From ‘Old’ to ‘New’ Politics: The Politicization of the Environment in Left-Wing British Intellectual Discourse (1970s–1980s)

Abstract

This article reconstructs the encounter between environmentalism and the intellectual discourse of the Left in Britain. It shows how environmentalism struggled to converse with British socialism and Marxism and why the final politicization of the environment took a quite long path to transition. Through the analysis of the discussions in The Ecologist, New Left Review, and Marxism Today the article documents their contributions to the ‘greening’ of wider political discourse, and the important place they had in rethinking the role of left-wing politics in the difficult years of the 1980s. While the concept of crisis played a central role in the assimilation of environmental argument and ecology into the complex ideological configuration of socialism and Marxism, it was however an external factor – Thatcherism – that forced the Left’s intellectuals to come to terms with the changing of the political and imposed the idea that the preservation of the environment was a ‘socialist principle’. The article contributes to two primary lines of historical inquiry: the field of modern British environmental history and the politics of the Labour Party’s reformulation during the 1980s.