A Few More Words on Doris Lessing and The Good Terrorist

I was going to type a few more words about Doris Lessing but wasn’t sure, and then a post on another blog made me more certain that I would do this.  But more on that in a minute…

What I wanted to say about Ms. Lessing (which is somewhat related to my answer to the other post) is that I in no way admire her for her opinions about politics these days.  I recently read an interview that reminded me how much I could disagree with her political views of the present, although her views are somehow so unclear, it’s hard to know exactly how I should disagree.  (I may actually bring up this interview and quote it for a revision of this post sometime later - but right now, I wanted to write a briefer and quicker comment than that.)  One problem is, Doris Lessing is someone who grew disillusioned with the Communist Party (of Great Britain) back when she was a member some 40+ years ago, and she chose to dismiss the whole idea of communism or Marxism because of this, but she never exactly explains why she thinks the Marxist analysis itself is wrong.  She merely dismissively says that all these leftists during and after World War II were mad with the idea that a new and perfect world was on the horizon.  She says rather flippantly that it doesn’t matter that she was a communist decades ago because ”everybody was a communist back then.”  Like so many people who got caught up in communism as part of a world trend sometime ago (who more likely than not supported Stalinism in some way), Lessing looks back on it as some passing fad inappropriate for the present day…because, I would guess, the groups and governments that were supposed to achieve communism, or claimed that they would or had, failed in that mission in the eyes of the world.

It’s fair enough to say that a huge movement that claimed to be communism failed to achieve what it had ostensibly set out to do (after a brief and troubled attempt over a period of 70 years - a tiny period of time compared to capitalism’s destructive reign)…  But the part I disagree with is the idea that the Marxist analysis itself has proven to be irrelevant.  That’s because it appears to be far more relevant in the present day than it might have some 40 to 60 years ago, as capital and the world economy have, in recent decades, fit the patterns predicted by Marx more than they did during the post-WW II boom.  And as we get further into the 21st century, and as all the compromises of the post-World War II era continue to disintegrate, capital becomes more global and at the same time consolidated, inequality increases, the world once again witnesses the prevalence and growth of sweatshop-type exploitation and the most barbaric examples of primitive accumulation by advanced powers, etc., etc….it’s looking more and more as though Marx’s critique of capitalism was quite correct.

Now, I haven’t read Lessing much recently, but it seems to me as though she doesn’t have much to say about all this stuff.  She opposes the war on Iraq and she has a solid interest in human rights (as she always had), but her political analysis in many ways doesn’t seem so deep, and she is certainly no ally of the left, nor has she been for some time.     

Although, admittedly, I say this as someone who hasn’t read that much of her recent books, more from evidence in her comments and interviews, and reviews and comments from others about her work… 

Nonetheless, she’s been with many of the characters whom one will find in left-wing groups and seems to know about the problems and conflicts that might plague people, especially young people, drawn to a movement that is politically and/or culturally radical.  And she obviously had some idea, when she wrote The Good Terrorist, what it was like to deal with a bunch of mixed-up young rebels living in  in a squat.

Which brings me to the comment at Inveresk Street Ingrate.  (And, I should add, I would have liked to answer this comment on the blog itself, but Darren still has the comments section set to accept only people registering through Google/Blogger.  I might still be technically registered with them, but I lost my password to that service long ago and don’t care right now to go take the time and trouble of finding it again - assuming I ever will be able to.  So, I will post my answer here, since I was going to write more about Doris Lessing anyway.)

Now, here’s the pertinent chunk from Darren’s post that I wanted to comment on::

It depicted a pocket of time and a group of people that I simply couldn’t recognise. They rampaged across the page like a rogue branch of the RCG who had swapped the writings of David Yaafe for a xeroxed copy of The Anarchist Cookbook, and I remembered being irritated at the time with the thought that Lessing was being given a free pass with this book because of her membership of the CP thirty years previously; Lessing supposedly knowing the psychology, motivations and dynamics of the left because she was once part of it. That’s where Richard’s post comes in.

Despite the fact that the novel is set in Britain and relates to a ficticious Leninist group, Richard could see parallels with the scene that he was a part of in Philadelphia in the early eighties, and more recently with the anarchist circles he was moving in a few years back in New York. Those self-same circles that Richard moved in had a low opinion of the novel, and Richard’s take is that: ” . . . . part of the reason for their [his political friends] dislike of this novel was that its satirical depiction of dysfunctional leftists hit a little too close to home. Moreover, her character study obviously applied across sectarian divides . . . “

I’m still not totally convinced by that line of argument, but I’ve never moved in the same sort of political circles as Richard.

Unfortunately, I fear that Darren has failed to get the reason why I appreciated this novel and other people might also misunderstand my comments on it in the same way.  I wouldn’t claim (and haven’t) that The Good Terrorist is an accurate depiction of the politics and tactics of an informed contemporary far-left group, whether Leninist or libertarian socialist.  What I liked about the novel was its great (I think) and funny depiction of a dysfunctional community of marginal young people living in a squat, rebelling against a world, claiming to have, or thinking that they have, a mission to help correct the world’s problems when they wouldn’t know the first thing about correcting some serious problems within their own little group. 

And when Lessing got into the characters and the dynamics between them, that’s when I saw some awfully familiar - and darkly hilarious - stuff.

I read this book sometime ago, and time doesn’t permit me to reread passages and quote from it right now - not, especially, if I want to give a quick enough answer to Darren’s comments (such is the nature of blogging, especially when there is a dialogue involved, especially if we have jobs, etc., to run to and we’re not paid blogger hacks).  But as I recall, time and again, the characters she depicted and their symptoms of dysfunction reminded me both of my punk rock days in 1980s West Philly (in an area that would actually become an anarchist center of sorts 15+ years later) and my encounters with anarchist types in the late 1990s.  Not so much because of politics, but because of characters.  And, especially, if you took the book as satire - which is what Darren touches on a little later in his post, when he says:

Perhaps it would be better to approach it again as a satire that could equally apply to the secular political extremism of the 60s and 70s (see above with Cathy Wilkerson) or even today where in some small quarters a religious political extremism has taken grip.

Except that I don’t think that The Good Terrorist, as I recall it, really dwelled much on “political extremism.”  The kids who were the main subject of this novel may have admired some extremists (such as the mysterious guys who lived in the IRA house down the street), but their fall into “terrorism” was quite accidental, their attempts to build a bomb and carry out its delivery fumbling and bumbling (somewhat reminiscent of the Weather Underground, discussed earlier in Darren’s post), and their ideological critique and mission quite vague and confused, driven more by personal rebellion than by a clear radical philosophy.

This might seem like a slightly exaggerated or unfair portrait, especially if it’s taken as a generalization about the far left.  But I saw a lot of familiar things in it, and I appreciated the skill with which Lessing drew those characters, as well as the brilliant (I think) way she moved the plot along, as a writer who was able to create something that was at the same time suspenseful drama and dark satire.

And though it’s not at all a flattering portrait, I think it might be appreciated by at least some radicals who are able to laugh a little at their collective selves. 

I once would have included myself in that group, but I have removed myself quite a bit from those circles, and I admit that I may have something in common with Lessing , as a disillusioned former communist (or anarchist) type.  However, I am still a type of communist, where that category meets a type of anarchist.  My problem is not wanting to deal with the groups and scenes that I encountered when I was more deeply involved.  (Although, one might argue that that’s all a moot point because in 2007, it’s impossible to be deeply involved in an anti-capitalist movement the way some of us were back in 1999, at least here in the U.S.)  So, maybe I can agree with Doris Lessing somewhat in her critique of these character types, but there’s no way I’m about to discard a 160-year-old social-political-economic critique of capitalism that seems to me, at least, to be incredibly pertinent right now.  (Plus, there are elements of Marxian philosophy that might interest me even more than the critique of capital per se.  And I doubt the types depicted in Lessing’s novel ever get to reading that sort of stuff.)

So, there’s my answer to Darren’s post and then some.  Although I should bring up one more point:  The people I was referring to when I talked about people on the left who disliked this novel were not a specific circle of friends, they were just people whose comments I had seen or gotten over the years.  And, in fact, Darren was one of them.  A few years ago, when he first saw my profile back when I was at blogger, he saw that I had listed The Good Terrorist as one of my favorite books, and he mentioned in a note to me that he thought the book was awful.  So, Darren, when I wrote that part of my post, I was actually at least partly thinking about you!