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The Lost World of British Communism
“British political life at the present moment seems peculiarly fissiparous. Four major parties are competing for the popular franchise (in Wales and Scotland five) where previously there were two, and there is an amoeba-like growth of minorities and tendencies within the parties themselves. With the rise of the . . .” read more
Thatcherism and the Politics of Hegemony: A Reply to Stuart Hall
“We are glad that Stuart Hall regards our article in nlr 147 as a significant contribution to contemporary debates on Thatcherism. In that article we examined his work on authoritarian populism (hereafter ‘AP’), sketched an alternative approach to Thatcherism in terms of its two-nations effects, and outlined . . .” read more
Crisis in British Communism: An Insider’s View
“The Communist Party of Great Britain is in the throes of a severe crisis. Political scissions and antagonisms between different tendencies, struggles for control of the Party machine and its publications, expulsions of leading militants, forced suspension of the work of major structures present a dramatic spectacle of . . .” read more
Authoritarian Populism: A Reply
“In nlr 147 Jessop, Bonnett, Bromley and Ling contributed a long and important article ‘Authoritarian Populism, Two Nations and Thatcherism’. This article took issue with ‘authoritarian populism’ (hereinafter, alas, ap) and the use of that concept in my work on Thatcherism; and proposed some wide-ranging alternative . . .” read more
Thatcherism and British Manufacturing
“In the broadest sense we are dealing with an old phenomenon. Carthage fell, Rome fell; now it is Britain’s turn. More narrowly it is a new phenomenon, the first instance of the threatened absolute decline of a fully capitalist social formation. The last phase of the internationalization of . . .” read more
The New Revisionism in Britain
“Since the late seventies, and particularly since the arrival in office of the Thatcher government in May 1979, a vast amount of writing has been produced on the left to account for the troubles which have beset the Labour Party and the labour movement as a whole. The . . .” read more
The British Women’s Movement
“A complete overview of British feminism would require a book rather than an essay. Within the context of a brief history of the movement we therefore aim in this article at an assessment of the developments within one section of the movement, socialist feminism, since the second half . . .” read more
The Miners' Strike in Easington
“In the summer of 1983 the newspapers were filled with the rumour that the new Chairman of the National Coal Board would be Mr Ian MacGregor. MacGregor had been head of the US mining company Amax which, after its strike-breaking activities at the Belle Ayr open cast mine . . .” read more
Towards 2000, or News From You-Know-Where
“Calendars are never innocent, but in recent times they have become positively lurid. Even the soberest temporal reckoning is open to the suggestions of political numerology, which fascinates by its very lack of reason. The year now ended was for a generation the deadline for the most widely . . .” read more
Authoritarian Populism, Two Nations, and Thatcherism
“Faced with the devastating electoral and political successes of Thatcherism in the past five years, the British Left responded in various ways. Some activists anticipated the imminent collapse of Thatcherism due to a sudden upsurge of union militancy, popular disturbances, or urban riots; or due to a Conservative . . .” read more
Why Labour Lost
“Before discussing the post-electoral situation in Britain and its possible consequences for the Labour Party, I would like to ask you just one ‘personal’ question. Soon after you were elected Leader of the Greater London Council (glc) you spoke at a left-wing rally where you shared . . .” read more
Socialists and the Labour Party
“Labour’s defeat in the General Election offers a profound challenge to the Party. It clearly calls for a period of sober reflection in which a serious analysis of the results can be made. We must forge new links with those too often thought of as natural Labour supporters. . . .” read more
Canvassing for Socialism
“Immediately after June 9th I went round in a daze, feeling like an alien, not a citizen of this country at all. I half expected everybody to have turned bright blue, or to hear military music blasting out of unseen amplifiers. Now, oddly enough, after this initial period . . .” read more
Monetarism in London
“In May 1979 when Mrs Thatcher came to power, there were 132,000 people unemployed in Greater London. In September 1982 there were 390,107. This amounts to a trebling of those without a job. For London as a whole, when allowance is made for unregistered women and for commuters, . . .” read more
Space and Agency in the Transition to Socialism
“It is now over a decade since John Saville’s survey of the Labour Party’s history led him to the view that ‘at least some things should become clearer as time moves along: that Labourism has nothing to do with Socialism: that the Labour Party has never been, nor . . .” read more
Iron Britannia (Special Issue)
“When history repeats itself, the first time is tragedy, the second farce. Despite its Marxist origin, the aphorism is now a received wisdom. Perhaps that alone is good reason to abandon the idea. Certainly we have gone beyond it. The British recapture of the Falkland Islands was obviously . . .” read more
On the Political Economy of the Socialist Transformation
“There are many questions which refuse a reassuring answer. This is no less true within socialist theory. The issue of whether socialists and Marxists should work within the Labour Party has preoccupied the British Left throughout this century. The Social Democratic Federation decided to disaffiliate in the early . . .” read more
Socialists and the Crisis of Labourism
“British politics today no longer lags behind economics. Hitherto, the hundred-year decline of British capitalism’s relative strength in the world economy, so often analysed, so rarely even temporarily checked, has been accompanied by a relative stability of the country’s political system. Of the major imperialist powers, only two . . .” read more
The Choices Before Labour
“Eric Hobsbawm is a distinguished scholar and an original thinker, a historian of the first rank and a Marxist of great eminence. The collection of essays provoked by the Marx Memorial Lecture he gave in 1978 on the state of the labour movement in Britain contains some interesting . . .” read more
The Crisis of the British State
“Ireland, mounting street violence in the greater English cities, the disintegration of the Labour Party (and hence of the old two-party stability), continuing separatist agitation in Wales and Scotland, a renewed economic crisis after the brief reprieve of North Sea oil—these may appear, at first sight, signs of . . .” read more
Solihull: Death of a Car Factory
“Nationally and internationally the motor industry has been catastrophically affected by the present recession. There have been massive layoffs, plant closures and redundancies with little resistance by the workforce. In Britain in the late sixties and early seventies, the workers at British Leyland were considered very militant and . . .” read more
Labourism and the Transition to Socialism
“In New Left Review 126 Michael Rustin analysed the constitutional changes currently taking place in the Labour Party and suggested that they contained at least the potential for the transformation of that party into a serious vehicle for socialist advance. Though he was very critical of the narrowness . . .” read more
Roots of British Communism
“The historiography of the British labour movement in the twentieth century has been dominated by a Whiggish concern with the rise and consolidation of the Labour Party and the emergence of trade unionism as an estate of the realm. Even Marxist historians have found it difficult to escape . . .” read more
The British Crisis--Can the Left Win?
“We are all learning from the crisis of the British economy, not only about how the economy itself works but also about the links between this and the politics of our society. We certainly need to learn if we are to make an effective political response. For the . . .” read more
The House of Windsor
“Genuine socialists have always detested the Windsor monarchs. They appear to confront a nation sucked into helpless crown-worship, without a single ounce of decent republicanism in its make-up. While they dream of communism, the country has not advanced out of this old feudal rhapsody. The ‘serious’ bourgeois Sunday . . .” read more
Different Conceptions of Party: Labour’s Constitutional Debates
“The Constitution of the Labour Party has for some years been the chosen terrain for an intensifying battle between left and right, over the issues of mandatory reselection of mp’s by their constituency parties, the determination of the party’s election manifesto, and the method of electing the . . .” read more
Secularism and British Marxism
“It was Raphael Samuel who last persuaded me to contribute to New Left Review eighteen years ago, and I am prompted by his essay on ‘British Marxist Historians’ (nlr 120) to do so again in the form of some comments on his discussion of the relationship between . . .” read more
Marxism and the 'Welfare State'
“The Political Economy of the Welfare State by Ian Gough is the third book to appear in a series of educational texts, ‘Critical Texts in Social Work and the Welfare State’, edited by Professor Peter Leonard. The series is located by Peter Leonard within the ‘crisis’ and . . .” 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
Individualism and the English Peasantry
“Alan Macfarlane’s principal objective in The Origins of English Individualism is to prove that there was no peasantry in England during the middle ages and that attempts to describe the development of capitalism as a consequence of the emergence of capitalist relations of production from a pre-capitalist peasant . . .” read more
British Marxist Historians 1880-1980 (Part I)
“Marxism is often discussed, both by its partisans and its critics, as though it was a closed system which, once elaborated, could be said to exist more or less independently of historical time. Marx and Engels’ own texts are given a privileged status, and even when there is . . .” read more
The Winter '79 Strikes in Camden
“Revolutionary socialists have traditionally assumed that it is among the strongly organised industrial workers that the first stirrings of a revolutionary consciousness would emerge and have identified this group as the backbone of the revolutionary process. This approach has often made them unable to appreciate the significance of . . .” read more
The Sexual Division of Labour in Feudal England
“The creation of a political economy of sexual divisions has undoubtedly been one of the most significant intellectual outcomes of the recent feminist revival. The call in the early seventies for the development of an historical and materialist (though not always Marxist) account of sexual division, oppression and . . .” read more
The Future of Britain’s Crisis
“‘The outstanding feature of the British situation since the Second World War has been unreality . . . On balance the wonder is that the system has remained afloat and changed course to the extent that it has. So far the repeated lesson of history that the loss . . .” read more
Some Reflections on 'The Break-up of Britain'
“Nationalism has been a great puzzle to (non-nationalist) politicians and theorists ever since its invention, not only because it is both powerful and devoid of any discernible rational theory, but also because its shape and function are constantly changing. Like the cloud with which Hamlet taunted Polonius, it . . .” read more
On William Morris
“Willard Wolfe writes: May I make use of your pages to protest against the tissue of misrepresentations and outright fabrications that forms the substance of E. P. Thompson’s attack on my book, From Radicalism to Socialism, in nlr 99 (September—October 1976), p. 85? Of course, I have . . .” read more
Reply to Willard Wolfe
“Edward Thompson replies: I did not ‘attack’ Willard Wolfe’s book, but cited it in passing as an example of the facility and confusion to be found in references to William Morris’s political thought in ‘reputable’ academic circles. I could no doubt have found elsewhere a dozen examples equally . . .” read more
Notes on British Marxism since 1945
“‘The neo-Marxist Left which now dominates the Labour Party’, said a speaker at this year’s Conservative Party conference. Or it may have been ‘near-Marxist Left’, given the difficulty of ruling-class English with the consonant ‘r’. In other speeches either qualification was dropped: the ‘Marxist Left’ now ‘dominates the . . .” read more
Romanticism, Utopianism and Moralism: The Case of William Morris
“Over the past two decades, my study of William Morris has come to be recognized as a ‘quarry’ of information, although in one or two instances it appears that it was a suspect quarry, to be worked surreptitiously for doctoral advancement. One ought not to object to this: . . .” read more
Rejoinder to Jean Monds
“Jean Monds draws a valuable distinction between the workerist belief that ‘the struggle for power at the point of production leads to advances in class consciousness in and of itself and without the intervention of political organization in the working class’ and the correct assumption that ‘the key . . .” read more
Introduction to 'Memories for the Future'
“It is often forgotten that the October Revolution, the Spartacist rising, or the foundation of the Chinese Communist Party are all events within living memory. The targets of Lenin’s polemic in ‘Left-wing Communism’ are not all dead. Even the editor of Pravda whose line was implicitly repudiated by . . .” read more
The General Strike: The 1931 Backlash
“The year 1926 and the National Strike brought traumatic experiences for many people and it was then that I became deeply involved in politics as an individual. But when I reflect precisely how this came about I realize that it was strangely connected with some apparently purely domestic . . .” read more
Workers' Control and the Historians: A New Economism
“Recently a number of labour historians have looked back into the industrial histories of Great Britain and the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and have discovered what to them appears to have been the ability of certain categories of skilled workers to ‘control’ . . .” read more
Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution
“John Foster’s Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution is a remarkable contribution to English historiography. It represents both a continuation of, and a stark contrast to, the impressive tradition of social history which has grown up in Britain in the last two decades. If the best work of . . .” read more
Hong Kong: Britain’s Chinese Colony
“There are 300,000 hard drug addicts; 80,000 triad gang members; several hundred thousand squatters; sickness and squalor all around. The post boxes are red. It is hot. The policemen wear short trousers. No doubt about it: this must be a British colony. Of the past one would think. . . .” read more
Introduction to Motor Stewards Interview
“The following interview explores the perspective of four trade-union militants on the development of the British class struggle in the factory and in society as a whole. In nlr 77 Anthony Barnett surveyed and analysed the upsurge of industrial militancy which culminated in the miners’ strike . . .” read more