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The Left in Britain in the Twentieth Century REPORTS AND

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The Left in Britain in the Twentieth Century REPORTS AND REPORTS AND CORRESPONDENCE The Left in Britain in the Twentieth Century John Callaghan Wolverhampton University The eleventh annual conference of the Institute of Contemporary British His- tory was held at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, July 12–16, 1999. The first day was largely concerned with British Marxist and so- cialist movements; the second concentrated on the trade unions and compara- tive perspectives; the third and fourth days focused on the Labour party; and the conference concluded with a day on the future of the Left. The conference was male-dominated to about the same proportion as most university departments in Britain, but the age range of participants was broad and involved doctoral stu- dents as well as professors. Only two papers were presented on women in the la- bor movement, and although participants addressed issues concerned with iden- tity and ethnicity, there was nothing directly concerned with imperialism or immigrants from Britain’s former colonies and their British-born offspring. The conference took place as the New Labour government entered its third year in office under the leadership of Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair is a cham- pion of the so-called Third Way strategy, which centers around the thesis that old social-democratic aspirations and the institutions associated with them have become obsolete in a world of globalizing markets and international production and financial flows. Clearly some reappraisal of the Labour party and its histo- ry might be expected in the light of this Blairite turn towards liberalism, rooted as it is in the recent history of Labour’s exclusion from office during the eighteen years of consensus-breaking Conservative government inaugurated by Mar- garet Thatcher in 1979. The final day of the conference could not contemplate the future of the Left without seeking to explain the nature and conditions of Labour’s ideological retreat during the 1980s. Professor Andrew Taylor exam- ined the weakened positions of the trade unions; Eric Shaw discussed organiza- tional and programmatic changes in the Labour party (which have led to a dis- tancing of the party from the unions, of course); and Hilary Wainwright and John Callaghan considered the extraparliamentary Left. The considerable interest that the conference displayed towards the Left beyond the Labour party is also connected to Britain’s recent history. Beginning in the late 1960s there was a revival of Marxist ideas and groups in Britain as in many other countries. In common with other social-democratic parties, the Labour party also made programmatic changes during the 1970s and early 1980s that suggested a future assault on British capitalism. Massive indus- International Labor and Working-Class History No. 57, Spring 2000, pp. 103–106 © 2000 International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 104 ILWCH, 57, Spring 2000 trial disputes characterized this period and Marxists were prominent in many of them, notably members of the Communist party. The peace movement bur- geoned at the same time. Yet by the end of the 1980s, all this had gone, destroyed by a combination of recession, the international turn to neoliberalism, the con- tinuing electoral successes of Mrs. Thatcher, the advent of Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the Communist regimes, and the drive to purge the Labour party of obstacles to “modernization.” Two observations can be made about this. First, the period of the “left turn” continues to interest academics: Papers were given, to take some examples, on the crisis of the mid-1970s and its conse- quences, the ideological splits in the unions in the 1970s, student political ac- tivism, the role of New Left Review, Militant (the most successful of the Trot- skyist groups to have infiltrated the Labour party), and the dissolution of the Communist party in 1991. Second and more important, the collapse of the Left undermined the complacency—occasionally triumphalism—that had informed recent expectations of what Labour, and the Left more generally, could achieve in Britain at various times in the twentieth century. Historians such as Nick Tiratsoo, Steve Fielding, and Jim Tomlinson have devoted much of their work to a critical reappraisal of the sort of leftist histori- ography that found the Labour party and Labour Governments wanting because of an imputed betrayal of ideals, demobilization of activists, failure to take opportunities for more radical departures, and so on. Tiratsoo reminded the con- ference of Labour’s relationship with the electorate. The Conservative domi- nance of government began after the advent of universal suffrage. In the inter- war years as many as fifty-five percent of the working class voted Conservative and, until May 1997, the Labour party had only won two general elections that gave it a parliamentary majority greater than ten seats. Fielding focused on Labour party organization—a “penny farthing machine” even in the era of the mass party (1950–1970) and one that failed to match the Conservative party for individual recruitment. All this points to a very conservative political culture, of- ten explained in terms both of the absence of the sort of traumas visited upon almost all of Britain’s neighbors in the twentieth century—defeats in war and military occupations, civil war, ethnic and religious polarization—and the rela- tively fair, rules-based organization of politics in Britain itself. The Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), 1920–1991, was stillborn into this conservative culture, yet with expectations of revolution in an era when catastrophic change was said to be endemic to capitalism. The party continues to interest academic researchers, and a number of papers at the conference were concerned to explain aspects of its history, politics, social composition, trade union implantation, and intellectual influence. The party made only a negligible electoral impact and failed to develop a mass membership—much as its prede- cessors on the Marxist Left such as the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) had failed before it. “Why was there no Marxism in Britain?” remains an interesting question upon which several papers touched. Jason Heppell also asked, “Why did Jews join the Communist party?” and other contributors sought to explain the CPGB’s appeal for trade unionists and intellectuals. Although the party nev- The Left in Britain in the Twentieth Century 105 er had more than 60,000 members, it was a significant contributor to the Left’s political culture and played a conspicuous role in aspects of its politics. Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s first prime minister, would have no truck with the Communists and played a large role within the reconstituted Second In- ternational, in the aftermath of the First World War, defining socialism as an es- sentially democratic, as well as collectivist, doctrine—thus excluding the Bol- sheviks and Soviet Russia from its orbit. David Stack examined MacDonald as a theorist, reminding the conference of his stature within European socialism on this score and of the biological and evolutionary bases of his thinking. While MacDonald was a product of late Victorian Lib-Labism and Fabian positivism, George Orwell began his career as a political writer in the 1930s when an organic evolution of socialism of the sort MacDonald stood for, the “in- evitability of gradualism” as Sidney Webb called it, looked very unlikely indeed. John Callaghan focused on Orwell’s relationship to the Marxist Left outside the Communist party, particularly to the circles receptive to Trotskyist ideas on the nature of the Soviet Union, the Comintern, and the Communist parties. Orwell’s intellectual debt to this independent Marxist milieu tends to be underplayed in the standard accounts despite the evidence adduced by Callaghan, the late Pe- ter Sedgwick, and John Newsinger (in the most recent political biography). Orwell was the only British intellectual of lasting influence to really engage with Trotskyism. The leading Marxist intellectuals in Britain tended to gravitate to the Communist party after 1935. The Party’s postwar Historians Group, for example, involved academics of the caliber of E. J. Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, Royden Harrison, Christopher Hill, and John Saville, to name only a few. Those who broke with the party in 1956, such as Thompson and Saville, became lead- ing figures in the New Left where they joined forces with Marxists who had only briefly flirted with the Communist party, such as Raymond Williams, and those who had always resisted its embrace, such as Ralph Miliband. Miliband (1924–1994) was educated and taught at the London School of Economics before spells as Professor of Politics at Leeds and Brandeis Univer- sities. His Marxism was formed under the influence of Professor Harold Laski and it was Laski’s biographer, Michael Newman, who led the discussion of Miliband’s place in the postwar history of the British Left. Though he was for many years an active member of the Labour party, Miliband made his first big impact on the Left with the publication of Parliamentary Socialism (London, 1961), which was widely read by the end of the 1960s as an eloquent critique of the Labour party’s social reformism. Miliband also opened a lively Marxist de- bate on the nature of the state, which had largely dropped out of academic analy- sis, with the publication of The State in Capitalist Society (London, 1969), a work inspired in some ways by The Power Elite (New York, 1956), which his friend C. Wright Mills had written. Miliband has to be situated in that influential New Left intellectual milieu that briefly promised to link up with a mass movement inde- pendent of both the Labour and Communist parties when the Campaign for Nu- clear Disarmament (CND) first emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Al- though he cautioned against the formation of New Left Review, which was 106 ILWCH, 57, Spring 2000 created from the merger of quite different New Left journals in 1959–1960, he joined the editorial board until the coup of 1963 when Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn took over and the original leaders were ousted—Thompson, Williams, and Stuart Hall among them.
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