Chapter 7 – Beautiful Troublemakers
The Failure of Social Democracy and the Failure of The Left
“Those who cling to the idea that the proletariat is the only force that can push society beyond capitalism are ignoring two key features of the modern world: that the route to postcapitalism is different; and that the agent of change has become, potentially, everyone on Earth.” (p 178)
We would first have to agree that we are in transition to some postcapitalism, but, in a sense, at least as far as the developed world is concerned, I might be inclined to agree with the best part of this sentence. The difference is that I would view it from the perspective that “everyone”, in this context, comprises the 99.9% of the population who work, in some form or another, as against the 0.01%, or less, who live as rentiers on the return on their assets, and in the last couple of decades, increasingly on the capital gains on those assets.
I remember in 1970, being sent on a day release course from work, and one of the subjects being sociology. The topic of an essay I remember was the extent to which Marx's concept of society dividing into two classes had been disproved by the fact that, even then, there had been a huge expansion of people in 'middle-class' professional occupations. Given that the course was made up of people in white-collar jobs, no doubt, some would have been flattered into accepting the idea that they had risen from the ranks of the working-class, inhabited by their parents. I certainly found plenty who would settle for a nominal change of job title as a poor alternative to a pay rise. But, I simply pointed out that whilst jobs such as teaching, and so on, may have occupied some intermediate or middle class status in the 19th century, or even the first half of the 20th century, that was no longer the case. The people who did these jobs were workers like any other. They lived in working-class communities; they went to school with other working-class kids; went to the same dance halls as the other working-class kids they went to school with; they courted working-class girlfriends who worked as machinists or on potbanks, or boyfriends who worked as engineers or brickies.
And, a few years later, on a similar course, that view was held by everyone else in the class. It was the lecturer who found it a shock to be told that all of us who worked in these 'middle-class', white collar jobs, actually earned quite a bit less than the manual workers who worked for the same companies. It was one reason that white collar workers were joining trades unions at a rapid pace, and why those unions were often the ones taking up the most radical positions, led by left-wing leaders.
Paul presents a picture whereby the old working-class community of the 19th and early 20th century had broken down by the 1980's, and so meant that the traditional levers of solidarity no longer worked, when they were pulled. I don't think that is right.
In 1974, we talk about the miners bringing down the Heath government, but, in reality, it was co-ordinated working-class action, in support of the miners that brought down the Heath government. Even by the late 1970's, despite the Social Contract, it looked like Labour would win the next election. Callaghan was expected to call the election in 1978, and win. But, with the Social Contract already coming under strain, Callaghan fannied around singing songs at the party conference, and delayed the election to the following year, having pushed low paid public sector workers into the Winter of Discontent.
Paul says,
“White southern workers put Reagan into power; many skilled British workers, tired of the chaos, swung to the Conservatives in 1979, to give Thatcher ten years in office.” (p 207)
But, even after the Winter of Discontent, and Callaghan's antics, most of us still thought Labour would win, in 1979. In fact, some of us felt confident enough not just to be pushing for a Labour win, but for a Socialist Campaign for a Labour Victory, based around a series of more radical policies. It was when I first met Jeremy Corbyn. But, I can also remember, in 1979, going around flyposting SCLV election posters, and starting to feel that it was slipping away. It was not that a sizeable chunk of working-class votes was shifting to the Tories, just that they were no longer going to be turning out to vote for a Labour Party that, for five years, had been imposing wage restraint and public spending cuts on them. That was not the social-democratic compromise that workers had agreed to after WWII.
In the 1970's, as the crisis phase of the long wave cycle imposed itself, many of the progressive social-democratic solutions pushed themselves forward. Failing companies, like Triumph, in Meriden, were taken over by their workers, and turned into worker-owned cooperatives; the Institute for Workers Control ran courses, and pushed for workers to adopt plans for cooperatives, and workers control; workers at Upper Clyde Shipbuilders occupied the shipyard, and continued to operate it, under workers control, until the CP got the workers to surrender control of it to the capitalist state; the workers at Lucas Aerospace developed their plan for alternative production to weapons and so on.
Many of these solutions were opposed by Stalinists/Left reformists and revolutionaries, all of whom looked instead to nationalisation by the capitalist state. Where that capitalist state did support some of these initiatives, now with Tony Benn as Industry Minister, it was fragmented and inadequate. And, the same “mistakes” as were made in 1945 were repeated. In 1945, former coal mine owners and landowners were heavily compensated, with payments to them continuing for decades, which meant money that could have gone into those industries was diverted to former owners. When BL and other failing companies were taken over, the government bought out the existing shareholders, which meant money that should have gone into recapitalising these industries went instead into the pockets of those shareholders. All the Labour government actually needed to do was to remove the right of shareholders to vote at company meetings, introduce a system of industrial democracy, similar to, but more radical than, the Co-determination Laws in Germany, and then begin the process of recapitalisation of the industry. But, it was precisely that step that the Labour government, of the time, was not prepared to take, and a similar hurdle was placed for social-democracy to jump, across the globe. Everywhere it baulked.
The Left of social-democratic parties, particularly across Europe, became embroiled in struggles that were ultimately a diversion. For a quarter of a century, the Left's main sphere of activity had revolved around industrial struggle, as the long-wave, post-war boom created the conditions for successful wage struggles, and enabled workplace organisation to be built. What changes, in the late 1970's, and into the 1980's, is not as Paul suggests, the fact that the old communal levers fail to work, but that, as the long-wave boom ends, the potential to win, simply on the basis of an industrial struggle ceases to exist.
But, the Left, in various ways, failed to recognise it. In a sense, the Eurocommunists did recognise it, and its not surprising that so many of them, having aligned themselves with Liberals, during that time, morphed into Blair-rights, in the later period. The Eurocommunists did recognise, even in things like the Social Contract, the elements of planning and regulation that a progressive social-democracy entails. However, consistent with the Stalinist concept of Socialism in One Country, they now simply transferred this idea into the concept of social-democracy in one country. The manifestation of that was the various national Roads to Socialism that each of these parties produced, each as a nationalistic programme. National renewal was to be achieved by planning and regulation at a national level, it would involve not just regulation of wages and prices, as with the Social Contract, but would regulate imports and immigration, with import and immigration controls, as well as regulating investment by Planning Agreements, incentives for capitalists, and state financing, through the National Enterprise Board. And, central to this nationalistic vision was that Britain should leave the Common Market.
Yet, the reality was that this progressive social-democratic solution could only have actually been progressive, and had any chance of success, if it was viewed in internationalist rather than nationalist terms. Attempting to deal rationally with huge structural changes in global capital that arose in the 1970's and 80's could only be done on a continent wide scale.
The divisions assumed a phoney character that has echoes still today. Because a large part of the left was identified with this nationalistic programme, and, in the 1970's, sections of the far left that had previously had an abstentionist position on the EEC collapsed into it too, what was presented as a division between left and right, was actually a division between conservative nationalism and progressive internationalism. In this division, it was large sections of the left that were in the conservative camp, and sections of the Labour right, along with Liberals and some Tories, that were in the progressive camp.
Sections of the left continued to urge the working-class battalions to once more go over the top, even as it became clear that such industrial struggles offered no way forward. And, with such confusion and lack of any credible route forward, it was no wonder that workers began to leave the battlefield, and do what they always have to do, which is to make their own way through the times and troubles ahead.
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