No Marx for young Mosley

Gary Day prefers a pensive Marxist to a noisy band of free marketeers.

In the Dunciad , Pope imagines culture being overwhelmed by "Night primeval and Chaos old". Now such a threat comes from the contributors to Dumbing Down , who pretend to care for culture rather as Brutus did for Caesar. If you believe that culture is in a bad way and you want to do something about it, then do not buy this book. Why on earth Marina Warner should have endorsed this pernicious, tendentious nonsense is a mystery. She describes it as "bold, straight polemic" but a more accurate description would be "prejudiced and proud of it".

The collection originates from a conference, " Culture Wars: Dumbing Down Wising Up ?", held in London last year, organised by Living Marxism ( LM ). The contributors to this volume do not let their ignorance of Marx prevent them from commenting on him. Here is Michael Oakeshott. The idea that "the morality of the 'anti-individual' must be imposed upon all mankind, appears unmistakably first in the writings of Marx and Engels". What Marx and Engels actually say is that the structure of capitalist society prevents people from realising their "individuality", whereas under communism "the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all". Oakeshott's travesty of Marx is nothing compared to Michael Polanyi's eye-popping assertion that Hitler and Mussolini modelled their societies on Marxist principles. Truth, it would seem, is the first casualty in the war over standards.

There is no connection between Marxism and National Socialism, but there is an association of sorts between LM and British Fascism. The editor of this collection, Ivo Mosley, son of Nicholas and grandson of Sir Oswald, is a busy presence in the volume, interviewing contributors as well as penning articles against science and parliamentary democracy. Dad, meanwhile, chips in with a piece demanding a return to mystery in religious matters. Although Mosley's heirs do not approve of Oswald's anti-Semitism, some supporters of LM certainly do. Journalist Andy Beckett has drawn attention to some of the causes to which LM has lent its voice. These include racists who deny the Holocaust and an organisation for British gun-owners called the Shooter's Rights Association. For LM it is not the David Irvings of the world who are a menace, but environmentalists - whom it has compared to Nazis. While not going quite that far, Redmond Mullin, in his chapter, does believe that Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth impose their views on society and "subvert the policies of elected governments". What Mullin really objects to, however, is Greenpeace's claim to have "a mandate for its invasion and destruction of private property".

Mick Hume, the last editor of LM , is reported as saying that there is "no alternative to the market", a mantra taken up by a number of contributors in the first section of this volume, entitled "Dumbocracy in government". Mosley speaks for most of them in describing the state as "dumb" because it has too much power - obviously a new twist to Acton's claim that power corrupts. Not only is the state dumb, continues Mosley, it is also dangerous because it "whisks away" our money and uses it to subsidise welfare programmes instead of letting people look after themselves. It would seem that not only Tony Blair and General Pinochet have been having tea with Margaret Thatcher.

None of the contributors seems to understand or care that the operation of the free market has caused the commodification of culture which they deplore as "dumbing down". Art, they complain, has abandoned its apparently traditional role of education in favour of entertainment. Anne Glyn-Jones leads the charge against the "sensationalism" of the mass media that she holds responsible for violent crime and the breakdown of family values. Her solution is to "re-establish restraint and self-discipline", not just in the "self-indulgent world of uninhibited artistic expression" but in "every aspect of life". Phillip Rieff agrees that culture's role is to constrain "individuality" and prevent "disorganising questions from arising". This demand for restrictions on individuals is in direct contrast to the repeated view that they should be free to determine their own destiny. The kind of society envisaged by these writers is one of unbridled economic freedom but strict social control.

Dumbing Down is a hysterical rightwing manifesto. All these free marketeers compete with one another in their contempt for truth, rational argument and artistic integrity. There is nothing academic about this book.It fails to situate itself within the context of ongoing debates about culture. Why, for instance, is there no mention of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams or Stuart Hall? Or references to contemporary polls and studies? The contributors are only interested in stirring things up, not in having a serious debate.

What a relief, then, to turn to Terry Eagleton's book. Here is a real Marxist scholar with a genuine interest in the nature and idea of culture. He recognises that it is a complex term with a long history and that it is simultaneously complicit with the very order it criticises. Eagleton begins his book by investigating the etymology of the word culture. Although often opposed to "nature", he reminds us that one of the original meanings of culture is "husbandry or the tending of natural growth". The Latin root of culture is colere, which, we are informed, "can mean anything from cultivating and inhabiting to worshipping and protecting". These different meanings and the way that some are emphasised to the exclusion of others, points to what Eagleton regards as the central problem of culture: that it is a concept at once "disablingly wide and discomfortingly rigid". But culture is not just a conceptual problem, it is also a personal one. It suggests a division within the self: arguments about culture are also arguments about and with ourselves.

The move from feudalism to capitalism was from a social conception of society to an economic one - we are still living with the consequences today. The free market is the antithesis of society because it works on the principle that the natural relation between individuals is one of competition not cooperation. No society can work on that basis and so some means for transforming a collection of individuals into a functioning community must be found. In the 18th century this role fell to culture. It was, writes Eagleton, "a kind of ethical pedagogy", which fitted people for "political citizenship" by "liberating (their) ideal or collective self... a self which (found) supreme representation in the universal realm of the state". This conception of culture is more to do with civility, with manners and morals, than with excellence in the arts. However, the emphasis on the harmonious development of the faculties did not seem to be an attainable ideal, particularly in the Victorian period with more exploitation than education. Moreover, towards the end of the 19th century,culture, in the sense of civility, was used to justify a policy of imperialism whose barbarous methods were quite at odds with its claim to bring civilisation to the benighted regions of the globe.

Accordingly, another conception of culture came to the fore. This stressed the idea of culture as a distinctive way of life and living rather than an ideal to which we should aspire. Rooted in the "Romantic anti-colonialist penchant for suppressed exotic societies", it urged that different cultures had different ways of viewing the world and that these should be respected. However, the danger of this position is that it does not encourage us to discriminate between, as Eagleton puts it with characteristic panache, "Bolivian culture... and sexual psychopath culture". In a separate development, culture became identified with art and literature, which not only narrowed its scope but also meant that "science, philosophy and politics, economics (could) no longer be regarded as creative or imaginative". This conception of culture provided only a limited criticism of capitalism, partly because it was confined to a tiny minority of people and partly because its emphasis on the arts deprived it of a vocabulary that enabled it to give an informed criticism of the effects of market economics. At its best, it promoted a view of art whose value resided in its nature rather than in a price tag, whose spirited playfulness contrasted with the rigours of the protestant ethic. At worst, it lent authority to the economic divisions of capitalism, implying that only a select number were capable of appreciating the universal human values of art, which culture as civility had sought to disseminate throughout the whole of society.

This, then, argues Eagleton, is the historical context for understanding current debates about culture. He has no truck with the idea that culture is in crisis: "when was it not?" "Culture and crisis go together like Laurel and Hardy." The comparison is apt not just because there is a great deal of humour in watching people get het up over whether we should be reading Baudelaire or watching Bond, but also because it encapsulates the argument between high and low culture in a single image. Once regarded as a vulgar art form, the early cinema is now revered as classic. It is not that culture is in crisis, Eagleton argues, rather it is that culture "comes to matter at points of historical crisis". One of these was the early 20th century, when the development of mass culture and consumption challenged the authority of high culture to regulate what should and should not be considered worthy of attention. The most important feature of this confrontation, however, was the commodification of culture. Now, the question is how culture can act as a critique of capitalism when it has been so thoroughly absorbed by it. Eagleton is right to insist that high culture still has much to offer and he gives qualified approval to Seamus Heaney's contention that "literary and artistic culture is almost coterminous with our discovery of... justice, freedom, beauty, love". He is also right to point out that perhaps we have been too preoccupied with culture in recent years and our concern with semiotics and self-fashioning may have blinded us to the "primary problems of war, famine, poverty, disease, debt, drugs, environmental pollution (and) the displacement of peoples". As always, Eagleton shows a provocative wealth of learning. He is able to see the many sides of a problem, to put it in context and suggest new ways of viewing it, a healthy corrective to the soundbite society.

Gary Day is principal lecturer in English, De Montfort University.