What follows is from a review by James Heartfield of Duncan
Thompson's new book about the NLR; see the characterisation of CSE in
the footnote.
I'd be interested in hearing comments from CSE members who, unlike
me, were there at the beginning.
Julian Wells
+++++++
None of the core editorial team, though, had much familiarity with
Marx's critique of political economy, and Thompson puts it fairly
when he says they were 'less interested in economics and more attuned
to political and questions of political strategy'.(8) Of course
social processes, like the course of the economy, demand a lot more
reflection, whereas politics is all on the surface and everyone can
be an expert. In practice the editorial team found it easier to defer
to boffins like Bob Rowthorn and Ernest Mandel to handle the
economics, which tended then to be treated as a discrete subject.(9)
Leaving the economics to someone else was a failing that would leave
the Review accommodating to Geoffrey Hodgson's fashionable rejection
of Marx's theory of economic crisis at the exact moment that it was
strikingly confirmed.(10) That socialists had such faith in the
durability of capitalism is at least part of the reason that the
system did survive a crisis whose outcome was far from certain.
Today, at the point that the capitalist economy has stabilised, the
Review gives table room to Robert Brenner's impressionistic
predictions of financial melt-down.
(9) This is perhaps why the Bulletin of the Conference of Socialist
Economists, later Capital and Class, which in political outlook was
hardly that distinct from the NLR, survived as a specialist journal.
(10) 'The theory of the falling rate of profit', NLR, March 1974;
Anderson, Considerations on Western Marxism, 115;
Pessimism of the Intellect: A History of the New Left Review,
Duncan Thompson,
Merlin Press
ISBN 9780850365566
The full review is at:
http://forth.ie/index.php/content/article/review_pessimism_of_the_intellect/#ixzz0Z1O5ujG1
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