The New Serfdom

by Angela Eagle

  One of the results of ‘Labourism’ is that Labour has overwhelmingly been concerned with responding to the aspirations of millions of workers within a capitalist society rather than with the total replacement of the capitalist system itself. The overthrow of the state always seemed to be put off until after the latest pay negotiations.

  MARX AND THE LABOUR PARTY

  From its inception, many in the Labour Party were sympathetic to Marx’s critique of the capitalist economic system in the volumes of masterly analysis that is Das Kapital. As we have seen, many who were inspired by Marx’s thought at the end of the nineteenth century (including many members of the Social Democratic Federation) looked to the Labour Party as the focus for the self-assertion of the working class. After this initial involvement, however, Marxist internationals took differing strategic decisions regarding what their relationship with the British Labour Party should be.

  For his part, Labour leader Keir Hardie was highly critical of what he regarded as the unemotional and dry nature of The Communist Manifesto, and accused Marx of reducing socialism, which at its heart was a crusade against selfishness, to a mere class faction fight. ‘Socialism makes war upon a system, not a class,’ he wrote in September 1903. For obvious reasons of political expediency, Hardie was less interested in Marxism and more interested in opposing the Liberal Party, which stood in the way of Labour’s progress in Parliament. He was created in a ‘Labourist’ rather than a revolutionary mould. And, with the exception of the militant syndicalists and their successors in the grassroots Shop Stewards’ Movement of the 1970s and ’80s, so were the trade unions.

  REVISIONISM – REFORM OR REVOLUTION?

  At the turn of the nineteenth century, as the industrialised nations developed further, the gradually extending democratic franchise meant that the interests of the working classes could no longer simply be ignored by any political party. As socialist parties sprang up across Europe and began to establish themselves and demand social and economic change, there was a realisation that revolution may not be the only way to achieve the desired transformation of society. At the same time, contradictions in the scientific predictions of Marxist doctrine about how change would come led some to question its accuracy as well as its desirability.

  The most prominent of these early ‘revisionists’ was the German leader Eduard Bernstein, who in his 1899 book Evolutionary Socialism noted that capitalism was proving supple and strong and that class conflict was diminishing, not increasing as Marx had predicted it would. He called for the achievement of socialism by what he called piecemeal and parliamentary means rather than revolution.

  It was at this point that the greatest bifurcation in the approach to the methods needed to achieve socialism appeared. Was it to be reform or revolution? The battle of ideas between the revolutionaries and the revisionists was one of the key features of the development of socialist thought in the twentieth century. As the inevitability of the demise of capitalism seemed to recede into the far distance, revisionist thought and the idea of ‘democratic socialism’, which emphasised reform rather than revolution, acquired increasing importance. After the Russian Revolution in 1917, though, it was the revolutionaries that dominated the theoretical and the political scene.

  The Fabian Society, which began in 1884 and was one of the founding organisations that created the Labour Party, was famously interested in the ‘inevitability of gradualism’, believing that the tide of democratic collectivism, not a revolutionary rupture, would mean steady advances towards the desired goal.

  The Labour Party’s lack of revolutionary zeal has been a source of constant frustration to the many socialist splinter groups in the UK, who have spent their time denouncing it as hopelessly unrevolutionary. However, despite their ideological disapproval, the Labour Party has transformed Britain for the better even though it was in government for only twenty-two years and nine months throughout the entire twentieth century.5

  R. H. TAWNEY

  If anyone can be said to have provided a uniquely English philosophy for the Labour Party in Britain, it was R. H. Tawney, a Christian socialist who abhorred poverty and deprivation. He was also a believer in British democracy, fighting against what he regarded as Prussian militarism on the Somme during the First World War. He was critical of utilitarian individualism as it had developed after the Reformation, which he blamed for creating a dangerous division between commerce and social morality. He was especially coruscating about what he saw as the idolatrous ‘worship of wealth’, which he believed characterised the immorality of capitalist societies. He felt that there was a disorder in social values caused by the capitalist emphasis on individual rights without any discussion of the function individuals should play in a healthy society. Because this abstracted the rights people expected from the social purpose for which they should be used, it was all too easy for individuals to pursue their own interests and material wants regardless of the effect on others. Because of this mistake, he believed that individual gain and self-interest had come to dominate society. The society which resulted then existed purely to promote the acquisition of wealth rather than the common good. He called for the creation of a functional society that would emphasise the performance of duties rather than the maintenance of rights and give social purpose precedence over material gain. In a healthy society, he believed, there should be duties and obligations to society rather than rights against society. His book Equality (1931) is a damning critique of the class system operating in Britain, and in it he wished for the creation of an equality based on esteem, dignity and what he referred to as common humanity, not class snobbery and undeserved privilege.

  He regarded the definition of liberty as far wider than the right of freedom from restraint. Rather, freedom was the right to act positively for the community and to accept some social rules to prevent the abuse of power. His observations still resonate very powerfully today. This is especially true in our modern era of hyper-consumerism dominated by sophisticated advertising, exhorting everyone to pursue wealth and material gain to the exclusion of all other considerations.

  THE EXPERIENCE OF GOVERNMENT

  From its birth, there has been a pragmatic edge to the ideological positions taken by the Labour Party. It has always fought shy of being too ideological in its approach to the theory of politics and has changed and developed in response to the challenges of being in government. Over time, there have been differing views on the role that nationalisation and state ownership should play in Labour’s political programme. There have been especially fierce arguments about the relative merits of unilateral or multilateral nuclear disarmament, and the Independent Labour Party (ILP) disaffiliated from the Labour Party in 1932 over the latter’s insistence that ILP MPs take the Labour whip and defer to Labour policy rather than their own, usually more left-wing, policy stances. While not particularly focusing on them, Labour has rigorously policed its ideological boundaries when it thought it necessary to do so. After the ILP disaffiliated in the 1930s, the Socialist League was formed by Tribune founder Sir Stafford Cripps to agitate within the party for more left-wing policy positions. It was finally proscribed, and he was temporarily expelled for making a nuisance of himself. The Communist Party of Great Britain tried to affiliate on several occasions but was always rebuffed. In 1933, Labour finally decided that individual membership of the Communist Party would be a bar to joining the party. Attempts at entryism by other far-left parties have periodically caused Labour to act, not least in the 1980s, when the Militant Tendency was expelled.

  Throughout its existence, the Labour Party has encompassed contending approaches to the theory and practice of achieving a socialist society in Britain. Utopian socialists focused on the form an ideal society would take and worked to bring it about initially in experimental miniature. Many Marxists had a ‘scientific’ theory of the economic conditions that had to be achieved before the overthrow of the existing order could bring about the new society. The trade unions tended to be more in
terested initially in improving the pay and working conditions of their members and focused on building their own organisational strength to increase their chances of success. They forged truly working-class institutions that have helped shape our country’s history for the better. They wanted direct representation of the working class in politics as an extension of their belief in self-reliance. The Fabians believed more in an elite rule of the enlightened middle class, using the levers of the state gradually to deliver the transformation required. As Marxism developed and theories about the inevitable overthrow of capitalism were refined, ‘revisionists’ opted for reform rather than revolution. Since Labour had been created explicitly to obtain direct representation in the legislature, it was hardly surprising that the parliamentary road was the one taken by Labour in the UK.

  Following the obvious successes of economic planning in the context of wartime, the Labour Party developed a form of ‘corporate socialism’, which it put into effect alongside creating the NHS and the welfare state after the Second World War. Labour was a victim of its own success in the years that followed. After it had alleviated many of the most egregious hardships of poverty and mass unemployment which were so obvious in the inter-war years of slump and the resulting political volatility, it soon became clear that a different economic approach to the organisation of society was needed to guarantee Labour’s continuing relevance in this rapidly changing world. Labour MP Anthony Crosland focused on equality, opportunity and ending the unfair class system which so distorted opportunity and life chances. He caused outrage in the party by doubting the importance of nationalisation to this project. Harold Wilson returned Labour to power with an appeal for a profound modernisation in the face of a new industrial age forged in the ‘white heat’ of the technological revolution, which he believed Britain must be prepared for. However, catching the zeitgeist in a notable speech and developing a vague commitment to economic planning did not produce a new and successful economic model that would project socialist values into the future. And he struggled to do so in office.

  While the achievements of the Wilson Labour governments were truly impressive in the social sphere, they were not able to cure Britain’s economic ailments. There was a failure to modernise and move on from ossified, backward-looking policy and old shibboleths even though times were rapidly changing. Often Labour resembled a religion bound by an unchanging creed rather than a democratic socialist party with a need to evolve to retain its appeal to voters. As a result, the Labour governments of the 1970s succeeded Ted Heath’s failed Tory experiment with industrial coercion by attempting a social partnership which proved politically unsustainable for long enough. It ran into the sand of temporary prices and incomes policies, public expenditure cuts and rising trade union anger. This paved the way for the election of a reactionary right-wing Tory government led by Mrs Thatcher, which most definitely did have an economic and political plan. The ideas of Friedrich Hayek were now to form the basis of a new settlement, and we are still suffering the baleful consequences.

  As Labour fell into recrimination and internal power struggles, the huge scale and ambition of the radical right-wing project only gradually became clearer. It was nothing less than the end of the post-war consensus and the inauguration of the age of market fundamentalism across the globe. Eighteen years of uninterrupted Conservative rule followed, which dismantled a great many of the gains Crosland had assumed would never be reversed. When Labour finally returned to government in a landslide larger than that achieved in 1945, it was espousing the ‘Third Way’, which sought to accommodate the perceived constraints imposed on democratic socialism by globalisation. Thus, the Third Way accepted the economic conditions as presented – with no thought of trying to influence them. Much of great use was achieved in thirteen years of Labour government, but ‘New Labour’ as a concept was killed by the global financial crisis of 2008. The question to be answered now is: what comes next?

  THE LESSONS OF TONY CROSLAND AND THE FUTURE OF SOCIALISM

  One of the most important contributions to ‘revisionism’ in the UK was Tony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism, published in 1956. It was written when Labour had been out of power for four years, after the 1945 Labour government had achieved the vast majority of its transformational programme and, exhausted by the demands of the war, had run out of steam. The Conservatives had grudgingly accepted Labour’s post-war settlement, especially the creation of the NHS and welfare state. They had even thrown themselves into the resulting house-building effort and focused successfully on wooing the industrial working class, as democratic electoral politics in the post-war era demanded they must.

  Crosland was frustrated that Labour had not used the four years in opposition to think more clearly about how socialism needed to evolve to remain relevant in the rapidly changing circumstances of the new era. He argued that Labour in government had transformed pre-Second World War capitalism out of all recognition and, as a result, socialism too had to be refined to reflect this success. He felt that, despite the huge advances made in dealing with the worst aspects of poverty, social distress and physical squalor still existed, that inequality and class privilege had not been banished, and that public services also needed strengthening to ensure that a fairer society could emerge.

  Crosland felt that the economic insights of J. M. Keynes meant that future slumps could and would be avoided and that growth could be harnessed further to enhance the life opportunities and prospects of all people. He felt that old-style nationalised state monopolies, organised in a top-down ‘Morrisonian’ way, were bad for freedom. He favoured instead what he referred to as diverse, diffuse and pluralist patterns of ownership for industry. He advocated a social revolution in the distribution of property and egalitarian reforms which would alleviate class inequalities, especially in relation to access to private schools and the creation of comprehensive schools. He advocated a fairer distribution of private wealth, and echoed Robert Owen and the early utopian socialists, rather than Sidney Webb, when he suggested updating the very restrictive laws on censorship, divorce, women’s rights and homosexuality, which still made Britain a drab and repressive place in which to live. In a famous dig at Sidney Webb, he drily observed (as a well-known and prodigious drinker himself) that total abstinence and a good filing system are not the right signposts to a socialist utopia.

  The Future of Socialism was widely acclaimed upon publication and still stands as one of the more important attempts by a major political figure in the UK to evolve the notion of what socialism should come to mean after the transformative success of the 1945 Labour government had completely changed the terms of political trade.

  Predictably, the book was viciously attacked by the right-wing Tory press, but it was also attacked by the Labour left. Principally, the left felt it had abandoned nationalisation as the means of reaching socialist ends and was therefore deeply flawed. The Conservatives attacked it because it suggested an evolution of socialist aims which they recognised would be popular and compelling in future electoral contests. It was brimming with ideas on how Labour should move forward in a way that no other contemporary publication achieved. Between 1964 and 1970, Harold Wilson’s Labour government was to implement parts of it, especially its suggestions on social reform. However, educational and class privilege were to prove harder to dismantle.

  Rereading The Future of Socialism today, with hindsight, it is hard to avoid the criticism that it was far too complacent about the prospects of ongoing economic success. It was virtually silent about the rising power of feminism and what was then becoming known as environmentalism. Also, it had no clear theory of the role of the state – an omission which to this day remains uncorrected.

  What also becomes painfully clear upon rereading is that the confident assumption that the progress that had been made towards a fairer society would inevitably be sustained, and, indeed, would continue and deepen, was proved by events to be very wrong. Nevertheless, we can forgive Crosland’s mistake as
a product of his intellectual confidence after Labour’s successful 1945 government, when the tide of history was flowing in the direction of collectivism and state intervention as the way to secure a fairer society. After all, the planned and centralised state implemented in Britain by the National Government during the war had outperformed the Nazi state and, with American support, won the war. Rationing had actually led to a decline in malnutrition among the British population, despite the hardships of war and blockade. Planning for fairer shares for all as well as economic efficiency had become popular since it was so obviously superior to the system of inter-war slump and misery it superseded. At this time, confidence that this success would persist was high, even if ultimately it was not to be proved correct.

  This new post-war consensus, which rejected laissez-faire economics, was dominant and seemingly unassailable. This in turn was because the appalling results of the untrammelled ‘free market’, especially mass unemployment and the rise of fascism and world war, were still all too fresh in the popular memory and few wished for a repeat of the misery it had caused. Moreover, war experience had ensured that civil servants, too, had the confidence to deliver planning effectively, as well as the intellectual underpinning to justify the state doing so.

  Unsurprisingly, Crosland completely failed to spot the intellectual revival in the discredited ideas of laissez-faire economics led by Friedrich Hayek, who published his seminal polemic, The Road to Serfdom, in 1944. And Crosland certainly did not predict the advent of Thatcherism, which was to dismantle bit by bit his overconfidence that the laissez-faire beast had indeed been vanquished for ever.