'"Emotional Anarchists"? The anarchic turn in the first British New Left - scope, limits, and missed opportunities'.
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
Book here EmotionalAnarchists.eventbrite.co.uk
The first British New Left is notoriously hard to define. Instead of a clear political programme, most commentators agree that its members shared common problems, questions, and practices. Among the latter was renewed enthusiasm for direct action and democracy. This, according to Alan Lovell, a NL fellow traveller, made them natural 'emotional anarchists', eager to recover aspects of this neglected utopian tradition. At the same time, Lovell and others viewed the formal British Anarchist movement with disdain, considering it outmoded, fractious, and sectarian.
In this paper, Sophie Scott-Brown discusses the extent and limits of the anarchic turn in the NL. She suggests that anarchism supplied NL members with a language for critiquing the traditional left and its organisations (namely the Communist and Labour Parties, and the trade unions). It also supplied resources for rethinking class politics in the age of affluence by recuperating notions of workers' control, for responding to emergent social formations, and for restructuring the aims of activism. At the same time, there were lines NL activists would not cross, not least the anarchist challenge to unity, a foundational concept in socialist revolutionary thought.
Was this resistance a piece of misplaced nostalgia that undermined the first NL's potential to launch the new politics they craved, or a shrewd diagnosis of anarchy's fatal flaw?
This is the first event in the new seminar series 'New Left Histories'. Other sessions include Mike Braddick (University of Oxford) on 5 March and James Crossley (University of Cambridge) on 9 April. More information and booking details to follow soon.
Contact Katy at RSHC for information (k.pettit@bbk.ac.uk)
Facilitated by the Raphael Samuel History Centre, a partnership between Birkbeck University of London and Queen Mary University of London.
Contact name: Katy Pettit
Speakers-
Sophie Scott-Brown
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Institute of Intellectual History, University of St Andrews
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