‘Among the Ordinary People’: New Left Involvement in Working-Class Political Mobilization 1956–68

Abstract

The British New Left's lack of influence within working class and labour movement politics is often adduced as evidence of political weakness and contrasted unfavourably with its evident strength in matters of ideas and theory. Yet the substance of New Left efforts to reach or create a social base for its ideas has rarely been examined. Focusing on the period between 1956 and 1968, this essay demonstrates that New Left involvement in working class political mobilisation was more persistent and significant than is usually recognised. New Leftists played a key role in the Fife Socialist League founded by miner Lawrence Daly, attempted to establish a New Left 'industrial wing', and pursued socialist educational and agitational work among working class organisations and communities. Though not producing the 'political breakthrough' envisaged by some protagonists, these engagements need not be seen as having failed, but as having created links and resources of significance for local and community histories. Closer attention to such engagements also rebalances a historiography that has focused on internal discontinuities and theoretical debates, offering a fuller sense of the New Left's activism and of its contribution to British political economy.

From Out of Apathy to the post-political: The spatial politics of austerity, the geographies of politicisation and the trajectories of the Scottish left(s)

“…Thus, while Thompson is attentive to the forms of consensus which were the product of the accommodation of Conservative and social democratic labour politics, his account does not see this as the end point of the political analysis. His interventions were alive to, and engaged with, the different ways that this consensus was unable to stem the production of antagonisms (see Davis, 2018).…”

“…Thus, Hall argues in his posthumously published memoir Familiar Stranger that ‘an expansive conception of the domain of “the political”’ emerged from these political experiences and commitments (Hall with Schwarz, 2017: 229). His account emphasises that the ideas of the New Left came out of an intense and significant period of political engagement, constituted through political networks such as those associated with the New Left clubs (see also Davis, 2018; Kenny, 1995). These engagements emphasise the need to unpack the term post-war consensus and to consider both its limits and some of the struggles which brought it into contestation.…”

“…Thompson’s reference to Fife is particularly instructive. In 1957, Lawrence Daly had established the Fife Socialist League therewhich was directly influenced by and strongly connected with the New Left, and was arguably the ‘most proletarian, best established, and most politically successful in the Scottish (or British) New Left’ and was based in that area’s coal field (Thompson, 1978: 221, see also Davis, 2018). Daly’s writings also give a strong sense of how some of the emergent antagonisms in relation to the post-war consensus were being given specific articulation in Scotland.…”

L’expérience collective des archives

“…Contextes militants : se tourner vers l'expérience pour réinventer la gauche Pour commencer, je souhaite esquisser l'arrière-plan militant de l'histoire par en bas, en suggérant de quelles manières l'appel à se tourner vers l'expérience opère au sein de la New Left et du féminisme socialiste des années 1970 14 . Les porte-paroles de la New Left revendiquent l'attention à l'expérience des personnes ordinaires dans son hétérogénéité et la multiplicité de ses dimensions ; les féministes socialistes se réapproprient cette revendication, tout en contestant la manière dont l'expérience est prédélimitée et prédéfinie selon un imaginaire sexiste.…”

Untitled

“…Les plus évidentes sont celles de l'homicide prémédité (assassinat) ou de l'homicide non prémédité (meurtre 11 ). À ces deux premières catégories, on peut ajouter le parricide 12 , l'infanticide 13 , ou encore l'empoisonnement 14 . Il faut encore adjoindre à ces catégories pénalement définies les tentatives de crime 15 .…”