This most timely book of essays carries forward the work begun by the New Left after 1956, and takes it an important stage further. Perry Anderson contributes two studies of great significance: one concerned with the working out of the nature and relations of classes in Britain throughout the last three hundred years; the other with the problems of socialist strategy today. Robin Blackburn and John Westergaard assemble and add to the growing volume of fact and analysis which have eroded the Crosslandite myths of a benevolent, classless, post-capitalist society. Thomas Balogh and Richard Crossman review the failings of economic planning and political strategy in post-war years, and Tom Nairn takes up and deepens the study of the nature of the Labour Party which has rightly been a pre-occupation of the New Left since its early days. Ken Coates' essay on Democracy and Workers! Control synthesises the two complementary aspects of the growing campaign in this field: the offensive which politicises the present struggle against trade union corporatism, and the pre-figuring, through transitional demands, of the full flowering of democracy in a self-managing socialist society. These themes are discussed also in the distinguished contribution of Andre Gorz. Professor Titmuss demonstrates with all his authority the failure of the welfare state to conform to the purposes of its Labour enthusiasts, and echoes also the demand for "social participation". Raymond Williams, too, sees the aspiration to self-government, control over the work situation and economic life generally as a fundamental goal of socialism,
Such a bare summary of contents cannot hope to convey the harvest of thought to be gathered from this volume. Its significance might be summar=ised under the following points:
(1) The earlier themes of the original New Left: the role of culture, the nature of the Labour Party, the critique of Croslandism, the nature of work and work relations, the evaluation of the welfare state, have been strengthened and deepened by further sustained research, and synthesised into what Perry Anderson insists again and again must be a "total" view of life under capitalism.
(2) Issuing from the analytical work has emerged the beginnings of a revolutionary discussion of a contemporary socialist strategy, which is distinct from orthodox Leninism and the exclusive parliamentaricanism of social democracy.
(3) In striving for a "total" view, and for a programmatic strategy for the transition to socialism, we are led to re-interpret the history of class in Britain, a re-interpretation which informs the whole discussion of ce ntemporary problems,
In the past, Bevanism, Victory for Socialism, and such movements have been vulnerable on two counts. Strategically, they have accepted the very parliamentary and vote-counting limitations which give the right wing leadership its apparently immovable authority, and they had too much of the instinctively moral protest, too little of theoretical self-awareness, about them. Their ownempiricism was confronted with a leadership endorsed by the intellectual traditions of utilitarianism and Fabianism, * Fontana Library: New Left Review. 10/64, edited by Perry Anderson and