from Problems of Capitalism & Socialism, No. 1. February/March 2008
The Left To Its Own Devices
Editorial
The second world war was won by Britain’s allies; by America and, above all, by Russia. The British bourgeoisie contributed nothing of substance to the victory. Everything that society achieved in the war years was achieved under working class leadership.
The British working class came through the General Strike and survived the Thirties under the leader ship of Ernest Bevin. During the war, while Churchill plotted military sideshows (that kept the war going by broadening it) and strutted in summits with the powers-that-be, Bevin exercised dictatorial power on the home front and organised the working class to win the peace.
The power that was built up by Bevin as leader of the Transport & General Workers’ Union and the driving force in the TUC was applied by him as Minister for everything fighting the war depended on (officially he was Minister for Labour and National Service) to establish political rights for the working class in a social economy of his own devising.
The interdependent and self-reinforcing system of social ownership, labour rights and welfare provision that underpinned working class power in post-war Britain was Bevin’s. Others may have thought the economics of it and others still may have sketched the legislative framework of it, but it was Bevin alone who built the welfare state.
That welfare state, which survived the attempts of Tory administrations to undermine it, is currently in the final stages of being dismantled by the left wing of the Labour Party which never reconciled itself to managing the economic relations it found itself living within and hated Bevin extravagantly for involving it so intimately with power and the responsibility for the use of power. When it finally captured the Labour Party in the nineties under Tony Blair the left set itself to disentangle itself from everything that caused it unease—industry and state involvement in industrial affairs and the remnants of working class economic power. The Labour Left is currently privatising what remains of the British economy and subsidising the Bourgeoisie mightily to (mis)manage it. The left which so hated Bevin has so completely had its revenge on him and the class which followed him.
The British working class would be immeasurably better off today if Bevin’s dictatorship had been of the vintage of the rights of man and subsequent revolutions. But it wasn’t. The closest analogy to Bevin’s use of dictatorial power is the classical one; that of Cincinnatus who in a time of military emergency was found plowing his fields and persuaded to take on dicatatorial power, then within sixteen days saved the state and retired back to his fields. Bevin established the working class in a power structure that ramified itself into its organised strengths and left the economic model to develop a political expression within the Labour Party.
It is by no means unreasonable that he should have expected the trade union movement to have block-voted the Labour Party into a routine of industrial common sense. Under Bevin’s direction the unions had acted to either prevent left-wing ideological adventures, or where they occurred anyway (the Ramsay MacDonald adventure) to pick up the pieces and reconstruct the movement. The unions might easily have structured their role as reality anchor into a dominant party position.
As things worked out, Bevin died in 1951and the unions refused to take a syndicalist step too far for them. They enrolled their members as Labour Party voters but refused to represent them as power brokers in the daily cut and thrust of Party and parliamentary business. Politically, organised workers were Labour Party members. Economically, Labour Party members were trade unionists. And Political Economy then? That was something foreign. Something a bit syndicalist sounding, something with a touch of corporatism about it. Political Economy was unEnglish and that was an end of it. Which left the Political Economy within which Bevin had established working class power to the loosest of its own devices. Which is to say it unravelled.
It took little more than twenty years for the strong working class position which Bevin established to be undone by the British left.
Let us be under no comfort of an old illusion here. Working class power was undone by the Left. The bourgeoisie in general, weak and demoralised as it was then, had nothing to do with it. Of that crime at least it is innocent.
At war’s end the British bourgeoisie was less exalted than greatly relieved in victory. The retreat from Empire which followed can easily be exaggerated. In many ways it was conducted more as a strategic withdrawal than as a retreat. Much of it was in response to American expansion into its markets and American anti-colonialism. But, for whatever complex of reasons, the imperial tide was receding and the imperial ruling class no longer had confidence in itself.
As the bourgeoisie lost the historical thread of itself the British working class enjoyed something of an Indian summer; really an autumn that was brighter and warmer than the weather could afford. With the welfare system taking up the slack of its oldest fears and the state buying out managerial incompetence the working class proceeded to collectively bargain itself into an inflationary pit.
The thirties then seemed a long time gone. Sickness and unemployment had become mere nuisances for the most part, even lifestyle choices for a few. Strikes were forgone conclusions, exhilerating and risk-free; fun for all the family. At the end of a bumpy road the worst that could happen was nationalisation.
Throughout the British economy bourgeois managements were unable to function in opposition to shop-floor power. It was all very well for Hugh Scanlon to say from a postion of irresponsible strength that management had a right to manage. Management was weak of will and unfit for purpose. All the talk about all the right in the world couldn’t turn managerial flab to industrial muscle. And Hugh Scanlon never for one moment intended that it should.
What Scanlon meant was that management had the right to produce ships, planes, cars, loaves of bread, tins of beans, sides of beef, fridges and washing machines from clean, fresh air and plenty of it. Though if the bourgoisie had somehow found some way of doing that Scanlon would inevitably have found some reason for interfering with it.
It was really like that in England in the seventies. Everything seemed to turn on the will of the organised working class. But strong as it was the organised working class was merely wilful. It had all the wilfulness in the world, but really it had no will and no steady purpose of its own. For will and steady purpose it looked to the Left wing of the Labour Party. And the Left wing of the Labour Party knew those words, along with a great many other words which it used in a vast extended stream that seemed never ending.
There was an end to all those words, which was a strong desire possessing the left-wing of the Labour Party and the Left in general that the world should be remade in the image of its own rhetoric. Blessed are the poor in spirit; go, be poor. Blessed are the meek; go, be meek. Justified are the powerless; go, be justified. Righteous are the weak; go, be righteous. So they went. And meek and poor they were and justified and righteous and all magnified in Kinnock. And multiplied in Tony Blair.
The political movement which coalesced around the leftwingers Blair and Brown and their New Labour Project was of the left, by the left and for the left. Neil Kinnock was deeply involved in it. As was Peter Mandelson who had once taken his Young Socialist branch into the Communist Youth League. Then there was Geoff Mulgan, David Aaronovich and, God Bless Them, the Millibands, father and son. And Peter Hain. And Clare Short.
May we never forget Margaret Hodge of the People’s Republic of Islington, not merely an Oppenheimer but also (now) an MBE. Or her one time deputy in Islington, Jack Straw. And of course Charles Clarke who would never have risen to the heights without his comrades in the depths. Then step up and take a bow, Nina Temple and Democratic Left, CPGB as was, New Politics Network as is. David Blunkett is too often ignored these days. So let us here remember Red Sheffield and its randy commissar. And oh yes, talking about commissars, the CPGB’s John Reid. And so many more. You know who you are.
The figure-head with the teeth for it, Tony Himself, acknowledged their debt to a particular set of founding principles. When Mick McGahey, CPGB executive member and Scargill’s deputy in the destruction of the Coal Industry, died in 1999, Blair eulogised him in these words:
“I knew him well. He had that combination of dedication to principle and toughness of mind that is the test of the trade union movement. He gave me advice often, never sneering and always sound. He was a genuine great of the trade union movement.”
Economic management is an indispensable social function, which in Britain in the seventies was not being performed by either of the economically involved classes whose business it was to see to it. That was an intolerable situation that the Bullock Inquiry into Industrial Democracy was set up to address.
Politics had produced Barbara Castle’s In Place of Strife for the Labour Pary and Ted Heath’s Tripartite Prices and Incomes Policy for the Conservatives, both of which had been rejected by the force of economics. The Bullock Committee was formally part of a later Labour Government’s Social Contract, albeit a part of it which hankered after Political Economy.
The British Labour Movement of the seventies was disabled by being a constitutional fiction, in which the powerless political wing was hamstrung by an industrial wing which refused to accept responsibility for the activity it imposed on the politicians. Then, when a section of the trade union movement attempted by way of industrial democracy to take responsibility for itself it was outmanoeuvred by an alliance of powerless politicians and irresponsible union bosses.
For the next year or so, or however long it takes, this magazine has set itself to reproduce the documentary record of the struggle that took place in that period over that policy. As a beginning this issue contains Jack Jones’ biography of Ernie Bevin, as well as Conor Lynch’s account of the period which began last year in the Irish Political Review, and the first few issues of the journal of the North London Workers’s Control Group of that period, Workers And Industry.