there should be a vital relation with the community, and there is not. Hence because the priest cannot find god in the streets but must shut the church-door first, his god is false; because the artist makes his art a thing apart, a private shrine, and not the music of other men's needs, his art jangles; because the business man wins wealth for himself from the community he feels like a criminal; and because the scientist sells his truths, we know him to only have half truths in stock. The flail of the materialist beats them all down. And what of him? All these others function imperfectly, he points out. When we cease to follow his finger and look at him, his own functioning is instantly suspect. They all hide a secret place which damns them. And so does he. Every materialist hides a secret romanticism in which he finds the antidote for the cynicism he offers to others. We cannot tolerate secrets nor he disclose his and it is this deadlock which holds us from materialism. If all ideals are false, then let us have them all destroyed and see what. We cannot have anyone nourishing a secret belief in predestined progress, or salvation through the machine, or justice, or magical determinism. Whoever hides his motives is a half-man. If the artist pretends that his art is not subject to material influences or the priest that his theology is entirely spiritual we damn them for holding half their souls in shadow. So, to, the materialist who pretends that his motives are anything but romantic and illogical is damned. We know that his talk of economic motives is half-truth only; just as we know that the Freudian talk of sex- motives is half-truth. We have been pelted so long with half-truths that our bruised cynicism can do nothing with them but pitch them at someone else. We choose a few we can manage, ignore the rest, and carry on leading half lives. That is obviously an intolerable state. There are too many truths nobody can do anything with. Therefore it is the task of the twentieth century to gather them up and relate them. We have to comprehend the essential wholeness of society in order to be whole men. It follows that organisations which are merely of a party-type must fail to be the vehicles of the new concepts. Political parties are constructed on the assumption that what is needed is an adjustment of the political machinery which serves society; revolutionary ones in the belief that a sudden transformation of the economic order will be enough; and planning parties out of the notion that tinkering with the financial mechanism will make all come right. In other days it was felt, with equal reason, that you had to change the religious form, the cannons of art, or the theory of military strategy and you had done the trick. The assumption is, always, that one activity or the other is fundamental whereas we know now that no activity is fundamental. Man is the sum of his activities not the product of any single one. And if you make an organisation on the assumption that politics is the key activity and others derive from that, you quickly find that your political organisation becomes a derivative of the other activities. To put it concretely, a Socialist organisation which is merely political falls a prey to members who import into it individualist conceptions derived from the art, or religion, or sport they have been engaging in outside. The ILP has always made some attempt to create a community life for its members. In this it was well advised. It must not give up that policy, for in future the ideal for Socialist or Communist organisations must be community, not party. We have to counter the tremendous developments in social mechanism with the cultural advances which alone can handle them. What keeps us from the full use of power is the ideological habits of a bygone age hence, we are still hemmed in by divisions and barriers which have no sanction for existing except that we believe in them. And the way to get rid of these things is not in the organisation of vote-snatching corporations, nor in the waging of day- to-day struggles, but in the gathering together of a body of people who are accustomed in their relations with one another to live by Socialist concepts. Socialism must be built in the working-class, by the creation of nerve-centres throughout that class which provide cultural contacts and prepare the new world-feeling which is the basis of the new order. We will have inevitably parties of the class-war. What we need is communities in which classlessness is a virtue and is understood in all its forms. WORking Press This is the text only version of the wORking Press reprint pamhlet FAKE LEFT by JACK COMMON if you copy or distribute it any form please acknowledge the original source and refer people to our website: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/working_press