The Legacy of the Cultural Front: an Interview with Alan Wald By Political Affairs
http://www.politicalaffairs.net/article/articleview/3887/ -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Editor’s note: Alan Wald teaches at the University of Michigan ( I was in Latin American solidarity work with Wald in Ann Arbor in 1982-4) and is the author of seven books including, Writing from the Left and Exiles from a Future Time. He is a member of the editorial boards of Science & Society and Against the Current. He also edited The Radical Novel Reconsidered series published by the University of Illinois Press, which includes Burning Valley by Philip Bonosky. PA: Can you talk about what proletarian and social realist literature is? AW: There are simple and complex definitions of both categories. There has long existed a broad proletarian literature about the lives and experience of working-class people, mostly written by those sympathetic to socialist ideals. However, in the early 1930’s, a more specific proletarian literature movement was fostered by the Communist Party. After the Popular Front began in 1935, the party officially turned in a new direction. Yet writers continued to be attracted to the Communist-led tradition; Philip Bonosky, who published proletarian novels from a Communist perspective during the cold war, is an example. Social realism is also a term with multiple meanings. It was originally applied to painting and generally referred to art with a social and political content, and a technique that one might call naturalist. In the 1930’s, however, social realism sometimes became linked to socialist realism, then the official Soviet doctrine. When a painting or text is called social realist, one can not always tell whether “social” is being used as a shorthand for the word socialist, as one finds in the phrase “social democracy,” or whether it means simply “social” in the looser sense of socially conscious. PA: So you make a distinction between the proletarian literature of the early 1930’s and that which came out of the Popular Front period? AW: Yes, although perhaps more in theory than practice; one of the contradictions to be found when a political party tries to lead a cultural movement is that writers and artists create out of needs beyond immediate policies. I would certainly say that there was more latitude after 1935 on the Communist-led literary left toward popular writing. The vocabulary changes to an advocacy of a people’s literature and a people’s culture. The John Reed Clubs, which focused on working-class writers, some of whom showed an affinity with modernism in their poetry, were abolished. Other kinds of writers become more prominent; for example, the Hollywood humorist Donald Ogden Stewart was the new head of the League of American Writers. Yet the broader trend of working-class literature persisted, and there also continued to be writers who wanted to work in the more specific proletarian school. PA: Is the “proletarian literature movement” over? Is it a real cultural force now? AW: I really don’t follow contemporary literature very closely; there are still too many fascinating and forgotten works to be unearthed from the 1930’s-50’s era. But I find that literature about working-class life continues to be produced, as well as some fine radical novels. The specific proletarian literature movement, the one primarily connected with the centrality of the Communist Party in the US left, is over. But I wouldn’t want to see that experience lost from memory or trivialized into a sound-byte. I think any new radical movement is going to have to come to terms with the achievements and weaknesses of Communism and the cultural work associated with it. At the same time, the next radical cultural upsurge must find its own way, and evolve only in a very loose association with organizations and social movements. PA: Given that you come from a different Marxist tradition than the people you study and given that there is a historical gulf between those traditions, how did you become interested in the Communist-led cultural front? AW: As a 1960’s radical, I didn’t come out of the Trotskyist tradition. In high school, I was an alienated existentialist; in college, briefly an aspiring beatnik and then a new leftist. I joined SDS in 1965, which was transformative in producing a lifelong opposition to capitalism. When SDS fell apart, I joined the Young Socialist Alliance at Antioch College in 1968, and then the Socialist Workers Party in Berkeley in late 1969. In these groups I received a fabulous political education in classical Marxism, and met extraordinary socialist veterans of the 1930’s, 40’s, and 50’s. But it wasn’t Trotskyism that particularly drew me in the first place. What attracted me was radical activism against racism and the Vietnam War, and the ideas of Marxism - something more heterogeneous. In the 1960’s and 1970’s I surely read more Georg Lukacs than Trotsky. I was entranced by the writings of Isaac Deutscher, but this started earlier - I had seen Deutscher’s books on the desk of Carl Oglesby, president of SDS, with whom I took a seminar in college. The Bolshevik leaders could be brilliant, but they could never be the fulcrum for my thinking. What was consistent from my early radicalization until now is that “hard” (sectarian) versions of Trotskyism always revolted me. I imagined that I saw a fresh revolutionary synthesis of old left and new left in the writings of Ernest Mandel and the journal New Left Review; for a few years I was hopeful that the SWP might go in that direction, too. Its creative response to Malcolm X impressed me, and I felt it embodied an organic link to the US working class, as did the Communist Party. Andy Castillo While studying US radicalism, I came to realize that, from the beginning of my intellectual and political awakening, there was a presence of the Communist left, but it wasn’t identified as such. For example, in high school, my teacher gave me Richard Wright to read, and my parents had 1930’s fiction by James T. Farrell on their bookshelf. It was only by reading about Wright that I discovered he had been in the Communist Party. Even when I read Wright’s essay in The God that Failed, which is an attack on the Communist Party, what he wrote about Communism was so intriguing that I wanted to learn more. In the ferment of the early 1960’s, this literature and culture of the old left was suddenly revived and present in a way that it is not today; I think that’s because the old left was intimately linked to the antiracist and anti-imperialist activism that was attracting the young. I was culturally into jazz and modernism, yet felt more affinity with the old left than with Timothy Leary and the Hippies. At Antioch College I found children of Communists leading the civil rights movement. While in SDS I was drawn to community organizing, and occasionally an old Communist would show up at a meeting and make a lot of sense. Remnants of the old left were just part of the picture if one was in the streets. So it wasn’t hard for me to feel an empathy with the ideals of Communist cultural workers of past decades, even though I was absolutely horrified by everything I learned about the Stalin regime. We should also note that practically every one of the important writers of the left departed the Communist movement, except for a handful like Walter Lowenfels, Meridel Le Sueur and Thomas McGrath, and of course Philip Bonosky. Most of the writers I interviewed had a critical perspective on the CP experience, and sometimes they were even more critical than myself. They agreed that they had completely misread what had occurred in the USSR. But they were admirable people, perhaps more so because they could admit that they had been wrong. PA: Can you talk about your upcoming book? AW: Trinity of Passion: The U.S. Literary Left and the Anti-Fascist Crusade is a follow-up to Exiles from a Future Time, which is mostly about poetry and the origins of the Communist tradition. The new book focuses on fiction from the Spanish Civil War through World War II. For example, I treat a number of veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, all who were then close to the Communist Party: Milton Wolfe, Alvah Bessie and William Herrick. I also treat several leftists who wrote about military combat during World War II, such as John Oliver Killens, Irwin Shaw, Dan Levin, Saul Levitt and Lewis Falstein. There is a section on the Harlem left during the war, focusing on Ann Petry, and a newly-documented chapter about Arthur Miller and the left. And I write about Albert Maltz, whose astonishing World War II novel, The Cross and the Arrow, addressed German resistance in a manner that anticipates contemporary debates about the responsibility of the Germans for Nazism. The book goes through the late 1940’s, and the follow-up volume will be on the cold war. PA: There have been a number of recent attacks on academics on the left for opposing the Bush administration, for being Marxists, or whatever. Why do you think universities reflect such a sharp point of conflict? What are some ways to protect political freedom on campuses? AW: You may have seen the recent piece by Ellen Schrecker, “Worse than McCarthy,” where she talks about how, during McCarthyism, professors were fired and blacklisted - which seems much worse than today. But Schrecker then observes that, at present, state legislatures are looking at who is being hired and what’s being taught - something more far-reaching than party affiliation. In that sense, it is not a repeat of McCarthyism. What is going on now is broader. My impression, from reading the charges of people like David Horowitz, who claims to identify the 100 most dangerous professors, is that the ideologists of the right are primarily concerned about gays and lesbians, or else people who are currently attacking US foreign policy, or just people who may have crossed swords with David Horowitz in the past. I see it as part of the general development of a right wing that is looking for ways to discredit liberalism wherever it can find an opening, not narrowly Marxism and Communism. One reason the universities make a good target is that a segment of scholars in the humanities give the impression of being elitists, even if they imagine that they are the opposite. Part of this is the appearance of indulging in esoteric vocabularies and theories, and a self-righteousness about one’s political correctness. The best way to fight back is to set a good example of actively creating a humane culture at the university, a democratic culture that tolerates a diversity of ideas - including ideas with which we disagree. As a socialist, I favor university intellectuals finding a way to relate to working people, especially rank-and-file labor organizations. At the least, intellectuals might be involved in community organizations - but as learners as much as teachers. When one works along side someone in a common project, trust is built. We should try to talk language that can have some resonance among ordinary people. In these last respects, Communist intellectuals and cultural workers set a good example - yet another reason to study them! --Send your letters to the editor to [EMAIL PROTECTED] This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list [email protected] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
