|
John Walker wrote:
> I'm afraid the split occured much earlier as the Morning Star was the > journal of half of the Communist Party of Britain. There was also the > New Communist Party (who were always my favourites from the split). > If I am not mistaken the initial split was over Hungary and the end > of the CPGB just produced a reduce Democratic Left. I don't have it at hand, but David Widgery edited a nice anthology published by Penguin on the British New Left. From this and E.P. Thompson's," Open Letter to Leszek Kolakowski," (Kolakowski was a Polish "revisionist" Marxist, who left Poland in '68. He authored a 3 volume critique of Marxism well worth grappling with) I gather that the Hungarian revolt in '56 (supporters of the intervention were called "tankies")and Khruschev's "Secret Speech" to the 20th CPSU congress in '56, led CPGB members like Thompson to start a journal entitled, The New Reasoner, which published party and non-party members like the, at the time Trotskyist, Alasdair MacIntyre, author of After Virtue. Party leaders took umbridge at the breach of discipline and the nucleus of what was to become the intellectual sector of the New Left took form. New Left Review emerges from these circles. A book I haven't read yet, Cultural Marxism in
Britain, out from Duke goes into this, former long time editor, Perry
Anderson, gives his elegent polemical read on this history in Arguments Within
English Marxism.
During the 80's when
Marxism Today was leading the intellectual Eurocommunist challenge to the party,
Morning Star was the voice of the traditionalist, class first, orthodoxy.
Marxism Today, like LM now, relished tweaking expectations, and would publish
Tories.
Democratic Left has a
URL.
The last issue of their publication, New Times, online is June
'99. Don't know if this reflects a morbid state.
Michael Pugliese
|
