THE LAST three years have scen a major shift to the right in British politics. currenttermsol inner-party debate are far to the right of those on which the February "74 election was fought. Within the parliamentary Labour Party, the Left has seldom seemed feebler; and after an uncertain beginning, Thatcherism has now consolidated its hold over the Conservative Party.
Outside parliament, Thatcher openly patronises the National Association For Freedom, the organisation that brought style and respectablility to the once make shift and semi-clandestine cratt of strikebreaking; and the National Front continues to grow, nourished by the social crisis, a pervasive sense of 'national" (i.e.
Great British) humiliation, and spreading disillusion among traditional Labour voters.
This political shift has had obvious cultural Tom Nairn The Break-up of Britain A brilliant overview of the historical crisis of British soglety and state in which Naim attempts to explain the new national questions of the UK, and develops a general theorelical analysis of nationalism.
lan Steedman Marx After Srafla The first systemalic recasting of Markist categories In the fight of the work of Piero Sraffa.
Steedman provides a radical reconstruction of Traditional theories of value, price and profit in a work which will have a protound affect on Marxist economic debate Etienne Balibar On the Dictatorship of the Proletarlat the French CP, together with an articie by Althusser on the significance of the zand Congress.
Dominique Lecourt Proletarian Science? The Case of Lysenko The first Marxist account of the notorious career of Lysenko — the provincial agronomist who dictated to Saviet sciance in Stalin's Russia. Lecourt provides a pungent and now account of the historical rise of Lysenkoism.
Emesto Laclau Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory FAN SUPP cLB effects. The emergence of capable and aggressive ideologues like Robert Moss Ca self-styled "political warfare specialist) and the expansion of Aims of Industry under the more ambitious title Aims for Freedom and Enterprise, are just two signs of the growing confidence and determination of the Right. But there are other signs, which warn of a more fundamental cultural disturbance. The deepening anti-Marxist bias of the Times Literary Supplement (the trade paper of British academia), the political and com mercial dislocation of the New Statesman, and the hysterical anti-union diatribes of its ex-editor, Paul Johnson - these are more than topical reactions to a period of economiccrisis. Theyareevidence, rather, of a profound politico-ideological shift, affecting a whole generation of British intellectuals and opening a new phase in British cultural life. This article will attempt a thumbnail sketch of this intelligensia and its crisis, and E8.50 E8.50 Publication: 10 Norember E8.50 E8.50 will indicate the dangers and opportunities that await the left in this new situation.
The Post-War Intelligensin The character of Britain's post-war intelligensia was shaped by three related factors: 1. Its political colouration; 2. Its social tradition; and 3. The internal design of the culture it created. 1. Its outstanding political trait was its insulation from Marxism. In the first post-war decade, the powerful Leftward currents of the Thirties were blocked and reversed, and Marxism ceased to have any serious influence in the national culture. The various factors that led to the post-war decimation of the Left in British culture — most obviously, Stalinism, the Cold War, the long boom and the roleof Labour — have yet to be assembled in a convincing historical analysis, but the institutional evidence speaks for itself.
The Left Book Club, which in 1939 had over 55,000 members, organised nationally in 1,500 local clubs. closed in 1948. The quarterly Politics and Letters, launched by Raymond Williams and others as a Left alternative to Zhdanovism, foundered after a year. The CP-sponsored journal Arena, whose line was fiercely anti-American national-populism, ceased publication in 1951; and shortly afterwards its companion theoretical journal, Modern Quarterly, also ceased to appear.
he new voice or inc Fifties was Encounter. Sponsored by the Congress for Cultural Freedom (and covertly by the CIA), Encounter schooled an entire generation of intellectuals in the morality of politics After the Apocalypse. *Totalitarian ideologies were henceforth to be shunned, and the true "liberal' spirit upheld, in a world whose most audacious project was "piecemeal social engineering'. Encounter was not only obsessively antiCommunist. The long-term effect of its "liberal" crusade was to devalue principled political debate of any kind, in favour of a blend of incoherent reformism and comfortable disillusionment that British intellectuals had made their own by the beginning of the Sixties.
2. Political conformism was buttressed by social integration. British intellectuals have an introduction to marxism never had a strong corporate indentity: unobtrusive as a stratum, they bave as a rule been virtually indistinguishable from and largely uncritical of their parent social classes.
The origins of this remarkable socio cultural pact lie far back in English history In its modern form it can be traced to th mid-Victorian "intellectual aristocracy, a network of brilliant and successful families, linked by class and intermarriage, whose names - Darwin, Huxley and Strachey, to name three — appear again and again in the rolls of England's cultural elite. Over the next century, the social and occupational composition of the intelligentsia was significantly altered; but not so the unwritten statutes that governed its conduct Britain's academics have remained solidly attached to their departmental smallhold ings, seldom pausing to take note of goings on over the hedge; its political and social commentators, like the loyal civil servants whom they so closely resemble, have been unrelievedly "practical" and "constructive" in their response to 'our" national difficulties; and in the 'quality Sunday papers reviewers have gone on organising the leisure time of their readers in an casy conversational tone born of inner peace and a profound sense of belonging.
3. Among the most striking features of post-war British culture has been its strong bias towards literature. The origins of this bias, which lie in the complex cultural history of the inter-war period, cannot be explored bere. Its main upshot was that literature came to be seen as the de facto moral centre of the culture, a sort of final appeal to which the lesser issues of culture and society could be referred for judge ment. The values that literature embodied were those of humanity itself - "decency". "compassion", honesty' and so on and to keep faith with it was somehow to insure one's integrity against the deceptions of the public world. This was a patent mystification, but its ideological effects were real and powerful.
Political discussion, once deprived of any "ultimate' social meaning sank into triviality and conformism; while literature, clevated above the merely" political and historical, Continued on Page IV to Communism
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A polemical critique of the recent abandonment of Marx's and Lenin's concept by the European CPs. Containe gacuments from the pre-Congress debate for the 22nd Congress of