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‘Slant’ and the Language of Revolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2024

Alan Wall
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‘The distinctive character of Western European Marxism since 1918 has been its co-emergence and colloquy with various currents of idealism—Dilthey, Croce, Husserl, etc. The same pattern is likely to be repeated in Britain, should an ‘Anglo-Marxism’ ever finally emerge. The precondition for a transcendence of this dialectic is the reunification of theory and practice in a mass socialist movement. This has not yet been achieved anywhere in Europe’ (Perry Anderson, New Left Review, 35).

Slant, the journal of the Catholic left in Britain in the 1960s, began publication in 1964 and ended in 1970. Its formation and development were the result of factors both within and outside the Catholic Church. The development of the ‘New Left’ in Britain seemed to open up an area of potential middle-class radicalisation. After Hungary and Suez in 1956 what appeared to be required was a de-Stalinised, socialist humanism, responsive to the specific conditions of welfare-state capitalism whilst being at the same time internationalist in its perspectives. In the early 1960s the New Left was a political tendency—with all the vagueness which that term implies. It represented a hesitant, exploratory analysis, which was only later to refine its insights into a more rigorous critique of contemporary capitalism.

Type
Research Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 56 , Issue 666 , November 1975 , pp. 506 - 516
Copyright
Copyright © 1975 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

References

1 See ‘The Failure of the Christian Revolution’, Catholics and the Left, p. 83. The issue of the political quality of Christian charity has also been dealt with, and again in a literary context, by Walter Stein, in articles which appeared in the pages of New Black friars and Slant, and were later to be elaborated in his book Criticism as Dialogue. The book takes as its starting‐point the socialist version of a tragic perspective as presented by Raymond Williams in Modern Tragedy. Stein argues that Williams confuses absolute conditions with irreparable ones, thereby evading the fact that situations of an exploitative or destructive character may be overcome but never obliterated, whether in individual or communal terms. They are an absolute as lived experience. Stein's attempt at a version of tragedy which will set out from a Christian perspective is both convincing and important. It is a pity that I do not have time to deal with it at greater length, since it demonstrates the dependence of this kind of analysis upon socialist humanism, at the same time that it proves the potential worth of the idea of a depth within existing movements at which Christianity can make a radical contribution.

2 At this point it is important to note that almost half of the issue has been predominantly literary, either directly or indirectly.

3 William Morris and the Dream of Revolution' in Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century, Methuen, 1971Google Scholar.

4 Catholics and the Left, p. ix.

5 But see Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘The Marxism of the Early Lukacs’, New Left Review, 70.

6 I realise that I am in danger of slipping into idealism myself here, but can see no way of avoiding the problem. The ‘Slant Enterprise’, of course, always contained its own critical and negative elements.