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International Socialism, Autumn 1961

 

Notes of the Quarter

1. Labour’s Suicide Bid

 

From International Socialism (1st series), No.6, Autumn 1961, p.1.
Thanks to Ted Crawford & the late Will Fancy.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

The 1961 Labour Party conference is likely to be an historic occasion. It will not seem like one. To both Left and Right it will appear to mark just another stage in internal faction fighting. To those observers fascinated by the mechanics of power it will look like a simple reassertion of the alliance between the trade union bureaucracy and the parliamentary party. Numbed by the flow of policy documents from Transport House and harangued in the name of party unity, the delegates will probably receive Signposts for the Sixties with no more grumbling than Mr Cousins uttered at the TGWU Conference. They will be deceived. For in its stumbling, empirical, O so ‘British’ way, the Labour Party is about to cross the bridge which the German Social Democrats recently traversed with fanfares of theoretical trumpets. In order to see what they will have done if they accept Signposts for the Sixties, delegates should ask themselves what other than a sentimental maundering over Keir Hardie’s grave led the authors to avoid the title Liberal Capitalism in the Sixties?

What are the marks of the document? First of all, a preoccupation with economic expansion. Secondly, a belief that the characteristic and obvious evils of our society can be remedied without any changes in the structure of economic power. Thirdly, an entirely empirical attitude to the role of the state in social and economic matters. And lastly, and most strikingly, there is a simple retreat from politics as such. Consider how many controversial issues are to be shunted off to Royal Commissions. If ever there was an acknowledgment of the diminished role of parliament and of the irrelevance of parliamentary victories, it is contained in this document. The next Labour government will apparently divide its time between offering incentives to progressive industrialists and holding seminars to discuss political and social questions.

The Left will react in the worst possible way to this, if they see it as a conspiracy of the Right. Not Mr Gaitskell, but ‘that best of all Marxists’, history, has forced the Labour Party towards the abandonment of social democracy. In Germany it was Herr Wehner, the leader of the Left, who announced the winds of change. In the present expansionist phase of capitalism the working-class is very largely absorbed into the dominant social patterns. The ideology of a society devoted to expanding production has at its centre the image of the worker as consumer. Changes in technique, changes in work, changes in social habit all erode the past dispositions of workers. They become non-political in terms of the only politics which they know. Bevin and Bevan are equally ghosts from the past to many contemporary workers in chemicals or electronics. And this is reflected in the strong pressure of white-collar unions upon the TUC to make that body non-political too. The pressure of the white-collar unions is strong because they represent the new forces in the working class.

Traditional social democratic politics is thus increasingly irrelevant. It touches neither on the consumer goals about which workers can do something in non-political unions nor on the deep perils such as the H-bomb, about which workers feel a quiet desperation because they can do nothing. In these circumstances the declining finances of the Labour Party, the loss of individual members and the lack of enthusiasm among the rank-and-file all point to a party which in accommodating itself to the existing economic order is also signing its own death-warrant. The tragedy in this is that among many delegates, not only of the Left, there is a socialist consciousness continually worn away by appeals for party unity, by lack of socialist education and activity and by the hard work of keeping the Labour Party going at local level. They owe it to themselves as well as to the working class to refuse to accept Signposts for the Sixties and to begin even at this late hour to think again about the nature of socialism. There is no other way forward.


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