Written by Jiajun Wang
The Soviet intervention in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 was an upheaval for British socialists. Many found it difficult to agree with the Soviet government’s proposed solution to the Hungarian revolution and felt it threatened the British Communist movement with moral and political bankruptcy. To restore the moral tradition and political authority of the movement, the first wave of New Leftists held the banner of a third route between their beliefs in social democracy and orthodox communism. The shared commitment to the pursuit of Marxist morality served as an intellectual rallying point, bringing together communists from different intellectual backgrounds. Namely, the older generation of communists in the traditional industrial areas with the middle-class radicalism of Oxford and the new generation of bourgeois in metropolitan London culture, under the first wave of New Left.
This article will analyze how the first wave of New Left’s pursuit of a shared commitment to morality sets it apart from Soviet communism. Structurally, this paper will be divided into three parts. First, faced with the moral crisis, the first wave of New Left re-established its moral authority by establishing open academic journals, participating in popular protest movements and exploring the behaviors of recognizing the “moral” of the first wave of New Left. Comparing political practice with the political activities of the CPGB we find that the first wave of New Left’s emphasis on open-mindedness and active participation in and leadership of indigenous political movements contrasts with the CPGB’s emphasis on ideological unity and its hesitancy to cooperate with the workers’ movement. In the second part, the first wave of New Left re-explores the moral principles of communism in the English native socialist tradition and in the thoughts of Young Marxists. Both the legacy of Romanticism and the theory of “alienation” offered by the Young Marx emphasized the subjective agency of man, and both criticized the determinism behind the scientific socialism of orthodox Soviet communism. In the third part, the first wave of New Left analytically refutes the Marxist linear description of the class struggle and the analysis of material decisions. In the analysis of the first wave of New Left, culture, an outcome originally determined by matter, has the power to influence the material world. In its postwar development, for a “classless” era shaped by popular culture, the first wave of New Left proposed that class struggle might be persistent and that it should be prepared for a “long revolution.”
Political Practice
In opposition to democratic centralization, the first wave of New Left wanted to rally socialists together to find a third way by creating open, non-sectarian forums to discuss the future of communism during the creation of the University and Left Review (ULR) and the New Rationalist (NR), and eventually merging the two into the New Left Review (NLR). With the shocks brought by the Hungarian revolution in 1956, British communists were disappointed not only with the Soviet Union for its hegemony but also with the Third Communist International’s British subsidiary, the CPGB, for its practice of democratic centralism. In the CPGB’s practice of democratic centralism, the monopoly of the interpretive power of communism at the top thus leaves no room for party members to criticize within the party, thus making the desire for unity within the CPGB almost pathological, similar to the “organizational fetishism” pointed out by R. Samuel. It is a blind worship of organizational structure and top-down management. John Saville and E.P. Thompson, both highly committed communists, established the CPGB party journal, “The Reasoner,” and its later independent journal, NR, as a way to critique the democratic centralization and the tragedy made by it and hopes to re-examine communism by a set of moral principles called “socialist humanism.”
At the same time, four new intellectuals with Oxford-educated backgrounds started the publication ULR, which sought to build on the concepts of Marxism, particularly Young Marxists, in an attempt to address the central question of why capitalism had not died in the new era of traditional communism. Contributors to the ULR discuss critiques of capitalism and modern culture. In January 1960, the publication of the joint issue of NR and ULR established the birth of the first wave of New Left. Unlike traditional communism, which had a systematic approach to analysis, the first wave of New Left emphasized at the beginning of its birth that it was an “intellectual movement” whose purpose was to explore the morality of communism.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), which broke out in 1958, was an expression of socialist morality. The CPGB always has a love-hate attitude toward political movements. On the one hand, the labor movement is the root of communism; on the other hand, the CPGB does not want to participate in political demonstration movements that are not influenced by communism and are not aimed at class struggle because they do not conform to the moral principles of the Communist movement. In contrast to the CPGB’s vague attitude towards participation in and leadership of the British workers’ movement, Savill and Thompson argued that allying with the peaceful movement represented by the middle class and advocating together “positive neutralism” could help people find their way to socialism. Of course, the CND, as an intellectual movement, had little influence on politics. However, the pursuit of peace and the anti-Cold War landscape called for a new generation of socialist sympathizers to learn and follow the path of socialism.
Methodology and Analysis
The first wave of New Left remained internally conflicted about what the morality of communism was and how it affects the analysis of the class struggle. However, its rejection of the humanist consensus and the determinism of orthodox communism united them. As E.P. Thompson’s critique of Stalinism in the first issue of NR, the “implicit hostility to democratic initiatives” derives precisely from the historicist concept of “scientific socialism” that insists that man is a passive object and class is an active subject. In his study of William Morris, E.P. Thompson called for a combination of Romanticism from the British socialist tradition with historical materialism, that is, reaffirming the “moral autonomy and historical energy” of historical materialism, which ultimately laid the basic ideological position of the first wave of New Left. This attempt to combine historical materialism with the English romantic tradition was met with much criticism from within the first wave of New Left, influenced in part by the ideas of the Young Marxists, who saw the impossibility of combining scientific socialism with socialist humanism and called for a break with communism. Alasdair McIntyre further comments significantly on the first two, arguing that the moral discussed in socialist humanism should not make history independent of human forces, as the “historical necessity” discussed in scientific socialism does, but “should build a bridge between morality and history. “
Culture study
With the gradual dissolution of the class structure of post-war British society, class culture also dissolved, and a “classless” mass culture emerged widely in Britain. Richard Hoggart believes that this kind of mass culture only hides the characteristics of class and still serves the capitalist society. This judgment is analogous to the understanding of orthodox Communism, in which Marx believed that the superstructure, which included culture, was determined by the material base. Moreover, the culture built by capitalism is also the ruling machine that capitalism uses to rule. However, Raymond Williams argues that the development of culture as “a historical complex of ideas, values, and references” has a practical separation from the development of the material world, and this provides human beings with spiritual criteria for the critical development of their development, such as the British Romanticism in the process of industrialization. Because Williams disagreed with Marx’s mechanistic determinism about culture, this conclusion led to a comprehensive socialist debate in cultural studies under the influence of the first wave of New Left. At the same time, the birth of Gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony promoted intellectuals to stop not only academic research but also to affirm the political role of intellectuals.
Richard Hoggart’s Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies, Raphael Samuel’s thirty-year partnership with Ruskin College, was the first generation of the first wave of New Left to fulfill its political responsibility through cultural studies, namely, to complete the study of modern culture. In his analysis of popular culture, Williams argues that anti-consumerism and anti-capitalist alienation will lead to a long-term revolution. That is, class contradictions will continue in both the material world and the spiritual world. Morality is our persistence in the long struggle.
In conclusion, morality was the central issue of the first generation of New Leftists throughout their discussion and the biggest difference between them and Soviet-style communism. At the level of political practice, the anti-Stalinism advocated by the New Left emphasizes anti-democratic centralism. At the analytical level, the New Left advocates a combination with the British socialist tradition, emphasizing the importance of human subjective agency, which is very different from the scientific socialism of the Soviet Union. In the field of research, the New Left opened up a whole new field of cultural studies, subverting the mechanistic economy of Soviet communism. The discussion of moral issues in the first generation of the New Left not only pioneered the academic study of communism but also served as a symbolic movement reminding future generations of the importance of morality.
Bibliography
Andrews, Geoff. New Left, new right and beyond: Taking the sixties seriously. Macmillan, 1999.
Blackledge, Paul. Morality and Revolution: Ethical Debates in the British New Left. Critique 35, no. 2, 211–28. https://doi.org/10.1080/03017600701446207, 2007.
Chun, Lin. The British New Left. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993.
Kenny, Michael. The first New Left: British intellectuals after Stalin. Lawrence & Wishart, 1995.
Samuel, Raphael. Lost world of british communism. Verso Books, 2017.
Featured image credit: Hungarian 1956 Revolution Su-76M Assault Gun in the Streets of Budapest by Jack Metzger. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hungarian_1956_Revolution_Su-76M_Assault_Gun_in_the_Streets_of_Budapest.jpg
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