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.In the view of then editor, Hall, his own work-ing style was criticized by all sections and interests that were broughttogether to the New Left.The journal could never satisfy everyone sinceat the heart of the debates lay the issue of whether New Left Review waspart of a political movement or a magazine with cultural and socialconcerns (Williams, 1979).These debates resulted in a diminishedreadership and editorial board confrontations.10 A new generationalsplit appeared between Hall, Thompson, Williams, and a team led byPerry Anderson, Tom Nairn, and Robin Blackburn, all Oxford gradu-ates who followed in the steps of the Universities and Left Review groupand who, while at Oxford, created their own journal, New University.The period between 1962 and 1963 was the most critical in the historyof the New Left, often interpreted as the transition from the First to theSecond New Left (Meiksins Wood, 1995; Sedgwick, 1976).Although characterized by many personal differences and muchacrimony, mainly by Thompson and Anderson, who would eventuallytake ownership of the journal, it is obvious that this transition alsoreflected serious changes in the qualitative nature of the New Left as amovement.11 The most critical view of the Second New Left argues thatthe 1963 excision represented the hijacking of the New Left by argu-ments that were strictly Old Left.After the takeover by Anderson andothers, the increasingly intellectual debate in New Left Review and thegradual importation of ideas from mainly French political and philosoph-ical traditions were severely criticized for becoming narrower in focus,more doctrinaire, and Old Left (Young, 1977).Whether we agree ornot with this assessment of the Second New Left, it is generally acceptedthat, after the 1962 crisis in New Left Review, the idea of a New Left asboth a political movement and an intellectual journal that ran along aparallel course receded significantly to maintain only the intellectual aspects of the movement, a criticism made by Hall while reminiscingabout the period (Hall, 1989).The New Left could not be all things to all people.The collapse of theCND after the Cuban Missile Crisis and the reinstatement of nuclearpolicy in the Labour Party brought about the end of the New Left clubsand the temporary disappearance of the New Left as an alternative polit-ical movement.12 From now on, the New Left, identified with journals ofvarying intellectual concerns, adopted political causes as they emerged,often disconnected from each other.This was the case with various groupsof student politics between 1966 and 1969 that, having emerged from theCND s most radical section, the Committee of 100, eventually cameto lead the Vietnam solidarity campaign, the most third-worldist and 92 Cuba and Western Intellectuals since 1959anti-imperialist political expression of the New Left in all countriesexplored here.On a different level, the theme of industrial democracyalso became part of the newly found form of militancy in this period,particularly among some sectors of the trade unions and the labor move-ment.Born in 1964, the Movement for Workers Control reached itszenith in 1968 with the creation of the Institute for Workers Control(Shepherd 1995).Having survived a virtual period of isolation, several members of theold generation of the First New Left, notably Miliband and Saville,jointly founded Socialist Register in 1964.Wanting to produce a journalthat maintained certain continuities with the initial New Reasoner,Socialist Register was less abstract than a New Left Review that seemed tohave broken with the past to become the British intellectual vanguardwhose mission was to graft continental Marxism onto British Marxisttraditions.These two journals co-exist today, yet in the 1960s theyrepresented alternative faces of the New Left.Their relationship andexchange of ideas was contradictory.Trading ideas and authors was virtu-ally non-existent,13 however, with some notable exceptions, both suffereda similar degree of radicalization toward the end of the 1960s, whichbrought them relatively close on many issues such as their support for theNorth Vietnamese war effort against the United States.A brief revival of the First New Left took place between 1963 and1966 and was represented in the creation of Views, a journal that soughtto develop a New Left theory while maintaining close links to the labormovement, and was accompanied by the participation of individualmembers such as Williams, Mike Rustin and Hall, along with closecollaborators of Socialist Register like Michael Barratt-Brown.14 Accordingto Shepherd (1995), its initial philosophical content was quickly super-seded by overtly New Left concerns that included articles on the ThirdWorld and British foreign policy, Vietnam, culture, and socialism.Theemphasis, however, rested on influencing and assessing Prime MinisterHarold Wilson government s construction of socialism after Labour svictory in 1964.It was mainly the group s recognition of their failure toachieve this objective that resulted in the dissolution of Views and theformation of the group that went on to publish May Day Manifesto.This1967 book mixed analysis and interpretation of the social, political, andeconomic basis of the world and a series of fundamental principles toguide strategy and action for the transformation of capitalist society
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