Politics of commitment: the early new left in Britain, 1956-1962

Abstract

This thesis is a study of a social movement, the early new left, that made a radical break with the past. A Loose amalgam of Communist Party members, young non-aligned people and left-wing Labour Party supporters, it grew up in disaffection from the traditional left. Whilst ex Communist Party members reworked their socialist commitment following Khrushchev's'secret speech' and the Soviet invasion. of Hungary in 1956, a new generation of young people were drawn into political activity out of opposition to the foreign and defence policies of the Government of their day.

These groups found common ground in their commitment to a humanist socialism. As communist dissidents, through the journals the Reasoner and the New Reasoner sought to free marxism from dogma, and to reassess the prospects for socialism in the 1950s, Universities and Left Review supporters campaigned for a socialism conceived as a 'whole way of life'. Both groups gave their very active support to the nascent campaign for nuclear disarmament. In 1960, these two journals merged to form the New Left Review. By now, local supporters of this new left politics had set up discussion and campaigning groups of their own, the new left clubs. 'For all comers and all issues', the New Left Review and the clubs were very positive attempts to free socialist politics from the dogmatism and the sectarianism of the cold war. But the movement and the first phase of the New Left Seriew were relatively short lived. The myriad problems that a non-aligned movement faces had overwhelmed the majority of the clubs by 1963. Meanwhile the New Left Review, always an unhappy amalgam of people from very different political traditions, did not survive the divergent pressures of providing theoretical analysis, visiting speakers and administrative support for the movement. Following long and heated discussions, the journal changed hands at the end of 1962.

Chapters 1 to 4 trace the political and historical context in which the early new left developed. The national, foreign and defence policies of the post war Labour Party, in and out of office, are set beside Communist Party and pacifist oppositions. Subsequent chapters describe how the four journals were published, and how both the movement for nuclear disarmament and the early new left movement were formed. Through library research, studying internal memoranda and lengthy interviews with over twenty of the people who were active in varied ways (editing the journals, administering the journals and the clubs, participating in new left activities), both the public life and the personal experience of the early new left is discussed.

The thesis touches too on some issues that the early new left ignored. Despite its commitment to retrieve all areas of social life for socialism, the family, ideologies of parenthood, gender divisions (and the position of women in particular), escaped its critical gaze. These absences are explained in terms of the context in which the early new left evolved.