The Marxism of the British New Left

Davis, Madeleine

doi:10.1080/13569310600923949

Cited by 14 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…The development of the Gramscian Nairn–Anderson thesis might be better understood in the light of its first appearance, in the Italian journal Il Contemporaneo (Nairn, 1963), and when placed in the context of the debate within Italian Marxism, which from the 1960s onward expressed increasing hostility toward the approved version of Italian Gramscianism (Liguori, 2012). However, Gramsci's thinking, filtered by the lens of Nairn and Anderson, won over a new British audience: portraying a highbrow Gramscianism, which became very popular in academic circles, their thesis represented a powerful alternative to the cultural Marxism of E. P. Thompson, Raphael Samuel, and Stuart Hall (Davis, 2006, 2013). Furthermore, as a concrete political project, Anderson's Gramscianism provided an appealing first theoretical attempt at a critique of Laborism and the stagnant corporatism of the British Labor Party in the 1960s and 1970s (see Campsie, 2021; Wickham‐Jones, 2003).…”

Section: “Appropriating” Gramsci's Hegemony: Perry Andersonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reclaiming Gramsci's “historicity”: A critical analysis of the British appropriation in light of the “crisis of democracy”

Maccaferri

2022

Constellations

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Any approach to the legacy of Antonio Gramsci represents a substantial challenge. Today, the thinking of this Italian intellectual is not only acknowledged as one of the most significant contributions to 20th century social theory, but has also been one of the most frequently employed frameworks for different disciplines and approaches. His categories, and especially his further development of the concept of hegemony, have provided the basis for new approaches in fields that include international relations, political theory, critical geography, literary criticism, media studies, and feminism, and for entirely new fields such as cultural and postcolonial studies. 1 The international success of Gramsci's work, now considered essential reading in political theory, derived from the political and cultural atmosphere of Cold War Europe as well as from its very favorable reception within the emancipation movements in the United States.While this first phase of the international spread of Gramsci's thinking was characterized by the explicitly political use of his writing within the context of Marxist internationalism (Liguori, 2012), a second phase, coinciding with the new century and reaching almost all corners of the globe, has been characterized by a shift in the application of Gramscian theoretical instruments which has sometimes resulted in the detachment, often unintentional, of his concepts from the Marxist spheres in which they were forged (Filippini, 2017;Frosini, 2008).The "globalization" of Gramsci, or, to paraphrase Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000), the provincialization of Gramsci (meaning the fragmentation and weakening of Gramsci's concepts as a way of giving them new life in different contexts; see also Harootunian, 2020) is not incompatible with a philological reading of his work, as Joseph Buttigieg (1990) and Italian scholarship have abundantly demonstrated (

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Section: “Appropriating” Gramsci's Hegemony: Perry Andersonmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reclaiming Gramsci's “historicity”: A critical analysis of the British appropriation in light of the “crisis of democracy”

Maccaferri

2022

Constellations

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“…The British New Left, including both the first and the second generation-the latter emerging with Perry Anderson's editorship of New Left Review in 1963-was largely oriented toward issues of history, culture, and the state, all established concerns of British thought, with Marxism incorporated into a broader range of UK intellectual traditions. 6 Though political economy was also part of this tradition, it was not a prominent area of inquiry during the period.…”

Section: Britain and The New Leftmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…This recourse to British history was also a source of theoretical influence, calling upon Robert Owen, and in particular William Morris, whose ideas, Thompson claimed, complemented those of Marx and informed Thompson's own humanism. 7 The first New Left's affinity with English popular radicalism would later became a source of antagonism, as the second generation detached itself from this native radical tradition, both theoretically and methodologically. 8 Tom Nairn, a second-generation historian and NLR contributor, rejected the empiricism of the first New Left as an "English ideology" incapable of engagement with "grand" ideas.…”

Section: Britain and The New Leftmentioning

confidence: 99%

UK Monopoly Capitalism: Applying a North American Brand to Britain

Matthews¹

2016

Mon. Rev.

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During the past decade, persistent excess productive capacity, at levels exceeding at times 25 percent, has blighted the British economy, along with rates of unemployment not experienced for two decades, with the result that a substantial proportion of the economy's productive resources remain underutilized. Orthodox economic theory often ascribes such phenomena to a lack of capital for investment. However, in the same period, interest rates have been historically low, and the UK corporate sector has accumulated increasing reserves of surplus capital. Clearly, there has been no shortage of capital for investment. The failure to invest stems not from the supply of capital, but instead from the paucity of investment opportunities, suggesting that British capitalism is mired in stagnation.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.

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confidence: 99%

“… 4. Following Madeleine Davis’ article (2006), whose context is the New Left Review’s circle, I can state that one of the weakest aspects of the 20th century Marxist theory has been that it saw culture either as part of the superstructure, along with ideology (or even as part of it regarding ideological state apparatuses) as in Louis Althusser (1970), or as a ‘whole way of life’ (as in Raymond Williams, see Davis, 2006), or as the cultural context and elements of the class-struggle, as in the ‘Historians’ Group’ which emphasized class-struggle as an area of analysis and put attention to the working-class culture, to which Edward Palmer Thompson was included. And in a relationship with Antonio Gramsci, culture was seen, along with ideology, as an aspect of hegemony as observed by David Forgacs (Davis, 2006). Even Lefebvre, the first Marxist theorist of social-urban space who could be expected to be sensitive to the categorical division between the social and the cultural, as is argued throughout this article, observed ‘a society dominated by the quotidian’ and stated that: ‘Style has degenerated into culture – subdivided into everyday culture for the masses and higher culture, a split that led to specialization and decay’ (Lefebvre, 1971: 36), and that ‘Modern man (the man who praises modernity) is the man of transition, standing between the death of style and its rebirth.…”

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confidence: 99%

On the difference between the social and the cultural: Reconstructing historical-geographical materialism

Gündoğan

2021

Social Science Information

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At the background of this article lies the question of how social sciences can internalize spatial and cultural phenomena and, in the most general sense, the ‘principle of difference’. Therefore, it has more than one problem and tries to see many seemingly contradictory phenomena as parts of a whole by employing a complex dialectical method. It looks at the relationships between the following phenomena: social and cultural; natural and cultural; universal and particular; similar and different. The article proceeds according to this method: it relates the opposites to each other through space and thus tries to show the following dialectical transitions: the social is produced as culture through the social space and the production of the social space itself. The article suggests that the transition between universal and particular constitutes the problematic of space, that space realizes the social as culture, and that this is the only realization of the social. The articles argues that the social is universalizing, and the cultural is particularizing, and that the social/universal can fulfill itself as necessarily cultural/particular. It also defends the principle of universality by stating that differences occur in relation to a whole. The article critically exploits classical social theory, specifically Marxist social theory and spatial Marxists such as Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey, some recent historical sociology, some postcolonial ideas, planetary urbanization theory, and tries to support the development of the theory of historical-geographical materialism.

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The Marxism of the British New Left

Cited by 14 publications

References 7 publications

Reclaiming Gramsci's “historicity”: A critical analysis of the British appropriation in light of the “crisis of democracy”

Reclaiming Gramsci's “historicity”: A critical analysis of the British appropriation in light of the “crisis of democracy”

UK Monopoly Capitalism: Applying a North American Brand to Britain

On the difference between the social and the cultural: Reconstructing historical-geographical materialism

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