August 16th, 2016 by geoffhodgson1946
Geoffrey M. Hodgson
“This, from the always measured g. m. hodgson, shows Labour’s existential crisis in horrifying detail” – Susan Wilde
“The revolutionary road: excellent sober distillation of Marxism/Leninism/Trotskyism/socialism; rights v insurrection” – Rich Greenhill
“A very good summary of Labour and Trotskyism” – Gerry Hassan
“Another fantastic article!” – Lily Jayne Summers
John McDonnell, the Labour Shadow Chancellor, is an admirer of Trotsky. Corbyn once called upon the USSR to rehabilitate the Russian revolutionary.2
Trotskyists are socialists who believe in the common ownership of the means of production. This goal was stated in Labour’s Clause Four from 1918 to 1995, so why shouldn’t Trotskyists be allowed to join Labour?
Trotskyists differ from the devotees of Mao Zedong or Joseph Stalin. Trotskyists do not describe the murderous regimes of Mao’s China and the USSR as socialist. They promote themselves as anti-totalitarian, and they might seem much more democratic than other Marxists.
So why shouldn’t Trotskyists be allowed to join Labour?
The Parliamentary versus the Revolutionary Road
There is a prominent negative answer to this question. It raises profound differences of strategy. As Neil Kinnock (who did the party a great service by kicking out Militant in 1985) said in a speech to the Parliamentary Labour Party in July 2016:
‘In 1918 in the shadow of the Russian revolution [Labour members decided] … that they would not pursue the revolutionary road – it was a real choice in those days. They would pursue the parliamentary road to socialism.’
According to this view, Labour members and revolutionary Marxists share the same aim – socialism – but they differ on the method of getting there. Labour follows the parliamentary road; Marxists choose the revolutionary road.
Robert Owen
There are big problems with a part of this argument. Socialism was defined by Robert Owen and Karl Marx in terms of common ownership of the means of production and ‘the abolition of private property’.
But at least in practice since 1945, Labour has been less and less devoted to this goal. Finally, the goal of ‘common ownership’ was removed from Clause Four of the Labour Party Constitution in 1995.
Labour now says that it is a ‘democratic socialist’ party but defines this not in terms of common ownership. Instead there is a goal of social solidarity, believing ‘that by the strength of our common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone’, and in a society ‘in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many not the few’.
Arguably, such a goal might be achievable in a reformed capitalism. But Trotskyists, like all Marxists, are emphatically against capitalism.
What Trotskyists and the post-1995 Labour Party Constitution mean by ‘socialism’ are very different. The divergences between Labour and Trotskyists concern different ends, as well as different means.
But Corbyn’s election as Leader by over 59 per cent of the membership in 2015 shows that the traditional definition and goal of socialism in the Labour Party is far from dead and buried. Under Corbyn’s leadership, Labour could return to its pre-1995 goals.
Tony Blair
Ironically, by getting rid of the traditional ‘common ownership’ version of socialism in 1995, but retaining the word ‘socialism’ in an attempt to invest it with a different meaning, Tony Blair provided legitimacy for any later attempt by classical socialists – including currently by Trotskyists and Corbynistas – to restore Labour to its original colours.
Within Labour today, because of this legacy, everyone from Trotskyists and Corbynistas at one extreme, through Owen Smith, Neil Kinnock and then on to Tony Blair at the other extreme, is obliged to call themselves a ‘socialist’. But there are massive silences and huge disagreements on its meaning.
Labour becomes less capable of discussing fundamental differences of goal, but clings onto the illusion of the fundamental goodness of something called ‘socialism’. Labour’s problem of entryism will never go away while the s-word continues to cast its spell. The word itself is an invitation for those who propose the common ownership of anything to join.
The Totalitarian Politics of Class Struggle
There are other fundamental problems with Marxism in general, and Trotskyism in particular. First, Marxism rejects the supreme values of the Enlightenment.
For example, Frederick Engels in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, saw these Enlightenment values as ‘nothing more than the idealized kingdom of the bourgeoisie’ with its ‘bourgeois justice’, its ‘bourgeois equality before the law’ and ‘bourgeois property … proclaimed as one of the essential rights of man’.
Marxists do not see the French Revolutionary principles of liberty, equality and fraternity as a potential achievement for all, but the rhetoric of the rising capitalist class in the class struggle against the old feudal order.
After playing their progressive historic role, Enlightenment ideas are seen as ‘bourgeois’ ideology, which now serves to repress the working class.
Marx saw socialism as the class destiny of the proletariat, which by overthrowing capitalism would emancipate humankind from inequality and exploitation. Socialism was not validated by an appeal to justice or rights. Instead it was grounded on ‘material’ and ‘economic’ developments within capitalism that were leading to growing internal crises and the rise of the proletariat.
Marx rejected all appeals to rights or justice. He bypassed the issues of morality and justice by focusing on the real social forces allegedly leading to socialism. But neither the driving forces of history nor the supposed destiny of a social class make this socialist future just, or morally right.
Karl Marx
By shelving the discourse on rights, in favour of the scientifically-clothed rhetoric of proletarian destiny, all versions of Marxism – including Trotskyism – are on the slippery slope toward totalitarianism.
When rights are no longer universal, and no-one has the protection of an independent legal system, the any action that is deemed ‘counter-revolutionary’ or ‘against the interests of the working class’ gives the accused no effective defence. The prosecutors monopolise the interpretation of guilt. Arbitrary punishment can follow.
The rights of critics and dissenters have to be protected, by their formal recognition and the autonomy of the judiciary. Unless this is done, any criticism can be crushed.
Trotsky was wrong: the roots of totalitarianism do not lie principally in the personalities of brutal, power-hungry individuals such as Stalin, but in Marxism itself. As Leszek Kolakowski suggested:
‘Marx’s anticipation of perfect unity of mankind and his mythology of the historically privileged proletarian consciousness … were responsible for his theory being eventually turned into an ideology of the totalitarian movement: not because he conceived of it in such terms, but because its basic values could hardly be materialized otherwise.’
Violence versus Parliament and Law
Laws get in the way of revolutionary struggle. Hence, along with their dilution of the notion of rights, Lenin proposed that all laws should be abolished.
Writing in 1918, Lenin described the desired ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ as ‘rule based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws. The revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat is rule won and maintained by the use of violence by the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, rule that is unrestricted by any laws.’ Trotsky supported Lenin in this and most other respects.
Consequently, a fundamental problem with Marxism is its failure to support the universality of human rights. Human rights apply to all, as in the majestic 1948 United Nations Declaration of Universal Human Rights.
Instead, Marxists see social advancement as a matter of ‘class struggle’ where one class must seize power and remove rights from another class. Lenin and Trotsky went one step further: they argued that this struggle for proletarian power must override the rule of law.
The Second Congress of the Communist International took place in Russia in 1920. Under the leadership of Lenin, one of its resolutions mentioned ‘bourgeois parliaments’ and declared:
‘The task of the proletariat consists in breaking up the bourgeois state machine, destroying it, and with it the parliamentary institutions, be they republican or constitutional monarchy.’
Throughout his life, Trotsky defended the decisions of the first four congresses of the Communist International, which took place when Lenin was alive and before Stalin seized power.
Trotsky added his own idea of ‘permanent revolution’, involving civil war, even in a parliamentary democracy:
‘Socialist construction is conceivable only on the foundation of the class struggle, on a national and international scale. This struggle … must inevitably lead to explosions, that is, internally to civil wars and externally to revolutionary wars. Therein lies the permanent character of the socialist revolution as such, regardless of whether it is a backward country … or an old capitalist country which already has behind it a long epoch of democracy and parliamentarism.’
Conclusion: Hands Tied Behind their Backs
Those in Labour wanting to fight the battle against entryism have two hands tied behind their backs.
First, by hanging on to the word ‘socialism’, after abandoning its original meaning, it is difficult to exclude those who are more genuinely socialist in the classical sense of common ownership. Labour’s obligatory (but now shallow) rhetoric of ‘socialism’ is a green light for socialist entryists of all kinds.
Second, Labour has long-ago ditched the politics of class struggle, but it retains a notion of class partisanship in its very name. It was formed historically to represent the interests of the working class. It was built upon the trade union movement. Labour itself is a class party.
Of course, Labour in practice has put aside the notion that it is speaking for one section of society only. But its name remains a problem, both for broadening its appeal and for barring the more energetic and extreme exponents of working class representation and power.
Of course, to achieve its goals, Labour is pledged to working through parliament, rather than through revolution. This is a very important difference. Many Marxists are still devoted to insurrection. Labour clearly is not. With this one big foot it can kick back. But its two hands are tied.
Labour still has much outdated baggage to deal with. Even if it staves off Trotskyist entryism – which now seems unlikely, at least while Corbyn is Labour Leader – it still will have a number of big problems. It will need to find and package a new identity for itself, which is suitable for the twenty-first century.
Retaining an unconvincing redefinition of ‘socialism’ and calling itself ‘Labour’ will not do.
Labour needs to come to terms with the fact that both classical socialism and class politics are untenable. It has to put democratic and progressive Enlightenment values at its centre, and reconfigure itself for the challenges of the twenty-first century.
16 August 2016
Minor edits: 17-18 August 2016
Endnotes
- Note that I refrain in this article from estimating the scale or impact of Trotskyist entryism in the Labour Party. They are not central to my argument here. For evidence of both (and of Corbyn’s links with the IRA) see here. At least currently, entryists into Labour are probably few in number, but it is a well-established fact that a few determined people can influence many thousands.
- In 2010, McDonnell attended an event commemorating the 70th anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination and has praised the ‘importance’ of his ideas (Riley-Smith 2016a). In 1988 Corbyn demanded from Parliament that the USSR should ‘give complete rehabilitation to Leon Trotsky’ (Riley-Smith, 2016b). Nothing wrong with that, but its shows the way he leans and who he chooses as friends.
- Personal note: I was a critical and wobbly Trotskyist from 1968 to 1973. I re-joined the Labour Party in 1974 and left it in 2001. The photograph below shows me (not then a Trot) visiting Trotsky’s house in Mexico in 1981, where he was murdered in 1940. It is a moving and impressive place.
References
Crick, Michael (2016) Militant (London: Biteback Publishing), esp. pp. xvii–xviii.
Kolakowski, Leszek (1977) ‘Marxist Roots of Stalinism’, in Robert C. Tucker (ed.) (1977) Stalinism: Essays in Historical Interpretation (New York: Norton), pp. 283-98.
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (1967) Selected Works in Three Volumes (London: Lawrence and Wishart), esp. vol. 3, p. 49.
Marx, Karl and Engels, Frederick (1962) Selected Works in Two Volumes (London: Lawrence and Wishart), esp. vol. 2, p. 117.
New Park Publications (1977) The Second Congress of the Communist International, 2 vols (London: New Park), esp. vol. 2, p. 52.
Riley-Smith, Ben (2016a) ‘Labour Entryism Row: John McDonnell Attended Celebration of Leon Trotsky and Praised ‘Importance’ of his Ideas’, The Telegraph, 14 August. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/14/labour-entryism-row-john-mcdonnell-attended-celebration-of-leon/.
Riley-Smith, Ben (2016b) ‘Jeremy Corbyn Called for a “Complete Rehabilitation” of Leon Trotsky in Parliament’, The Telegraph, 16 August. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/15/jeremy-corbyn-called-for-complete-rehabilitation-of-leon-trotsky/
Sparrow, Andrew and Jones, Harrison (2016) ‘Secret Recording of Kinnock’s anti-Corbyn Speech to MPs – In Full’, The Guardian, 6 July. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/08/secret-recording-neil-kinnock-jeremy-corbyn-step-down-speech-to-mps-in-full.
Trotsky, Leon D. (1962) The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects (London: New Park), esp. ch. 10.
Watson, Tom (2016) ‘Tom Watson Sends Corbyn “Proof of Trotskyist Labour Infiltration”’, The Guardian, 10 August. http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/aug/10/tom-watson-sends-corbyn-proof-of-trotskyist-labour-infiltration
Posted in Common ownership, Democracy, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party, Left politics, Liberalism, Nationalization, Robert Owen, Socialism, Tony Benn, Tony Blair, Uncategorized
July 10th, 2016 by geoffhodgson1946
“A thoughtful analysis of Labour’s current impasse – back to 1918 in more senses than one”
Niamh Hardiman, Professor of Political Science and Public Policy, University College Dublin
Geoffrey M. Hodgson
Tony Blair and Jeremy Corbyn have been pulling Labour in different directions for decades. But under the surface there are some common roots in their thinking. Also Blair created some of the circumstances in which Corbyn was decisively elected as Labour Party Leader in 2015, with 59.5 per cent of the vote.
Both Blair and Corbyn have enjoyed huge support among Labour members. How could this radical transformation of political opinion take place within a large political party, in the space of less than 20 years?
To answer this question we must first briefly examine how Labour evolved from 1945 to 1979, as a mass party based on strong trade unions. Then came the earthquake of Margaret Thatcher’s election victory in 1979. Labour was defeated in three subsequent elections, before Tony Blair led Labour into power for thirteen years. Blair had help to make Labour electable by combining a reforming momentum with a pro-business image, but he did not provide an adequate political philosophy to replace traditional socialism.
This vacuum, combined with the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003, and Labour’s part in the financial crash of 2008, created the conditions for the election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader in 2015. Corbyn turned Labour’s ideological clock back by over half a century and lost its prospect of electability.
Post-War Labour: The Broad Church
After the first majority Labour government was elected in 1945, Labour party individual membership was rising rapidly towards one million and trade union membership began a long upward trend, rising from about 8 million in 1945 to 13 million in 1979. In general elections from 1945 to 1979 inclusive, Labour always polled between 36 per cent and 49 per cent of the vote. Labour was a mass party, built on the pillars of organised individual membership, powerful trade union support, a strong presence in parliament, and the loyalty of over a third of the electorate.
Clement Attlee
Labour’s commitment to widespread common ownership was enshrined in Clause Four of its constitution, which had been adopted in 1918. Before he became Prime Minister in 1945, Clement Attlee had expressed his support for this full-blooded socialist vision of a planned economy with widespread public ownership. But the practicalities of government, and the outbreak of the Cold War in 1948, pushed Labour leaders and intellectuals towards social democracy and a mixed economy. The most important statement of this shift was Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism in 1956.
But, despite the efforts of Hugh Gaitskell and others, Labour’s Clause Four remained unchanged. Labour contained both classical socialist and social-democratic currents. But the socialist wing never achieved supremacy, largely because it had insufficient support among the trade unions that were affiliated to the party. The great union flywheel kept Labour on a social-democratic course. The first-past-the-post electoral system made a party split and a socialist breakaway unviable.
The Thatcher Era: From Multiple Defeats to Recovery
The 1979 defeat of the Labour Government under James Callaghan brought Margaret Thatcher to power and an ensuing 18 years of Tory rule. At first, in reaction to this defeat, the traditional socialist wing of the party made gains under the leadership of Tony Benn. In 1980, Michael Foot, a radical social democrat, was elected as party leader. In 1981, Dennis Healey narrowly defeated Benn for the Deputy Leadership. In frustration with Labour’s shift to the Left and the use of union block votes, a sizeable portion split off to form the Social Democratic Party.
Labour’s 1983 general election manifesto prescribed a good dose of nationalisation, an interventionist industrial policy, unilateral nuclear disarmament, higher personal taxation and withdrawal from the European Economic Community (now the European Union). Tested at the polls, Labour’s vote slumped below 28 per cent, for the first time since 1918.
Neil Kinnock
Then Foot resigned. Neil Kinnock was elected as leader, beginning the long process of making Labour electable once again. Kinnock fought the Marxist entryists in the party, modernised its policies on vital issues such as home ownership, and made it more credible.
Meanwhile, Thatcher continued her assault on Labour’s trade union base. A series of restrictive laws reduced trade union powers. By the time that Labour regained power in 1997, trade union membership had been reduced by more than a third. Today, trade union membership is less than half what it was in 1979, notwithstanding a bigger workforce.
The Blair Revolution: From Socialism to Undeclared Liberalism
The long period in opposition from 1979 to 1997 convinced a majority of Labour members that principle was impotent without power, and that some compromises were necessary to make Labour electable. In this climate, Tony Blair was elected as party leader in 1994.
The term ‘New Labour’ separated the party from its previous electoral baggage, including its original primary focus on common ownership and its antagonism to private business. Blair argued that previous socialists had confused means with ends. The desired end was a society in which all individuals would be valued and had the means of self-fulfilment. If common ownership had been a means that end in the past, then it was no longer appropriate for the modern, complex, global economy.
Tony Benn
In 1995 Blair successfully removed Labour’s commitment to ‘common ownership’ from Clause Four of its constitution. But from the Left, Tony Benn protested: ‘Labour’s heart is being cut out’. In a sense Benn was right, common ownership had been Labour’s core principle since 1918, even if no leader since 1945 had made it a primary goal.
Blair hyphenated the word as ‘social-ism’ and attempted to change its meaning. It now meant a recognition of individuals as socially interdependent, the promotion of social justice and of equality of opportunity, recognising the equal worth of each citizen. He also used the term ‘third way’ to describe a path that differed from widespread collectivisation, on the one hand, and unrestrained markets, on the other.
While Blair saw a sizable role for the market, he was not a ‘neoliberal’ or a free-market libertarian. The state was still to play a major role in the economy. But redistributive taxation and the reduction of inequality were not major priorities. Blair’s close ally Peter Mandelson declared in 1998 that the Labour Government was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they pay their taxes’.
Thomas Paine
While Blair redefined and retained the word social-ism, he moved Labour closer to a version of social liberalism. There is a radical tradition of social liberalism, but it is not socialist in the sense of widespread common ownership. The good of the community is seen as harmonious with the freedom of the individual. This tradition stretches from Thomas Paine through John Stuart Mill to Thomas H. Green, John A. Hobson and others.
From Paine onwards, social liberals raised concerns about inequalities of wealth and power. They appreciated the complexity of decision-making and the potential fallibility of government. Hence they advocated flexibility: there was a need for policy experiments and ongoing appraisals. Institutional checks and balances were required. But for Blair it was all about ‘values’, not structures or institutions.
Labour’s nostalgic devotion to the word socialism was too strong. With or without the hyphen, social-ism had become a zombie-term – a mere badge of identity. Labour was still stuck in its old rhetoric and unable to learn much from the broad liberal tradition.
Blairism as Marxism turned Upside-Down
The relationship between means and ends is important. Marxism famously separates ends from means, claiming that ‘the ends justify the means’. For Marxism, all means are evaluated solely in terms of the ends that they are deemed to serve. But in a complex world, we cannot be sure that specific means will lead to their assumed ends. Hence, contrary to Marxism, means must be placed under moral constraints as well.
Karl Marx
Blair argued that the emphasis on common ownership or nationalization confused means with ends. The ends of social harmony and social justice, for example, might be achieved by means other than common ownership. Ironically, by separating means and ends so completely, Blair mirrored Marxism. Blair used a Marx-like separation of ends from means to abandon classical socialist aims.
But means and ends cannot be completely separated. The American philosopher John Dewey pointed out that the pursuit of goal is itself a learning process that can modify our ends. Furthermore, the use of particular means might modify our ends, as we discover unforeseen problems or benefits. Furthermore, the end we uphold is a spur to action, hence also a means of energizing change. Dewey wrote: ‘there is no end which is not in turn a means’.
Blair adopted another dichotomy from Marxism. This is the separation of the sphere of ‘values and beliefs’ from economic structures and patterns of ownership. This is redolent of Marx’s distinction between the ideological ‘superstructure’ and the ‘economic base’. But Blair reversed their importance: for him ‘values and beliefs’ assumed primacy. Adopting the same dichotomy, Marxism was turned upside-down.
This Marxist dichotomy is false. All economic activity involves beliefs, evaluations and value-laden motivations. Values and beliefs are intrinsic to the economy. The economy is not a machine that can be considered separately from the knowledge, beliefs and expectations of the human agents within it.
Blair in Power: From Achievement to Catastrophe
Blair’s highly charismatic and effective leadership led to the electoral landslide of 1997. Labour’s share of the vote jumped from 34.4 per cent in 1992 to 43.2 per cent in 1997. Especially in the early years, his government achieved a great deal. Education and the National Health Service benefitted for large increases in spending.
One of the first major achievements of Blair’s government was the Good Friday Peace Agreement in Northern Ireland. A minimum wage was introduced and devolved assemblies were set up in Scotland and Wales. The Human Rights Act was passed in 1998, but the Blair government was later accused of complicity in human rights abuses abroad. There was important legislation in pursuit of gay rights. Child and pensioner poverty were dramatically reduced. There was continuous economic growth. Many more people were brought into employment.
Blair won another landslide election in 2001. Demonstrably, by a wide margin, he had made Labour electable, after the wilderness of the Thatcher era. But he did not offer Labour a new philosophy or a robust architecture, after the abandonment of traditional socialism and the decline of its trade union base. Even before Iraq, some of his new policies were challengeable.
For example, Blair’s emphasis on ‘values and beliefs’ over institutional structures allowed him to privatize some public services, including parts of the National Health Service. His claim was that the same esteemed values could endure within any system of ownership. But changes to institutional structures affect the habits and beliefs of those involved. Extending the scope for contracts and markets means – rightly or wrongly – that pecuniary and profit-orientated values can become more pervasive, unless checks are put in place.
Consistent with his emphasis on ‘values and beliefs’, Blair promoted a programme of expansion of publicly-funded faith schools. But religious faiths are not simply ‘values’: they are organised enclaves of group self-protection and survival. As already evident from the long experience of segregation in Northern Ireland, institutionalised separation can exacerbate political, ethnic and cultural divisions.
A 2001 report commissioned by Bradford City Council concluded that its communities were becoming increasingly isolated along racial, cultural and religious lines, and that faith-segregated schools were fuelling the divisions. Major riots erupted that year in Bradford and other northern cities.
David Bell – the then Chief Inspector of Schools – warned in a January 2005 speech to the Hansard Society that a traditional Islamic education did not equip Muslim children for living in modern Britain. He said: ‘I worry that many young people are being educated in faith-based schools, with little appreciation of their wider responsibilities and obligations to British society.’ In another lecture Bell said: ‘We can choose … whether we want to bring our diversity together in a single rainbow or whether we allow our differences to fester into separate cultures and separate communities.’ Yet, even after the July 2005 London bombings by home-grown Islamic extremists, and until his resignation from office in 2007, Prime Minister Blair continued to promote faith schools.1
Blair’s government reduced the number of heredity peers in the House of Lords, but dithered on further reform. Whether the House of Lords should be fully appointed, fully elected, or be subject to a combination of the two remained under dispute. Blair worried that the House of Lords might impair the will of the Commons – institutionalised checks and balances were not central to his thinking.
Then there was the catastrophe of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Blair was over-confident that his ‘values’ could prevail, and President George W. Bush could be persuaded to seek United Nations approval. But these ‘values’ were no match for a belligerent Republican Party.
Of dubious legality, this bloody disaster wrecked Blair’s political career. Deadly strife in Iraq continues to this day, with enduring political reverberations in the UK.
Blair’s motivation for his decision to support Bush’s invasion will be the subject of many biographies and histories to come. The explanation is bound to be complex, but I guess that Blair’s supreme emphasis on ‘values’ over legalities, structures, evidence, fallibilities and practicalities will be uppermost. How else could someone believe in the possibility that Western democratic ideals could quickly take hold in an artificially-created country with no democratic history, riven by ethnic and religious division and fragmented into countless clans?
Blair was an outstanding politician: he restored Labour’s electability and won three major victories in succession. But when he stepped down from office in 2007 he left an ideological as well as a charismatic vacuum. Labour retained the term socialism, but in substance Blair moved Labour toward an untutored version of reforming liberalism. Largely because of the damage to Blair’s reputation after Iraq, the party was unable to digest this ideological shift.
Blair compounded a problem faced by social democratic parties throughout the world. To a large extent they have lost their way, lacking a well-developed ideology with related, viable goals.
The Corbyn Restoration: Marxism-Leninism Revived
After Blair’s exit, the theoretical, ideological and charismatic void helps to explain why the Labour Party eventually choose the retro-Marxist Jeremy Corbyn as its leader.2 Furthermore, the weakened trade unions were no longer a moderating force: the flywheel had been dismantled. Constitutional changes had given them less power within Labour’s structure and the power they retained had been moved by internal changes to the Left.
The financial crash of 2008 undermined Labour’s reputation for sound finance. When Gordon Brown was Labour Chancellor under Blair, he promoted significant deregulation of the financial sector. After the debt bubble burst, and Western capitalism teetered on the edge of collapse, there was a widespread resurgence of Marxist thinking.
Corbyn turned the clock back, returning to socialism in its original meaning. The goal of common ownership was restored. His semi-Marxist, Bennite socialism was combined with a quasi-Leninist foreign policy. Opposed to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and to the oppressive treatment of Palestinians by Israel, Corbyn’s foreign policy became systematically anti-West. Corbyn turned Marxism the right way up.
As if oblivious to the enormous changes in world capitalism, Corbyn clings to an ideology made in 1918. There is neither strategy, detail nor appraisal of feasibilty, to his thinking. All that is left is his ‘values’: his outrage and protest against forces from the West that inflict suffering on the world. There is no mention of the many millions that have died under regimes that were ‘Marxist-Leninist’ by name.
Although very different from Blair’s, Corbyn’s ideology faces the same problem of dealing with the potential fallibility of all decisions and policies. Both Blair and Corbyn proceeded as if they had the uncontroversial right answer to any problem. Yet the complexity of the modern world underlines the need for an experimental approach to policy, and for countervailing institutional structures to appraise every move.
Unlike Blair, Corbyn believes that these problems can be solved by large doses of democracy and popular involvement. But he overlooks the problems and dangers of undetailed ultra-democracy. Widespread democratic involvement in the myriad of intricate decisions in a complex politico-economic system is unworkable.
While Blair after 2003 carried the scars of Iraq, Corbyn is on record in his support for terrorist organisations such as Hamas, Hezbollah and the IRA. He has claimed that he was engaging in the peace processes in these theatres of combat. But there was no visible negotiation with the other sides in these conflicts. Corbyn has also given speeches supporting Colonel Muammar Gaddaffi’s regime in Libya and Slobodan Milosevic, the butcher of Bosnian Muslims. Corbyn’s behaviour was more consistent with an ‘anti-imperialist’ and anti-West Leninist than with a broker for peace.
In 1918, Labour first established individual party membership and the ‘common ownership’ Clause Four was first placed in its constitution. Corbyn’s Leninism would take us back to the year after Lenin and the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. Momentum yes – but backwards in time. Over a hundred years of hard work by millions of activists, building Labour as a political movement and as a party of government, will be reversed.
Corbyn’s political brew has little chance of success. But we should understand the unwitting role of Blair in helping to prepare the ground for its ascendancy within the Labour machine.
Conclusion: Beginning Again
Values are important, but we need more than that. While conservatives can nod in favour of the status quo, radicals must offer a distinctive vision for change – they have to outline the kind of future they want. A movement to change the world must uphold its aims and recruit to its cause.
Changed under Blair’s leadership, the current Labour Party Constitution outlines commendable principles such as by ‘common endeavour we achieve more than we achieve alone’. It laudably aims for a society where ‘power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many not the few’ and ‘where we live together freely, in a spirit of solidarity, tolerance and respect’.
But these words are too vague to provide a clear goal. They are consistent with a range of idealistic plans, from statist socialism to egalitarian ‘people’s capitalism’.
The current Clause Four Part One is silent on the question of property, whether it is to be private or owned in common. Reference to ‘a thriving private sector’ is tucked away in Part Two, alongside a mention of public ownership or accountability where ‘essential to the common good’.
This unmotivated melange satisfies neither traditional socialists who see common ownership as a vital goal, nor liberals who regard some private ownership as one of the preconditions of human freedom. Clause Four is inaudible on these vital institutional questions. ‘Values’ fill the vacuum instead.
Clause Four commendably promotes democracy and human rights, but is unclear about the institutional and politico-economic conditions under which they are nurtured. It does not acknowledge one of the major lessons of the twentieth century, that human rights and traditional socialism have never co-existed, and there are good reasons to conclude that they never will.
The institutional aims of the Labour Party are unclear. There is now a battle for the stricken party’s soul. It will be fought out between traditional socialists and social-democratic modernisers. But it will be a fight over an organisation that has already lost its direction and has no clear way forward. Both Blair and Corbyn bear some responsibility for this crisis.
10 July 2016
Amended: 11-13 July 2016, 18 February 2019.
1 Like Blair, Corbyn also supports faith schools (at least Jewish ones).
2 Pressed by Andrew Marr in July 2015 on whether he was a Marxist, Corbyn ducked the opportunity to deny on television that he held to that view.
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Posted in Common ownership, Democracy, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party, Left politics, Nationalization, Politics, Socialism, Tony Benn, Tony Blair, Tony Blair
May 22nd, 2016 by geoffhodgson1946
Geoffrey M. Hodgson
In September 2015 a rank outsider, with minimal support from inside the Parliamentary Party, became Labour Party Leader. But he was elected with the support of almost 60% of the party membership.
Jeremy Corbyn first became a Member of Parliament in 1983 and was frequently in opposition to the leadership of his own party. His elevation to Leader in 2015 was widely regarded as a radical break from Labour’s past, particularly from the era of Tony Blair’s leadership from 1994 to 2007.
In contrast to a widespread view, I argue here that Corbyn’s politics are – in most respects – more mainstream than reported. They are broadly in line with the original Labour Party, from its formation in 1900 (as the Labour Representation Committee) to at least 1945.
By contrast, from the election of the first majority Labour government in 1945 to the resignation of Ed Miliband from the leadership in 2015, Labour adjusted to the realities of gaining and retaining power, and became more moderate in much of its political rhetoric. A large section of the party abandoned its original socialist ideology, in substance if not in name, and these pragmatists dominated Labour during the post-war period. To retain credibility, they tried to alter the meaning of socialism to serve more moderate ends.
Corbyn’s election as leader should be understood – in part – as a rehabilitation of typical Labour doctrines of the 1900-1945 period, and of Labour’s aspiration for socialism as originally defined. Corbyn has Labour’s DNA. But he has recombined Labour’s original DNA with ‘anti-imperialist’ doctrines that became prominent, largely outside Labour, in the 1960s and 1970s.
I first summarise Labour Party ideology in the 1900-1945 period. I then show how Corbyn exhibits these earlier views, but in genetic recombination with an “anti-imperialist” politics of the 1960s and 1970s. I then briefly draw some tentative conclusions from this analysis.
Socialism and the Labour Party
The word socialism first appeared in English in 1827 in the Co-operative Magazine, published in London by followers of Robert Owen. It was used in the Poor Man’s Guardian in 1833, and moved into wider usage thereafter.
Robert Owen
For Owen and his followers, socialism meant the abolition of private property. As Owen argued in 1840, ‘virtue and happiness could never be attained’ in ‘any system in which private property was admitted’. He aimed to secure ‘an equality of wealth and rank, by merging all private into public property’.
From the 1830s until the 1950s, socialism was almost universally defined in terms of the abolition of private property and some form of widespread common ownership.
In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels echoed Owen and others and called for the ‘abolition of private property.’ In 1850 Marx declared: ‘Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it’. In the Communist Manifesto and elsewhere, he and Engels proclaimed an economic order in which ‘capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society.’ They wanted the complete abolition of the ‘free selling and buying’ of commodities.
They welcomed efforts ‘to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state’ and looked forward to a time when ‘all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation’. Their version of socialism was particularly centralist, but they reflected the views of all socialists in looking for universal common ownership.
Marxism was never a major influence in the British Labour Party. But its founders took on board this same definition of socialism. Socialism was widely understood as the abolition of private ownership and its replacement by some form of common ownership.
Beatrice & Sidney Webb
Fabian socialists such as Sidney and Beatrice Webb had an ultimate vision of a fully planned and consciously controlled socialist economy where all markets and private ownership of the means of production were gradually marginalized to insignificance. They wanted private ownership of the means of production to be ended: it was a ‘perversion’.
They envisaged a massive, complex structure of national, regional and local committees, all involved in decision-making over details of production and distribution. But how would these cope with the huge amounts of information and specialized knowledge in modern complex economies? It was simply assumed that this was relatively easy to sort out in some rational manner.
G D H Cole
Some contemporary Labour Party intellectuals stressed workplace democracy. This was a central theme in the “guild socialism” of G. D. H. Cole and others. Cole – another Fabian – is sometimes described as a ‘libertarian socialist’ and as an advocate of ‘decentralized’ socialism. But he supported the wholesale nationalisation of industry and the abolition of private enterprise.
Cole’s vision of socialism was of an integrated, national system where ‘a single authority is responsible both for the planning of the social production as a whole and for the distribution of the incomes which will be used in buying it.’ Within this ‘single authority’ he also sought devolved worker control. He wanted local autonomy of manufacturing, modelled on the medieval guild. But he was tragically unclear about how the two were to be reconciled.
These theorists ignored the problem of devolving genuine power within a national bureaucracy, without the creation of autonomous private enterprises. A major debate within the Labour Party concerned the desired structure and devolution of power within this national public framework.
Clause Four, Part Four of the Labour Party Constitution reflected a compromise between these different strands of thought. But all were united in their support of wholesale common ownership. Sidney Webb drafted these words and they were adopted by the Labour Party in 1918:
“To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.”
This provided for no exception: all production would be in common ownership and there would be no private sector. Although some Labour Party thinkers began to entertain the possibility of some private enterprise, resolute support for widespread common ownership prevailed.
Clement Attlee
In 1937, eight years before he became Prime Minister, Clement Attlee wrote of the ‘evils’ of capitalism: their ‘cause is the private ownership of the means of life; the remedy is public ownership.’
Attlee approvingly quoted the words of Bertrand Russell: ‘Socialism means the common ownership of land and capital together with a democratic form of government. … It involves the abolition of all unearned wealth and of all private control over the means of livelihood of the workers’.
After 1945, the position of many leading Labour Party members began to shift. First the realities of gaining and holding on to power – as a majority party for the first time – dramatized the political and practical unfeasibility of abolishing all private enterprise. Some nationalization was achieved, but a large private sector remained.
Second, with the outbreak of the Cold War in 1948 it was more difficult to sustain the naïve, rose-tinted views of the Soviet Union, although as Bill Jones shows in his book The Russia Complex, they were remarkably persistent.
In 1956 C. Anthony Crosland published The Future of Socialism. This underlined Labour’s slow reconciliation with markets, private enterprise and a mixed economy. In 1959 the (West) German Social Democratic Party abandoned the goal of widespread common ownership. In the same year, Hugh Gaitskell tried to get the British Labour Party to follow this lead, but met stiff resistance.
Because of Gaitskell’s failed attempt to change the wording of Clause Four, Corbyn’s mentor Tony Benn switched his allegiance to Harold Wilson. Wilson had been a student of Cole at Oxford University. When he was Prime Minister, Wilson pragmatically retained the clause but tolerated a mixed economy.
Tony Benn
In 1995, Tony Blair successfully ended the Labour Party’s longstanding constitutional commitment to far-reaching common ownership. But Benn still wished to retain the original wording and protested: ‘Labour’s heart is being cut out’.
In an interview in 2000, Benn favourably quoted Attlee: ‘If you look around the world, what are the problems? They’re all caused by the private ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.’
It should be clear that Labour’s commitment to widespread common ownership was uppermost from 1900 to 1945. Subsequently Labour adjusted to the realities of a large-scale complex economy, where it is impossible to gather all information together in some central planning office, or even in some massive computer.
Democratic deliberation over every key decision is even more unfeasible. As Oscar Wilde quipped: socialism is impossible because it would take too many meetings.
In practice, if not in declaration, every leader of the Labour Party from 1955 to 2015 had abandoned the commitment to wholesale common ownership. But as Benn and Corbyn have illustrated so well, it has remained in Labour’s DNA.
A tricky gene transplant might have been possible, but only if Labour had developed a thoroughgoing alternative to its pre-1945 socialism. The closest it came to this was Crosland’s Future of Socialism, which commendably emphasized the goal of diminishing economic inequality, instead of common ownership.
Tony Blair
But largely the party fudged the issue, trying to turn the original meaning of socialism (which had prevailed from 1830 to 1950) into something else. Even Blair retained the word socialism in his rhetoric and in his redraft of Clause Four.
Blair promoted ‘social-ism’, which now meant recognizing individuals as socially interdependent. It also signalled social justice, cohesion, and the equal worth of each citizen, with equal opportunities.
Such a doctrine was indistinguishable from the earlier views of radical social liberals, such as T. H. Green and J. A. Hobson. It was a hundred miles away from the collectivism of Owen, Cole or the Webbs. But (with or without the hyphen) the word socialism was retained.
Blair favoured the tradition of ‘ethical socialism’ naming proponents such as John Macmurray and R. H. Tawney. But he wrongly stated that these socialists had been opposed to common ownership. On the contrary, their original devotion to this goal was no less than that of Owenism or Marxism, although Tawney and others later adjusted their views.
Instead of tackling the problem of its collectivist DNA more explicitly and resolutely, Labour tried to change the meaning of socialism and even rewrote parts of its own history. It is unsurprising that the old DNA survived.
Genetic Recombination with ‘Anti-Imperialism’
The late 1960s and early 1970s were years of great political convulsion. At the centre was opposition to the War in Vietnam. Previously most hard-left groups – including the forerunner of today’s Socialist Workers Party – were ‘entryists’ in the Labour Party. Before 1968 it was the only place to be. But the Vietnam War changed all that.
As British Prime Minister, Wilson declared government support for the military actions of the United States in Vietnam, but astutely avoided sending British troops. By 1968 the Labour Party conference had come out against the war. Wilson personally bore the brunt of the opposition. Thousands of activists left the Labour Party. Most of the hard-left sects followed them.
From 1920 to 1968 the main socialist party outside Labour was the Communist Party of Great Britain. After 1968 they were competing in this narrow space with several feuding and splintering Trotskyist groups.
It was Lenin, not Marx, who had made ‘anti-imperialism’ and national liberation a key motif of his Marxism. He was followed in this respect by Trotsky.
Hence Leninism once again became visible on the far left. But this time it did not necessarily mean loyalty to the Soviet Union: it mean ‘solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles’ in Cuba, Vietnam, Palestine and elsewhere.
Corbyn was 19 years old in 1968. Politically, these were his formative years. Unlike many others he remained in the Labour Party, partly attracted by the ideas and charisma of Benn, who narrowly lost the contest for deputy leadership against Dennis Healey in 1981. Corbyn’s unwavering views, his election as an MP in 1983 and his political survival until his triumphant bid for leadership in 2015, has spliced Leninist genes alongside those of the old Owenite collectivism.
Blair’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the financial crash of 2008 had helped to turn the Labour membership against Blairism, in all its forms and dilutions. As evidence of the Freudian defence mechanism of regression as a response to severe stress, Labour reverted to an earlier stage of development, adopting its infant profile of collectivism and state control.
Labour’s ‘Russia complex’ also re-emerged. We can find sympathy with a post-Soviet Russia, in disputes over the Ukraine and the expansion of NATO.
Labour’s Future?
Labour’s enduring successes in 1945-51, 1964-1970, 1974-1979 and 1997-2010 were great liberal reforms and extensions of social justice, from the National Health Service to the minimum wage. They did not bring a mythical socialist future any closer. Labour advanced despite, not because of, its original socialism.
Recent developments within the Labour Party – including the resurgence of its collectivist past – make a parliamentary majority in 2020 impossible, unless some unforeseen catastrophe hits the Conservative Party. A recent report from within the Labour Party states that unless radical action is taken, Labour’s electoral prospects ‘remain very poor’.
Any way we look, the outlook is bleak. The election of Corbyn to Labour Party Leader shows that organizations have something similar to the enduring DNA of biological organisms. As business practitioners know well, changing organizational DNA is notoriously difficult.
Later posts on this New Politics blog will address this problem and try to formulate some solutions. But we should not underestimate the scale of the task ahead. One of the first jobs for the Left is to reconsider where it has come from, and what kind of future it wishes to build. Nothing should be taken for granted.
But this ‘DNA’ analysis shows that the status of the Labour Party in Britain as the leader of a renewed and viable Left is now in doubt.
23 May 2016
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Cole, George D. H. (1920) Guild Socialism Re-Stated (London: Parsons).
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Hodgson, Geoffrey M. (1999) Economics and Utopia: Why the Learning Economy is not the End of History (London and New York: Routledge).
Jones, Bill (1977) The Russia Complex: The British Labour Party and the Soviet Union (Manchester: University of Manchester Press).
Marx, Karl (1973) The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings – Volume 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Owen, Robert (1991) A New View of Society and Other Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Webb, Sidney J. and Webb, Beatrice (1920) A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain (London: Longmans Green).
Posted in Common ownership, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour Party, Nationalization, Politics, Robert Owen, Socialism, Tony Benn, Tony Blair