Page 59 - Culture Media Language Working Papers in Cultural Studies

48 MOORE, ANDERSON AND ENGLISH SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

classes within the ruling bloc: a failed or flawed bourgeoisie and a hegemonic
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‘aristocracy’. There are five main stages in this argument. First, Anderson
agrees that the Puritan Revolution was a succcessful revolution for capitalism (the
view is similar to Moore’s) but argues that the commercial bourgeoisie remained
a subaltern class and that the Revolution left no bourgeois ideological legacy. In
a sense it failed because impure and too early. Second, the Industrial Revolution
created both an English proletariat and the industrial fraction of the bourgeoisie.
Both had heroic moments. The industrial bourgeoisie forced the reform of
Parliament and the repeal of the Corn Laws but its courage (in some mysterious
way) waned, and it delegated its power to ‘aristocracy’. Thus far one can speak of
two classes—‘aristocracy’ and bourgeoisie; after about 1850, in a third stage,
they fuse, become a ‘detotalized totality’. Yet still within this hegemonic bloc,
through its hold on formal politics and through its socializing institutions,
‘aristocracy’ remains the dominant fraction. Fourth, just when it is losing its base
in the agricultural depression, it receives a further lease of life through
imperialism. This set the culture of the dominant class in a ‘normatively agrarian
mould’, which it has not lost since. Finally, Britain escaped most of the creative
domestic effects of two world wars. Even now (1964) the ‘aristocratic’ segment
of the dominant class remains ascendant, and it is its culture which is
monolithicly hegemonic.
The second British failure was the failure of Labour or Labourism. Nairn’s
starting-point was a paradox: the British Labour Party was ‘one of the greatest
political forces of the capitalist world’, with the almost undivided loyalty of the
working class in ‘an overwhelmingly proletarian nation’. Why, then, had
it repeatedly failed, even in 1945, to grasp ‘the revolutionary opportunity’? 34
Nairn and Anderson answer this question on two levels: a general thesis about
the historical development of the English working class and a more detailed
discussion of the internal dimensions of Labourism and the more persistent and
structural problems of the British Left. The general theory, since it is an integral
part of their view of English social development as a whole, is the part which
concerns us here, but it should be stressed that there are elements of great
independent value in their whole discussion of the Labour Party.
For the New Left Reviewers, the British working class, that exasperating
entity, has had one abiding characteristic. After the defeat of Chartism it became,
and has ever since remained, obstinately ‘corporate’. They give a particular
meaning to this word, nearer to Gramsci’s usage than to that of Raymond
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Williams. A corporate culture is self-identifying, inward-looking, purely
indigenous, the opposite to hegemonic. ‘A corporate class is one which pursues
its own ends within a social totality whose global determination lies outside it’. 36
It is acknowledged, following Williams and Hoggart, that English working-class
culture has been peculiarly dense and specific in its hinterlands. Often penetrated
by bourgeois ideas, it has never been entirely assimilated. But nor has it acquired
a world view complete or oppositional enough to combat hegemony over the
whole range of society. Its characteristic state has remained that of social