THE FUTURE OF BRITISH SOCIALISM?
Lukes, Steven
In 1932 R. H. Tawney published an article in which he reflected upon the events of the previous year: the collapse of the Labour government and the massive electoral defeat of the Labour party...
...It must also address other forms of domination and powerlessness, injustice and unfreedom than the exploitative wage relation, and particularly those rightly associated in the public mind with socialism and the Labour party, such as the relation between welfare bureaucracies and their clients...
...Of course, choices cannot be willed or conjured into existence whatever the objective circumstances...
...But 200 they have proved to be pyrrhic (as the Callaghan government discovered), and they demonstrate beyond any question the party's lack of any "stable standard of political values" and "ordered conception of its task...
...Consumption patterns increasingly shape and reflect how people view their interests, their reference groups, the welfare state, and the Labour party...
...For a time it seemed to have been won...
...117...
...E. Hobsbawm, The Forward March of Labour Halted...
...A future socialist government must "apply to the affairs of its own country the principles which, it believes, should govern those of the world," aiming to extend the area of economic life controlled by some rational conception of the common good, not by a scramble, whether of persons, classes, or nations, for individual power and profit...
...In essentials, however, Tawney's essay still offers broad guidelines for reshaping the Labour party's "common conception of its task," after the deforming and dispiriting years, under Wilson and Callaghan, of pragmatic capitulation...
...They must have created, before they assume office, a strong body of opinion, which "knows what it fights for, and loves what it knows...
...Common to all such arguments is the assumption that "interests" on which the Labour party essentially relies are fatally withering away...
...Now we must take it up all over again, with no certainty of victory...
...Hobsbawm, "The Forward March of Labour Halted," p. 18...
...I have greatly benefited from reading this excellent analysis, on which much in the next section of this article draws...
...It rests on functionless property, on the control of key positions in finance and industry, on educational inequalities, on the mere precariousness of proletarian existence, which prevents its victims looking before and after...
...Fourth, the very distinction between manual and nonmanual labor is less and less relevant...
...Within the curriculum the battle against orthodoxy and establishment-mindedness must be waged with new vigor: where are the radical and critical history books for primary schoolchildren...
...But when Stalin unleashed a virtual civil war against the peasantry and the private sector in 1929, repudiating NEP as "rotten liberalism," he destroyed a model of Communist politics and economics that many citizens would long remember as the "golden era" in Soviet history and in which, decades later, Communist reformers in the U.S.S.R., Eastern Europe, and elsewhere would find a lost alternative to Stalinism...
...Third, and finally, this leads us to Tawney's account of the socialist objective itself...
...If it neither acts with decision nor inspires others so to act, the principal reason is that it is itself undecided...
...Unemployment and deprivation, poor public services, the "Thatchervilles" of inner cities, inadequate housing and transport, high crime rates, unsatisfactory policing—on such issues successful campaigning can be mounted, as part of the necessary task of seeking interests that may be "harnessed by principles into a serviceable tool" to build a new social order...
...In part, as I have suggested, the very pursuit of socialist objectives has made them less widely appealing and less easily attainable...
...In current circumstances, on the left, it would seem that a pessimist is a well-informed optimist...
...A new dividing line, between home owners and others, now cuts across older, fading class divisions, fragmenting the working class by dividing those with a stake in the financial and property markets from those dependent on state provision, and significantly affecting voting patterns, to the progressive disadvantage of the Labour party, given its current policies...
...Because he did not believe that the interests of its actual and potential electorate were independent, given facts to which the party must simply respond...
...The Labour party expressed and represented this alliance, which culminated triumphantly in 1945...
...In this world, the organized working class had "the consciousness of an estate with definite interests to defend and advance within the existing polity," through the trade union movement, while the consciousness of the professional classes was "the ethic of service, of intelligence, and expertise, in pursuit of humanitarian ends, of a civilizing mission both at home and abroad...
...New Models are not made by being all things to all men...
...or that, though its condition is probably terminal, the "future of the left lies in the consolidation of a new strength outside Parliament," in "the support and encouragement of factory occupations, peace campaigns, black struggles, and women's resistance...
...Third, we must finally cast off the belief, shared by both the Fabian and the Marxist components of the British socialist tradition, that, whatever its setbacks, capitalist development somehow naturally culminates in socialism...
...Lacking such a standard, it "lacks also the ability to subordinate the claims of this section of the movement or that to the progress of the whole, and to throw its whole weight against the central positions...
...It must accordingly begin to distinguish between capitalism and the market principle, and between different types of markets...
...This is partly a matter of fiercely campaigning against the cumulative and growing inequalities within the formal education system (in the 1990s there is likely to be a smaller proportion of working-class children at universities than in the 1970s 27 ) and resisting at every point the current drive to sharpen these...
...It is not enough to take note of the "changes in British capitalism" (the rise of mass production and the concentration of production units, the growth of monopoly capitalism and the public sector, the political determination of the capitalist market and the massive rise in workers' living standards) and the "changes within the working class" (the influx of women workers and immigrants, and the growth of divisive sectional struggles) in order to explain why "common working-class interests" have failed to prevail and why the movement "in the right general direction" seems "to have got stuck," and to conclude that we are today (quoting Hobsbawm once more): in a period of world crisis for capitalism, and, more specifically, of the crisis—one might almost say the breakdown—of the British capitalist society, at a moment when the working class and its movement should be in a clear position to provide a clear alternative and to lead British peoples toward it...
...22 Newby et al., art...
...It is both economic and social...
...In part, these frameworks have been withering away as the industrial, urban, and social structure changes...
...As in economic life, the excesses of statism and coercion were deplored...
...For] the dynamic of any living movement is to be found, not merely in interests, but in principles, which unite men whose personal interests may be poles asunder, and . if principles are to exercise their appeal, they must be frankly stated...
...Second, there must be a renewal of the socialist educational tradition, in which Tawney, and the Fabians generally, played such a central part...
...Dimensions of Defeat," Marxism Today, July 1983...
...27 As Gareth Williams suggests in the Times Higher Education Supplement, March 30, 1984...
...It was needed in the 1930s and it is needed today...
...It is to abolish all advantages and disabilities which have their source, not in differences of personal quality, but in disparities of wealth, opportunity, social position, and economic power...
...See also Democratic Trends and Future University Candidates (London: Royal Society, 1984...
...But "it cannot be both at the same time in the same measure...
...This is not just a question of rejecting an 204 antique, falsely reassuring evolutionary optimism, the Whig history of the left...
...The answer, Tawney said, was "simplicity itself': The fundamental question, as always, is: Who is to be master...
...In this it has been outstandingly successful, propagating a fatalistic creed (the Hayekian canon banishes the very notion of social justice, seeking to replace a sense of injustice by the recognition of necessity, in the form of ill luck...
...If Labour leaders "accept titles and other such toys, without a clear duty to the movement to do so," writes Tawney, "[they] widen the rift between its principles and practice, [for] livery and an independent mind go ill together...
...Wright that it is "possible that it is Tawney rather than Trotsky who has more to contribute" to contemporary arguments within the Labour Party,' and further that, as he argues in the essay he contributed to Fabian Essays on Socialist Thought, "Tawneyism provides the materials for an assault on Thatcherism" and for an escape from the current harsh and cold climate of ideas...
...If there is, what, if any, are the party's prospects...
...Those who do not accept it are not socialists, though they may be as wise as Solon and as virtuous as Aristides...
...Tawney, from one point of view, may be seen as its finest and most articulate exponent...
...It has indeed always relied upon substantial sectors of the middle class for support to achieve majority governments...
...Being pessimists, however, does not mean that we should be fatalists...
...Instead, it has drugged itself with the illusion that, by adding one to one, it would achieve the millennium, without the painful necessity of clarifying its mind, disciplining its appetites, and training for a tough wrestle with established powers and property...
...The policies introduced by Lenin in 1921 were new in that they broke sharply with the extremist measures and coercive ideas of the civil war...
...If a will and a way cannot be found to commit the unions to an effective incomes policy, within the Labour party (the Social Democrats have a will, but no way), then not only will the prevailing fatalism about the inevitability of largescale unemployment prove amply justified, but the Labour party will finally show itself to be unserious about the pursuit of the socialist objective...
...Today the opposite case is advanced: because of deindustrialization and the current recession, the proletariat is disappearing, as traditional proletarian occupations decline...
...Nor does Tawney grapple with the relations between solidarity, pluralism, and individuality...
...In this process, particular attention should be paid to the rejuvenation of local democracy—a central Fabian concern since the Webbs, much neglected by the Labour party in recent times...
...Certainly, the socialist project confronts some formidable obstacles in present-day Britain...
...It has now to rediscover it...
...It must also grapple, as Peter Kellner argues (in Fabian Essays), with the problem of reconciling the community's good with that of preserving, indeed expanding, the role of voluntary transactions within it: exactly when should market forces operate and how should they be constrained and guided...
...The Socialist Register 1966 (London: Merlin Press, 1966), p. 23...
...Socialist education must awaken after its long, comfortable sleep...
...The Labour Government of 1929-1931 (London: Macmillan, 1967), p. xii...
...It must take seriously the consumptionrelated interests of people whose loyalties have already been alienated by the Labour party's historically laudable singleminded commitment to state provision...
...The Labour party could either be "a political agent, pressing in Parliament the claims of different groups of wage-earners," or "an instrument for the establishment of a socialist commonwealth, which alone, on its own principles, would meet those claims effectively, but would not meet them at once...
...Or shall a serious effort be made—as serious, for example, as was made, for other purposes, during the war—to create organs through which the nation can control, in cooperation with other nations, its own economic destinies...
...Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960...
...R. Miliband, "Socialist Advance in Britain," in R. Miliband and J. Saville (eds...
...A socialist party chooses the second...
...that in consequence the parties to the old Labour alliance have fragmented in various cross-cutting, ambiguous, and contradictory ways...
...It was a world in which Britain still played an independent world role and its social structure rested upon the central geological fault of the distinction between manual and mental labor...
...Is it feasible to live by and to spread the spirit of socialism...
...One view is that it was just unable to rise to the demands of the time—for example, because of its "commitment to a utopian social197 ism that incapacitated it from effectively working the parliamentary system and prevented it from coming to terms with economic reality" 7 ; or, alternatively, because it was enmeshed in "labourism...
...20 G. Stedman Jones, art...
...It was then widely held that Labour's traditional working-class base was threatened by affluence...
...Social harmony and class collaboration, rather than strife and terror, became the principles of NEP...
...Finally, we need to rethink and restate those principles in a way that will evoke a response from people who are justifiably skeptical of the socialist record (while in countless unacknowledged ways its beneficiaries) and of the Labour party's claims to their allegiance, but for whom the available alternatives offer bleak prospects indeed...
...But lesser enterprises were denationalized, the principle of private peasant farming reaffirmed, and market relations, which had been suppressed during the civil war, restored...
...They gave birth to the first dual economy in the history of Communist movements, combining a public and private sector, socialist aspirations and capitalist practices, plan and market...
...Furthermore, the deindustrialization and shedding of labor in the current recession has accentuated the division between those in work and the unemployed and underemployed...
...or merely because they have an eccentric prejudice in treating men as men...
...Finally, there appears to have been a reactive growth (encouraged by the combination of recession and inflation) of instrumental, pecuniary, egoistic, in short, capitalist values and attitudes, and a disintegration of various moral 203 frameworks within which these had a subordinate place and faced various countervailing forms of commitment, loyalty, and discipline —whether based on unionism, locality, or class...
...It is neither what is currently called "libertarian" nor "collectivist," in the manner of the Webbs, nor cautiously social-democratic, but begins to inject a distinctively socialist content into basic values central to (some of) our traditions, such as liberty, democracy, equal opportunity, justice and, indeed, solidarity...
...Fifth, among these steps must be the immensely difficult business of forging alliances between potential constituencies, building outward from the Labour party's shrunken base and upon various forms of solidarity, including those based on local and urban communities, regionalism, ethnicity, and social movements...
...In 1932 R. H. Tawney published an article in which he reflected upon the events of the previous year: the collapse of the Labour government and the massive electoral defeat of the Labour party in which it lost 235 seats, with 30.8 percent of the polls and 52 seats as against the National government's 67.2 percent and 554 seats...
...But it is no longer mainly in miners' lodges, the Workers' Educational Association, and Ruskin College that such renewal will be found, but in the use of the media—both at the national (television, a national labor newspaper) and at local levels—through the creative participatory use of new technology, above all videos, whose democratic possibilities can now only be glimpsed...
...Certainly, anyone disposed to dispute both views must offer a detailed defense of his own against some powerful current counterarguments...
...These consequences lie at different levels...
...His statement of this is an admirably clear, coherent, and compelling statement of essentials that still captures much of what distinguishes a socialist from a liberal perspective (and socialists from our Social Democrats anxious to purloin the mantle of Tawney's name and legacy...
...and distribute the product of its labours in accordance with some generally recognized principles of justice...
...I do so because I agree with Anthony This essay is reprinted from Fabian Essays in Socialist Thought, edited for the Fabian Society by Ben Pimlott...
...achieve the conquest of the Labour Party is more open than I had believed" (p...
...More generally, an "ordered conception of its task" would enable the party to cut a path through the jungle of conflicting sectional claims and, in particular, to abandon its disastrous, self-defeating support for "free collective bargaining...
...This weakness was fundamental: If it continues uncorrected, there neither is, nor ought to be, a future for the Labour Party...
...Facing them with "cold realism" carries several implications...
...Now there has been a clearing of the decks, and we should see this as an opportunity to rediscover and redefine a "common conception of the ends of political action, and of the means of achieving them, based on a common view of the life proper to human beings, and of the steps required at any moment more nearly to attain it...
...Fourth, we should welcome, rather than regret, the passing of "consensus politics...
...In either case, they are socialists, though on matters of technique and procedure they may be uninstructed socialists...
...There have been massive changes in the nature of both capital and labor...
...For the truth is that the class structure has 202 radically changed over the last decades, becoming both more complex and more obscure...
...Socialism, thus defined, will be unpleasant, of course, to some persons professing it...
...The book is to be published in the U.S...
...Sixth, those in employment, including the professional classes, have turned more and more to sectional distributional conflicts, exploiting their differential market situations and organizational resources to the full—a trend only increased under inflationary conditions, albeit tempered by recession...
...So it ended by forgetting the reason for its existence...
...It never really fitted anyway, and it derived from an antiquated kind of military campaign based on the poor bloody infantry...
...Second, the contours of the occupational structure have become more difficult to discern...
...It is a common conception of the ends of political action, and of the means of achieving them, based on a common view of the life proper to human beings, and of the steps required at any moment more nearly to attain it...
...One example, and not a trivial one, concerns personal life style...
...Third, the traditional image of the proletarian—as "male, manual, and muscular" (in David Lockwood's happy phrase)—is becoming increasingly inapplicable to the industrial scene...
...These are urgent tasks for socialist political theory...
...This has occurred within the context of an increasingly international economy, now dominated by international corporations, in which they have been restructuring the international division of labor, directing capital-intensive production, research and development to areas of high labor productivity and the best markets, and labor-intensive production to the Third World: as a result, Britain's economic decline, unemployment in skilled and semiskilled occupations, and deindustrialization have been accelerated...
...See W. Beckerman, "A New Realism," New Statesman, December 2, 1983...
...Anne Phillips draws attention to this in her essay in Fabian Essays and the Winter 1985 Dissent...
...This was the battle the Fabians fought...
...It might, of course, seem widely optimistic to propose Tawney's 1932 essay as a reference point for discussion, since it might conjure up the prospect of a future Labour majority on the scale of 1945 (presumably without the benefit of another world war...
...it appears to have bitten deep into the electorate itself...
...That business was not the passage of a series of reforms in the interests of different sections of the working classes...
...In short, the moral background to the cash nexus may be fading away," leaving us morally unencumbered in what Tawney, in his forthright way, called an "acquisitive society...
...A. Clayre (ed...
...Trade unionism was "the vehicle of the poor and the underprivileged," while "the self-esteem of the old professional middle class"—experts, teachers, scientists, doctors, civil servants, preachers—" stemmed from their sense of difference from the working class and of helping the labor movement from an unassailed privileged position...
...Why did Tawney believe that such an energizing creed was a possibility that could be chosen...
...Or it is argued, as by Eric Hobsbawm, that increasing sectionalism and publicsector employment in the working class has halted the "forward march of labor...
...by the Associated University Presses...
...or, since the reasons are not necessarily inconsistent, for both reasons at once...
...For it is at the local and regional level that powerlessness and inequality are most resented and have grown most dramatically...
...There must be a massive effort to make the increasingly opaque and complex processes and relations to which I have alluded more widely intelligible to those caught up within them...
...Miliband holds that "whether the activists can...
...p. 100...
...Another essay from the book, "images of Fraternity: Socialist Slogans, Feminist Values," by Anne Phillips, appeared in the Winter 1985 Dissent...
...Is it possible today to be antifatalist...
...On the contrary, he held that until the void in the mind of the Labour party is filled—till interests are hammered by principles into a serviceable tool, which is what interests should be, and a steady will for a new social order takes the place of mild yearnings to make somewhat more comfortable terms with the social order of today—mere repairs to the engines will produce little but disillusionment...
...But since the 1950s, the parties to this alliance have largely fragmented, and their unifying forms of class consciousness largely dissolved—while the Labour party has ceased to function as its natural embodiment (uniting workers of "hand and brain") combining the largely defensive interests of the working class with the evangelical, Christian-based conscience of the middle classes, under the acknowledged leadership of the latter...
...It is no longer a question of "the mere precariousness of proletarian existence," but increasingly the precariousness of existing outside the proletariat— outside work and the organized working class...
...The verdict this time can only be suicidal selfabsorption producing general noncredibility...
...q Latest News from China...
...But it will keep those worth keeping...
...Copyright © 1984 by The Fabian Society...
...plan its business as it deems most conducive to the general well-being...
...D. Coates, "The Labour Party and the Future of the Left," in Miliband and Saville (eds...
...25 J. Westergaard, "The Rediscovery of the Cash Nexus," in R. Miliband and J. Saville (eds...
...Rather than resuming the "forward march," the problem is now one of drawing up new maps, of regrouping the army and recruiting new forces...
...The Labour party, he wrote, must put essentials before sectional claims, and it must create "a body of men and women who, whether trade unionists or intellectuals, put socialism first, and whose creed carries conviction, because they live in accordance with it...
...Despite the massive changes in the social and economic landscape, and even in the Labour party, it is still worth going back to Tawney's essay as a reference point in seeking to address these questions...
...R. McKibbin, "The Economic Policy of the Second Labour Government 1929-1931," Past and Present 68, 1975...
...Tawney could plausibly analyze his world in time-honored and well-tried categories...
...323-45...
...Notes ' R. H. Tawney, "The Choice Before the Labour Party," Political Quarterly 3, 1932, pp...
...The dominating and growing role of multinationals makes this task all the more urgent and difficult, and all the more scandalous the Labour party's relative traditional disinterest in the socialist parties and movements beyond our shores, and especially on the European continent...
...Such support and avoidance can buy political allies and achieve famous victories (as over the Heath government...
...It was, of course, objected that, by taking such a course, the Labour party would alienate many of its supporters: 198 It may, for the time being...
...First, our social analysis must endeavor to grasp these hard realities, unencumbered by wishful and anachronistic notions of class and class structure...
...See I. Crewe, "How to Link Up and Pick Up Vital Seats," Guardian, March 23, 1984...
...As Wright observes (in Fabian Essays in Socialist Thought), Tawney's "discussion of equality in terms of equal worth and social solidarity has different foundations from a liberal approach concerned with identifying the criteria of 'fairness' and 'social justice.'" It centers upon the notion of social unity based upon common ends and shared values—what Anne Phillips (in Fabian Essays, and in the Winter 1985 Dissent) calls the "social" in socialism—and is indeed fully vulnerable to her admirable critique (in its "eccentric prejudice in treating men as men...
...The Political Economy of Cooperation and Participation: A Third Sector (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980...
...Being without clear convictions as to its own meaning and purpose, it is deprived of the dynamic which only convictions supply...
...The Communist party maintained its dictatorship, but the Soviet party-state of the 1920s was limited and relatively tolerant, allowing a greater degree of social, cultural, and intellectual pluralism than has ever existed since in that country...
...On one view, the Labour party could never be a vehicle for socialism: "cart-horses," Ralph Miliband once wrote, "should not be expected to win the Derby...
...Is the reality behind the decorous drapery of political democracy to continue to be the economic power wielded by a few thousand— or, if that be preferred, a few hundred thousand—bankers, industrialists, and landowners...
...R. Miliband, "The Labour Government and Beyond," in Miliband and Saville (eds...
...It would encourage it to grasp the nettle of an effective incomes policy, instead of avoiding it, as in the last election campaign...
...This raised the question of attitude or (a word he liked) "spirit," which Tawney's essay both exemplifies and describes...
...It is true that it lacks a critical sense of the varied forms of solidarity and the conflicts between these...
...For a real and effective incomes policy (such as the left used to advocate) is the only alternative to unemployment as a means of controlling inflation...
...In the face of such triumphant fatalism, the only option is, as Tawney proposed, "to seize every opportunity of forcing a battle on fundamental questions...
...Furthermore, it is unhelpful to speak of resuming "the forward march of labor, which began to falter 30 years ago""—as though the problem were to continue a (once magnificent) journey across territory that, though it may have been substantially transformed by various new developments, is still recognizable by the old familiar landmarks...
...Kellner (in Fabian Essays) is right: it is a measure of the Tories' ideological ascendancy that they have so successfully clothed the pursuit of privilege in the rhetoric of democracy—and a measure of Labour's retreat that our opposition in the name of fairness and decency should be so widely construed as an assault on liberty...
...Economic power and vested interests have become less and less representable: capitalism now lacks not so much a human face as a human form...
...All quotations from Tawney, unless otherwise indicated, are from this essay...
...NEP brought also a new, more conciliatory politics...
...But, as Gareth Stedman Jones has well said, "the 'objective' realities of class discerned by social surveys and sociological analysis do not have any unambiguous bearing upon the fate of classoriented political parties...
...III I f this is the world we live in, how, then, are the lessons of Tawney to be applied to it...
...The party, he declared, needed "a little cold realism" now it had "an interval in which to meditate on its errors...
...201 H Yet the world of today is one that has been radically transformed since Tawney wrote, and the scale and dimensions of this transformation must be understood and faced...
...in his Languages of Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 242...
...and that the complementary forms of class consciousness on which that alliance depended (the defense of unambiguous and shared collective interests allied with a middleclass humanitarian conscience) have all but dissolved...
...Here the most notable effects have been the massive growth and diversification in the service sector, deskilling and white-collar proletarianization, and the increasing feminization of work...
...23 See E. 0. Wright and J. Singleman, "Proletarianization in Advanced Capitalist Societies: An Empirical Investigation into the Debate Between Marxist and Post-Industrialist Theorists over the Transformation of the Labor Process (Mimeo, Department of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, 1978...
...Indeed, the very metaphor of a "forward march" will have to be abandoned...
...If we are to move "beyond the fragments," one prerequisite is a coherent scheme of socialist principles, to order priorities and unify adherents—" a body of conviction as resolute and informed as the opposition in front of it...
...The nature of its business is determined by its choice...
...override, for the sake of economic efficiency, the obstruction of vested interests...
...333), compare Neil Kinnock's characterization of "democratic socialism as a productionist philosophy": "My Socialism," New Statesman, October 7, 1983...
...It does not achieve what it could, because it does not know what it wants...
...When socialists come to power, they must do so, not "as diffident agents of policies not their own, but as socialists...
...Edited by M. Jacques and E Mulhern (London: Verso, in association with Marxism Today, 1981...
...Economic power, vested interests, class privilege, and class oppression seemed (whether to Marxists or Fabians) clearly identifiable, as did the agency that would bring them to an end (whether it be revolutionary workers or rational professionals...
...205 ' R. Skidelsky, Politicians and the Slump...
...Capitalist parties presumably accept the first alternative...
...Nevertheless, Tawney's antifatalism provides a valu199 able antidote to a certain kind of electoral determinism that has prevailed in Labour party debates ever since the 1950s, when the Revisionists embraced the embourgoisement thesis and especially since the postmortems on the 1959 election...
...Published by Heinemann Educational Books, in London, with whose kind permission it appears here...
...Who promised them pleasure...
...Achieving such control has long been a major preoccupation of the population at large...
...See H. Newby, C. Vogler, D. Rose, and G. Marshall, "From Class Structure to Class Action: British Working Class Politics in the 1980s," forthcoming...
...Tawney called his article "The Choice Before the Labour Party...
...For when Tawney wrote, the "mere precariousness of proletarian existence" gave the ties of solidarity and community a clear instrumental point: the workplace, the union, the neighborhood, the extended family, the Labour party were vital means of defending, and advancing, shared interests in a hostile and uncertain world...
...And indeed, as Tawney shrewdly observed, the Labour party is "less of a class party than any other British party...
...The evidence from public opinion and voting studies seems to suggest that Britain's apparently intractable economic problems have led to quiet disillusionment: people increasingly assume that widespread inequalities are unalterable and the economy is beyond human control...
...It is also a matter of taking antifatalism seriously, looking hard to see how and where capitalism can be socialized —by diffusing the ownership and control of capital, both personal and industrial, and to discover what forms the "organs through which the nation can control, in cooperation with other nations, its own economic destinies" can take in the contemporary world of internationally imposed inequalities...
...2 Now, if ever, there is a need for "cold realism" and meditation upon past errors...
...It is, in short—it is absurd that at this time of day the statement should be necessary— a classless society...
...They threw themselves into the role of the Obsequious Apprentice, or Prudence Rewarded, as though bent on proving that, so far from being different from other governments, His Majesty's Labour government could rival the most respectable of them in cautious conventionality...
...Ibid., p. 51, but see also Ben Pimlott, Labour and the Left in the 1930s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), and Elizabeth Durbin's essay in Fabian Essays in Socialist Thought...
...If it continued to be the first, with programs that were more "miscellanies" than programs, offering "the greatest possible number of carrots to the greatest possible number of donkeys," then it would continue to lack a "stable standard of political values, such as would teach it to discriminate between the relative urgencies of different objectives...
...Those who accept this objective, Tawney observed, may do so for more than one reason: because they think it more conducive to economic efficiency than a capitalism which no longer, as in its prime, delivers the goods...
...See also Newby et al, art...
...If a pessimist is someone without illusions in a tough world, then we had better all be pessimists...
...See R. Eatwell and A. Wright, "Labour and the Lessons of 1931," History 63, 1978...
...A. Wright, British Socialism, p. 13...
...AMONG ALL THESE DEVELOPMENTS, a number are particularly worth stressing...
...Universal welfare provision, however inadequate and maladministered, has removed that context, further weakening the bonds of communal solidarity...
...And those retained will gather others, of a kind [that] will not turn back in the day of battle...
...Or labor support is said to be doomed by long-term social-demographic trends...
...For Tawney, the choice was clear-cut...
...Indeed, the question must now be asked: Is there a choice before the Labour party...
...In any case, "how can followers be Ironsides if leaders are flunkies...
...Here is a major area in which the old Fabian tradition of research, of "measurement and publicity," must be continued and renewed...
...Thus, for example, we had better reject the notion that all the Labour party needs is a period of further bleeding to cure it of its surfeit of crypto-Social Democrats and thereby turn it "into a socialist party free from the constrictions hitherto imposed upon it by its leaders" 5; or that it is basically healthy and only needs a period of time to recuperate under its bright, new leadership...
...In short, it lacked "any ordered conception of its task...
...To this quote from Tawney's essay (p...
...This is the only way, if there is one, to stir and mobilize the deep and partly submerged countercurrents of our social and cultural life...
...A. Wright (ed...
...24 See J. Westergaard, "Class of '84," New Socialist, Jan/Feb., 1984...
...Fifth, indeed labor or work itself, and the sphere of production, seems to be becoming less central to the identity and consciousness of workers, while consumption, especially with respect to housing and transport, has become more central to the definition of their basic interests...
...There are various ways of looking at the Labour party of 1929-31...
...And what, if any, are the prospects for socialism in Britain over the next decades...
...The Labour party was "hesitant in action, because divided in mind...
...See D. Massey, "The Contours of Victory...
...also see Alec Nove, The Economics of Feasible Socialism (London: Allen and Unwin, 1983...
...In part, too, this has occurred because of the very successes of the welfare state and of Labour in power...
...Tawney, by contrast, took the view, as did many socialists at the time,' that there were lessons to be learned from 1931, choices to be faced, and alternative paths to be pursued— though it is true that as the 1930s progressed, the Labour party had made no significant break with the past.' An analogous range of views exists today...
...With such sentiments Thatcherism is peculiarly at home, and it has sought to nurture and breed them, while attempting to root out the very idea that social progress can be achieved through the rational exercise of political will...
...Fatalism, however, extends far beyond the perennial analyses of Labour's prospects...
...For such a battle, Tawney writes, there needs to be "a body of conviction as resolute and informed as the opposition in front of it"—a set of attitudes free of class hatred and aware that "both duty and prudence require that necessary changes be effected without a breakdown," and that "the possibility of effecting them is conditioned by international, as much as by domestic, factors...
...Another view is that there was no such opportunity: the Labour party "could not . . . reorganize economic life through state intervention" because of deficient understanding, lack of theory, the physical incapacity of the state, and the opposition of "the bureaucracy, the Bank of England, the banks, the great financial institutions, most of industry," and "the dead weight of conventional wisdom...
...And we must do so with the driving purpose of recovering and mobilizing a latent antifatalistic consensus of sentiment and belief: a sense of outrage and of justice, and a belief in the centrality of welfare • rights to citizenship and of political will to social progress...
...The only potentially effective means of resisting, and eventually rolling back, the present tide is to develop and propagate an alternative analysis of the present that reaches to fundamentals, and a vision of an alternative future of a "society of go-getters" that is both appealing and feasible...
...Consider, first, Tawney's very title: "The Choice Before the Labour Party...
...The first is antifatalism...
...And the systematic, though selective, onslaught on social science, and sociology in particular, by the present government and opinion leaders friendly to it must be taken especially seriously...
...The Socialist Register 1983 (London: Merlin Press, 1983), p. 116...
...The Socialist Register 1970 (London: The Merlin Press, 1970...
...As for the changes in labor, these have resulted from sectoral shifts in the economy between industries and from the restructuring and reorganization of labor within them...
...His verdict on the late government was "pernicious anaemia producing general futility...
...The Soviet 1920s were neither democratic nor, in our sense, liberal...
...In 1984 we can look back on an electoral defeat that is, if less dramatic, more catastrophic...
...5 G. Stedman Jones, "Why Is the Labour Party in a Mess...
...On this intriguing question see, for example, C. E. Lindblom, Politics and Markets: The World's PoliticalEconomic Systems (New York: Basic Books, 1977...
...What Tawney illustrates is something that has been all too rare in the history of the labor movement and has never been more needed than today: "moralism" with "a hard cutting edge" that makes "connections between moral valuations and social institutions with direct consequences for political practice...
...IN SUM, TAWNEY'S ESSAY carries three lessons that are strikingly and urgently relevant to the present day...
...The second lesson concerns what we may call the spirit of socialism...
...The changes in capital have been in the direction of ever more complex forms of ownership and control, rendering them ever more difficult to perceive and make sense of...
...For further evidence on fatalism see J. Alt, The Politics of Economic Decline (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979...
...It is not a question, of course, either of merely improving the distribution of wealth, or merely increasing its production, but of doing both together...
...Thus he could write of the "economic power [of] bankers, industrialists, and land-owners," of overcoming the "vested interests" they imposed in the way of a socialist distribution, and that class-privilege takes more than one form...
...And what are the links between these...
...A political creed, it need hardly be said, is neither a system of transcendental doctrine nor a code of rigid formulae...
...Of course, it needs reformulating and rethinking in the light both of new, or newly visible, forms of oppression, injustice, and unfreedom, and of new social movements with new vocabularies and concerns...
...Seventh, the poor and the underprivileged are now to be found more and more outside the organized working class and the trade union bargaining process— among the unemployed, the unwaged, colored immigrants, and one-parent families...
...But his account does register a clear sense of what socialist solidarity is not—the "scramble . . . for individual power and profit [and the] tyranny of money"—and it forms, I believe, as good a starting point as any for building a socialist (as against a liberal or social-democratic) theory of justice...
...If there is the right spirit in the movement," he wrote, "there will not be any question of the next Labour government repeating the policy of office at all costs, which was followed by the last...
...The party must "create in advance a temper and mentality of a kind to carry it through, not one crisis, but a series of crises...
...cit., and the references cited therein...
...British Socialism: Socialist Thought from the 1880s to 1960s (London: Longman, 1983), p. 13...
...What, then, was the objective of a socialist party...
...See Crewe, Guardian, art...
...How should the socialist objective be framed and pursued...
...Labour's fundamental weakness, according to Tawney, was "its lack of a creed...
...See also E. Hobsbawm, "Labour's Lost Million," Marxism Today, October 1983...
...It touched lightly on its objectives, or veiled them in the radiant ambiguity of the word socialism, which each hearer could interpret to his taste...
...From Stephen F. Cohen, Rethinking the Soviet Experience, Politics and History Since 1917, Oxford University Press, 1985 206...
...First, economic power has become more anonymous and invisible...
...It has not...
...It is also a question of returning to the innovative educational traditions of the past outside the formal system...
...On another point of view, increasingly advanced on the right, at different levels of sophistication, the socialist project is, for a variety of reasons, inherently unrealizable or only realizable at an unacceptable cost...
...The Soviet state retained control of heavy industry, foreign trade, banking, and transportation...
...But this is a world we have lost, just as the Labour party Tawney addressed was the Labour party of yesterday...
...It embodies a vision that is neither "distributionist" nor "productionist," but both together...
...In part, more recently, they are being stripped away in a systematic, ruthless, and manipulative political onslaught on the organizations of the working class and the institutions of local government...
...It is no longer a question of Tawney's few thousand or few hundred thousand "bankers, industrialists, and land-owners," but of pension funds, multinational corporations, cartels, "spheres of interest," and so on...
...This was a form of politics within which socialist advance was never going to prove possible...
...2 For example, see M. Abrams and R. Rose, Must Labour Lose...
Vol. 32 • April 1985 • No. 2
