The Forgotten Rival of Marxism Today: The British Labour Party’s New Socialist and the Business of Political Culture in the Late Twentieth Century

Abstract

Abstract In recent years, historians of modern Britain have focused on reconstructing its ‘political culture’, drawing extensively upon print sources. This work routinely highlights the commercial pressures that shape some types of print media—especially popular newspapers—but is less attentive to others. This article argues for closer attention to the business and financial contexts of a broader spectrum of Britain’s political culture in the late twentieth century. Drawing on histories of publishing, it illustrates the importance of business through a case-study of party-political intellectual journals for the 1980s British left. No history of the 1980s is complete without reference to the Communist Party’s glamorous Marxism Today. However, scholars have overlooked one of its significant market competitors. In 1981, the Labour Party founded its own intellectual magazine, the New Socialist. Initially, it was highly successful, recording healthy circulation figures and attracting iconoclastic pieces by leading socialists. Its early commercial success shows that it has been unjustly neglected since. Yet unfavourable political winds and internal editorial divisions fatally overlapped with ruinous business decisions in a worsening financial environment. This precipitated the collapse of New Socialist in the later 1980s—just as its Eurocommunist rival declared the arrival of the ‘New Times’ and wrote itself into history books. Closer attention to business contexts thus returns New Socialist to histories of the left and provides a better map of its ideological debates during a transformative decade. It also situates the travails of the 1980s left within social and cultural trends over the twentieth century.