the relationship between ideas and men of ideas, on the one hand, and working-class and popular action on the other, has not been looked at very closely in post-war Britain. It should be becoming increasingly clear, however, that orthodox communist views, for example, of automatic working-class leadership of national liberation movements and the like, fall down when you look at the world that is with us. If we look no further than the liberation struggles in Latin America, the movement that brought down Syngman Rhee, and the dawn of democratic action in Turkey, we can see how far they have been student-stimulated, not working class-organised. On all important anti-colonialist issues, the British universities have, since the war, been in action long before the trade unions. Yet ideas and ideamongers have become increasingly suspect in the British Labour movement, and in starting from this point—of the relevance of ideas in general for crystallising working class action—I am neither “justifying” the incapable intellectual that Wesker gets at very justly in Roots, nor baiting workingclass organisations. I am merely stating the tragic situation of working-class and rank-and-file Labour suspicion of ideas, at a time when every worthwhile political expression by the Labour movement (e.g. the Labour Party on apartheid and the AEU on nuclear disarmament) derives, initially, from sources outside the working class, outside the Labour Party.
In examining, therefore, what the New Left is, what its impact could be, what causes a Left Club and what job it can do, we rightly use phraseology like “looking for the ‘break-back’ of New Left ideas in to the main channels”. The New Left is self-consciously a movement of ideas, which is both its strength and weakness. Its strength lies in the fact that its ideas are needed, its weakness in its amateur attempts to build the bridges that the “professionals” have failed to build before. The New Left has so far been essentially an “intellectual” movement, a fact which the roots of many of its members in the organisations of the Labour movement, and the sterling work done in it by many leading figures in the trade union movement, for example, do not disguise. By and large, the New Left understands this in a general sort of way; but it is the implications—in particular for the development of the New Left, and the Clubs especially—that I should like to examine.