The poet Tony Harrison, who lived near me in Newcastle upon Tyne, has recently died (1937-2025); and then we also met some of his relations by marriage.
So he has been somewhat in mind lately, since there was a time in the late 1980s when I was on the left and also had a high regard for his writing. For a few years I probably regarded him as the best of living British poets.
(Although - to provide context - I did not, and do not, rate any living poets very highly; so it was more a case of being the best of a relatively mediocre bunch!)
Consequently, I stumbled across this rather interesting discussion of Harrison as a representative of a type of Leftist writer with working class origins who - via education - became middle class and Establishment-approved - and who spent the rest of their lives brooding (without ever reaching a coherent conclusion!) on their own subsequent class alienation.
There are many such writers, indeed just about all writers with such a social trajectory - another who I have discussed here is Alan Garner.
This "problem" (if it is one) seems to be restricted to writers and certain other analogous types; because the many, many more people who not writers (such as my parents, many of my relatives and their circle of friends) who also experienced this class change - do not seem to have been much troubled by it!
We lived a middle class professional family life for most of the year, and then spent visits and holidays staying with our working class grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins; without any of the angst or social friction so obsessively described in the post-war literature of Britain.
But my focus here is on the description of Harrison as a typical Leftist intellectual of the 1980s - a grouping to which I also belonged at that time (broadly, with a few reservations - as is usually the case).
The author lists a set of beliefs that such people as Harrison and myself espoused:
- strongly anti monarchy
- strongly anti censorship
- strongly anti religion
- anti capitalist
- anti racist
- anti British Empire
- anti America passively
- pro feminist passively
- pro gay passively
- pro multiculturalism
- pro democracy
- pro welfare
- pro miners / trade unions
- pro learning, education, civilisation, civility
- pro European Union
It can readily be seen that the 1980s was therefore a time of inflexion, between the (British originated) Old Left - focused on economics and class; and the (US originated) New Left (political correctness or "woke") that we have today - focused on antiracism, feminism and sexuality...
And "environment" - not mentioned in this list, but actually already very significant - albeit not near-exclusively focused on CO2/Climate manipulated delusion - which only became important from the 1990s.
The Old to New shift also went from (supposedly) aiming at equality of opportunity; to (supposedly) aiming to enforce equality of outcome - and then to inverting outcomes to favour individuals who claim to be members of groups that were (supposedly) "historically under-represented".
The fact that the 1980s Leftists beliefs were mutually incoherent and incompatible seems more obvious now than it did then - yet hostile incoherence somehow never did, or does, seem obvious to those of the Left.
Extremely few people who were "socialists" in 1980, subsequently abandoned the Left over the next decades; despite that Leftism all-but inverted from idealizing native male working class men (e.g. in the 1984 national Miners' strike)...
To demonizing and attempting socially to annihilate (by multiple means) exactly the same group of people, accelerating from about a decade later (especially the Blair "New Labour" government of 1997 onward).
This accomodationism of Leftists ought to be a matter of shame; because it was motivated by little more than unprincipled expedience and sheer mental laziness.
A typical post-millennial Leftist is nowadays much more likely to idealize and aggrandize members of the hyper-wealthy "Davos" multi-billionaire class - than a coal miner or other manual worker!
The history of Tony Harrison shows some detail of how this inversion happened; how these writers of working-class origin were co-opted into the globalist totalitarian strategy; a process marked by Harrison's lavish 1969 UNESCO "travelling scholarship" (six months fully-paid international travel for the whole family) - for a poet who who hadn't even published a book!
In other words; Harrison had already been identified as a promising subversive New Leftist "asset", in his twenties - whether he realized it or not; or else (very probably) he would never have been awarded this luxury freebie in the first place.
It is a sad reflection of the value-bankruptcy of Leftism that vanishingly few of the ex-working class writers who were used as totalitarian assets were in the slightest degree aware of their role, of their "raison d'etre" among those who published, praised, paid and awarded status to poets and other authors.
Typically, such writers instead mistook their own chronic, obsessive, class-based resentments and spite - for anti-Establishment radicalism and righteous anger!
And were encouraged in this by social incentives.
And the same situation nowadays applies to writers who are - instead of being socialist ex-working class men - are women, racial or ethnic "minorities", or sexually non-biological.
I suppose one of the main jobs of such writers - from the perspective of those who "manage" their careers and sustain their livelihoods; is to spread through books, plays, TV, movies etc the typical and pervasive Left-intellectual milieu of negation, resentment, atheist-materialism, and a moralistic focus on this-worldly gratification.
A skilful and cultured author like Tony Harrison performed this role very effectively.
As do many of his less-skilled and uncultured successors.
Well; we at least can observe such people across time; analyse and learn from their experiences - including when they themselves did not learn.
7 comments:
Reading this brought back some memories from my teenage years. While the transition from old to new left was well underway, there were still people I knew who were 'old left' and despised the 'new' focus. I had one friend in particular who was very militant in this (both in the support of 'old' left ideals and his insistence that the 'new' left ideals were capitalist and american trojan horses). He was also a poet, and his poetry featured the common themes (with decades of delay) about 'the proletariat', 'the poor', 'the power of the people', etc etc. And this was in almost every single poem. Even love poems somehow ended up with screeds about the means of production and other such images. By the age of seventeen we had drifted apart and the last thing I knew of him was a couple of years later: he had become a youth leader in the communist party.
Fast forward to a few years ago, when I saw his face and his name in a newspaper. He had come to moderate 'fame' by putting together an exhibition about a transvestite who got killed after leaving a club or something like that. And was doing now a documentary about our very own George Floyd-type (same story, essentially). Then I dug a little and found that this type of thing was all talked about, and yet he was still using the same exact sort of language (even the word proletariat!), all the while completely despising the native working class (as is necessary now). No more talk about capitalist or american trojan horses. Even econnomic issues seemed to disappear from his interests, except as word-signals (inequality, injustice, capitalism, etc). All he really cares about now is people with dark skin and unconventional sexual appetites.
What's the moral of the story? I don't know. But I don't think either he or the people around him and like him registered the change. I think in their minds they are still the same old kind of leftist, which is very strange and even scary.
@Laeth - Thanks for that vignette.
It's been a common story - indeed almost universal as a pattern - among those in my circle.
Strange and scary indeed. In a very general way, it is a symptom of the intractable incoherence of post-religious secular mainstream "values" - as was perceived would happen a long time ago, by the likes of Dostoevsky.
I think the moral of the story is this. These people are primarily motivated by anger and hatred and they turn to whatever cause feeds this frenzy within them, and justifies them as valiant outsiders battling against the system.
@William - I agree. And it certainly is not any *positive* principles; because these are picked up and put down as convenience dictates.
"motivated by anger and hatred" and stupidity
@m - Not really "stupidity" - at least, not if, by stupidity, you mean unintelligent, unwise, or silly.
"the intractable incoherence of post-religious secular mainstream "values""
look pretty stupid to me, but I'm no genius.
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