Proletarian Intellectuals

iest) proletarian intellectual to come out of the British Communist Party”] inevitably ran afoul of the Communist Party hierarchy. “The party line,” he once sighed, “is always moving in a circle.” Early British Marxists tended to dismiss as “bourgeois” the same classic literature that autodidacts found so liberating, a fact that goes a long way toward explaining why Marxism failed to gain a following among British workers. As the manifesto of the Communist-affiliated Workers’ Theatre Movement proclaimed, “It rejects decisively the role of raising the cultural levels of the workers through contact with great dramatic art.” That ruled out Shakespeare and just about every other important playwright: even Sean O’Casey was considered ideologically unsafe. Ewan MacColl was a Communist and the son of a Communist iron-founder, but he had been raised on Gogol, Dostoevsky, Balzac, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and he found the party’s agitprop drama an insult to his intelligence. “We had a strong feeling that we were being written down to,” he remembered. “I’ve noticed frequently that among middle-class party people that I’ve worked with, over the years, that there’s an idea that workers will accept anything, providing the message is OK. The quality doesn’t matter, the form doesn’t matter. All that matters is that we agree on the correct slogans.”