there’s little in Thompson’s “Revolution Again” (NLR 6) with which one can disagree in substance. That the working class or class consciousness are not concrete slabs hoisted into Shapes by History, but subtle things that owe some, at least, of their existence to our own efforts, must be agreed. So too the possibility that class consciousness is forming among new strata in new ways. We can agree, too, with his characterisation of what he calls the sectaries, their sniff-sniff-sniff after heresy, their ambivalence towards the New Left. But since I find myself and other contributors to International Socialism included in the catch-all, I should like to say that some of us at least are as suspicious of ourselves and our potential irrelevance as we are of our “competitors!”
There is agreement in substance. Yet a whiff of mutual suspicion remains. Thompson doesn’t know what to do with IS. Include us with the Trotskyists? condemn us as quotation mongers? class us with elitists? We can’t help him except to recommend continued reading of IS.