The New Left is difficult to pin down. Its point of origin is clear, amid the profound political crises of 1956, but the movement was never defined by party or organisation and so its boundaries are imprecise. It was born out of a deep disillusion with communism and the horrors perpetrated by Stalin, and by an impatience with social democracy and particularly with the British Labour Party’s support for American foreign policy. History Workshop emerged out of the British New Left, not directly but shaped by a similar agenda and loose style of organisation. Raphael Samuel, one of the most important figures in the emergence of the New Left in the 1950s, was a decade later the guiding force behind History Workshop. So it’s particularly appropriate for History Workshop to showcase some of the most worthwhile items about the New Left that we have published or posted over the past half-century.
Historians were conspicuous among the founders of the amorphous political tradition that has been labelled as the New Left. In the summer of 1956, two Yorkshire-based Communist historians, Edward Thompson and John Saville, challenged the discipline and intellectual approach of the Communist Party of Great Britain by starting an unauthorised journal, The Reasoner. The spur was deep concern about the implications of Khrushchev’s ‘secret’ speech to the twentieth congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which detailed Stalin’s abuse of power and the debilitating ‘cult of personality’ surrounding him. The concurrent crises later in the year of Britain’s ill-fated involvement in the invasion of Suez, an attempt to seize the canal and topple Egypt’s Arab nationalist government, and the Soviet military intervention in Hungary to crush a popular uprising, led to still greater political anguish. Both these crises were seen by many of the left as demonstrating the continuing aggressiveness of rival imperialisms. Thousands of British Communists left the party.
Raphael Samuel, the youngest member of the influential Communist Party Historians’ Group, was part of that exodus. With three fellow Oxford students – Stuart Hall, Chuck Taylor and Gabriel Pearson – he established the other founding journal of the British New Left, Universities and Left Review (ULR). ‘Deciding to launch ULR was specifically triggered by the events of 1956’, Hall commented, ‘[which were] as significant to us as 1968 was to become to a later generation’. The review became one of the liveliest political publications of its era.
These two currents came together, a touch awkwardly, with the formation of New Left Review in 1960, initially under the editorship of Stuart Hall. Later in the decade, Raphael Samuel – by now teaching at Ruskin, a trade union college at Oxford – collaborated with his students in organising events, workshops, to present their research and ideas and forge a sense of community among those engaged in new avenues of historical inquiry. Out of that sprang the History Workshop movement, and while not all its founders identified with the New Left there was a clear affinity in agenda and approach.
In turn, History Workshop played a part in the inception of second-wave feminism, a movement at first intertwined with the New Left, though not in the most comfortable of circumstances. Sheila Rowbotham has recounted in her memoir Daring to Hope: My Life in the 1970s how a proposal at a History Workshop meeting to look in more depth at women’s history was met with guffaws from some of the men present. That mocking hostility prompted a group of women historians – including Sally Alexander and Anna Davin, both then adult history students and now members of History Workshop’s editorial collective – to plan their own women’s history conference. This in turn metamorphosed into Britain’s first Women’s Liberation conference, held at Ruskin College, Oxford, in 1970.
History Workshop has not been burdened by excessive self-reflection, but as you would expect of any venture of historians, it is keenly aware of its own past. We have over the decades published a rich array of articles, reminiscences and podcasts on the New Left in Britain and elsewhere. This Virtual Special Issue brings together a selection from History Workshop Journal (which our publishers, Oxford University Press, are making freely available for a limited period) and from the History Workshop digital magazine.
But what was the New Left? It was an avowedly socialist endeavour which distanced itself from Stalinism and from mainstream social democracy. While participatory and democratic, it sought to operate largely outside conventional political parties and electoral politics. The issues it embraced were mainly non-economic. In its early years, it was associated above all with the peace movement and opposition to militarism and nuclear arsenals. The New Left pursued new forms of protest, including direct action, the sit-down and the sit-in, and novel styles of political communication, from agitprop poetry to street art. It was concerned with cultural as well as political and social change and both encouraged and was moulded by the upsurge in student radicalism of the 1960s and by the emergence of the counterculture. The libertarian approach and fluid organisational structure of the New Left helped to nurture the Gay Liberation and Women’s Liberation movements, though it was less important in the emergence of Black Power.
There was no single organisation or publication, and no ‘Big idea’, that defined the New Left. The notion of the nouvelle gauche developed in France in the early 1950s, partly as a counterpoint to the intellectual dead-weight of the Communist Party and the electoralism of the centre-left. It found powerful expression in the student-led radicalism of the May Events in Paris in 1968, a defining moment in European politics. In the United States, the New Left was embodied above all in the activism of the SDS, Students for a Democratic Society, and helped to shape the anti-Vietnam War and Civil Rights movements and crystallise opposition to the emerging military-industrial monolith.
By the 1970s, the influence of the New Left was becoming more difficult to decipher. It has not left any direct institutional legacy (beyond the remarkable longevity of New Left Review) but its imprint can still be seen in the radical environmentalist movement and other aspects of libertarian politics as well as in projects such as History Workshop.
The collection of articles below is divided into six themes or formats:
- ideas: articles on the intellectual formation of key figures in the early New Left, Edward Thompson and his concept of socialist humanism, the pioneering cultural theorist Raymond Williams, and History Workshop’s Raphael Samuel
- memories: Jean McCrindle’s recollection of leaving the Communist Party in 1956, Chandan Fraser’s account of attending and photographing the first Women’s Liberation conference, Sally Alexander’s reminiscence of her personal and political formation, and Mary Chamberlain’s remarkable story of taking on an assumed identity to distribute ANC propaganda in apartheid-era South Africa
- activism: including examinations of the British New Left’s involvement in the labour movement, the testimony of the Spies for Peace whose direct action revealed and discredited Britain’s civil defence planning, the place of the Students for a Democratic Society within the broader American left, the importance of sociability and comradeship in the left political culture among young men in the 1960s, and pornography as an expression of protest and rebellion in the German alternative press
- 1968: pieces looking at how the May Events were reflected in cinema and documentary film, Valerie Solanas and the Society for Cutting Up Men (SCUM) manifesto, and the Poster Workshop in London
- podcasts: do please explore all our podcasts here, but for this VSI we have chosen three episodes, Alice Echols discussing radical feminism and the turbulence of 1968, Nic Ralph offering a dramatic first-hand account of how the Spies for Peace broke in to secret civil defence installations, and Jay Ginn recounting how she sought to ‘tame’ police horses being used aggressively at the huge anti-Vietnam War protest in London in March 1968
- obituaries: appreciations of Clive Goodwin, a very successful literary agent who established the radical left paper Black Dwarf, Ken Weller, a key figure in the Spies for Peace and in the libertarian socialist organisation Solidarity, and Jean McCrindle, whose long involvement in socialist and feminist movements included working with New Left clubs and developing the Fife Socialist League
Not all the articles and reminiscences are unambiguously about, or emerge from, the New Left – but in line with our subject matter, we have erred on the side of inclusivity. We have included articles about the New Left in the United States, Germany and France, though most look at aspects of the movement in Britain. The selection does not attempt to be exhaustive but we hope it will stimulate interest in the history of the New Left as well as highlighting the range of content in History Workshop Journal – which is soon to publish its 100th issue – and of our digital magazine.
Ideas
Edward Thompson, Eugene Genovese, and Socialist-Humanist History
Richard Johnson | HWJ 6 (1978)
‘Philosophy Teaching By Example’: Past and Present in Raymond William
Raphael Samuel | HWJ 27 (1989)
Ruskin, Radicalism and Raphael Samuel: Politics, Pedagogy and the Origins of the History Workshop
Kynan Gentry | HWJ 76 (2013)
Memories
The Hungarian Uprising and a Young British Communist
Jean McCrindle | HWJ 62 (2006)
The ANC’s London Recruits: a Personal Story
Mary Chamberlain | HWJ 75 (2013)
Taking Photos of the First Women’s Liberation Conference
Chandan Fraser | History Workshop (2021)
Beyond ‘Misbehaviour’: Sally Alexander in Conversation
Poppy Sebag-Montefiore | History Workshop (2020)
Activism
‘Among the Ordinary People’: New Left Involvement in Working-Class Political Mobilization 1956–68
Madeleine Davis | HWJ 86 (2018)
Danger! Official Secret: the Spies for Peace: Discretion and Disclosure in the Committee of 100
Sam Carroll | HWJ 69 (2010)
Young Socialist Men in 1960s Britain: Subjectivity and Sociability
Celia Hughes | HWJ 73 (2012)
Political Pornography in the West German Underground Press
Mia Lee | HWJ 78 (2014)
Students for a Democratic Society & the American Left
Linda Gordon | History Workshop (2012)
1968
HISTORY ON FILM: May ’68 on Film
Gudie Lawaetz | HWJ 2 (1976)
Remembering 1968: The S.C.U.M. Manifesto for the Society for Cutting up Men
Marybeth Hamilton | History Workshop (2018)
Remembering 1968 – The Poster Workshop, 1968-71
Sam Lord | History Workshop (2018)
History Workshop Podcasts
Radical Feminism and 1968
Alice Echols | History Workshop Podcast (2018)
Spies For Peace
Nic Ralph with Sam Carroll | History Workshop Podcast (2023)
The Horse Tamer of Grosvenor Square ’68
Jay Ginn | History Workshop Podcast (2023)
Appreciations and Obituaries
Clive Goodwin, 1932–1977
John McGrath | HWJ 5 (1978)
Ken Weller (1935–2021)
David Goodway | HWJ 92 (2021)
Jean McCrindle (1937–2022)
Andrew Whitehead | HWJ 97 (2024)
Remembering Jean McCrindle
Sally Alexander | HWJ 97 (2024)