Anthony Barnett

Raymond Williams and Marxism:

A Rejoinder to Terry Eagleton

Revolutionaries have traditionally believed that there are three forms of class
struggle. The first two are both relatively obvious: political mobilization and
economic organization. But in addition to the political and economic struggles
there is a third. Lenin, invoking the authority of Engels, called it ‘theoretical
struggle’. But this was not a call directed to philosophers. The theory which he
argued for was Marxism itself, the general theory of historical materialism. The
struggle involved was its application, not only intellectually to the specific con-
ditions of the day, but educationally, to the working class and its most able
members: ‘training the masses in political consciousness and revolutionary
activity’, ‘we can and must educate workers so as to be able to discuss these ques-
tions with them’. Today in the West, the masses—enfranchized, unionized, no
longer working eleven-hour days—are surrounded by ‘education’ and ‘dis-
cussion’ in the mass media, not all of it always wrong. The third struggle, in
advanced capitalist countries, now takes on a different form: alongside the duty
of revolutionary theoretical clarification is the need to transform a political
47
consciousness already heavily invested by the bourgeoisie. This struggle
is a struggle for ‘culture’. One way of suggesting the contrast between
Western capitalist democracies and the Tsarist autocracy in Russia
might be that Lenin’s two classical conditions for revolution—‘Only
when the “lower classes” do not want the old way, and when the “upper
classes” cannot carry on in the old way—only then can revolution triumph’
—have changed. The second clause still holds. But the first condition,
in the West, should now read: ‘only when the “lower classes” want to
go on in a new way’. In other words, until a majority of the working
class actively desire socialism, they will continue to be willing to accept
bourgeois solutions to the recurrent crises of capitalism, however tem-
porarily acute.
It follows that cultural studies are a crucial component of historical
materialism and that cultural struggle is an arduous, exacting and vital
part of revolutionary practice. It also follows, therefore, that whenever
Marxists attempt extensive generalizations about ‘culture’, they cannot
proceed convincingly if they presume that the main problems of poli-
tical theory and practice have been effectively solved in a separate
domain. On the contrary, it seems much more likely that there is a
strong bond between the political and the cultural weaknesses of
Marxism in the West.
In Britain, Marxists should be alert to such a bond in any discussion
of the work of Raymond Williams, who currently dominates the
field of ‘cultural criticism’. Until recently it was not necessary to say
this, because his commanding achievement had rarely been approached
systematically.1 Now, however, Terry Eagleton, a former pupil of
Williams, has written an aggressive survey of Williams’s work.2 The
first thing to be said about this article is that it is a very welcome end to
a silence which now seems incredible. By insisting that literary criti-
cism cannot evade taking the ‘full weight’ of Williams’s contribution,
and by then proceeding to a political estimate of it as well, Eagleton has
boldly confronted the most productive and one of the most creative
writers on the British Left today. For this we are all in his debt.
It is my belief, however, that the balance of Eagleton’s judgement of
Williams—both literary and political—is seriously wrong. In this brief
rejoinder I will try to explain why, and to suggest some ways in which
another appraisal of Williams’s complex work is possible. Obviously
the remarks which follow are not presented dogmatically, but there is
one point I would argue strongly. Williams has raised major questions
that he has not satisfactorily solved; as a result it is relatively easy to
point to the obvious weaknesses in his case and conclude from them
that he has no case at all, that he has no legitimate ‘problematic’, or
whatever. I will try and show that the framework of Williams’s cultural
and political theories has indeed been flawed. But there is another
1
Michael Green has written a helpful overview, ‘Raymond Williams and Cultural
Studies’, in Cultural Studies 6. There was also a critique of Williams’s early work by
E. P. Thompson, ‘The Long Revolution’, NLR 9 and 10.
2
Terry Eagleton, ‘Criticism and Politics: the work of Raymond Williams’, NLR 95,
Jan.–Feb. 1976. The essay now forms part of the first chapter of Eagleton’s important
work on Marxist aesthetics, Criticism and Ideology, NLB, November 1976.

48
respect in which the direction of his work has been vindicated, if one
assesses it not only in terms of the answers he has proffered but also in
terms of the general balance of priorities and relevance he has asserted.
For Williams has seen the complex, cultural powers of capitalism more
clearly than any other socialist writer in England, and has consistently
tried to measure the means and resources of resistance to them.
Situating Williams
From the short-lived journal which he helped to start in 1947 (Politics
and Letters) through to the present, Williams has always worked on the
relationship between culture and politics. His insistent message has been
that these two areas of practice, defined in their broadest terms, are
bound up with each other in a multitude of discernible forms. If there is
an evident weakness to William’s work it is that through fear of losing
the connections between politics and culture, he has often refused to
deal separately, and therefore sufficiently, with either part. His constant
thematic stress on the unity of the two has tended to block him from a
structural explanation of how they relate to each other, and what the
limits of such relationships may be. The problems are complex, but
Williams tends to harp on their ‘difficulties’ in a way that at once
rightly insists upon the connections and yet acts as an impediment to
unravelling them.
Eagleton wishes to cut this particular knot. His text on Williams is a
preliminary chapter to a study in literary theory and concludes with a
call that criticism be transformed into a domain of scientific know-
ledge. This demand for theoretical concentration on problems of
literary practices and the specific ideologies attached to them may
advance our understanding of literature; and Eagleton’s primary objec-
tive is to proceed to new methods of critical analysis. With some justifi-
cation, Eagleton speaks of Williams as having ‘by-passed’ Marxism
during the last twenty years. The intended function of Eagleton’s essay
is to get criticism back onto the high road. In this sense, his critique of
Williams is only secondary to his main purpose.
In seeking to furnish criticism with its appropriate methods, however,
Eagleton appears to deny validity to wider problems. For him ‘culture’
is not a problematic area; it does not exist except as ‘an ideological
term’, demanding only exercises in demystification. At best, culture is
‘an empty anthropological abstraction’. This Althusserian elision of
culture into ideology leaves room for certain concrete, specific expo-
sures of ideological mechanisms (Eagleton’s own work is an example),
but the resulting difficulties are now well known. ‘Science’ floats un-
easily between the status of an independent fourth practice and a posi-
tion on the other side of ideology’s oblique stroke (ideology/science).
Even more significantly, art—which is neither ideology nor science—
does not obtain any location at all within the classification. As ‘art’
includes literature, the very object to which Eagleton would apply his
scientific criticism itself appears to have no status within this theoretical
system, once ‘culture’ has been assigned to the realm of ideology.3

3
A point made in the ‘Introduction to Glucksmann’, NLR 72, March–April 1972,
p. 62. See Althusser’s ‘Letter on Art’ in Lenin and Philosophy, NLB 1971.

49
Political over-confidence accompanies Eagleton’s conceptual borrow-
ing. He admits the backwardness of Marxist aesthetics, the field within
which he is working, but criticizes Williams in a way which suggests
that Marxist politics is complete. Williams’s writing (Eagleton uses
the singular) is admonished for being ‘reticent and ambiguous in its
attitude towards insurrectionary organization’. This phrase conceals a
confusion, however. Reticence towards extant organizations on the left
can be a responsible attitude, if they are defective; Eagleton may share
it. Reticence towards the very idea of insurrections in history is another
matter. They do, of course, need organization, yet in Britain today it
would be hard to argue that the touchstone for revolutionary politics
is advocacy of the need for a popular armed rising against the State in
the absence of any organizations remotely capable of preparing one.
Similarly, Eagleton complains that Williams’s recent ‘rapprochement
with Marxism is still evidently a fraught, dissentient, intellectually un-
clarified affair’. But should we not congratulate Williams for this honest
and serious approach? It is exactly because he possesses these qualities
that Williams can be engaged in serious debate by historical material-
ists. No doubt mutual distance will be taken, alongside mutual respect;
but this should not be measured in terms of an abstract confidence in
insurrection, an unfraught commitment to Marxism, or any other such
simplistic formula.
Is Williams a Populist?
Eagleton goes further than this: his essay categorizes and condemns
Williams as a populist. He accurately spots many ambiguities and faults
in Williams’s writing. But virtually all of these are attributed to one
source: ‘romantic populism’. Although this categorization of Williams’s
position is central to Eagleton’s argument, he nevertheless argues that
Williams’s populism soon becomes ‘residual’, even though this still
remains ‘at the root of his consistent over-subjectivizing of the social
formation’. A less conventional populist than Williams is hard to
imagine. He has explicitly rejected cherished populist beliefs. In Culture
and Society he wrote: ‘traditional popular culture . . . is small in quantity
and narrow in range. It exacts respect, but is in no sense an alternative
culture.’4
Williams has a healthy respect for working people, but this is not the
same as populism. There may perhaps be specific national characteris-
tics to this respect which make it otherwise disconcerting for many
socialists. Williams is in some ways consciously Welsh—a nationality
which embodies traditions of strong inter-class affiliations and small-
man radicalism with a particularly strong if ambiguous communal
emphasis.5 ‘Radical eisteddfodism’, then, might be closer to the mark
4 P.307 in the Penguin edition.
5 See the text of his talk ‘Welsh Culture’, in Culture and Politics, Plaid Cymru’s Challenge
to Wales (Plaid Cymru, Caerdydd/Cardiff, no editor). As this pamphlet is hard to
obtain, here is a short quotation from Williams’s contribution: ‘To the extent that
we are a people, we have been defeated, colonized, penetrated, incorporated. Never
finally, of course. The living resilience, in many different forms, has always been there.
But its forms are distinct. They do not normally include, for example, the fighting
hatred of some of the Irish. There is a drawing back to some of our own resources.
There is a very skilful kind of accommodation, finding new ways to be recognized as
different, which we then actively cultivate, while not noticing, beyond them, the
profound resignation.’
50
than ‘populism’, were it not for Williams’s refusal of nostalgia. Before
rejecting this Welsh note of harmony, other British socialists might
reflect on the fact that within the UK it is possibly only in Wales that
socialism has been to date a mass popular ideal.
Eagleton defines Williams’s supposed populism as his ‘deep-seated
trust in the capacity of individuals to create “new meanings and values”
now—meanings and values which will extend . . . to socialism’. Against
such a view, Eagleton argues that ‘the creation of new meanings and
values, which is in fact only enabled by revolutionary rupture, was read
back by Williams as a description of the present’ (my emphasis). This
makes revolution a completely self-enclosed transformation. But, in
fact, if some new meanings and values, to use that phrase, are not created
beforehand by the masses, how will there ever be a revolution? Is
Williams wrong to place a trust in the creative capacity of the working-
class men and women even through the longest periods of working-
class resignation to bourgeois rule? Is it not axiomatic that Marxists
also share such a view? To put it simply, there are forms of socialist
confidence in any working class which are not labourist.
Eagleton, however, perhaps inadvertently, appears to discount such
potential as far as contemporary Britain is concerned. He writes as if the
British labour movement were homogeneously reformist and Williams
‘contaminated’ by the resulting ideology. But working-class ‘ideology’
in this island is not a mere illness. It is a plural heritage which includes
a strong tradition of collective solidarity and defensive militancy which
only recently toppled the Heath government. Williams, in point of fact,
has made a more balanced and judicious assessment of the labour move-
ment than Eagleton. He long ago argued that the most radical strand
within it—the ‘romantic’ tradition which he had documented—had
typically been unable to confront the issue of political power, even
though it had always resisted the enticements of capital.6
To suggest, therefore, as Eagleton does, that Williams’s moralist cri-
tique of capitalism merely ‘consecrated’ the reformism of the British
labour movement, a reformism which ‘seeks to accommodate itself’ to
bourgeois rule, is wholly unjust. Whatever criticism Marxists can make
of Williams politically, it is wrong in principle to bracket together those,
like him, who have consistently opposed capitalism—even if they are
reluctant to advocate mass coercion against it—with social democrats
anxious to organize a mixed economy and neutralize working-class
militancy against it. Indeed, it is one rule of insurrection, about which
Eagleton seems so self-assured, that friends and enemies must be dis-
tinguished with the greatest care. The decisive test of this often lies in
the middle ground, where issues may seem confused. If the opportunity
arises, we can be certain that only those who keep their judgement here
will be in a position to exercise it elsewhere.
Nairn on Williams
Eagleton is certainly not alone in having misinterpreted Raymond
6 In ‘The British Left’, NLR 30, March–April 1965.

51
Williams’s politics. Tom Nairn, for example, made a now demonstrable
mistake over Williams in his memorable essay The Left Against Europe?.7
I mention it here because it vividly illuminates the problem of situating
Williams. Nairn’s essay was both profound (in its feel for a nerve of
British politics) and prescient (at the time the Left generally thought the
issue buried); despite the arguments it caused, its central thesis was
correct. So if its author was wrong about Williams, this mistake can be
read as a symptom of a more general difficulty: a major writer, whom
all agree is a central figure for the British Left, appears to elude cate-
gorization.
During the debate on the Common Market under Heath in 1971,
Williams publicly refused to register a position. Nairn showed how
Williams failed to draw the conclusions of his own justification for this
stand, the argument of which favoured entry. Nairn assumed that only
an unbudgeable nationalist prejudice could explain this wilful obsti-
nacy. He therefore assimilated Williams to the ‘consensus that extends
so astonishingly from Michael Foot, via John Gollan and Raymond
Williams, to the outposts of the IMG and IS’.8 However, when the refer-
endum came round in 1975 and Williams could no longer refuse to
register, he drew exactly the conclusion that Nairn thought he would
not. Unlike the other personalities and organizations castigated by
Nairn, Williams voted for entry into Europe, as a socialist.9
For Nairn, Williams is ‘the outstanding contemporary (perhaps the
greatest) representative of national culture: he represents the most
valiant and unremitting effort to formulate a valid left-wing Weltan-
schauung out of the materials of national culture, through the organic
inheritance of one rich nation-state heritage’. How, then, could Williams
ever favour EEC entry? Especially if the issue, as Nairn argued, was the
touchstone for a realistic internationalism? Throughout the fifties and
early sixties, the idiom and political framework of Williams’s work was
indeed largely parochial—confined to the British inheritance as Nairn
stated. But to a greater extent than Nairn realized, Williams had been
forced to turn to this national legacy by the international circumstances
of his initial formation (I will say something about this below). Williams
was not a sworn exponent of this national tradition. Far from clinging
to it, he began to break away when international developments after
1968 made this more possible, until when the referendum came round
he chose a ‘West European’ identity.
Nairn believed that Williams could not support ‘Entry into Europe’,
but he did. Eagleton acknowledges that Williams has ‘consistently pre-
empted important theoretical developments’, but he insinuates that this
is a kind of sleight of hand, for which Williams cannot really be given
credit—‘an intuitive knack of pre-empting intellectual positions’ is how
7 NLR 75, Sept.–Oct. 1972 (also Penguin Books, London 1973).
8 Ibid. pp. 106–8.
9 ‘It seems that I shall be one of the very few socialists (as distinct from social-demo-

crats) voting “yes” in the referendum . . . any “national” solution is politically incon-
ceivable. Culturally, I find more sense in a West European identity than in the domi-
nant English versions of sovereignty and tradition. . . .’ From Williams’s contribu-
tion to ‘The Referendum Choice’, New Statesman, 30 May 1975.

52
he puts it a second time. For Eagleton insists that in other ways Williams
is ‘ideologically bound to nineteenth-century realism’. Eagleton and
Nairn, in other words, have tried to press Williams into the antiquated
mould of the English traditions—but he does not quite fit.
Williams’s Work

This short comment cannot include a full assessment of Williams’s

work—as a critic, a theorist and as a socialist intellectual in post-war
Britain. There are perhaps five main regions within Williams’s work,
which are contiguous but distinct. First, there are his books on drama.
Second, there is his literary criticism. I will not discuss either of these
two here. Third, there are his novels and his play, which I will also
leave on one side. Fourth, there are Williams’s more strictly political
ideas, which I will criticize briefly. Finally, there is his general theory of
culture, to which I will offer an approach that differs from Eagleton’s.
I should like to stress the tentative character of my comments, as well
as their partial nature—and also to point out that Williams has proven
his capacity to develop his positions and confound his critics!
Williams, who is fifty-five, has published fourteen books to date, which
have run through numerous editions (his London publishers alone have
sold over a quarter of a million copies), along with many introductions,
essays and reviews. Chronologically, as Eagleton points out, these can
be seen as progressing from work mainly influenced by ‘practical
criticism’ in the late forties and early fifties, through a more general ‘new
left’ period in the late fifties and early sixties, to a greater political and
theoretical intransigence in the late sixties and seventies. Throughout
these decades Williams has written on drama, his main critical pre-
occupation (his earliest books were on film and theatre). He has pub-
lished two novels Border Country (1960) and Second Generation (1964), and
a play about Stalin, Koba (written in the late fifties and published as part
of Modern Tragedy). Two more novels are promised.
The clearest way of grouping Williams’s major non-fiction is by themes
which cluster chronologically only to a limited extent. The first group
is the most ‘engaged’, and its commitment becomes more exact through
time. The dominant theme of these books is that a cultural transforma-
tion of capitalist society is possible by winnowing the ‘seeds of life’
from those of ‘death’, as Williams puts it in the final paragraph of
Culture and Society (1958). The book was the first of this group and it
made his reputation. Its argument was continued in the second volume
of the set, The Long Revolution (1961): an ambitious attempt to ‘review
the nature of our whole common life’. Communications (1962) extended
a major emphasis in both books, and was revised in 1966. The series
ends with the May Day Manifesto (1966 and 1968), a collective work
edited by Williams, which called for a new socialist movement outside
the Labour Party.
The second group is concerned with drama. This set of works is the
least acknowledged of Williams’s formidable achievement, partly
because of the predominance of literary criticism in the universities,
but also because two volumes appeared in the early fifties, and were
53
only revised (one extensively) in the last decade. Nonetheless, Williams
is justified in claiming that Modern Tragedy (1966), Drama from Ibsen to
Brecht (1968) and Drama in Performance (1968) should be considered
together: they embrace a general discussion of changes in dramatic
expression between different social epochs; the specific rise of bour-
geois theatre over the last century; and an examination of the conditions
of production of the dramatic text. Television: Technology and Cultural
Change (1974) should also be added to this set.
The third group of studies post-dates 1968 and leads up to The Country
and the City (1973). It includes The Pelican Book of English Prose, Vol. II:
1780–Present (1969), which Williams selected and introduced; The
English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970); and Orwell (1971). The-
matically, this group analyses language and society—English society in
particular and language in general: in other words, aspects of English
literature. Narrower in scope than the studies of culture and society,
these books are more penetrating and authoritative. Although not
about literature, Keywords (1976), Williams’s recent ‘surprise best-seller’,
may also belong here. It began its manuscript life as an addendum to
Culture and Society but was rewritten for publication, and is effectively
an intervention into the vocabulary shared by writer and reader.
It would seem that another group may soon be launched with the forth-
coming publication of Marxism and Literature. Certainly, Williams’s
recent article on ‘Base and Superstructure’ had a new theoretical con-
fidence and international range.10
Eagleton’s Overview

Eagleton’s essay is predominantly an assessment of the ‘first group’ of

Williams’s work. He omits to mention three of the five latest books
altogether.11 The studies of drama are in effect downgraded, for Eagle-
ton seems to regard Williams’s dramatic theory as an unserious dis-
placement of critical attention.12 It is an ‘intriguing’ pastime into which
Williams ‘exports’ his internationalism—which is thereby diverted
from its true object: literature. The whole of Williams’s preoccupation
with theatre, film and television appears to be trivialized as a soft
option: one in which social relevance is ‘guaranteed’ by the structure of
their production.
At the same time Eagleton over-politicizes his attack on Williams. He
begins by casting Williams as ‘first and foremost a literary critic’, yet
hardly considers Williams’s actual literary criticism and focuses instead
on his politics and cultural theory. One of the problems posed by
Williams’s work as a whole is precisely the way it approaches political
matters from within a form of literary discourse. The aim of any critic
discussing his work now should be to disentangle political, cultural
and literary arguments. To condemn Williams as a literary critic on
10 In NLR 82, Nov.–Dec. 1973.
11 The Pelican Book of English Prose,Orwell and Television: Technology and Cultural Change.
(Keywords was published only after Eagleton’s essay appeared.)
12 For example, Eagleton refers only to Drama from Ibsen to Eliot, whereas the new

title of the much revised later edition is Drama from Ibsen to Brecbt.

54
broadly political grounds actually compounds a confusion for which
Williams himself has sometimes been responsible.
Williams has often put forward his general theories in a tangled and
elusive fashion: a clear, forceful organization of emphasis is not always
characteristic of his writing about revolutionary strategy and socialist
culture. On the contrary, especially in his crucial work of the fifties and
early sixties, the way Williams emphasizes the difficulty of the problems
is sometimes so ambiguous that the reader is baffled as to the solutions
actually proposed. Any critic of Williams, therefore, is forced to sim-
plify Williams’s positions in order to clarify the levels of argument
involved. Such criticism should not exploit the confusion to its own
(short-term) advantage, because the entanglement of different levels in
Williams’s work can also be traced back to a singular determination—
a positive quality from which it gains a great deal of authority.
Perhaps the clearest way of putting the positive side is this. Although
Williams’s political analysis of British society in the early sixties was
manifestly inadequate, so too in different ways were the extant alterna-
tives. The revolutionary groups of what might be called the Leninist
Left, which would form the most obvious standard of comparison,
certainly avoided many of Williams’s errors, by their loyalty to classical
doctrines and their engagement and practical activity within the work-
ing class. On the other hand, they typically committed their own errors
of judgement, frequently relapsing into a comfortable catastrophism at
variance with the evidence of the world, and generally failed to produce
any substantial or convincing innovations in socialist theory. These
limitations were all too often the result of a persistent unwillingness to
look at the realities of society before them, when they did not conform
to expectations.
By contrast, for all his circumlocutions and silences, Raymond Williams
stands for a kind of truthfulness. This is not merely a personal or moral
quality, it is a decisive political attribute and (if the word has not been
over-used) a scientific necessity as well. Eagleton’s essay is bold and
brilliant and advances Marxist discussion as I have said, but in its selec-
tion of facts and emphases it is difficult at times to feel that it keeps to
the same commitment. It should be said that this failure is not an indivi-
dual one so much as an obstacle within our own culture. The art of
polemic is something that most of us on the left have still to learn. We
are familiar enough with the aridity of academic and sectarian disputes,
but not with the discipline of persuasion—which is so taxing in its
demands for scruple and restraint.
Williams’s Political Thought
1. Culturalism

Eagleton contends that the structural flaw in Williams’s first group of

works is populism, and I have argued that this is inaccurate, notwith-
standing Williams’s belief in ‘community’. What, then, is the real weak-
ness of these books? If it is to be described in a single word, it would be
culturalism. This is not a misconception familiar to the Left, but Williams
55
has never been conventional. By culturalism, I mean here a strategic
vision of socialist politics in its way parallel to that of economism.
Where economist strategies for socialism rely upon the spontaneous
momentum of industrial struggles to accomplish the overthrow of
capital, Williams’s early books contain a culturalist argument which is
logically similar. He suggests that revolutionary change will be accom-
plished by the spontaneous intensification of cultural exchange, the
deepening of free communication and the liberation of creative expres-
sion. This was the idealized process—the ‘long revolution’—for which
Williams pleaded: ‘I see this cultural revolution as a part of the great
process of human liberation, comparable in importance with the indus-
trial revolution and the struggle for democracy.’ He continued: ‘I
believe also that we must not see any part of this great process of change
as separate, or as an end in itself.’13 But precisely by not analysing it
adequately as a separate instance, Williams typically has slipped into a
treatment of cultural change as the dominant front on which all ener-
gies should be concentrated.
Clear evidence of this ‘slippage’ can be found in the short section in
The Long Revolution on the nature of historical change (and its compres-
sion into barely five pages is itself evidence of Williams’s elision).
There, he concedes that to isolate learning and communication as ‘the
key to change’ could be ‘unrealistic’. Yet he proceeds to do something
very similar, going so far as to argue that ‘the progress of democracy’
essentially means ‘releasing the creative potential of . . . working skills
and communications’. One result is occasional subjectivist declarations
of an obviously untenable sort, for example: ‘The human crisis is
always a crisis of understanding, what we genuinely understand we
can do.’14
For despite the emphasis Williams laid on the constraints of the capital-
ist economy and the incomplete character of liberal democracy in the
West, he valorized cultural change (communication, understanding,
art) at the expense of industrial and, above all, political struggle by the
working class against bourgeois society. Williams argued that cultural
change could transform the content of British democracy, but was never
able to attack parliamentary institutions as a form of class rule. The
result was that the capitalist state virtually disappeared from Williams’s
writings in these works. For culturalism, like economism, is essentially
a failure to comprehend that only a mass revolutionary abolition of the
apparatus of bourgeois rule can inaugurate a transition to socialism—
something neither wage militancy nor cultural innovation alone can
ever achieve. In Williams’s work, politics proper all too quickly dis-
solved into the process of communication. The Long Revolution failed as
a strategic intervention because it did not take a measure of the ulti-
mately decisive concentration of the enemy. The May Day Manifesto
evaded the question of state power in a similar way, its two brief sec-
tions on the state totalling a mere five-and-a-half pages out of a total of
180. They discuss the economic role and acknowledge the class charac-
13
Communications, London 1966, p. 125.
14
The Long Revolution, London 1961, pp. 117–22, and the final paragraph of Culture
and Society.

56
ter of the British State, but there is no mention of the nature and func-
tions of its monopoly of armed force.15
Linked to this evasion, in early Williams, of the primary instrument of
class domination, is a profound unease towards class conflict itself.
Indeed, Eagleton is right to claim that Williams, at times, was close to
denying even the existence of classes. In The Long Revolution, for exam-
ple, there is a passage which suggests that class divisions are politically
irrelevant: ‘a group may be a convenient mark on the scale, but it is
only a mark and it is the fact of continuity over the whole scale which
is fundamental’.16 Fundamental continuity: Williams’s culturalist
programme could not proceed by divisive conflict, it could only move
forward by a steady accumulation of experience. The transformation of
ideas involves a lengthy task of cultivation. Deutscher wrote of Lenin’s
father, a school inspector: ‘The Kulturträger could not be a revolutionary,
for the harvest of popular education ripens slowly’.17 Not that Williams
is at all paternalist, but the uncontentious tone of his writing and the
undulating sense of time which informs it convey something of the
same gradualism. This is emphatically not social-democratic reformism
of the kind we are most familiar with today: Williams is and always has
been extremely hostile to Fabianism, for example, with its conviction
that an already given culture should be mechanically transmitted to a
population that lacks it, by a series of institutional adjustments. Wil-
liams’s culturalism has overlapped with such political reformism at
times. Its dynamic, however, is quite different and has always allowed
him to retain intact his fundamental hostility to capitalism. Before
Marxists yield to any easy censure, they should remember their own
history. A similar ideology was widespread when the gradualism of
German Social Democracy turned to flood-tide. Engels then claimed:
‘Marx relied solely and exclusively upon the intellectual development of
the working class, which was sure to result from combined action and
discussion.’18 Solely? Surely not. The political imperative remains: to
strike against the oppressor state when the iron is hot. Between 1956
and 1961, while Raymond Williams wrote The Long Revolution, Fidel
Castro and his comrades-in-arms completed one in record time. Change,
which Williams values highly, always keeps its surprises, and socialist
revolution is necessarily sudden as well as protracted.
2. Democracy and Violence

Williams, however, was not writing at the end of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Engels may have given Marxism an evolutionary gloss, but if
he did so it was in the flush of enthusiasm and over-confidence created
15 Eagleton says that the collapse of the Manifesto’s aim to create a new socialist
movement ‘was almost mathematically predictable’ (although he omits to mention
that he was one of the contributing editors). In fact its emphasis on open debate and
grass-roots activism was a precursor to the politics of May. Its contradiction was not
the flatulence of such an approach, but rather the very coherence of the Manifesto as a
total programme, which in fact demanded an equally coherent organization of its
supporters. But its openness, its ‘culturalism’, made this impossible.
16 The Long Repolution, London 1961, p. 84.
17 Isaac Deutscher, Lenin’s Childhood, London 1970, p. 20.
18 In Engels’s ‘Preface’ to the 1890 German edition of The Communist Manifesto:

‘. . . einzig und allein . . .’, Werke, Vol. 4, p. 585.

57
by the historic expansion of a then Marxist party. Williams has been
writing in a quite different period. He was, briefly, a member of the
Communist Party at the end of the thirties, and in the forties he was on
the Labour Left which was defeated by the experience of the Attlee
government and its aftermath. Williams’s evasion of the nature and
position of bourgeois state power lies in his response to this period, the
period of the Cold War.
This turning-point is discussed in the conclusion to Williams’s book on
Orwell. He describes how in the successive conflicts against first
Fascism and then Stalin’s Russia, Western ideologues managed to
counterpose democracy and communism. ‘Democracy’ was, of course,
in the possession of capitalism, and in Williams’s word ‘accommoda-
tion’ to capitalism followed. ‘This is the knot that was tied in the middle
1940s. And Orwell, indeed, helped to tie it.’ But while he attacks
Orwell for this capitulation, Williams also tries to explain it: ‘The
affiliation he tried to make, that he was ready to die for, was prevented
by the political contradictions of those years and was lost, finally, in
illusion and terror.’19 Williams’s relationship to Orwell is obviously an
important one for him. Orwell is the last individual to be given a chap-
ter in the roll-call of Culture and Society. If that inheritance has been
continued by Williams, then he picked up the baton from a writer
whose conclusions, he states, ‘have no general validity’ but who was
‘brave’ and ‘frank’.20 A study of Orwell, Williams argued, must learn
what it was that broke him: what it was that Orwell ‘lost’ and which
must be preserved.
But it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Williams, despite the fact
that he was not defeated and never became an anti-Communist, in fact
retained a kind of left version of the knot which Orwell helped to tie.
That he, in effect, reproduced in his main political works the assump-
tion that there is only one kind of democracy—which exists as a human
inter-relationship irrespective of its class character. He does not seem
to recognize that there are two kinds of democracy: bourgeois and pro-
letarian. There are many socialists who still dismiss bourgeois demo-
cracy as a mere ‘fake’. This mistake is one Williams has never made;
on the contrary, he has an outstanding record on the Left as a socialist
who has confronted the reality of the parliamentary rights and civil
liberties of capitalism in the West. The complementary reality of the
repressive apparatuses of the bourgeois state has, however, as we have
seen, never received comparable attention in his work.
There is an inversion of this failing in his writings on the Russian Revo-
lution and the history of the USSR. For what is missing in these appears
to be any awareness of the classical counter-component to bourgeois
parliaments within proletarian politics: nowhere does he mention
soviets or workers’ councils. By contrast, when he writes on the Soviet
experience, Williams has always tended to confuse the problem of the
fate of the institutions of workers’ democracy with the real yet separ-
able issue of social violence. His book Modern Tragedy contains an
19 Orwell, p. 93.
20 Culture and Society, p. 284.

58
oblique discussion of the October Revolution and its consequences.
Yet instead of concentrating on the turning-point which saw the des-
truction of direct workers’ power, Williams amalgamates the whole
history of the Soviet Union—from the storming of the Winter Palace
to the triumph of Stalinism—into a single revolutionary experience.
This is evident in the essay on ‘Tragedy and Revolution’—which, al-
though flawed, is perhaps the finest piece of political writing in his
work, proving beyond doubt that he is a revolutionary socialist. In it,
Williams argues that tragedy inescapably accompanies all mass revolu-
tions. He does not stress this in order to condemn revolution, nor to
dismiss deaths and crimes as the small change of great events; instead
he insists upon the connection between liberation and terror: ‘it is
difficult for the mind to accept this and we all erect our defences against
so tragic a recognition. But I believe that it is inevitable, and that we
must speak of it if it is not to overwhelm us.’21
Since then Williams has acknowledged the ‘subjectivism and fatalism’
which ‘for a generation dominated our thought’.22 The fatalism is
evident here in the resignation towards the Stalinist terror in Russia.
By contrast, so far as the West is concerned, it is Williams’s subjectiv-
ism that comes to the fore, as a striking passage from the same essay
shows: ‘In some Western societies we are engaged in the attempt to
make this total revolution without violence, by a process of argument
and consensus. It is impossible to say if we shall succeed.’23 The evident
lack of conviction in the last sentence is deservedly there—for how can
a total revolution come out of a consensus?
What is wrong here? In effect, the binary opposition of liberation and
terror leaves no room to argue that there are forms of proletarian
emancipation in which the power of the masses—institutionally safe-
guarded by elective and democratic rights, independence of organiza-
tions and freedom of publication and criticism—can make it possible to
check, limit and finally abolish terror, something parliamentary forms
can never do. Williams’s omission of any account of soviets or workers’
councils thus unwittingly makes him at once too indulgent towards
Stalinism in Russia (where terror is equated with the popular violence
of any social upheaval), and too uncritical of parliamentarism in the
West (where violence of any sort becomes hypothetically eliminable).
In the specific creations of proletarian democracy alone lies the solution
to Williams’s dilemma.
In Russia, the disappearance of all autonomous organs of workers’
power was a key factor in the bureaucratic ascendance of Stalin. That
there was a connection, historically, between the victory of 1917 and
Stalin’s régime is undeniable: its exact nature has not yet been ade-
quately analysed by Marxist historians. But that there is a difference in
kind between them must be the starting-point for discussing any such
21
Modern Tragedy, London 1966, p. 78. Or, for another example: ‘We have still to
attend to the whole action, and to see actual liberation as part of the same process as
the terror which appalls. I do not mean that the liberation cancels the terror; I mean
only that they are connected and that this connection is tragic’ Ibid. p. 82.
22
The Country and the City, St Albans 1973, pp. 366–7.
23
Modern Tragedy, p. 78.

59
connection. Therefore, to premise a discussion of the Russian revolu-
tion on the fundamental continuity of the October Revolution and
Stalinism is to depoliticize any subsequent morality. This is what
Williams does in his play about Stalin (turning him into a tragic figure
of the revolution) and also what he does in his reluctance to discuss the
writing of the Marxist political classics. Although he debates tragedy
and revolution, liberation and terror, in a way which is individually un-
flinching, he never discusses or shows any awareness of the arguments
of Trotsky or Luxemburg on exactly these issues.24 A comparison of
Williams’s essay with Isaac Deutscher’s ‘Marxism and Violence’25 is
telling here, for Deutscher was probably the only other major revolu-
tionary writer in Britain not ‘broken during that decade’26 (the forties).
Like Williams, Deutscher had a ‘tragic vision’ of the Russian revolu-
tion. But his Marxist understanding of its historical dynamics was
vastly superior, and ensured that he never mistook proletarian insur-
gency for anonymous terror (in whatever form). Williams’s isolation
from a Marxist discourse here was thus a real and damaging limit to his
work.27

Williams’s Theory of Culture

If these are the real criticisms to be made of Williams’s political contri-
bution—that he is culturalist in his approach to Western society, and
silent about proletarian forms of democracy—how should we assess his
general theory of culture? I have argued that in his political account of
society and history Williams is idealist in the role he assigns to culture.
This is true in his general theory as well: he discusses culture as a unified
set of practices, assigns it a transformative function and makes it an
over-riding source of value. Williams’s ideas of historical change and
of social organization are to this extent all disembodied. But there is
another contrasting side to his approach which is materialist. For in
part precisely in order to endow culture with the causal weight neces-
sary for it to finally determine change, Williams—to a unique extent—
has stressed and studied the material history of cultural forms.

The paradox of Williams is this: that while he has been idealist in the
roles which he assigns to culture within society, he has at the same time
been materialist in his treatment of practices within culture. If at times
he has been almost ethereal in his insistence upon ‘communication’ as a
24 Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism. For Rosa Luxemburg, see Norman Geras’s very

interesting discussion in The Legacy of Rosa Luxemburg, ch. 4, ‘Bourgeois power and
socialist democracy: on the relations of ends and means’, NLB, London 1976.
25 In Marxism in Our Time, London 1972.
26 To use a phrase from E. P. Thompson, NLR 9, p. 27.
27 Perhaps a note concerning Williams’s own mode of debate is relevant here, as this

too is an aspect of socialist democracy. The bleakness of Williams’s essay on tragedy

and revolution tells us something larger about his style as a writer. His prose harnes-
ses together hope and endurance in equal measure. It is premised on the belief that a
‘community’ of understanding can exist, but recognizes, in its cadences, that it does
not. The most immediate drawback to this style is that it refuses explicit polemic,
necessary to create such a ‘community’, even while it retains a persistent equanimity
of argument. This was not true of the few short articles Williams was able to publish
in Politics and Letters, and it must again cease to be true if Williams is to re-engage
properly with the revolutionary Left.

60
solvent of conflict, yet he has always been unshakeably solid when he
has examined actual forms and types of communication, from vocabu-
lary and dialects to newspaper formats and the architecture of the
stage.
Tension between his materialism and his idealism is present through-
out Williams’s work. The earliest edition of Drama in Performance (1954)
discusses the material effects of the interposition of stage and action
upon the relationship between script and audience. The Long Revolution
provides a concrete account of the reading public, and the list can be
extended through all his books. Similarly, an idealist component has
never been absent either: from the discussion of ‘community’ in Culture
and Society to that of ‘human practices’ in his recent essay on ‘Base and
Superstructure’. The key to understanding the general development of
Williams’s work is that the balance between the two has altered towards
an increasingly materialist emphasis.
In the first group of his output, Williams’s idealism was undoubtedly
dominant. In the third group, the one most concerned with literature,
his materialism gains the upper hand. Similar books from each set can
be compared to illustrate this development: Communications and Tele-
vision. Each contains careful, detailed content analysis and historical dis-
cussion of the growth of the media—newspapers and television, respec-
tively. But in Communications, these reflections take up only the first half
of the book and lead on to an argument that a ‘cultural revolution’
through institutional reforms will democratize society via the com-
munications sector. Television contains virtually no such special plead-
ing, but does advance an original account of the way technical and
social structures of the medium determine forms of expression them-
selves—an analysis entirely absent from the earlier volume. The terms
‘idealist’ and ‘materialist’ do not in themselves separate two sides of a
manichean gulf between virtue and iniquity. The absence of any politi-
cal advocacy in Television, even of an idealist kind, is a limitation. Valid
proposals may be made within an idealist framework, just as mistakes
can be made within a materialist one. It is their co-existence with its
tension and dynamic which forms the contradictory unity of Williams’s
work.
Williams’s notion of culture as ‘a whole way of life’ is an example. The
definition was taken from T. S. Eliot, but Williams produced a secular,
socialist version of it by insisting upon the statistical and technical
elements necessary for any adequate account of culture, and the social
determinants of any ‘way of life’. The reason why Williams turned to
such an obviously reactionary source is also interesting. In Culture and
Society he compared Eliot’s theories to those of Fabian reformism and
decided that, in contrast to the Fabians, Eliot was correct to believe
that the democratization of culture would indeed undermine its tradi-
tional structure and transform its values—a prospect Eliot deplored.
But this is exactly why Williams agreed with Eliot rather than the
Fabians: Eliot was not evasive about a change which for him meant a
‘cheapening’, whereas for Williams it was an ‘enrichment’.28 The way
28 Culture and Society, p. 235.

61
in which Williams inherited an idealist framework, yet turned it upside
down from within, is clear.

Another telling instance of Williams’s dualism is the role he gives to

‘experience’. Eagleton rightly notes its crucial epistemological import-
ance for Williams and its methodological inadequacy. He also argues
that Williams inherited its use from Leavis and Scrutiny. But for Wil-
liams, unlike Leavis, experience is not an unalterable or metaphysical
value—a single paradigmatic criterion of subjective judgement. It too
is subject to history—he refers to ‘the sense of an experience and ways
of changing it’ (my emphasis).29 Williams’s development of the concept
‘structure of feeling’ is designed exactly to restore the category of
experience to the world, as a part of its mutable and various social
history. The contrast with Leavis can be seen in the consequences for
his literary judgements. Williams extols Dickens for his dramatization
of the chaotic realities of new urban experience, and then Joyce for his
disintegration of a unified consciousness in Ulysses.30 In a cautious essay
on Solzhenitsyn he insists upon the reality of the ‘negative group’:
‘innumerable centres: all subjects, all objects’.31 Williams’s literary
world is structurally plural. If this sensitivity to the varying character
of experience is elided into traditional bourgeois individualism, then
Williams’s modernism (and in the theatre he long ago singled out
Brecht and Beckett for praise) becomes incomprehensible—a mere
knack for the au courant.32

For all the subjectivism of his general cultural theory, Williams has
been able to create from it a vehicle for an outstanding series of material-
ist studies. Indeed Williams has perhaps been more responsive to tech-
nical developments in culture than any Marxist critic of this century.
The contrast with Lukàcs or Goldmann is illuminating. Yet because he
has also taken far more seriously than such critics the precise social
setting of new material techniques, he has also been immune to the
29
The Country and the City, p. 368.
30
Ibid. pp. 191, 293.
31 ‘On Solzhenitsyn’, in Literature and Revolution, Eds. G. A. White and C. Newman,

New York 1972, p. 329.

32 It can be said that, although he approaches experience in a historical and material-

ist fashion, the use to which Williams puts his notion of ‘experience’ does not share
these qualities. On the contrary it is given a privileged role as the determining organ-
izer of knowledge. His insistence on the ‘living’ obstructs Williams’s efforts to con-
struct an overall social theory, simply because he has regarded experience as the
repository of truth. Obviously experience can be a vital instrument of discovery,
especially the active experience of practice. But however much experience may be a
valid check on theory, the laws of motion of capitalism as a global system obviously
can only be uncovered by arguments of an abstract kind. The consequences of these
laws of motion will be experienced, but the reality of the process behind such effects
cannot be uncovered by experience. Is Williams capable of such a vulgar error? The
logic of his position in The Long Revolution seems to be that change is predomi-
nantly cultural; culture is the organization of experience; therefore, through the
comprehension of experience as expressed in the cultural record, one can adequately
understand the whole history of capitalist society. In other words, while Williams
handles specific experiences in a concrete and objective way, when he deploys the
term as a concept, he does so in a subjectivist fashion: this central notion reproduces
in miniature the tension of his work as a whole. But it follows that it is not sufficient
to show that Williams’s work is dominated by an idealist epistemology to conclude
that all his generalizations are false.

62
naive technologism for which Adorno once criticized Benjamin.
Williams has been able to welcome the revolutionary potential of new
media without ever forgetting the ability of capital to manipulate them
for its own ends. In this respect he has often been in advance of the
Marxism of his time.
Conclusion

Williams’s work deserves a much more comprehensive survey than has

been possible here. These remarks have been designed only to bring
into focus two of the difficult problems it presents for any Marxist
assessment—the exact strengths and weaknesses of Williams’s political
thought, between consensus and conflict, and the constant complexity
of his cultural theory, combining idealism and materialism. An honest
appraisal must accept at the outset that on many of the issues on which
Williams has written there is no simple superior terrain of historical
materialism from which his work can be judged. This does not mean,
as I have tried to show, that Williams’s work is exempt from criticisms
that are properly Marxist. However, any careful critic of Williams must
not only acknowledge, as Eagleton does, the manifest intellectual and
political development of the author; he or she needs to offer a satis-
factory explanation of this change.33 I think it can be shown that vir-
tually all of Williams’s books contain a strong materialist moment as
well as a recognizably idealist one. It is the altering relationship be-
tween the two which provides a basis for comprehending the remark-
able evolution of his thought.
His work also deserves a more balanced coverage than it has so far
received. Especially needed is a serious treatment of his work on
drama: theatre, film and television. This may be another area where
Williams will prove to be ahead of his time as a critic. He points out, in
the introduction to Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, that although the modern
European theatre is an important bourgeois art, for the first seventy-
five years of its century-long existence it has been ‘overshadowed
by the novel as a major form’.34 He might have gone on to comment
that since the Second World War the ascent of movies and TV has
tended to reverse the relationship between drama and literature in
society at large. In addition, Williams’s own fiction, his play, as well as
his journalism and his attempt to found a magazine, all need to be
integrated into any assessment of his achievement as a whole.
Another major problem posed by Williams’s work is why his political
and social theories should have appeared from within the literary sector
or, more precisely, why only the literary culture in England was capable
of such fertility. Perry Anderson has stressed the exceptional nature of
the literary tradition in Britain and isolated it as the displaced site of
33
Thus Eagleton argues that Williams was still on the ‘Leavisite terrain’ when he
wrote The English Novel, while in The Country and the City he agrees that ‘Marxist
positions constitute the very terms of the debate’. How could this rupture take place
(especially when entire sections of the former are included in the latter)? How could
someone so thoroughly ‘idealist’ and ‘populist’ have leapt the enormous gulf which
separates such ideologies from historical materialism?
34
Drama from Ibsen to Brecht, London 1971, p. 11.

63
totalizing theory.35 Yet, while he mapped out this distinction, he did
not fully explain its dynamic. Why was it that a virtually isolated social-
ist in the literary sector should have attempted a unified historical and
social account of contemporary Britain, while none of the brilliant
generation of Marxist historians who were Williams’s contemporaries
were politically capable of an equivalent effort in the fifties and sixties?

This poses the question of Williams’s role as an intellectual. Any evalua-

tion must situate him concretely in his own society. Comparison may
illuminate this most succinctly. While Eagleton properly insists that
Williams’s criticism should be compared with that of Lukács, Gold-
mann and Benjamin, his political role can be contrasted with Sartre’s. At
first sight no two figures might appear more dissimilar, but there are
some striking parallels between the two. Both have worked on the
relationship between politics and culture, especially literature. Both
have written novels and plays as well as criticism and social theory.
Both are fascinated by the heroic period of the 1840s. Both have tried
to become materialists on their own terms, fighting an obstinate battle
against the reductionism of mechanical Marxism. Had Politics and
Letters survived, rather than flickering out, after a year of publication,
in 1948, it would have been the English cousin of Les Temps Modernes.

Finally, of course, any responsible appraisal of Williams must situate

him historically. Williams’s primary formation was in the forties and
not, as Eagleton implies, in the thirties. He set out on the study which
was to result in Culture and Society at the onset of the Cold War.36 It was
the tremendous pressures of this conjuncture which forced Williams—
a Communist in 1938—to turn inwards to the English tradition to seek
some anchorage for a general investigation of his own time. This was
the point at which he temporarily relinquished an international idiom.

Looking back, we have to ask: in 1946, when he was twenty-five,

what Marxism could Williams have easily inherited? The Soviet State
had killed or silenced its finest intellectuals. Within two years the con-
tinent’s only victorious partisans—in Yugoslavia—were anathemized
as fascists, and trials gripped the rest of Eastern Europe. Western Marx-
ism, which now provides one means of affiliating to historical material-
ism without party association, was unavailable. Gramsci was not yet
published; Sartre was defending existentialism while Lukács was
abusing it (History and Class Consciousness remained suppressed); the
Frankfurt School was producing pessimistic sociology in the United
States; Benjamin had yet to be unearthed. Those who claim the Marxist
tradition today cannot deny what it was then. If Williams has been
obliged to change his ideas, and to develop them considerably since the
late forties, it should not be forgotten that Marxism has been obliged to
change itself even more.
35
In ‘Components of the National Culture’, NLR 50, July–August 1968. Anderson
also discussed Williams, briefly but cogently, in ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, NLR
23, Jan.–Feb. 1964.
36
Comparing what was to become known as McCarthyism in the States with Zhdan-
ovism in Russia, Williams concluded: ‘Politically, the American is perhaps the most
distasteful; culturally the Soviet is certainly the most serious.’ Politics and Letters 4,
1948, p. 68.

64