Interesting Times - Eric Hobsbawm [122]
In Britain the main effect of the great 1956 earthquake was that it made some 30,000 members of the Communist Party feel terrible, and scattered the forces of the small extreme left. Most of those who left the Party probably quietly dropped out of political activism. (So also did some who remained, like myself, convinced that, since the Party had not reformed itself, it had no long-term political future in the country.) Some joined the three main Trotskyist groups, although these grew not so much by transfers from the CP as by the general cracking of the world communist monolith and the loss of the CP’s virtual monopoly in Marxism. The militant young now had the choice of lefts. Most of the critics from the Historians’ Group, which did not effectively survive the crisis, groped for, or rather tried to build, some ‘New Left’ undefiled by the bad memories of Stalinism.
Saville and Thompson’s New Reasoner (1957–9) became the home for most of the ex-CP intellectuals. Eventually it merged with the Universities and Left Review founded by the youngest former member of the Historians’ Group, Raphael Samuel, together with another ex-communist, Gabriel Pearson, and two rather impressive unattached younger Oxford radicals, the Jamaican cultural theorist Stuart Hall and the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor. The average age of the editors was twenty-four. From the early 1960s this uneasily merged New Left Review was taken over by a new team of young Oxford post-CP Marxists, the core of which came from the old Anglo-Irish milieu in the Irish Republic. Its chieftain was the remarkably able Perry Anderson (aged twenty-two), who also largely financed it. Unlike the little Britons of the older ‘New Lefts’, its interests were distinctly international, more theoretical, and much less tied to the labour movement or socialist politics. Although it moved into the orbit of the Fourth International it succeeded in establishing itself as the major periodical of a new generation of Anglo-Saxon Marxists.
In practical terms these ‘New Lefts’, although intellectually productive, were negligible. They did not reform the Labour Party (about which they remained ambivalent) or the Communist Party (as happened in Sweden). They produced neither new parties of the left (as in Denmark), nor lasting new organizations of significance, nor even individual national leaders. Thompson himself eventually became nationally famous as a spokesman for nuclear disarmament, but although CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament), by far the most important movement of the post-1945 British left, was founded about the same time (1958) it had nothing to do with the crisis in the CP.
In some ways the brief episode of the Partisan Coffee House symbolizes the combination of ideology, impracticality and sentimental hope of those early post-1956 ‘New Lefts’. Like so much else it was the brainchild of Raphael Samuel who, with Edward Thompson, another and greater natural Romantic, emerged as the most original influence among the ex-CP intellectuals. Anyone who knew Raphael during an impassioned life cut short by cancer has exactly the same memories of him: a thin, enthusiastic face with mild, quick-witted eyes under a waterfall of eventually thinning dark hair, rushing from place to place alone, carrying with him wherever he went a vast collection of notes and files from which he struggled to retrieve the right piece of paper. All the work he ever published was part of an infinite all-embracing