Young Socialist Men in 1960s Britain: Subjectivity and Sociability

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In the summer of 1971 socialist feminist Sheila Rowbotham reflected back on her sense of female selfhood in the dislocated days immediately prior to the emergence of Women's Liberation. An important component of the personal experiences she recounted involved the confusion she had frequently felt as a woman in the London left circles in which she spent three-and-a-half years from 1964 to 1967. After her Oxford undergraduate years she had arrived in Hackney and, seeking a genuine working-class politics, she joined the Labour Party Young Socialists (YS). The local branch swiftly initiated her into the intense world of the left, on the one hand all the Trotskyist tendencies – International Socialism (IS), Militant, the Socialist Labour League (SLL), the International Marxist Group (IMG) – and on the other the Young Communist League (YCL).¹ Her recollections focus attention on the political behaviour and cultural expression of a cohort of young working-class men as delineated by the particular ‘tendency’ to which each belonged. All had espoused a ‘disputatious’ Marxism, learned through the ‘ready-made’ analysis of theoretical literature.² Cultural conformity to the tendencies extended even to members’ external appearance. While International Socialist men ‘were predominantly donkey-jacketed, Militant – a deep entryist lot – wore brown suedette jackets with fur collars’.³ Despite all best efforts to prove her seriousness, Rowbotham's clothes (King's Road hipster skirts and Op Art dresses) betrayed her ‘petit bourgeois’ identity.⁴ As she endured the weekly trial by meeting, the complex politics of Trotskyist lineage and the Militant men's taste for outdated fifties music taught her valuable sociological lessons about the complex landscape of class that prevailed in post-war Britain, and how this intersected with specific identities and cultures of gender amongst the young working-class men she met.⁵

Through her detailed attention to cultural texture and experiential feeling Rowbotham's musings and memoir, Promise of a Dream, is one of the few coming-of-age narratives to shed light on the culture of the Trotskyist left between the collapse of CND and the growth of the student movement.⁶ In the late 1960s she was one of a small cohort of young people whose political activity around Britain's anti-war movement, the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign (VSC), resulted from involvement with social and political sub-cultures encountered earlier in the decade, notably the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Young Socialists. In the wake of the 1956 Communist Party split, the British left in the early 1960s was in flux. By 1962 the New Left was in decline and many of its activists had begun to drift away to more promising milieus such as the Labour Party and CND. The Young Socialists were situated on the edge of the old New Left, the Labour Left, and CND, part of a wider (though still small) and fluid left scene that supplied young activists with a political education and a social circle and that by the mid 1960s provided the basis of the VSC network. Initiated by individuals around the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and the International Marxist Group (IMG), the VSC was from 1967 until 1969 the heart of the burgeoning activist scene, drawing support from the student movement and the steadily expanding membership of the two main Trotskyist organizations, IS and IMG.⁷

In the historiography of social and political protest among Britain's sixties youth, the internal world of the extra-parliamentary left has received little attention. Historians have not addressed the areas of political and social experience which Rowbotham saw as having altered the boundaries between public and personal life.⁸ This article is part of a wider project that seeks to claim a space for Britain's left activists within the political, social and cultural framework of sixties historiography. Privileging individual and collective subjectivities, the intention of my oral-history study has been to explore the role men and women played in shaping the rich, eclectic cultures of the extra-parliamentary left, and at the same time to determine the contribution of those cultures in shaping activists’ sense of self. The individual stories afford insight into how the experience of social and political maturation intersected with a specific social and political moment – the formation of a new left culture that came to fruition only in the aftermath of 1968. In this respect the study is informed by recent interest in historical subjectivity: in history that seeks to explore not only the ‘complex relationship between the self and the social’, but also the emotional and the political.⁹

This article examines the political, social and psychological experiences of a group of YS men whose left identity came into being in the context of a sub-cultural milieu, in the early to mid 1960s, at a time of political transition involving the emergence of the VSC and the accompanying activist scene. The men joined YS branches that had become increasingly open to the politics of the International Socialists, in areas concentrated around North and East London. Brief references to Tyneside also figure, where too a vibrant socialist youth movement in the late fifties gave way in the mid 1960s to YS/IS activism.¹⁰ The narrative sources informing the account are a series of oral-history interviews I conducted in 2009 and 2010, mainly in London and southern regions, but also in northern areas of the country including Leeds, Middlesbrough and Newcastle upon Tyne. During the late 1960s and 1970s my male and female respondents had either been active members of the Trotskyist IS and IMG, or involved in ‘non-aligned’ libertarian milieus associated with the VSC and the Women's Liberation Movement. While many IS members had joined in 1967-68, as students participating in university protests and VSC demonstrations, a smaller number had been recruited at the beginning of the decade. These members came mainly from working-class homes (manual or occasionally white-collar), and through political activity, often first in CND, followed a pathway through the YS into the International Socialists. In February 1960 the decision of the Labour Party to launch a new national youth organization, the Young Socialists, had prompted the Socialist Review group (as IS was known until 1964) to use the opportunity for recruitment. Through CND, YS meetings, and the Socialist Review's youth paper, Young Guard, YS men, and a few women, were absorbed into a youthful revolutionary culture that combined beer-drinking and folk-singing with activity in the labour movement.¹¹

If the social and psychic stories underlying the activist enclaves of the late 1960s and 1970s have received little attention, even less effort has been put into examining such stories in the small Trotskyist groupings which preceded them.¹² My attempt to examine the relationship between this small group of left men and their YS milieu, to understand the emotional meaning and social expression of political belonging, is informed by the wider questions with which Rowbotham framed her gendered narrative of personal politics. She asked what was going on in the heads of her male comrades and why did she feel emotionally disconnected from the revolutionary men who refused to allow political space for inner life. Her attention to the symbiosis between the external and the internal, between political, social and psychic forces, is developed in Michael Roper's psychoanalytically informed writing on the place of subjectivity in gender history. Arguing that subjectivity should not be left to the level of discourse and generality he declares it ‘a matter pertaining to individual psychic make-up’, while ‘complex mechanisms … mediate between individual subjects and cultural formations’.¹³ Providing a cultural space for the expression of left subjectivities necessitates reading the oral-history narratives for emotive impulses and what they reveal about the young inner lives as they were felt within the milieus. In this article I consider how the encounter with the YS milieu interacted with individual histories, structures of feeling, and ways of seeing and being. In other words: what did active socialist involvement feel like to these young working-class men? How did internal feeling shape outward culture, and what was the relationship between collective belonging and cultural expression? And how did the masculine codes of Trotskyism relate to the felt experiences of the young working-class men; how did political identity shape their social behaviour?

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The men's narratives reveal that for a small cohort of working-class apprentices the YS/early IS milieu served significant social, cultural and psychological functions, and these were connected to their childhood efforts to make sense of themselves in relation to their families and local environment. Continuity between the childhood and activist landscape was mediated through a working-class identity grounded in a specific locality, in cultural patterns, and memories which nurtured an emotional attachment between the men and the labour left. Simon J. Charlesworth has highlighted the importance of understanding place as ‘a natural starting-point for understanding being’.¹⁴ The British left landscape which young men and women entered in the early to mid 1960s defied any notion of a flat class plain as bemoaned by Richard Hoggart in The Uses of Literacy (1957).¹⁵ In this instance Raymond Williams’s term ‘structures of feeling’ and Marc Bloch's ‘underlying feeling’ suggest possibilities for thinking about how the male respondents came to register and interact with the shifting social, economic, political and cultural habitus of their post-war childhood.¹⁶ Memories of childhood emotions, attached to the men's social interactions, echoed in the affective ties of solidarity they formed in the working-class culture of their YS milieu.

On a sociological level the men's accounts may be read in conjunction with the findings of the LSE-trained sociologists whose post-war surveys of working-class life suggested a complex, multilayered society where tensions between older patterns of class and the modernizing aspects of affluence and youth culture provided the external social structures.¹⁷ Also pertinent in this context is work from the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies, notably by Phil Cohen, who interpreted post-war youth sub-cultures as specific yet contradictory cultural responses to social disruptions which had affected the entire East End community. Cohen saw the styles of mods, teddy boys and skinheads as attempts to ‘express and resolve’ contradictions that remained hidden or unresolved in the parent culture.¹⁸ Such findings pertain to the cultural expression of working-class, Young Socialist men because in terms of post-war social development their styles too were part of wider youthful responses to childhoods in local communities deeply imbued with class feeling. The concern in this article is to approach the relationship between class experience and political sub-cultural identity through the language of psychic makeup and gender in order to allow for what Sally Alexander has termed ‘a rich elaboration of subjectivity, identification and desire – essentially psychic processes which give a political movement its emotional power’.¹⁹ The intention is to accord to class identity the space it warranted for each of the men concerned without excluding other important components of social being. Despite the primacy of the local landscape, the international Cold War climate also affected these men's homes and communities, shaping their everyday perceptions of the world around them. The formation of their inner lives occurred in the context of profound shifts in the wider international body politic. For these individuals the process of understanding oneself, of creating an identity, occurred not only in a local familial context, but also in a national and international setting of expanding social and political boundaries.

The political cultures that developed in the early YS/IS milieu reflected the very socio-cultural identity that had informed the young men's Marxism. Bob Light was raised in a Communist Party home in London's East End. His father, a docker, was one of eleven brothers who all remained a constant presence in Light's childhood, where regular Sunday gatherings featured not only ‘verbally violent’ discussions of football, but also ‘incredibly loud and belligerent arguments about politics’. His father provided an early and lasting impression of principled left engagement in which anti-fascism was the ‘crucible’, but it was Light's peer group who inculcated in him a collective, almost unconscious identification with the left.

There was this degree of shared poverty … Everyone knows everyone else. Their parents all work together and they are all wearing each other’s clothes. If there is a community it is one of impoverishment. We all look alike. We all have the same haircut because we go to the same barber. I would have been in junior or infant school and certainly we were … aware that we were Labour, and I don’t mean just me, but everybody in the class … you shared the same bond in the form of the same conditions and experiences, and you identified with Labour … I can remember that really clearly.²⁰

In the summer of 1967 he encountered ‘a group of young kids’ from the East-End YS. The meeting occurred after months spent ‘trawling through left book shops’ in search of a left politics distinct from the Stalinist Russia shaping his father's Communism. Light soon felt at home in the YS branch. Its culture of male political sparring reminded him of how his father and uncles behaved, and he and other members shared the same socio-economic and socio-cultural background.²¹ The branch, which by 1968 integrated Walthamstow, Leyton and Hackney, initially consisted of a dozen or so predominantly East-End men along with a few women. All shared a mono-cultural background of deprivation and a defiant sense of injustice against the veritable, visible injuries of class. Like Light a number of them came from left-wing families, had grown up interested in politics, and shared his enthusiasm for football and for non-mainstream music, including blues and folk. The group also held some very good parties. It attracted him partly because it felt so familiar:

My experience is almost self-defining. Walthamstow was very self-contained, people didn’t travel, and so it was very much kids from the local area … The guys would be all working-class, but somewhere with a dissident gene so Roy, for example, Jimmy, people like that came, like me, from a political family, and politics was a natural area of interest.²²

Fred Lindop was an exception among the East-End members. An LSE post-graduate, he was four years older than Light and his peers, and his Oxford education and extensive book collection distinguished him in the branch. He was also married, and as a university teacher his routine lifestyle and serious persona contrasted with the laddish conduct of Light and ‘the guys’ who shared a ‘den of iniquity and excess’ in a flat near to Walthamstow Central tube station.²⁴ However, Lindop's presence did not diminish the inclusive working-class identity of the branch; members were familiar with his Birkenhead background as the son of a wood-cutting machinist in the Camel Laird shipyard. Between 1952 and 1959 his attendance at Birkenhead direct-grant school had made him conscious of being socially different from contemporaries who came mostly from professional middle-class families and had fathers who were company directors, solicitors or even MPs.²⁵ He was determined to distance himself from the materialist culture of this professional grouping, and in his sixth-form years gravitated to a friendship group of predominantly working or lower middle-class boys who shared the socialist outlook which he was developing out of the discomfort and antagonism he felt in relation to middle-class pupils. In the localized political culture of the East-End YS branch, where accusations of being petty bourgeois abounded, class identity was a key constituent of belonging. Bonds of affective solidarity rested on the shared cultural patterns and emotions of working-class childhood. Within this landscape Lindop's presence, together with his marriage to a Hackney Jewish woman, reinforced the overall working-class East-End ethos of the membership.²⁶

Lindop had previously belonged to the same Hackney branch as Sheila Rowbotham, which was composed of a dozen or more mostly Jewish working-class young people living in and around Stepney and Hackney. He recalled that he had stood out amongst the younger Jewish members who seemed much sharper and more culturally and socially attuned to the area. Whereas Rowbotham had no taste for the solemn ritual of sectarian combat, Lindop thrived on arguments with Militant members like Peter Taafe and Brian Smith.²⁷ His discomfort with his middle-class Oxford peers finally found a home, and he readily embraced the music of the local West Indian community which he heard whilst campaigning in Ridley Road market:

To be truthful, if I am entirely honest I have always felt much more comfortable with working-class people, and especially with working-class women, than I did with middle-class people, although I had lots of friends who became television producers, writers, theatre directors, but some of those had working-class backgrounds, including publicans in working-class areas. I didn’t really have much contact with them beyond ’67. Most of my friends by then were political activists or the people I met through tenants’ activities.²⁸

The otherness of the Trotskyist identity, defined by tendency, rooted in a commitment to the professional calling of revolutionary, and embedded in the bitter experience of past political failure,²⁹ seemed to connect with Lindop's deeply felt sense of social difference, as ascribed by his upbringing as the son of a Liverpool ship worker. Despite the beginnings of student unrest at the LSE from June 1965, he remained more at home in Hackney where he concentrated his efforts on building the East London IS.³⁰

In mid-1960s society the subtle suffusion of class with a longstanding cultural attachment to Labour politics meant that for young working-class men like Bob Light and Fred Lindop initial attraction into the YS and early IS milieu was often social. Alan Watts was the son of a factory engineer whose early sense of social conscience came from the small circle of male friends with whom, in 1958, he joined his local YS branch in Tottenham:

I knew I was socially aware and then Gordon, a mate of mine, was big into reading war stories, and I remember having an argument with him about this … 1958, and I said ‘why do we need nuclear weapons?’ He said, ‘Well, we’ve got to protect ourselves’. I said ‘Well, if we got rid of them and so did they’ … but none of this went anywhere, and later on several of us who knocked around together, the guy we hung around with, Mel Norris, asked us to go to a YS meeting, and we went there and came across these people just pouring out these ideas, and stuff I had never heard before, and it was absolutely brilliant.³¹

Roger Cox was raised in the East End hearing stories of his father's trade-union battles. Like Watts his entry into Tottenham IS occurred through his local friendship ties, starting in 1953, when he joined the Shoreditch Labour Party branch:

When I was in secondary school my best friend was the son of a London County Councillor, and therefore he was in the Labour Party, and so from the age of twelve or thirteen I was active in the Labour Party, and you had lots of different views, and in terms of friendships and ties you had got this … I was in the YS … but the other thing was that the old Trotskyist organizations began to grow around these circles, and we bumped into people from the SLL, and the other people who came round was the IS.³²

By 1964 the Labour Party Young Socialists had begun to move progressively leftwards as discontent with Labour Party headquarters increased. They had also come under the increasing influence of Trotskyist groups – IS, the SLL, and the Revolutionary Socialist League – which lent activists a willingness to defy the party line. Active around the YS and CND, the International Socialists had emerged in the 1950s as the Socialist Review Group, following the orientation of their founder, Tony Cliff. In 1960 the group had launched a theoretical magazine, International Socialism, whose title asserted the state-capitalist position Cliff had embraced: ‘Neither Washington nor Moscow, but International Socialism’. According to Martin Shaw the group provided an anti-Stalinist, freethinking alternative to the intimidating ‘orthodoxy’ of the SLL, and in the early sixties it began to attract ‘refugees’ from the latter and from the declining New Left as well as a few young workers and students from CND and the YS.³³ Yet by 1964 the organization remained small, numbering no more than 200 members.³⁴

For working-class activists like Watts and Cox the power of IS ideas lay in their resonance with personal experiences of the local workaday world. Cliff emphasized, for example, the concept of ‘substitutionism’, substituting the revolutionary party for the working-class, whereby he advocated a party which discussed and decided openly in front of the workers.³⁵ Alan Watts remembered the electrifying nature of the ideas he heard on Tuesday evenings when IS speakers, Cliff and John Palmer, would come and speak to his YS branch:

What was exciting about it to me was that it was the beginnings of an explanation of what was going on around me … On the one hand I was working in this factory everyday with loads of working-class people, obviously, toolmakers, and so there was a union organization because they were all craftsmen, and on Tuesday evenings going to these meetings, and I can distinctly remember going to work in the mornings and working my drill, and my head was just spinning with all these ideas. It was just fantastic. I didn’t realise at the time. I just thought what about this, what about that?³⁶

Watts's narrative indicates how, for socially and politically conscious youngsters in the early 1960s, the uncertainty and angst of the early adult self often became intertwined with a wider framework of national and international politics and social developments. He encountered the early IS milieu at a crucial moment of personal frustration with his work and family relations. Having gained an apprenticeship at Stockholm Metal Works in Enfield, he had recently been dismissed after he accused his foreman of responsibility for a serious accident at the works in which a toolmaker had had his fingers crushed in a ten-tonne press. During this same time his hopes of travelling with his brother to Southern Rhodesia had also been dashed after his brother and not he was accepted for Voluntary Overseas Service (VSO).³⁷

The idea was that my brother and I were going to Southern Rhodesia. It was just somewhere to go other than where I was … at the time he was working in the Financial Times as an office boy, and they accepted him and not me, and so he went. I must have been twenty-two or so. David went when he was nineteen, and my mother always thought he was the dog’s bollocks and I was the son who was the Commie. It was all a bit of a nightmare really.³⁸

What was being explained to me over quite a long period of time was really how we all fitted together. The Bomb for instance was a bit of an issue, it was ongoing … The explanations that were being presented for why it was necessary to build the bomb was explained by the politics of IS at the time with the permanent war economy … So that was quite exciting that suddenly I had a grasp on the Bomb and why they needed to have it … when you explain Russia, if you take Russia it was a black hole … There was an iron curtain in our heads, and so when Tony Cliff and the IS group were explaining the class nature of Russia that began to get a grasp the way the world worked.³⁹

Bob Light underlined how for these young men politics was from the outset inextricably personal, an extension of the self, because of the way in which their encounters with the YS/IS occurred at pivotal moments of personal and political transition, as they struggled to make sense of turbulent emotions and their relationship to the local and international world. After a traumatic end to a relationship when he was sixteen, he had abandoned plans to become a professional footballer, and instead flew to France where he and his friends stayed in youth hostels, picking fruit to earn money. The subsequent years of travelling through Europe and India, immersing himself in black music, absorbing a new understanding of race, and experimenting sexually can be seen both as an extension of his earlier involvement in the vibrant mod scene around East-End pubs and also as a psychic response to the trauma of his girlfriend's suicide. He reflected: ‘If you hit this prism from my background where there is this deep rebelliousness, and I have also had this appalling broken part of me … then you tend to come out of it in a political way’.⁴⁰

Roger Cox confirmed that the captivating appeal of IS speakers occurred at a critical juncture in these young men's relations with the left, when they were seeking a new, dynamic political space to accommodate contradictory experiences of post-war affluence and Cold War bloc politics. Apart from CND, few radical options appealed to jocular East-End youngsters, who were likely to greet the brittle orthodoxy of SLL activists with cynicism and teasing. The Communist Party, as the party of Russia and the Bomb, seemed irrelevant its members tired and authoritarian, while the Labour Party represented bingo sessions in Shoreditch.⁴¹ Cox was instantly captivated by the first IS speakers he met, Robyn Fiore and Michael Kidron; their ability to relate Marxist ideas to him with humour and sincerity, and without a hint of patronization, were quite unlike the austere culture the young men found elsewhere on the left. Cox recalled:

Then arrived on the scene two contrasting characters, and the impact they had was quite unimaginable really. One was Robyn Fiore and the other was Mike Kidron; these two toffs, gents, spoke very posh. They came and had these arguments with us, ‘Do you know this?’, and they were incredibly unpatronizing and quite funny, and again they were from this different world, a world which was more sophisticated, and again there was this opportunity to actually have a better understanding of the world, and they used to go around various groups of youngsters talking to them to lure them into Tony Cliff’s front room where he gave these lectures on Marxism.⁴²

The personality of Tony Cliff, Palestinian socialist, with his organic ideas and affectionate manner, ready to nurture, respectfully engage, yet banter with and challenge the apprentices, was central to the appeal the early IS milieu held for them. Once Fiore and Kidron had successfully ‘lured’ Cox into Cliff's front room he was enraptured by the ‘funny old man’, his Marxist explanations scattered with amusing idiosyncrasies. In contrast to the officialdom of the Communist Party and the labour movement, Cox recalled, ‘suddenly there is this Marxism, and Cliff is going to do it, and it was in someone's front room, so you didn't have the intimidation’.⁴³ The domesticity of the political setting – the Cliffs’ Stoke Newington home – created a reassuring familiarity that helped to shape a sense of belonging amongst the young men. Before long Cox and Light found themselves baby-sitting for Cliff and his South African wife, Chanie, at ease in a familial circle that seemed fluidly to include the members of the small organization.⁴⁴ Chanie also played a nurturing role to the young workers who came into Cliff's circle. She was a teacher and Sarah Cox, Roger's wife, recalls her attentiveness, setting Roger tests on the political ideas the group had discussed.⁴⁵ In Light's case Cliff played a mediating role, helping him to make intellectual and emotional sense of his strained loyalties, of loving his father but being unable to relate to his steadfast Communist beliefs. Cliff, living around the corner, stepped in as paternal and political role model for Light, who was captivated:

You cannot imagine the influence. He was in so many respects a parallel to my father … My father was ten years older or so, and my father was the product of a troubled home, and he came out of it as really fine people, he and my mum, and for all I didn’t agree with my father, and he and I used to have really intense political arguments at this stage, especially about Russia because [of] the invasion of Czechoslovakia, but it was vicious at this time, but you meet Cliff, he was an intellectual in this sense.⁴⁶

For Light, Cox and Watts the IS milieu provided a Marxist education that in other circumstances they might have gained from Oxford's Ruskin College or from the Workers Educational Association (WEA). The IS circle around Cliff was small and intimate, but a hot-house of political and intellectual ferment. Cliff, Kidron, Paul Foot, John Palmer and others nurtured these youngsters, took a personal interest in their political development, and encouraged them to pursue their own ideas through reading Marxist texts. Although the experience was sometimes difficult at first given their elementary education, they persevered because Cliff and others gave them confidence in their intellectual abilities where school teachers had previously dismissed them. From the moment he joined the organization in 1958, aged seventeen, Cox's receptiveness to reading and education developed with the importance the organization placed on him as a worker. Cliff spent time grilling him on the life of the factory; on its politics and on union practices as well as on daily minutiae such as the importance of the tea break.⁴⁷ In these areas workers like Cox were experts and Cliff made them feel so. The self-confidence Cox gained was mediated through a politics that empowered him as a young worker in an alienating industrial world:

Right from the start I was told by the organization, when I was doing my apprenticeship, you must work hard and pass your exams, and then you can get a good job and really begin to operate. Education is of the utmost importance. You had to read … For a working-class boy like me the organization was your university. It was where you learnt everything, and where you were expected to teach yourself. If you talk to a kid of my generation I was probably exceptional in a way. You stood head and shoulders above people around you in terms of ideas, you know. You came to love ideas. The best conversations I had were with my mates when I was on the railways, because some of these guys had travelled the world a bit and [had also left behind] the narrowness I didn’t have any longer.⁴⁸

Among late sixties activists, intellectual mobility and the transference of new left political, social and cultural ideas from western Europe and North America offered young men and women alternative ways of thinking and new versions of the world.⁴⁹ At a local level, IS culture was offering men like Watts and Cox an international socialist politics that was embedded in both long-standing and newly emerging cultural patterns of East-End working-class life, including work, family and leisure. Inside the tiny organization they gained an intellectual apprenticeship and opportunities to engage in the global process of intellectual mobility and political exchange.⁵⁰ They found a sense of self through belonging to the group; they came to identify themselves as being IS. Critical to this left selfhood was the body of ideas the young activists steadily integrated into their local childhood landscape. As global politics came within their purview the world seemed simultaneously to expand and shrink around them: possibilities for perception increased, and their own place in the local and international situation expanded.

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The intellectual stimulus of the YS/IS milieu was associated with a masculine-oriented sociability that informed the collective identity binding young socialist men together. Social bonds grew from a shared identity of class, enthusiasm for newly discovered Marxist ideas, political debate, intensive activity and cultural preferences. The process of being collectively active and learning how to be activists developed the bonds of comradeship. In the run-up to the general election of 1964 Watts recalled attending a meeting at Finsbury Town Hall when he and his friends clashed with far-right supporters:

I thought whatever happens I am going to go in. So we got into this meeting, but we kept thinking we knew which side we were on. We had had meetings on Russia and Germany, and all that sort of stuff, and the Spanish Civil War, and so we knew what the story was, and so we acted collectively to oppose people with like views over here, so this drew us together as friends and comrades.⁵¹

I began to form a loyalty and the first big demo was in October ’67 … and there was a part of me that really liked being able to smack the police right in the mouth, exerting all that resentment built up over the years being a working-class kid, and Red Riding⁵² is the thin version, but they were little Nazis, and it added up to a really nice day out to me, and you consolidate the sense of identification, and I think I got arrested at that one, and I didn’t mind, no great stigma, I got fined and then I went away.⁵³

For Alan Woodward, who joined Tottenham YS around 1962, the social bonds of comradeship exuded a collective self-assertion derived from the energy generated through their political activities. He and other members of the Tottenham group supported the tenants’ struggle, went on CND marches and were arrested in the Committee of 100 sit-downs, wrote and distributed a factory leaflet (‘A Blow Against the Bomb is a Blow Against the Boss’), attended countless meetings, sold the IS paper Labour Worker, and later joined in the anti-Vietnam war marches.⁵⁴ All this activity occurred alongside continual, heated discussions, implicitly competitive: ‘people saying I have read this book. Have you read that book?’⁵⁵ Throughout the early-to-mid 1960s, as they gained confidence in their effectiveness as a group of political actors, political ties in turn strengthened the social bonds to create a shared sense of comradeship. The masculine language and tropes discernible in their narratives suggest that the dynamic of comradeship was inherently active. An element of competition was present in all their social and political activities and in their shared relationships, and they were continually on the move. Woodward recalls that activity became integral to his socialist selfhood:

We would come back and say how many papers we had sold, how many arguments we had had … it was this milieu of activity of consciousness being perceived by activity. Out of activity came consciousness as opposed to many Marxists who believed it was the other way round.⁵⁶

The thing with being a Trotskyist for thirty years is that you can’t break out of the workers aren’t workers, they are the proletariat sort of thing, a code if you didn’t know you would think the person was talking rubbish, but once you knew the code, the vanguard, the proletariat, etcetera, there was a cohesion behind it all.⁵⁷

We were a little group who went around together … who went on holiday together once to Scotland hitchhiking and sleeping in railway trains and when we got to the town we would ask for the Labour Party and just try and cadge beds off the Labour Party, so there was this group who in a sense carried out an intense rescheduling of my thinking into revolutionary socialist lines.⁵⁸

The integrated social and political patterns through which these Young Socialists developed their own vibrant youth culture illustrate how before the emergence of the student movement and Women's Liberation the personal had already become political and the boundaries between politics, work, home and social life blurred. The picture of a lively IS sub-culture complements interpretations of CND as a ‘culturefest’ for the young; these milieus were cultural staging-posts for the activist scene that developed around the VSC with the student influx into the revolutionary left.⁵⁹ Symbolic of this deep interaction of youth sub-culture and activist politics was the flat in 65 Bishop's Close, fulcrum of the East-End IS branch, where Light and his comrades created a vibrant social and cultural scene. By 1968 their legendary parties were attracting more and more local working-class youths from the Walthamstow area. Young party-goers were recruited into IS, and throughout 1968 the flat became central to the political as well as to the social life of the branch. Social and political patterns blurred into one: branch meetings, held in the Britannia Pub, became social as well as political gatherings; Light and his comrades started a band together in the flat. His memory of life in that household shows how easily the libertarian socialist politics the young men found in IS fitted in with their enthusiasm for the mod sub-culture shaping their musical tastes, style of dress and sexual conduct:

We were simultaneously young men, yeah, doing young men things. We were really into music and we had a band associated with the flat. Me and a guy, Will, used to play quite a bit and we were into the blues scene, and I began to get really heavily into San Francisco music because Roger was really big into San Francisco music. There wasn’t any sense that it was separate from politics, but in many ways it was the DNA of our politics, the exploration of new kinds of music … The sense of sexual freedom was important because in an earlier generation you couldn’t have done it, but in this generation we were unusual and we were very committed. We would go and leaflet factory bulletins. The branch and the household were almost inseparable to be honest. People would hang out there and there would always be someone sleeping on the floor.⁶⁰

Dynamic, at times militant, political activity not only empowered Young Socialist men as political agents working for change at a local and international level, but informed their willingness to push against social boundaries constraining their capacity for social and sexual mobility and pleasure. The men's narratives exuded a self-determination that testified to the self-assertion they acquired during these initial years of activism. As IS politics came quickly to shape their identities as workers, it also penetrated their places of work by affecting their attitudes towards their jobs. The higher spending power of working-class youth, noted by the Albermarle Committee (1959-60) as underpinning the new youth culture, also facilitated the burgeoning activist youth scene.⁶¹ Light was one of a cohort of young men who benefited from the growing demand for young unskilled and semi-skilled workers, accompanied by falling contributions made to parents.⁶² In 1968 he worked casually as a painter and decorator; working at the weekend for double pay was sufficient to keep him afloat for the rest of the week and allowed him time and leisure to pursue music and politics. He explained this pattern of work as follows: ‘I didn't have a regular routine life and I didn't want one. My life was about politics, not in a messianic way because politics was about friendships and music’.

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That women hardly figure in the men's narratives underscores the masculine, fraternal character of early Trotskyist culture and identity. Woodward was married during this period (one of only a few Tottenham YS/IS comrades who were), yet in his extensive narrative neither his own wife nor the wives or girlfriends of his comrades featured. The absence of women, or their presence only in the background, is no surprise: a number of women in the early WLM, notably Rowbotham herself, documented negative experiences of the Trotskyist groups.⁶³

The masculine sociability may to some extent be seen as a logical extension of the fraternal bonds celebrated in the ‘Angry Young Men’ literature of the late 1950s and 1960s, whose authors in lamenting the decline of traditional working-class culture placed misogynist blame on the female corrupted by modern consumerism.⁶⁴ As adolescents many of the men interviewed had read this literature voraciously and identified with its ‘aggressively’ working-class male protagonists, but it is difficult to know how far they consciously or unconsciously absorbed its gendered sub-texts. Like the London-based respondents, John Charlton the son of a Tyneside chauffeur, came across IS through membership in the YS. In 1959, aged twenty-one, he was among the first members of the unofficial young socialist group in Gateshead, the 59 Society, one of a core of working and lower middle-class grammar school boys whose entry into this new group channelled their antagonisms concerning class.⁶⁵ Members found collective identification with the ‘Angry Young Men’ literature. Charlton felt himself part of this cultural movement precisely because the authors’ revolt against the ‘genteel, class-segregated staidness of fifties British society’ echoed his own embarrassed discomfort as a working-class boy standing outside the threshold of genteel Newcastle households.⁶⁶ The boys shared the collective cultural ‘effervescence’ around class and latched on to works such as Kingsley Amis's 1954 novel Lucky Jim, whose protagonist like Charlton was a working-class grammar-school boy lacking the requisite social skills for acceptance in provincial middle-class society.⁶⁷

However, the YS/IS milieu did not harbour the ‘sex-hostility’ of the ‘Angry Young Men’ literature, evident also in male gangs of the period such as the Teddy Boys.⁶⁸ The 59 Society, for example, contained a large number of young women of secondary-school and university age. Women like Mary Feinmann, Fiona Scott-Batey and Jane Owens were daughters of Tyneside Labour councillors while others were drawn in through participation in Tyneside CND.⁶⁹ The fluid integration of membership between CND and the YS meant that the social and sexual values prevailing in each could incline towards a mutual libertarianism. Given the critical social and political consciousness of these young adults, it is not surprising that their sexual behaviour and attitudes fitted in with the new youth sub-cultures, characterized according to sociologists by the ‘greatest openness, frankness, and contempt for adult hypocrisy’.⁷⁰ In the early-to-mid 1960s young women as well as men around these left milieus displayed a growing sense of social and sexual agency that allowed individuals like seventeen-year-old, beatnik-dressed Welsh Bronwen Davis to head off alone to London for demonstrations.⁷¹

John Charlton's reflections on the opportunities the 59 Society offered for social and sexual freedom were echoed by female members like Jane (Lu) Bell, who felt stifled by the paternalistic rules governing her social life and sexual body in her Newcastle University hall of residence.⁷² Such sentiments were shared by other young men and women active in the YS and CND, which signals that mutually companionable relations between the sexes could exist along with the fraternal bonds of intellectual and political comradeship.⁷³ For Light a couple of casual relationships with women from Hackney, one an IS member, stimulated his entry into the milieu because alongside sex, politics provided a mutual, intimate area for personal and political exploration in a relationship where he had the sexual vocabulary and experience while she brought political experience and intellectual capital.⁷⁴ Di Parkin joined the West Surrey Federation branch of the YS at the age of sixteen. She explained how friendships with male as well as female members rested equally on their shared identities as revolutionaries.⁷⁵ Such personal and political mutuality would subsequently feature in male-female relations at the height of the VSC activist scene, though that is not to deny the contradictory experiences of many young women in the late 1960s left. By the time of the first Women's Liberation conference, in February 1970, IS women had established the North London Women's Group, aiming to integrate wives of male comrades who did not normally attend meetings, because, as women, family responsibilities fell mainly to them.⁷⁶

In the YS young men's public displays of political identity and comradeship minimized space for the feminine. Alan Woodward's wife was a fellow activist: in 1962 he had met her in London's Chelsea YS which he chaired during his training at the local teaching college. He insisted in the interview that his account of women's role in the Tottenham YS was not meant to be pejorative; and he signalled his respect for the wife of another comrade – a ‘fully fledged politico’ – who stood out because the other female members were ‘little women’, passive members who ‘tagged along behind this group of very active, very effective men’. He confirmed the psychic connection between activism, fraternal ties and the men's collective Trotskyist identity: ‘We were extremely effective in most of what we did. We were shit-hot basically’.⁷⁷ For Woodward the bonds of comradeship were explicitly masculine even despite his own wife's activism. This traditionally masculine working-class culture seems to have endured partly because it fed off the traditional gender division of labour inside the post-war family: the powerful discourse of motherhood and maternalism perpetuated women's childcare responsibilities.⁷⁸ Yet Woodward did stress that he took his turn looking after the children so that his wife could attend YS meetings.⁷⁹ In any case neither he nor the other respondents perceived young women as threats to their male solidarity, and for Woodward their status in the group was subordinate. The political, intellectual and social bonds between the men left no space for an emotive, feminine dimension. These young working-class men seemed caught between shifting, often conflicting old and new models of class and gender identity.

On the one hand, sites of agitation such as the factory, docks and coal mines conjured up and brought them into contact with an older working-class identity, which rested on established ideas of masculinity and femininity. Such traditionally gendered notions of class fitted easily alongside the fictional representations many had read as adolescents as well as the wider social messages of women's subordinate status where femininity continued to be defined ultimately through home and family. On the other hand, within their own families, through contact with families of friends, and as a result of friendships and mutual romantic relationships with women in their social and political circles, these young working-class men had been exposed to increasingly complicated notions of masculinity and femininity, including the companionability which was increasingly coming to characterize working-class as well as middle-class marriage, family and social life.⁸⁰ Light described his father's role in his East-End household in terms which echoed the model of the ‘new’ working-class man described by sociologists such as Michael Young, Peter Willmott and Ferdynand Zweig; one who was increasingly domesticated, even feminized, in his softer approach to his wife and children. Although Light's father had been a docker, immersed in a traditionally gender segregated industry where heavy drinking culture underscored a dominant masculinity, he was not like other men in the neighbourhood:

My father had a very different role in the household to the majority of men. There were things he wouldn’t do. He would never iron but he did cook. He did wash up … he took a much closer involvement in childcare. He had a role of working-class fatherhood which would be more typical of today, but this was in the 1950s. It was to do with his politics and to do with his early experiences. My Dad grew up in the really tough times in the East End and his mother was a … I have never wholly understood this but his mother, I suspect it was some form of post-natal depression … Dad was just in the point in the family where he was young enough to be ordered around yet old enough to have the measure of responsibility. He actually effectively became a functioning family. ⁸¹

Gendered contradictions in the YS sub-culture rested, then, on experiences of and exposure to models of class and gender that by the mid 1960s were at a point of transition. As part of the left scene the young men sought to make sense of themselves in relation to the wider local, national and international arena. In this respect the masculine narratives provided valuable signs with which it becomes possible to understand the mono-gendered ethos of the early activist milieu: the transformative ways in which for a cohort of predominantly working-class, young socialist men the culture they together fostered rested on shared mono-cultural bonds of class, familial relations and politics, shaping political identity, means of belonging, and forms of social behaviour during formative early adult years. For many men in the YS/IS contingent the social and political bonds that came to shape their ways of being drew upon a search for some form of political and social space, a means of identity that could help them to make sense of their uncertain early adult selfhood.

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This article has considered the particular place of male subjectivities in the context of a political activist culture in the mid sixties. This was a point of transition on the British left before the emergence in the late 1960s of the extra-parliamentary politics of VSC and the student movement. To understand the political, cultural and socio-psychological processes that brought about the new left political-cultural formation, it is necessary to examine the social dynamics of the activist left cultures preceding and informing it. A major theme of the new left politics of the late 1960s was the ‘subjective in struggle’, as young activists drew upon struggles for national and individual liberation from the United States to Western Europe and the Third World.⁸² Young British activists saw at first hand, or mediated by television and photographs, the possibilities for external change presented by the actions of foreign students and workers. What they saw fed into and informed their own grass-roots activism – in the anti-war movement, in student strikes, in factories and docks, and in tenants’ campaigns. Acquiring new ways of seeing then consciously and unconsciously shaped new ways of being. In the late 1960s the activist network, which spread from the capital and expanded to encompass social contacts with international activists, acquired an internal, psychic shape as much as a tangible cultural form. For young male activists the masculinity of street politics shaped a particular way of being political: internally as a psychic condition and externally in a host of political mannerisms. The ‘street-fighting man – the cult of Che, the paraphernalia of helmets’, the militancy of the streets, of physical gesturing, of competition as to who could shout the loudest, were all external symptoms of a new international political masculinity.⁸³

For a particular cohort of working-class young men, as this paper has sought to show, encounters with the Trotskyist milieu in the early-to-mid 1960s, prior to the emergence of an activist network, coincided with specific experiences of social class, family relations, and gender and of the changing post-war British society in which they were coming of age. When by 1969 women on the left began to call for male comrades, husbands and lovers to discover a new manner of being men they raised deep questions of masculinity and femininity and their relationship to the post-war family and wider patterns of socialization. Understanding the masculine political self embedded in the new left cultures of the late 1960s requires interrogating the complex historical category of ‘experience’ in relation to young men, the left and post-war British society from childhood to early adulthood. For the cohort of working-class men in this paper the YS/IS milieu was a crucial conjuncture which provided the pattern for their particular journeys into the wave of sixties radical protest. How women felt and acted in relation to this same working-class milieu of ‘angry’ left young men provides the other half of the deeper picture.

NOTES AND REFERENCES