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Critique of Wilsonism
The relatively stable equilibrium, which defined British politics and society for a
decade, has now broken down. The crisis of the traditional English hegemonic
class, under whose rule British capitalism has in recent years so visibly declined,
threatens the long supremacy of the Conservative Party. It would be too
much to say that socialists were prepared for this, poised for their own participaation in coming events. Since its severe defeat at Blackpool in 1961, the Left has
taken no major initiatives and launched no great debates. The rapid succession of
crises and upheavals which began with the death of Gaitskell and culminated
with the resignation of Macmillan, unfolded without any independent intervention by the Left. In two years, there has been a memorable bonfire of values in
Britain. The Left did not light it. Will it benefit from it?
3
Origins of the Present Crisis, New Left Review 23, JanuaryFebruary 1964.
The decisive superiority of this strategy over the vacuities of revisionism is evident.3 It allows Wilson to use a distinctive and cogent
rhetoric, that has become integral to his whole political style. The crisis
of the British economy is naturally the starting-point of Wilsons
2 The term is borrowed here from its usage in Eastern Europe, simply as a convenient
short-hand. This stratum does not have any of the traditional characteristics of a
homogeneous, self-conscious intelligentsia.
3It would be a mistake, of course, to attribute Wilsonism exclusively to Wilson. The
partial left-turn of the party pre-dates his accession to the leadership by about a year.
Morgan Phillips document, Labour in the Sixties, a trailer for Signposts for the Sixties,
was the first indication of the new direction of official thinking. The Common
Market episode, in which Gaitskell played on left-wing as well as nationalist sentiment, and for the first time flouted the weight of orthodox opinion, suggests that he
had at last realized the unviability of an extreme Right leadership. It is largely for the
sake of exposition that the constructs Gaitskellism and Wilsonism are opposed so
sharply in this analysis. It is more a question of different periods, than of different
men. Butby chanceeach period found the man who perfectly expressed it.
analysis, the theme of speech after speech since his election as leader of
the Party in March 1962: Why do we give such a high priority to expanding production? The answer is that all else in our programme and
our vision for the new Britain depend on what we turn out from our
factories, mines and farms: our laboratories and drawing offices. On our
national production effort depends our standing in the world. The
responsibility for Britains economic decline and all the evils which have
attended it, is placed on the archaic aristocracy which dominates the
Conservative Party and British industry alike. The tone is radical, the
targets apparently comprehensive: The high command of too large
a sector of Britains industry is manned either dynastically, or on the
basis of a family, school or social network . . . The highest places in a
Conservative Government are reserved for the products of a small,
unrepresentative group of schools, almost for the product of a single
school . . . Tory society is a closed society, in which birth and wealth
have priority, in which the master-and-servant, landlord-and-peasant
mentality is predominant. Wilson has a fairly clear perception of the
specific quality and vulnerability of the governing class in Britain: his
attacks are carefully calculated to isolate and discredit it. The counterpoint to them is the constant appeal to technicians and scientists and
production men to rally to the Labour Party, which alone believes that
Britains future depends on the thrusting ability and even iconoclasm of
millions of products of our grammar schools, comprehensive schools,
secondary moderns and the rest who are today held down not only within
the Government Party but over a wide sector of industry. Wilson continually invokes the opposition between an amateur aristocracy and
skilled, scientifically trained specialists. This rhetorical device is so insistent that the manual working-class itself, the overwhelming basis of
the Labour Partys support, recedes almost entirely from Wilsons
speeches. He can even say with pride: Great interest has been shown
by our people in these ideas. We are told that we have replaced the
cloth-cap with the white laboratory coat as the symbol of British
Labour.
A second set of contrasts complements this primary one. Wilson denounces, not only incompetent and amateur sectors of industry, but
speculative and parasitical ones as well. Throughout the fifties, in fact,
Wilson was always notable for his biting attacks on property promotion,
gambling interests, the stock-market and advertising (Bank Rate Tribunal, etc). This theme recurs again and again today: Nothing so
perverts our national life as Conservative attempts to identify the
British standard of independence, ingenuity and venture with the selfinterest of the share-pushers, take-over bidders, land- and propertyspeculators, ad-mass extravagancies and tax-dodgers. This indictment
is extended to the role of the City and finance capital in the economy
as a whole. The great merger movement, the wave of take-over bids
instead of leading to rationalization of production has left too many
industries in the hands of financiers rather than managers . . . The key
to a strong pound lies not in Britains finances but in the nations
industry. Finance must be the index, not the determinant of economic
strength . . . Against this world of profligacy and facility, he juxtaposes the dedicated, responsible work of a manager, a designer, a
craftsman, an architect, an engineer, a nuclear physicist, a doctor, a
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nurse or a social worker. The creation of the one has been a society
in which in our large industrial towns, about one-third of the households have no bathrooms and about one-quarter have no piped hot
water. Nearly half our hospitals survive as ancient monuments,
whispering their last carbolic tribute to the age of Queen Victoria.
Over half our primary schools in which the children of the new Britain
are being educated were built in the 19th century . . . New building,
which is geared to private profit and the speculative gains of the
property developer, will, in the end, produce an asphalt and concrete
wilderness . . . In place of this, Wilson calls for a social environment
transformed by the generous, purposeful efforts of the whole community,
mobilizing all the skills of the new social groups to whom he addresses
himself: We shall not succeed in this great task unless we can call into
action all our people architects and planners, local authority representatives and traffic engineers, sociologists and town planners, to build
the cities of the future in which people live a satisfying life and realize
to the full the talents and potentialities within them. It is in appeals
like these, to a long British tradition of social responsibility and public
service, that much of Wilsons strength lies.
He explicitly calls for a responsible Britain based on public service, not
a commercialized society in which everything has its price. This stress
on public service allows him to advocate public intervention much more
confidently than Gaitskell ever did. The transition, however, is
usually confined to the future. Advanced capitalist countries are maintaining full employment today only by virtue of vast arms orders, and
panic would be the order of the day in Wall Street and other Stock
Markets the day peace breaks out . . . The economic consequences of
disarmament cannot be dealt with except on a basis of socialist planning. He speaks with the same accents of the oncoming of automation,
which for a year now has been the single theme with which he has most
personally identified himself: The growth of automation is likely, in
Britain no less than in America, to create a vast problem of technological employment. If Keynes were alive today, the one law he would
be propounding above all others, is the observed fact that each new
cyclical peak in an advanced industrial economy is marked by a higher
rate of structural unemployment than its predecessor . . . Since technological progress left to the mechanism of private industry and private
property can lead only to high profits for a few, a high rate of employment for a few, and to mass redundancies for the many, if there had
never been a case for socialism before, automation would have created
it. This idea is his ideological trump-card within the Labour Party.
This, then, is the strategy and language of Wilsonism. Its distinctive
blend of attack on social imbalance, hostility to traditional hierarchy,
cult of science, and ethic of useful work is neatly summed up in Wilsons
official credo for the Party: Our proposals show the way towards a
more balanced, satisfied society in which human dignity is accepted as
the ultimate aim of economic activity. The feverish creation of wants,
the urgency to manipulate consumer demand which has dominated our
economy will give way to a balanced enjoyment of life in which income
will no longer depend on the artificial stimulation of dissatisfaction, of
class differentiation and conspicuous status symbols. Production for
7
use, for widening the potentialities of man will enable us to get full
enjoyment from our increased leisure.
3. The New Programme
An Economic Policy for Labour, New Left Review 24, MarchApril 1964.
third category is foreign, especially American enterprise. Wilson is particularly
fond of patriotic attacks on take-over bids involving foreign capital (ChryslerRootes deal, etc).
5A
10
The specific commitments require, perhaps, least comment. The renationalizations of steel and road transport, important as these are, do
not represent a genuine advance: they merely restore a position lost
fourteen years ago. The proposals for new measures of public ownership, by contrast, are wide-ranging but vague. Signposts for the Sixties
declares that there is a case for socialism where an industry is dependent for its existence either on state subsidies or state purchases;
and where an industry is controlled by a monopoly. It promises to set
up public companies in the new industries based on science, where the
State already provides 60 per cent of the research funds. These ideas
vary in relevance and importance. Socialization of deficitary sectors
like the aircraft industry, which is dependent on state contracts, would
not in itself mark any advance beyond Labours conceptions of 1945.
Serious use of public enterprise to replace subsidized private enterprise
in the depressed regions could, on the other hand, be a major step
forward. Monopoly power is in one form or another so widespread in
the British economy today that Labours ability to isolate and challenge
it in any significant way seems very doubtful. All these proposals however, are overshadowed by or dependent on the promises to create new,
socially owned industries based on science: it is on them that Labours
programme for the extension of the public sector in the main rests. This
is the core of its new policies. It is time to ask what the objective
content and prospects of this conception are.
The attraction of the idea, as is evident, lies in its reversal of the
direction of traditional nationalizations: the community is now to become the owner, not of bankrupt or archaic industries, but of the most
modern and dynamic sectors of the economy. The official picture, however, omits one vital fact. The most technologically advanced sectors today are
often the most expensive and least immediately profitable: they are not the existing growth sectors, with huge plants and markets and declining unit-costs. There
is a world of difference between, say, the computer and chemical industries that is, a firm like ICT (International Computers and Tabulators) and ICI. The really profitable and expansionist sectors of the
British economy are the big industries producing for the mass consumer
market cars, domestic appliances, synthetic fibres, televisions, etc.
The typical enterprise in these markets is the immense, internationally
affiliated corporation, ramified into a complex hierarchy of product
divisions and subsidiaries: Ford, Unilever, General Electric, ICI,
Phillips, etc.6 There is no chance whatever of a Labour Government
pioneering publicly owned firms in these sectors: they would be
wiped out immediately. What, then, are the prospects for public enterprise in science-based industries working on more advanced technological frontiers? Two such industries that spring to mind are the
electronics industry and its derivative, the computer industry. Electronics is now the main motor of all technological progress. Precisely
because of this, it is an enormously costly and risky field, which requires colossal investment programmes and in which research and de6
This sector is likely to provide the socio-economic base for an eventual Conservative
come-back, after the election, if the Labour Party wins: MacLeod, Maudling or
Heath are the logical candidates to succeed Home in this perspectivethe emergence of a powerful, coherent neo-capitalism. Britain still notably lacks this.
12
How far does the rest of the Labour programme accord with this
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which have long advocated a solution after the pattern of the mixedeconomy: that is to say, the introduction of a quantitatively pegged intake (perhaps 50 per cent) of non-fee-paying pupils into the public
schools, without any change in the structure and ideology of the schools.
Such a solution would, of course, merely inoculate the public schools
against serious reform while preserving their essential elite character
intact. It must be fought absolutely. Until there is no longer any chance
of Labour adopting a plan of this kind, final judgement must be reserved on its educational policy.
9. Planning
capitalism and partly reflects its requirements, so its new deterrence policy grew
out of a mutation in the pattern of international capitalism and reflects its
requirements. There is, in effect, a close homology between Labours
attacks on archaism and dilettantism in British industry, and its attacks
on illusions of grandeur in British defence policy. Both are made in the
name of modernism and rationality. Both freely invoke American example or American advice. In the latter case, the preferences of the
Pentagon have played a direct role in shaping Labour policy.
Thus Labours most important initial step in international affairs would
also be, in a sense, its least adventurous. It is, rather, the proposals for
disengagement in Europe and the refusal of the multilateral force
which will be truer indications of the real nature of Labours foreign
policy. For these run counter to Washingtons policies, not with it.
In both cases, Labours official positions are irreproachable. But a large
question mark hangs over each. Would a Labour Government, faced
with determined American opposition, persist in its positions, or would
it quietly drop them? Againthe pattern is by now familiarit is not
Wilson, but one of his lieutenants, Gordon Walker, who has indiscreetly
remarked abroad that if it was unable to persuade the USA to the contrary, the Labour Party would finally rally to the multilateral force.
Such statements do not necessarily determine policy. But they are an
unmistakable warning.
In general, the Labour Partys policies towards the arms race and the
Soviet Union are now very similiar to those of the Kennedy-Johnson
administrations; they are covered by the Russo-American entente. The
one significant difference concerns West Germany, where the Labour
Party (and Wilson) has always historically shown a greater sensitivity
to Russian and East European fears than Washington. But Labours
capacity to carry out a genuinely independent and progressive foreign
policy will be at stake over a much wider front than this. The two key
areas, which will determine the character of its foreign policy far more
than the problems of disengagement in Europe, are the world-wide
systems of British and American imperialism. This is where its major
responsibilities lie. It is relatively easy for Labour to seek peaceful coexistence in Europe under the umbrella of the Soviet-American dtente.
But outside Europe, in Vietnam, in Laos, in the Congo, in Cuba, in
BrazilAmerican military and political forces today are fighting a
blind, pitiless struggle against the rising tide of national and social
emancipation. Will a Labour Government, by its silence or support,
abet them? At this moment, it seems only too likely. So far, no Labour
spokesman has condemned the war in Vietnam, the blockade against
Cuba, the repression in the Congo. Loyalty to the American alliance, or
actual conviction of the need to defend the free world, has overborn
every other consideration.
The weight of Atlantic conformism is made all the heavier, and more
dangerous, by the vulnerability of British imperialism today, which has
created a chain of mutual favours and dependences between it and
American imperialism, from Singapore to Georgetown. The Left could
entertain no worse illusion that to believe that only curios and cast-offs
of Empire now remain. Nothing could be further from the truth. As
18
20
Time, October 11, 1963. All other quotations from Wilson in this article come from
speeches made this year, or from The Relevance of British Socialism.
11
Not of which he was himself a member. Occupationally, Wilsons background is
lower-middle classhis father is a pharmacist. But the urban area in which he grew
up during the Depression was overwhelmingly working-class: in such an environment the sociological distance between individual lower-middle class families and
the majority of working-class families around them, although discernible, is not so
very great. The regional culturean important element in Wilsons make-upis,
of course, common to both.
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More important than this, however, has been its impact on the internal life of the Party. Wilsons dirigisme has been superimposed on a
party long innured to factionalism, but without any recent tradition of
real democracy. His careful avoidance of clear-cut left or right-wing
positions, his apparent ability to propose perspectives satisfactory to
everyone, his constant care to denounce the Conservatives rather than
any section of his own Partyall these have suddenly made the old
factions ineffective and redundant. There is no longer a clearly defined
battlefield with clearly defined protagonists. But this change has not
given rise to a genuine dialectical democracy, in which contrasting
positions are publicly exchanged and debated through to real conclusions, and in which there is a free movement of opinion and discussion which does not ossify into rigid, hermetic factions. For the existence of permanent factions within a partyapparent sign of democracy
in reality denotes almost its opposite: a blocked situation, dominated
by ritual and bureaucracy, in which intrigue tends to replace debate.
The present situation in the Labour Party is simply a void: the factions
have disappeared, but not the bureaucracy. It is merely concealed by
Wilsons expertly suave and deft management. This in itself is hardly
surprising: even without the imminence of a general election, it is unlikely that the habits of open debate and democracy would have been
relearnt immediately. What is much more disquieting is that this temps
mort inside the party is rapidly being consecrated as an ideal state, under
the slogan of party unity. If a Labour Government is elected, the
mystique of unity, the pressure for responsibility while a Labour
Government is in power, and Wilsons own political authority will
make for a formidable combination against the revival of a vital,
critical democracy within the Party. It is all too easy to imagine the reduction of Labour Party Conferences to little more than enthusiastic
demonstrations of loyalty, with occasional, muted expressions of
dissent.
This prospect is clearly in contradiction with the very notion of a
progress towards socialism. The Left must resist it unconditionally. But
it cannot do so abstractly: its resistance will only be successful if it takes the
form of a programme of coherent and concrete demands in advance of the official
objectives of the partydemands which impose themselves as living issues
within the Labour Movement. This is not the place for any full-length
discussion of what such a programme should be. But some elements
in it can perhapsvery brieflybe suggested.
A general remark should be made first. It is useless for the Left to put
forward purely voluntarist demands, which have no point of insertion
into the political context of Britain in 1964. Abstract maximalism of
this kind is, in the current situation, wholly sterile. On the contrary, at
every point the Left should try to press demands which are firmly rooted in
the present problems and perspectives of the Labour movement, but which
creatively prolong and surpass them. This is the only way in which socialist
ideas and objectives will become the political currency of the Labour
Party. What does this imply, in practical terms? There are at least three
sectors in which an obvious application suggests itself. This article may
conclude with a rapid evocation of them.
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The first task of the Left, of course, is to fight over the whole range of
domestic and foreign issues for a maximum implementation of Labours
existing programme. The room for different applications of Labours
mandate is, as has been seen, so wide that this will be the immediate
obligation of the Left if and when a Labour Government is formed. This
means an attack all along the line, on every issue. In public ownership, in
land, in housing, in transport, in pensions, in education and in foreign
policy, unrelenting pressure must be exerted to ensure that the radical
and not the right-wing interpretation is adopted: in every field, this
involves a critical contest with national or international capitalism.
This will require a tremendous effort in itself. But the Left cannot rest
there. In addition to all this, it must press for the creation of new democratic institutions to carry out Labours social programme. Officially,
at least, this promises to reorient the whole industrial environment
away from the inhuman mechanisms of profit and towards human needs,
Without the participation and control of the people concerned, this programme will inevitably end in paternalism, if it is carried out at all. For
there to be a genuine advance towards socialism, the stifling urban
limbo of contemporary England must be recovered by the people who
live and die in it, not merely ameliorated for them. The only way to
ensure this is the creation of local democratic institutions, above all
regionally, for the operation and renovation of the economic and
social services of each area. In particular, democratically-elected Regional Assemblies are a key objective. Wilson has called for the virtues
of political irreverence and iconoclasm, and declared that: We want
a Britain in which everyone, not a small clique or class, feel themselves
to be part of a process of new policy-making, of taking national decisions, where every home, every club, every pub is its own Parliament in
miniaturethrashing out the issues of the day. We want a Britain
where the ideas and efforts of its citizens are more important to the
Government than day-to-day ups and downs in public opinion polls
or on the stock exchange. For this rhetoric to become a reality, concrete steps will have to be taken. Only the Left could force a Labour
Government to do so. The whole texture of British political life,
which is now essentially reduced to remote, ritualized debates in a
national Parliament, mediated by the anonymity of press and television
to millions of atomized spectators, will have to be immeasurably enriched and transformed. A dense network of intermediary agencies and
institutions is an absolute necessity for this. It alone can create a concrete
civic democracy in place of an abstract and formal one.
The struggle of the Left for an authentic democracy within the Labour
Party must, then, rejoin a struggle for democracy within British society
as a whole. The same leverage can serve it for both. Party unity
would be even more to a Labour Government than to the party leader
today. It must be made to pay a price for ita radical implementation
of its social programme and, inseparably, a wide devolution of democracy to carry it out.
15. Workers Control
is likely to be its incomes policy. This is the crunch on which all its
other plans and programmes depend. It is the one time-bomb which no
amount of dexterity or evasion can painlessly defuse. What should
socialist attitudes be towards a Labour Governments incomes policy?
Numerous voices on the Left have suggested that the unions should be
prepared to accept an incomes policy which guarantees them a real
wage increase of perhaps 20 per cent over 45 years, plus the increase in
their real income from he benefits of Labours social programme. This
looks like a perfectly defensible policy. It overlooks, however, one
fundamental fact. Trade Union freedom of action is not simply an
economic asset, a way of achieving a higher standard of living, which
can therefore be bartered for a guaranteed rise in real wages. It is a
political asset in its own right, of priceless value. For however limited
the official credo of Trade Union leaders has been, the reality is that in
Britain, as in every other Western European country, the socio-political
identity of the working-class is first and foremost incarnated in its Trade Unions.
The very existence of a Trade Union de facto asserts the unbridgeable difference between capital and labour within a capitalist society;
it embodies the refusal of the working-class to become incorporated into that society on its own terms. Thus the integration of
the Trade Unions into the State machinery in the long-run threatens
to extinguish working-class consciousness and autonomy within a
framework of neo-capitalism. As such, it must be resisted, no matter
what apparently favourable economic bargain is offered as a counterpart. The two things on exchange are not of the same order.
Does this mean that the unions should a priori refuse any discussion
of incomes policy? By no means. To advocate such a policy would in
any case be utopian, since all the major unions are committed to discussions with a Labour Government. What it does mean is that they
should demand as a priority, not greater wage increases, but measures
of workers control. For workers control is the only negotiable exchange for
an incomes policy: it alone offers a genuine counterpartpowers and not
pence. The sacrifice of Trade Union autonomy to the State which is
involved in an incomes policy could only be compensated by the gain in
return of decisively increased autonomy and control for the workers in
the plant. There is no space here to discuss the successive modes of
workers control that could be envisaged. It is, however, abundantly
clear by nowfrom a wide range of international experiencethat
workers control is not a utopian myth, but is an eminently practicable
political goal, above all in a country with as skilled and mature a working-class as Britain. A crucial first step could be, as Tony Topham has
recently suggested, the institutionalized right of shop stewards and
Trade Union officials to have access to company books, and thus to
administer the provisions of the incomes policy regulating profits.12
Control over work-speeds, introduction of new equipment, hiring and
firing, welfare and recreation, are other preliminary objectives. These
aims should be made an urgent, immediate target of the Left. They are
here and now on the agenda of British socialism.
Once again, it must be stressed that the Left has a real chance of
12
Shop Stewards and Workers Control, New Left Review 25 MayJune 1964.
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The Labour Party at present has no official programme of any seriousness in the field of culture and communications. Wilsons speeches
have made no reference to them: a single paragraph in The Relevance of
British Socialism discusses the subject, finishing with a call for more
stadia and cindertracks. It might seem, then, that pressure from the
Left for a coherent cultural policy would have little or no purchase on the
preoccupations of a Labour Government, and as such be vain. In
reality, the picture is likely to look very different if a Labour
Government is elected. For this will have demonstrated that we are
now at a point when it is no longer viableeven in terms of short-run
self-interestfor a Government in Britain to offer a purely materiallyoriented administration. But even apart from this, two highly
successful and internationally renowned examples have already
shown how politically effective a governments cultural policy can be.
It is clear that a significant part of Kennedys immense prestige and
popularity in the United States and in the West generally was due to
his carefully created image as a contemporary Maecenas, a patron of
the arts who was surrounded by the most distinguished thinkers and
men of letters in America. The glamour of the New Frontier owed
much to this. A second and less factitious success has been that of the
Gaullist rgime in France. De Gaulles unique national and international position, due in the first instance to his defiance of America,
also rests on a very skilful exploitation of the traditional clat and
authority of French culture. Within France, the cultural policy of the
rgime has not been limited simply by the simulacrum of a polished court
around the Head of State, but has taken the form of an extensive programme of civic renovation, theatrical subventions, establishment of
cultural centres in working-class areas, etc. The inspiration here too
remains visibly paternalist: culture has become an instrument of the
neo-capitalist state. The lesson will not be lost. A Labour Government,
mindful of the ruinous defeats ultimately inflicted on the Attlee
Administration because of its austeritythe bleak narrowness of
outlook that always characterized itand well aware of the precedent
of the New Frontier, would almost certainly attempt some kind of
cultural presence. Left to itself, it is all too likely that this would be a
British version of the American and French experienceworthier,
duller, and more bien-pensant, no doubtbut in essence the same. This
prospect must be resolutely combatted. At the same time, however, the
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