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From The New International, Vol. XVII. No. 1, January–February 1951, pp. 24–28.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Crisis in Britain
by Robert A. Brady
Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press, 714 pp. $5.00.
A good deal is being written these days about the “meaning” of the British Labor government. From the conservative right we are told that there is a direct and inevitable road leading straight from British “socialism” to the “new serfdom” of Stalinism. At the devitalized center stands Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. to bewail the loss of élan by the British labor leadership, and to tell us that if only labor would abandon its rigid faith in nationalization of industry, and grasp instead the creative gospel of Keynesian economics as propounded by the liberals, all would be well. Standing at Schlesinger’s left shoulder is the American Socialist Party which sees in the program of the Labor government the realization of the socialist dream in practical terms. This school of analysis includes the official view of the British Labor Party itself as propounded in its election platforms. It includes also almost the whole of that vague and unorganized “socialistic” thought in America which ranges from the legion of ex-socialists who make a small though respectable living in the research departments of our more enlightened unions, to the fair-dealish writers and politicians who temper their firm determination to bring about a better world with the even firmer desire to keep the Democratic Party in power regardless of the cost.
The thing which all these analyses of the British Labor government have in common is the sweep with which they jump from their premises to their conclusions. In between there is only the most bald-faced impressionism, which is another way of saying that there is a substitution of premises and impressions for analysis.
Robert A. Brady’s Crisis in Britain is a welcome relief from all the above-mentioned schools of writing about Britain. A professor of economics at the University of California at Berkeley, Brady [1] was able to spend eight months in Britain. The result of his work as presented in this book is the first rounded study of the problems which confront Britain today and of the theory and practice with which the British Labor Party has tried to meet these problems. It is hardly a serious criticism to say that even as extensive a work as this has left a lot of loose ends for others to tie up.
Brady has a thesis which runs through his whole analysis of the British Labor government. Whether he started his work with a “preconceived idea,” or whether his thesis developed from his materials is a question which can concern only people who are ignorant of scientific method as employed in the social sciences or who identify this method with the blind grabbings of academic moles. Brady gathers and analyzes an impressive mass of data to demonstrate his thesis: the present operational theories (as distinguished from holiday statements) of the British Labor government, and the practice which flows from them are inadequate to bring about a socialist solution to the problems of British society. Or, to put it in a way which may avoid terminological dispute over the word “socialist,” the crisis in which Britain finds itself cannot and will not be solved if the British Labor Party continues along the tack it has been following since 1945, and which it seems even more determined to follow since the narrow electoral victory in 1950.
“From the moment of its coming to power,” writes Brady in the first paragraph of Crisis in Britain, “the British Labour government has had to contend not only with issues that were legacies of two world wars, but with many of the still unsolved problems that had led to those wars. It has been compelled to divide its forces in order to battle for national economic survival in the international sphere and, at the same time, struggle for wide-ranging social and economic revolution at home. The first task involves a web of interdependent issues which is coextensive with virtually the entire range of economic policy-making decisions by all parties and interests through the nation, and is further complicated by the fact that very nearly everywhere, and with almost every facet of such policy, success at home depends upon a world economic situation over which Britain can exercise at best only a very limited and highly tentative influence. The second is no less complex or vital; it reaches to the central ideological conflicts and their attendant cultural values, which lie at the heart of not only British but all Western civilization.”
The rest of the book puts substance into these generalizations. First it discusses the historical and ideological factors which have shaped the British Labor Party and its thinking. It then discusses each major field in which the BLP government has intervened in a decisive manner: the Bank of England; Coal; Electricity and Gas; Iron and Steel; National Transport; Telecommunications; Social Insurance; Health; Town and Country Planning; Agriculture and Marketing. The book ends with four chapters entitled Industry: National Planning; Industry: Co-partnership and Monopoly; Empire: Commonwealth and Colonies; and finally, Achievements and Prospects.
It must be borne in mind that the leadership of the BLP are not, and never have been Marxists. They recognize the existence of the class struggle and the contradictions inherent in capitalism, but not in the Marxian sense. To them the arrogance and propensity to exploit of the ruling class is a moral failing of the old rulers of Britain. In their economics they are, despite Arthur Schlesinger Jr., much closer to Keynes than to Marx. That is, here again they believe that the contradictions of capitalism are a product mainly of the short-sightedness of private investors. The necessary changes can be brought about, therefore, by moral suasion and education on the one hand, and by direction of investment on a long-term basis by a far-sighted Labor government.
With such a social theory, nationalization of industry can take place only within certain fairly well-defined limits. It is difficult to persuade people whom you have expropriated to cooperate with you, nor is it easy to re-educate people who are smarting under the sense of a great social wrong done them by their teachers. Thus the nationalization program can extend only to those sectors of British industry which the capitalists will relinquish without too bitter a struggle, and it must be accomplished in such a way as to minimize the opposition of the former owners.
Brady’s chief index to the reaction of the British ruling class to the nationalization schemes is the debates in Parliament over them. By extensive quotation he demonstrates that in every case but that of steel, the opposition of the Tories was not one of principle, but rather to the specific proposals on the national organization and the method and extent of compensation. The same applies to almost all the social security measures carried out by the BLP. In the last election the Conservatives made the case clear by claiming that what the Labor government had done in this field was merely an acceptable though poorly administered extension of measures initiated and proposed originally by Conservative statesmen. This does not mean, of course, that had the Tories been in power they would have done in these spheres what Labor has accomplished. It means simply that they were not in principle opposed to these measures, that they do not feel them incompatible with continued social dominance of the class which they represent in British society.
Thus the policies pursued by the Labor government have clearly accomplished one of their goals: to introduce broad- scale social and economic reforms and changes without throwing British society into turmoil. But have they accomplished enough to solve even in a preliminary way, the most pressing problems which afflict British society?
These problems are so many and so diverse that one hesitates to select the “central” one among them. Yet if we abstract for the moment from the international field, it is certainly clear that a good deal of the crisis in Britain can be lumped together under the heading of a crisis in the productivity of labor.
As everyone knows, Britain has the oldest industrial plant in the world. It has a tremendous density of population with a staggering food production deficit. It has to import the overwhelming bulk of almost every raw material its industries transform into finished goods (except coal). Thus foreign trade for Britain is not, so to speak, a safety valve for the economy, it is in the most immediate, daily and direct sense its bloodstream.
This means that the relative productivity of British labor is a datum crucial to the survival of the nation, again, in an immediate and daily sense. Any plan for the reorganization of British industry which does not involve the rapid and extensive upward movement of productivity is bound to fail to solve the central problem.
The factors which have kept back the productivity of British labor compared to that of the United States are many in number. Even before the First World War it was pointed out that the tendency of the British world position was to make of the British capitalists an essentially rentier class. Instead of striding ahead technologically, British industry tended to rest on its laurels and seek to secure its markets through world-wide cartel agreements, and through an Empire and Commonwealth-wide protective system.
There are a dozen other factors. British industry, though highly monopolized in a financial sense, has never been integrated technologically, even on a corporation-wide level. Tremendous wastage in cross-haulage within a single technological process is the result (e.g. from iron-ore smelting through to the final product). The financial monopolization of industry has led to a whole web of commercial relations which make no sense from the point of view of producer-to-consumer efficiency.
Thus the basic problem from the purely technological point of view is the complete reorganization of British industry on the basis of a ground-plan which would relocate industry in relation to raw materials, manpower and markets. This would have to be accompanied side by side with the vertical integration of production processes which would permit modern mass-production techniques to be applied, and which would eliminate unnecessary cross-haulage of materials and products.
Brady contends that none of the nationalized industries have been reorganized from this point of view, and that there are no plans to reorganize them. Though nationalization has brought certain efficiencies, they are essentially of the kind that one would expect if each of the nationalized industries had been given over to a private corporation to run without regard to anything that was being done by other corporations within the country.
As a matter of fact, that is just about what the administrative structure of nationalized industry amounts to in Britain. Each is run by an autonomous public corporation. The corporation has a struc- turne not unlike the structures of private corporations, except that the officers of the boards are appointed by public bodies. There are, to be sure, a variety of interindustry liaison committees and planning boards. But these either function on a day-to-day “practical” basis, or hardly function at all. The result is that technologically British industry has been creeping ahead instead of making the rapid strides which the situation requires.
The other major factor affecting productivity is the attitude of the workers and the degree to which they control production.
In Britain this is of exceptional importance. The British working class, though non-Marxist in its political ideology, is imbued with a deep-going sense of hostility to the ruling class. In production this translates itself into a hostility to change and a very effective resistance to any and all forms of speed-up. Unless these attitudes are transformed, the workers themselves become an obstacle to the introduction of new machinery and new methods of organizing the work, and cannot be driven faster with the old methods.
This comes to the heart of the failure of the British Labor government to solve the crisis in Britain, as Brady sees it. It is also, of course, the central problem of socialism, that is, of the possibility of reorganizing society on a socialist basis.
The workers of Britain won a great victory at the polls in 1945. They carried their party into power with a decisive majority. Yet on the day after, and the month and the year after their victory, they still had to go to the same jobs and work under the same foremen and superintendents. They still lived in the slums, while the class which had been beaten at the elections still lived in fine houses and apartments surrounded by servants. And what is even more important, as far as the workers could see ahead, even if they kept the Labor Party in power, no basic change would be wrought in all this.
The public corporations which run nationalized British industry are staffed by the old technicians and owners and managers. They are in no way subject to the control of the workers in the plants and mines. Even if a labor leader gets appointed to one of these boards, he does not sit as a representative of the workers. He is then an “expert,” and must relinquish his union office as a condition of his employment. It is quite in line with official BLP philosophy that labor men on the boards shall serve the “general public” and not the workers. But it also means that the workers have no greater voice in the administration of industry than they had before.
The liberals in this country have been bemoaning the fact that the British workers are so irresponsible that most of the strikes in the past few months have been against nationalized industries. Yet why should this be surprising? They were never given any responsibility in the management of these industries. That would be “class” legislation. Why then should they feel a responsibility to them? In fact, it may be inherent in the situation that the workers feel more resentful toward industrial managements which have been set up by “their” government than toward private employers who never seriously pretended to have any responsibility toward the workers.
Ever since the days of Marx socialists have disputed over the methods of social revolution. In this dispute the advocates of “gradualism” have based their arguments to no small degree on the “social overhead” of a rapid and drastic seizure of power by the working class. The tearing of the social fabric which results when the basic social relations are transformed over a brief period of time have been described as the evil which is to be avoided at all costs.
In Britain today we see the “social overhead’ of the gradualist approach. The working class has not broken with its traditions of servitude. It has not been emancipated by an act of social revolution in the course of which it gains a new vision of the possibilities of a society organized by itself on completely new lines. It has not been imbued with the willingness to take large-scale risks which is the negative way of saying that it has no large creative ideas for the transformation of British society.
The result is that although vast energies are put forth by the government, the increase in productivity is negligible, and certainly does not come close to solving the crisis of Britain in the most immediate sense. The workers are reluctant to accept even those minor proposals which are made by the government authorities unless they can see direct benefits to themselves in the personal, short- range sense. The government’s agencies have a purely bureaucratic, administrative approach to the workers, and tend increasingly to blame them for not being willing to work harder and to accept every decision from above without question. As there is nothing creative, transforming in the procedures and plans of the government (except in the sense of improving things here and there within the old framework) there is no reason for the workers to change their attitude.
This is the central thesis of Brady’s book, demonstrated in detail and at length. He makes certain specific criticisms of the fundamental planlessness of British economic planning (it really differs little from the approach of the Fair Deal except in so far as Keynesian “full employment” policies are more consciously used) and of the administrative set-up in the various industries.
But the problem is obviously not one which can be solved by anything the government can do, as long as it clings to the idea that the capitalist system can be reformed or transformed without seriously inconveniencing the capitalists. In fact, it cannot be solved by the government at all. A new movement must grow inside the working class of Britain which consciously rejects the present ideology of the Labor Party. It must be a movement which not only recognizes the capitalist class as an enemy, but proposes to deal with it as such. This is, again, a negative way of saying that the British working class must recognize that it and it alone has the power to transform British society and thus save it.
In this discussion of Crisis in Britain there has been an obvious abstraction from the relations of Britain to the rest of the world. Brady does not fail to discuss this question in the book, though his discussion is of necessity more sketchy on this point than on the internal problems of British society.
The abstraction is, of course, purely artificial. Yet it seems useful to discuss whether or not the present Labor government is, in any sense, on the road to socialism purely on the basis of its domestic program because there has been a certain tendency in the socialist movement to accept this while insisting that the crucial weakness of BLP policy lies in its failure to adopt a foreign program of socialist internationalism.
On the evidence adduced by Brady, the British Labor government is not moving toward socialism, in any sense in which that word has been understood by Marxists in the past. And failing to do so, it is also failing to solve the most immediate and pressing economic and social problems which constitute the crisis in Britain.
The Cautious Revolution
by Ernest Watkins
New York. Farrar, Straus. 451 pp. $5.00.
The sub-title of this book is Britain Today and Tomorrow. After the sub-title, Ernest Watkins, who is on the staff of the Economist and is a news commentator for the overseas program of the BBC, succeeds in continuing for four and a half hundred pages a “description” and “analysis” of the type which could be expected in a Sunday supplement of a liberal paper.
The book is crammed full of facts and figures. But the approach of the author is such that no clear or coherent picture ever develops from them. He writes as a determined anti-theoretician, in fact as one who reserves his most cutting jibes for those who seek to generalize experience in a consistent theory and then to formulate policies based on such a theory. When this is coupled with the desire to “interpret” the five years of the British Labor Party government to Americans with confirmed capitalist views in such a way as to flatter their prejudices without making them antagonistic to further cooperation with the British government, the result is a book which sheds no real light on the future of Britain.
Of course, it is true that the “revolution” in Britain which Watkins is describing is a social movement piloted by people who are almost as anti-theoretical, as empiric and hence as lacking in a concrete program adequate to the problems of Britain as he is. If the future of Britain is to remain in their hands indefinitely, undisturbed by any eruption from the workers of that country, it will be a dark future indeed. Yet, the revolutionary socialists of Britain need not abandon their firm conviction that sooner or later the workers will assert themselves for a bold and positive program in the affairs of their island as well as in those of the world at large. For, as Watkins writes in an entirely different connection: “If the human race has any merits at all, one must accept its capacity to fight until the last second of the last hour.”
1. Other books by Robert A. Brady: Spirit and Structure of German Fascism; Business as a System of Power; Rationalisation Movement in German Industry.
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