England: Socialism And Apathy

...in the last decade or two this left wing found popular expression through the oratory of Nye Bevan and the agitation of the weekly Tribune...

...when only private gains are seen as worth striving for, the public weal decays...

...WHILE I AM MOVED by much of the descriptive side of this critique, and while I find the diagnosis, though sometimes over-simplified, pointed and sharply drawn, I am less impressed by the authors' efforts to think of viable alternatives or to devise strategies for reaching socialist goals...

...New Left Books...

...He argues for the necessity of "revolution," but this seems in places to mean no more than the advocacy of non-violent gradual change culminating ultimately in a qualitative transformation of the character of society...

...This political uncertainty is perhaps best exemplified by the ambiguities with which the various authors handle the term "revolution...

...Here they indulge in cliche-ridden verbiage of the neutralist variety...

...They showed that city-planning and mass culture were essentially political questions, that cultural problems belonged in the very center of political debate...

...Meanwhile we are deeply in the debt of the NLR for what is without doubt the most brilliant radical attack on modern mass society which has come out of England in many years...

...What warranty do we have that the quality of human relations in the factory will necessarily change when common ownership replaces private property...

...308 pp...

...If the freshness of its theoretical contribution were to match the freshness of its perceptions of the current scene as well as the vigor of its moral stance, then we might be justified in hoping that a genuinely new departure will be made in the tradition of socialism...

...Elsewhere Thompson contends that "we need no longer think of disaster as a prelude to advance" and polemicizes against "cataclysmic" versions of revolution, yet he ends his contribution with a surrealist fantasy about popular protest winning "sufficient strength to force our country out of NATO" and economic hardship then disclosing to people "the possibility of the socialist alternative...

...Though morally in revulsion from Stalinism and breaking significantly from crucial Leninist dogma, the editors of The New Rea soner seemed still caught in a web of old half-emotional half-ideological attachments...

...A fetishism of commodities, more powerful than even a Marx could visualize, corrupts the taste of the individual and leads to the atrophy of a common culture...

...Out of Apathy.' which recently ap peared in England, is the first in a 'Out of Apathy...

...While apathy has grown below, the "insiders" of Bastard Capitalism (see the reprint of Ralph Samuel's essay in the last issue of DISSENT) penetrate areas of social life previously barred to them...

...Yet while workers have thus become more independent, their interest and participation in traditional working class activity has decreased...

...They appear to grant that under the Welfare State the battle for material improvement has been partly won...

...Alasdair Maclntyre urges that we have to choose between "Keynes with his peerage, and Trotsky with an icepick in his skull...

...When one read the early issues of ULR it was really possible to gain some awareness of the quality of contemporary English life: the way young people feel about work and leisure, the problems of workers uprooted from traditional neighborhoods, the growth of a new "American-style" mass culture, etc., etc...

...Nor is it sufficient to harp upon "the replacement of production for profit by production for use," while heaping scorn upon Gaitskell, Crossland, and Strachey...

...Such whistling in the dark will get us nowhere...

...And when rhetoric takes over, clarity of intellectual orientation is bound to suffer...

...All that wells up from the depth of the young soul is cast in the old molds, young feelings stiffen in senile works, and instead of rearing itself up in its own creative power, it can only hate the distant power with a hate that grows monstrous...

...Some months ago the two journals were merged, to form New Left Review...

...Human priorities are pushed aside as the values and rituals of salesmanship assume dominance...

...It has for its editor and major contributor E. P. Thompson, one of the editors of the defunct New Reasoner...

...Political apathy is linked to a process of "privatization," a withdrawal from the public scene...

...Even those who might sympathize with the general outlook of this left wing had to admit, however, that it was often characterized by an impoverishment of thought cloaked as an intransigence of belief...

...They made useful and interesting suggestions both on the problem of city-planning and with regard to controlling advertising and the mass media...

...How do we move out of apathy...

...Edited by E. P. Thomp son...

...Whatever is most vital in the New Left came from the young intellectuals editing ULR...

...The general orientation of the book is appealing in many ways...

...The British Labor movement has always been favored, or goaded, by a left wing which felt that Labor lacked full socialist consciousness...

...The ULR people had no tradition of system-building or habits of sectarian polemics to shake off: they were not weary from old battles lost...

...Private ambitions," says E. P. Thompson, "have displaced social aspirations...

...And with it disappears the sense of rebelliousness which characterized the earlier socialist movement...

...Most of the authors conduct their criticism of British society in terms of moral and esthetic, rather than economic, criteria...

...Whenever they go beyond their vivid characterization of the shortcomings of present-day British society they tend to fall back on cliches...

...By contrast, the weakness of ULR was in politics...

...We can no longer afford to ignore the question whether "common ownership" will in fact make a difference in actual control...

...OSWALD SPENGLER was wont to use the term "pseudomorphosis," which he had borrowed from the mineralogists, to designate those historical cases "in which an older alien Culture lies so massively over the land that a young Culture, born in this land, cannot get its breath and fails not only to achieve pure and specific expression forms, but even to develop fully its own self-consciousness...

...In its few years this magazine brought a remarkable freshness and animation to the socialist criticism of English Welfare State society...

...Men then Iose their will to shape society and become creatures of irrational impulse...

...If it is to succeed, it must do more than write a kind of Byzantine gloss on the dominant theme of traditional socialism...

...Capitalism has been limited and circumscribed, yet business values pervade the national conscience...

...Recently, by contrast, there has arisen a new left wing—it calls itself the New Left —which is more thoughtful and alert...

...But they never envisage what might happen if Britain were to attain common ownership while perpetuating the regime of managerial control over "privatized," docile and prosperous workers...

...When things are in the saddle human nature gets distorted...

...Its main theme is an analysis of the political-social apathy which seems to characterize England today, and a variety of proposals for overcoming that apathy by a resurgent socialism...

...They lack understanding of the dynamics of totalitarian power, and it is disappointing to note that these humanist socialists, while failing even to mention Sweden or Norway, consider authoritarian states like Yugoslavia and Indonesia to be in their camp...

...15 shillings...

...The authors' concern is above all with the impoverished quality of life in modern Britain, the lack of a common culture, the decline of community, the dehumanizing effects of the mass media...

...Its contributors include Stuart Hall and Ralph Samuel, the gifted young former editors of ULR, both of whom are now active on New Left Review...

...It is just because they have already done so much in so short a span of time that one is entitled to criticize their shortcomings and to hope for what is still to come...

...Kenneth Alexander, Vice Chairman of the North Angus and Mearns Labour Party...

...Of the two component tendencies, by far the least valuable was the second one...

...This is most welcome...

...Others say that "reformism is near the end of the road...

...They attempt to combat the heritage of Webbsian manipulation in British socialism by reemphasizing the humanist tradition of William Morris...

...In a climate in which acquisitive propensities are maximized, public capacity declines...

...And it should also be said that the very existence of this journal has helped bring sharpness and healthy anger to the discussions within the Labor Party and on its intellectual fringes...

...This seems to me a most apt characterization of the danger which threatens the New Left...

...SINCE THE MERGER Of the two journals into New Left Review it has been somewhat difficult to tell what the relationship would be between the inherited strength and weakness of the two groups...

...Thus E. P. Thompson argues that, "Contemporary British society gives as much reason for outrage as the society of the 1880s or the 1930s," yet he also polemicizes against Marxist dogmatists who claim that no progress has been made since the last century...

...It is no longer sufficient to affirm that the way out is "a society of equals, a cooperative community...

...They do not face the totalitarian menace, that peculiar hell of the Twentieth Century...

...The moral fervor with which the NLR writers have responded to the crisis of socialism contrasts favorably with the passionless practicality of most of the right wing...

...As one watched them expressing sympathy for the east European "revisionists" while anxiously searching for evidence of "progressivism" in the Communist world, one felt that they had not yet made the decisive step of questioning some of the basic assumptions of their earlier politics...

...they spoke in revolt against the status quo, but in their speech one felt the force of personal experience, the force of young people who had known intimately both the benefits and the stultifying effects of the Welfare State...

...But they do not dare say so for fear, perhaps, of losing revolutionary purity...

...One feels that many of the writers here attempt to overcome underlying doubts by verbal violence against right wingers, NATO, and the like...

...It reminded one but too often of Carlyle's remark about the Benthamite Party being "so far in the rear of others as to fancy itself the van...

...The success of reformism, Alexander argues, has greatly increased the number of people capable of criticizing the values of the society in which they live by spreading more widely the benefits of education, leisure and material security...

...E. P. Thompson does not indulge in such appalling romantic non sequiturs, yet his own more controlled reasoning also involves him in basic inconsistencies...

...The New Left stems from two main sources: first a group of young students and teachers who several years ago began publishing Universities and Left Review (ULR) and second, a group of intellectuals who broke from the British Communist Party after the Hungarian revolution to begin publishing The New Reasoner...

...This is why they stress that British socialism must now press forward with a "moral revolution" built, in Kenneth Alexander's words, "upon a moral revulsion with existing values...

...Stevens & Sons...

...The authors are right to emphasize, in Alexander's phrase, that "the enthusiasm of workers must be awakened again and encouraged to action: without this there can be no socialism...

...Their most notable contribution was a kind of impressionistic sociology...

...their straining toward a redefinition of socialist politics seemed inhibited by residual piety with respect to the form, though not always the content, of their earlier beliefs...

...and two other radical intellectuals, one of them a Trotskyist and the other of the New Reasoner outlook...

...This also accounts for the appalling insularity of their comments on the foreign scene...

...Here, because they were no more successful than other socialists in working out a new program and because they were functioning in a milieu where the need for such a program was both pressing and immediate, they often fell back on the slogans of sectarian Marxism, though with a winning lack of conviction...

...At other points, however, Thompson argues against piecemeal changes...

...series of New Left books...

...This the authors see rightly as a central problem of modern socialism...

...It would almost seem as if the majority of these authors were corn mitted to a new kind of reformism predicated on the gradual encroachment from below upon the powers above, upon the gradual whittling away by workers and outsiders of the decision-making powers of the "insiders" and managers...

...One source of encouragement has been the participation of such sophisticated and nondoctrinal radical writers as Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart...