Page 87 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

STUART HALL, CULTURAL STUDIES AND MARXISM 75

the Communist Party and an active participant in its History Group, but
his break with the party was first articulated in terms of a rediscovery and
reaffirmation of what he saw as central aspects of marxism. He was the
founder editor of the New Reasoner and contributed to it, and
subsequently to New Left Review, a number of substantial articles which
tried explicitly to develop a new form of marxism which went under the
general label ‘socialist humanism’. The New Reasoner, both in its leading
personalities and in its concerns, was both a ‘marxist’ and a ‘high cultural’
journal. In the first editorial, Thompson and Saville announced their belief
in the importance of the ‘rediscovery and re-affirmation’ of the ‘Marxist
and Communist Tradition in Britain’ and were quite clear that ‘we have no
desire to break impetuously with the Marxist and Communist tradition in
Britain’ (Saville and Thompson, 1957:2–3). It was hardly innovative in
cultural matters. Its first five issues contained poems by Brecht, McGrath,
Logue, Swingler and others, and a short story by Doris Lessing. The same
issues carried articles on Blake, Diego Rivera and Daumier. This journal,
clearly, was not directly a precursor of ‘cultural studies’.
The emphasis on being the inheritors of a tradition which had been
distorted by stalinism underwent important modifications in the course of
a long debate over the status of marxism which occupied much of the life of
the journal. The final issue modified the insistence upon marxism as the
central point of reference. Thompson now claimed that now ‘we tend to
see “Marxism” less as a self-sufficient system, more as major creative
influence within a wider socialist tradition’ (Thompson, 1959a: 8). But
despite these reservations, he summed up what he felt to be the legacy of the
journal thus:
But we still have no desire to disown our debts to the Communist
tradition…. We would like to feel that this journal has been, not the
bridge for an evacuation, but the point of junction at which this valid
part of the Communist tradition has been transmitted to a new
socialist generation.
(Thompson, 1959a:8)

This ‘point of junction’ was between a journal which issued more or less
directly out of the crisis of the Communist Parties and the rather different
group around Universities and Left Review. The latter, as its title suggests,
issued out of student radicalism.
The major shift in Thompson’s thinking was his developing critique of
the limits and positions of stalinism, which he saw as a distortion of the
real tradition of marxism which he wished to defend. In its place he
developed the idea of ‘socialist humanism’ which had a stress on ‘the
question of agency…at the core’ (Thompson, 1958:92). The stress upon the