LONDON LETTER
343
and there may
be
some orgamzmg principle, other than that of
decorous modernizing adjustment to small-power capitalism, that
has escaped me. Meanwhile I could try to give some account of
the New Left, from my own bias, and see what you make of it.
After long discussion, two independent journals-the
New
R easoner
and the
Universities and Left Review-joined
forces
recently to produce the
New Left Review,
which is to come out
six times a year. Typographically it may not be very clear, but
the emphasis is a review of the New Left not a new Left Review;
reference back to the
Left Review
of the 1930's is not intended.
The two original periodicals had very different beginnings. The
New Reasoner
succeeded the
Reasoner,
which began as an opposi–
tion journal inside the British Communist Party. Its editors
originally were Edward Thompson and John Saville, from Halifax
and Hull respectively. John Saville is an economic historian;
Edward Thompson has written a long and excellent book on
William Morris-a combination
~f
history and literary criticism.
Thompson and Saville came to defining Stalinism as a distortion
of communism. The breaking point came with their support of the
Hungarian Revolution, but it seems this was only the climax of a
longer history of democratic opposition. Many British intellectuals
came out of the Communist Party at about that time, and
energies that had been locked up in the apparatus soon invigorated
the traditional non-Communist Labour Left. At the same time,
the non-Communist Labour Left has long seemed uncomfortable
resting-ground for intellectuals. Theoretically very weak, it made
up in good-heartedness what it lacked in social theory, but was
still subject to a jerky emotional opportunism, characteristically
expressed by powerful leader-figures like Aneurin Bevan. Bevan's
apparent desertion of the Left in 1958 on the issue of Britain's
hydrogen bomb exposed this weakness and dependence dramat–
ically. Meanwhile thinkers on the right of the Labour Party,
especially C. A. R. Crosland, won easy if hollow victories, with
the Labour Left theoretically impoverished.
The
New Reasoner
marked the reorganization of democratic
socialist theory in Britain, and the wonder to me
is
that the
people who wrote for it could have stayed in the Communist
Party for so long. The question really was one of alternatives.
