Harker, B 2009, 'Class composition: John Axon, cultural debate and the British left' , Science & Society: A Journal of Marxist Thought and Analysis, 73 (3) , pp. 340-356.

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Abstract

This article presents influential BBC documentary radio programme The Ballad of John Axon (1958) as a text which refracts, recodes and intervenes into anxious debates within the late 1950s British left about shifting class formations, working-class investment in consumer capitalism and the attempt to formulate an appropriate cultural strategy. It contextualises the programme with reference to the writing of New Left intellectuals Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart; it also reads the programme as a critical response to the hesitant cultural policies of the post 1956 Communist Party. It argues that in complex ways the radio programme’s nostalgic construction of contemporary reality is generated by an impetus to contain late 1950s economic, social and political shifts within the framework of older and now contested modes of political analysis and organisation.

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