One of the great Marxist thinkers and organizers of the last century has just departed the mortal coil. My purpose in this reminiscence is to shine a light on one of Neil Davidson’s less well-known qualities, his work as a cultural theorist and critic. Neil was a regular contributor to Red Wedge and appeared on a number of our panels at Historical Materialism conferences. He acted as a mentor to a number of current and former members of the Red Wedge editorial collective and its offshoots.
Neil Davidson speaking on Punk Rock, HM London 2018.
Neil and I once had a conversation about how people like us were exceptionally sectarian, about how we’d judge someone merely by a slight deviation in their “line” about this or that minutiae. No, we weren’t talking about the Marxist tradition, we were talking about music and music fandom. I had just delivered a paper, likely in 2014 or 2015, on “Reactionary Rock Music” or some such, at HM London, in one of those older small classrooms. The point I was making was examining precisely the uneven and combined development of “sixties subjectivity”, in which bands like The Who and The Kinks could be reactionary, but be ahead of everyone else on gender and even queer issues, while the Beatles and the Stones were known to be good progressives, except for on gender and queer issues, the latter no doubt to Jagger and Lennon’s repression of their queerness.
Neil could not – stand – for my still well-held beliefs that Pete Townsend and the Who were right wing, that Tommy was an anti-hippy, anti-left screed. Indeed, Pete Townsend had even recorded advertisements for the US Air Force, and famously whacked Abbie Hoffman in the head with his guitar when the opportunist yippie took the stage at Woodstock. Neil wasn’t having it. His interventions were every bit as intense and cutting, but warm and comradely, as at the infamous “Neil and Charlie shows,”, that is, the ongoing debates around Political Marxism. It mattered very little what The Who thought or said, he pointed out from the floor, as well as when he followed me out and spoke to me during the “lunch period” at HM. It was clear that Neil was making a consequentialist argument, a key aspect of his defence of the concept of Bourgeois Revolution. In Neil’s line of thought, and increasingly in my own, as I came to finish my doctorate, it was less important (not unimportant but less important), what a given artist said or thought. It was the effect of their music. And it became clear that to Neil, “Won’t Get Fooled Again”, for example, was not Anti-Communist, it was about Stalinism and social democracy and how it fools the working class.
As much as Neil Davidson was a foremost historical social theorist of the rise of modernity, a socialist tactician who helped act as a true compass for the far left, he was an immensely skilled cultural theorist. His work here on the pages of Red Wedge, and elsewhere, notably collected in his books We Cannot Escape History and Holding Fast to to an Image of the Past. While examining figures notable for their “cultural” Marxism, notably Walter Benjamin and David Renton, Davidson also dives into the work of Deutscher and Kiernan. In addition, with regard to Benjamin, he doesn’t treat his “cultural turn” as one away from the classical Marxist tradition, but rather back towards it, noting Benjamin’s messianic emphasis on class struggle. Even the insights of a renegade figure like former Trotskyist turned modernist gatekeeper Clement Greenberg are engaged not in the spirit of denunciation, but in the spirit of critique. Davidson doesn’t absolve Lukacs of his Stalinism, nor Greenberg for his capitulation to McCarthyism and naming names. Nor does he consider these “deviations” epiphenomenal to their work. Rather, the “ideologies” of modernism and realism provide insight partially because, as opposed to in spite of these, deviations.
Always a rapt listener, Neil Davidson with Holly Lewis, Red Wedge panel series at the Historical Materialism “Great Transition” conference, Montreal, spring 2018.
Davidson treats all of the figures under consideration as much as he does concepts, be they realism and modernism, nationalism and so on. This is to say, Davidson examines the generality of what these thinkers crystallize in their work, in historic, temporal and geographic specificity, returning to the generality and their relevance (or lack thereof). Similarly, the notions of realism and modernism, like the concept of “bourgeois revolution” are concepts to be defended both theoretically and practically. Yet in defending these concepts, the concepts themselves are denaturalized, as here in the first of his trilogy for us:
Since the 1930s and 1940s respectively, the dominant theories of realism and modernism have, however, also functioned as ideologies, representing in cultural theory the defence of existing class societies, a task which involves, among other things, prescribing what art can and cannot do. This ideological role does not invalidate every aspect of these theories, it simply means that Marxists can neither adopt them directly nor adopt them indirectly while inverting their value judgements. They themselves must first be subjected to critical analysis. In short, neither realism nor modernism is necessarily what the ideologists of realism and modernism say they are.
Davidson’s final piece for Red Wedge, and indeed the final piece that was published during his lifetime culminated his series on the relevance of Unveven and Combined Development for how we can understand cultural production. This was the red thread that tied Davidson to Red Wedge’s project as a whole, in particular the concept of the “Popular Avant Garde”. UCD, as always, however, is a point of departure:
Modernism must be seen then, not as a conjunctural moment in the history of capitalism, but as a form of artistic production generated by the triumph of capitalism as the globally dominant socio-economic system. The significance of 1848, in this perspective, is not the failure of the revolutions of that year, but as a marker indicating when that system became definitively established.. ..modernism is not the cultural logic of monopoly capitalism, but of uneven and combined development, which is one of the reasons why countries as politically distinct as Italy and Russia could both manifest such similar versions prior to the First World War.
To play on his book title, in these pages, Davidson answered the question as to was (and wasn’t) real about realism, and what was (and wasn’t) modern about modernism. Unlike many Marxist theorists who write about cultural production in a separate sphere from capitalist social relations, nor others that are reductive and boilerplate, Davidson ranges from Scottish literature of the 19th century to the classics of early 20th century visual arts, al the way, in recent (unpublished) work, to punk rock and neoliberalism. I won’t soon forget the moment in which Neil casually rattled off how he was a punk rocker for a week, but stopped as his punk friends didn’t like that he also enjoyed going out to the disco. This juxtaposition of subcultures is a fitting description of his output as a Marxist historian, cultural theorist and socialist organizer. Nothing under the sun was alien to him.
He will be missed.
Jordy Cummings is an editor at Red Wedge.