Contraventions: editorials from New Left Review
Susan Watkins, Verso, £25

THIS selection of editorials from the New Left Review in the years from 2000 to 2022 reveals more about NLR’s ideology than was possibly intended. 

The self-important NLR team has always seen its role as indispensable — to inject correct theory into the somnolent masses. NLR’s philosopher-kings will enlighten the benighted masses across the world. There is no need for all the hard work of building a party, which it sees as inevitably doomed to bureaucratic deformation.

Tony Wood noted in his 2010 editorial “Good Riddance”: “The British state has traditionally accorded priority to external affairs - the pursuit of imperial greatness overseas becoming, in post-imperial times, a desperate bid to maintain global stature through association with the hegemon.” NLR always puts internationalism first, above all considerations of national interests. It echoes the ruling class’s wrong priority.

This book’s back cover has the question, “How should today’s left intervene on the international stage?” What? By demanding that the British government keep off that stage?  

Perry Anderson remarked in his 2000 editorial “Renewals” that Britain is “a state we must hope will not last much longer.” This casual sneer lazily confuses a state with a country. Anderson and others routinely call Britain “Ukania,” an ugly denigration which has not caught on anywhere else, but which reveals NLR’s contempt for Britain and the British working class. 

This contempt for the nation goes together with NLR’s supercilious disdain for trade unions, its opposition to what it dismisses as “economic struggles,” as if fighting for wages and conditions against the employing class were neither political nor a class struggle.

Of course, NLR’s writers opposed Brexit, joining Cameron, the CBI and the EU itself in smearing this mass popular movement as backward, chauvinist, imperialist and racist. 

Tom Hazeldine wrote a 2017 editorial “Revolt of the Rustbelt”. The title is a dismissal of the huge popular vote as a merely local vote by the left-behind, not as the magnificent assertion of popular sovereignty that it was. He observed that “this journal has noted how the Brexit poll exposed a set of interlinked fractures; national, regional, local ideological. Ideological... memories were the real ghosts abroad in England, ghosts of industry and of empire.” This reduced the democratic idea behind the Leave vote to the usual lame explanation — “unquestionably... nostalgia for empire.” 

Hazeldine references Lord Ashcroft’s poll of June 24 2016 in a footnote, but refuses to use in his analysis the poll’s key finding, that sovereignty — the idea that decisions about Britain should be taken in Britain — was the reason that Leave voters cited most often for their decision.

But amidst all the misjudgements and sneers, there are some accurate perceptions. For example, Susan Watkins in her introduction rightly rejects the lesser evil ideology. As she puts it: “lesser evil arguments generally rest upon a false assumption: that there can be any principled strategic basis for socialist attachment to a neoliberal party.” The social democratic “alternative” evil always proves to be just the next evil. 

And she acutely notes: “Mystifications of foreign policy are liable to be more potent, covering faraway operations, appealing to loftier values and generally immune to the disillusioning tests of daily experience that domestic politics must undergo.”
 
But she is not immune from NLR’s contempt for national struggles. She wrote in her 2008 editorial “The Nuclear Non-Protestation Treaty” that “the movement of anti-imperialist solidarity... played a critical role in ending the war in Vietnam.” No, the Vietnamese people played the critical role in ending the war in Vietnam, by defeating the US. As Alexander Cockburn had written in his 2007 editorial (didn’t she read it?), “Do anti-war movements end wars? The Vietnam War ended primarily because the Vietnamese defeated the Americans, and because a huge number of US troops were in open mutiny.”

The late Peter Gowan observed in his 2003 editorial “US:UN” that “the UN’s utility to the US in the post-Cold War world required that its core principle of state sovereignty be scrapped. For that principle suggests that states are free to organise their domestic political economies as they wish, whereas the profit streams of American (and much of European, especially British) business depend crucially on internal arrangements in other states that provide unfettered freedom to external financial operators, unfettered rights for foreign companies to buy out domestic concerns and unfettered protection of monopoly rents on intellectual property.”

Susan Watkins wrote in her 2008 editorial “... a nuclear deterrent is still a potent defence for lesser states, against regime change or invasion. Given their respective histories and circumstances, it is small wonder that Iran and North Korea should be trying to insure themselves against such risks. Williams’s ‘wholly reasonable desire of peoples to be secure against direct attack’ is starkly posed by the current threats against them. ... Generally speaking, the motives of self-preservation that impel a lesser power to seek nuclear capability will also determine that its strategic purpose will be deterrent.”

But CND appears not to understand this logic of deterrence, when it proclaims that “North Korea is to be condemned for its repeated nuclear and ballistic missile testing in violation of UNSC resolutions.”

In sum, the book does a good job in exposing NLR’s pretensions.