This article of mine appears in the London Progressive Journal:
It is fashionable to claim that Michael Gove has
been influenced by Antonio Gramsci.
The thing about Gramsci is that we have never
really needed him in Britain. The insistence on the unity of theory and
practice, the rejection of economic determinism and of metaphysical
materialism, the celebration of the “national-popular”, an organic
working-class culture and self-organisation including worker-intellectuals: we
already had them all. At least, we did have them. Until Gove’s political
heroine, whom no one ever accused of being either a worker or an intellectual,
came along and destroyed their economic base.
But there remained heirs to the organic worker-intellectual tradition, often very left-wing people indeed, who tried as best they could to maintain in their own classrooms, until they themselves retired, whatever they could of the best that had been known and thought, in the midst of her enforcement upon everyone else of her own utter philistinism and of her own total lack of even the slightest intellectual curiosity. Truly, her natural successor was Tony Blair. And truly, his natural successors are David Cameron and George Osborne.
But there remained heirs to the organic worker-intellectual tradition, often very left-wing people indeed, who tried as best they could to maintain in their own classrooms, until they themselves retired, whatever they could of the best that had been known and thought, in the midst of her enforcement upon everyone else of her own utter philistinism and of her own total lack of even the slightest intellectual curiosity. Truly, her natural successor was Tony Blair. And truly, his natural successors are David Cameron and George Osborne.
There had been some grounds for hoping that Gove
was different. But he is clearly oblivious to these facts. He knows nothing of
the trade union, co-operative and mutual, Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Guild
Socialist, Christian Socialist, Social Catholic and Distributist, and many
other roots of the British, Irish and Commonwealth Labour Movements, predating
Marx and long predating Gramsci.
He knows nothing of their roots, which are in the
anti-Whig subcultures disaffected by the events of 1688, subcultures predating
any counterrevolutionary movement on the continent, predating any revolution
there or in North America, and emphasising the indispensable role of the State
in protecting against the market everything that conservatives seek to
conserve, while offering perennial critiques of individualism, capitalism,
imperialism, militarism, bourgeois triumphalism, and the fallacy of inevitable
historical progress. As an ardent neoconservative, Gove is fully signed up to
all of those.
Does he even know anything of their roots,
which are in Early Modernity and in the Middle Ages, in the Classics that he
purports to promote and in the Bible that he ostentatiously sends out to
schools with a preface by himself, together with a reference to himself on the
very cover? Or is the entirety of this Government exactly as it would appear to
be: intellectually unequipped to be the Government of the United Kingdom, or,
at root, to be the Government of any country on earth?
But Gove may yet revive the worker-intellectual
tradition in spite of himself. Under him, universities are to become confined
merely to those whose parents happened to have nine thousand pounds per annum
lying around with no other call on it, and therefore had no need to send their
offspring out to work at the earliest opportunity. Academic ability or
accomplishment will have nothing to do with it. Indeed, they will be relatively
rare among the entrants, one would expect.
Leaving plenty of room for the successors of the
pitmen poets and of the pitmen painters, of the Workers’ Educational
Association (which still exists) and of the Miners’ Lodge Libraries, of the
brass and silver bands, of the people’s papers rather than the red top rags, to
re-emerge in, though and as an organic working-class culture and self-organisation.
That, in turn, requires an economic base such as
only the State can guarantee, and such as only the State can very often
deliver. Not exclusively, but in no small part, that is what the State is for.
Not exclusively, but in no small part, that is why we have it.
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