Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)
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The Dialectics of Hope: Marxism and Method in The Cultural Front / Charles D. Cunningham
<1> The tenth anniversary of Michael Denning's The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century is a fitting occasion to revisit a work posing questions that remain fresh today and probably will as long as there is a need to analyze the relationship between dissident cultural movements and a non-egalitarian social order. Encyclopedic in scope, the book is a study of the "cultural production" of the Popular Front of the 1930s and 40s that moves eruditely through a wide range of objects, including proletarian literature, popular music, theater, film, cartoons, and cultural theory. Denning makes substantial interventions into each of these fields - without simply collapsing them - and shows how each was connected by a broader historical impulse. The book at once celebrates the depth and breadth of politically left culture, interprets its texts, recovers neglected works, and reminds us of the once suppressed and forgotten ties many famous popular culture figures had to the left. Denning not only offers interpretations of a remarkable number of primary texts, but also intervenes in the scholarly debates at multiple levels. Especially impressive is his command of the secondary scholarship both of the individual fields and of the overarching movement. The book's footnotes expose us to the prodigious reading that undergirds his primary narrative and succinctly articulate theses that for other writers would be books in themselves. That The Cultural Front was the subject of substantial symposia in the journals Labor History and Intellectual History Newsletter suggests that it has reached beyond the more familiar disciplines of literary and cultural analysis.
<2> In the spirit of what I see as Denning's invitation to converse and debate, I will focus on the promise and limitations offered by his method, which derives largely from the Marxist cultural studies tradition. Any serious engagement with The Cultural Front must understand it not simply as an argument sustained across a wide array of objects and fields, but as a veritable terrain on which to analyze the meaning, impact, and legacy of the thirties left; the relationship between culture and social structure; and the prospects for future counterhegemonic movements. Like any analysis of left wing cultural movements, Denning's implicitly comments on the possibilities of transition to socialism. He champions ideals that, strictly speaking, cannot be widely achieved in the current social order; yet rather than consign us and our culture to a hopeless status quo, his book becomes a meditation on the possibility of a better future.
<3> While Cold War critics sneered at the thirties left for producing inferior art under the domination of Moscow, Denning sees the "cultural front" - as a "socially democratic" movement that produced a "second American Renaissance." This stance simultaneously challenges narrowly anticommunist judgments and tries to distinguish the ideals of the left from its institutions in the period, particularly the Communist Party USA (CP). His conceptualization of the "cultural front" thus becomes an argument for an alternative historiography of the era. According to Denning, the standard account holds that the Popular Front (PF) was structured by CP policy and that its "core" was party members and its "periphery" fellow travelers and liberals. The same structure held for the cultural movement grounded in PF politics. Adopting Antonio Gramsci's terms, Denning argues instead that the Popular Front was a "radical historical bloc uniting industrial unionists, Communists, independent socialists, community activists, and émigré anti-fascists around laborist social democracy, anti-fascism, and anti-lynching" (4). Its "cultural front" took shape at the intersection of three "formations" of cultural workers: the "plebeians," young working class writers usually from immigrant families; the "émigrés," refugees from European fascism; and the "moderns," an older (only slightly in some cases) generation of Americans that included Malcolm Cowley, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Duke Ellington, Charlie Chaplin, and many others.
<4> Denning also describes the cultural front era's "structure of feeling," using Raymond Williams's term. This theorization is a crucial move for several reasons. As Denning notes, the concept is Williams's attempt to take into account how each generation experiences political and social possibilities that cannot be exhausted by self-conscious political movements or affiliations. It describes both the origins of movements before they can be identified as such and the sense of possibility that is the necessary for them to continue. [1] For Denning, this means that the cultural front effectively predated the official CP adoption of the Popular Front strategy in 1935. Thus he sees pre-1935 artifacts such as the first wave of proletarian literature as part of the movement. Furthermore, earlier cultural institutions such as The Masses, the leftist magazine of the 1910s, become harbingers of the thirties left renaissance, which therefore cannot be reduced causally to the Great Depression. The use of a structure of feeling helps Denning move the conversation about the 1930s beyond a mechanistic relationship between individual political institutions and a broader, more loosely structured social movement. Thus, the left culture cannot be reduced to CP dictates and the cultural front can be understood as more than simply a cooptation of the left by the New Deal regime. This partial detachment of the cultural front from the CP and the New Deal allows Denning to examine the politics of the movement and of individual texts and artists in terms that would complicate stark dichotomies between revolution and reform, cooptation and autonomy.
<5> The Cultural Front's methodology is influenced by the traditions of both American Studies, the discipline in which Denning got his doctorate and teaches, and Birmingham cultural studies, which he studied on site as a graduate student. One of the things that makes Denning's work so important is that he serves as a kind of bridge between the two "schools". From the American tradition he derives his focus on culture in the more limited sense, as "that part of the social surplus devoted to the arts and entertainment" (3). [2] From Birmingham he gets the Gramscian framework - by way of Williams and Stuart Hall - that he uses to theorize the character of the Popular and cultural fronts as movements within a larger social totality. While I will note problems with his theorization to some extent, the Birmingham influence is nevertheless one of the book's strengths. Denning eschews the false pretense of neutrality once claimed as the hallmark of academic knowledge production, instead self-consciously acknowledging his interestedness. He understands the inextricable relationship between description and prescription, implicitly operating by Gramsci's dictum, "What ought to be is ... concrete; indeed it is the only realistic and historicist interpretation of reality" (Gramsci 172). The Cultural Front is consistently optimistic, celebrating a moment in history when left wing culture came very close to the mainstream and when it was thought proper - even necessary - to mix art and politics. Yet the book is not an exercise in nostalgia: in revisiting the old, Denning is clearly interested in helping to birth the new - to revive the cultural front impulse.
<6> The cultural studies approach makes class - as both identity and social relation - a primary category of analysis, one less vague and prone to reification than the "America" of American Studies. The latter tradition may engage in class analysis, but it is integral to cultural studies. The Cultural Front specifically examines the relationship between cultural production and the rise of the CIO, which Denning sees as a broad social - not simply union - movement. While the objects of his study are cultural in the narrower sense, the book nonetheless gestures toward the transdisciplinary, seeking connections between cultural production, economics, and politics without first having to observe the disciplinary boundaries that often serve precisely to displace such interrogations. [3]
<7> That The Cultural Front makes political, economic, and cultural connections will hardly raise the eyebrows of anyone familiar with cultural studies. Yet its approach is quite significant given earlier scholarship on the period. Like his literary studies counterparts Barbara Foley and Alan Wald, Denning challenges the Cold War left view that thirties left culture was ultimately conservative and given over to populist sentimentalism [4]; thereby he liberates the analysis from mandarin pessimism.
<8> Denning's focus also implicitly downplays the notion "modernism," which is making a resurgence after dominating the study of this period during the Cold War. There were, and are, several problems with modernism as a primary category of analysis, not least of which is that it is a notoriously vague term. It is often used in a restricted sense to mean a specific movement embracing self-conscious innovation and experimentation, beginning in the 1910s (in the US). [5] Used in this way, not all texts in the period are modernist. Sometimes modernism is used simply to designate a period of varying lengths beginning usually in the 1890s, as it does in American literature (evidenced most compellingly by informal MLA job classifications). Another common use of modernism is to name the response to modernization, a term also variously defined and periodized. Finally, modernism often connotes - consciously or not - quality: the characteristics that come to describe modernism also become evaluative criteria that have traditionally ruled out (usually on New Critical grounds) much of the "proletarian" or "social realist" objects that Denning finds important and inspiring. With the exception of the original usage, the definitions of modernism are flawed and unable to stand alone; each must combine with one of the others to produce boundaries. Yet each categorically contradicts the others: strictly speaking, modernism cannot simultaneously be a period, a historical response, and a set of criteria, because each delineates a different set of objects. If modernist studies would claim otherwise - that all may fit under its roof - then the term threatens to become "so vague and vacuous as to be intellectually inconsequential," as Fredric Jameson has noted (164).
<9> Unfortunately, this vagueness is not innocuous. "Modernism" as an analytic term was codified by the New Criticism, which bloomed in the Cold War and dismissed left writing as bad art because it was expressly political and often crafted to produce emotional effects (thereby violating the "affective fallacy"). Despite its powerful and useful legacy as a method of close reading, New Criticism served to elide or diminish political struggles by implying that the aesthetic can be separated from the political. It assumed the nationalism, anticommunism, and anti-"plebeianism" (to use a Denning term) then dominant in the academy. Indeed, this legacy may "weigh like a nightmare" on the revival of modernist studies, which to some extent overlaps with Denning's project in both artifacts and chronology. In its current form, modernist studies shares some of his interdisciplinary impulse, including the desire to examine multiple kinds of artifacts and to connect them to extradisciplinary forces. While capable of producing erudite and important work that in some instances may even foreground socio-political connections, its principle category is "modernism." Therefore, as an academic discourse, its fundamental question must be taxonomic: is it modernist or not? And that taxonomy has a problematic history.
<10> Denning begins at the intersection of art and politics, not after they have been separated. If the primary question of modernist studies depends upon a shifting and politically vague taxonomy, the questions that drive Denning's inquiry might include, what effects did the movement have on its producers and their audiences? How did it shape people's perceptions of their circumstances and how those circumstances came about? Did the movement change those circumstances for the better, sow the seeds for change, or perhaps offer a model for it? These questions are analytical, but they are founded upon acknowledged values and are driven ultimately by a hope to make the mass of people's lives better. Arguably this is where art and "culture" live for most us, where "humanism" and "science" would meet.
<11> Yet acknowledging his politics does not mean that Denning shuns aesthetic categories; he is concerned with both "the politics of allegiances and affiliations" and "the politics of form" or "aesthetic ideologies" (xix). Both form and content, art and politics, are in a dialectical relationship, ultimately inextricable. In fact, Denning's primary argument is that even after the Popular Front declined as a visible political movement, the cultural front still survives in an aesthetic that has become an enduring "political unconscious" manifested specifically in the concern with working class ethnic Americanism. As Denning notes of the proletarian writers of the thirties - who were not widely read (as far as we can tell) - "their cumulative effect transformed American culture, making their ghetto childhoods, their drifters and hobos, their vernacular prose, their gangsters and prostitutes, even their occasional union organizer part of the mythology of the United States, part of the national-popular imagination" (229). For example, Denning argues that the "Ghetto Pastoral" becomes a dominant American genre long after the political influence of the Popular Front had waned. The genre must be understood both in terms of its proletarian literary politics and by its formal conventions, including "an allegorical cityscape composed in a pidgin of American slang and ghetto dialect, with traces of old country tongues" (231). The endurance of this genre - epitomized by The Godfather films - contrasts with the decline in popularity of what might be the "ur-text of the Popular Front," John Dos Passos's U.S.A., which in the thirties was widely considered an innovative masterpiece combining fiction, biography, poetry, and various fragmentary forms into a sweeping collage (166). Denning attributes the waning appreciation of Dos Passos's aesthetic with the waning of the author's political ideal, the "Lincoln Republic." U.S.A. celebrates - while describing the passing of - the relatively quaint democratic individualist ideals of an earlier era now overwhelmed by the ascendance of corporate capital. These examples suggest the extent to which the aesthetic and political are intertwined in The Cultural Front.
<12> If the book convincingly moves beyond Cold War categories, it has another methodological challenger in what might be called New Historicist American studies, whose principal influence has been Walter Benn Michaels. One work in particular intersects with Denning's in ways worth contrasting, especially since it criticizes Denning's method in defining its own. Michael Szalay's New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State argues that the ideal of security is the central political desire of the mid-century US, and that it becomes manifest in the Social Security Act, which he maintains is the heart of the New Deal. For Szalay, this impulse towards security becomes something like a structure of feeling, an initially inchoate emergence that subtly comes to orient US politics and culture. New Deal Modernism offers new readings of some famous texts of the period, rejecting what Szalay sees as Denning's method of analyzing writers in terms of their political affiliations (Szalay 17). Thus freed of the necessity of taking into account these affiliations or the histories of political organizations, Szalay claims that disparate writers from different generations, not to mention radically different backgrounds - Wallace Stevens (the hero of the book as writer and insurance executive) and Richard Wright, for example - are actually united by this shared desire for security.
<13> While his notion of security resembles Williams's structure of feeling, Szalay does not use the term - and rightly so. Structures of feeling characterize broad social trends in particular historical conjunctures, in their moments, before the politics of those trends become clearly distinguishable. Yet Williams does not dispense with causality and determination in rendering them more complex; structures of feeling exist in a social order determined by the processes of hegemony and the mode of production, capitalism. [6] In contrast, Szalay instead sees the social order as "national community," from which the New Deal emerges as a manifestation (Szalay 6). The State thus becomes the more or less neutral site on which this consensus can be institutionalized.
<14> The central problem with Szalay's method is that it downplays competing interests. [7] Rather than a complex, unequal compromise between working-class and capitalist interests - which even Franklin Roosevelt understood it to be - the New Deal epitomizes shared values for Szalay. The massive struggles that resulted in the ascendance of the New Deal regime are thus reduced to a general desire for security, which effectively diminishes other principles or ideals of the era, including egalitarianism, social justice, and solidarity. Many people - collectively and individually - put their security at risk for their principles. But for Szalay, the writers he studies engage in "risk management," and social relations become "actuarial" or instances of "commerce," all terms borrowed from business and finance discourses (the insurance industry in particular, not surprisingly). The book does not adequately address the relationships between capital and labor or capitalism and culture, because Szalay does not seem to see them as central to the making of the social order. What New Deal Modernism lacks, then, is a theory of hegemony; far from being a manifestation of "national community," Gramsci argues that "the life of the [hegemonic] State is...a continuous process of formation and superseding of unstable equilibria...between the interests of the fundamental group [the capitalist class] and those of the subordinate groups - equilibria in which the interests of the dominant group prevail, but only up to a certain point" (Gramsci 182). The State, therefore, is not a manifestation of consensus but of struggle. [8]
<15> A more compelling social theory clarifies the advantages of Denning's method. The "cultural front," as a structure of feeling, is not reducible simply to institutions like the CP or the New Deal, or, implicitly, to a single notion like security. Unlike Szalay, Denning understands that political affiliations were integral to the era, prompting him to analyze its specific "cultural formations," which "are simultaneously artistic forms and social locations" (Williams, qtd. in Denning xx). Thus, political affiliations become not merely aggregate biographical details, as Szalay implies, but studies of cultural formations. [9] In general, the methodological combination of hegemony and structure of feeling has a compelling explanatory power.
<16> Yet, The Cultural Front does not altogether live up to its promise, failing to some extent to follow through with the possibilities offered by its invocation of Williams, Gramsci, and cultural studies. To begin with, his attempt to separate the cultural front from the Communist Party - to break free from reductive historical causality - results in its opposite, a tendency to make claims in this regard unsubstantiated by historical evidence. For example, in denying the CP member/fellow traveler, core-periphery model of the Popular Front, Denning, in effect, reverses it: "The heart of the Popular Front as a social movement, lay among those who were non-Communist socialists and independent leftists, working with Communists and with liberals, but marking out a culture that was neither a Party nor a liberal New Deal culture" (5). The book does not so much argue who or what is authentically Popular Front, but assumes it from the outset. [10] Thus, authenticity operates as a tacit category in Denning's analysis, one of the problems he implicitly attributes to the CP core-periphery historiography. Moreover, as The Cultural Front unfolds, even these "non-Communist socialists and independent leftists" become less important than his privileged subjects of the Popular Front, "the CIO working class" (7). Also variously named "the new working class" (7) and the "New Americans," they are the representatives of the new "working-class ethnic Americanism" (8) produced by second-generation immigrants, African Americans, and other peoples of color. On the one hand, this privileging allows Denning to argue convincingly that the thirties left was concerned not only with the politics of class, but also with race, ethnicity, and gender - a point not unique to him. On the other hand, this move threatens to fall into what leftists used to call workerism, the tendency to fetishize a person's origins over his or her political activity. While this problem is not exactly what Szalay identifies when he claims that the book's methodology is based on political affiliations, Denning often does emphasize racial, ethnic, and gender status over political analysis. While he is right to break free from the dogmatic, all-or-nothing judgments characteristic of anti-communism or doctrinaire leftism (historically a much less powerful force in the United States), he often treats the politics of texts only briefly. Moreover, while class is not the only social determinant, everyone who has to sell their labor power to live has something in common, a connection that was emphasized in the thirties, not obscured.
<17> An example of the general tendency to emphasize personal origins over political analysis is the chapter "Grapes of Wrath: 'The Art and Science of Migratin.'" Denning asserts, "the best-known Popular Front genre is probably the 'grapes of wrath,' the narrative of migrant agricultural workers in California"; it "remains one of the most striking examples of Popular Front narrative becoming part of American mass culture" (259). However, John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), which names the genre because of its fame, is not "a true exemplar of the cultural politics and aesthetic ideologies of the Popular Front" (259). The reasons for this demotion are Steinbeck's middle-class origins and the "racial populism" in the story, which celebrates the endurance and strength of white Anglo-Saxon neo-pioneers. His race critique of the novel is partially correct, I would argue, [11] but Denning bases his claim primarily on newspaper articles Steinbeck wrote three years earlier that were later collected under the now ominous title, Their Blood is Strong. [12] Echoing the eugenics that was then part of the American common sense, the "blood" meant, of course, the white blood of the Okie migrants.
<18> Yet the politics of The Grapes of Wrath are significantly different from those of the earlier articles; the novel demonstrates the bankruptcy of racial populism, because their whiteness gains the Joads nothing in California. Fellow "white" gasoline station attendants observe that they are unthinking "gorillas" inured to pain for attempting to cross the Mojave Desert in their precarious jalopy. The Joads' poverty and vulnerability to being exploited is thus racialized. Denning also fails to notice that the novel contains some of the most passionate and eloquent descriptions of the ravages of capital accumulation in American literature. Steinbeck uses the specific depredations of California agribusiness - including the super-exploitation of workers and the public destruction of food crops to prop up prices - to point to the general character of capitalism. If racial populism is a troubling aspect of the novels' political unconscious - and its popularity - we might likewise credit The Grapes of Wrath with its expose of the underpinnings of the social order. The - to us - jarring mixture of anticapitalism and racial populism is symptomatic of the era's contradictions, not just Steinbeck's.
<19> Steinbeck becomes for Denning another example of the 1930s pattern of "established intellectuals going to sites of intense class conflict and 'representing' the 'people'" (268). Such a formulation implies that these intellectuals are middle-class voyeurs, not authentic cultural fronters, and by extension impugns in an uncomplicated way the 1930s projects of Theodore Dreiser, the Gastonia novelists, Caldwell and Bourke-White, Agee and Evans, Archibald MacLeish, and even Muriel Rukeyser, among many others. [13] While the politics of these "documentary" efforts bear scrutiny, dismissing them threatens to erase the connections between the working and middle classes, however fraught those connections might be.
<20> According to Denning, Woody Guthrie, Carlos Bulosan, and Ernesto Galarza offer better examples of the "grapes of wrath" narrative because they chronicle the "longterm, less visible struggle for the cultural enfranchisement of working people" (268). Denning asserts that all are more authentically working-class than Steinbeck and thus better representatives of "working-class ethnic Americanism." Yet there are several problems with this contention, beyond its tendency to reinforce class and race divides. Bulosan's America is in the Heart (1946) and Galarza's Barrio Boy (1971) were published after mainstream outrage over the treatment of migrant workers in California had peaked, Galarza's well after the Popular Front period. Guthrie's Dust Bowl Ballads (1940) recording and his fictive memoir Bound for Glory (1943) were relatively minor successes, and the former was recorded due to interest in the subject generated by The Grapes of Wrath. In fact, after the novel debuted, Guthrie began to embellish his "Dust Bowl" experience at the behest of record producers and radio stations (Cray 179-80). Indeed, Guthrie is domesticated somewhat by Denning's account, which forgets that Guthrie was a staunch CP sympathizer who wrote a column for the Daily Worker for several years and produced other writings that were openly anticapitalist. He wrote in 1946, "The biggest thing that ever happened to me in my whole life was back in 1936 the day I joined hands with the Communist Party" (Guthrie 164). This omission is not insignificant, because it is an example of Denning's tendency to suggest that the CP was less organically and authentically Popular Front than CIO unionism.
<21> Here The Cultural Front is not true to its attempt to capture a social movement in all its complexity; it seems to bend to a subtle anticommunism that downplays the Communist Party's role in thirties culture. It is hard not to get the impression that championing the CIO is safer and less controversial. [14] I make this point not simply to defend the CP, which in my estimation - in spite of its principles, or what should have been its principles - was far too autocratic and was even cynical at moments. Yet so was - and is - the CIO by many accounts. It tended to quash shop floor activism even in its early years and signed contracts with no strike clauses that made "wildcat" striking for site-specific grievances illegal; in other words, the CIO has often been undemocratic and even anti-working class. [15] I am not dismissing the CIO or its accomplishments out of hand, but our analysis of it at this late date must be unflinching - especially when these problems have festered, as any recent issue of the pro rank-and-file union journal Labor Notes will attest. One cannot arbitrarily choose determinants in describing a complex and complicated historical movement. Yet, because it does just that in places, The Cultural Front does not use "structure of feeling" carefully enough. The concept should represent an attempt to theorize the open-ended (within limits) quality of social movements in their time. These movements are populated by often imperfect and unruly actors and institutions; yet their histories need not be domesticated. At stake is the fact that official memory of periods of social upheaval often diminishes or even erases the faith that people had in radical transformation. Retrenchments come to be called inevitable, fundamental changes impossible. Culling the imperfect threatens to distort our understanding of the energy of the whole.
<22> The problematic elevation of the CIO to thirties left ideal is manifest in the chapter "'Who's Afraid of Big Bad Walt': Disney's Radical Cartoonists," which also begs the question of what "radical" means. Writing with Holly Allen, Denning states that the strike of cartoonists against the Disney studio in 1941 "stands as a powerful emblem of culture industry unionism that formed the base of the cultural front" (405). Disney cartoonists had once considered themselves superior to their counterparts at other studios because they worked in a less alienated atmosphere that could "accommodate its animators' artistic integrity" (405). However, the company went into debt to finance an expansion in the midst of an industry downturn in the early 1940s, and to cut expenses, it adopted a more top down, rationalized production process that ultimately led to a strike. This conflict is emblematic of the cultural front for Denning because it involved the organization of workers in the newly developing culture industry and because "the strike moved a number of animators to the left" (415). Yet Denning is at pains to show that the workers were not led by communists (despite Walt Disney's red-baiting accusations to that effect), quoting a participant who notes that "there weren't more than two or three leftists in the whole studio" (412). Herein lies the problem for Denning's analysis of the politics of the strike: on the one hand, it was not really driven by the left; on the other, it is supposed to be "radical," but unsullied by the CP. The strike could in fact have been "radical" without much CP influence, but the tone of the chapter suggests that CP influence would have made it less authentic and less in the spirit of the cultural front.
<23> Yet the concrete political gains of the strike seem not so radical. Though the cartoonists organized a union and won concessions, their success, according to Denning, was that they now saw "themselves as both artists and workers, and as members of a broader social movement" (413). An example of this new consciousness is the cartoonists helping to produce union films that agitated for Franklin Roosevelt's reelection and for winning the war (ironically, two CP strategies). Part of the latter effort included making "more films and filmstrips for the army, navy, and defense contractors" (419). While one could argue that reelecting FDR and winning the war were politically expedient, they were not "radical" political activities, nor was support for defense contractors, arguably the most powerful antiprogressive force in US history. In fact, one could argue that the cartoonists were co-opted to a liberal corporate agenda, one that profited from the fight against fascism (and soon thereafter, from the Cold War).
<24> In his contribution to the Labor History symposium on The Cultural Front, Peter Rachleff wonders if the process Denning describes is indeed cooptation. Denning's response in the symposium addresses only one aspect of cooptation - that of the cultural products themselves. He argues that insurgent cultural movements cannot be dismissed because they were co-opted - which is their standard fate. Rather, the effects of the cultural front should be understood as shaping "the possibilities of the future," manifested now as "lingering plebeian imprint on the American century, a political unconscious in post-modern culture" (LH 336). What he aims to avoid is "looking forever at Waiting for Lefty, asking why he never turned up" (LH 335). In other words, Denning resists fixating on the manifest defeats of the Popular Front, emphasizing instead how it changed the cultural terrain. While this response does not excuse calling propaganda for defense contractors radical, his point is nevertheless instructive. The thirties left did not produce an egalitarian social order, but we do not have to judge this simply as a failure; the causal relationship between cultural activity and result is not necessarily direct or to be measured in the short term. This insight is one of the book's most profound, moving us beyond the all-or-nothing Cold War dichotomies.
<25> Yet moving beyond a doctrinaire Marxist revolution-reform dichotomy does not invalidate Marx's description of how capitalism works - a framework fundamental to Gramsci and Williams, the putative shapers of Denning's method. The Cultural Front does not address cooptation in the Marxist sense, the fact that workers - "cultural" and otherwise - must sell their labor power to live, which involves them in an exploitative power relation that alienates the worker from his or her product, creator from creation. That Denning does not discuss the ongoing cooptation within the labor process itself is surprising since his thesis is that the cultural front accomplished "the laboring of American culture." One might sarcastically ask if he believes that the triumph of the thirties left was to win equal opportunity to be exploited in and by the culture industries. Admittedly, there are degrees of exploitation practically speaking; a Disney cartoonist is less exploited, presumably, than a migrant worker is. Yet exploitation is what they share, along with the possibility of losing their livelihoods when they lose their jobs, the character of being "free" laborers. Moreover, many CIO workers came to discover that they had won higher wages and better hours yet accepted profoundly alienating labor in exchange. As historian and political activist Martin Glaberman notes even of high paying union jobs, "work sucks" when it is tedious and the worker has no control over the production process. For Glaberman, this condition is fundamental to both the need for social change and the means to bring it about: "Until someone can tell me that work has become real nice under capitalism ... that is the basis of our theory and our practice. Work sucks, and sooner or later workers are going to resist in whatever way they can" (Lynd New Rank 208). Denning's unqualified embrace of the CIO as an ideal thus becomes a theoretical and practical problem, obscuring the fact that alienation and exploitation go hand in hand. To say so is not to wallow in pessimism, but to remark the conditions of modern working life.
<26> Indeed, Denning's apparent desire to avoid defeatism and pessimism at all costs becomes methodological, seeming to prompt him to another problematic theoretical assumption, that culture could be autonomous of capitalism. He claims that "the CIO working class may not have made a revolution but it did remake American culture" (LH 335). While this statement comes from his response in the Labor History symposium, it is consistent with his theorizing of the movement in The Cultural Front and is partially attributable to a selective use of Gramsci. Denning argues that the front was a counterhegemonic "bloc" with a "base" in the labor movement that gave birth to the CIO (CF 6). The implication here is that the cultural front was superstructural and the CIO its economic base. On the one hand, assigning the movement a base implies that cultural struggles are not distinct from those on the shop floor and in the streets; "culture" requires material support - time and money - to be sustained. Yet Denning also uses the term "cultural hegemony" as though there could be a hegemony in culture that does not exist in the rest of the social totality - hence the idea that the movement could remake culture without remaking society, a notion that is not Gramscian.
<27> The impulse to invoke Gramsci is not the problem. Gramscian analysis resists Marxism's occasional tendency to both "economic" determinism and to passivity, waiting for the supposedly inevitable collapse of capitalism. Gramsci notes:
It may be ruled out that immediate economic crises in and of themselves produce fundamental historical events; they can simply create a terrain more favorable to the dissemination of certain modes of thought, and certain ways of posing and resolving questions involving the entire subsequent development of national life (Gramsci 184).
In effect, Gramsci attempts to theorize the relationship between the "economic" and the "political," suggesting, as Williams would later say, that they are "indissoluble" (Williams 80) [16] Gramsci's theory of hegemony thus becomes useful for understanding the Great Depression, the most profound crisis of capitalism in US history, but one that did not produce a revolutionary change in the relations of production (i.e. that capitalists own the means of production and that the rest must sell their labor power to sustain themselves). Why reform, and not radical change, was the result of the Depression is not simply an "economic" question, nor could it be merely "cultural"; economy, politics, culture, and the forms of state are all interdependent aspects of a social totality.
<28> The idea of "cultural hegemony" thus sits uneasily with Gramscian thinking and seems to owe more - tacitly - to a kind of Althusserianism, with its notion of "relative autonomy." This phrase is notoriously slippery because "relative" is ever ambiguous. Though it sets out to complicate reductive determinism, Althusserian theory nevertheless depends upon an intricate base-and-superstructure model that abstracts various "levels" of the social totality and pronounces them relatively autonomous. The notion of cultural hegemony - which is not actually Althusser's - seems to assume that culture can be autonomous of capital (crudely reduced to "base"), an idea insupportable for two reasons. One is obvious: the culture industry is dependent on sales of commodities and advertising and will not sustain an anticapitalist or radical project for practical reasons.
<29> A more subtle reason is offered by E. P. Thompson in his sometimes intemperate engagement with Althusserian theory. [17] His attack on the base-and-superstructure orthodoxy - which he felt the Althusserians a part of - begins with Thompson's insistence that capitalist relations of production do not live merely at the sites of production: "the logic of capitalist process [finds] expression within all the activities of a society" (qtd. in Wood, 134). Thus, relative autonomy (and by extension, "cultural hegemony") threatens to obscure the diffuse and pervasive character of the social relations of capital. Yet, this omnipresence need not lead to paralysis; as Ellen Meiksins Wood notes, "the challenge imposed by Marx himself [is] how to encompass historical specificity, as well as human agency" (134). Marx summarizes this dialectic in the famous lines from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly found, given and transmitted from the past" (Marx 595).
<30> The problem with The Cultural Front is that it is overly sanguine: in effect, it overemphasizes agency and underemphasizes structure. Methodologically, this tendency makes it difficult to assess the impact of capitalism on the Popular Front (and vice versa) and almost impossible to analyze how texts respond to capitalism. Yet many of the cultural front texts Denning treats offer perceptive analyses of the structure/agency dialectic that he might have acknowledged more systematically. Two novels he admires in The Cultural Front serve as examples of writers wrestling with this question, each with a different emphasis.
<31> Thomas Bell's Out of This Furnace (1941) chronicles three generations of a Slovak family in the steel valleys of the Pittsburgh area. After two generations experience little but hardship, a third sees the Steelworkers Union's triumphant birth, which the narrator calls "the freeing of the steeltowns" from despotic company control (Bell 404). Out of This Furnace is thus an exemplar of Denning's claims for the Popular Front; it is a story of the social democratic ideal promised by CIO unionism. Yet the novel is not overly sanguine: it first describes fifty years of suffering from poverty, long work hours, accidents, illness, and ethnic prejudice. Moreover, in the last passages of the novel, Dobie, the third generation union activist, wonders whether or not the victory will be sustainable given both the nature of capitalism and the fragility of the environment. Nevertheless, the novel expresses hope that union organization will be a crucial step toward a democratic social order.
<32> Harriette Arnow's The Dollmaker (1954) is the story of gifted wood carver Gertie Nevels, who moves with her family from rural Kentucky to Detroit during World War II. Denning sees the novel as interrogating a specific historical conjuncture, the "larger defeat" of a social democratic US in the war and immediate post war years (468). The political promise of the Popular Front founders on the racial, ethnic, and regional strife accompanying the wartime industrial migrations. While this is crucial historicizing, Denning might also note that The Dollmaker is a study of the alienation engendered by modern capital's labor processes, even in unionized industries. In fact, the novel identifies an undemocratic and narrow-minded quality of the CIO that frustrates workers otherwise committed to union solidarity. The story ends on an ambiguous note when Gertie destroys her unfinished masterpiece, a wood sculpture (symbolically, of a human head), in order to make mechanically produced trinkets that will sustain the family. If Bell focuses on triumph and worker agency, Arnow's "work sucks" narrative tends to emphasize the domination of "men" by conditions. Yet together they exemplify the attempts of writers and artists to characterize their present and envision a future.
<34> In fact, the question of social transition lurks in the shadows of The Cultural Front, as it does in any analysis of dissident cultural movements. Denning's implicit aversion to an inflexible and debilitating revolution/reform dichotomy offers an alternative possibility for thinking about the transition from capitalism to socialism. Since the thirties left's belief that the Great Depression signaled capitalism's eminent failure proved to be wrong, what counts as revolutionary, reformist, or co-opted has since become more difficult to discern. The revolutionary moment described by John Reed's 1919 account, Ten Days That Shook the World, where seizure of state power is climactic (and possible), now seems almost quaint. Leaving aside questions of the efficacy of large-scale violence in bringing about a more just social order (I am thinking here of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s famous dictum that "ends and means must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means") [18] capital has proved to be resilient and diffuse in the social structure, as E P. Thompson observed. Thus, determining the criteria for what is revolutionary is complicated by the fact that an egalitarian, democratic mode of production does not exist on a wide scale in the world and thus the organic conditions for such a culture do not either. Yet, activities or cultural production that might once have been understood as compromised or merely reformist may now be seen as having effects that shift people's sense of what they should expect from society. For example, single payer health insurance in the US could be seen as a compromise assuring the domination of society by giant corporations or as a reform that expands the set of what are regarded as basic human rights, shifting the terrain of the "national-popular" towards a more egalitarian possibility.
<35> For Denning, the cultural front worked towards the latter, but he does not adequately acknowledge the possibility that the former was happening also. Ironically, this lapse only returns us to the revolution/reform dichotomy; rather than transcending it, the two poles are collapsed, rendering the question of transition just as obscure. The cultural front survives, but primarily as a "political unconscious," which does not offer much of a sense of how a democratic, egalitarian impulse might be awakened. However, the book is clearly just such an awakening effort. Denning does not seem be waiting for this political unconscious to be rendered conscious by a favorable historical moment; rather, he opens us up to it, but without theorizing how it might live.
<36> Activist and historian Staughton Lynd has spent a lifetime pondering social transformation, and his notion of "living inside our hope" offers an attitude towards the future that is hopeful without being overly sanguine. [19] Lynd reminds us of "the simultaneous containment and potential of working-class institutions," while trying to think about the transition to socialism ("Edward Thompson's Warrens" 15). He turns to Thompson for the concept of "rabbit warrens," pockets of democratic institutions and practices that prefigure a social order predicated on "participatory democracy" (11). Warrens exist "within the shell" of the capitalist order, and include, according to Thompson, local unions, "committees, voluntary organisations, councils, electoral procedures," and, I might add, groups of cultural workers and their audiences (qtd. in Lynd, 11) [20] The democracy of the warrens is complemented by the "positive demands" of workers in state or corporate institutions, including "teachers who want better schools, scientists who wish to advance research, welfare workers who want hospitals, actors who want National Theatre, technicians impatient to improve industrial organisation." Thompson argues, "Upon these positives, and not upon the debris of a smashed society, the socialist community must be built" (qtd. in Lynd, 17). Thompson thus suggests a theory of transition and revolution that does not require a "great catastrophe" or "conflagration"; socialism develops within, not after, capitalism. Sounding like Gramsci, Thompson understands the social order as a "precarious equilibrium" that might be "heaved forward, by popular pressures of great intensity to the point where the powers of democracy cease to be countervailing and become the active dynamic of society in their own right. This is revolution" (qtd. in Lynd, 15, italics in original).
<37> The irony here with respect to Denning's sanguinity is that only by acknowledging the structural determinations of capital - the tendency to "containment" of democratic impulses - can Thompson and Lynd begin to offer reasons for hope, to theorize the agency of working people. If we better acknowledge the limitations of the cultural front, we might begin to see the warrening process it engendered. To its credit, The Cultural Front points to this possibility.
Works Cited
Arnow, Harriette. The Dollmaker. (1954). New York: Perennial, 2003.
Bell, Thomas. Out of This Furnace. 1941. Pittsburgh: U Pittsburgh P, 1976.
Cray, Ed. Ramblin' Man: The Life and Times of Woody Guthrie. New York: Norton, 2004.
Cunningham, Charles. "Rethinking the Politics of The Grapes of Wrath." Cultural Logic (Fall 2002), http://clogic.eserver.org/2002/cunningham.html.
Denning, Michael. The Cultural Front: The Laboring of American Culture in the Twentieth Century. New York: Verso, 1997.
Foley, Barbara. "New Historicism, Liberalism, and the Re-Marginalization of the Left." Minnesota Review 55-57 (2002): 303-318.
Gramsci, Antonio. Selections From the Prison Notebooks. New York: International, 1971.
Guthrie, Woody. Pastures of Plenty: A Self-Portrait: The Unpublished Writings of an American Folk Hero. Dave Marsh and Harold Leventhal, eds. New York: HarperPerennial, 1992.
Jameson, Fredric. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present. New York: Verso, 2002.
Lynd, Staughton. "Edward Thompson's Warrens: On the Transition to Socialism and Its Relation to Current Left Mobilizations." Labour/Le Travail 50 (Fall 2002), http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/11t/50/lynd.html.
---. Living Inside Our Hope. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997.
Lynd, Alice and Staughton, eds. Rank and File: Personal Histories by Working-Class Organizers. Boston: Beacon, 1973.
Lynd, Staughton and Alice Lynd, eds. New Rank and File. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2000.
Marx, Karl. "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte." The Marx-Engels Reader. 2 nd edition. Robert C. Tucker, ed. New York: Norton, 1978. 594-617.
"Michael Denning and the 'Laboring' of American Culture: A Symposium." Labor History 39.3 (1998): 311-336.
Nelson, Casey Blake and Howard Brick, eds. "Symposium: 'Culture and Commitment Reconsidered.'" Intellectual History Newsletter 19 (1997): 1-58.
Szalay, Michael. New Deal Modernism: American Literature and the Invention of the Welfare State. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2000.
Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977.
Wood, Ellen Meiksins. "Falling Through the Cracks: E. P. Thompson and the Debate on Base and Superstructure." E. P. Thompson: Critical Perspectives. Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland eds. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1990. 125-152.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Joe Ramsey and Victor Cohen for insightful comments on earlier drafts of this essay.
Notes
[1] Denning cites Williams's The Long Revolution in discussing "structure of feeling" (Denning 26). I would add William's Politics and Letters: Interviews with the New Left Review (London: New Left Books, 1979). [^]
[2] Like Denning, I use the terms culture and cultural in this limited sense, as a common and useful shorthand. [^]
[3] By social totality, I mean not a rigidly structured whole, but a field of radical interconnectedness and interdependence. Denning is aware of this notion of culture, which he notes from the outset, but not quite in these terms (3, 27). [^]
[4] For a prominent example of Cold War criticism that Denning is responding to, see Warren I. Susman's "The Culture of the Thirties" and "Culture and Commitment" in Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1984). [^]
[5] Modernism and modernist in this sense are useful terms that could be said to characterize a structure of feeling in this era. [^]
[6] See Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), especially Section II. [^]
[7] See Foley for a more extended analysis and criticism of both New Deal Modernism and "New Historicist" American studies. [^]
[8] Thus we can see why "security" cannot be a structure of feeling, since the latter term assumes that hegemony and shifts in the mode of production are the underlying processes of society making. [^]
[9] It is worth mentioning that Szalay claims that The Cultural Front is "more concerned with reinvigorating the left politics of the academy than with interrogating what it means to produce literary-political analysis in the first place" (19). Yet, New Deal Modernism then goes on to attempt to invigorate liberal academic politics, a tendency summed up in the assertion, "Now more than ever, confident dismissals of New Deal liberalism simply will not do" (20). I might add that Denning does not dismiss the New Deal out of hand. Szalay quotes out of context one phrase from The Cultural Front where Denning claims that the cultural front is not "simply New Deal liberalism" (Szalay 21). At that moment, Denning is arguing against critics such as Warren Susman who dismissed the cultural front as merely the cooptation of the left by New Deal (Denning xvii). [^]
[10] An otherwise sympathetic Kathleen Brown argues in her contribution to the Labor History symposium that "Denning goes too far in decentralizing the CP" and that the "base" of the Popular Front was wider than the CIO (314-320). Barbara Foley's Radical Representations: Politics and Form in U.S. Proletarian Fiction, 1929-1941 (Durham and London: Duke UP, 1993) offers an extended analysis of the role of the CP in proletarian culture. While noting that proletarian writers were not under the heel of Moscow, as Cold War critics would have it, she does argue that the CP had a central role in 1930s culture. [^]
[11] See my "Rethinking the Politics of The Grapes of Wrath" for a more extended engagement with the politics of the novel and with Denning's interpretation of them. [^]
[12] The articles were written for the San Francisco News in 1936 and in 1938 were collected and given this title by the Simon J. Lubing Society, a migrant aid organization that had some eugenicist assumptions. [^]
[13] See William Stott's Documentary Expression and Thirties America (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1973) for a survey and analysis of many texts in this genre. [^]
[14] Szalay makes a similar point, for different reasons (19). [^]
[15] For oral histories critical of the tactics of John L. Lewis and the early CIO see the Lynds' Rank and File and for analysis see Staughton's "The Possibility of Radicalism in the early 1930s: The Case of Steel" in Living Inside Our Hope (141-58). [^]
[16] I would argue that hegemony becomes the concept that organizes Williams's theory of culture in the broader sense, the means of theorizing determination without a crude base and superstructure model, while not forgetting the structuring force of the mode of production. [^]
[17] The most famous site of his critique is The Poverty of Theory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), but the key points are made in many other places, often more affirmatively. Here I rely on Ellen Meiksins Wood's "Falling Through the Cracks," which summarizes Thompson's ideas succinctly and renders them more consistent. [^]
[18] See, for example, "A Christmas Sermon on Peace" (Dec.24, 1967) in A Documentary History of the Negro People, Herbert Aptheker, ed. (New York: Citadel, 1994) 516-19. [^]
[19] Lynd borrows this phrase from Barbara Kingsolver's Animal Dreams. See the epigraph of Living Inside Our Hope. [^]
[20] Local, but not national, unions are potential warrens, according to Lynd, who provides a view of the CIO that contradicts Denning's. Lynd notes that although "it would be dangerously misguided to suppose that national unions, under any conceivable leadership, will ever lead the way to fundamental social change, local unions are potentially a different story" (38, italics in original). [^]
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