3y Frank Higgins
Socialist Organiser1983 1983-10-27Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 11 →
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A grimmer picture of working class life, painted by an inside explanation don't ask a sociologist, go to the psychiatrist. Through the Jewish image -and it is an image used to express a truth, it isn't the truth itself — Woody Allen has created a comic Kafka hero that is both durable and universal.
Of course it is grim and bleak - he depicts poverty-ridden people with a brutally cramped and pub-centred culture, with narrowed outlooks and concerns. Allen's usual subject -in 'Days of Hope' , for example, his series about the run-up to the General Strike - is the proletariat in heroic battles, breaking out of narrowness and pettiness, forging its own view of the world, concerned to change it. His central characters are class-conscious women and men. Here, much of the action happens in the local Labour club - but this is workaday Labourism. Hope is focused on the new Attlee Labour government, and there is not much of it.
It is the story of how the hero becomes a socialist, learning to understand the class realities from his grandfather, from the world around him, and from books. (He has first to learn about books from a Labour councillor who has portraits of both Clem Attlee and Karl Marx on her wall).
'This is no working class hero. At the end he is still unsure how much he wants to commit himself to socialism.
Perhaps symbolically, the socialist grandfather (named Jim Larkin) is something of a lone figure, unrepresentative, and even a bit of a bore.
This is the working-class world when the 'Days of Hope' are long passed — succeeded by stagnation, the consolidation of the trade union bureaucracy in the 1930s, and by imperialist war, with Churchill, the capitalist militant in the General Strike, leading the British bourgeois democracy against Hitler.
These are the grim consequences of working class defeat - the grinding down of the working class, the imposition by the bourgeoisie and their labour
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Socialist Organiser no.152 October Page 271983 *Organise the left to beat back the Tories' attacks!