British Labor in Retrospect

...c) institution of controls over the private sector of the national economy...

...Most significant of all in the attitude of the Tories and the bourgeoisie is their recognition that, in the words of Professor Arthur Lewis of the University of Manchester, "Nothing can be done without the consent of the workers...

...The schema described by Lucien Laurat in his study of planified economy and socialization (l'Economie Dirigee et Socialisation) would seem to have found a classic expression in Great Britain...

...THE REACTION TO THE LABOR GOVERNMENT'S weaknesses and the disappointment that followed upon its defeat provoked a still unsolved Winter 1954 • DISSENT • 83 crisis in the party's ranks, of which the most dramatic outward sign is the rise of the Bevan group...

...Aware that "politics is the art of the possible," the Conservatives are prepared to yield and thus to avoid any challenge to the Winer 1954 • DISSENT • 77 property relations in the non-statified eighty per cent of the national economy, or to the decisive industries of that sector...

...that the people, hardened by the danger they had been in, like seamen after a storm is over, were more wicked and more stupid, more bold and hardened in their vices and immoralities than they were before...

...Outwardly contradictory, these statements by two different writers touch in reality upon different aspects of the Labor Party's crisis...

...But this, if true, is only a partial explanation...

...power and authority will reside in the collectivized economy operated from above...

...The structure of British society did change, and in many important ways...

...In a work whose importance is insufficiently recognized (Le Socialisme contre l'Etat) the old Social Democratic theoretician Emile Vandervelde makes a fundamental distinction between Statism in which authority and the governing of men exists side by side with state control over cartels, trade unions and the main industries...

...And since the Tories have returned to power there have been few or no startling decreases in bureaucratic regulations or any of those restrictions and nuisances which they claimed were peculiar to the socialist mentality...

...In neither of these documents is it possible to find a strictly socialist content...

...On the one hand, the movement itself...

...I don't claim, and I don't know who does, that that would solve anything in itself...

...Those who have studied the problem of industrial democracy—in England this means principally the Fabian Society—recognize that most important of all for the success of nationalization is what takes place in the mine pits, the workshops and the depots or centers of transportation...

...relations based upon reciprocity and which develop in the intellectual and moral consciousness norms of activity capable of aiding the transformation of society itself...

...But what image did the Tories propose in its place...

...It will have to assure, likewise, a sufficient quantity of products so that everyone will have enough...

...The weight of the entire system not only favors a profound solidarity of the different social categories but also facilitates a doctrinal drawing-together which, for six years now, has seen the Labor Party progressively renounce its socialist conquests and content itself with a simple "planning" program while, for their part, the Tories foresee only an extremely moderate return to free enterprise...

...the other raises the question of the programmatic and doctrinal weaknesses of the same movement, its difficulty, if not incapacity, to adopt a new perspective when the old has foundered...

...It neither wanted to nor could conceive of the organization of a full-production economy...

...If it wants to return to power it had better count not upon the imperfections of the Churchill government, but upon a new affirmation of the socialist ideal...

...and no compromise was possible...

...The point of departure seems to be the individual...

...Economists understand, naturally, that real profits are distributed under the guise of dividends to holders of preferred stocks, not to holders of common stocks...

...A symptom of this low morale is the desire to flee the dirt, boredom and general sadness of life in the great industrial centers of England...

...They were applied by a government representing the working class...

...The Labor Government did not establish those new social relations within industry or society as a whole which characterize socialism...

...and it has, therefore, next to nothing in common with Trotsky's slogan of "workers' control of industry" the exact sense of which he never defined except in a political way, as a slogan for the revolutionary seizure of power...

...In his book Socialization, Serban Voinea declares that this preliminary condition for socialism already existed in Great Britain toward the end of the Labor regime...

...If we may describe the objectives of workers' participation in management as being the creation of a feeling of freedom among the workers, the feeling of collaborating in a common cause...

...Bevanism was the instinctive response, the elementary reflex of the Labor Party to the dilemma it has been in since 1950, to stagnation and conservatism manifested by the government and party alike, to the dwindling away of the spirit and dynamism of 1945...

...Britain's bankruptcy and the liquidation of its world holdings at the end of the war naturally placed before both parties common problems and imposed a common, limiting framework in which to work out solutions...

...The phenomenon of socialization [as against mere nationalization of industry under bureaucratic state control] must become generalized and embrace the entire society," writes Serban Voinea, a Rumanian socialist theoretician...

...Vandervelde recognized the necessity and usefulness of state intervention in the first, transitory phases of socialist construction, but he urged that the success of the socialist experiment would depend on the rapidity with which this transitory phase was replaced by a genuinely socialist phase in which the workers managed industry, consumers were organized as articulate groups, and democratic mass participation reached unprecedented heights...

...life drab, circumscribed, miserable...

...This was the most important difference between the two parties in the post-war period...

...Under such a system every government must hold a position of strength...

...See C. Zweig, Labor, Life and Poverty...

...If this group of Labor deputies tried to present a constructive motion of its own making on the question of rearmament it would find it extremely difficult—if not impossible—to come to an agreement...

...THE PORTRAIT OF THE AVERAGE English citizen under the Labor regime may be sketched as follows, according to Conservative standards: an individual overwhelmed by taxation, starved for meat, harassed by an all pervading government bureaucracy, and living in a house (if the govern ment's promise to build one had been kept) that was always poorly heated...

...This patronizing statement abandons, of course, any of the classical definitions of socialism...

...This experience has ended in a partial social check and a major political defeat...

...This means that classic reformism, at least in Great Britain, had changed together with capitalism itself...

...is not this the sense of the new "Elizabethan epoch" now being presented to the world...

...They have lost their dynamic qualities and appear exhausted by the enormous responsibilities they had to assume...

...The workers remained faithful to Labor .. . a prompt revenge may be expected...

...it can be instituted only stage by stage, with measures that cannot be anticipated in advance...

...The Winter 1954 • DISSENT • 87 "facts" favorable to the beginnings of a socialist society were present or available: a working class party holding political power and with full authority to carry out its program...

...But the planning state requires new types of administrators: managers, accountants, economists, engineers, consumers' advisors, statisticians, production experts—a whole set of specialists who, as Donald Kingsley writes in Representative Bureaucracy, are "capable of creating something" rather than merely "making reports and offering advice...

...This is a slow process, demanding learning and experience...

...But this transitional phase possessed neither the inner dynamics nor the favorable occasion to develop further...

...Instead of the traditional socialist emphasis on a libertarian, classless society we find an acceptance of the Welfare State, with its galling bureaucratic apparatus, as an end in itself...

...And Cole notes: 84 • DISSENT • Winter 1954 In Great Britain there is no room for this kind of leaders...

...The damned impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary men, and what-nots who lecture the working-class socialist for his `materialism!' All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all...

...the notion of "co-association" between labor and capital, despite its advocacy by the leading circles of the Trade Union Congress and such spokesmen of the right wing of the Labor Party as Hugh Gaitskill, has been rejected by all the management associations...

...the little man on the point of being sub merged...

...To be sure, the tradition of British Labor demands that practical compromises be reached, and everyone realizes that a split would be a catastrophe...

...This, of course, gives a new importance to a question already prominent at the end of the Labor regime: the social morale of the British people...

...Facts, wrote Pirandello, are empty sacks into which must be poured a particular content if we want them to stand on their feet...

...but the idea that it is "doomed" is indignantly rejected by its defenders...

...Without hesi tation Trotsky predicted that a Labor majority would be incapable of ruling since the police, judiciary and military would remain under bourgeois con trol...

...Keith Hutchison speaks of the "Fabian retreat of the forces of British capitalism before the slow progress of the political and industrial armies of Labor...

...The ruling class of Great Britain, having gradually to give way before the rise of Labor, had Iikewise developed new and more sophisticated attitudes toward political life...

...This point of view has little in common with the idea of "welfare capitalism," since it demonstrates no confidence in the future of British capitalism...

...But tendencies and forces already existed within the ranks of the labor movement itself which, together with the electoral defeat of 1951, called into question such an evolution by which the leadership of a mass movement tended to substitute itself for the movement and to provoke the crystallization of a bureaucracy disposing of immense powers...

...It was possible for the British bourgeoisie to accept nationalization of coal, but not of iron and steel...

...that is, young party intellectuals who would appear to have been influenced more by Keynes than by Marxist or even Fabian socialism...

...In the long course of its history Great Britain's ruling class has always known how to adapt itself to new political and social situations...

...The party is therefore passing through a difficult moment in its history—more profound than the MacDonald crisis which posed tactical 80 • DISSENT • Winter 1954 rather than doctrinal questions...

...It is here that the new forms of democracy succeed or fail and that the workers recognize they hold a new power they did not hold before...

...It could have accommodated itself to the existence of the private sector by means of what Laurat calls a "managed competition...

...During the last four years," declared Churchill in a speech of July 23, 1949, "they [the Laborites] have carried out projects prepared by the coalition government whose head I was...

...inter-penetration which, had it been pushed further, would have passed beyond nationalization into socialization...

...and besides, the British bourgeoisie, especially in moments of weakness, was too wily to risk everything in the hope of recouping limited losses...

...There can be no precise answer to this question, for the Conservatives devoted themselves mainly to attacking the Labor government, while giving only secondary attention to developing their own point of view...

...Property, the claim goes, is no longer to be the privilege of industrialists or landowners...

...the joy of working, realizing and creating...

...The struggle inside the party continues, though it oscillates between moments of intensity and moments of relative quiet...

...This elite comprises thousands of administrators, functionaries, managers, technicians, economists and statisticians...

...If the Labor leaders remained stationary at this point it was partly in consequence of a rather widespread idea in their ranks that British capitalism was coming to an end by itself...

...The continuity between Britain's national economy of the war epoch and the economic and social program of Labor (the Beveridge Plan is most striking) cannot be too often stressed...

...When Labor came to political power in 1945, it inherited an advanced capitalism which had not only accomplished an immense preparatory work, economically speaking, for the construction of a socialist order but also— again in the economic sense—had become organized and planified, thanks to the growth of state controls during the war years...

...They admitted that the general clauses of the social security program must be kept by any Conservative government, even if the preservation of such aspects of the Welfare State would exclude fiscal reforms favorable to the wealthy class...

...It is freely admitted that at the time Labor took power in 1945, English capitalism had already underNoTE: This article forms part of a larger unpublished study of Labor England...

...Classic reformism had hardly dreamed of expropriating the bourgeoisie and infringing upon the rule of capital...

...and Socialism which is based upon the administration and management of things rather than of men...

...support of the workers and the middle class...

...a short time thereafter it was again plunged into defeat and crisis...

...Daniel Defoe, "Journal of the Year of The Plague" The third Labor Government of England, which held political power for somewhat more than six years, was the first in which the Labor Party ruled with full authority and responsibility...

...The two propaganda organizations formed by the Federation of British Industries (FBI) —known as the Economic League and the Aims of Industry movement— concentrated on the struggle against any further nationalization and for the safeguarding of private property when it still existed...

...How could a socialist democracy effectively counteract the totalitarian regimes with their capacity for organization and their techniques of total planning...

...However, the essential characteristics of British socialism, formed by Fabianism, have largely been abandoned by those raised in the spirit of this doctrine...

...the intellectuals such as R. H. Crossman .. . the band of discontented leftists who have never had the slightest influence on policy and who have always been a minority...

...During the last war it hesitated 82 • DISSENT • Winter 1954 to extend state controls over industry...

...b) nationalization of the basic industries...

...Thinking British socialists are attempting to redefine the substance of freedom in terms inspired neither by the Americans nor Russians...

...To raise the standard of living of the whole world to that of Britain would not be a greater undertaking than the war we have just fought...

...88 • DISSENT • Winter 1954 It is impossible to say upon what this assertion is founded, for it simply ignores both the facts about the Labor regime and the attitude of the party leadership...

...One is concerned with the organic vigor of the labor movement, as well as the effects of its years in power...

...The difficulty of Labor's left wing in presenting a "constructive motion" might at first appear as a damning criticism of it and it alone...

...Precisely within this circle of Labor administrators and technicians, the role of the trade unions under a Labor Government—that is, the idea timidly put forward of limiting the independence and power of the unions—has been most frequently raised...

...The development of nationalization tends to undermine the British capitalist class and compromises its faculty for resisting change...

...This implied the development of a different attitude toward private property and capitalist domination of the economy, which may be described as the intention to dispossess the holders of property without, however, permitting the installation of the rule of the workers themselves...

...But what was most significantly improved was the political and economic position of the Labor leadership itself...

...In its place there has emerged, at least in the more conservative ranks of the party and particularly among those who made up the recent Labor government, the concept of a bureaucratic socialism, statified and administrative...

...Some believed they found this, in part, in the concept of planning which offered the possibility of establishing relations of a new type between equals...

...The objectives of socialist egalitarianism did not go beyond the dreams of certain intellectuals or old Fabian pioneers...

...it counts upon an electoral return of the Labor Party to power and a continuation of nationalization, though at a slower pace...

...It bedevils both Conservatives and Laborites, it is the visible symptom of the decline of a once great empire, and is the material from which future social and political clashes will be made...

...That there would be a large measure of social planning in England was accepted by virtually every significant political group...

...Two prior coalition governments had ended in disaster...

...This made the British capitalist class—it may be said—too weak to oppose the Labor program...

...The related question of workers' control of production, in itself complex and controversial, was never raised by the Labor Government...

...Le Monde, March 14, 1952) . 76 • DISSENT • Winter 1954 But adaptation and compromise can take place only under certain cornditions...

...Bevanism takes its origin much more in the need for a general reorientation of party than from immediate questions posed by rearmament or foreign policy or the snide remark of the Economist that...

...IT HAS BECOME A COMMONPLACE, in consequence, to assert that England's political divisions—the existence of two great parties, each claiming half the nation—have little bearing upon the main question, the social question...

...failing to recognize any evolution in the mentality and motivations of the Labor Winter 1954 • DISSENT • 79 leadership, such left-wing critics treat it as if it were still the classical Social Democratic or Fabian type...

...for that aspect of the Labor program which permits it to speak in the name of the British people "as a whole" and to deal with economic problems within the limiting context of capitalism quite submerges socialist considerations...

...The error is to offer a simplified view of capitalism in defining it only according to such traits as the free market or the monopoly of political power by the bourgeoisie...

...The old civil service and government administration, tied together by tradition, was the creation of a liberal state representing the middle class and practising laissez faire...

...millions of workers became employees of the state...

...This version is a theory of the mixed economy, in a British form, in which governmental influence manifests itself in the permanent nationalized sector of the economy while the private sector is subject to indirect controls...

...But the one crucial measure which the Labor Government seemed unable to take consisted in giving to those economic and social forms it had created an effective socialist content...

...The problem of "second degree poverty"—that is, the absence of those goods, activities and pleasures which give a meaning to life, rather than the absence of those immediate and basic material requirements which define "primary poverty"—has assumed a new importance in Great Britain...

...In a defense of the 1950 electoral program of the Conservatives, R. A. Butler, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, said: We propose to develop and encourage what I call a "system of open enterprise...

...State, government, public organisms, control, regulation, organization, planning, economic boards, commissions, etc.—such were the key words of Labor experience...

...Petain attributes the fall of France to the common people's `love of pleasure.' One sees this in its right perspective if one stops to wonder how much pleasure the ordinary French peasant's or workingman's life would contain compared to Petain's own...

...The logical extension of such an attitude, if we abstract all the other political and social factors involved, would lead to ownership by the State of all the means of production and exchange, this State being in the hands of an omnipotent bureaucracy...

...This Iatter criticism refuses to believe that the Labor Party, as a "reformist" movement, could effect any major changes that go in the direction of socialism...

...The Labor Government did not try to favor them...

...Nor was this Conservative image mere propaganda, for it truthfully expressed many of the undeniable facts as well as the attitude of millions of people who supported the Tory party...

...as the power that would redistribute wealth and income...

...Far removed from the world of work and the working class, this group believes that in realizing a program of social security and thereby making the concept of the Welfare State somewhat concrete, they have, as it were, abolished the worker, or proletarian, in the social and political sense of the word...

...It does not account for the fact that nowhere in Britain today can one see, even in embryo, any revolutionary or counter-revolutionary tendencies which think in terms of challenging through extra-legal means the past or possible future steps of a Labor government...

...G. D. H. Cole, excellent observer of British social and labor movements that he is, has noted that the implications of Bevanism from the start passed beyond the immediate and the sensational...

...But it continues to 78 • DISSENT • Winter 1954 oppose bitterly any effort to extend this principle to the basic areas of property...

...in six years of governing, the Labor Party exhausted its fund of socialist ideas . . . it failed to carry out self-criticism and self-education and limited its propaganda to a justification of its action...

...If the working class must master the technique of accounting and economic calculation as well as become acquainted with the responsibilities of finance in order to participate actively in the management of modern industry, then it must be admitted that Britain's workers Winter 1954 • DISSENT • 89 are far from having attained such a level of development...

...They likewise agreed to state controls over the private sector of the economy and did not contest the need for nationalizing a number of industries...

...the others show signs of fatigue...

...Six years of war proved to be the training ground for just such a bureaucracy...

...A struggle against the state, I say, can not only not succeed, it cannot even be undertaken...

...The London Times, describing the left-wing of the Labor Party as a kind of English version of the Fronde, offered the following hostile remarks: There are now the pacifists and survivors of the old Independent Labor Party tradition...

...The internal crisis of Labor is in large part due to the fact that British socialism was not aware of the insufficiency of a simple transfer of the means of production to the public domain, or of the necessity for the workers to participate effectively in the management of industry...

...Advanced with smugness by neo-conservative and neo-classical economists, it is a point of view that has a curious similarity to the criticisms of the Labor regime formuIated by the extreme left-wing of the socialist movement...

...But the British labor leaders did not hesitate to change their doctrine in accordance with the change of British capitalism...

...Such is the preliminary condition for new forms of collective activity in the administration of statified resources...

...The Conservatives felt their revived social consciousness to be an extension of Disraeli's paternalistic "Tory socialism...

...The interventionist and regulatory State, however, was not only accepted in principle by the FBI, but was considered by it an integral part of economic planning...

...Certain observers have therefore concluded that—apart from extreme wings in the two parties—a community of interests and a fundamental agreement existed between Labor and Conservative...

...The leaders who replaced the best representatives of the Fabian period have, in their turn, grown old...

...They still live on Trotsky's famous polemic of 1926 against the Labor leadership, Where is Britain Going?, in which he described the party's doctrine as an "amalgam of conservatism and liberal ism" founded upon "a religion of progressive Christianity...

...The very crudity of this statement makes it unpalatable to most leaders and members of the Labor Party, and consequently a more sophisticated version has been advanced by certain Labor Party spokesmen who recognize that the Welfare State must have a firmer base than mere political control of the state institutions...

...but I will not carry it so far neither...

...At a conference devoted to a defense of the official Labor regime Strachey said that it had attained its principal objectives while in power: (a) redistribution of wealth and incomes...

...The hope nourished by certain Labor Party centers that the unions and their membership would one day know how to take into their hands management of the nationalized industries, was not realized...

...Purpose and Policy) . It would be easy to cite similar statements with respect to the concentration in London of top-heavy economic power and the dangers of neglecting the need of decentralization in a socialist society...

...If the totalitarian and Stalinist solution is rejected then "the only way is to diffuse power, to distribute it among many hands, to base oneself upon the people who bring to power those who lead the groups to which the people belong...

...He now becomes, instead, a new version of the "economic man" who not only takes his place as an item in the planning strategy of the government but is even assigned his "proper" rank in the nation's economic and social life...

...A prudent French observer writes in le Monde: It is practically impossible to separate England into two camps, one Conservative and the other Labor...

...This is what gave the regime its transitory character, making it neither capitalist nor socialist...

...But all this, while obviously important, does not yet constitute a basic change in social relations...

...The most striking personalities of this leadership, Ernest Bevin and Sir Stafford Cripps, are dead...

...If the party, because of the pressures of its conservative trade unionist sector, often seemed to lack initiative, it nonetheless developed its program in accordance with the needs of the moment, gained much practical administrative experience during the war-time coalition with the Conservatives and finally, when it took office, went far beyond the most sanguine hopes of its left-wing supporters and/or critics...

...A HISTORY OF THE LABOR PARTY would indicate that its initial doctrine—Fabianism—was transformed after the First World War and the MacDonald fiasco into a more active and aggressive anti-capitalist policy...

...that the morals of the people declined from this very time...

...the train (nationalized) which took him home from work always late...

...A PLEA FOR MATERIALISM "The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the `change of heart,' much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system...

...I No one contests the fact that British capitalism has experienced a severe decline during the twentieth century...

...If, however, this conception has a real base in a country like the United States, supported by its high level of productivity, together with a mass production system that is content with a relatively low profit margin, it has no foundation in a country like Great Britain whose industrial plant is partly obsolete, whose economic opportunities have greatly and perhaps permanently shrunken, and whose economy cannot be salvaged on a national basis alone...

...The sort of antediluvian elegies to laissez faire that appear in the reactionary American press are a luxury the British bourgeoisie can no longer afford: it recognizes that the field of contention has shifted, though the issue of contention remains unsettled...

...But this did not take place in Labor England...

...To do that it is necessary to take a closer look at the Labor Party itself, its present line of thought and its divergent inner tendencies...

...Its brief experience, apart from an obvious intrinsic interest, must command the attention of everyone concerned with the idea of socialism and of everyone who hopes for democratic solutions to the problems of humanity...

...September 29, 1951) . This viewpoint, which at first glance seems in accord with the bitter reality of English life, is actually little more than an ideological reflection of the ability of English society in general and the bourgeoisie in particular to assimilate and nullify political and social changes...

...before 1942 there was, symptomatically, no Ministry of Production...

...finally, a rabble of displaced persons some of whom would be more at home in the party's right wing...

...It would be absurd to persist in the view that Labor permitted the "old capitalism" to continue to live behind a new but transparent mask...

...As is often the case, this manifests itself by a considerable increase in gambling, an industry which, officially, now employs 230,000 people and disposes of tens of millions of pounds sterling annually...

...It is merely that privation and brute labor have to be abolished before the real problems of humanity can be tackled...

...However one may estimate the achievements of the Labor party, it would be hard to deny that the morale of a large part of the population is rather low, as is demonstrated by the widespread desire of Englishmen to emigrate...

...If statification of industries, or the nationalizations, had been effected by a government con 86 • DISSENT • Winter 1954 trolled by the conservatives (or any other bourgeois party), such measures, it seems to us, could be seen as falling under the heading of what is generally meant by that vague phrase "state capitalism...

...But such was not the case...

...For it was this aspect of the Labor program—the tendency of nationalized industry to encroach upon private industry—which caused the greatest uneasiness in Tory circles...

...And it is this, above all, which is the cause of the present internal struggle between the traditional leadership and the Bevan group...

...He writes: Democratic practice at all levels of administration offer the guarantee that Great Britain will endeavor to and will succeed in creating in those industries which have become public property really democratic and socialist forms of organization and management...

...The Labor regime was the first effort to institute socialist policies, on some considerable scale, in a highly industrialized country, and simultaneously, to adopt these policies to a tradition of political democracy...

...Clement Atlee, who leads this group of party leaders, often expressed such typically Fabian views as appear in a book of his published in the 1930's...

...it probably requires a degree of international cooperation the British Labor Government could not expect...

...an important number of capitalists were dispossessed of their means of production and required to become state rentiers...

...In part, Trotsky's erroneous prediction may be explained or explained away by noting first, the continuous decline of British capitalism and the disintegration of the empire, and second, the increasing strength of the working class movement...

...Despite the innovations of the Labor regime, the social structure and its hierarchy—so continues the argument—remain intact...

...Those who had always shown a certain critical and independent spirit with respect to the party's official policy were now able to take a leading part in this reexamination of party conscience...

...I do not think so...

...BBC speech, February 20, 1949) . At the same time, the Conservatives recognized the need to regulate the distribution of goods and income according to new concepts...

...actually, this difficulty reflects a weakness of the whole movement...

...a considerable increase in the consumption of tobacco and drinks has also been noted...

...Yet, as writers like Grossman have noted, it is precisely England's chronic economic crisis which makes practical compromises so difficult and increases the pressure for more fundamental solutions to the ideological problem before the Labor Party...

...Nonetheless, the Conservatives wish to see their formula of participation take on more popular forms...

...How right the working classes are in their `materialism.' How right they are to realize that the belly comes before the soul, not in the scale of values but in point of time...

...a vast program of social reforms supported by the middle class in the existing capitalist framework, the managed economy of wartime and its extension under Labor signified inter-penetration of state and economy...

...John Strachey, former Marxian economist, has presented this view most systematically and intelligently...

...In the language of British sociologists, this is due to "modern poverty or second degree poverty...

...Out of power, the party leadership speaks as though it has remained in power, or expected to be restored to power before long...

...If it had desired, the Labor Party could have enlarged the collectivized sector of the national economy at the point where it had shown itself more capable than the private sector of solving the problem of production and productivity...

...But this terminology describes form and structure more than content and function...

...a state possessing the key industries...

...An important element in Fabian doctrine has been the idea of participation by the citizens in the management of public affairs, including workers' participation in the management of nationalized industries...

...They maintain, on the contrary, that Labor having failed to attain its objectives, British capitalism must now undergo a renaissance...

...the conviction of building a just social organization and of being at home and among one's own, then we must state the Labor Government fell far short...

...This helps explain the multitude of interpretations that have been made of the Labor regime...

...In the same issue of a French socialist review (La Revue Socialiste) we find, for instance, two contradictory views: Winter 1954 • DISSENT • 85 Six years of power have had practically no wearing effect whatever upon Labor...

...it is necessary to foresee citizen participation in all phases of the organization of the socialist state and exercising of direct control by him over its immediate activities as well as an indirect control, through the intermediary of his representatives, over the policy of the state as a whole...

...this is a symbol of the education of the English working class...

...The boundaries criss-cross everywhere and imperceptibly displace one another...

...and their theoreticians, such as Richard Butler, in urging a modernization of party doctrine, accepted the notion of full employment, at least in its Keynesian sense, as well as the general concept of the Welfare State...

...There can be no question that the general situation of the working class improved while the power of the bourgeoisie declined...

...This is one reason for the hostility often found among English trade union leaders toward the Labor functionaries...

...GEORGE ORWELL Winter 1954 • DISSENT • 91...

...It is the answer to this problem that will determine the next phase of the labor movement...

...This new group looks forward, however, to a society that can hardly be called socialist but which is also radically different from traditional capitalism...

...March 7, 1952) . But it must be remembered that this heterogeneous character of the Bevan tendency, though it offers the Times an occasion for a sneer, is due to the traditional British political system, which has always encouraged loose alliances of groups rather than precisely demarcated and monolithic parties...

...The Labor Government created the embryonic forms of a workers' state which might have served as the basis for a socialist society...

...The historic circumstances which led to the formation of the Labor Government of 1945 are no longer the same...

...It is no more exaggerated to say that the perspective of the opening phase of a democratic transition to a socialist society existed...

...The New Statesman and Nation, May 5, 1951) . The revolt of Bevan and his supporters translated into concrete terms this feeling in the ranks of the party...

...as the agency responsible for social security and the well-being of the population...

...A half century of Labor Party life, celebrated in 1950, found the party at its peak...

...Regardless of the well-known fact that the elementary institutions of the working class had little or no share in the management and operation of these industries, the social meaning of nationalization under Labor had therefore a different sense...

...The Cautious Revolution...

...The juridical overturn which nationalization of industry constitutes must be accompanied not only by an administrative but also by a social change in its management...

...J. H. Huizinga has admirably summarized this evolution over the course of centuries At all times new elements have acquired fortune or power—the great woolen merchants of the XIV century, London's commercial community of the XV century, the courtiers and servitors of the Crown during the Tudor epoch, the bankers and armourers of the period of English world commercial expansion, the industrialists and colonial nabobs of the XIX century...

...The general thesis might therefore be offered that Conservatism in England tends toward a "welfare capitalism," leaning upon a democratization or expansion of the property-holding class...

...The welfare capitalism that has just been described is in origin largely an American concept, but its delayed recognition by the British bourgeoisie has made it no less important for the latter...

...Most important of all, they accepted the new role assumed by the state: as the center of economic planning and regulation...

...And how easily that minimum could be attained if we chose to set our minds to it for only twenty years...

...In England, declared Professor Cole, the problem of reorganizing the economy along modern lines coexists with the problem of making certain that the transition to socialism proceeds in the fullest democratic way and is not allowed to degenerate into a bureaucratic collectivism...

...It must now rethink its program, reconsider its methods of action...

...The British bourgeoisie, which originally had rejected the Tory paternalism of the landed gentry in the name of the liberalism of the Manchester school, has by now reconciled itself to a kind of social paternalism...

...Strachey here advanced the view of the Labor Party administrative elite...

...and (d) planning of national resources in terms of socially defined priorities...

...The Labor government put Fabianism into practice, a Fabianism stretched to its uttermost limits...

...the managing bodies must include representatives of the wage earners, the consumers, the state, the technicians and the scientists...

...A journalist who often expresses the views of the Labor leadership, E. Watkins, offers the following definition of socialism: I would say that in a democracy, socialism is the tendency of the government to seek to favor those elements in society which will maintain a minimum and if possible produce a rising standard of living and well-being for the least capable of its citizens...

...The electoral victory of 1945, together with the social enthusiasm and militancy it aroused among the people, makes it no exaggeration to say that it constituted an elementary and embryonic conquest of political power by the working class...

...Winter 1954 • DISSENT • 75 gone profound changes in its traditional structure, notably the partial paralysis of the free market economy...

...But beyond this, no common program really existed...

...Both positions—the sophisticated conservative claim, that the British Labor regime did not fundamentally alter the social structure but was forced by the pressure of reality to adapt itself to a more "moderate" vision, and the sectarian "Marxist" view that the British Labor regime was simply another reformist government out to "save capitalism" —both positions do not get very close to what has recently been happening in England...

...11 Who is less free than the State worker...

...Under the Labor Government, the state played the dominant role, and was sufficiently powerful to control and regulate all forms and expressions of social, political and economic life...

...The statement on nationalization adopted at the recent Trade Union Congress, in Winter 1954 • DISSENT • 8I effect, drops the concept of citizen participation...

...it possessed neither the personnel nor the experience necessary for guiding a managed economy...

...the tough old union leaders are suspicious of any effort to subordinate their organizations to the "necessities of planning...

...Jules Guesde in Socialism and Public Service) . Labor England formed a working class government under which, for over six years, political and social power was exercised by the popular, democratic party of the working class...

...Bevan's position does not so much consist in his opposing tanks as in his attaching less importance to them than to false teeth...

...The political representatives of the British bourgeoisie, united in the Tory party, claimed paternity of certain planning principles, as well as of specific projects carried out by the Labor government...

...Torydom's most temperate attacks against the Labor Government were directed against the principle of nationalization in general, while its most violent attacks were directed against the dynamic and self-extending character of nationalization in particular...

...nationalized sector of the economy...

...The State as boss is the worker doubly enslaved because, held by the stomach, he is likewise gripped by the collar...

...if Labor were to attempt the application of its program, including nationalization of credit, "civil war would be inevitable...

...To them must be added the trade-union elite which includes not merely the old-Ftyle leaders ripened under Bevin and Citrine but new tradeunion secretaries and functionaries with some training in economic thought and capable of grasping the complexities of an annual Economic Survey...

...According to this new group of Labor administrators, the hour of collectivization has sounded...

...The two last important documents submitted to the party membership by the leaders, Labour and the New Society (1950 annual party Congress) and one for the 1953 Congress, lack imagination or boldness, largely repeat the old electoral declarations, and passively defend the defeated Labor government...

...on the other, its achievements and their value...

...It neither undermined the nation's basic economic structure nor compromised its property relations, whereas the second measure threatened the existence of private industry and capital...

...Nonetheless, the Labor Government made important incursions into British capitalism, touching upon all domains of production and distribution, including the regulation of conditions of work, the investment and employment of capital, the level and distribution of profits, etc...

...But even as the active elite of the Labor government rejected the tactical methods and the more abstract theories of Fabianism, it was nonetheless deeply influenced by the general cast of Fabian thought...

...it is to be extended to the working class by a system of profit-sharing, bonus awards and distribution of company stocks...

...This new Labor elite, composed of technicians and administrators formed in the school of state interventionism, betrays a large amount of the bureaucratic outlook...

...It happened, however, that this exercise of power by the British workers through their political party appeared in indirect and contradictory ways...

...In the old administration and bureaucracy no groups favorable to social planning existed...

...Its ability to compromise and make concessions at the decisive moment, to transform its inner structure and renew its leading personnel, has often been noted...

...Neither in the nationalized industries, nor in the trade-unions, nor in the cooperative movement did it let these veterans try their chance...

...The first measure not only could be absorbed within the body of the national economy but was required for its continued functioning...

...it was the kind of planning, the social content and social purpose of the planning, that was and remains the major issue of political and, indeed, class contention...

...Such a party elite constitutes a new element in the labor movement—previous bureaucratic formations on top of Social Democratic parties were aggressively content to function within the framework of capitalist economy...

...These British socialists, in a word, are looking for the social 90 • DISSENT • Winter 1954 content that would have to be introduced into the structure established during the Labor Government's rule if that structure, given labor's return to political power, is to move to a higher socialist plane...

...there was a certain redistribution of revenues and income...

...A democratic political party exercising power in the name of the working class...

...The substance of liberty demands a redefinition each time one is faced with a new combination of historic circumstances, for these circumstances produce a different effect," wrote Harold Laski...

...the measures of nationalization and welfare legislation did have tremendous consequences...

...It will have to determine, for example, what proportion of production is to be reserved for export...

...While rejecting the prefabricated notion that the Labor Government simply carried on where the bourgeoisie could or would not continue, we cannot avoid the conclusion that it did not undertake any basic transformation of social relations...

...It has often been claimed that the manager and technicians will be bothered by the permanent functioning of workers' and consumers' committees...

...There was much truth in this contention about the progressive foundering of English capitalism, but not as much as was believed...

...administrative apparatus for planning and control—but into this framework had been put only a partial socialist content...

...Football pools, dog and horse racing as well as gambling machines of American manufacture absorb an important part of working class and lower middle class incomes...

...All constituted reserve forces from whose ranks there emerged each time a new ruling class generation, at the same time possessing sufficient economic power to govern and a clear enough understanding of the needs of the time to prevent the fossilisation of this class and to safeguard its prestige...