TY - JOUR
AU - Madeleine, Davis,
AB - Abstract The British New Left’s lack of influence in working-class and labour movement politics is often adduced as evidence of political weakness and contrasted unfavourably with its evident strength in matters of ideas and theory. Yet the substance of New Left efforts to reach or create a social base for its ideas has rarely been examined. Focusing on the period between 1956 and 1968, this essay demonstrates that New Left involvement in working-class political mobilization was more persistent and significant than is usually recognized. New Leftists played a key role in the Fife Socialist League founded by miner Lawrence Daly, attempted to establish a New Left ‘industrial wing’, and pursued socialist educational and agitational work in working-class organizations and communities. Though not producing the ‘political breakthrough’ envisaged by some protagonists, these engagements need not be seen as having failed, but as having created links and resources of significance for local and community histories. Closer attention to such engagements also rebalances a historiography that has focused on internal discontinuities and theoretical debates, offering a fuller sense of the New Left’s activism and of its contribution to British political economy. The New Left, in Raphael Samuel’s words, ‘defined not so much a politics but a stance; it was concerned not so much to establish a platform but to open up a space’.1 Denoting a non-aligned socialist politics rejecting both orthodox communism and western social democracy, the label was gradually claimed by a loose coalition of disaffected communists, independent socialists and student radicals for whom 1956, according to Stuart Hall ‘a conjuncture – not just a year – bounded on one side by the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution by Soviet tanks and on the other by the British and French invasion of the Suez Canal zone’, was in different ways a watershed.2 It was a space for rethinking and experimentation, for an open, critical discourse about the implications for socialism of Communist disillusion, of capitalist modernization and western ‘affluence’, and of Cold War international relations. Into this space would flow the swelling tide of radicalism that produced the revolutionary wave of ‘1968’ as well as the ‘new social movement’ and identity politics that the ‘New Left’ label is now commonly used to describe. In its British variant, the New Left is generally viewed as a predominantly intellectual tendency whose history can be told in terms of two phases, a ‘first New Left’ that attempted to forge an experimental and activist ‘movement of ideas’ (expressed in journals, New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review, then New Left Review) but petered out by 1962, and a ‘second New Left’ which from the early 1960s centred on Perry Anderson’s reoriented New Left Review and was concerned mainly with theoretical production.3 Historians of the New Left have long pointed out the limitations of this narrative and there now exists a range of nuanced accounts giving proper weight to the continuities between ‘old’ and ‘new’ lefts and to the diversities within the various New Left groups.4 Yet there remain gaps in the historiography. In particular, efforts by the New Left to reach or create a social base have usually been overlooked or dismissed as marginal, confined to the period before 1963, and above all a failure.5 The historical assessment of the British New Left then tends to be that it was intellectually strong but politically ineffectual. This misses the point of Samuel’s insight (quoted above) and trivializes New Left activism. New conceptual and methodological approaches to the history of post-war Britain and its politics, often themselves displaying a New Left influence in their recognition of the importance of culture, civil society and the everyday as sites of political contestation, have stimulated fresh interest in grassroots and community histories, and in cultures of activism on the left.6 This is a productive context in which to rebalance the history of the New Left itself, encouraging a shift of focus away from the oeuvres of key intellectuals and a metropolitan viewpoint toward ‘subterranean’ and local dimensions of the history, as well as more serious engagement with the New Left as practising an expressive form of cultural politics which defies analysis in orthodox terms.7 A different provocation to historians was offered earlier by Dorothy Thompson, who in a sometimes intemperate review of two major studies of the British New Left criticized the absence from both of an adequate sense of the New Left as a ‘political movement’.8 If her suggestion that the term New Left be reserved for such a movement invokes a separation between the political and the intellectual that many New Leftists would reject, it reminds us nevertheless of the importance of historical context. Discussions of the New Left too often seem to pivot around internal disagreements, so that it can seem like an inward facing milieu, instead of one whose discussions were invariably aimed at the clarification of problems shared and discussed with a larger community of socialist thinkers and activists. There are, then, reasons for an approach to the history of the New Left that takes its activism (in the sense of those aspects of its practice most directly concerned with effecting immediate change) more seriously, registering its full extent, and recognizing its indispensability to the New Left’s ‘intellectual’ work. This essay addresses one aspect of this history: New Left attempts to mobilize a working-class constituency for its ideas and positions in the period between 1956 and 1968. The first section considers early New Left perspectives on class, industrial relations and economic policy in Britain, introducing a set of interrelated themes and proposals that shaped, and were shaped by, its more direct mobilizing efforts. A second section discusses Lawrence Daly’s Fife Socialist League, between 1958 and 1962 the only real instance of a working-class political grouping with significant New Left influence. Daly’s early success emboldened some associated with the New Reasoner group to try to establish a ‘New Left industrial wing’; these efforts are discussed in the third section. A final part addresses the period after the 1962–3 organizational crisis that resulted in the break-up of the New Left Board and the reorientation of New Left Review. Although direct mobilizing efforts were for a time a casualty of this crisis, this period nevertheless saw a regroupment of New Leftists around propagandist and educational work within the trades-union movement. CLASS AND INDUSTRY: EARLY NEW LEFT PERSPECTIVES Assessing the record of his New Left predecessors in 1965, Perry Anderson regarded their contribution to analysis of British society and capitalism as negligible, and their links to the working class as non-existent.9 Later historiography has replayed, even as it has qualified, the hyperbole of the exchanges between Anderson and Edward Thompson that followed the breakdown of relations on an unwieldy New Left Board charged with overseeing New Left Review (NLR) and the wider New Left ‘movement’. This has had the effect of overstating the extent of the rupture – oversimplifying the ideological and political issues at stake and lending the New Left before 1962 a retrospective unity and coherence it simply did not have, while at the same time neglecting the range and significance of the intellectual-political project it pursued. Among the casualties of this neglect has been early New Left work on British political economy, overlooked in favour of the pioneering work in (what came to be called) cultural studies and regarded as the early New Left’s most significant contribution.10 That assessment chimes too with a sense that New Left agendas appealed primarily to an emergent social constituency (forerunner to today’s ‘metropolitan middle-class liberal elite’) of middle-class students and professionals working in the arts, media, education, technology or social work, and had little to say on issues relevant to a working-class or trade-union constituency. There was, however, a strand of New Left work that did articulate a coherent position on British economic and political themes and, moreover, sought to make this effective within trade-union and working-class politics. A group around the New Reasoner, which included several economists and adult educationalists, contributed heavily to this work, but it also drew on theoretical and empirical work published in Universities and Left Review. These groups, who merged in 1959 to form NLR, had different political backgrounds and senses of audience, but their differences were productive as well as limiting and should not be overstated.11 The quarterly New Reasoner (Fig. 1) was set up by John Saville and Edward Thompson after their resignation from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in late 1956. Leaving, like thousands of others, in protest against the British party leadership’s support for Soviet suppression of the Hungarian uprising, they resigned only after some months of trying to force an open discussion of the implications of Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalinism earlier the same year, through publication of a cyclostyled ‘unofficial’ inner-party journal, The Reasoner.12 Many of those who had supported their efforts within the party joined them in the new venture. This group included economists Ken Alexander, Ron Meek and Michael Barratt Brown, writers Mervyn Jones and Doris Lessing, poet Randall Swingler and a little later, political theorist Ralph Miliband, the only editor not to have been a CP member. New Reasoners were predominantly ex-Communists in their thirties, many with experience of wartime military service. Central figures were based in universities or colleges in the north of England or Scotland, often, crucially, with a background in adult and worker education.13 Claiming fidelity to a libertarian, humanist Marxist and communist tradition exemplified by Tom Mann and William Morris, the New Reasoner rejected Stalinism and ‘its stunted opposite, dogmatic Trotskyism’. Regretting the ‘snapping of links between socialist intellectuals and those who bear the brunt of the practical work of the movement’, its editors assumed a self-consciously educative role in relation to a labour movement whose ‘pragmatic and anti-theoretical bias’ they straightaway noted as a limitation. ‘Socialists who desire not only to act but to understand the context and aim of their actions’ were figured as their audience, so coverage was pitched at a level intellectually serious but not ‘academic’, with plenty of irreverent editorial content including informal ‘letters to readers’.14 Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Cover of New Reasoner 2, 1957. Fig. 1. View largeDownload slide Cover of New Reasoner 2, 1957. Its ten-issue run (1957– 9) was remarkable for the range of topics tackled. Studies of Mau-Mau rubbed up against Doris Lessing’s short stories, poems by Christopher Logue, discussions of Gramsci, ‘art in the community’, Polish theatre, a supplement on Blake, Keralan communism, to name but a few. Four signature themes emerged: socialist humanism (an organizing perspective developed largely by Thompson that stimulated some controversy); internationalism (comprising support for de-Stalinization in the Communist bloc, unilateralism at home, and a pioneering interest in decolonization and the ‘third world’); culture, especially creative writing;15 and questions of political organization in Britain. On the last the Reasoners were divided; convinced of the need for the ex-CP left to regroup, but with no settled sense of what it should regroup into. Having rejected the CP’s ‘democratic centralism’, and hostile to the sectarian style and tactics of the British Trotskyist groups, the Reasoners valorized democratic and ‘bottom-up’ socialist traditions and remained committed to the agency of the working class. For some, joining the Labour Party, previously impossible – the CPGB remained a proscribed organization though wielding considerable influence in some trades unions and sections of the broader labour movement – was a logical next step, particularly given that in practice the CPGB recognized Labour as the critical vehicle for socialist advance in Britain. However while some embarked on the attempt to transform Labour from the inside, others thought it impossible, and individuals often wavered between these views. Thus the question of a new political organization – and whether the New Left itself could become or initiate that organization – surfaced repeatedly, both animating and impeding the Reasoners’ efforts to make common cause with working-class militants. Uncertainty about organization and a consequent openness to new political possibilities, especially on Thompson’s part, was one factor bringing the Reasoners into collaboration with Universities and Left Review. ULR, launched spring 1957, was produced by a younger, student cohort. Several had been influenced by G.D.H Cole at Oxford and were more interested in Labour Party than Communist problems, though two of its four editors including prime mover Raphael (Ralph) Samuel had been in the CPGB. (Indeed, Samuel knew the Reasoner editors and approached them early on about his plans for ULR.)16 The ULRers were in their twenties, based in Oxford and London, with less direct political experience. If Cole’s libertarian and guild socialism were key influences, the centre of gravity was firmly postwar: in meetings of the Oxford University Labour Club and the pages of Oxford student journal The Clarion, this group, provoked by F. R. Leavis and inspired by Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, debated the implications of ‘mass society’ for working-class culture and Labour’s future. ULR was trendsetting in design, using graphic art and Roger Mayne’s photography in its magazine-style format, and audacious in style and content, with a pioneering attention to youth and popular culture (Fig. 2). Teenagers, teddyboys, the ‘secondary modern generation’ featured, as did free cinema, ‘angry’ literature, TV and town planning. More experimental than the Reasoners and committed to the creation (rather than revival) of a ‘socialism at full stretch’ bridging the divorce of socialist politics from cultural life, the ULRers nevertheless harked back to the intellectual surge of the thirties and shared many reference points with the Reasoners. They were attracted by Thompson’s socialist humanism, less for communist revival than for indictment of the moral bankruptcy of capitalism, colonialism and the H-bomb. In turn, the boldness of ULR, its expansiveness, activism and youth appeal excited Thompson. He shared the ULR editors’ sense that the experimental left clubs network it sponsored, alongside the take-off of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), could spark a new kind of socialist extra-parliamentary politics uninhibited by questions of party affiliation. Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Cover of Universities and Left Review 5, 1958. Fig. 2. View largeDownload slide Cover of Universities and Left Review 5, 1958. Attitudes toward the working class were one source of tension between the two groups as they moved closer, though the broadside unleashed by Thompson against Stuart Hall’s prescient 1958 exploration of ‘A sense of classlessness’ both missed some of Hall’s points and overstated the differences.17ULR, despite its more experimental and cross-class organizational practice as manifested in the clubs network, remained committed to the primacy of working-class agency, while the Reasoners, including Thompson, worried about the ‘dulled political consciousness’ of working people, notwithstanding their adherence to a Marxist conception of class.18 C. Wright Mills’s later plea to the New Left to abandon ‘the labour metaphysic’ (belief in the industrial proletariat as the historic agency of change) thus accurately detected an ambivalence not fully confronted.19 Both groups, however, agreed on the retrograde direction of Hugh Gaitskell’s Labour Party, and between 1957 and 1961 developed a set of arguments and policy proposals amounting to a coherent New Left challenge to the revisionist prospectus, particularly as outlined in the 1957 Labour policy document Industry and Society, and in C.A.R Crosland’s The Future of Socialism.20 New Left writers disputed the extent of the changes to capitalism on which the revisionist thesis depended, especially the notion of a separation of the functions of ownership and control in industry. They defended common ownership as essential to socialism but rejected the bureaucratic Morrisonian model of nationalization. Socialism for them involved not only transfer of economic power but its transformation and democratization: industrial democracy and workers’ control were key preoccupations. Notions of declining inequality and greater social mobility were challenged; the welfare state was not a ‘halfway house to socialism’ but a convenience to capitalism whose achievements might be undone in leaner times (its statism and inefficiency were also noted, though aspects of this were controversial). Some of this discussion was at a high level of generality, tied into at times rather rhetorical evocations of socialist humanism and de-alienation, making an intellectual case against what was seen as Crosland’s selective and faulty interpretation of socialist aims, traditions and values. However there were also detailed pieces of work with policy relevance and with a Labour left or trade-union audience in mind. This coverage came, on the NR side, from ex-Communist economists with strong links to adult and worker education, and with a stronger commitment to working within the Labour Party than Saville and Thompson. John Hughes, Ken Alexander and Michael Barratt Brown were the key figures.21ULR writers also contributed. During 1957–61 a series of articles and pamphlets appeared that comprised a distinct New Left economic strategy offered as a socialist alternative to the Labour mainstream. Critical interventions included the Insiders, a multi-authored ULR pamphlet spiritedly rebutting the claims of Industry and Society; John Hughes’s proposals for steel renationalization; Barratt Brown’s series The Controllers, a detailed analysis of the concentration of British economic power; and Hughes and Alexander’s A Socialist Wages Plan.22 This New Left analysis pressed Labour to adopt ‘a new radical programme and strategy’ on nationalization and the economy.23 Proposals included the reconstitution and democratization of the Boards of nationalized industries, ‘experiments in worker and trade union participation’, and for the trades unions, measures toward adoption of a more solidaristic and strategic perspective as opposed to a sectoral and economistic approach.24 Hughes and Alexander’s wages plan, which, hypothesizing a future Labour government, argued for limits on union wage demands in return for measures on social policy and nationalization, was especially noteworthy. Largely ignored in most mainstream histories of Labour, these arguments did spark contemporary debate, appearing, in Hughes’s words, ‘at a moment when the New Left was actually able to have some kind of dialogue with a lot of the more traditional (if you like) state socialists of the old brand, from the trade unions and elsewhere, who rose in defence of Clause 4’. 25 The extent of their influence on Labour perspectives is arguable. Although by the mid 1960s many New Leftists felt that the opportunities Hughes referred to had gone, the development of what some have called a ‘Labour New Left’ may nevertheless be traced, and there are important lines of continuity to subsequent Labour left initiatives including the Alternative Economic Strategy and ‘Bennism’.26 More central to the present study, however, is the extent to which the New Left managed to get traction for its ideas within a working-class base, and it is to these efforts that we now turn. LAWRENCE DALY, THE FIFE SOCIALIST LEAGUE AND THE PROBLEM OF ORGANIZATION We talk a lot about the potentialities of working people in the abstract, but here one felt it in the concrete, and it has given me added faith in the real meaning and force of socialism, when people start acting for themselves from below. Letter from Thompson to Daly, 11 Oct. 1959.27 One of the staunchest supporters of the Reasoner during the months of its unofficial publication in 1956 was Fife miner Lawrence Daly, later General Secretary of the National Union of Miners (NUM) 1968–84. The son of Jimmy Daly, miner and founding member of the CPGB, Lawrence joined the Young Communist League around the time he began work at Glencraig colliery, aged fourteen. He visited the Soviet Union as part of a Trades Union Congress (TUC) youth delegation in 1945, and in 1946 became secretary of his local NUM branch.28 By the time the Reasoner appeared in July 1956, Daly had left the CP, convinced that the leadership would not abandon the ‘blind loyalty to Soviet leaders instead of communist principle … the basic error which has led the CP to support and defend (or deny and ignore) the most colossal mistakes and monstrous crimes’.29 He wrote in support of the Reasoner to the Daily Worker and to Saville and Thompson personally, establishing a warm and regular correspondence in which he offered to distribute the journal among his contacts, commented on content, made tactful recommendations for making it more accessible to a working-class readership (and cheaper), and urged them to persist in their fight. ‘You must neither surrender nor compromise’, he wrote in August 1956. ‘If you do, the last glimmer of hope will be gone. The conscience of the CP has passed into your care.’ Impressed by Thompson’s ‘socialist humanism’ – his own prose could be equally stirring – Daly agreed fresh theoretical work was needed but posed questions of political organization outside the CP as a problem of at least equal urgency. He wrote that he had ‘not yet decided about joining the LP [Labour Party]; am considering formation of a local, wide, progressive discussion group (for the winter), to be called perhaps The Reasoners … And toying with the idea of a British Communist League (suggestions for better titles welcome) as a temporary body’.30 A month later, as the likelihood of Saville and Thompson’s expulsion grew, he wrote of his hopes for their group as the basis for a new political force, carrying 500–1000 of ‘the best elements close to the party’ into a temporary formation: either a British Socialist organization, which could help, ultimately, to revivify and unify the Labour movement, OR a new British Communist organisation, which could eventually reunite with the CP on terms which could generate the changes we want to see … . I am not saying there is a basis for a new mass organization, but there is a basis and need for a new body which will revive the British labour movement and bridge the tragic gap of these last 30 years. If there is no sign of it within the next 6 months – or of vast (and totally unforeseeable) changes in the CP, those in my position will have to join the LP or just abandon the fight.31 For those sharing Daly’s predicament, Socialist Forum, a loose collaboration that organized meetings and produced a journal (Forum, edited by Michael Segal and Royden Harrison), briefly gave space for socialists of varying stripes, ex-CP, Trotskyist and Labour left, to exchange views about the ferment on the left. Daly and Thompson attended a Forum conference in Leeds in January 1957, where plans were made to form local discussion groups in preparation for a Spring 1957 conference at Wortley Hall in Sheffield. This was the context in which Daly started the Fife Socialist League, which first met in February 1957 at Lochgelly Miners’ Institute. Adopting the ‘building of democratic socialism’ as its aim, its membership was open to anyone over fifteen for a joining fee of a shilling and contribution of sixpence a week. On 2 March Daly wrote a letter headed ‘Which way to socialism?’ to CP and ex-CP contacts in Scotland, referring hopefully to the plans made at Leeds for a new movement for socialism, introducing the ‘new working-class political group’ formed in Fife, and proposing a Scottish conference to bring people and groups together.32 By autumn 1957, however, the relative openness of the Forum movement was giving way as familiar sectarian pressures reasserted themselves. Daly and Thompson’s letters bemoaned what Thompson described as the ‘gloomy picture of defeat and fragmentation’ on the left: there is no leadership anyone trusts or organisation they can work in wholeheartedly and in such an atmosphere sects can grow on the one hand, and people drop out on the other: how the hell can one recruit young people to be socialist today and what does one recruit them to? I can see how to carry on our cultural and intellectual work all right … but on the practical organisational side I am puzzled and depressed. I think there is a 50/50 chance a new left party may in the end get formed, because I don’t see how the broader labour movement will be transformed without an electoral threat being presented on the left of the official LP. 33 Thompson did not mean a ‘New Left’ party, but as the NR became established outside the CP, and as collaboration with ULR deepened, the question of what organizational perspective the nascent New Left should adopt (or even play) was continually debated. When Daly, who from the start harboured hopes for the Reasoner as a nucleus for a new organization, began to envisage the Fife Socialist League as an electoral vehicle to build and test support for the Reasoner’s positions in West Fife, he straightaway approached Thompson and Saville. Thompson especially was enthusiastic about Daly’s plan to stand for election for the mining village of Ballingry in the Fife county council elections of 1958. He even promised that if Daly won and went on to stand in the following year’s General Election he would come and help, though he warned Daly not to expect support from more Labour-oriented Reasoner figures such as Ken Alexander (who did indeed refuse to endorse the candidacy).34 Daly’s election material emphasized his own authenticity and record (‘a west fife miner for west fife’), urging electors to judge not by party label but on matters of socialist principle. It also carried ‘an appeal from the universities’ signed by Saville and Thompson.35 His comfortable win was celebrated in the next New Reasoner. Describing the League as a ‘small independent socialist propaganda society’, and emphasizing Daly’s ‘exceptional personal standing’, the editors were careful to insist that no general organizational lesson could be drawn ‘and we certainly aren’t urging readers to form new parties or leagues’.36 Daly’s next approach, for funds and practical help to stand as the West Fife candidate in the 1959 general election, required a more elaborate justification, and caused considerable debate among the Reasoner group (Fig. 3). West Fife was an unusual seat with a strong radical tradition. It was the stronghold of Willie Gallacher, Clydeside legend and one of only two Communist MPs, who had held it from 1935 until defeated by Labour in 1950; he subsequently acquired a status as ‘Grand Old Man’ of the Party and served as its President from 1956–63.37 With no chance of a Tory win, Daly thought an electorate that regarded Labour as ‘the lesser of three evils’ might give a decent showing to a ‘militant socialist alternative’, and though he wouldn’t defeat Labour incumbent William Hamilton, beating the CP’s Bill Lauchlan in a seat so freighted with Party symbolism might ‘boost the morale of the real left’.38 In the event Daly’s respectable 4,886 votes were mainly at the expense of Lauchlan, beaten into last place, but Hamilton’s majority was reduced by some 1,300. The role of New Leftists in his campaign was considerable. Saville and Thompson had developed great regard for Daly. ‘He is the most impressive industrial worker I have ever met’, wrote Saville, though Thompson seems to have established the closer personal relationship.39 Noting in a letter the importance of Daly’s influence on his own perspectives, Thompson perhaps saw in him an exemplar of the type of working-class leader he celebrated in ‘Homage to Tom Maguire’, the ‘gifted propagandist and trade unionist’ who could demonstrate ‘qualities of mass leadership and the rare ability to relate theory to practice without losing sight of theory in the press of events’.40 There was another factor at play too: Daly had been approached by Gerry Healy and Peter Fryer’s Trotskyist ‘Newsletter’ group with an offer to fund his campaign and provide full-time local campaigners, cars and loudspeakers, with ‘no strings attached’, and he wrote to the Reasoner editors for their advice.41 The two initially sent separate responses, with Thompson more unequivocal than Saville that this offer should be rejected. Healy’s apparatus, he said, was doctrinaire and authoritarian; they felt ‘no loyalty to the movements with which they associate or with the working people’, and were simply out to strengthen their own faction. He doubted Daly could accept help without the Newsletter group publicizing their role in the campaign, and this would undermine the basis on which Daly wanted to stand. ‘If you could fight, and come near to winning, that would be terrific, but you must do so as a Fife miner and Fife socialist and on the issues of constructive revolutionary socialism and nuclear disarmament, not smash and grab destructivism.’42 Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide Lawrence Daly’s 1959 General Election leaflet. Fig. 3. View largeDownload slide Lawrence Daly’s 1959 General Election leaflet. Daly, it seems, heeded Thompson’s advice, and the Reasoner editors did their best to step into the breach. Thompson offered his services as ‘extra territorial agent gathering together what help we can outside Scotland’ for Daly’s candidacy. Resources were stretched: ‘Brother, I can’t produce a loudspeaker and van’, he wrote in August 1959, but he brokered contacts with the Direct Action Committee of CND, who sent up Will Warren to act as Daly’s election agent, complete with van.43 Jean McCrindle and other young volunteers mobilized by ULR and the left clubs network also helped out before and after the campaign, and the New Reasoner launched an appeal to readers for funds.44 Daly’s platform was distinctly New Leftish, especially in its linkage of the local to the national and global: new industries locally to reduce dependence on the declining coal industry; more schools and houses; a devolved Scottish parliament; extended public ownership; cuts in military expenditure; support for decolonization; and ‘a British lead to give up the H bomb’.45 This time, the New Reasoner editors’ public support was more strongly argued in relation to broader issues of left strategy and tactics, in a characteristically pithy ‘Note on West Fife’ written by Saville. Noting first the ‘intellectual collapse’ of the left and its failure both inside and outside Labour, Saville sought to move the debate on from the ‘in or out of Labour’ dichotomy: our central problem is the recreation of a vigorous movement for socialism among the ordinary people. This involves both the development of a body of socialist ideas that makes sense in contemporary terms, as well as the translation of these ideas into forms of political and cultural activity that reach out beyond the existing sects and groups. We have set our face against the development of a new political party; both our past history and our present analysis reject this. But if we are to take our ideas into and among our own people in the labour movement, and then beyond the movement to begin to make socialists from among the rising generations, we shall have to find forms of political work that in part will be traditional but in some respects will be new. Flexibility and analysis of local possibilities and priorities, he suggested, would guide New Left strategy, not ‘a simple assertion that what is not favoured by the Labour Party organisation is in itself wrong for socialists and the socialist movement. With a Labour Party dominated by Mr. Gaitskell and a world dominated by nuclear weapons, no socialist can give that answer’.46 After the election Saville and Thompson wrote warm congratulatory letters to Daly, and New Left influence on the League continued to be strong. Thompson urged Daly to have a recruiting drive, challenge Communist Party influence on workers in one or more pits, and get more local people – especially women – involved in political education.47 The League hosted meetings ‘against the bomb’ with visiting New Left speakers, and produced an accessible, even chatty, monthly publication, The Socialist (motto: ‘peace, freedom, prosperity’), as well as Daly’s own Ballingry Bulletin. While local issues featured heavily, particularly pit closures and critiques of Labour policy on the mining industry, a manifesto and declaration of policy were drafted in which broader New Left themes again predominated (unilateralism, abolition of racial and religious discrimination; common ownership), and in 1960 associate membership was offered to socialists outside Fife.48 (Fig. 4) The League remained tiny, however: a 1960 minute book recorded paid-up members as just thirty-two locally and twenty-five associate, though The Socialist was recorded as having a circulation of some 200.49 By this time ULR and NR had merged as New Left Review, the clubs network was reaching its height, and the tactic of standing independent unilateralist candidates in electoral fights was spreading (though controversial both in the New Left and in CND). Daly was a key figure in efforts (discussed below) to link the northern clubs and organize a ‘new left industrial wing’ and accepted Thompson’s invitation to join the New Left Board. In 1960 he summarized the journey of the League in the new NLR: the optimistic note he struck about its prospects, however, was to be shortlived.50 Fig. 4. View largeDownload slide Fife Socialist League poster, 1960. Fig. 4. View largeDownload slide Fife Socialist League poster, 1960. Daly’s efforts to broaden the League reflected his hope that the New Left might become the basis for ‘a new socialist force on a national scale’.51 But Saville and Thompson, to whom he looked for orientation, were increasingly preoccupied, first with plans for the merger, itself precipitated by their overwork and inability to secure the NR financially, then – and even before the merger was completed – by serious strains on their own relations and those within the broader New Left. Nor did they agree about the political situation that faced them. Saville, more sober about the prospects for an independent New Left movement than Thompson, wanted to focus on building the profile of the New Left in industry, and was more attracted than Thompson to joint work with Labour leftists. Thompson’s (perhaps inflated) sense of the possibilities raised by expansion of the clubs and CND contributed to his intense frustration with the working methods of those charged with production of the new NLR, which could never live up to his expectations. Through 1959 and 1960 the two had some angry exchanges, especially over Thompson’s attitude to NLR and its editor Stuart Hall.52 In terms of Daly’s developing perspectives, the broader, national focus he sought for the League made little sense without an effective national organization to link up with. Although the League enjoyed some modest further electoral success when George MacDonald won a District Council seat in 1961, its fortunes were dwindling. Evaporating too were Daly’s hopes in the New Left. In March 1962, amidst the breakdown of the New Left Board which preceded Perry Anderson’s editorship, Daly sought Thompson’s help with plans for a new ‘society of socialists’, as precursor to a new national organization. Preoccupied with the New Left’s internal crisis, Thompson ruled himself out. While professing himself ‘a great deal closer to the view that a new socialist party should be formed than ever before’, he doubted that the time was right. He suggested instead ‘a national socialist society, uninhibited by Labour constitutionalism, waging a guerrilla war on the left of the party, supporting by-election or even local council candidatures where and when the circumstances dictate this tactic against the Right’. Privately, he counselled Daly against collaboration with John Rex, mooted as a possible chair for such an initiative, advising Daly that if he was serious about it he was better placed to take on the task himself.53 By autumn 1962 Daly had changed his position. In a confidential circular he told friends the League was in dire straits, its journal suspended for lack of funds and his own priorities shifting elsewhere. Interest in it, he admitted, had virtually disappeared, a situation he blamed partly on its limitations as a purely local phenomenon. He himself, he said, was beginning to think the immediate duty of socialists was to work to secure a Labour victory in the general election; for the left this meant no independent candidates, getting into Labour and behind the best Labour candidates and pushing ‘like hell’.54 Though his proposal to disband the League was not finally effected until 1964, this marked its end. The fate of the League highlights difficulties the New Left had in reconciling its orientation to the grassroots and the local with an impatience to contribute to a national organizational breakthrough.55 Insisting that a ‘vigorous movement for socialism among the ordinary people’, must come ‘from below’, it recognized that socialist consciousness was not latent but must be created by patient propaganda, education, agitation and leadership and by the connection of local issues to the national and global. Daly’s was a rare experiment that tried to do just this, and in a working-class context. But as Thompson recognized in his reply to Daly’s proposal to dissolve the League, the lack of link-up to an effective UK-wide political force limited its capacity to ‘deliver the goods’ on pressing issues of pit closures, unemployment and local economic strategy, while its unilateralist and international perspectives could seem abstract and of limited local relevance. Yet at the same time Thompson suggested (as Daly himself had in a prescient 1961 NLR piece ‘Scotland on the dole’) that the rising support for the ‘Tartan Tories’ of the Scottish National Party signalled that space might yet open for an independent left alternative to channel Scots discontent. ‘IF from your position in the Scottish NUM and Fife (& presumably LP)’, Thompson wrote, Daly was able to put pressure on a Wilson government to ‘introduce new industries in Fife under new forms of municipal or cooperative control’ or to ‘introduce new experimental forms of democratic control in selected pits’, this would give ‘real leadership to the movement in the country’.56 Thompson, then, remained convinced of the need for the kind of localized ‘socialist independence’ movement represented by the FSL, not least to give ‘political clarity’ to ‘the Fife people themselves’, but recognized that with prospects for sustaining and linking up such initiatives remote, such a marginal role was unlikely to satisfy Daly.57 After Labour’s election victory, the disbandment of the clubs network and of the New Left Board, he told Daly that ‘socialists like ourselves in the next 5 years are likely to be able to do more in local/industrial or intellectual-cultural work than in the national political field’.58 Daly had already decided his only course was an ‘uphill fight’ inside Labour to ‘strengthen political consciousness among the trade unions and local parties’.59 Elected to the Scottish area NUM executive as a full-time officer in 1962, he joined the Labour Party, and after election to the national executive in 1965, left Fife for Hemel Hempstead. He retained New Left links and served on the Russell Tribunal investigating war crimes in Vietnam, before beating Joe Gormley to become NUM general secretary in 1968 and leading the miners in industrial action in 1972 and 1974 (Fig. 5). Fig. 5. View largeDownload slide Lawrence Daly addressing miners in 1971. Fig. 5. View largeDownload slide Lawrence Daly addressing miners in 1971. NEW LEFT INDUSTRIAL WORK If Daly more than anyone personified a Thompsonian ideal of rank-and-file socialist activism – militant, internationalist and independent from the ‘sects’ – the League’s example proved difficult to replicate. Saville, at least, was under no illusion about this, warning Thompson not to overstate the importance of Daly’s electoral fight – ‘we have too often in the past mistaken our own enthusiasm for a real movement’.60 Though supportive of Daly, his scepticism about the possibilities for an independent New Left movement led him to prioritize a longer-run effort to develop New Left positions within the institutions of the labour movement. Key figures for this endeavour included Ken Alexander and John Hughes, Michael Barratt Brown, Royden Harrison in Sheffield, Ken Coates in Nottingham, and Tony Topham in Hull. All were or had been involved in adult and worker education and/or the CP; many were key contributors to New Left work on political economy. The political networks of the Reasoners also included a number of ex-CP activists and union militants like Leeds garment workers Jim and Gertie Roche, Derbyshire NUM secretary Bert Wynn and graduates of the Workers Educational Association like Dorothy and Joe Greenald. New Left sponsorship of a wide network of local left clubs, (which reached its peak in 1959–60 with some forty clubs and up to three thousand individual members), the prospect of merger with ULR and the take-off of CND extended collaborations and enabled joint work with the unilateralist left in the Labour Party and union movement. The northern and Scottish clubs (they existed in Bradford, Hull, Manchester, Nottingham, Sheffield, Preston, Newcastle, Huddersfield, Carlisle, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Leeds) were identified as an important connecting network for industrial work, though this was not their only or even main focus. Material on the independent histories of the northern clubs is scarce and they feature hardly at all in histories of the New Left, but the involvement of figures such as the left-wing playwright Trevor Griffiths in the Manchester club, and scattered personal recollections from elsewhere suggest a lively and varied picture.61 Still, for some of the NR group, their potential as a springboard for a ‘New Left industrial wing’ was an opportunity. As well as an overall clubs co-ordinating committee reporting to the New Left Board, a northern clubs committee was established. An industrial conference took place in April 1959, with the participation of some thirty trade-union officials.62 Toward the end of the same year, as Saville and Thompson debated the merits of intensifying links with Labour leftists around Tribune and Victory for Socialism (VFS) on industrial work, Saville asked to be relieved of some New Left Board duties ‘because the industrial work is growing and I shall have to give a lot of time to the bulletin in the next six months’.63 The bulletin in question was Searchlight (subtitled ‘a new left industrial bulletin’), a monthly produced and edited by Jim Roche which was circulated among union contacts in early 1960. Comprising a mix of short pieces by active trade unionists and New Leftists with editorial content by Roche, coverage during its four-month run included the battle in the Labour Party over clause 4, arguments for a forty-hour week and for economic democracy, and a report from an industrial conference held in London in January 1960 under joint auspices of VFS and the New Left. A New Left slant was evident in arguments on these topics and in inclusion of material on international issues: exploitation by ‘the great imperial corporations’ of workers in former British colonies in Africa (‘the struggle of the African peoples is similar to that of the British working class’), and unilateralism. ‘We shall try to give you the kind of information that active workers who haven’t all that much time for reading require in their daily round’, noted a ‘letter to readers’, and ‘at the same time … a sense and a feeling of our socialist future, without which the shopfloor struggles too often lose their meaning’.64 Both NLR and New Left pamphlets (Hughes and Alexander’s Socialist Wages Plan, Michael Barratt Brown’s Who are the Tories?, Jim Mortimer’s The Forty Hour Week, John Rex’s Britain Without the Bomb) were promoted. The northern clubs also played a central role in running a New Left fringe presence at the 1960 Labour conference in Scarborough, with production of a daily news-sheet, ‘This Week’, distributed to conference attendees. This was hailed in NLR as ‘an unqualified success’, and the sense of having played a role in securing the unilateralist resolution at conference released new energies around the possibilities of agitational work within the labour movement.65 On 22 October 1960, a meeting in the Manchester left coffee house planned publication of a (new) printed industrial bulletin, study schools and conferences. Those present included Thompson, Daly, Jim Roche, John Robottom (clubs co-ordinator), Stan Orme (then a Bevanite Labour councillor, later MP) and Eric Heffer (then president of the Liverpool trades council, later Labour MP for Walton).66 The minutes record Thompson urging the need for an ‘organisational breakthrough’, Daly making the case for an ‘agitational’ journal for industrial workers (as opposed to an ‘industrial workers’ journal’), and agreement on set-up of a dedicated New Left industrial committee. An ad hoc group was formed from those present, with others to be asked to join.67 This committee was to be separate from the left clubs, but would liaise with them. Orme, Heffer and Roche were deputed to attend the Northern left clubs conference planned for December 1960 in order to propose ways of strengthening the industrial work of the New Left. Following the Manchester meeting the attendees went on to Wortley Hall for a weekend school for miners and their communities on ‘The politics of coal’, with Ken Alexander and Daly the main speakers. As for the published NLR, though the plan was certainly for the journal and industrial committee activities to complement each other, in practice co-ordination was haphazard and coverage reliant on a few individuals. Stuart Hall wrote to Daly in November 1959 soliciting a piece on ‘pithead relations’ for NLR and detailing plans for a series on nationalization and workers control. On the latter, a ‘frontal assault’ was planned, starting with a historical framework to set the scene for a ‘major piece’ from Alexander and Hughes, alongside reflection on the nature of a socialist conception of work.68 While several of these pieces materialized, plans for sustained industrial work at shop-floor level came to little.69 Efforts to re-found an industrial journal stalled, and in a 1961 report to the New Left Board, Thompson described the industrial committee, which Heffer had agreed to chair, as having been ‘inactive’.70 The same report proposed that Heffer should join the New Left Board instead, and reported that John Hughes had agreed to be industrial adviser to NLR and that Michael Barratt Brown was willing to attempt reformation of an industrial committee. The crisis that overtook the New Left not long after, leading to the reorientation of NLR and eventual dissolution of the board, made these plans abortive, but in truth, momentum had already stalled. Part of the problem, as with New Left commitment to the Fife Socialist League, was simple incapacity and overwork, but there was also a lack of clarity and agreement over what was truly distinctive in the New Left’s industrial work as well as how to advance it organizationally. Saville and Thompson repeatedly considered channelling such efforts through already established Labour left groups (mainly Michael Foot’s Tribune and Victory for Socialism), but while Saville inclined to this, Thompson thought New Left industrial perspectives ‘distinct and more specialised’, was wary of being drawn into inner Labour factionalism and preferred to retain an independent base. At the same time he confessed himself unsuited to leading on this and in late 1959 advised Saville to ‘let [industrial work] ride’ until a proper committee could be formed.71 As Mark Wickham Jones notes, evidence for impact within the trades-union movement of New Left perspectives is limited.72 As his and the present study show, however, this was not due to any neglect of the importance of economic analysis and industrial policy, nor for want of considerable effort on the part of New Leftists. Nor should it be too glibly ascribed to an inability to bridge a divide between the supposedly intellectual, middle-class milieu of New Leftists and the working-class constituencies they sought to reach. No doubt there were many who found New Left positions esoteric and over-intellectualized,73 but the categories of working-class militant and New Leftist were not mutually exclusive, especially within the ex-CP Reasoner cohort – Daly was the outstanding example. More relevant, perhaps, is the difficulty of the task the New Left faced in staking out a clear space in a crowded field, lacking the ideological discipline and party apparatus of its CP, Trotskyist and Labour competitors. Also key is the fact that New Left perspectives contained much that challenged established practices and cultures within the trades-union and broader labour movement, including critiques of ‘Labourist’ defensiveness, sectionalism, insularity and bureaucratism; of free collective bargaining and of the structures and methods of the nationalized industries. This agenda could be a hard sell on the shop-floor, and while New Leftists realized this, they lacked the capacity and resources to do much about it, and their network of sympathetic contacts was small and underresourced. Even where links were made in specific unions, these did not always prove deep or lasting. Whether there was also implicit tension between the practical, policy-focused interventions of the Hughes and Alexander type and the uncompromising critiques of Labourism being developed for example by Ralph Miliband, is a moot point. Hughes and Alexander were clear that the measures they proposed were part of an ultimately transformative agenda (a wages plan, they suggested, would ‘probe the limits of reform’ within capitalism), but by the late 1960s Thompson would find their developing arguments too ‘gradualist’ for inclusion in the May Day Manifesto.74 Early New Left efforts to weave different types and levels of analysis together into a transformative and explicitly socialist perspective were aborted by the polarization of the milieu.75 So too was the effort to co-ordinate a grassroots New Left industrial wing where these arguments could be pressed and tested. EDUCATION AND ‘WORKERS’ CONTROL’ Two linked themes that survived the break-up of the early New Left were worker education and emphasis on industrial democracy and workers’ control. Work of the ‘outreach and education’ type was where many New Leftists had come from, and perhaps where they were really most comfortable. After a period of recomposition and reorientation in the early 1960s (during which Anderson’s NLR established new co-ordinates, Hall and Hoggart founded the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and Saville and Miliband set up Socialist Register as a kind of successor to the New Reasoner – though without Thompson) these themes also provided a basis for renewed collaborations between various New Left strands. One development of note was the establishment of Centres for Socialist Education in 1965. Impelled by gathering disillusion with the ‘retrograde direction being taken by the Labour Government’, Ken Coates and Ralph Miliband convened a small gathering of socialists ‘including academics, trade unionists and other national and local spokesmen of the left’ to discuss steps to overcome a sense of ‘fragmentation and demoralisation’, as well as produce a coherent critique of Wilsonism.76 Miliband chaired a founding meeting in October 1965, at which the settled aim was to initiate and service a network of local socialist educational enterprises under the convenorship of Ken Coates, with a steering committee as backup. Plans for regional then national conferences were mooted, and it was decided that membership of centres would be open to any socialist. Coates produced a draft manifesto (headed Society for Industrial Democracy and Socialist Education – SIDSE), which included as key aims reuniting industrial and political struggles; popularizing the idea of workers committees, and forging solidarity links with labour movements elsewhere. Tony Topham and Milband worked on a statement of aims and objectives to be published in NLR. From the start there was a sense that a solely educational focus might be too abstract: Miliband was asked in November 1965 to add a sentence to his draft to make it clear that the Centres for Socialist Education would service the union movement: ‘this work of socialist education does not mean remoteness from the immediate struggles in which trade unionists and others in the labour movement are engaged – we intend the work of the centre to be of direct assistance in these struggles’.77 The strategic backdrop was set out by Miliband: The question is not at present one of parties and political combinations, but of a broad and sustained effort of socialist education, cutting across existing boundaries, free from formula-mongering, and carried on with patience and intelligence by socialists wherever in the Labour movement or outside they may be situated. Such an effort is not an alternative to an immediate involvement in concrete struggle but an essential element of it.78 As with Forum and the left clubs, CSEs were an arena in which socialists with varying allegiances worked closely together. There were figures of a broadly Trotskyist persuasion. Coates, founder of the International Group, expelled from the Labour Party in 1965. is the most obvious example. Another is Peter Sedgwick of the International Socialists, who made crucial contributions within the New Left. Other factors – the general radicalization of the mid 1960s, the greater openness of the younger NLR group to new Marxist influences and to Fourth International Trotskyism, and a developing interest in Third World struggles on the non-Labour left – also made collaboration easier than perhaps it had been in the immediate aftermath of 1956. The CSEs, then, were by no means a specifically New Left initiative, though there were obvious continuities from the clubs, and figures from both New Left ‘generations’ were involved as speakers and organizers. Local groups were formed (Coates recorded some thirty expressions of interest in membership from different towns), there were ‘read-ins’ on incomes policy and a proposal to establish a Bureau for Industrial Democracy within the general ambit of the centre. As the centres developed the initial broad educational focus was sharpened to a more specific role of supporting rank-and-file movements for workers’ control. This was in part a result of pressure from figures like Coates, Topham and Sedgwick, keen that socialist education must not be seen as ‘the job of “providing theory”’, but rather as presenting material useful to the immediate needs of union militants. By April 1966, when the Steering Group took stock of progress, the CSE had an estimated membership of 150 concentrated in eight cities, and reckoned that some 500 people regularly attended local centre events (Fig. 6).79 Only three of four centres were judged to be strong enough to provide the service role to the labour movement that was sought; at the fourth, one event had had to be cancelled for lack of support. Events and schools on the theme of workers’ control were proving the most successful, and the financial position was reported to be tight. The CSE convened the Fifth National Conference on Workers’ Control in Coventry in June 1967. Conference proceedings show that attendees were drawn from the union movement, New Left, Labour Party, Tribune, IS, and student radicals, and that the conference featured a lively exchange between C.L.R. James and E. P. Thompson. Thompson had come along to promote a different initiative – the May Day Manifesto, whose first iteration had just been published, written principally by Raymond Williams, but with involvement from other New Leftists. Thompson described the manifesto to the assembled delegates as an attempt to offer ‘a comprehensive analysis of the crisis in which the left finds itself in this country’, with the aim to unify the left and work up to a national convention.80 Fig. 6. View largeDownload slide Centre for Socialist Education flyer, 1967. Fig. 6. View largeDownload slide Centre for Socialist Education flyer, 1967. By late 1967, then, on the eve of another Labour conference in Scarborough, there was renewed recognition of the (perennial) need to combine forces on the left, albeit in a somewhat different political context. In the proceedings of a teach-in, Williams argued for a more ‘connected socialism’ that would link up different struggles.81 The May Day Manifesto, however, would prove no more able to accomplish this in a sustained way than any of its New Left predecessors. Though the 1968 Penguin edition sold 10,000 copies and briefly sustained local discussion and action groups, by the time the National Convention of the Left was held in 1969 the politics of the Manifesto had been overtaken by the events of 1968. With its broad focus and partial grasp of the mood of new agencies and possibilities, there was a transitional feel about the Manifesto; it was subsumed more or less rapidly by the more student-centred and avowedly revolutionary politics that came to fore in ’68. If the Manifesto was a product of the ‘New Left university intelligentsia’, it nevertheless partly cannibalized the more didactic elements of the CSE project. The CSE morphed into the more successful Institute for Workers’ Control in 1968, an initiative that retained links with and support of New Leftists, but was by no means their sole product.82 CONCLUSION New Left efforts to propagandize and organize among working-class constituencies were more serious and persistent than is usually recognized. They were also more central to the project of the early New Left than most accounts have allowed. Not only did the New Left make a distinct intellectual contribution to British political economy, it also, and crucially, attempted to inform and to test its analyses in practical political and mobilizing efforts. Certainly, the difficulty of pursuing both ‘intellectual’ and ‘movement’ work – along with repeated arguments about which should be prioritized – contributed to its disintegration, but there is a deeper sense in which the effort to fuse them was essential to the self-conception of the milieu, at least for many of the key players. Political responsibility, as Thompson put it, was responsibility not to ideas, attitudes or positions, but to people involved in concrete struggles. The close orientation of early New Left work to the immediate political context, and specifically to Labour debates around unilateralism and common ownership from 1957–61, meant that when the positions it argued for were marginalized within Labour, the New Left experienced a demoralization that contributed to its own crisis. Anderson’s NLR learned that lesson and renounced any directly mobilizing role on the British political scene in favour of a gradual project to transform British (high) intellectual culture. Yet despite this rather grand disavowal of ambitions to mobilize, and the widespread notion of a rupture between ‘first’ and ‘second’ New Lefts, mobilizing efforts resumed after a short hiatus and were contributed to by both ‘generations’, a phenomenon that further demonstrates the limited utility of temporal and polarizing narratives of New Left development. The full reach and impact of New Left activist work is difficult to evidence: the diffuse structure of the milieu means, for example, that material on the clubs is hard to trace, and such written sources as exist are widely scattered in collections of personal papers. New Left activism was not, of course, confined to the initiatives discussed in this essay, which has sought to make more visible one particularly neglected aspect of its practice. It is likely that many New Left histories have still to be uncovered, in the independent lives of the clubs and regional centres, as well as the biographies of people whose names never featured on an NLR editorial board. One striking aspect of researching the New Left beyond its journals is the extent to which it turns up lines of influence, personal connection, linkages and overlaps between groups and events too often treated separately. The local and municipal socialisms that would have an impact in cities like Sheffield and Liverpool owe much to individuals whose involvement in left clubs and discussions was an important part of their political education.83 The New Left’s continuation and development of traditions of worker and trade-union education seem likely to have had a critical, if unquantifiable, effect on careers less stellar than Daly’s. It also influenced the establishment of institutions such as Northern College, founded by Michael Barratt Brown, whose own career, as with those of Hughes, Alexander, Saville, Coates and numerous others, carried forward this important aspect of the New Left’s legacy. The recovery of such histories has the potential to reshape historiography of the New Left, challenging standard assessments of its political inefficacy and suggesting new avenues and methodologies for research which can venture beyond the usual sources and key figures to address the New Left’s insertion in broader cultural and political settings. Madeleine Davis is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Queen Mary University of London. She has published widely on the history and political thought of the British New Left. Research for this article was partially funded by the Barry Amiel and Norman Melburn Trust. For comments on earlier versions thanks to Ben Jones, Camilla Schofield, Nick Stevenson, Andrew Whitehead and Mark Wickham Jones. Thanks also to Richard Saville, Ross Speer and archivists Claire Weatherall and Carole Wright. NOTES AND REFERENCES Footnotes 1 Raphael Samuel, quoted in Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left Thirty Years On, ed. Robin Archer, Diemut Bubeck and Hanjo Glock, London, 1989, p. 3. 2 Stuart Hall, ‘The First New Left’, in Out of Apathy, ed. Archer and others, p. 13. 3 The best known studies are Michael Kenny, The First New Left: British Intellectuals after Stalin, London, 1995, and Lin Chun, The British New Left, Edinburgh, 1993. 4 For a nuanced recent account see Wade Matthews, ‘History and Historiography of the New Left in Britain’, in his The New Left, National Identity and the Break-up of Britain, Leiden, 2013; also Holger Nehring, ‘“Out of Apathy”: Genealogies and Meanings of the British “New Left” in a Transnational Context, 1956–1962’, in Between Prague Spring and French May: Opposition and Revolt in Europe, 1960–1980, ed. Martin Klimke and Joaquin Scharloth, New York, 2011, pp. 15–31. 5 Michael Kenny’s assessment that ‘In Britain, the New Left became a major force within the world of theory, but proved a failure in the world of politics’ is a more uncompromising judgement than that ventured in his 1995 book, but broadly expresses a consensus shared by scholars and some protagonists of the New Left: ‘Habits of the Mind: Marxism Today and Today’s Left’, Public Policy Research 18: 3, 2011, p. 133. 6 Lawrence Black, Redefining British Politics: Culture, Consumerism and Participation 1954–70, London, 2010, registers the New Left’s cultural politics, though regarding it largely as having failed. 7 Significant examples of recent work in this vein are Thomas Dowling, ‘In Spite of History: New Leftism in Britain 1956–1979’, unpublished PhD thesis, Sheffield, 2015, and Ben Jones and Camilla Schofield, ‘“Whatever Community is, this is not it”: Notting Hill and the Reconstruction of “Race” in Britain after 1958’, forthcoming. 8 Dorothy Thompson, ‘On the Trail of the New Left’, New Left Review 1/215, 1996. The two works reviewed were Kenny, The First New Left, and Lin Chun, The British New Left. 9 Perry Anderson, ‘The Left in the Fifties’, New Left Review 1/29, 1965, pp. 16–17. 10 There are exceptions. Kenny, The First New Left, has a chapter on political economy but does not link it closely to the New Left’s activist efforts. For recent assessments of New Left economic thinking see Mark Wickham Jones,‘The Debate about Wages: the New Left, the Labour Party, and Incomes Policy’, Journal of Political Ideologies 18: 1, February 2013, also his ‘The New Left’s Economic Model: the Challenge to Labour Party Orthodoxy, Renewal 21: 1, 2013, and Madeleine Davis, ‘Arguing Affluence: New Left Contributions to the Socialist Debate, 1957–1963’, Twentieth Century British History 23: 4, 2012. 11 A point well made by Matthews (‘History and Historiography of the New Left in Britain’, p. 6), especially in relation to a ‘provincial vs metropolitan’ tension often overstated. 12 It followed on from The Reasoner, a duplicated inner-party discussion journal produced in the aftermath of the Khrushchev revelations, whose unauthorized publication caused Saville and Thompson to face disciplinary sanctions. See Madeleine Davis, ‘The New Reasoner and the Early New Left’, in John Saville: Commitment and History: Themes from the Life and Work of a Socialist Historian, ed. David Howell, Dianne Kirby and Kevin Morgan, London, 2011; John Saville, Memoirs from the Left, London, 2003. The three issues of The Reasoner are reprinted in Paul Flewers and John McIlroy, 1956: John Saville, EP Thompson and The Reasoner, London, 2016. 13 On the importance of adult education as background to the work of Thompson and others, see essays in Beyond the Walls: 50 years of Continuing Education at the University of Leeds 1946–1996, ed. Richard Taylor, Leeds, 1996. 14 New Reasoner 1, summer 1957, Editorial, p. 2. 15 Novelist Doris Lessing and poet Randall Swingler were among the first recruits to the New Reasoner editorial board; there was also a shortlived supplement in the form of the Rhyming Reasoner: a Journal of Indiscretion, 1956, a poetical parody of the CPGB crisis produced by Ron Meek and George Houston. 16 For a flavour of the early ULR atmosphere, see ‘Document: Minutes of the Oxford University Socialist Club Executive Committee, 17 October 1956–27 February 1957’, History Workshop Journal 62, 2006, pp. 205–13; also personal recollections of 1956 by Jean McCrindle and Rod Prince in the same issue. 17 Stuart Hall, ‘A Sense of Classlessness’, Universities and Left Review 5, 1958, pp. 26–32. Thompson’s reply was ‘Commitment in Politics’, ULR 6, 1959, pp. 50–5. 18 For a fuller discussion see Madeleine Davis, ‘Rethinking Class: the Lineage of the Socialist Register’, Socialist Register, 2014. 19 C. Wright Mills, ‘Letter to the New Left’, NLR 1/5, 1960. 20 Industry and Society: Labour’s Policy on Future Public Ownership, Labour Party, 1957; Anthony Crosland, The Future of Socialism, London, 1956. 21 Hughes organized extramural classes for Sheffield steelworkers and then moved to Ruskin College as lecturer in industrial relations. He founded Ruskin’s Trade Union Research Unit, advised the TUC on economic strategy during the 1960s and was later Principal of Ruskin. Kenneth Alexander lectured at Leeds, Sheffield and Aberdeen before becoming Chair in Economics at Strathclyde. He played a major role in Scottish political and economic life, including stints as Chair at Govan Shipbuilders, the Highlands and Islands Development Board and the Committee on Adult Education in Scotland. Michael Barratt Brown worked from 1959–76 at Sheffield University’s Extra-mural Department, where he established day-release courses for miners and steelworkers. In 1978 he became the first Principal of Northern College, an adult residential college near Barnsley which he had helped establish. 22 Stuart Hall, Ralph Samuel, Peter Sedgwick, Charles Taylor, Mike Artis, The Insiders: a Study of the Men who Rule British Industry, ULR 3, 1957; Michael Barratt Brown, ‘The Controllers’, part 1, ULR 5, 1958, 53–61; II, ULR 6, 1959, pp. 38–41 and part 3, ULR 7, 1959, pp. 43–9; John Hughes and Ken Alexander, ‘A Socialist Wages Plan’, ULR/New Reasoner pamphlet, February 1959. For the broader New Left analysis see Ralph Miliband, ‘The Transition to the Transition’, New Reasoner 6, 1958; Michael Barratt Brown, ‘Plan for Progress: Labour’s Economic Policy’, ULR 6, 1959, pp.12–18; ‘Polemic on the Wages Plan’, New Reasoner 10, 1959, pp. 74–80; Stuart Hall, ‘Crosland Territory’, NLR 1, 1960; Charles Taylor, ‘What’s Wrong with Capitalism?’, NLR 1, 1960; John Hughes, ‘The Commanding Heights’, NLR 1 1960, pp. 11–19; John Hughes, ‘Nationalisation in the Mixed Economy’, Fabian Tract 328, 1960; John Hughes, ‘Socialism for the 1960s’, Tribune pamphlet, 1960; Royden Harrison, ‘Retreat from Industrial Democracy’, NLR 1 1960, pp. 32–8. 23 The Insiders, p. 59. 24 Hughes, ‘Commanding Heights’, p. 17. 25 John Hughes, ‘New Left Economic Policy’, in Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left 30 Years on, ed. Archer and others, p. 98. 26 The term ‘Labour New Left’ is used in Colin Leys and Leo Panitch, The End of Parliamentary Socialism, London, 2001. For New Left influence on Labour’s economic thinking more broadly see Wickham Jones, ‘The Debate about Wages’, 2013, and his Economic Strategy and the Labour Party: Politics and Policy-Making, 1970–83, London, 1996. 27 Letter from Thompson to Daly, 11 Oct. 1959: Papers of Lawrence Daly, Warwick Modern Records Centre, MRC MSS 302/3/13. 28 For a sense of Daly’s character and formidable intellect, see ‘A canny lad for a’ that’, interview in the Guardian, 23 Aug. 1979; ‘How a car crash changed the life of Lawrence Daly’, Sunday Express, 32 May 1979, and the obituary by Jean McCrindle, 30 May 2009: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/may/30/obituary-lawrence-daly, accessed 18 April 2017. 29 Draft letter from Daly to Daily Worker, 20 June 1956: Daly papers, MRC MSS 302/3/3. 30 Daly to Thompson and Saville, 14 Aug. 1956: Saville papers, Hull University Archives, Hull History Centre, U DJS/1/71. 31 Daly to Saville, 22 Sept. 1956: Saville papers, U DJS/1/60. 32 Letter, 2 March 1957: Daly papers, RC MSS 302/3/12. 33 Thompson to Daly, 8 Oct. 1957: Daly papers, MRC MSS 302/3/12. 34 Thompson to Daly, 2 April 1958: Daly papers, MRC MSS 302/3/12. 35 ‘A message to the electors from Lawrence Daly’, leaflet, May 1958: Daly papers, MRC MSS 302/3/12. In the 1959 general election leaflet, the ‘message from the universities’ was also signed by Michael Kullman and Christopher Hill: Daly papers, RC MSS 302/3/9. 36 Letter to our readers, NR 5, summer 1958, p. 130. 37 Kevin Morgan, International Communism and the Cult of the Individual, London, 2017, p.102. 38 Daly to Saville, 23 March 1959: Saville papers, U DJS/ 1/27. 39 Saville to Peter Worsley, 17 Sept. 1959: Saville papers, U DJS/1/27. Thompson visited Daly in Fife in 1957 and Daly and his family visited the Thompsons at their holiday cottage in Wales, see Thompson to Saville, 17 July 1959: Saville papers, U DJS/1/73. 40 Thompson, ‘Homage to Tom Maguire’, reprinted in E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left, ed. Cal Winslow, London, 2014, p. 265. For Thompson’s role in the League see Christos Efstathiou, ‘E. P. Thompson, the Early New Left and the Fife Socialist League’, Labour History Review 81: 1, 2016, p. 44. 41 Daly to Saville, 23 March 1959: Saville papers, U DJS/1/27. 42 Thompson to Daly, 26 March 1959: Saville papers, U DJS/1/27. 43 Thompson to Daly, 27 Aug. and 31 Aug. 1959: Daly papers, MRC MSS 302/3/13. 44 A record in Saville’s papers gives the sum raised as £109 11s, with £45 of that from Joe Greenald: Saville papers, U DJS/1/27. Thompson also advertised in Tribune for funds to cover the costs of Daly’s campaign. 45 Parliamentary Election 1959, Lawrence Daly leaflet: Daly papers, MRC MSS 302/2/9. 46 John Saville, ‘A Note on West Fife’, New Reasoner 10, autumn 1959. 47 Thompson to Daly, 11 Oct. 1959: Daly papers, MRC MSS/302/3/13. 48 ‘Dear Friend’ circular from Daly: Saville papers, U DJS/1/72. 49 Notebook titled Fife Socialist League: Daly papers, MRC MSS/302/3/10. 50 Daly, ‘Fife Socialist League’, NLR 1/4, 1960. 51 Daly to ‘Peter’ [Worsley?], 26 July 1964: Daly papers, MRC MSS 302/3/4. 52 See letters between the two in U DJS 1/72, especially Saville to Thompson 30 Nov. 1959, Saville to ‘Ralph’ [Miliband] 10 Jan. 1960, Thompson to Saville [12 May] (n.d): Saville papers. 53 Thompson to Daly, 16 March, 1962: Daly papers, MRC MSS 302/3/4. 54 Daly circular, 12 Sept. 1962: Daly papers, MRC MSS 302/3/18. 55 A problem also noted by Kenny, The First New Left, p. 38. 56 Thompson to Daly, 31 Dec. 1963: Daly papers, MRC MSS 302/3/4. A later letter, around the time of the May Day Manifesto, contained an interesting reflection on the position of the miners. Noting that the outlook for the miners as a unified force was bleak, Thompson once more recommended pioneering experiments in co-operative and locally based public ownership. ‘Economically-doomed’ groups can sometimes – like the handworkers of chartist times – play the most progressive and conscious of roles’: Thompson to Daly, 11 Nov. [probably 1967]: Daly papers, MRC MSS 302/3/7. 57 Thompson to Daly 29 Sept. 1962: Daly papers, MRC MSS 302/3/18. 58 Thompson to Daly, 31 Dec. 1963: Daly papers, MRC MSS 302/3/4. 59 Daly to Peter [Worsley?], 26 July 1964: Daly papers, MRC MSS 302/3/4. 60 Saville to Thompson, 4 April 1958, U DJS/1/70, Saville papers. 61 On the Scottish picture see Willie Thompson, ‘The New Left in Scotland’, in Essays in Scottish Labour History, ed. Ian MacDougall, Edinburgh, 1978. 62 Kenny, The First New Left, p. 45. 63 Saville to Peter [Worsley?] and Edward [Thompson], 29 Nov. 1959: Saville papers, U DJS/1/72. 64 Searchlight 2, 1960: Saville papers, U DJS 4/38. 65 ‘Letter to Readers’, NLR 1/6, 1960. 66 Also present were John Kenyon, Bob Alston, William Hannsford: Minutes of New Left industrial committee, Manchester, 22 Oct. 1960: Daly papers, MRC MSS 302/3/3. 67 Those to be invited were Barratt Brown, Tom Ryan, Joe Jackson, Len Youle, Norman Atkinson, Bill Hart, and Bert Wynn. 68 Hall to Daly, 8 Nov. 1959: Daly papers, MRC MSS 302/3/3. 69 See Barratt Brown, ‘Yugoslavia Revisited’, in NLR 1 and 2, 1960; Hughes, ‘Commanding Heights’ and Harrison, ‘Retreat From Industrial Democracy’, both in NLR 1/4, 1960; Denis Butt, ‘Workers’ Control’ and David Armstrong, ‘Meaning in Work’, both in NLR 1/10, 1961. Perry Anderson’s early contributions also emphasized industrial democracy: see ‘Sweden: Mr Crosland’s dreamland’, NLR 1/7, 1961. 70 Chairman’s report to New Left Board, 16 Oct. [1961]: Saville papers, File U DJS/1/70. 71 Thompson to Saville, 7 July and 17 July 1959: Saville papers, U DJS/1/73. 72 Wickham Jones, ‘The New Left’s Economic Model’. 73 For a less than sympathetic portrayal of the New Left’s industrial efforts via Searchlight and Roche, see Norman Harding, Staying Red: Why I Remain a Socialist, London, 2005, pp. 142–4. 74 Thompson to Daly, 29 April 1967: Daly Papers, MRC MSS 302/3/4. He noted that ‘as usual with this end of the post-1956 left we suffer from a crumbling, incoherent, organisationally null centre’. 75 Thompson’s ‘Revolution!’, in NLR 1/3, 1960, was one of the most important pieces to attempt this – interestingly Thompson later criticized it as attempting to unify incompatible perspectives. 76 12 April 1965, Harvester Press Archive: the Left in Britain, fiche 31 on Centre for Socialist Education, BLPES, LSE. Among the invitees to the discussion were figures from both ‘first’ and ‘second’ New Lefts as well as the wider left. 77 Centre for Socialist Education statement of aims, NLR 1/35, Jan/Feb, 1966. 78 ‘The Labour Government and Beyond’ Socialist Register, 1966. 79 CSE steering committee notes April 16, 1966: fiche 31, Harvester Press Archive: the Left in Britain, BLPES, LSE. 80 Report of the 5th National Conference on workers control and industrial democracy, Coventry, June 10–11 1967: fiche 32, Harvester Press Archive: the Left in Britain, BLPES, LSE. 81 Ken Coates, A Future for British Socialism, Centre for Socialist Education, 1968. 82 For the Institute for Workers’ Control, see David Coates and Tony Topham, Readings and Witnesses for Workers’ Control, Nottingham, Spokesman Books, 2005. 83 For aspects of this legacy see Local Socialism? Labour Councils and New Left Alternatives, ed. Martin Boddy and Colin Fudge, London, 1984. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - ‘Among the Ordinary People’: New Left Involvement in Working-Class Political Mobilization 1956–68
JF - History Workshop Journal
DO - 10.1093/hwj/dby018
DA - 2018-10-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/among-the-ordinary-people-new-left-involvement-in-working-class-zs7M9NqvZj
SP - 133
VL - 86
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -