LETTERS
Mendelson, Saul
The British Left Editors: It is hard to believe that a more incorrect impression as to the state of opinion in the British Labor Party could be created than that produced by Stanley Plastrik...
...More and more it has tended to use this issue as the touchstone marking off "socialists" from non-socialists...
...Actually Plastrik agrees with the substance of left wing Labor thinking on this subject but seems to feel a need to distort the situation in order to disassociate himself from the Labor Party left...
...It is true that the left wing opposes such a modification, but they do not leave it at that...
...Also, it offers a stimulating supplement to my course of study in political science...
...And most prominently of all, the left has concentrated its energies overwhelmingly in the past year on the campaign for Nuclear Disarmament...
...I feel a deep sense of identity with the overall attitude and many of the specific ideas developed in the book...
...The now-postponed or withdrawn Gaitskell amendment to the party constitution was but the latest —probably the most significant...
...To him the whole question was whether an industry was being operated efficiently in private hands...
...Nationalization is presented as an issue raised by the left wing...
...In the context of his article the implication is that the left wing stands for nationalization per se...
...Anyone acquainted with the British Labor Party knows how loose and shifting are the lines within it...
...In the part few years could anyone seriously contend that the Labor Left has concentrated on the issue of nationalization...
...For these reasons I became interested, to the point of subscribing...
...Immediately after the Conference, Tribune (the left-wing paper) ran a series on the need for workers' democratic participation in the management of nationalized industry at all levels...
...This is far from being the case...
...surely not the last—round in a long battle...
...Leftwingers may somewhere use the term, but in articles and speeches they have stated a thousand times that they want nationalization for precisely the purposes Plastrik mentions so approvingly...
...Earlier Tribune had emphasized many times that the voters' image of the Labor Party as standing for an all powerful state bureaucracy that harasses a helpless citizenry is the fault of the present Party leadership whose approach has always been an exclusively statist one, irrespective of any shift within this statism from nationalization to state control, or state ownership of shares in private corporations...
...TExAs STUDENT...
...This statement is nonsense...
...To the degree that welfare capitalism has taken the edge off class conflicts in Britain the movement has lost its steam...
...The British Left Editors: It is hard to believe that a more incorrect impression as to the state of opinion in the British Labor Party could be created than that produced by Stanley Plastrik in the Winter 1960 DISSENT...
...For Plastrik there are other considerations...
...This is simply not so...
...SAUL MENDELSON STANLEY PLASTRIK replies: Saul Mendelson seems unaware of the fact that the hue-and-cry over nationalization is now a good many years old in the British Labor movement...
...This is its relation to the power of the capitalist class in all fields...
...Sense of Identify Editors: Recently in a Dallas bookstore I came across Voices of Dissent, which I quickly purchased...
...Plastrik states that it would be folly to assume that nationalization per se can assure profound reforms in British society...
...The article which Saul Mendelson criticizes presented my view that a kind of fundamentalist reiteration of the old formulas would not do any more than a brushing aside of the need for profound structural changes in British society would do...
...Tribune has also consistently criticized bureaucratic practices in the unions, and has opposed the monolithic Standing Orders of the Parliamentary Labor Party and of the groups of Labor Municipal Councillors, which are now at last being modified...
...It was the left that immediately took a stand on Suez while Gaitskell straddled the fence for a week after the invasion and then buried the Party campaign after a month...
...It happens that nationalization (per se, if you will) has broader support within the party than workers control of industry, or unilateral nuclear disarmament...
...This problem falls equally upon the "right" and "left" wings...
...It was Gaitskell who made the chief issue at the Conference a proposal to amend the party constitution to modify the section that states the party's ultimate aim as common ownership of the means of production...
...What was wrong in this...
...To cry for more nationalization in the name of 'socialist fundamentals,' as does the left wing, is to obscure the issues...
...That is one of its virtues...
...The left has campaigned for colonial freedom...
...I cite as evidence a typical statement by Ralph Miliband in the New Left Review, product of the merger between two leftist publications: "What does not admit of 'rethinking,' at least for a party which claims to be committed to the creation of a socialist order of society, is whether common ownership is central to its purpose...
...I was very much impressed with the contents of the book...
...But I see the difficulty of British socialism not primarily as a struggle between "left" and "right" but as a terrible dilemma rooted in British society itself...
...The left is making nationalization an issue now, because Gaitskell chose this as his key issue...
...But why argue over who fired the opening shots, particularly in a debate rooted in the past and likely to extend far into the future...
...The "left wing" has raised this issue in one or an316 other form at each Labor Party conference over the past ten years...
...Does this mean that the left should allow this basic aim to be taken out of the party constitution simply because it isn't strong enough to put workers control in...
...Gaitskell said not a word about the problem of power...
...and it clearly has not progressed too far in working out a new reason for its existence...
...He states "Nationalization of industry is a possible means toward social ends: toward effective social planning, toward the diminution of the power of private capital, toward the spread of democracy into economic life...
...In general, my sympathies are with the "left," taking this term in its largest sense...
...There would be no difficulty in producing many similar and equally categoric statements...
...Plastrik seems to have missed the actual point of difference in attitude toward nationalization between Gaitskell and the bulk of the party...
Vol. 7 • July 1960 • No. 3
