Abstract
This article examines left-wing ideas about social change in the 1980s. It focuses on the ‘New Times’ debates, a series of discussions held in the Communist Party of Great Britain theoretical journal Marxism Today. The journal’s key contributors contended that the profoundly transformed nature of 1980s Britain necessitated the adoption of revised political strategies. I historicise these claims by situating them within a longer tradition of British New Left analysis, and an engagement with post-1968 ‘new social movements’. I illustrate how Marxism Today’s vision of modernity was highly stylised. The journal’s iconoclastic proclamations about apprehend the most strikingly modern forms. The 1980s were thus not entirely foreclosed by the parameters imposed by socio-economic transformations—a whole range of alternative ideas were on offer in this period. That this vibrant moment would give way to more reductive political solutions in the 1990s and beyond was not inevitable.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 166-188 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| Journal | Contemporary British History |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 20 Apr 2017 |
Bibliographical note
AcknowledgementsWith thanks to Jon Lawrence, Kieran Heinemann, Christopher Green, James Campsie, audiences at the University of Nottingham and Queen Mary University London, and to the two anonymous reviewers at Contemporary British History for extremely helpful comments on previous drafts of this article. I would also like to express my gratitude to Sally Alexander, Rosalind Delmar, Martin Jacques and Gareth Stedman Jones for very kindly agreeing to be interviewed by me as I carried out my research. This work was generously supported by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Award.
Funding
This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council [grant number 04158]
Keywords
- left
- Marxism
- social change
- new social movements
- 1980s