Abstract
In this essay I analyse the debate over the question of political organisation as it was articulated within the first British New Left of 1956-62. I argue that to characterise the New Left primarily in terms of the break made by many of its leading intellectuals with Stalinism is only partially adequate. For while the formation of the New Left undoubtedly marked a break with old left politics, there were also important areas of continuity between the old and New lefts. Of particular importance in this respect was the shared classification of the Eastern bloc countries as socialist states. This shared assumption, I argue, informed both the New Left’s break with Leninism and its embrace of a form of left reformism after 1956; and so informed its unsuccessful attempt to transform the Labour Party into a socialist organisation. As the collapse of this strategy heralded the demise of the New Left, I conclude that the New Left was complicit in its own defeat.
Introduction
Throughout the twentieth century the confrontation between reformists and revolutionaries was a constant feature of left-wing political debate: and as we enter the twenty-first century the contemporary anti-capitalist movement has once again pushed this debate to the fore.[1] Unfortunately, despite the power of much of the anti-capitalist literature, most of it seems innocent of a historical dimension. Thus, while it is not uncommon for observers of this movement to refer to it as a new ‘new left’, few do so with more than a tangential references to Britain’s first ‘New Left’ of 1956-62. This lapse is somewhat unfortunate, for while there is no direct parallel between the conditions that gave rise to the first New Left and those that led to Seattle etc., the contemporary left has perhaps much to learn from the failure of the first New Left to capitalise on its early achievements.
Like its modern descendant, the first New Left enjoyed an early effervescence. However, within six short years this vitality had been lost, as the successes of this early period evaporated in the early 1960s. In this essay I argue that the New Left need not have collapsed so dramatically if the strategy of transforming the Labour Party into an agency of socialist advance, embraced by the majority of New Left leaders around the turn of the 1960s, had been rejected. I argue that this strategic orientation can profitably be understood as a consequence of the New Left’s reluctance to break fully with the reformism that many of its leading members inherited from the Communist Party. Moreover, while this political heritage informed the strategy taken by the bulk of the New Left, this strategic orientation was reinforced by the assumption of an immovable Labourist ideology within the British working class that was widely accepted in New Left circles. I suggest that the germ of a much more subtle analysis of the relationship between Labourism and the British working class structure can be extracted from New Left literature, and conclude that had this insight been developed into the operational ideology of the movement then the first New Left might have bequeathed a stronger inheritance to the second New Left of 1968, from which the latter could have only benefited.
I thus engage with the debate on the nature of socialist organisation as it was articulated within the first British New Left of 1956-62. In his recently published memoirs, John Saville, writing of his time as a leading member of the New Left, seems to wilfully obscure the theoretical issues involved in the New Left’s debate on organisation by asserting both that the project of building an independent socialist organisation after 1956 was ‘not tenable’, and also that the New Left universally accepted that this was the case: ‘what is overlooked’ by those who criticise the New Left for failing to leave an organisational legacy, ‘is that we were deeply aware of the overriding strength of the Labourist tradition’.[2] Saville apparently formulates this claim in opposition to some unnamed academic consensus which seemingly finds the New Left wanting for its failure to build a socialist organisation after 1956. However, this consensus does not exist: the general opinion within the academy seems to fall somewhere between ambivalence and hostility to a counterfactual project of building a New Left organisation.[3] Ironically, of the minority of commentators that have criticised the New Left for this failing, perhaps the most authoritative was Saville’s late collaborator on The Socialist Register: Ralph Miliband. Given the closeness of Saville’s relationship with Miliband, his dismissal this argument thus seems somewhat surprising. Unfortunately, the fact that Saville does not address Miliband’s contribution to this literature is not simply regrettable; it functions, more importantly, to gloss over an important theoretical debate between those who carried forward the legacy of the New Left.
Where Saville implicitly dismisses any theoretical critique of the New Left’s organisational policies through the rhetorical suggestion that the project of building an independent organisation to the left of Labour at the time was simply impracticable, Miliband, by contrast, argued that the failure to build a New Left organisation did not merely reflect the objective difficulties of the terrain upon which the New Left operated, but was also in part caused by weaknesses with the New Left’s theory: ‘The main reason why the New Reasoner was not kept going is that there was no adequate perception that a new socialist organisation was needed, and where there was some kind of perception of it, there was no clear view as to what it should specifically stand for, in programmatic and organisational as well as theoretical terms’.[4] Similarly, Raymond Williams, a third key player in the New Left, argued that ‘in my view the biggest mistake made was not the overestimate of the possibilities of an alternative movement from ’58 to ’61, but the resigned re-acceptance of conventional politics which followed from ’62 to ‘64’.[5] Saville’s assumption of an unmoveable Labourist consciousness within the British working class, by contrast, leads him to deduce that a project of building an independent socialist party was unfeasible. But this is to confuse two distinct issues. I agree, as I suspect would Miliband and Williams, that a mass alternative to Labour could not have been built at the time, but I suggest that it would have been feasible to build a small nucleus of a future such organisation. Indeed, the theoretical framework that could have informed such a long-term project can be found in some of Edward Thompson’s contemporary remarks on Labourism. Unfortunately, while Thompson could abstractly conceive of a successful challenge to the hegemony of Labourism, his – and in this respect he was in the majority of the leading figures within the New Left – weak critique of reformism undermined this strategic insight, and subsequently undermined the practice of the New Left.
In this essay I therefore seek to defend and develop Miliband’s and Williams’ insights, and to challenge Saville’s recent attempt to excuse the New Left’s failings. I argue that it was weaknesses with the New Left’s strategic theory that informed its disastrous practice; and while I resist the temptation of suggesting that better theory would have guaranteed better results, I argue that a clearer break with reformism might have immunised the New Left against some its worst errors of judgement made at the turn of the 1960s.
I begin the essay with a brief overview of the genesis of the New Left, after which I examine its critique of Leninism. I then overview the elision that occurred in New Left circles from their critique of Leninist organisational politics to a scepticism regarding all forms of independent socialist organisation. Fourth, I show how, when combined with a form of militant left reformism, the New Left’s rejection of independent socialist organisation paradoxically opened it to the gravitational pull of the Labour Party, to which it essentially became a fringe group between 1960 and 1962. I then show how this orientation opened the New Left to a swift defeat at the hands of the Labour Party’s right-wing in 1961. I argue that, while Saville is correct to point out that the objective terrain upon which the New Left operated was far from ideal, he is wrong to imply that weaknesses with the New Left’s strategic thought did not contribute to the scale of its loss. Rather, theoretical weaknesses, in particular the New Left’s failure to adequately theorise its break with Stalinism, facilitated this defeat.
The New Left
In the 1950s the political bipolarity of Cold War international relations was refracted in Britain’s organised labour politics through the Communist and Labour parties. The Labour Party, then as now, hegemonised the British left. However, this position was challenged by the CPGB which, most successfully in the trades unions, positioned itself as the left opposition to Labour. Unsurprisingly, the Communist Party had long since proved its willingness to perform any number of elaborate political contortions at the behest of its mentors in Moscow; while, more counterintuitively, the Labour Party, though more pluralistic, had developed a parallel relationship to Washington. This situation was, of course, not conducive to the development of an independent left capable of articulating a political programme that went beyond Cold War dualism.
The Asia-Africa Conference at Bandung in 1955 provided the first sign of an alternative to this bipolar world. At this conference, what later was labelled the ‘Third World’ declared itself for the first time as a major independent player in international affairs. If this episode opened a crack in the world order, the events of 1956 – Khrushchev’s secret speech, his invasion of Hungary and the Anglo‑French invasion of Egypt – together created a space for widespread criticism of the world order as a totality. In striking deep at the heart of the international system these actions opened a space from which independent political forces could grow in Britain. In response to these events a ‘New Left’ emerged which sought to map a third way between Eastern Communism and Western Capitalism, and their left‑wing political allies: Stalinism and social democracy. This movement, though born of the conjuncture of 1956, was built upon much deeper social roots: in particular the post-war economic boom, while generating previously unheard levels of affluence, did so without challenging the gross inequalities of pre-war patterns of wealth distribution.[6] This context generated its own disillusioned children, who, in Britain, were personified by Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger: many of these youngsters were too critically self‑aware to remain loyally attached to a system that had proved itself, in Egypt, as brutal as that which suppressed the revolution in Hungary. Cynical of official politics, this generation provided the base of the New Left.
However, while the events of 1956 marked the point at which an independent left first emerged in post-war Britain, it was a further eighteen months or so before a movement erupted that offered this milieu the opportunity to test its politics against those of the Labour and Communist parties. The force that brought a new generation of activists onto the streets, and then into the New Left meeting rooms, was CND; whose marches, from early 1958, saw thousands of dissatisfied youth come into conflict both with the government and the leaderships of the Labour and Communist parties.[7]
The New Left Against Leninism
The Communist Party had effectively ceased to be a revolutionary organisation long before it stopped deploying revolutionary rhetoric. Thus, a façade of revolutionary language had been used to cover what was essentially a reformist political practice for around two and a half decades before the publication of the party’s new programme, The British Road to Socialism, in 1951.[8] However, this document did mark an important turning point in Communist thinking: for the first time the CP it made its shift away from revolutionary politics explicit. In part this explicit shift to a reformist strategy was underpinned by an argument, originating from Moscow, but expressed in Britain by CP general secretary Harry Pollitt, that the transitions to ‘Communism’ in Eastern Europe after the war had shown that ‘it is possible to see how the people will move towards socialism without further revolutions, without the dictatorship of the proletariat’.[9] Concretely, in Britain, the CP argued that the Labour Party, once rid of its right-wing leadership, could act as the agency for the socialist transformation of society through parliament.[10] In practice this meant that the CPGB became very excited at the prospects for a left advance in the Labour Party after the defeats of the right-wing of the Party over the issues of Clause Four and unilateralism at the 1960 Labour Party conference in Scarborough. Indeed, the CP’s new general secretary argued that the key political task at the time for his party was to ‘redouble the struggle in the trade unions in support of the Scarborough decisions; to carry the struggle into the right-wing camp and win the trade unions now pledged to the right-wing policy for the Scarborough line’.[11]
This perspective generated something of a contradiction for a supposedly Leninist organisation. For Lenin, as Cliff argues, ‘the organizational forms needed by Social Democracy derived from the nature of the political tasks’ they set themselves. Thus, a centralised party was a necessary prerequisite for any successful revolutionary challenge to state power, while parties that aimed only to reform the existing system could manage with a decentralised structure.[12] Paradoxically, in 1950s Britain, the Communist Party maintained the appearance of Leninism, in its bastardised Stalinist form, through the adherence to a strong centralised party structure, while rejecting the revolutionary political content of Lenin’s thought.
But why should socialists remain wedded to a centralised organisation if its politics were reformist? The first New Leftist to point to the incoherence between the Communist Party’s structure and its politics was Ken Alexander. He argued that while it was true that a Leninist[13] party was a necessary prerequisite for the execution of a successful revolutionary strategy, Leninist parties, once in power, had, and would, inevitably act as agencies of the degeneration of the revolution into some form of totalitarianism.[14] This argument implied that Marxism’s traditional rejection of the reformist alternative to revolutionary strategy had, as its corollary, the argument that Stalinism, or something like it, was the only conceivable alternative to capitalism. However, if, as Moscow insisted, peaceful transitions to socialism had occurred in Eastern Europe, then not only was a new reformist socialist strategy conceivable, but it could also be imagined that this strategy might be prosecuted without a Leninist party.
Thus, Alexander took Pollitt’s claim that the East European transitions had shown that revolutions were an unnecessary step on the road to socialism, and derived from it two conclusions. First, that history had moved on from Marx’s day – reformism had become a realistic socialist political strategy; and, second, that Lenin too had become equally redundant: centralised organisations were no longer the necessary evil through which socialists must fight for the overthrow of capitalism. This second conclusion was drawn coherently from Alexander’s old Leninist frame of reference. For if a revolutionary strategy had ceased to be the only realistic option open to socialist activists, then, as a corollary of this, revolutionary parties were becoming historically redundant. Indeed the only function of a Leninist party, according to Alexander, would be to act as the agency of the degeneration of socialist democracy in a post-capitalist regime.[15] Alexander was thus one of the first ex-Communists of the 1956 generation to generalise from the reformist assumptions of the Communist Party, to a critique of its formal Leninism.
However, within the New Left, critiques of Leninist organisational forms quickly merged into more general arguments against any strategy, reformist as well as revolutionary, that aimed to build an independent socialist organisation. Indeed, Edward Thompson famously wrote that
‘the New Left does not offer an alternative faction, party or leadership to those now holding the field … once launched on the course of factionalism, it would contribute, not to the re‑unification of the socialist movement, but to its further fragmentation; it would contribute further to the alienation of the post‑war generation from the movement; and the established bureaucracies cannot be effectively challenged by their own methods…. The bureaucracy will hold the machine; but the New Left will hold the passes between it and the younger generation’: in fact socialist intellectual work was not best ‘accomplished by joining anything’.[16]
Furthermore, and in a tone that prefigures the critique of organisational politics that is so common amongst anti-capitalists today, Thompson argued that intellectuals ‘should not ask which party should I join? But what else shall I do to stir up the dormant socialist traditions of this country’?[17]
The New Left, Labour and the Question of Organisation
Nevertheless, despite the stridency of his earlier opposition to building an independent party, by the end of the 1950s Thompson had moved to embrace some form of organisational politics. Thus, in his parting editorial for the last issue of the New Left journal The New Reasoner, published immediately prior to its merger with the Universities and Left Review to become New Left Review, he argued that ‘we think that the time has come for our readers, together with the readers of ULR, to pass over from diffuse discussion to political organisation. … We must now put this thinking to use, and carry it outward to the younger generation, and inward to the traditional labour movement. In particular we must establish far more contact between the New Left and the industrial working class’.[18] In fact, Thompson insisted, new activists ‘must learn from the steady attention to organisation, and from the true moral realism which has enabled men, year in and year out, to meet each situation as it has arisen’.[19] Unfortunately, while Thompson thus opened a space within the New Left for a serious engagement with the question of organisation, this potential was undermined by his broad acceptance of the reformist assumptions expressed by Alexander, and indeed Pollitt. This consequence was disastrous for the New Left, which had already begun to take on de facto organisational forms.
Once the New Left had moved from acting as merely a loosely organised propaganda body towards political intervention proper, the problem of its factional nature came to the fore. The peculiar manner in which this occurred followed from the New Left’s structure: while it was only a very small milieu it boasted the affiliation of some very prominent activists. This was nowhere more pronounced than in Fife where Lawrence Daly, an important national figure both within the New Left and the National Union of Mineworkers, had a significant local following. Daly had left the CPGB in 1956 after years of activity, and in 1957 he set up the Fife Socialist League, through which he maintained both close links with the labour movement, and ‘a vigorous correspondence in the local press on questions of national or international significance’.[20] Combined with his local standing and his desire not to be labelled as a mere oppositionist, this assault quickly put him at the centre of local politics; a position from which, in 1958, he stood as a credible candidate for council. In the end Daly actually won the council seat; a victory which, in turn, set the stage for his, ultimately unsuccessful, stand against the sitting Labour MP in the 1959 General Election. It was this act that put the issue of standing as a national alternative to Labour to the forefront of debates within the New Left.[21]
A number of important New Left leaders chose to support Daly’s stand.[22] This was a momentous choice; for any decision to stand against the Labour Party in an election was tantamount to a declaration of political war. However, the New Left’s support for Daly’s candidature was not unequivocal. Rather, many of the leading intellectuals argued that Fife was a unique case, and while they would support Daly this did not imply a universal break with the Labour Party. John Saville suggested that as it was a key role of the New Left to ‘recreate a vigorous movement for socialism amongst the ordinary people’, it should develop a body of ideas that was capable of refuting the dominant Fabian consensus in a language that was open to easy translation into cultural and political activity.[23] Such a project could sometimes be best served by the New Left operating wholly within the Labour Party, sometimes wholly without and sometimes, probably mostly, ‘partly within, partly without’. Fundamentally, there were to be no organisational ‘sacred cows’ to which the New Left would bow.[24] So, to counter the New Left’s weakness, Saville argued for a flexible approach to politics. In West Fife, local conditions favoured standing a socialist candidate against the incumbent Labour MP: the sitting MP was not only a right‑winger, he was also distrusted by a large section of the local population; the Communist vote was declining; and finally, the weakness of the Tories in the area meant that even if the left’s vote was split three ways between Communist, Labour and socialist this would not have disastrous consequences as one of these three would still triumph.[25]
However, Saville’s approach was not quite as flexible as it at first appeared. For in the midst of his essay he reaffirmed the New Left’s unwillingness to form a new party: ‘We have set our face against the development of a new political party; both our past history and our present analysis reject this’.[26] So despite his support for Daly’s de facto party, and his own ‘membership’ of what was essentially a de facto micro-party, Saville was wary of constituting the New Left as an independent organisation. While this position was reinforced by the sense of demoralisation felt by many New Leftists after Daly’s defeat in the Parliamentary election, it was rooted in the reformist theoretical assumptions of the milieu from which the New Left sprang: assumptions that were inherited from the Communist Party, and, to a large degree, best articulated by Edward Thompson.
Reformist Revolution
Thompson developed his analysis of the tasks of the contemporary left most eloquently in his essay Revolution. His explicit aim in this article was to steer a political course between the twin rocks of Leninist apocalyptic insurrectionism and Fabian evolutionism. If the essay’s title was meant as a challenge to Fabian gradualism, its substance was aimed at a series of Leninist political positions. Leninists, he argued, had seriously misconstrued the nature of the coming revolution, and consequentially they were incapable of adequately preparing for it. Thompson argued that the past century had been witness to a series of structural reforms that had been granted by capital to labour. These reforms were not the product of capital’s philanthropic nature; rather they were a corollary of its instinct for self-preservation: capital retreated, inch-by-inch, before the pressure for reform that originated at the base of society. The weakness with Fabianism did not lie in its belief in the possibility of reform; these all too palpably existed, but rather in its misdiagnosis of their cause. Leninism, meanwhile, was incapable of reorienting to the changed situation. In particular, Leninists could not comprehend the implications of the enormous reforms that had been brought about through the War: for it was in the period from 1942 to 1948 that the most significant reforms had been won. These changes allowed Thompson to look forward to a ‘peaceful revolution in Britain’.[27] In fact, Thompson suggested, radical change could be instituted relatively easily:
‘the Establishment appears to rest upon an equilibrium of forces so delicate that it is forced to respond to determined pressure … if we nationalise … if we tax … if we contract out of NATO … At each point the initiative might provoke repercussions which would necessitate a total transformation of relations of production, forms of power, alliances and trade agreements, and institutions: that is, is a socialist revolution’.[28]
If such a peaceful ‘revolution’ was possible, then what of the Labour Party, Britain’s traditional vehicle of reformist socialist aspirations? Against Thompson’s earlier rejection of the case for socialists joining any organisation, others prominent members of the New Left, such as Hilton and Jones, argued that as the Labour Party was ‘still a mass movement of the British working class’, and ‘a battleground in which opposing trends are free to contend for leadership’, socialists should join it.[29] These arguments seemed to be confirmed in 1960 when, through the medium of the trade union bloc vote, the leadership of the Labour Party was defeated over both its attack on Clause Four of the Party’s constitution, and over the issue of unilateral nuclear disarmament. Indeed Ralph Miliband, the author of one of the most powerful critiques of Labourism, argued at the time that ‘it is not inevitable that the Labour Party should continue towards the political graveyard’. Moreover, he suggested that socialists might act to transform the party into a socialist organisation, ‘before it was too late’.[30] Furthermore, in an argument first published in 1961, he argued that ‘the leadership whose purpose it is to reduce the Party’s commitment to socialist politics can no longer rely on the trade unions to help it in achieving its aims’.[31] By 1960 Thompson appeared to have gravitated to a similar position. In fact, he suggested that the transformation of Labour into a socialist party was not only possible, but also that this potential was being realised as he wrote: ‘Labour is ceasing to offer an alternative way of governing existing society, and is beginning to look for an alternative society’.[32] He argued that the New Left’s role should be to encourage this process, while remaining aware that if his more optimistic perspective for the transformation of the Labour Party were frustrated ‘then new organisations will have to be created’.[33] So, Thompson, in the late 1950s, moved to accept both the viability and desirability of working to transform the Labour Party into an organisation capable of realising the transition to socialism.
John Rex made a similar argument for joining Labour. He began his case by noting, somewhat counter-intuitively, the ‘powerful system of bureaucratic control which operates within the party’: indeed, ‘the big unions or their officials do in fact control the Labour Party’.[34] However, despite this structural limitation to the influence on policy by the ordinary members of the party, he argued that ‘we must either educate a new generation of socialists to take over the local and national party machine, the trade unions and the parliamentary party, or we must be prepared to set about the building of a new socialist party’.[35] As he did not believe that there was much hope for the formation of a new socialist party, he aimed to build a strong socialist presence within the Labour Party: New Left activists should be prepared ‘to become collectors and ward secretaries as well as councillors and trade union officials’.[36] Indeed, in a letter to their readers, New Left Review’s editors wrote that ‘the struggle for socialism is in a very important sense the struggle for the ‘soul of Labour’’.[37] But what should be the strategic goal of such activists?
Domestically, the leading members of the New Left believed that Labour could be the agency of a socialist incomes policy. Thus, in what Raphael Samuel suggested was the New Left’s ‘most influential contribution to Labour Party thought’,[38] John Hughes and Ken Alexander in A Socialist Wages Plan, published under the imprint of both the Universities and Left Review and The New Reasoner, argued for the creation of ‘an alliance of government and trade unions’ to redistribute incomes by taxation, to maintain stable prices, and to raise real wages and salaries.[39] Defending their arguments against criticism from the Socialist Review Group[40] Alexander wrote; ‘government power could be thrown in behind an egalitarian incomes policy if sufficient political pressure were built up to insist that it were’: and a suitably transformed Labour Party would lead such a government.[41] Unfortunately, Alexander’s case for a socialist incomes policy broke against the reality of Wilson’s reactionary articulation of this strategy in the 1960s.[42]
However, if many on the left were slow to appreciate the insidious nature of incomes policy, the New Left’s foreign policy perspective fell apart much more quickly. The dominant foreign policy perspective within New Left circles suggested that a ‘socialist’ Labour government might make a stand for ‘positive neutralism’ with the non-aligned countries against the Cold War duopoly. Thus Thompson, argued for a stronger UN, and a ‘British initiative in building something like a ‘Bandung’ group of uncommitted nations in Europe, with the Scandinavian countries, Yugoslavia, Austria and Poland as possible entrants’.[43]
Following this argument, David Ross wrote in New Left Review that, at the Belgrade Conference of unaligned states in 1961, there existed a group of states ‘whose domestic policies deserve, broadly speaking, our sympathy’. Amongst the countries, ‘led by our sort of people’, Ross included India, Ireland, Israel, Yugoslavia, Burma, Cambodia, Cuba, Lebanon, Morocco, and Ceylon – ‘despite her outrageous policy towards the Tamils’![44] Similarly, Michael Barratt Brown argued that Britain should strive to strengthen the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) – the British led alternative to the Common Market – as a beacon of neutralist hope for less developed Africa and Asia. Furthermore, in addition to a call to strengthen the UN, he also hoped that GATT should be reinforced as a bulwark against unfettered American power.[45] Likewise, Perry Anderson and Stuart Hall argued that Britain’s role in the Commonwealth and in EFTA had created the basis for ‘a genuine internationalism’ for the 1970s and 1980s. Links with these countries should be deepened, as EFTA’s neutralism, combined with the links to the emergent nations of the Third World through the Commonwealth, could put Britain into a position where it could act as a force for international peace and progress. Beyond this moderate strategy, Anderson and Hall argued for a more radical programme that would join to the Commonwealth and EFTA the independent ‘emergent powers’ themselves. Together they could pool the world’s ‘industrial, agricultural and capitalist resources which could be mobilised … for a common assault … on common problems’.[46] Moreover, Peter Worsley attacked the ‘clean hands’ of the ‘infantile leftists and a-political idealists’ who opposed the positive neutralist perspective.[47] Despite Worsley’s defence of the New Left’s realism, within a year or so of the publication of his article this perspective was in tatters, having failed the test of history.[48] Unfortunately, before its collapse, positive neutralism provided one more reason why the New Left should orientate towards transforming the Labour Party into an agency of socialist reform.
So, the bulk of the New Left followed Hilton and Jones to fight for the transformation of the Labour Party. Indeed Thompson interpreted the alarm bells sounding in the national press at the time as an indication that bourgeois society was becoming anxious of the developments within the Labour Party, developments which should therefore excite and energise the New Left.[49] These optimistic flames were fanned when the left won the vote on unilateralism at the 1960 Labour Party conference, confirming to the more moderate elements within the New Left the essentially correct nature of their strategy for transforming Labour.[50] Moreover, just as events seemed to be bearing out this approach, the more radical policy of those who argued for an independent New Left organisation became increasingly marginalized after the failure of Daly to make a Parliamentary breakthrough in 1959. Without their own organisation, and optimistic about the future for Labour, the New Left threw themselves into the fight against the right wing of the Labour Party after its defeat in the 1959 general election. The sense of optimism for the possibility of socialist advance within the Labour Party, combined with a deep sense of unease at the thought of building a new party, undermined calls for the New Left to set itself up as an independent party.[51] So, while nearly forty New Left clubs existed across the country in 1959, when a call came to create a national body, ‘suspicions of conventional party life and bureaucratisation’ acted to wreck the national conference.[52] Rather than orientating towards the long-term haul of building their own organisation, a course of action that appealed to many of the New Left’s rank and file, the New Left leadership poured most of its hopes into the strategy of transforming the Labour Party.[53]
At its heart this perspective greatly underestimated the power of Labour’s right wing within the Party machine. In fact, once the right mobilised its forces at the 1961 party conference the left was easily defeated. This defeat might not have proved fatal for the New Left had it not aligned itself so closely with the Labour Left in the years before. Regrettably, this is exactly what the New Left had done, and consequently it was dragged into the vortex of the Labour Left’s defeat, and its activists subsequently became demoralised.[54] The medium through which the right’s victory was secured at the 1961 conference was the trade union bloc vote.[55] This, as we have suggested, came as something of a surprise to most of the New Left’s leadership, who had come to believe that the trade union bureaucracy would no longer play its traditionally conservative role. That it had, and after two years of almost continuous advance for the left in the party, was doubly disappointing. Indeed, Raymond Williams argued, ‘the reversal of the vote on nuclear disarmament in 1961 came as an astounding blow. There was no idea of the strengths of the labour machine, or of the political skill with which the right was able to organise for victory within it’.[56]
Like the New Left, CND had gravitated towards a programme that aimed to win the Labour Party for unilateral nuclear disarmament; and, because they too hoped for so much from this strategy, they were also hugely disappointed by the defeat of the vote on unilateralism at the 1961 Labour Party conference. If, this defeat signalled the beginning of the end for both CND and the New Left,[57] its immediate effect was to rekindle the debate about standing unilateralist candidates in the forthcoming by-elections, and perhaps even creating a new party.[58] However, the moment when such an organisation could have been built was, in the short-term at least, gone. In these depressing circumstances, the erstwhile activists of the New Left eagerly grasped at any sign, however meagre, of a revival in the fortunes of the left. It was thus with Gaitskell’s early death, and Harold Wilson’s election to the leadership of the Labour Party in 1963 that the reformist illusions that had previously opened the door to the New Left’s disastrous strategic goal of transforming the Labour Party into the agency of socialist transformation, now led them to believe that even in defeat the left had been victorious: Wilson it seemed was going to lead the left to the promised land; and from then onwards ‘all hopes were now focused on Labour’.[59] Indeed, Perry Anderson, the new editor of New Left Review, wrote that Wilson had stepped into the fray just as the objective circumstances favoured the left as they had never done before. Therefore, he argued, Wilson ‘may in the end represent a certain moment in the auto emancipation of the working‑class movement in England’.[60]
So, by the early 1960s, the New Left’s aim of creating a socialist voice independent of both social democracy and Stalinism had collapsed into the train of Harold Wilson’s general election bandwagon. This move to the right meant that it was hopelessly ill positioned to respond to the movements that arose in response to either Wilson’s incomes policy, or his support for the American war in Vietnam: in effect the first New Left of 1956 bequeathed almost nothing to this second New Left of 1968.[61]
Conclusion
The break made by many ex-Communists with Leninism in 1956 is normally assumed to represent a moment in the liberation of English Marxism from the deadly grip of Stalinism. There is a large element of truth to this assumption; especially in so far as this emancipatory act was represented through the work on agency and culture developed by Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams. However, there was a darker side to the New Left’s critique of Leninism: many of the assumptions that underlay this critique were inherited from the Communist Party. For instance, within New Left circles it was generally assumed that the regimes created in Eastern Europe after the war were in some sense socialist, and that the regimes thus created were authentic products of Leninism. However, in contrast to official Communist doctrine, the New Left asserted that, as the transitions to socialism in Eastern Europe were executed by reformist strategies, the Leninism of their leading parties was anachronistic. Moreover, as the New Left argued that the deformations of these regimes were in large part caused by the Leninist character of the leading political organisations, then the main focus of their anti-Stalinism took on an anti-Leninist character. Indeed, throughout their engagements with Leninism, Thompson, Alexander, and others around them, consistently assumed the most malign interpretation of its relationship to the democratic tradition of socialism. This attitude is partially explicable as a reaction to their own familiarity with the undemocratic structure of the Communist Party, and through their experiences of the more ridiculously sectarian excesses of Gerry Healy’s brand of orthodox Trotskyism;[62] while, additionally, the major studies, by Cliff, Harding, Le Blanc and Liebman, which would offer more democratic interpretations of Leninism, were as yet unavailable. However, some important attempts to reconsider Leninism were published by theoreticians within and around the New Left, but the arguments and ideas outlined in these articles were not addressed or engaged with by Thompson, Alexander or any other mainstream member of the New Left.[63]
While the dominant group within the New Left ignored any argument that Leninism could be re-appropriated for the tradition of democratic socialism, they made their break with the CPGB precisely because they realised the incoherence, from within the CPGB’s own Leninist frame of reference, of the goal of building a centralised, but yet reformist, socialist organisation. Indeed, the New Left’s movement towards the strategy of transforming the Labour Party into an agency for the transition to socialism marked perhaps the arena of greatest continuity with their Communist heritage. In a sense their rejection of organised politics beyond Labour simply made explicit the organisational implications of the CPGB’s break with revolutionary politics. Having attempted to develop a coherent politics from the incoherent combination of revolutionary form and reformist content that characterised official Communism, the New Left then followed through on the CPGB’s perspective for transforming the Labour Party, and, unfortunately, were broken in the process by the Labour right.
This need not have been so. In an essay published in 1979 Ralph Miliband argued; ‘As I see it now, and as I only dimly perceived it then, the New Reasoner ‘rebellion’ should have been followed by a sustained and systematic attempt to regroup whoever was willing into a socialist association, league or party, of which the journal might have been the voice. But this is no more than hindsight; and there was then no steam behind any such idea’.[64] Similarly, Raymond Williams, reappraising those days with the benefit of hindsight, suggested that ‘the real problems of political organisation on the left were never confronted in this period’.[65] For the New Left such a confrontation would have necessarily occurred initially at the level of theory. Therefore, it would be perhaps better to say that the central tragedy of the first British New Left was primarily theoretical: rather than reject the political reformism that it inherited from Stalinism, it threw out the baby of Leninism with the bureaucratic centralist bathwater of the Stalinist political parties. Commenting on this failure, Duncan Hallas wrote that ‘the New Left failed; no, it refused, to take a clear and unequivocal stand against left-reformism. It refused to come to grips with the Communist tradition in its original Leninist form and with the Left Opposition tradition that arose from it. It largely ignored the whole historical experience from 1914 to 1956. Significantly, it hardly discussed the Communist International. In short, it failed to develop a clear and consistent theoretical and political foundation. Ambiguity and vagueness reigned … extend[ing] to the question of organisation … Inevitably, given this politically amorphous and organisationally unserious character, the movement collapsed’.[66]
Given a more realistic assessment of the limited short to medium term prospects for socialist advance within Britain generally and the Labour Party specifically, the New Left might have laid down some organisational roots that could have acted as an embryonic alternative to Labour. Indeed, if it had attempted to build on the experiences of the New Left Clubs, the Fife experiment, and orientate itself on the tension between working class practice and the Labour Party, rather than towards transforming the Labour Party, then the nucleus of a small socialist alternative to Labour might have been built that could have acted as bridge between the first and second new lefts. Unfortunately, the combined reformist hopes for Labour and the non-aligned states, undermined any chance that this goal might have been realised. Saville’s dismissal of the claim that the New Left ought to have aimed to build a new socialist organisation as ‘not tenable’[67] thus acts to obscure weaknesses with the New Left’s theory. For no one would suggest that Labour’s hegemony could have been easily overcome in 1960; rather, a realistic alternative to the strategy of transforming Labour would perhaps have been to make the first steps towards laying the foundations of an alternative socialist organisation with a long-term strategy of overthrowing the hegemony of Labourism. Indeed, the basis for some such policy can be read into Thompson’s 1965 critique of Perry Anderson’s dismissal of the hopelessly Labourist character of the British working class. In contrast to Anderson’s mechanical model of working class consciousness, Thompson suggested that it might be possible that ‘old class institutions and value systems’ might ‘break-up’, opening the space for ‘the creation of new ones’.[68] Unfortunately, just a few years before he wrote these lines, Thompson’s own version of left reformism informed the New Left’s disastrous policy of aiming to change the old institutions rather than replace them with new ones.
What this experience suggests is,
first, that the argument for a radical strategy aiming to transform the Labour
Party into a socialist organisation is not only doomed to failure, but also
inclines to its opposite: the Labour Party tends to break the left groups that
enter it. Second, and more generally, it was the New Left’s reformist political
strategy that opened it both to the gravitational pull of Labour, and to a
naively optimistic sense of the short term prospects for radical advance in Britain. By
contrast, a strategy that focussed the New Left’s attention towards the greater
challenges facing socialists, might have compelled it to examine the more
powerful agencies needed to overcome the barriers to a socialist transformation
of society. If the New Left had then begun a long-term orientation on the
tension between workers in struggle and the Labour Party in office, rather than
looking for quick gains in the Labour Party itself, perhaps it could have laid
the foundations for the realisation of Thompson’s later suggestion of creating
new political institutions of the working class that were adequate to the task of
the socialist reconstruction of society.
[1] A. Callinicos An Anti-Capitalist Manifesto (Cambridge: Polity 2003, pp. 86ff); J. Holloway Change the World Without Taking Power (London, Pluto Press 2002, pp. 11-18); J. Kingsnorth One No, Many Yeses (London: Free Press 2003, pp. 229ff); J. Neale You are G8, We are 6 Billion (London: Vision 2002, p. 127); G. Monbiot The Age of Consent (London: Flamingo 2003, p. 67); H. Wainwright Reclaim the State (London, Verso 2003, p. xi); S. Zizek ‘Afterword: Lenin’s Choice’ in Zizek, S. ed. (2002) Revolution at the Gates (London: Verso 2002, p. 297).
[2] J. Saville Memoirs From the Left (London, Merlin Press 2003, pp. 117-8).
[3] For instance the authors of the two most substantial recent works on the New Left either express ambivalence or outright hostility to the project of a New Left organisation. L. Chun The British New Left (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press 1993, xvi & 19); M. Kenny The First New Left (London, Lawrence and Wishart 1995, pp. 43 & 205). See also Dworkin’s comment that New Left’s stress on ideas at the expense of action ‘perceptively defined the outer limits of what [it] could hope to achieve in the early sixties’. D. Dworkin Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain (London, Duke University Press 1997, p.69).
[4] R. Miliband ‘John Saville: A Presentation’ in Martin, DE. & Rubinstein, D. eds Ideology and the Labour Movement: Essays Presented to John Saville (Croom Helm, London 1979, p. 27). Rather ironically Milibands comments on this issue were published as a tribute to Saville
[5] R. Williams Politics and Letters (London, Verso 1979, 366-7).
[6] J. Saville ‘The Welfare State’ The New Reasoner 3, 24, 1957
[7] Both Labour and Communist parties initially opposed CND’s demand for unilateral nuclear disarmament. W. Thompson The Long Death of British Labourism (London, Pluto Press 1992, p. 116), and W. Thompson The Good Old Cause (London, Pluto Press 1993, p. 64).
[8] CPGB The British Road to Socialism (London, Communist Party 1952). Both critics and supporters of the Popular Front line embraced by the Comintern in the 1930s are agreed that it marked a qualitative break with the tradition of revolutionary socialism. Thus, in a sympathetic account of the strategy, Hobsbawm argues that it was a realistic alternative to the utopian belief in revolution, while, from the revolutionary left, Trotsky had argued that this strategy was ‘counterrevolutionary’ (E. Hobsbawm Politics for a Rational Left (London, Verso 1989: 107 & 105); L. Trotsky The Spanish Revolution (New York, Pathfinder 1973: p. 311)). Others have argued that the right turn in Comintern strategy taken in 1924, and the ‘Third Period’ policy of 1928-34, both, in their own ways, marked the retreat of the Comintern from its earlier revolutionary politics (CLR. James World Revolution (New Jersey, The Humanities Press 1993, p. 217); D. Hallas The Comintern (London, Bookmarks 1985, p. 126)). However, Willie Thompson is right to stress the importance of the political shift that occurred in the late 1940s and early 1950s (W. Thompson The Good Old Cause (London, Pluto Press 1992, p. 10)). There were two new programmatic developments in the CPGB in this period: first, the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat was, for the first time, explicitly dropped from the Party’s programme; and, second, within the British Road to Socialism there was a deployment of evidence based upon the supposed success of the People’s Front policy in Eastern Europe.
[9] Quoted in J. Callaghan The Far Left in British Politics (Oxford, Blackwell 1987, p. 163).
[10] J. Gollan Which Way for Socialists? (London, Communist Party 1958).
[11] J. Golan Gaitskell or Socialism? (London, Communist Party 1960, p. 12).
[12] T. Cliff Lenin: Building the Party (London, Bookmarks 1986, p. 84). Le Blanc similarly argues that , for Lenin, there existed a ‘close interrelationship between program, practical tasks, and organisation (P. Le Blanc Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (New Jersey, Humanities Press 1990, p. 44)). Cf N. Harding Lenin’s Political Thought (London, Macmillan 1983 Volume 1, 137), and M. Liebman Leninism under Lenin (London, Jonathon Cape 1975). For some of Lenin’s remarks see V. Lenin ‘What is to be Done?’ in Selected Works in 12 Volumes Volume 2 (Moscow, Progress Publishers 1936, 115 & 127).
[13] The leading members of the New Left consistently assumed the authentically Leninist character of the Stalinist parties from which they had broken. In this essay I have generally followed their usage of the term Leninist to describe Stalinist parties and practices without endorsing it.
[14] K. Alexander ‘Democratic Centralism’ The Reasoner 1, 9 1956
[15] ibid 10
[16] EP. Thompson ‘The New Left’ The New Reasoner 9, pp.15-7Summer 1959 & ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals’ Universities and Left Review 1, p. 34 Spring 1957
[17] EP. Thompson ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals – A Reply’ Universities and Left Review 2, 21 Summer 1957
[18] EP. Thompson ‘A Psessay in Ephology’ The New Reasoner 10, pp. 5-6 Autumn 1959
[19] EP. Thompson ‘Commitment in Politics’ Universities and Left Review 6, p. 55 Spring 1959
[20] M. Kenny The First New Left London, Lawrence and Wishart 1995, p. 40
[21] J. Saville Memoirs from the Left (London, Merlin Press 2003, pp. 120-1).
[22] Kenny The First New Left London, Lawrence and Wishart 1995, p. 40
[23] J. Saville ‘A Note on West Fife’ The New Reasoner 10, p. 11 1959
[24] ibid, p. 12 1059; cf J. Saville ‘Apathy into Politics’ New Left Review 1:4
[25] ibid, p. 12
[26] ibid 1959, p. 11
[27] EP. Thompson ‘Revolution’ in EP. Thompson ed. Out of Apathy London, Stevens and Sons 1960, p. 302
[28] EP. Thompson ‘At the Point of Decay’ in Thompson, EP. ed. (1960) Out of Apathy London, Stevens and Sons 1960, pp. 8-10
[29] R. Hilton ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals – Four’ Universities and Left Review 2 Summer 1957, p. 20 & M. Jones ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals – One’ Universities and Left Review 2 Summer 1957, p. 16
[30] R. Miliband ‘The Sickness of Labourism’ New Left Review 1:1, p.8 1960; M. Newman Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left (London, Merlin Press 2002, p. 76).
[31] R. Miliband Parliamentary Socialism (London, Merlin Press 1972, p. 346).
[32] EP. Thompson ‘Revolution Again’ New Left Review 1:6, p. 19 1960
[33] ibid, p. 29
[34] J. Rex ‘The Labour Bureaucracy’ in The New Reasoner 6, pp. 49 & 59 Autumn 1958
[35] ibid, p. 60
[36] ibid, p. 60
[37] New Left Review ‘Letter to Readers’ New Left Review 1:2, p. 71 1960
[38] R. Samuel ‘Born-Again Socialism’ in Archer, R. et al. ed. Out of Apathy (London, Verso 1989, p. 49)
[39] J. Hughes and K. Alexander A Socialist Wages Plan (London, Universities and Left Review and The New Reasoner1958, p. 7).
[40] For the SRG, Mike Kidron argued that nowhere did Alexander and Hughes ‘so much as suggest that a future Labour government would be any different to its predecessors’ (M. Kidron ‘The Limits of Reform’ in Higgins, J. ed. A Socialist Review London, International Socialism 1965, p.94. First published as an article in Socialist Review in 1959, also published in The New Reasoner 10,1959, p. 81). More substantially Kidron challenged the terms upon which Alexander and Hughes built their argument: he noted the close ties that existed between the British state and private industry; and insisted that, as capital would prevent the state from overturning the rule of the profit motive, these links negated the reformist perspective. He concluded that Alexander and Hughes’ perspective was utopian: they ‘attempt to substitute a concept ‑ the state ‑ disembowelled of any reality, abstracted from society, for a social force as the agent of reform’ (ibid 1965, p. 99 & 1959, p. 86). Alexander took this to mean that Kidron believed that reforms were impossible under capitalism and questioned his Marxist credentials by noting Marx’s own analysis of the introduction of the 10 hour day (J. Hughes & K. Alexander ‘Kidron and the Limits of Revolution’ in Higgins, J. ed A Socialist Review London, International Socialism 1965, p. 104. First published in Socialist Reviiew in 1959, also published as part of ‘Reply to Critics’ in The New Reasoner 10 1959, p. 103). Kidron replied that as ‘reforms are palpably with us’ his aim was not to deny their reality, but rather to ask whether they were best won by revolutionary or reformist means (M. Kidron ‘A Note on the Limitations of Reforming ‘Realism’’ in Higgins, J. ed. A Socialist Review London, International Socialism 1965, p. 106. First published as an article in Socialist Review in 1959).
[41] K. Alexander ‘Socialist Wages Plan’ in Higgins, J. ed A Socialist Review London, International Socialism 1965, p. 91. First published in Socialist Review June 1959; J. Hughes & K. Alexander ‘Kidron and the Limits of Revolution’ in Higgins, J. ed A Socialist Review London, International Socialism 1965, p. 103
[42] D. Coates The Labour Party and the Struggle for Socialism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1975, pp. 119-127).
[43] EP. Thompson ) ‘Nato, Neutralism and Survival’ Universities and Left Review 4 Summer 1958, p. 50
[44] D. Ross ‘The Belgrade Conference’ New Left Review 1:12, p. 15 1961.
[45] M. Barratt Brown ‘Neutralism and the Common Market’ New Left Review 1: 12
1961, p. 27 and ‘A Foreign Economic Policy’ The New Reasoner 4, pp. 53-6 1958
[46] P. Anderson & S. Hall The Politics of the Common Market’ New Left Review 10, p. 14 1961
[47] P. Worsley ‘Revolution of the Third World’ New Left Review 1:12, p. 18 1961
[48] P. Sedgwick ‘The Two New Lefts’ Widgery, D. ed. The Left in Britain (London, Penguin 1976, p. 142). This article was first published in International Socialism 17 August 1964. Sedgwick had earlier outlined a critique of the utopian reformism of the New Left’s treatment of foreign policy in a powerful Universities and Left Review article in 1959 (P. Sedgwick ‘NATO, the Bomb and Socialism’ Universities and Left Review 7, 1959).
[49] EP. Thompson ‘Revolution Again’ New Left Review 1:6, p. 19 1960
[50] New Left Review ‘The Consequences of a Conference’ Editorial New Left Review 1:6
1960
[51] M. Kenny The First New Left London, Lawrence and Wishart 1995, p. 38
[52] ibid, 27
[53] Thompson commented that readers of NLR and Left Club members wanted ‘something to join, something to fight for, something to do. And hence the cloudburst of frustration which descended on our heads’. Quoted in D. Dworkin Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain (London, Duke University Press 1997, p. 275).
[54] P. Anderson Arguments Within English Marxism (London, Verso 1980, p. 136)
[55] P. Anderson ‘The Left in the Fifties’ New Left Review 1:29, p. 16
1965
[56] R. Williams Politics and Letters (London, Verso 1979, p. 365).
[57] J. Hinton Protests and Visions (London, Hutchinson 1989, p. 178)
[58] ibid, pp. 172-3.
[59] R. Fraser 1968: A Student Generation in Revolt (Chatto & Windus, London 1988, p. 61). Dorothy Thompson, speaking at The British Marxist Historians and the New Social Movements conference at Edge Hill College in June 2002, recounted the story of the night that she, Edward Thompson, Robin Blackburn and Perry Anderson euphorically celebrated Wilson’s victory in the 1963 Labour Party leadership election.
[60] P. Anderson ‘Critique of Wilsonism’ New Left Review 1:27, p. 22 1964
[61] The small group around Anderson’s New Left Review did throw themselves into the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign and the radicalised student movement, but these figures had burnt most of their bridges with the first New Left by this point.
[62] S. Woodhams History in the Making London, Merlin Press 2001, p. 132; J. Saville Memoirs From the Left London, Merlin Press 2003, p. 114
[63] A. MacIntyre ‘Freedom and Revolution’ Labour Review February-March 1960; A. MacIntyre What is Marxist Theory For? Socialist Labour League, London; T. Cliff Rosa Luxemburg London, International Socialism; T. Cliff ‘Trotsky on Substitutionism’ in International Socialism 1: 2 Autumn 1960; C. Slaughter ‘What is Revolutionary Leadership?’ Labour Review October-November 1960
[64] R. Miliband ‘John Saville: A Presentation’ in Martin, DE. & Rubinstein, D. eds Ideology and the Labour Movement: Essays Presented to John Saville (Croom Helm, London 1979, p. 27)
[65] R. Williams Politics and Letters (London, Verso 1979, 367).
[66] D. Hallas ‘How Can we Move On?’ Socialist Register 1977, (London, Merlin Press 1977, p. 7)
[67] J. Saville Memoirs From the Left (London, Merlin Press 2003, pp. 117-8).
[68] EP. Thompson ‘The Peculiarities of the English’ in EP. Thompson The Poverty of Theory London, Merlin Press 1978, p. 282. First published in The Socialist Register 1965.