Perry Anderson

For a decade in Britain, under Conservative rule, there was a recognizable andactive Left. Now at last there is a Labour Government. But there is no longer, inthe same sense, a Left. This paradox must be the starting-point of any considera-tion of the tasks confronting socialists today. Clearly, the most urgent need is torecreate an independent, combative Left, with its own goals and its own time-table. A condition of success in this is a critical assessment of the Left which hasjust disappeared. Without such an assessment, it is unlikely that anythingdurable will emerge in the search for a new strategy. For any future Left willhave to learn the lessons of the past. These lessons concern not so much themistakes of the Left in the Fifties, as its character. It is this which requires aprecise and lucid analysis today.

There now seems to be a tacit agreement among socialists to bury the past. Thetemptation to maintain a discreet silence, to forget old quarrels, to look onlytowards the future, is understandable. But no attempt to consider the possibili-ties of the present will be viable unless it starts from some examination of theconflicts and contradictions which led up to it.

The Left in the Fifties

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There is no need here to recount the course of events in the Labourmovement over the past decade, after the fall of the Attlee governmentin 1951. The rise of Bevanism, the conflict over German Rearmament,the loss of the 1955 election, the accession of Gaitskell to the leader-ship, the adoption of Industry and Society, the first Aldermaston March,the defeat in the 1959 election, the fight over Clause Four, the bitterstruggle over unilateralism, the final victory of Gaitskell, the publicationof Signposts for the Sixties, unity in opposition to the Common Market,Gaitskell’s death — all these are fresh in everyone’s memory. More-over, at this point of time, any full attempt to retrace and synthesize theintricate political struggles within the Labour Party would necessarilyfail. However, looking back at the development of the party since 1951,certain permanent themes are clearly visible. It is in terms of them—and the conflicts they engendered—that the analysis sketched belowwill be made. The remarks which follow will inevitably be schematic.No subject is so contentious or difficult to seize. The focus of the ana-lysis will be, not the political narrative of the period, but the sociologyof its actors and the ideology of their interventions. In each case, ex-tremely complex and variegated phenomena will be brusquely simplifiedand ‘essentialized’ for the purposes of discussion: the requirementsof a short article make this inevitable. Within these limitations, whatapproximate balance-sheet can be drawn up of this anguished, parcheddecade?

General context

Two problems have dominated the struggle for socialism in Britainfrom the turn of the fifties onwards: ‘affluence’ and the ‘cold war’.These issues have provided the deepest experience of the EuropeanSocialist movement in our time. By the early fifties, Keynesian capital-ism had eliminated mass unemployment and allowed a steady increasein the material standard of living of the working-class. It therebyappeared to annul the positive case for socialism that had been made for50 years by the working-class movement: that capitalism was unable toprevent cyclical hunger and destitution. Simultaneously, the Cold Warallowed capitalist régimes everywhere to establish a powerful negativeidentification of socialism with the political order of the Soviet Unionunder Stalin—and to mobilize their populations for a suicidal militaryconfrontation with Russia. Full employment and rising incomesrendered the classical socialist solutions—in particular social ownershipof the means of production—redundant; the spectre of Russian‘totalitarianism’ rendered them menacing. An insurmountable, doubletaboo fell on them. Its effect was to create an ideological barrier whichblocked the Labour movement’s outward political advance and driedup its every inner impulse. Socialism was stopped dead everywhere inEurope, while the world slipped towards destruction.

This was the general historical context of the fifties. In Britain, it ex-ploded a dramatic struggle within the party of the working-class, whoseenigmatic aftermath we inherit today. What forces were at work?What were their ideas? What is their legacy?

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Public ownership

The first skirmishes over public ownership were fought at the 1952and 1953 Party Conferences. The leadership carried the day fairlyeasily on both occasions. Challenge for Britain, the 1953 policy document,besides proposing to re nationalize steel and road transport, made con-ditional promises of selective socialization in medium and light in-dustry (engineering, chemicals, etc). At this stage, however, tacticalrather than doctrinal reasons were advanced for the refusal to be com-mitted to anything more than this. No major theoretical debate overpublic ownership marked these years. It was the Labour Party’s defeatin 1955 which provided the impetus for this. Within a year, Gaitskellhad written his pamphlet Socialism and Nationalization and—above all—Crosland had published The Future of Socialism. Both writers directlyattacked the idea that social ownership was any longer indispensable tothe realization of socialism. Crosland flatly described British society as‘post-capitalist’, and—while conceding the need for some limited,empirical measures of nationalization—dismissed the traditionalreasons for public ownership as anachronistic. It is important to re-member what he thought these reasons to be. Basically, they were three:common ownership had been believed to ensure economic efficiency(through increases in technical scale), full employment (through theinvestment policies of public industries) and redistribution of income(through expropriation of capital). Crosland had little difficulty inshowing that further nationalizations were largely irrelevant to in-creased efficiency (exaggeration of scale can reduce productivity), wereunnecessary for full employment (the Conservative Government wasmaintaining that), and were ineffective for income redistribution (com-pensation restored with one hand what nationalization had taken withthe other). To clinch mutters, he made it clear that, if extended unduly,nationalizations were a threat to political freedom: ‘I at least do notwant a chain of State monopolies, believing this to be bad for liberty . . .’Crosland then set out what he believed should be the main goals of amodern socialist party in a prosperous, fully employed Britain. Thesewere: increases in social welfare, educational equality, and income re-distribution. None of them depended on any major extensions of publicownership.

The following year, Industry and Society was drafted, presented and dulyapproved by a Labour Party Conference at Brighton. It erected intofundamental policy an idea which Crosland had tentatively discussed inhis book. It also went further than Crosland had done, either in hisanalysis or his programme. For the first time in the history of theLabour Party, capitalist industry was formally legitimated as sociallyresponsible and useful. In a famous, ineffable phrase, British firmswere declared to be ‘on the whole, serving the nation well’.Instead of taking industries into public ownership, a Labour Govern-ment would make public purchases of—non-controlling—shares inprivate companies on the stock exchange. In effect, the subordination ofthe market to the State was to be superseded by the incorporation ofthe State into the market. This solution was probably unique even inthe annals of social-democracy.

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The Labour Party fought the election of 1959 on this platform, andlost even more heavily than in 1955. The Right in the party immediatelycame to the conclusion that one of the main causes of defeat was—precisely Industry and Society. The ‘vague references’ to the 600 largestfirms in Britain had understandably alarmed middle-of-the-road voters.The only way to reassure them was, not merely to drop the proposals inIndustry and Society, but to erase the very mention of socialization fromthe Party’s constitution. Gaitskell, speaking to the post-election con-ference at Blackpool in 1959, denounced the responsibility of ClauseFour for the party’s electoral defeat, and called for its elimination. It was,then, on this issue that the show-down came. Although the Left in theparty made clear its enraged opposition, the battle was not fought outin the open. Gaitskell’s proposal was finally killed in the obscurity andsilence of an NEC meeting. But there is little doubt what happened.Faced with the prospect of a public, irreversible cancellation of one ofthe historic aims of the Labour movement, inscribed in the constitutionof the party, not merely the Left but much of the Right rebelled. Manyof the union conferences of that spring had already voted against theabolition of Clause Four. It seems certain that it was the right-wingunionists—normally the most obdurately reactionary single element inthe party—who voted the motion down in the NEC. What had happen-ed? The proposal to abolish Clause Four appeared to have everythingon its side: the full power and prestige of the party leader and hislieutenants, a severe loss of confidence in the movement, and a solid,well-argued body of argument in print. Against this, the supporters ofClause Four, in early 1960, had almost nothing: there was no serioustheory of public ownership on the Left, and there was considerableevidence to suggest that it was unpopular electorally. Yet they pre-vailed. How? This critical moment in the Labour Party’s history—when its official raison d’être hung in the balance can only be under-stood in terms of its whole character and evolution.

In an earlier essay, I suggested that the specific, historical character ofthe working-class movement in England has been the combination ofan impermeable corporate class consciousness with a radical lack ofhegemonic ambition.1 This paradox was never seen to clearer effectthan in the preservation of Clause Four. The commitment of theLabour Party to the common ownership of the means of production,distribution and exchange had been written into its constitution bySidney Webb in 1918. Never in all its history had this clause come nearto being an operative goal of the Labour Party. It did not spell out anyfundamental will to transform society, or any transfiguring vision of anew social order. It was rather, for the majority of the party, sentimentand symbol, at once a consolation and evasion of the real. In due course,it became part of the hallowed historical baggage of the movement, andso acquired all the inertia of the Party itself. Thus the defence ofClause Four in 1960 by extreme Right working-class trade-unionistsdid not involve any attachment to the living values of an ideology—only to the dead sediment of a tradition. By a characteristic irony, whatmight have been the premise of a hegemonic social vision had become

1 The terms ‘hegemonic’, and ‘corporate’ are discussed at length in ‘Origins of thePresent Crisis’. NLR 23.

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the postscript of an introverted corporatism. The apparent mystery ofthe leadership’s defeat is thus understandable. It was precisely becausethere were so few arguments for Clause Four that it retained so many supporters;the more it meant, the fewer it would have rallied. It was saved, in a sense, byits very innocuousness.

Just over a year later, the Party released its new policy document,Signposts for the Sixties. It was at once obvious that the high-tide of theRight had receded. A complex of pressures had at last, for the firsttime since 1951, succeeded in shifting the Party’s positions somewhat tothe Left. Among these, two were pre-eminent. In the first place, theanaemia and lethargy of British capitalism was becoming more andmore evident. Domestic prosperity had screened its disastrous inter-national performance as late as 1959. But by 1961 it was unmistakable.Events had spectacularly rebuffed the belief that British industry was onthe whole ‘serving the nation well’. Thus the strictly economiclegitimation of British capitalism had virtually collapsed.

At the same time, its social rationale had come under a new andmordant attack. In 1958 Galbraith had published The Affluent Society.In a celebrated phrase, he argued that the overwhelming social evil ofAmerican capitalism was its combination of private opulence withpublic squalor. Maximization of profit was unable to satisfy social asopposed to individual needs: schools, parks and roads decayed whileautomobiles, electrical appliances and detergents multiplied. ‘The linewhich divides our area of wealth from our area of poverty is roughlythat which divides privately produced and marketed goods and servicesfrom publicly rendered services. Our wealth in the first is not only instartling contrast with the meagreness of the latter, but our wealth inprivately produced goods is, to a marked degree, the cause of crisis inthe supply of public services.’ This idea is so familiar now, that it maybe difficult to remember its novelty at the time. It is enough to pointout that Crosland’s work, The Future of Socialism contained just one(indirect) paragraph on the problem—in 500 pages of discussion ofcontemporary socialist objectives.2 Thus a frontal attack on the socialpriorities of capitalism was fresh and radical. It was some two yearsbefore it gained much currency in Britain.

In April 1960, just as the attempt to annul Clause Four was coming toan end, Charles Taylor published an article in New Left Review, whichtook up Galbraith’s analysis, applied it to British society and arguedthat only common ownership of the means of production could alterthe inhuman priorities of capitalism.3 Galbraith, of course, had believedthat the simple device of a general sales tax would be sufficient tocorrect what he called ‘social imbalance’ in the USA. Taylor’s argumentwas thus effectively the first new theory of public ownership offered onthe Left. It was soon taken up and merged with an attack on the torporof the British economy, by Crossman. In his pamphlet Labour in theAffluent Society, published in June 1960, Crossman at one stroke com-bined both of the new criticisms of British capitalism: it was inefficient—

2 The Future of Socialism, p. 112.3 ‘What’s Wrong with Capitalism?’ NLR 3, May-June 1960.

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unable to compete with the dynamic of the Communist economies, andimmoral—permanently biased towards consumer frivolities at theexpense of social needs. The solution to both problems was a greatlyextended public sector, which alone could ensure a faster rate ofgrowth and a fair balance between social and private goods. I havecriticized the validity of this case for public ownership in an earlierarticle,4 and it has since come under damaging attack from the Right; itis, in fact, very weak. However, it was soon having a visible impact onthe balance of doctrine in the Labour Party.

Signposts for the Sixties, the final outcome of the ten-year battle overLabour’s road to socialism, was released in the early summer of 1961.It was a sensitive index of the new conjuncture. Both of the currentLeft arguments found their place in the document. The failures ofBritish capitalism were denounced with some acerbity. The languagenow used was very different from the accolades of 1957. ‘With certainhonourable exceptions, our finance and industry need a major shake-upat the top . . . The story of the last ten years is one of wasted opportuni-ties and limping progress.’ The indictment of social imbalance wasequally sharp: ‘There is the contrast between starved community ser-vices and extravagant consumption. . . The building of luxury flats andnew offices, for example, continues completely uncontrolled while theGovernment makes it as difficult as possible for local authorities to endthe housing shortage by building council houses at reasonable rents. . .The motor-car industry is now doubling its productive capacity. Butpublic enterprise is not allowed to build the roads on which to drivethe cars. . .’ The document added, following Galbraith’s analysis to theletter: ‘This unbalance of the economy is made worse by commercialadvertising, which artificially stimulates private as opposed to com-munity wants. . . As a result, we have a wide choice of detergents andcosmetics, but not enough flats to live in.’ It went on to attack the‘small and compact oligarchy’ at the top of British society. WhereIndustry and Society had effusively greeted ‘the divorce between owner-ship and control’ in British industry, Signposts for the Sixties statedflatly: ‘The economy is still dominated by a small ruling caste’. Rarelyhas a political party reversed its theoretical positions so swiftly and sosweepingly.

Thus, the social analysis of the new programme echoed fairly closelytheses current on the Left. The conclusions it drew, however, werequite distinctive. Instead of calling for a structural extension of thepublic sector by a wide transfer of existing industries from private topublic ownership, it in effect proposed to build up the public sector

4 ‘The Swedish Model’, NLR 7 and 9, January-February and May-June 1961. Itwould take too long to rehearse the argument here. It can be summed up saying thatthe attempt to locate the basic oppression of capitalism simply in the imbalance ofsocial and private goods is altogether too facile. To predicate public ownership on thisproblem is to trivialize its significance and lose the argument in advance: for undercertain historical conditions, capitalism can achieve a relatively ‘fair’ balance of thetwo. Sweden is a striking example. Social imbalance is thus in no sense an insolublecontradiction of capitalism, as Crosland had little difficulty in pointing out subse-quently (The Conservative Enemy). The real significance of public ownership is situatedat a much more fundamental level, in the recovery of an alienated economy andsociety.

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alongside an intact private sector, by creating new public enterprises inthe ‘science-based’ and ‘growth’ industries, where the government al-ready finances the bulk of research. This idea was, politically, a smallmasterpiece. Throughout the fifties, the Party had been stalemated bythe conflicting pressures of the Left, arguing that common ownershipwas intrinsic to any definition of socialism, and the Right, arguing thatnationalization was so unpopular that it was disastrous electorally. Oneof the main reasons for its unpopularity was notoriously the fact thatthe main industries that the Attlee government had chosen to socializewere backward and bankrupt; this had given nationalization its draband down-at-heel image in Britain, which the Conservative Party hadexploited with such sucess. The new programme, with great artistry,proposed to redress this situation, which had long been a source ofbitterness to its militants. Instead of taking over ancient and ruinedindustries, a Labour Government would create its own, advanced andprofitable, industries. The idea was calculated to gratify the Left. Atthe same time, it neatly circumvented the classic objections of the Right.For since it was no longer a question of expropriation, public owner-ship need not be damaging electorally. Indeed the tables could now beturned on the Conservatives. If the Government was providing thefunds for research, was it not doctrinaire to oppose the creation ofpublic enterprises based on that research—particularly if they were tobe sited in depressed regions where private industry refused to go?The Labour Party had, in fact, at last succeeded in seizing the initiative.

The fifties in effect, had seen a long drawn-out battle within the Partyin which both sides had been on the defensive. The Right, dominatingthe Party leadership, the permanent bureaucracy, the parliamentaryparty and bulk of the unions, was continually on the defensive beforethe consumer prosperity of the fifties. Its only response to the newaffluence was negative: it tried to jettison the traditional banners of thepast, which had become an embarrassing burden in the present.Trapped by the Right’s control of the Party, the Left reacted defensivelyin its turn, fighting to preserve the historic aims of the movement, butno longer able confidently or adequately to justify them. Given theright-wing majority in the Party’s institutions, the attempt to purge theLabour Party progressively of all commitment to public ownershipshould, logically, have been successful. In 1960, after all, the GermanSocial-Democratic Party, historically the very fountain of WesternEuropean Marxism, and throughout its existence infinitely more‘ideological’ than the Labour Party, had seen a similar attempt. It hadsuccumbed totally—henceforward preaching ‘competition’ as thedefinition of the good society. The Labour Party, apparently so mucheasier a victim, proved, much harder to change. The major lesson ofthese years was the enduring force, even in its most atrophied form, ofthat deep sense of being a distinct community in society, which is thesubstance of the class-consciousness of the British Labour Movement.It was this that finally saved the day. Afterwards, a new political situa-tion developed, and—apparently—new solutions emerged. One of themen most responsible for them, Peter Shore, recently gave his view ofthe decade: ‘The Labour Party remains an anti-capitalist party. We are,moreover, almost the only Socialist Party in Western Europe that hasnot abandoned its doctrine.’

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Nuclear disarmament

The second great conflict of these years was altogether different incharacter. The history of unilateralism was not marked by muchtheoretical debate, but it did involve an authentic mass movement, theonly one in Britain in this period.

The fight over German rearmament can, and has, been seen as a directprelude to the dramatic battle over nuclear disarmament. In one sense,the connection is obvious and fundamental: both were concerned withthe international logic of the Cold War. But in another sense thedifferences were very great. For the movement which sprang up afterthe Aldermaston March of 1958 was sociologically a quite distinctphenomenon. German Rearmament was fought within the LabourParty, by its traditional Left—militants in the constituencies and branchcommittees, and leaders in parliament. It had been a conventionalpolitical issue, involving nationalist as well as socialist sentiment.Once made, the decision was irreversible: the issue was buried with theratification of the Paris treaties. Four years later, it was no longerprimarily the political but the military logic of the Cold War that was atstake. With the development of the hydrogen bomb, the conflict be-tween East and West threatened the existence of the human race itself.It was in response to this ultimate challenge that the Campaign forNuclear Disarmament was born.

There is no space here for an adequate analysis of the complexities ofCND. But some preliminary remarks are possible. The immense appealand success of the Campaign, which for a time renovated Britishpolitics, cannot be understood simply in terms of the traditional Leftin the Labour Party, or even of the younger Left which joined it in theyears after 1956. Its final, irreducible strength lay elsewhere. Its lineagewas that of the Campaigns against the Slave Trade, Governor Eyre,the Bulgarian Atrocities, the Boer War. Authentic English liberalismwas fighting its last, and most critical battle. The moral consciousness ofthat section of the middle-class which has traditionally been thesanctuary of liberal values in Britain, was seized, like no other, byimages of infinite destruction, the abolition of man. It responded withits finest energies, maintaining a passionate pressure for change underthe most adverse historical circumstances. The campaign which re-sulted surpassed anything in its earlier history.

Of course, CND was not simply a product of English liberalism. Thebulk of its leadership—Collins, Russell, Priestley, etc—came from thistradition. But the base of the movement was very different in character.CND also marked the revolt of great numbers of working-class andlower middle-class youth against the whole society of which thehydrogen bomb had become the sanction. This revolt was made pos-sible by the relative prosperity diffused by British capitalism in thefifties,5 which created the purchasing-power and leisure which were thepreconditions of an autonomous teenage world. It was made necessary

5 Leaving a huge undertow of misery and neglect—the submerged fifth of thepopulation.

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by the new institutional pattern of this capitalism, which denied ordeformed the satisfaction of the very possibilities which it created. Areified and abstract society, co-ordinated in ever greater bureaucraticcomplexes, everywhere negating human meaning and control, expro-priated the work and confiscated the leisure of its newest and leastbroken recruits. It was against the increasing impotence and im-personality of social life in Britain that youth revolted, in the name ofits own potential emancipation. For the young, thermonuclear weaponswere not merely a specific threat to the future, they were the generaltruth of the present: their radical lack of control over the forces govern-ing their lives. In this sense, the hydrogen bomb became the centralmyth of the society itself.6 In refusing it, the campaigners necessarilyrefused the forms of organization of which it was the ultimate logic.Thus CND became a movement of protest, not only in its aims, but inits methods and organization. Confronted with the atrophy of politicalparties and the bureaucratization of public life, it was a pure affirmationof spontaneity and democracy, a living refusal of the petrified societyaround it. As its leaders always claimed, it was a ‘new kind of politics’.It was the only kind which moved large masses of people in this period.

The explosive force of this new phenomenon caught up the traditionalLeft, swept into the Labour movement, and for a moment looked as ifit might succeed in storming its heights. In the end, however, it fellback. It has not recovered its momentum since.

Why did CND finally fail to leave a lasting imprint on the Labour Partyin these years? The obvious answer is that there was a basic incom-patibility of nature between the two organizations—the heavy, druggedbureaucracy of the Labour Party, and the volatile, nomadic improvisa-tion of the Campaign. But this is clearly not the whole, or even themost important, explanation. The final impasse of CND was the resultof a political failure, not simply an organizational one. It had been unableto present a coherent and comprehensive alternative to the officialpolicies of the Labour Party—policies, which were, of course, en-shrined as the ‘consensus’ of British society as a whole. What was thereason for this inability?

Looking back, it can be seen that, historically, English liberalism—while it has always retained a pervasive, obstinate presence in Britishsociety—has never achieved an ascendant position within it. It hastempered a system, at home and abroad, which it has never determined.This mild and myopic creed, the traditional idiom of the Englishintelligentsia and professional middle-class has never—any more thanthe engrained resistances and reflexes of the working-class—become ahegemonic force in Britain. It has always been a secondary phenomenonwithin the larger society. Partly as a result of the political alliances ofthe 19th century, the Labour Party from its inception inherited thisliberalism, which thereafter became a permanent ingredient of itsheterogeneous Left—symbolized in the thirties by men like Sir CharlesTrevelyan. Thus the alliance which swiftly sprang up between CND and6 To use an analogy from literary criticism, it was a ‘mythical correlate’ of thewhole society.

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the Labour Party was in one sense easy and natural: it renewed a longtradition. But by the same token it was unlikely to alter the subordina-tion of the Left within the Party, which was precisely the product ofthat tradition. CND did not, in the last resort, introduce a sufficientlynew element into the classic compound of ‘Labourism’ to catalyze areal change in it.

This was the historical background of CND’s failure. But it was also aspecifically contemporary defeat, brought about by its own particularlimitations. The great weakness of liberalism in the 19th century hadbeen its structural inability to see the world as whole, to attain whatHegel called a concrete universality. Its insights and ideals existed in afragmented, segregated space, dissociated from the real world. Itcriticized particular aspects of Victorian capitalism, but was blind to itas a system. Its ideals became ‘abstract universals’ (liberty, justice,toleration), while their application became, paradoxically but neces-sarily, singular ‘causes’, usually international (Greek Independence,Abolition of the Slave Trade, Bulgarian Atrocities). Something of thesame thing occurred with CND. Victorian liberalism lacked a theory ofcapitalism; CND lacked a theory of the Cold War. This was its realstumbling-block. The difficulty of the task, of course, was immense. Itamounted to nothing less than a ‘totalization’ of world history in the20th century. No other movement or doctrine has so far provided this.It remains the insurpassable horizon of all thought and action in ourtime. It is clear, however, that the Cold War has at least four structuralcomponents, which any adequate account must synthesize: a strugglebetween capitalist and socialist economic systems, a conflict betweenparliamentary and authoritarian political systems, a contest betweenimperialist and indigenous national systems and a confrontation be-tween technologically equivalent and reciprocally suicidal militarysystems. International class struggle, defence of democracy, revoltagainst colonialism, arms race: each slogan indicates one ‘moment’ inthe Cold War, and denies the others. The reality is their infinite im-brication and interpenetration. This is not to say that each moment isequally privileged or permanent. The task of any serious theory of theCold War is precisely to adjudicate their relative weight and differentiatetheir evolutions. This alone would allow a dynamic reconstruction ofthe historical totality which is the ‘world conflict’ of our time. Theofficial ideology of the West, by contrast, has always seen the Cold Waras a simple defence of freedom against the dictatorship of internationalcommunism. It was this view which CND radically, and unforgivably,rejected. It insisted that the primary reality of the Cold War was not astruggle between democratic West and totalitarian East, but an armsrace which threatened to wipe out both. CND gave an absolute pre-eminence to the dangers of a thermonuclear holocaust: for it, this issuetranscended all others. The moral, and practical, force of this positionwas tremendous. But it was politically insufficient. The orthodoxy ofthe Cold War rested on a simple, but consistent and comprehensive,vision of the post-war world: Communism was evil and dangerous, itwas a threat to the freedom of the West, it could only be deterred fromaggression by the balance of terror. Against this, CND posed the greaterevil of universal genocide. It had little to say about Communism, lessabout the West. In a word, it designated fewer facts, gave a less com-

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plete account of the world than its powerfully established adversary. Inthe 19th century, the great single-issue movements of liberalism hadoften been successful, even though they were restricted in their aims,because these aims never contested the social order as a whole. Uni-lateralism, however, was a single-issue movement with a difference.It objectively challenged the whole contemporary teleology of British society, butnever subjectively assumed this challenge. This was the secret of its failure.The implementation of unilateralism, entailing withdrawal from NATO,would have meant an immense reorientation of Britain’s identity, atevery level of national life. For everything hung together. Britain wasintegrated into the Western, anti-communist alliance by every social,economic, cultural and geo-political bond that history could bestow.This was the insuperable weight that CND, more or less unwittingly,was trying to lift. It had all the disadvantages of threatening thedominant ideology of its society, without any of the compensatingadvantages of offering an alternative ideology itself. The task ofcreating one was beyond its powers.7

Who can blame it? CND’s truth was an abstract universality, like thatof its predecessors. But there was no movement, no man in the tormentof that time who attained a concrete universality: the truth of the ColdWar. In another, and more problematic sense, ‘unilateralism’ wascommon to all positions, no matter how conflicting. Today, with allthe changes of the past three years, the dilemmas still continue. Whatelse is the Sino-Soviet debate but a vast transposition of the same prob-lems into the Communist camp itself ?

CND, then, failed—or has done so far. As it underwent political set-backs, the limitations of its organization revealed themselves. Itsspontaneity had been an immediate negation of bureaucracy, ratherthan a mediated transcendence of it. Fragility and fissiparity were theresults. But the legacy of its democracy is still a living one. Moreover,its impact was not confined to this. It did, after all, quite concretelyanticipate and contribute to the major shift in the Labour Party’s de-fence policy in these years, the abandonment of Britain’s independentdeterrent after the failure of the Blue Streak programme in 1961. Thereis a certain parallelism here with the struggle over socialization. In eachcase, the long battle finally ended in an ambiguous result. In each case,for all its weaknesses, the Left was vindicated by the future. Neitheraffluence nor the Cold War turned out to be the unchanging, inexorablerealities the Right had claimed them to be. In 1959 Gaitskell fought theelection, proclaiming the necessity and morality of a British hydrogenbomb and offering a programme of ‘modest social reform’. Five yearslater, Wilson was denouncing the independent deterrent and proposinga ‘new case for socialism’.

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7 Two important minority elements in CND, pacificism and anarchism, have beenomitted from this discussion. These were mainly responsible for the Committee of100 after the Campaign as a unitary movement began to disintegrate. They wouldrequire separate treatment. However, much of what is said above about the characterof the Campaign, in particular its abstraction, applies a fortiori to them as well. Today,Peace News represents an iteresting attempt to transcend the traditional limitationsof pacifist and anarchist thought in the direction of greater concreteness. Theresult still lacks coherence.

The New Left

One group stood at the cross-roads of all the currents and conflicts ofthese years: the New Left. Here, and here alone, the different pre-occupations and pressures of the English Left met, and for a momentseemed as if they might fuse. The New Left attempted to broadenunilateralism into a consequent, internationalist neutralism. It put for-ward new arguments for public ownership. It tried to generalize theexperience of CND into a theory of democratic politics. It articulated thecultural revolt of the new generation into a critique of capitalism. Noother phenomenon of this period had a comparable breadth and gener-osity.

The New Left was created in 1956, by the twin crises of Suez andHungary. It grew rapidly from 1957 onwards, with the rise of theCampaign for Nuclear Disarmament itself. Its peak was reached in theelectric climate of 1960, when the attempt to delete Clause Four wasdefeated, and unilateralism was victorious at the Scarborough Con-ference. Thereafter, its strength declined, as CND became increasinglydisoriented and the Labour Left lost its combativity with party unityover the Common Market.

The origins of the New Left, then, were highly conjunctural. It was bornout of the two crises of October-November 1956 in Central Europeand the Near East. The Hungarian revolt led to a wave of resignationsfrom the Communist Party, and the Suez crisis suddenly galvanizedmany hitherto indifferent or apolitical members of the younger genera-tion, especially in the universities. The convergence of the twophenomena produced the New Left, which initially defined itself as asimultaneous rejection of Stalinism and Social-Democracy. If this had,in fact, been the main substance of the new movement, it would havebeen a more ephemeral phenomenon than it was. Suez and Hungarywere external crises, which did not shake British society as a whole.Moreover, they were, in a way that was not generally recognized at thetime, anachronistic rather than prototypical events. The Soviet inter-vention in Hungary was an unwilling re-enactment of Stalinism by arégime proceeding towards de-Stalinization. The British intervention inSuez was the last folie de grandeur of an imperialism which was alreadyoutdated in its ambitions and methods. The subsequent policies of boththe Soviet Government under Khruschev and the ConservativeGovernment under Macmillan were quite different in character. Theimpetus given the New Left by the turmoil of 1956 was thus necessarilylimited: and in fact, it is striking that within three years, the New Leftappeared to have lost interest in either Communism or British colonial-ism. It made almost no attempt to analyze the evolution of the Easternbloc, or the emergence of a world-wide Euro-American neo-colonial-ism. Thus the circumstances of its birth give relatively little indicationof the real character and importance of the New Left. For despite itsconjunctural origins, it did have deep roots in the British situation, andreflected a definite moment in the development of post-war Britishsociety. Its initial ambition, it will be remembered, was ‘to take social-ism at full stretch’, applying its values to ‘the total scale of man’s

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activities’.8 This amounted, in effect, to a call for a new and comprehen-sive theoretical synthesis, capable of mobilizing the full resources ofcontemporary socialist thought throughout the world—a synthesis of akind which has never existed before on the British Left. It is arguablethat only a major structural shock to our society could eventually pro-duce it. This was clearly absent in 1956–57. However, a slow andlong-run change in the nature of British society was becoming visiblein these years, which created its own characteristic consciousness.British capitalism had, under great pressure, learnt to satisfy certainfundamental human needs: it had achieved a marked reduction inprimary poverty, a considerable stability of employment, an extensivewelfare network. Yet it remained a potentially intolerable and suffocat-ing system even, or precisely for, groups in the population whichenjoyed a relatively high standard of living. The very satisfaction oftraditional needs in turn created new ones, which neo-capitalism refusedand thwarted as traditional capitalism had done earlier ones. Asmaterial deprivation to a certain degree receded, cultural loss anddevastation became more and more evident and important. The chaosand desolation of the urban environment, the sterility and formalism ofeducation, the saturation of space and matter with advertising, theatomization of local life, the concentration of control of the means ofcommunication and the degradation of their content, these were whatbecame the distinctive preoccupations of the New Left. In attackingthem, however, it did not start ex nihilo. On the contrary, the resonanceand strength of its appeal derived in large part from its renewal of along tradition in British history, whose genealogy was traced withgreat power and intensity in Culture and Society, probably the mostformative socialist work of this period. This tradition, which ran fromBlake and the Romantics through Ruskin and Morris to Lawrence,constituted a profound, if often sublimated, critique of capitalism—theonly radical critique in England in the 19th century. It had, however,always remained sociologically disestablished, never becoming incarnated inany major social force. Now this changed. The New Left represented,in effect, the first time that this tradition found an anchorage in society,and became the inspiration of an actual political movement. The neweconomic conditions of the fifties had at last made this possible.

At the same time, the New Left was a distinctively British phenomenon,beyond its economic context or its cultural antecedents. It was theproduct, and finally perhaps the victim, of an idiosyncracy of oursocial structure. Historically, modern English society has never givenbirth to an autonomous, antagonistic intelligentsia of the kind that hasmarked other European countries. Overwhelmingly drawn from thedominant bloc, its intellectuals have remained, like its merchants andits rulers, avowed amateurs—part-time thinkers, defined as persons notby their social profession but by their private and ostentatiouslyordinary humanity (characteristically expressed in the self-deprecatingtone and bluff idiom of their work). Traditionally integrated intosociety as unassuming and undifferentiated members of it, with the onsetof the Cold War, British intellectuals by and large ceased to have anypolitical radicalism as well. When the whole weight of established8 Universities and Left Review, No. 1, Spring 1957.

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society was mobilized against an external enemy, it was inevitable thatthe great majority of its intellectuals, lacking any independent social orhistorical resources, should have uncritically followed it. It was notuntil 1956 that this changed. The Suez Affair marked, in fact, the firsttime that there was any widespread revulsion against the existingpolitical order among intellectuals (expressed at very differing levels ofprofundity). The most coherent and important force to emerge fromthe crisis of that year was precisely the New Left.

In its origins, the New Left was a diffuse group of intellectuals, comingeither from a student milieu (Universities and Left Review) or from theCommunist Party (New Reasoner). Its dimensions, however, soon grew.Large audiences began to attend meetings in London and the provinces,and it seemed as if a sizeable political movement might be imminent. Itwas at this moment of apparent opportunity that the character of theNew Left crystallized. It was no longer a group of intellectuals, it wasnot yet a mass movement. Henceforward a fundamental ambiguity ofscale marked it. This ambiguity was a legacy of the whole traditionalrelationship between Enaglish intellectuals and their society. They werenever a separate caste in England as they were elsewhere. They were,rather, part of an insensible continuum of roles within the ‘uppermiddle’ class itself. Radicalized, English intellectuals reproduced thisrelationship with the radical sections of the middle-class. Thus the NewLeft never became a tight, compact intellectual formation, any morethan it became a mass political movement. It was a certain politicalmilieu, in which there was an open interflow of professions and pre-occupations, ranging between the extremes of the theoretical and thepragmatic: it included students, journalists, teachers, doctors, archi-tects, academics and social workers. Potentially, this was a verycreative and hopeful phenomenon. Where it has occurred, the con-stitution of a separate pariah-elite of intellectuals, cut off from the restof society, has had innumerable damaging consequences on the socialistmovement in Europe. Avoidance of it appeared to be one of the great-est advantages of the New Left. Unfortunately, however, it was alsothe source of paralyzing confusions. In a favourable situation of rapidsocial transformation and socialist advance, the existence of link-phenomena between intellectuals, professional groups and working-class can be a great asset. But in a relatively static situation, character-ized by the absence of any mass socialist movement, the temptation forsuch a phenomenon is to try itself to become the range of forces which itcan properly only link: where there are no structured groups to link, akind of unconscious ‘substitutionism’ creeps in. The New Left had be-gun a handful of intellectuals: it gained a certain—minority—middle-class audience: it never touched any section of the working-class. Onceit had ceased to be a purely intellectual grouping, the hope of becominga major political movement haunted it, and ended by dissipating itsinitial assets. The pressure of circumstances was partly responsible forthis change. The existence, in CND, of a genuine mass movement with acomparable base, but: without any articulated ideology, seemed to offera vacuum designed for the New Left to fill. It tried to do so, in 1960–61,and paid the price—of being at the mercy of a conjunctural fluctuation.When the tide of unilateralism ebbed after the Scarborough Conferenceof 1961, its strength seeped away as well. It had lost the virtues of16

intellectual energy without gaining those of political efficacy. Theore-tical and intellectual work were sacrificed for a mobilizing role whichperpetually escaped it.

This was the direct consequence of the New Left’s ambiguous identity.But there was also an indirect consequence which affected its theoreticalwork itself. In one crucial field, objective ambiguity became subjectiveconfusion and, ultimately, evasion. In terms of the sociology of know-ledge, the New Left, lacking clear-cut social boundaries, was unable tofocus any precise image of itself or—by extension—of its society. Itsalmost complete failure to offer any structural analysis of British societyis striking. Instead of a systematic sociology of British capitalism, ittended to rely on a simplistic rhetoric in which the ‘common people’,‘ordinary men and women’ were opposed to the ‘interests’, the ‘estab-lishment’, etc. Described as ‘humanist’, the idiom was, in fact, populistand pre-socialist. It represented a major failure of nerve and intelligence,an inability to name things as they were, which constantly yielded theinitiative to the Labour Right in the polemics between it and the NewLeft in this period. This immense hiatus automatically made the NewLeft’s ambition to furnish a new socialist synthesis impossible.

Its most valuable work continued to be a moral critique of capital-ism, and as time went on, this in turn tended to become more andmore concerned with cultural problems—precisely those which mostimmediately and intimately affected its audience of teachers, writers,students. It had ended by becoming one element in the synthesis ithad set out to create.

This in itself, however, was a major achievement. Britain remains tothis day the only capitalist country in the world in which there exists aserious socialist programme for the transformation of the system ofcommunications. This achievement is itself—by a final dialectical twist—partly traceable to the same specific situation of British intellectuals.Where an intelligentsia forms a complete, self-sufficient ‘world’ withinthe larger society, it characteristically produces a cultural critique ofcapitalism of great sophistication and theoretical brilliance, but withoutany programmatic edge to it: its concepts cannot be cashed in the arenaof practical politics. One reason for this is undoubtedly that there isless pressure on the intellectuals themselves—they inhabit a morecoherent and secure universe, from which a remote and coruscatinganalysis of commercial culture is possible. British intellectuals have nosuch escape: they are intimately, inextricably plunged into their society.This has affected the whole direction of the work, and made it muchmore socially responsible than its counterparts elsewhere. The differ-ence between Barthes in France or Adorno in Germany and Hoggart inEngland is, in this respect, immense. In England, the publication of thePilkington Report testified to the impact of the New Left’s critiqueeven on the official politics of the period. The emergence of the NewLeft marked, in fact, a renaissance of the deepest tradition of socialcriticism in English society since the industrial revolution, a renaissancewhich continues today.

The history of the last decade, then, showed that there were three

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living sources of opposition within British society, unsilenced byprosperity or fear. In different ways, each constituted a rejection of thetwo dominant realities of the time: consumer capitalism and the ColdWar. The corporative defences and antagonistic identity of the working-class found its expression in the Labour Left; the integral liberalism ofa section of the middle-class in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarma-ment; the intellectual tradition of a moral and cultural criticism ofindustrial capitalism in the New Left. Separately and together, it wasthe vitality of these forces which prevented England in this periodfrom becoming anything like a replica of North America or WestGermany.

The paradox is that at the very moment when the suffocating situationwhich they had so long resisted suddenly changed, they had spent them-selves. The great crisis of Conservative Britain, which exploded indepth in 1961, supervened a few months after the Left had collapsed,demobilized and exhausted. The Labour Left had ceased to provide anyserious opposition to party policy. CND was visibly disintegrating. TheNew Left was volatilized. The inheritor of the crisis had another name:Wilson.

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