[Speaker 1]
us tonight. Stuart will speak for about an hour, we'll then break briefly while people can get drinks or whatever, and then move into discussion. Stuart

[Stuart Hall]
Thanks. Perhaps I'll start by saying what this is not. It is not revelations of the new left in the manner of Sarah Keyes. It is not hot anecdotes from the past. At the same time, it isn't quite trying to treat oneself as a sort of neutral subject amidst the objective laws of history, because I'm not able to do that about the new left. Trying to think of what might interest people or what might make a useful session, I really try to focus on two things. One is, this is a slice of history of the left in Britain, which I think a lot of people know something about, but not a great deal, especially in the early period, which is the period that I want to talk about. And therefore, to try to recover that historically is, I think, a very important part of a project which is perfectly well thought out. Secondly, I think that there are important ways in which that past history throws up lessons, presents problems, raises questions for us about socialist organization, about left movements, et cetera, in the present, which are not exactly the same as they were when the new left first emerged in Britain, but which aren't perhaps as different as we would sometimes have liked them to be. And I think that people who may not be interested in the particular details of the past may nevertheless
find something important to discuss or chew over in those terms. So what I want to do is to try to -- I don't want to try to construct a single narrative or chronological history. I want to pick out some important questions which I think may a kind of comprehensive picture. This is a particular picture about the early new left from my own point of view. First of all, the term -- the term "new left" has been around for so long that I think very few people actually know where it might have come from. Actually, it was borrowed from the French "Nouvelle Gauche." That is to say, it arose partly because some of us who were involved in the early new left in Britain had had early contact with the French new left, especially with the figure of Claude Bourdais, who was at that time the editor of the paper "France Observateur." And Bourdais was associated with the attempt to open a third way in French and European politics -- that is to say, an independent Marxist or left set of positions, which were opposed to the Cold War, which were not -- which were opposed to forms of Stalinist politics, but which nevertheless -- refused the shift into reformist social democracy, which had become the consensus that dominated the respectable European left in that period. He was a figure that had had a distinguished history in the French resistance and had carved out in the period immediately after the war a very independent line in European and French politics, founded the journal France Observateur, (04:25)which seemed to speak to the politics and aspirations of a large number of disparate people in Britain and elsewhere. It represented something important, which I'll go on to say something more about in a moment. That space, because I think the topographical metaphor is the most convenient one, the space where Stalinism ends and reformism begins. There is a space there, and those of you who have sometime in your political life found yourself in a space where you can say, inside that space belong, whether you like it or not, to the new left. It's a very loose and ambiguous and constantly shifting boundary, and yet I think in some ways it's really quite precise. I think you all know exactly what I mean. Those people who have never been tempted to really subscribe to the hard doctrines of the Stalinist left and who are persuaded that there must be some other form of socialism other than that represented by social democracy are instinctive members of the new left. Whether you've ever paid up a subscription or not. And that was the space that Boudet tried to occupy in the very difficult era of the Cold War. And when we tried to search around for something to kind of signify what space we were trying to occupy, that was a good word to use. Not just the left, but the new left. I came across, I had contact with Boudet, and this is a piece of apparently anecdotal history, but I don't think it's as anecdotal as all that. But my contact, first with Claude Boudet, was I met him at a meeting in Paris, which I went to, along with a number of people who went to a grouping called the Internationalist Socialist Society. This was an attempt to bring people together in Europe, again around common left positions, independent left positions. It was an attempt to bring people together not only in France and Italy and West Germany, but also in Yugoslavia and in the Eastern Bloc if we could get any contact with them. And it was principally the inspiration of G.D.H. Kohl. not because it was a very successful venture, but because the relationship to Kohl was very important. Kohl stood for, as one of those independent socialists who had always been, on the one hand, committed to the left, and on the other hand, seriously critical of, say, the top-downwards forms of, say, nationalization, which represented social ownership. He made a long and early critique of the kind of Morrison-type nationalization and of its socialist content. That is to say, he brought back into play those traditions of guild socialism, the traditions of socialism from below, of revolutionary democracy. as a kind of test of what were or could be taken to be socialist initiatives. And once again, anybody who was in that space between Stalinism and reformism was inevitably, instinctively pulled to this discussion of someone who, after all, was himself a kind of chronicler of the European socialist movement, This occurred within two months of each other over the summer of 1956, and it precipitated most of us out of the last recluse of graduate studies into... an unsuspected career somewhere in Left politics. In that period, Universities and Left Review, this journal, now fading, which I suspect few of you have ever seen, and which I will pass around the room on pain of death that I get it back. This journal was first put together, Universities and Left Review was... came out of a group of Left students in Oxford, most of them just beginning graduate work, having been there for a period of time. It was a kind of response to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party, then to the Hungarian Revolution, then to the impact of Suez. It represented a kind of breaking through of the crust of the... of the freeze-up of politics, which had dominated the later years of the 1940s and early 50s. It was, as the cumbersome title, Universities and Left Review, I mean, never has a journal attempted to make a really... big impact on the political scene with a less convincing and persuasive title. I mean, the Left is not particularly good at self-advertisement, to some set of Left positions. That was really its main impact. At the same time, however, as a consequence of the 20th Congress and then of the Hungarian Revolution, the New Reasoner had emerged as an internal opposition bulletin inside the Communist Party, which drew the support of a large number of people who were still at that time in the party, and after a long wrangle, people either left or were expelled, and the first issue of the New Reasoner, which was a kind of follow-on from an internal cyclist-style bulletin, that volume, edited by Edward Thompson and John Saville, came out virtually within months. The two things appeared from two different left generations, responses from two rather different age generations, two somewhat different political traditions, but responding to the same immediate political situation. And to the same long-term set of political problems, which I'm going on to talk about. For a time, the two journals, one functioning very much in cosmopolitan London, the other functioning very much in cosmopolitan Yorkshire, persisted, sharing ideas, gradually meeting together. There were, over a period of time, exchanges between one editorial board and the other, joint meetings, which were launched jointly sponsored by the two. Then, a more extended set of discussions, as the attempts to keep the two journals alivebrought difficulties, including the bailiffs to people's doors, started to talk together about the possibility of launching one journal out of an amalgamation of the two, and eventually,
in 1960, such a journal was launched, and that was New Left Review, and that, those of you who have long-running issues of the wide margined... of Universities and Left Review. Isaac Deutscher on Russia in Transition. Claude Boudet on the French Left. Graham Shankland, who's an architect on the crisis in town planning. Lindsay Anderson, the reprint of an article which had been in a film magazine, an article called Commitment in Cinema Criticism. Peter de Francher, who's an art critic on Commitment in Art Criticism. E.P. Thompson on Socialism and the Intellectuals. G.D.H. Cole to What is Happening to Capitalism. Joan Robinson on Full Employment and After, a prophetic essay. Basil Davidson on Nationalism in Colonial Africa. And other articles. One other article I noticed �is Stuart Hall on the New Conservatism. And that is a long-running story, if ever there was one. Okay. who began to question the whole forms of politics of the communist movement, the distortions which had gone on in the 30s and afterwards, the degree to which the particular national developments of communist parties in the individual societies had been distorted by the impact of the Comintern, etc., who, as it were, drew on their own intellectual and political history in the past to establish a critical point of reference inside the party itself, and from that point to call on the party to make some substantial reckoning with its own Stalinist path. That path, that reckoning, was refused by the party, and people either then left in droves or were themselves expelled, and that is, in fact, the basis of the regrouping of the new reasoner tradition outside as an independent Marxist socialist journal. The second tradition is a generation younger than that, most of us were undergraduates in Oxford in the early 1950s, some of us stayed on there to do postgraduate work, others went elsewhere to do postgraduate work, but we were, as it were, a post-war, rather than a pre-war generation. I say a little bit more about this second strand in the New Left, in the early formation of the New Left, not because I think it's more important, Those were the issues that concerned me. I knew in Oxford at the time people who were involved in left politics, there was a small communist grouping with people like Raphael and Peter Sedgwick around. They were very active in Balliol. They had a much wider confluence of influence in the left. But let me remind you what the actual climate of student politics was in that period. We're talking about the early 50s. We're talking about the depth of the Cold War. We're talking about a period when it was not formally possible to be both a member of the Communist Party and go to an Oxford Labour Party. It was not a party group meeting. It was forbidden to do so. When all that was discussed were the degrees of formal bans and prescriptions of anybody further to the left than as it were social democracy. There had been no mass political movements in that part of the 50s and 60s. There was no mass movement to relate to. We were in the grip of the Cold War. It had to do with the nature of post-war capitalism. The debate about changes in the nature, organization of post-war advanced capitalism was not only a theoretical debate, it was a very central political issue. It was the issue about which, from the mid-50s onwards, the Labour Party, having lost the 51 and the 55, election started to tear itself apart. And the predominant definition was, as you know, that we were now in or approaching a post-capitalist society in which the principal problems of distribution, etc., had been resolved by the post-war boom and the expansion of capitalism. We were now seeing the erosion of traditional class cultures. Everybody was going to be middle class. Sooner or later, around the corner was the cross-land dream of a kind of American... Americanized Britain. Hamburger stalls at every traffic light, as it were, etc. You know, the smooth, open, unfenced reaches of the new towns were really a little bit of America here, a little bit of the future in the present, The Cold War represented a renunciation of the anti-fascist movement.
 It represented a renunciation of the politics of the Popular Front. It represented a renunciation of the positive hope of the resistance movements in Europe. It represented a denial of the radical... It represented a denial of the radical populism of the war. It said, forget all that. You have to choose between freedom and tyranny, between liberty and totalitarianism. In that choice, it is better to go with capitalism with a human face, especially since we are now in a post-capitalist society, or heading rapidly that way, than to fall into the gulag. The salt mines and Wall Street, it was the stark choice that you had. And people actually felt that, not as a kind of... you know, not as a general... with which the first edition is peppered. But in there, we tried to say something. In that first paragraph, we tried to say something very incoherent, very open-ended about the resistance to the notion that politics had to do principally with, you know, formed political parties, elections, electioneering, getting the vote out, parliament, and so on. We simply, our discussion simply could not be, they were political to the back teeth, but they could not be confined within that definition of politics. And what we wanted to say was there is something ideological, there is something confining about the very way in which politics is now discussed on the left. There are a whole range of issues, issues about personal life, issues about culture, issues about leisure, issues about how people live, issues about families, etc., which have real political meaning, real political repercussions, which are not topics of political debate because what people understand by politics is an extremely narrow thing. From that point of view, the discussions that range in those circles for a long period of time covered a much wider range of topics and themes than would normally in that period have been considered political. And one of the sort of the focal points of this rather wide-ranging debate was precisely the question of the nature of post-war social change. which they recognized as talking about the world that they actually inhabited. Now, I mean, sometimes, as I said, I think I go on saying exactly the same thing over and over again, trying to find new ways of saying them. I am still myself. For my sins, persuaded. That it is true that unless the analyses of socialism and the aspirations and projects of a socialist society are able to speak in a language about society which ordinary people can recognize as actually describing the life situations they have, it doesn't have a cat's hell hope in life of persuading them to make some other difference in their lives. If they can't, we aren't people who can speak to... Ordinary people, in terms which at any rate resonate with the way in which they feel the world and live the world in their pulses, the analysis might be perfectly correct, the theory might be as rigorous as you like, and it may be as orthodox as hell, but actually it will not grip anybody. It will not transform the actual ways in which they perceive themselves and their situation and how they can bring about change. So, I don't suggest that then, as now, anybody in the New Left have the recipe for that, Those groups were always smaller than the new left, but they were always capable of targeting politically much more effectively than we were, we were never sure who exactly would define themselves in the new left one Monday to the next. Sometimes the meeting meetings were gigantic, sometimes they were very small, and we didn't know whether that was because people had passed on or were just manning some other barricade. It's a very loose formation in which one tried to keep together a variety of different currents, different political currents. Okay, the second thing is, how on earth then did the journal, the New Left Review, or before that the two feeder journals, University of the Left Review and the New Reasoner, and how did the people who found themselves willy-nilly in the leadership of this much larger movement than they had ever imagined they would be, how did they see themselves? And the best metaphor that I can use is the metaphor of the socialist propaganda, which is an idea from William Morris. That is to say, we fortunately... we fortunately or unfortunately never believed that we could constitute the political leadership of the New Left. We knew that we had got into it by a series of inadvertent errors. It was honest and open. We never went into CND with a kind of covert agenda for CND, which CND didn't know about. In some ways, it's been said, Peggy Duff, who was the general secretary of CND in that period, said in her book, Left, Left, Left, eventually, CND swallowed the new left. That is to say, we got so absorbed in keeping that peace movement going that we didn't pay sufficient attention to the preserving and maintaining the autonomy and distinctiveness of the new left. That may well have been so. It may have been a political error. But my judgment... My judgment now is that we were... It was the right instinct to see in the peace movement a new kind of political movement, mobilization, to see in the social composition of the peace movement

[Speaker 1]
Just a quick question, really. In addition to those two journals that came out pretty much about the same time, I think in 1960, the miners in West Fifeshire had put out a journal called Researchers, and Lawrence Dilley, who's turned over his papers to me recently, I've been reading all of it, and I think your name cropped up somewhere. How did you relate to... That specifically labour-oriented type of socialist journal?

[Stuart Hall]
Well, the New Reasoner, yes, had had a long historic connection with the miners in West Fife, and particularly with Lawrence Dilley. And therefore, at the period of his candidature, a number of people, in and around the New Reasoner, and with them, some of us in ULR, who were by then having joined him, and the Trade Union movement encounter, you know, CIA-funded encounter, trying to kind of corral left intellectuals into a kind of... to give them a voice, you know, somewhere kind of in the reformist left, but clearly demarcated around their commitment to the West. A whole series of real interventions in one area after another, to kind of draw the line between the left subversive and the people who were in the argument. And he ordered the food, he helped to prepare the sandwiches, he put the coffee in the coffee machine, and he served vast numbers of people in the lower darkness of the downstairs of the partisan coffee bar. It was an absolutely extraordinary historical moment. But it never really took off as a coffee bar, and we wound it up fairly quickly, lived in a sense of the rent of it. What we kept was the office upstairs, and for a time, the clubhouse where the New Left Review could have small meetings. New Left Review London Club could have small meetings. That's the answer to the question about the coffee bar. The question about John... It lasted a year. And there were others, there was a Manchester Left coffee. Yes, but nobody was being strict, and everybody would just sit around and make coffee last all day, whereas in any commercially run place, you'd be shamed into buying something else. I'm afraid we did not have what might be called Mrs. Fatter's entrepreneurial spirit. And vast numbers of people then resident, permanently resident on the streets of Soho, which came out round about the same time as, a little bit after Crosland's book on the, yes, on socialism, and which took on the whole question of neocolonialism, which introduced the debate about neocolonialism. We didn't agree with Strachey because we thought that by then Strachey was rather too optimistic about the whole decolonizing movement. But what we thought was that Strachey had introduced into the political debate the whole question of what imperialism would look like in the period of decolonization. Yes, and that debate was not being had anywhere. Now, one of the interesting features of the grouping that predates universities and left review in Oxford in 1954 to 1956 is that a whole number of people in that grouping were people from the, yes, they included not only people like myself, but they included people like Clovis McSood, who was afterwards one of the founders of the Ba'ath Socialist Party in Syria. They included Sadiq al-Mahdi, who was one of the left people in the Sudan, yes. There were people in there who were interested in third world issues, which was an area absolutely taboo, as far as discussion on the left was concerned in that period. And we thought that Strachey's book had kind of, not in the right way, but had opened up the debate. And also, of course, because Strachey had been a Marxist in the 30s, you know, the terms in which he opened that debate were amenable to a Marxist conversation, as it were, which was a rare object in somebody who by then that here was a socialist country whose break, however complex in terms of political configuration it was, did represent, you know, the beginnings. You know, the claim of the Hungarian Revolution like the claim of the Czechoslovak revolution after that was speak the truth about socialism, you know. You know, say what is actually going... what is actually going on in Hungarian society. Talk about what socialism is actually like, what its actual problems are like. I mean, it was, you know, let alone where it thought it was going, it was simply a breakthrough into speech. I mean, what it said was, you know, we ought to use the language to just tell the truth about what it is like to be a Hungarian socialist in 1956. And at the very moment to actually watch the tanks, you know, Soviet tanks, We're speaking of somebody who was three in 1960. 

[Speaker 1]
I was just wondering, mean, you're talking about not going for the same Leninist ways of organizing and stuff like that, but one thing seems very strong still, which is newspaper and the way of, you know, organizing around a newspaper. And I was interested whether there was any sort of alternative put forward to that.

[Stuart Hall]
Yes. And especially nowadays, this will bring it forward with things like community radio and videos and things, but there's actually a very different possibility there. You know, sort of appropriations and means of production, things like that. There was not, in fact, very much in the New Left which tried to organize in that particular way. One of the things which did happen, as you may glean a little bit from our conversation about what was happening in West 5, was that there were a whole range of, you know, small local publications, which clubs and other movements began to produce for the first time, and a lot of New Left people were involved in that, but it wasn't seen as a general strategy. There was a debate about, if not a newspaper, about the role of an organizing journal, yes, in the New Left around the time when I left the editorship, which is at the end of 1961. And what was being said was that New Left Review was, you know, kind of all right as a general political journal. What it wasn't was the journal of a movement. It didn't, you know, give news of what was going on in the clubs. It wasn't a political organizer in that sense. Well, the people around the New Left editorial board tried to insist that there was a role for a general political journal of this kind, but that if we could get the resources together, it might be useful to have another kind of more local campaigning, newspaper or journal, which would genuinely be, as it were, the journal of the movement. Our problem at that stage was resources. We simply didn't have the resources to do both things at the same time. As you know, it's not very long before, as you begin to move towards 1968, you do get the beginnings of, first of all, the alternative press in a cultural sense, yes, all the papers that are linked with an alternative culture, and then the politicizing of those journals. So that you get in 1968 the huge explosion of alternative journals of a left political or cultural and then shortly after that a feminist kind.