Page 78 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

THE NEW LEFT

New Left spurned the “peculiarities of the English” in favour of an
uncompromisingly internationalist sympathy for the Vietnamese
Revolution. Where the Old New Left had counterposed “experience”
and “culture” to Communist dogmatism, the New New Left discovered
in Western Marxism a type of “Theory” that would function as an
antidote to the alleged empiricism both of English bourgeois culture
and of the British Labour Party.
Much in the Western Marxist tradition had been unavailable in
English translation until well into the 1960s. Indeed, substantial
translations of Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness and Gramsci’s
Prison Notebooks, perhaps the tradition’s two “key” texts, only
appeared as late as 1971. For the New New Left the lure of “Theory”
reached its apogee, however, not so much with either of these humanist
Marxisms as with Althusserian structural Marxism: the reconstructed
New Left Review adopted as its central theoretical project the
translation and importation into Britain of a version of Western
Marxism selectively “weighted” towards Althusserianism. This
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interest in continental Marxism can be represented as a simple
disengagement from the analysis of British society and culture, and
from the practicalities of British politics, that had concerned the Old
New Left. But such an interpretation captures a part only of the truth.
For, in a series of extremely ambitious essays, Anderson and his
colleagues, and in particular Tom Nairn, had propounded a distinctly
original account of British history, which in turn came to provide an
essentially practical political rationale for their developing interest in
Western Marxism.
According to Anderson and Nairn, the English revolution of the
17th century remained essentially uncompleted, its central political
legacy a class compromise between the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie
rather than a fully-formed bourgeois polity, its central cultural legacy
a deeply conservative combination of traditionalism and empiricism.
Out of this class compromise, they argued, there had arisen in England
a peculiarly archaic state form, a peculiarly supine bourgeoisie, a
peculiarly subordinate proletariat, and a peculiarly philistine
intelligentsia. Anderson, Nairn and their collaborators saw the
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importation into Britain of Western Marxism as a device by which to
break the politico-intellectual log-jam they had detected. This analysis
has been subsequently amended by Nairn’s work on nationalism and
by his practical political involvement with Scottish nationalism; by
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