Perry Anderson

The Left in the Fifties

For a decade in Britain, under Conservative rule, there was a recognizable and
active Left. Now at last there is a Labour Government. But there is no longer, in
the same sense, a Left. This paradox must be the starting-point of any consideration of the tasks confronting socialists today. Clearly, the most urgent need is to
recreate an independent, combative Left, with its own goals and its own timetable. A condition of success in this is a critical assessment of the Left which has
just disappeared. Without such an assessment, it is unlikely that anything
durable will emerge in the search for a new strategy. For any future Left will
have to learn the lessons of the past. These lessons concern not so much the
mistakes of the Left in the Fifties, as its character. It is this which requires a
precise and lucid analysis today.
There now seems to be a tacit agreement among socialists to bury the past. The
temptation to maintain a discreet silence, to forget old quarrels, to look only
towards the future, is understandable. But no attempt to consider the possibilities of the present will be viable unless it starts from some examination of the
conflicts and contradictions which led up to it.
3

There is no need here to recount the course of events in the Labour

movement over the past decade, after the fall of the Attlee government
in 1951. The rise of Bevanism, the conflict over German Rearmament,
the loss of the 1955 election, the accession of Gaitskell to the leadership, the adoption of Industry and Society, the first Aldermaston March,
the defeat in the 1959 election, the fight over Clause Four, the bitter
struggle over unilateralism, the final victory of Gaitskell, the publication
of Signposts for the Sixties, unity in opposition to the Common Market,
Gaitskells death all these are fresh in everyones memory. Moreover, at this point of time, any full attempt to retrace and synthesize the
intricate political struggles within the Labour Party would necessarily
fail. However, looking back at the development of the party since 1951,
certain permanent themes are clearly visible. It is in terms of them
and the conflicts they engenderedthat the analysis sketched below
will be made. The remarks which follow will inevitably be schematic.
No subject is so contentious or difficult to seize. The focus of the analysis will be, not the political narrative of the period, but the sociology
of its actors and the ideology of their interventions. In each case, extremely complex and variegated phenomena will be brusquely simplified
and essentialized for the purposes of discussion: the requirements
of a short article make this inevitable. Within these limitations, what
approximate balance-sheet can be drawn up of this anguished, parched
decade?
General context

Two problems have dominated the struggle for socialism in Britain

from the turn of the fifties onwards: affluence and the cold war.
These issues have provided the deepest experience of the European
Socialist movement in our time. By the early fifties, Keynesian capitalism had eliminated mass unemployment and allowed a steady increase
in the material standard of living of the working-class. It thereby
appeared to annul the positive case for socialism that had been made for
50 years by the working-class movement: that capitalism was unable to
prevent cyclical hunger and destitution. Simultaneously, the Cold War
allowed capitalist rgimes everywhere to establish a powerful negative
identification of socialism with the political order of the Soviet Union
under Stalinand to mobilize their populations for a suicidal military
confrontation with Russia. Full employment and rising incomes
rendered the classical socialist solutionsin particular social ownership
of the means of productionredundant; the spectre of Russian
totalitarianism rendered them menacing. An insurmountable, double
taboo fell on them. Its effect was to create an ideological barrier which
blocked the Labour movements outward political advance and dried
up its every inner impulse. Socialism was stopped dead everywhere in
Europe, while the world slipped towards destruction.
This was the general historical context of the fifties. In Britain, it exploded a dramatic struggle within the party of the working-class, whose
enigmatic aftermath we inherit today. What forces were at work?
What were their ideas? What is their legacy?

Public ownership

The first skirmishes over public ownership were fought at the 1952
and 1953 Party Conferences. The leadership carried the day fairly
easily on both occasions. Challenge for Britain, the 1953 policy document,
besides proposing to re nationalize steel and road transport, made conditional promises of selective socialization in medium and light industry (engineering, chemicals, etc). At this stage, however, tactical
rather than doctrinal reasons were advanced for the refusal to be committed to anything more than this. No major theoretical debate over
public ownership marked these years. It was the Labour Partys defeat
in 1955 which provided the impetus for this. Within a year, Gaitskell
had written his pamphlet Socialism and Nationalization andabove all
Crosland had published The Future of Socialism. Both writers directly
attacked the idea that social ownership was any longer indispensable to
the realization of socialism. Crosland flatly described British society as
post-capitalist, andwhile conceding the need for some limited,
empirical measures of nationalizationdismissed the traditional
reasons for public ownership as anachronistic. It is important to remember what he thought these reasons to be. Basically, they were three:
common ownership had been believed to ensure economic efficiency
(through increases in technical scale), full employment (through the
investment policies of public industries) and redistribution of income
(through expropriation of capital). Crosland had little difficulty in
showing that further nationalizations were largely irrelevant to increased efficiency (exaggeration of scale can reduce productivity), were
unnecessary for full employment (the Conservative Government was
maintaining that), and were ineffective for income redistribution (compensation restored with one hand what nationalization had taken with
the other). To clinch mutters, he made it clear that, if extended unduly,
nationalizations were a threat to political freedom: I at least do not
want a chain of State monopolies, believing this to be bad for liberty . . .
Crosland then set out what he believed should be the main goals of a
modern socialist party in a prosperous, fully employed Britain. These
were: increases in social welfare, educational equality, and income redistribution. None of them depended on any major extensions of public
ownership.
The following year, Industry and Society was drafted, presented and duly
approved by a Labour Party Conference at Brighton. It erected into
fundamental policy an idea which Crosland had tentatively discussed in
his book. It also went further than Crosland had done, either in his
analysis or his programme. For the first time in the history of the
Labour Party, capitalist industry was formally legitimated as socially
responsible and useful. In a famous, ineffable phrase, British firms
were declared to be on the whole, serving the nation well.
Instead of taking industries into public ownership, a Labour Government would make public purchases ofnon-controllingshares in
private companies on the stock exchange. In effect, the subordination of
the market to the State was to be superseded by the incorporation of
the State into the market. This solution was probably unique even in
the annals of social-democracy.
5

The Labour Party fought the election of 1959 on this platform, and
lost even more heavily than in 1955. The Right in the party immediately
came to the conclusion that one of the main causes of defeat was
precisely Industry and Society. The vague references to the 600 largest
firms in Britain had understandably alarmed middle-of-the-road voters.
The only way to reassure them was, not merely to drop the proposals in
Industry and Society, but to erase the very mention of socialization from
the Partys constitution. Gaitskell, speaking to the post-election conference at Blackpool in 1959, denounced the responsibility of Clause
Four for the partys electoral defeat, and called for its elimination. It was,
then, on this issue that the show-down came. Although the Left in the
party made clear its enraged opposition, the battle was not fought out
in the open. Gaitskells proposal was finally killed in the obscurity and
silence of an NEC meeting. But there is little doubt what happened.
Faced with the prospect of a public, irreversible cancellation of one of
the historic aims of the Labour movement, inscribed in the constitution
of the party, not merely the Left but much of the Right rebelled. Many
of the union conferences of that spring had already voted against the
abolition of Clause Four. It seems certain that it was the right-wing
unionistsnormally the most obdurately reactionary single element in
the partywho voted the motion down in the NEC. What had happened? The proposal to abolish Clause Four appeared to have everything
on its side: the full power and prestige of the party leader and his
lieutenants, a severe loss of confidence in the movement, and a solid,
well-argued body of argument in print. Against this, the supporters of
Clause Four, in early 1960, had almost nothing: there was no serious
theory of public ownership on the Left, and there was considerable
evidence to suggest that it was unpopular electorally. Yet they prevailed. How? This critical moment in the Labour Partys history
when its official raison dtre hung in the balance can only be understood in terms of its whole character and evolution.
In an earlier essay, I suggested that the specific, historical character of
the working-class movement in England has been the combination of
an impermeable corporate class consciousness with a radical lack of
hegemonic ambition.1 This paradox was never seen to clearer effect
than in the preservation of Clause Four. The commitment of the
Labour Party to the common ownership of the means of production,
distribution and exchange had been written into its constitution by
Sidney Webb in 1918. Never in all its history had this clause come near
to being an operative goal of the Labour Party. It did not spell out any
fundamental will to transform society, or any transfiguring vision of a
new social order. It was rather, for the majority of the party, sentiment
and symbol, at once a consolation and evasion of the real. In due course,
it became part of the hallowed historical baggage of the movement, and
so acquired all the inertia of the Party itself. Thus the defence of
Clause Four in 1960 by extreme Right working-class trade-unionists
did not involve any attachment to the living values of an ideology
only to the dead sediment of a tradition. By a characteristic irony, what
might have been the premise of a hegemonic social vision had become
1

The terms hegemonic, and corporate are discussed at length in Origins of the
Present Crisis. NLR 23.

the postscript of an introverted corporatism. The apparent mystery of

the leaderships defeat is thus understandable. It was precisely because
there were so few arguments for Clause Four that it retained so many supporters;
the more it meant, the fewer it would have rallied. It was saved, in a sense, by
its very innocuousness.
Just over a year later, the Party released its new policy document,
Signposts for the Sixties. It was at once obvious that the high-tide of the
Right had receded. A complex of pressures had at last, for the first
time since 1951, succeeded in shifting the Partys positions somewhat to
the Left. Among these, two were pre-eminent. In the first place, the
anaemia and lethargy of British capitalism was becoming more and
more evident. Domestic prosperity had screened its disastrous international performance as late as 1959. But by 1961 it was unmistakable.
Events had spectacularly rebuffed the belief that British industry was on
the whole serving the nation well. Thus the strictly economic
legitimation of British capitalism had virtually collapsed.
At the same time, its social rationale had come under a new and
mordant attack. In 1958 Galbraith had published The Affluent Society.
In a celebrated phrase, he argued that the overwhelming social evil of
American capitalism was its combination of private opulence with
public squalor. Maximization of profit was unable to satisfy social as
opposed to individual needs: schools, parks and roads decayed while
automobiles, electrical appliances and detergents multiplied. The line
which divides our area of wealth from our area of poverty is roughly
that which divides privately produced and marketed goods and services
from publicly rendered services. Our wealth in the first is not only in
startling contrast with the meagreness of the latter, but our wealth in
privately produced goods is, to a marked degree, the cause of crisis in
the supply of public services. This idea is so familiar now, that it may
be difficult to remember its novelty at the time. It is enough to point
out that Croslands work, The Future of Socialism contained just one
(indirect) paragraph on the problemin 500 pages of discussion of
contemporary socialist objectives.2 Thus a frontal attack on the social
priorities of capitalism was fresh and radical. It was some two years
before it gained much currency in Britain.
In April 1960, just as the attempt to annul Clause Four was coming to
an end, Charles Taylor published an article in New Left Review, which
took up Galbraiths analysis, applied it to British society and argued
that only common ownership of the means of production could alter
the inhuman priorities of capitalism.3 Galbraith, of course, had believed
that the simple device of a general sales tax would be sufficient to
correct what he called social imbalance in the USA. Taylors argument
was thus effectively the first new theory of public ownership offered on
the Left. It was soon taken up and merged with an attack on the torpor
of the British economy, by Crossman. In his pamphlet Labour in the
Affluent Society, published in June 1960, Crossman at one stroke combined both of the new criticisms of British capitalism: it was inefficient
2 The

Future of Socialism, p. 112.

Wrong with Capitalism? NLR 3, May-June 1960.

3 Whats

unable to compete with the dynamic of the Communist economies, and

immoralpermanently biased towards consumer frivolities at the
expense of social needs. The solution to both problems was a greatly
extended public sector, which alone could ensure a faster rate of
growth and a fair balance between social and private goods. I have
criticized the validity of this case for public ownership in an earlier
article,4 and it has since come under damaging attack from the Right; it
is, in fact, very weak. However, it was soon having a visible impact on
the balance of doctrine in the Labour Party.
Signposts for the Sixties, the final outcome of the ten-year battle over
Labours road to socialism, was released in the early summer of 1961.
It was a sensitive index of the new conjuncture. Both of the current
Left arguments found their place in the document. The failures of
British capitalism were denounced with some acerbity. The language
now used was very different from the accolades of 1957. With certain
honourable exceptions, our finance and industry need a major shake-up
at the top . . . The story of the last ten years is one of wasted opportunities and limping progress. The indictment of social imbalance was
equally sharp: There is the contrast between starved community services and extravagant consumption. . . The building of luxury flats and
new offices, for example, continues completely uncontrolled while the
Government makes it as difficult as possible for local authorities to end
the housing shortage by building council houses at reasonable rents. . .
The motor-car industry is now doubling its productive capacity. But
public enterprise is not allowed to build the roads on which to drive
the cars. . . The document added, following Galbraiths analysis to the
letter: This unbalance of the economy is made worse by commercial
advertising, which artificially stimulates private as opposed to community wants. . . As a result, we have a wide choice of detergents and
cosmetics, but not enough flats to live in. It went on to attack the
small and compact oligarchy at the top of British society. Where
Industry and Society had effusively greeted the divorce between ownership and control in British industry, Signposts for the Sixties stated
flatly: The economy is still dominated by a small ruling caste. Rarely
has a political party reversed its theoretical positions so swiftly and so
sweepingly.
Thus, the social analysis of the new programme echoed fairly closely
theses current on the Left. The conclusions it drew, however, were
quite distinctive. Instead of calling for a structural extension of the
public sector by a wide transfer of existing industries from private to
public ownership, it in effect proposed to build up the public sector
4

The Swedish Model, NLR 7 and 9, January-February and May-June 1961. It

would take too long to rehearse the argument here. It can be summed up saying that
the attempt to locate the basic oppression of capitalism simply in the imbalance of
social and private goods is altogether too facile. To predicate public ownership on this
problem is to trivialize its significance and lose the argument in advance: for under
certain historical conditions, capitalism can achieve a relatively fair balance of the
two. Sweden is a striking example. Social imbalance is thus in no sense an insoluble
contradiction of capitalism, as Crosland had little difficulty in pointing out subsequently (The Conservative Enemy). The real significance of public ownership is situated
at a much more fundamental level, in the recovery of an alienated economy and
society.

alongside an intact private sector, by creating new public enterprises in

the science-based and growth industries, where the government already finances the bulk of research. This idea was, politically, a small
masterpiece. Throughout the fifties, the Party had been stalemated by
the conflicting pressures of the Left, arguing that common ownership
was intrinsic to any definition of socialism, and the Right, arguing that
nationalization was so unpopular that it was disastrous electorally. One
of the main reasons for its unpopularity was notoriously the fact that
the main industries that the Attlee government had chosen to socialize
were backward and bankrupt; this had given nationalization its drab
and down-at-heel image in Britain, which the Conservative Party had
exploited with such sucess. The new programme, with great artistry,
proposed to redress this situation, which had long been a source of
bitterness to its militants. Instead of taking over ancient and ruined
industries, a Labour Government would create its own, advanced and
profitable, industries. The idea was calculated to gratify the Left. At
the same time, it neatly circumvented the classic objections of the Right.
For since it was no longer a question of expropriation, public ownership need not be damaging electorally. Indeed the tables could now be
turned on the Conservatives. If the Government was providing the
funds for research, was it not doctrinaire to oppose the creation of
public enterprises based on that researchparticularly if they were to
be sited in depressed regions where private industry refused to go?
The Labour Party had, in fact, at last succeeded in seizing the initiative.
The fifties in effect, had seen a long drawn-out battle within the Party
in which both sides had been on the defensive. The Right, dominating
the Party leadership, the permanent bureaucracy, the parliamentary
party and bulk of the unions, was continually on the defensive before
the consumer prosperity of the fifties. Its only response to the new
affluence was negative: it tried to jettison the traditional banners of the
past, which had become an embarrassing burden in the present.
Trapped by the Rights control of the Party, the Left reacted defensively
in its turn, fighting to preserve the historic aims of the movement, but
no longer able confidently or adequately to justify them. Given the
right-wing majority in the Partys institutions, the attempt to purge the
Labour Party progressively of all commitment to public ownership
should, logically, have been successful. In 1960, after all, the German
Social-Democratic Party, historically the very fountain of Western
European Marxism, and throughout its existence infinitely more
ideological than the Labour Party, had seen a similar attempt. It had
succumbed totallyhenceforward preaching competition as the
definition of the good society. The Labour Party, apparently so much
easier a victim, proved, much harder to change. The major lesson of
these years was the enduring force, even in its most atrophied form, of
that deep sense of being a distinct community in society, which is the
substance of the class-consciousness of the British Labour Movement.
It was this that finally saved the day. Afterwards, a new political situation developed, andapparentlynew solutions emerged. One of the
men most responsible for them, Peter Shore, recently gave his view of
the decade: The Labour Party remains an anti-capitalist party. We are,
moreover, almost the only Socialist Party in Western Europe that has
not abandoned its doctrine.
9

Nuclear disarmament

The second great conflict of these years was altogether different in

character. The history of unilateralism was not marked by much
theoretical debate, but it did involve an authentic mass movement, the
only one in Britain in this period.
The fight over German rearmament can, and has, been seen as a direct
prelude to the dramatic battle over nuclear disarmament. In one sense,
the connection is obvious and fundamental: both were concerned with
the international logic of the Cold War. But in another sense the
differences were very great. For the movement which sprang up after
the Aldermaston March of 1958 was sociologically a quite distinct
phenomenon. German Rearmament was fought within the Labour
Party, by its traditional Leftmilitants in the constituencies and branch
committees, and leaders in parliament. It had been a conventional
political issue, involving nationalist as well as socialist sentiment.
Once made, the decision was irreversible: the issue was buried with the
ratification of the Paris treaties. Four years later, it was no longer
primarily the political but the military logic of the Cold War that was at
stake. With the development of the hydrogen bomb, the conflict between East and West threatened the existence of the human race itself.
It was in response to this ultimate challenge that the Campaign for
Nuclear Disarmament was born.
There is no space here for an adequate analysis of the complexities of
But some preliminary remarks are possible. The immense appeal
and success of the Campaign, which for a time renovated British
politics, cannot be understood simply in terms of the traditional Left
in the Labour Party, or even of the younger Left which joined it in the
years after 1956. Its final, irreducible strength lay elsewhere. Its lineage
was that of the Campaigns against the Slave Trade, Governor Eyre,
the Bulgarian Atrocities, the Boer War. Authentic English liberalism
was fighting its last, and most critical battle. The moral consciousness of
that section of the middle-class which has traditionally been the
sanctuary of liberal values in Britain, was seized, like no other, by
images of infinite destruction, the abolition of man. It responded with
its finest energies, maintaining a passionate pressure for change under
the most adverse historical circumstances. The campaign which resulted surpassed anything in its earlier history.

CND.

Of course, CND was not simply a product of English liberalism. The

bulk of its leadershipCollins, Russell, Priestley, etccame from this
tradition. But the base of the movement was very different in character.
CND also marked the revolt of great numbers of working-class and
lower middle-class youth against the whole society of which the
hydrogen bomb had become the sanction. This revolt was made possible by the relative prosperity diffused by British capitalism in the
fifties,5 which created the purchasing-power and leisure which were the
preconditions of an autonomous teenage world. It was made necessary
5

Leaving a huge undertow of misery and neglectthe submerged fifth of the

population.

10

by the new institutional pattern of this capitalism, which denied or

deformed the satisfaction of the very possibilities which it created. A
reified and abstract society, co-ordinated in ever greater bureaucratic
complexes, everywhere negating human meaning and control, expropriated the work and confiscated the leisure of its newest and least
broken recruits. It was against the increasing impotence and impersonality of social life in Britain that youth revolted, in the name of
its own potential emancipation. For the young, thermonuclear weapons
were not merely a specific threat to the future, they were the general
truth of the present: their radical lack of control over the forces governing their lives. In this sense, the hydrogen bomb became the central
myth of the society itself.6 In refusing it, the campaigners necessarily
refused the forms of organization of which it was the ultimate logic.
Thus CND became a movement of protest, not only in its aims, but in
its methods and organization. Confronted with the atrophy of political
parties and the bureaucratization of public life, it was a pure affirmation
of spontaneity and democracy, a living refusal of the petrified society
around it. As its leaders always claimed, it was a new kind of politics.
It was the only kind which moved large masses of people in this period.
The explosive force of this new phenomenon caught up the traditional
Left, swept into the Labour movement, and for a moment looked as if
it might succeed in storming its heights. In the end, however, it fell
back. It has not recovered its momentum since.
Why did CND finally fail to leave a lasting imprint on the Labour Party
in these years? The obvious answer is that there was a basic incompatibility of nature between the two organizationsthe heavy, drugged
bureaucracy of the Labour Party, and the volatile, nomadic improvisation of the Campaign. But this is clearly not the whole, or even the
most important, explanation. The final impasse of CND was the result
of a political failure, not simply an organizational one. It had been unable
to present a coherent and comprehensive alternative to the official
policies of the Labour Partypolicies, which were, of course, enshrined as the consensus of British society as a whole. What was the
reason for this inability?
Looking back, it can be seen that, historically, English liberalism
while it has always retained a pervasive, obstinate presence in British
societyhas never achieved an ascendant position within it. It has
tempered a system, at home and abroad, which it has never determined.
This mild and myopic creed, the traditional idiom of the English
intelligentsia and professional middle-class has neverany more than
the engrained resistances and reflexes of the working-classbecome a
hegemonic force in Britain. It has always been a secondary phenomenon
within the larger society. Partly as a result of the political alliances of
the 19th century, the Labour Party from its inception inherited this
liberalism, which thereafter became a permanent ingredient of its
heterogeneous Leftsymbolized in the thirties by men like Sir Charles
Trevelyan. Thus the alliance which swiftly sprang up between CND and
6

To use an analogy from literary criticism, it was a mythical correlate of the

whole society.
11

the Labour Party was in one sense easy and natural: it renewed a long
tradition. But by the same token it was unlikely to alter the subordination of the Left within the Party, which was precisely the product of
that tradition. CND did not, in the last resort, introduce a sufficiently
new element into the classic compound of Labourism to catalyze a
real change in it.
This was the historical background of CNDs failure. But it was also a
specifically contemporary defeat, brought about by its own particular
limitations. The great weakness of liberalism in the 19th century had
been its structural inability to see the world as whole, to attain what
Hegel called a concrete universality. Its insights and ideals existed in a
fragmented, segregated space, dissociated from the real world. It
criticized particular aspects of Victorian capitalism, but was blind to it
as a system. Its ideals became abstract universals (liberty, justice,
toleration), while their application became, paradoxically but necessarily, singular causes, usually international (Greek Independence,
Abolition of the Slave Trade, Bulgarian Atrocities). Something of the
same thing occurred with CND. Victorian liberalism lacked a theory of
capitalism; CND lacked a theory of the Cold War. This was its real
stumbling-block. The difficulty of the task, of course, was immense. It
amounted to nothing less than a totalization of world history in the
20th century. No other movement or doctrine has so far provided this.
It remains the insurpassable horizon of all thought and action in our
time. It is clear, however, that the Cold War has at least four structural
components, which any adequate account must synthesize: a struggle
between capitalist and socialist economic systems, a conflict between
parliamentary and authoritarian political systems, a contest between
imperialist and indigenous national systems and a confrontation between technologically equivalent and reciprocally suicidal military
systems. International class struggle, defence of democracy, revolt
against colonialism, arms race: each slogan indicates one moment in
the Cold War, and denies the others. The reality is their infinite imbrication and interpenetration. This is not to say that each moment is
equally privileged or permanent. The task of any serious theory of the
Cold War is precisely to adjudicate their relative weight and differentiate
their evolutions. This alone would allow a dynamic reconstruction of
the historical totality which is the world conflict of our time. The
official ideology of the West, by contrast, has always seen the Cold War
as a simple defence of freedom against the dictatorship of international
communism. It was this view which CND radically, and unforgivably,
rejected. It insisted that the primary reality of the Cold War was not a
struggle between democratic West and totalitarian East, but an arms
race which threatened to wipe out both. CND gave an absolute preeminence to the dangers of a thermonuclear holocaust: for it, this issue
transcended all others. The moral, and practical, force of this position
was tremendous. But it was politically insufficient. The orthodoxy of
the Cold War rested on a simple, but consistent and comprehensive,
vision of the post-war world: Communism was evil and dangerous, it
was a threat to the freedom of the West, it could only be deterred from
aggression by the balance of terror. Against this, CND posed the greater
evil of universal genocide. It had little to say about Communism, less
about the West. In a word, it designated fewer facts, gave a less com12

plete account of the world than its powerfully established adversary. In

the 19th century, the great single-issue movements of liberalism had
often been successful, even though they were restricted in their aims,
because these aims never contested the social order as a whole. Unilateralism, however, was a single-issue movement with a difference.
It objectively challenged the whole contemporary teleology of British society, but
never subjectively assumed this challenge. This was the secret of its failure.
The implementation of unilateralism, entailing withdrawal from NATO,
would have meant an immense reorientation of Britains identity, at
every level of national life. For everything hung together. Britain was
integrated into the Western, anti-communist alliance by every social,
economic, cultural and geo-political bond that history could bestow.
This was the insuperable weight that CND, more or less unwittingly,
was trying to lift. It had all the disadvantages of threatening the
dominant ideology of its society, without any of the compensating
advantages of offering an alternative ideology itself. The task of
creating one was beyond its powers.7
Who can blame it? CNDs truth was an abstract universality, like that
of its predecessors. But there was no movement, no man in the torment
of that time who attained a concrete universality: the truth of the Cold
War. In another, and more problematic sense, unilateralism was
common to all positions, no matter how conflicting. Today, with all
the changes of the past three years, the dilemmas still continue. What
else is the Sino-Soviet debate but a vast transposition of the same problems into the Communist camp itself ?
CND,

then, failedor has done so far. As it underwent political setbacks, the limitations of its organization revealed themselves. Its
spontaneity had been an immediate negation of bureaucracy, rather
than a mediated transcendence of it. Fragility and fissiparity were the
results. But the legacy of its democracy is still a living one. Moreover,
its impact was not confined to this. It did, after all, quite concretely
anticipate and contribute to the major shift in the Labour Partys defence policy in these years, the abandonment of Britains independent
deterrent after the failure of the Blue Streak programme in 1961. There
is a certain parallelism here with the struggle over socialization. In each
case, the long battle finally ended in an ambiguous result. In each case,
for all its weaknesses, the Left was vindicated by the future. Neither
affluence nor the Cold War turned out to be the unchanging, inexorable
realities the Right had claimed them to be. In 1959 Gaitskell fought the
election, proclaiming the necessity and morality of a British hydrogen
bomb and offering a programme of modest social reform. Five years
later, Wilson was denouncing the independent deterrent and proposing
a new case for socialism.
7

Two important minority elements in CND, pacificism and anarchism, have been
omitted from this discussion. These were mainly responsible for the Committee of
100 after the Campaign as a unitary movement began to disintegrate. They would
require separate treatment. However, much of what is said above about the character
of the Campaign, in particular its abstraction, applies a fortiori to them as well. Today,
Peace News represents an iteresting attempt to transcend the traditional limitations
of pacifist and anarchist thought in the direction of greater concreteness. The
result still lacks coherence.
13

The New Left

One group stood at the cross-roads of all the currents and conflicts of
these years: the New Left. Here, and here alone, the different preoccupations and pressures of the English Left met, and for a moment
seemed as if they might fuse. The New Left attempted to broaden
unilateralism into a consequent, internationalist neutralism. It put forward new arguments for public ownership. It tried to generalize the
experience of CND into a theory of democratic politics. It articulated the
cultural revolt of the new generation into a critique of capitalism. No
other phenomenon of this period had a comparable breadth and generosity.
The New Left was created in 1956, by the twin crises of Suez and
Hungary. It grew rapidly from 1957 onwards, with the rise of the
Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament itself. Its peak was reached in the
electric climate of 1960, when the attempt to delete Clause Four was
defeated, and unilateralism was victorious at the Scarborough Conference. Thereafter, its strength declined, as CND became increasingly
disoriented and the Labour Left lost its combativity with party unity
over the Common Market.
The origins of the New Left, then, were highly conjunctural. It was born
out of the two crises of October-November 1956 in Central Europe
and the Near East. The Hungarian revolt led to a wave of resignations
from the Communist Party, and the Suez crisis suddenly galvanized
many hitherto indifferent or apolitical members of the younger generation, especially in the universities. The convergence of the two
phenomena produced the New Left, which initially defined itself as a
simultaneous rejection of Stalinism and Social-Democracy. If this had,
in fact, been the main substance of the new movement, it would have
been a more ephemeral phenomenon than it was. Suez and Hungary
were external crises, which did not shake British society as a whole.
Moreover, they were, in a way that was not generally recognized at the
time, anachronistic rather than prototypical events. The Soviet intervention in Hungary was an unwilling re-enactment of Stalinism by a
rgime proceeding towards de-Stalinization. The British intervention in
Suez was the last folie de grandeur of an imperialism which was already
outdated in its ambitions and methods. The subsequent policies of both
the Soviet Government under Khruschev and the Conservative
Government under Macmillan were quite different in character. The
impetus given the New Left by the turmoil of 1956 was thus necessarily
limited: and in fact, it is striking that within three years, the New Left
appeared to have lost interest in either Communism or British colonialism. It made almost no attempt to analyze the evolution of the Eastern
bloc, or the emergence of a world-wide Euro-American neo-colonialism. Thus the circumstances of its birth give relatively little indication
of the real character and importance of the New Left. For despite its
conjunctural origins, it did have deep roots in the British situation, and
reflected a definite moment in the development of post-war British
society. Its initial ambition, it will be remembered, was to take socialism at full stretch, applying its values to the total scale of mans
14

activities.8 This amounted, in effect, to a call for a new and comprehensive theoretical synthesis, capable of mobilizing the full resources of
contemporary socialist thought throughout the worlda synthesis of a
kind which has never existed before on the British Left. It is arguable
that only a major structural shock to our society could eventually produce it. This was clearly absent in 195657. However, a slow and
long-run change in the nature of British society was becoming visible
in these years, which created its own characteristic consciousness.
British capitalism had, under great pressure, learnt to satisfy certain
fundamental human needs: it had achieved a marked reduction in
primary poverty, a considerable stability of employment, an extensive
welfare network. Yet it remained a potentially intolerable and suffocating system even, or precisely for, groups in the population which
enjoyed a relatively high standard of living. The very satisfaction of
traditional needs in turn created new ones, which neo-capitalism refused
and thwarted as traditional capitalism had done earlier ones. As
material deprivation to a certain degree receded, cultural loss and
devastation became more and more evident and important. The chaos
and desolation of the urban environment, the sterility and formalism of
education, the saturation of space and matter with advertising, the
atomization of local life, the concentration of control of the means of
communication and the degradation of their content, these were what
became the distinctive preoccupations of the New Left. In attacking
them, however, it did not start ex nihilo. On the contrary, the resonance
and strength of its appeal derived in large part from its renewal of a
long tradition in British history, whose genealogy was traced with
great power and intensity in Culture and Society, probably the most
formative socialist work of this period. This tradition, which ran from
Blake and the Romantics through Ruskin and Morris to Lawrence,
constituted a profound, if often sublimated, critique of capitalismthe
only radical critique in England in the 19th century. It had, however,
always remained sociologically disestablished, never becoming incarnated in
any major social force. Now this changed. The New Left represented,
in effect, the first time that this tradition found an anchorage in society,
and became the inspiration of an actual political movement. The new
economic conditions of the fifties had at last made this possible.
At the same time, the New Left was a distinctively British phenomenon,
beyond its economic context or its cultural antecedents. It was the
product, and finally perhaps the victim, of an idiosyncracy of our
social structure. Historically, modern English society has never given
birth to an autonomous, antagonistic intelligentsia of the kind that has
marked other European countries. Overwhelmingly drawn from the
dominant bloc, its intellectuals have remained, like its merchants and
its rulers, avowed amateurspart-time thinkers, defined as persons not
by their social profession but by their private and ostentatiously
ordinary humanity (characteristically expressed in the self-deprecating
tone and bluff idiom of their work). Traditionally integrated into
society as unassuming and undifferentiated members of it, with the onset
of the Cold War, British intellectuals by and large ceased to have any
political radicalism as well. When the whole weight of established
8

Universities and Left Review, No. 1, Spring 1957.

15

society was mobilized against an external enemy, it was inevitable that

the great majority of its intellectuals, lacking any independent social or
historical resources, should have uncritically followed it. It was not
until 1956 that this changed. The Suez Affair marked, in fact, the first
time that there was any widespread revulsion against the existing
political order among intellectuals (expressed at very differing levels of
profundity). The most coherent and important force to emerge from
the crisis of that year was precisely the New Left.
In its origins, the New Left was a diffuse group of intellectuals, coming
either from a student milieu (Universities and Left Review) or from the
Communist Party (New Reasoner). Its dimensions, however, soon grew.
Large audiences began to attend meetings in London and the provinces,
and it seemed as if a sizeable political movement might be imminent. It
was at this moment of apparent opportunity that the character of the
New Left crystallized. It was no longer a group of intellectuals, it was
not yet a mass movement. Henceforward a fundamental ambiguity of
scale marked it. This ambiguity was a legacy of the whole traditional
relationship between Enaglish intellectuals and their society. They were
never a separate caste in England as they were elsewhere. They were,
rather, part of an insensible continuum of roles within the upper
middle class itself. Radicalized, English intellectuals reproduced this
relationship with the radical sections of the middle-class. Thus the New
Left never became a tight, compact intellectual formation, any more
than it became a mass political movement. It was a certain political
milieu, in which there was an open interflow of professions and preoccupations, ranging between the extremes of the theoretical and the
pragmatic: it included students, journalists, teachers, doctors, architects, academics and social workers. Potentially, this was a very
creative and hopeful phenomenon. Where it has occurred, the constitution of a separate pariah-elite of intellectuals, cut off from the rest
of society, has had innumerable damaging consequences on the socialist
movement in Europe. Avoidance of it appeared to be one of the greatest advantages of the New Left. Unfortunately, however, it was also
the source of paralyzing confusions. In a favourable situation of rapid
social transformation and socialist advance, the existence of linkphenomena between intellectuals, professional groups and workingclass can be a great asset. But in a relatively static situation, characterized by the absence of any mass socialist movement, the temptation for
such a phenomenon is to try itself to become the range of forces which it
can properly only link: where there are no structured groups to link, a
kind of unconscious substitutionism creeps in. The New Left had begun a handful of intellectuals: it gained a certainminoritymiddleclass audience: it never touched any section of the working-class. Once
it had ceased to be a purely intellectual grouping, the hope of becoming
a major political movement haunted it, and ended by dissipating its
initial assets. The pressure of circumstances was partly responsible for
this change. The existence, in CND, of a genuine mass movement with a
comparable base, but: without any articulated ideology, seemed to offer
a vacuum designed for the New Left to fill. It tried to do so, in 196061,
and paid the priceof being at the mercy of a conjunctural fluctuation.
When the tide of unilateralism ebbed after the Scarborough Conference
of 1961, its strength seeped away as well. It had lost the virtues of
16

intellectual energy without gaining those of political efficacy. Theoretical and intellectual work were sacrificed for a mobilizing role which
perpetually escaped it.
This was the direct consequence of the New Lefts ambiguous identity.
But there was also an indirect consequence which affected its theoretical
work itself. In one crucial field, objective ambiguity became subjective
confusion and, ultimately, evasion. In terms of the sociology of knowledge, the New Left, lacking clear-cut social boundaries, was unable to
focus any precise image of itself orby extensionof its society. Its
almost complete failure to offer any structural analysis of British society
is striking. Instead of a systematic sociology of British capitalism, it
tended to rely on a simplistic rhetoric in which the common people,
ordinary men and women were opposed to the interests, the establishment, etc. Described as humanist, the idiom was, in fact, populist
and pre-socialist. It represented a major failure of nerve and intelligence,
an inability to name things as they were, which constantly yielded the
initiative to the Labour Right in the polemics between it and the New
Left in this period. This immense hiatus automatically made the New
Lefts ambition to furnish a new socialist synthesis impossible.
Its most valuable work continued to be a moral critique of capitalism, and as time went on, this in turn tended to become more and
more concerned with cultural problemsprecisely those which most
immediately and intimately affected its audience of teachers, writers,
students. It had ended by becoming one element in the synthesis it
had set out to create.
This in itself, however, was a major achievement. Britain remains to
this day the only capitalist country in the world in which there exists a
serious socialist programme for the transformation of the system of
communications. This achievement is itselfby a final dialectical twist
partly traceable to the same specific situation of British intellectuals.
Where an intelligentsia forms a complete, self-sufficient world within
the larger society, it characteristically produces a cultural critique of
capitalism of great sophistication and theoretical brilliance, but without
any programmatic edge to it: its concepts cannot be cashed in the arena
of practical politics. One reason for this is undoubtedly that there is
less pressure on the intellectuals themselvesthey inhabit a more
coherent and secure universe, from which a remote and coruscating
analysis of commercial culture is possible. British intellectuals have no
such escape: they are intimately, inextricably plunged into their society.
This has affected the whole direction of the work, and made it much
more socially responsible than its counterparts elsewhere. The difference between Barthes in France or Adorno in Germany and Hoggart in
England is, in this respect, immense. In England, the publication of the
Pilkington Report testified to the impact of the New Lefts critique
even on the official politics of the period. The emergence of the New
Left marked, in fact, a renaissance of the deepest tradition of social
criticism in English society since the industrial revolution, a renaissance
which continues today.
The history of the last decade, then, showed that there were three
17

living sources of opposition within British society, unsilenced by

prosperity or fear. In different ways, each constituted a rejection of the
two dominant realities of the time: consumer capitalism and the Cold
War. The corporative defences and antagonistic identity of the workingclass found its expression in the Labour Left; the integral liberalism of
a section of the middle-class in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; the intellectual tradition of a moral and cultural criticism of
industrial capitalism in the New Left. Separately and together, it was
the vitality of these forces which prevented England in this period
from becoming anything like a replica of North America or West
Germany.
The paradox is that at the very moment when the suffocating situation
which they had so long resisted suddenly changed, they had spent themselves. The great crisis of Conservative Britain, which exploded in
depth in 1961, supervened a few months after the Left had collapsed,
demobilized and exhausted. The Labour Left had ceased to provide any
serious opposition to party policy. CND was visibly disintegrating. The
New Left was volatilized. The inheritor of the crisis had another name:
Wilson.

18