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'TRENDS IN YOUTH CULTURE'
Jacques's outlook was made clear in his reply to a long-running discussion in the columns of Marxism Today on 'Trends in Youth Culture'. This discussion took place in 1974-1975 and Jacques's reply was published in the April 1975 issue. But the position he put forward in this reply, and which most other contributors to the discussion approved, was simply the evolved expression of a position which he had already been canvassing for the previous five years, if not longer.
This position took as its point of departure certain cultural developments in Britain in the 1960s, the 'radical' aspects of pop music (The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, etc.), the popularity of folk songs of the 'protest' variety imported from America (Bob Dylan, Joan Baez), the growth of the 'alternative society' or 'counter-culture' ideology, also imported from America, as well as the 'student revolt' itself and especially that aspect of it connected with opposition to the Vietnam war, and argued that these developments were evidence of the existence of something called 'Youth Culture'. Youth Culture was not to be dismissed as 'petty-bourgeois' or 'individualist' and so irrelevant to Communists. On the contrary, the element of rebellion or revolt expressed in these cultural manifestations was to be taken seriously, and it was the duty of Communists to see to it that its revolutionary potential was realised. While admitting that "such revolts may well become absorbed and integrated by the bourgeoisie", Jacques insisted that
'such revolts can move in the other direction, towards a more generalised opposition based on a more universal understanding of their causes. Here the role of the Party is critical. Its intervention can be decisive in ensuring that the positive aspects of the revolt ultimately prove to be the decisive ones in its development. But, in order to make such an intervention, the Party must be involved in these struggles…'
[Marxism Today, April 1975, 112-113.]
In other words, what Jacques was proposing was an entirely new agenda for the CPGB, one which took as axiomatic the postulate that "for Marxists … the cultural and ideological spheres are a crucial area of struggle",
[Jacques, art. cit., 112.] and which accordingly privileged the political role of Communists inhabiting these spheres, that is, academics such as himself. But the other fundamental aspects of this outlook were its orientation to America and its essentially parasitic and opportunistic relationship to cultural trends.
This outlook expressed the acute awareness of elements within the CPGB that pro-Sovietism was no longer fashionable within the British intelligentsia and a tacit assumption that the intelligentsia mattered more than the working class. Conscious that the Soviet ideal was a turn-off for British academics and students with radical impulses, unable to provide a form of socialist politics distinct from and independent of the Soviet model into which to direct the rebelliousness of 'youth', Jacques & Co. opted for fashion-following as a political agenda and covered their ideological flanks by investing the fashions in question with not only an anti-capitalist character (which some of them arguably possessed in some measure) but also a socialist potential which could be realised through developing fluids furnished by the CPGB.
The delusion inherent in this outlook, that the "intervention" of the CPGB would be enough to triumph over the capacity of "the bourgeoisie" to "absorb and integrate" these rebellions, should be obvious to everyone today. But the long-term significance of the Jacques agenda lay in the fact that the fashions it proposed to follow were all American fashions. Belief in the revolutionary potential of American fashions replaced the old belief in the revolutionary potential of Soviet influence. The vacant space in the mind-set of British Communists where illusions about the USSR had been was filled with hallucinations about the USA.
The politics of what, in the 1980s, was to be called the 'Rainbow Coalition' existed in embryo within the CPGB in 1974-1975, if not earlier, and Martin Jacques's claim to paternity is stronger than that of anyone else.
The benefits of this new orientation were numerous. It gave the middle-class intellectual wing of the CPGB plenty of things to do in the academic and literary sphere, which kept them well away from the industrial sphere in which they no longer took a real interest in any case; it enabled the CP to become influential once again in the British intelligentsia as the authoritative arbiter of what was and what was not progressive in the stream of American fashions in which this intelligentsia lived and breathed; it enabled the CP to "absorb and integrate" the new fashion of feminism in particular, and so tap the energies of a new generation of radical middle class women; and it did all this without immediately disturbing in any serious way the various vested interests in the Party's apparatus, and without formally breaking with the general ideology of the Party as a whole - other than the tendency, scandalous to Frenchite ears, to voice public criticism of the USSR as part of the distancing manœuvre
FROM THE USSR TO THE USA
Someone somewhere once wrote that a successful revolution is one in which the professed values (as opposed to the real values) of the old order are made the real values of the new order. By that definition, what occurred within the CPGB between 1972 and 1975 was a kind of revolution and, beneath all the waffle about culture and so forth, the central aspect of this revolution concerned the Party's attitude to the working class.
The vigorous championing of the established routines of British trade unionism was, as I have explained, a central element of the strategy of the pro-Moscow Communists to bring about the eventual abolition of British trade unionism. In defending free collective bargaining against the attempts of Labour governments to promote incomes policies, the CPGB professed an attachment to the principles of free trade unionism which it did not really feel. But, with the displacement of the pro-Moscow Old Guard by Jacques and his followers, the CPGB lost all interest in the fantasy of a Soviet-style proletarian dictatorship and its attachment to free collective bargaining became disconnected from unavowable ulterior motives of this kind and found a natural place for itself within a critique of British social democracy which, for all its Marxist terminology, was in effect a critique from the standpoint of American capitalist democracy.
American capitalist democracy has made room for American trade unionism because this trade unionism accepts the capitalist system as eternal, takes it for granted that collective bargaining in the labour market is its principal if not its only business, has no ambition to take responsibility for management and is not affiliated to any political party. The American working class has no politics of its own and its spontaneous attitudes are regarded as the last word in reaction by the fashionable lines of middle class American radicalism.
A mere 20 years after the mutation which produced the Broad Left occurred, the British working class has been all but reduced to the same outlook and situation and the Labour Party has all but ceased to represent it and has lost four elections in a row and, even with Kinnock and Clarke at last out of the way, its remaining leaders still cannot put two and two together.
But Martin Jacques has taken all these developments – that is to say, the catastrophe which has engulfed the British working class – in his stride. The striking thing about the way Marxism Today under his editorship in 1980s responded to Thatcherism was that this response was unaccompanied by the slightest regret for – let alone anger at – all the damage Thatcherism was doing to the working class. On the contrary, Jacques enthusiastically embraced the "New Times" he so sententiously told his readers about. In this respect, Jacques's outlook exactly mirrored that of the doyen of CPGB academic pundits, Eric Hobsbawm in 1978 when he announced that "the forward march of labour" had been "halted", without expressing the slightest concern at the fact, for the excellent reason that it was the indefatigable wrecking activity of Hobsbawm's own party which had been primarily responsible for it.
There was nothing surprising about Jacques's attitude to Thatcherism at all. For the critique of British social democracy from the standpoint of American capitalist democracy which informed his fashion-following agenda for the CPGB in the 1970s was of course, in most points of substance, precisely what underlay Margaret Thatcher's policy-making agenda for the Conservative Party in 1980s. And, since April 9,
[the date of the General Election in 1992] he has been hammering away in The Observer and elsewhere at the theme that Labour must consummate the protracted act of hara-kiri which he has been urging it to commit for years by cutting its last links with the trade unions, and become a party of utter tumbleweeds like himself.
The CPGB has all but achieved its two most important negative aims in British politics, while achieving none of its positive aims. The first great negative aim was to destroy the umbilical connection between the trade unions and the Labour Party, because this connection condemned the CP to a permanently marginal role. And the second great negative aim was to destroy in the mind of left-wing opinion in Britain the attachment to the British tradition of representative government via parliamentary democracy which informed the mainstream of British socialism from the 1870s to the 1970s.
The CPGB has never wanted the British working class to have politics of its own. From 1921 to around 1970 its aim was to impose Soviet politics on it. Since the early 1970s it has been principally engaged in imposing a superficially modified brand of American politics on it. Throughout its entire existence the CP has been determined to destroy the politics which the British working class actually produced for itself, and which were given their highest expression by Ernest Bevin, and which won Labour the greatest number of votes it has ever received in a British general election in 1951.
So the change from the shamefaced Soviet orientation to the tacit American orientation, while involving a radical turning away from the working class, and a massively negative re-evaluation of its spontaneous social attitudes and behaviour, and a genuine (as opposed to hypocritical) acceptance of its free collective bargaining routines, and thus a revolution in the CPGB's attitude to it, was a change only in what one might call the positive content of the CPGB's worldview. It was made possible by the fact that there was no change in the negative content of this worldview, which was preserved intact. And this means that what really motivated the CPGB was a bitter hostility to British society and the British state, rather than a serious sympathy for some other society and state.
The precondition of Jacques's attitude to American fashions was an uncritical orientation to American society founded on a thorough-going lack of curiosity about America, which could guarantee that an abstract vision of America could survive in his mind indefinitely because untroubled by any real knowledge of the place. This was, of course, the exact counterpart of the earlier attitude towards the Soviet Union. The dominant characteristic of both attitudes was the radical lack of realism which informed them. And this profoundly unrealistic attitude towards the USSR and the USA is proof, if proof were needed, that the mind-set of British Communist 'intellectuals' has never ceased to be the mind-set of people living in wonderland.