LONDON LETTER
347
development seem to be: a new grasp of social and cultural poverty
in an otherwise prosperous society; a renewal of belief in active
participating democracy as the means of reform-neither the State
board nor the compromise with powerful private monopolies,
but the building of democratic institutions in industry, in the
cultural apparatus, and in our heavily bureaucratic communities;
an imaginative growth, finally, of a new attitude to international
politics which will stop centering relations on military alliances
and nuclear armaments. In the next five years, the official Labour
Party could well be changed in precisely these ways;
if
so, it
would itself be the New Left.
If
not, the Labour Party will almost
certainly continue to decline. Reformed Conservatism, with the
Bow Group as its pilot, will leave hardly any room for the
moderate policy on which Labour lost three elections.
The difficult stage is now, when the New Left, pleased by
its first successes, might easily sit back and become exactly like
the Old Left which it sought to invigorate and clarify. The
crucial test it still has to pass is that posed by the many com–
munists who look on it all as little more than a game. Can you
create contemporary and effective socialist theory, they ask, with–
out in effect coming back to us? More important, can you do
anything with it, even if you have created it, as a miscellaneous
group of writers and young people? These are real questions, with
no certain answers. Until the New Left makes sense to industrial
workers (it is certainly trying to do this now), its potential is
severely limited. But we think that all over the world two threads
of development have snapped and are useless: Stalinism on the
one hand (on issues of power and freedom), simple democratic
evolution on the other (we get richer but not more free, and
communicate more easily but often at the price of a culture so
bad that it can destroy us). Facing our own problems, we find
echoes not only from the United States, but from the Soviet Union
and Poland. The gradual definition of new problems, the recovery
of nerve to face radical change, seem carried to us by many winds.
Or so it seems to me from this crowded island we are trying
both to discover and to change.
If
I am wrong, we shall all know
about it, but the effort is pretty exhilarating.
Raymond Williams
