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Chapter One History and Historiography of the New Left in Britain Chapter One History and Historiography of the New Left in Britain I 1956 was something like a ‘Year Zero’ for sections of the European Left. Sheila Rowbotham, from the per- spective of the late 1970s, called it the beginning of ‘modern times’.1 De-Stalinisation, dissident-communist attempts to ‘humanise’ socialism, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, the gathering strength of Labour revision- ism and the Suez crisis: 1956 would prove a tocsin and a touchstone for a revaluation of the socialist princi- ple across Europe.2 The New Left in Britain was born in relation to these international and national con- junctures. In the familiar story of post-war European socialism, ‘new’ Lefts emerged on the one hand as a product of discontent with international communism and social democracy, and, on the other, as a response to ‘old’ and ‘new’ imperialisms and transformations in the capitalist mode of production. Constituted at the interface of these currents, the New Left in Britain reflected and reflected upon a fractured and uneven geography of politics, culture and interest throughout its history. In truth, 1956 was not a ‘Year Zero’. Like all politi- cal movements, the New Left drew selectively on the past.3 The ‘religion of socialism’, the Plebs League, 1. Rowbotham 1979, p. 21. 2. Sassoon 1997, pp. 241–73; Eley 2002, pp. 329–39. 3. I find Lin Chun’s suggestion that the New Left ‘seriously neglected or underrated’ the ‘positive and vital elements in the legacy of traditional English socialism’ to be inad- equate as a characterisation of the New Left’s engagement with socialism’s past. See Chun 1993, p. xvi. 2 • Chapter One G.D.H. Cole’s guild-socialism, and the ‘creative Marxism’ of the 1930s, might all be included among those immediate portents in politics and thought that allowed the New Left to distinguish itself in the tradition of British socialism.4 Indeed, the degree to which the New Left drew on ‘mainstream’ socialist ideas should not be overlooked. There was a constant tension between the New Left’s ambition to found new socialist ideas and its attempt to rediscover an ‘essential’ socialism obscured by communist and social-democratic theory and practice. If there was a ‘core’ to socialism, then the New Left found it in a philosophical anthropology that stressed co-operation, community and human creativity. But if the New Left reinserted a utopian element into socialist discourse it nonetheless argued for steel-nationalisation, an incomes-policy and a socialist national plan. II The emergence of the New Left in Britain is conventionally dated from the for- mation of two independent-socialist journals following the events of 1956: New Reasoner, direct descendant of The Reasoner,5 and Universities and Left Review. Both journals (eventually) positioned the New Left as an alternative to com- munism and social democracy, with a stress on the need to remake social- ism through an emphasis on moral values, feeling and imagination, and a matched imperative to render it correspondent to transformations in capital- ist productive relations. However, the sterilities of post-war socialism and its discord with contemporary political economy were widely remarked upon in the early-to-mid-1950s. From R.H.S. Crossman’s 1950 book Socialist Values in a Changing Civilization to Anthony Crosland’s 1956 The Future of Socialism, social- ists across the Left spectrum identified political archaism and an absence of ‘spirit’ as characteristic of socialism’s contemporary malaise.6 The New Left was unique because it argued for socialism’s rescue through the recuperation of its moral essence and contended that such redemption could only happen outside socialism’s customary political manifestations. Thus the New Left located itself in the awkward position of at once valuing and rejecting the tradition that informed its ambitions. New Reasoner was established and edited by former Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) partisans E.P. Thompson, Dorothy Thompson and John Saville in northern England, home to the industrial working class typically outcast from 4. Yeo 1977, pp. 5–56; Miles 1984, pp. 102–14; MacIntyre 1980, p. 181; Coombes 1980. 5. Saville 1976, pp. 1–23. 6. Crossman 1950; Crosland 1956. See Black 2003, p. 12..
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