"new times"

Jim heartfield jim at heartfield.demon.co.uk
Sun Feb 13 08:32:19 PST 2000


In message <d9.1243d8b.25d79432 at aol.com>, JKSCHW at aol.com writes
>In a message dated 00-02-12 17:36:18 EST, you write:
>
><< I also believe the CPGB was big on the new times theme. Marxism
> Today, under the editorship of Martin Jacques, was another major
> organ, right? >>
>
>Yes, that's right. Jim H ought to be able to say more here. There was an NLR
>piece-is it the same one I was thinking of by Anderson? on Marxism Today.
>--jks

Well, I'm pretty biassed against it. New Times was, as Lew said, the CPGB's swan song. It was also a long process of reconciliation between the old left in the Stalinist movement with the ideas of the New Left - which is why Stuart Hall was so pivotal. Elsewhere, and earlier, this current was called EuroCommunism. Pointedly, as Chris suggests, a great deal of the 'ferment' of ideas ended up being New Labour's policy. In some ways, the CPGB, proved more capable of revising its old left socialism than the Labour Party did. The CPGB's alienation of its trade union bureaucracy links created the room for the whole 'New Times' stuff. Later, New Labour copied the model. That's why a lot of the New Labour apparatchiks are ex-Communist Party members: Geoff Mulgan in Blair's Policy Unit, Charlie Whelan formerly advisor to Gordon Brown, NI Minister Peter Mandelson, DTI aide Charlie Leadbetter ... the list goes on and on.

In politics the New Times was feminist only insofar as this was a platform to attack the Labour movement as masculinist, and anti-racist only insofar as this was a basis to vilify the left as 'white'. In economics New Times was wholly in favour of the market, and in politics, in favour of 'networking' and 'cafe society'.

Martin Jacques was editor of Marxism Today, which had long been the theoretical journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain, but was the rallying point of the 'Euros' in their struggles against the 'Tankies' (ie those traditional Stalinists who still saw social change as coming via Russian tanks - at least in the caricature) who controlled the party's daily paper, the Morning Star.

Jacques wrote an interesting article about his long struggle with 'yuppie flu' M.E.. Especially interesting was that he recounted bouts of somnambulance in 1983, 1987 and 1992 - all election years in Britain. Apparently he was unaware of this psychosomatic evasion of the awful truth, that the British left had once again let Thatcher in. -- Jim heartfield



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