Alternatives to State-Socialism in Britain

Other Worlds of Labour in the Twentieth Century

Peter Ackers, Alastair J. Reid, Peter Ackers, Alastair J. Reid

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783319341620
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book poses a major revisionist challenge to 20th century British labour history, aiming to look beyond the Marxist and Fabian exclusion of working class experience, notably religion and self-help, in order to exaggerate 'labour movement' class cohesion. Instead of a 'forward march' to secular state-socialism, the research presented here is devoted to a rich diversity of social movements and ideas. In this collection of essays, the editors establish the liberal-pluralist tradition, with the following chapters covering three distinct sections. Part One, 'Other Forms of Association' covers subjects such as trade unions, the Co-operative Party, women's community activism and Protestant Nonconformity. Part Two, 'Other Leaders', covers employer Edward Cadbury; Trades Union Congress leader Walter Citrine; and the electricians' leader, Frank Chapple. Part Three, 'Other Intellectuals', considers G.D.H. Cole, Michael Young and left libertarianism by Stuart White. Readers interested in the British Labour movement will find this an invaluable resource.

© The Author(s) 2016

Peter Ackers and Alastair J. Reid (eds.)Alternatives to State-Socialism in BritainPalgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements10.1007/978-3-319-34162-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Other Worlds of Labour: Liberal-Pluralism in Twentieth-Century British Labour History

Peter Ackers¹ and Alastair J. Reid²

(1)

De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

(2)

Girton College, Cambridge, UK

End Abstract

Introduction: Framing the Debate

In many ways, debates in the field of British labour history resemble controversies in religious history over the nature of the British Reformation. Most historians have had a strong presentist ideological commitment—in this case socialist politics and ideas rather than Protestant or Catholic faith—and their history has been written not only to justify this, but also, as a propaganda tool to ‘win the battle of ideas’ and hasten the building of their particular brand of socialist society. On the most dogmatic wing, Communist historians have expected British working people to fulfil Marx and Engels’ role of ‘the proletariat’ and stage class conflict to overthrow capitalist society. Their obvious failure to do so has been explained by introducing factors which interfered with underlying mechanisms, such as the ‘labour aristocracy’ (from Lenin) or ‘labourism’ (from Engels): blaming the peculiarities of British society and preserving the purity of Marxist theory. Even moderate Fabian socialists, who have eschewed class conflict and revolutionary change, harnessed their historical writing to a progressive teleology which moved smoothly, if gradually, from capitalism to socialism. In both cases, socialism had a very specific meaning, as a system of state ownership and planning of all economic life.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, this state-socialist dream is now dead and gone, leaving only a memory of brutal oppression and economic inefficiency. However, it has left a strong, lingering imprint on British labour history and our understanding of working-class life in twentieth-century British society. This is true in two senses, both of which we explore here. One is an interpretation of working people as if they were members of a proletariat, fighting capitalism and aspiring to socialism. The other is an approach to middle-class thinking as if its left-leaning variants were always concerned with using the levers of central government. State-socialist accounts of labour history tend to conflate the two in a global confection of workers and socialist intellectuals marching together in one direction. In this book, by contrast, we uncover a much stronger, simultaneously more central and more diverse, British commitment to pluralism: deep-rooted in national traditions that mix and match older liberal and conservative values with newer elements of ethical socialism, anarchism and social democracy. This is not a residual, obstructive confusion, as state-socialist historians have suggested if they have recognized it at all, but rather a living political tradition that values associational forms of life above the state.

This essay develops the argument through three stages. First, we explore the roots of the state-socialist approach and show how this still informs much of recent labour history. Next, we sketch a vibrant and wide-ranging alternative pluralist intellectual tradition, which responds to the associational movements in popular British life in various ways, some more focused on institution building, some more focused on the potential of informal groups. Finally, we chart change and continuity in this tradition through the ‘short twentieth century’ from 1918 to 1979, particularly during the post-war period of state collectivism.

The State-Socialist Conventional Wisdom in British Labour History

Sidney and Beatrice Webb laid the Fabian state-socialist foundations of British labour history with their History of Trade Unionism (1894) and Industrial Democracy (1897). Both studies analysed associational forms, but only as stepping-stones to a socialist society managed by experts. G.D.H. Cole’s The World of Labour: A Discussion of the Present and Future of Trade Unionism (1913) was another foundational work, from which we take our title and theme. Cole wrote under the influence of a pre-war surge of syndicalism and was sceptical of the state, but subsequent labour history responded firstly to the ‘success’ of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet experiment in central planning, at a time when capitalist economies appeared to be failing; and secondly to the 1945 landslide election victory of the British Labour Party, and its partial fulfilment of its ascribed socialist destiny. Even after Khrushchev’s 1956 exposure of Stalinism, alongside the persistence in the West of a period of unprecedented economic prosperity, the ideal of state-socialism remained strong among left-wing intellectuals and was reinvigorated by an unanticipated revival of interest in Marxism from the late 1960s. Thus the rehearsal of very old themes in Eric Hobsbawm’s Worlds of Labour, written by a historian who was still a member of the Communist Party, appeared to wide acclaim as late as 1984.

Once labour history entered the universities and became professionalized, the field did move away from oversimplistic state-socialist explanations. ¹ Yet as it became institutionalized in departments and peer-reviewed journals, a shared assumption continued to underpin most studies that increasingly effective self-organization of the working classes was a prelude to the replacement of capitalist liberal democracy by a publicly owned, centrally planned socialist state. Indeed, these were still usually ‘committed’ historians—from the Communist Party Historians’ Group to democratic socialists in the Labour Party—who saw labour history as part-and-parcel of the socialist struggle. History was a road leading in one direction and any detours tended to be ignored. Working-class movements were judged by how far they contributed to socialist goals, even when these ideas were weak among ordinary working people. Thus John Saville, who had left the Communist Party in 1956, focused his 1988, The Labour Movement in Britain, on ‘the emergence of the particular variety of British Labour socialism in the first half of the twentieth century’. He argued that ‘the most important achievement of British Labour in the twentieth century has been the progressive incorporation of social welfare policies into public politics’ but, as a Marxist assuming that ‘the labour movement’ was on the road to socialism, he concluded that the Labour Party had in the end failed to achieve its real destiny. Likewise, James Hinton’s 1983, History of the British Labour Movement took Labour and Socialism for its main title. ²

More recently there have been a number of more or less revisionist studies of particular sectors and localities, including by the present authors, but the state-socialist paradigm remains surprisingly persistent in broad surveys of the social experience of working people and remarkably unquestioned in studies of the development of labour politics. ³ As a result, academic labour history has continued to amplify certain features of working-class life, while ignoring others. Marx and Engels’s ghostly, imagined ‘proletariat’ still haunts the shelves of subsequent generations of socialist intellectuals, awaiting ‘the organization of the proletarians into a class, and consequently into a political party’. ⁴ So much more is written on strikes than on cooperation between workers and employers, while enlightened employers are neglected or disparaged. Certain aspects of working-class life, most notably religion, are routinely fenced off from the official labour movement, which is presented as almost entirely secular and largely confined to its supposedly ‘socialist’ elements. Yet most twentieth-century British working people, labour activists and intellectuals, were still deeply influenced by a wide variety of ideas about employment, religion and politics inherited from the past. ⁵

Post-1956 state-socialist history has taken three main forms, drawing directly or indirectly on different strands of Marxism. ⁶ The first emphasizes ‘class struggle’, in a sophisticated adaption of socialist agitprop, designed to win converts to the cause. Thus Edward Thompson composed The Making of the English Working Class (1963) while a New Left and Committee for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) activist. Famous for his emphasis on agency and moral possibility, he challenged Communist Party economic determinism, insisting that ‘the working class’ could have a more fluid composition and be ‘present at its own making’. ⁷ Today, decades since the Labour Party abandoned Clause 4, this approach might seem outdated. Yet unwittingly the concept of ‘New Labour’, rather than stimulating the charting of an evolving liberal-pluralist lineage, has given fresh life to leftist myths about ‘Old Labour’ as a genuine socialist movement: one which has been abandoned by opportunists with no real roots in authentic working-class traditions.

Such is Selina Todd’s tone in The People. The Rise and Fall of the Working Class 1910–2010 (2014) which follows Thompson in celebrating the detail of individual lives and adopting a flexible, agency-driven definition of class. Todd’s innovation is to integrate the history of women, by stressing the role of domestic servants, a group which had little connection with the world of trade unionism, dominated as that still was by men in industrial employment. Rather than acknowledge the complexity of popular identities, she reaches for the notion of common class experience. Just as Thompson assimilated handicraft artisans and factory workers, so Todd casually asserts that, ‘in the years after 1910, servants were central to the modern working class that was emerging … [and] the labour movement was beginning to make an impact on British political life’. ⁸ Thus, despite valuable efforts at recovering women’s experience, Todd takes an essentially agitational approach to the past: inequality leads to frustration and resistance, which can be labelled ‘working-class struggle’. Defeat, in the 1926 ‘General Strike’ or 1979 ‘Winter of Discontent’, is then simply due to ruling-class repression. Other strong influences, for example of the ‘feminized’ churches or more conservative family values, are barely touched on. ⁹ Once more there is the danger that, as the lives of the old manual working classes become more distant from our own contemporary experience, we begin to sentimentalize, so that socialist commitment becomes a form of nostalgia.

The second strand of state-socialist history comes from a cooler, more analytical ‘mode of production’ Marxist root. This presents a concrete and sober analysis of changing material conditions, explaining failures as well as celebrating successes. Eric Hobsbawm’s Olympian historical tone echoed ‘the analyses of the current political situation’ presented to many a Communist Party central committee: ‘I wish to underline something which a Marxist analysis alone will help us to understand[:] … the long-term perspective of the changing structure of British capitalism and the proletariat in it.’ This analysis centred on ‘objective’ economic obstacles to a shared socialist consciousness. Thus the labour movement was hampered first by a specially privileged ‘labour aristocracy’, then by general prosperity brought about by ‘imperialism’, and finally by the entrenchment of narrow economic ‘sectionalism’ throughout later twentieth-century collective bargaining. ¹⁰ The long-awaited socialist proletariat had still not arrived and the task of labour history to was to explain why not: a style of analysis which, rather surprisingly, has lingered on long after any explicit hope for the accomplishment of state-socialism has been extinguished.

A version of this approach can be seen in Mike Savage and Andrew Miles’s 1994 The Remaking of the British Working Class, 1840–1940, which—despite the Thompsonian title—mainly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Other Worlds of Labour: Liberal-Pluralism in Twentieth-Century British Labour History
• 1. Other Forms of Association
• 2. Other Leaders
• 3. Other Intellectuals
• Backmatter