Left turn…

I came across this cartoon today. It's by Syd Hoff, a talented artist who also published communist satire in the American Daily Worker, under the name A. Redfield.

Lots of his cartoons are shockingly apposite for now: he often depicted fat, rich upper class people failing to understand the plight of the poor during a savage recession, or even claiming to be 'all in this together'. But this one caught my eye because - and I know this is a bit radical for a blogger - it's something I know about.

The humour in this is pretty much limited to the narrow circle of Communist Party literary theorists. It's certainly referencing Orwell's The Road to Wigan Pier and other similar texts, but it also marks a decisive (and rather unfortunate) shift in Communist Party cultural policy (the CP, unlike most parties, genuinely thought that culture was important. The point here is that around 1927-1932, disappointed with the failure of the middle-classes and 'professional' representatives of organised labour, such as the Labour Party and trades unions in the UK, the CP decided on a policy of confrontation, known in the USSR as Proletkult.

Culturally, this meant becoming hostile to the sympathetic work of middle and upper-class authors, such as Orwell and others. In particular, the term 'proletarian' becomes a term of abuse. At first, 'proletarian' referred to any sympathetic fiction about working-class lives, but with the Class Against Class phase, any material by non-communist non-workers was automatically tainted by the aroma of class tourism: quality and intention became far less important than political allegiance. Two novels I wrote my PhD about, Lewis Jones's Cwmardy and We Live are praised in the Communist press in the 1930s for not being proletarian - i.e. not patronising work by non-worker, but the authentic voice of a real miner - though how accurate that was is a matter of considerable debate. Well, I debated it, anyway.

Manichaean…

As told by Alex Ross in The New Yorker this month, the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein was believed to be a Communist by the secret services - leading to spies trying to analyze his music for subversive material.

How very reductive. Like most artistic people of the time, Bernstein was of the left (it was, after all, the period of McCarthy and then Nixon) but the idea that musical notes are politically charged is exactly what the Soviets thought in the very depths of their most Philistine period, the Proletkult (late 1920s-1930s). It's just such a facile argument and shows how plain dumb our superiors were, whichever side they were on. Also, artists just aren't that bright. They have their peculiar skills and are usually happy to side with whoever will let them exercise their talents. Rarely has a composer had the intellectual ability to discuss the dialectic, let alone encode it into his or her music (which doesn't stop people endlessly analyzing Shostakovich's music for anti-Stalinist attitudes).

Bernstein was on Hoover's 'Security Index', a list of 12,000 Americans he thought were so dangerous that they should be arrested in the event of a Soviet invasion. Because fat conductors are always the shock troops of the occupation. I'd love to get a copy of it.

On a more enlightened level, I'd recommend Who Paid the Piper?, Frances Stonor Saunders' excellent book on the US secret service's attempts to control the worlds of literature, art and music.

Here's alleged Communist Bernstein conducting alleged anti-Communist Shostakovich's allegedly anti-Communist 5th symphony. Oooh, feel the confusing subversion. After that, the Latvian State Choir singing the Mass that the FBI thought was Communist (like all Catholic masses written by Jewish composers are secretly communist).