[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Thompson held dominion over New Reasoner s main theoreticalconcern.The latter was based on his concept of socialist humanism,which several authors have suggested was a major contribution to thepolitical legacy of the New Left (Shepherd, 1995; Holden, 1976;Bamford, 1983).More than any other concept specific to this move-ment, socialist humanism must be understood as the product of thepolitical forces that shaped it.Devoted to finding a revived Marxismbased on national traditions, socialist humanism tried to find a way outof the prescriptive character of the entire Marxist tradition dominatedby the orthodox practices of Communist parties while it tried to revivethe flagging Marxism of the labor left.socialist humanism tried to breakthe excessive economic determinism characteristic of CommunistMarxism mainly by appealing to notions of individual agency andchoice, possibilities regimented not in a crude causal manner but by ahigher moral order and as a result of ideas and intellectual convictions(Thompson, 1957).In this respect, Thompson s notion of socialist humanism overlappedwith the overall intellectual project of existentialist Marxism initiated byFrench philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Sartre, and developedin France in the post-war period (Hirsh, 1981).5 The concept, as well asthe work of French intellectual thinkers, was also a common point ofreference between the New Reasoner intellectuals and a group of Oxfordstudents formed around another publication, Universities and LeftReview.Although the New Reasoner was a dissenting voice that emerged toencourage reform within the CPGB, a second international crisis thistime the aggression directed at Egypt by France and Britain over controlof the Suez Canal provoked serious social unrest in Britain where someof the largest demonstrations ever seen in London took place.The SuezCampaign, like the Soviet invasion of Hungary, thus had a major signifi-cance in the formative process of the early New Left as it confirmed fearsthat Western imperialism and its Stalinist counterpart were ideologicalsystems based on the practice of intolerable levels of violence and aggres-sion.6 It gathered intellectually around a new journal, Universities andLeft Review, created by a group of students based at Oxford University, amajority of whom were not and had not been Communist activists(Kenny, 1995).Universities and Left Review brought together a disparategroup of individuals.Having emerged from the Oxford students socialistclub, it included people like Stuart Hall, former editor of Oxford sstudent journal The Clarion; Charles Taylor, who had never been a88 Cuba and Western Intellectuals since 1959member of the Communist Party; and others, such as Raphael Samueland Gabriel Pearson, who abandoned the CPGB as a result of theHungarian invasion of 1956.Both groups, represented by the New Reasoner and Universities andLeft Review, constituted the pillars of the original British New Left.Common to them was a leftist critique of capitalist society made withoutrecourse to the two existing ideologies of the Left and their representativeparties.Signaling an equal disillusionment with orthodox Communismas with social democracy, both journals, though different in approach andcontent, attempted to encourage the discussion of alternative forms ofsocialism.And yet, Universities and Left Review was different in nature fromNew Reasoner.Committed to a more ideologically mixed debate than thelatter, Universities and Left Review put forward a number of critiques ofBritain in terms of a society that was entering a phase of consumerism andrapid social change.In both cases, their interests were political as theysought an international role for a country that was losing its leading posi-tion in the international arena.The group around Universities and LeftReview was, however, broader in the range of themes treated and directedtoward cultural and intellectual practice.Universities and Left Reviewdrew inspiration from an earlier journal, Left Review, and became thefocal point of critical New Left debate, together with its London Cluband New Left coffeehouse the Partisan (Kenny, 1995).Often non-Marxist in its approach, Universities and Left Review s initialconstituency was based on the views of a small minority of people atOxford University who did not belong to the mainstream student body,what Hall has described as .an intellectual minority culture withinOxford s dominant English upper-middle class tone of the 1950s (Hall,1989: 19), a minority that included a number of emigrés such as himself,Dodd Alleyne, and Taylor.The journal s original contribution to thediscourse of the New Left was perhaps its ability to politicize previouslynon-political aspects of society such as youth culture, very much like thejournal s North American counterpart, Dissent (Holden, 1976).7However, its lack of links with the labor movement was a crucial differ-ence in relation to New Reasoner and was seen as a major handicap at thetime of their merger by Ralph Miliband, Thompson, and Saville(Shepherd, 1995).This criticism survived the fusion of both sections ofthe First New Left and was inherited by the descendants of the early NewLeft Review.The departure of Saville and Miliband from New Left Reviewin 1962 took place in part over the issue of links with the labor move-ment, something they tried to correct with the founding of SocialistRegister in 1964 (Meiksins-Wood, 1995) [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]