Review: Pessimism of the Intellect

Pessimism of the Intellect: A History of the New Left Review,
Duncan Thompson, 
Merlin Press
ISBN 9780850365566

Duncan Thompson’s book, Pessimism of the Intellect: A History of the New Left Review, painstakingly reconstructs the journal’s long-term engagement with the British left from its post-Prague Spring reconstitution up until today. Despite the intra-left skirmishes and role reversals, the bigger picture that emerges, writes James Heartfield, is of the British left’s historical inability to act

The late John Merrington told me a story about his first day on the editorial board of the New Left Review, being interviewed by Perry Anderson in an office with a large map of the world behind him. All over the map were little red flags stuck in with pins. ‘Are those all outlets’, asked Merrington in wonder? ‘No, they are places that we have written about’, said Anderson.

The New Left Review started life as a college-based journal mostly edited by dissident members of the Communist Party of Great Britain, notably the historian E.P. Thompson and the founder of Cultural Studies Stuart Hall in 1960 – an amalgamation of two preceding titles, the Universities and Left Review and Thompson’s New Reasoner. The duo that gave the journal its style though were two younger recruits, Anderson (Eton and Oxford educated, who edited from 1962 to 1983, to take up the reins again in 1999) and Robin Blackburn (also Oxford educated, who edited it in between, 1983-99). Anderson’s Anglo-Irish father made some modest fortune as a customs official in China, capital which would subsidise the magazine in its early years.

The New Left Review was possibly more important than its editors understood at the time, becoming the defining voice of the New Left. It was the New Left Review that opened up the possibilities of a radical left that was organisationally distinct from the official Communist movement, and denouncing the suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968, avoided responsibility for the disgrace that all-but destroyed the membership haemorrhaging CPGB.

The journal was carried on a wave of trad-jazz listening, duffel-coated CND activists, radicals who felt as constrained by the strait-jacket of East European Stalinism as they did by the thirteen wasted years of Tory misrule (1951-64). Embarrassed by the pedantic style of the CP-influenced trade union leaders, these (then) younger radicals fed on the satire boom, and looked forward to a left that was, well, cool and trendy. The NLR sustained a reputation for exotic and challenging work, introducing British audiences to such European intellectuals, living and dead, as Antonio Gramsci, Georg Lukacs, Claude Levi-Strauss, Mikhail Bakhtin, Lucio Colletti, Louis Althusser and Walter Benjamin, as well as giving a launch pad here for Francis Mulhern, Terry Eagleton, and Americans like Mike Davis, Doug Henwood and David Roediger. Anderson’s commitment to translating and popularising these different thinkers helped the journal to be more than a political journal. It served the growing Cultural Studies movement that was developing across North America, and today NLR is financially buoyant because of the library subscriptions from American colleges.(1)

The longevity of the NLR meant that one did not always pay attention to the editorial line that was often buried under some otiose rhetoric. When political conflict was high in Britain, the NLR sometimes seemed like so much irritating background noise – a reaction that might be philistinism, or just common sense. In writing this admirably clear and compelling book Duncan Thompson seems to have done the obvious and remarkable thing: he has read through the NLR in its entirety. His access to the internal documents sheds some light, but most compelling of all is his reconstruction of the intellectual journey the review took over its 47-year history.

As well as a determination to educate the English philistines, Anderson showed a talent for setting out the big picture, and was not bad at asking the question where are we at, particularly homing in on the paradox that the Communist left had won out in the worst possible circumstances, the underdeveloped East, while capitalism held sway where the working class was most advanced. But despite the grandiose statements, the underlying weakness of the NLR was its own sense of inadequacy to the moment, which gave rise to a tendency to invest great hopes in new social forces. An internal bulletin written in 1980 summed up the problem astutely:

‘Ever since the early sixties, the review had looked with hope to one potential agent after another to unhinge the ruling political order in England – each time overstating its radicalism or staying power.(2)

At various points the academics that made up the NLR editorial board glommed on to passing trends. Harold Wilson’s Labour Party was ‘the dynamic left-wing of European Social Democracy(3) and leading figures in the administration like Richard Crossman and Thomas Balogh were invited to write for the review. The left’s investment in Wilson’s white heat of the technological revolution was bound to be disappointed as he accommodated himself to power, and rather like Tony Blair he became in turn a great hate figure (moral support for the Vietnam war being emblematic for the left).

‘Build Red Bases’, wrote the New Left Review in January 1969, echoing Mao’s call for dual power in the countryside, except they were talking about the universities, hot with Vietnam protests, and echoes of the May Paris student riots. We must ask ourselves, wrote Robin Blackburn ‘whether the complex structures of late capitalism do not contain areas, sociologically inaccessible to the repressive forces of the ruling class which can become growing points of revolutionary power’.(4) Student activism was important, but in sociological terms it was not independence from capitalism that marked it out, but an openness to change that just as readily launched Richard Branson’s Virgin Records and Tim Puttnam’s Enigma Productions as revolutionary sloganeering. And though its explicit political ambitions for the students did not come to pass, it did the NLR no harm to insert itself into the consciousness of the sixties radicals that would go on to make up the culturati.

Duncan Thompson makes much of Peter Sedgwick’s criticism of the ‘Olympian detachment’ of the NLR. Sedgwick, who had been involved with the early Universities and Left Review went on to join the International Socialists (today’s Socialist Workers’ Party). For them it was the NLR’s stand-offishness from working class struggle that was the issue. There is some sense to the argument. It was ‘Olympian detachment’ that drove Tom Nairn’s disdain for Britishness, and his preference for the Common Market, and led to a preference for covering the struggles in the Italian labour movement to those in Britain’s. But much more important a failing was the NLR’s mundane attachment to whichever radical current offered itself as a vehicle for change.

Far from being too theoretical the Review was not theoretical enough. The tendency to manufacture deep sociological explanations for transient events certainly showed literary productivity, but it would be wrong to see that as necessarily representing theoretical work. ‘Theories’ were produced that in the end only echoed contemporary trends, without really criticising them. So between them Anderson and Tom Nairn manufactured the theory that Britain’s political revolution was, unlike its Continental counterparts, incomplete; an argument that became known as the Nairn-Anderson thesis. The idea was that the emerging capitalist class in Britain had done a deal with the old aristocracy to gain influence, leaving the old pre-democratic power structures in place; the inordinate influence of the City of London over the British economy, with its old-Etonian clubbishness, Nairn and Anderson thought, was evidence of the persistence of a ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism’.

Today it is not hard to see that they had just created a radical version of Harold Wilson’s demotic denunciation of the Tories, with its ideological abandonment of class struggle in favour of ‘modernisation’. The wholly false characterisation of Britain’s gentlemanly capitalism that Nairn and Anderson formulated continued to confuse radicals for a generation. In 1988, NLR Editorial Board member Anthony Barnett distracted a disappointed left into the desert of Constitutional Reform to complete the bourgeois revolution with the organisation Charter 88; in 1995 Will Hutton retailed a version of the Nairn-Anderson thesis in his book The State We’re In effectively drafting Tony Blair’s apolitical modernisation agenda.

Of course, the NLR was capable of getting the answer formally right, and often did. Anderson himself noted that Wilson’s criticisms of capitalism suffered a ‘consistent displacement of attention from essential to inessential’, but then followed him anyway.(5) NLR contributors like Michael Barret Brown and Ernest Mandel rejected the Third Worldist argument that there was an inherent conflict between the working class in the West and the poor of the Third World.(6) But such points were lost in the rhetorical fervour for a Third World revolution led by Castro, Guevara and Mao. These were in fact critical reflections on the journal’s own tendency to lionise the Third World revolution while remaining sceptical about the potential of the British working class. On similar lines, Thompson points out an intriguing 1971 article on feminism arguing, rightly, that the ‘ideology which characterises the women’s liberation movement’, is ‘often explicitly and bitterly anti-Marxist(7) – a criticism not often made today.