Notebook: Does Public Ownership Still Matter?

...The New Left is essentially anti-political, The unions are stodgy...

...In his own words, "It outlines a program of radical social-democratic reform for the middle 1960s...

...Fabianism is indeterminate as between socialism and liberal radicalism, and he can thus claim to be in a respectable tradition...

...Oddly enough, exactly the same argument applies if such an operation were performed by a Labor government—as is perhaps more likely...

...On this point M. Mendes-France—a Keynesian liberal-socialist if ever there was one —is more realistic, and more pragmatic, than Mr...

...Cape...

...In a sense it is unfair to Mr...

...None of these demands are specifically socialist, and Point Nine ("An abatement of national sovereignty, in the long run in favor of world government, in the short run in favor of Europe—even at the cost of loosening Commonwealth links") would have gone down better at the last Liberal conference than it seems to have done at the last Labor conference...

...It is by no means clear, though, whether even so modest an aim as the imposi tion of a planned economy guaranteeing full emlpoyment and a more rapid rate of growth can be reached without drastic measures of nationalization designed to shift the balance of the "mixed" economy from the private to the publicly owned sector...

...Crosland has told us what to look for...

...Henry Smith's observations in The Economics of Socialism Reconsidered: a work on which it would be interesting to have Mr...

...and "public squalor" can be righted short of effective state control over the economy...

...Indeed, if Britain does eventually "join Europe," the Conservatives will have no choice in the matter...

...Crosland, it must be stressed, is convinced that his list of desiderata adds up to something that "a radical, progressive, revisionist Labor party" could and should put forward as an alternative to traditional "Clause Four" socialism...

...What would really undermine its hold —a major shift in the ownership of property—is precisely the thing he regards as unnecessary...

...The emphasis being on radicalism, the enemy quite naturally is defined as "conservatism...

...30s.] carries the operation a stage further: in applying the "revisionist" doctrine to a variety of topical issues he has suggested the practical steps to be taken by a Labor government in the present decade to make Britain more democratic and (if possible) more socialist...

...The conflict between the parties must be about something else...

...Galbraith's rather modest program— a diversion of resources from private to public spending—now turns out to be requisite for economic as well as social reasons: it is not simply a matter of providing more public housing and better amenities, but of coping with massive structural unemployment...

...Setting aside utopian goals of complete equality and total socialization, the current political line-up has to do with how much plan ping there should be, and who should be in charge of the machinery...

...What will then become of respectable radicalism...

...But it must take some form that is recognizably different from either private entrepreneurship or corporate management...

...We would then have a "Swedish" situation: doubtless a great improvement on the current state of affairs, but somehow not quite what is meant by socialism...

...ism has not crept very fast or very far...

...Like the country itself, it is parochial and inward-looking...

...Outside the United States this is now taken for granted...

...It is the opponents, not the supporters, of nationalization who are being doctrinaire on this point...

...There is no longer anything specifically socialist about the notion that the state should intervene to maintain a volume of total demand adequate to sustain full employment...

...The difficulty with Mr...

...Creeping social...

...It is, however, regrettable that in his understandable anxiety to supply a rationale for the acceptance of the mixed economy as desirable and progressive, he has blurred the importance of public ownership...

...The article which follows, by a long-standing contributor to DISSENT and one of the keenest commentators on current political issues, refers primarily to the situation in England but has an obvious general relevance...

...Gaitskell on a recent occasion described as "an independent foreign policy...

...It is suspicious of foreigners and indifferent to Europe...

...But even on the bleak assumption that progress towards full socialism so defined is ruled out for the present (notably in a country so heavily dependent on foreign trade as Britain), it remains important to specify who is to run the planned economy which even Conservatives are beginning to admit is the only alternative to chronic stagnation...

...Crosland's essay collection is an interesting contribution to this debate...

...Yet M. Mendes-France is not a Marxist...

...The need to labor this rather obvious theme arises paradoxically from Mr...

...His recent pronouncements in La Republique Moderne (a work curiously neglected in England) envisage not merely drastic constitutional change and a movement away from traditional parliamentary rule, but an expansion of the public sector such as to give it the dominant role in the economy: thereby enabling the central authorities to plan in real earnest...

...What• ever may be said about the growth of managerialism, this is ultimately a political issue: in other words, a question of power...

...It is reprinted, with one or two minor deletions, from the New Statesman, with permission.—Ed...

...It looks as though the investors' strike will have to be broken...

...The current growth of quasisocialist tendencies on the left wing of American liberalism (an interesting parallel to the corresponding British phenomenon before 1914) is directly related to the discovery that national planning demands a much higher de gree of governmental regulation...

...Doubtless there would be fewer institutional obstacles in England if unemployment became really serious...

...His major work, The Future of Socialism, brought the Fabian doctrine up to date and supplied the rationale for the post-I955 attempt to define the Labor party's aims in terms of the mixed economy and the welfare state...

...If this should turn out to be the case, it would cut the ground from under socialist expectations: at any rate if socialism is identified with substantial social equality and the gradual ending of economic conflict...

...Crosland lists here 11 topical proposals ranging from a capital gains tax and expansion of town planning and social welfare, via educational reform, to "racial equality and an effective program of foreign aid...

...It may be said that all this is more relevant to the United States than to Britain, and that after all it is not Mr...

...Anthony Crosland is the ablest and most persuasive spokesman of the British Labor party's "New Right," notably that section of it which is also pro-European and skeptical of what Mr...

...Crosland's fault if the Kennedy Administration has hitherto not applied even the ordinary Keynesian remedies...

...Here one encounters an equivocation: although conservatism "is naturally most visible in the shape of the Conservative party," its true source is "a certain national mood of stagnation and dislike of change...

...His new essay collection [The Conservative Enemy...

...Yet in the end one is obliged to ask what exactly is being revised...

...Grimond's Liberal party...

...Crosland's opinion, the more so since it supplies some rather depressing pointers to the conclusion that, for the present anyhow, the electorates of highly industrialized countries are unlikely to want more than full employment and the welfare state...

...This mood, one gathers, is also to be encountered on the Left and among the unions...

...After all, few people have ever seriously supposed that the Labor party—as distinct from its socialist wing—is really committed to anything beyond the socialdemocratic program...

...Very likely socialization need not everywhere take the form of nationalization— in the traditional sense...

...Crosland's social-democratic program commits him to...

...Leaving aside the quarrel over Europe, this book can be said to formulate the "revisionist" credo with greater clarity and consistency than the other writings of the school...

...What he says on the subject lacks the intellectual rigor of Mr...

...But this merely underscores the point that a moderately progressive and intelligent Tory government could do most of the things he wants done, without effecting those basic changes to which socialists are traditionally committed...

...Keynes, Galbraith, the New Frontier—all these are now among the pillars of the New Liberalism...

...Mr...

...No Tory could accept either its implications for taxation policy, the level of government spending, and the extent of public control, or its challenge to traditional mystiques about the rights of inheritance, the importance of elites, orthodox "morality," national sovereignty, and the British Commonwealth— generally, indeed, to the whole ossified, middle-class, stagnant, complacent, class-conscious conservatism of British society...

...Still, it might be an adequate goal for the remainder of the 1960s, and to be fair, it is all that Mr...

...Mr...

...Its value fortunately does not depend on his uncritical admiration for Galbraith, nor on his involvement with transitory factional alignments within the Labor party...

...Many of these points in fact are acceptable to Conservatives of the HeathMacleod kind, though doubtless the Tory party is not ideally constituted as an instrument of radical reform...

...Moreover it does not lead to the conclusion that public ownership is irrelevant...

...Crosland...

...If he fails to make it plain (at any rate to this reviewer) where he sees the dividing line between a "mixed" economy and a "planned" one, he is in all other respects sufficiently clear-cut and consistent to sustain a principled commitment to radical "revisionism...

...Crosland's position indeed is not that he is "revisionist" with respect to Marxism—after all the Labor party has never been Marxist—but that his reformist zeal is not easy to tell apart from the more advanced notions held by radical Liberals...

...Crosland to labor this point...

...indeed he has gone out of his way to affirm that the need for a centrally controlled socialist planned economy can be demonstrated on empirical grounds alone...

...He is an enthusiastic admirer of Galbraith, to the point of accepting rather uncritically the notion that American so ciety—and at a remove Western European society—has become, or is becoming, "affluent" in the sense that real poverty has almost disappeared and basic inequalities are diminishing...

...Still, it has already swallowed the principle of national planning...

...Indeed the whole Galbraithian concern with amenities as against necessities begins to seem frivolous against the current menacing backdrop of stagnation...

...We may awake one day to find that Toryism has transmuted itself into something like a Christian-Democratic party with a trade-union wing...

...The residual demand for it is, he thinks, a vestige of Marxism...

...Generally, the Labor party has so far failed to generate the 'new frontiers' enthusiasm which President Kennedy once inspired...

...He is almost certainly mistaken: the Conservative party could in principle accept practically all his demands and still retain control of the country...

...It would be straining the evidence to say that Mr...

...The latter may be summed up in the terms "full employment" and "the welfare state," to which Keynesian economics has added the discovery that the market economy left to itself, tends to equilibrate below the optimum level...

...In that case the Tories must be regarded as full-blooded Marxists, for the one thing they seem determined to prevent is a drastic change in the social balance which would transfer the power of decision-making frQm private firms to public authorities...

...Furthermore we now know, thanks to the studies undertaken by Lampman and Kolko, that the shift towards greater income equality in America came to an end about a decade ago: a date perhaps not unconnected with the subsequent slowdown in economic growth...

...Even in a mixed economy it makes a difference whether the public sector is large enough to permit effective planning from the center...

...That this can be done by tinkering with the monetary mechanism, without a paral lel expansion of the public sector and a consequent shift in the balance of social forces, is just the kind of antiquated liberal illusion which it is the proper business of socialists—Fabians or Marxians—to correct...

...The traditional "Left" is conservative in a different and more pernicious way, clinging to an outdated semi-Marxist analysis of society in terms of ownership...

...Wide ranging, gracefully phrased, and agreeably literate and anti-philistine in tone, these essays make excellent reading, even though half the time one catches oneself wondering where exactly this pragmatic reformism differs from the new radicalism of Mr...

...This is far too optimistic a picture even fox the United States (since The Affluent Society was published, the Kennedy Administration has been embarrassed by persistent structural unemployment and virtual economic stagnation...

...Admittedly this need not everywhere take the form of public ownership, but on pragmatic grounds it is difficult to see how the balance between "private affluence" (for a minority—and not even a large one...

...Crosland's wholehearted commitment to the Galbraithian proposition that what is required is a major shift from private to public expenditure...