# Raymond Williams



## Udo Erasmus (May 23, 2008)

I'm thinking about reading some Raymond Williams, never read much of his stuff, other than dipping into "The Long Revolution".
So what's good about his work? What would be good to read? What is Raymond Williams-Thought all about? What are his ideas? Is his work any good?

Discuss.


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## llantwit (May 23, 2008)

I've read some of his cultural theory and tried to read one of his novels (which I half-remember being dire). The theory's really good in places - he came up with the idea of cultural materialsm - a way of approaching and understanding the politics of cultural texts while complicating the orthodox/crude Marxist base-superstructure dichotomy. 
Culture and Society is pretty good. A (broadly defined) Marxist approach to the British literary tradition.
His work on Orwell is also quite good.
A nice one to start with might also be Keywords - a Marxist cultural-theoretical approach to 100 important and ambiguously used words in English.
Marxism and Literature (1977) is an good book as well, I think. Although I think that's where he comes up with his ideas on 'structures of feeling' to characterise the relationship between ideology and culture, and I always found this a bit wooly.
There was quite a nice discussion of Williams on radio 4 recently (including a contribution from Terry Eagleton.


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## Udo Erasmus (May 23, 2008)

i can't say I'm an expert on the base/superstructure concept, but the idea of marxism as crude and economically deterministic is not the feeling I get from. both Marx's own historical writings. and the very rich, subtle and sophisticated works of history that have been written in the marxist tradition. Nor the idea that marxists ignore human agency and subjectivity. It seems that if you abandon the base/superstructure idea that you are left at sea with little to navigate you through a sea of interconnected and somehow related forces.

This word that Llantwit uses, woolly, is what I noticed when I dipped into some of Williams' work sometime back, there seemed a certain vagueness in soem of his concepts, but I thought I would try and make another assault on his work.

One thing that strikes me is that Sartre always unjustly gets a bad rap for his brief flirtation with love for the USSR, but Raymond Williams made approving nods to Chairman Mao and even Pol Pot!

Incidentally, Terry Eagleton on Radio 3s was recently heard to wax nostalgic on his days as a young Oxford Don selling Socialist Worker in the City Centre.


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## llantwit (May 23, 2008)

Udo Erasmus said:


> i can't say I'm an expert on the base/superstructure concept, but the idea of marxism as crude and economically deterministic is not the feeling I get from. both Marx's own historical writings. and the very rich, subtle and sophisticated works of history that have been written in the marxist tradition. Nor the idea that marxists ignore human agency and subjectivity. It seems that if you abandon the base/superstructure idea that you are left at sea with little to navigate you through a sea of interconnected and somehow related forces.


I think one of the main reasons the base/superstructure model gets such a bad rap is because Marx wasn't a cultural critic, and therefore spent most of his time writing about economics... Whether Marx's theory was crude or not the theories of culture/art which used this model were often fairly crude (the socialist realism  movement, for example). I think that Williams was attempting to sophisticate and problematise crude applications or understandings of what a Marxist theory of culture might look like. I don't think he was as succesful as the French theorists of ideology writing at the same time, myself, but his stuff is still really good and is well worth a read.


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## Brockway (May 23, 2008)

Udo Erasmus said:


> One thing that strikes me is that Sartre always unjustly gets a bad rap for his brief flirtation with love for the USSR, but Raymond Williams made approving nods to Chairman Mao and even Pol Pot!



Pol Pot? Really? Cool. Where to was this?


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## llantwit (May 23, 2008)

Loads of radicals around this time were making nice with Chairman Mao, though, weren't they. Pol Pot's a bit extreme, but it's probably a version of the same thing. Casting around for some socialist role model after the horrors of Stalinism were revealed and before the horrors of Maoism got proper circulation.
I'd be interested to see the quote where RW bigs up Pol Pot as well. Bluddy hell. Talk about backing the wrong horse.


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## Udo Erasmus (May 23, 2008)

Raymond Williams on Pol Pot and the Cambodian Khmer Rouge campaign in 1975: 

_Many people drew back at the spectacle of forced repatriation to the coutryside and the very brutal discipline employed to force it, although it could be argued that these were a consequence imposed by a revolutionary seizure of power in a situation made so exposed by a previous history . . . The real tragedy occurs at those dreadful moments when the revolutionary movement has to impose the harshest discipline on itself and over relatively innocent people in order not to be broken down and defeated._

Hardly a smoking gun, but somethnig of a mild apologia


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## Udo Erasmus (May 23, 2008)

llantwit said:


> Loads of radicals around this time were making nice with Chairman Mao, though, weren't they. Pol Pot's a bit extreme, but it's probably a version of the same thing. Casting around for some socialist role model after the horrors of Stalinism were revealed and before the horrors of Maoism got proper circulation.
> I'd be interested to see the quote where RW bigs up Pol Pot as well. Bluddy hell. Talk about backing the wrong horse.



Other Pol Pot groupies include lacanian socialist, Alain Badiou, who wrote a very poetic work on St Paul that I dig.

I googled and the quote came up (quoted in Fred Inglis' bio of RW), but it doesn't give the source. But I dd hear that in an interview with New Left Review he was waxing lyrical on some dodgy regimes.

The only reason I mentioned it, was that Sartre's very brief flirtation with Stalinism is always cited, whereas other thinkers get let off the hook.

One can see why RW might be attracted to Mao, a fellow devotee of Cultural Revolution, as he himself writes in 1980 in New Left Review:

_cultural revolution’, became known as a description of the most remarkable political movement of the twentieth century: the sustained (and of course confused) attempt, in People’s China, to define new priorities and alter actual and foreseen political relations, trying to make new forms of popular power within and where necessary against the received shapes of a socialist economic order._


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## llantwit (May 23, 2008)

Fuck me - that's a pretty clear sympathy for the Khmer Rouge. "Disciplining " "relatively innocent people"!!!
I don't think Sartre can be singled out for his 'flirtation' myself. Most of those who were linked to the CP in 50s and early 60s France were clear supporters of Communist Russia and Stalin fans. Many would later claim they didn't know the true horror of what he did, and probably quite fairly, too.


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## Udo Erasmus (May 23, 2008)

> Fuck me - that's a pretty clear sympathy for the Khmer Rouge. "Disciplining " "relatively innocent people"!!!



Sartre said you can't make an omelete without breaking some eggs.


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## Gavin Bl (May 23, 2008)

Udo Erasmus said:


> Sartre said you can't make an omelete without breaking some eggs.



And Brecht said "the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot" - the comments pile up after a while, and get a bit damning IMO.

I read a couple of  the Keyworks 'Marxism and <something>', they're pretty good, though its a long time ago. The Williams' "Marxism and Literature" I heard was good (as per Llantwits note), and Milibands "Marxism and Politics" is very readable - though I thought the conclusion a bit ropey (at the time at least).


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## Udo Erasmus (May 23, 2008)

Gavin Bl said:


> And Brecht said "the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot" - the comments pile up after a while, and get a bit damning IMO.
> 
> I read a couple of  the Keyworks 'Marxism and <something>', they're pretty good, though its a long time ago. The Williams' "Marxism and Literature" I heard was good (as per Llantwits note), and Milibands "Marxism and Politics" is very readable - though I thought the conclusion a bit ropey (at the time at least).



My favourite quote from Brecht is
 "Which is the greatest crime, to rob a bank - or to own one?"
and my favourite poem is To Posterity

Ralph Miliband's (father of David?!) _Parliamentary Socialism _is a damning critique labourism and of those who think that socialism can come through parliament. Wasn't their some long polemic between Nicos Poulantzas and Miliband on the marxist theory of the state?


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## butchersapron (May 23, 2008)

For me the best intro to Williams is the book Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review - which, despite the title, isn't really a collection of Magazine style interviews or Williams letters. It's bascially  NLR types feeding Williams a few subjects (biography, Culture, Drama, Literature, Politics) and him then outlining his ideas on each, how he came to develop them and placing them in a real-life context etc. This last bit makes it very easy to connect with, far more so than Williams more formal wide-ranging historical works. The biography section and the Britain 1956-78 section are really thought-provoking and i re-read the latter one every few years - always worth revisiting.


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## Karac (May 23, 2008)

Read about 2 thirds of Border Country-it was ok


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## butchersapron (May 23, 2008)

Udo Erasmus said:


> My favourite quote from Brecht is
> "Which is the greatest crime, to rob a bank - or to own one?"
> and my favourite poem is To Posterity
> 
> Ralph Miliband's (father of David?!) _Parliamentary Socialism _is a damning critique labourism and of those who think that socialism can come through parliament. Wasn't their some long polemic between Nicos Poulantzas and Miliband on the marxist theory of the state?



There was a bad tempered and often juvenile series of exchanges between the two in NLR, yes.


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## llantwit (May 24, 2008)

Karac said:


> Read about 2 thirds of Border Country-it was ok


Talk about damning with faint praise!


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## articul8 (May 25, 2008)

Udo Erasmus said:


> Incidentally, Terry Eagleton on Radio 3s was recently heard to wax nostalgic on his days as a young Oxford Don selling Socialist Worker in the City Centre.



You sure he said SW not "the paper" - as far as I know Eagleton wasn't a member of the IS/SWP but of a group called the Workers Socialist League (a split from the WRP which ended up joining the Labour party to work from within, ironically at just the point that the Militant were being kicked out)

see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers_Socialist_League

anyway, Eagleton made a rash broad-side against Williams in NLR which, despite having a grain of truth, wasn't at all generous about Williams' contribution, something he later regretted.


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## butchersapron (May 25, 2008)

The Independent has it as 



> He fell into the orbit of a radical Dominican friar, Laurence Bright, and became a Catholic activist. Marxism and Catholicism were comfortable bedfellows, he said. Eagleton lived a double life, fleeing high table to deliver meals on wheels to the elderly poor. The dual existence continued when he moved to Oxford in 1969, rising at dawn to leaflet the local car plant or sell Socialist Worker, before rushing back to Wadham College to teach Dickens or T S Eliot



...but i don't think Socialist Worker even existed then. The SWP certainly didn't. (And Eliot and Dickens were both dead)


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## Udo Erasmus (May 25, 2008)

articul8 said:


> You sure he said SW not "the paper" - as far as I know Eagleton wasn't a member of the IS/SWP but of a group called the Workers Socialist League (a split from the WRP which ended up joining the Labour party to work from within, ironically at just the point that the Militant were being kicked out)
> 
> see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Workers_Socialist_League
> 
> anyway, Eagleton made a rash broad-side against Williams in NLR which, despite having a grain of truth, wasn't at all generous about Williams' contribution, something he later regretted.



As I understood it Eagleton was an admirer and pupil of Williams & I've read several books in which he makes positive mention of Williams as a theoretician. 

Last week, Eagleton wrote this review of a new bio of Raymond Williams written 20 years after his death by Dai Smith, currently head of the Arts Council of Wales and editor of the Libray of Wales series of Welsh writing in English, and co-author of the seminal history book, The Fed

Eagleton was first a a member of a left wing Catholic circle grouped around a  journal edited by radical dominican monks called _Slant_. Prominent members of this network include Herbert McCabe, to whom Eagleton dedicated his great book _After Theory_ who has written some excellent books on Thomist philosophy and was also an influence on philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, the modern master of ethics. Eagleton's book _After Theory _seems to allude to MacIntyre's _After Virtue_, and seems to aim to renew radical thought through by fusing socialism with a thomist/aristotelian approach to ethics. (On an aside, having recently been reading a lot of Thomas Aquinas, I have to say that he is a far more contemporary and relevant thinker than you might think). MacIntyre began as a radical catholic, joined the International Socialists (predecessor of the SWP), and then converted back to Catholicism.

Eagleton was definitely a member of the International Socialists, you can read some of his writing from the IS/SWP journal International Socialism Journal here - not sure why he left IS in the mid-70s to join WSL (nicknamed the Weasels)




			
				The Guardian said:
			
		

> He joined the International Socialists party, which later became the Socialist Workers Party. At Oxford he moved on to a smaller grouping, the Workers' Socialist League, after disagreeing with the SWP about liaison between local academia and industry. In The Gatekeeper, Eagleton is sharply aware of, and very funny about, the sexual and psycho-pathology of small left wing groups, but Alan Thornett, then a leading militant shop steward at the Cowley car plant and leader of the Workers' Socialist League, remembers Eagleton as a good comrade. "When Terry became a member it helped connect the struggles in the factories with the student movement. While he was a very valuable comrade, in formal meetings some of his language was a bit impenetrable. But people very much appreciated his contribution."



According to an interview with the Independent:



> He fell into the orbit of a radical Dominican friar, Laurence Bright, and became a Catholic activist. Marxism and Catholicism were comfortable bedfellows, he said. Eagleton lived a double life, fleeing high table to deliver meals on wheels to the elderly poor. The dual existence continued when he moved to Oxford in 1969, rising at dawn to leaflet the local car plant or sell Socialist Worker, before rushing back to Wadham College to teach Dickens or T S Eliot. But when Laurence Bright died, Eagleton abandoned religion and threw himself entirely into Marxism.


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## Udo Erasmus (May 25, 2008)

butchersapron said:


> ...but i don't think Socialist Worker even existed then. The SWP certainly didn't. (And Eliot and Dickens were both dead)



I believe that Socialist Worker began as a newspaper in 1968 or earlier first as a rather amateurish newsletter. May have been called Labour Worker, when the IS group were poaching for members in the Labour Party. Incidentally, Terry Eagleton interviewed by Philip Dodd on Radio 3's Nightwaves definitely talked about being a young Don and selling Socialist Worker on the Cornmarket in Oxford in the early 70s and doing sales at factory gates.

In his memoir, the Gatekeeper, he alludes to being a member of another (unamed) ultra-left sect who said that you "couldn't trust the working class further than you could throw it" and has solemn debates on such weighty topics about whether it was permittable to lie to the class. He also explained the concept of "dialectical truth", for example, literally the group were made up of teachers, lawyers, academics, doctors etc - but _dialectically_ they were totally working class and made up of dockers, builders and factory workers.


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## butchersapron (May 25, 2008)

I imagine you've came across that sort of logic one or two times within your own party.

Going back to Williams and Pol Pot - he was clealry stuck in the no mans land between labour and the extra-parliamentary left, and as such sometomes didn't know where to turn or why. It's a common postion for those whose roots now lie within the labour movement establishement but who still recognise it's failings but who are no longer directly in touch with the current w/c sensibilties they came from. So they make stupid prounouncments to look radicial, but get it totally wrong. It's also common to those coming from _outside_ both of these traditions who want to demonstrate their good faith, without realising they're actually alienmating themselves from both sides and looking like clowns (sartre)


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## Udo Erasmus (May 25, 2008)

Interestingly, both Raymond Williams and ex-CP historian, Gwyn Alf Williams joined Plaid Cymru, I would be interested to hear how their theorising on issues such as community related to their embrace of left nationalism.


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## Karac (May 25, 2008)

Udo Erasmus said:


> Interestingly, both Raymond Williams and ex-CP historian, Gwyn Alf Williams joined Plaid Cymru, I would be interested to hear how their theorising on issues such as community related to their embrace of left nationalism.



Are you sure about Raymond Williams?
Gwyn Alf-who else was he going to join?


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## Udo Erasmus (May 25, 2008)

Karac said:


> Are you sure about Raymond Williams?
> Gwyn Alf-who else was he going to join?



Well Plaid themselves mention that he joined them in the 70s, surprised given his macho words about "the revolutionary movement has to impose the harshest discipline on itself and over relatively innocent people in order not to be broken down and defeated" that he didn't find Plaid a little wimpy?!
http://www.plaidcymru.org/content.php?nID=90;lID=1

take your point about GwynWilliams, but I would argue that his book _When Was Wales_ actually demolishes all the myths that are pedalled by nationalism.


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## lewislewis (May 25, 2008)

I think what Gwyn Alf establishes with that book is that Welsh nationalism can only be vindicated from a left direction and not from the right, but that's just my reading.

I too am less sure why Raymond Williams joined Plaid, although I am unsurprised he ended up there i'm just curious about his theory and how that related to Plaid.


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## lewislewis (May 25, 2008)

Btw if anyone ever wants to look up mystical left figures from Plaid's past, DJ Davies is one of the most interesting, a succesful boxer who toured America. 

Here's a good article about Plaid's history and the development of cultural nationalism, the turn toward Scandinavian style socialism, political nationalism, etc
http://www.hum.uit.no/a/Schimanski/artikler/cultpol.htm


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## articul8 (May 26, 2008)

Udo Erasmus said:


> As I understood it Eagleton was an admirer and pupil of Williams & I've read several books in which he makes positive mention of Williams as a theoretician.



He was indeed a pupil, and influenced by Williams, but in the height of Eagleton's Althusserian period he attacked RW for being a left-Leavisite humanist.  Ironically, because Eagleton himself rowed back from this position and, as you say, has come to re-affirm that value of Williams.


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## Udo Erasmus (May 26, 2008)

lewislewis said:


> I too am less sure why Raymond Williams joined Plaid, although I am unsurprised he ended up there i'm just curious about his theory and how that related to Plaid.



Probably the key thread is reformism - from the stalinist CP, to labourism, to Plaid. One only has to study the dialectics of the ex-"marxist" Dafydd Ellis Thomas to see the confusion.

Raymond Williams apparently spoke at a Plaid Summer School in 1977 on "community". Out of interest, do they still hold summer schools?I haven't read it, but this volume that collects his writing on Welsh culture and politics  may give the answer to your questions: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Who-Speaks-Wales-Culture-Identity/dp/0708317847 




			
				Synopsis said:
			
		

> Who Speaks for Wales? is the first collection of Raymond Williams' writings on Welsh culture, literature, history and politics. It brings together material that has long been overlooked by commentators on his work, and emphasises both the centrality of his Welshness to his work as a whole, and the continuing relevance of his thought for post-devolution Wales. Daniel Williams's introduction offers an original reading of Raymond Williams's career from a Welsh perspective and underlines the ways in which his engagement with Welsh issues makes a significant contribution to contemporary debates on nation, race and class. Who Speaks for Wales? will be essential reading for everyone interested in questions of identity, nationhood and ethnicity in Britain and beyond.


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## Donna Ferentes (May 27, 2008)

Udo Erasmus said:


> One only has to study the dialectics of the ex-"marxist" Dafydd Ellis Thomas to see the confusion.


Oh aye.


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## Udo Erasmus (May 28, 2008)

I picked up a copy of the Raymond Willaims book on Wales from my local corporate bookshop in Cardiff, I will write a review on here, when I've read it properly, but very stimulating, even if I don't agree with all of it.


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## lewislewis (May 28, 2008)

Udo Erasmus said:


> Out of interest, do they still hold summer schools?



There is an Ysgol Haf every year- this year it's in Cuba to learn about sustainability. See Leanne Wood's recent debate at the Assembly in which she called for Wales to become self-sufficient in locally produced food on the Havana model. I think that will be an increasingly influential part of the doctrine of the Plaid left.

Leanne also wants to see a decentralised renewable energy model across Wales in which local communities have power over their own energy supplies, linked in with growing their own food (as much as its practical). 

I do worry that we do not have the necessary law-making powers to achieve this. At the moment all Plaid can do is suggest things and try to shift the agenda.


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