Gramsci | ukwatch.net

England and the 'National-Popular' (Part 2)

eddie — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:36:49 +0000

Click here for Part 1 of this article

Where is England?

Well, I think I live in it. So, for me, it’s the earth beneath my feet and the landscape I walk through with my dog. Green and pleasant, temperate and mild, most of the time anyway. It’s the slightly scruffy streets of the fine city I live in; the cafes and theatres, the galleries and libraries and museums, the gyms and jogging routes that give me culinary, aesthetic, intellectual and athletic sustenance. It’s the semi-darkness of the urban evening, the encounters with the familiar unknown and the safely dangerous, which as a man I feel securely entitled to. Then, venturing further afield for work and research, it’s the overheated, creaking railway line that takes me to London and Essex, where I make my living as an expert of sorts in the social care of people with HIV/AIDS. As I speed past the fields and woods, back yards and warehouses of East Anglia, I often wonder what kinds of lives are led there and whether they are anything like mine. Then, at the end of a working day, I speed back to Norwich and Norfolk and a decent night’s sleep in this ‘city of silence’. This was the poet D’Annunzio’s term for ancient, pre-industrial cities, cited respectfully in the Selections from Prison Notebooks: ‘all had glorious pasts but are now of secondary importance, some little more than villages with magnificent monumental centres as a relic of their bygone splendour’. So this, in rough summary, is my England. Of course this is my personal corner of the country, but the interesting question is how to link this into a wider narrative.

England has more often defined itself by what it is not: black, Jewish, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Asian, African, Spanish, French, German, European of any sort really. This ‘negative identity’ is characteristic of national-popular cultures shaped by militaristic adventure and imperial dominion. So maybe I should also say what the England I live in is not. First off, it is no longer ‘British’, at any rate since Scottish and Welsh devolution, which had the (surely unintended but wholly predictable) effect of making some of the English feel as if these other people of the British land mass really didn’t want to live with us any more. (Northern Ireland is a more complex question which I don’t have the space to go into here.) One of my own recent weekend breaks was to Edinburgh, the beautiful, sensibly vibrant, deeply cultured and obviously prosperous capital city of Scotland, where it really does feel like the separate country it plainly aspires to be.

Secondly, the England I live in is not (for all its best intentions) multi-cultural, in the sense of a diverse but essentially unitary community. Let’s be clear: the ethnic groups of England (where they have to) live and work politely alongside each other, but there is precious little real, voluntary inter-connection. And what there is often takes the form of slightly broader ‘exclusive alliances’, based on new ‘negative identities’, such as underclass white and black youth united in ‘chav/gangsta’ culture against both Asian youth and the wider ‘respectable’ society. Paul Gilroy wrote in the 1980s that ‘there ain’t no black in the union jack’. Well, there’s plenty of black in the St George Cross in 2008, but very little brown (and certainly no tartan or taff).

I am conscious that in this last paragraph I have finally introduced some real live people into my account of the English, even if only to argue that many of them don’t seem to want to have much to do with anyone else. And this, it seems to me, is another currently defining ‘negative identity’ of the English, coming ever closer to home: that, as I and others have argued in the pamphlet Feelbad Britain, ‘we are a society of people who don’t appear to like themselves and each other very much’. The white people I commute with once or twice a week to Essex and London, on crowded, uncomfortable, often malfunctioning and surprisingly slow trains, barely exchange a glance let alone a word. For much of the year they are yellow and grey with fatigue and ill health. Unless they’ve just been on their holidays, when they briefly turn a lightly toasted colour. The comfortably unhappy.

Two other of our current social categories deserve a mention, because of what they represent in English society: the ‘grumpy old’, and then back to ‘chav’. We are well used to being told that our aging population is a problem, primarily because of the burden it will place on the welfare state and on the working-age people whose taxes pay for it. This is real enough – leaving aside the question of whether increased longevity is actually a problem – but like so much of our current political discourse, it casts the issue within a narrowly economistic framework. Far more immediate and apparent is what Gramsci would have called the ‘moral crisis’ of longer lives: a general loss of purpose, often amounting to a sense of utter futility, amongst this growing sector of the population. Faced with redundancy from jobs and industries that no longer exist, early retirement on questionable ill health grounds, or even statutory retirement decades before they can expect to die – and deprived of (or excused from) any sustained involvement in childcare by the dispersal of family networks – older people now have loads of time and (mostly) money, with little idea what to do with it all.

There are two general options for this growing segment of the population. The first is the positive ‘active elderly’ route, keeping physically fit and mentally engaged and flexible, and living happily and well – a historically unprecedented experience that requires a degree of personal resourcefulness, family and social support, and simple good luck in avoiding chronic illness and disability. The second, in many ways easier but obviously far more problematic for the individual and for society, is the negative ‘grumpy old’ option, ossifying into your grievances and prejudices, bathing in outrage and disgust. In an English context, this pretty much sums up the hard-core Daily Mail readership and the people who still bother to vote in local elections; and it casts a wider, ever darker pall over our public life.

As for chav – the Burberry cap and sportswear-clad, shaved or scraped-scalp, gold-bedecked look and lifestyle that has overrun much of what’s left of the English working class – well, it’s a genuine social phenomenon deserving far more serious scrutiny than the kind of for/against discourse of tabloid press and TV, or than I have space for here. Basically, chav is what happens when a working class is left culturally defenceless, exposed to a low-grade diet of American cultural imperialism, especially the gangsta-rap and porno-R&B that passes for pop culture in the age of MTV, the shopping mall, fast food and freely available strong lager and C-class drugs. Is chav a new way of being English? Or just a weird hybrid of commercial/‘globalisation’-era cultural styles, that will fade away as quickly as it arose, and make way for some new garb and patois for the lumpen proletariat, the white trash made not so poor in the lower reaches of the neo-liberal informal economy? We shall see…

Finally, one other thing England is not: London. Our supposedly capital city is now a quite separate entity, a member of the international network of mega-cities, which has turned its back wilfully and consciously on the country of England. As Doreen Massey has recently established in her book World City, London has its own wholly distinctive patterns of interaction and division, engagement and exploitation, quite different from the rest of England, while having distinct (and often damaging) repercussions for it. I regularly commute between the two, and spend time in both, and they are now in reality wholly separate places. To be specific, the concerns and perspectives of the metropolitan liberal left (in that lovely term, ‘the chattering classes’) are shared by very, very few people outside London. I know it comes as an occasional, very nasty surprise to be reminded of this by such phenomena as the Countryside Alliance, periodic fuel protests, or the recurring rumble of irritation about ‘political correctness’, but the middle and upper class liberal intelligentsia who
staff the political and media and cultural industries of London have really very little idea of what’s going on in the separate country of England. They might occasionally venture out into it, for the purposes of rest and recreation (more weekend breaks), but this is little more than internal tourism. Especially when it’s to weekend and summer holiday villages consisting almost wholly of second homes, dead in the week and the winter.

London’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence is a key element in the failure of the traditional English national-popular settlement. It has been gathering pace for decades, if not centuries, and its effect is now evident in the attitudes of non-Londoners towards our notional national capital. Popular reactions in the rest of England to exclusively London phenomena – from the Millennium Dome to the 7/7 bombings and the 2012 Olympics – are at best ambivalent and at worst downright contemptuous.

So, this England is not London, it is not Scotland or Wales or Europe, and large parts of it subsist on an emotional diet of aggravation and disquiet which could, if we’re not very careful, turn seriously nasty. Even parts of the Southeast, London’s own hinterland, are getting seriously pissed off. If I were a displaced white East Ender, living in the modern post-industrial slums of the ‘Thames Gateway’ towns of Dagenham, Thurrock or Basildon, with an extended family in inter-generational multiple deprivation, I would be seriously tempted to vote BNP, just for the sheer two-fingered hell of it. And if you find that shocking, I would respectfully suggest that you are lacking in political imagination, and offer to accompany you there on my next fortnightly visit.

So what might a national-popular England be like?

I am well aware that mine is not the first attempt to flesh out a ‘progressive patriotism’. E.P. Thompson harked back somewhat sentimentally to ‘the freeborn Englishman’, and the Communist Party in its immediate post-war heyday had a stab at a patriotic national ‘story’, taking in the various waves of peasant and proletarian rebellion and martyrdom. It seems to have consisted mostly of pageants and paeans, a kind of misty-eyed romanticism, and it didn’t survive the onset of Cold War. Most famously, the old Cold Warrior George Orwell attempted it in some of his rightly celebrated essays, especially ‘England your England’, written in late 1940, as ‘highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me’. Orwell was a vastly overrated writer, a much better essayist than novelist. As for his politics, I’ve always thought Isaac Deutscher pinned him down as ‘a simple-minded anarchist’, which explains why Orwell lends himself so readily to reactionary purposes, like so many self-styled ‘libertarians’. But in his wartime essays, Orwell came close to identifying the quality of defiant reserve in the English that thumbed its nose at ’itler and the Jerries and pretty much everyone else too, and might just yet make the kernel of a national-popular ‘positive identity’. Orwell called it ‘national loyalty… as a positive force’. But his observation that ‘in moments of supreme crisis, the whole nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a species of instinct, really a code of conduct which is understood by almost everyone though never formulated’ is deeply if unconsciously Gramscian in its grasp of the political and ideological function of national-popular ‘common sense’.

Towards the end of my own last bout of ‘democratic left’ activism, in the mid-1980s, people associated with Marxism Today attempted to ‘reclaim the union jack’ for the left. This reached its ultimate absurdity, I recall, in a version of that tawdry, blood-stained rag in Rastafarian colours. More recently another old acquaintance, Mark Perryman, has been heavily involved in what he calls ‘football activism’, with the aim of turning the England football team into a Gramscian ‘national-popular’ cause. A bit of a lost one, I would say, given the abject performances of that bunch of overpaid, over-hyped, overgrown infants. Billy Bragg and Tessa Jowell have argued that the football-related mass sproutings of the St George’s Cross can be seen as, variously, an expression of national pride or ‘just a bit of fun’. Well…

It may be because I am so bloody English, and defiantly anti-postmodern, but I’m getting increasingly impatient with the symbolism of it all: the various flags, principles and abstract values and causes we are supposed to espouse as our ‘national identity’. It’s all just too easily switched on and off, manipulated and repackaged, usually for the commercial interests of various media and leisure corporations (to be unfashionably anti-postmarxist about it) and sometimes for blatantly manipulative political purposes. As such, it sums up neatly our bourgeoisie’s failure (back to Nairn-Anderson) to construct a national-popular consensus that goes beyond commerce, recreation and showbiz: fan-dom and spectating, which is pretty much all it requires of our masses. And it has no relationship with the real place of England, the land of fields and woods, towns and cities that we all of us actually if reluctantly spend our lives in. As Orwell put it in 1940, and I would love to think it still holds, ‘In England all the boasting and flag-wagging, the “Rule Britannia stuff”, is done by small minorities. The patriotism of the common people is not vocal or even conscious’.

So let’s shove all that to one side, and dig a bit deeper into our past and present for a democratic (possibly left) English national-popular. To begin with, we can just about discern some sparks of resistance, and embryonic Gramscian popular hegemony, within what Gareth Stedman Jones called the English proletarian ‘culture of consolation’. It’s there in elements of the music hall and folk tradition: the mocking and the cheeky, rather than the maudlin and sentimental. It’s there among the 1950s ‘angry young men’ (and women), especially the ‘social-realist’ wing of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or A Taste of Honey. It’s there in 1960s mod culture, that extraordinary appropriation by white working class youth of black American and Caribbean music and ‘cool’, of European elegance and fashion, and avant-garde pop-art stylings. It’s there in the consciously popular-democratic ‘folk-rock’ of early Fairport Convention, whose recently re-issued, magnificent Liege and Lief was hailed at the time as an English masterpiece. It’s there in the DIY, democratic wing of punk, especially in the Northwest, which was much more explicitly cultural-political than the showy, bin-liner and safety pin London variety. It’s there now in the TV show Shameless, which at its best assembles story-lines and characters from the writer Paul Abbot’s own childhood on a council estate into a prototype for new, reconstituted proletarian living. Joyful as well as shameless; resiliently female as well as fecklessly male; sexy and polysexual; and yes, naturally if wishfully multicultural.

There is something in all of this that is enduringly ‘down to earth’; what Orwell called our ‘horror of abstract thought’. This seems to me the central feature of the English national-popular identity, and happily resonates with my earlier call ‘back to the land’ of this real, mucky place. It locates us firmly where we need to be, in our material existence rather than a fog of tacky symbols. And let’s be honest: it exposes the complete dead-end we on the left have allowed ourselves to be shunted into, of ‘political correctness’. How on earth (that word again) did we allow otherwise progressive demands, about equality and freedom and fairness, to be turned into a new moral code for language and behaviour that the majority of the population finds utterly bewildering and alienating? What we have done with ‘political correctness’ is set about imposing upon the national discourse a new form of the traditional middle-class sensibility of politeness and nice-ness and ‘good manners’, which itself arose as a trusty guide for social climbers through the otherwise hazardous,
tumultuous social landscape of the nineteenth century. This was where Gramsci’s ‘separate entity’, the English bourgeoisie, found its moral purpose, keeping the silly, licentious aristocracy in check, and policing the rude manners of the unruly masses. But instead of not eating off your knife or saying ‘bloody’, only doing the washing on Monday and never discussing personal feelings, we now censure the white, generally powerless lower orders for using terms of ethnic or sexual designation that are in everyday, colloquial use among minority ethnic (nigger and paki) and sexual communities (queer and dyke) themselves! Whatever possessed us? Probably the same malign spirit that made us think we could construct a progressive – even socialist! – politics around every other aspect of ‘individual identity’ than nation and class, the central categories within Gramsci’s thinking.

But then, as Stedman Jones reminds us, there are plenty of historical antecedents for this kind of thing within the social relations of our country. Sometimes they have played a key role in the adaptation of bourgeois hegemony, as in the ‘affinity of outlook between the “top and bottom drawer” against the “killjoys in between”’ during middle-class attempts to impose a restrictive moral order on pleasure-taking in the late nineteenth century (after a loosening of moral restraints that had generated new commercial possibilities within the consumption of leisure). This was a time when Conservatism put down its deep roots amongst the English working class, because you could drink alcohol freely in the ‘Conny club’, sing along with gusto at the Conservative-protected music hall, and cheer on the boxers and football teams sponsored by your Conservative employer. Conservatism was fun, well out of reach of the finger-wagging zealots of non-conformism, Liberalism and Labourism. For the nineteenth-century temperance movements, Humanitarian League or anti-Gambling League of Stedman Jones’s account, ‘all acting on the same principle, trying to interfere with the enjoyments and pleasures of the people’, read twenty-first century ‘political correctness gone mad’ or moral panic over drugs and binge-drinking.

Much of the theorising about culture and identity of the last twenty years has followed a trajectory from ‘communities of identity’ (people drawn together by a common ethnicity or sexuality), through ‘communities of interest’ (people with shared hobbies or pastimes) to ‘communities of affect’ (people united by taste or sensation in music, art, sport or other spectacle). What we have ended up with is a society of ‘virtual enclaves’ or self-selecting ghettoes, mutually exclusive sets of PLUs (People Like Us) living alongside but not with each other, the reductio ad absurdum of a process of social retreat first identified in the late-1980s by Michael Rustin and others. I propose, in pursuit of the English national-popular – the Scottish and Welsh are welcome to join in too, by the way, but it seems to me that they’re a fair way down their own road already – that we seek to rediscover ‘communities of place’.

That is, real geographical material places you can put your finger and foot on, like Norwich and Norfolk or anywhere else that takes your English fancy. A quaint notion, I know, but the fact is that while we’ve been busily setting up communities of identity/interest/affect, most real people have continued living in such real geographical material places. We need to re-establish political contact with them, as is already happening, in small, localized, sometimes contradictory ways, in the ‘greening’ of municipal politics. My own local Green Party group of Norwich city councillors is now in double figures, with a realistic chance of an MP and an MEP in the next few years. They have still to extend their electoral reach much beyond the disaffected urban intelligentsia, and to develop a fully modern, urban progressive politics, but at its best greenery connects to people’s real, troubled experience of their land and lives: a crucial ingredient in any emergent democratic left England.

Maybe, once we’ve embraced our core-Englishness, we can begin happily and comfortably being other things too – men, women, black, white, brown, gay, straight, young, old, whatever constitutes our own unique personalities – and articulating our nationality with all our other identities. Maybe as a nation we could start to like each other again, and just maybe start to creep out from under the shadow of failed, partial bourgeois hegemony and its contemporary ideological twists of Thatcherism and its neo-liberal, New Labour adaptation. As the socialist visionary Edward Carpenter wrote in his eponymous ‘national-popular’ hymn of the 1900s, ‘England Arise!’ Or, as one of the foremost English visionaries of our own time, Ian Dury, put it, ‘There ain’t half been some clever bastards…’

England and the 'National-Popular' (Part 1)

eddie — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 14:33:57 +0000

What does it mean to be English? Let’s start with the fashionably confessional/genealogical. I am about the most English person I know. As far back as I can go – admittedly, like most ordinary English people, not very far – my forebears were unquestionably English. My mother’s family came from the old market town of Ashby-de-la-Zouch in Leicestershire, and my father’s from rural Cambridgeshire. I have never traced either branch back beyond my great-grandparents, who were tradesmen and clerks. But, given the relatively fixed family and community patterns of the southern English midlands, with relatively little outward or inward migration until recently, and my family’s decidedly non-exalted social status, I can safely assume that they all came from the solid, steady heart of England. Nothing Celtic, continental or colonial in there, though a bit of TV celebrity-style digging or a DNA test might unearth some surprises.

So, if I’m so bloody English, why do I find myself so generally embarrassed and often downright ashamed of it? Why have I, throughout my adult life, felt drawn to other countries and cultures, and carried inside me an elaborate (almost wholly unrealistic) ‘escape-plan’ for when life here becomes finally unbearable? Why, whenever I find myself amongst the English abroad – the tattooed, bloated, around-the-clock pissed, football shirt-wearing variety, or their complacent, condescending, wine-quaffing, socks-and-sandals superiors – do I insist on marching my family a further half-mile down the beach? Why do I start thinking in O-level French, German or Italian to convince myself I’m not one of them? Why do the English towns and cities where most of us live seem so mean and dull by comparison to the vibrant, civilized places in continental Europe Easyjet and Ryanair are so eager and ready to whisk us away to? Is it only a matter of lousy weather? And why do we persist, in our petty fog of regional rivalries, in thinking that everywhere else in England is even worse? Is there some general tendency in the English towards self-loathing, and if so, what are its specific contemporary triggers?

Blimey; a whole paragraph of questions. I’d better start providing some answers. In this essay, I want to begin thinking a way out of this distinctively English mess. I’m particularly interested in what I might call a ‘democratic left’ Englishness, as opposed to the boorish, braying, occasionally terrifying and essentially terrified Englishness we see all around (and, if we’re honest, inside) us. I plan to use the thinking of the great twentieth century libertarian Marxist Antonio Gramsci (an Italian with a recurring, somewhat puzzled fascination with England), and specifically his concept of the ‘national-popular’, to illuminate elements of our English ‘national identity’. That’s in both its negative connotations, what we have to feel ashamed of; and the more positive, what we might incorporate into a more intelligent, expansive and generous outlook on our own country and the rest of the world.

I’ve spent much of the last few years ruminating on this stuff, often while out walking with my dog in the real, physical English places I live in: the urban pockets, green wildernesses, long beaches and more managed rural landscapes of northern East Anglia, mainly Norfolk and Suffolk. This most English of the English regions, or at least those further parts that remain outside daily commuting reach of London, seems to me to represent the best and the worst of our country. Its largest and most important settlement, the ‘fine city’ of Norwich where I reside, really is closer in ‘feel’ and layout to the vibrant, civilized, manageable and easily walkable places explored on short breaks to Europe than to other comparable English cities. It is also closer, as both the proverbial crow and its contemporary low-cost airline equivalent fly, to Amsterdam than London. At the same time, it was once famously (and accurately still) referred to by the National Front as ‘the last white city in England’.

Gramsci and the national-popular

I have no idea whether Antonio Gramsci did much walking as an adult. For the last ten years of his life, during which he produced his extraordinary Prison Notebooks, he was only ever able to walk around his cell, prison yard and hospital ward. As a child, however, he spent much of his time roaming the Sardinian hills and fields, and recalls it regularly in his letters from prison as an obvious highlight in a troubled, poverty-stricken childhood. What shines through all his writings, in freedom or incarceration, is a deep appreciation for the feelings, traditions and perspectives of ordinary people, both in his native Sardinia and recently unified, mainland Italy. But his affection was fiercely realistic and wholly unsentimental. He was acutely aware of the contradictory impulses at work among the nascent Italian masses: from women like his mother holding together fractured families and communities, and the self-taught, determined and heroic activists of the 1919/20 Turin factory occupations, to ‘the scum of society’ he remembered hanging around the squares and bars of Cagliari and the ‘monkey people’ who embraced fascism.

Gramsci was always preoccupied with the social, cultural and regional tensions amongst the Italian people, from a ‘Sardist’ schoolboy composition calling for ‘the mainlanders to be thrown into the sea’ to his final essay as a free man, ‘The Southern Question’. This scrutinized the supposedly ‘scientific basis for regional prejudice’ propagated by the Italian Socialist Party among the northern industrial proletariat, as against the ‘backward south’. The Prison Notebooks make repeated reference to the processes whereby the Italian people are brought together and pulled apart. For Gramsci, the national-popular is a key element within the process of hegemony, whereby a particular social group represents its own interests as those of the whole nation. The success of this hegemonic project is measured by the extent to which other subordinate or ‘subaltern’ social groups accept this new ‘settlement’, more or less voluntarily, and are drawn into a ‘historic bloc’ around the dominant elite. We might call this, a little cheekily, ‘a coalition of the willing’, but note that in Gramsci it is a wholly real rather than rhetorical device. Together, these new social allies forge a national-popular identity and purpose, which becomes the new ‘common sense’ of the epoch, a ‘collective will as operative awareness of-historical necessity, as protagonist of a real and effective historical drama’. A further condition of the continued hegemony of the national-popular historic bloc is that it is constantly refreshed with new personnel, energies and insights, especially from subaltern groups’ own elites and intellectuals.

Gramsci sought to understand the attempts made over centuries to awaken this national-popular ‘collective will’, and the struggles to form a distinctive national-popular culture, alongside the mythology and iconography required to construct a national ‘story’. He was always especially sensitive to the question of language within a national-popular project: a common language is one of the primary sites wherein a nation coheres, and literally learns to talk and listen to itself. In our own time, this perhaps explains the extraordinary sensitivity over the uses and abuses of English, especially amongst certain sectors (Radio 4 listeners spring to mind) who rush to its defence at the slightest provocation, especially over suspected Americanisms. (This linguistic protectionism is even more evident in France, which Gramsci felt displayed a more pronounced ‘national-popular culture’ than any other nation, largely because of its thorough-going bourgeois revolution and because its intellectuals ‘tend to guide the population ideologically and keep it linked with the
leading group’.)

Gramsci attributes the relative historic failure of some countries’ attempts to forge a national-popular primarily to limitations within the ‘leading’ class of the society – in particular to an inability or unwillingness to represent its own sectional interests as the interests of the nation. The examples he cites are mostly drawn from Italian history, but he was also intrigued by the similarly untypical and conditional English ‘bourgeois revolution’. He suggests that the English bourgeoisie were never especially interested in forging a national-popular consensus: ‘instead of the bourgeoisie leading the people and winning their support to abolish feudal privileges, the nobility (or a fraction of it) formed the national-popular bloc against the industrial bourgeoisie’. (An elaboration of this idea formed one of the famous ‘Nairn-Anderson theses’ of the early 1960s, which basically issued a vote of no-confidence in the British ruling class.) It seems to me that the ramifications of this analysis for the formation of our society are immense, not least (as Gramsci goes on to note) in explaining the English tradition of popular Toryism, and the predominance of financial over industrial capitalism. Not to mention a divide between north and south, which is hardly less marked in England than it is in Italy.

British Labourism offers an equally resonant case study. When Gramsci says of the Italian Risorgimento ‘an effective Jacobin force was always missing’, he might just as well be indicating the recurrent failures of political leadership within the British labour movement. In particular, the lack of a ‘Modern Prince’ – by which Gramsci meant a coherent, consciously revolutionary party with a wide, deep mass base, such as only his own PCI ever came close to, certainly in Europe – points to the utter historic failure of the ‘militant’ wing of Labourism, the Communist Party of Great Britain. And the ‘British problem’ is not simply one of leadership, but equally to do with those who allow themselves to be led. As labour historians such as Eric Hobsbawm and Gareth Stedman Jones have established, the class-consciousness of the oldest and proportionately largest proletariat in the world was formed and expressed primarily through lifestyle, recreational pursuits and appearance, manners and ethos, rather than political action, intellectual formation or deep-seated ideological affiliation. As Stedman Jones puts it: ‘Its dominant cultural institutions were not the school, the evening class, the library, the friendly society, the church or the chapel, but the pub, the sporting paper, the racecourse and the music hall … both impermeable to outsiders and yet predominantly conservative’. What political agencies have emerged from the British working class, in the various forms of the labour and trade union movement, have tended to be shallow and ineffectual, imbued with a quasi-religious mythology and iconography and a narrowly electoral or sectional approach. There has been little sense of a class that seeks to represent itself as the leading actor in a new national story.

Gramsci insists that what is required of a political party is a conscious and systematic programme of ‘intellectual and moral reform’ conducted by ‘intellectuals who are conscious of being organically linked to a national-popular mass’. While this notion of party leadership is not as vanguardist as some notable twentieth-century models, it still seems far enough from populism, in our own deep-dyed ‘anti-elitist’ time and culture, to make me at least feel deeply uncomfortable, and apprehensive at the prospect of such a programme of reform. Geoffrey Nowell Smith and Quintin Hoare, the editors of the Selections from the Prison Notebooks published in 1971, plainly also feel uncomfortable with ‘the national popular’ and add a note of their own on the concept, which they describe as ‘one of the most interesting and also widely criticized ideas in Gramsci’s thought’. They argue that it is important to stress that it is a ‘cultural concept, relating to the position of the masses within the culture of the nation, and radically alien to any form of populism or national socialism’.

Hoare and Nowell Smith’s clear unease with the term betrays their underlying allegiance to the New Left Review end of British Gramscianism, which, amongst other things, was severely critical of PCI leader Togliatti’s application of the Gramscian legacy to post-war Italian politics. But it also serves the useful purpose of demonstrating much of the British left’s traditional discomfort with the ‘nation’ and pretty much any aspect of the ‘national’, especially when applied to the geographical and social entity of England. There are some good reasons for this. We are still haunted by fascism and Nazism, embarrassed by their socialist origins; and during the twentieth century socialism was linked to nationalism in dangerous ways in many countries. Furthermore, the history of the English nation-state is generally one of military aggression, conquest and violent dominion over other peoples. From the Holy Land of the Crusades to Cromwell in Ireland and the clearance of the Scottish Highlands; the colonization of the New World and Australasia; the enslavement, imperial occupation and exploitation of large parts of Africa and Asia; to more recent military adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, we English lefties have much to feel deeply uncomfortable about. Even Tony Blair, our furthest outrider, recently felt moved to apologize for some of it. The anti-nationalist, anti-imperialist, ‘internationalist’ and solidaristic currents of the British left run deep and close. And, while many other of our traditional stances have been jettisoned in the last twenty or thirty years, this one has if anything been re-invigorated by its coupling with anti-racism and more recently anti-globalisation.

A contemporary variant on this latter theme – what we might call a social-democratic anti-globalisation – argues that the nation-state is redundant in an era of unchecked global capitalism and that we must shift our attention and efforts to supra-national institutions and their requirements of our population. This could be seen as a generous interpretation of the ‘Third Way’, especially in its Brownite version. But it seems to me to be an approach based on an economism of just the kind Gramsci railed against in early twentieth-century social democracy, and in the ‘orthodox’ positivism of pre first world war marxism. Both are fixated on the economy and the state, with no sense for the separate, ‘relatively autonomous’ arenas of society; not to mention the cultural or ideological or the politically contingent. Yet the national-popular has become, if anything, more important in this latest phase of globalisation, not least as a form of cultural and ideological protectionism for groups who feel threatened and marginalised.

This is surely why the rhetoric and symbolism of national identity has become so evident across the globe – sometimes to murderous effect – as an expression of popular grievance and resentment at the effects of the neo-liberal agenda. Like all subaltern cultural forms, it ultimately serves the purposes of consolation and adjustment to new hegemonic realities, but it is still a major part of daily material reality. Thus, within the still vigorous ideological corpus of Thatcherism, the patriotic heart of Englishness still strongly beats, even as the world status of the English nation-state continues to decline. This is one of the ramifications of the ideology of Thatcherism that the British left has found it difficult to understand, not least because our latest political ‘project’ (New Labour) is turning out to be an embarrassing ‘transformist’ adaptation and deepening of it. Nevertheless, any politics that seeks – as Thatcher and Blair did – to create a hegemonic sense of what a country means to its inhabitants must grapple with this question.

We might argue that it’s all right for Gramsci and the Italians to talk about the ‘national popular’. They don’t have quite so much, by way of imperial conquest and dominion, to feel ashamed of. And what they have had, in North and East Africa, can easily be blamed on Mussolini and the fascists, who were no less rapacious in their treatment of parts of Italy itself. Gramsci himself was amongst the first to identify, in his writing on ‘the Southern Question’ and elsewhere, the colonial relationship between the industrial/ financial capitalism of the Italian north and the peasant, agrarian south. But then hang on a minute. What about the relationship between the wealthy South east of England and large parts of the rest of the country, especially the industrial north of England where I was born? Wasn’t that, and isn’t it still in some ways, oppressive and exploitative? (It is even more so, according to a recent IPPR report, after ten years of New Labour government.) And Italian fascism was not outside Italian culture: it was, and still is, deeply rooted in the oppressed, ‘subaltern’ south, and is still a vigorous current in the rest of its ‘modern advanced democracy’, just as conservatism, xenophobia and racism are deeply rooted in the British proletariat and most of its post-industrial fragments.

So, as Gramsci might ask us, is there something specific and peculiar in the British left’s discomfort and occasional loathing of the national, and in particular the English? And might it go some way towards explaining, or at least illustrating, the almost total disappearance of the communist, socialist or even social-democratic currents from our country’s political system and culture? Perhaps we should start by asking exactly what is ‘our country’?

Follow the links on the right for Part 2…