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The Future of Marxism

Published at last in NLR, a remarkable, long-buried intervention by one of the leading thinkers of the early New Left. Characteristically original and independent-minded considerations of the relation of Marxism to the actually existing Communist regimes and the correspondences of socialist theory and practice across the ‘three worlds’, written just after The Long Revolution.

The Missing Text

The debates of the English New Left in the summer of 1961 as backdrop to the memorable essay by Raymond Williams, printed below—and possible explanation for its first appearance in an obscure, formerly CIA-funded literary journal. Perry Anderson asks how knowledge of it would revise Edward Thompson’s critical assessment of The Long Revolution in NLR.

Two-Island Estrangement

Nikil Saval on Stuart Hall, Familiar Stranger. The early years in Jamaica and Britain of NLR’s first editor and the founder of Cultural Studies, at home in neither island, an influence across the world.

Stuart Hall, 1932–2014

Founding editor of NLR, pioneer of Cultural Studies, early analyst of Thatcherism, theorist of Caribbean identities, nuncio of New Times—Robin Blackburn remembers Stuart Hall.

Life and Times of the First New Left

NLR’s founding editor recalls the emergence of the British New Left out of the double conjuncture of 1956—Hungary and Suez—and identifies the cross-currents, cultural and political, that nourished its initial cohort.

Shifting Sands

What remains of the neo-liberal order after the implosion of 2008—with what implications for a journal of the left? Notes for a future research agenda, as NLR enters its quinquagenary year.

After Dialectics

Göran Therborn offers a panoramic survey of left social theory since the fall of Communism. The vicissitudes of modernity as contested temporal narrative, and the divergent thematic paths—religion, Utopia, class, sexuality, networks, world-systems—that are emerging in the new landscape.

Fire at the Castle Gate

The Chinese intellectual scene has been transformed by the emergence of a New Left. Its leading theorist explains how and why the neo-liberal consensus of the early nineties broke down, and considers what a radical agenda should look like as social and political problems mount.

Renewals

As New Left Review enters its fifth decade, a stock-taking of the journal. Where has it come from, and where is it going? How should the political and cultural scene of the nineties be assessed? A manifesto for the new series of NLR that begins with this issue.

Correspondence on the German Student Movement

“Prof. Dr. Theodor W. Adorno” read more

Introduction to Adorno/Marcuse Correspondence

“On 12 January 1969, Herbert Marcuse wrote to Theodor Adorno announcing a June visit to Frankfurt. He wanted to give a lecture. He requested that the meeting be small and intimate, and solicited an official invitation, so that he could get leave from the University of California. This . . .” read more

Raphael Samuel: The Politics of Thick Description

“Raphael Samuel was a founder of this Review, a constant friend and counsellor to its editors and an outstanding contributor. The articles he wrote for us proved to be landmark texts, amongst the dozen or so most important that we have published. The process of extracting them was . . .” read more

Raphael Samuel: 1934-1996

“Raphael Samuel, who died of cancer in December—in the old weaver’s house in Elder Street he loved so much, behind Spitalfield Market in the heart of what was once Jewish and Radical London—was one of the most outstanding, original intellectuals of his generation: a lifelong socialist of deep . . .” read more

Some Memories of Raphael

“My first memory of Raphael is at a history meeting in St Hilda’s, Oxford in the early 60s. I think it may have been the Stubbs Society, anyway it was august and formal and donnish and he was a dark, thin, extraordinary figure with a flop of hair . . .” read more

Interpreting the New Left: Pitfalls and Opportunities

“Interpretation of the New Left raises a number of tricky historical and hermeneutical issues for the contemporary commentator. This current has always challenged conventional demarcations between intellectual matters and political life, and has experimented with different kinds of theoretical argument and political project. Accordingly, the New Left does . . .” read more

Reply to Dorothy Thompson and Fred Inglis

“What initially inspired me to study the British New Left was not just an awareness of the intellectual importance and political urgency of its legacy, but a curious attraction to its charismatic personalities. As a matter of fact, and understandably since he was personally involved, Gareth Stedman Jones . . .” read more

A New American Politics: Who Will Answer the Invitation?

“Joel Rogers (nlr 210) has done the Left in the us a great service in pointing out that the current political conjuncture in the us ‘is the unstated invitation to progressive action, our opportunity to do some good.’ As Rogers argues, liberalism is dying, the . . .” read more

On the Trail of the New Left

“The politics of the non-aligned Left of the years 1956–1962 have become fashionable of late. Two at least of the writers who were prominent in the journals of the time have published memoirs, and at least two more are in the pipeline. Clancy Segal has published two romans . . .” read more

Reviewing a Life. Fred Inglis’s Biography of Raymond Williams

“The publication of a first biography of Raymond Williams was bound to be a significant event for anyone touched by his work and yet now, in a period of immense uncertainty, doubtful of its enduring value and political resonance. Michel Foucault died of aids in 1984 and . . .” read more

Introduction: Revisiting the New Left

“The publication of several books about the New Left has triggered a querulous chorus from the broadsheet press. Despite the contemporary resonance of the watchwords of the New Left—culture and community, participatory democracy, mobile privatization—it is felt to be part of the old world.” read more

The Figures of Dissent

“Like many of the subscribers to this journal, I have bought it since it first came out. For many years, of course, the latest number has arrived in its tidy polythene wrapper through the post but, in 1960, just having left Cambridge and fired by David Holbrook and . . .” read more

New Left Podsnappery: The British Left and Ireland

“‘We English are Very Proud of our” read more

Ireland and the NLR

“The nlr’s record of publication on Ireland is indeed a patchy one, though not as lacking in substance as is claimed by Sam Porter and Denis O’Hearn. We should certainly have published much more than we did over the last twenty-five years, but what we did publish . . .” read more

Reply to Porter and O'Hearn

“Sam Porter and Denis O’Hearn (hereafter poh) accuse us of radically misrepresenting the current situation in Ireland in the interests of sectarian Ulster unionism and British imperialism. They claim that our explicit and implicit agenda is the maintenance of the union of Northern Ireland with Britain, and . . .” read more

Edward Thompson and the New Left

“The death of Edward Thompson on 28 August takes from us the most eloquent voice on the British Left, a historian who transformed his craft, a writer of some of the best English prose of the twentieth century, a thinker who knew that ideas were not a world . . .” read more

E.P. Thompson, The Historian: an Appreciation

“Edward Thompson was a remarkable person and a great historian. That does not mean that he was always right or that later generations will always read his works in the same ways. But he was wonderfully creative and original, full of pioneering insights, with his own distinctive style . . .” read more

From the Upper West Side to Wick Episcopi

“don’t go barefoot to a snake-stomping! loosen your wigs! It’s no use hooking them both on the same circuit— The English and American traditions. It won’t take the play out of the loose eccentrics. Cattlemen, sheepmen and outlaws, that’s American writing, And few enough . . .” read more

Tenured Radicals, the New McCarthyism and 'PC'

“‘Watch What You Say,’ warned the cover of Newsweek in December of last year. ‘There’s a “Politically Correct” Way to Talk About Race, Sex, and Ideas. Is This the New Enlightenment—or the New McCarthyism?’ Answering this question in a blurb for Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education (1991), the latest . . .” read more

The Ecological Challenge to Marxism

“Contemporary Marxism has responded in a number of ways to the challenge posed by ecology. Broadly speaking, three currents of thought can be distinguished. The first I shall call the ‘Marxist dissident’ response. Its proponents have abandoned central elements of Marx’s theory, claiming that the new questions posed . . .” read more

The Rise and Fall of the West German Left

“Left politics in West Germany in the period 1945–90 were marked first by the rise of the spd, leading to its participation in government in the years 1966–82, and then by a sequence of election defeats, each more serious than the last. The strength of spd . . .” read more

America in the 1960s

“Last year’s anniversary of 1968, the high-water mark of the 1960s student radicalization, can only partly explain the outpouring of books by participants in the events. I suspect that most of these had been thinking about writing a book on the 1960s for some time, and that the . . .” read more

Raymond Williams and the Politics of a New Left

“The death of Raymond Williams on January 26th robs the left in Britain of its most authoritative, consistent and radical voice. His loss is the more difficult to bear in that it was unexpected and came when he was at the height of his powers. Tributes to Williams . . .” read more

The New Left and the Present Crisis

“This paper is a reflection on the present condition of the Left, and on its recent history. It is meant to address our current situation, and indeed to suggest action, but I have not found it possible to do this without thinking about previous initiatives of the earlier . . .” read more

The Left in the Fifties

“For a decade in Britain, under Conservative rule, there was a recognizable and active Left. Now at last there is a Labour Government. But there is no longer, in the same sense, a Left. This paradox must be the starting-point of any consideration of the tasks confronting socialists . . .” read more

The Socialist Register

“Intended by its editors to be ‘the first of a series of annual volumes of socialist analysis and discussion’, The Socialist Register 1964 is an event in socialist publishing in Britain of great importance. Not only are certain articles likely to stand as permanent contributions to the development . . .” read more

The Socialist Register

“We would like to draw the attention of our readers to the recently published Socialist Register (Merlin Press, 30s)—first of a projected series of yearly volumes. This first volume contains a wide range of articles: Deutscher on Maoism, Abdel-Malek on Egypt, Miliband on the myth of the . . .” read more

Statement (on Editorial Team)

“Statement” read more

To Our Readers

“This issue of the Review is taken up mainly with domestic themes, with topics related—directly or indirectly—to the Labour Party and the prospects for the next Labour Government. It differs in this from what has been the prevailing pattern of nlr, leaning as it has done towards . . .” read more

Notes for Readers

“it moves forward again. Applications to join CND come into Peggy Duff by the hundreds each day. The Committee of 100 starts to count in thousands. Quiescent Left Clubs yawn, rub their eyes, and begin to think of their programmes. The sales of NLR tip upwards again. . . .” read more

New Left Notes

“the pamphlet announced in the first article on the Economic Implications of the Common Market is now in preparation and will be available soon. Clubs interested in taking a block order should write in early so that copies can be mailed off to them in good order. . . .” read more

Can the Clubs Grow?

“At present the Clubs are basically centres for discussion. They are collections of people more or less active in politics who gather to talk over contemporary issues from a broadly common standpoint. The discussion at times reaches a profound level and is accompanied by some research (as with . . .” read more

Letter to Readers

“the scarborough venture, mentioned in this column (NLR 5) proved an unqualified success, and the New Left’s most effective intervention in the current dingdong to date. A team of 12 or more managed to get out a four-paged bulletin, This Week, for every day of the Conference, . . .” read more

Letter to Readers

“we have had a steady flow of comments from readers and critics on Out of Apathy, and particularly Edward Thompson’s Chapter on “Revolution” (NLR 3). He will discuss some of the points raised, and develop the theme in a follow-up essay in our next issue. In the . . .” read more

Letter to the New Left

“when i settle down to write to you, I feel somehow “freer” than usual. The reason, I suppose, is that most of the time I am writing for people whose ambiguities and values I imagine to be rather different from mine; but with you, I feel enough . . .” read more

Fife Socialist League

“the defection of 10,000 members (30 per cent of the total) from the British Communist Party in 1956–58 is already described as “the revolt of the intellectuals”; sometimes by those same historians who claim that the intellectuals formed only a tiny minority of the CP’s membership!” read more

Letter to Readers

“since the appearance of NLR 3, the first of the New Left Books, Out of Apathy, has been published by Stevens & Co. Although the cost is relatively high (15/-), we hope that readers of the journal will buy and discuss the book: several Left Clubs have . . .” read more

Can the Clubs Grow?

“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 . . .” read more

The Croydon Club

“the croydon New Left Club has now been in existence for about four months. It evolved from the spontaneous demands of those people within the Croydon YCND and the Croydon Young Socialists, who wished for some independent socialist body, in which topics of a wider scope could . . .” read more

Recreative Arts

“when it was realised by Croydon NLR Club that the London New Left Club’s challenge to a game of soccer was to be taken seriously, there was much unexpected enthusiasm from a hitherto ostentatiously sport-despising faction of political dissenters. Consequently the match was arranged to be played . . .” read more

Letter to Readers

“we finally managed to get most of our 9,000 copies of the first issue distributed. It was something of a small miracle performed almost entirely by voluntary help during the last month or so. To say that we—and in particular Janet Hase—are grateful would be to commit . . .” read more