344
RAYMOND WILLIAMS
If
you were really interested in socialism, where could you work
for it
in
Britain, with the official Labour Party steadily slipping
away from it, and with the Labour Left in the condition described?
Moreover, it must be said quite clearly that the long parade
of ex-communist recanters was so truly miserable to watch, seemed
so obviously not just a political change but a collapse of feeling
and hope, that the incentive to stay attached was probably
strengthened in many of the best men. I can only speak from the
experience of several old personal friends, who hung on to their
Communist cards through an increasingly bitter disillusion but
hung on because, with the alternatives as they were, it seemed
a test of plain human strength. I know no better people in postwar
Britain than these, though I could not share their actual loyalties.
If
communists or ex-communists are suspect because they are not
natural democrats, I can only say that I find men like Edward
Thompson the real democratic fighters in a period in which the
formal democratic assent was much too often a simple compromise
with capitalism and the military alliances. The tension they have
been through is, of course, still unresolved. The
New R easoner,
for me, was still much too involved in arid fights with the Party
Marxists, and occasional articles came though in which nothing
at all seemed to have changed. But also there were signs of socialist
thinking
again, in the terms of actual contemporary British life,
and that was the valuable strand.
The
Universities and Left Review
was always very different.
It started from Oxford, after the Hungary-Suez crisis, and its
editors were all new to politics. The eldest, Charles Taylor, a
Canadian, was a Fellow of All Souls and a philosopher. The
others were recent graduates: Stuart Hall, from Jamaica, in
English; Gabriel Pearson in English; Ralph Samuel in politics
and economics. The magazine took some time to find an identity,
but eventually became the channel of two distinct lines of work:
economic description of contemporary British capitalism,
The
Insiders
and Michael Barratt-Brown's
The Controllers;
and the
cultural analysis-the bringing together of sociology and literary
criticism. The former would have tied in easily to the best work
of the
New Reasoner;
the latter was a bit more doubtful.
Three books appeared, in these formative stages,
that
had
