The political commentators of the established and respectable press have for some time, now, been expressing the view that the New Left has disappeared, We have even heard some men of the hard, if thickheaded, left, singing chirpy littic “irges at what they seemdd to imagine was a funeral, Like Mark Twain, tne New Left has already had the’ pleasupe of reading a number of its own obituary notices in the newspapers.
Of course, those who trouble to read such journals as NEW LEFT . REVIEW will be very well aware that it is quite vitally alive. Those again, who follow the publishers! lists and see the number of ifew Left titles that are piling up, can scarcely ignore the contribution to socialist thought and documentation which they represent, But it does remain true that until very recently the New Left has been noticeably more fertile in the field of abstract analysis and argument than it has in that of practical prescriptions for action, An encouraging change is beginning to make itself apparent here, both in the pages of NLR itself, and now in the most recent symposium of the New Left: THE SOCIALIST REGISTER, edited by Ralph Miliband and John Saville, published by the Merlin Press,
The new REGISTER will be an annual and will produce a survey of the important developments in‘socialist thought as well as accamts of the socialist movement in action, year by year, The first number is full of exciting material, It includes valuable contributions by Isaac Deutscher, Royden Harrison, Donald Hodges and many others, But many people will feel that its most important contributions hinge on the rec ommendations which its authors make for action,
In a useful essay on *Labour Policy and the Labour Left', Miliband and Saville discuss the crucial problem of organising the Left, They draw a babnce sheet of the failure of such bodies as the Socialist League and Victory for Socialism, and’discuss the formation of Left pressure groups, for limited purposes, as an alternative, They also appea}Z for the formation of 4 socialist educational body, to assist not only in making new socidlists, but in developing old ones,
One such pressure group, already partly formed is that for Workers' Control, Those who participated in the VOICE seminar held in Nottingham on this matter could with great profit, study the articles by Michael Barratt Brown - Nationalisation in Britain - and Ernest Mandel ~- The Economics of Neo-Capitalism - both of which appear in this same volume, Barratt Brown provides a documented account of the shortcomings of° official Labour's approach to industrial democracy in the nationalised industries, Mandel shows in a very clear way how the necessary answer to any campaign for an incomes policy is the demand for Workers' Controle : No capitalist promoted policy, he says, can effectively tackle the problem of vwrofits : but everybody knows the wages bill, The Tradé@ Union answer it follows is to counterpose to the pressure for incomes policy, an equivalent pressure for Workers! Control, which would require workers? access to the employers' books. A pressure group which developed around such a question as this could with sufficient effort and insight, become a focus for the whole left-wing movement,