The Dilemmas of "Revisionist" Social Democracy

...The low growth rate of its first three years in office was the result...

...The unexpected resilience of the traditional Left, in other words, is not just an irritating quirk of social history...

...Abuse from the German New Left has not cost Willy Brandt a single vote...

...Ten years ago, most revisionists took it for granted that affluence would produce DAVID MARQUAND embourgeoisement, and that embourgeoisement would sustain revisionism...

...In depressing contrast to its precursors of ten years ago, the student Left of today appears to have turned its back on the hard work of social and political analysis in favor of the delights of political protest and an emotional communion of souls...

...By definition, such a government would refuse to give in...

...Consciously or unconsiciously, those who used it—like those who used the parallel argument in favor of maintaining a British presence in the Far East—still thought of Britain as a world power, with a world role and world responsibilities...

...Even in Britain, where Hugh Gaitskell failed to persuade his party to repudiate its formal commitment to wholesale public ownership, the Left was emotionally and intellectually on the defensive...

...and that, too, is now much less obvious than it was in the late 1950s and early 1960s...

...Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Harold Wilson—the faces are different, but the policy is the same...

...Its symbols and rallying cries were echoes from the past, not signposts to the future...

...The result is that revisionist democratic socialists now face a much more difficult task than they did ten years ago...

...Even so, a government that would attempt to carry out its program in defiance of the international economic system, of which this country is a part, would almost certainly be forced into totalitarian paths...

...The government is savagely attacked, both by what I have called the traditional Left and the New Left...

...Then their opponents were a forlorn and dwindling minority of activists, clinging to traditional beliefs less because they seriously hoped to carry them into effect than because they could not bear the thought of giving them up...

...Hence its refusal to devalue the pound in 1964, when it inherited the Conservative balance of payments deficit, and in 1966, when it became clear that it could only maintain the $2.80 parity at the cost of severe deflation...

...and the political muscle of the far Left, as well as its emotional fervor, comes from the campus revolutionists in the New Left...

...t , SPECTER is haunting Europe," A mocked Anthony Crosland in an attack on the traditional Left of the British Labour party nearly ten years ago, "the specter of revisionism...

...There is no doubt at all they are at least as potent in the advanced and thriving automobile industry, for example, as in "traditional" industries like the docks or coal mines...

...The labor movement came into existence as an alliance between the organized working class and the radical intelligentsia...

...It does not prove that the left-wing critique of the Wilson government is wrong...

...The old slogans of the class war have acquired a different psychological meaning from what they had 30 years ago, but they have not lost their power...

...But there is another trap, of an opposite kind...

...But although the revisionist road remains the only road toward a fairer and more humane society in Western Europe and North America, a disquietingly large proportion of the radical intelligentsia no longer seems to want it...

...It was British socialists like Anthony Crosland and John Strachey who developed the most comprehensive critique of the traditional Marxist belief in the inevitability of the class war and the necessity of wholesale nationalization...

...The revisionists had the self-confidence and the elan, as well as the arguments...

...Except to the eye of love, its hopes, its policies, and its social and economic assumptions were all patently irrelevant to the society it purported to want to change...

...T T HE IMPLICATIONS are clear...

...For the New Left has taken the traditional Left's analysis to its logical conclusion...

...Five years later, after the withdrawal from east of Suez and the devaluation of 1967, the old bugle calls no longer sound through the corridors of Westminster and Whitehall...

...But in France the Communist party has kept its share of the working-class vote despite ten years of rising living standards...

...It is to ensure that growth is export-led...

...But this only proves that the left-wing alternative is no pleasanter than the present strategy...

...The conclusion drawn by the New Left is that it should be replaced...

...The truth is more prosaic and infinitely more complicated...

...And it has done all this because the foreign bankers have forced it to, as the price for supporting sterling...

...and if it is to be carried out at all, it will have to be carried out by the revisionist wing of the Labour party...

...It has imposed a wage freeze on the trade unions and flirted with legislation against unofficial strikes...

...Parties of the Right can afford to do without intellectuals, because they can afford to do without ideas...

...In terms of political power, the revisionist analysis has been triumphantly vindicated...

...In Britain, at least, rising living standards have not led to embourgeoisement, except in the most trivial sense...

...he offers, from a "revisionist" point of view, some notable revisions of "revisionist" doctrine...

...The crucial argument against devaluation was not strictly economic or strictly political, but a mixture of the two...

...A vital link in the revisionist chain is missing...

...but it could reasonably be expected to fall off of its own accord...

...Socialist aims can only be achieved by consent: consent can only be obtained by working within existing society, and trying to modify it piecemeal...

...What it does mean is that we can no longer take our constituency for granted...

...the lesson was part of the environment in which I grew up...

...Bernard Rosenberg, an editor of DISSENT who spent last year in England, has some caustic things to say which parallel the views of the traditional Labour Left...

...A party which accepts the need to win over a majority in the society risks absorbing the values of that society, and may become an apologist for the system it came into existence to change...

...Instead of being applauded for sticking to its socialist guns, however, it has been DAVID MARQUAND bitterly attacked for cutting working-class living standards...

...All socialist parties have to steer between the Scylla of "revolutionary" sectarianism and the Charybdis of "democratic" complacency...

...but the traditional, quasi-Marxist Left remains firmly extrenched in the trade unions, and won at least two major victories at the latest TUC Congress this September...

...Britain, it was said, was not India or even France...

...The left-wing answer is simple: because the bankers have prevented it from carrying out an expansionist policy...

...The task of a socialist government was to be two-fold: first, to produce a higher rate of growth, and second, to spend the proceeds on attacking the Galbraithian imbalance between private affluence and public squalor...

...But even now the adjustment is incomplete...

...David Marquand is a young Labour MP, and one of the most stimulating publicists of the movement...

...The same applies, though for different reasons, to the upsurge of the revolutionary New Left...

...This government was able to soften the blow involved in putting this situation right by borrowing abroad...

...The traditional Left in this country eschews violence, and is firmly committed to parliamentary methods...

...In a democracy, this can only be done if the majority —or at least a significant part of the majority— agree...

...All Labour governments are weak and cowardly...

...and they are weak and cowardly because the Labour party itself is weak and cowardly...

...Put at its lowest, the alienation of a significant proportion of the left-wing intelligentsia of the developed world from the only left-wing parties with any hope of holding power would be a tragic human loss...

...On the contrary, there is some evidence— albeit sketchy and impressionistic—that they appeal more strongly to the generation grown up since the war than they do to those who actually lived through depression and mass unemployment...

...If it does not even take part in the voyage, the rest of us are that much more likely to drift—just as disastrously—in the opposite direction...

...sterling was a major reserve currency...

...At the same time, the traditional Marxist or quasi-Marxist Left has turned out to be a good deal more resilient than most revisionists expected...

...For the forseeable future, left-wing parties will still need working-class votes if they are to have any hope of achieving power...

...If the student Left got its hands on the tiller, the labor movement would be heading for Scylla inside two minutes...

...Industrial workers would continue to have conflicts of interest with shareholders or managers, and it would still be necessary for them to defend their interests by belonging to trade unions and voting for left-wing parties...

...They recognized that it would be a long and difficult task to convert the rest of the labor movement, but they had little doubt they would do so in the end or that, having done so, they would gradually reshape British so ciety in the image of reformist social democracy...

...This argument, it is important to note, was not wholly without foundation...

...The government's unwillingness to devalue in 1964 or 1966, moreover, was not the result of some sinister capitalist conspiracy...

...The reason, of course, is that in order to allow public expenditure to increase in this way it has been necessary to keep down the increase in private consumption to a much lower rate than that of the recent past...

...The affluent worker who owns a car and a washing machine does not, for that reason, think of himself as middle-class or adopt middle-class values...

...This plan envisaged that public expenditure would increase at approximately the same rate as the national income...

...What the revisionists said is as true now as when they first said it...

...But he is useless and dangerous because he is irrelevant to the problems of an advanced industrial society, not because he is irrelevant to the mid-twentieth century...

...It is still as true as it was ten years ago that—outside the Third World, and perhaps even there—the alternative to revisionist democratic socialism is not revolution, but reaction...

...Despite recurrent "cuts" in spending programs, however, public expenditure as a whole has grown at approximately the forecast rate...

...This does not mean that revisionist social democrats should make any concessions to their opponents on the far Left...

...Britain was a major trading nation...

...It is a major political challenge...

...But it is irrelevant in a different way—in space, not time...

...If revisionism makes sense anywhere, it ought to make sense in Britain: if its claims are valid at all, they ought to be borne out by the record of a British government in which so many distinguished revisionists hold high office...

...Can this be done...

...Labour's program in the 1964 election consisted of two parts...

...Under this government public expenditure has in fact increased—both absolutely and as a proportion of the national income...

...But the survival of traditional, class-war attitudes makes it much more difficult to create an effective coalition— capable of appealing at the same time to a diminishing army of blue-collar workers and a growing army of white-collar ones —than it seemed ten years ago...

...A British devaluation—unlike an Indian or ENGLAND, OUR ENGLAND French one—might cause such chaos in the international monetary system that the whole world would be the poorer, including Britain herself...

...T T HESE PROPHECIES have been borne out only in part...

...The British Labour party is the strongest social democratic party in the world...

...A socialist party which tries to achieve its aims by force ends as a totalitarian monstrosity, as the Russian Bolsheviks did...

...It is useless and self-defeating to work within the Labour party and try to push it to the left...

...Most socialists would probably agree that the second part of this program, which said that the fruits of growth should be spent on attacking inequality and injustice, was much more distinctively "socialist" than the first part, which merely said that the sluggish growth rate Britain had enjoyed under the Conservatives should be increased...

...The government has had to disinflate the economy to prevent a runaway boom, which would erode the competitive advantage devaluation brought and frustrate the necessary switch of resources to exports...

...But although this neo-Marxist revivalism need not be taken seriously, politically or intellectually, it should be taken very seriously in less obvious ways...

...The Galbraithian imbalance can only be put right by increasing public expenditure...

...The answer is that it can, but in a curiously paradoxical way...

...But there is nothing odd about that...

...In many industries, the effective representatives of working-class opinion—the shop stewards who wield power in day-today negotiation with employers—still use the old slogans as a bargaining weapon, and get results by doing so...

...But there will be fewer workingclass votes to win, and as a result, the Left will increasingly have to appeal to other ENGLAND, OUR ENGLAND sections of the population as well...

...What is needed, says the New Left, is an entirely new movement...

...They no longer beckon men to a utopian future, but they still give an edge of bitterness to the ordinary conflicts of industrial life and, in doing so, sustain the old psychology of "us" and "them...

...We hope for further comment on these topics, since they reflect a deep-going crisis within the socialist movement, not only of England but of many European countries.—ED...

...It was this misunderstanding— honorable, moving, sometimes even noble—which lay behind the government's foreign and economic policies from 1964 to 1967...

...Since devaluation, the rate of growth has been high by British standards...

...Nevertheless, it was based on a disastrous misunderstanding...

...Revisionists hold or have held ministerial office in three of the four largest countries in Western Europe...

...Politically and militarily, Britain's retreat from empire was almost complete by 1964...

...The conclusion the traditional Left draws from its analysis of the failures of the present government is that the Labour party should return to its old socialist faith...

...among the radical young, the specters haunting Europe are those of Che Guevara, Her ENGLAND, OUR ENGLAND bert Marcuse, and (even more astonishingly) Mao Tse-tung...

...A significant proportion of the working class has adopted a middle-class style of life without adopting middle-class values...

...Socialist parties were abandoning their old belief in the class war and the expropriation of the property owner...

...For that very reason, this record is already a matter of intense controversy...

...But they were right in thinking that a low rate of growth would fortify them both...

...In any case, it was not only the irrelevance of revolutionary socialism that crippled the far Left often years ago...

...Psychologically it had barely begun...

...A cut in current consumption of the size that would be necessary is almost inconceivable in a democracy in peacetime...

...If this is true of the Wilson government, it would presumably be true of any socialist government...

...Ten years later, Crosland's mockery has a hollow ring...

...It was also its inhumanity and immorality...

...If the socialist government concerned were more radical than the Wilson government, the holders of economic power would be even more hostile...

...Foreign bankers are, after all, capitalists...

...The reason the Wilson government has had to pay so much attention to confidence factors is that for some years the British people have been consuming too much of their national income, and exporting too little...

...In other words, the government has carried out a much greater shift of resources from the private sector to the public than it promised to do...

...The class war is no longer fought with cavalry...

...The left wing of the Parliamentary Labour party, which sustains the Wilson government in power as it previously sustained the Attlee and MacDonald governments, is as guilty as the right wing...

...And in a society that has grown accustomed to a steady and apparently automatic increase in private consumption, a sudden fall in the rate of increase seems like an infringement on natural justice...

...The paradox is that the government has been far more successful in carrying out the second part of the program than in carrying out the first, and that it is precisely because of this that it has been so bitterly attacked by the Left...

...I did not need to learn from history books that even an unjust society is usually better than anarchy, that force and terror are inseparable from revolution, and that revolutions devour their children...

...But the purpose of the exercise is not to hold back growth...

...They were wrong in thinking that the class war would end of its own accord...

...Growth and social justice do go hand in hand—though not for the reasons the revisionists imagined...

...Far more than French Gaullists, British Conservatives, or German Christian Democrats, it drew its inspiration from a mythical golden age when villains were really villainous and heroes really heroic...

...Thirty years ago, the labor movement represented a great army of "have-nots," confronting a minority of "haves...

...It enjoys the fruits of welfare capitalism, but it angrily disputes its legitimacy...

...Nor do the slogans appeal only to those with personal experience of the bad old days, or evoke a response only in obsolescent industries suffering from the effects of technological change...

...The New Left, however, goes much further...

...But a government that decided to ignore confidence factors altogether would no longer be able to borrow...

...Emotionally, I came at the tail end of the generation whose hopes were betrayed in the Spanish Civil War, the generation that liberated Belsen and Buchenwald and learned where the exaltation of emotion at the expense of reason could lead, and that watched in horror while the social democrats of Eastern Europe were murdered...

...It was the result of a complex network of attitudes and emotions—to be found in every social class and every political party...

...It was the 1945 Labour government which finally proved that socialist aims could be translated into action without violence or terror—not only in remote New Zealand or placid Sweden, but even in a large and notoriously conservative country...

...But although the messianic vision that once lay behind the slogans of the class war has evaporated, it has left a harsh sediment not likely to disappear in the near future...

...The Wilson government, says the Left, has sacrificed the interests of the working class to the demands of international finance...

...It is a more difficult challenge than any it has yet faced...

...Revisionist or quasi-revisionist leaders are firmly in control in most important social democratic parties...

...Revisionism was in the ascendant in Holland, West Germany, and Scandinavia...

...Those who do, no longer display the self-confidence of ten years ago...

...We must recognize that the traditional Left is not going to drown in a sea of refrigerators and television sets...

...In my own case, for example, though I was only nineteen the year Stalin died, the labor camps, the show trials, and even the Kronstadt rising were somehow part of my own immediate political experience...

...Parties of the Left which try to emulate them end up as bodies without heads...

...It would do so as an increasingly bureaucratic and conservative political machine, not as a vehicle for social change...

...in terms of the long history of socialist theory it represents not so much a dead end as a Gadarene leap...

...That environment no longer exists...

...Borrowing from the revisionist analysis of the late 1950s, the party had put its faith in economic growth, as the necessary prerequisite for social reform...

...It has introduced charges in some social services and cut down expenditure in others...

...in some respects it is even more guilty...

...The old, embittered ghosts still walk...

...This is not a task for which the old myths of proletarian solidarity or new dreams of a British Cuba are likely to be of much use...

...abuse from its equivalents in Britain would benefit Harold Wilson far more than harm him...

...This has not invalidated the rest of the revisionist analysis, but it has made the revisionist position much more uncomfortable politically than most revisionists expected...

...Then why has this government not produced a much higher rate of growth...

...Instead, the army has entrenched itself in the mud of a psychological Western Front...

...The real enemy of the traditional Left, it has turned out, is not the disappearance of traditional workingclass attitudes produced by rising living standards, but the disappearance of traditional working-class occupations produced by technical change...

...And the moral of the last five years of British history is that the majority are not going to agree unless the overall rate of growth is high enough for their own living standards to improve in absolute terms while the redistribution is carried out...

...N ANY SUCH STRUGGLE, the record of the ' present Labour government in Britain seems certain to be one of the main bones of contention...

...A party which combines a revolutionary ideology with democratic methods ends with the worst of both worlds, as the German Social Democrats did before 1914...

...Ten years ago, the horrors of Stalinism were alive and real, even to the younger generation of socialists...

...The strongest card of the far Left was nostalgia...

...The Labour party might continue to hold power without a single intellectual in its ranks...

...A significant proportion of the working class still responds to the old, classwar slogans, but even so, the working class is steadily dwindling...

...If even ENGLAND, OUR ENGLAND the Wilson government has been forced to water down its already inadequate program by the need to conciliate foreign holders of sterling, a left-wing socialist government would be under much greater pressure to do the same...

...In particular, it must rebut the two central charges—that the government has failed to carry even its own reformist program into practice, and that it has failed to do this because economic power is still in the hands of its enemies...

...The ideology of the student Left is as irrelevant to contemporary industrial society as the ideology of the traditional Left in the 1950s...

...In West Germany, it is true, traditional Marxism seems to be as discredited as ever...

...If revisionism is to mount an effective counterattack on the far Left, it must rebut that critique more positively than I have tried to do so far...

...The values it appears to exalt are nonintellectual, if not anti-intellectual...

...Nor does it present a significant threat in terms of ideas...

...The two articles below present sharply different judgments—though at some points similar analyses—of the problems of the British Labour government...

...Crosland was the leading theorist on the right wing of the party, and his boast seemed well-founded...

...The terror and tragedy of the thirties and forties seem as remote to a generation that was not even born at the time of the Berlin blockade as the Boer War seemed to me— or as the terror and tragedy of the French Revolution seemed by 1848...

...It is doubtful that the traditional Left—either in the trade unions or in the Labour party—looks forward in any serious sense to the disappearance of the capitalist system, or expects to take part in an apocalyptic "final conflict" with the bourgeoisie...

...In terms of votes at general elections and seats in parliaments, it presents no threat...

...What it did not do was to accompany that strategy with a strategy for the balance of payments...

...In Britain, as in the U.S., by far the ugliest feature of the affluent society is the cruel and growing gap between certain minorities of poor people— the old, the disabled, the mentally retarded, the parents of large families, the possessors of colored skins—and a comfortable majority...

...When the government came into power, it produced a National Plan covering the period from 1965 to 1970...

...In doing so, the Left critique runs, it has disproved the most important part of the whole revisionist argument...

...The central proposition, common to both, is that the Wilson government has been prevented from carrying out socialist policies because the levers of economic power—in Britain, and still more abroad—are in the hand of its enemies...

...This disagreement is of more than academic interest...

...None of this is true today...

...We must face the fact that many of those whom we expected to follow in our footsteps find our ideas barren and our values corrupt...

...All over Western Europe, the traditional Marxist Left was on the defensive...

...Today, the "havenots" are a minority...

...We must, in short, reopen the old struggle against revolutionary utopianism and class-war dogmatism which DAVID MARQUAND we thought our intellectual ancestors had won long ago...

...And the misunderstanding was, and is, at least as common on the left wing of the labor movement as on the right...

...That gap cannot be closed merely by soaking the rich, however desirable soaking the rich may be on other grounds...

...Rising living standards, they argued, would diminish felt inequalities and lower-class barriers...

...Like the un fortunate 1929 government, in fact, the Wilson government has discovered that it is not possible to carry out a socialist program when the "commanding heights" of economic power are in nonsocialist hands...

...In the event, the national income has grown much more slowly than the government hoped...

...The world role has gone: but it has been replaced by a vacuum...

...they cannot be expected to approve of a socialist government, and they have been determined to prevent it from carrying out socialist policies...

...Both are still essen tial to success, if success is defined in any but the most superficial way...

...It can only be closed by a deliberate redistribution of income, away from the comfortable and toward the poor...

...Sterling was a major reserve currency: Britain's devaluation did cause a much greater disturbance to the international monetary system than other devaluations have done...

...It has held back economic growth and allowed unemployment to rise...

...Emotionally, though not intellectually, revisionism is on the defensive now...

...The difficulties which today's revisionist social democrats face in confronting the traditional Left are different, but almost as great...

...In particular, it failed to reckon with the possibility that a high rate of growth at home would be incompatible with the existing exchange rate...

...But as their style of life approximated more and more closely that of the middle class, the bitter memories of the past would subside and the slogans of the class war lose their appeal...

...This is the real moral of the last five years...

...If devaluation succeeds—and the signs are that it will— Britain will at last be able to escape from the balance-of-payments straitjacket that has condemned her to a low rate of growth since the middle fifties...

...Che Guevara is as useless a symbol for the labor movement in Western Europe and North America as the Paris Commune or the Petrograd Soviet were...

...and on a superficial view, policy-makers are thoroughly reconciled to their disappearance...

...Before 1964, the Labour party had worked out a reasonably comprehensive strategy for modernizing and restructuring the British economy...

...They were right in believing that a political party that continued to wage it would be doomed to sterility...

...There is a dilemma at the heart of gradualist social democracy which has to be faced anew in every generation...

...It was, no doubt, an albatross upon the labor movement...

...and the only alternative would be a drastic cut in consumption, which would make the measures introduced by the present Chancellor of the Exchequer look like chicken feed...

...in Italy the Communists have gained voters at the expense of the Socialists...

...But this would entail far more hardship for the British people than the fairly mild austerities inflicted on them in the last five years...

...The weakness and cowardice of the Wilson government, says the New Left, are not accidental...

...So far, the traditional Left and the New Left agree...

...The revisionists of ten years ago were wrong in thinking that a high rate of growth would automatically induce social inequality and class tension...

...The most urgent task for the British Left is to make sure that the vacuum is filled by it and not by its enemies...

...In Britain, the Communist party is as impotent electorally as always...

...Beneath all the sound and fury, one criticism stands out...