EP THOMPSON'S achievements as an historian and champion of the peace movement justly built him a huge reputation.
But thompson was a key representative of the '1956' generation: he nesses of this gencration, he theorised and championed both.
The 1956 Hungarian revolution and Kruschev's secret speech - shook the British Communist Party to its core The issue of Stalinism was posed centre-stage. People left the CP in droves. and the New Left took shape.
It was a turning point for British Trotskyism. Many CP intellectuals were won over by the then-largest (although still tiny) Trotskyist organisation, led by Gerry Healy But those who tumda to Trotskyism were a minority. When the key New Left anthology Out of Apathy was produced in 1962 only one of it contributors, Alasdair Macintyre, latterly right-wing philosophy lecturer at Essex, claimed allegiance to Trotskyism.
The dominant New Left politics were neutralist, anti-Stalinist and antisocial democratic; its political focus was the rapidly growing CND.
Some of the articles in Out of Apathy are militantly anti-capitalist, not least that by former Marxism Today guru and ex-socialist Stuart Hall. But among these 'anti stands, there was little co. herent positive alterative.
The 1963 split in the New Left Review editorial board, over the significance of continental high theory' Marxism (especially Gramsci), was highly political. In retrospect this clash hetween"Thomason and the Petty Anand conflict between the Old New Left' and the 1960s generation which took neutralism and pacifism in the di. recdon of mutant anti-impchausm. AS of production. plied. ism. CND declined in the mid-1960s, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign emerged.
Thompson broke with Stalinism. but he never broke with popular frontism; if is the organising theme in all his no. litical positions and writings. Neutral. ated. ism and popular frontism were writ large in his intervention in the early 1980s peace movement, with his theory of 'exterminism'. the idea that cast and west were locked into mutually re. inforcing nuclear 'exterminist "modes work.
Thompson's overall theoretical and political positions were subject to com prehensive demolition in Perry Ander'Reason'. Marxism, to which Thompson never reThe Making of the English Working Class is above all a work which celebrates and does justice to the generations of ordinary working people who were te vicams of, and tigaters against, the horrors of emerging capitalAs such it is an immense achievement. But the oft-repeated view that this and Thompson's other historical work if the most important work of the British Marxist historians is exaggerChristopher Hill's work on the English revolution and the successive volumes of Eric Hobsbawm on the development of British capitalism are at least as important as Thompson's In the face of militant anti-imperial. ism and Marxist theoretical development, Thompson, to use his own words 'sulked in his tent", in the name of But his 'reason' was always a combination of socialist idealism and English radicalism, revealing the incomplete character of his break with the tradition of ine batish Communist Party. Ine promise of 1956, the potential of a renewed and revolutionary Marxism, had
SOCIALIST OUTLOOK No. 49. 18 September 1993, Page 11 POLiTICS