JAMES D. YOUNG
Culture and Socialism: Working-Class
Glasgow, 1778-1978
Sexless, ageless, classless, nationless he/she is the all-important nothing
of middle-class wisdom.
Royden Harrison
WE ARE GATHERED at the People's Palace, Glasgow, on Thursday, 3 September,
to inaugurate Ken Currie's magnificent pictorial ode to all rebels, martyrs,
fugitives and anti-capitalist saints and sinners in Glasgow between 1778
and 1978. The inauguration of this mural history of Glasgow ranging over
a period of two hundred years is a unique occasion for creative, poetic,
artistic, intellectual, and radical Scotland: an occasion for celebration
and resurrection. Because the Left in Scotland has usually had to function
in a hostile and philistine environment for a prolonged historical period,
the radicals and socialists have always responded to massive poverty, inequality
and class-engendered injustice by girning and flyting. But this is not an
occasion for girning or flyting. It is rather an occasion for celebrating
what the Scottish working-class movement has achieved, what it is achieving
and what it will achieve in the years to come, Thatcher or no Thatcher.
Although the result of the general election in June, 1987, means that the
Scots are now standing at a crossroads-crisis marked 'national extinction'
at the hands of the multinational corporations or 'national re-birth' under
the inspiration of our centuries-old radical tradition and outward-looking
internationalism, Ken Currie's mural history of working-class Glasgow is
another major sign of our growing confidence and self-confidence. It is
also a permanent landmark in the ongoing cultural revolution in late-twentieth-century
Scotland.
What Ken Currie has achieved as an artist cannot be separated from political
development in contemporary Scotland, though the relationships between the
two are neither simple nor immediately obvious. This is important because
in a recent article in the Sunday Telegraph entitled 'Can the Tories govern
Scotland?', Norman Stone, the Glaswegian Thatcherite, attributed the Scottish
Tories electorial annihilation to 'the decline of Imperial consciousness'.1
Yet he deliberately ignored the cultural, spiritual and intellectual resurgence
in this small corner of the modern world.
But if the connections between the resurgence in contemporary culture and
politics are not obvious, there are identifiable links between what is happening
in Scotland today and Scottish history. From the Reformation onwards, there
were powerful negative and positive factors operating within Scottish society.
The country was very poor by comparison with England; and the Scottish ruling
class did not really encourage artistic or cultural endeavour. This specific,
concrete material environment and heritage had a profound influence on the
development of the history of radicalism in Scotland between 1778 and 1978.
As Frederick Engels always insisted: 'There is no great historical evil
without a compensating historical progress'. And the Scots' centuries-old
material poverty gave them an intense interest in theology and philosophy,
a passion for the 3 Rs, and an argumentative, disputatious disposition.
In the eighteenth century, this intellectual and cultural heritage allowed
them to become the pioneers of modern economics, sociology, a rudimentary
psychology and Utopian socialism. The 'contradictions' of modern capitalism
were very sharp in the City of Glasgow. By the late nineteenth century,
Scottish socialists were more successful than their English or French counterparts
in disseminating and popularising Marxian economics among working-class
men and women.
In surveying the history of socialist movements throughout the world before
the First World War, Edward Roux, the South African socialist, said that
Glasgow and Chicago had produced more socialist literature than any other
cities in the world.2 In an article published in an American socialist magazine
in 1941, it was asserted that Glasgow had been 'the intellectual centre
of British labour' in the 1930s.3 The Scottish workers' movement was, in
fact, reflecting the national environment in which it had been shaped from
1778 onwards.
In the 1930s the Scottish working-class movement produced important socialist
novelists and poets - James Barke, James Welsh, Lewis Grassic Gibbon and
Hugh MacDiarmid. The socialists in Scotland were now encouraging and fostering
socialist poetry and doggerel. And out of the working-class struggle for
better wages and better social conditions a market - a huge market - was
created for the chapbooks and doggerel of John S. Clarke and Tom Anderson.
There were also attempts to develop a workers' theatre and a left-wing cinema.
Yet despite the first significant artistic and cultural stirrings in Glasgow
in the 1920s and 1930s, the labour movement did not have the material resources
to encourage, assist or commission a Scottish Diego Rivera. Indeed in 1938,
when Hugh MacDiarmid first published 'The Red Scotland Thesis', he complained
quite bitterly about 'the philistine 'common sense", and the 'self-satisfied
antu-intellectualism in the Scottish working-class movement. In Hugh MacDiarmid's
opinion, Guy Aldred - and this in spite of Aldred's anti-Stalinism and agitation
for a Fourth International - was the only socialist writer in Glasgow who
was worth reading. As MacDiarmid summed up: 'His (Aldred's) 'Bakunin House'
has long been a tower of liberty and justice in the otherwise unredeemed
cultural chaos of Glasgow.'4
When he published Scottish Studies in 1926, Hugh MacDiarmid had argued that
'in music as in drama we (the Scots) are unique in the fact that we have
practically failed to develop any worth considering at all'. He attributed
the absence of a national tradition of any great music or drama to Calvinism
and 'the comparative material poverty of our country'.5 He did not say anything
at all about painting or the pictorial arts.
Mexico was a much more poverty-stricken country than Scotland in the 1930s,
and yet the Mexicans produced the great painter and revolutionary socialist,
Diego Rivera. In producing magnificent murals of scenes from Mexican history
- of the bitter and bloody struggles of the peasants and workers - Rivera
became one of the great painters of the twentieth century. But there were
two concrete reasons for the emergence of Diego Rivera. In the first place,
there was a long tradition of painting murals in Mexico long before this
all-round, multi-talented, almost renaissance man, came on the scene. Secondly,
he could not have achieved what he did without the moral, spiritual and
financial support of the workers' movement in Mexico and America. Furthermore,
the crucial importance of socialist institutions and a supportive culture
did not detract from - or belittle - Rivera's genius.
To the best of my knowledge Hugh MacDiarmid and Diego Rivera never met or
corresponded with each other. Yet they both understood the revolutionary
role of art, culture and poetry in the struggle for democracy, justice and
socialism. In explaining the connection between the workers' struggle for
better material conditions and culture, Walter Benjamin, the German socialist
and victim of fascism, wrote: 'The class struggle, which is always present
to a historian influenced by Marx, is a fight for the crude material things
without which no refined and spiritual things could exist'.6 And yet Benjamin
fought as few socialists have fought for an appreciation of the finer spiritual
things in life.
A major reason for the absence of a Scottish Diego Rivera was the terrible
mass unemployment, poverty, malnutrition, deprivation and ill-health. As
socialists have always argued, the imaginative faculty depends on a reasonable
material and spiritual environment. In 1938 Hugh MacDiarmid also wrote about
'the disproportionately terrible social and economic conditions of Scotland
compared with England and of the absolute needlessness of anything of the
sort'.7 Capitalism was always more harsh, rapacious and brutal in Scotland
than in England. Because they existed within a much poorer country, the
Scots were more preoccupied with a struggle for the crude material things.
By the 1930s the first serious stirrings of working-class and socialist
activity in drama and music were evident in Glasgow. The philistine bourgeoisie
in Glasgow were much more interested in making profits and arms and in encouraging
the dictators in Italy, Spain and Germany than in assisting artists, poets
or prophets. Those who tried to make a living by writing novels or biographies
had a very tough time; and the poverty-haunted Grassic Gibbon depended on
Americans to buy the novels in which he portrayed working-class Scotland.
But Gibbon did at least stimulate the middle-class dunces in Aberdeen to
coin one immortal phrase: 'Him write a book. I kent his faither'.
The cultural chaos that Hugh MacDiarmid saw in Glasgow in the 1930s has
now gone; and it has been replaced by a socialist- inspired cultural revival,
a resurgence and a vitality in historiography, poetry, literature, drama,
the cinema, painting and the arts. Modern capitalism is coming to an end
in the Western world; and the working classes from Nicaragua to Scotland
are displaying a new self-confidence despite the brutality of the Thatchers
and the Reagans. As Grassic Gibbon said in one of the last essays he wrote
before his death in 1934: 'Towards the culmination of a civilisation the
arts, so far from decaying, always reach their greatest efflorescence'.8
Pat Lally, the leader of the Glasgow District Council, has described Ken
Currie's mural history as a major work of popular art. Moreover, this major
work of popular art does not just represent a comparatively new and major
talent in Scottish painting, although it does that vividly, graphically
and visually in a permanent form. It is also a much deeper national expression
of the forces of change and the voices of revolt against philistine money-grubbing
at the expense of human dignity, creativity, curiosity, individual vitality
and autonomy.
The good book tells us that 'where there is no vision, the people perish'.
Yet despite the Scots' historic deficiences in music, drama and the pictorial
arts, the Scots portrayed in Ken Currie's mural history of Glasgow did not
lack vision. The vision was there in the speeches, writings and agitations
of Thomas Muir of Huntershill, in the struggles of the Black weaver, Mathew
Bogie, who was one of the leaders of the Radical War of 1820, and in the
superb pedagogy of 'the great John MacLean'. And in our own times, the vision
of a better society was seen in the UCS sit-in.
When I had the privilege of living in the home of Eugene V. Debs, the great
American socialist described by Guy Aldred as 'America's vision-maker',
in Terre Haute, Indiana, in 1980,1 encountered and enjoyed the murals dedicated
to Debs' fruitful life of struggle for justice and socialism. But Ken Currie
has not just portrayed the lives of great individuals. He has, in fact,
portrayed the lives and struggles of the working class in Glasgow - a magnificent
class in a magnificent City - over a period of two hundred years.
To appreciate the unique scale and scope of Ken Currie's artistic achievement
and vision from a socialist perspective, we must yet again glance at what
Walter Benjamin, the German authority on art and culture, had to say about
the most important aspect of developing socialist images of the world around
us:
Not man or men but the struggling, oppressed class itself is the
depository of historical knowledge. In Marx it appears as the last enslaved class, as the avenger that completes the liberation in the name of generations of the downtrodden.
Furthermore, in describing what separated socialists from Social Democrats,
Benjamin criticised the right-wing elements in the labour movement for portraying
the working class as 'the redeemer of the future generations'. In summing
up, he said: 'This training made the (German) working class forget both
its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image
of the enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren'.9
The dominant socialist image in this mural history of Glasgow is the unbroken
image of our 'enslaved ancestors' within a specific national setting.
In 1957 John McLeish, a brilliant psychologist from Glasgow, contributed
an article to the magazine, Universities and Left Review. The article culminated
with an unanswered but not rhetorical question: 'Scotland a nation once
again or the workers' international?' But in 1987 the forces of socialist
internationalism outside of Scotland are telling us that the survival of
the Scottish nation is the pre-condition for a socialist-humanist society
in this small part of the world. And the most intelligent, imaginative,
creative and radical Scots have always given a sympathetic ear to the democratic
forces in the outside world from the French Revolution in 1789, right through
to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Revolution in Nicaragua today.
What Ken Currie's mural history of Glasgow conveys to us is that the Scots
have been exiled inside their own country. For when a people have no access
to their own real history, they are exiles. However, this mural history
of Glasgow between 1778 and 1978 is proof of the profound changes occurring
in Scottish artistic, cultural and political life. By forcing their way
into the national culture, the murals of Ken Currie depicting the historic
struggles of working-class men and women, together with other facets of
contemporary working-class cultural activity, are feeding back into Scottish
life and impinging on the political consciousness of socialists and trade
unionists.
This was brought home to me when I visited my friend Harry McShane, the
veteran Clydeside socialist, at Baxter House, exactly a week ago. Within
minutes of my arrival, he showed me a letter that he was sending to Mrs.
Thatcher. In this historic letter, he told Thatcher-Victoria that a Scottish
Assembly was the very minimum change being demanded by the working-class
movement. In informing me that he now favoured national independence rather
than mere Devolution, Harry was expressing something much deeper than himself.
This is simply another expression of 'the new passions and the new forces'
represented in the new mural history of working-class Glasgow.
In the recent article in the Sunday Telegraph, Norman Stone observed with
some sadness and nostalgia for the days of the Empire that the Tories in
Scotland are now a 'foreign', 'patrician' group of outsiders. He might have
added that they are full of bare-faced cheek. But this is not a new development
at all. The real culture of the Scottish nation - not just the fight for
crude material things, but the deep unconquerable spirituality of the producers
of wealth - is depicted by Ken Currie. As Scotland increasingly moves towards
self-determination, the new attempts to rehabilitate such reactionary obscurantists
as Henry Dundas, the Dictator of the 1790s, will fail because the Tories
in Scotland are now naked, exposed and indecent.
Contemporary Scotland is not just beginning to come of age as it moves towards
self-government. It is simultaneously reaching out to 'the Age of Reason'
anticipated by Tom Paine and Thomas Muir of Huntershill. What is happening
in Scotland is a part of the international revolt that we have seen in Nicaragua
and South Africa. But even in the heartlands of capitalism, the 'new passions
and new forces' are agitating for a People's art, a People's history and
a People's culture.
In recent years I have been privileged to attend conferences on working-class
history in Austria, West Germany and America. Despite the formidable obstacles
facing socialists in those countries, they have done much to promote left-wing
films, poetry, literature, drama and murals portraying the history of the
really important people in their own societies - the producers of wealth,
not the parasites.
But in Austria the Labour Party has created its own choirs and choral societies.
Despite the enormous number of influential fascist sympathisers in the ruling
circles in Vienna, local Labour administrations have had streets and squares
named after such famous socialists as Otto Bauer. In the Austrian universities
the socialists' intellectual, artistic and cultural achievements and anti-fascist
struggles are acknowledged and recognised as a part of the national culture.
As I was preparing this talk, it occurred to me that the most accurate guide
to the degree of democracy in any contemporary society is the continuous
presence - or the continuous absence - of working-class struggles in drama,
films, street-names and murals.
Although the socialists in West Germany have agitated and worked in a less
sympathetic and favourable environment than their Austrian counterparts,
they have begun to make some impression on the dominant culture. In 1968
the government of the West German Federal Republic asserted that the assassination
of Rosa Luxemburg in 1919 had been in accordance with martial law, though
no charges had been made against her and no trial had taken place. Rosa
was - even in death - 'the enemy within'. Yet West Germany with its terrible
fascist legacy is changing; and militant, democratic socialists are saying
what socialists have to say in the universities and research institutes.
In 1985 an international cultural festival celebrating the contribution
of Antonio Gramsci and Rosa Luxemburg to human knowledge, culture and advancement
was held in Hamburg. It attracted artists, painters, historians and film-makers
from all over the world; and it was funded by official sources and, in turn,
generated profit and stimulated other cultural projects. Next year a group
of socialist scholars are hosting an international congress on the work
of Upton Sinclair, the American novelist and author of The Jungle, in order
to discuss and assess the relationship between socialism, literature and
the arts,
In America socialists and radicals have published major biographies of Daniel
De Leon and Eugene V. Debs. Just as the Scots and the West Germans have
forced the authorities to confront the issue of the systematic persecution
of John Maclean and Roso Luxemburg, so the Americans are succeeding in securing
the gradual rehabilitation of Gene Debs. By 1979 John Joseph Laska had completed
his murals celebrating the achievements of the man who on five different
occasions stood for election as the Socialist Party's Presidential candidate.
The murals paying tribute to Debs' life and martyrdom in the cause of American
and international Labour are in the attic of the Debs' home in Terre Haute.
Moreover, the Debs' home is now classified as 'a National Parks Department
Historic Site'. As Glasgow prepares to become the cultural capital of Europe
in 1990, perhaps we could do something to secure Labour's 'martyred dead'
even greater recognition in the schools and culture of Scotland's most energetic
City. One of the questions I have asked myself during the last few days
is this: 'What united the multitude of individuals portrayed in the murals
painted by Ken Currie?' It would be comforting to suggest that they were
all socialists. However, it simply would not be true. In the technical language
of academic historians, the working class in Scotland before 1832 belonged
to 'the pre-industrial' working class. But what the Scottish men and women
portrayed in the eight panels of murals had in common was a passion for
justice and freedom - a preoccupation more often than not with the crude
material things as a pre-condition for art, culture and dignity. What they
also had in common was a hatred of Absolutism, arbitrary authority, tyranny,
injustice and hierarchy.
To understand the importance of the contribution to human advancement made
by the individuals portrayed in Ken Currie's murals between 1778 and 1850,
we should remember that it was an era of rising 'bourgeois individualism'
when ordinary people were regarded by ruling classes everywhere as un-persons
whose poverty was a part of the natural order of things. In the eighteenth
century, for example, the 'great' Samuel Johnson told James Boswell: 'You
are to consider that it is our duty to maintain the subordination of civil
society; and where there is a gross or shameful deviation from rank, it
should be punished so as to deter others from making the same perversion'.'1
In the late 1840s Thomas Carlyle attacked working people for asking questions
about the 'natural' hierarchy in the world. As he expressed it: 'Recognised
or not, a man has his superiors, a regular hierarchy above him, extending
upwards, degree by degree, to Heaven itself and God the maker, Who made
this world not for anarchy but for rule and order'.12
From the 1880s, when modern socialism was born, to the UCS sit-in in 1971,
the presence of the socialist vision of the better world to come has been
a constant factor in Scottish - and English, German, French, Italian and
American - working-class struggles. In what is perhaps the best available
definition of socialism in any language, Theodor Shanin says: 'Socialism
is about ending the domination of people by other people, about collectivism
which is nobody's prison, about social justice and equality, about making
people conscious of their power and ability to control their destinies here
and now'. This is the vision which united all of the colourful individuals
portrayed by Ken Currie over a period of two hundred years; and this is
what we are celebrating tonight as we look in the direction of what Antonio
Gramsci, the Italian socialist, described as 'the City of the future'.
We should acknowledge the determination and the hard, sustained work undertaken
by Elspeth King and Michael Donnelly in helping in the birth of this work
of popular art; and we should not be afraid to trumpet our socialist opinions
from the rooftops, the squares and the market-places of this hardworking,
honest and very cheeky City. And is doing so, it is appropriate to recall
the words of the young American novelist, Norman Mailer:
We want a socialist world not because we have the conceit that men would therefore be happy...but because we feel the moral imperative in life itself to raise the human condition, even if this should ultimately mean no more than that man's suffering has been lifted to a higher level.
FOOTNOTES
1. Norman Stone, 'Can the Tories govern Scotland?', Sunday Telegraph, 14
June 1987.
2. Eddie and Win Roux, Rebel Pity (London, 1970), p.7.
3. Britannicus, 'The 'New International' in England', The New International,
July 1941.
4. Hugh MacDiarmid, 'The Red Scotland Thesis', The Voice of Scotland, Vol.1,
No.l, 1938.
5. Hugh MacDiarmid, Scottish Studies (Edinburgh, 1926).
6. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations (London, 1977).
7. MacDiarmid, 'The Red Scotland Thesis', op. cit.
8. Hugh MacDiarmid, 'Lewis Grassic Gibbon', Little Reviews Anthology 1946(London,
1946).
9. Benjamin, op. cit.
10. John McLeish, 'The Uses of Literacy', Universities and Left Review,
Summer 1957.
11. James Boswell's Life of Johnson, edited J. Brady (New York, 1968).
12. Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (London, 1960).