Correspondents' Correspondence The Militant Class
MANDER, John
Correspondent's Correspondence BRIEF TAKEOUTS OF MORE THAN PERSONAL INTEREST FROM LETTERS AND OTHER COMMUNICATIONS RECEIVED BY THE EDITORS. The Militant Class London-An old saw holds that only...
...For the chief difference between U.S...
...If the Labor party is to win the next election, it must formulate a new policy for the '70s, taking these facts as its premises.-John Mander...
...It will be interesting to see if they stick...
...Though class feelings were expected to decline as the new reforms were enacted, class conflict remains as real a thing in Britain today as it has ever been...
...Instead of opposing "imperialism" in Vietnam or Ulster or Rhodesia, it chose to fight to preserve the economic gains it has won since the War, which it rightly perceives as threatened by inflation...
...These men are where they are not because of Left-wing or Communist manipulation (as in the unhappy era of the Electrical Union scandal), but because they genuinely reflect working-class sentiments...
...What this all means, I think, is that the position of the older (and now largely deceased) generation of trade union leaders has been eroded over the years by their own lack of ideological foresight...
...Welfare statism, while rendering this nation far more "socialist" than the U.S., has not proved to be enough in the end...
...Out of office, the Labor party has been forced to play along with it...
...The changed picture is, by British standards, rather extraordinary...
...Only recently has the average British worker been willing to accept a check for his services-he seldom had a bank before, and quite certainly no equity assets...
...Lately, the American labels "white-collar" (increasingly) and "blue-collar" (still rare) have started to come into fashion...
...But the rise of new Left-wing leaders like Frank Cousins and now Jack Jones of the Transport Workers, Hugh Scanlon of the Engineering Workers, and Clive Jenkins?who is attempting to build a mili-tantly Leftist white-collar union?has quite changed the situation...
...Nevertheless, many on the Labor Right see the new (but really very old) "bloody-minded" attitude of the working class as a denial of all the efforts of postwar Social Democracy...
...The 1945-51 Attlee government implemented most of their long-sought welfare-state proposals, and the Conservatives were shrewd enough not to repeal this legislation but to proceed further along the same lines...
...The Militant Class London-An old saw holds that only their common language divides the British and the Americans...
...One does not have to look far for the cause: Under the Labor government wages were deliberately held down while inflation soared...
...Take, for example, the term "working class," which gradually displaced the designation "lower class" as the English bourgeoisie began to heed its social conscience...
...now it is running at such a rate that even a settlement above the 9 per cent official norm is not likely to keep the wolf from the door more than 12 months or so...
...Like his American counterpart, he is mainly concerned with those things that directly impinge on his living standard: wages, prices, pensions, welfare services, housing, etc...
...As a result, the older leaders were left without any purposeful ideology...
...Yet the irony-or to Marxists the shame-is that the British worker is not at all class conscious in the Marxist sense...
...To the extent that he looks to the government in such matters, he is of course far more "socialist" and less "capitalistic" than most American laborers...
...and British society is that here the working man retains an intense class pride-or, more neutrally, class identification--that is closer to the Continental than to the American worker's self-image...
...In the old days, Clement Attlee and Hugh Gaitskell used to rely on the big battalions of Ernest Bevin's and Arthur Deakin's Transport Workers to insure that the Left was kept firmly in its place at party conferences...
...Looking back, it seems almost inevitable that the inbred militancy of the British working class would eventually find new channels...
...In Marxist-Leninist terms, to be sure, this amounts to no more than "trade-union consciousness," being basically economic and only sporadically political...
...But in the past five years this country has witnessed a steadily growing self-centered militancy among the working class and its leaders...
Vol. 55 • July 1972 • No. 14
