Comments on Reading the Maps: EP Thompson, Leon Trotsky, and the first New Left:...

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Firstly, thanks for an interesting article. I have...

2007-03-10T04:17:13.850+13:00

Firstly, thanks for an interesting article. I haven't read Paul Blackledge's piece, but it seems from your description of it that his reading of the history of the New Left is very forced in order to fit his aim of exalting Cliff et al - although I should probably have a read of the offending article.

Secondly, I was wondering if you could possibly share with me the conversations you conducted with Dorothy Thompson, John Saville and Raymond Challinor? If your article is anything to go by, they would be very useful material for my dissertation. My email address is hia04cch@shef.ac.uk - I would have emailed (bit more personal) but I couldn't find an address and I wasn't sure who the author is!

Thanks a lot,

Carey Davies

This is an interesting and useful contribution. Th...

2006-12-31T02:02:08.726+13:00

This is an interesting and useful contribution. The material on Challinor and Thompson is of particular interest. I am quite sure Paul Blackledge can defend his reading of Thompsopn. I should just like to comment briefly on two other points.

a) There is a danger in focusing too narrowly on the "New Left" seen simply as the circle around ULR and New Reasoner. With the rise of CND and the Labour Party Young Socialists, a new generation of young people who had come to political activity after 1956 emerged. If it is true that Cliff had relatively little influence on the generation which had broken with Stalinism in 1956, his influence was much greater on a current within the new generation. The International Socialists succeeded in attracting not only some talented intellectuals (Paul Foot, Nigel Harris) but a considerable number of young workers. The theory of "state capitalism" had a natural appeal to newly radicalised young people who detested the H-bomb and the political systems, East and West, that maintained it. And this was not a merely passing influence. Today, 45 years on, I still know dozens of people of this generation who are still active socialists (some in the SWP, others outside it.)

b) It is undoubtedly true that Deutscher had an important influence on the New Left. And it would be stupid to deny the positive aspects of this influence on those of us who got our first introduction to Trotsky through his magnificent biogtraphy. But it is also the case that Deutscher moved far further from Trotsky than Cliff did, especially in that he abandoned the very core of Trotskys's politics, the commitment to working class self-emancipation. Anyone who wants to understand this, and the very ambiguous nature of Deutscher's legacy, should read Cliff's brilliant polemic against Deutscher, available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/cliff/works/1963/xx/deutscher.htm

Interesting piece.The difference seems to be that ...

2006-12-30T18:38:56.166+13:00

Interesting piece.
The difference seems to be that Thompson swiped a bit of Trotsky without acknowledging it, while the SWP proclaimed its trotskyist heritage falsely before quietly dumping it. As it turns out neither of them are real Trotskyists, because the bits they swiped or reluctantly acknowledged are not the essential Trotsky.

Thompsons 'transitional program' grasps the dialectical process but, like the SWP, relies on some voluntarist process or 'spontaneity' to make the revolution. The essential role of the revolutionary party to unite objective and subjective reality through program and practice is missing. In Thompson's case vountarism could be a genuine ignorance of the concept of a Leninist party, rather than a rejection of the caricatures in existence. In the SWP case 'spontaneity' is a cover for the party's bureaucratic centralism.

On the most important question of independent working class politics they both end up in the same camp, building a national road to socialism through a popular front. For Thompson this was the CND that blocked with British democratic bosses against the US. For the SWP this is any broad left 'progresive' bloc that can include bishops and mullahs.

The essense of the popular front is petty bourgeois intellectuals and bureaucrats patronising (while praising)the workers for their backwardness and joining bosses governments to pressure them (i.e. beg) for 'socialist' policies.

The period of British politics from the 50s to now doesnt have a lot to show for it. For me that's because there is no real Trotskyist party. The only group that I think is putting up a fight at the moment is the majority of Workers Power. It exists as a healthy force precisely because it broke from the SWP and the failed trotskyist currents who ended up in reformist blocs. So the main contradiction it seems to me is between the reformists, both New Left and fake trotskyist, and revolutionary trotskyism i.e. the crisis of revolutionary leadership.