Issue 8, October - December 1988
For once, Neil Kinnock has been proved right: the leadership contest has been a total waste of time. Labour politics have not benefited one iota from it. There has been no useful debate at all.
But then it was absurd to expect anything useful from the challenge of a man with incoherent politics to a man with no politics.
There are a number of ways in which the fundamental problem of contemporary Labour politics may reasonably be described. One way of describing it is as the problem of how leftwing idealism is to be made purposeful.
Idealism and realism
One of the fixed ideas which has dominated the Labour Party for the last thirty-seven years is the assumption that political idealism and political realism are mutually exclusive, eternally and comprehensively opposed to each other. This fixed idea has effortlessly survived Mrs Thatcher's demonstration that it is groundless.
There is a very strong core of idealism in Thatcherism. Thatcherism has carried all before it since 1979 because it has combined a coherent social ideal with a highly developed sense of purpose, which has ensured that the pursuit of this ideal has taken due account of political realities at every stage. Mrs Thatcher has known when to retreat, when to stand her ground and when to pursue her advantage. Her ability to make the correct political judgements at every stage has been grounded in her determination to realise her social ideal. And this determination in turn has been made possible by the fact that the social ideal in question is both coherent and plausible.
Politicians who subscribe to incoherent and implausible ideals are unlikely to be determined in the pursuit of them, and when confronted with obstacles are more likely to abandon their ideals than conceive of imaginative ways of coping with the opposition which these ideals inevitably arouse.
The Labour government of 1945-1951 had to cope with enormous and sustained opposition to its policies. It was able to triumph over this opposition because it believed profoundly in its policies and had good reason to do so, because these polices embodied coherent, plausible and inspiring ideals which enjoyed considerable public support.
But the lessons of the Attlee-Bevin government were entirely lost on the Labour Party after 1951, and the purposeful idealism which animated it soon gave way to a purposeless idealism which never really believed in itself and which therefore allowed itself to be repeatedly subordinated to a superficial and ineffectual pragmatism in the name of realism.
Kinnock's displacement activity
An idealism which does not take itself seriously is a counterfeit idealism. Neil Kinnock made his way in the party as a counterfeit idealist, cynically trading on the tradition of spurious idealism concocted by Michael Foot out of the erratic career of Aneurin Bevan. He has since made the transition from counterfeit idealist to ineffectual pragmatist. And this transition, like that of Harold Wilson before him, has been a virtually seamless one.
As we predicted in L&TUR No.6, the last thing which Tony Benn's challenge has done is to give Kinnock & Co. serious food for thought. Benn's defence of the rag-bag of doctrines and sentiments which preoccupy leftwing idealism these days has done nothing to shake Kinnock's belief in what he is doing. This is because, for all his shortcomings, Kinnock is actually addressing real political problems. A leftwing idealism which not only fails to propose superior solutions to Labour's problems but actually refuses to acknowledge these problems in the first place cannot expect to make any impact on Labour's leaders.
Kinnock cannot be blamed for refusing to identify the party with the mishmash of contradictory dogmas served up by Tony Benn. But it is now self-evident that his strategy for leading the party involves him in the attempt to suppress its idealism altogether.
This strategy is terribly misconceived. It ensures that the leadership is continually engaging in trials of strength with the most enthusiastic element of the party membership. It represents a colossal diversion of political energy into a form of displacement activity which is as fruitless as the leftwing displacement activity it opposes. And it is a venture which cannot possibly succeed, no matter how relentlessly it is canvassed by Brian Walden and the like.
Necessary enthusiasms
Idealism is a necessary and inevitable feature of political activity. No political party can drain itself of its idealism and survive. And Kinnock cannot always expect to win these trials of strength, and is liable to lose some of them in the most embarrassing ways, as was demonstrated last June over defence.
The reason why Kinnock has embarked upon this strategy is that he can conceive of no other. He is the product of the same ideological outlook as that which orients his opponents, the superficial student Leftism of the 1960s which was made possible by the incoherent Bevanism of the 1950s. He knows that the idealism in this outlook is futile. But, because he has nothing to counterpoise to it, he considers the enthusiasms which animate Labour's activists as a menace instead of a resource.
All effective forms of politics channel enthusiasms. A form of politics which has lost the knack of doing this has no future. British Toryism has been in business for so long because it has always known how to harness the wayward enthusiasms of the backwoods and direct them into purposeful projects. Thatcherism has succeeded magnificently in this.
Effective politicians channel enthusiasms by capturing imaginations. What is required if Labour politics is to recover or even survive is that the introverted and hidebound idealism now prevalent on the Left be superseded by a leftwing idealism which is superior to it because more imaginative and more audacious as well as more realistic.
For this to happen, Labour politicians need to come to terms with the central reason for the remorseless decline of socialist politics over the last three decades.
Equality and utopia
This decline has been due to a fundamental philosophical and political weakness which has expressed itself in the persistent evasion of the central issue of British politics since 1951.
Having supervised the establishment of a large public sector and the welfare state, British socialism has refused to take effective responsibility for the management and progressive development of either. It has lacked a central idea to orient it in this undertaking and has therefore shirked it. Its policies have accordingly tended increasingly to superficiality and incoherence, and its arguments for them to unconvincing, because abstract, imperatives.
This weakness has its origin in an inadequate conception of socialism.
The British Left has overwhelmingly tended to conceive of socialism in redistributionist terms ("equality") and in utopian-millenarian terms (eternal harmony, "Jerusalem").
The redistributionist bias in its outlook has led it to ignore the problem of production and to justify redistributive measures in terms of abstract egalitarian imperatives, irrespective of circumstances.
The millenarian aspect of its conception has inhibited it from taking responsibility for governing the society at any stage short of the millennium on the grounds that to do so would be to take responsibility for "capitalism", and so prevented it from thinking about what progressive socialist reforms may actually be necessary and realisable in the short and medium term.
As a result, Labour governments have been returned to power since 1951 only in exceptional circumstances - the aftermath of the Profumo affair in 1963-4 and the 3-day week in 1974 - with neither the bearings nor the mandate required for substantial social reform. And British society has been obliged to progress through the medium of Conservative politics for lack of an alternative.
Evading the issue
So far, Labour's response to the fact that it is fundamentally unelectable has been to continue to evade the issue.
It has spent a great deal of time in internal recriminations, the leaders blaming the led and vice versa.
It has blamed the British political system for its own failure, and has thereby set up an unending series of windmills to tilt at - the House of Lords, the monarchy, the electoral system, etc.
It has been tempted into a total capitulation to the gung-ho free-market ideology of Thatcherism at the precise moment that this ideology has begun to come under attack from Thatcher's Tory critics.
It has cast around for policy models demonstrated abroad, especially in the USA, without taking a moment's thought for the relevance of these models to the British context.
It has engaged in self-defeating daydreams about an alliance with the even more incoherent and ineffectual SLD.
And it has allowed its crusading impulse to draw it into ineffectual displacement activities (CND, "anti-racism", "animal rights" and what-have-you) which marginalise it still further.
The revival of Labour's fortunes does not require the abandonment of socialist principles in an unconvincing espousal of the market, nor their replacement by American fashions, but the supersession of an inadequate conception of socialism by an adequate one.
An adequate conception of socialism in the British context is one which addresses the central issues of British society and is equal to the challenge they represent.
Productive socialism
The Labour Party needs a conception of socialism
(i) which takes charge of the question of productivity (that is, the question of the relationship between technological change and changes in production relations) in a manner which radically distinguishes it from the Right in that it takes consistent account, as a matter of principle, both of the interests of the workforce and of the public interest;
(ii) in which redistributionist objectives are firmly allied to productionist objectives and so justified by them instead of by an abstract egalitarianism or a patronising "compassion".
In the absence of such a conception,
(i) the question of productivity cannot be effectively addressed on a socialist basis, so that the general economic case for public ownership and public investment is critically vitiated, and the economic case for Thatcherite privatisation cannot be answered convincingly;
(ii) particular forms of state intervention in the economy, whether large- or small-scale, long-run or short-run, cannot be properly oriented by a clear strategy expressed in a set of definite priorities, and will accordingly tend to improvisation and incoherence;
(iii) the question of the relationship between state and market, and between public and private sector, cannot be thought about coherently except in the terms proposed by the Right, so that, in particular, the extent to which social needs fail to be expressed in the form of market demand cannot be accurately assessed or effectively counteracted, with all that this entails in terms of waste (e.g. of human resources: unemployment), inequalities and imbalances (e.g. the housing crisis in London);
(iv) leftwing idealism will continue to be channelled into an abstract and illiberal egalitarianism which is inherently incapable of imposing any limits upon itself and therefore inclined to be taken to farcical and literally indescribable extremes which rightly alienate public opinion and which the merely pragmatic leadership of a democratically constituted Labour Party is badly placed to contain;
(v) working class energies will continue to express themselves in either a realistic but apolitical business unionism a la EETPU or the self-defeating defence of restrictive practices a la NUM, T&GWU, NALGO et al. and, outside the medium of trade-unionism, in either the retreat from public life or various politically disoriented forms of protest;
(vi) Conservative governments will continue to be elected indefinitely, and the Labour Party and trade union "movement" to disintegrate.
A spirit and an ethic
At the heart of capitalist economic philosophy lies a spirit and an ethic. At the heart of productive socialism there must also be a spirit and an ethic: the spirit of cooperative enterprise and the ethic of public service.
The collectivist aspect of this conception is not at all opposed to individualism. Its purpose is to establish the framework for a more widely-based, creative and socially responsible individualism in place of the narrow, acquisitive and antisocial individualism promoted by the Right.
The purposeful idealism inherent in this conception will supersede the frivolous and whimsical idealism now prevalent on the Left only if it also supersedes the narrow sectionalism to which the trade unionist ethic has been reduced in recent decades. But, for as long as economic reality is mediated for British workers by managements which do not represent them, no substantive change in their outlook can be expected.
Productive socialism in Britain accordingly implies the advent of industrial democracy in some form or other and probably a variety of forms.
And the spirit and the ethic at the heart of productive socialism can and should be developed in both public and private sectors.
Public and private
The British Left has never given much thought to the difference between public and private sectors. This difference is very far from being absolute or comprehensive. In fact, the only difference which generally obtains is in the nature of investment.
Public sector enterprises are financed by public capital and private sector enterprises by private capital. In theory, this fundamental difference might have been expected to imply or generate other differences, in the form of management, the quality of service, the degree of dynamism and so forth. In practice, it has not done so, because the Left has persistently failed to think about how it might do so.
There are enterprises in the private sector which are run on a genuinely cooperative basis. And most public companies are run in a very hierarchical way. Equally significant is the fact that plenty of private companies (whether co-operatives or traditional capitalist firms) operate with an ethic of public service while plenty of public companies fail to do so in the most flagrant and shocking fashion.
There are obvious limits to how far the ethic of public service can inform and determine the behaviour of private companies. These companies are self-evidently obliged to respect capitalist criteria of efficiency expressed in terms of profitability. (This is necessarily true of workers' co-operatives every bit as much as of conventional private firms.) But there are plenty of private companies which know that unless they offer a genuine service to the public they cannot expect to achieve the degree of profitability on which their survival depends.
In principle, the fact that public companies rely on public investment instead of depending upon the free capital market means that they are under no obligation to calculate profitability on the purely short-term basis of the financial year. This freedom should enable them to take a far longer-term view and to give a far more developed expression to the ethic of public service. In practice, it has failed to do so but has encouraged inefficiency instead.
Public enterprise
Private companies - whether those of individual capitalists, or joint-stock companies, or workers' co-operatives - are obliged to be enterprising by the very logic of capitalist competition. Public companies are in principle insulated from this logic. Unless some other factor is present to ensure that they are run in an enterprising way, they are bound to be inefficient, and so a drain on public finance in the short run and a sitting duck for Thatcherite privatisation proposals in the long run.
The missing factor has been the spirit of public enterprise. It has been missing because the Left has done absolutely nothing to develop it. The tragedy is that elements of it were unquestionably present in the British public sector in the 1940s and 1950s, and even later in some cases. But they were allowed to wither and die.
The Left has often complained about the fact that many of the public companies set up after 1945 were run by managers recruited from private industry. In itself, this was a perfectly valid complaint. But it ignored two crucial facts: first, that many of the individuals appointed to run these companies were sympathetic to the principle of public ownership and genuinely anxious to make the public sector a success, and, second, that managers were bound to be appointed from the private sector for as long as nothing was done to develop a capacity for management in the public sector workforce.
The British Left has never had a word to say about how the public sector workforce might be encouraged and trained to take collective responsibility for management and thereby obviate the continued recourse to managers recruited from private industry. And, in practice, the Left has been hostile to any such development taking place.
Many of the workers in the industries and services nationalised after 1945 were subjectively ready for this development. They knew what they had endured under private ownership, in the mines, on the railways and in many other sectors, and they experienced nationalisation as a historic victory for their class and one which potentially altered the relations of production in their favour and so called for a radically new attitude on their part. In place of the defensive and essentially negative kind of trade union activity which had been self-evidently necessary when they were up against capitalist management, they recognised that a new, positive, constructive and socially responsible attitude was called for.
This new spirit expressed itself in a willingness to take into account the long-term interests of the industry or service in question in negotiations with management. The behaviour of the NUM during the 1950s and 1960s under leaders such as Will Paynter was a vivid expression of this. But this new attitude could not sustain itself indefinitely.
Industrial democracy
The idealism of the generation of workers who had known the bad old days could not simply be transmitted to the next generation, which had never known anything but public ownership and took it for granted. The positive and constructive spirit could be sustained only if subsequent generations of workers saw that it was in their own interest to act in this spirit.
For them to be able to see this, it was vital that they begin to take actual responsibility for management, that they begin themselves to wrestle with all the complex problems of managing a public industry or service, acquire skill and self-confidence in doing this and develop a corresponding pride in their collective ability to ensure that their industry or service was run efficiently, so that their own interest in it was safeguarded by their success in serving the public interest.
In other words, for the fledgling spirit of public enterprise to survive in Britain's public sector workforce, it was vital that it be developed in all kinds of practical ways. And the precondition of this development was industrial democracy. The Labour Party is clearly still light years away from appreciating this.
"Our goal is... to create a public enterprise culture" declare the authors of the section on "Consumers and the Community" in the First Report of Labour's Policy Review. But fine words butter no parsnips. There can be no such "culture" unless the spirit of public enterprise animates the public sector workforce. And the section on "People at Work" says absolutely nothing about industrial democracy.
Until Labour wakes up to this it will have nothing with which to oppose Thatcherism at the level of fundamental economic principles. For what Thatcherism is now doing to the British public sector is the inevitable consequence of the British Left's failure to understand the need for industrial democracy and to campaign for it when it was a possibility of practical politics in the 1960s and 1970s.
Towards privatisation
Because the fledgling spirit of public enterprise in the public sector workforce was allowed to wither away, it became increasingly difficult to manage public sector companies on a non-capitalist basis. The failure to secure efficiency and productivity in a socialist manner made the pressure on management to revert to straightforwardly capitalist criteria of efficiency irresistible. This quickly set up a vicious circle.
The fact that public companies were increasingly being managed in the same way as private companies reinforced the tendency in the public sector unions to revert to the traditional, sectionalist and defensive, attitudes, to regard public sector management as indistinguishable from that of the private sector, and to conceive of their relations with management in terms of class conflict.
The principal effect of this was a widespread collapse in the public sector workforce of any feeling of responsibility for the quality of the product or service in question. And as this quality remorselessly declined, the case for privatisation was correspondingly strengthened.
The terrible thing about the wholesale demolition of the public sector which is now taking place is that it is not being seriously opposed. Neither the trade unions nor the Labour Party are capable of opposing it with any spirit or conviction. They lack the conception of productive socialism on which they could base a determined resistance to Thatcherite privatisation. And had they possessed this conception and acted on it when industrial democracy was on the agenda in the 1970s, there would be no Thatcherite privatisation to resist, for Labour would still be in power and deservedly so.
From Bevin to Kinnock
As Brendan Clifford pointed out in L&TUR No.6, Ernest Bevin had a productive conception of socialism and acted with enormous purpose and determination to give effect to it. It was this which made the achievements of the 1945-1951 government possible. But because he never put this conception in writing, it was lost to subsequent generations of Labour activists.
Numerous individual trade unionists and Labour politicians have had glimmerings of this conception over the last thirty years. Harold Wilson subscribed to it in 1964, as did George Brown and Peter Shore and Barbara Castle. So did the young Anthony Wedgwood Benn, as is evident from the first volume of his diaries. But they subscribed to it in a superficial way, and in particular failed to realise its central implication, the need for industrial democracy as the indispensable condition of an enduring change in the outlook of British workers.
Undoubtedly, their essentially patronising attitude to British workers was one of the main reasons for this failure. But perhaps the main reason was, as Brendan Clifford argues elsewhere in this issue, their total lack of a sound historical understanding of British society.
Benn eventually recognised the need for industrial democracy, at least up to a point, in the mid-1970s, as it began to be canvassed by influential trade union leaders such as Jack Jones. But he proved utterly incapable of developing the case for it within the Labour Party and accordingly failed to stand up to the conservatism of the Labour Left and that of the bulk of the trade union "movement" when the Bullock Committee's report brought matters to a head.
Benn did not have it in him to seize his one opportunity to make an historic contribution to the development of British socialism in 1974-1977, and has been little more than a political nuisance ever since.
Back in the 1950s, Aneurin Bevan made the occasional remark suggesting a vague understanding of what was at issue. But he never developed this understanding in any way. And so Neil Kinnock, having made a point of joining the Institute for Workers' Control in the early stages of his career, felt free to oppose the Bullock Committee's proposals on flagrantly dishonest grounds in order to bolster his credentials as a radical socialist while keeping in with the most conservative trade union bosses.
Kinnock is now paying the political price for his own cynical behaviour eleven years ago. He acted to prevent the idealism of the Labour Left from being channelled in a useful direction in 1977 and he is now trying vainly to cope with the futile idealism whose survival he helped to ensure. The chickens have come home to roost. And, although Kinnock is now in a position to make amends for that youthful mistake, there is no reason to expect him to do so.
But unless the Labour Party takes up the conception of productive socialism, and does so in earnest, there will be no reason to expect an end to the futile conflicts which are now paralysing it and paralysing the trade union "movement" as well. And there will be no reason to expect an end to the Conservative governments and the triumphant capitalist reaction which this paralysis make inevitable.
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