E P Thompson on Raymond Williams (1961)
E P Thompson reviewed Raymond Williams Long Revolution in the New Left Review, 60 years ago in 1961. (NLR 1/9 and 1/10)
Thompson was unequivocal about Williams role in the new left:
This is to say that his work is very important indeed, and that—so far as we can speak of a New Left—he is our best man
He goes on to note
Raymond Williams is one of the very few intellectuals in this country who was not broken in some degree during that decade (1950sKF); and who maintained his independence from the attractive poles of cold war ideology
Thompson argued however that in identifying a popular cultural tradition Williams had avoided discussing Marx and Capital:
Oh, that book! Do we really have to go over all that old nineteenth-century stuff again? We have all felt this response: Marx has become not only an embarrassment but a bore. But The Long Revolution has convinced me, finally, that go over it again we must.
Thompson concludes:
The crisis, as Mr. Williams insists, is a crisis of consciousness and of human relationships. The human system of socialism is manifest on all sides, in our means of social production, in new patterns of feeling, in fragmentary institutional forms, so that it seems necessary and inevitable that we shall grow into it any day now. But for societies, as well as individuals, there may be a “river of fire”: an epochal transition in which men become aware that they are making history and in which institutions are broken and remade. “Revolution” and “growth” become incompatible terms at this point. Which term will Mr. Williams choose?
It is his greatest service that he has, more than anyone, made articulate the potential of the common good, as a general aspiration and in particular constructive ways. It is because this good is the common good that he avoids polemic and the language of class-power.
For Thompson Raymond Williams was on the left in the early 1960s (and remained so). The argument perhaps as now was to understand what that had meant and did mean
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