MAY DAY MANIFESTO1967-68 A re-issue of the text of the May Day Manifesto, with a new introduction by Michael Rustin May 2013 May Day Manifesto 1967-68 A re-issue of the text of the May Day Manifesto, with a new introduction by Michael Rustin May 2013 Note on text May Day Manifesto 1967-8 - Edited by Raymond Williams There are two versions of the May Day Manifesto. The first published in May 1967 was the result of a large group of contributors and edited by Stuart Hall, Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams. The second, a Penguin special was released with Raymond Williams as sole editor. Both versions are copyright the May Day Manifesto Committee of which Michael Rustin was secretary. The 1968 version has been preferred. Typesetting: Ed Sherman Cover: Yoav Segal Project co-ordinator: Ben Little © Mayday Manifesto Committee Published by Soundings With thanks to: Avni Shah Middlesex University ii Contents Note on text ii Revisiting the May Day Manifesto of 1967-68 vi Original preface xxii 1. May Day 1 2. Where the analysis starts 5 3. Social realities 8 4. Poverty today 11 5. The facts of inequality 16 6. Social poverty 19 7. Housing, health and education 23 8. The realities of work 29 9. Communications 34 10. Advertising 36 11. The meaning of modernization 39 12. New capitalist requirements 42 13. The laws of the new market 47 iii Contents 14. The laws of the United States economy 51 15. The economic drive outwards 55 16. America and Europe 58 17. The technological gap 61 18. Effects on the ‘host’ nations 64 19. The new imperialism 68 20. The power of trade 73 21. The power of money 76 22. The international firm 79 23. The effects of aid 81 24. Changes in the Third World 85 25. Elites and armies 88 26. War and Cold War 91 27. The Cold War moves outwards 96 28. Political managers of the world 100 29. Backlash in Europe 105 30. The British crisis 108 31. The position of British industry 114 32. The response of British industry 117 33. Special characteristics of British capitalism 120 34. The role of the State 123 iv Contents 35. But what is the State? 127 36. Labour’s aims and capitalist planning 129 37. Labour and the crisis of the world economy 131 38. The Rake’s Progress 134 39. Devaluation and after 139 40. The power of capital and labour in Britain 143 41. There are alternative policies 146 42. Against managed politics 157 43. Voters, representatives and others 161 44. Two meanings of social democracy 165 45. The Labour Party 171 46. Other radical groupings 178 47. Other socialist groupings 185 48. The unions and politics 192 49. The bearings of change 197 50. The politics of the manifesto 202 v Revisiting the May Day Manifesto of 1967-68 Michael Rustin The May Day Manifesto came out in May 1967, not far short of fifty years ago. It was edited by Stuart Hall, Edward Thompson and Raymond Williams, and appeared with the names of over 70 signatories - writers, academics and activists associated with the New Left. It was republished in an extended form a year later as a Penguin Special, with Raymond Williams as its editor, and sold more than 10,000 copies. Its purpose was to make a comprehensive declaration of opposition to the new capitalism - a ‘managerial’ form of capitalism - which it saw emerging. More specifically, it set out its disappointment and dismay at the retreat of the Labour government which had been elected with high hopes in 1964, as it placed “the protection of a capitalist economic and financial system before jobs, care and extended education.” (p.1) Its emphasis was on confronting this system as a whole. As the editors state in the opening chapter: It is our basic case, in this Manifesto, that the separate campaigns in which we have been active, and the separate issues with which we have all been concerned, run back, in their essence to a single political system and its alternatives. We believe that the system we now oppose can only survive by a willed separation of issues, and the resulting fragmentation of consciousness. Our own first position is that all the issues, industrial and political, international and domestic, economic and cultural, humanitarian and radical, are deeply connected; that what we oppose is a political, economic and social system, vi Revisiting the May Day Manifesto of 1967-68 that what we work for is a different whole society. (p.4) We are again confronting an entire system, now in a state of more severe crisis than that which faced the authors of the May Day Manifesto in 1967. We are republishing this document because we think it is valuable to read a statement which gave such a unified analysis and critique of the ‘new capitalism’ of that time, and urged a joined-up opposition to it. It did this in the name of a socialism which we define “again as humanism: a recognition of the social reality of man in all his activities, and of the consequent struggle for the direction of this reality by and for ordinary men and women.” (p.4) This is a language of socialist aspiration which is today scarcely uttered. At a time when many are coming to see that the triumph of neoliberalism - an unfettered version of capitalism - has come at enormous economic, social and environmental cost, it seems to me that the May Day Manifesto deserves to be read again as a contribution to the project of inspiring a concerted resistance to the system that now dominates much of the world. Later in this introduction, something will be said about the origins of the May Day Manifesto and its place in the history of the New Left which had begun its existence a decade or so earlier, in 1956. But first, the Manifesto’s political analysis. The 1967 critique The May Day Manifesto was addressing in 1967 a crisis very different from that of today. Yet all the same we find in its analysis of the society of its day some remarkable continuities with what we can observe now. The adversary against which the Manifesto set itself was an emerging system, a new capitalism. It saw this system as coming increasingly under the sway of large corporations, whose leading and dominant examples were based in the United States, although they were actively expanding their influence at that time. It believed this semi-monopolistic form of capitalism to be aggressive in its determination to impose its power over all of the economy, government and society. It saw it as a global system, active in fashioning vii Revisiting the May Day Manifesto of 1967-68 new means of imperial influence and control, through the penetration of the economies of developing countries, and also in its confrontation with the Communist world in the Cold War, now extended across many continents. It was written during the Vietnam War and was allied to contemporary resistance to it, for example one of its few quotations is from an Isaac Deutscher speech at the 1966 Berkeley teach-in on the War. The May Day Manifesto insisted that the resistance to the new capitalism, to the new imperialism, and to the Cold War, were connected in terms of explanation, and needed to be joined up in terms of political action. It proposed what was in effect a total break with the dominant system, in all its manifestations, asking its readers to imagine the development of an alternative, democratic, socialist and humanist society. From our current location in history, such an ambition is resonant, urgently needed even, and the text describes symptoms that bear striking similarity to our current conjuncture, but it is important to remember that the system which the Manifesto of 1967-68 confronted was in many respects different from that of the present day. One has the disorienting experience in reading the document, of knowing that the adversary the authors had believed to be so powerful and threatening, was soon to encounter a period of extreme tension, and was to fail in the governmental crisis of the 1970s. The Manifesto feared ‘corporatism’ as an unwelcome and undesirable solution to the economic difficulties it described. It saw some kind of compromise between capital and organised labour as inevitable, if the system was to function in a stable way. There is a pre-echo of later discussions of the ‘Fordist mode of production’, in which it was held that mass production could only be profitable for capital if there were adequate demand to sustain mass consumption. Workers in industry were deemed to hold such powers, as a consequence of full employment and relative prosperity, that trade unions were perceived to have a valuable function for corporate employers in managing the demands of their workforce. The substantial (one quarter) of the national economy then in public ownership was held to have a function which was positive for capital, in providing goods and services for the private sector at below their true costs, with the support of subsidies from viii Revisiting the May Day Manifesto of 1967-68 the state. Some sort of collective stake in the system then seemed necessary to the stability of capitalism itself. The new capitalism was feared for its potential to incorporate and nullify any serious dissension from its world-view. The retreats of the Labour government of the 1960s were read as emblematic of a general tendency within Labourism to become absorbed into the dominant system, offering little more than token resistance to its demands.