Interviews with the New Left: ‘It Was the First Time I Felt the Spirit of Revolution’. Protest and Politics in the late 1950s and 1960s, Neal Ascherson interviewed by Andrew Whitehead (original) (raw)
Related papers
“The ‘first’ New Left was born in 1956, a conjuncture—not just a year—bounded on one side by the suppression of the Hungarian Revolution by Soviet tanks and on the other by the British and French invasion of the Suez Canal zone. The New Left represented the coming together of two related but different traditions—also of two political experiences or generations. One was the tradition I would call, for want of a better term, communist humanism, symbolized by the New Reasoner and its founders, John Saville and Edward and Dorothy Thompson. The second is perhaps best described as an independent socialist tradition, whose centre of gravity lay in the left student generation of the 1950s and which maintained some distance from ‘party’ affiliations. Towards 1968: The period 1965-7 saw a series of escalating student struggles in British universities: a number of these were over calls for dis-investment by universities in apartheid South Africa. Indeed South Africa was prior to Vietnam, the one international issue that united the left over a long period. The raw material that saw an explosion of radicalism was coming together through the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (in Britain) and student radicalism, ignited by events in Vietnam, Czechoslovakia , Southern Africa and France.
‘Among the Ordinary People’: New Left Involvement in Working-Class Political Mobilization 1956–68
History Workshop Journal, 2018
The British New Left's lack of influence within working class and labour movement politics is often adduced as evidence of political weakness and contrasted unfavourably with its evident strength in matters of ideas and theory. Yet the substance of New Left efforts to reach or create a social base for its ideas has rarely been examined. Focusing on the period between 1956 and 1968, this essay demonstrates that New Left involvement in working class political mobilisation was more persistent and significant than is usually recognised. New Leftists played a key role in the Fife Socialist League founded by miner Lawrence Daly, attempted to establish a New Left 'industrial wing', and pursued socialist educational and agitational work among working class organisations and communities. Though not producing the 'political breakthrough' envisaged by some protagonists, these engagements need not be seen as having failed, but as having created links and resources of significance for local and community histories. Closer attention to such engagements also rebalances a historiography that has focused on internal discontinuities and theoretical debates, offering a fuller sense of the New Left's activism and of its contribution to British political economy.
'The Break-up of the Political Ice Age': The Legacy of the First New Left in Britain, 1956-1970
"The study discusses the relationship between the first New Left in Britain in 1956 and the later, more widely recognised, New Left movement that appeared in the 1960s. Drawing on key contemporary arguments from scholars such as Paul Blackledge, Madeleine Davis and Michael Kenny, the paper contends that the first New Left was more than a failed attempt to transform British politics and the Labour movement of the 1950s and sixties, and, despite previous historical criticism, did not disappear in 1962 after changes within the New Left Review. Through an engagement with archival material and New Left journals, this study discusses how the movement, as it first appeared in 1956, amounted to a revival of a radical intellectual culture in Britain that was crucial to the political and cultural changes of the sixties. "
A Turbulent Decade: Social Protest Movements and the Labour Movement, 1965-1975
2005
The editors thank Beverley Symons for undertaking the task of transcribing and editing the Conference proceedings, the SEARCH Foundation for a small grant to assist with financing this task, and the Conference participants who gave permission for their contributions to be published here. Segmentation of the past into manageable units, decades as in 'the fifties', 'the sixties', 'the seventies', or into eras as in 'the decade of dissent' or 'the protest era' (circa 1965-1975) is useful, facilitating the close study of specific chunks of time isolated from the complexities of the entire past. However, isolation can also separate segments from the past to the extent that connections and relationships with what has gone before are unacknowledged. Eric Hobsbawm rejected segmentation in his study, Age o f Extremes:
The History, Theory & Praxis of the Left in the 1960s: A Basic Bibliography
This bibliography is not exhaustive owing, in part, to three constraints: books, in English, with a largely (thus not exclusively) North American orientation. In addition, this compilation assumes the 1950s spill over into the 1960s and that the cultural ethos and politics of " the Left " in the 1960s, in turn, coherently and often vibrantly persist in one way or another into the 1970s (in other words, our periodization lacks mathematical rigour and so our historical parameter, in spite of the title, can encompass several decades). The works below by avowedly Left or Left-leaning intellectuals (some of which were written prior to or after the '60s) are intended to be merely representative and thus indicative of their formative influence during this period. I assume there are rarely good reasons for drawing hard and fast boundaries between a Left worldview or lifeworld and countercultural identities and endeavors. Finally, there is only a smattering of analytical, critical, and biographical titles devoted to these selfsame intellectuals (perhaps less so for the groups, organizations, and movements they were associated with).
The Party's Over? The Angry Brigade, the Counterculture, and the British New Left, 1967–1972
The Historical Journal, 2015
ABSTRACTThis article analyses the emergence of politically motivated acts of left-wing terrorism in Britain between 1967 and 1972. Through the case of the ‘Angry Brigade’, an ill-defined grouping which claimed responsibility for a number of attacks against property between 1970 and 1971, it analyses how protest and political violence emerged from discourses and events in the British New Left, the anti-war protest movements, the counterculture, and the underground press. Against common interpretations of ’68 as a watershed of naïve hopes that waned into inaction, this article identifies a consistency of political activity that developed beyond traditional party and class politics towards a more internationally aware and diverse network of struggles for civil equality. Among the shared political and cultural commitments of the counterculture, campaigns around squatting, women's liberation, or the necessity of ‘armed propaganda’ each became possible and at times overlapped. It anal...