22 June 1980 Marxism Today

known position in the 1930s. The positions of the British Left writers
in the 30s, although they were not normally assembled around the

The Writer: term 'commitment', were directed towards the same essential idea.
But in the late 40s and early 50s it was another time. It was the
beginning of the cold war. There were then three kinds of backlash
commitment against the idea.
First, and we should not forget this, a backlash against the cause to

and alignment which those writers had been committed. This was the time when we
had to look at the other face of that generation of the 30s. It is true that
many of the best had died in Spain or in the general European War.

Raymond Williams But we had also the beginning of that extraordinary and terrible
period in which one writer after another from the 30s renounced what
he had then believed in, and explained in what was meant to be a
charming and pathetic — anyway an apologetic — manner how he
had been taken in or fooled or something of that kind. There were
some writers who didn't move in this way but their views tended to be
less publicised. By the early 50s you could line up a whole series of
writers who said 'Yes, of course, I was like that in my foolish youth,
but now I know better.' And from that it was no distance at all to
saying that writers should keep out of that kind of political and
Some people, when they see an idea, think the first thing to do is to especially left-political thing. That was the first reason why the
argue about it. But while this passes the time and has the advantage of argument got off to a very bad start after the war.
keeping them warm it has little else to recommend it. If there is one Second, there was one very severe problem that ought to be
thing we should have learned from the Marxist tradition it is that ideas intellectually distinguished from this but of course was not. For there
are always representations of things people are actually doing or feel were phases, including the Stalin phase, in the Soviet Union, when
themselves prevented from doing. So that the first way to look at the the notion of commitment could easily be related to the practice of an
idea of commitment is not as at some general notion about which we authority above the writer which was telling him what to write and
can at once argue, citing this or that historical case, but rather to see how to write. 'We know what you mean by commitment. You don't
why the notion of commitment was developed and against what want to be a real writer, you want yourself and others to be party
alternative ideas it was directed. hacks.' And the fact that some — too many — real historical instances
In fact the matters at issue have been discussed in many terms. could be quoted to support this made clarity very difficult to sustain.
Commitment became the normal term, in our own time, because of Yet at its best this was always a dispute inside the socialist
the famous intervention by Jean-Paul Sartre at the end of the war movement. There is still no better statement on this whole matter
when he wrote: than that of Brecht, a communist writer, in the 1930s, replying to an
'If literature is not everything it is worth nothing. This is what I mean by article by the Hungarian Marxist then in Moscow, George Lukacs.
"commitment". It wilts if it is reduced to innocence or to songs. If a Brecht said of that whole tendency:
written sentence does not reverberate at every level of man and society 'They are, to put it bluntly, enemies of production. Production makes
then it makes no sense. What is the literature of an epoch, but the epoch them uncomfortable. You never know where you are with production;
appropriated by its literature?'1 production is unforeseeable. You never know what is going to come out.
It was in this sense that a long standing argument was concentrated And they themselves don't want to produce. They want to play the
around the notion of commitment. But immediately with a certain apparatchik and exercise control over other people. Every one of their
difficulty. First that Sartre, quite wrongly in my view, said that this criticisms contains a threat.'2
should only apply to prose, that poetry was something else. But it is So there was a principled position, inside the socialist movement,
very difficult to argue this case for one kind of writing in ways that which could enable a totally committed writer like Brecht to make the
make it clear why you should exclude the same demands on another necessary distinction between a commitment to production linked to
kind of writing. The distinction between prose and poetry that Sartre a cause, and on the other hand subservience to some version of
tried to make confused the argument from the beginning. Second, desirable production arbitrarily decided by a party and its ideologists.
and much more seriously, the unstated background of Sartre's This remains a crucial distinction, but it was very difficult to sustain it
intervention was a very specific historical and political context. It was in the period of cold war and that mood of confession of errors which
within the climate of the Resistance. It was moreover at a time of real was weakening the confidence of a whole generation of writers. In
possibilities of significant movement, in France as in other parts of practice the two very different ideas — of commitment and of
Western Europe, towards a new kind of democracy. The engagement subservience — were pushed together and seemed to support each
of intellectuals of all kinds, and especially writers, in those great other.
collective movements which had come from anti-fascist war and
resistance, had an immediate, concentrated and urgent social Good writing
resonance. On the other hand in England, by the time the idea had Third, there was a certain backlash among those few Left writers who
taken its usual inordinate time to cross the Channel (because that kept their heads through this difficult period. And it was an intensely
must be one of the longest cultural journeys in existence by difficult period, because it was so complex. There was an
comparison with the physical distance) it fell into the most difficult understandable wariness of what can quite properly be called
times. opportunism. This, then as now, was not the reality of commitment
but a careerist version of it. Commitment still meant, at its best,
The cold war taking social reality, historical reality, the development of social and
Then it sounded like, and of course correctly sounded like, a well- historical reality, as the centres of attention, and then finding some of
 Marxism Today June 1980 23

the hundreds of ways in which all those processes can be written. On meretricious. And that I think, although people are still nervous of it,
the other hand, at its worst, it could be a superficial kind of writing is what has been happening in more recent thinking.
which took care to include the political references that went with the
cry of the moment. If we want an authority on this we have in one of Freedom of the artist
his grumpier moods no less an authority than Engels, who said: There has been a change from the 60s onwards after the end of that
'It became more and more the habit, particularly of the inferior sorts of confused and frightened period. Actually 'commitment' is still not
literati, to make up for the want of cleverness in their productions by the word most commonly used because, given that history, there is
political allusions which were sure to attract attention. Poetry, novels, still a lot of nervousness about it. What we have come to understand, I
reviews, the drama, every literary production teemed with what was think, is that commitment was not, for the most part, a positive
called "tendency".'3 proposition. It was mainly a response to another position, which had
This was only a few years after Marx had referred to work like that of become very general and which it wanted to challenge. This was the
Eugene Sue as 'the most wretched offal of socialist literature.' 4 And position that the artist, by definition, must be a free individual; that to
Engels, in an even grumpier mood, thirty years later, talked about 'a be an artist is to be a free individual. Of course there is a version of
worthless fellow who, due to lack of talent, has gone to extremes with commitment which can include that, because if you are a free
tendentious junk to show his convictions, but it is really in order to individual you can choose to commit yourself. This was really what
gain an audience.' 5 Now I don't quote these remarks because we Sartre was saying. But to others such commitment was a cancellation
should believe everything Marx or Engels said. In fact, in the later of freedom. How can you commit yourself to anything except the
mood, Engels was moving, as in his literary tastes he often did, practice of your own heart? Is the artist then not necessarily the very
towards a slightly grumpy bourgeois position rather than necessarily type of the free individual?
towards a Marxist one. But it is very important, if we are to have Now this is an important general case. And one of the advantages of
honesty on the Left, that we should be quite clear that there is a kind looking at it within Marxist thought is this, that we can see when the
of opportunism which can usurp the idea of commitment, by catching idea of the artist as a free individual arose, and this in turn throws
the political cry of the moment whether or not it has any significant important light on the history of the practice of writing and of its
reference to the central experience or the integrity of the writing. This always difficult social relations. For the idea of the artist as the type of
is the false commitment of the inserted political reference. It is not the free individual in fact arose in the late eighteenth and early
what Sartre or anyone else who has taken the idea seriously can mean nineteenth centuries; that is to say in the period of two very important
by commitment. changes. On the one hand there was the emergence of a new
libertarianism in literature, primarily in the romantic movement. On
What kind of commitment? the other hand the conditions of writing and publishing were
Anyway this third backlash, this wariness, developed, and in the
middle of it one further fact was discovered, one which was Yet it can happen that the bad times
memorably expressed by the German Marxist Adorno. He made the
point that if you propose commitment you have to recognise that it is
teach us as much as the good times
what he called 'politically polyvalent'.6 That is to say, if you ask changing in unprecedented ways, which on the one hand gave a new
writers to commit themselves, you can have no certainty at all that professional independence to successful writers, and on the other
they are going to commit themselves to any particular cause. It would hand marginalised certain sectors of writing to such an extent that the
have been easier if it had been true that writers of significance could possibility of feeling related to and wanted by society — either as a
never commit themselves to fascism, or to the most archaic kinds of whole or by any part of it — had for that kind of writer been in effect
conservatism, or to the softer kinds of liberalism. But indeed if the excluded.
idea of commitment is there but undefined, as in the rhetoric it often Now we should not reduce this development to any one of these
is, such writers indeed come out, take a position about social reality, three factors. All three are crucial in the developing notion of the free
engage with political struggle. Indeed this is happening from the artist. The free artist of the romantic movement was arguing for a
Right all the time. Then if that is so, at whatever level it is done, in kind of freedom which identified itself, in many cases, with the most
actual writing or in some more general capacity, there can of course be general human liberation. He was arguing against the tyranny of
no guarantee that commitment is intrinsically progressive, as some Church and State, indeed against any authority which tried to dictate
people had assumed. On its own, that is to say, the usual idea of to the artist what he should think or write. He was also arguing against
commitment is bound to be polyvalent. We used to have arguments at the tyranny of artistic rules. There is a standard romantic complaint
the end of the 30s about whether a good writer could be a fascist. It against what they defined and opposed as classicist imitation: rules of
seemed to us then that there was something wrong if that could be so, how to write well; rules of what to write about; rules of how any
and some people found themselves in quite extraordinary positions, particular subject should be handled; rules which had been taken to a
saying either, 'yes, he is a fascist but then he is not a very good writer', point, at least theoretically, as definitive, so that the test of good
or 'he may be a good writer but of course he is politically naive'. It is writing was the extent to which you showed the qualities of this
better to recognise social reality, which in our own time as in others known craft, with all its rules and its skills. The new claim that a
has produced good and even great reactionary writers, as well as all writer must be free to break the rules, must be free to innovate, free to
the others whom we may prefer, for different reasons, to honour and create works as the experience required, whether or not this
remember. corresponded with pre-existing notions; that was the important claim
Those were bad, confused times. Yet it can happen that the bad 1
times teach us as much as the good times. When there is intellectual JP Sartre: Between Existentialism and Marxism, NLB 1974 pp 13-14.
2
Quoted in W Benjamin, 'Talking to Brecht', New Left Review 77 p55.
confusion, when you undergo a great deal of political rhetoric, when 3
Engels, New York Daily Tribune, 28 October 1851
you have all sorts of recriminations and divisions inside your own 4
The Holy Family, cit Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, ed Baxandale and
movement, there is still a chance to learn, from within such Morawskil973pll9.
developments. In the case of a general idea there is a chance to learn 5
Engels, August 1881 cit Marx and Engels on Literature and Art, p. 123
what is significant in it and what on the other hand is insignificant or 6
TW Adorno 'Commitment' New Left Review 1974 pp 87-88.
24 June 1980 Marxism Today

of the romantic movement, and it was accompanied by a conscious there was a different type of patronage, in which courts, households
revolt against any authorities which would try to seize or suppress or and similar authorities hired writers and artists for specific
discriminate against new writing of such kinds. commissions. In the course of that hiring every complaint came up
that was subsequently heard in the market, but in the most favourable
Growth of the literary market conditions there was a certain diversity; that if you ran into trouble
On the other hand the literary market which was then becoming more with this patron you could take the work to another, as indeed in the
organised had a very curious double-edged effect. If you were a early capitalist market. It was not a comfortable situation, it was not a
certain kind of novelist, from about the 1830s, you could become a good situation, but it does not necessarily compare unfavourably with
successful professional man in a way that very few writers had been the market. There is also another phase of patronage, which didn't
before. And although this was obviously most true for the most depend on monetary exchange at all but was simply the offering of
successful, still, given the extraordinary expansion of magazine- social support, social protection, and where necessary early
publications, the cheapening of books and the huge growth of the encouragement. It often happened, of course, that support and
newspaper and periodical press, the opportunities for a very large protection were only offered to certain kinds of writing, from the
number of writers were much wider than those in any preceding notion that this was a good kind of writing to have done. But this was
period. But of course this was a freedom to go out and compete in that always potentially a different calculation — let us leave aside whether it
market. So that what came through at this level was the professional was a better calculation — from what became for the market the single
ideology of the independent artist, who was defining freedom in this criterion, of whether this writing would sell. As the market developed
very special sense, that he must be free to compete in the market. In this became and is becoming the only criterion. Indeed we are passing
effect he was then taking the market as a definition of his social through now the biggest change in the writing and publishing market
province, his real social relations. And since society was represented since the early nineteenth century. The criterion of desirability is the
by the market, there could be no question of any other significant promise to sell, and, increasingly now, to sell fast, so that there are no
social commitments. This is a classic bourgeois definition of freedom. expensive warehousing costs and other accounting considerations.
On the other hand, in other areas of writing, and notably in poetry, This development set up, within the very conditions which appeared
the economic situation of writers was moving quite the other way. to guarantee freedom to the successful, constraints of a new kind,
Certain kinds of writing were marginalised, for the market was which however could not be recognised as obstacles to freedom
replacing earlier systems of patronage, and in the market such writing because this was the very competitive area which most writers had
as poetry was at best a marginal product, at worst quite unwanted. So sought. A bourgeois writer could not say 'it is the market which is
alongside the newly successful literary professional, claiming his restricting my freedom', because for him the market was his freedom.
professional freedom but claiming it so that he could enter the Yet it has always been clear that the market guides writers, restricts
market (which would tell him what society wanted) was the them, pushes them this way and that. It can be a very simple or a very
unwanted writer, who was soon mythicised as the starving genius. complex process. It is extraordinarily difficult for any of us, as
There were indeed some of these, and the starving would-be genius, writers, to be honest about it.
there were some of them too. But at its worst it became a model of
what a serious writer ought to be. You can still find people who think New kinds of public support
it is something which proves you are a real writer. It was a myth which The situation now, for example, at a very organised late stage of the
seemed all the more attractive in this market society in which the market, is often this: that you want to write a particular work which
leading writers were becoming more and more professionally happens to be of an inconvenient length, that length being your best
established solid citizens. estimate of what handling that material would be. You talk to a
Now we can see what a very complex idea this proposition that the publisher or an editor about it, and he often says: 'Well, it's a pity
artist must be free is. In one sense who would wish to dissent from it? about that length. But we've got an idea for a book in one of our series.
Who would suppose that we are likely to get better writing if some Surely you can do that meanwhile.'' And suppose this is, with luck,
appointed authority is at the writer's elbow, looking over his something which you thought someday you might write, but which
shoulder, advising him what to do? It isn't that writers don't benefit you wouldn't have written just then, by the time you have decided to
from advice; it's that there is an almost insoluble problem of getting do it — and many people do — it has become what you want. Indeed
the right advice and the right writer together: it is always more likely unless you are absolutely ruthless with yourself, ruthless in your
that you will get the wrong writer with the wrong advice. What we examination of your motives and especially your more complex
have really to understand is the set of ideas that were being fused in adaptations, these pressured decisions come to take on the
this notion of free independence, which we have really to take apart plausibility of your natural wishes, of your free development as a
again if we are to understand the real situation. For the acceptance of
the market as the guarantee of freedom is of course largely illusory. This is a classic bourgeois definition of
Although it is true that, at the point of success, the independent
professional writer can operate very freely in the market, becoming
freedom
himself a seller with a certain real independence, the average writer, writer. And of course people say: 'Why should you be a primadonna?'
and in these conditions these were the great majority, was dependent on 'Why shouldn't you write what people want?' Indeed the familiar
the market in ways which were at least as severe and sometimes more phrases of commitment come back in the rhetoric of the sharply
severe than the earlier dependence of writers on patrons. commercial editor: 'Don't you want to write what people are
interested in?' 'What's the point of writing for yourself and a few
Patronage friends?' So the market comes to seem a definition of social duty, even
Patronage itself had passed through several stages, only some of though, with respect to any who may be present, publishers usually
which were deeply restrictive. In the very earliest forms patronage know a good deal less than writers about what people will like to read,
was an obligation. In feudal society, for example, it was the obligation as distinct from what they have liked. They are at least as often wrong
of a household of a certain dignity to support and to give hospitality, as they are right, but in any case the notion of what people want which
to sustain the livelihood, of artists, poets, painters, musicians. Later has passed through the market comes back as a strange kind of
 Marxism Today June 1980 25

freedom. Yet many writers are afraid that if they say 'the market is not holding the pen or tapping the typewriter, what is being written,
really free', then they deny the accessible basis of their own freedom. while not separate from him, is not only him either, and of course this
So what they talk about instead, in relation to freedom, is not of where other force is literary form. Very few if any of us could write at all if
they are. They talk about other situations, where the constraints are certain forms were not available. And then we may be lucky, we may
different: where there is state support of writers, for example, but of find forms which happen to correspond to our experience. But take
course not the state's support of all literature, indeed the refusal to the case of the nineteenth-century working-class writers, who wanted
publish certain kinds of book, and that is totalitarian. So indeed it to write about their working lives. The most popular form was the
often is. We have all to recognise the faults and deformities — novel, but though they had marvellous material that could go into the
sometimes the crimes — of such systems. Most of them are limited by novel very few of them managed to write good or even any novels.
the fact that public support operates only as state support; that will Instead they wrote marvellous autobiographies. Why? Because the
have to be changed, by new and more open kinds of procedure. Yet in form coming down through the religious tradition was of the witness
any case we have also to look at freedom, and at its enemies, where we confessing the story of his life, or there was the defence speech at the
ourselves are. trial when a man tells the judge who he is and what he has done, or of
course other kinds of speech. These oral forms were more accessible,
Alignment forms centred on 'I', on the single person. The novel with its quite
Now I said at the beginning that it is a mistake, when you see an idea, different narrative forms was virtually impenetrable to working-class
to go straight into an argument about- it. The trouble with most writers for three or four generations, and there are still many
arguments about commitment is that they confuse two pairings. problems in using the received forms for what is, in the end, very
Either they confuse the notion of the artist having his own different material. Indeed the forms of working-class consciousness
autonomy, which commitment is held to undermine, with the notion are bound to be different from the literary forms of another class, and
of being ordered by some central authority to do something. Or they it is a long struggle to find new and adequate forms.
confuse both with the idea of professional independence, which has
been the historical situation of fortunate writers in our own kind of The content of commitment
society. And at that point we have to attempt a further disentangling. Now these are alignments of a deep type, and really I think the most
I put into the title of this lecture not only the word 'commitment', but serious case for commitment is that we should commit ourselves far
also the word 'alignment'. Of course in one weak sense 'alignment' is enough to social reality to be conscious of this level of sociality. It
just another word for 'commitment'. But there is another sense of means becoming conscious of our own real alignments. This may lead
alignment, which I take very seriously and from which, I think, any to us confirming them, in some situations. Or it can often lead to
serious contemporary argument about commitment must begin. changing or shifting or amending them, a more painful process than it
Marxism, more clearly than any other kind of thinking, has shown sounds. Some of the most publicised cases of 'commitment' are when
us that we are in fact aligned long before we realise that we are aligned. people shift in this way from one set of beliefs and assumptions to
For we are born into a social situation, into social relationships, into a another, and this can involve a quite radical shift in real practice. In
family, all of which have formed what we can later abstract as fact even when we confirm our deepest alignments, but now very
ourselves as individuals. Much of this formation occurs before we can consciously and deliberately, something strange has happened and we
be conscious of any individuality. Indeed the consciousness of feel quite differently committed. Because really to have understood
individuality is often the consciousness of all those elements of our the social pressures on our own thinking, or when we come to that
formation, yet this can never be complete. The alignments are so wonderful although at first terrible realisation that what we are
deep. They are our normal ways of living in the world, our normal thinking is what a lot of other people have thought, that what we are
ways of seeing the world. Of course we may become intellectually seeing is what a lot of other people have seen, that is an extraordinary
aware that they are not normal in the sense that they are universal. We experience. We can make this point negatively against all those people
come to recognise that other people live differently, were born into who appeal to the freedom of the individual artist within their own
different social relationships, see the world differently. Yet still, at isolated terms. It is one of the most surprising things about most of
certain deep levels — and this matters very much in writing — our them that they say, 'I only write as a free individual, I only write what
own actual alignment is so inseparable from the constitution of our I want to write', but in fact what they write is, in majority, already
own individuality that to separate them is quite artificial. And then written and what everybody already knows. That of course is an
for a writer there is something even more specific, that he is born into illusion of freedom. But beyond it, under pressure, there is a very
a language; that his very medium is something which he will have high kind of freedom. This is when you are free to choose, or to choose
learned as if it were natural although of course he eventually knows to try to alter, that which is really pressuring you, in your whole social
that there are other very different languages. But still it is the medium formation, in your understanding of the possibilities of writing.
in which he will work, the medium which he shares with his own To be committed to that is nothing whatever to do with submission
people, and which has entered into his own constitution long before to anybody. It is the discovery of those social relationships which are
he begins to write. To be aligned to and by that language, with some in any case there. It is what I think Sartre meant by reverberation,
of its deep qualities, is inevitable if he is to write at all. So, born into a resonance: that active consciousness of those social relationships
social situation with all its specific perspectives, and into a language, which include ourselves and our practices. It is never likely to be a
the writer begins by being aligned. Yet alignment goes deeper again, convenient discovery, in our kind of world. It permits very little in the
into the actual and available forms of writing. When I hear people talk way of being immediately signed up for somebody else's market or
about literature, describing what so-and-so did with that form — how somebody else's policy. But when it really happens, in the many
did he handle the short novel? — I often think we should reverse the different ways that are possible, its sound is usually unmistakeable:
question and ask, how did the short novel handle him. the sound of that voice which, in speaking as itself, is speaking,
necessarily, for more than itself. Whether we find such voices or not,
Writing and working-class consciousness it is worth committing ourselves to the attempt. •
Because anyone who has carefully observed his own practice of
writing eventually finds that there is a point where, although he is Note: This article was given as the Marx memorial Lecture in March 1980.