The New Left and its influence
ICA, London, 19 February 2007

Tim Black
posted 2 March 2007

'The New Left' is a problematic term, in many ways responsible for creating what it purports to explain. It conjures up an ideological coherence and simplicity akin to that of its redoubtable father, the good old Left. However, as the diverse allegiances and activism of the three speakers at this event indicate, it was never that simple. For Lynne Segal, professor of psychology and gender studies at Birkbeck, Ernesto Laclau and Robin Blackburn, professors of politics and sociology respectively, both at Essex, the New Left meant variously: grassroots women's lib, Gramsci and Althusser set loose upon Marxist shibboleths, and, in Blackburn's case, John Lennon's 'Imagine'. The New Left, it seems, represented less a movement than a disparate experience of radicalism in dispute.

This does not mean the notion of the New Left is without historical purchase. From the mid-1950s, through the 1960s and 1970s, there was indeed a marked proliferation of leftist standpoints. But what they were critical of, and the implications this had in practice, differed to the point of contradiction. CND, self-styled Trots, and a post-Suez, but pre-Young Ones mode of student protest - these were just some of the uneasy cohorts assembled under the banner of the British New Left. Moreover, as that last noun-phrase implies, the New Left existed in differing national contexts. What it meant in France, then, was significantly different from what it meant in America. For the former, May 1968, that explosive convergence of student and labour movements, tends to funnel all interpretation. For the latter, the slippage of civil rights into identity politics predominates.

While talking of the New Left's utopian dimension, Lynne Segal touched on the reason for its turbidity. Yes, it promised freedom, that is, the freedom to theorise afresh, to pursue a new politics without organisational constraint. But it was just as much a flight from previous forms of radical politics, be it in some cases the Communist Party, or in others a long-held attachment to old left pieties. For all the talk of liberation, disillusion lay at its root. The events of 1956 were of course critical. But Khrushchev's secret speech and the Soviet invasion of Hungary really only confirmed what the success of the postwar mixed economy of the West seemed to be insinuating; the obsolescence of Communism as the currency of the future. The consequences for a notion of what it was to be on the left were profound. As Istvan Mészáros wrote:

...the dominant intellectual climate of postwar expansion, with its boundless promises for the future which seemed to be authenticated by some real advances in a limited part of the world, succeeded in distorting also the perspectives of some critical intellectuals who personally welcomed the possible end of capitalist exploitation. (1)

The New Left, indissociable from the old left's disorientation, was necessarily fragmentary. Its protagonists had to think critically without erstwhile convictions and certainties. Some, like Raymond Williams, drew on a tradition of cultural critique that dated back to the Romantics, whilst others, often younger - Ernesto Laclau, for instance - drew on structuralism. Either way, neat categorisation is impossible.

What many on the New Left did have in common - and certainly what united the three speakers at the ICA - was what they gradually abandoned, namely the idea that the working class was the revolutionary subject. This saw the terms of social critique mutate. As Robin Blackburn asserted, somewhat allusively, 'theoretically, [the New Left] resisted economic essentialism'. He meant that all aspects of social life - cultural, political or otherwise - were not reduced to, or seen as, economic determinations, ie, as economic in essence. On one level that makes sense. Trying to interpret Howards End as an immediate expression of class interest, an economic reflex, would be absurd, not to mention really difficult.

But the rejection of totalising theory went further than recognising the role of mediation. (There had in any case always been currents in Marxism more sophisticated than Stalinist 'economic essentialism'.) It actually meant that any attempt to grasp appearance in terms of its subjective essence, to grasp reality in terms of its becoming; to grasp capital, as the old left might once have done, in terms of alienating labour, was abandoned. Without such an aspiration, appearance can easily become a tableaux of achieved things, reality an agglomeration of autonomous facts. There ceases to be a sense of why things are as they are. It is no coincidence that identity politics emerged at this juncture, with its Holy Trinity of class, gender, and race. No longer apprehended as mediated aspects of a dynamic social whole, they each acquired a thing-like quality instead.

Lynne Segal acknowledged this as a problem: 'the rise of identity politics, the identification of too many subcultures - it went too far and undermined universalism'. She was not alone in this lament. Blackburn and Laclau also felt that what we have in common is something that needs formulating. Expressing this through the Byzantine structures of mid-1980s critical theory, Laclau eventually concluded that we need a new logic to 'interpellate' a political subject. In short, a rebirth of a political ideology in which people recognise their interests.

As seductive as this appeal to universalism seems, it turns out to be pretty coercive. Blackburn illustrated this when dismissing certain universals like 'liberty' - surely as progressive as it is universal - for being of little use now. As far as he was concerned, the global context of climate change has altered all that. 'Humanism' was useful as a universal, so long as it was coupled with 'survival'. The former editor of the New Left Review continued unabashed: 'Perhaps democracy itself is actually complicit with climate change, because people do not actually want to cut back'. His demand that 'carbon rationing' be adopted complements the anti-democratic sentiment. Segal chimed in with a plea for everyone to recognise the universal 'fragility of our existence'.

For all the emphasis on what we have in common, then, for all the imprecations to 'humanism' and 'humanity,' it seems that from Blackburn's Olympian heights, universal concepts are made to serve a predetermined agenda. This is perhaps a legacy of the New Left's abandonment of any collective agency. An 'ought' without a social basis, an 'ought' unmediated by the needs of real people, becomes a command instead. It is the rhetoric of a superior authority that knows what's best for the foolish crowd. No questions, just do it.

Suitably enough, Blackburn's closing remarks were redolent of the headmaster. Recalling the phrase, 'society becomes conscious of itself,' from his 1965 book, Towards Socialism, he proceeded to accuse his younger self of 'rabid idealism', a testament to the adolescence of the 1960s. 'Society needs to grow up', he remarked, before imparting the decadent wisdom, 'we need to tame capitalism, tame the desire to accumulate'. Where once he might have criticised capitalism from the perspective of a better future, he now does so from the perspective of no future. To this New New Left, a voice from its old vanguard provides a useful corrective: 'The human crisis is always a crisis of understanding: what we genuinely understand we can do.' (2)

(1) p. 63, Mészáros, I. The Power of Ideology (Harvester and Wheatsheaf: New York, 1989)
(2) p. 338, Williams, R., Culture and Society, (The Hogarth Press: London, 1988)