British Labor Views the Future

...Nationalizations need to be combined with industrial democracy, and so far socialists have significantly failed in showing how this is to be done...

...What new relationships must be established between movement and party, doctrine and practice, means and ends...

...Yet, even such proposed extensions of leveling and redistributing meet fierce Tory resistance, except within the group of Tory "radicals" who wish to "humanize" the large corporations and introduce "democracy" into private ownership...

...Under such circumstances, the Labor Party is doomed to "remain an opposition party...

...At the Party conference in October he based his plea for future leadership upon this...

...Writing in the same publication, Gaitskell expressed the view that the party doctrine of public ownership of industry, whose Fabian origins are familiar enough, now offers a "too simple" view of society...

...What then, demand the Bevanites and party radicals, is socialism...

...and reformed death duties would strike further at the inequalities which come from inheritance...

...Shortly after, G. D. H. Cole, in an article entitled "Thoughts After the Election" (New Statesman and Nation, June 25, 1955) , probed still deeper into the heart of the question which, for him, concerned the future of socialism itself...

...Professor Tawney's description—"autocracy tempered by insurgence"—still sums up the system which prevails within the greater part of industry...

...Youth does not build its case on the memory of the old...

...Communal memories are overlaid by a new situation and their influence grows ever more remote and vague...

...The ethical basis of socialism's appeal must be revived...

...The central socialist ideal is equality," writes Hugh Gaitskell in the Socialist Standard, publication of the Party's conservative wing...

...But none of these is an end in itself...

...All this is tied up with the advance toward a socialist society without which aim, Bevan writes in the Tribune, the Labor Party...

...Automation, atomic energy, electronics, etc., strengthen the case for central planning and social ownership...

...A generation has grown up in Britain • It may be found scattered throughout such publications as the New Statesman and Nation, Tribune, Socialist Standard, etc...

...For "the appeal of socialism, unlike that of the Welfare State, is not to human selfishness but to the will to work together in a cause common to all mankind...

...Professor Tawney in his famous work Equality, which summed up the best in British thought on the subject, defined socialist equality as that state of affairs under which each individual could utilize all his faculties and capacities at their highest level...

...To do so means facing the problem of property ownership, for the continued private ownership of large accumulations of property is undoubtedly the great barrier to ridding ourselves of the most objectionable inequalities which still remain in our society...

...It means equal opportunities for every person to make the most of his life without harming others, to develop his capacities in freedom, to share in some finer, more cooperative way of living...

...3) Improving the social service system and the Welfare State...

...The managers of private enterprise are ultimately accountable only to its owners...

...This link seems to us to have been clarified in an editorial in the July, 1955, number of Socialist Commentary, organ of a small socialist group outside the Labor Party...

...they are problems of the movement as a whole...

...Nationalization, by itself, is also not enough to solve the problems of workers' status in industry...

...Here we find perhaps the greatI0 est specific divergence of views...

...Its basic appeal is not to class, but to conscience and community...

...Is our concept of socialism lacking, antiquated...

...They are means...

...Between 1945 and 1951 the party headed the first post-war government to carry out a substantial portion of its program...

...In 1937 Attlee wrote: The British Labor Party is an expression of the socialist movement adapted to the British climate...

...An alternative would be to democratize property not by nationalizing it but by redistributing it...

...Seen in this way socialism has its appeal to every man of generous impulse...

...It relates to the key issue for British labor: the struggle for political, social and cultural equality...

...S...

...Whatever may be said about the weakening of socialist goals in Britain, this view remains unchanged...

...British socialism is alive and thinking...

...A few big firms have set an example...

...A society in which each person owned an equal amount of property would come much nearer the socialist ideal than one in which the Government owned all the property...

...The workers are given only as much respect as trade unions may be able to enforce or as expediency may require...

...will have no significance in the future life of the nation...

...There is much strength in such an approach...

...Yet how wrong both are...

...In 1945, for example, two-thirds of the Labor MP's in Parliament could correctly be described as Christian-Socialists, with the late Sir Stafford Cripps at their head...

...Is it not clear that the two basic wings of the party (conservatives and radicals) have much in common, no matter how serious their differences in approach may be...

...Disunity remains, but a split has been avoided...

...The Gaitskell-Lewis wing of the party favors a policy of "restraint" as concerns wage claims, property redistribution, etc., and it clearly opposes a capital levy on wealth at this time...

...At the same time, it offers nothing to the "marginal, floating voters" which the Tory party does not offer...

...other measures are required, and the proposals are there...

...Furthermore, says Cole, "by bidding against them," the socialist parties and the unions keep the capitalists "up to scratch...

...But the question for socialists is not simply how to win elections, but how to win them for further socialist advance...

...New techniques have made it possible to alleviate economic crises with the result that trade unions and socialist parties press for "further installments" of the "Welfare State," rather than the socialist program...

...capitalism becomes "tolerably progressive...

...But nationalization today seems to have little appeal, even to the working class...

...It does not mean equal opportunities for each to scramble over the backs of others while pushing the weakest to the wall...

...Does our party have a future...

...The pessimistic views of Cole are not shared by many English socialists...

...The old keen edge of attack on capitalist society was therefore blunted...

...Labor is essentially the custodian of those memories and they were not sufficient in themselves to form the basis of mass appeal...

...Moral, ethical and religious questions—"problems of conscience"—have played a much greater part in British socialism than elsewhere...

...A futher, infinitely more complex and difficult advance is now under preparation...

...But examine these schemes, and there is nothing of worth behind the facade...

...5) Establishment of a higher investment rate in industry in order to hasten its modernization...

...It has its own emotional attitude to contemporary society and this is not compounded of the elements that make up the mental climate of past generations...

...Property is a source of power as well as privilege...

...As soon as one tries to express equality in meaningful terms, other values enter...

...Fair shares" has been one of the best slogans used by the Labor Party since the war...

...They will build a "property-owning democracy" through a redistribution of property by means of co-partnership...

...A strange silence fell over the British Labor Party immediately after its electoral defeat...

...Thus, by attacking the inheritance of large fortunes, "we may also see the State gradually becoming a property-owner and shareholder over a much wider field" than that represented by its current ownership of certain key industries (coal, railroads, etc...

...This experience is now exhausted...

...It is true that the transfer to the State of the ownership of enterprise gives society control over the appointment of managers and makes them accountable to the public...

...III The Attlee government carried out a massive redistribution of income and earning capacity...

...What is the socialist alternative...

...That would be a final defeat, for there never will be socialism without socialists...

...This must remain the crux of any socialist program...

...Even the flurry of mutual recrimination within the party leadership hardly lasted more than a few days...

...Gaitskell has since become party leader...

...Equality with quality can only be won through increased public ownership, public enterprise and public expenditure...

...4) Development of extensive consumer protection...

...In an article attacking the notion that the nationalization of industry by itself acts as a bridge leading us from inequality toward equality, the ex-Chancellor* of the Exchequer and the almost sure-to-be future Party leader feels compelled to reassert this principal goal of social equality...

...Professor Arthur Lewis, an official right-wing party economist, presents similar views even more concisely: A Government machine in which all property and all opportunities of employment are concentrated is really a totalitarian rather than a Socialist conception...

...A capital gains tax would go some way to prevent new accumulations of property...

...Unfortunately it was tied up too much with rationing and subsidies...

...Whatever happens within the party or in the struggle for succession to Attlee, these are essentials to keep in mind...

...specifically, Cole urges participation by socialist intellectuals in his rather nebulous "World Socialist Crusade...

...by and large it is the intellectuals of the party who refuse to think about its problems...

...One of the striking things about this discussion* is that it turns upon much the same problems that are plaguing socialists everywhere, be they members of a powerful movement or simply scattered individuals...

...The evil is that large-scale ownership is so closely concentrated in the hands of a very few...

...By a neat, if transparent, play on words Professor Lewis labels as the "real Party conservatives" those who cling to the old line (complete or almost complete nationalization of private enterprise) : Some party members just keep on demanding the old mixture as if we were still back in the good old days of 1900...

...Full employment and stiff income tax have narrowed the span of most incomes from work, and the majority are gradually tending to a common mode of life...

...but its redistribution of wealth and ownership was, by comparison, insignificant...

...This will mean a, capital levy...

...For, whatever may be the subjective-views of individual leaders, only a common, abiding faith in socialism itself can sustain the movement...

...In no way do they give their employees the glimmerings of equality of status in the enterprise...

...My emphasis...

...The cartoonist Vicky, in a sketch mocking this same conference, shows the aspirants for party leadership parading before the delegates in their "ideological bikinis...

...It is also a political movement of the English people which is the heir of many others...

...Perhaps no political party in history has ever had such deep-going roots, tapping such rich and varied sources, as does British Labor...

...The Tories are now promising that they will be the party to take action...

...Much of the material so far presented gives the impression that this common recognition of the party's impasse has resulted in a common effort to think things over...

...What this is to be is now under discussion...

...Who knows but the Labor Party maybefore long have a theoretical review of its owni rA that has not experienced the frustration and privation of unemployment...

...The central, acknowledged socialist ideal is equality...

...Nationalization has been the traditional socialist position...

...11 Soon enough, in the tradition of British practicality, the discussion assumed more concrete form...

...These new problems are simple enough: Where, do we go from here...

...If taxation, particularly the income tax, has now been pushed to its uttermost limits, as both Professor Lewis and Peter Shore, writing in the New Statesman and Nation, contend, then further equalization of social wealth and power must come about through other means...

...P.) In a recent issue of the New Leader, Irving Kristol, reporting on the Margate conference, attempts to draw a line between the Socialist-Labor movement, with its "ideological trappings," and the Labor Party, whose goal is to administer the Welfare State...

...Industry today, it is often said, is in the hands of its managers, not its owners...

...The only final solution is to transfer all the large accumulations of property into public ownership...

...But almost all tendencies in the party agree that the continued existence of the present-sized capitalist sector in British society cannot be reconciled with any major progress toward equality...

...Even electoral victories are not mandates for the introduction of socialism, but only for more "welfare...

...Pointing both to the absolute and relative growth of intermediate social groups between the proletariat and capitalist class, Professor Cole goes on: "Workers are much better off and much more secure economically than they were in Marx's day...

...Its fears cannot be evoked by possibilities that lie outside its own experience...

...Nationalization with compensation cannot do much to redistribute property...

...Perhaps for the first time in its history, the British Labor Party has been dragged out of its habitual provincialism, forced to take a look at its past and present and to search its very soul for the future...

...Unless we believe that it is possible for people actually to prefer—and vote for—a society based on socialist and not on capitalist values, then we cease to believe in this, our own message...

...Equality does not mean uniformity or regimentation...

...That is the gist of the discussion which we have, in part, quoted...

...Cole's conclusion from the vexing situation is his now familiar belief that the party is not enough...

...Considering the rapid deflation of the Conservative government and the disenchantment with Anthony Eden, the occasion to prove this may arrive sooner than foreseen...

...Gaitskell believes the inheritance of large fortunes constitutes a greater evil in terms of inequities than does what remains of private ownership...

...The aim, in other words, has been to combine equality with quality...

...This, in turn, weakens the socialist appeal to the proletariat, which is no longer a fundamental one built around principles and ideals...

...Equality is not, as is sometimes thought, the whole of socialism...

...that is too narrow a view...

...Have socialists the courage to go further...

...These differences with Toryism really point up the character a new Labor government would take, assuming that Gaitskell and his supporters were in command...

...The truth is that once the elections were over, the real issues before Britain's socialist movement made the former struggle of party groups seem irrelevant...

...disagreement continues, but the movement goes on...

...I In a particularly sober article (Tribune, June 2, 1955) , Aneurin Bevan descended from the rhetorical clouds of his electoral militancy to make some telling observations: For the first time within living memory a Tory Government managed to exist for more than three years without inflicting mass unemployment on the country at the same time...

...There can be no playing with this...

...More specifically, the editors of the Socialist Standard (June and July, 1955) , who by and large constitute the brain center for the new conservative wing of the party now forming around Gaitskell, formulated the following key differences with present-day Toryism: (I) Fairer shares of prosperity and income for the masses of people...

...Yesterday's issues were tactical or narrowly political while the new issues tend to replace old struggles and factions...

...It is our national custom to look for precedents in the past for each step in advance that we take...

...Further, only revision of the tax system to strike still harder at inherited wealth, together with a capital levy organized by the state can advance us on the path of a further redistribution of wealth...

...What bearing has this on the practical consequences of the present discussion...

...The annual party conference held in October of last year impressed observers more by its dullness than by anything else...

...to level up and not to level down...

...The Economist (October 22, 1955) comments that Gaitskell's insistence upon equality of opportunity as the foundation of his socialist faith does not strongly differentiate him from "the Babeufs of the Labor Party...

...The whole idea is a pious sham...

...indeed there is danger that that is precisely what we may be tempted into doing...

...A broader and more radical content must now be given to this aim...

...Thus socialism, far from being a necessary outcome of current economic trends, in practice turns counter to them both in the subjective sense that the will to fundamental change is weakened by success in improving conditions and opportunities under capitalism and in the objective sense that there is no necessary tendency for capitalism to break down under the stress of its inner contradictions...

...Rather than concentrating on enlarging the statified sphere of economy, we must pursue fiscal aims, he writes, whose goal is further levelling and equalizing...

...Is there doubt that such a program will win votes...

...One of the great sources of British socialism is, of course, reform movements within the Established Church as well as the independent dissenting churches...

...The concentration of private property also gives rise to the inequalities of status in work...

...Yet over and above them remains a class of people who are able to pursue an entirely other kind of existence, on the strength of their property holdings...

...The original socialist objectives retain their full validity, but we now see they may be achieved by something other than the old formulas and methods...

...The non-Marxian origins of British Labor are known to all of us and recent years have only emphasized the line of demarcation between English socialism and the continental varieties...

...In response to the viewpoint outlined above, this wing of the party asks for an end to the habit of mild apology whenever nationalization of industry is discussed...

...This is our dilemma...

...But even these measures will at best take effect slowly...

...If all that is to count are efficiency and productivity, then the position of the workers will continue to be treated as of subsidiary importance...

...2) A heavy taxing hand applied to capital gains and inheritance...

...But this does not get us very far unless the very purposes of industry are changed...

...What would be done about the crucial problem of property ownership...

...This is a dangerous half-truth...

...The true answer, however, is not to throw nationalization overboard, but to recognize that by itself it is not enough...

...We note, of course, the kinship of these views to Keynesian liberalism and their remoteness from revolutionary economic doctrine as practiced, let us say, in the earliest phase of the Russian Revolution...

...It is possible to devise taxation, inheritance, and financial systems which break up property concentrations and redistribute property ownership...

...It is worth quoting at length: If our only problem were "how to win elections," then the obvious answer would be to compete , with the Conservatives in the race for personal and material satisfactions...