5/30/2023 0 Comments Neo marxismAt that time a group of communist intellectuals published and circulated a duplicated bulletin, The Reasoner, in open defiance of the party bureaucrats in King Street and, when the second wave of Russian tanks rolled into Budapest to crush the Hungarian workers’ rising, most of the opposition leaders within the party at once resigned. The Khrushchev ‘revelations’ at the twentieth congress of the CPSU was the key event triggering off the emergence and crystallisation of opposition within the British Communist Party. I think there is some point in some of us in the West asserting our communist origins, instead of hoping our traces will be covered by the dust of time we may be ashamed of past gullibility, arguments and attitudes, but we need not be ashamed of our basic decision to stand on the side on which we did when faced with this historical dilemma. I still prefer to call myself a dissident communist rather than a late convert to democratic socialism or any other hybrid. By 1958 the political mood within the New Left had hardened, and the movement as a whole was committed to a form of neo-Marxist analysis of contemporary society. This mood was reflected in the universal enthusiasm with which Richard Hoggart’s book, The Uses of Literacy, was reviewed in 1957. It was both a product of and a response to a mood of social discontent among a new generation of intellectuals, of university graduates and undergraduates in the 1950s. The New Left grew out of the upheavals in British social and political life revolving round the Suez crisis, the Khrushchev revelations, the Hungarian revolution, the frustrations and alienation of ‘the scholarship boy’, and the preoccupations of socially-conscious intellectuals with the ‘pernicious influence’ of advertising and television. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers. James D Young 1967 Neo-Marxism and the British New Left Neo-Marxism and the British New Left by James D Young 1967
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