University of Minnesota Press

Chapter Title: Raymond Williams and Marxism

Chapter Author(s): John Brenkman

Book Title: Cultural Materialism

Book Subtitle: On Raymond Williams
Book Editor(s): Christopher Prendergast
Published by: University of Minnesota Press. (1995)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttspjc.15

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Raymond Williams and Marxism
John Brenkman

Reds

For twenty years Western Marxists looked back to two historic mo-
ments to guide our theoretical work on society and culture 1917 and
1968. As symbols, as historic watersheds, as reminder and conscience
of political struggle, the Russian Revolution and then the events in
Prague, Paris, and Mexico City and in the United States at the Demo-
cratic convention in Chicago and at Columbia University stimulated
important work in every field of social and cultural theory.
As each generation of Marxists has faced coming to terms with
Stalin, "Soviet Marxism," or "actually existing socialism," it has devel-
oped various explanations for the fate of the Russian Revolution.
And at each turn there have been attempts to consolidate—and with-
stand—the criticisms of the Soviet Union by renewing the notion
that 1917 remained a starting point and a benchmark for socialism in
the twentieth century.
The proximity of the uprisings in Paris and Prague in 1968 gave a
new twist to these resurrections of the Russian Revolution, namely,
the belief that the struggle against Western imperialism and capital-
ism and the struggle against state socialism and Soviet hegemony
were two sides of the same coin. The challenge to Western capital-
ism, we believed, would turn out to belong to the same struggle as
the challenge to Soviet totalitarianism. From this perspective, the
Russian Revolution could once again become a revolutionary start-

237

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238 John Brenkman

ing point From this conjuncture flowed Rudolph Bahro's critique of

actually existing socialism.
The sentiment that the revolutionary legacy had a future per-
vades a good deal of writing throughout the 1970s and into the
1980s, but the future began to dim as the decade of Thatcher and
Reagan took hold tooth and claw. The 1980s rapidly eroded the
whole project in which Marxist theory attempted to preserve the
expectations and transformations of the 1960s.
An emblem of Marxist theory in the Thatcher-Reagan decade is
furnished in the film written by Hanif Kureishi, My Beautiful Laun-
drette. Omar's Papa is a Pakistani journalist and socialist. Ailing and
alcoholic, he lies bedridden in London watching his son trim his toe-
nails for him. He berates Omar for succumbing to his rich uncle's en-
ticements and admonishes him, "You've got to study. We are under
siege by the white man. For us education is power." The socialist's
son, however, is smitten with Thatcherite ambition and wants only
to make money managing his uncle's laundrette. When Papa stum-
bles into the laundrette's grand opening hours late and encounters
Johnny, Omar's long-time friend, a former skinhead turned entre-
preneur, he can only shake his head and sigh, "The working class is
such a great disappointment to me."
When this decade of greed and social regression in the West then
culminated, so unexpectedly, in the revolutions of 1989 in the East,
critical Marxism found itself, I believe, at an ultimate impasse. There
were of course last gasps: "Now that the Soviet perversion of social-
ism has collapsed the West can finally have a genuine debate on so-
cialism!" "The events in Eastern Europe finally prove that even actu-
ally existing socialism contained an inner dynamic propelling it
toward changef Despite such absurd claims, the liberation of East-
ern Europe from socialism has shattered the mythological value of
the Russian Revolution. It is no longer a meaningful starting point
for envisioning social and political change. When the Berlin Wall
fell, Humpty-Dumpty could not be put back together again.
The very project of critical or Western Marxism has been thrown
into question. I do not mean to suggest that it is implicated in the
fallen regimes. The differences in political conviction between
Western and Soviet Marxism, or between critical and scientific
Marxism, ran deep. What counts, rather, is that Western Marxism
could not provide the intellectual tools or the political vocabulary

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 Raymond Williams and Marxism 239

that the peoples and movements of the former Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe—let alone China—needed to struggle for their free-
doms and rights and for justice within their societies. Western Marx-
ism proved irrelevant to the great revolutionary moment at the end
of the twentieth century.
As a result, socialism has been left to appear antithetical to democ-
racy. Conversely, the anachronistic notion that capitalism is the cra-
dle of democracy has gained prestige worldwide. Thatcherism and
Reaganism have scored an unanticipated ideological victory that
will continue to influence the processes of social and political re-
newal going forward in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet
Union.
What then does it mean today to take up the topic of Raymond
Williams's contribution to Marxism? It cannot be a matter of looking
to his works simply for paths out of the current impasse. As regards
Marxism itself, I believe the impasse is permanent. The need is for a
rearticulation of socialism and democracy. And Williams's contribu-
tion to that theoretical and political task, which requires a critique
rather than a renewal of Marxism, was immense.
As a novelist, Williams found sources for this articulation of so-
cialism and democracy in his own earliest experiences as the child
of working-class parents. As a political thinker, he sought to link so-
cialism and democracy by interrogating the meaning of revolution
and the vocabularies of modern politics. As critic and teacher, he re-
vitalized socialist thought through his commitments to the democra-
tization of culture. Through this multiplicity of his writing—fiction,
politics, criticism—there emerges, I hope to show, a profound work-
ing through of some of the most urgent political and cultural issues
of our time.

In the Name of the Father

It is significant that Williams's own historical benchmarks were not

1917 and 1968. They were 1926 and 1966, the year of the General
Strike in Great Britain and the year that the Labour Party's return to
power revealed how intent it was to make its pact with capitalism,
NATO, and American imperialism. In 1926 Williams's father joined
the General Strike at great risk to his own well-being and his fam-

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240 John Brenkman

ily's. In 1966 Williams himself left the Labour Party, with a pained
and ominous sense that the future of socialism had just become far
more difficult and far riskier.
Williams's most important intellectual contributions to literary
and cultural studies were, I will argue, efforts to keep faith with
these two historic moments and with the choices he and his father
made in their drastically different circumstances. I am not thereby
restricting the relevance of his thought to its national context—as
though to explain what makes his Marxism so British-nor am I sug-
gesting that the biographical benchmarks limit the import of his
work. On the contrary, these pressures coming from his own politi-
cal experience animate his thought and are key to its broader valid-
ity. Historical thinking cannot test its validity except against history,
a history that is concrete and pressing.
Williams was five years old, his father barely thirty, at the time of
the General Strike. The nation's miners were locked out when they
refused a contract calling for dramatic wage cuts; the owners also
sought a longer working day and the power to replace nationwide
contracts with local agreements. The government of Prime Minister
Stanley Baldwin, whose Tories had been brought to power by a red
scare in 1924, refused to sustain the miners' wages through subsidies
to the coal industry. When talks between the government and the
Trades Union Congress broke down, the TUC called for a national
strike in support of the beleaguered miners. More than 3 million
workers struck for nine days before retreating; the miners suffered
utter defeat and were eventually forced to accept the coal industry's
conditions.1
Williams explored his own relation to these events, and to the
continuing importance of the strike in his own life, in his 1962 novel,
Border Country. He later told an interviewer, "The chapter which
describes the Strike is very close to the facts."2 The autobiographical
novel weaves together two stories. Matthew Price, historian and aca-
demic, has returned to his family's village in Wales at the time of his
father's stroke. In the other, flashed-back strand of the story, the life
story of the father, Harry Price, is told in the context of family and
community life.
In 1926 Harry Price is a signalman in Gynmawr along with two
other men, Morgan Rosser and Jack Merideth. Instructions come
from the union to begin a work stoppage on Tuesday morning. Mor-

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 Raymond Williams and Marxism 241

gan is the local secretary of the railwaymen's union and a dedicated

socialist who sees in a general strike a weapon against the capitalist
order. '"We're saying we're the country,'" he tells Harry. "'We're the
power, we the working class are defying the bosses' government,
going to build our own social system.' "3
Harry not only resists this view but warns Morgan that it will
only backfire in trying to enlist Merideth in the strike. And indeed
Merideth does refuse to strike. His is the last shift before the stop-
page, and he refuses to sign out until another man comes on. He re-
fuses to shut down the signal box. All three signalmen and their
stationmaster, Tom Rees, are in the box that Tuesday morning,
stalemated so long as Merideth does not sign out. Finally, Rees tells
Merideth he will take over himself. It seems to be the act of a com-
pany man taking over his striking subordinate's duties, but as soon
as Merideth signs out, Rees himself initiates the strike by closing the
box.
By dramatizing the divergent opinions and motives of the three
signalmen, Williams attempts to ground his story in their specific ex-
periences of community and work. The men never "represent" ide-
ologies. Harry is not motivated by any of the larger aims, but by his
sense of allegiance: '"I'll stand by the miners, if it comes to it.'"
The anticipation of a long strike throws him headlong into efforts
to provide for his family. He is desperate to avoid debt. He resolves
to pay the rent with a pound from his strike pay and then replenish
that with the advance he hopes to get on his monthly one-pound
payment as groundskeeper of the village's bowling green. His other
savings he had recently spent "on a new honey extractor and a sea-
son's supply of jars." How precarious the family's finances might be-
come, how the strike threatens to strain the villagers' reliable rela-
tionships with one another, how sullen Harry becomes under all the
stresses he bears but refuses to express—all this Williams portrays
through a series of small events that occur during the nine days of
the strike.
Complicating the texture of this essentially naturalistic narrative is
the mixing in of the young son's perspective. His knowledge of the
events is sharply limited because of his age, and he is shown pursu-
ing his normal activities with friends, school, and church. His moral
experience, on the other hand, is somehow caught up in the crisis of

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242 John Brenkman

the strike. Indeed, the specific actions Williams recounts involve

guilty actions: a misdeed and a false accusation.
After receiving a book for his part in a church school program,
Will (as Matthew was called in childhood) hurls the book into a
stream in plain sight of the congregation. His father retrieves it, and
the family pass by the gathering of churchgoers, including their
landlady, and walk home. The father says not a word until they
reach the cottage, and then tells his wife, referring apparently to the
humiliations of the community's gaze, '"He's got his punishment.'"
What Will does not witness is his father's encounter the next day
with the landlady, when Harry brings her the rent and apologizes
for his son's behavior:
Mrs Hybart put down the iron, and went across to the fire, "Well,
they always say, boy. Like father like son."
"I don't know what you mean."
"The father goes on strike, the boy throws the book away."
"That's altogether different. I'm not apologizing for the strike."
"Well you ought to. Such daftness."

Having registered her opinion on the strike, Mrs. Hybart then per-
plexes Harry by refusing to take the rent. "'When it's all over, boy,
you can pay me then.'" Her parting words—'"Forget this old strike.'"—
reiterate her disapproval. Harry, as though declaring his intention to
keep up his commitment to her and to the strike, retorts, '"I shan't
forget anything.'"
The pound Harry intended for the rent figures in Will's other
episode as well, which happened the day before the book-hurling
episode. Just after Harry had calculated how he would use his strike
pay for the rent and replenish it with his earnings from mowing, he
learns that Will has lost the one-pound note a neighbor had given
him to buy her groceries. With, as always, determined silence, Harry
looks for the money without success, and then takes the family's
rent money down to the store, buys the groceries, and delivers them
and the change to the neighbor. It turns out, however, that the
neighbor had never in fact put the money in the pouch she gave
Will. He had been falsely accused of losing it. The scene's denoue-
ment includes father, mother, and son:
"I'm sorry. Honestly, I'm sorry," Harry said, and bent forward so that
his head touched the boy's shoulder.

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 Raymond Williams and Marxism 243

"Not for you to be sorry, Dada," Will said but pushed the head
away.
Ellen came in behind them, quietly.
"I got the pound, Harry. And the twopence she made me bring, for
Will's sweets."
"I don't want her old twopence," Will shouted
"Leave it all," Harry said, sharply, and got up. "I'll hear no more
about it. Now get the lamp lit, and we'll have some food."
Ellen, suddenly quiet, obeyed.

What began with the accusing father's regret ends with the hus-
band's irritated commands. Harry's money worries toss him from pa-
ternal remorse to male authoritarianism. He is caught in the panic of
his fear of debt in the midst of the community's ethic of mutual
obligation. At the same time, he makes displays of authority to salve
his wounded sense of his ability to provide.
While these typical pathologies of working-class men in crisis are
rendered crisply as well as sympathetically, Williams's portrayal of
Will's moral experience is more complex. What connects the false
accusation and the misdeed, the missing money and the damaged
book? I think the key lies in how much happens out of Will's
earshot. He does not hear Mrs. Hybart compare him to his father. Yet
it is by means of this identification of the son with the father on the
basis of their misdeeds that the narrative creates a moral reverbera-
tion between the childhood memory and the historical record. The
child's experience becomes implicated in historical events. In the
other episode, the moral resonance lies in the fact that the son is ac-
cused of losing money just at the time of the family's greatest need.
His negligence not only adds to the father's worries but also intensi-
fies his sense of failure. By the same token, the son's guiltiness is it-
self very like the father's fear of failing in his responsibilities, and
the falseness of the accusations ends up resembling the unjustified
scorn the striking father has encountered from the schoolteacher
and the landlady. Once again father and son are reflected in one an-
other. Yet all these implications, too, lie just beyond Will's conscious-
ness, since he is not privy to the difficult calculations his father was
making at the very moment he himself supposedly lost the money.
The complex tie between the son's experience and the father's re-
sides, therefore, in the connections the writer makes, not in those
Will could have directly felt. The moral tropes that decisively con-

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244 John Brenkman

nect the son's experience to the father's have been constructed in

the process of writing. They have been, to use a phrase from Wil-
liams's own critical lexicon, actively composed. If the novel is read
naturalistically, such constructions are a kind of allegorical overlay.
If it is read autobiographically, however, these fabricated parallels
between father and son create, retrospectively, the son's moral tie to
the father's political decision.4
The trope that makes the son mirror the father also fashions
Williams's own relation to 1926. It links the writer and the story, and
in turn links past and present in the shape of a moral commitment
to the politics of the General Strike. Williams takes on a responsibil-
ity to keep faith with the strikers in his own political-intellectual ac-
tivities, just as he continually pays homage to family and village.
When he delivers a commemorative lecture on the fiftieth anniver-
sary of the strike, he barely even alludes to the strike's causes and
outcomes. Looking past the strike's failure, he instead stresses the po-
litical learning processes it unleashed in the consciousness of ordi-
nary workers. From this perspective, what happened in the Welsh
village where his father was a railway signalman becomes a cru-
cially typical rather than peripheral event, the key to a continuing
heritage rather than an isolated moment lost in the past.

Heritage of Revolt/Mythology of Revolution

Williams knew in his bones how important it is to keep faith with

actual moments of rebellion, with histories of resistance and revolt.
Such historical moments are filled with meanings without which
our own search for social justice would be lost. The messages they
send forth, however, are seldom obvious. Forty or fifty years later,
what should be the political form of fidelity to the General Strike?
Williams felt that question to be so urgent and so difficult that he
had to write a novel to begin working it through. And he continued
to work it through in each new political context he faced. Keeping
faith requires a recurrent struggle with the meaning of the past as
well as the present.
An ambivalence runs through Williams's responses to the reso-
nance between 1926 and contemporary situations and problems. On
the one hand, he draws from the General Strike the insight that peo-

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 Raymond Williams and Marxism 245

pie's politicization and their readiness to govern themselves follow

the arc of their everyday relationships and understandings. He car-
ries this insight into his criticism and teaching. It informs his whole
commitment to the democratization of culture. On the other hand,
Williams also falls back on a mythology of revolution to interpret
the General Strike, casting its brief flowering of direct popular
power as a prefiguration of socialism. This interpretation, I will
argue, distorts his political reflections on democratic and revolution-
ary traditions.
Paradoxical as it sounds, his fidelity to the General Strike radical-
izes his commitment to the democratization of culture even as it
confuses his political understanding of democracy and revolution.
First, the problem of Williams's political reflection on democracy
and then, in the next section, his contribution to the democratization
of culture.
Williams starts out with a cogent account of the impact of the
General Strike on the railwaymen, whom he considers genuinely in-
dustrial workers even though they were scattered throughout the
country and lived in villages and on farms. Their participation in the
strike, he argues, led them to see themselves as a force within soci-
ety as a whole
The part of the history that most needs emphasis, and that was actu-
ally very evident in that country station and in thousands of other
places up and down the country, was the growth of consciousness
during that action itself. What began with relative formality, within a
representative dimension, became, in its experience, the confidence,
the vigour, the practical self-reliance, of which there is so much local
evidence; and this was not just the spirit of a fight; it was the steady
and remarkable self-realization of the capacity of a class, in its own
sufficient social relations and in its potentially positive social and eco-
nomic power.5

This legacy of class consciousness was still palpable to Williams in

1977. A few months after his lecture at the National Union of
Mineworkers' anniversary conference at Pontypridd, he wistfully
recalled how at that commemorative event "it seemed incredible
that there had not been socialism in Britain for fifty years."6
In his writings between 1966 and 1977, Williams tends to mythify
the leap in consciousness experienced by his father and the other
striking workers of 1926. He wants the workers' intensified sense of

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246 John Brenkman

their power within society to translate, more or less directly, into a

vision of a socialist future. Accordingly, the striking railwaymen's
self-reliance is made to prefigure—and prepare—what Williams con-
sidered the key to socialism: "the direct exercise of popular power."7
So what is wrong with this resoundingly democratic slogan? As-
suredly, a general strike is a challenge to capitalist enterprises and to
the government that supports them. There is strong evidence that
when British workers confronted the government as an antagonist
in 1926, they saw themselves as a class and glimpsed how they
might shape the nation. And indeed the concerted collective action
that workers undertake in a general strike can prefigure radically
widened and deepened participation in political institutions.
The direct exercise of popular power is short-lived, however,
whether it succeeds in its immediate goals or not. Direct popular
power cannot establish, let alone instantiate, the forms of democra-
tic participation. It can create the space for new democratic institu-
tions, and it can bring new participants into the political sphere. But
"direct popular power" cannot itself be institutionalized. Increased
popular participation requires increases in the mediations, the com-
plexity, the diversity of various decision-making bodies composed
of different constituencies, driven by different needs and interests,
and probably guided by varying principles and values. Democracy
has to guarantee, even foster, plurality.
Williams was too enamored of the moment of class unity briefly
embodied in the General Strike. It became the benchmark for his un-
derstanding of socialist democracy, especially in Politics and Letters
and Keywords and even in the political essays from the 1980s col-
lected in Resources of Hope. He does not fully appreciate the coun-
tervailing need for democratic institutions to fracture and diversify
power. The solidarity of embattled workers and the bonds of rural
communities so dominate Williams's image of socialism that he one-
sidedly privileges the goal of social unity. Neither individual rights
nor the plurality of social life finds an adequate place in his concep-
tion of socialist democracy.
The undervaluation of plurality and right is compounded by Wil-
liams's antipathy to the electoral process in Western democracies.
His attitude congealed in the aftermath of his break with the Labour
Party in 1966. Labour had won a hundred-seat majority in Parliament
but proceeded to chart a conservative course. Prime Minister Harold

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 Raymond Williams and Marxism 247

Wilson set out to break a seamen's strike and shortly afterward re-
sponded to a currency crisis by devaluing the pound sterling and
cutting social programs. These events finalized Williams's sense that
"the Labour Party was no longer just an inadequate agency for so
cialism, it was now an active collaborator in the process of repro-
ducing capitalist society."8
Williams joined with E. P. Thompson and Stuart Hall to write the
May-Day Manifesto in 1967-68. Under its aegis they helped form a
national commission of leftist groups. "There was real unity," Wil-
liams recalled in his 1976 interviews, "against the Labour govern-
ment's trade union legislation, against the emergence of Powellism,
against the Vietnamese war." But in 1970 the group split four ways
and collapsed in response to upcoming national elections. Williams
belonged to a group that wanted to run Left Alliance candidates, an
alternative that Left Labourites, the Communist Party, and other
groups participating in the commission found unacceptable.
The bitterness Williams still felt six years later over the commis-
sion's demise expressed itself in a vituperation against elections:
It never reassembled. A movement which had managed to sustain a
significant amount of left unity disintegrated over the electoral
process—over whether it was permissible to make electoral interven-
tions to the left of the Labour Party. A strategy of common activity
could survive anything except an election?

The blame is misplaced, however much the scheduling of elections

can be a tactic to blunt opposition. The more salient issue is that the
Manifesto commission was not yet ready to act in concert in a crisis
that tested the various groups' loyalty to the ideologies, programs,
and allegiances they had brought with them in the first place. Time
never stands still politically, and new political identities always have
to ripen in unpredictable weather. There is nothing unique about
the electoral process's ability to nip political plans in the bud. Fluctu-
ations in the economy, public opinion, or war can just as unexpect-
edly deplete or fuel an incipient process of political organization.
Williams's response stems, I believe, from his anger at Labour's be-
trayal of the legacy of 1926 in 1966. The party of our fathers had sold
out the past. It had broken faith with the political traditions that led
back to the General Strike. What, then, did it now mean to keep faith

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248 John Brenkman

in a context where no organization could legitimately claim to be

the instrument of workers or the site of their unity?
Deeply troubled by this question, Williams responded with his in-
terpretation of the General Strike as a prefiguration of revolution
and socialism. He also began to revise his important concept of the
long revolution—by which he had meant that social transformation
was never a punctual event but a protracted process of change
through many-layered social relationships and feelings. He dissoci-
ated the long revolution from electoral politics altogether. And, fi-
nally, he moved considerably closer to a kind of rejectionist critique
of liberal democratic values.
The new critique of liberal democracy offers itself as a correction
to the assumptions behind The Long Revolution, published in 1961.
"In The Long Revolution, I did start to develop a distinction between
representative and what I called participatory democracy," he says
in reply to a fairly aggressive question from New Left Review about
the difference between "bourgeois democracy" and "socialist democ-
racy." "However, I certainly had not at that time developed a full cri-
tique of the notion of representation, which it now seems to me in
its common ideological form is fundamentally hostile to democracy.
I think the distinction between representation and popular power
has to be now put very sharply."10
The opposition between mere representative democracy (equat-
ed with electoral politics) and genuine popular power (equated
with the General Strike) thematizes, in theoretical terms, the rupture
between 1966 and 1926. Williams's important discussion of "democ-
racy" in Keywords is flawed precisely to the extent that it employs
this theoretical opposition. He construes a polarity in the modern
meaning of democracy between socialist and liberal alternatives:
In the socialist tradition, democracy continued to mean popular
power, a state in which the interests of the majority of the people were
paramount and in which these interests were practically exercised and
controlled by the majority. In the liberal tradition, democracy meant
open election of representatives and certain conditions (democratic
rights, such as free speech) which maintained the openness of elec-
tion and political argument. These two conceptions, in their extremes,
now meet each other as enemies.11

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 Raymond Williams and Marxism 249

This antagonism at the extremes of meaning seems to refer to the

cold war confrontation between NATO and the Soviet bloc, at the
level of their political systems and of their legitimating rhetorics:
If the predominant criterion is popular power in the popular interest,
other criteria are often taken as secondary (as in the People's Democ-
racies) and their emphasis is specialized to "capitalist democracy" or
"bourgeois democracy." If the predominant criteria are elections and
free speech, other criteria are seen as secondary or are rejected.

The sense of symmetry obfuscates an important difference. The

Western democracies actually have elections and various guarantees
of free speech, but the regimes of the Soviet Union and Eastern Eu-
rope (the "people's democracies") in the 1970s were in no way ad-
vancing or institutionalizing "popular power in the popular interest."
By failing to account for the specific cynicism and emptiness of So-
viet rhetoric or to distinguish its duplicities from those of Western
cold war rhetoric, Williams created the impression that the tension
between the liberal and socialist understandings of democracy was
as stalemated as the cold war itself.
The semantics of extremes grossly oversimplifies the liberal tradi-
tion. Western denunciations of the Soviet system in the name of
freedom, democracy, or rights have run a complex gamut from de-
monization to engaged critique. Hannah Arendt, Claude Lefort, and
George Konrad cannot be thrown in with the Richard Nixon of the
1950s or the Ronald Reagan of the 1980s.
When Williams turns to spell out what criteria of democracy are
subordinated or rejected in the liberal tradition (in symmetry with
Soviet denunciations of "bourgeois democracy"), he skips the intrica-
cies of anti-Soviet discourse altogether. Instead, he portrays the lib-
eral tradition quite narrowly in its Tory guise as a repressive force
against British labor:
If the predominant criteria are elections and free speech, other criteria
are seen as secondary or are rejected; an attempt to exercise popular
power in the general interest, for example by a General Strike, is de-
scribed as anti-democratic, since democracy has already been as-
sured by other means; to claim economic EQUALITY . . . as the
essence of democracy is seen as leading to "chaos" or to totalitarian
democracy or government by trade unions.

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250 John Brenkman

The polarization of Toryism and the working class within Great

Britain is thus made parallel to the cold war polarization of West and
East, and both are then said to embody the fate of the modern liberal
and socialist meanings of "democracy." What gets completely lost is
the fact that the liberal and socialist traditions have themselves de-
veloped complex, ambiguous understandings of democracy.
The semantic promiscuity of "democracy" bothers Williams. Every-
body uses it. "Democracy was," he writes, "until the 19th century a
strongly unfavourable term, and it is only since the late 19th and
early 20th century that a majority of political parties have united in
declaring their belief in it."12 Faced with the many hypocritical and
propagandistic uses of the term, Williams concludes with a strange
lament that harks back to a supposedly simpler time when "democ-
racy" could have been appropriated with a cleaner, unambiguously
oppositional meaning since it was mostly used negatively by ruling
classes to express their contempt for the very idea that the multi-
tude of poor might rule: "It would sometimes be easier to believe in
democracy, or stand for it," Williams writes, "if the 19th-century
change had not happened and it were still an unfavourable or fac-
tional term. But that history has occurred, and the range of contem-
porary sense is its confused and still active record."13
"Its confused and still active record"—Williams has painted himself
into this corner. For the idea that socialism stands for an unequivocal
sense of democracy is an illusory effect of his polarization of the lib-
eral and socialist traditions. As he otherwise demonstrates so power-
fully in Keywords, lexical problems are political problems. And the
difficulties of meshing socialism and democracy are profound. They
do not arise because liberals have misappropriated the term democ-
racy. Socialism has tremendous antidemocratic potential that cannot
be dispelled by appeals to egalitarianism. This antidemocratic poten-
tial is just as intrinsic to socialism as it is to capitalism, and just as dan-
gerous and damaging.
I reread Williams's remarks on the Chinese Cultural Revolution
with sorrow:
It is an indispensable condition of socialist democracy that the division
of labour should be challenged by regular participation of everyone in
ordinary labour. The fact that the Chinese did not fully put it into
practice or that certain people were exempted from it doesn't change
the fundamental principle at all. That principle has never been so

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 Raymond Williams and Marxism 251

clearly and powerfully enunciated as in the Cultural Revolution. I do

not think that anyone should manage or administer any form of
labour without the knowledge that they themselves will perform it, as
well as, preferably, having come from it. When I heard pathetic stories
about professors being taken from their libraries and laboratories and
sent to help bring in the harvest I felt totally on the side of the revolu-
tionaries.14

These remarks are all the more striking because they come in a pas-
sage of the New Left Review interviews where Williams had just
warned about the capacity of Western leftists to display more polit-
ical passion about distant or long past struggles than about their
own: "A particular kind of political alienation can occur when peo-
ple opt for revolutionary processes which have happened else-
where, coming alive more when they are relating to those than
when they are engaging with the drabness of their own situation."15
In the next breath he glorifies the Chinese Cultural Revolution as
though it was pointing the way through the thorny problem of
squaring freedom and equality at the level of the division of labor.
What reveals a more poignant "political alienation" than a Western
intellectual dubbing the Cultural Revolution an exemplar of social-
ist democracy''!
And yet Williams's attitude was widely shared in the mid-1970s. I
made Mao's Four Essays on Philosophy, especially "On Contradic-
tion," a central text in the first seminar I taught on theory in 1975,
buoyed by the Tel Quel project and Althusser's For Marx and Lenin
and Philosophy. In the immediate wake of the 1960s, "cultural revo-
lution" seemed to name a generalized set of processes transforming
societies worldwide. Our hopes for radical political transformation
in the West had been dashed, and yet we had an ongoing experi-
ence of significant transformations in everyday life and in culture.
Much of the impetus for the initiatives in cultural theory in the mid-
1970s was a desire to consolidate the gains and redeem the losses of
the 1960s through a concept and practice of cultural revolution.
Many of us too easily lost our moral-political bearings in this con-
text regarding the People's Republic. Ignorance of what was really
going on found a convenient alibi in the complexity of events and
in the Western supposition of Chinese inscrutability. The romance
of revolution effortlessly transformed the Great Proletarian Cultural
Revolution into a symbol of radical political renewal. The Red

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252 John Brenkman

Guards through whom the Chinese leadership wielded power be-

came an icon of the European and American student movements as
their own political potential was dissipating.
There is a haunting irony in the fact that a student movement in
the West could symbolize its highest aspirations in the repression of
intellectuals and the programming of young people's thought in
China. As the New Left Review interviewer put it in a pointed re-
buke of Williams's comment, "It is far more important in China
today that everybody should have equal access to political informa-
tion than that professors should bring in the harvest."

Against Distinction

I want to turn now to the alternative trend in "Williams's fidelity to

the General Strike of 1926. He saw that the whole process that al-
tered the strikers' consciousness of themselves and their society was
a development from, not a break with, their everyday experiences,
relationships, and forms of communication. Culture was a resource
for their critical awareness of society and their vision of a fuller par-
ticipation in its institutions.
Williams kept faith with this insight in the whole project of his lit-
erary and cultural criticism, embodying it in a commitment to the
democratization of culture quite unparalleled in the Marxist tradi-
tion or in contemporary theory more generally. In the topics and
methods of his criticism he sought out paths to demonstrate how
the production of culture is the result of the accumulated learning,
coordinated efforts, and shared understandings of human beings in
their social relationships.
He experimented with concepts like "structure of feeling" to ex-
plain how even the most innovative moments in literary history are
evidence of some emergent set of social perceptions, dispositions, or
attitudes shared by a group. He was seeking an alternative to the
concept of ideology, which, since Marx, was laden with the assump-
tion that culture is merely a distorted consciousness of real social
practices. He increasingly distanced himself from Marxism. By the
time he wrote Marxism and Literature he was systematically de-
taching his own cultural and literary criticism from the concept of
ideology.

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 Raymond Williams and Marxism 253

He had gravitated much closer to the sense of culture introduced

by the early Marx and then abandoned, namely, the notion that cul-
ture is a set of material-social practices that are not categorically dif-
ferent from the material-social practices typically designated as
"economy" or "material production." This notion runs directly
counter to the basic paradigm of Marxist cultural theory. Marxism
categorically separates "society" and "culture," whether the two
terms are then conceptualized as base and superstructure or mate-
rial reality and consciousness or social relations and representation
or the economy and the symbolic. Williams shows how the key
models of Marxist cultural and literary interpretation—reflection,
mediation, typification, homology, correspondence—remained in
thrall to the base-superstructure model at the heart of Marx's own
theory of ideology.16
Williams rejects the idea that social classes in capitalist society
have radically distinct or separate cultures (bourgeois culture, prole-
tarian culture). The developed forms of the modern public sphere,
citizenship, and education leave no social group utterly insulated
from the dominant culture. At the same time, Williams rejects the
notion that the dominant culture itself is merely imposed on subor-
dinate groups and classes. The dominant classes are not so singly the
authors of the culture, and the subordinate classes are not so passive
as the model suggests. The prospect or the possibility of a common
culture has, in Williams's view, been irreversibly planted in the de-
velopment of modern Western societies.
The new forms of multiculturalism in contemporary society may
well have sounded the death knell for the ideal of a common cul-
ture, and they are undoubtedly posing a new challenge to the rela-
tion between plurality and equality. But to understand Williams it is
crucial to see how a common culture served as an ideal in his work.
He did not presuppose that there already was a common culture, let
alone that, as in F. R. Leavis, it could be comfortably located within
the habits and prejudices of a particular stratum of society.
It was primarily in the domain of educational reform that Wil-
liams advanced the idea of a common culture as a goal. He advo-
cated several measures together designed to radically reform educa-
tion. The scope of the minimum education provided every child in
elementary and secondary school should be expanded; tiered or
tracked systems of schooling up to the age of sixteen should be bro-

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254 John Brenkman

ken down; students should be trained in democratic deliberation

and decision through "their participation in the immediate govern-
ment of the institution they attend"; instead of being pressured to
quickly acquire specific credentials for an intended occupation or
profession, young people age sixteen to twenty-five should be given
a wide range of postsecondary education options and the freedom
to revise or experiment with their choices; some form of continuing
education should be guaranteed for all adults, and employers should
be required to make provision for it. With his call for "a public edu-
cation designed to express and create the values of an educated
democracy and a common culture," Williams turned the arrogant,
traditionalist, class-bound idea of a common culture into a radical,
open-ended vision of people's widening participation in changing
forms of literacy and learning.17
The same preoccupation informs the most basic premises of
Williams's literary criticism and theory. He approached literature as
part and parcel of the history of literacy. Literature/literacy—there is
no more basic ground, etymologically or empirically, on which to
understand literary history or the relation between literature and so-
ciety. Yet literacy long remained a marginal topic of literary studies.
Williams not only makes it central but also construes "literature"
more broadly than any modern critic. The phrase he chose to title
his most important collection of essays—"writing in society"—might
well serve as his definition of literature.
The connections between literature and literacy cut two ways.
Since reading and writing have to be taught in an organized manner,
"the introduction of writing and all its subsequent stages of develop-
ment are intrinsically new forms of social relationship." By the same
token, the social relationships that shape literacy shape writing: "It
was only at some point in the nineteenth century, very late in the
record of English literature, that the majority of English people could
read and write. It is impossible to imagine," Williams dryly asserts,
"that this had no effect on what was written and what was read."18
The social unevenness of literacy and learning not only shapes
what is written and read and how it is written, it also shapes how it
is read. As Pierre Bourdieu has shown, social classes in capitalist so-
ciety use their education and orchestrate the whole range of their
cultural preferences, from eating to musical taste, to differentiate
themselves from others, or to accept their differentiation from oth-

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 Raymond Williams and Marxism 255

ers, on the basis of distinction^ In the specific domain of literature,

confirming one's social distinction is ingrained in the motives and re-
wards of reading. The "social conditions of the education of read-
ers—and, more generally, of interpreters—affect the way they read
the texts or the documents they use."20
As a critic and teacher, Williams devised various strategies for cut-
ting against the grain of distinction in the reading of texts. He sought
to give the reinterpretation and appropriation of literary traditions a
contrary value. Reading should be a learning process in which the
potential leveling of social hierarchies becomes palpable; it should
sharpen the perception of both the elements of commonality and
the elements of domination—the civilization and the barbarism—in
cultural creations.
Always alert to the institutional context in which he worked,
Williams inflected his democratizing strategies with interestingly dif-
ferent emphases when it came to elite and nonelite education. Sev-
eral of his early books— Culture and Society, 1780-1950, Drama
from Ibsen to Eliot, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence—
grew directly out of his years of teaching adult education. His aim
was to enable adult working students to lay hold of the intellectual
and literary traditions that, in the complex history of social exclu-
sion and cultural distinction, had become the prevalent trends in cul-
tural criticism, drama, and the novel. Students were not being invited
to an exercise in abject appreciation. They were, rather, being pro-
vided with the competence and mastery needed to understand, on
their own terms, just those texts that the culture of distinction con-
tinually tried to put beyond their grasp.
A red thread running through these early books is the modern de-
bate over culture and society. His adult students were being invited
to see themselves as participants in that debate. "In speaking of a
common culture," Williams wrote, "one is asking, precisely for that
free, contributive and common process of participation in the cre-
ation of meanings and values, as I have tried to define it."21
Williams demystifies without denigrating the complexity and
learning accumulated in texts by Dickens or Ibsen or Eliot. His criti-
cism tends to describe forms by breaking down the various means
of expression or "composition" or construction the authors employ.
He tends to show how dramas and novels get made, but he roman-

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256 John Brenkman

ticizes neither genius nor craft. Nor does he cast the reader's deci-
pherments as heroic acts of unconcealing or demythologizing.
Rather, he tends to put the writer's process of artistic construction
and the reader's process of interpretive reconstruction more nearly
on the same footing. Reading and writing become the two sides of a
shared competence. Williams theorized this reciprocal relationship
in Marxism and Literature in terms of the sociality of language "It
is a socially shared and reciprocal activity, already embedded in ac-
tive relationships, within which every move is an activation of what
is already shared and reciprocal or may become so."22
Shared competence and reciprocal relationship do not imply un-
examined consensus. By foregrounding the continuing modern de-
bate over culture and society as well as the social relationships
within which literature is produced, Williams linked culture to criti-
cal reflection. He was readying readers to participate in those de-
bates and in the active making and remaking of culture.
An essay that reflects these pedagogic and critical values is the in-
troduction Williams wrote in 1969 to a volume of the Pelican Book
of English Prose. A sketch of the social origins and education of writ-
ers in English literary history alerts his readers to the role of the so-
cial divisions running through British culture:
It is still quite clear in Britain today that there is not only a marked in-
equality of representation in writers, as between different social
groups, with the majority of writing still coming from a highly orga-
nized middle class; but also, in relation to this, a definition of interest
which has to do with their quite common educational background,
which only a few share with the majority of their potential readers.23

The essay's accent falls on opening this majority's access to a litera-

ture not written for them. While society controls access to education
and participation in the public sphere, the resulting literature also
holds out the prospect of an experience that is not wholly bound by
these contours of social exclusion and hierarchy. Writing and read-
ing are a social transaction that can displace or realign the social rela-
tionships within which the writing was produced While "society de-
termines . . . the writing of literature," it is also the case that
the society is not complete, not fully and immediately present, until the
literature has been written, and that this literature, in prose as often as
any other form, can come through to stand as if on its own, with an in-

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 Raymond Williams and Marxism 257

trinsic and permanent importance, so that we can see the rest of our liv-
ing through it as well as it through the rest of our living.24

What can sound to more jaded postmodern ears like a simple faith
naively expressed is in fact Williams's significant and principled
stand for the idea that every literate citizen is but a few semesters
away from a capacity to engage literature amply and critically, and
to do so by bringing his or her own experience to the act of reading.
Williams held to a humanism in his understanding of textuality
and reading. It kept him at a distance from the antihumanism of the-
orists like Althusser, Foucault, and Derrida. Like the radical Puritans
of the seventeenth century and today's liberation theologists,
Williams believed the interpretation of even the most complex and
sacred texts is within everyone's reach. To put it in their grasp is the
responsibility of writers and teachers in struggles within all the in-
stitutions and discourses of culture.
A democratizing appropriation, making the culture one's own, is
also necessarily fraught with ambivalence. It needs to be an articu-
late ambivalence. A model is Williams's own The Country and the
City. His project is to connect English literature's complex history of
nature poetry, pastorals, and country settings to the crushing history
of feudal and capitalist exploitations of the land and the landless.
Those exploitations of the past are still visible in the beautiful land-
scapes and architecture of the English countryside. Visible, but not
immediately recognized. The history of social relationships is easily
effaced from consciousness even as it fills the whole visual field of
consciousness. Monuments of civilization are also monuments of
barbarism. It is the task of criticism then to appropriate and protest
at the same time.
Williams, the Welsh railway signalman's son, analyzes country-
house poems and the place of the country estate in British fiction
through a fiercely personal assessment of English mansions:
Some of them had been there for centuries, visible triumphs over the
ruin and labour of others. But the extraordinary phase of extension,
rebuilding and enlarging, which occurred in the eighteenth century,
represents a spectacular increase in the rate of exploitation: a good
deal of it, of course, the profit of trade and of colonial exploitation;
much of it, however, the higher surplus value of a new and more effi-
cient mode of production. It is fashionable to admire these extraordi-

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258 John Brenkman

narily numerous houses: the extended manors, the neo-classical man-

sions, that lie so close to hand in rural Britain. People still pass from vil-
lage to village, guidebook in hand, to see the next and yet the next ex-
ample, to look at the stones and the furniture. But stand at any point
and look at that land. Look at what those fields, those streams, those
woods even today produce. Think it through as labour and see how
long and systematic the exploitation and seizure must have been, to
rear that many houses, on that scale. See by contrast what any ancient
isolated farm, in uncounted generations of labour, has managed to be-
come, by the efforts of any single real family, however prolonged.
And then turn and look at what these other "families," these systematic
owners, have accumulated and arrogantly declared. It isn't only that
you know, looking at the land and then at the house, how much rob-
bery and fraud there must have been, for so long to produce that de-
gree of disparity, the barbarous disproportion of scale. The working
farms and cottages are so small beside them: what men really raise, by
their own efforts or by such portion as is left to them, in the ordinary
scale of human achievement. What these "great" houses do is to break
the scale, by an act of will corresponding to their real and systematic
exploitation of others. For look at the sites, the facades, the defining
avenues and walls, the great iron gates and the guardian lodges. These
were chosen for more than the effect from the inside out; where so
many admirers, too many of them writers, have stood and shared the
view, finding its prospect delightful. They were chosen, also, you now
see, for the other effect, from the outside looking in: a visible stamping
of power, of displayed wealth and command a social disproportion
which was meant to impress and overawe.25

The physicality of the class society persists down into the present
not only in the presence of the country houses but also in the mod-
ern reclamation of them. For every house turned to "some general
use, as a hospital or an agricultural college" others have become "the
corporation country-house, the industrial seat, the ruling-class
school."
The New Left Review editors would later scold Williams for
"eclips[ing] history seen as a cumulative development of forces of
production and division of labour, which in and through the very
forms of social stratification and exploitation has been responsible
for the growth of real human gains." Yes, yes, of course, he replied,
the country house or the cathedral was built as part of an earlier pe-
riod's perhaps inevitable form of creating wealth and developing
society. Nevertheless, he added:

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 Raymond Williams and Marxism 259

The nature of their power does not necessarily end, in the tidy way
the simplest kind of Marxism suggests, with its epoch. The cathedrals
are not just monuments to faith, the country houses are not just build-
ings of elegance. They are constantly presented as "our heritage," in-
ducing a particular way of seeing and relating to the world, which
must be critically registered along with our acknowledgement of their
value.26

The struggle over what our heritage shall be, and how it will be
used, is the critic and teacher's daily battleground The work that
flowed most directly from the context of adult education stressed
the mastery of forms and the learning of history. Williams's empha-
sis changes with his appointment to Cambridge in the mid-1960s.
New problematics arise, in particular, over how to apply the aes-
thetic and intellectual understanding of the past to the present. In
short, what are the alternatives to "distinction" in the appropriation
of culture within elite education?
Williams tells a marvelous, self-mocking anecdote about how he
came to write Modern Tragedy, a book the editors of New Left Re-
view among others consider his "most militant text." His first lectures
at Cambridge were to be a course on modern tragedy. To avoid hav-
ing to prepare, he decided to rip off and recycle his 1952 book,
Drama from Ibsen to Eliot:
But in the process of giving the lectures, with a particular awareness
now of the more general debate over the nature of tragedy, they be-
came transformed. It was as if I went into the lecture room with the
text of a chapter from Drama from Ibsen to Eliot in front of me, and
came out with the text of a chapter from Modern Tragedy. The same
authors are discussed in the two books, the same themes developed,
the same quotations used—which is the key point of continuity.

Faced with students for whom "the idea of revolution had—if not
the impact of the late sixties—already a significant resonance," Wil-
liams transformed a textbook on dialogue and staging into a treatise
on tragedy and revolution! What had been practical criticism for
workers and adult students became ideology critique for radicalized
elite students. "It is a curious fact," he muses, "that I was being a rela-
tively sound academic before I was in academia. Once I was in it—. I
think the connection isn't accidental."27
The chapter entitled "Tragedy and Revolution," written in 1965, is

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260 John Brenkman

one of Williams's most searching essays. He marshals a whole read-

ing of tragic drama and of the relevant traditions of the idea of
tragedy and then brings that cultural heritage to bear on the under-
standing of contemporary history. The use of heritage is for critical
reflection on the present. In inaugurating his Cambridge teaching
with this project, Williams challenged the culture of distinction and
turned a kind of knowledge acquired by social privilege to a new
task.
In substance the essay works out a tragic-revolutionary view of
modern history. On the one hand, Williams insists on the tragic char-
acter of modern political and social transformation. On the other
hand, he affirms his commitment to the transformation of capitalist
society. He holds a decidedly humanistic and moral perspective on
societies. A society is in need of revolution to the extent that "the in-
corporation of all its people, as whole human beings, is in practice
impossible without a change in its fundamental form of relation-
ships." The source of the society's disorder, the violence already
wound into its institutions and structures, is the product of social di-
vision and exclusion. In such a society, the everyday acquiescence to
disorder is called order:
We expect men brutally exploited and intolerably poor to rest and be
patient in their misery, because if they act to end their condition it will
involve the rest of us, and threaten our convenience or our lives. . . .
We have identified war and revolution as tragic dangers, when the
real tragic danger, underlying war and revolution, is a disorder which
we continually re-enact.

For Williams, the forms of tragic drama illuminate the nature of

modern social transformation: "The tragic action, in its deepest sense,
is not the confirmation of disorder, but its experience, its compre-
hension and its resolution."28
In a strategy strikingly different from the building of cultural
competence in adult education, Williams's Cambridge lectures on
tragedy mobilize the intellectual and aesthetic resources of Western
tragic drama for a pointedly oppositional interpretation of history
and society. He sought to displace the culture of distinction with a
tragic-revolutionary appropriation of the cultural heritage.
There are, then, perhaps three registers of Williams's criticism. In
Modern Tragedy, the knowledge of a tradition is turned from a

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 Raymond Williams and Marxism 261

badge of social distinction into an instrument of political reflection.

Culture and Society or "Notes on English Prose," in contrast, recon-
structs the intellectual and aesthetic skills of reading, imparting to
new readers a capacity to experiment with active cultural-political
interpretation, to join the debate on culture and society in the very
act of appropriating traditions into their own life world. And, finally,
in a third register, The Country and the City asks how a society's
forms of wealth and power are embodied in its structures of feeling
and its modes of expression; cultural forms, from poems to the cul-
tivated landscape, are found to be ambiguous ciphers of human
achievement and human violence.
These three registers of Williams's criticism are not united
methodologically. Each took shape in the context of particular insti-
tutions and practices. Each proceeds from a distinct assessment of
criticism's role in the public sphere. Moreover, as a critic, Williams
continually plunged into new empirical complexities before com-
pleting his theoretical clarifications. Nevertheless, his diverse pro-
jects share a common intent: to challenge the culture of distinction
by deepening and broadening the democratization of culture.

Heretical Empiricist

Williams was ultimately of two minds when it came to the meaning

of revolution and social transformation. Debating revolutionary the-
ory with New Left Review, he oscillates between a latter-day Leninist
vision of revolutionaries capturing state power and the contrary vi-
sion in which layers of socialist transformations have to be accom-
plished before the state can be loosed from the imperatives of capi-
tal. First
I have no doubt that the short revolution, to use that phrase, also has
to occur. I wouldn't at all dissent from the traditional notions of the vi-
olent capture of state power.

And then:
So I am always uneasy about talk of short revolution when the prob-
lems of the run-up to it have not been fully appreciated I have found
that most of the images of the inherited tradition do not bear very
much on this complicated process of preparation and learning.29

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262 John Brenkman

The contradiction is glaring. The "images of the inherited tradition"

and the "traditional notions of the violent capture of state power"
are, after all, the exact same thing.
Despite the power and insight of the essay "Tragedy and Revolu-
tion," it is haunted by an unsolved problem. Resonant with Hegel's
idea of the "causality of fate," Williams postulates that the unjust so-
ciety is a torn whole. And, like Marx, he seems to imply that those
most oppressed or excluded by the disordered order of society are
driven to overthrow it. But it is just that Marxian assumption that
Williams in fact does not make. Nowhere in his work does he pro-
ject the proletariat as the historically necessary agent of revolution-
ary change. The moral imperative to change society is not objecti-
vated in any group. His temptation to this view, or, at least, his
failure to set it aside—"I see revolution as the inevitable working
through of a deep and tragic disorder"30—is what led him in the
decade that followed this essay to idealize the General Strike of 1926
and mythologize the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
The insights and the difficulties in Williams's idea of tragedy and
of revolution stem from the difficulty he had in interpreting the di-
rection of the workers movement in light of the Labour Party's inte-
gration into capitalism. The crisis form of that question burst upon
him in 1966. Social change revealed its tragic face. Henceforth the so-
cialist movement would have to encounter the Labour Party itself as
an antagonist. Long-standing solidarities would have to be broken in
any process of radical social change. This sharpened Williams's sense
of the disorder in contemporary society and the suffering exacted
by political struggle.
The revolutionary myth became tempting because it gave sym-
bolic shape to the sense of potential upheaval. And it returned the
events of 1926 into the present not only as a source of radical com-
mitment but also as an emblem of revolutionary social transforma-
tion. Williams's fidelity to the General Strike also, and at the same
time, intensified his commitment to the democratization of culture
and sharpened his sense that the resources of social transformation
reside in people's everyday practices, relationships, and obligations.
The long rather than the short revolution, the deep transformations
of the "run-up" rather than the violent seizure of power, pointed up
a process at once socialist and democratic.

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 Raymond Williams and Marxism 263

Williams never squared the two views. The ambivalences per-

sisted. In my view, his most significant contributions are those that
illuminated the democratization of culture. The Long Revolution
(1961) is, finally, the starting point of his best insight into the links
between socialism and democracy. The concept of long revolution
itself was meant to address modern Western capitalist societies. The
term signals that the transformation of capitalism into socialism
would require a deep, pervasive change in institutions and in the
very character of social relationships, from the impersonal relation-
ships through which the society's wealth is created and distributed
down to the personal relationships in which moral attitudes and
mutual obligations are enacted. In this respect, there can be no so-
cialism without revolution.
For the same reasons, however, it is a long revolution. The imper-
atives and values of capitalism organize layer upon layer of social
life. As a process of democratization, the long revolution has to
transform distributions of wealth, power, and decision through
these many layers, extending participation and inventing new forms
of participation. Williams believed, on the one hand, that this strug-
gle has been going on for decades in capitalist society through vari-
ous social reforms and in the structural changes in the public sphere
and education. On the other hand, capitalism vigorously defends it-
self, and its antidemocratic tendencies are never merely dormant.
Gains are not always permanent; reforms do not always combine to
create enduring social changes; innovations that might anchor so-
cialist institutions can be reabsorbed into capitalist ones.
Williams consistently refuses to denigrate such incorporated
gains, reforms, or innovations. They have not merely been "co-
opted." Incorporations cannot be judged wholesale, only in their par-
ticular contexts and effects. Incorporation is a descriptive rather
than an evaluative term in Williams's vocabulary. Because capitalist
society absorbs so many pressures for change, its institutions have to
be continually reassessed and diagnosed anew. They at once em-
body instruments for the survival of capitalism and fragments of po-
tential socialist institutions. Capitalist tool or revolutionary latency?
The evaluation of particular reforms and institutions cannot be fur-
nished through a theory; it always has to come from the open-ended
process of social criticism and political decision taking.

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264 John Brenkman

Williams was, to borrow Pier Paolo Pasoloni's phrase, a "heretical

empiricist." Reform-or-revolution has to be decided in struggles over
moral-political questions steeped in people's actual social relation-
ships, not from within the matrix of revolutionary theory. So, too,
cultural and literary interpretations belong to the moral and political
domain.
Where a deconstructive critic might relish discovering in a text
those nuances that seem to gather themselves into a dark yet play-
ful aporia; where an Althusserian might home in on those structures
of meaning that can at once be associated with a dominant ideology
and yet seem to crack the more tightly they cohere; or where a critic
inspired by Benjamin or Adorno might delight in the emergence of
a text's inner form at just the point where the resulting sense of aes-
thetic inevitability suddenly acquires the meaning of social proph-
ecy or negation—Williams's mind by contrast seems to have thrilled
to those moments in reading where it flashes upon you that this text
could only have been written, could only have come into being at
all, because of the forms of learning that had consolidated at that
point in history; because of some coordinated effort or shared pur-
pose on the part of a class, a movement, a class fraction or a forma-
tion; because of perceptions, feelings, values that belong to the
everyday life of some social group.
The capacity for such responses to literature was Williams's gift as
a critic, and it is his intellectual legacy to us. It is worth imagining
how to keep faith with it.
Yet like all paternal legacies, especially symbolic ones, the one
Williams bequeathed is burdened. He often shortchanged the liberal
traditions of individual right and failed to think through the impor-
tance of plurality in modern societies. His failure to grasp the rele-
vance of feminism or to really examine how racism and imperialism
have shaped British culture mars a project that was expressly de-
signed to open culture to a "free, contributive and common process
of participation."
The distorting contours of the public sphere are not carved out
along merely class lines. The whole history of women's writing un-
folds in the tortured development of the public sphere and educa-
tion that excluded women, channeled their learning, devalued their
forms of communication, and defined the very ideas and institu-

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 Raymond Williams and Marxism 265

tions of "public" and "private" in gender terms. Colonialism is in-

scribed in our literature just as indelibly as feudal and capitalist ex-
ploitation is inscribed on the English landscape; moreover, Britain's
centuries of destroying and controlling the literacy and learning of
Asians and Africans has unwittingly created the social conditions for
writing that has completely altered the meaning of "English" litera-
ture.
That these other histories and struggles are so central to the project
Williams defined and yet so absent from his work serves doubly to
criticize him and reaffirm the project itself. In the decade or more of
crisis that followed his break with the Labour Party in 1966, a time in
which the women's movement and immigration certainly brought
home the changing face of political struggle, Williams was not ready
to accept that the working class could no longer be the ground or ref-
erence point of socialist politics.
The working class, and not just the Labour Party, had become in-
corporated into the institutions of capitalism in unprecedented
ways. Williams could never have bombastically announced, as
Andre Gorz did, Farewell to the Working Class\ But Gorz's insights
would have sharpened his sense that the task of the democratiza-
tion of culture and the struggle for socialist institutions was pro-
ceeding through new social movements that certainly traversed but
could never unite the working class.
So much in Williams's work potentially speaks to just these new
hopes and needs for social transformation. Unlike Kureishi's disillu-
sioned journalist, Williams never gave the working class a mission.
He did not demand that they fulfill his dreams for society. He did
not limit the agency of the working class to their supposed revolu-
tionary agency. Indeed, it is not the unique fate of any social group
to be the agent of revolution. The long revolution does not have a
historically necessary subject. Unlike Lukacs, Williams did not await
this subject's (inevitable) awakening. And unlike Adorno, he did not
lament its (inevitable) passing. And unlike Althusser, he did not be-
lieve history is a process without a subject, the (inevitable) crisis of a
system. It is a process with subjects, a process of uncertain outcome
that will succeed in suffering the birth of a new society only if these
empirical, complex, contradictory "subjects"—a.k.a. people—reinvent

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266 John Brenkman

our governing forms of wealth, power, and sociality. It is, Williams

understood, a painfully (and inevitably) human task.

NOTES
I am extremely grateful to Carla Kaplan for her comments and suggestions.
1. See Margaret Morris, The General Strike (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), and
Patrick Renshaw, The General Strike (London: Eyre Methuen, 1975).
2. Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (London:
New Left Books, 1979), p. 27.
3. Raymond Williams, Border Country (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), p. 87. All
the quotations from the novel come from chapter four, pp. 85-137.
4. Williams discouraged readers from equating Harry Price with his own father: "Many
people have assumed that Harry Price, the signalman with his gardens, was a portrait of
my father; but this is not really so. I found that to get the real movement I had to divide
and contrast what I had seen in my father as conflicting impulses and modes. I had to
imagine another character, Morgan Rosser, the politician and dealer, who in his relation to
Harry Price could express and work through what I believed I had seen as an internal
conflict" (.The Country and the City [New York: Oxford University Press, 19731 p- 299). In
reading the novel autobiographically, it is not really a question of assuming that Harry
Price is an accurate "portrait" of Williams's father. What counts is Harry's relation to his
son Matthew; the autobiographical tenor of the novel comes from the identification of
Williams with Matthew. It is therefore the writer's relation to that father-son relation itself
that needs to be illuminated. Terry Eagleton, in what is a generally injudicious commen-
tary on Williams, raises a pertinent criticism of this splitting of the father figure on the
grounds that it syphons off from Harry Price the troubling or ambivalent values of the
rural community and thus idealizes that community by letting him stand as the "almost
wholly admirable representative of [its] best values"; see Criticism and Ideology: A Study
in Marxist Literary Theory (London: New Left Books, 1976), pp. 30-31.
5. Raymond Williams, "The Social Significance of 1926" (1977), in Resources of Hope:
Culture, Democracy, Socialism, ed. Robin Gable (London: Verso, 1989), p. 108.
6. Raymond Williams, "The Importance of Community" (1977), ibid., p. 119.
7. Williams, Politics and Letters, p. 426.
8. Ibid, p. 373.
9. Ibid, p. 375. Italics added.
10. Ibid, p. 415.
11. Raymond Williams, Keywords A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New
York Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 96.
12. Ibid, p. 94.
13. Ibid, pp. 97-98.
14. Williams, Politics and Letters, p. 404.
15. Ibid, p. 403.
16. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press,
1977), pp. 75-107.1 have commented on the relevance of Williams's critique and related it
to a submerged and abandoned tendency within Marx's thought in my Culture and
Domination (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 72-76.
17. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press,
1961), pp. 125-55.

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 Raymond Williams and Marxism 267

18. Raymond Williams, "Writing," in Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1984), p. 3-

19. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans.
Richard Nice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984).
20. Pierre Bourdieu, "Reading, Readers, the Literate, Literature," in Jn Other Words: Es-
says Towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Matthew Adamson (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 1990), p. 95.
21. Raymond Williams, "The Idea of a Common Culture" (1968), in Gable, ed, Resources
of Hope, p. 38.
22 Williams, Marxism and Literature, p. 167.
23. Raymond Williams, "Notes on English Prose: 1780-1950," in Writing in Society, p. 72
24. Ibid.
25. Williams, Country and the City, pp. 105-6. On this passage, see also Jonathan Arac,
Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1987), p. 278.
26. Williams, Politics and Letters, pp. 308-9.
27. Ibid, pp. 211-12.
28. Raymond Williams, Modern Tragedy (1966; rev. ed, London: Verso, 1979), pp. 76,
80-81, 83.
29. Williams, Politics and Letters, pp. 420, 422.
30. Williams, Modern Tragedy, p. 75.

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