Socialist History Journal Issue 18: Radical Substructures

The Socialist History Journal explores and assesses the past of the socialist movement, both for historical understanding and as a contribution to the movement's development and future.

Socialist History 18--Radical Subcultures

Lenin once compared art to the human appendix; "in time," he said, "we shall cut it out." Radicals and socialists have always shared his ambivalent attitude to high culture: sometimes embracing it, often rejecting or subverting it, but always creating to some extent their own alternative cultures of expression and association.

Major individuals featured in Socialist History 18 include Karl Marx, Franz Kafka and John Ruskin, whose centenary falls this year. Lenin himself figures negatively in the discussion by Judith Harrison and Liam O'Sullivan of the Russian avant-garde and the state. They show that in the period 1905-1924 a brilliant generation of revolutionary artists, blasphemers and subversives under Tsarism, found little improvement under Bolshevism. Matthew Worley tackles the political culture of the British Communist Party in the "Third Period," where political marginality was not incompatible with a rich and vigorously adversarial political culture. Andrew Whitehead also explores the problems of creating an independent working-class culture, but in the very different circumstances of late 19th century Clerkenwell, an inner London district with deeply rooted traditions of artisan radicalism, where he captures the moment of transition from radicalism to socialism.

In tracing the differing paths which socialists take to forge their cultural and political identity, the range of articles reflects the complex relationship of the left to culture.

Kevin Morgan teaches politics at the University of Manchester. He has written extensively on comparative labor history and the cultural politics of the left. Among his books are a biography of Harry Pollitt and (as editor) Opening the Books, a collection of essays on the social and cultural history of the British Communist Party.