Socialism Abroad: The Revisionist Debate
Plastrik, Stanley
From time to time DISSENT plans to offer summaries of significant articles published abroad and dealing with major problems of the socialist movement. This first report deals with the dispute...
...One of the stranger aspects of the intellectual turmoil within the Labor Party is that all groups disclaim nationalization as the key issue, but then proceed to batter roundly one another's heads over precisely this issue...
...For one thing, the party ought no longer allow itself to be caught up in a confused debate over nationalization...
...First, the fact that it has gained so much of what it sought (the full-employment, welfare-state capitalism of today) has automatically tended to dampen its appeal to the electorate...
...Socialist Commentary—a supporter of the Gaitskell leadership of the Labor Party—goes on to express the wish that the latter's retreat on his proposal to revise the famous clause four of the party constitution (the clause proposing public ownership of the major means of production) will calm the atmosphere and restore party peace...
...The point is, summarizes Crosland, that it is wrong to believe that . . nothing except public ownership divides the two political parties...
...the decline of the older basic industries such as coal, railways, and textiles in which Socialist loyalties were always strongest...
...HOWEVER, THE EVIDENCE does not clearly establish that these trends add up to a world-wide move to the Right so powerful that it explains away recent international setbacks of the socialist movement...
...Crossland readily acknowledges that the Left leadership has "long since avowedly abandoned wholesale nationalization as an objective...
...The nature of these is unspecified...
...He ties the future of socialism to the most conservative and "institutionalized" parties of the SocialThe Disputed Clause CLAUSE IV—PARTY OBJECTS (4) To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible, upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service...
...Since the detailed job of applying Socialism to the coal mines, the railways, etc., was left to the civil servants in the Ministries, it is hardly surprising that what we got were not socialized industries but centralized, bureaucratic State monopolies...
...What actually happens, according to Crosland, is that only those parties of the Left identified in the public mind with a "sectional, traditional, class appeal" are handicapped...
...ist International—the Dutch, Austrian, Swiss etc.—parties whose aim is solely to share power with anti-Socialists and without any hope of ever carrying out a Socialist program...
...Where do the Communist bloc or the under-developed countries enter into his rosy picture...
...What is that guise to be...
...This first report deals with the dispute over "revisionism" in the British labor movement...
...Our society is not divided into antagonistic social classes leading to the polarization of "persons, personal beliefs" and the holding of extreme ideological positions...
...What, in effect, asks Mr...
...Defeat in itself need not be demoralizing— it is sometimes remarkably stimulating...
...Unfortunately, before 1945, the Labor Party had done very little advanced planning and there were no blueprints ready, showing how the industries due for nationalization were to be organized...
...This prospect is set out in editorial remarks in the May/June 1960 issue of New Left Review, publication of what we may describe as the most radical group in the Labor Party...
...An editorial in the April, 1960 issue of Socialist Comnzentary begins as follows: It would be stupid to deny that demoralization has overtaken the Labor Party since the election...
...The proper way to counteract public opposition to nationalization, pursues Grossman, is not revision of clause four but a frank disassociation of the Labor Party from its own Labor Government and then the working out of ". . . precise proposals for nationalizing the nationalized industries, decentralizing their oligarchies and subjecting them to full public control...
...It is the only hope on the admittedly long road back to political power...
...Crosland, is all the shouting about...
...The British Labor Party's primary task is therefore clear: "to adapt itself, without in any way surrendering basic principles, to the realities of social change, and to present itself to the electorate in a mid-20th-century guise...
...Reverting to an earlier issue cited by Grossman, this statement would seem to indicate his belief in the socialist nature of the Russian and satellite state economy...
...that is, the case for democratic socialism...
...Not, however, in the context of his article...
...Fourth, the socialist belief in the equality of all races and people...
...The values formulated by socialists do not necessarily, therefore, arouse the "total hostility of every Liberal or progressive Tory...
...Grossman, in other words, dismisses the revisionism of Crosland and, in effect, proposes to raise a completely different, if related, question...
...Hugh Gaitskell in his now famous Blackpool speech calling for revision of clause four of the party constitution was simply saying what Edouard Bernstein had said 60 years back...
...Fifth, differences over the proper division between the public and private sectors of the economy, touching 293 upon concrete matters of social control, Government intervention and economic planning...
...Further, a "Marxist-type class struggle" is no longer on the order of the day in England...
...Or rather, it would be truer to say that a phony debate, purposefully raised by Mr...
...the polemics that appeared before Gaitskell's withdrawal indicate major rather than minor differences...
...many of the British "Left," including Bevan, have recognized the need for both flexibility and a "mixed" approach on this question...
...the June and July issues will contain other instalments which, if they are as informative as the first, promise to be the first serious effort to study what people in England really think of the Labor Party...
...For, however weak he may consider Crosland's case to be, he must acknowledge the influence his opponent wields, particularly among nonsocialists outside the Labor Party...
...Secondly, the socialist aim of an equitable distribution of wealth according to individual effort and ability, not the accident of birth...
...In fact, on the record it favors enlarging the public sector of the economy not by creation of more state monopolies but by "other and more flexible forms of social ownership...
...To get an indication of this we must turn to the non-socialist publication Encounter which carried some of the most important exchanges of opinion within the ranks of British socialism.* * We want to call our readers' attention to a series of articles now being C. A. R. Crosland ("The Future of the Left," Encounter, March, 1960) accepts the charge of "revisionism" levied against him by the Left...
...The nationalized Board —neither a public enterprise responsible to Parliament nor yet an efficient profit-making monopoly— is a hybrid, neither fish nor fowl...
...But there are still serious points of separation between Right and Left, employing these political labels in their wider sense...
...This is not the issue...
...Grossman hastens to modify this by insisting that he has in mind ". . . planning and free choice, social discipline and civil liberty, a strong Executive and independent justice...
...the cultural effect of the new mass media...
...Instead of assaulting economic orthodoxy and the vulgarity, wastefulness and inherent contradictions of Western capitalism, Crosland emphasizes its stability and strength...
...The Labor Party, in terms of such a crisis, must prepare itself to be not an alternative Government, but a radical Opposition with revolutionary solutions in place of efforts to manage for the better Britain's Welfare Capitalism...
...Crosland finds his socialist program for the 20th Century...
...Why does he ignore the problem of concentration of power represented by the modern corporation...
...We have every right to wonder...
...The Party ought to harry both the Conservative Government and the Establishment, . • . warning the country of the troubles that lie ahead, and showing 294 how they can only be overcome by a further advance towards Socialism...
...Gaitskell and his close compatriots in order to strangle the subject of common ownership once and for all, and conducted by them in the most doctrinal manner possible, has come to an end without a clear decision having been declared one way or another...
...It would be strange indeed for the Labor Party to abandon its belief in the central importance of public ownership at the precise moment when the superiority of socialized economies is being triumphantly vindicated in world affairs...
...the trouble has been in the reactions to defeat...
...292 gration from the solidly working-class slum areas into socially more fluid suburban estates and new towns...
...the debate at the top failed to connect: it neither settled the questions of "means" and "ends," nor did it envisage anything like a political timetable for the Labor Movement...
...His perspective is one of coming political and economic crisis which the Affluent Society will be unable to cope with...
...Calling for a "ruthless critique of the nationalization undertaken by the Attlee Government," Grossman subjects it to the severest criticism any Laborite has yet publicly made: • . . the public discredit into which public ownership has fallen is very largely due to the disregard of Socialist principle with which whole industries have been subjected to management by remote, centralized Boards, which Parliament is expressly forbidden to investigate or control...
...The first part of the survey has already appeared in the May issue...
...Here there is a sharp parting of the ways...
...The material has been prepared by Stanley Plastrik...
...rather, it is the nature and type of nationalization which must be debated...
...is being eroded by the changing agestructure of most Western populations (the old militants are dying off, unreplaced...
...He concludes his article expressing the belief that a united Labor party will reject revisionism...
...More important, revisionism faithfully reflects " . . . the political mood of Britain during the last eight years...
...But to him, revisionism—the proposal to revise the Labor Party's platform and tradition...
...is a long-term effort to enable the Labor Party to survive in mid-20th-century conditions...
...and above all the sudden irruption of the upper working class into the world of automobiles, gadgets, and consumer durables...
...The party, says Crosland, is already favorable to a mixed economy concept and no longer committed to complete public ownership...
...First, the socialist emphasis on social welfare, and the priority accorded to it...
...While the National Executive labored and travailed over words, the electorate yawned...
...TO THE INTENTIONALLY moderate views of Crosland the British Left riposted (Encounter, April, 1960) with an article by its most able polemicist, R. H. S. Crossman—"The Spectre of Revisionism...
...The more flexible Leftist parties can, if they will, benefit from these general trends...
...ON THE THEORETICAL GROUNDS, Grossman finds the viewpoint of the revisionists still weaker than on practical, election-winning grounds...
...Thirdly, the ideal of a socialist, classless society, as opposed to the Tory concept of a national elite...
...The first telling point made by Grossman is his inability to discover any concrete proposals (beyond the suggestion of revising clause four) in the views of the Revisionists...
...Crosland rejects the fairly optimistic prospects which the revisionists hold out for Welfare Capitalism...
...And here Mr...
...the issue, perhaps, on which Tory and Laborite have the sharpest divergence...
...The debate about Clause 4 is a debate which never really happened...
...the housing mipublished in Socialist Commentary, analyzing the results of a research survey on British political attitudes...
...What is the crisis of the Socialist Left, according to Crosland...
...What could be more depressing than the contrast between the position today and the buoyant enthusiasm at the height of the election campaign six months ago...
...Crosland ignores this issue, but not Grossman...
...For the time being, he is unquestionably correct, but this shortlived discussion has indicated a wide and deep-going set of differences...
...295...
...On the contrary: Progressively year by year we shall see that, judged in terms of national security, scientific and technological development, popular education, and finally, even of mass living standards, free enterprise is losing out in the peaceful competition between East and West...
...But is it adequate for the years ahead...
...the changing character of the labor-force and the decline of the blue-collar relative to the white-collar working class...
...secondly, the strength of the traditional Left...
Vol. 7 • July 1960 • No. 3
