E.P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left reviewed by Counterfire

E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics

E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left: Essays and Polemics, ed. Cal Winslow (Lawrence and Wishart/Monthly Review Press 2014), 333p.

The ‘left’ has been reborn many times over the last two centuries. Every renewal has carried with it traditions from past phases, with greater or lesser degrees of continuity, while establishing new relations and alliances in response to the changing structures of capitalism. This can be seen in the transition between radical Jacobinism and early forms of socialism, or between the Chartist movement and later nineteenth-century trade-union and socialist movements, and in other moments in the history of working-class politics.

E. P. Thompson was a figure who both recaptured these transitions in his historical writing, and participated in a major re-orientation of left politics after the Soviet Union’s suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956. This event created the movement known as the ‘New Left’, which can either be seen as a short-lived experiment, or a long lasting re-direction in socialist politics, leading in fruitful or disastrous directions, or possibly both, depending upon your perspective.

The break with Stalinist-dominated Communist Parties, for some, however justified, had unfortunate consequences, in that it led to the abandonment of many fundamentals of Marxist theory, even socialist commitment to the working class. Yet, it is important to remember that the New Left was an essential moment in the renewal of an independent radical left that was, for example, more open to women’s liberation and anti-racism than the labour movement had been for some time (p.26). Any vibrancy on the Left in general in the 1960s and 70s owes something to that shift. Nonetheless, a line can be drawn from the ‘cultural’ turn taken by some members of the New Left through to various postmodern revisions, the abandonment of revolutionary politics, and even to the intellectual groundwork that was laid within parts of the left for Blairism from the late 1980s onwards…

Read the entire review from Counterfire