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From Socialist Worker, No. 102, 21 December 1968, p. 2 & 3.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
HAVING PERMITTED yourself a gratuitous and ignorant reference to me in your paper (November 30), you might also consider printing my comments.
First: ‘... trendy left-wing playwright’. Trendy of course is a trendy word; however, passing on from that I suppose one could say in a political context means a fashionable posturing, a dabbling in current political moods and moments, more for narcissistic reasons or mere ego-satisfaction than having a genuine and objective political position.
I’m puzzled as to how this could apply to myself.
Since the period of the Korean War, when my (non [?]) position was ‘disillusioned-might-have-been-a-communist-but’ I have spent 16 years trying to educate myself in the Marxist-Leninist view of history and to apply my conclusions to history as it passed, so to speak, under all our noses.
There was no principled, coherent party based on what I could accept as genuine Marxism-Leninism in sight.
In the muddled and chaotic development of criticism and protest in this country, like so many others put my enthusiasm and energy now here, now there.
Naturally one gravitates to those points where contradictions appear to be taking the form of actual confrontations—and thus the confusions arising from that particularly pernicious English tradition of ‘liberal-democratic socialism’ from which it is so hard to disengage.
I say hard, because given a sort of Keir Hardie working-class background, and virtually no education—given this, with a strong dose of the post-war Koestler/Orwell ‘disillusion’ at a critical age, then the path to understanding theory and apprehending revolution, is long and difficult.
So much for my trendy 16 years between then and now.
Secondly: you blandly quote from an interview with me in The Guardian. You do so comfortably out of context and without, it seems, even bothering to wonder what I could have meant.
Let’s have it again: ‘... I think it’s (politics) becoming less important for me as a writer. Political commitment is not something that I’m concerned with in the foreground of my preoccupation as a writer ...’
For me writing is essentially and primarily a process of the imagination. It is out of the question to cook a play in a pot of theory, or indeed any sort, of conscious intellectual structure.
I know, because in the beginning I tried it and the results were a dubious hybrid – mostly neither good politics nor good drama. The idea was to consciously dramatise social and political realities through the relationship between characters, and their relationship with their environment.
It took me some time to learn that the total play is the total man—that you submit to what is intuitive, and the degree (or absence) of talent determines the stature (or failure) of the work at all levels: psychological, social, political, whatever.
My statement in The Guardian, upon which you so sneeringly and unthinkingly pounce, was an attempt to compress what I have said above. No doubt I should have spelled it out more clearly for the benefit of those who would rather make hurried assumptions than scrupulously apply their minds.
As for the SLL and the ‘well-heeled intellectuals’ (are no-heeled intellectuals necessarily more authentic?) one can only conclude here that you are pursuing that vindictive and paranoid sectarianism which is doing so much to destroy what little hope there is in this country of evolving towards a revolutionary party.
I support the SLL’s imminent daily newspaper because I believe the time and conditions are right for the emergence of a daily newspaper based on revolutionary theoretical principles and practice, based on the need for a dialectical analysis of current events, based on the urgent imperative for a press which might counter the lies, distortions and evasions of the bourgeois press.
Whether this is what we shall get remains to be seen. It seems to me that there is a good chance, and in the meantime I doubt whether anything I say can cause alarm in Clapham High Street.
Whether or not the SLL ‘deals with’ its members (I can hardly know since I am not one) I suspect the relationship between their committee and individuals is rather different than your fantasies would have us believe.
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David Mercer |
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Last updated on 30 October 2020