Page 66 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

BRITISH COMMUNIST MARXISM

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deceit”. The same cannot be said of Western socialist, realist writers
such as Upton Sinclair, Frank Hardy or, for that matter, Raymond
Williams. 25

British communist Marxism
During the 1930s, almost exactly contemporaneously with the early
development of the Scrutiny group, communist Marxism came to
exercise a considerable albeit temporary influence over significant
sections of the British literary intelligentsia. Key figures here included:
C.Day Lewis, W.H.Auden, Stephen Spender, Christopher Caudwell,
Edward Upward, Ralph Fox and Alick West. Communist Marxism
had inherited the base/superstructure formula from Marx and a strong
preference for literary “realism” from Engels. To these, it had added
an immediate diagnosis of contemporary capitalist society as crisis-
ridden and of contemporary bourgeois culture as decadent. And, in
the more specific case of British communism, all of this was compounded
by a quasi-Romantic sense of the social mission of the creative writer.
For socialist intellectuals, the communist experience came to represent
a deeply ambiguous legacy. On the one hand, the normally authoritarian
doctrines and disciplines of the Party were frequently directed at those
questions of cultural policy that most concerned the radical intelligentsia
itself. On the other, the depth and extent of Party organization permitted
the creation of a whole series of alternative cultural institutions capable
of sustaining an often very vital oppositional culture.
In Britain, as elsewhere, the Communist Party subscribed to a series
of more or less Zhdanovite variants of the theory of socialist realism.
Christopher Caudwell was by far the most influential of the British
communist cultural theorists. His Illusion and Reality was first published
in 1937, only a few months after he had been killed in action with the
International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. For Caudwell, as
for communist Marxism generally, the literary super-structures
remained essentially an effect of the developing material base. “What
is the basis of literary art?”, he wrote, “What is the inner contradiction
which produces its own onward movement? Evidently it can only be
a special form of the contradiction which produces the whole movement
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of society”. Literature is thus essentially a by-product of economic
activity: “Poetry is clotted social history, the emotional sweat of man’s

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