Posts Tagged Anthony C Green

Exploring the 1954 BBC Adaptation of 1984: A Classic Review

August 23, 2025 at 7:05 am · Filed under Film & DVD Reviews, Uncategorized ·Tagged , , , , , , , ,

1954 BBC television production reviewed by Anthony C Green

Cover of the 1954 BBC television adaptation of 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' featuring key characters and cast names in a vintage graphic design.
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Introduction

A repeat showing of this production in 1977 was almost certainly my first exposure, as a largely apolitical fifteen-year-old, to Orwell’s masterpiece. I watched it with my friend Neil (RIP). I can’t vouch for how much of it we understood, and it would be another three or four years before I first tackled the book.

Though I might not have initially ‘got’ the world of 1984 and its political message during my initial viewing of the recording of this live television production, in murky, spotty, unrestored black and white. But it must have had an impact, because every time I’ve read the book since, perhaps on four occasions all the way through, I’ve pictured Winston Smith as Peter Cushing, who played the lead in the play.

Even the great John Hurt, who did a fine job with the role in the film version that was released, somewhat inevitably in the real 1984, didn’t succeed in separating the two in my mind.

As well as Orwell’s iconic novel itself, this production and the 1984 film, I’ve also read and reviewed  the book Julia by Sandra Newman, a retelling of the story from the point of view of Winston Smith’s eponymous lover rather than that of Winston Review: Julia By Sandra Newman, and   an excellent theatrical production by the Bath Playhouse theatre company here in Liverpool last year, which I also reviewed 1984 Play Review: A Dystopian Masterpiece | Counter Culture

So, I can now justifiably claim a decent grounding in the world and mythos of the story, and having picked up the DVD/Blu Ray physical media combo restoration of this first attempt to bring Orwell’s nightmare vision to life visually for the British public, I thought it would be interesting to take a second look, almost five decades after my first, and more than seven decades since it first aired.

1984 Pre 1954

We should perhaps first remind ourselves that this wasn’t an adaptation of some dusty old classic of English literature. The production took place a mere five years after the novel was first published, and only four after the death of Orwell.

The first radio adaptation of the book was broadcast on American radio in 1949, while the author was still around. I don’t know if he ever got to hear it.

The idea of a television adaptation had been knocking around the BBC before even that. They had been quick to obtain the rights to dramatise the novel from Orwell that year, when it quickly became clear that the book was an instant classic.

As it turned out, the Americans once again got there first with a CBS production in 1953.

A limited amount of the footage from the recording of this has survived. Still, the consensus is that it wasn’t great, and with only fifty minutes of runtime, excluding the advertisements of which we were blessedly free in the UK in those far-off pre-commercial TV days, it’s hard to see how it could have been.

The  BBC production, was always going to be a big deal, what today we would call ‘event TV’, ultimately broadcast less than a year-and-a-half after what was almost inarguably the world’s first ever TV event, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth 11, for which many British families specifically bought their first television set, with many others crowding the living rooms of the only families in their street who had.

A script had been commissioned in late 1953, written by one Hugh Faulks in consultation with Orwell’s widow Sonia, with the hope of airing in April 1954.

However, when Rudolph Cartier was hired as Director/Producer, he rejected Faulk’s script, pushing back the broadcast by eight months.

Cartier was a German Jew who was already a well-established and successful film director when he fled the Nazi regime for Britain in 1936.

It was his work on the Quatermass Experiment in 1953 that secured him the 1984 job. This had served as the British public’s first introduction to television Science Fiction/Horror, and it had been a massive success.

The character of Professor Quatermass had been the creation of Nigel Kneale, who also wrote the script for the six-part series. He and Cartier had next worked together on an adaptation of Wuthering Heights, and Cartier, a man with a reputation for getting his own way, had made it a precondition for accepting the 1984 job that Kneale write the script.

It’s primarily to these two individuals, to their skill, courage and persistence, who we owe a debt of gratitude for the play being as good as it turned out to be.

The Cast

With the BBC having agreed to his demand to have Kneale on board, Cartier assembled a great team of actors, almost all of whom had experience in both film and theatre work, as well as the new-fangled medium of television, which was crucial given the potential pitfalls of attempting to bring such a dark and complex novel to life on the small screen under the technical and financial limitations of the day.

Peter Cushing was still three years away from The Curse of Frankenstein, the film that made him a household name and would forever associate him in the minds of the viewing public with the Horror genre, as well as launching Hammer Film Studios as the home of great British horror.

But even in 1954, though not quite yet a ‘star’, he would already have been a familiar face to cinema goers and the smaller numbers of television viewers.

Yvonne Mitchell was given the role of Julia. She’d played Cathy in the recent Cartier/Kneale Wuthering Heights, a role for which she’d received criticism for being too tall, and that this had detracted from the essential manliness of a Heathcliffe played by the relatively diminutive Richard Todd.

 There are relatively few speaking roles in the adaptation, and the minimum number of Extras they could get away with while remaining credible. But there are still several faces and names who are still familiar to viewers of a certain generation to this day, including the great Donald Pleasance as Syme, Andre Morell as O’Brien, and Wilfred Bramble who appears first as ‘Old Man’ early in the play, a decade before he became the Dirty Old Man in Steptoe and Son (and the ‘very clean’ old man in the Beatles A Hard Day’s Night), before reappearing towards the end as ‘Thin Prisoner’ following Winston and Julia’s incarnation.

All involved, cast and crew, played their part in creating a dark, sinister tone that was fully in keeping with the spirit of Orwell’s novel.

The Broadcast

The play was first broadcast on December 12th 1954. As was the norm, the bulk of the production was performed live by the actors, though with some pre-filmed insets. As I mentioned, this was a lavish production by the standards of the time. For one thing, it had a whopping one hour, fifty minutes running time (more than double that of the CBS production), including a five-minute interval, allowing viewers the chance to use the toilet, which in many cases would have involved braving the cold of a British winter in their backyard, or to make a nice cup of tea, the actors an opportunity to catch their breath and perhaps have a quick ciggy, and the crew time to, in the words of Cartier, ‘move the furniture around.’

Although the actors would also have had short breaks during the insets, almost two hours is still a long time for actors to perform with no possibility of a retake, and it took meticulous planning by Cartier and crew to make the whole thing work.

When Mark Gattis produced a live recreation of the Quatermass Experiment on BBC Four in 2005, starring himself and David Tennant, they under-ran by a full twenty minutes, which is an indication of how difficult working in the television medium would have been five decades earlier, when live productions were, by necessity, the norm.

1984 ran to time almost to the second, and, as far as I can tell, nobody once fluffed a line or missed their mark.

The scale of the production is also indicated by the BBC’s agreement to the use of an original musical score, written by John Hotchkis, for which he conducted a 17-piece orchestra in an adjacent studio as the play went out, instead of the customary pre-recorded, canned incidental music.

The composition does its job of enhancing the bleak, sinister nature of the work, and the knowledge that it was being played live by real musicians as the production was being beamed into people’s homes via aerials mounted on chimney pots also adds to our appreciation of how ambitious this project was for the time.

We don’t have precise figures for the cost, but it’s believed the budget rose from an original allocation of around £2000 to an eventual figure closer to £3000.

Credit is due to the BBC  for giving Kneale and Cartier the freedom and the money to do it their way.

The pre-filmed insets include a recreation of Winston visiting the ‘Prole’ sector, where he discovers the antique shop and its owner, which ultimately leads to his downfall. That these were shot on London streets still recovering from the damage inflicted by the Luftwaffe only a decade or so earlier, and the period black and white realist style of the production, plays a big part in establishing an atmosphere in keeping with the book to a degree that has still never been equalled.

It’s also worth noting that wartime rationing had only come to an end in Britain the year before. Viewers would therefore have had direct and recent, and in some cases ongoing, if less severe, experience of the shortages and lack of choice depicted, which can only have added to the play’s powerful impression.

The premise that the nature of the society with which the story is concerned had its origins in the aftermath of a nuclear war would have also been resonant in these early days of the Cold War, only nine years after the atomic bomb was unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

It was also, of course, only a year or so since the death of Stalin, upon whom Big Brother was clearly modelled.

The familiar picture of Big Brother (actually a member of the design crew who happened to have the right moustache) continues to stare out from the screen during the Interval, which is included in the physical media version.

This was a clever artistic choice by Cartier that still holds power today, perhaps even more so now than then. Even back in 1954, there were dark rumours that the televisions rapidly becoming commonplace in people’s homes were not simply transmitters but also receivers with the ability to ‘watch the watchers.’

Perhaps, that’s not quite so far-fetched now, in the era of ‘Smart’ TVs.

Big Brother is watching you?

The play was initially shown in the Sunday Night Theatre slot usually reserved for classic adaptations like Wuthering Heights, or genteel so-called ‘Comedies of Manners,’ sometimes broadcast directly from actual theatrical performances.

That 1984 was shown in this slot led to controversy, as we will come to shortly.

As was customary, the cast and crew reconvened for a repeat performance four days later. The reasoning behind this was that the second performance would generally be better than the first, because all concerned would have had the opportunity to learn from mistakes and iron out any logistical problems with the initial production.

Cushing always insisted that the Sunday night version was better, that a certain amount of spontaneity and energy was lost the second time around.

We’ll never be able to assess the validity of this because, as was also customary, only the second performance was recorded for posterity.

Given the common practice at the BBC of reusing tapes for other shows, a practice that continued into the 1970s (and of which Johnny-Come-Lately ITV was also guilty), we are fortunate that this recording survived to be enjoyed by viewers today.

Controversy and Mythology

This controversy arose in the four-day gap between the two performances.

It was real enough, but it has been rather exaggerated over the years, largely through later interviews with both Cartier and Kneale, especially the latter, who became skilled in the art of enhancing reality through the judicious use of embellishment.

The mythologised version of what happened is that the first showing was immediately followed by an outcry in the press at such horrors being inflicted on the viewing public, especially on a Sunday, and in the run-up to Christmas, with questions raised in parliament, and consideration given to cancelling the second performance completely.

The mood changed, so the story goes, when Prince Philip made an offhand comment at some function or other about how much he and his wife, our young and popular new Queen, had enjoyed the production.

The reality is that the critical reaction in the newspapers had been almost wholly positive. The exception was the Daily Worker, the paper of the Communist Party of Great Britain (forerunner of today’s Morning Star), which had long denounced Orwell as a Trotskyist and his works as anti-Soviet propaganda. Their cultural critic attacked the play as portraying a ‘Tory guttersnipe version of socialism.’

There were, however, and this is where the kernel of truth in the myth lies, plenty of letters to the press by outraged viewers, which were duly reported by the newspapers. Most of these did indeed cite the sanctity of Sundays as a day of religious observance, or at least of wholesome family relaxation, not a day for infesting their living rooms with dystopian visions of a nightmare future, especially in the run-up to Christmas.

A small number of MPs questioned whether such horror was in keeping with the ‘Educate, Entertain and Inform’ Reithian values on which the BBC had been founded. But the issue wasn’t formally debated in parliament.

The Daily Express, perhaps sensing an opportunity to capitalise on the response of some of its readers, ran with a sensationalist headline concerning a woman dying whilst watching the play. She had suffered a fatal heart attack while doing the ironing, but it seems unlikely there was any connection between this and what she happened to be watching on TV at the time.

Prince Philip’s remark concerning him and the Queen having watched and enjoyed the play seems to be true, but this had no great impact on how it was regarded.

Certainly, the BBC never seriously considered cancelling the second performance.

However, they did begin the second airing with a few minutes of what we would today call a ‘trigger-warning,’ in which the head of BBC drama, Michael Barry warned that some viewers may find some of what they were about to see disturbing, and concluded with hope that they would retain more hope for the future than was to found in the play. Thankfully, this has also been retained in the physical media release.

1984 After 1954

A film version, also with Donald Pleasence in the cast, but with no involvement from Kneale and Cartier, was released in 1956. That’s available on YouTube. It clearly owes much to its predecessor, but lacks its power and authenticity, and somewhat misses the point of the novel by implying a happy ending for Winston and Julia.

In 1965, the BBC attempted to repeat the 1954 experience with another theatrical TV production, not performed live, but using Kneale’s original script with a few changes.

This was part of a three-play series produced under the umbrella title of The World Of George Orwell. Sadly,1984 is the only adaptation that survives. You can also watch this free online, but again this doesn’t quite hit the mark, and is ruined, for me, early on by making the Goldstein character on the telescreen during the ‘Two-Minute Hate’ look and sound more like a comedic parody than a sinister, counter-revolutionary receptacle for the repressed frustrations of the Party rank and file.

In addition to the version that was released in 1984 itself, there’s also a joint Russian/Finnish film production made in 2023, which I’ve just become aware of, and will be renting on Amazon soon.

Conclusion

The 1954 production is a historical television landmark that, unlike so much vintage television, we are fortunate to have survived for us to view and enjoy today.

I still regard it as the definitive adaptation, with a great script, great acting, and an atmosphere fully in keeping with the original novel.

It is available to rent or buy on Amazon. But I highly recommend the relatively inexpensive DVD/Blu-ray set for its excellent Special Features, from which I gained most of my information for this article.

In whatever form you choose to watch it, watch it you should.

Anthony C Green, August 2025

PS This satire of the production from January 1955 is worth a listen. The popularity and importance of The Goons, and their influence on artists such as John Lennon and the Mony Python team, is hard to understand today. Their humour hasn’t dated well, but this works well as an entertaining and affectionate dig at the BBC itself, and it adds a little more to our knowledge and understanding of how the Cartier/Kneale play was regarded at the time.

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Exploring David Peace’s ‘Red Or Dead’: A Theatre Review by Anthony C Green

April 7, 2025 at 6:26 am · Filed under Books, Drama ·Tagged , , , , , ,

2,207 words, 12 minutes read time.

I’m a big fan of David Peace, the author whose novel of the same name this play is based. The Damned United, his fictionalised account of Brian Clough’s il-fated 44-day tenure at Leeds United (a day less than Liz’ Truss period as Prime Minister, as many journalist and online wags pointed when her disastrous period as Prime Minister ended), is the book he’s best known for. I loved it, and the film adaptation starring Steve Coogan, though much lighter in tone, was still a worthy effort. I also read his GB 1984, a novelisation of the miners’ strike written from the viewpoints of Messrs Scargill, Heathcliffe and McGahey. That’s pretty good too. Time prevented me from reading all of his Red Riding trilogy, set in Yorkshire during Peter Sutcliffe’s murderous rampage against girls and women. But what I read was good, and the television adaptation on Channel Four was a powerful, gritty, violent drama that’s well worth revisiting.

I purchased Red Or Dead, Peace’s second legendary football manager based novelisation, this time with the great Bill Shankly as its subject, almost as soon as it came out, hoping it would match or even exceed the Damned United.

It was a huge hardback tome of over seven hundred pages in length. I found it to be almost unreadable, and gave up on it about one-tenth in.

I wasn’t alone in my opinion, as a skim through the Amazon reviews makes clear, and for a book originally retailing at £20 plus to be available for £2.99 in The Works within a few months of publication is not a sign of success.

I could see what Peace was trying to do. He was attempting to demonstrate how Shankly’s success was based on repetition, on doing the same things over and over, ingraining good habits in mind and body until a state of perfection is reached, in the manner that a classical musician will repeat scales or certain musical pieces over and over until they can be performed on demand almost unconsciously. This was the methodology Shankly sought to instil in his players and the teams he managed, in the fifteen years he spent in charge at Liverpool FC, THE team he managed.

Statue of Bill Shankly at Anfield stadium in Liverpool (England)

Peace’s attempt to mirror the Shankly method in a literary fashion was a bold, admirable idea. But page after page of ‘Bill Shankly goes into the kitchen and makes himself a cup of tea. The first cup of tea of the morning. Strong with a splash of milk. Two sugars. Stirred clockwise three times. Bill Shankly sits at the table and opens his notepad. Bill Shankly drinks his tea and looks at the notepad. The notepad with the team sheet for Liverpool’s game against Arsenal. On Saturday. At home. At Anfield. Bill Shankly thinks about Ian St John. Ian St John who was injured in the match against Leeds United. Last Saturday. Away. At Elland Road. Bill Shankly thinks about Liverpool’s game next Wednesday. Against Real Madrid. In the first leg of the European Cup quarter-final. Away. In Madrid. Bill Shankly picks up a pencil. Bill Shankly writes a question mark next to Ian St John’s name. On the team sheet. The team sheet Bill Shankly had written. In the notepad. The team sheet for the game against Arsenal. On Saturday. At home. At Anfield…’

And so on, and on, and on.

And on…

How can anyone make of such source material an entertaining play?

Such were my thoughts as I headed for the Royal Court theatre.

The Royal Court theatre in Liverpool.

The month-long run at the Royal marks the world premiere of the production, and the theatre was packed by the time the doors closed and the lights dimmed.

The audience tended towards the middle to upper age register, though with a smattering of younger men and women, with quite a few couples.

I’d guess that most of those in attendance were working class, likely to be long-term Liverpool FC supporters, and with many of them not being regular theatre goers, though maybe that’s too many assumptions.

As is my usual practice, I read no reviews beforehand and so genuinely had no idea of what to expect as the cast assembled on the minimalist, suitably vintage stage.

I’m happy to report that Philip Breen did a superb job in adapting such seemingly unpromising source material for the stage, demonstrating that not only could it be done, but that it could be done in such a manner that it has a genuinely populist appeal.

As narrated by the multi-talented Alison McKenzie, in the guise of Shankly’s beloved wife Ness, Peace’s words were revealed to possess a poetry that had failed to escape my notice as dry words on the page.

 As well as narration, we get plenty of great dialogue too, sometimes in dramatic re-enactments of key moments in Shankly’s life and career, from before, during and after those momentous days at Liverpool FC, and sometimes in well-crafted interactions between Shankly and his players, coaching staff, groundsman, supporters, club chairman, fellow managers (including Clough), and Ness, all written and designed to illustrate the character and philosophy of life of the man.  

There’s plenty of nostalgia to be had for those who lived and followed football in this period, with cameos from the likes of Kevin Keegan and Emlyn Hughes (with a sly did at the latter for being an irritating Tory), and there are also some genuinely heart tugging moments, such as when we are informed that the troubled club chairman Jimmy McInnes, who first brought Shankly to Liverpool from Huddersfield Town was found hanging under the Kop.

The play has a large cast of fifty-two, drawn, aside from the lead actors, from a local community theatre group, almost all of whom occupied the stage throughout the performance.

The size of the cast gives the play an appropriately democratic and collectivist style and form, with those who don’t have a speaking part still able to play an essential role as representatives of the Anfield crowd on match days, as well as being a rousing choir in the production’s several musical numbers.

The first rendition we get of the inevitable You’ll Never Walk Alone is at the point in the story when it was adopted as the club anthem by the Kop, one Saturday afternoon in 1963, as Merseybeat swept the nation and Gerry and the Pacemakers took this little remembered number from the musical Carousel to the top of the Hit Parade. The recreation of that moment began as a solo rendition by McKenzie, soon to be joined by the full cast. They in turn were augmented by the archived, echoic, full-throated surround-sound of the Kop itself, and not a small number of the audience, until it felt as though the whole theatre was shaking through sheer volume and raw emotion.

Musically, we also get She Loves You, again as a full-cast plus Kop number, and Cilla the Singer in full peak-Cilla dress and hair, standing alone in the spotlight on a raised platform at the back of the stage, giving us Anyone Who Had a Heart, as copied from Dionne Warwick.

This musical interlude, despite being beautifully performed by Jhanaica Van Mook, was one of the play’s few missteps. Every other musical component served to illustrate key moments in the story. This felt like pure cabaret, though audience reaction suggested that mine was a minority opinion.

Some more or less good natured audience hissing at the first mention of a defeat by Liverpool’s arch nemesis’ Manchester United early on, was beautifully undercut by Shankly movingly relaying the moment he learned of the tragic event of the Munich Air Crash of 1958, his words accompanied by symbolic snow falling onto the stage, of how he got down on his knees and prayed ‘harder than I’ve ever prayed for anything’ for the survival of his friend and fellow Scot, United’s manager Matt Busby.

As we know, Busby did survive, unlike twenty-three of his fellow passengers on that ill-starred and ill-advised return flight from Belgrade, including eight of his young team, the Busby Babes.

The close relationship between the two managers remains an important theme throughout the rest of the play.

After the interval, the performance resumes with archival newsreel footage of shocked, and often disbelieving, real-life Liverpudlians’ as they reacted to the news of Shankly’s retirement in 1974, one of several intelligent uses of ghostly period film projected onto the back of the stage.

This second half was a half-hour or so shorter than the first half. This made sense, given that life for Shankly after football would last a mere seven years, until his death at the relatively young age of sixty-seven.

But for Shankly, who was only half-joking when he famously said that ‘Football’s not a matter of life and death, it’s more important than that,’ there could never really be a meaningful ‘Life after football.’

The difficulty that many working men, and Shankly never ceased to consider himself a ‘working man,’ have in finding meaning in life once the daily routine of work is over, is in and of itself a great topic for drama. But here, the great man’s failure to adjust to retirement was played a little too much for laughs, and this made the second half of the play weaker than the first, though that’s not to say it was weak per se, or that it significantly lowered my estimation of the whole.

For some considerable time after his decision to step down, Shankly continued to turn up at Liverpool’s training ground, to impart the benefits of his wisdom to players and staff, to ‘keep himself in shape’, to ‘help out’, to be around in case he was needed, but really just to be there because there was nowhere else that he needed to be.

 In the end, it was politely requested that he stay away, because his presence was at risk of undermining new manager Bob Paisley, previously his long-term assistant, at a time when he needed to ‘make his mark’.

Soon, of course, he did indeed make his mark, building upon the essential foundations Shankly had laid to lead Liverpool to even greater heights, to add the European Cup, the one triumph that had alluded his predecessor, to the already impressively stocked Anfield trophy cabinet.

 We do see all this in the play, but the over-concentration on the comedic in this second half downplayed the key, tragic essence of Shankly’s final years, an essence well encapsulated by the Ian St John in his remark that, ‘Shanks died of boredom, of not being the manager of Liverpool Football Club.’

That’s not to say, to paraphrase the cliche beloved of football commentators, that this was ‘play of two-halves’. The level of performance was never below excellent, and the comedy provided the audience with plenty of laugh-out-loud moments.

Shankly believed footballing success was predicated on individuals working as one, as a collective towards a shared goal (or, more correctly, towards the opposing team’s goal). In one of his most iconic statements he described this as a form of socialism, ‘real socialism in action.’ He always recognised that the collective extended well beyond the eleven players on the pitch to incorporate everybody connected with the club, from the boardroom down to the supporters, with the players and the manager, those who most obviously receive the glory and the accolades of success, being but parts of a much greater whole.

Much the same, with appropriate linguistic amendments, can be said of a successful theatre production, and of much else in life.

Almost everything about this play serves to powerfully illustrate this truth.

This being said, it seems almost a contradiction to single out individuals for praise. Nevertheless, it would be remiss not to mention Peter Mullan’s superb performance in the lead role, though perhaps we should expect nothing less from such an experienced and accomplished actor. He had Shankly’s mannerisms and accent down pat. But his performance never descended into mere impersonation, and although he is the ‘star’ name, there are no star moments, no grandstanding attempts to dominate. Clearly, he understands his subject and the nature of the production well.

Alison McKenzie, I’ve mentioned, but Les Dennis was so convincing as Tom Williams, who took over as the Liverpool club chairman after the suicide of McInnes, that ‘Les Dennis’ disappeared entirely and I didn’t even realise it was Les Dennis until I checked the cast list on the bus home.   

Breen’s direction should also be commended. Two-and-a-half hours is a fair old length for a play, but never for a moment did it drag.

Some prior knowledge of the life and times of Bill Shankly would certainly enhance enjoyment of the production. But those who lack such knowledge would almost certainly leave the theatre wanting to rectify this deficiency.

I wouldn’t recommend that they head straight for Peace’s novel, although I left tempted to dig it out from the darkest, most neglected corner of my book collection.

Red Or Dead continues at the Royal Court, Liverpool until April 19th, but will surely be coming to a theatre near you at some point.

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 Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani – A Defence

April 26, 2020 at 12:49 pm · Filed under Books, Politics ·Tagged , , , , , ,

fullyautomatedluxurycommunismAlthough Karl Marx and his key collaborator Frederic Engels were politically engaged, active participants in the class struggle as well as being the theoretical founders of Scientific Socialism, neither of them had much to say about what a future Communist Society might look like. It is not true to say, however, as some critics claim, that they gave no indication of how society and the state might function in the immediate aftermath of the overthrow of capitalism. In his book The Civil War in France, Marx made it clear that he saw the form of Direct Democracy exercised by the Communards in the short-lived but heroic Paris Commune, as an indication of how the working class might exercise State Power in a socialist society, a society that he saw as the transitional stage between Capitalism and Communism. The ideas Marx expressed here were later developed by Lenin in his pamphlet ‘The State and Revolution’ as a model for the future Soviet State, although in reality, for reasons that need not detain us here, very few of them were actually put into operation once this state was established.

That neither Marx nor Engels were willing to speculate on how Full Communism might look, once the concentration of power in the hands of the Proletariat under socialism had been long enough established for the state to, in his own terms, ‘wither away’, was more than anything else an indication of how far away such a prospect seemed at the time that they were writing. One thing that they were clear on however was that Communism, a society where class rule, and hence the repressive apparatus of the state had ceased to exist completely, could only arise in a situation where the application of scientific theory and praxis had created an ‘abundance of goods’ that were accessible to all, rather than to a small pampered elite that lived off the wealth creation of others. Once established, such a society would free individuals from the necessity of dedicating the bulk of their lives to maintaining the barest of existences through their work, thus enabling them to take part fully in the running of that society, as well as being able to dedicate themselves to such noble pursuits as Art, Philosophy and Science. An example of how such a society might function was perhaps given, in somewhat primitive form, by the Ancient Greek City states, where those who were fortunate enough to enjoy full citizenship were freed from the prosaic needs of survival by the existence of large numbers of much less fortunate slaves, thus enabling a flowering of creativity and thought that remains influential to this day. Marx and Engels were of course not agitating for a return to slavery, and indeed strongly supported the abolitionist North against the Slave owning South in the American Civil War. Rather, they saw in the rapidly advancing technological marvels of the Industrial Revolution, the outlines of a future world where mechanisation would allow full citizenship for all, and through that developments in the finer elements of human endeavour that would make the achievements of the Ancients, and of the Enlightenment, seem like a mere prehistoric prelude to history. Under Full Communism, every man would be a Renaissance Man.

Marx and Engels resided for a long period in Victorian Britain, which was then the citadel of world capitalism, as well as the birthplace of the industrial revolution; and it was a through a study of this society that much of what we have come to know as ‘Marxism’ was developed. Here, even in the most developed nation on Earth, they found conditions of extreme poverty afflicting the developing working class, as described most graphically in Engels ‘The Conditions of the Working Class in England.’ Given such appalling conditions, speculation about how a future communist society might look once all such poverty had been eliminated, along with the system of class exploitation itself, would have seemed just that: wild speculation best left to utopians and dreamers, and best avoided by those who based their analysis on the application of the scientific method to the study of politics. Of course, It was also axiomatic to the founders of Scientific Socialism that a society of abundance could only be built from the starting point of the highest forms of capitalism. That is why, the clear expectation of both Marx and Engels was that the first socialist society would be established in one of the most developed capitalist nations, most likely in Britain or Germany. The reality, of course, is that the first state in the world that proclaimed itself to be a Socialist State in the process of advancing towards Communism arose in backward, semi-feudal Russia, a fact that has had a great bearing on the development of socialist thought both East and West.

Those who have called themselves ‘Socialists’ or ‘Communists’ in the West since the Russian Revolution of 1917, have tended to place themselves at either one of two extremes: Firstly, those who follow Marx in insisting that the society of the future is almost unimaginable to our puny, capitalist indoctrinated brains, and therefore such speculation is best avoided; and, secondly, those who say that such a society is already in the process of being created, in the Soviet Union, China, Albania, Cuba, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea et al. Both of these approaches have their weaknesses. The former has led to many activists seeming to do little more than ask people to continue to fight the good fight and to have trust in a brighter future, in the way that religious zealots might demand faith in a future paradise that can bring about through good works and/or devout faith. The latter group is all too easily, rightly or wrongly, portrayed by the defenders of the status quo as apologists for Totalitarian Dictatorship and mass murder.

It is to these historical weaknesses in the case for Socialism/Communism that Aaron Bastani’s book Fully Automated Luxury Communism is addressed.

His essential thesis is that a future of material abundance is now far from unimaginable. The technological advances made since Marx’ time, and particularly in the period since the Second World War, have been literally astonishing, calling to mind the dictum that ‘if technology is sufficiently advanced it becomes indistinguishable from magic’. Marx was around at the time of the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell: what would he have made of our modern mobile phones, devices through which we hold in our hands virtually the sum total of all human knowledge? The primary mode of transport in Victorian London at the time of Marx’ period of residence in our capital city was the horse-drawn carriage, and the world’s first Railway network was still in the process of being created through the brute labour power of overworked and underpaid itinerant  Navies, the ‘precariat’ of their day. Today, the motor car is king, human beings have walked on the Moon and have developed the ability to send crafts, albeit unmanned, well beyond the confines of our own Galaxy.

And yet, as Bastani shows in clear, easy to read, accessible prose, our astonishing technological advance has been and still is used in the service of a tiny elite, rather than utilised for the benefit of the many; and to make this state of affairs even worse, the ceaseless pursuit of private profit by a few techno-corporate giants threatens, even sans nuclear warfare, to destroy our planet, our habitat, our home, the environment upon which our very survival as a species depends.

Bastani is able to show that a society of post-scarcity is both possible and necessary, as well as to give an indication of how such a society might be achieved and might look. Those of us who are actively engaged in the struggle for a radically different, fairer world, whether we call ourselves Communists, Socialists, Anarchists or Ecologists, be we Trade Unionists and/or campaigners for peace and climate justice, need to absorb, to treat with seriousness, and to make use of the kind of analysis and agenda that Bastani and his co-thinkers are currently advancing. If we don’t, if we ignore such developments and merely implore activists to stick to a study of the classics of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, Enver Hoxa, Kim Il Sung, mix and match as you see fit, and if we continue to re-fight the battles of the past rather than becoming proselytisers for an incomparably brighter and entirely realistic future, then we will confine ourselves to perpetual life on the political margins. The revolution will remain, as one wag put it, ‘just around the corner, the same place it has always been.’

Sadly, too many on the political Left have decided to dismiss Bastani’s work as worthless ‘hipster communism’, often it seems to me without having even bothered to read the book, let alone to engage seriously with the ideas put forward within its pages.

Here, in defending Bastani from his ‘Leftist’ critics, I will confine myself to two main points.

The first of these is the contention that FALC is essentially a ‘Reformist’ project. This is a point that is easily dealt with. Of course, the ideas in the book are indeed reformist, reformist in the sense that it contains a set of proposals to be implemented by a future radical government. That is, it is reformist in the same way that Labour’s 2017 and 2019 Election Manifestoes were reformist, in the same way that the 1945 Labour government was reformist. Reforms are important. Reforms, before Thatcher and Blair between them made the word ‘reform’ mean the opposite of its former political definition, have given working people much. But the reforms contained in Bastani’s book, if implemented in full, would amount to a revolution in the way we live more radical than anything ever previously seen.

In one badly argued ‘Left’ critique of FALC, from John Sweeney of the Communist Party of Britain (Morning Star, July 1st, 2019), Bastani’s assertion that the revolution won’t come about through a storming of the Winter Palace was written off disparagingly: why? Leaving aside the point that there was a lot more to the Russian Revolution than the storming of the official residence of the Tsar by an armed detachment of the working class led by the Bolshevik Party, how many on the Left in Britain today seriously believe that the British revolution will come about through a storming of Buckingham Palace? Does Sweeney himself believe this? If he does, then that is indicative of a very narrow understanding of the form and meaning of the socialist revolution.

One of the most exciting ideas that Bastani advocates is that of using technological development in order to advance towards a society of ever-increasing free Universal Basic Services, or UBS, a method he prefers to that of Universal Basic Income, UBI, (UBS rather than UBI), the latter which he rejects as little more than a trick to further enhance the capitalistic notion of ‘personal responsibility’ at the expense of the socialist imperative of collective security, as well as a way of further shrinking what remains of our actually existing Welfare State. Even at the present level of technological development, Bastani argues, it would be possible, once the capitalist class has been dispossessed, to rapidly advance to a system of UBS in the provision of energy, of high-speed broadband and other means of communication, in transport, in housing as well as in education and health care.

As well as UBS, Bastani advocates worker’s ownership of the means of production, to be administered in differing and varied forms (e.g. state ownership, municipal ownership, cooperatives), and the virtual abolition of all intellectual copyright and patent laws, so that the fruits of the sum total of human knowledge truly become the property of all.

Contrary to the impression given by Sweeney and many other ‘Left’ critics, Bastani doesn’t shy away from the need for political struggle if such a radical overhaul of society is to come about. The Red-Green Populist mass movement he calls for might not in and of itself be sufficient to bring about the changes he advocates. But is it really any less realistic than the idea of a shrinking industrial working class being led to power by a ‘vanguard’ party of the type Lenin first advocated in his ‘What is to be Done’ pamphlet way back in 1903?

This leads me to my second main point: the idea that Bastani is a Techno-Determinist who believes that Full Communism will emerge naturally through technological advance, without the need for political struggle at all. In reality, this is a weak caricature of Bastani’s thought, about as accurate as the common misconception that Marxism is an ideology of Economic Determinism which believes that socialism and communism are inevitable, whatever we as human beings do or don’t do.

In fact, the main thread that runs throughout the pages of Fully Automated Luxury Communism is that the potential for modern technology to liberate the whole of humankind from the evils of drudgery, poverty, and alienation, as well as to reverse climate change through ending our dependence on the rapidly diminishing supply of oil, is severely and quite deliberately limited by the physical and intellectual ownership of this technology by a tiny corporate, globalist elite. In short, Bastani’s work is wholly compatible with the Marxian analysis that under capitalism the capacity of the Forces of Production to liberate mankind will always, so long as capitalism exists, be limited by the Relations of Production, the ownership of the means of production by a tiny elite who then use that ownership to enrich themselves rather than to benefit the many.

A single quotation from the closing pages of the book should forever refute the idea that Bastani believes that political struggle is unnecessary in order to bring about revolutionary change:

‘There is no necessary reason why they (scientists and corporations currently leading technological advance – T.G) should liberate us, or maintain our planet’s ecosystems, any more than that they should lead to ever-widening income inequality and widespread collapse. The direction we take next won’t be the result of a predictive algorithm or unicorn start-up – it will be the result of politics, the binding decisions on all of us that we collectively choose to make.’

I am by no means a Bastani fan-boy. I have my own criticisms of his book. I’m not keen on the use of the word ‘Luxury’ for a start, a word that to me conjures up images of indolent decadence rather than of the unleashing of the creative potential of the masses that I believe would arise in a society built on abundance for all. There is also a strong case for dispensing with the word ‘communism’, a word that has, again rightly or wrongly to have much more negative connotations than its original Marxian meaning.  And I agree that Bastani doesn’t say enough about the form that the sort of movement he believes needs to be developed should take: for instance, a new political party, work through the existing parties, a Gramscian long march through the institutions, mass street protest, Trade Union action, or all of the above? Would such a movement, and/or a government committed to implementing Bastani’s ideas be prepared to use violence in order to defeat resistance that would inevitably be mounted by a threatened ruling elite? I would also add ‘Democratic’ and ‘National’ to Bastani’s ‘Red-Green-Populist triptych. ‘Democratic’ because, contrary to the sectarianism that has plagued the Left since the time of Marx himself, it really would be better if we let as many flowers bloom as possible, and ‘National’ because the political struggle is still fought primarily at the level of the Nation-State, and I believe that history has demonstrated that the Nation-State remains the largest form of political organization possible for the operation of a truly democratic culture. In addition, I wouldn’t be as quick as Bastani to dismiss the revolutionary/reformist potential of UBI, dependent on how it is implemented and by whom. There is no contradiction between the ideas of UBI and UBS. The two are twins, not opposites.

But at the very least FALC offers a hopeful vision of a future worth fighting for, and of how that future might look, something that, as I have already suggested, has been sorely lacking from Socialist discourse from its inception. Admittedly, I’m no scientist; and therefore, I’m not in a position to comment on the feasibility of asteroid mining, of nano-technology, of quantum computers, to give but a few examples of the many technological wonders of the future that Bastani believes can lead to a life of meaningful, healthy leisure for all. Nor do I know if the capacity of renewable energies can be expanded to the point that everyday energy usage can be made free for all, whilst at the same time making a huge contribution to reversing climate change, as quickly and as easily as Bastani suggests. But I doubt that many of the True Communist critics of the book are in any better position as regards such matters than I am.

Aaron Bastani advances a vision that inspires me, and can I believe be used to inspire others, to show the disillusioned and the dispossessed that, contrary to the fatalism and pessimism that is deliberately fostered by the ideologues of capital, that another world, a world for the many, not the few, a world that sees nature as a home in need of repair and protection rather than as a resource to be exploited,  is indeed possible.

It is time to leave our self-constructed Far Left ghettoes; time to dream; time to allow the imagination to take power.

Anthony C Green. Anthony C Green is a social care worker, novelist, Trade Unionist, and political activist living in Liverpool. His latest novel Special, based on his experiences as a social care worker, is now available: https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/contemporary/special/

Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto Hardcover – 11 Jun. 2019
Hardcover: 288 pages
Publisher: Verso Books (11 Jun. 2019)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1786632624
ISBN-13: 978-1786632623

 

 

  • Fully Automated Luxury Communism: A Manifesto Hardcover – 11 Jun. 2019
  • Hardcover: 288 pages
  • Publisher: Verso Books (11 Jun. 2019)
  • ISBN-10: 1786632624
  • ISBN-13: 978-1786632623

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The Vanishing Futurist by Charlotte Hobson

April 24, 2020 at 6:43 am · Filed under Books ·Tagged ,

The Vanishing Futurist by Charlotte Hobson

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Faber & Faber; Main edition (2 Mar. 2017)
• ISBN-10: 9780571234875
• ISBN-13: 978-0571234875

Reviewed by Anthony C Green

thevanishingfuturistThe Vanishing Futurist is a novel that I stumbled upon by accident whilst browsing in Liverpool’s excellent News from Nowhere left-wing bookshop. It is set in Russia in the period immediately prior to, during, and after the revolution of 1917.
The story is told from the perspective of Gerty Freely, a young English governess who works for a wealthy Moscow family. It is told in the past tense, from an unspecified point in the future, although it is clear that it is a point at which the Soviet Union is still in existence. References to a Soviet film of The Vanishing Futurist being made in the nineteen fifties, and other snippets of information, make it appear as though we are dealing with real, historical events. The appearance of real-life individuals such as the great Constructivist architect, designer, and artist Vladimir Tatlin and early Soviet Commissar for Education Anatoly Lunacharsky add to this sense of realism.

As the revolutionary upheavals of 1917 intensify, the Kobolev family by whom Gerty is employed, decide to leave Moscow, for the warmer and safer climate of the Crimea. Finding it more and more difficult to support herself through the teaching of English, and also partly out of ideological commitment, Freely ends up becoming a member of the Institute for Revolutionary Transformation (IRT), a small community which is established in order to practice a radical form of collectivist living, where all goods, including clothes, are held in common. The Communities increasingly meagre supplies of food are all shared equally, all work is collectively undertaken without distinctions of gender, and all diversions from the inner and outer struggle to reinvent oneself as the perfect Socialist Man/Woman are either frowned upon or banned outright.
Sex is regarded as one such diversion, though the proscription on physical relationships between commune members is tested early in the novel when Gerty falls in love with an avant-garde artist, scientist, and fellow IRT member Nikita Slavkin.

It is Slavkin who is the hero of the novel, and the Futurist referred to in its title. He brings his sexual relationship with Gerty to an end not long after it had begun, although his claim that he has done so for ideological reasons is strongly undermined when he quickly becomes physically involved with Sonya, another female member of the commune.

Life in the IRT mirrors developments in the world outside as the young Soviet Worker’s State battles for survival against the combined forces of Imperialist intervention, internal counter-revolution, and endemic poverty and backwardness which has been worsened by the wasteful brutalities of the First World War. Thus, as the original revolutionary spirit of experimentation in art comes up against the austere and harsh requirements of War Communism, a split emerges within the commune itself, between the radical followers of Slavkin on one side, and those who side with Fyodor, an IRT member who stresses the importance of discipline and efficiency as the key to the building of socialism. The original radical impulse of the IRT is further weakened when the leadership of the local Soviet decrees that in order to help cope with the acute housing shortage in Moscow it must open its doors to people who do not necessarily share the ideological fervour of its founders.

This aspect of the novel can be read as an analogy for the way that the revolutionary spirit of Russia’s small but class conscious industrial working class was severely diluted by an influx of more politically and culturally backward elements from the countryside, who were needed to replace workers who had joined the newly established Red Army in order to fight the White Counter-Revolutionaries and imperialist interventionists. This struggle also mirrors the tensions within Russia between on the one side the Slavic/conservative/traditionalist elements and the Westernised/ liberal/modernisers, a tension that dates back to at least the 19h century and is still unresolved within today’s Russian Federation.

It is on two of Slavkin’s radical inventions that the novel hinges. The first is called the PropMash, an abbreviation of Propaganda Machine, which is a form of sensory overload capsule that, by bombarding people with sights, sounds and smells designed to promote socialism, can supposedly rapidly break down individualistic conditioning and raise political consciousness to the required level of the new revolutionary man or woman.

The PropMash has mixed results, and Slavkin’s attention is soon diverted to an intense study of the newly emerging theories of Quantum Physics. These studies lead him to adopt what has become known as the Many Worlds/Multi-verse interpretation of quantum reality, essentially the idea that every decision we make creates a new universe; that an infinite number of parallel universes therefore exist, and that within this plurality of worlds everything that can possibly happen has happened, is happening, or will happen. Although seemingly straight out of a Philip K Dick novel this scientific theory, first postulated by the American Physicist Hugh Everett in the late nineteen fifties, has now become almost mainstream.

Slavkin’s logical deduction from the Many Worlds’ theory is that although Communism, the highest and final form of socialism and thus of human development, may not be possible here and now in the conditions of the backward and impoverished Russia of 1918, there must exist an infinite number of alternate universes where Full Communism has already been achieved. This revelation leads him to invent the Socialisation Capsule, which is essentially a vehicle for the transportation of individuals, beginning with Slavkin himself, from the harsh reality of his own material existence into a dimension where one of these utopian, communist parallel realities exists.

Slavkin’s public questioning of the possibility of achieving communism in present-day Russia quickly brings him to the attention of the local Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB. When he disappears from the experimental laboratory where he has been taken, a disappearance that apparently occurs after the facilities’ housekeeper had heard his new device whirling into action, the central mystery of the novel is posed: has Slavkin actually disappeared into one of the alternate communist futures that he believes must exist or, more prosaically, have his radical scientific theorising and experimentation led him to pay the ultimate price under the increasingly harsh excesses of Soviet Communism? It’s a question that Gerty, who has by now found that her brief physical relationship with Slavkin has left her pregnant with his child, sets out to discover the answer to.

I was not entirely satisfied by the ending to the book, but that may be no more than saying that, as a writer myself I would have chosen to conclude it differently. That aside, I thought The Vanishing Futurist was excellent. it is part Historical Fiction, part Science Fiction, and it deals with big questions, about how we should live, about our capacity to imagine different, better worlds, about high ideals, and how such ideals often come into conflict with the material practicalities of brute survival.

If that makes it sound as though it might be hard going, it isn’t. Its light and easy to read style make it a novel that is accessible to all reasonably intelligent readers. I would, however, add the caveat that although prior knowledge is not essential to the enjoyment of the book, the readers who will get the most from it are those with some background understanding of the main events and themes of the Russian Revolution, and perhaps also of the artistic movements that came to prominence and flowered briefly during this period of history, movements such as Futurism and Constructivism. The writer has clearly done her own homework in these areas, and her novel is highly recommended.

Anthony C Green is a social care worker, novelist, Trade Unionist, and political activist living in Liverpool. His latest novel Special, based on his experiences as a social care worker, is now available: https://www.troubador.co.uk/bookshop/contemporary/special/

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