6 January 2006: Thompson and Trotsky

Reading the Maps has a closely-argued piece, pointing out some flaws in Paul Blackledge's recent ISJ article on E. P. Thompson and the New Left. 

When I read Paul's original piece, I felt instinctively that it suffered from a series of problems (without perhaps being able to identify them), and it's useful to see these brought out. After all, given the marginality, diffusion and heterodoxy of the SR Group / IS to British politics in this period - acknowledged in the past by IS members such as David Widgery and Ian Birchall - it's just a bit daft to use the organisation as a revolutionary exemplar against which to set the much larger New Left. 

But having said all that, I'm not entirely convinced by Maps' replacement of one undifferentiated advocacy (Blackledge's for the IS) by another (Map's for Thompson). 

You certainly can argue Thompson's case: I've done it myself elsewhere. 

Yet as Blackledge has argued: the streak towards moralism in Thompson was diagnosed as early as the 1950s by one of the IS's only two significant recruits from 1956, Alastair Macintyre (the other was Peter Sedgwick) in an important piece, 'Notes from the Moral Wilderness' (there's a copy in the Macintyre Reader). I think it's most useful to see Macintyre's insight not as the product simply of his genius or of Cliff's but of the balance of arguments and experience that then existed within the group. More to the point, I think Macintyre's argument still stands. 

I have also argued here that Thompson's 1956-era politics were even then diminished by an uncertainty as to agency: yes a revolution was needed, but how? John Saville, I think, saw the problems more clearly at the time.

I also think that while correspondence between Challinor and Thompson can be treated as reliable, some of the oral history could do with corroboration: Eg "Challinor confirmed that he had regularly supplied Thompson with writing by Trotsky in the 1950s. ‘He took it, read it, and always found it interesting’, Challinor remembered." I'd love to see further sources to back this up. 

Perhaps over-influenced by things that I've heard Dorothy Thompson say, my reading has always been that having had his fingers burned by Healy (Saville again, has useful things to say about his own contacts with the SLL) - Thompson lost interest in not just Trotskyism but Trotsky himself at the same time.

More by way of context on the CP historians here.