The British far left from 1956 EDITED BY EVAN SMITH AND MATTHEW WORLEY Against the grain MANCHESTER 1824 Manchester University Press This content downloaded from 154.59.124.115 on Sun, 11 Feb 2018 10:26:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 154.59.124.115 on Sun, 11 Feb 2018 10:26:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Against the grain The British far left from 1956 Edited by Evan Smith and Matthew Worley Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan This content downloaded from 154.59.124.115 on Sun, 11 Feb 2018 10:26:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Copyright © Manchester University Press 2014 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN 978 07190 9590 0 hardback First published 2014 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset in Sabon 10.5/12.5 by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster This content downloaded from 154.59.124.115 on Sun, 11 Feb 2018 10:26:06 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Contents List of contributors vii Acknowledgements xi List of abbreviations xiii Introduction: the far left in Britain from 1956 1 Evan Smith and Matthew Worley Part I Movements 1 Engaging with Trotsky: the influence of Trotskyism in Britain 25 John Callaghan 2 The New Left: beyond Stalinism and social democracy? 45 Paul Blackledge 3 Narratives of radical lives: the roots of 1960s activism and the making of the British left 62 Celia Hughes 4 Marching separately, seldom together: the political history of two principal trends in British Trotskyism, 1945-2009 80 Phil Burton-Cartledge 5 Opposition in slow motion: the CPGB’s ‘anti-revisionists’ in the 1960s and 1970s 98 Lawrence Parker This content downloaded from 154.59.124.115 on Sun, 11 Feb 2018 10:26:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms vi Contents 6 Dissent from dissent: the ‘Smith/Party’ Group in the 1970s CPGB 115 Andrew Pearmain 7 British anarchism in the era of Thatcherism 133 Rich Cross Part II Issues 8 Jam tomorrow? Socialist women and Women’s Liberation, 1968-82: an oral history approach 155 Sue Bruley 9 Something new under the sun: the revolutionary left and gay politics 173 Graham Willett 10 ‘Vicarious pleasure’? The British far left and the third world, 1956-79 190 Ian Birchall 11 Anti-racism and the socialist left, 1968-79 209 Satnam Virdee 12 Red Action - left-wing political pariah: some observations regarding ideological apostasy and the discourse of proletarian resistance 229 M ark Hayes 13 Anti-fascism in Britain, 1997-2012 247 David Renton Index 264 This content downloaded from 154.59.124.115 on Sun, 11 Feb 2018 10:26:39 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms List of contributors Ian Birchall was a member of International Socialism/Socialist Workers Party from 1962, active as a trade unionist and in campaigns against war and racism, formerly a lecturer at Middlesex University and is now an independent writer and translator. He is a member of the editorial board of Revolutionary History and author of The Spectre of Babeuf (1997), Sartre Against Stalinism (2004) and Tony Cliff: A Marxist for His Time (2011). Paul Blackledge is professor of political theory and UCU branch secretary at Leeds Metropolitan University. He is author of Marxism and Ethics (2012), Reflections on the Marxist Theory of History (2006) and Perry Anderson, Marxism and the New Left (2004). Sue Bruley is a reader in modern history at the University of Portsmouth. Her work includes Women in Britain Since 1900 (1999), The Women and Men of 1926: The General Strike and Miners’s Lockout in South Wales (2010) and the book of her Ph.D. thesis, Leninism, Stalinism and the Women’s Movement in Britain 1920-39, which has recently been reissued. Phil Burton-Cartledge lectures in sociology at Derby University, and regularly blogs about the far left (among other things) at http://averypublic sociologist.blogspot.co.uk. His Ph.D. thesis looked at the life histories of Trotskyist activists, paying particular attention to their radicalisation and how they remained committed to revolutionary socialist politics. John Callaghan is professor of politics and contemporary history at the University of Salford. He is the author of The Far Left in British Politics (1987), Socialism in Britain since 1884 (1990) and The Retreat of Social Democracy (2000). This content downloaded from 154.59.124.115 on Sun, 11 Feb 2018 10:26:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms viii List o f contributors Rich Cross has written about the British, European and US left for Contemporary Politics, Twentieth Century Communism, Science & Society and Communisme and on the culture and practice of anarchist punk for Socialist History, Music and Politics and Freedom. His doctoral thesis was a study of the decline and demise of the British Communist Party. He works as an academic librarian and is currently researching a book on the history of anarcho-punk. Mark Hayes is a senior lecturer in politics and criminology at Solent University, Southampton. He has published on a wide variety of subjects including Irish Republicanism, Ulster loyalism, anti-fascism, and the New Right in Britain. He is currently working on a book about fascism and the extreme right in Britain and was an active member of both Anti-Fascist Action and Red Action. Celia Hughes is assistant professor of British History in the department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Her study of the socio-cultural milieus of Britain’s New Left cultures in the late 1960s will be published by Manchester University Press in 2015. ‘Young Lives on the Left: Sixties Activism and the Liberation of the Self’ examines the relationship between activist subjectivities and the shaping of Britain’s New Left cultures in the late 1960s. She is currently working on a study of the subjectivities of pro-feminist men in 1970s and 1980s Britain. Lawrence Parker lives and works in London. His book, The Kick Inside: Revolutionary Opposition in the CPGB, 1945-91, was published in 2012. Andrew Pearmain is a political historian, whose recent book, The Politics of New Labour, offered a Gramscian analysis of British Labourism. He is also a national expert on HIV/AIDS social care and is a contributing editor to Arena H om m e Plus. David Renton is a barrister at Garden Court chambers, author of several books about fascism and anti-fascism and was previously a member of the national steering committee of Unite Against Fascism (2003-6). Evan Smith is a vice-chancellor’s postdoctoral research fellow in the School of International Studies at Flinders University, South Australia. He has written widely on the post-war history of the Communist Party of Great Britain, anti-racism/fascism and the politics of ‘race’. He is currently conducting a comparative research project of the communist parties in Britain, Australia and South Africa between 1920 and 1960. This content downloaded from 154.59.124.115 on Sun, 11 Feb 2018 10:26:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms List o f contributors ix Satnam Virdee is professor of sociology at the University of Glasgow and founding director of the Centre for Research on Racism, Ethnicity and Nationalism (CRREN). His research focuses on the study of anti-racist collective action and the relationship between racism, nationalism and the socialist left. His book Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider will be published in 2014. Graham Willett is a recovering academic who researches gay and lesbian history. His current project is an examination of the origins and diffusion of homosexual politics in the British world in the 1950s and 1960s. He is an honorary fellow in the school of historical and philosophical studies at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Matthew Worley is professor of modern history at the University of Reading. He has written widely on British politics, including the Communist Party of Great Britain, and is a co-editor of the Twentieth Century Communism journal. He is currently working on a study of the relationship between politics and youth culture, from which an article on the influence of the far left (and far right) on British punk was published in Contemporary British History in 2012. This content downloaded from 154.59.124.115 on Sun, 11 Feb 2018 10:26:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 154.59.124.115 on Sun, 11 Feb 2018 10:26:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Acknowledgements The editors would like to thank the contributors for the time they gave to produce this book.