V V: View from the Left

Extensive interviews have now become an integral element in publishers’ repertoire. Their great advantage is the manoeuvrability and range with which they accommodate a whole range of spoken and written varieties at both poles of the exchange – expository and narrative, argumentative rallies, and anecdotes – that fall somewhere between an autobiography and a memoir. This mix of recollection, statement and expectation often becomes the starting point for a full-fledged article or even a book. Lives on the Left: A Group Portrait, edited by Francis Mulhern (Verso Books, £14.99), comprises interviews with Left intellectuals published by New Left Review since its inception in 1960.

There are 16 interviews with Left intellectuals of different traditions of Marxism and communism, most with significant experience in academic work in language, literature, philosophy and social theory. There are also interviews with some generalists in their parties or movements, as organisers, leaders and writers. So it is a ready mix of both theory and practice.

The book is divided into five sections:

• Georg Lukacs: Life and Work and Hedda Korsch: Memories of Karl Korsch. 
   
• Jiri Pelikan: The Struggle for Socialism in Czechoslovakia; K Damodaran: Memoir of an Indian Communist; Ernest Mandel: The Luck of a Crazy Youth; Dorothy Thompson: The Personal and the Political; Lucio Colletti: A Political and Philosophical Interview; Luciana Castellina: II Manifesto and Italian Communism; and Adolfo Gilly: What Exists Cannot Be True. 
   
• Jean-Paul Sartre: Itinerary of a Thought; Noam Chomsky: Linguistics and Politics; and David Harvey: Reinventing Geography. 
   
• Joao Pedro Stedile: Landless Battalions; Asada Akira: A Left Within the Place of Nothingness; and Wang Hui: Fire at the Castle Gate. 
• Guivanni Arrighi: The Winding Paths of Capital.

Together they “range across one hundred years, twenty and more countries and five continents to make up a continuous record of Marxist socialism and above all, of communism – the International and the informal movement that outlived it, and also the organised revolutionary opposition to the Left – from the emergence of the early 20th century to its dissolution in the 1990s”.

A brief summing up of each of the key figures would be somewhat as follows even at the cost of some oversimplification. But you really need to read each of the interviews because of all the ifs and buts in their arguments.

Georg Lukacs, who took to Marxism under the inspiration of the October Revolution, speaks as a Party member with more than half a century’s standing. But the thrust of the interview is more literary and philosophical than political. He talks about his works, history and class consciousness, the theory of the novel and the meaning of contemporary realism.

Both Lukacs and Korsch had parallel lives: they were among the founding generation in their respective communist parties, in Hungary and Germany, participated in the revolutionary upheavals at the end of World War I, held office in communist governments, and fell foul of Comintern orthodoxy in the following years. Sadly, they don’t tell us why they were thrown out and what brought them back into the fold. For the early generation of communist party members there was an odd sense of loyalty that dissuaded them from talking freely of their doubts about the Party.

For the next generation like Jiri Pelikan (Czechoslovakia), Dorothy Thompson (Britain), Luciana Castellina and Lucio Colletti (both Italy), who joined the Party between 1939 and 1950, in the years of Stalin’s domination over the Communist movement, it was World War II, its preludes and outcomes that provided the first stirrings of doubt about the infallibility of the Party.

These are essentially political and philosophical interviews but the question is what role the Party played in the development of radical ideas in their respective countries. Or, was it just an intellectual exercise divorced from the ground realities? And why did the disillusion spread so rapidly after the 20th Congress and the Soviet invasion of Hungary? There are no clear-cut answers, except there were deviations from the Marxist tradition; the honest answer would be that the Party hacks took over the “machine” because their own cushioned places would be lost.

Noam Chomsky, however, stood outside the fold as a public intellectual who intervened in the debates without benefit or constraints of the Party. In this, his peers are Sartre, Damodaran and David Harvey, who expressed their views independent of the Party line. And that is why what they said still matters.

It is the Damodaran interview, conducted in 1975, a year before his death, that readers would first turn to, and read it again and again. He talks about the split in the Party in 1964 when significant numbers of is leaders left to form the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and why he stayed on with the Communist Party of India: “there were no fundamental differences between the two groupings.” All that he said about the Party still holds true.

There is a lot more in these interviews you should check out because the Left seems to have learnt nothing and forgotten nothing.