It is a fault of our analysis that we have concentrated our attention on the evolution of the Tories and the Labour Left to the exclusion of a serious consideration of the Labour Right and Centre. This can lead to bad misunderstandings such as merely posing the anti-Common Market policy of the Labour Party in the context of Wilson'sopportunism, In fact, this policy is only one aspect of a reorientation of Labourite strategy and a consequent deep split in the Labour Right. A convenient point of departure for an examination of the Labour Right is the early Fifties. The Bevanites, in the wake of the 1951 election defeat, launched a series of attacks on the Labour leadership, who were being stoutly defended by union bureaucrats such as Lawther, Deakin and Williamson. But while the T. U. Barons could deliver the blockvotes to save the Labour Right, they were totally unable to provide any ideas to covero vertbe ideological nakedness of Attlee and Morrison. The political fight was waged over two major issues: foreign policy and nationalisation. The Left argued for a socialist foreign policy based on critical support of U.S. imperialism and against German rearmament. The Right argued for a socialist foreign policy based on a less critical support for U.S. imperialism and for German rearmament. The nationalisation issue was polarised between the options of more Morrisonian nationalisation and a long 'shopping-list" of industries to be taken over or a short "shopping-list". The area of debate was completely shifted by the group of Rightwing intellectuals around Gaitskell which included Jay, Jenkins, Crosland and Healey. Gaitskell was unpopular within the Constituency Parties, then a stronghold of the Lett. He did, however, impress Deakin of the TGWU because of his extreme anti-communism which had led him to denounce "one-sixth" of the 1952 Annual Conference delegates as communists. The Gaitskellites savaged the Left arguments unmercifully. There was no such thing alas" foreign policy but British fo reign policy should consist of total support of America and the Free World in its fight against the Communist menace. The debate around nationalisation was similary transcended by stating that Britain was no longer a capitalist country. Furthermore - "The power previously wielded by the owners of property has now largely, though not entirely, passed to a class of managers-working directors, managing directors and higher grades of salaried executives. "1 From this analysis it could be shown that there was a difference between ownership and control and therefore nationalisation be came irrelevant. The Labour Left were defeated in the realm of ideas and then organisationally routed by the block-vote of the Trade Union Right. In 1955 Gaitskell was installed as Party leader and in 1957 the policy statement Industry and Society was adopted which encapsulated the ideas of the revisionists.
The 'revisionist" Right had captured the Party and destroyed the Labour Left but its classless pragmatism still failed to win electoral success.
The "revisionists" decided that it was necessarv to rip out the vestigial remnants of "socialism" inherent in the fabric of the Party, Jay evolved schemes to stop trade-union participation in Party Conferences. Labour was too much associated with the working-class and we are in danger of fighting under the label of a class that no longer exists".2 This strand in revisionist thinking was a clear break from the ideological norms of Labourism. It threatened the basis of the Labour Party, which, from the start, has been based on an alliance of liberals, trade-unionists and social-democrats. The revisionist assault was continued by Gaitskell who wished to formalise his pres ous victories by te moving the ownership expressed in Clause IV of the titution Between tell suffered a series of hun the Centre and the Unions nev not merely that a left The strongly in the trade unions; defections from his previously solid wing backen as the A.E.U., N.U.M. and N.U.R. swang al The all nice between the Labour and the Trade Union Right was re-established to fight off the unilateralists in 1960 and 1961. The right-wing Campaign for Democratic Socialism had broken the power of the Left in the Constituencies. The battle was won and the Labour Left in full retreat but Gaitskell realised, particularly with the rise in industrial militancy, that no Labour leader could sever the link with the trade unions or even, over a long period of time, carry on a fight against the union leaderships without sawing off the branch he was so comfortably astride.
In 1962 Gaitskell was forced to reassess his strategy of trying to turn the Labour Party into an explicitly bourgeois party with a middle class base and took refuge in an extraordinary display of patriotic ranting on the Common Market issue. Overnight, he became the hero of the Centre and the Left. The sacrificial offering to seal the covenant was his own revisionist Right.
The initial manifesto of the C.D.S. had pledged support for the needs of the big bourgeoisie:
we are convinced Europeans, certain that s are inextricably bo with those of a resurgent and united Europe".
Roughly three quarters of the C.D.S. came out against Gaitskell but they were isolated and suffered a defeat even more severe than that inflicted on the Labour Left in 1961. The disorganisation was such that no revisionist candidate could be found to compete for the leadership on the death of Gaitskell and the inheritor of these crises was the "anti-Gaitskellite" Wilson.
In fact Wilson proved to be a faithful disciple of Gaitskell. He, for a time, successfully synthesised the two styles of the old leader. The plan to turn Labour into the party of government by attuning it more finely to the needs of neo-capitalism than the "Edwardian" Tories had a populist rhetoric grafted onto it. The 1964 programme, The New Britain, was the entirely revisionist document that made no demands for nationalisation but was very strong on modernisation and vigour; yet it contained enough vaguely radical verbiage to enrapture the Tribunites. Wilson's strategy was to change mal bourgeois ruling party along the lines of Swedish Social Democracy. The crisis of British Capitalism made such a strategy, which entails the Labour Party balancing with one foot on the shoulders of big capital and the other on those of the Labour Movement, impossible. The lack of money for welfare reforms and the necessity to smash wage militancy toppled Wilson from his precarious perch so that he fell with both feet on the side of capital. In Place of Strife opened a wider chasm between the Party and the Unions than the controversies of the late fifties.
The debate after the 1970 election failure was mainly carried out by the Right and the Centre. The strategy of Labour as the party of government had failed. Workers and capitalists had turned against Wilson. The Constituencies had become depopulated as the working class came to see the unions as their most effective weapon of defence. 3 Roy Jenkins, very early in the discussion, demanded that Labour should not change its course, that it should regain the confidence of the capitalists and therefore must continue to support British entry in the E.E.C. Above all, the Party should not give in to the temptation of leftist de magogery . He spoke on this theme to the 1970 Party Conference: "We must not expect a full-scale peaceful revolution every time a Labour Government is elected. If we do, I think the occasions on which we are elected will not be as frequent as we should wish to expect. We must keep our radical cutting edge. But we should now see our role as being able to make substantial progress at frequent intervals rather than cataclysmic jumps forward at extremely infrequent intervals.
The most fierce antagonists of this view were a tendency that had also emerged from C.D.S.the Labour Populists. Jenkins was pilloried as a progressive liberal, an admirer of Asquith, a defender of civilised values and a supporter of such middle-class causes as the Arts Council and the Race Relations Board. To this was opposed populism. Crosland argued the case against the liberal progressives. *I have long been locked in conflict with a middle-class element on the left which seems to me to show an elitist and even condescending attitude to the wants and aspirations of ordinary people... The need for a populist streak in our thinking becomes greater as the social composition of the Parliamentary Labour Party changes and college graduates (often lecturers) increasingly outnumber trade union M.P.s."4 Roy Hattersley, a firm supporter of Jenkins, has written an article in The Guardian describing the history of American populism and ending with the ominous messagr that populism does not win elections. It is, however, the populist current that is making the running in the Labour Party and two major themes have been developed; nationalism and participation.
The case for Labour populism was first argued in an extended form by Haseler and Gyford. S Their starting point was a dissection of the thesis that Labour must turn itself from a party of protest into a party of government. They pointed out that Labour had very regularly provided governments and that, within the context of a democratic mixed economy, it was highly unlikely that any party should govern continuously. If, on the other hand, Labour alienated itself from its working class base, as it had done from 1964-70, then the possibility of retaining the present percentage of success in elections would be slim. The cause of the election defeat was "liberal progressivism". Liberal progressivism was internationalist and believed in individual rights as opposed to class rights.
Labour populism stood for a patriotism appealing to popular sovereignty. Labour's "concern for permissive legislation, the arts, higher education and technological efficiency could not mask its failure to deal adequately with housing, unemployment and the cost of living."
These views may seem surprising from exC.D.S. supporters but they claim Gaitskell as their inspiration. His views "contained serious populist messages which appealed to large sections of the British working class. Gaitskell's defence of a national nuclear policy, his ingrained suspicion of Britain's commitment to join the Common Market and in his articulation of this view his use of the phrase a thousand years of history' were hardly liberal, progressive or international and not, on the whole, likely to inspire his middle-class supporters in the Parliamentary Labour Party." This whole the me finds its expression in the anti-Common Market rhetoric of Labour. After a period of Government characterised by savage attacks on trade-unionists the Labour Right seeks to re-establish its links with the working-class by a retreat to the chauvinism that is structurally built into the British Labour Movement.
The second theme of the Labour populists is participation. This was a thread that ran through the first serious attack on the Wilson One contributor commented acidly on the elitist ethos of the Wilson Government: "Almost the only decision in which the public has felt it has had a say in 1968 has been the retention of the Esso Tiger." Wedgwood Benn saw the failure to redistribute political power as the reason for the "70 election defeat.? The drift away from the Labour Party had its corollary in the growth of groups such as educational campaigns, amenity groups, noise abatement societies and shop stewards movements that were seen as more relevant and effective than working through the party system. The task of the Labour Party was to relate to these groups and to turn them into its allies. The key question was that of workers' control, which is seen as an anti-authoritarian gesture, need not be revolutionary, indeed it is not of necessity anti-capitalist. "The old crude industrial authoritarianism is now being attacked as directly by modern management thinkers as it is by the trade unions who are determined to change it." Modern industry requires a sophisticated information that feeds back continuous reports on how the system is functioning.
Benn argues that workers' control is merely an extension of suffrage, or "voters' control". Workers' control "means the power to plan their own work and to hire and fire the immediate plant management just as M.P.s are hired and fired by the voters." Benn spices this with leftist' noises about Mao and Black Power and vigorous attacks on consultation and participation. Benn warns us that it is impermi sible to present his version of workers' control" as a panacea. "With real power will come real responsibility for dealing directly with some of the outer realities of our competitive world including the inescapable market mechanisms and other inter-connections which will set severe limits on the freedom the new power wi bring." Benn has succeeded in exposing strategies of workers' control that limit themselves to anti-authoritarianism and refuse to pose the question of the state and the productive relations, as sophisticated exercises in participation It is particularly worrying that the Institute of Workers' Control has welcomed Benn's ideas and failed to expose their integrationist logic. It is also necessary to see that Benn is evolving strategy that could be exploited by sophisticat representatives of big capital. "The gap betwee some of the best of management thinking.. and the workers' demand from below for real power at the place of work, is now so narrow a to be capable of being bridged..." It is possi to see Benn as having, in a very imaginative wa reintegrated the "managerial revolution" concepts of the revisionists of the early Fifties inte a Labourite strategy for the Seventies.
Marxists have correctly interpreted successive Labour Governments as agents of bourgeois power. It would be totally incorrect to assum that Labour politicians consciously operate wi thin this conceptual framework. Not only are they buffered from reality by the consoling myths of bourgeois ideology (which also ensur that it is not possible to pose ideas that do not fall within a capitalist framework) but they ha to get the majority of the working-class to vot for them. And if they fail to get those votes they are then of no use to the capitalist class.
Therefore the Labour Party has adopted an an E.E.C. stance which is clearly opposed to the needs of big capital but will rally wide suppor amongst the labour movement. It is quite like that, in order to regain popularity amongst th working class, the Labour Party will engage in series of radical actions, e.g., leading rent strik against the Tory Rent Act. The limitations of any such left shift are also apparent. Labour not win elections in the face of outright and c sistent opposition by the capitalist class. It is most likely that the nationalist strand in Labo populism will have to be moderated and an an biguous acceptance of the Common Market er gineered before Labour can again form a gove ment. The failure of the Heath confrontation strategy with the unions could be the signal fo Labour to be allowed to try a policy of emasc ting shop floor militancy under the banner of "workers' control". Whistle stop tours of fut U.C.S. and Fisher-Bendix situations and the ti of participation can become an ace card for L if Kearton, Stokes, etc. decide that open cont tation with the unions cannot work and an in grationist strategy is necessary.
A. Jenkins NOTES:
C. A. R. Crosland, New Fabian Essays, 1952 Forward, 16 October 1959.
3. Jenkins and Marshall, 'Whatever Happened to Labour Left', The Red Mole 36.
The Sunday Times, 4 April 1971.
Haseler and Gyford, Social Democracy: Bey Revisionism. 1971 Matters of Principle: Labour's Last Chance A. Wedgwood Benn, The New Politics, 197
ability of students union funds, the executive the State's attack on the political autonomy