Like some Blairites, Elizabeth Wilson (Letters, 1 October) wants to re-run lost battles. She asserts that Marxism Today paved the path for Tony Blair. Yet John Harris’s article (The long read, 29 September) recalls how Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques warned of the dangers of Blairism before his 1997 election and how a one-off issue of the magazine was produced in 1998 criticising him under the simple heading, “Wrong”.
Marxism Today got two big things right: Thatcherism and the emerging post-Fordist world. This understanding of our new times is even more relevant today. Both demand a modernised left able to respond to these realities and develop new alliances. As Harris suggests, these are key insights for all those keen to help Labour venture into its post-Blairite future.
Jon Bloomfield
Birmingham
• If we’re reconnecting with the 1980s, maybe it’s not Marxism Today or “new times”. Please can we have an article on Beyond the Fragments?
Jonathan Stanley
Grange Over Sands, Cumbria
• Elizabeth Wilson provides a more accurate analysis of Marxism Today’s legacy than can be found by interviewing its staff. MT in the 1980s was symptomatic of the Thatcherite political climate, rather than an alternative to it. When a collective ethical response was desperately needed to the ruthless individualism and neoliberalism of the Tory government, MT misinterpreted Gramsci to mean we should “run with the times”, promoting identity politics while attacking collectivism and trade unions, declaring nationalisation out-of-date, and championing Next as a model of responsiveness in the post-Fordist marketplace. Many of us on the left consistently criticised these positions, which, as Wilson points out, led directly to Blairism. MT never really broke from the framework of neoliberal ideology – but it is exciting today to see a new generation of activists who have.
Judith Williamson
London
• John Harris’s article is an excellent piece of recovery work. However, Marxism Today represented the Eurocommunist wing of academic leftist thinking from 1980 to 1993. A different tradition, that of Raymond Williams and Terry Eagleton, formed at Oxbridge in the late 1950s, and peaked in 1985 in a conference at the University of Oxford (organised by Oxford English Ltd), The State of Criticism. The traditions represented here were both Trotskyist (Eagleton) and cultural (Williams) and focu sed on the lived meaning of political culture in Britain. If we want a full picture of the left’s intellectual critique of Thatcherism, we need to include these figures.
Peter Higginson
Wolverhampton
• Perhaps the most interesting thing about Marxism Today is that many who contributed to it are still around now. It quoted little-known backbench MP Jeremy Corbyn in December 1987 as arguing for the need to spend all “waking hours working to bring about a socialist society”, and in its final issue in December 1991 I wrote, when asked to comment on what the magazine meant to me: “I haven’t agreed with much of what you’ve said in the 1980s.” Those weren’t the days.
Keith Flett
London
• John Harris’s piece on Marxism Today should be seen as a beacon of hope for the parties of the left. It reminded me of a strange event way back in 1965 when a woman (with the splendidly aristocratic name of Bonamy) offered me a third of her Communist party table at the Newcastle University freshers, fair so that I could get the Liberal Society started. I was quite amazed to discover a generous, co-operative strand within the CPGB and British Marxism that I later came to recognise in the writings of Beatrix Campbell.
The Manifesto for New Times of the late 1980s contained many proposals that Liberals and Liberal Democrats could readily embrace, often more easily than many in the Labour party. Twenty-five years later a group of Scottish Liberal Democrats produced a collection of essays, Unlocking Liberalism: Life after the Coalition, with the declared aim of “re-establishing the anti-establishment, challenging, coruscating radicalism which is our party and our movement at its best”. The silver lining of the 2015 general election result is the amount of open-ended thinking that is going on in the political undergrowth in non-Conservative parties. It is a time for inclusive debate within which committed people can cherish the best of their own traditions and ideologies. It is not a time for easy analysis and populist policy proposals, but the no-brainer in the pack is the need for proportional representation as a precursor to replacing the hegemony of the right. Will the Labour Party ever bite that bullet?
Geoff Reid
Bradford
• John Harris’s piece repeats the myth of a causal link between the Falklands war and the 1983 election result. The numbers don’t support it. In a 1987 article in the British Journal of Political Science, David Sanders of the University of Essex and three others argue that “the Falklands war produced a boost to Conservative popularity of at most three percentage points for a period of only three months”. The victory “merely coincided with a jump in government popularity which would have occurred anyway in the wake of Geoffrey Howe’s 1982 budget”.
Chris Coates
Colchester, Essex
