Out of Apathy, by E.P. Thompson

[p019] Out of Apathy, &, P. Thompson, Maun This Seems to betray a tends) e editor, New Left Books, Stevens ency to slip into the conception thatl by and Sons. 15s. the ‘leap from necessity to freedom k , is essentially an effort of the indiyj- as Let’s face it; w so far as politics are concerned, the New Left is old hat. Did you know that Unilever's adver- tising budget equals twice the amount spent by the government on colonial development and Welfare, and that ICTs advertising costs half as much 48 Britain's total education _ pro- gramme? If you did, think at least twice before you buy this book, and then order it from the library if you must read it, for there is not much else in it that you will profitably remember, Edward Thompson has been reading Orwell, and finding him nasty; Ken Alexander has found that even workers’ power can be built up ‘in the here and now’. inside capital- ism; Stuart Hall is more disgusted than ever at the decadence of our ‘materialist’ culture; Ralph Samuel continues to collect interesting examples of the increasing power of big business despite appearances of its retreat, and this is useful, though like the other Contributors to this book, he seems incapable of Starting from the working class, its struggles and its historic role. For our epoch, this is essential for an objec- tive view, and is the only way ‘out of apathy’, Peter Worsley’s subject, ‘Imperial Retreat’, should have turned in this direction: the whole point of the Marxist definition of imperial- ism is that it) is capitalism's final Stage, and that therefore the equip- ment of the working class for its Overthrow is the Outstanding histori- cal task. Sentiments about solidarity dual will and reason rather than the creation of a social movement tg lead the class Struggle. Before quoting the last thesis on Feuerbach in conclusion, MacIntyre Says, ‘. . . Keynes with his peerage, Trotsky with an icepick in his skull, They are the twin lives between which intellectual choice in our society lies’. That is all right as far as it goes, and no doubt readers of this journal will watch with some interest the choices made by Mac- Intyre himself, [t is perhaps a vain hope that he and the others who wrote this book are not too much under the spell of Edward Thomp- son's blinkered Pontifications, which are well exemplified in this rhetorical question: ‘Is it not Possible that British intellectuals work in one of the only well-equipped and peace- able laboratories that are feft?’ CLIFF SLA IGHTER.