Residues of the 1930s

The following is a discussion of

Patrick Deane, ed., History in Our Hands: A Critical Anthology of Writings on Literature, Culture and Politics from the 1930s (London & New York: Leicester University Press, 1998)

Martin Jay, Cultural Semantics: Keywords of our Time (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998)

Zellig Harris, The Transformation of Capitalist Society (Lanham MD: Rowman and Littlefield 1997)

and various texts published by Avukah in the 1930s.

The decade between 1930 and 1940 has left an enduring legacy, not only because of the hugely consequential events that occurred therein, but also because of the sense one has, in looking back to that period, of opportunities lost. From an Occidental perspective, this sentiment relates most strongly to those we never chose to stop: Hitler, Stalin, and their respective cronies, who were amassing and consolidating power through that decade in preparation for their murderous projects, signs of which were obvious enough for us to see today. This conveys a sense of overwhelming regret, even, strangely enough, if we weren't among the living until decades later. This is the dream of redemption, of saving those not-yet-victims from the horrors of acts committed in the name of one totalitarian dream, one power grab, one deranged passage, one purposeful misreading, or another.

There's another way of conceiving of the 1930s, which leaves an acrid taste of regret when we look back at opportunities not seized, not just to stop individuals who, for all we know (and we know quite a lot after books like A People's Tragedy and Le livre noir du communisme), reflected rather than directed larger purposes carried out by others. There were other opportunities to put into place social and cultural institutions that could have changed in an enduring way relations between the individual and the community. Some of these social projects did bear fruit, and to them we owe segments of a welfare state (in dissolution), a mitigated social freedom, and a world that has not as yet destroyed itself in a gaseous ball of fire. But many others have been obliterated, intentionally or not, even though they may have been of more interest than the failed experiment of brutal monopoly capitalism, for example, about which we know far too much.

A look back to the 1930s is, therefore, an archival project, which in my opinion demands that we re-investigate ideas--Arab-Jewish cooperation, left-Zionism, council communism, anarchosyndicalism, worker participation, to name but a few--not as marginal sub-categories of an historically interesting but ostensibly irrelevant mass of "radical thought," but instead as serious challenges and alternatives to a status quo destroyed and then re-built, sans as many opposing voices, in the course of a six-year quest for destruction and domination that began in the last years of the 1930s. The fact that this project of re-discovering valuable alternatives should be an "archival" one is itself significant, worthy of a careful study of the very powerful and directed attempts to quash, either by dilution or orchestrated discrediting, all that impedes the system as presently conceived. Many of the efforts in this direction are linked to discursive practices in society (media, propaganda, interpretation, censorship). This is one reason why so many powerful social theorists in the twentieth century have been connected in some way or another to the study of language; Mikhail Bakhtin, Noam Chomsky, Antonio Gramsci, Zellig Harris, Edward S. Herman, Roman Jakobson, and Raymond Williams are but the best-known of those to have linked, overtly or not, their work on "de-fooling," propaganda, content analysis, structuralism, discourse analysis, and so forth, to broader social concerns.

Raymond Williams's efforts at understanding the evolution of language and ruling ideologies are recorded variously, notably in his seminal works Culture and Society and Keywords. Martin Jay has adopted Williams's strategy of "acknowledging the ideological charge on certain pivotal terms" in his own Cultural Semantics: Keywords of our Time, although Jay's approach insists that we become aware...