Reviews

Most of the essays included in this volume have appeared over the last few years in Marxism Today. They have been greeted, inside and outside the left, as reflecting a political turning point. New Times marks an optimistic upturn in left thinking despite ten years of Thatcherism. The critical term here is that of ‘facing up’ to the new times. There is a determination to extend the vocabulary of socialism into areas of public and private life which have, until recently, existed beyond the boundaries of left politics. The New Timers have much to thank feminists and the gay movement for in this respect. It was feminists, for example, who first insisted on the importance of analysing pleasure, rather than simply feeling guilty about it. This included small everyday pleasures as well as larger social festivities and celebrations. Likewise, much of the new emphasis on style, consumerism and on the use of these in the carving out of a distinct social identity, came out of gay politics. It was both of these groups who insisted that if politics was to be worth the effort, if it was to be a lifelong commitment, it had to be fun, and even if it could not be fun all the time, then at least it should not be punitive, self-denying or puritan. Far from being a sign of collusion with capitalism, making domestic life pleasurable through attending to ‘home decoration’, and taking pleasure in ‘self-decoration’, were gestures which created within capitalism and within consumer culture ‘personalized spaces’ which were active rather than passive, negotiated rather than simply received. These pleasurable practices of everyday life were important precisely because of their immediacy, their tangible existence in the here-and-now. Finally, and most importantly, it was the recognition of the right to enjoyment and pleasure which by the mid-eighties seemed to connect some of the left, many feminists and many gay men, with the broader mass of the people. It was the shared pleasure of key television programmes, of certain social and cultural activities (for example, the pleasures of parenthood,) or of the ‘culture of narcissism’ (sport and personal style) which, ironically perhaps, provided the link between the ‘unpopular’ left and an electorate which had voted en masse for a radical right-wing government three times in a row. This in turn became part of a wider political project, to tap into the sources of ‘popular’ needs, to understand the success of the Tories’ ‘populism’, and to attempt to reconstruct a ‘new times’ left politics which was better able to take into account these social needs while maintaining the commitment to social democracy, social equality and social justice. This kind of new-left populism has been welcomed and endorsed by sectors of the Labour Party, (to the extent that some now see Marxism Today as the theoretical wing of Labour), it has been dubbed ‘designer socialism’ by the Guardian, and has been dismissed as left Thatcherism by the hard left.