The Poverty of Strategy: E.P. Thompson, Perry Anderson, and the Transition to Socialism

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Marked initially by Perry Anderson's assumption of editorial authority, and completed by his subsequent control of its theoretical and political direction, a "palace coup" took place within New Left Review (NLR) in 1962, which gave rise to what is now called the "second" New Left. Emerging as a direct reproach to the politics of the "first" New Left, the "second" New Left undertook a revolution against "Revolution." Not only did the new editors of the NLR, Perry Anderson, Tom Nairn and Robin Blackburn maintain that the "first" New Left had failed to offer "any structural analysis of British society"; imperative to the construction, they main tained, of an adequate socialist politics, they also reproached it for the "populist" and "pre-socialist" character of its humanist politics.

SOURCE

Labour / Le Travail, Vol. 50 (Fall, 2002), pp. 217-241