Between Prague Spring and French May

Opposition and Revolt in Europe, 1960-1980

Martin Klimke, Jacco Pekelder, Joachim Scharloth, Martin Klimke, Jacco Pekelder, Joachim Scharloth

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857451071
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica

Abandoning the usual Cold War–oriented narrative of postwar European protest and opposition movements, this volume offers an innovative, interdisciplinary, and comprehensive perspective on two decades of protest and social upheaval in postwar Europe. It examines the mutual influences and interactions among dissenters in Western Europe, the Warsaw Pact countries, and the nonaligned European countries, and shows how ideological and political developments in the East and West were interconnected through official state or party channels as well as a variety of private and clandestine contacts. Focusing on issues arising from the cross-cultural transfer of ideas, the adjustments to institutional and political frameworks, and the role of the media in staging protest, the volume examines the romanticized attitude of Western activists to violent liberation movements in the Third World and the idolization of imprisoned RAF members as martyrs among left-wing circles across Western Europe.

Part I

Politics between East and West

Chapter 1

“Out of Apathy”

Genealogies of the British “New Left”
in a Transnational Context, 1956–1962

Holger Nehring

Introduction

This chapter traces the intellectual genealogies and meanings of the British “New Left.” The focus is on the first phase of the New Left, from its origins in 1956 to its decline in the early 1960s. Two approaches in particular dominate the history of the origins of the New Left. The first of these assumes that New Left ideas depended on the complete abandonment of old Left positions, involving a wholly new political language and culture.¹ In contrast, other historians have assumed that activists’ transitions from party membership to New Left participation were seamless.²

Unlike many accounts that link the British New Left directly with processes of political liberalization and the emergence of affluent and permissive societies, this chapter highlights the rather ambiguous character of New Left ideas by locating them in British Communist and socialist traditions. This chapter aims to demonstrate how British New Left activists created a novel form of socialism by working through what they regarded as Socialist (and in particular Marxist) traditions. Hence, rather than interpreting the British New Left as part of a European, if not worldwide transnational movement, this chapter develops a more nuanced reading of its transnational character, by bringing out the multiple layers through which the British New Left was connected beyond borders.³ First, many of its activists could look back on transnational biographies in the British Empire; second, some even continued to advocate transnational campaigns that would endow British national identity with a transnational mission to lead the world toward “socialism”; and third, they were involved in processes of transnational communication and observation. Fundamentally, the emergence of the New Left was intimately connected to the international history of the time: “1956”, marked by the three key events of Nikita Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Soviet Communist Party in which he admitted Stalinist atrocities during the 1930s; the crushing of the Hungarian civil rights campaigners with the help of Soviet tanks; and the British-French war with Egypt over the Suez Canal. These events no longer seemed to fit into the bipolar framework of the Cold War, and they set into motion processes of discussion that had an impact on organizations such as the Communist Party, which were modeled upon this bipolar coding of politics.

The so-called New Left began its life as a loose network of activists around the journals Reasoner/New Reasoner and the Universities and Left Review (ULR), later the New Left Review, and around the New Left clubs and coffee houses, which were established in late 1950s and early 1960s. Although the boundaries were quite fluid, two main groups can be distinguished, one around the historians Edward P. Thompson and John Saville, based primarily in the north of England and consisting mainly of former Communist Party members. After the violent suppression of the Hungarian uprising by Soviet forces, as well as Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin’s atrocities in his “Secret Speech” at the Twentieth CPSU Party Congress, they left the party. Most of them then gathered around the journal New Reasoner.

The second strand of the New Left first emerged around the Caribbean Rhodes Scholar Stuart Hall, who was to become a famous cultural sociologist, and other students in at the University of Oxford’s Labour Club and their journal Universities and Left Review. They were interested in revitalizing the British Labour movement and were its most vocal spokesmen. Both movements pooled their efforts by founding a common journal, the New Left Review, in 1959/60, thus tapping the tradition of the Left Review, a radical journal of the 1930s.⁴ Both sections were united in their desire to move, in the words of one of their first joint publications, “out of apathy” by circumventing the organizational straightjackets of the Communist and Labour parties and championing more direct political activism. This political activism would, they pointed out, no longer be concerned with Cold War politics, but rather with overcoming the boundaries of Cold War political discourses by moving “beyond the Cold War.”⁵

This chapter does not regard the New Left as a homogeneous entity, as it emerged as a product of dynamic political processes. It focuses, therefore, on the conditions and processes under which “the unstable ordering of multiple possibilities” becomes “temporarily fixed in such a way as to enable individuals and groups to behave as a particular kind of agency.”⁶ Such social-boundary processes were plausible to contemporaries because they rested upon a set of symbolic resources that were not as novel as the label “New Left” suggests, but harked back to Socialist and Communist traditions. These traditions were not simply out there to be discovered. Rather, the activists actively rediscovered and re-appropriated them.⁷ The historical antecedents to which New Left activists referred ranged from nineteenth-century anarchism and Owenite socialism, through the Popular Front and the Left Book Club of the 1930s, to the social reformer G.D.H. Cole’s “Guild Socialism.” The New Left, therefore, comprised both political activism and challenges to the dominant language, the dominant political codes, and the shape of social practices.

This chapter will begin its exploration by examining the role of what the activists regarded as traditional elements in the various groups of the New Left before highlighting the problems this implied for developing a common identification amongst New Left activists as well as for transnational relations with other movements.

Communism and the New Left

Looking back to what became the origins of the New Left, John Saville remarked that “the idea of resigning from the Communist Party was not in our minds when we began the Reasoner and it was only in the following months that we recognized, with great reluctance, the fundamental conservatism, not only of the leadership, but also of the rank and file.”⁸ Some of this criticism goes back to the immediate postwar years, when activists, such as the historian of the English Revolution of 1688, Christopher Hill, had expressed his skepticism toward the unthinking application of the Stalinist organizational model to the British context and had emphasized the importance of uniting morality and political activism.⁹

Indeed, for many of those who left it in the aftermath of 1956, the British Communist Party (CPGB) had been a political, personal, and emotional home. Abandoning the party meant giving up friendships and leaving feelings of community behind.¹⁰ In the specific international environment of the mid 1960s, these activists did not, like the writer George Orwell or the intellectual Arthur Koestler before him, become staunch anti-Communists. Instead, they came to play a key role as activists who developed an alternative to virulent anti-communism, defining a space between the polarities of political debate in the Cold War. While they abandoned certain elements of the Communist (in particular Stalinist) heritage, they retained and elaborated some aspects of this experience in a new context.

The development of what came to be called the New Left was not a straightforward process but often involved personally hurtful experiences. It started with the publication of Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech,” which became known in Britain in late spring and early summer 1956. In the speech, Khrushchev had criticized the Stalinist purges and the Stalinist cult of leadership more generally. The process continued with what many regarded as the lukewarm response of the Communist CPGB to these challenges. It culminated in the Soviet intervention in Hungary in autumn 1956, backed by the CPGB leadership, which conjured up memories of the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939 and the Soviet intervention in Finland during World War II. This dissatisfaction resulted in a loss of around 9,000 members or 28 percent of the membership by 1 January 1958: around 2,000 left in the wake of the Khrushchev speech, another 5,000 quit over Hungary, and around 2,000 resigned after disappointments at the Twenty-fifth CPGB Congress.¹¹

The activists not only moved away from the party out of their own volition, they were also pushed out after being identified as a distinct group that sought to wreck the Communist project by the CPGB leadership. By the summer of 1956, John Saville and Edward Thompson had tried to promote intra-party discussions in the correspondence columns of the party’s publications.¹² When this failed, they launched their own journal, the Reasoner. After the first issue in July 1957, the CPGB’s Yorkshire district committee instructed the editors to close it down, but by then Saville and Thompson knew that it had met needs amongst party activists: it sold out within weeks, and the 300 letters sent to the journal all supported the initiative.¹³

The transition from identifying themselves as “Communist” to turning to “New Left” activism, however, was far more complicated than is usually suggested and did not necessarily involve a complete break from previous orthodoxies. An important part of British communism consisted of a shared sense of purpose and the feeling of mutual sacrifice by party members for the cause. This was only heightened by the social and political isolation which many Communists experienced in Cold War Britain. Coming to terms with the exclusion from their community (which most of them had not planned) and with the sudden collapse of the boundaries which had given their political and social world meaning, was a process which took years rather than months.¹⁴

This feeling of disappointment rarely undermined these core commitments, but was the result of a mixture of political, social, and ideological anxieties: concerning the CPGB leadership’s support for Soviet policies, particularly with regard to the intervention in Hungary in late 1956; the validity of Khrushchev’s argument that the removal of the “cult of personality” had eradicated the main features of Stalinism; aspects of Soviet history, such as the discovery of widespread anti-Semitism, particularly by Communists in the United States, but also by the CPGB activist Hyman Levy on his journeys through the Soviet Union; and not least, by the reluctance of the party leadership to allow a genuine debate to take place about all these issues in the mainstream party press.¹⁵

Hence, the diffuse opposition which arose against the Stalinist line of the CPGB’s leadership in responding to Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” argued in terms of Communist loyalty and traditions. The continued belief that the party would respond and reflect their members’ expectations fired their indignation. The activists’ initial objective was, therefore, reform.¹⁶ With their submissions to the Commission of Inner-Party Democracy which the CPGB leadership had set up in order to fend off criticism, they intended to strengthen the party, rather than weaken it.¹⁷

The process of breaking away from the CPGB was neither caused nor encouraged by the development of a coherent alternative model of political organization which aimed to replace the “democratic centralism” of the CPGB. Amongst those who produced a minority report to the CPGB’s Commission on Democracy (the historians Christopher Hill and Peter Cadogan, as well as Malcolm MacEwen who was to become a prominent conservationist) the main concern was the balance between democracy, meaning unfettered internal discussion, and the need for centralism.¹⁸ Yet no substantial alternative model was available to them at the time.¹⁹

The Soviet invasion in Hungary in autumn 1956 was the catalyst that persuaded many to leave and demonstrated how events in the international arena influenced domestic political and social change. The project of reforming and democratizing the party had found its equivalent in similar processes of debate in the Communist parties beyond the Iron Curtain, in particular in Hungary. The Soviet military intervention in Hungary to stop the Socialist experiment there thus appeared to many British activists all the ...