Comment

SPEAKING TO THE MASSES: REFLECTIONS ON THE COMMUNIST PARTY'S WELSH ELECTION BROADCAST

Philip Bounds

The Communist Party of Britain (CPB) fielded candidates in all five regions of Wales during the recent elections for the Welsh Assembly. This entitled it to a single Party Political Broadcast (its first for thirty-seven years), which was transmitted on BBC Wales, HTV Wales and the Welsh-language channel S4C in the last week of April 2007. Broadcast in both English and Welsh, it made a pleasant change from the blander fare offered up by the mainstream parties. The three people who did pieces to camera were especially good. The CPB's leader Robert Griffiths made a powerful and eloquent case for the creation of a 'People's Parliament for Wales', while Angharad Halpin and Gwen Griffiths (the former in the English version and the latter in the Welsh) proved more believable and telegenic than many of Wales's more experienced politicians. Yet at the same time, even as it took the palm for the liveliest piece of propaganda during the election season, the broadcast's visual language was often awkward, obscure and distracting. Taken as a whole, it illustrated the sheer difficulty of communicating a socialist message in modern cultural conditions.

The biggest problem facing the CPB and other left propagandists is the exhaustion of an entire visual tradition. Although socialist propaganda has never been as homogeneous or as hackneyed as its detractors like to claim, it has tended to recycle a fairly limited range of images. Its most salient motif has been the representation of mass movements. From chiaroscuro sketches of resolute strikers through to dayglo photographs of marching students, the left has gone out of its way to serve up visual metaphors (or metonyms) for its belief in the power of collective action. A related strategy has been the emphasis on what cultural theorists sometime call 'types'. In an attempt to clarify the distinction between 'us' and 'them', socialist propaganda has been littered with characters that embody in extremis the signature characteristics of their particular class or group. The monocled capitalist and the muscular, flat-capped worker have been a staple of the progressive imagination for over a century, cropping up time and again in the left's posters, cartoons and pamphlets. The persistence of types has probably got something to do with the prestige of Frederick Engels, who endorsed their use in a famous letter to the novelist Margaret Harkness in 1888.

To their credit, the people who made the CPB's broadcast realised that the established visual tradition is bankrupt. At a time when the labour movement has all but disappeared and class identities have fractured along a thousand different lines, it makes no sense to pretend that the proletariat is mustering its forces for a final assault on capital. But the drawback with the broadcast was that its attempt to find a new visual language for the left caused as many problems as it solved. Its most startling feature was its tendency to focus on things rather than people. Anxious to avoid the usual parade of visual clichés, it spent much of its time representing social forces in terms of their urban geography. As Griffiths and his comrades spoke passionately about the inequalities of wealth in modern Britain, the viewer was treated to a fast-moving montage of emblematic buildings. The enormous riches of the ruling class were symbolised by gleaming skyscrapers (notably the HSBC building in Canary Wharf), the Saudi Arabian embassy in London and sumptuous wine bars with names like 'The Rogue Trader'. By contrast, the hardships of working people inspired a less opulent set of images - terraced houses in rundown streets, the abandoned LG building in Eastern Wales, a quiet rural pub. There was also an interesting attempt to make use of written texts. From time to time, especially in the first two minutes of the broadcast, the narrated message was illustrated and reinforced by stark headlines from the socialist newspaper the Morning Star: 'Brown cosies up to fat cats', 'Child poverty soars to 3m', 'New Labour's nuclear betrayal'. The sincerity was palpable.

But who cares about sincerity? The montage of buildings and headlines might have been visually compelling but it failed to work politically. The biggest problem was that it reinforced many of the forms of 'false consciousness' which a socialist party should be aiming to dissolve. As one building rapidly gave way to another, there was a disconcerting sense that the urban environment was taking on a life of its own. In a wholly unintentional illustration of Marx's doctrine of commodity fetishism, the broadcast seemed to transform the products of human labour into 'independent beings endowed with life' (Capital, Volume One). The result was that skyscrapers, factories and houses seemed to exercise more of an influence over the social landscape than the people who had built them. The air of confusion was compounded by the effects of the written texts. Whenever one of the Morning Star's headlines flashed across the screen, the viewer was obliged to read and listen at the same time. At the very moment when our attention should have been wholly focused on two or three simple messages, it was being needlessly fragmented and dispersed. None of the other parties in Wales made the same mistake.

Another mistake which the other parties generally avoided was that of dwelling on their own history. Not so the CPB. As might have been expected from an organisation that is rightly proud of its contribution to the history of progressive politics in Britain, there were a number of indirect allusions to the Communist Party's deep roots in Welsh society. Just as the Party's contact details began to flash across the bottom of the screen, a famous black-and-white photograph of a Thirties hunger march was suspended above them. Eyes cast downwards in a street adorned with garish advertisements, swarms of men in flat caps and raincoats marched beneath a banner saying 'Struggle or Starve'. This historical theme had been flagged up a minute or so earlier, when contemporary footage of the South Wales valleys was accompanied by a melodious segment from Frank Hennessy's folksong Farewell to the Rhondda: 'The mines they are a-closin', the valleys they're all doomed/ There's no work in the Rhondda boys, we'll be in London soon.' While references such as these were undoubtedly interesting to those of us who honour the Party's history, it seems unlikely that they made much of an impression on anyone else. It could even be argued that their appearance was counterproductive. However much the ideologues of the hard left might pretend otherwise, there is simply no comparison between the consumerist indulgences of Blair's Britain and the soul-destroying austerities of the 1930s. By implying that the two periods are somehow continuous, the broadcast went a long way towards confirming the CPB's reputation for being stuck in the past. Moreover, in its all too predictable use of an obscure folksong, it reminded us that British communists have been far better at forging alternative cultures than in reaching out to the mainstream.

There is one final irony. Although the broadcast made a decent attempt to break with the outmoded language of mass movements and types, it did not entirely succeed in doing so. On a couple of occasions, nervous of breaking with over a century of socialist tradition, it harked back briefly and unfortunately to the propaganda conventions of the past. At one point we saw the less-than-massed ranks of the CPB on an anti-war march, looking less like the vanguard party of the working class than a collocation of Stalinist cheerleaders. Even worse was the excruciating attempt to serve up a representative image of the modern capitalist. For nearly ten seconds in the middle of the broadcast (it seemed like far longer), the screen was disfigured by a sinister plutocrat whose dark suit, funereal tie and slicked-back hair were scarcely less ludicrous than the copy of the Financial Times which he held up in front of him. The problem here was not simply the clichés but the physical appearance of the actor who played the role. With his craggy features, deeply lined skin and powerful hands, he no more looked like a scion of the bourgeoisie than Jade Goody or John Prescott. More than anything else he came across as an ordinary bloke in an ill-fitting suit. He could have been any of us. Far from projecting an effective image of unearned privilege, he reminded us of something which the ruling class would be happy to affirm - that working people rarely look at home when surrounded by the symbols of class power.

The appearance of the unlikely entrepreneur was a measure of what the left's cultural workers are up against. The point about the hidebound conventions of socialist propaganda is that they are not only out of date but radically unuseable - any attempt to resurrect them will only result in awkwardness, self-satire and embarrassment. And that is why the CPB's broadcast was ultimately so encouraging. In its tentative efforts to throw off the burden of a powerful but outdated tradition, it served notice that Britain's left parties are at last coming to terms with the demands of modern culture. I have no doubt that the next one will be better.

The CPB's Welsh Election Broadcast can be seen at www.youtube.com. It is archived under the title 'Communist Party Political in the Welsh Election 07'.