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Politics and Culture: Class, Writing, Socialism
Brand new collection of essays from one of the founders of cultural studies, Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams was a pioneering scholar of culture and society, and one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century. In this, a collection of difficult to find essays, some of which are published for the first time, Williams emerges as not only one of the great writers of materialist criticism, but also a thoroughly engaged political writer.
Raymond Williams was a pioneering scholar of culture and society, and one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century. In this, a collection of difficult to find essays, some of which are published for the first time, Williams emerges as not only one of the great writers of materialist criticism, but also a thoroughly engaged political writer.
- GenresPoliticsNonfictionTheory
224 pages, Paperback
First published August 24, 2021
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About the author
Raymond Williams
212 books276 followersRaymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist, and critic. He taught for many years and the Professor of Drama at the University of Cambridge. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. His work laid the foundations for the field of cultural studies and the cultural materialist approach. Among his many books are Culture and Society, Culture and Materialism, Politics and Letters, Problems in Materialism and Culture, and several novels.
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March 19, 2023
CRITIQUE:
Lectures into Essays
This volume contains ten lucid essays on political economy and culture by Raymond Williams, and an excellent introduction by Phil O'Brien.
The essays were originally delivered as lectures, hence their lucidity. Some of them were written and delivered shortly before they were published as chapters in a larger work. Some were edited substantially before incorporation in the later work. Thus, the essays in this volume reveal some of the changes in mind during the course of writing, as well as nuances in the exposition that resulted from extended reflection and audience response.
Cultural Studies instead of Political Economy
I must confess that I read these essays with a number of motives in mind. I wanted to assess:
(1) the extent to which Williams could claim, or be said, to be a Marxist;
(2) whether Williams prioritised society and culture (e.g., literature and art) over economics (or political economy) as a subject for academic study or political activism;
(3) whether Williams' theory had contributed to the fact that, in my belief, the New Left had moved the focus of the Left away from economic, labour or class issues, and towards cultural issues.
The most useful essay for the purposes of answering these questions is "Marxist Cultural Theory", an earlier version of which was written and published as "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory".
1. Marxist or Socialist?
The best source of information about the first question can be found in the autobiographical content of the Introduction to the book "Marxism and Literature" (1977), which extrapolates on the essay, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory".
I would say that, having been born into a working class family and therefore the labour movement, Williams started life as a socialist with a hostility towards "avoidable poverty", but was exposed to Marxism through fellow students (rather than lecturers), when he went to university to read English at Cambridge in 1939.
He claims that his position as a "socialist student of literature" between 1939 and 1941 constituted a discourse in which "a confident but highly selective Marxism co-existed, awkwardly, with my ordinary academic work, until the incompatibility ...became a problem... for myself and for anything that I could call my own thinking."
Up until this point, he described his development as "my own long and often internal and solitary debate with what I had known as Marxism."
In the early seventies, he was exposed to more recent European Marxist writings, e.g., by György Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lucien Goldmann, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu. Of these philosophers, he felt the greatest affinity with Lucien Goldmann.
From this point on, his development "now took its place in a serious and extending international inquiry" into Marxism.
Although Williams would always describe himself as a Socialist rather than a Marxist, his thinking and writing during this period was clearly Marxist-influenced, if not necessarily conventionally Marxist (but which truly individual thinker can be said to be completely Marxist? Not even Karl Marx himself).
A Young Raymond Williams Source:
2. Base or Superstructure?
In the essay, "Marxist Cultural Theory", Williams proceeds on the basis that "any modern approach to a Marxist theory of culture must begin by considering the proposition of a determining base and a determined superstructure."
Personally, he would have preferred to start with the proposition that "social being determines consciousness."
This proposition can be broken down into a number of sequential steps:
* base determines superstructure;
* superstructure determines society and culture ("social being"); and
* society and culture (social being) determine consciousness.
Williams then proceeds to examine the meaning of the terms base, superstructure and determination more closely.
He explains his approach in the following terms:
This makes sense, if and when it is acknowledged that the base is the ultimate determinant.
However, it's interesting that the purpose of his inquiry is to better understand "cultural process". Thus, it's arguable that his interest in the base is secondary or subordinate to his interest in the superstructure.
Williams explains the base as "the real relations of production corresponding to a stage of the development of material productive forces" or "primary economic activities". In other words, the base is "a mode of production at a particular stage of its development." At a more abstract level, "the base is the real social existence of man."
In contrast, Williams doesn't specifically define the term "superstructure". Instead, he refers to it variously as a "cultural superstructure", "real cultural activities", and "certain kinds of activity in the cultural sphere". He sees an analogy with "the social apparatus...in the area of social and political and ideological activity and construction."
The term "determinism" has traditionally caused the greatest difficulty in interpretation. Williams argues that "[The] language of determination, of determinism, is in fact inherited from idealist and theological accounts of the world and of man...[It suggests] the notion of that external cause which totally predicts or prefigures, totally controls, a subsequent activity...[It implies a process in which a subsequent content is essentially prefigured, predicted, and controlled by a pre-existing external quality."
Instead, Williams confines the term to the notion of "setting limits, exerting pressures in very firm ways."
"Corporate Culture"
Williams also adopts the concept of a "social totality" or "totality of social practices" developed by Lukacs, although he considers that the concept must be "compatible with the notion of consciousness determined by social being".
At this point, he goes beyond the concepts of base and superstructure, in order to rely on Gramsci's concept of hegemony.
Williams continues:
"Alternative, Oppositional, Residual and Emergent Culture"
In contrast to corporate culture, there might be practices which are "alternative" or "oppositional". Oppositional involves "articulated opposition" or resistance.
Williams also refers to aspects of culture which are "residual" (i.e., "they're practised on the basis of some previous social formation"). Similarly, he refers to "emergent" culture (i.e., "new meanings and values, new practices, new significances and experiences, are continually being created").
All of these terms reveal that Williams sees culture and the superstructure as dynamic, not static.
He doesn't believe in a primitive or simplistic economic determinism, which rigidly dictates the nature and content of society and culture.
That said, Williams expressly acknowledged the primacy of the base as an influence or limit, even if it appears that his personal academic interest was in the structure and practices of the superstructure (e.g., society, culture, art, film, and literature).
3. Old Left or New Left?
It seems that Williams never abandoned his fundamental belief in Socialism and a Socialist agenda, even though he resigned (or lapsed) his membership of both the Communist Party of Great Britain (1941) and the UK Labour Party (1966) at different times and for different reasons.
It's arguable that his interest in culture and society was founded in his interest in politics and political economy.
In a later essay on Bourdieu, Williams suggests that cultural studies are "a marginal sub-discipline" of historical materialism, the Marxist critique of political economy.
However, early in his career, E. P. Thompson accused him, like the New Left, of a "culturalist tendency", which implicitly diminished the significance of traditional Old Left politics and economics.
My personal view is that, even if this criticism isn't strictly correct with respect to Williams, in many ways it applies to the New Left, at least the New Left as it portrayed itself after what is often called "the First New Left" formed in 1956.
It certainly applies to the American New Left, which subsequently morphed into the assemblage of interest groups that orchestrate the reception of Post-Modernist literature (especially of the maximalist variety) (to the extent that they aren't simply Christian Hegelian Anarchists, and not of the Left at all).
SOUNDTRACK:
Lectures into Essays
This volume contains ten lucid essays on political economy and culture by Raymond Williams, and an excellent introduction by Phil O'Brien.
The essays were originally delivered as lectures, hence their lucidity. Some of them were written and delivered shortly before they were published as chapters in a larger work. Some were edited substantially before incorporation in the later work. Thus, the essays in this volume reveal some of the changes in mind during the course of writing, as well as nuances in the exposition that resulted from extended reflection and audience response.
Cultural Studies instead of Political Economy
I must confess that I read these essays with a number of motives in mind. I wanted to assess:
(1) the extent to which Williams could claim, or be said, to be a Marxist;
(2) whether Williams prioritised society and culture (e.g., literature and art) over economics (or political economy) as a subject for academic study or political activism;
(3) whether Williams' theory had contributed to the fact that, in my belief, the New Left had moved the focus of the Left away from economic, labour or class issues, and towards cultural issues.
The most useful essay for the purposes of answering these questions is "Marxist Cultural Theory", an earlier version of which was written and published as "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory".
1. Marxist or Socialist?
The best source of information about the first question can be found in the autobiographical content of the Introduction to the book "Marxism and Literature" (1977), which extrapolates on the essay, "Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory".
I would say that, having been born into a working class family and therefore the labour movement, Williams started life as a socialist with a hostility towards "avoidable poverty", but was exposed to Marxism through fellow students (rather than lecturers), when he went to university to read English at Cambridge in 1939.
He claims that his position as a "socialist student of literature" between 1939 and 1941 constituted a discourse in which "a confident but highly selective Marxism co-existed, awkwardly, with my ordinary academic work, until the incompatibility ...became a problem... for myself and for anything that I could call my own thinking."
Up until this point, he described his development as "my own long and often internal and solitary debate with what I had known as Marxism."
In the early seventies, he was exposed to more recent European Marxist writings, e.g., by György Lukacs, Jean-Paul Sartre, Lucien Goldmann, Antonio Gramsci, Walter Benjamin, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu. Of these philosophers, he felt the greatest affinity with Lucien Goldmann.
From this point on, his development "now took its place in a serious and extending international inquiry" into Marxism.
Although Williams would always describe himself as a Socialist rather than a Marxist, his thinking and writing during this period was clearly Marxist-influenced, if not necessarily conventionally Marxist (but which truly individual thinker can be said to be completely Marxist? Not even Karl Marx himself).
A Young Raymond Williams Source:
2. Base or Superstructure?
In the essay, "Marxist Cultural Theory", Williams proceeds on the basis that "any modern approach to a Marxist theory of culture must begin by considering the proposition of a determining base and a determined superstructure."
Personally, he would have preferred to start with the proposition that "social being determines consciousness."
This proposition can be broken down into a number of sequential steps:
* base determines superstructure;
* superstructure determines society and culture ("social being"); and
* society and culture (social being) determine consciousness.
Williams then proceeds to examine the meaning of the terms base, superstructure and determination more closely.
He explains his approach in the following terms:
"[It] seems to me that the base is the more important concept to look at if we are to understand the notion of cultural process."
This makes sense, if and when it is acknowledged that the base is the ultimate determinant.
However, it's interesting that the purpose of his inquiry is to better understand "cultural process". Thus, it's arguable that his interest in the base is secondary or subordinate to his interest in the superstructure.
Williams explains the base as "the real relations of production corresponding to a stage of the development of material productive forces" or "primary economic activities". In other words, the base is "a mode of production at a particular stage of its development." At a more abstract level, "the base is the real social existence of man."
In contrast, Williams doesn't specifically define the term "superstructure". Instead, he refers to it variously as a "cultural superstructure", "real cultural activities", and "certain kinds of activity in the cultural sphere". He sees an analogy with "the social apparatus...in the area of social and political and ideological activity and construction."
The term "determinism" has traditionally caused the greatest difficulty in interpretation. Williams argues that "[The] language of determination, of determinism, is in fact inherited from idealist and theological accounts of the world and of man...[It suggests] the notion of that external cause which totally predicts or prefigures, totally controls, a subsequent activity...[It implies a process in which a subsequent content is essentially prefigured, predicted, and controlled by a pre-existing external quality."
Instead, Williams confines the term to the notion of "setting limits, exerting pressures in very firm ways."
"Corporate Culture"
Williams also adopts the concept of a "social totality" or "totality of social practices" developed by Lukacs, although he considers that the concept must be "compatible with the notion of consciousness determined by social being".
At this point, he goes beyond the concepts of base and superstructure, in order to rely on Gramsci's concept of hegemony.
Williams continues:
"I would say first, that in any society, in a particular period, there is a central system of practices, meanings and values, which we can properly call corporate [or] central...It is the true expression of what is dominant in our society...It is a system which is not to be understood at the level of mere opinion or mere manipulation. It is a whole body of practices and expectations, assignments of energy, ordinary understandings of the nature of man and of his world."
"Alternative, Oppositional, Residual and Emergent Culture"
In contrast to corporate culture, there might be practices which are "alternative" or "oppositional". Oppositional involves "articulated opposition" or resistance.
Williams also refers to aspects of culture which are "residual" (i.e., "they're practised on the basis of some previous social formation"). Similarly, he refers to "emergent" culture (i.e., "new meanings and values, new practices, new significances and experiences, are continually being created").
All of these terms reveal that Williams sees culture and the superstructure as dynamic, not static.
He doesn't believe in a primitive or simplistic economic determinism, which rigidly dictates the nature and content of society and culture.
That said, Williams expressly acknowledged the primacy of the base as an influence or limit, even if it appears that his personal academic interest was in the structure and practices of the superstructure (e.g., society, culture, art, film, and literature).
3. Old Left or New Left?
It seems that Williams never abandoned his fundamental belief in Socialism and a Socialist agenda, even though he resigned (or lapsed) his membership of both the Communist Party of Great Britain (1941) and the UK Labour Party (1966) at different times and for different reasons.
It's arguable that his interest in culture and society was founded in his interest in politics and political economy.
In a later essay on Bourdieu, Williams suggests that cultural studies are "a marginal sub-discipline" of historical materialism, the Marxist critique of political economy.
However, early in his career, E. P. Thompson accused him, like the New Left, of a "culturalist tendency", which implicitly diminished the significance of traditional Old Left politics and economics.
My personal view is that, even if this criticism isn't strictly correct with respect to Williams, in many ways it applies to the New Left, at least the New Left as it portrayed itself after what is often called "the First New Left" formed in 1956.
It certainly applies to the American New Left, which subsequently morphed into the assemblage of interest groups that orchestrate the reception of Post-Modernist literature (especially of the maximalist variety) (to the extent that they aren't simply Christian Hegelian Anarchists, and not of the Left at all).
SOUNDTRACK:
February 8, 2022
While I cannot speak to the relative strength of this work as an introduction to Raymond Williams' thought, I can say with great confidence that this is a fantastic, highly consumable first foray. The ease of reading that one experiences throughout is a product of the Williams' alarming ability to speak to deeply intellectually embedded social and cultural problems with the ease of everyday language. In that way he is a great successor to Marx's own writing, which was capable of being listened to and understood by the everyday worker during breaks where (one of often very few) literate workers would read Capital aloud to them.
I want to avoid summizing each work, because Williams will speak better to each of them than I ever could. However, what I will say is that there are two very common themes, intimately intertwined: the first is the idea that the production, or formation, of our cultural values and ideas are precisely that - a product of our society. The second is an ever pervasive and subtle shifting of our everyday assumptions about key, common words that eventually lead us into a much deeper and probing set of questions and understandings.
These are connected because what Williams' work seems to be emphasizing is that since culture is a production of values, culture is itself a historical process just as the material world is. As such, it is something we can change; something we have control over just as much as it has control over us. 'Good Taste' in the 'Fine' Arts is a constant example of where, without much thought, we believe in this idea of certain arts being more refined and as such more artistic, valuable, or aesthetic. However, if we really look back in time and study the history, the acceptance of certain art as The Art, or Good Art changes over time. Suddenly, we find ourself talking with Williams about Fine Art not as some objective type of art, as many of us took it to be for most of our life, but as a status given to certain types of art during certain historical epochs.
Additionally, there is a real cleverness behind Phil O'Brien's selection of texts, especially when one considers the alleged novelty of some of the collected essays; and it is his well thought out structure that makes this such a wonderful book to become acquainted to Williams through. My favorite example of this is the pairing of the 7th and 8th essays. The former, "Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociology of Culture", is cowritten with an individual named Nicholos Garnham, and is easily the most abstract and dense text in the collection. It walks through the core of Bourdieu's theory, which is an ultra-gamified explanation of the relationship between classes in society and its culture. It explains, in abstract, mechanical terms, how society can have an overall culture that produces different cultural perspectives and motivations across classes, and it fits into this schema the roles of the intellectual and the artist, and why their works are, by necessity, created in capitalism for the Bourgeois and in an unapproachable way (each for a very different reason). It is very enriching, but a hard turn from the type of approachable language Williams employs in every essay before it. The 8th essay then begins with an absolute brow beating of the use of abstract language - a hilarious commentary on an aspect that the previous essay got so wrong while speaking about something so right. By the beginning of that essay one is immediately left with the impression that Williams made certain sacrifices in the previous coauthorship.
Anyways, read this incredible book if you're interested in cultural studies and/or Marxism - its immensely rich and there is so much a small review could never cover.
I want to avoid summizing each work, because Williams will speak better to each of them than I ever could. However, what I will say is that there are two very common themes, intimately intertwined: the first is the idea that the production, or formation, of our cultural values and ideas are precisely that - a product of our society. The second is an ever pervasive and subtle shifting of our everyday assumptions about key, common words that eventually lead us into a much deeper and probing set of questions and understandings.
These are connected because what Williams' work seems to be emphasizing is that since culture is a production of values, culture is itself a historical process just as the material world is. As such, it is something we can change; something we have control over just as much as it has control over us. 'Good Taste' in the 'Fine' Arts is a constant example of where, without much thought, we believe in this idea of certain arts being more refined and as such more artistic, valuable, or aesthetic. However, if we really look back in time and study the history, the acceptance of certain art as The Art, or Good Art changes over time. Suddenly, we find ourself talking with Williams about Fine Art not as some objective type of art, as many of us took it to be for most of our life, but as a status given to certain types of art during certain historical epochs.
Additionally, there is a real cleverness behind Phil O'Brien's selection of texts, especially when one considers the alleged novelty of some of the collected essays; and it is his well thought out structure that makes this such a wonderful book to become acquainted to Williams through. My favorite example of this is the pairing of the 7th and 8th essays. The former, "Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociology of Culture", is cowritten with an individual named Nicholos Garnham, and is easily the most abstract and dense text in the collection. It walks through the core of Bourdieu's theory, which is an ultra-gamified explanation of the relationship between classes in society and its culture. It explains, in abstract, mechanical terms, how society can have an overall culture that produces different cultural perspectives and motivations across classes, and it fits into this schema the roles of the intellectual and the artist, and why their works are, by necessity, created in capitalism for the Bourgeois and in an unapproachable way (each for a very different reason). It is very enriching, but a hard turn from the type of approachable language Williams employs in every essay before it. The 8th essay then begins with an absolute brow beating of the use of abstract language - a hilarious commentary on an aspect that the previous essay got so wrong while speaking about something so right. By the beginning of that essay one is immediately left with the impression that Williams made certain sacrifices in the previous coauthorship.
Anyways, read this incredible book if you're interested in cultural studies and/or Marxism - its immensely rich and there is so much a small review could never cover.
March 4, 2023
I found this one to be a very good overview of Williams' work, spanning over three decades of his output. Many of the essays/speech transcripts I enjoyed greatly, and was impressed he deliberately (naturally?) communicates in what he described at one point as "direct language," meaning he writes for a large audience by communicating plainly, but the same time not shying away from his theoretical subjects—the chapter on Pierre Bourdieu excepted, probably because it was co-written with Nicholas Garnham, but was nonetheless a great introduction to this French sociologist.
The work seemed to me a pretty good outline of the development of Williams' cultural theory, which he called cultural materialism, and if I had to describe it in nested sub-clauses I would say it has a leveling bent which depicts social hierarchy as an ideological illusion, and what is obscured is the material truth (which is only a matter of variation). I must admit it has given me a much wider appreciation for his work than I had after reading Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (though not in any way to knock that memorable book).
The work seemed to me a pretty good outline of the development of Williams' cultural theory, which he called cultural materialism, and if I had to describe it in nested sub-clauses I would say it has a leveling bent which depicts social hierarchy as an ideological illusion, and what is obscured is the material truth (which is only a matter of variation). I must admit it has given me a much wider appreciation for his work than I had after reading Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (though not in any way to knock that memorable book).
May 14, 2023
This is a wonderful if themeless collection of speeches and essays from an unmatched figure in socialist theory and criticism. I confess to finding the essays on Marxist inner workings somewhat tiresome, but gravitated to Williams' incisive comments on political organization, employment striation (anyone who enjoyed David Graeber's Bullshit Jobs should veer here to find the source of much of that text, albeit without the survey data), and narrative genres. This is literary criticism that really connects narrative forms and mutations to social concerns, and it is wonderful.
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March 21, 2024aunque son textos que no pertenecen a ninguna obra (son conferencias y artículos) me parecen una muy buena introducción porque si algo han conseguido es dejarme con ganas de leerlo todo de williams.
July 2, 2025
“We’ve got to take these things as they are”
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews