Class Composition: The Ballad of John Axon,Cultural Debate and the Late 1950s British Left

Abstract

The influential BBC documentary radio program The Ballad of John Axon (1958) refracted, recoded and intervened 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. The program should be considered in the context of the writing of New Left intellectuals Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart; it also appears as a critical response to the hesitant cultural policies of the post-1956 Communist Party. In complex ways the radio program'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 organization.