British Labor's Self-Examination
Newman, William J.
Ever since the Labor Party came to power in England a decade ago, its achievements and shortcomings have been a subject of first importance for socialists, as indeed for everyone else...
...He is correct...
...To a greater extent, it has been the unwitting effect of thetechnological changes which have taken place in the United States since the end of the war...
...Today the context is different...
...The electoral facts of life (and the running down of Labor's program and its zest) are forcing the Labor Party to become a national party...
...Bonham presents in his book are disturbing for those who believe, or would like to believe, that the Labor Party gains the automatic support of the English workers...
...Today selfrespect and economic needs can be satisfied in other ways...
...Is, then, the classless society still necessary and desirable...
...and Stanley Plastrik (in "British Labor in Retrospect") have presented their own brand of disillusionment in DISSENT is, therefore, more interesting as an indication of the tenderness of socialists for their past opinions than as a guide to the needs of the movement...
...Does this mean that it will simply become an alternative opposition party—of good will perhaps, but a party essentially playing the role which the Liberal Party played up to 1914...
...So what meaning does the classless society have today for the Britisher...
...The Labor Party is a worker's party, yet is something more...
...The problem is simple and devastating...
...at every level of social class and income...
...being realized, or at least can or may be realized...
...Education plus the opportunity to perform an important function in industry can make it possible for workers to move upward in the field of control in accordance with their ability...
...It is at this point that the fact of social mobility may serve the interests of the worker...
...Mark Arnold-Foster in the Manchester Guardian recently posed the electoral dilemma of the Party, when he pointed out that the "masses" are bored with Labor's high ideals and see no need of them...
...Ever since the Labor Party came to power in England a decade ago, its achievements and shortcomings have been a subject of first importance for socialists, as indeed for everyone else interested in politics...
...THIS BRINGS US TO COLE'S CONCEPT Of workers' control of industry, something which no one can doubt is fundamental to any serious interpretation of socialism...
...THESE ARE SOME OF THE IMPLICATIONS for the British Labor Party of modern social and political facts...
...Gene Tunney (Part of advertising blurb for Max Eastman's book, Reflections on the Failure of Socialism, published in the New Leader...
...These are superficial manifestations of a larger concern—the facts of mid-twentieth century society and their meaning for socialism...
...However, since research does not have a political pointofview, it destroys old suppositions without putting anything in their place...
...1945 working class vote for the Conservatives...
...If social mobility and the acceptance of the welfare state have posed a pretty problem as to the significance of the classless society today, it has also posed a problem of tactics...
...It is easy to toss the Labor Party aside as a tired failure or an agency of right-wing trade union leaders...
...Plastrik has said in his article "Labor in Retrospect," Millions of adults • 1945 middle class vote for the Conservatives 4.8...
...This means that Labor may be foreverand-a-day dependent on the shifting vote, and not, as Cole casually suggests, for one or two elections alone while the workers get back their scattered senses...
...The problem is complicated by the discovery in John Bonham's new book, the Middle Class Vote, that the workers are not always faithful to the Labor candidate, to put it mildly...
...It is not an interpretation of equality to be sneered at—especially when it is something that is * Rowntree and Lavers, Poverty and the Welfare State (1951) . A. M. Cartter has pointed out in The Redistribution of Income in Postwar Britain (1955) that the "necessary prerequisite for the diminishing of inequality of opportunity" nowexists for the first time in Britain because of the ending of poverty...
...He claims that "The main effort must be devoted to more equalization of opportunity on the 'supply' side...
...The logic of the nineteenth century in this as in other respects is clear...
...Britain today presents no likeness to the highly stratified and immobile society of the nineteenth century...
...But it does not, and never has, and those middle class votes are accordingly Very Important Votes...
...The distribution of Party choices in Great Britain does not conform to the pattern of a class struggle...
...Followed by a Left to the Jaw...
...is there a basic incompatibility between the role of a national party and a socialist party...
...In making her point that more equalitarianism is needed to make a rational distribution of income in proportion to ability, she indicates how little the Labor Party has done in this direction...
...The logical end of social mobility is equality of opportunity...
...The dilemmas of this situation could be avoided in the years 1945 - 1950, when the nation agreed that a modicum of socialism would do it no harm...
...1951 middle class vote for the Conservatives 6.5 1951 working class vote for...
...But the Labor Party is more than an object of pity or a subject of disappointment...
...Perhaps very little...
...Or will it retain its virtue and—like most vir tuous things—become more ingrown and less attractive...
...The despair with which G. D. H. Cole (in "Is This Socialism...
...But what the conservative wing of the Labor Party has forgotten is that equality is still a necessary component of the socialist society...
...Modern research often uncovers things better left covered (and sometimes it uncovers the obvious with a great flourish of learning), but there it is and it must be faced...
...For social mobility can mean more than increasing one's wealth...
...He can only view the concepts of social mobility and the open society with disdain and as a threat to the classless society...
...The split is not horizontal, but oblique.* * In short, British politics are to a great extent independent of class...
...Movement upward and downward on the social scale is much more free and easy than had been realized...
...Social mobility has changed the character and meaning of the British class structure, and, as D. V. Glass has shown in Social Mobility in Britain, the open society is a concrete and very palpable thing in Britain...
...I am ordering 50 copies to be sent to 50 universities with my card...
...It is a question which the socialists have never had to answer before, because they have never before had a party of the stature of the British Labour Party...
...worker mobility will be a partial realization, at least, of the slogan "from each according to his means...
...G. D. H. Cole thinks so...
...First, we have the very large dependence of the Conservative Party on wage-class votes...
...There is a radical use and a conservative use...
...This is not to say that the Labor Party is not predominantly supported by the working class...
...Social mobility, if it is planned to its logical end, can achieve not a classless society, but a very real form of social democracy...
...Such men as Gaitskill and Attlee are willing, therefore, to tolerate the class structure as it now exists...
...Britain, it seems, is the most fluid society in the world—save the United States...
...equality meant the classless society since social mobility was not even a dream, and the only way to break down the class barriers reflecting economic and social subordination was to wipe out the exploiters by wiping out their class...
...they need only involve some new ideas as to what they mean...
...It is planned social mobility, not the laissez-faire form in which the middle class takes most, which can give the workers their rights by giving them the tools to rise above the level of the shophand.* That would be the radical use...
...The last twenty-five years have brought changes in British social and political life which throw considerable doubt on the traditional beliefs and assumptions of British socialists and socialists everywhere...
...Rowntree and Lavers pointed out in 1951, that primary poverty was virtually abolished in Britain, and secondary poverty almost so.• The worker has his problems to be sure, but they are to a great extent problems of his nation rather than his class...
...1950 working class vote for the Conservatives 5.8...
...Nor does this need decrease because of the results of the recent British election...
...it can also mean increasing one's usefulness and capacities...
...Ibid., p. 179...
...The fact that British society is fluid and contains great possibilities of equality of opportunity, and that the British Labor Party is not solely a working-class party, may grate on some traditional beliefs of some socialists...
...the Conservatives 6,2...
...THE SIGHT OF THE BRITISH LABOR PARTY wrestling with its socialistic soul is an encouraging one, but it is a controversy not confined to ideological content...
...The electorial problem which faces the Labor Party today is posed by these statistics, but—as usual with statistics— is not solved by them...
...For the belief in the efficacy of a classless society rested on the assumption that social mobility under capitalism was impossible...
...He also points out that technical education without responsibility is socially irresponsible...
...267 that the election of 1945 "constituted an elementary and embryonic (sic) conquest of political power by the working class...
...But the present difficulties of the Party are not to be explained by electoral defeat or the sound and fury of the Bevanite quarrel...
...its situation raises the issues which face Western socialism today— as distinct from the late 19th century...
...Secondly, we have...
...But the conservative wing of the Labor Party finds it easier—conservatism is always easier: that is why it is con * To some extent—but to a small extent —this has been the effect of welfare measures in Britain...
...In the nineteenth century this structure was anathema...
...Robin Marris, discussing her book as an economist, in The Twentieth Century (May, 1955), points out that direct action against social attitudes is not enough to meet the very real problem of supply and demand which does exist...
...The theme is not new but the emphasis it represents was neglected in the post-war period when the party was mainly concerned with major legislation...
...There is every reason why, say, education should give to a worker not so much the ability to move into the middle class, as the power to take a real part in workermanagement...
...Encouragement of worker mobility in the sense of opening up to him the chance of management on practical levels can be a partial means of achieving the hitherto nebulous goal of workers' control...
...If social mobility as a form of equality is a concept which has not been clearly formulated by either side within the Party, it is being discovered that the specific meaning of the word equality may vary from one epoch to another...
...John Bonham, The Middle Class Vote (1954) p. 168...
...The Labor Party is faced with the fact of social mobility in Britain, but what it means to socialism depends on what use it makes of it...
...She weighs down on the inequality— the irrationality, in fact— of wages in Britain, and claims that wage differentials represent the social attitudes of social classes, not the facts of supply and demand...
...G. L. Arnold, an English writer, has recently pointed to the existence of a new class of technical workers and the rise of a new "industrial democracy" which is based on "technical competence...
...It is discussion about these facts, and not whether Britain should build the hydrogen bomb or nationalize the Imperial Chemical Company, which has caused the party publicly to harrow itself with argument about "The Nature of Socialism" (one would have thought that had been discovered by now) and "The Next Step in Socialism," etc., etc...
...As part of this discussion, there follows an article in which a point of view considerably different from those of Plastrik and Cole is presented.—.The Editors The high hopes many people held for the British Labor Party after 1945 have, to some extent, been replaced by disillusionment...
...Such conclusions, however, need not cause these beliefs to be overthrown...
...But if the "higher effort" is more than slightly irrelevant, does that mean that one must adopt a vulgar middle-class tone and smugly worship the social riser...
...Class issues do play a role in British politics—but so do other issues...
...4.4 1950 middle class vote for the Conservatives 5.8...
...This being so, the Labor Party has had to reckon with this society and has had to rethink the meaning of its ideal of a classless and equalitarian society...
...But he unwittingly shows their attractiveness when lie notes that mechanization is increasing production without the need for the "higher effort" on the part of the workers which, it was once thought, a classless society would demand...
...A "Labour Policy-Maker" states in the Manchester Guardian (January 11, 1955) that: . . . . . An advance towards greater social equality is likely to become more and more the conscious objective of Socialist planning in the coming years...
...There is no reason why the equal opportunities implied in free social movement should be restricted to the middle class, as now they usually are...
...But again, the question is raised as to what equalitarianism means...
...the rise and fall of party votes...
...Several articles in DISSENT—one by Stanley Plastrik in the first issue and another by G. D. H. Cole in the fourth issue—have tried to assess the Labor Party's record...
...in the postwar period only one in five Labor votes came from the middle class, and in theory if Labor got all the workers' votes, it could, of course, win any election...
...Barbara Wootton has re-opened the whole question of equality in her new book The Social Foundations of Wage Policy...
...Now that a virtual electoral stalemate has been reached, the pressure exerted on the party to make a choice of its political character has become more intense...
...There are no groaning and toiling masses— only the old age pensioners, the trade unions, and the middle classes...
...He shows that half the votes of the Conservative Party in 1951 came from the manual workers, and that after 1945, both the workers and the middle class swung in equal proportions to the Conservative Party.* The facts which Mr...
...In the light of these facts, his remark sounds rather Victorian...
...Cole, along with other zealots who have nothing to lose but their M.P., may want to wander in purity and faith in the electoral wilderness while they find the grail, but others in his party suspect the wandering may be of longer duration than is good for either the party or socialism...
...This is a problem which Hyndman and his SDF met and failed to solve in much more propitious days, and the Fabians met and solved in their own peculiar way...
...But so far in Britain social mobility has meant nothing more stimulating than moving from a Council house to a suburban villa, servatism—to let things go on as they are, since the laissez-faire form of social mobility releases the pressure of the lower classes for change...
...But he also points out that: . . . . . the answer to Labour's dilemma will not be found in a comprehensive doctrine but in a simple restatement of some of Labour's traditional faith adapted to, and worked out in terms of, British society in the nineteen-fifties...
Vol. 2 • July 1955 • No. 3
