UNIVERSIDAD AUTÓNOMA DE MADRID FACULTAD DE FILOSOFÍA Y LETRAS DEPARTAMENTO DE FILOLOGÍA INGLESA THE CULTURES OF POSSIBILITY POLITICS AND EMANCIPATION IN GEORGE ORWELL, E.P. THOMPSON AND RAYMOND WILLIAMS TESIS DOCTORAL ROBERTO DEL VALLE ALCALÁ DIRECTORA: DRA. MARÍA LOZANO MANTECÓN 2010 A mis padres. And to David Musselwhite , in memoriam. TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS……………………………………………………………v INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………...1 PART ONE GEORGE ORWELL: REVOLUTION AND REFORM…………………………….9 1. WIGAN PIER AND THE ROAD TO SOCIALISM .......................................... 10 2. IMAGINING THE REVOLUTION .................................................................... 30 3. SOCIALISM AND THE TOTALITARIAN ABYSS ………………………….77 PART TWO E.P. THOMPSON: HISTORY AND HUMANISM……………………………….102 1. COMMUNISM WITH A BRITISH FACE: POLITICS, HISTORY AND CULTURE ……………………………………………………………………. 103 2. THE MAKING OF ENGLISH SOCIALIST HUMANISM …………………. 129 3. HISTORY, UTOPIA AND THE LIMITS OF THEORY ……………………. 156 4. HUMANISM REVISITED: ANTINOMIANS AND ALIENS IN THOMPSON’S LATER WORK ……………………………………………... 180 PART THREE RAYMOND WILLIAMS: CULTURE AND COMMUNITY…………………… 201 1. AN ORDINARY PROCESS: THE POLITICS OF CULTURE ……………... 202 2. THE LONG REVOLUTION : HISTORY, COMMUNICATION AND CONFLICT …………………………………………………………………… 238 3. TOWARDS CULTURAL MATERIALISM …………………………………256 4. THE RETURN(S) OF COMMUNITY: CLASS, NATION, AND “THE DESIRE CALLED UTOPIA” ………………………………………………... 278 CONCLUSION………………………………………………………………………300 RESUMEN Y CONCLUSIONES EN ESPAÑOL…………………………………308 REFERENCE MATTER……………………………………………………………323 Acknowledgements My first debt of gratitude is, without a doubt, to my supervisor Dr María Lozano, for her unfailing support, extraordinary kindness and intellectual generosity. Without her invaluable help – not always delivered in the standard form of “supervision” – this project could not have been completed. Dr Maria Cristina Fumagalli, of the University of Essex, graciously took me on board for a research stay in the Autumn term of the 2009-2010 academic year. Her stimulus and encouragement were vital at a crucial stage in the writing of this thesis. The Literature, Film and Theatre Studies Department at Essex were kind enough to invite me to address one of their seminars in the month of December 2009. The feedback offered at this vibrant occasion was instrumental in helping me to shape a surer understanding of Orwell’s political project. My parents have supported me more than I can begin to register here. Que estas páginas sirvan de agradecimiento. Por esto y todo lo demás. Finally, Dr David Musselwhite, my friend and mentor, who first told me about Raymond Williams, took me to his beloved Welsh Valleys and on numerous other journeys of discovery, is the undisputed inspiration for so many cultural and political concerns which this project only begins to address. It saddens me more than I can say that he did not live to see it finished. These are the real grounds of hope. It is by working and living together, with some real place and common interest to identify with, and as free as may be from external ideological definitions, whether divisive or universalist, that real social identities are formed. Raymond Williams, Towards 2000 Ma conception de l’universel est celle d’un universel riche de tout le particulier, riche de tous les particuliers, approfondissement et coexistence de tous les particuliers. Aimé Césaire, Lettre à Maurice Thorez Introduction This dissertation is an attempt to compare three British projects of radical social imagination temporally inscribed between the critical economic and political conjuncture of the mid to late 1930s and the consolidation of Thatcherism in the 1980s. My principal aim is to reconstruct the connections and continuities of three differentiated political, historical and personal articulations of the concept “Socialism”, and to vindicate a common ascription to the anti-deterministic logic of alternatives and possibilities which ultimately singles all three projects out as “dissident”, “anti- authoritarian” and even “libertarian”. In each case, this task imposes a fundamental confrontation and analysis of the doctrinal contexts and broader political circumstances in which these authors are rooted. It also demands a basic problematisation of their canonical and generic areas of definition (as “literature”, “history”, “criticism”, “theory” etc.) in a conscious effort to dissolve the post hoc boundaries and epistemic categories which threaten to distort the precise contextual geometry of their interventions. This is therefore an interdisciplinary comparative assessment of Orwell, Thompson and Williams’ radical political programmes under the common terminological denominator of “Socialism”. As a result, the particular orientation of each author’s treatment is conditioned by this shared pursuit and necessarily leaves out (except when the contextual imperative requires otherwise) those aspects (fundamental, no doubt, to any exhaustive characterisation of their respective intellectual 1 contributions) which do not directly inform the individual voice and imaginary of an oppositional or alternative project of social organisation. Even within these limits, however, the survey may seem incomplete. Notable areas of silence can certainly be pointed up which no thematic or methodological criterion necessarily imposes. Thus, for example, one could mention the strategic importance of Orwell’s anti-imperialist ideas (first crystallised in his novel Burmese Days ), as they come to shape and define his more explicitly socialist outlook. Similarly, Williams’ writings on drama (and even his own, authored, plays), which are not considered here, both define and expand the range of his political references. A further silence may be detected in Williams’ ground- breaking work on the media (especially on television), as well as in his earliest intellectual productions (of the Forties and early Fifties). Likewise my discussion of Thompson leaves out his extended analyses – beyond The Making of the English Working Class and its related texts – of the eighteenth century. This is, in any case, a representative selection of moments, arguments and emphases within the respective “problem-spaces” of these authors. And it is my belief that the selectivity which they entail may nevertheless come across as integral to and consistent with the articulation of a unitary problematic. This unity is offered according to a tripartite organisation. I have selected three sets of binary labels which, however reductive (or overly indeterminate and hence sprawling) in semantic scope, summarise the thematic specificities of each author’s position. Needless to say, the programmatic – theoretical and even temperamental – emphases often overlap, suggesting a schematism which in no way exhausts the political imaginaries rehearsed by each of them. 2 Thus the first section, which deals with Orwell’s political evolution from the moment of his encounter with the dire “condition” of industrial capitalism in the North of England, through a concrete definition of his revolutionary socialist vision in Spain, to a final (and more tentative than often acknowledged) compromise with British social democracy, is headed by the signpost “Revolution and Reform”. The second section, devoted to E.P. Thompson in the context of Communist dissidence in Britain, opens under the banner of “History and Humanism”. Thus, while the stress appears to fall (as indeed it often does throughout the presentation) on Thompson’s interlacing of a particular epistemology of historical inquiry with the specific political aims of his “socialist humanist” revision of the Communist tradition, this does not detract from an obvious commitment to “revolutionary” change in a sense which connects with and extends (into the contexts of the 1950s and beyond) Orwell’s preoccupations with anti-authoritarian egalitarianism and socialist renewal. The third and final section deals with the prominent thematisation of “culture” within Williams’ oeuvre both as a crucial scientific object in its own right and as a projective articulation of a specifically social problematic within capitalism. For Williams, “community” is an operative concept which, despite ongoing problematisations and changes in critical status, appears to condense the main lines of development of a totalising vision of struggle and social transformation. In spite of the obvious evolution which his thinking undergoes over the three decades under examination (from around 1958 until his death in 1988), and despite the varying emphases subsequently accorded to his focal terms and concepts, the section preserves a nominal selectivity in its general thematisation of “Culture and Community”. 3 A conceptual force-field which almost inevitably imposes itself in any discussion of radical social imagination is that governed by the term “utopia”. Its multiple and often incompatible theorisations have nevertheless converged upon a substantial commitment to the “othering” possibilities inscribed in the imagination of interpersonal arrangements (whether these possibilities are of a narrative, philosophical or anthropological kind). A common feature of the definitions and projects found across the term’s intellectual history (from Thomas More to William Morris and from Karl Mannheim and Ernst Bloch to Fredric Jameson) is the ontological commitment to a radical disturbance of existing conditions and relations of power. Empirical history, however, especially