The British New Left in 1958

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[As I have been stating repeatedly, the left today faces a set of
circumstances not unlike the 1950s. Back then the Krushchev revelations
provoked ideological crisis during a time of reaction. Today, the collapse
of the USSR provokes the same kind of rethinking, taking place in a time of
retreat for the left. The American Socialist Magazine was deeply involved
in trying to create a new Marxist left out of the ferment of the 1950s,
just as we today are in a similar effort. Thus the article "New Horizons
for European Socialism" by Bert Cochran that appeared in the January, 1958
issue is of particular interest. It is a report on shakeups in the British
and French radical movement. The excerpt below deals with the British left
and some figures who continue to be well-known today. Following Bert's
article is an excerpt from an article by Ellen Meiksins Wood that appeared
in the 1995 Socialist Register. Titled "A Chronology of the New Left and
its Successors, or: Who's Old-Fashioned Now?", it covers the same events
and from not a dissimilar perspective.]

American Socialist, January 1958
"New Horizons for European Socialism" by Bert Cochran

WHAT has come out of the year?s churning? In terms of organization and
social influence, very little. In terms of intellectual quickening,
something of importance. As explained by our British correspondent in the
October American Socialist, an immediate outgrowth of the mass exodus out
of the Communist Party was the so-called forum movement, and the
periodical, the New Reasoner, an offspring of the Reasoner, which was the
opposition journal inside the CP.

The socialist forums held a two-day conference in April of this year at
Sheffield attended largely by recent CP members to try to figure out what
had brought on the catastrophe and how to go about reconstructing a
philosophy for the movement. As was only natural after a sudden release
from an intellectual prison-house, the gathering brought forth a remarkable
babel of music in which every possible instrument of the orchestra was
represented. Some thought Marxism remained unimpaired. Others believed
Marxism had proved "a defective tool." One delegate wondered whether there
weren?t after all absolute humanitarian values. Another held out for
proletarian values. Some wanted to go ahead and build a new Marxist party.
Others thought the forums should not try to become a new center of
political power but stimulate a new climate of socialist opinion.

Nothing could be more indispensable for the political hygiene of the ex-CP
members, of course, than to purge themselves of accumulated poison. But as
a catharsis, the forums had a necessarily limited function. The dilemma was
well expressed, if not resolved at the conference by Michael Segal, one of
the editors of the journal, Forum, when he said "that there was danger of
having nothing at all within a couple of months if they did not organize.
On the other hand, if they adopted a program and formed a party there was a
danger of becoming one more little sect."

The second conference of the forums which was just recently held in London
saw a hectic debate between those who wanted to adopt a political platform
and those who wanted to keep the forums as a wide-open discussion center,
with the latter viewpoint winning out. But the impression is that the
forums have already passed their peak and are now in a state of decline,
and have become a bit of a hunting ground for some of the sects. The forums
served a purpose at first when lots of bewildered CP?ers were looking for
guidance. But many, possibly a majority, have already joined the Labor
Party, and are caught up in new associations and routine.

ONE of the forum organizers proposed that the forums should become "a
left-wing version of the Fabian society." This is a familiar thought. A
while back we advocated a similar project in this country. But its
realization is clearly beyond the forum?s powers, as it proved beyond the
powers of the American Left at the time. It has to be kept in mind that the
original Fabian society, for all its casualness, was not an intellectual
free-for-all, but had a very definite political outlook and promulgated
very specific ideas, concepts and projects. It also had a number of figures
who were eminently capable, not merely of hollering for discussion,
re-thinking, and new approaches, but brilliantly carrying through with a
series of noteworthy pamphlets and books. The Forum movement is not equally
well situated on either count. As for maintaining an organization merely to
exchange opinions, people tire of that after a while, and besides in
England other vehicles serve the purpose better.

The New Reasoner understood more clearly what it was about and what it
conceived as its job. The editorial of the opening issue succinctly
explained its approach:

"Forty years of desperate emergencies, wars, and factional conflicts have
reduced the creative body of ideas once known as Marxism to the state
orthodoxy of "Marxism-Leninism -Stalinism" on the one hand, and to its
stunted opposite, dogmatic Trotskyism on the other. But revulsion against
these orthodoxies has strengthened the traditionally pragmatic and
anti-theoretical bias of the British labor movement, and has narrowed its
internationalist outlook and diminished its revolutionary perspectives.

"The career politician, with his inevitable pre-occupation with maneuvers
and expediencies, dominates the political field. And the vigorous Left
movement, expressed in the main around Tribune, has itself tended to fight
shy of theoretical discussion or extended analysis, preferring to trust to
the robust intuition of Mr. Bevan. In doing so it has failed to win the
complete confidence of that great body of socialists who desire not only to
act but also to understand the context and aim of their actions. The
energies of the labor movement have been weakened by the snapping of links
between socialist intellectuals and those who bear the brunt of the
practical work of the movement.

"The New Reasoner hopes to make some contribution towards re-establishing
these links and regenerating these energies. In the political field, we
take our stand with those workers and intellectuals in the Soviet Union and
East Europe who are fighting for that return to Communist principle and
that extension of liberties which has been dubbed "de-Stalinization"; in
Britain with those socialists of the left wing of the Labor Party, or
unattached to any party, who are fighting under very different conditions,
for a similar re-birth of principle within the movement. We have no desire
to break impetuously with the Marxist and Communist tradition in Britain."

E. P. Thompson, one of the magazine?s leading spirits, who is a university
lecturer and biographer of William Morris, has made a notable contribution
to the present British discussion in an article on "Socialism and the
Intellectuals" that appeared in the first number of Universities and Left
Review and which elicited in the following number a spirited discussion
contributed by Mervyn Jones of Tribune and several university lecturers.

Thompson argues that the circuit by which ideas are transformed into
effective social energies has been broken by the withdrawal of the
intellectuals on one side, and the bureaucratic structure of the labor
movement on the other. He doesn?t think the solution is for intellectuals
to simply join the Labor Party. "I think that the greatest need of the
moment is for a new, vital, and principled movement of socialist ideas, a
new two-way flow of ideas and experience between the younger generation of
technical, professional, and in particular industrial workers. After the
spiritual impoverishment of the past decade, I think that the star of the
imagination is likely once again to be in the ascendant. And, further, that
for the time being at least it will be to the great advantage of any such
movement if it takes place entirely independently of the organizational
machinery of either Transport House or King Street. Specifically, I am
thinking of books, pamphlets, and journals; discussion groups and forums;
poems and novels; a re-awakened student movement; and cultural activities.
. ."

IT is naturally outside the purpose of this review to subject the various
articles and positions to detailed critical analyses. I am trying rather to
fit the different views and periodicals into a coherent or at least
discernible pattern. Thompson is obviously trying to re-establish the
figure of the Marxist intellectual as a personality of independent
integrity and special skill who has a distinct contribution to make to the
cause by practicing his trade, not by laying it aside in favor of so-called
practical activities, or prostituting himself as a technician in the
service of the machines. He is trying to open up the channels of
intellectual exchange. His is a ringing "call to arms" to intellectuals,
and may have an important influence especially on those with Communist
background.

The weakness of the New Reasoner appears to be that most of its writers are
still unduly pre-occupied with the world from which they have so recently
broken, as evidenced in the subject matter which claims their attention,
the problems that continue to dominate their thoughts, and the people to
whom they are primarily addressing their writings. Moreover, trying to
continue to rest on the Communist tradition by restoring it to its original
pre-Stalinist pristine purity strikes me as a quixotic venture. Communism
is bound by historical associations of a quarter of a century that neither
god nor man can eradicate. To try to restore Communism to the meaning that
it possessed in 1917 or 1848 is like trying to take Christianity away from
the Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist churches of today and restore it to
the simple virtues of the Biblical Apostles. It is a subject matter for
literary exercises. It has no use as a workable tradition for the Left in
Britain, much less, in the United States.

The periodical which seems to be most sensitive to the thought processes of
the new generation and involved in making socialism a living, challenging
movement again in a country like Britain is the Universities and Left
Review. In part, it starts from similar premises as the New Reasoner. But
its editors have had more success in freeing themselves from parochialism,
their range of vision is wider, and they have a better feel to whom their
message should be addressed. Their introductory editorial shows that a
group of people has finally come along who know what the problem is, at any
rate. Here is part of their opening statement:

"The post-war decade was one in which declining political orthodoxies held
sway. Every political concept became a weapon in the cold war of ideas,
every idea had its label, every person had his place in the political
spectrum, every form of political action appeared? in someone?s eyes?a
polite treason. . . . Between the high citadel of Stalinist Russia, and the
'welfare-state? no further' jungle of the mixed economy, there seemed to be
nothing but an arid waste. In the tight compartmentalized worlds,
buttressed by bans and proscriptions, suspicions and fears, supported by
texts from Lenin and Stalin, mottoes from Burke and Bagehot, protected by
massive armies with nuclear stockpiles and mutually exclusive military
pacts, British socialism suffered moral and intellectual collapse. . . . It
was inevitable that the post-war generation should identify socialism, at
worst with the barbarities of Stalinist Russia, at best, with the
low-pressure society of Welfare Britain. . . . The debate between those who
clung to the slogans of the thirties and those who embraced the new
orthodoxies of Welfare Britain, a debate which evaded the critical problems
and the main frustrations of post-war society, appeared monstrously
irrelevant to the post-war generation.

"What is needed, therefore, is the regeneration of the whole tradition of
free, open, critical debate. The socialist tradition ought to be the most
fruitful and the most stringent of the intellectual traditions. . . . Those
who feel that the values of a capitalist society are bankrupt, that the
social inequalities upon which the system battens are an affront to the
potentialities of the individual, have before them a problem, more
intricate and more difficult than any which has previously been posed. That
is the problem of how to change contemporary society so as to make it more
democratic and more egalitarian, and yet how to prevent it degenerating
into totalitarianism. . ."

One can complain, of course, about all these declarations, that while they
give the questions, they don?t supply the answers. It seems to me that the
political mistiness, in these cases, arises not necessarily from personal
failings, but the intrinsic difficulty of the times: the realization that
while the old socialism?both Stalinist and welfare-statist?has reached a
blind alley, a new detailed program cannot simply be sucked out of a few
editors? thumbs, but will have to come more organically through sustained
efforts, exchanges, and experiences, and that a new dogmatism must be
shunned. That does not mean that the Universities and Left Review is a
vacuum. It would not have elicited the favorable response that it had if it
did not represent something beyond the mere plea to have a discussion. By
its statement of the problem, by its tone, by its very selection of writers
and subject matter, it is carving out a political approach, which explains
why it has struck a responsive chord and been able to constitute itself a
veritable avant-garde socialist institution.

====

Ellen Meiksins Wood:

The term ?New Left? has been applied to a fairly broad range of formations
in various countries, commonly associated with the of the late 1960s. But
to the extent that all these formations had something fundamental in
common, what made the New Left ?new? was above all dissociation from the
traditional forms of ?old? left politics, both Stalinist Communism and
social democracy. More particularly, the various New Lefts shared a
commitment to emancipatory struggles apart from ? or least in addition to ?
traditional class struggle, especially the student, Vietnam War and black
liberation movements.

In Britain the development of the New Left was marked by institutional
milestones in the form of influential journals whose changes of content
style record the trajectory of this movement through its various
permutations. This literary record therefore provides a particularly useful
framework for tracking the relevant history. It is true that the British
New Left was in some important respects distinctive, especially because the
radicalism of the sixties, while converging with the international wave
that culminated in the ?revolution? of 1968, was directly connected to,
continuous from, an earlier and rather different ?New Left?, composed
largely of dissident Communists with strong and abiding roots in labour
movement. But if this means that the British experience cannot be
generalized without great caution, it also means that the history of the
Left in Britain provides a particularly well documented record of
transition from ?Old? Left to ?New? and, in the public debates between
generation and the next, eloquent testimony to the changes in the West Left
since 1956.

In 1959, The New Reasoner, founded by Communist dissidents Saville and E.
P. Thompson in 1956-7, was joined by Ralph Miliband who never been a member
of the Party, merged with Universities and Review, created in 1957 by a
group of very young Oxbridge radicals, notably Stuart Hall, Charles Taylor,
and Raphael Samuel. The fruit of this union was the New Left Review. The
two rather disparate founding projects were brought together not only by
what they had in common but essentially divided them. Both were committed
to the kind of struggle which was felt to be especially urgent in the
conditions ?consumer capitalism?. Yet they came to this common project not
only from different generations but from substantially different
directions. hope, no doubt, of converting their differences into
complementarities.

Raymond Williams, who was brought into the planning of the new journal very
early, makes an interesting witness because he never neatly fitted into
either group and for that reason could be seen as bridging them. Looking
back on his experience some years later, he spoke of various differences
between the two: the ULR people were less interested in the history and
traditions of the international left than in the rapidly changing society
of Britain, and more interested in a changing cultural experience than in
political activism. The New Reasoner group was less attuned to immediate
cultural changes in Britain and more steeped in the traditions of both
international Marxism and of the labour movement, including the native
British radical tradition. Williams situated himself somewhere in between.
While he regarded the New Reasoner as a ?much more solid journal?, and
while in his own ?experience and style? (not to mention age) he located
himself within the older generation, he found himself drawn to the
interests of the younger generation, their preoccupation with a changing
cultural experience. In retrospect, however, he judged himself wrong in
having thought that a cultural and educational programme was enough, to the
exclusion of engagement with ?tougher political problems?. More
significantly, he concluded that the New Left and especially the younger
generation, in its preoccupation with all that had changed in Britain with
the advent of consumer capitalism, seriously underestimated all that had
remained the same, miscalculating the power of the capitalist state and
overestimating the possibilities of cultural politics. If the older
generation was not entirely immune to this weakness, its engagement in
traditional Marxist arguments may have offered some protection. Elsewhere
(I shall come back to this), Williams also demonstrated another major
difference between himself and the younger generation, refusing its
tendency ? also resisted by Thompson and others ? to treat the working
class as passive victims, irredeemably ?hegemonized? by TV and mass
consumption. At any rate, his judgment from the start seems to have been
that the merger never really took hold.

The product of this uneasy merger, the New Left Review under the editorship
of Stuart Hall, was itself soon to fracture, at first more or less along
the fault lines between the two founding projects. The result was the
departure of Hall and Taylor; but the crisis did not in the end consolidate
the ascendancy of the other, senior partner. On the contrary, control of
the Review passed to another younger generation; and a wholly new team ?
Perry Anderson, Tom Nairn, Robin Blackburn et al. ? soon displaced both of
the founding projects and their leading figures.


Louis Proyect
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