If many of the Yorkshire young people had in fact got socialism ‘inside of them,’ then something of its quality—the hostility to Grundyism,!1 the warm espousal of sexual equality, the rich internationalism—owed much to Tom Maguire.”
The late Edward Thompson paid special tribute to only a few individuals. Tom Maguire was one. Maguire was a young Leeds socialist (1865–1895); he was a member of the Socialist League and a founder of the Yorkshire Independent Labour Party (ILP). Thompson immortalized him in his 1960 essay “Homage to Tom Maguire,” reprinted in this book.
Maguire personified the tradition of northern socialism for Thompson and connected him and his own comrades to that tradition. Thompson clearly felt a deep admiration for the young socialist (Maguire died at thirty). It was not that he idealized Maguire, but he did see in him the best of the working class, the kind of person the socialist movement needed. Maguire, semi-employed, of poor Irish-Catholic parentage, became a socialist at sixteen; he joined the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) a year later. When the split in the SDF took place in 1884, he sided with William Morris, artist and revolutionary socialist. This, for Thompson, was not simply an episode of historical interest. Rather, it was a link in a chain; and this took him right back to the origins of British Marxism and its since-forgotten fusion with English Romantic socialism, with Morris, his circle, and the Socialist Federation.2
Edward Thompson was one of the great figures of the post–Second World War left.3 He is remembered best as a historian, the author of a biography of William Morris,4 and then, most famously, for his magisterial history of the Industrial Revolution in England, The Making of the English Working Class (1963).5 He was, of course, much more than this. He was a veteran of the war; he served as a tank commander in North Africa and the Italian campaign. He thought of himself as a poet first, also as a writer; visiting New York, in 1946, “an aged war veteran of 22,” and the author at that time of just one short story, he was thrilled at the “misrecognition” of being “taken to be a writer.”6 Indeed, as a writer, his style, wit, and eloquence were rivaled by few; as a political prose writer probably none. He was a lifelong poet, the author of a novel, and an orator capable of commanding the attention of thousands.7
In the years 1948 to 1965, Edward Thompson lived with his family in Halifax in the north of England. Edward and Dorothy Thompson had been Communist Party members; they joined in the war years, horrified by Hitler but critically ill-informed in regard to the Soviet Union and Stalin. In the crisis of 1956 (Hungary and Suez), they rebelled, left the Party, and became founders of a New Left, a British movement in an international current of dissident Communists. This movement was as well an early manifestation of the youth rebellions of the decade to come.
In the 1960s, Thompson created and then directed the prestigious Centre for the Study of Social History at the new Warwick University (1965–1970), where he was a labor historian, best known for “history from below,” and a founder of the “new social history.” In 1970, the Thompsons left Warwick for rural Worcestershire. He worked there as a free scholar, an independent writer, and a public intellectual, a critic of “the secret state” and a thorn in the side of Labour and Tory alike.8 During these years, Thompson completed a series of magnificent essays on eighteenth-century England.9
In 1980, Thompson, alarmed by the late-1979 NATO decision to deploy Cruise and Pershing II missiles in Britain and across Western Europe, turned to full-time peace/anti-nuclear activism. He became a founder, then best-known spokesperson of END (European Nuclear Disarmament), a movement unique and distinct in that it linked its work with dissidents in the Soviet Union and its East-Central European Communist states. This last project reflected Thompson’s lifelong antipathy to the Cold War and the division of Europe. END would attract millions, and, though ultimately unsuccessful in resisting the missile deployment, did much to undermine authority both in the East and West. And it accomplished this on the basis of a mass movement from below.10
The essays in this collection reflect Thompson and his work in the late 1950s and early 1960s when the Thompsons lived in Halifax. This was for Thompson a period of intense activity, editing, writing, and peace/political organizing, all the while raising a family and working full-time as a teacher in adult working-class education. This place and these years are the setting for the essays; they are the essential background for our subject, E. P. Thompson and the Making of the New Left. The essays reflect his work, his experience, and his outlook in a time perhaps not so well known as others in his life; yet these years were crucial in terms of the development of his teaching, writing, and political activism. They culminated, fifty years ago, in the publication of The Making of the English Working Class, an achievement that would at once overshadow virtually all his other work.
The Making came to have a life of its own, separate from this background and sometimes separate from Thompson as a real, living, working person. Perhaps this can be corrected—it needs to be. The Making, after all, was more than a history. It was, he insisted, a political work as well, “a polemic” and a call to arms. It was the result, in part, of a decade of work in the peace movement, then nearly another decade in the New Left. The Making was aimed not at the academy but principally at “his students, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the Left Clubs,” and those young workers, indifferent to the trade unions and the Labour Party, radicalized yet watching from the fringes of these movements.11 It was, then, also a work of the moment. It was to be a sort of platform for the New Left. It was meant to connect his movement to that “long tenacious revolutionary tradition of the British commoner.”12
The New Left, the first New Left, was born in 1956, the year that commenced with Nikita Khruschev’s “secret speech” and ended jolted by the twin crises of Suez and Hungary.13 The October-November Suez debacle in Egypt began with the British, French, and Israeli plot to seize the Suez Canal—just nationalized by the Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser—then to overthrow his regime. Simultaneously, Soviet tanks crushed a workers’ rebellion in Budapest, the Hungarian capital. “These two events,” Stuart Hall, another founder of the New Left, recalled, “whose dramatic impact was heightened by the fact that they occurred within days of each other, unmasked the underlying violence and aggression latent in the two systems that dominated life at that time—Western Imperialism and Stalinism.”14 Hall himself was then “dragged backwards into Marxism, against the tanks in Budapest.”15
In a complacent Britain, where the approved discourse fixed on apathy and affluence, the New Left was something new—a new movement, a “milieu.”16 It championed free, open discussion, debates, participation, demonstrations, marches, and sit-downs. Hilary Rose, the historian of science, remembers “the ferment” of the time, the “searching for a new kind of politics. New Left Clubs sprang up as places to debate ideas, rather than expound the correct line.”17 It advanced a socialism that considered cultural and social, as well as economic and political issues. It campaigned for a non-aligned left, independent of and in opposition to the two superpowers. In addition, it joined with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) in its campaigns against nuclear weapons and nuclear war. It was a revolutionary socialist movement, active in the trade union and labor movements.
The New Left, however, cast aside much of what then defined the revolutionary left. This included, first of all, abandoning traditional Communist norms, the consecration of the experience of the Russian Revolution, that is, the “road map” to revolution. It also rejected fetishizing the form and role of organization, that is, of Leninism and “The Party.” Edward Thompson savaged this tradition, above all Stalinism and its ideology, its determinism and cruel anti-humanism, its turning “men into things.” The New Left was instead decentralized, non-hierarchical, creative, experimental, and humanist.18 It was a movement from below and its intention was for socialism from below. Thompson’s “Socialist Humanism” set many of the political signposts for this movement, yet this was just one essay, one in an outpouring of writing by his and others. The articles, books, and journals that would come from this movement reveal an astonishing array of talent and commitment: Thompson; Doris Lessing, writer; Stuart Hall, founder of cultural studies; Christopher Hill, historian of the English Revolution; Paul Hogarth, illustrator; Raymond Williams, historian of culture: John Saville, labor historian; Lawrence Daly, coal miner; Ralph Miliband, political theorist; Raphael Samuel, founder of the History Workshop; and many others.
Thompson’s New Left essays illuminate this movement, its ideals, its causes, and its practice, all invaluable for the historian of these years. They bring it back to life, but they are of more than academic interest. Today we see a resumption of a global resistance to capitalism—a resistance to its neoliberal armies and its reinvigorated imperialism, its staggering inequalities, and its war on our planet. This has inspired a new generation of activists. The essays here represent an offering as well, a political gift to the new generation as it confronts capitalism and empire. Confrontation, of course, brings questions that every generation inevitably must face, questions the first New Left faced. Hard questions. What is to be done? What are the alternatives? And also older ones: What is socialism? What are its values? How to get there, how to organize? The 1950s New Left pursued a socialist renewal. What went wrong? What did they get right? Our own traditions remain hidden, fractured, and incomplete. They too demand rethinking, reworking, and renewal. Perhaps some guidance will be found here.
THE EXPERIENCE OF TOM MAGUIRE and his place in the history of northern socialism present a rewarding introduction to Edward Thompson in these years. “Homage to Tom Maguire” reveals not just what Thompson meant by “socialism from below” but anticipates, as all these essays do, The Making, and it explains by historical example the sort of socialist movement he wanted. Thompson saw in Tom Maguire the potential of working people, the kind of young worker he looked for in his own efforts in the first New Left. Maguire was the product of the mills, brickyards, and gasworks of the West Riding, of communities where squalid back-to-backs, open-privy middens, and “infant mortality rates (in some districts) of over one in four” persisted. Children went into the mills at the age of ten.19 But also it was a place where memories were long and communities—the Colne, Calder, and Holme valleys—were close-knit. Here “an ‘alien agitator’ from outside would make little headway; but once the local leaders moved, the whole community might follow.”20 This seems to have been the case in the West Riding strikes of 1889, the great gas workers’ victory in Leeds, and the defeated 1890 Mannington Mills strike in Bradford. Maguire was a poet as well (“Machine Room Chants”), but first of all a socialist, and, in what was the highest praise from Thompson, a socialist with “his boots on.”21 The Leeds strikes, in which Maguire played a critical part, were “a groundswell . . . at the rank-and-file level.” They were “bottom-up” strikes, of the kind that Thompson had celebrated, as had Morris when he wrote of the 1889 London dockers: “They have knocked on the head the old slander against the lower ranks of labour.”22 The strikes embodied what Thompson valued in provincial socialism—the roots in community, the commitment to class struggle, and the thirst for political organization. These were the sorts of movements, Thompson believed, upon which a “socialism from the bottom up” might be built.
The 1890s were not the 1840s; there had been “improvements” since “the Hungry Forties.” More had changed when the Thompsons moved to Halifax in 1948. Nevertheless, older conditions survived, both in memory and in fact. Poverty remained widespread in postwar Britain; it was a hard place for millions, even at the “end of austerity.” It remained so, despite what the Tories said about abundance. The academy’s “affluent worker” misleads us.23 It’s not surprising that Labour Party “statesmen” happily joined in this chorus.24 But the fact was, as sociologist Peter Townsend would reveal, that poverty actually increased in the 1950s. He and Brian Abel-Smith, practitioners of a new, committed sociology, were relentless in exposing widespread deprivation; Townsend’s work was just the beginning of a lifetime of challenging the official myths of an abolished poverty.25
The Thompsons’ friend Richard Hoggart, author of The Uses of Literacy, the classic account of class and culture, said this of his native Leeds: “To a visitor, they are understandably depressing, these massed proletarian areas; street after regular street of shoddily uniform houses intersected by a dark pattern of ginnels and snickets (alleyways) and courts; mean, squalid and in a permanent half fog; a study in shades of dirty grey, without greenness or the blueness of sky. . . . There are houses fitted into the dark and lowering canyons between giant factories and the services which attend them; the barracks of an industry.”26
The Thompsons came north to learn about class and working-class movements, thus the northern context demands emphasis. This is often dismissed, more often ignored, yet here were Labour’s strongholds, where deprivation remained pervasive and class was ubiquitous.27 Edward and Dorothy Thompson settled in Siddal, a working-class district on the edge of the Halifax. Dorothy had joined the Communist Party as a schoolgirl in Kent; Edward, following the example of his older brother, Frank, joined in 1942 at Cambridge, just before enlisting in the armed forces. They met at Cambridge and were reunited after the war, together joining international volunteers in the Yugoslav Youth Railway, working with a wide assortment of young people to build a crucial link in the national rail network. The project, they believed, represented “a new spirit in Europe,” and an alternative to division and war. They would later reject the “Communism” that took them to the Balkans, but not the spirit they found there, which would inform their commitments right through their lives.28
The Thompsons started their family in Halifax with three children—Ben, Mark, and Kate. They were not like George Orwell, just passing through, on assignment.29 They would stay well into the 1960s. Years later Dorothy would tell friends they regretted having left the West Riding. Their home, “a large, cold, hospitable gritstone house in the dark town of Halifax,”30 became a vital center of activism, an “open house” for comrades and kids. Their friend Trevor Griffiths remembers that “the energy of the discussions in that house was palpable; you could smell the sweat from the arguments.”31 It was also a place for working-class neighbors. Some years later, in an editorial dispute with John Saville over a question of education policy, Edward in his defense responded, “Since the children of manual laborers [have been continuously] in and out of our house for the past ten years, I know something about this.”32 At issue was Thompson’s dissatisfaction with socialists who confined educational policy to “provisions” and “equality of opportunity.” He asked Saville, “What is education for?” and “What sort of life do we educate for?”33 The Thompsons’ door was open there in Halifax as well as in Leamington and later in Wick Episcopi; Julian Harber, a student and lifelong friend, remembers their “legendary hospitality”34 and that this was their intention, to provide an open place for discussion, argument, and camaraderie.35
The Making of the English Working Class is dedicated to Dorothy Greenald, born in Hartshead, West Yorkshire, the daughter of a coal miner. She was among his first students: “Edward was almost working class, really, in his attitudes and warmth and friendliness. . . . I don’t think I’ve ever had as long and close and warm a relationship with anyone than we had with Edward.”36 Hilary Rose attributed this to the anthropologist in him: “Listen, listen, listen . . .”37
Thompson wasn’t working class, of course, far from it. He was raised in Boars Hill, at Oxford, educated at Kingswood School, Bath, and Cambridge (Literature). His father, also named Edward (“a tough liberal”), a missionary in India, a poet and writer, was a prominent anti-imperialist of his time, a leading advocate of independence for India. He taught Indian history at Oxford and lived Indian history in India. Edward Sr. was fluent in Tamil and Urdu; he lectured in Bengali and Sanskrit at Oriel College, Oxford. Edward’s mother, Theodosia, an American, was also a missionary; she was teaching Arabic and French at an orphanage in Jerusalem when they met.38 The gift for language was passed on to Frank, their elder son, allegedly favored and more gifted.39 He is said to have mastered a score of tongues. India was ingrained in the Thompson home: its history and culture, its freedom fighters, its heroes. Edward the younger recalled he found it no surprise to learn that a visiting honored guest might just have been released from prison. On one such visit, he was given instructions in cricket batting by Jawaharlal Nehru.
Dorothy Thompson was also a historian; she and Edward were both associated with the now celebrated Communist Historians’ Group,40 organized by Dona Torr. “We were or tried to be good communists,” writes Eric Hobsbawm, recalling the Group, “though only E. P. Thompson (who was less closely associated with the Group than Dorothy Thompson) was politically important enough to be elected to his District Party Committee.”41 The Group included not just the Thompsons but Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, Victor Kiernan, R. H. Hilton, Maurice Dobb, James B. Jefferys, George Rudé, John Saville, and an assembly of others who in important ways rewrote English history. Thompson, first a poet and writer, must nevertheless have picked up some history in the Group. He also, at Torr’s insistence, got the habit of getting things right empirically and learned the value of collective work. Thompson would recall “all the healthy ideas of collective intellectual work which we learned from Dona.”42
In family history, it was agreed that, in addition to political work—he would chair the Halifax Peace Committee; he was secretary of the Yorkshire Federation of Peace Organizations; and he was editor of the West Riding Peace Journal—Edward would take full-time employment teaching. Dorothy would raise the children, as well as teach part-time (adult education), work in the Historians’ Group, and continue political organizing. In the late 1940s she organized campaigns in the West Riding to keep wartime nurseries open.43 She also worked in the peace movement, which in the early 1950s meant opposition to the U.S. role in the war in Korea, and began research on her lifetime interest, Chartism. Such arrangements were not so unusual in the forties,44 but they were easier said than done, surely in the chaos of the Thompson house. It meant, among other things, that Dorothy’s writings would be considerably postponed. In 1970, with the children mostly grown, she took a position as full-time lecturer at Birmingham University where she confirmed an esteemed place in her field and a permanently secure position in the historiography of Chartism.45
Edward Thompson in turn taught adult education, crisscrossing the heavily populated West Riding to meet small groups who signed up for courses on offer from the Leeds University Extramural Department and the Workers Education Association (WEA). The Leeds University Extramural Department’s terrain was extensive, covering not only the densely populated West Riding of Yorkshire but also the huge, then remote and sparsely populated North Riding, stretching as far north as Middlesbrough on Teeside.46 Thompson’s home in Halifax was fifteen miles from Leeds, seventy-five miles from Middlesbrough. Most often these were three-year courses, twenty-four weeks per term and simply to learn, with no degrees, no certificates, and no promise of future employment.
Thompson was one in a generation of socialist educators—young people, nearly all veterans—who chose workers’ education as an active alternative to elite education, just as the Thompsons chose to live in the provincial West Riding, purposely far from the metropolis. Workers’ education was seen not just as avocation but as a movement for social change. These veterans turned teachers had been radicalized in the military; many had participated in the Cairo Parliaments and the shipboard assemblies. They had also participated in the politicized education on offer from the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, an official wartime incarnation of adult education, but one that Churchill suspected of spreading socialist ideas. It did. Frank Thompson had been a Unit Education Officer. His superior in Cairo Special Operations was fellow Communist James Klugmann.47 Edward fought in North Africa and in the Italian campaigns; he was a tank commander in the terrible siege of Cassino (100,000 Allied casualties). One finds no hints of Soviet chauvinism in his writings; nor was he a patriot, and clearly he was not anti-British. The war for him was an anti-fascist crusade; he was, like his brother, a pan-European and internationalist.48 The Thompsons shared the hopes of 1945: the idea was that there would be no going back to the old Britain and that they could do something about it. The hope was that “the old social class horribleness would be broken up forever.”49
In a shabby old Rover, or sometimes on the bus, Thompson, carried with him books and papers, making his way to some village hall or schoolroom to meet with a dozen or fifteen people in order to talk about Wordsworth and Blake, Lawrence and Shakespeare, or the future of socialism, but especially the inheritance of these people and their West Riding communities: the connections between his students and their forebears—the weavers, spinners, miners, the Luddites, Chartists, and utopians.
Thompson taught in a score of towns and villages, including Cleckheaton, “one of Gradgrind’s fortresses,”50 a textile town in the Spen Valley, best known now as a setting for Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley and for its history of Luddite risings. He taught in Shepley, a village in Kirklees that was home to four woolen mills in the nineteenth century and a place where Joseph Radcliffe from Milmsbridge House had been Lord of the Manor (he was knighted for his role in suppressing the Luddites in Huddersfield following the murder of a Marsden mill owner). He taught in Hemsworth, a mining village on the eastern border of the West Riding, the place with the biggest Labour majority in the country, where ballots for Labour were “weighed not counted,” and where, he wrote to Saville in 1958, “The miners spit when they hear their MP and councilors mentioned.”51 Halifax itself was then a town of 80,000 in Calderdale in the South Pennines; its industries included woollens, carpets, machine tools. It was an important center of the early Independent Labour Party (ILP).52
The past may be another country, but not here, not this past. These towns, communities, even streets, remained close-knit; memories were long, old traditions persisted, and so much seemed never-changing. On this moor the Luddites drilled. In this valley, the Chartists assembled. Thompson found that in Maguire’s Leeds “a quite remarkable proportion of the young men and women prominent in the early Yorkshire I.L.P. claimed Chartist forebears or the influence of Chartist’s traditions in their childhood.”53
The Industrial Revolution in Yorkshire was tangible, ever present. Saville, teaching at Hull, remembered an early trip to visit the Thompsons: “I took the train to Halifax, changing at Leeds. It was a journey that has remained in my mind. I was steeped in Chartist history and now here I was, seeing the towns and villages where I knew there had been Chartist meetings and gatherings, with wonderful names such as Sowerby Bridge, Hipperholme and Luddendon Foot. Edward met me at Halifax station and took me up to their house which overlooked part of the town.”54 Edward and Dorothy worked to make themselves part of this history; they passed it on as well, and not just in writing. Shelia Rowbotham, a pioneer in feminist history, was twenty-one when she first explored the Thompsons’ library and learned from them the stories of Maguire, Alf Mattison, and Edward Carpenter. She soon began her own life of recovering hidden histories. “Through Dorothy and Edward Thompson there was a living connection to those early days of West Riding socialism. . . . Edward Thompson [told] . . . me about that northern socialism, how for a time preoccupation with changing all forms of human relationships had been central in a working-class movement.”55
THE NAME EDWARD THOMPSON came to be synonymous with “history from below,” a way of practicing and understanding history that became important in the 1960s and 1970s. “Edward didn’t invent ‘history from below,’” Dorothy Thompson told our memorial meeting at New York’s Ethical Culture Center in late 1993. “He was just one of the best practitioners of it.”56 The “practitioner,” however, did not just write about workers’ history. He lived it as teacher, neighbor, friend, comrade. He lived with workers, he learned from workers, and it is this that made The Making unique, timeless. It was also the fact that Thompson was a master of the archives, the records, the citation; and it was this genius, fused with his perspectives, that enabled him to recover “forgotten evidence of class struggle” and the “invisible rules that govern behavior.” In Britain, he argued, “an immense amount of existing historiography . . . has seen society within the expectations, the self-image, the apologetics, of a ruling class: ‘the propaganda of the victors.’”57 So to counter this, it was necessary to find not just what is “hidden in history” but also to challenge the official records, rebutting the lies of the record-keepers and giving a voice to those who had none. This was one of Thompson’s great contributions.58
Moreover, Thompson’s example encouraged in others a new freedom, surely for those of us working beyond the confines of the typical historians’ hedges, seeking new ways of understanding the actualities of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century life.59 His reach carried well beyond his initial discoveries, into innumerable new areas of investigation, clearing a path for working-class studies, women’s history,60 black history, cultural studies, and even the world of painting.61 Here, as John Barrell has suggested, the “voices” of the painters—Gainsborough, Morland, Constable—could be extraordinarily powerful in shaping what we might call the official memory of the period, the tradition of Happy Britannia with “its good, deserving poor.”62 And yet, as Barrell wrote in The Dark Side of the Landscape, this freedom opened entirely new dimensions of work, among other things, by demanding research against that tradition and understanding the “constraints”—“often apparently aesthetic but in fact moral and social—that determined how the poor could, or rather how they could not be represented.”63 Further, this freedom challenged the way in which the tradition was used “to resist or to deny the creation of that consciousness,” that is, that working-class consciousness revealed in The Making.64
Adult education was not easy work. It required discipline and a certain zealous commitment. As a young tutor, Thompson would explain that, on more than one occasion, “his aim was to make socialists, create revolutionaries and transform society.”65 Over time this was tempered, but teaching, like everything else for Thompson, was always political. It had its frustrations and disappointments. One class in Middlesbrough was a problem: “Two steelworkers (it is true) were on the provisional register, but despite the friendly atmosphere of the class, they did not appear to be at home, and did not go beyond the sixth meeting. . . . The tutor, who drove over eighty miles to the illuminated sky and glaring furnaces of the steel centers, found this disappointing.”66 A closer look, however, reveals that such complaints, his “disappointments,” most often contain a core of self-criticism. What had he done wrong? How had he failed his students? What adjustments must he make? This is seen in his persistent appeals that even the least successful classes must not be cancelled. When his class at Hemsworth caused considerable administrative problems, Thompson stated that it was “important . . . that a branch of this quality, with a good tutorial record, should be kept alive in the heart of the Yorkshire coalfield.”67 Whatever the problems, they could be resolved; they must be kept going because “the alternative was surrender, surrender to false standards, surrender to the pressures of elitism.”68
And how was this a problem? Just what were the “pressures of elitism”? As an example, Roger Fieldhouse tells us that in July 1950, Thompson submitted a paper to the Extramural Department, “Against University Standards,” a twenty-five-page polemic, a critique of what he saw as the mistaken direction of the department.69 It was not an argument contesting the aim of high-quality in-class work; it was not against excellence in teaching tutors or against the pursuit of good outcomes. Rather, it challenged what Thompson considered “a theory hostile to the healthy development of working-class adult education.” The paper referred to a colleague’s uncritical reference to John Henry Newman’s70 conception of the mission of the university, that is, as a place with the aim of fostering “a pure and clear atmosphere of thought . . . habits of mind formed to last through life, of which the attributes are, freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom” often translated, Thompson explained, as “tolerance.”71 Thompson contested this notion of “tolerance” as an aim of education. He advanced this response: “A student, let us suppose, joins the class with a burning sense of class injustice or an attitude of compassion to his fellow workers. He desires to study economics in order to find the means of righting this injustice: or literature in order to enrich his life and that of his fellows.” But, we are told, his process of study must aim to make an effective change in his “attitude.” Thus, it follows, Thompson contended, that “we must deny the validity of the student’s experience, and assert that the tutor, by virtue of a university education, is better fitted to judge both matters of fact and matters of attitude and behaviour.” But “to prescribe an attitude of calmness, or moderation, or tolerance toward a society or social problems is to pre-judge that this attitude is an appropriate one. The exponents of this theory of ‘objectivity’ are not only agreeing to make available facts about society to their students, but are also claiming to dictate the students’ response, and therefore, behaviour in relation to these facts.”72 In this case “the student is to change his persistent attitude from one of indignation or compassion to one of tolerance, only on the grounds that he was mistaken before and that the facts of society are such as merit toleration. And to do this we must deny the validity of the student’s experience and assert that the tutor, by virtue of a university education is better fitted to judge both matters of fact and matters of attitude and behaviour.” It seems, Thompson concluded, that the pursuit of the theory of “objectivity” and “tolerance” as the decisive aim of adult education “leads in the end to a theory of indoctrination” and that “this is a typical form of class indoctrination.”73
This dispute seems not to have interfered with Thompson’s teaching nor to have produced negative consequences. He would remain in the department for seventeen years. Most of Thompson’s classes were in fact successful, both in themselves and in his pursuit of the history of the Industrial Revolution. Sometimes a class member was able to provide indirect, but personal, links to the period. At Cleckheaton the great-grandfather of a student had been named Feargus O’Connor after the Chartist leader.74 At Batley a student “revealed herself in the last evening to have been a lifelong collector of old songs and ballads,” and in his report Thompson quoted in full an example taken down “fifteen to twenty years ago” from “a blind workhouse inmate (who thought the song ‘Chartist’),” but which he himself judged plausibly as “an early (eighteenth century?) song—possibly sung at primitive trade-union ceremonies.”75
“The mixture of students, old, young, verbose, garrulous, set the stage for an evening—unpredictable—exciting, anything could happen.”76 One student recalls, “I was struck by his sheer enthusiasm, also a little bit awed by his undoubted intellect, which, combined with his humor, and his articulate & graphic method of expression, made his classes fascinating.”77 Quite early on, he came to be seen as one of the Extramural Department’s outstanding tutors. Bill Baker, a senior member of staff at Leeds, observed a 1949 class in Cleckheaton. He expected to find Thompson ill at ease because of his “lack of knowledge of the character of WEA classes.” Instead, he was impressed “by the way the class participated with freedom and abandon.”78 This free expression was to be valued, above all by the tutor, the educator who, Thompson insisted, had as much to learn from the student’s experience as to teach. In November Baker visited another of Thompson’s classes, at Bingley. He reported, “In many respects this was one of the most satisfactory classes that I have ever visited. Thompson’s work was quite first-class, both in his introduction of the subject (Dickens’s Hard Times) and in stimulating the discussion.”79
“I WENT INTO ADULT EDUCATION,” Thompson recalled, “because it seemed to me to be an area in which I would learn something about industrial England and teach people who would teach me.”80 He did, and they did. It was in Halifax that both William Morris and The Making were written. The Making, Thompson wrote, was “written in Yorkshire, and is coloured at times by West Riding sources.”81 Originally, The Making was intended simply as a modest “industrial and social history” of West Riding, a guide for his students. He would sometimes refer to it as “my West Riding book.” It was in the West Riding that he worked to rescue the forgotten histories, and to implant these in a tradition right up to the present, fusing that tradition with the movement for socialism in his own time. He wrote for his students, for the young trade unionists, the CND, and the New Left. He also wrote, in Morris’s sense, to “make socialists,” showing, as Hobsbawm once observed, “little distinction between how the world is and how it ought to be.” Thompson moved easily to what needs to be done.82
The Making of the English Working Class, a 900-page volume, was completed in less than three years. This astonishing accomplishment remained something of a puzzle of “just how the book got itself written” even to Thompson himself. In 1980, looking back, he explained, “In 1959–62 I was also heavily engaged in the work of the first New Left, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and so on. The writing was only possible because some part of the research had already been laid down during the previous ten years in the course of my work as a tutor in extramural classes in the West Riding.”83
Published to great acclaim, The Making was instantly recognized as a classic. It is now in its fiftieth year of uninterrupted publication. In an editorial, The Guardian of 26 December 2013 recalled its “elegance and dedication.” “No historian of British society has since produced a book to match E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class. . . . The book crackles with energy, as it uses scraps of evidence such as popular songs and workshop rituals to paint a picture of workers’ lived ‘experience’” (emphasis in original).84 It is no surprise, thinking back, that The Making came as something of a shock in its field. It was written by a virtually unknown lecturer in adult education; its author was self-taught, without an advanced degree, with no attachment to a prestigious institution or department. His use of poetry, song, broadsheets, made academics flinch. Indeed, The Making quite literally burst the complacency of history departments. Iain Boal has written that it sent “shock waves” through “the polite smoking rooms” of quiescent universities and “permanently changed the landscape of that epoch.”85 The Making was a defiant challenge to academic history, a counter-narrative to the official record—for example, his contention that “the Industrial Revolution was imposed not on raw material but on free-born Englishmen.”86 Thompson’s humanism transformed social history, and the history of the Industrial Revolution has never been the same since. Nor has the conclusion to the school days’ debate “progress or poverty” been more contested. Progress? he asked. “I do not mean to deny the positive evidence,” he wrote, but “growth can be a misleading term. Suffering is not just wastage on the margin of growth: for those who suffer it is absolute.”87 Assessing the period, Thompson wrote, “There was intensified exploitation, greater insecurity, and increasing human misery. By 1840 most people were ‘better off’ than their fore-runners had been fifty years before, but they had suffered and continued to suffer this slight improvement as a catastrophic experience.”88 Thompson had a keen sense of the heavy price of progress. The Making placed Edward Thompson with Dickens and Engels and Gaskell as a chronicler of one of history’s great transformations.
On this side of the Atlantic, The Making helped clear a path in a widening challenge to the nation’s official record of compromise, consensus, and conservatism. Of course, the civil rights movement was the major force in exploding all this. But The Making added to the progress achieved in our understanding of just how debilitating, how disarming the ideology of classlessness, or “we’re all middle class,” was then, and is now. Thompson raised the forbidden banners of class, banners then half-buried in the wreckage of post-McCarthy America. These were not just the banners of old, however; they were not those that upheld the deterministic categories of the Old Left. Thompson’s notion of class was set free of these. He argued that class was not a “thing”; it was a “historical phenomenon . . . that must be embodied in real people and in a real context.” Thompson’s assertion that the working class “made itself as much as it was made” was a provocation and also a revelation.89 It raised the question of “agency,” and from this followed “self-activity.” This renewed, deeper vision of class was indispensable if a new generation was to make any sense at all of the conflicts and new movements of the 1960s.90
“I COMMENCED TO REASON in my thirty-third year, and, despite my best efforts, I have never been able to shake the habit off.”91
I first acquired the habit in 1956, when, with John Saville and others, I was involved in producing a duplicated journal of discussion within the Communist Party, The Reasoner. Reasoning was disliked by the leadership of the Party, and the editors were suspended from membership. Since this suspension coincided with the repression of the Hungarian revolution (October/November 1956)—and the exodus of some 10,000 members from the British Communist Party—it was decided that our offensive activities might be continued outside the structure, and, with the aid of other comrades, The New Reasoner was founded in 1957. This quarterly journal continued for 2 ½ years.92
Thus the immediate origins of the first New Left. Saville recalls, “We were highly committed Party members who had come through the tough and difficult years of the Cold War—more difficult than is often appreciated.” He recalled “personal experiences” with others “who had left the Party to cultivate their own gardens, or of those who had left to become, in our eyes, renegades.”93 At the same time, he remembers, “we had both been emotionally, politically and morally shocked at the revelations of what Stalinism really meant, and as Communists and historians we saw clearly that we were obliged to analyze seriously the causes of the crimes which in the past we had defended or apologized for.”94
The first issue of The Reasoner sold out in a few weeks. The second issue was published twenty-four hours before the September meeting of the CP Executive Committee, a meeting for which the agenda included the demand that Thompson and Saville cease publication immediately or be suspended. The production of The Reasoner was no small task; it fell largely on Saville, Dorothy Thompson, and Edward Thompson. Nevertheless, a third issue was scheduled for November. “Edward typed all the stencils—in a note to a correspondent I [Saville] remarked that Edward had typed nearly 40,000 words on stencils . . . in five days’ time; and he similarly typed the whole of the longer third issue.”95
It was the rebellion and then the bloody repression in Hungary that stunned the Thompsons and shook the world of Communism. “Stalinism has sown the wind,” Edward Thompson responded, in an emotional appeal to his movement, “and now the whirlwind centers on Hungary. As I write the smoke is still rising above Budapest.”96 He asked, rhetorically, “Where is my party in Hungary?” but there was no answer from King Street, the Party headquarters in London; instead, “by an angry twist of history, it seems that the crop is coming up as students’, workers’ and soldiers’ councils, as ‘anti-Soviet’ soviets.”97 The news of the rebellion, of the tens of thousands of workers and students taking to the streets, the scenes of the street battles, now to be seen on television, the spectacle of unarmed workers and students confronting Soviet tanks, then, two days after Suez, the bloody repression, all this could mean only one thing: “This was the end.” “It meant a profound break,” recalled Dorothy Thompson. “It was the finish of old-style politics, the old block of ice.”98 And for Edward Thompson, “No chapter would be more tragic in international socialist history, if the Hungarian people, who once before lost their revolution to armed reaction, were driven into the arms of the capitalist powers by the crimes of a Communist government and the uncomprehending violence of Soviet armies.”99
The events in Budapest, staggering as they were, found the Thompsons not entirely unprepared. Dorothy Thompson suggested that “most of those who left the Party in 1956 also had a name within for being critical,”100 and “the Reasoners,” as journal supporters called themselves, “none of [us] came from Communist families, all had joined the party in the late thirties or early forties as a conscious choice. These were the years of the failed defense of the Spanish government and the attempts at building a Popular Front against fascism in Europe.”101
The Thompsons had been committed Party members; they followed the line. They believed in the values of loyalty and discipline. Still, they were critics; one need not look far for the evidence of this. Thompson’s long 1950 poem, “A Place Called Choice,” concludes, “I declare that man has choice,” a conviction he would make prominent in the New Left outlook; his second contribution to The New Reasoner was titled “Agency and Choice.”102 Thompson had not been a Party puritan; his bohemian Boars Hill youth was never quite forgotten. He shared much with his beloved brother Frank Thompson, whose biographer tells us that Frank joined at a time when “idealism, romanticism and a passionate anti-fascism came together to move the best of a generation leftwards. . . . His pull towards Communism lay in its promise of universal brotherhood, an imaginary politics of kindness, caring and compassion and the belief in a utopian future to stand against the evident bankruptcies of capitalism and the nightmare world of Fascism.” He joined when “Iris [Murdoch] showed [him] how gentle and artistic communists could be.” The young brother, also the writer and poet, under the spell of Wordsworth, Blake, Morris, could hardly have been immune to this.103
The Suez adventure ended in ignominious retreat, forced by the Americans and marking yet another blow to Britain’s illusions of Empire. Only for the Israelis was the operation a success, inspiring both its military and enhancing its appetite. The Tories muddled through, but Labour’s opposition, tortuously arrived at, gave space for a growing youth opposition, which would be a factor in the early successes of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the New Left. “The events of 1956 in the Eastern bloc,” according to historian and peace activist James Hinton, “opened the way for a younger generation of socialists to take up once again the abandoned search for a third way between Stalinist authoritarianism and American hegemony. Khrushchev’s denunciations of Stalin in 1956 threw the world communist movement into crisis.” Hinton suggests that “the Hungarian revolution lifted the spell of ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ reviving the possibility of building a genuinely democratic socialism in Eastern Europe.”104 In a February 1957 letter, Doris Lessing, who had joined the Communist Party as a young girl in Southern Rhodesia, wrote Thompson, “I feel as if I’ve been let out of a prison.”105
Thompson’s own retrospective (from 1960) was this: “1956 marks the watershed. In the first place, since 1956, there has been a world-wide and continuing movement of Communist dissidence which (if we overlook—as we should—Mr. Howard Fast) has not entered into the worn paths of traumatic anti-communism, God-That-Failedism, Encounterism, and the rest; but which has, on the contrary, sought to affirm and develop the humane and libertarian features of the Communist tradition.”106
Thompson’s “reasoning” was political and always practical.107 It began with the appeal addressed to the world of “dissident communism.” It then became a keystone in the collective project to create a New Left. By the spring of 1957, the Thompsons and Saville had published the first issue of the New Reasoner, “a quarterly journal of socialist humanism,” based in the industrial North. There was from the start a North/South issue in the New Left, the North always closer to the trade unions and the labor movement. The New Reasoner editorial board included Doris Lessing, Ken Alexander, Peter Worsley, and Malcolm MacEwen. In succeeding issues contributors would include Ralph Miliband, Ronald Meek, Tibor Dery, G. D. H. Cole, Claude Bourdet, Raymond Williams, Tom Mboya, Dora Scarlett, Christopher Hill, C. Rajagopalachari, Michael Barrett-Brown, Alasdair MacIntyre, Victor Kiernan, and Dorothy Thompson.
That same spring a group of independent socialists at Oxford, including Stuart Hall and Raphael Samuel, produced the first issue of Universities and Left Review.108 These two journals, along with the emergence of the CND in early 1958, became the institutional foundations of the new movement. Together they sought to rekindle the “moral imagination” of the British people. They developed, of course, in the midst of Britain’s wider cultural revolution—Look Back in Anger, Room at the Top, and similar plays and films—in the late 1950s and early 1960s. And in this context, the New Left “displayed an expansive and apparently tireless dynamism, accumulating an imposing set of political properties and insignia, the tokens and titles of an estate of presumable substance.”109 In 1960 the two journals merged to form the New Left Review.110
Thompson, describing The New Reasoner as a journal of dissident Communists, remained for a time reluctant to abandon the term Communist. One reason was to make it clear that any new movement would have nothing whatsoever to do with “the God that failed” phenomenon, that is, the parade of notable ex-Communists entering service for the West. Richard Crossman’s 1949 anthology of that name included Arthur Koestler, Richard Wright, André Gide, Louis Fisher, and Stephen Spender. Another reason was his insistence on what he then believed to be loyalty to a Communist tradition, a tradition reaching back not only to Marx and Engels but also to Morris and the first English socialists.
Thompson saw The New Reasoner as “polemical, engaged intellectual work,” not as “a political ginger group in the labour movement” but as a vital part of a new, independent left; a broad but revolutionary left, committed to socialist renewal, and independent of but not hostile to the labor movement and the Labour Party.111 The main enemy became the “Natopolitans.”112 Thompson was no anarchist, but neither was he sympathetic to Trotskyism, believing correctly, I think, that, though critics of Stalinism, the Trotskyists carried over into opposition much of its baggage, “the same false conceptual framework and attitudes—the same economic behaviourism, cult of the elite, moral nihilism.”113 The New Reasoners, in Hinton’s words, “were frankly revisionist and uninterested in a return to Leninist purity. Harking back to the days of the Left Book Club—and, less explicitly, to the socialist revival of the 1880s and 1890s—Thompson urged the ‘active minority of convinced socialists’ not to lock themselves up in a new ‘vanguard’ or in the mere resolution mongering within the Labour Party.”114 He wrote to Saville, concerned that “we [not] just jump from one cozy in-group to another.”115
Edward Thompson was not “the leader” of the first New Left; by definition it had no leader. Nevertheless, he played a critical role, as thinker—“reasoner”—writer, organizer, and foot soldier. Certainly his piece “Socialist Humanism,” though subject of fierce debate in the New Left, including in the pages of The New Reasoner itself, was central in defining the political parameters of the movement. The New Left was diverse; it had neither a single political line nor a particular agenda. It was organized largely around its publications, The New Reasoner and the Universities and Left Review, and The New Left Review. The anthology Out of Apathy (1960), a symposium of ideas and ideals edited by Thompson, was an intellectual tour deforce. Contributors were Thompson, Ken Alexander, Stuart Hall, Ralph Samuel, Peter Worsley, and Alasdair MacIntyre. The best-known New Left ventures, aside from those of the journals, involved the creation of the Left Clubs and participation and influence in the CND, where it pressed for unilateralism and independence from the Labour Party.
The clubs (by 1960, there were thirty or forty of them scattered across the country) became the real centers of radical thinking and activity in these years. The Partisan Café in Carlisle Street, Soho, the first of the radical coffeehouses in London, was especially significant. It was largely the creation of Raphael Samuel, one of the “younger” generation. In 1962, Samuel began what became a life of teaching adult education at Ruskin College, Oxford. In the early years, the London Club attracted several hundred people to its weekly meetings.116 Hilary Rose recalls “the Partisan” and still identifies “as one of the enthusiastic youth who flocked to the Left Clubs in the early sixties.” She remembers “the excitement, hearing speakers like Tom Mboya and Desmond Bernal, people she never thought she’d hear in person.”117 One club campaigned against “ugly” buildings. Another, Stuart Hall records, concerned “the deep involvement in 1958 with the race riots in Notting Hill and with the anti-racist struggles of the period around North Kensington.” The clubs worked to establish tenants’ associations and “helped to protect black people who, at the height of the ‘troubles,’ were molested and harassed by white crowds.”118 Dorothy Thompson remembers “the arguments and discussions which went on in and around the clubs about the family, open marriage, child rearing, and such matters were often too intense to be reduced to print, although some interesting fragments remain.”119 The writer and filmmaker Trevor Griffiths attended a 1961 summer school held just outside Otley, in the Yorkshire Dales: “Peter Worsley was there, so was John Rex, Ken Coates, Anderson came, so did Stuart Hall and Edward, of course. It was a terrific school; there was a striking lack of pomposity in the New Left, also a detestation of rank. The school was full of arguments, we argued about everything; in the end no one was right, no one wrong. And we played bad table tennis.”120
The CND emerged in 1957 in reaction to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan’s announcement of the development of a British thermonuclear arsenal, then the testing of a British hydrogen bomb at Christmas Island. It was founded in 1958 by a group of intellectuals, including Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley, and A. J. P. Taylor. Its first rally that spring was the hugely successful Central Hall meeting (5,000 attended with a 1,000-person overflow); this was followed by the first of the Aldermaston marches. Thousands walked for four days to the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston in Berkshire. The Mail ran this firsthand account: “I am writing this sitting on a grass verge of a country lane in Berkshire. During the past forty-five minutes nearly 5,000 people in a marching column three miles long have trudged past on this, the first day of the anti–H bomb march from Aldermaston to London. These marchers—men, women, and children—have come from all over Britain and many parts of Europe and the Commonwealth. And at late evening it looked like [it was] developing into the biggest single demonstration since the war.”121 Subsequent marches increased in size and were welcomed by tens of thousands in London; by 1960 100,000 Easter demonstrators had gathered in Trafalgar Square.122 The relationship between CND and the New Left was deep; Thompson believed that many of the thousands of those “left homeless” became CND stalwarts.123 Within CND, Thompson argued for “a dynamic movement outside the Labour Party and free from its bureaucratic gags and tactical chloroform.124 The sit-downs, like the Aldermaston marches, take the issues beyond conference halls and committee rooms to the ‘arena of the whole nation.’”125 CND declined in the early 1960s, though antiwar sentiment continued to define left-wing thinking and activity.126
In retrospect, the CND’s significance is difficult to exaggerate, as is the New Left’s influence within it. The CND’s decentralized structures (in spite of its “leaders”), its grassroots formations, direct action, sit-downs, mass marches, and political independence—some of these forms borrowed from the civil rights movement in the United States—came to characterize the New Left movements nearly everywhere. It prefigured the social movements to come. CND has been represented as a “middle-class” movement; this was true only to a degree. Its base, as Thompson, anticipating the 1960s, and others were quick to see, included thousands of young workers, blue-collar as well as white. These people were representatives of a generation of young people who would, in time, move beyond the parameters established by the Labour Movement. “The young marchers of Aldermaston,” Thompson wrote, “despite all immaturities and individualistic attitudes, are at root more mature than their critics on the Old Left. They have understood that ‘politics’ have become too serious to be left to the routines of politicians.” And, he asked, “As for ‘moral and spiritual values,’ what can the Old left or Old Right offer, after all?”127
The British trade unions in the 1950s often tilted right. The Labour Party, led by Hugh Gaitskell, was divided; it exuded “the enfeeblement of the energies . . . [that] brought it to power in 1945.”128 The unions tended to be rigid, and entrenched leaderships were the rule, left and right. They were, however, well organized with strong militant currents within them; the 1956 shift to the left of the Transport Workers, led by Frank Cousins, though unexpected, would have long-term implications.129 “Power at the Base,” the title of an article by Ken Alexander, argued for a rejection of Fabianism, Labourism, and reformism.130 Thompson granted the influence of Labourism: “The workers, having failed to overthrow capitalist society, proceeded to warren it end to end.”131 But he detected fractures within “the rank-and-file mood,” “unofficial strikers,” the “blue union” of the docks, and the rebellion led by the shop stewards at Briggs Motor, Dagenham.132
The Left Clubs, for Thompson, were to be “discussion-centers . . . places beyond the reach of the bureaucracy, where the initiative remains in the hands of the rank-and-file. If the bureaucracy reacts by anathemas and prescriptions, the clubs and publications will continue, staffed by socialists who are members of no party, but who intend to provide service to the whole movement.”133 And this indeed was the case with the clubs and CND; Thompson himself was one such socialist—teacher, writer, and activist. However, he was not without complaints. He wrote to Raphael Samuel:
I have also SIX CLASSES, plus additional teaching for hospital administrators (NINE classes this week) plus being on four Department Committees, plus three children who keep having Guy Fawkes and birthdays, plus a miraculous growth of YCND (Youth CND) and CND in Halifax this past two months—which after so many dead years we can’t just ignore (from nought to 150 YCND in two months!)—plus the correspondence of Chairing a Board (of New Left Review) you may have heard of. My only affinity to Marx is that I get boils on my neck.134
THOMPSON WAS GUARDED in assessing perspectives, yet optimistic as well—too optimistic, as things turned out. In his May 1959 New Reasoner article, “The New Left,” he wrote that it was “scarcely identifiable in terms of organization—a few journals, several clubs, successful educational work.” Yet he saw openings in Britain, “a mood which is very widely diffused both within the traditional labour movement and outside it.” The “mood” expressed itself in “participation in the nuclear disarmament movement, which may soon precipitate in more specifically socialist form.” Then he was inspired by the participation of young people, both in CND and in response to the New Left movement. He also believed that in Britain “the 1956 dissidence with the Communist movement coincided with Mr. Bevan’s accommodation with Mr. Gaitskell and the disorientation of the traditional Labour left.”
In these circumstances, he set some parameters, argued for and against politics and forms, and for the New Left he envisioned. This included the recurring theme of the fight for socialism, for socialist renewal, he argued, must be in the here and now. The New Left “must not wait hopefully for the old disasters and repressions to engender the old defensive responses.” On the contrary, its task is “to discover the new frustrations and potentials within contemporary life, the new growing-points. The way forward for Socialism lies not in frightening the children of the 1950s with the Ogre of the 1930s (although, true enough, he may still be lurking around), but in pointing the way to the great enrichment of social life potential within our society today. Enduring militancy is built not upon negative anxieties but upon positive aspirations.” At the same time, he contested Crosland’s U.S.-inspired politics of affluence and consumption, arguing that Crosland had capitulated to the “mythology of prosperity” and was in reality offering up “the American tourist’s dream” replete with “open-air cafes, brighter and gayer streets, later closing hours for public houses.” Instead, Thompson contended, “Men do not want only the list of things which Mr. Crosland offers; they want also to change themselves as men. However fitfully and ineffectively, they want other and greater things: they want to stop killing one another: they want to stop this pollution of their spiritual life which runs through society as the rivers carried their sewage and refuse through our nineteenth century industrial towns; side by side with their direct economic interests, they would like to ‘do benefits’ to each other.”
He challenged the Old Left argument that “apathy” in the labor movement was due exclusively to the machinations of the bureaucracy (either Transport House or King Street) and the treachery of the leaders. “This convenient excuse enables the Old Left to fall back upon the old repertoire of militant slogans, and to evade the labour of analysing the actual social forces which have contributed to the rise of bureaucracy and which enable the leadership to maintain its power.” This permits the Old Left “to idealize a mythical militant working class . . . a working class which is far more a construct from passages of Lenin and/or Trotsky than a derivation from actual observation of the real tensions and conflicts of contemporary working-class life.”
Thompson’s prescriptions for the trade unions and the labor movement translated into a “bottom up” perspective for socialists. Their task was not to “lead” the workers—he had no time for “vanguards”—but to “assist in the education of a new generation of dedicated socialist leaders in the trade union and labour movements” who “must be dedicated to the enlistment of the people, in the participation, at every level of the exercise of power.”
A democratic, revolutionary strategy, Thompson argued, would demand “a common strand of wage and ethical demands”; it would be built on education and research, with journals, books, Left Clubs. It would demand “the exchange of ideas between specialists and those whose experience—in nationalized industry or in local government—enables them to see more clearly than the theorist the limits of the old system, the growing-points of the new.”135
Most of all, he believed, it would demand “a brake with parliamentary fetishism which supposes that all advance must wait upon legislative change.” Most “popular gains,” he argued, “have been won, in the first place, by direct action: direct action to increase wages, improve working conditions, shorter hours, build co-ops, found nursery schools.”136 And they have been won by struggle.
The club of the greatest interest, perhaps the one closest to Thompson’s own perspectives, was not a club at all, but the Fife Socialist League. It was founded by Lawrence Daly, the coal miner and the League’s chief spokesperson. In 1956 Daly publicly tore up his CP card; in 1959, he founded the League as a political discussion forum from which it could launch independent candidates. He joined CND in 1957. (In 1968 Daly would become the National Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM); he steered the union through the great strikes of 1972 and 1974.137)
Daly was on the board of both New Left journals; he was a contributor as well. In 1957 he became an independent county councillor in Fife.138 In the 1959 general election he contested West Fife, the seat held by the CP between 1935 and 1950. Thompson and John Saville managed his campaign.139 The campaign was independent, grassroots, and socialist, exactly, one suspects, what Thompson wanted. He, Dorothy Thompson, and the Dalys were personal friends; in Scotland the Thompsons stayed at Glencraig with Daly and his wife, Renee, on both private and political visits, and the Thompsons reciprocated. An anecdote, retrieved by historian David Kynaston, captures Thompson, the activist, “with his boots on.” Responding in Halifax to a request from Daly, Thompson writes: “It’s just possible we might find a speaker for you. But not a van. People just don’t have vans to lend around.” He could offer, however, some help: “Look,” he wrote, “this Ernest Rodker is a first-class lad. He is what a young socialist comrade ought to be heart, soul and body in the cause. He has imitative and good ideas. He is willing to listen and learn. He has proved himself an organizer—did most of the publicity in London for the first Aldermaston. It would be good for him. The only problem? A beard. I have written to him and suggested to him he takes off his beard. If he does, I am telling you Bro., you will damn well have him for your campaign and you will thank us all afterwards.”140
Nationally, the elections produced a heavy defeat for Labour; in Fife, Daly finished third, with 5,000 votes, well ahead of the Communist Party candidate.141
THE THOMPSON FAMILY PAPERS remain closed at their request and will be closed for some time to come. On this subject, Dorothy Thompson routinely advised, “If you want to know about Edward, you had best read his writing.”142 The articles collected here are presented in that spirit and with the hope they fill a gap; these New Left writings have until now been scattered, unpublished, or difficult to retrieve. This book represents just a selection of Thompson’s many New Left writings; in the years 1956–62 he was prolific as always. The book begins with his appeal to fellow Communists, “Through the Smoke of Budapest,” published in the mimeographed Reasoner, and concludes with three historical pieces: a lecture on William Morris, whose spirit informs all of Thompson’s writings: “The Free-born Englishman,” published first in the New Left Review, later in revised form as an important chapter in The Making of the English Working Class. Here he finds Thomas Paine, the champion of an ideal he himself cherished: “It was Paine who put his faith in the free operation of opinion in the ‘open society’: mankind are not now to be told they should not think or they should not read.”143 The third historical piece, “Homage to Tom Maguire,” “the poet, propagandist and sagacious organizer,” was first published in a collection honouring the historian G. D. H. Cole. Here Thompson anticipates the Preface to The Making with insistence on history from the bottom up. Maguire, Thompson argues, represents “the provincial leaders, commonly denied full citizenship . . . the marginalized and the hidden from respectable history.”144
These pieces bookend a set of polemics from The New Reasoner, The Universities and Left Review, and the New Left Review. The New Reasoner essays are “Socialist Humanism” and “The New Left.” The Universities and Left Review pieces presented here are “Socialism and the Intellectuals” and “Commitment in Politics,” in which Thompson addresses “classlessness” but also offers a critique of tendencies to sentimentalize the old working class, misusing, he argues, Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy. He worries about “an evasion of class struggle” and is skeptical about theories of “consumer capitalism.” While praising ULR writers and readers, and the young middle-class activists of the day, he responds: “Let us keep steadily in view the realities of class power in our time: the community to which we look forward is potential only within our working-class movement.”145 From the New Left Review we have “Revolution Again” and “The Long Revolution,” I & II, Thompson’s review of Raymond Williams’s classic The Long Revolution. Thompson discusses various “notions of revolution,” while keeping his distance from the “cultural critique,” that is, Williams’s idea of “a whole way of life,” counterposing to this “a whole way of struggle.”146 From Out of Apathy we have “At the Point of Decay,” and “Revolution.” And finally, unpublished until now, is “Where Are We Now?,” Thompson’s reflections on the state of things in 1963, the year of crisis for the first New Left.
“Socialist Humanism” continues to be the essential document for these years. It (and the continuation in “Agency and Choice”) came to define the core politics of the first New Left; Dorothy Thompson described it as “a first attempt to anatomize Stalinism and the policies of the non-Soviet communist parties by someone who had only just come up for air.”147 It is still the most discussed (and criticized) of his contributions in these years.148 Readers will judge its merits for themselves, but this might be the place to acknowledge the important cautionary recommendations made by Madeleine Davis, a leading historian of the British New Left: “We should be careful not to abstract ‘socialist humanism’ from the political context and purpose of Thompson’s writing at this time and from the collective project of the New Left. . . . In keeping with Thompson’s view of ‘theory as provisional’ and as polemic, socialist humanism is better viewed less as a fully articulated position than as a polemical and provisional starting point, as an ethical sensibility rather than a theory. . . . It is not one static position but rather describes the developing project that Thompson said ran through all his work, an attempt to recover and claim for socialism a ‘lost vocabulary’ of agency and moral choice. He pursued this through his histories.”149
In this context, “Socialist Humanism” is an extraordinary document. It is an indictment that sweeps through the basic tenets of a whole worldview, one that, in theory, was representative of half the globe. It is also, importantly, a redefinition of socialism, and, however provisional, a beginning of perspectives, of a platform, for a new left. The background to this, of course, is the Khrushchev revelations, the purge trials, forced collectivization, the famines, and all the unfolding realities of the barbarities of Soviet rule. Thompson’s subject here, however, is Stalinism as ideology, its anti-humanism, its projection, for example, of the idea that socialism can be defined and evaluated in terms of industrial output, its success or failure measured in tons of steel. Yet also, and not coincidentally, one finds in these pages the themes and arguments that are the foundation upon which The Making, and virtually all of Thompson’s writings, are built. There is, for example, the idea that socialism is “not only economically practicable” but also “intensely desirable” and that socialism “would revolutionize human relationships, replacing respect for property by respect for man, and replacing the acquisitive society by the common weal.”150
At the same time, Thompson asserts, “a long derided trend within the socialist movement appears to be reviving Utopian (or ‘Socratic’) socialism, that is, the vindication of the right of the moral imagination to project an ideal to which it is legitimate to aspire; and the right of the reason to enquire into the aims and ends of social arrangements, irrespective of questions of immediate feasibility: in brief, to ask questions of the order of ‘Why?’ and not only ‘How?’”151 At the same time, he offers a critique of “extravagances of utopianism,” warning that “the value of utopianism is to be found not in raising banners in the wilderness, but in confronting living people with an image of their own potential life, in summoning up their aspirations so that they challenge the old forms of life, and in influencing such social choices as there are in the direction that is desired. Utopianism and realism should not form into rival contingents; they should quarrel in a constructive way in the heart of the same movement.”152
WHAT HAPPENED? LOOKING BACK, 1959–60 was the heyday of both the New Left and the CND; the early 1960s brought decline in the clubs, then the disappearance of the New Left as a visible, tangible phenomenon. Its diversity, so vital in its early success, might have become a burden. Its financial resources were never adequate; then there was the organization issue, and the ever-present Labour Party conundrum: in or out or what? How to assess this? Dorothy Thompson, in “On the Trail of the New Left,” takes issue “with the repeated suggestion that the New Left somehow ‘failed.’”153 She suggests that “in the long run, these years can be seen as the beginning of a long political rethinking of the problem of approaching the ideal of a just society.”154 Many of the themes and perspectives developed in the pages of New Left journals certainly persisted. Edward Thompson’s writings are among the best examples. The attempts at a unified movement, of permanent organization, with the Left Clubs in particular, never really got off the ground. The idea of a nonaligned left, however, endured, “in organizations like the Institute for Workers Control, CND and some parts of the Labour Party and the trade-union movement, where [the New Leftists] fought for a non-aligned position against the communists and fellow-travellers, on the one hand, and the Natopolitan social democrats, on the other.”155
But if the “movement” disappeared, the New Left Review did not. The new editor of New Left Review, Perry Anderson, and the editorial “team” he constructed in 1963 would have disagreed with the above assessment, I think. Certainly one sees in the journal a dramatic revision in style, perspectives, and politics. Anderson himself, reflecting in 1974, wrote: “The mainstream of ’56 proved in the end surprisingly thin, and left rather little trace.”156 I have included “Where Are We Now?” partly in response to this but also because it represents critical arguments in the political divide that is commonly seen to separate the New Lefts, first and second. It should be read along with “The Peculiarities of the English,” Thompson’s best-known assessment of these disputes. That essay is not included here due to its length and also because it has been reprinted and is easily available.157
“Where Are We Now?” was no doubt left unpublished for obvious reasons: it is a difficult piece and publishing it might have been seen as contrary to the notion that these were disputes best left buried and reconciliation sought. It is an angry piece; at the time Thompson believed the journal had been captured in a “coup.” Over time, fences were mended. The team refused to publish “Peculiarities of the English,” but later would carry articles by Thompson. Robin Blackburn was a member in 1963 of the Anderson team; his 1993 obituary, “Edward Thompson and the New Left,” is a moving and thought-provoking reconsideration of both Thompson and the issues of the divide. It deserves the appreciation of all concerned.158 “Where Are We Now?” is included here not to rekindle the flames. Rather, reading it today, it seems relevant and important, its points of contention were crucial then; it suggests fundamental issues for the New Left to come: the Third World, the meaning of “internationalism,” violence, the role of socialists, theory and practice. Certainly, these issues, however controversial, came to bewitch much of the “new” New Left, and in truth, this “new” New Left was tripped up by most of them. “Where Are We Now?,” then, fills an important gap in assessing the left, not just the first New Left, but that of the whole period, including the New Left of the 1960s. It remains of interest. As for the New Left Review, its appeal was reduced to a rather limited audience and it is still with us today. Theory, often originating on the continent, became its mainstay; practice was abandoned altogether. The writers and readers of the old Review withdrew and were scattered; the movement of the 1960s would have no journal to educate, activate, and unite it.
FINALLY, I SHOULD REPEAT HERE, there was more than one Edward Thompson. He was a poet, tank commander, Communist, teacher, historian, founder of the New Left, public intellectual, spokesperson for END, and an active socialist for more than fifty years. People expecting a political consistency, therefore, will inevitably be disappointed—there were indeed transitions. I have deliberately avoided the issue of his larger transitions, aside from his departure from and dispute with the Communist Party, and focused only on the New Left years.159 But the fact is he moved from being quite orthodox as a Marxist to, at the end of his life, not really a Marxist at all. In the essays here, he worked, as he would say later, “within the Marxist tradition,” but the keen observer will no doubt find revisions right along. But wouldn’t this be expected? In context, the important thing is that “theory” (a term always problematic for him) was to be related to circumstances and practice. His ideas would over time be modified and reformulated, according to the nature of the struggle.160 They were to be guides to action. They enabled him to connect the enclosing of the commons, the despoliation of the Dales, the pollution of the industrial cities, world war, and the threat of nuclear war with our concerns for the environment and the fate of the earth. I am afraid all this imprecision will be unsatisfactory to some; for my part I find many of the disputes of academia and of the left, the nitpickery and the scholastic antiquarianism, to be of little interest or significance. Edward Thompson was, and this is what is important to me, a lifelong socialist—a socialist interested in changing all forms of human relationships. Socialism was “inside him,” as it had been for Maguire and Morris. Thompson was a person of the long tradition of “the left” in the old-fashioned sense. He was a person who fought for that tradition, he deeply believed in it, and in doing so he became a part of it, the ongoing tradition he did so much to chronicle. And in this his most lasting contributions may be his demand that we see things “from the bottom up”; for this he wrote “history from the bottom up” and pursued a socialism from the bottom up, a socialism for “real people.” Thus he insisted that socialists must be willing to put on their boots and “walk among the people, to listen to them . . . and have a touch of humility before their experience.”161
Did Thompson always get it right? Surely not. Were there times when he “sulked in his tent”?162 Yes, but he was the first to say so. Could he be harsh, too harsh? Yes, but he fought tough battles, important battles, battles that needed winning and sometimes in his own camp. I will remember the Edward Thompson who excoriated the authorities at Warwick University; the Thompson who celebrated not the darkness brought on by the miners’ strike in 1972, but rather the “incandescence.”163 Then, too, for his (to some) infamous discussion of “arbitrary power and the rule of law.”164 How is this last to be read today, I wonder, in an era of Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Fallujah, the NSA, and the war on terror? His 1976 piece, “The Secret State,” reads like a defense of Manning and Snowden. Thompson gave his life campaigning against nuclear weapons and nuclear war, and against the regimes that brandished them; in this he remained true to the values that carried him through life.
“I am not, I think, betraying a closely guarded state secret,” Edward Thompson wrote to C. Wright Mills, “when I say that the movement which once claimed to be ‘The New Left’ has now, in this country, dispersed itself both organizationally and (to some extent) intellectually. We failed to implement our original purposes, or even to sustain what cultural apparatuses we had.”165 That was so, but we need still to remember Dorothy Thompson’s qualifications. Edward Thompson was never afraid of failure; that would seem self-evident in a veteran of Monte Cassino. It seems equally doubtful that even as a young Communist, however full of hubris, he could have believed “success” as in any way guaranteed. And let us recall his targets: fascism, Stalinism, NATO, the secret state, Thatcher, Reagan, the Gulag, and Brezhnev. The movement, then as now, had lost as many battles as it had won. The idea of an end of history appalled Edward Thompson, as did any notion that the pursuit of a just society could be in any way time-bound. And so in concluding I will return to The Making: “Our only criterion of judgement should not be whether or not a man’s actions are justified in the light of subsequent evolution.” After all, “we are not at the end of social evolution ourselves.” We now face our own “exterminisms,” in the form of permanent war, the enduring curse of class, the ravaging of our environment, and the issue of the very survival of our earth as we know it.
—DECEMBER 2013
MENDOCINO COUNTY, CALIFORNIA
THIS IS AN APPEAL TO THE WORLD COMMUNIST MOVEMENT, above all to the British Communists, supporting the rebellion of the workers and students of Budapest and savaging the quiescence of his Party’s leaders. Edward Thompson, then thirty-three and teaching adult working-class education in the West Riding of Yorkshire, was still a member of the Communist Party, having followed the footsteps of his brother Frank during the Second World War. He wrote this article, smoke literally still in the air, typed the stencils himself, and with Dorothy Thompson, his partner and comrade, and John Saville, the Hull historian, distributed it to an ever-widening world of Communist dissent. Within a year, 10,000 would leave the British CP. “No chapter,” Thompson wrote, “would be more tragic in international socialist history, if the Hungarian people, who once before lost their revolution to armed reaction, were driven into the arms of the capitalist powers by the crimes of a Communist government and the uncomprehending violence of Soviet armies.”