two mid-1970s polemics

I'd like to recommend a couple of polemical essays from the mid-1970s - celebrated in their time, worth reading now - that you may enjoy if you're 'in the common market' for that kind of thing (ha, do you see what I did there?).

The first is Michael Moorcock's 'Epic Pooh'. He wrote this in 1978 (though he later revised it, hence otherwise-anachronistic references to J.K. Rowling and others) and it's a spirited attack on both A.A. Milne and, more centrally, J.R.R. Tolkein, C.S. Lewis and their influence on both genre fantasy and the wider culture. If you're not very interested in fantasy as a genre, you may find that the first half's more engaging than the rest - still, this is full of quotable lines and worth your time. 

 

The second is E.P. Thompson's 'Going into Europe', a thousand word polemic against EU (or, as it was then known, EEC or 'common market') membership commissioned by the Sunday Times as part of a job lot of 'pro' and 'anti' think pieces from the great and the good, during the run up to the 1975 Referendum. 

 

This is written in a less nuanced, more knockabout, at moments downright trenchant and unfair, style - and one might ask whether its internationalist yet left-Eurosceptic position (a Bennite and also non-aligned position, envisaging a socialist federation of states that had nothing to do with any extant political structures - "neither Washington nor Moscow," to coin a phrase) was ever anywhere close to becoming practical politics or an achievable goal - but, again, this is a piece that's worthwhile for its panache, glee, and quotable lines. 

(If you've previously heard of just one book of E.P. Thompson's, it'd probably be The Making of the English Working Class. And if you haven't - well, one to ask Santa for, perhaps? "All I want for Christmas is the means of production.").

 

Do these two essays have anything in common? Well (to state the obvious) they're both written from a broadly-speaking 'progressive' political position, they both believe fervently in the inter-relationship of politics with culture (then again, don't we all?) and - perhaps more specifically - both appear to take aim, in a sort of sociological way, freighted with a very personal sense of grudge or just dislike, at a specific segment of the British middle classes:

"...a disenchanted and thoroughly discredited section of the repressed English middle-class too afraid, even as it falls, to make any sort of direct complaint ("They kicked us out of Rhodesia, you know"), least of all to the Higher Authority, their Tory God who has evidently failed them..." (Moorcock)

"The first person who enthused to me, some years ago, about ‘going into Europe’ went on to enthuse about green peppers. This gave a clue as to what the great British middle class thinks ‘Europe’ is about. It is about the belly.... This Eurostomach is the logical extension of the existing eating-out habits of Oxford and North London. Particular arrangements convenient to West European capitalism blur into a haze of remembered vacations, beaches, bougainvillaea, business jaunts, and vintage wines." (Thompson, who also then careens from alimentary into sexual disgust - the bourgeois European project is also not unlike a number of jaded middle-aged middle-class couples at a swingers' party.. ?!).

There's so much more to be said about 'class grudge' during that season immediately before Thatcherism, and about how the psychopolitics of social class continued to unfold thereafter...

[A better text of the E.P. Thompson piece is available in the collection 'Writing by Candlelight', which collects some of his journalism and shorter political writings from the 1970s.]