I never bothered with Raymond Williams. I knew he was popular in postmodern cultural studies circles, and that alone made me suspicious. So I was pleasantly surprised when I picked up his collection Resources of Hope and discovered he was a Marxist: he thought strategically about how to overthrow capitalism. In his essay You're a Marxist, Aren't You?, he picks up the threads of a genuine, revolutionary, Marxist tradition, against the dead ends of Stalinism and reformism. And he connects culture, feelings and class struggle.


Hale and hearty - Williams

Raymond not reformist

Reformism is the idea that lasting reforms can be made in the capitalist system, without overturning the system as a whole. Williams dismisses this, on the basis of actual social movements – in particular, the trade union and nuclear disarmament movements. When he offers the following thoughts about reformism (what he calls 'gradualism') he's not just plucking ideas out of the air, but judging the entire post-war experience of the British left:

Gradual changes might indeed be brought about by legislation and even more by changes in public opinion, changes in education and so on. But what this kind of politics really assumed was that there was not an enemy, there was only something out of date.

Capitalism could be modernized away - this was the essence of the welfare state. Today, when 'cradle-to-the-grave' is just a phrase in a U2 song, it's easy to forget how the European states pursued a postwar compromise with labour, providing social welfare benefits in return for class peace. It’s also easy to forget how strong social democracy used to be, back when it claimed to offer a real alternative and not the 'exploitation with a human face' liberalism of current Labourites.


And under capitalism too?

Unlike today, Marxists couldn't argue that social democrats didn't offer real reforms to make working people's lives better - they could and did. They had to say those reforms defused revolutionary alternatives:

It was not only, that is to say, that the gradualism was not inevitable, that it was not moving step by steady step towards a socialist society. It was that the very forms of the gradualism seemed to be ways of incorporating the movement which had set out to create a socialist society; indeed forms of conscious preservation of an unaltered, or only marginally altered, capitalist society.

From noble dreams of a better life, reformism became a compromise with capitalist rule. The reforms themselves weren't the problem: it was "the very forms of the gradualism" which sapped revolutionary potential. Government and bureaucratic trade unions took decision-making power out of the hands of working people, encouraging passivity. This wasn't a plot or conspiracy: it was the way capitalist institutions were supposed to work. The social democrats couldn't understand this, because they didn't understand the power that lay behind those institutions:

But the real question about an enemy was always this. Was this the kind of enemy who could be defeated by the normal processes of civil society; that is to say by the processes of political democracy, parliamentary democracy, trade union action, social organization and so on? Or was this an enemy who had to be defeated by power, and in the last instance, if necessary, by actual violent defeat?

If you don't defend yourself, who will? - Chinese revolutionaries carry the red flag

Here’s Raymond Williams, distinguished gent of British academia, calling for violent revolution. He's not speaking from some trendy 70s ultraleftism, but from an analysis of "the normal processes of civil society", which let capitalist rule absorb peaceful challenges without blinking an eye. Remember that the next time you hear someone call Williams a 'cultural academic'.

How culture matters

Williams was, of course, a major figure in cultural studies. But he was also driven by an overarching goal: cultural studies mattered because it was a means to revolution. This is miles away from saying the revolution has to be cultural, that it can proceed through art and personal expression:

I believe in the necessary economic struggle of the organized working class. I believe that this is still the most creative activity in our society, as I indicated years ago in calling the great working-class institutions creative cultural achievements, as well as the indispensable first means of political struggle.

Political and economic struggle against capitalism define the Marxist revolution. But I defy anyone to claim Williams didn't take culture seriously. For the doyen of cultural studies, it was a method of struggle:

I know that there is a profoundly necessary job to do in relation to the processes of the cultural hegemony itself. I believe that the system of meanings and values which a capitalist society has generated has to be defeated in general and in detail by the most sustained kinds of political and educational work.

Williams called this the 'long revolution': the minute processes of creating the cultural institutions necessary for struggle to arise.


Probably not what he meant - Cultural revolution poster

Williams is against spontaneous theories of revolution: struggle doesn’t just 'happen', except to the casual observer. It's built, and it requires a 'war of position', in Gramsci's sense of the word. People forget Gramsci was talking about political institutions of the working class. When he theorized a war of position, he didn't mean unaffiliated intellectuals, he meant a war led by the Communist Party. Williams also wants to build socialist institutions. But he also tries to understand what that means in practice.

Nothing more than feelings

Williams doesn't shy away from seeing the personal in the political:

I believe that the system of meanings and values which a capitalist society has generated has to be defeated in general and in detail by the most sustained kinds of intellectual and educational work... [as] part of the necessary battles of democracy and of economic victory for the organized working class.

His goal is to overthrow capitalism, and that requires "sustained... intellectual and educational work". To do this work, we need to understand how it affects us:

People change, it is true, in struggle and by action. Anything as deep as a dominant structure of feeling is only changed by active new experience. But this does not mean that change can be remitted to action otherwise conceived. On the contrary the task of a successful socialist movement will be one of feeling and imagination quite as much as one of fact and organization.

Find me somebody to love

It's easy to interpret this in a touchy-feely sense - to mean socialist organizations are primarily about how we relate to one another. I do think too much focus on 'socialist community' makes us lose the forest for the trees: strategic organizing against capitalist exploitation fades, when we make its personal consequences the focus for our efforts. Private liberation risks becoming another form of political reformism.

Socialists come together to form political organizations, not cliques or self-help groups. But Williams finds a bridge between the two concepts:

Not imagination or feeling in their weak sense - 'imagining the future' (which is a waste of time) or 'the emotional side of things'. On the contrary, we have to learn and to teach other the connections between a political and economic formation, a cultural and educational formation, and, perhaps hardest of all, the formations of feeling and relationship which are our immediate resources in any struggle.

Williams is saying our definition of socialism has to broaden. We need to acknowledge the real, emotional affect that goes into building the institutions of class struggle, "part of the necessary battles of democracy and of economic victory for the organized working class." Class struggle has an emotional component. It creates the conditions for collective empowerment and, like all acts of creation, it's accompanied by intense feelings.

Whether you agree or not, this is a powerful message. Through our activism, we're building the institutions that future struggles will grow out of. Culture and emotions matter as part of the 'long revolution'. For revolutionaries, they may only matter in that context - but in that context, they matter a lot. That Williams can connect these concerns to the traditional, 'hard' Marxist politics and economics, in a way that enriches both, shows just how revolutionary he was.