John Mulgan has a big name in
His only novel ‘Man Alone’ has been a set text in schools and universities for decades. Its hero, Johnson, stands for basic values such as toughness, self-reliance, and the independence of the ‘common man’ of action and few words. That title is taken from Hemingway’s To Have and To Have Not: “a man alone ain’t got no fucking chance”. For Mulgan it means that human freedom and democracy has to be grounded in the individual self-reliance and resilience of agricultural communities resistant to modern ‘fascism of the right or of the left’.
For that reason Mulgan has been adopted
as the role model of the left liberal intelligentsia in
In my view Mulgan’s personal heroism is not in question. But heroism is not an adequate explanation of Mulgan’s real significance. What if his task was made humanly impossible because he could not personally transcend the contradiction, starkly posed by depression and world wars, without taking sides between capitalist barbarism or degenerated socialism? In that case, his heroic attempt to try to resolve this dilemma by defending democracy as a solitary intellectual makes Mulgan a hopeless case. He becomes a ‘Man Alone’ separated from the community of his choice and his life becomes a modern Greek tragedy.
Vincent O’Sullivan’s recent biography is a wonderfully illuminating picture of Mulgan’s life. It is true to Mulgan since it interprets his life as Mulgan himself might have. It does not step outside Mulgan’s ideological frame of the solitary intellectual. It accepts, as Mulgan did, the centrality of the defence of democracy against fascism and against Stalinism. It defines Mulgan’s importance as the voice of the maturing, independent, and increasingly self-conscious intelligentsia in NZ that sees itself as inseparable from the generation of British, US, and European intellectuals who faced up to the existential questions of war and peace, democracy and fascism, capitalism and socialism.
What I want to argue in this essay is that taking Mulgan’s own standpoint to reflect on his life cannot fully account for his significance. I will argue that Mulgan was trapped by his fidelity to a belief in the sovereign individual, and like many intellectuals of that period who gave their lives in one or other cause (most risked their lives by thinking) he became a victim of that very belief – itself an ideology masking the true nature of the bourgeois self as alienated, self-defeating and powerless. To make this argument however, it is necessary to step outside the liberal frame of O’Sullivan’s biography and adopt a critical Marxist theory of the intelligentsia.
I want to use
arguments derived from the dead Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci and the very much
alive Spanish ‘Althusserian’, Juan Carlos Rodriguez. Gramsci’s influence on
Western Marxism and the rise of ‘cultural studies’ today is really too
important to ignore when locating prominent intellectuals within modern
capitalist society. Rodriguez is a more acquired taste derived from Gramsci by
way of Althusser and heavy on the theory of ideological production. These
approaches share the Marxist assumption that writers are intellectuals who
serve to reproduce the key ideas that meet the material interests of the ruling
classes –traditional intellectuals –
in competition with intellectuals thrown up by the challenge of the
revolutionary classes from below – organic
intellectuals.
Modern traditional
intellectuals reproduce the essentials of capitalist or bourgeois ideology –
individualism, private property etc., and the political expression of these,
bourgeois democracy. Organic intellectuals speak for the producing classes –
workers and peasants – and raise revolutionary challenges to the hegemonic ideology.
Organic intellectuals can be co-opted unless they are embedded in the
collective practices of workers and peasant struggles. Moreover, traditional
intellectuals can pose as organic intellectuals, effectively ‘incorporating’ or
‘immunising’ counter-hegemonic ideas.
In this light,
Mulgan’s significance was as a traditional intellectual neutralizing socialism
as a counter-hegemonic threat to bourgeois democracy by reducing it to a
‘fascism of the left’. When he kills
himself (as an ‘existentialist’ before his time?) his death fuels the powerful
myth that bourgeois democracy is worth dying for. (Note that I accept that
Mulgan didn’t kill himself for personal reasons, including illness or
depression, but out of despair. Yet
this concept remains psychologically or culturally reductionist unless unpacked
in the full glare of the critical Marxist method.)
My method differs
from the standard method of a biography like O’Sullivan’s Long Journey to the Border, which for all its strengths, must deal
with the individual in a social setting where the impact of deeply rooted class
forces on the individual become truncated as personality, psychology, beliefs,
national cultures, experience etc. Gramsci argues that it is the role of
traditional intellectuals to obscure these deeper causes by (most effectively I
would say, unconsciously) de-historicising or naturalising them. Rodriguez
produces a detailed account of the historic formation and reproduction of the
terms of ideology as the product of deeper social structures; in particular
structures (or modes) that overlap or intersect, generating complex hybrid
ideological formations, The point is
that ignorance of these deeper structures disarms the individual – just as
knowledge of them empowers the individual – as a conscious agent of historic
change.
I shall use this
approach to argue that Mulgan in Man
Alone and Report on Experience
adopts the standard method (in fiction and biography) and reveals that his
understanding of the social forces in which he is caught up will not allow him
to break out of the inverted and distorted world view of bourgeois ideology.
Moreover, I would argue that Mulgan is a victim of a particularly insidious
strand of this ideology – English empiricism. Mulgan is an actor in momentous historic
events, yet for all his heroic temperament he cannot transcend the role of an
isolated and alienated bourgeois subject.
According to
O’Sullivan, Mulgan’s intellectual formation was virtually complete by 1932. The
‘road to Damascus’ episode of the Queen St Riots saw Mulgan reject his role as
a student ‘police special’ and consciously take the side of the ‘common man’.
(That his class loyalties were challenged by a former army officer, and now
unemployed farmer driven off his land by the depression, is very significant). His earlier ‘benign and
complacent’ liberalism owing much to his father, became a more mature and
‘questioning’ liberalism which avoided ‘extremes’ of the right and left.
Further developments under fire are ‘fine tuning’ of, and vindication of, his essential liberalism.
This is a fair
conclusion as far as it goes. But it does not investigate the limits posed by
liberalism on Mulgan’s ability to take theory seriously or to test his beliefs
in practice. I would argue that Mulgan’s commitment to liberalism disarmed him
intellectually in the face of the momentous events of the Great Depression and
World War II and left him bereft of any realistic principles facing the task of
the rebuilding of post-war society. In the last two chapters of Report on Experience as he approaches
the end of his life, Mulgan returns,
almost by default, to the familiar English liberal themes of the ‘common
man’, respect for tradition, defence of
democracy from fascism, the resilience of the English in war and so on.
What I look for
and do not find in O’Sullivan’s book is any account of why Mulgan kept true to
English liberalism from his ‘Road to
While this gave
him great authority and success in translating bourgeois principles into
commonly held values it also meant he internalised an isolatable contradiction.
The traditional intellectual’s role is to translate bourgeois ideology into the
language of the ‘common man’ as natural and just. Such are the ‘four freedoms’
of liberty, equality, fraternity and ... property rights. [ref in Report]. English liberalism defends
itself well against all aberrations that challenge natural justice –the
‘extremes’ O’Sullivan talks of fascism of the right an left. It is practical,
moderate, and capable of dealing with
the excesses of ‘freedom’ such as war profiteering. In Report the main theme is that war is just (it brings out the best
in humanity: life, love and solidarity) when it is not about profits or power.
Mulgan’s war does
not bring freedom from these extremes; it brings despair about the future. The
price of reconciling the contradiction of capitalism with the life of ‘common
man’ is not to take up the fight for socialism in the future, but to a retreat
into the past ideal of rural life found in the Greek villages destroyed by the
Nazis and civil war. Transcendence, not possible in this life, is found in the
death of the ‘would-be’ intellectual.
Why didn’t Mulgan take his positive concrete experience of the ‘common
man’ and translate it into the theory and practice of the revolutionary
socialist party? Why didn’t he
penetrate the surface manifestations of Stalinism as ‘would-be’ socialism? The answer,
I would suggest is in the immunising effects of the English humanism he adopts
in his evolution as a traditional intellectual.
The
class terms of English liberalism
Mulgan outgrows NZ provincialism (his
father’s a better Brit) and adopts an English humanism (a better Angle?). It is
important to emphasise the ‘
Typically the English ‘lefts’ commitment
to socialism is therefore empiricist and social imperialist. It’s thought is
ultimately shaped by the belief in
Mulgan adopted English empiricism when the empire was already in decline. He took its class terms of reference. Its origins were in the class compromise between feudalism and capitalism in which the old social relations coexisted alongside the new. For Mulgan this accounted for the survival of the English gentleman and the amateur approach to war. This incomplete bourgeois revolution was entrenched by the spoils of imperialism that bought off the labour aristocracy aligning it politically to the bourgeoisie under the British flag. Thus the riches of empire enabled British empiricism to project itself as an enlightenment of class compromise rather than class revolution.
Other NZ expatriates like Bertram and
Milner rejected English empiricism and went over to Stalinist (or Maoist)
socialism. This was a pragmatic adaptation of NZ ‘state socialism’ (more
properly statism) of the 1930s applied on a grand scale in
Johnson, the chief
protagonist of Man Alone, embodies
this dilemma in part; or rather the underlying contradiction. The positive part
of this is his commitment to the social forms of the pre-capitalist peasant
community on the land. He identifies with Maori society. One suspects that for
Mulgan the reason Johnson goes to
His loyalty is to
the pre-capitalist peasantry, not the landlords, church or intelligentsia. He
does not articulate his beliefs in words but in actions. The negative part of
the dilemma is that he resolutely rejects Enlightenment modernity not just its
‘extremes’ of fascism of right and left. Johnson is instinctively suspicious of
any attempt to ‘intellectualise’ modernity as humanist full stop. It leads to
the ‘fascism of the left’. Mulgan denounced the “ideological control and maneuvering
of the International Brigade by Andre Marty and the Communist hierarchs” during
the Spanish civil war. (Journey, 159)
The ‘Johnson’ side
of Mulgan comes out more fully in
These observations
provide the class ‘bearings’ to locate Mulgan’s ‘would be’ intellectual
authority. He embodies the contradiction between common man and bourgeois
intellectual personally. His instincts are pre-capitalist in his love of nature
and for working the land. But he is also an English humanist intellectual. He
looks to the enlightenment as the continuation of the freedom of the peasant
collective translated into modern times as bourgeois democracy. And Mulgan
defends bourgeois democracy against what he sees as the twin extremes of right
and left fascism. He rejects the utopia of a communist future that suppresses
individual freedoms as evenhandedly as he rejected the fascism of the right. He
sees these fascisms as equal. The Greek Stalinists did not forgive the Polish
boys forced to fight for the Nazis to protect their families at home, when they
defected to the partisans.
Why did Mulgan
stick to the already historically bankrupted English humanism under the impact
of depression and imperialist war? To many intellectuals of this period it was
part of the problem and not the solution to the crisis facing humanity. Other
New Zealanders like Bertram and Milner sided with Stalinism for better or
worse. Mulgan was highly critical of British imperialism, its complicity with the
rise of German fascism, and its role in
Why did Mulgan
equate Stalinism with socialism? Was this bad faith? While swimming against the
stream, Trotskyists certainly recognised that Stalinism was a parasitic growth
on an otherwise healthy workers state. Moreover, Stalinism may have been
homegrown but it was a bacillus introduced by the reactionary attacks on the
soviet states by Western bourgeois democracy. We know that Mulgan read Trotsky
but obviously did not agree that the left-fascist Stalinist state machine was
superimposed on top of workers property rights which could be rescued by
overthrowing the Stalinists.
Was Mulgan even aware of the left
critiques of Stalinism? The
I would suggest
that Mulgan was unable to pose these questions (or possibly arrive at a serious
answers) because his adopted English liberalism was part of the problem not the
solution? It was the English success in class compromise stretching back to the
civil war that betrayed the 1917 revolution and prepared the ground for
Stalinism. The General Strike of 1926 was aborted by the unholy alliance of the
TUC and Stalin’s machine. Fascism itself was the consequence of the treachery
of German social democracy in the 1920s. The ‘fascist twins’ of the 1930s were
the progeny of the financial mergers of the English and German ruling
classes. That is why in the end, Mulgan
could not see through the false ‘facts’ of fascist twinning in Greece to the
historic struggle between revolution and counter-revolution.
The final test of his historic
ambivalence was working with the resistance in
Mulgan was the main character in his own Report on Experience. He was driven by forces beyond his control only because they were beyond his comprehension. Had Mulgan understood that the partisan struggle was a local expression of a global revolution in which the cast of actors were the Greek ‘Johnsons’ pitted against a counter-revolution band of landlords, Yalta generals and politicians, and murderous Stalinists, he might have demanded a greater historic role for himself as a leader of that revolution.
But that would have meant shifting his emotional loyalty from the rudimentary mechanical solidarity of the peasant community, to that of Gramsci’s Modern Prince – the Revolutionary Party –and abandoning his hegemonic role. In the event he could not defend his admiring view of Lenin’s ‘openness and pragmatism’ from the onslaught of Stalinism. He could not transcend the limits of English humanism and break out of the contradiction he personally embodied. Like countless thousands of others trapped in an ideological system where the limits of bourgeois morality are given by an alienated subjectivity, he took the only other way out.
While O’Sullivan
shares much of Mulgan’s standard frame he cannot ask the all important
questions and so they remain unanswered. Interestingly, the title Long Journey to the Border echoes the
path of another intellectual who could not escape the trap of bourgeois
alienated subjectivity, Walter Benjamin,
who killed himself within hours of crossing the border of Fascist Spain
to find freedom in the
O’Sullivan shares
a story about Mulgan and Theodore Adorno deep in conversation on a train from
It seems that
Benjamin did not know that his freedom was near and killed himself in ignorance
of this fact. But it is an ideologically induced ignorance rooted in the
alienation of the individual who cannot find his way to class solidarity
because it appears to be blocked by the Stalinist party. It is tempting to say
this of Mulgan too, but that in his case his alienation left him trapped inside
a historically bankrupt English humanism. Unlike Johnson who was not a Man
Alone, and ‘who could not be killed’, Mulgan was both. He was unable to find a
way back to his beloved community, or forward to the promised land, on the long
journey to the border.