With the cooperation of: the Faculty of Environmental and Social Studies at the University of North London.

Dr Thompson's paper can either be downloaded in Microsoft Word format by clicking here, or you can view it online below. The paper presented on this web site may differ from that presented in the seminar. Ownership and copyright of the material remains in the hands of Dr. Duncan Thompson.

If you have comments or criticisms of the paper, you can contact Dr. Thompson, at dthompson@waitrose.com

Pessimism of the intellect: the New Left Review and the ‘conjuncture of 1989’

Duncan Thompson

Introduction

Forty years and 238 issues after its first appearance in 1960, and coinciding with Perry Anderson’s return as editor, one of the foremost Marxist journals in the English language, the New Left Review, marked the new century by commencing a ‘new series’ with NLR (II) 1, January/February 2000. Although billed as a ‘new New Left Review’[i] anyone led to expect a statement of new political direction, or overdue critical self-reflection upon the journal’s past, will be disappointed. Whilst Anderson judges that the journal has reached the point, as it enters its fifth decade, where its life must be extended ‘beyond the conditions’ and ‘generations that gave rise to’ it, the shape and direction of any such ‘overhaul’ is left curiously in the air: the ‘transition to another style of review’, he writes, ‘is not to be achieved overnight’, cautioning that his editorial launching the new series is but ‘a personal - and therefore provisional - statement’.[ii] A rousing manifesto of the tasks of the journal, and, more widely, a New Left politics, it is not.

The uncertainty of the project that will define the new series is a direct reflection of the Review’s reading of what Anderson calls the ‘conjuncture of ’89’; namely, ‘the virtually uncontested consolidation, and universal diffusion, of neo-liberalism’.[iii] Even under notionally centre-left ‘third way’ governments of the Clinton-Blair type, the ‘hard core of government policies remains further pursuit of the Reagan-Thatcher legacy … now carefully surrounded with subsidiary concessions and softer rhetoric’, the combined effect of which, ‘now being diffused throughout Europe, is to suppress the conflictual potential of the pioneering regimes of the radical right, and kill off opposition to neo-liberal hegemony more completely’.[iv] Thus, in Anderson’s sweeping and downbeat estimate, for ‘the first time since the Reformation, there are no longer any significant oppositions - that is, systemic rival outlooks - within the thought-world of the West’.[v]

If the principal response of the erstwhile Left has been one of ‘accommodation’ to the triumph of capitalism, Anderson is equally quick to warn against what he describes as the politics of ‘consolation’, the search for ‘silver linings’, inducing ‘a propensity to over-estimate the significance of contrary processes, to invest inappropriate agencies with disinterested potentials, to nourish illusions in imaginary forces’.[vi] Instead, Anderson advocates for the NLR an ‘uncompromising realism’, ‘refusing any accommodation with the ruling system, and rejecting every piety and euphemism that would understate its power’.[vii] Tellingly, however, and buried in a footnote, Anderson identifies a third response on the Left; namely, ‘resignation’: ‘a lucid recognition of the nature and triumph of the system, without either adaptation or self-deception, but also without any belief in the chance of an alternative to it’.[viii]Although a ‘bitter conclusion’, and one ‘rarely articulated as a public position’,[ix] we may speculate that this is indeed, at least privately, Anderson’s own perspective.

What is missing from Anderson’s editorial - consistent with the veil of secrecy the second New Left has drawn over its own affairs and the public reticence concerning its own evolution - is any critical reflection upon the Review’s past. It is a history that, in contrast to that of the first New Left, is curiously unexplored, for neither accounts of their past involvement in the NLR, nor critical reflections upon the journal’s history, have been forthcoming from anyone intimately involved in the post-1962 Review. Whilst of intrinsic interest in itself, it is, moreover, a history that is central to understanding the Review’s reading of, and response to, the ‘conjuncture of 1989’, and thus its ability or otherwise to illuminate the terrain on which we must contest capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

The emergence of the ‘second’ New Left

When Anderson et al. inherited the New Left Review on the dissolution of the first New Left (of Edward Thompson, Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams et al.) in 1962, they were undaunted by the disappearance of the New Left as a political movement, and showed no interest in seeking to resurrect it. Writing in the Review in 1965, Anderson reflected that ‘the hope of becoming a major political movement haunted’ the first New Left, ‘and ended by dissipating its initial assets’.[x] Henceforth, accordingly, the Review’s focus was the ‘[t]heoretical and intellectual work ... sacrificed’ by the first New Left ‘for a mobilising role which perpetually escaped it’.[xi] Its model was Sartre and de Beauvoir’s Les Temps Modernes.[xii] Thus, in a perceptive critique as early as 1964, Peter Sedgwick identified in Anderson and co. a ‘new New Left’, ‘rootless’ and ‘Olympian’ in character.[xiii]

Significant differences between the two New Lefts there certainly were, though initially these were arguably more of style and temperament than political substance. The first New Left’s focus was more immediate (even managing, for instance, to produce a four-page daily bulletin for delegates at Labour’s 1960 Scarborough conference), as were its expectations: in Thompson’s impatient diagnosis Britain was ‘over-ripe’ for socialism. After relinquishing control of the New Left Review its principal preoccupations continued to be popular culture and the recovery of working class history ‘from below’ (in, for example, the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and the History Workshop). By contrast, the second New Left thought in terms of ‘epochs and continents’;[xiv] was determined to see Britain, in some sense, ‘as a foreign country’;[xv] and was committed to the importation and naturalisation of continental Marxism in a bid to fill the perceived ‘absent centre’ at the heart of British intellectual culture. It was thus altogether more intellectual and theoretical in register.

The sharp exchange with Edward Thompson in 1965-6 over the heterodox interpretation of modern British history offered in the ‘Nairn-Anderson theses’ served very publicly to demarcate the emergence of a ‘new’ or second New Left distinct from its forbears - though it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the intemperance of these polemics was over-determined by a residual bitterness on Thompson’s part, and a defensiveness on Anderson’s, concerning the change in editorial control of the Review. At this stage, the second New Left, like the first, was committed to a species of reformism, and Ian Birchall, writing in 1981, is right to conclude that whilst the change in editorial control marked ‘a significant shift in style and personnel’, ‘as far as politics was concerned there was no clear break’.[xvi] In this period, the second New Left advocated a proto-Euro-Communist policy of ‘presence’ and a strategy of structural reform. In ‘Problems of Socialist Strategy’ (1965), for example, Anderson counterposed a Gramscian war of position in civil society to both Leninist and social democratic fixation on the state, arguing that Leninism has ‘meaning’ only ‘in backward, inchoate societies, dominated by scarcity and integrated only by the state,’[xvii] whereas ‘in western Europe ... capitalist hegemony is first and foremost entrenched in civil society, and must be beaten there’.[xviii] Anderson himself later critically reflected that such a reading of Gramsci exhibited the ‘illusions of Left Social-Democracy’.[xix]

Revolutionary expectations

In terms of substantive political reorientation, the real break came in 1968 - as much a discontinuity within the career of the second New Left as a break between it and the first New Left. Whereas the latter, briefly regrouped around the May Day Manifesto and subsequent Convention of the Left, continued to seek a third way between social democracy and Communism, the events of that momentous revolutionary year radicalised, and effectively refounded, the second New Left. Above all, the French May was seminal, for it appeared to herald the ‘return of the repressed’ to the West.[xx] The ‘idea of the actuality of the revolution’, reflected the editorial collective, looking back on the May Events in the one hundreth issue of the Review in 1977, ‘transformed political consciousness throughout the capitalist world’.[xxi] So far as the New Left Review was concerned, the question of the transition to socialism in one or more of the advanced capitalist countries remained firmly on the political agenda for a decade or more.

Judging, in the new militant temper of the times, that the ‘intellectual course’ of Western Marxism - the product of defeat and the long separation of theory from revolutionary practice - had ‘probably already been run’,[xxii] the Review initially oriented itself towards Maoism and its western European offshoot, student revolutionism. Maoism was judged the theory of a genuine revolutionary practice, superior in important respects to Lenin, no less.[xxiii] Thus, as it later acknowledged, the Review ‘slid towards an uncritical substitution of China for Russia in its ... political orientation’, in which the ‘record of the Chinese Revolution ... functioned as a kind of absolution for the disasters of the Russian Revolution’.[xxiv] Meanwhile, in June 1968 the NLR ‘collectively participated as a group’ in the founding conference of the Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation,[xxv] whose uncompromising eleven-point manifesto, committed ‘to the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism and imperialism and its replacement by workers power’,[xxvi] was reprinted in full in the Review.

However, quickly disabused of the limitations of student politics and illusions in Maoism, the Review gravitated, in a somewhat circuitous fashion, towards Trotskyism. In the immediate context of the moment of 1968, the NLR dismissed Trotskyism as having remained imprisoned in the experience of the October Revolution;[xxvii] in Nairn’s damning account, the Trotskyites ‘remained the guardians of the flame, in a world that would not catch fire’:[xxviii] a ‘profoundly conservative’ task.[xxix] Tellingly, it was via ‘a new debate on the twenties’[xxx] that the Review was nudged in the direction of Trotskyism: an exchange on Trotsky’s legacy initiated by Nicolas Krassó - a pupil of Lukács who had left Hungary in 1956, and a recent recruit to the editorial committee - and rejoined by Ernest Mandel. Krasso’s two essays, processed within the editorial collective (Decennial Report p.29-30), demonstrate the distance between the NLR and Trotskyism at this time. ‘Paradoxically’, and alone amongst the editorial committee, Anderson’s thinking was ‘permanently altered’ by Mandel’s two replies (Ibid., p.31). Resistance to Anderson’s Trotskyist orientation meant that the first unambiguous public endorsement of Trotskyism was not made until 1976, in Anderson’s Considerations on Western Marxism. To the core text - written in 1974, ‘discussed and criticised by colleagues on New Left Review (Considerations p.viii), and eliciting strong reservations from some quarters (Elliott p.105) - Anderson added a somewhat chastened Afterword, reflecting upon ‘difficulties peremptorily evaded or ignored’ (Considerations p.109). Aware of Trotskyism’s weaknesses, Anderson’s affiliation was more forthright than his own reservations warranted. For if, through its long divorce from revolutionary practice, Western Marxism became immersed in philosophical abstractions, the Trotskyist response involved its own penalties, not least a certain conservatism: ‘[t]he preservation of classical doctrines took priority over their development. Triumphalism in the cause of the working class, and catastrophism in the analysis of capitalism, asserted more by will than by intellect, were to be the typical vices of this tradition in its routine forms’.[xxxi] Moreover, Anderson conceded, Trotskyism had yet to resolve ‘the formidable scientific problems posed to the socialist movement’ by the question of revolutionary strategy in the West.[xxxii]

Whatever the merits or costs of this orientation, there is no doubt that in the seventies the Review developed a strong identity on the basis, in its own estimate, ‘of an open and critical revolutionary marxism’.[xxxiii] In part, this identity derived from an organisational style that matched its politics: a ‘common-law variety of democratic centralism’ (as one far from hostile observer reputedly put it) that effectively fashioned a collective New Left Review persona. And when it came to determining the editorial ‘line’, there is no doubt that Anderson was the dominant figure.

Commercially too it was a success: having initially been bank-rolled by Anderson, the Review had recorded its first annual surplus in 1967.[xxxiv] Benefiting from the rapid expansion of higher education since the sixties, the NLR found a ready audience in a growing and radicalised academia. That there was a ready reception for classical and Western Marxism is witnessed by both the collaboration with mainstream publisher Penguin Books in producing the Pelican Marx library under the general editorship of Quintin Hoare, and the success of the Review’s own imprint, New Left Books (now Verso), launched in 1970 (in Edward Thompson’s caustic aside, ‘import agencies’ for continental Marxism[xxxv]).

The Trotskysant complexion of the NLR’s editorial collective was strengthened both by the resignations of Ben Brewster and David Fernbach over editorial criticism of China in 1971, and the inactivity of members at odds with the new orientation. Of the editorial committee’s eight identifiably active members in the mid-seventies - Perry Anderson, Anthony Barnett, Robin Blackburn, Norman Geras, Fred Halliday, Quintin Hoare, Branka Magas, and Francis Mulhern - four were members of the International Marxist Group (IMG), the British section of the Fourth International: Blackburn, Geras, Hoare and Magas. In addition, Ernest Mandel, a leading figure in the Fourth International, became a major contributor to the Review.[xxxvi] His Revolutionary Marxism Today, published by New Left Books in 1979, was, to all intents and purposes, a manifesto of the Fourth International. However, whilst the ‘coupure of May’ had led to the revolutionary reorientation of the Review, it crucially left unchanged something deeply inscribed in the second New Left’s collective character trait from its birth: its Olympianism and high intellectualism.

Misreading the moment of 1968

The Review was not mistaken in its judgement concerning the prospects of a revolutionary transition to socialism in one or more of the advanced capitalist countries (southern Europe being identified as the potential weak link in the chain of metropolitan capital) - it was a view shared across the political spectrum, by hopeful and fearful commentators alike. But what is most revealing about the orientation of the NLR is its commitment to the paradigm of 1917 and an excavation of the debates of the twenties - ‘the last great strategic debate in the European workers’ movement’ on the development of a ‘revolutionary strategy in metropolitan capitalism that ... had any direct contact with the masses’[xxxvii] - and its failure to address the emergence of a ‘post-affluence’ socialist politics and the libertarian socialist agenda tabled by the events of 1968 and after in the development of a genuinely contemporary revolutionary politics, despite the fact, for example, that the IMG was itself ‘heavily influenced by the anti-bureaucratic thrust of the women’s movement, student radicalism, community politics, the squatters’ and claimants’ movements’.[xxxviii] Today, it is this agenda that constitutes the basis for an anti-capitalist, ‘Red-Green’ politics in the advanced capitalist countries. The Review would not have had to look far to discover the resources for such an engagement. Juliet Mitchell, the ‘first major exponent of socialist feminism’ in Britain,[xxxix] though inactive, remained on the editorial committee until 1983. Others who were open to a dialogue on these terms also went unrepresented in the pages of the Review - see, for example, the contents of the weekly newspaper Seven Days (1971-2), a collaborative venture involving the Women’s Liberation Workshop, Black Dwarf, Idiot International, and Gay Liberation alongside Anthony Barnett, Fred Halliday, Alexander Cockburn, Gareth Stedman Jones and Peter Wollen from the New Left Review. The women’s movement featured prominently in Seven Days, whose coverage ranged from mental health issues to the commune movement, from ‘kids’ lib’ to hunt saboteurs.

In the event, of course, the political defeats of the seventies multiplied, illustrating ‘a spectrum of different types of blockage or error’: from the ‘fawning accommodation’ of the PCI and the electoral misadventures of the PCF, to the bureaucratic ‘sectarian putschism’ of the Portuguese Communist Party[xl] - compounded more significantly still by the failure of the Fourth International in Portugal, where ‘arguably the best single chance of a socialist revolution in Western Europe was spectacularly missed’.[xli] The strategic debate in the pages of the Review in this period was an energetic one, pitting Left Euro-Communists such as Claudin and Poulantzas against revolutionary Marxists such as Mandel and Henri Weber. However, it was also to prove inconclusive. Despite its revolutionary affiliation, the Review expressed a certain equivocation, unwilling, or perhaps unable, to adjudicate on the debate. A confidential editorial report lamented the fact that ‘favourable significantly outweighed critical treatment of Eurocommunism’, while what criticism there was tended to reiterate ‘classical tenets’, rather than develop ‘new revolutionary strategies’.[xlii] As early as 1978 Anderson was voicing his disappointment at the failure of the Fourth International to respond convincingly to the strategic impasse.[xliii]

Even from the outset of its revolutionary orientation in 1968, the Review had accepted that a revolutionary strategy appropriate to the conditions of the advanced liberal capitalist countries had yet to be formulated. But, having firmly situated itself within the revolutionary tradition of 1917,[xliv] the Review made little progress in its search; an appropriate socialist strategy, wrote Anderson in 1983, remained ‘the Sphinx facing Marxism in the West’.[xlv] Whereas in 1976 Anderson had maintained that Trotskyism might provide ‘one of the central elements for any renaissance of revolutionary Marxism’[xlvi], by 1983 he was compelled to acknowledge that ‘the promise it contained’ had not been ‘fulfilled’.[xlvii] The Trotskyist tradition had failed to provide a ‘scenario for defeating capitalism in the West’ - a ‘blockage’, he argued, which ‘stemmed from too close an imaginative adherence to the paradigm of the October Revolution’.[xlviii] It is a criticism that applies equally to the Review itself.

Facing the Sphinx

Meanwhile, the period of revolutionary expectations heralded by the moment of 1968 had passed. The Review’s confidential Decennial Report in 1974 had concluded that the ‘chances of the Left are now much greater than at any time since the start of the Cold War, in the advanced and ex-colonial countries alike’.[xlix] However, surveying global prospects six years later, the NLR conceded that ‘[n]o such confidence is possible in 1980’.[l] The decade of revolutionary expectations, opened in Europe on the streets of Paris in May 1968, had come to an end. ‘The historical defeat of the European labour movement in these years was a momentous one’, judged the Review, ‘quelling ... any short-range prospect of progress towards socialism in this central zone of imperialism’.[li] The terms of the new conjuncture, by contrast, were to be set by a sustained ideological and political offensive by an invigorated ‘new Right’.

The Review had all but ignored domestic politics since the late sixties - writing in 1977, Geoff Hodgson judged that Anderson and co. had become ‘the lost sheep of the labour movement’,[lii] too remote from the institutions of organised labour and the problems confronting any realistic political strategy for the attainment of socialism in British; similar critiques were penned by Mike Rustin and Donald Sassoon.[liii] In 1980, however, the Review advocated a conscious ‘reanchorage in Britain’[liv] which initially reflected a new-found confidence in the health of Anglo-Marxism and the potential of the left-wing insurgency within the Labour Party. But reanchorage was also, at least implicitly, a recognition that the Review’s search since 1968 for an answer to the strategic questions facing a New Left politics in the West within the canon of classical revolutionary Marxism had proved unavailing. This was a potentially fruitful moment in the career of the second New Left, promising to focus its attentions upon the development of a genuinely contemporary revolutionary politics.

Anderson was soon to concede that the challenge of the issues raised by gender, ecology and war ‘have now become unevadable’.[lv] While judging that the peace movement, bringing millions onto the streets of western Europe in protest, represented perhaps ‘the greatest hope in European politics of the last few years’,[lvi] it was the Review’s engagement with the question of feminism and the women’s movement that was to prove central to its evolution. The Review had all but ignored the women’s liberation movement since its inception in 1970, the one intervention by a member of the NLR collective in this period - by Branka Magas in 1971 - concluded that socialism was a precondition for women’s liberation and hence asserted the primacy of class politics.[lvii] However, the confidential 1980 editorial report belatedly suggested that the Review ‘should ... have a conscious programme for the integration of gender into class debates within the socialist culture it seeks to develop’, adding that a ‘sexual - as well as ecological - politics will clearly be salient parts of any late 20th century socialism’.[lviii] 

Nonetheless, Anderson considered that the very universality of the appeal of the women’s, peace, and Green movements provided no specific leverage to effect the far-reaching social transformation necessary to the resolution of the problems they raised, a transformation that could only be achieved by the overthrow of capitalism.[lix] Although the Review recognised the value of the pre-figurative and utopian dimension to these new movements - arguing that the ‘long-separated traditions’ of ‘utopian’ and ‘scientific’ socialism must ‘be rejoined ... today’[lx] - it maintained that socialism still needed a perspective indicating ‘particular agencies and strategies for its realisation’.[lxi] The ‘decisive advance’ of Marxism, Anderson argued, had been to identify ‘the site of a particular social agency ... as the Archimedean point from which the old order could be overturned - the structural position occupied by the industrial working-class created by the advent of capitalism’.[lxii] But while there were ‘structural reasons why the classical labour movement still remains the most steadfast component of anti-capitalist politics’, it was the new social movements, wrote Anderson et al. in 1984, that ‘have ... in recent years often shown themselves superior to the workers’ movement in terms of ideal-political imagination and immediate capacity for moral mobilisation’.[lxiii] What was required was ‘an alliance between the older labour movements and the anti-capitalist elements in the new social movements, which alone can secure the goals of each’[lxiv] - in effect, a combination of social power and moral mobilisation, sustained by a ‘concrete utopianism’. The Review’s public recognition of the limits of the classical revolutionary tradition, and its apparent willingness to engage with the utopian and pre-figurative themes raised by new social currents and forces, was potentially of great significance. The moment, however, was to be short-lived.

Retrenchment

It was soon evident that the crisis of socialist politics, which Anderson had initially hoped would be contained to southern Europe - directly attributable, he argued, to the recent defeats suffered by the Left and the ‘double disappointment’ in Maoism and Euro-Communism[lxv] - had escaped its Latin quarantine. At odds with Anderson’s public expression of confidence in the health of Anglo-Marxism (see In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, 1983) an editorial report of late 1982 privately accepted that Britain and America have ‘now also been infected by local variants of the continental virus’,[lxvi] expressed in Britain as a crisis of the labour movement and taking its cue from Hobsbawm’s seminal The Forward March of Labour Halted? of 1978.[lxvii] Indeed, as early as 1981 Anderson was privately warning that in Britain the decomposition of Euro-Communism was threatening a similar rightward movement to that experienced in southern Europe.[lxviii]As some on the Left, ‘pink Professors and their even paler house-journals’[lxix] - i.e., Marxism Today - rallied to a moderating ‘realism’, the 1982 editorial report, while not wishing to ‘warrant a retreat to the isolationism of the review in the past’, suggested ‘a greater measure of reserve towards our immediate environment’.[lxx] How far it was safe, in such a context, to pursue ‘reanchorage’ and venture from the Review’s previously self-imposed isolation was to prove an explosive issue for the NLR. It would appear to be the principal cause of a sharp exchange within the editorial committee, which ultimately issued in the resignation of ten of its members (though only two active members, Anthony Barnett and Fred Halliday) at the end of 1983.

Plans to enlarge the editorial committee following the 1983 resignations immediately went awry when four of the five women invited to join - Cathy Porter, Lynne Segal, Barbara Taylor, and Hilary Wainwright - tabled demands which the existing rump editorial committee found unacceptable. The majority view of the NLR (Francis Mulhern, for one, dissented) was that the labour and women’s movements had distinct goals. As its 1983 Charter argued: ‘Just as NLR is not a peace journal, but a socialist journal that supports the peace movement, so it is not a feminist journal but a socialist journal that supports the women’s movement.’[lxxi] Having situated the working class, in Anderson’s words, at the Archimedean point from which the old order could be overturned, what the Review sought was an alliance between the two movements. But, Porter, Segal, Taylor and Wainwright countered that a gender-neutral workers’ struggle was an insidious illusion, since, in the first instance, it failed to challenge existing inequalities within the labour movement and organisations of the Left. They did not believe that feminism could be simply tacked on to existing socialist theory and political practice: it was not an alliance of feminism with socialism they sought, but a feminist reformulation of socialist politics. It was perhaps unsurprising that when the editorial committee was at length enlarged early in 1984, a clear majority of the new recruits could be said to share the Review’s more traditionalist perspectives: Victoria Brittain, Patrick Camiller, Peter Dews, ‘Oliver MacDonald’ (Peter Gowan), and Ellen Wood.

By 1985 the Review was writing that the current political scene was ‘a much harsher one than anything the Left has known since the 30’s’.[lxxii]The domestic Left was in undisguised disarray: of its main detachments, the miners had been defeated, and left-wing local government either abolished or isolated and disowned by a rightward-moving Labour leadership. In this new, and increasingly unfavourable conjuncture, it became apparent that the debate around The Forward March of Labour Halted?, ‘at least so far as some of its participants were concerned’, had ‘acted to clear the ground for an increasingly outright repudiation of the very notion of an anti-capitalist working-class’.[lxxiii] Far from seeking a combination between the labour movement and the ‘new social movements’, Marxism Today, main exemplar of the ‘new revisionism’, counterposed them. Significantly, Raphael Samuel, denouncing these ‘Filofax Marxists’ and ‘Designer Socialists’, contended that in counterposing ‘the “new social forces” to the “pre-historic” ones represented by the trade unions’, Marxism Today had ‘taken its cue from feminism’.[lxxiv] In championing the politics of the new social movements, the ‘new revisionists’ served to make them suspect in the eyes of the NLR. In any event, by the mid-eighties the peace movement was in visible decline, and the women’s movement fragmented.

Nervous of the revisionist contagion, and by now wary of too radical a reformulation of socialist politics, the Review’s response - over-determined, no doubt, by the new revisionists’ coded assault upon socialism - was a defence of class politics. In a keynote essay in the Review’s one hundred and fiftieth issue in 1985, Ralph Miliband (like Samuel, a key figure of the ‘first’ New Left) argued that the ‘organised working class’ remained the ‘principal ... “gravedigger” of capitalism’, the ‘indispensable “agency of historical change”’.[lxxv]Other social forces had a role to play, but the structural location of the working class within capitalist production and reproduction meant that it was the only social actor with sufficient leverage to overturn capitalism. If ‘the organised working class will refuse to do the job’, Miliband concluded, ‘then the job will not be done; and capitalist society will continue, generation after generation, as a conflict-ridden, growingly authoritarian and brutalised social system’.[lxxvi] Similarly forceful interventions were made in the Review and elsewhere by Geras, Mulhern, and Wood.[lxxvii] It was symptomatic of the defensiveness of its engagement with the new revisionism that the Review was more forthright in its reassertion of basic tenets of classical socialism, than its resolution of the problems acknowledged to be confronting socialist strategy in the West.

The crisis of left-wing politics in Britain was due to no mere local, or temporarily unfavourable, turn of events: it affected the entire West European Left, north and south, social democrat and Communist alike. The failure of the French Left’s projected ‘rupture with capitalism’ in 1981-2 set the boundaries for the reformist experience in neighbouring countries; thereafter ‘Euro-Socialism’ - enthusiastically endorsing Atlanticism, the Cold War and anti-Communism - embraced neo-liberal capitalist rationalisation: ‘Reagonomics with a socialist gloss’, as James Petras put it in the NLR in 1984.[lxxviii] In mapping the West European Left in this period[lxxix] the Review focused entirely on the principal, if increasingly nominal, parties of the centre-Left; busy, in the Review’s own words, ‘dumping awkward commitments’ and adjusting ‘their sights downwards, confining themselves to ever more modest instalments of redistribution and promises to reduce unemployment, while having nothing to say about the organisation of production or the pattern of ownership’.[lxxx] Despite heralding ‘red-green’ parties such as the Left Socialists in Norway as supplying ‘a needed element of socialist renewal’,[lxxxi] anti-capitalist parties and movements were conspicuously absent from the Review’s survey - indicative that it had abandoned its search for an answer to the question of revolutionary strategy in the West. Instead, the Review looked East.

The fall in the East

Central to the conjuncture of the eighties was the West’s calculated escalation of geo-political tension with the Soviet Union,  issuing, from late 1978, in a ‘second’ Cold War. Rejecting Edward Thompson’s thesis that the ‘second’ Cold War was driven by its own ‘exterminist’ momentum, Fred Halliday replied for the Review that while the possession of nuclear weapons ‘at once dramatise and endow’ the conflict ‘with infinitely greater risk’, its ‘bases lie elsewhere - above all in the conflict between capitalist and non-capitalist worlds’.[lxxxii] In Halliday’s analysis, the origins of the renewed Cold War lay in a threefold right-wing offensive against the global post-war settlement, targeted at the domestic gains of the working class; at the USSR as a world power; and at the independence of the former colonial world. Counting fourteen ‘revolutionary upheavals’ in the Third World between 1974 and 1980,[lxxxiii] Halliday judged that ‘it is social revolution itself and the response to it which has triggered the counter-revolutionary drive that is so central to the Second Cold War’.[lxxxiv] It was the West, ‘precisely because it has the upper hand’, that had taken ‘the initiative in introducing a new level of competition which it believes will restore the primacy in world politics which recent developments have taken from it’.[lxxxv] Thus the NLR was quick to recognise that the advent of the Second Cold War in 1978-9 ‘manifestly imposed new duties on the review’.[lxxxvi] The Review was under no illusions as to the ‘involuted and bureaucratic’[lxxxvii] character of the ‘socialism’ on offer in the Soviet Union: its 1983 Charter condemned the Communist states for exercising a ‘repressive tutelage over the working population’, denying them ‘fundamental rights of self-expression and self-determination’.[lxxxviii] However, in the climate of orchestrated ‘Gulagism’,[lxxxix] and the slippage of erstwhile leftists from anti-Stalinist to anti-Communist and anti-socialist perspectives, a vigilant ‘anti-anti-Sovietism’[xc] was deemed an unavoidable obligation.

Despite the further tarnishing of the image of ‘actually existing socialism’ - by, for example, Polish martial law, presidential shoot-outs in Kabul, the ‘dementia’[xci] of ‘Democratic Kampuchea’, and the outbreak of war between rival ‘socialist’ countries in Indo-China - the Review nonetheless judged that ‘the Communist states’ represented ‘a historic progress over the capitalist or pre-capitalist societies that preceded them’, and provided ‘a vital bulwark against imperialism’; adding that the Review’s duty was to ‘defend them ... against every variety of capitalist attack, to which they are ceaselessly subject’.[xcii] Even North Korea, with an ‘extraordinarily monolithic and regimented social order prostrated before the narcissistic cult of ... [its] Communist monarch’,[xciii] elicited a sober and broadly favourable endorsement in Jon Halliday’s 1981 essay.[xciv] Moreover, recognising that ‘the unwelcome shocks suffered by the world imperialist system’ in Vietnam, Angola, Ethiopia, South Yemen, and Afghanistan ‘had all been ‘facilitated or safeguarded by Soviet arms or assistance’,[xcv] the Review reversed Trotsky’s judgement that the Soviet Union was a counter-revolutionary force abroad: a 1978 editorial praised the progressive character of Soviet foreign policy, with specific reference to Vietnam and Afghanistan.[xcvi]

As the prospects of a breakthrough in the First World receded, the Review increasingly judged the prospects for socialism in terms of the global contest between East and West. In 1980 it accepted, confidentially, that it would have to bear ‘with fortitude’ the ‘grim prospect’ that the cause of socialism in the West might remain stalled until a democratic model proved viable in the East’.[xcvii] This said as much for the impasse of socialist strategy in the West as it did of the likelihood of democratisation in the Soviet Union. Events, however, were about to unfold at an unforeseen pace, and the ascension of Mikhail Gorbachev to the leadership of the CPSU in 1985 raised expectations of reform from within the ranks of the party-bureaucracy. Affording ‘historical priority to progress in the East over advance in the West’[xcviii] was to prove decisive in determining the Review’s political trajectory as it navigated the ‘crisis of socialism’. As Tariq Ali put it to Yuri Afanasyev in an interview in the NLR in 1988: ‘Many of us who remain socialists in the West are beginning to regard the Soviet Union once again as a country of hope. If you succeed, it could help in the rebirth of mass socialism elsewhere in the world. In that sense the fight for a socialist democracy is important not just for you but for us as well’.[xcix] Similar sentiments were echoed by the Review early in 1989, which considered that ‘an alliance between the Western Left and socialist reform forces in the East could throw back the neo-liberal offensive of the past decade’.[c] Substantial hopes were thus invested in a transition to socialist democracy in the East at a time when, on other fronts, West and South, prospects were at a premium, and thus the ‘fall’ of 1989-91 could not but have profound consequences for the Review’s geo-political perspective and its estimate of the prospects for socialism. The NLR had already privately contemplated, in 1980, the possibility of capitalist restoration in the East. It seemed ‘historically implausible’ that there would be no individual cases of restoration, ‘however jolting the prospect. After all, the bourgeois revolutions were followed by a number of absolutist restorations, even if these did not prove durable in character - 1660, 1815, 1824’.[ci] Yugoslavia might be one such candidate for capitalist restoration, China ‘possibly’ another.[cii] But capitalist restoration in the Soviet Union itself was a ‘jolting prospect’ indeed.

The penalties of Olympianism

A certain ‘super-theoreticism’[ciii] may have its place in an intellectual division of labour within the culture of the Left, but the lack of ‘control’ that comes with a detached intellectualism has its penalties, not least the blockages in strategic thinking that result.[civ] The second New Left’s search for a convincing political strategy was hampered both by its failure to shake off its early conviction that intellectual leadership had to come from outside the working class,[cv] deflecting it from developing any organic links with either the labour movement or other progressive social forces, and by its privileging the task of transforming high intellectual culture, for whilst the undoubted growth of Marxism in Britain had, in Thompson’s words, produced ‘a mountain of thought’, it had failed to give ‘birth to one political mouse’.[cvi] Whilst the insights to be gained from a perspective that measures in terms of ‘epochs and continents’ are not to be doubted, the costs have been central to the Review’s evolution. The NLR was not mistaken in construing the events of 1968, chiefly the French May, as opening the prospect of a transition to socialism in one or more of the advanced capitalist countries. But unable to escape its romance with the moment of 1917, it failed to engage with the libertarian socialist currents (or, indeed, a radicalised labour movement) that surfaced after 1968, and thus failed to develop a political strategy in contemporary conditions - tellingly, no concrete revolutionary analysis, comparable to Anderson’s reformist ‘Problems of Socialist Strategy’ of 1965, was produced. Acknowledging the strategic impasse that had been reached at the end of the seventies, the Review’s belated willingness to engage with the British Left and the issues raised by, amongst others, the women’s movement was a potentially fruitful moment. Crucially, however, the moment was lost: an epidemic of defeatism on the Left induced the Review to retreat to its accustomed isolation, and, instead, everything was wagered, in a typically grand geo-political gesture, on the East.

The most recent attempt to engage more directly with the domestic Left ended acrimoniously in 1993, when the addition of a cross-section of individuals to the editorial committee three years earlier led to a sharp dispute over ownership and control of the journal and the resignation of nineteen of its members.[cvii] The eight ‘old guard’ who remained - Anderson, Tariq Ali, Blackburn, Brenner, Cockburn, Davis, Gowan and Sprinker - were, in their majority, North American-based; analagous, perhaps, to Marx’s transfer of the First International to New York to kill it off in preference to it falling into the hands of his political opponents. The journal, of course, continues, but the pursuit of a New Left politics via the New Left Review, the founding project of the second New Left, has been quietly abandoned. While the Review has continued to provide excellent coverage of global affairs, it is no longer possible to discern an editorial project. If, as Anderson writes in launching the new series, the future trajectory of the Review is unclear, this is but a belated acknowledgment of an uncertainty that has been evident for a decade.

Suitably chastened by the events of 1989-91, and maintaining an Olympian perspective in preference to the closer scrutiny of, and engagement with, the admittedly small and fragmented opposition to the neo-liberal order on the ground (though certainly no smaller than the detachments of the Fourth International to which the Review was oriented in the seventies), the Review began to articulate (without ever explicitly endorsing) a minimalist liberal-socialism - involving an unacknowledged acceptance of key themes of the lately reviled new revisionism, and an abandonment of its erstwhile revolutionary politics without so much as a word of critical reflection. In After The Fall, published by Verso in 1991, Blackburn, for example, now insisted that ‘the Left must respect the complex structures of self-determination which the market embodies’,[cviii]whilst the collection of essays led, significantly, with Norberto Bobbio, whose ‘distinctive synthesis of liberalism and socialism’[cix] had won Anderson’s praise in the NLR in 1988;[cx] in the new conjuncture, wrote Anderson, Bobbio had come ‘into his own’.[cxi] The collection contained not one contribution from an identifiably revolutionary socialist perspective. Mandel, previously so prominent in the Review, was conspicuously absent, whereas Hobsbawm, only recently reprehended as an instigator of the new revisionism, contributed two essays, both reprinted from Marxism Today.

While a liberal-socialism may be justified in the immediate-term as a rallying point upon an unfavourable terrain, the Review, given its precise advantage of thinking in terms of ‘epochs and continents’, ought to have been better placed than most to offer a bolder, longer term perspective. Unwilling to connect with those social and political forces contesting global capital, the Review’s rare interventions in contemporary politics have been curiously modest in scope. In 1991 Anderson wrote approvingly that Charter 88 had proved the ‘liveliest recent movement within civil society’[cxii] - pointedly ignoring the poll tax rebellion, a far livelier movement, and one which, moreover, could take no small credit for Thatcher’s downfall. In the Review’s first intervention in a British general election since 1964, Blackburn advocated tactical voting in 1992;[cxiii] cautiously welcoming Labour’s 1997 victory as a ‘Velvet Revolution’.[cxiv] It is not enough to recognise, with Anderson and Camiller, that social democracy has ‘lost its compass’, ‘[t]rapped between a shifting social base and a contracting political horizon’, where financial deregulation and international currency speculation have undermined its traditional Keynesian policy tools and the ‘new tax aversion’ has ‘drastically narrowed’ the ‘limits of fiscal initiative’.[cxv] Social democratic management of capitalism was never what we meant by socialism, then or now. The ‘new reality’ is indeed ‘a massive asymmetry between the international mobility and organisation of capital, and the dispersal and segmentation of labour, that has no historical precedent’, and it may be that, for the present, the ‘globalisation of capitalism’, far from drawing ‘the resistances to it together’, has ‘scattered and outflanked them’, resulting in ‘a reduction in social capacities’ to fight for an alternative to capitalism’.[cxvi] The point, however, is to explore the basis upon which new coalitions within an internally divided global working class can be built. The triumph of neo-liberal capitalism is unmistakable, but not uncontested.

While we should indeed endorse an uncompromising realism in preference to facile illusions in the prospects of radical social change, global capital is not invincible. If extraordinarily dynamic, it remains inherently unstable. Its greater reach merely multiplies the points at which it may breakdown and begin to unravel. If, in its new series, the New Left Review is unlikely to abandon the undoubted advantages of its Olympian perspective, engaging with those social and political movements that are actively contesting global capital in the task of making a New Left will help guard that a salutary pessimism of the intellect is leavened by an equally necessary optimism of the will.

[i] Full back page advertisement, Red Pepper September 2000.

[ii] Perry Anderson, ‘Renewals’, New Left Review (II) 1 January/February 2000, p. 6.

[iii] Ibid., p. 10.

[iv] Ibid., p. 11.

[v] Ibid., p. 17.

[vi] Ibid., pp. 13-14.

[vii] Ibid., p. 14.

[viii] Ibid., p. 13.

[ix] Ibid.

[x] Perry Anderson, ‘The Left in the Fifties’, New Left Review 29 January/February 1965, p. 16.

[xi] Ibid., p. 17

[xii] NLR, ‘A Decennial Report’, unpublished editorial document, 1974, p. 11.

[xiii] Peter Sedgwick, ‘The Two New Lefts’, International Socialism 17 August 1964, reprinted in David Widgery, ed., The Left in Britain 1956-68, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1976, p. 148.

[xiv] A perspective Trotsky attributed to Lenin, and Gregory Elliott in turn to Perry Anderson (‘Olympus Mislaid? A Profile of Perry Anderson’, Radical Philosophy no. 71 May/June 1995, p. 5.

[xv] Ibid., p. 7: pitting Thompson’s ‘messianic nationalism’ and ‘maundering populism’ (Perry Anderson, ‘Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism’, New Left Review 35 January/February 1966, pp. 35, 34) against Anderson and Nairn’s professed ‘national nihilism’ (a weakness subsequently acknowledged by Anderson: Foreword to English Questions, Verso, London and New York, 1992, p. 5) and intellectualism; what Thompson characterised as a preoccupation with the experience of ‘Other Countries’ (‘The Peculiarities of the English’, Socialist Register 1965, reprinted unexpurgated text in The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (1978), Merlin Press, London, 1980, p. 37), and Richard Johnson as ‘a rather self-indulgent Anglophobia’ (Johnson, ‘Barrington Moore, Perry Anderson and English Social Development’ (1980), in Stuart Hall et al., eds, Culture, Media, Language,  Hutchinson, London, 1984, p. 61).

[xvi] Ian Birchall, ‘The Autonomy of Theory: A Short History of New Left Review’, International Socialism no. 10 Winter 1980/81, p. 60.

[xvii] Perry Anderson, ‘Problems of Socialist Strategy’ in Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn, eds., Towards Socialism (1965), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1966, p. 228.

[xviii] Ibid., p. 244.

[xix] Perry Anderson, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, New Left Review 100 November 1976/January 1977, p. 27.

[xx] Introduction, New Left Review 52 November/December 1968, p. 5.

[xxi] ‘Themes’, New Left Review 100 November 1976/January 1977, p. 1.

[xxii] Perry Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism (1976), Verso, London, 1989, p. 101.

[xxiii] NLR, ‘Document A: Theory and Practice: The Coupure of May’, unpublished editorial document, 1969, p. 10.

[xxiv] ‘A Decennial Report’, p. 32.

[xxv] Ibid., p. 39.

[xxvi]‘Revolutionary Socialist Students’ Federation, Manifesto’, New Left Review 53 January/February 1969, p. 21.

[xxvii] ‘ The Coupure of May’, p. 9.

[xxviii] Tom Nairn, ‘Why It Happened’ in Angelo Quattrocchi and Tom Nairn, The Beginning of the End: France, May 1968, Panther Books, London, 1968, p. 129.

[xxix] Ibid., p. 130.

[xxx]‘Themes’, New Left Review 44 July/August 1967, p. 2.

[xxxi] Ibid., p. 101.

[xxxii] Ibid., p. 103.

[xxxiii] NLR, ‘NLR 1975-1980’, unpublished editorial document, 1980, pp. 3-4.

[xxxiv] ‘A Decennial Report’, p. 6.

[xxxv] Edward Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (1978), Merlin Press, London, 1980, p. 366.

[xxxvi] By 1983 Mandel had contributed more to the Review than anyone apart from Anderson and Nairn: no less than 13 articles and 250 pages (NLR, ‘NLR 1980-1983’, unpublished editorial document, 1982: appendix p. xi).

[xxxvii] Perry Anderson, ‘The Antinomies of Antonio Gramsci’, p. 78.

[xxxviii] John Callaghan, John, The Far Left in British Politics, Blackwell, Oxford, 1987, p. 159.

[xxxix] Anna Coote and Beatrix Campbell, Sweet Freedom: The struggle for women’s liberation, Picador, London, 1982, p. 17.

[xl] ‘NLR 1975-1980’, p. 41.

[xli] Perry Anderson, ‘Communist Party History’ in Raphael Samuel, ed., People’s History and Socialist Theory, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1981, p. 158. ‘The Fourth International’, wrote Anderson in 1983, had ‘lost its way at the cross-roads of the Portuguese Revolution’ (In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, Verso, London, 1983, p. 80).

[xlii] ‘NLR 1975-1980’, p. 19.

[xliii] Perry Anderson, ‘The Strategic Option: Some Questions’ in Andre Liebach, ed., The Future of Socialism in Europe?, Interuniversity Centre for European Studies, 1978, pp. 27-8.

[xliv] NLR, ‘Charter’, unpublished editorial document,  1983, p. 4.

[xlv] In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, p. 80.

[xlvi] Considerations on Western Marxism, p. 100.

[xlvii] In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, p. 79.

[xlviii] Ibid.

[xlix] ‘A Decennial Report’, p.85.

[l] ‘NLR 1975-1980’, p. 33.

[li] Ibid., p. 40.

[lii] Geoff Hodgson, ‘The Antinomies of Perry Anderson’ in Hodgson, Socialism and Parliamentary Democracy, Spokesman, Nottingham, 1977, p. 137.

[liii] Michael Rustin, ‘The New Left and the Present Crisis’, New Left Review 121 May/June 1980, pp. 63-89; and Donald Sassoon, ‘The Silences of New Left Review’, Politics and Power 3, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1981, pp. 219-254.

[liv] ‘NLR 1975-1980’, p. 54.

[lv] In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, p. 83.

[lvi] ‘Themes’, New Left Review 130 November/December 1981, p. 1.

[lvii] Branka Magas, ‘Sex Politics and Class Politics’, New Left Review 66 March/April 1971, pp. 69-92.

[lviii] ‘NLR 1975-1980’, p. 66.

[lix] In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, pp. 91-2.

[lx] NLR  (ed.), Exterminism and Cold War, Verso, London, 1982, p. ix.

[lxi] Ibid.

[lxii] In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, p. 94.

[lxiii] Perry Anderson, Fölker Fröbel, Jürgen Heinrichs, & Otto Kreye, ‘On Some Postulates of an Anti-Systemic Policy in Western Europe’, Starnberg Institute for the Study of Global Structures, Developments and Crises, 1984, pp. 17, 18.

[lxiv] Ibid., p. 18.

[lxv] Anderson, In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, p. 76.

[lxvi] ‘NLR 1980-1983’, p. 45.

[lxvii] It was Verso, ironically, who published The Forward March of Labour Halted? , in association with Marxism Today, as a collection of essays in 1981. The tone of the debate, however, was a disappointing one from the perspective of the Review - of the editorial collective, only Blackburn contributed (a mere six pages) to the published volume - and the Review privately regretted that it had been ‘instrumentalised to the right by our partners when it appeared’ (‘NLR 1980-1983’, p. 12).

[lxviii] Perry Anderson, ‘A Problem in Defining the Socialist Society’, unpublished document, 1981, p. 1.

[lxix] Tariq Ali, ‘Labourism and the Pink Professors’ in Tariq Ali and Ken Livingstone, Who’s Afraid of Margaret Thatcher?, Verso, London, 1984, p. 2.

[lxx] ‘NLR 1980-1983’, pp. 51, 52.

[lxxi] NLR, ‘Charter’, p. 10.

[lxxii] ‘Themes’, New Left Review 150 March/April 1985, p. 1.

[lxxiii] ‘NLR 1980-1983’, p. 46.

[lxxiv] Raphael Samuel, ‘Class Politics: The Lost World of British Communism, Part Three’, New Left Review 165 September/October 1987, pp. 76, 83, 90-1.

[lxxv] Ralph Miliband, ‘The New Revisionism in Britain’, New Left Review 150 March/April 1985, p. 13.

[lxxvi] Ibid.

[lxxvii] Norman Geras, ‘Post-Marxism?’, New Left Review 163 May/June 1987, pp. 40-82; Francis Mulhern, ‘Towards 2000, or News From You-Know-Where’, New Left Review 148 November/December 1984, pp. 5-30; and Ellen Wood, The Retreat From Class: A New ‘True’ Socialism, Verso, London, 1986.

[lxxviii] James Petras, ‘The Rise and Decline of Southern European Socialism’, New Left Review 146 July/August 1984, p. 42.

[lxxix] A series commenced in 1984 and collected and published by Verso a decade later: Perry Anderson and Patrick Camiller, eds, Mapping the West European Left, Verso, London and New York, 1994.

[lxxx] ‘Themes’, New Left Review 165 September/October 1987, p. 1.

[lxxxi] ‘Themes’, New Left Review 181 May/June 1990, p. 2.

[lxxxii] Fred Halliday, ‘The Sources of the New Cold War’, in NLR (ed.),Exterminism and Cold War, Verso, London, 1982, pp. 291-2.

[lxxxiii] Fred Halliday, The Making of the Second Cold War (1983), second edition, Verso, London, 1986, p. 92.

[lxxxiv] Ibid., p. 63.

[lxxxv] Ibid., p. 45

[lxxxvi] ‘NLR 1975-1980’, p. 24.

[lxxxvii] Halliday, ‘The Sources of the New Cold War’, p. 327.

[lxxxviii] NLR, ‘Charter’, p. 5.

[lxxxix] ‘NLR 1975-1980’, p. 23.

[xc] Elliott, ‘Olympus Mislaid?’, p. 13.

[xci] Perry Anderson, ‘Trotsky’s Interpretation of Stalinism’, New Left Review 139 May/June 1983, p. 57.

[xcii] NLR, ‘Charter’, p. 5.

[xciii] ‘Themes’, New Left Review 127 May/June 1981, p. 2.

[xciv] Jon Halliday, ‘The North Korean Enigma’, New Left Review 127 May/June 1981, pp. 18-52.

[xcv] ‘Themes’, New Left Review 117 September/October 1979, p. 1.

[xcvi]  ‘Themes’, New Left Review 110 July/August 1978, p. 1.

[xcvii] ‘NLR 1975-1980’, p. 71.

[xcviii] Ibid.

[xcix] ‘Yuri Afanasyev on the 19th Conference of the CPSU’ (interview), New Left Review 171 September/October 1988, p. 86.

[c]  ‘Themes’, New Left Review 175 May/June 1989, p. 1.

[ci] ‘NLR 1975-1980’, p. 70.

[cii] Ibid.

[ciii] Lin Chun, The British New Left, Edinburgh University Press, 1993, p. xvi.

[civ] Paul Hirst considered ‘its failure to establish any political or democratic relation to its own ‘‘constituency’’’ (‘Anderson’s Balance Sheet’, in Paul Hirst, Marxism and Historical Writing, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1985, p. 5) as one of the Review’s main weaknesses, and the establishment of readers’ groups was one of the unacceptable demands tabled by Barbara Taylor and her fellow-feminists, when invited to join the editorial committee in 1984.

[cv] Because, wrote Anderson in 1965, ‘the relationship between the working class and culture, decisive for its consciousness and ideology is inevitably mediated through intellectuals, the only full tenants of culture in a capitalist society’ (‘Problems of Socialist Strategy’ in Perry Anderson and Robin Blackburn, eds., Towards Socialism (1965), Cornell University Press, Ithaca, New York, 1966, p. 241). Again, two years later, he was writing that ‘intellectuals and petit bourgeois … alone can provide the essential theory of socialism’ (Perry Anderson, ‘The Limits and Possibilities of Trade Union Action’, in Robin Blackburn and Alexander Cockburn, eds., The Incompatibles: Trade Union Militancy and the Consensus, Penguin & New Left Review, Harmondsworth, 1967, p. 266).

[cvi] Edward Thompson, The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (1978), Merlin Press, London, 1980, p. 383.

[cvii] New members had included Christopher Bertram, Paul Cammack, Diane Elson, Ken Hirschkop, Monty Johnstone, Deniz Kandiyoti, Doreen Massey, Robin Murray, Mike Rustin (previously on the editorial committee 1962-4), Kate Soper, Hilary Wainwright and Elizabeth Wilson.

[cviii] Robin Blackburn, Preface to Blackburn (ed) After The Fall: The Failure of Communism and the Future of Socialism, Verso, London and New York, 1991, p. xvi.

[cix] Perry Anderson, A Zone Of Engagement, Verso, London and New York, 1992, p. xii.

[cx] Perry Anderson, ‘The Affinities of Norberto Bobbio’, New Left Review 170 July/August 1988, pp. 3-36.

[cxi] A Zone Of Engagement, p. xii.

[cxii] Perry Anderson, ‘The Light of Europe’, in English Questions, Verso, London and New York, 1992, p. 347

[cxiii] Robin Blackburn, ‘The Ruins of Westminster’, New Left Review 191 January/February 1992, p. 23.

[cxiv] Robin Blackburn, ‘Reflections on Blair’s Velvet Revolution’, New Left Review 223 May/June 1997, pp. 3-16.

[cxv] Mapping the West European Left, p. 15.

[cxvi] Perry Anderson, ‘The Ends of History’, in A Zone of Engagement, p. 366.