Some six decades—three generations—ago, this journal developed a set of arguments about British state and society that were distinctive, and controversial at the time, as they have remained since.footnote¹ What bearing, if any, do they have on the present conjuncture, generally—if not incontestably—described as a turning-point in the history of the country? To get a sense of the question, it may be of use to resume briefly the original theses sketched in nlr in the early sixties and their sequels. Their novelty lay in both their substantive claims, on which debate has principally focused, and their formal concerns, which set them apart from ways of thinking about the United Kingdom current on the left, and beyond, in those years. Four features in the journal’s approach to the country were new. It aimed at a (naturally, schematic) totalization of its object, that is, a characterization of all the principal structures and agents in the field, rather than exploration of partial elements of it. It sought to situate the present in a much longer historical perspective than was customary in political commentary. Its analytical framework was avowedly theoretical, drawing on then unfamiliar resources of a continental—principally Gramscian—Marxism. It was resistant to the typical habits of social patriotism, left or right, folkloric or historiographic, of the period.

The initial nlr theses were produced in response to a gathering sense of crisis in Britain. This conjuncture was compounded of a growing realization of economic decline relative to capitalist competitors abroad; popular discredit, amid scandals and divisions, of the Conservative political regime of the period, culminating in its passage from Macmillan to Home; national humiliation at failure in suing for entry to the Common Market, vetoed by France; and widespread disaffection with, and ridicule of, the hierarchical social order presiding over these misfortunes. The novelty of the nlr theses was to locate the explanation of this crisis in the peculiar class configuration of England that developed from the late 17th to the late 19th century, and the institutions and ideologies it bequeathed to the 20th. Telegraphically condensed, the principal points of this explanation, and what ensued from it, went as below. Resuming about half of the 50-plus articles written by editors of the journal in these years, taken as the most significant, the account is selective, and does not distinguish between individual signatures beyond indicating them, though their accents and outlooks of course varied. Where substantive differences developed, sometimes in the positions taken by the same writer over time, these are touched on in conclusion.

1. A highly successful agrarian capitalism, controlled by large landowners, long preceded the arrival of industrial capitalism in Britain, installing by the 1690s an aristocratic ruling class, flanked by mercantile capital, at the head of a state shaped in their image—one which went on to acquire the largest empire in the world well before the emergence of a manufacturing class of any political consequence. The industrial revolution of the 19th century generated just such a bourgeoisie. But in not having to break feudal fetters in its path, nor possessing either the wealth or political experience of the agrarian aristocracy, the manufacturing class settled for a subordinate position in the ruling bloc, sealed by the reform of 1832, generating no hegemonic ambition or ideology of its own. Ideologically speaking, classical political economy was perfectly palatable to the landowning class, leaving only utilitarianism as a shrunken world-view of distinctively bourgeois stamp. A further powerful motivation for this abdication was fear of the world’s first industrial proletariat, which for some three decades rose in a sequence of mutinies against both the bourgeoisie and the landowner state.footnote²

2. With the crushing of Chartism, however, and the subsequent re-composition of the working class, such rebellions lapsed, giving way in the second half of the 19th century to a trade-unionism that was for the most part timorously respectable and largely apolitical, as subordinate to the established order as the bourgeoisie was within it. Nor did any disestablished intelligentsia emerge to challenge the fusion of traditionalism and empiricism that formed the cultural norm of the time. When eventually—not until 1906, exceptionally late by European standards—the working class produced its own political expression in the Labour Party, the resulting formation was dominated organizationally by the block vote of the unions who created the party to further their economic aims, and ideologically by a hand-me-down variant of utilitarianism in the form of Fabianism, counterpointed by a Christian moralism of low church descent. No threat to the state or to capital, Labour became the second party in the political system, once the Conservative Party—in keeping with the logic of aristocratic rather than bourgeois command of the dominant bloc—put paid to the Liberals after the First World War.

3. After two brief fiascos in office between the wars, then reassuring partnership with Conservatives and remnant Liberals during the Second World War, Labour eventually formed a government with a large parliamentary majority in 1945. For six years it administered the British state without modifying its constitution or significantly altering its imperial cast, contenting itself with provision of welfare—creation of the National Health Service its principal achievement—and nationalization of loss-making industries, without any structural encroachment on either the directionality or prerogatives of capital. Restoration to office of the Conservatives, under a quartet of rulers of classic aristocratic background, left Labour’s welfare reforms untouched. But Tory rule proved no less ineffectual in checking a competitive economic decline of the country—traceable back to its early low-tech manufacturing base, and compounded by the blows of two world wars to Britain’s global position, nominal victory in each case preserving rather than destroying accumulated archaisms. If the dominant bloc was to preserve its hegemony, it would have to transform itself, taking up the unfinished work of 1640 and 1832 again. If Labour, under recent new management (Wilson had just taken over) were to come to power in its stead, no socialist transformation of the country would be on its agenda, since it was not a socialist party. Did that mean it would therefore become an executor of bourgeois reform and re-stabilization of British economy and society, or might it release more explosive possibilities?

4. Labour in office, any prospect of the former outcome vanished. Within six months, the journal could write its obituary.footnote³ Confronted by its first test with capital, a sterling crisis as the pound plunged on its entry into office, Wilson’s government rushed to appease the City by propping up the currency with an international loan and deflationary contraction, in unbroken continuity with the priorities of the imperial past. Moreover, in keeping with the now established post-war premise of these, Labour was still playing aide-de-camp to Washington—just then escalating its war in Vietnam—across the world, while pursuing its own colonial operations in Asia and elsewhere. In such conditions, in yet another failing attempt to shore up British capitalism against competitive decline, Wilson’s leading domestic objective was bound to become a bid to batten down trade-union militancy at home. That set the scene for the political turbulence of the next six years: the launching and crushing of the seamen’s strike, flare-up of student revolt, outbreak of Catholic rebellion in Ulster, emergence of neo-nationalism in Scotland, first stirrings of popular racism in England.

5. The journal’s response to this intensification of crisis came in three directions. Hailing the changing temper of the unions, which for the first time pitted major forces directly against the party they had originally created, in an overdue revolt against the deeply unequal society over which Labour presided, nlr organized the production of a Penguin Special on the rise in industrial unrest, excoriating Wilson’s red-baiting repression of the long and bitter seamen’s struggle, and welcoming the capture by the left of the big Engineering Union of the time, hitherto a stronghold of the right—while noting the structural limits of any trade-union militancy without a political organization flanking it.footnote⁴ Simultaneously, cresting on the tide that took currents of the ‘new left’ of the late fiftiesfootnote⁵ into the much broader waters of a ‘cultural revolution’ in the sixties, and taking its cue from Gramsci’s systematic concern, alone among thinkers of the Third International, with the role of intelligentsias in the organization of social consent, the journal produced another Penguin Special on the student revolt of 1967–68, seen as the beginning of a radicalization of the newest generation of British intellectuals.footnote⁶ In aid of that revolt, this outlined a map of the prevailing conformism of post-war national culture across the social sciences and humanities—tracing its degree of dependence on White émigrés of conservative stamp, and stressing the historic lack in Britain of either a classical sociology or a native Marxism: a dual myopia that precluded any critical understanding of the totality of insular society, against which campus iconoclasm should take aim.footnote⁷