[Peace-discuss] New Left Review, sponsor of acad. freedom session

[C. G. Estabrook]

	Published on Mute magazine - Culture and politics after the net
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	New Left, Old Pessimism
	By mute | Created 10/10/2007
	By James Heartfield

[Duncan Thompson’s book, Pessimism of the Intellect: A History of the 
New Left Review, painstakingly reconstructs the journal’s long-term 
engagement with the British left from its post-Prague Spring 
reconstitution up until today. Despite the intra-left skirmishes and 
role reversals, the bigger picture that emerges, writes James 
Heartfield, is of the British left’s historical inability to act.]

The late John Merrington told me a story about his first day on the 
editorial board of the New Left Review, being interviewed by Perry 
Anderson in an office with a large map of the world behind him. All over 
the map were little red flags stuck in with pins. ‘Are those all 
outlets’, asked Merrington in wonder? ‘No, they are places that we have 
written about’, said Anderson.

The New Left Review started life as a college-based journal mostly 
edited by dissident members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, 
notably the historian E.P. Thompson and the founder of Cultural Studies 
Stuart Hall in 1960 – an amalgamation of two preceding titles, the 
Universities and Left Review and Thompson’s New Reasoner. The duo that 
gave the journal its style though were two younger recruits, Anderson 
(Eton and Oxford educated, who edited from 1962 to 1983, to take up the 
reins again in 1999) and Robin Blackburn (also Oxford educated, who 
edited it in between, 1983-99). Anderson’s Anglo-Irish father made some 
modest fortune as a customs official in China, capital which would 
subsidise the magazine in its early years.

The New Left Review was possibly more important than its editors 
understood at the time, becoming the defining voice of the New Left. It 
was the New Left Review that opened up the possibilities of a radical 
left that was organisationally distinct from the official Communist 
movement, and denouncing the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, 
avoided responsibility for the disgrace that all-but destroyed the 
membership-haemorrhaging CPGB.

The journal was carried on a wave of trad-jazz listening, duffel-coated 
CND activists, radicals who felt as constrained by the strait-jacket of 
East European Stalinism as they did by the thirteen wasted years of Tory 
misrule (1951-64). Embarrassed by the pedantic style of the 
CP-influenced trade union leaders, these (then) younger radicals fed on 
the satire boom, and looked forward to a left that was, well, cool and 
trendy. The NLR sustained a reputation for exotic and challenging work, 
introducing British audiences to such European intellectuals, living and 
dead, as Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, Claude Levi-Strauss, Mikhail 
Bakhtin, Lucio Colletti, Louis Althusser and Walter Benjamin, as well as 
giving a launch pad here for Francis Mulhern, Terry Eagleton, and 
Americans like Mike Davis, Doug Henwood and David Roediger. Anderson’s 
commitment to translating and popularising these different thinkers 
helped the journal to be more than a political journal. It served the 
growing Cultural Studies movement that was developing across North 
America, and today NLR is financially buoyant because of the library 
subscriptions from American colleges.[1]

The longevity of the NLR meant that one did not always pay attention to 
the editorial line that was often buried under some otiose rhetoric. 
When political conflict was high in Britain, the NLR sometimes seemed 
like so much irritating background noise – a reaction that might be 
philistinism, or just common sense. In writing this admirably clear and 
compelling book Duncan Thompson seems to have done the obvious and 
remarkable thing: he has read through the NLR in its entirety. His 
access to the internal documents sheds some light, but most compelling 
of all is his reconstruction of the intellectual journey the review took 
over its 47-year history.

As well as a determination to educate the English philistines, Anderson 
showed a talent for setting out the big picture, and was not bad at 
asking the question where are we at, particularly homing in on the 
paradox that the Communist left had won out in the worst possible 
circumstances, the underdeveloped East, while capitalism held sway where 
the working class was most advanced. But despite the grandiose 
statements, the underlying weakness of the NLR was its own sense of 
inadequacy to the moment, which gave rise to a tendency to invest great 
hopes in new social forces. An internal bulletin written in 1980 summed 
up the problem astutely:

‘Ever since the early sixties, the review had looked with hope to one 
potential agent after another to unhinge the ruling political order in 
England – each time overstating its radicalism or staying power.[2]

At various points the academics that made up the NLR editorial board 
glommed on to passing trends. Harold Wilson’s Labour Party was ‘the 
dynamic left-wing of European Social Democracy[3] and leading figures in 
the administration like Richard Crossman and Thomas Balogh were invited 
to write for the review. The left’s investment in Wilson’s white heat of 
the technological revolution was bound to be disappointed as he 
accommodated himself to power, and rather like Tony Blair he became in 
turn a great hate figure (moral support for the Vietnam war being 
emblematic for the left).

‘Build Red Bases’, wrote the New Left Review in January 1969, echoing 
Mao’s call for dual power in the countryside, except they were talking 
about the universities, hot with Vietnam protests, and echoes of the May 
Paris student riots. We must ask ourselves, wrote Robin Blackburn 
‘whether the complex structures of late capitalism do not contain areas, 
sociologically inaccessible to the repressive forces of the ruling class 
which can become growing points of revolutionary power’.[4] Student 
activism was important, but in sociological terms it was not 
independence from capitalism that marked it out, but an openness to 
change that just as readily launched Richard Branson’s Virgin Records 
and Tim Puttnam’s Enigma Productions as revolutionary sloganeering. And 
though its explicit political ambitions for the students did not come to 
pass, it did the NLR no harm to insert itself into the consciousness of 
the sixties radicals that would go on to make up the culturati.

Duncan Thompson makes much of Peter Sedgwick’s criticism of the 
‘Olympian detachment’ of the NLR. Sedgwick, who had been involved with 
the early Universities and Left Review went on to join the International 
Socialists (today’s Socialist Workers’ Party). For them it was the NLR’s 
stand-offishness from working class struggle that was the issue. There 
is some sense to the argument. It was ‘Olympian detachment’ that drove 
Tom Nairn’s disdain for Britishness, and his preference for the Common 
Market, and led to a preference for covering the struggles in the 
Italian labour movement to those in Britain’s. But much more important a 
failing was the NLR’s mundane attachment to whichever radical current 
offered itself as a vehicle for change.

Far from being too theoretical the Review was not theoretical enough. 
The tendency to manufacture deep sociological explanations for transient 
events certainly showed literary productivity, but it would be wrong to 
see that as necessarily representing theoretical work. ‘Theories’ were 
produced that in the end only echoed contemporary trends, without really 
criticising them. So between them Anderson and Tom Nairn manufactured 
the theory that Britain’s political revolution was, unlike its 
Continental counterparts, incomplete; an argument that became known as 
the Nairn-Anderson thesis. The idea was that the emerging capitalist 
class in Britain had done a deal with the old aristocracy to gain 
influence, leaving the old pre-democratic power structures in place; the 
inordinate influence of the City of London over the British economy, 
with its old-Etonian clubbishness, Nairn and Anderson thought, was 
evidence of the persistence of a ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism’.

Today it is not hard to see that they had just created a radical version 
of Harold Wilson’s demotic denunciation of the Tories, with its 
ideological abandonment of class struggle in favour of ‘modernisation’. 
The wholly false characterisation of Britain’s gentlemanly capitalism 
that Nairn and Anderson formulated continued to confuse radicals for a 
generation. In 1988, NLR Editorial Board member Anthony Barnett 
distracted a disappointed left into the desert of Constitutional Reform 
to complete the bourgeois revolution with the organisation Charter 88; 
in 1995 Will Hutton retailed a version of the Nairn-Anderson thesis in 
his book The State We’re In effectively drafting Tony Blair’s apolitical 
modernisation agenda.

Of course, the NLR was capable of getting the answer formally right, and 
often did. Anderson himself noted that Wilson’s criticisms of capitalism 
suffered a ‘consistent displacement of attention from essential to 
inessential’, but then followed him anyway.[5] NLR contributors like 
Michael Barret Brown and Ernest Mandel rejected the Third Worldist 
argument that there was an inherent conflict between the working class 
in the West and the poor of the Third World.[6] But such points were 
lost in the rhetorical fervour for a Third World revolution led by 
Castro, Guevara and Mao. These were in fact critical reflections on the 
journal’s own tendency to lionise the Third World revolution while 
remaining sceptical about the potential of the British working class. On 
similar lines, Thompson points out an intriguing 1971 article on 
feminism arguing, rightly, that the ‘ideology which characterises the 
women’s liberation movement’, is ‘often explicitly and bitterly 
anti-Marxist[7] – a criticism not often made today.

None of the core editorial team, though, had much familiarity with 
Marx’s critique of political economy, and Thompson puts it fairly when 
he says they were ‘less interested in economics and more attuned to 
political and questions of political strategy’.[8] Of course social 
processes, like the course of the economy, demand a lot more reflection, 
whereas politics is all on the surface and everyone can be an expert. In 
practice the editorial team found it easier to defer to boffins like Bob 
Rowthorn and Ernest Mandel to handle the economics, which tended then to 
be treated as a discrete subject.[9] Leaving the economics to someone 
else was a failing that would leave the Review accommodating to Geoffrey 
Hodgson’s fashionable rejection of Marx’s theory of economic crisis at 
the exact moment that it was strikingly confirmed.[10] That socialists 
had such faith in the durability of capitalism is at least part of the 
reason that the system did survive a crisis whose outcome was far from 
certain. Today, at the point that the capitalist economy has stabilised, 
the Review gives table room to Robert Brenner’s impressionistic 
predictions of financial melt-down.[11]

Another striking blindspot was the NLR’s lack of coverage of the British 
military occupation of northern Ireland from 1969 (the British Army’s 
‘operation banner’ was only formally wound up in August 2007). Where 
student rebellions, Wilson’s government and the Scottish National Party 
were all lauded as a challenge to the British state, the one profound 
challenge to state power by the Irish Republican Army was ignored. 
Despite the existence of a ‘full-scale civil war’ an internal bulletin 
admitted that ‘a tacit impasse’ on the editorial board meant that ‘by 
common consent’, the question of Ireland was ‘avoided in the NLR.[12] 
What was the nature of the ‘common consent’? At the time many of us 
thought that it was Anderson’s own Anglo-Irish background, which he 
shared with another board member, Fred Halliday, that gave rise to the 
Review’s silence on the repression in Ireland. Certainly Halliday and 
Blackburn indulged the pro-Unionist Workers’ Party’s characterisations 
of Republicanism as a reactionary force, and support for the national 
claims of unionism. In the end the personal loyalties were less 
important than the fact that this was one issue where the British left 
entirely abdicated responsibility.[13] In the case of the NLR, Thompson 
works out, the silence lasted twenty-five years, broken only by the 
publication of an article by the Workers’ Party fellow-travellers Henry 
Patterson and Ellen Hazelkorn in 1994. Imagine if The Village Voice had 
given the American military a pass on its war in Vietnam, or 
Counterpunch refused to comment on the invasion of Iraq.

The shortcoming in the Review’s claim to novelty were exposed in the 
1980s, when it rallied to the cause of the Labour left in its struggle 
for the party leadership. This radical turn in the Labour Party was in 
fact an after-effect of the country’s swing to the right. The leftists 
had all re-joined Labour, where they were well-represented in the 
constituency organisation, just as the Party’s trade union paymasters 
(who had been a moderating influence) withdrew, fed up at the Callaghan 
government’s attacks on them. The left’s leader Tony Benn, and his 
revivalist, back-to-1945 socialism was lauded in the Review: ‘A new 
labour left with impressive rank and file strength is engaged in a 
pitched struggle with the quasi-dynastic authority of the parliamentary 
party’.[14]

Joining Benn’s bandwagon pulled the NLR onto unfamiliar ground – left 
wing traditionalism. The Communist Party of Great Britain, still 
smarting at their losses in the struggle for the youth of 1968, adopted 
a pointedly revisionist pose with the relaunch of their journal Marxism 
Today edited by Martin Jacques. The roles were reversed: MT was trendy, 
NLR fusty. It was a difficult time to be on the left, caught between the 
Scylla of MT’s specious ‘new thinking’ (Blairite de-politicisation 
before its time) and the Charybdis of Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill’s 
‘resolute Left’. On the Review, funnily enough, it was the late Ralph 
Miliband, father of New Labour ministers Ed and David, who led the 
assault on Jacques’ new thinking along with Goran Therborn and 
University and Left Review veteran Raphael Samuel. Samuel made some 
strong points against the ‘filofax Marxists’ and ‘Designer socialists’ 
Marxism Today: ‘taking its cue from feminism, it counterposed “new 
social forces” to the “pre-historic” ones …Workers, at any rate male 
workers, appear as objects of contempt, “racist” and “sexist,” 
beer-swilling and pot-bellied, loud-mouthed and according to Marxism 
Today’s fashion writers, the wearers of shapeless clothes’.[15] Of 
course the category ‘new social forces’ (more often ‘new social 
movements’) was a short-hand for the constituencies that the NLR itself 
had lauded previously: students, CND activists, Third Worldists, 
minority nationalisms.

The problem with this rearguard action against the ‘filofax Marxists’ 
was that the NLR’s resistance to ‘anti-welfare state, anti-union and 
anti-party’ ideologies was boxing it into a defence of the very 
organisations that had failed the working class – the welfare state, the 
trade unions, and the Labour Party. Defensiveness bred conservatism, 
when only a forward-looking policy could have presented a real challenge 
to the emergence of a Marxism Today-scripted New Labour Party.

The all-too-predictable failure of the resolute left, shunned by the 
very class it claimed to defend, left the NLR in disarray. Thompson 
gives a good account of the internal dissent that wracked the Review, 
which explains a lot of the subsequent trajectory of many embittered 
leftists today. It is intriguing, for example, to discover that some of 
the key ideologues of the left’s humanitarian intervention policy, the 
husband-and-wife team Quintin Hoare and Branka Magas who spear-headed 
the case for intervention in Bosnia in 1996, and Euston Manifesto 
blogger Norman Geras were the International Marxist Group’s faction on 
the NLR editorial board. In Marxism Today, Fred Halliday lent support to 
the 1991 war against Iraq on the grounds that this was a UN war, not an 
imperialist one. Anderson, though, had the good sense to pull the Review 
back from the radical trend for supporting humanitarian imperialism.

Interesting, too, is the relationship that the Review had with the 
organised left-wing parties, flirting with Maoism and Trotskyism in 
turn, but never losing the organisational independence of the Review, 
which according to one insider acted as a ‘fantasy politbureau’.[16] 
Perhaps surprising, given the Review’s defining role in the formation of 
the New Left, is how they saw it as largely a movement outside of them, 
that they were intervening in, seeking to win over. When Anderson 
surprised everyone by resuming editorial duties in 1999 he wrote ‘the 
life-span of journals is no warrant of their achievement’ in the kind of 
reflective editorial he was best at: ‘A couple of issues, and abrupt 
extinction, can count for more in the history of a culture than a 
century of continuous publication’.[17] The New Left Review’s 
contribution to the intellectual life of the English-speaking world has 
indeed been profound. But on the essential question of the working class 
challenge to the survival of capitalism, the NLR’s intellectual heritage 
summarises the left’s failure to act.

Duncan Thompson, Pessimism of the Intellect: A History of the New Left 
Review, Merlin Press, 2007

Footnotes

[1] Since the late sixties, one 1984 editorial memo noted, ‘between a 
half and two-thirds of the Review’s readers have been overseas, with a 
particular concentration in North America, Northern Europe, Australia 
and Japan’, Thompson, p 211.

[2] Thompson, 99

[3] NLR September 1964, Thompson, p 27

[4] Thomson, 54

[5] NLR September 1964, Thompson, p 27

[6] Thompson, 35

[7] Thompson, 94, the author was Branka Magas

[8] Thompson, 74; rather late in the day, Blackburn wrote a long book 
about pension funds, Banking on Death, 2002

[9] This is perhaps why the Bulletin of the Conference of Socialist 
Economists, later Capital and Class, which in political outlook was 
hardly that distinct from the NLR, survived as a specialist journal.

[10] ‘The theory of the falling rate of profit’, NLR, March 1974; 
Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, 115;

[11] See Heartfield, Zombie Anti-Imperalists vs. the ‘Empire’, 
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CA6BA.htm

[12] A Decennial Report, 1974; Thompson, 95

[13] See for example the account of the Guardian newspaper’s 
aggressively anti-Republican stance in Murray McDonald’s comic 
masterpiece 50,000 Editions of the Imperialist, Warmongering, 
Hate-Filled Guardian Newspaper, 2007

[14] NLR September 1981; Thompson, 116

[15] Thompson, 128; NLR September 1987

[16] Thompson, 123

[17] January 2000

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