I think this book may be brilliant , it is certainly
disturbing. It reads like a handbook for rebellion
against the theatre and academic and political
establishments; Its opening paragraph doesn't
pull punches; "The past four decades have seen
a social revolution. It is part of the propaganda
victory of the new middle class establishment
that they have managed to present their rise to
ascendancy as a popular movement, and to
associate it in people’s minds with socialism,
and, by extension, with the working classes. This
impression is false."

With these 56 words Motton rejects the
presumption that the past 40 years has seen a
move towards greater liberalism - The apparent
march to social freedom Motton sees as a
revolution of the prosperous middle classes, who
snatched power from the class above them; they
remade society to do it, and it was the poor who
paid the price. Effectively this stands
conventional politics on its head. Modern
Leftwingism, says Motton, is anti-working class.
Motton puts this in the context of the huge
increase in poverty since the 1970s, including
13 years under Labour. In 1979, 2 per cent were
on very low income, now its 9 per cent - no
policy shift between Conservatives and Labour -
and the betrayal began under the Wilson
government.
Social conditions too have changed for the
worse, a fact denied or ignored by middle class
"socialists". A surge of violence has made many
of the working classes, especially children,
afraid to leave their homes. There are 80,000
people in prison, most of them are working class.
But the plight of the poorest hardly featured in
the election campaign
The stealing of the Labour party by the middle
classes is central to this process. Modern
Leftwingism is a doctrine which serves the
material needs of the non-conservative middle
classes, and their self image - but has little to do
with the working classes, whom, in Motton's
opinion, they generally despise. Motton writes
with wit and clarity about the doctrine from
Rousseau to Marx to Althusser and Marcuse. He
points out that the working class movement in
Britain would have been more successful without
any of them, and reminds us that Socialism
came before Marxism, not the other way around,
- and it must mean the working classes fighting
for their own interests
The book describes how the presumptions of
conventional modern enlightened thinking
(much of which Motton dares to challenge)
transformed our society from a peaceful, safe
one, into a violent one, He traces them back to
some of their earlier manifestations, giving the
book an , at first, curious seeming range of
topics, from art critic Herbert Read, to the Oz
Trial of the 1970s, Concept Art (there's a
penetrating chapter on the visual arts), Freud (a
fraud), and violence in the theatre and
television. But it gives us a painful tour of left
wing middle class opinion.
In an entertaining chapter on the Royal Court,
he reveals the expensive public schools behind
the fake working class posture of most of its
leading lights of the 1960s and 70s, and puts
their self-styled political radicalism in the
illuminating and damning context of the Labour
movement which too had by that time been
taken over by the middle classes. - According to
Motton this led to the betrayal of the unions by
Labour; When the unions tried to get a bigger
slice of the pie, their wage claims were seen by
the Labour government as inflationary ; Motton
argues, against modern left wing wisdom, that it
was the bosses who were inflationary when they
passed the wage rises back as price rises; A
working class government would have
supported the unions; - It was a turning point;
He attributes continuing poverty in Britain to
the lack, even then, of a working class Labour
movement.
The middle class leftwingism in the theatre of
the 1970s and 80s grew easily into what Motton
calls "collaborators theatre" of violence and
amoral individualism of the 1990s; "Radicalism"
eagerly combined with fashion, which it
continues to follow; theatre doesn't criticise
society, it merely ingratiates itself with so-called
popular culture. Its failure to treat violence as
anything more than a game earns Motton's
particular censure. Sarah Kane and In-Yer-Face
theatre, come in for fierce criticism; Motton is
never afraid to attack the sacred cows, he is a
butcher of presumptions. And despite a
remarkable consistency in his thought, you
never know from which direction he will
approach.
There is a forthright attack too on academia;
Motton, in a fascinating section on education,
denounces deconstructionism as a new-
establishment tool to make rebellion in the arts
almost impossible, by effectively silencing the
text and taking away from the writer the power
to rebel. Motton recommends students to take
direct action against it.
Motton says that while Labour leaders despise
their working class supporters as bigots, the
middle class left might still miss the point of
their electoral defeat. Already in theatre they
are dusting down the self-righteous clichés from
their last period of opposition. Motton's
liberating analysis, in a witty and impassioned
way, tears to pieces the idea that the middle
class left help anyone but themselves. It points
the way forward to a rebellion against them in
the arts, and in theatre, and in education, and
reminds us of the possibility of a genuine
working class labour movement. This is a clever
and controversial book, - it challenges the
orthodox views that we the middle classes have
somehow mistakenly clung to for the last 40
years

By Beryl Bainbridge