The British Labor Party Politics And "Abundance"

...the party's very success has brought about an attachment to the current British social system among many Laborites...

...Some may take it as a commentary on this literature that he concludes, pessimistically, that there are no institutional means by which human nature can be changed...

...But his confusion is not simply verbal...

...In this context, Crosland's conception of socialism is worth repeating: First, a protest against the material poverty and physical squalor which capitalism produced...

...The workers, and the lower middle classes as well, cannot enjoy any but the vicarious pleasures associated with this image...

...The eternalization of the present is a recurrent characteristic of conservative thought: the insistence that what is exhausts what can be...

...A disdain for the workers, a belief that they are getting much more than their due, extends upwards from the lower middle classes to the London clubs...

...That, indeed, is its chief political value to the Tories...

...It is conceivable that such a status hierarchy might be as rigid and unequal as the class hierarchy which it supersedes...

...The Tories have been adept at portraying the Labor Party as the enemy of the good life, as indeed it ought to be if the good life is conceived in this fashion...

...And he makes no suggestions for dealing with the resistance of presently favored British groups to this proposal...

...Crosland is here clearly talking of "social inequality" in terms of parity, or near parity, of prestige and esteem...

...Secondly, a concern for 'social welfare,' for the interests of those in need, or oppressed, or unfortunate .. . Thirdly, a belief in equality and the 'classless society,' and especially a desire to give the worker his 'just' rights and a responsible status at work...

...cludes critical socialist responses...

...Resentment alone cannot produce politics, but Crosland ignores the ugly potential in this situation...

...they rest on quite tangible things like power and wealth...

...Prosperity is not the most novel feature of the contemporary British scene...

...if we do, we may find that history has some unpleasant surprises up its sleeves for us...

...The British landed classes and the financial ones are not quite as distinct as this phrasing would lead us to suppose, and it is amusing to find Crosland afraid that property would pass from "stable established families" to "nouveau riche speculators" as well as the state...

...But in warning against "paternalism" with respect to a cultural policy, he accepts as fixed the present distribution of cultural values in the population...

...Irreversible" trends make impossible largescale unemployment, significant cuts in working-class living standards, and the concentration of political power in the hands of a property-owning class...

...In this context, it seems gratuitous...

...The pursuit of status in the United States is in fact the pursuit of the tangible advantages of higher class position, which in turn confer status...

...And this view is the source not only of his reluctance to consider fundamental alterations of British society...

...it leads him to misinterpret the current scene: he ignores the ways in which the original liberal responses no longer fit a bureaucratized society...

...And precisely on this point Crosland refuses analysis...

...But Crosland's entrapment in a classical dilemma is most evident in his proposals for the reshaping of British society...

...But it should not be thought that his counsel is one of despair...

...Their enjoyment has been interfered with, however, by others of the intelligentsia...

...Even before the Tory electoral victory of 1951, a singular conservative revival had begun...

...He introduces his proposals with the claim that "the levelling process is a reality even in terms of consumption standards...

...All definitions are arbitrary, of course, but Crosland's arbitrariness gives him certain advantages...

...The Angry Young Men are often ostensibly apolitical...

...And it is the sobriety of acceptance, a reasoned response to what was yesterday the equilibrium in politics...

...one should never monkey about with society too much...

...It is striking that this notion should characterize C. A. R. Crosland's The Future of Socialism, a systematic attempt to reconsider the politics of the British Labor Party.* But while striking, it is not altogether surprising...

...The latter make it a principle to enjoy nothing that delights the yea-sayers...

...238 itancy and lessened the electorate's readiness to accept critical changes in social and economic structure...

...Crosland holds that any society must have some structure of conventional and accepted rankings...

...We cannot tax him with ignoring the problem...

...Those who, like Crosland, think in these terms, mistake a temporary sort of equilibrium for a long-term trend...

...he does not think that social institutions can be given a specifically socialist content...

...And the industrial managers and the Conservative leaders generally are enlightened...

...One of Britain's canniest Scots, Donald MacRae, has suggested that post1918 France is in fact the best analogy...

...His warnings against proceeding to a "drab extreme" of egalitarianism might be appropriate had he envisaged anything radically egalitarian...

...He supposes that socialism was concerned only with the problem of replacing capitalist property...

...Along with these inequities Crosland deplores the retention of status attitudes more appropriate to the earlier stages of capitalism than to the Welfare State...

...Crosland's image of America is somewhat idealized...

...His proposals for "high level industrial democracy," then, simply entail a certain widening of the scope of the bureaucratic control structures now dominating our lives...

...He is quite content to recommend what he terms as "High Level Industrial Democracy...

...Of the ideal of cooperation he says that it is "impossible to reach a definite conclusion about its relevance to contemporary conditions...

...He honestly thinks that, on balance, there is more to conserve than to change in contemporary Britain— despite his revulsion from the present British status system...

...But the choices he cites suggest that he assumes that men are genuinely free in our type of society...

...The royal family, alternately appearing in the country on horseback and mixing with film stars in night clubs, does much to sustain the image...

...Turning to industrial organization, he declares the extension of state controls "a tiresome and unnecessary nuisance" —a view incorporated in the Labor Party's subsequent document, Industry and Society, which calls for passive government shareholding in private enterprises...

...He writes of British workers, undertaking cruelly long hours at the workbench in order to pay for consumer durable goods, and he does not stop to analyze the way in which they have assimilated middle-class consumption values...

...Rejecting worker participation in management, he is in favor of an extension of the scope of trade union consultation with management, on the American model...

...And those who say what many think, like the naively honest Tory Lord, Altrincham, or the iconoclastic journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, are ferociously abused...

...In fact, industrial property is not owned in the traditional sense...

...but this too requires energy...

...It also, of course, performs a number of undefined—because undefinable—" service" functions and thus reassures the puritanical among the lower middle class that its fun is earned...

...He thinks it possible to convert elite schools into democratic institutions...

...Now some of these formulations are liberal rather than (or as well as) socialist...

...In any case, social superordination and subordination do not rest merely on "attitudes...

...Some of it was released at the time of Britain's humil iation at Suez but more of it is there, temporarily quiescent...

...the idea is most unclear (only Mills has done something to clarify it) and I should not wish it thought that I supposed we have the answer...

...And the present political atmosphere in Britain (as in America and West Germany) is to some extent dominated by a boom psychology...

...The cult of the monarchy, the hierarchy of honors and titles bestowed by the crown, and the absurd and repulsive sycophancy associated with this cult—these are indispensable to the revival, particularly at the lower levels of the class system...

...An important section of the intelligentsia has declared that we live, if not in the best of possible worlds, then in about the only possible one...

...And while Crosland recommends upon his fellow countrymen adoption of American attitudes toward social status, he hardly discusses the American class system underlying these attitudes—and at times, possibly, obscured by them...

...III Crosland also devotes much attention to the class structure...

...His socialism thus comes to a defense of a Welfare State organized on liberal political principles...

...but it is precisely these that Crosland holds incapable of realization...

...There are groups in relative decline, 'forced to pay taxes at an unprecedented rate, angry at the disappearance of cheap domestic labor and indignant at their own inability to afford what have been called, I believe, the unbought graces of life...

...This assertion, however, may give the Labor Party too much credit, since its immobility is partly a response to a successful Tory propaganda counter-attack...

...This is what he means when he declares: "It is quite consistent to say both that Britain remains to an exceptional degree a 'class society,' and that no ruling class exists in the narrow Marxian or economic sense...

...The American social system is by no means as open as Crosland thinks—although it would be absurd to deny that in some respects it is psychologically more tolerable than the British one...

...Fourthly, a rejection of competitive antagonism, and an ideal of fraternity and cooperation...

...Middleclass socialist conviction, then, has relaxed into the benign and indefinite feeling that justice must be done—accompanied by the comfortable belief that, practically, it has almost all been done already...

...The trouble with British society—continues Crosland's argument—consists of some remaining structural inequities in the distribution of life chances...

...And the managers are subject to dictation by governments that are themselves dependent upon the votes of a people committed to the maintenance, indeed the extension, of the Welfare State...

...It is a political and sociological problem of large scale, which now presents itself as strongly in the state bureaucracy, the Trade Unions, the nationalised industries, and the political parties, as it does in private industry...

...the latter differ from the Laborites over means, not ends...

...and Britain has an appreciably more equal society after six years of Labor rule either than it had before the war, or than it would otherwise have had...

...Let us take as an instance of Cros land's thought his approach to the problem of socialist transformation of human nature...

...Political in meaning, and above all in consequences, the revival has not been political in appearance...

...But the temper of his book marks him as, by contrast, a Sober Young Man...

...He seems to have read somewhat in the literature of neo-Freudianism, and in social anthropology...

...But if socialism entails only a genteel knock at the door of these, our rulers, then a great tradition is in colossal disrepair...

...The mass media propagate as a legitimate image of aspiration a fantastic style of life which appears to combine "gracious living" in a country house with the more sensual delights of the gilded scum of mass society...

...But when he writes of the class structure, he refers mainly to the status system in Britain, which he so dislikes...

...What this can mean without a substantial degree of workers' control, it is hard to see...

...But having written the script, he cannot very well criticize the lines of the play...

...it may be a Welfare State but it is not an Op portunity Society...

...It has succeeded, to a large extent, in making the recent recruits to the upper and middle layers of the new class system into zealous defenders of the older status values —even though they owe their social ascent to the Welfare State...

...But I have said enough to show that there is considerable ground for being less than sanguine about what is going to follow the present unstable equilibrium in British politics...

...but then as now it was possible to see how much tension lay just beneath the surface...

...Given more political and economic reverses in England, Weimar Germany might be one...

...I have said that he wishes to leave social structure essentially intact, in its present form...

...The removal of widespread poverty has diminished the socialist commitments of middle-class politicians once afflicted with a bad conscience...

...but how this is to be done without an attack on the elite is unimaginable...

...Since he proposes to do nothing to diminish the power of the present British elite, or of the sycophant strata clinging to it, it is quite impossible to see how they are to be deprived of their attitudes of superiority...

...The future of socialism, in the West no less than in the eastern European countries, depends upon a solution to the problem of bureaucracy...

...but these attempted few experiments in new forms of worker participation— and invariably left the former managers in charge...

...This is perhaps unlikely in practice...

...Socialism may have outlived its usefulness, but it has not done so on Crosland's evidence...

...Crosland's remedy for snobbishness in Britain is to increase the rate of upward social mobility, despite the fact that there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that the rate differs from that in the U.S...

...And they, at least, aim to enjoy it...

...The experience of the nationalized industries, to which he continually refers, was depressing...

...That equilibrium has, indeed, been badly shaken since Crosland wrote his book...

...I have used the notion of a managerial elite as a new exploiting and ruling class in this discussion...

...who is not...

...has little to do either with socialism, which historically has been concerned only with the economic power of private business, or with capitalism...

...Crosland's arguments against too much interference with the social structure tell us a good deal about his mode of thought...

...Crosland's cultural politics show many of the tendencies of his other positions...

...Meanwhile, with the equilibrium already in dissolution, the intellectuals have made it their business to legitimize it...

...Its basis is a classical sort of petty bourgeois resentment, but it has swept up a curious rag-bag of malcontents from most sections of the middle class...

...What the Croslands do not see, of course, is that our societies are already in acute convulsion—and we had the right to expect something better, by way of an answer, from a comrade...

...These questions become particularly acute in connection with his views on a socialist cultural policy...

...what is disheartening is his acceptance of conventional notions of abundance...

...He says nothing of the education—if that be the term—of the workers by their middleclass teachers in command positions on magazines, newspapers, radio and television...

...Since the author makes very much of the replacement of owners by man agers, it might be supposed that he would extend socialist analysis to the role of the latter, who do have enormous powers...

...Like most Laborites, he deplores Britain's hopelessly confused and unjust educational system which functions on three levels: one for the elite, another for the middle classes, and a third for the workers...

...He is thrown back on the notion that socialists ought to aim at enlarging the area of free personal choice...

...he ignores—in this connection, at least—the generalized socialist goal of liberation from all the forms of economic domination...

...His aim is to make of Britain a middle class society, of the American type...

...Labor policy now, he declares, ought to concentrate on altering these attitudes...

...1 The success of the Labor Party, it is said, has both reduced its own mil * Published in the United States byMacmillan...

...He does not even consider the question of the atomization, purposelessness, and degradation of our lives...

...Perhaps the reason for the refusal is his apparent conviction that the bureaucratic problem is insoluble...

...Crosland makes much of this attachment in his discussion of Labor politics, but his point is not simply a tactical one...

...The necessary changes have already taken place and...

...it is hard to believe that the disappearance of broad class demarcations, and their replacement by a con tinuous series of status gradations, would not diminish social inequality...

...Crosland, as we shall see, renounces an aggressive socialist cultural policy and thus explicitly attests the extent of the conservative propaganda victory on this score...

...But at the same time tension between them has heightened, mainly because of middle-class aggression...

...Professor Harold Laski's successor at The London School of Economics (an institution become compulsively respectable) is Michael Oakeshott, who has been acclaimed for a philosophy of politics the chief point of which is that the best politics consist in doing nothing...

...He therefore rejects all the proposals for workers' control as impractical...

...Trade union organization and the Labor Party, similarly, have effected a redistribution of economic and political power...

...In this atmosphere, protest at anything—except about those who protest at something—is thought to be in the very worst kind of bad taste...

...I do not know whether Crosland has read much in conservative social philosophy, but the position is dear: The fact is that a society like ours is an organic unity—a "going concern" in Mackinder's phrase, and one so highly organised and interdependent between its various parts, resting as it does on a balance of tensions, thrusts and stresses, that intervention at one point will have effects at numerous and often unexpected other points...

...His sanguine belief that Britain (and the West) are now moving into an era of abundance may or may not be correct...

...Here again, he accepts the present structure of motives as a universal one: he believes that workers will not wish to double as managers...

...Not many Britons are willing to look beyond their noses at things other than new houses, television sets, automo biles, and vacations...

...it is managed...

...For the data he adduces to demonstrate the decline of traditional capitalist forms of exploitation show that new and more subtle types of exploitation have succeeded it...

...Fifthly, a protest against the inefficiencies of capitalism as an economic system, and notably its tendency to mass unemployment...

...He confuses the term "class," which generally refers to strata differentiated by objective criteria, with status groupings...

...That is correct...

...The revival has resuscitated status values associated with the prewar English class system...

...Crosland, however, is so pre-occupied with the boom and its supposed indefinite continuance that he fails to see there may be other analogies for Britain than America...

...But before considering the text, perhaps we can look at the situation which has produced it...

...One therefore cannot give it a shock of more than a certain violence without the risk of damage to the entire structure...

...His book, which reflects the political mood of the dominant element in the Labor Party, is a considerable exercise in apologetics, to which an answer in left ist terms is as necessary as it is difficult...

...He is certainly aware that bureaucracy is a problem found in all industrial societies...

...The destruction of the present political equilibrium, which has already begun, may release still more of these forces—particularly since nothing seems able to halt Britain's decline as a world power, a source of personal distress to millions of Britons...

...American status attitudes might or might not be preferable to the combination of petty bourgeois snobbery and pseudo-aristocratic arrogance manifested by various sections of the British middle classes —but it would not be socialism...

...Fiscal and budgetary measures, along with a minimum of nationalization and a considerable enlargement of the social services, have sufficed—and can suffice in the future—to obtain a roughly just redistribution of income...

...Crosland's proposals for educational reform again show his reluctance to think of major alterations in social structure...

...The former regard themselves as public trustees and do not behave like plutocrats...

...Yet others have been reassuring Britain's uneasy elite, sometimes with the aid of American professors, that Plato would be sure to identify it with his philosopher kings...

...Opposing the confiscation of property, he writes: All large fortunes and estates would be suddenly destroyed, and the whole of the propertied classes (and more especially the settled landed classes—the financial classes would no doubt find a means of partial escape) would find them selves catapulted into a state of considerable confusion, with quite unpredictable social results...

...And since many trade union leaders are lower middle class in disposition, as are many British workers, prosperity has had similar effects on them...

...Others have been celebrating the era of bureaucracy by explaining that all political problems are administrative ones...

...He is in favor of a higher culture...

...the intellectual framework within which most pre-war socialist discussion was conducted is growing obsolete, first by the fact that the economy is growing at a rapid pace, and secondly by the fact that we now have a quite different configuration of economic power...

...The third and fourth points are more specifically socialist...

...But he declares that the issue of managerial and bureaucratic power...

...Intellectuals like Harold Macmillan do not, of course, believe their public statements about the monarchy...

...But their targets are always on the right: the fetishism of "taste," the exaggerations of status consciousness, the pretensions of what is termed "The Establishment"—that tight network of university officials, clerics, higher civil servants, directors of broadcasting, and miscellaneous busybodies which exerts decisive power over the cultural life of the nation...

...11 Crosland's basic thesis is that capitalism has had its teeth pulled...

...it is the use to which prosperity has been put...

...There are groups of an ascending sort, anxious to enjoy unimpeded the style of life to which they should like to become accustomed...

...Crosland, to be fair, criticizes many of the things in British society these literary men dislike...

...As he seems to imply, the separation of the worker from control of the produc tion process arises "inevitably" from the technical imperatives of industrial organization...

...This can be done, he insists, without major structural alterations in the class system...

...THE LIFE STYLES of the workers and the middle classes are beginning to merge, particularly among the young...

...But their acceptance of it (if for no other reason than the want of alternatives) pre...