Series Preface
The first Left Book Club (1936–48) had 57,000 members, had distributed two million books, and had formed 1,200 workplace and local groups by the time it peaked in 1939. LBC members were active throughout the labour and radical movement at the time, and the Club became an educational mass movement, remodelling British public opinion and contributing substantially to the Labour landslide of 1945 and the construction of the welfare state.
Publisher Victor Gollancz, the driving force, saw the LBC as a movement against poverty, fascism, and the growing threat of war. He aimed to resist the tide of austerity and appeasement, and to present radical ideas for progressive social change in the interests of working people. The Club was about enlightenment, empowerment, and collective organisation.
The world today faces a crisis on the scale of the 1930s. Capitalism is trapped in a long-term crisis. Financialisation and austerity are shrinking demand, deepening the depression, and widening social inequalities. The social fabric is being torn apart. International relations are increasingly tense and militarised. War threatens on several fronts, while fascist and racist organisations are gaining ground across much of Europe. Global warming threatens the planet and the whole of humanity with climate catastrophe. Workplace organisation has been weakened, and social democratic parties have been hollowed out by acceptance of pro-market dogma. Society has become more atomised, and mainstream politics suffers an acute democratic deficit.
Yet the last decade has seen historically unprecedented levels of participation in street protest, implying a mass audience for progressive alternatives. But socialist ideas are no longer, as in the immediate post-war period, ‘in the tea’. One of neoliberalism’s achievements has been to undermine ideas of solidarity, collective provision, and public service.
The Left Book Club aspires to meet this ideological challenge. Our aim is to offer high-quality books at affordable prices that are carefully selected to address the central issues of the day and to be accessible to a wide general audience. Our list represents the full range of progressive traditions, perspectives, and ideas. We hope the books will be used as the basis of reading circles, discussion groups, and other educational and cultural activities relevant to developing, sharing, and disseminating ideas for change in the interests of the common people at home and abroad.
The Left Book Club collective
Foreword
John McDonnell MP
What is the Labour Party for? This has been the question at the centre of the party’s history since the first trade unionists and progressives came together to discuss whether an independent political party to represent working people should exist at all. The question has focused on whether the Labour Party is a party of social reform aiming simply to ameliorate our existing capitalist society, or a reformist party that seeks to replace capitalism by incremental social reform, or a transformative, some would say revolutionary party, aiming at the radical replacement of the existing economic and social system.
Both those who wish to bring about change in our society and those who want to resist change have sought to understand and influence the role of the party. The various depictions of the party have both informed the decisions of people looking for a vehicle to fulfil their ambition for change and determined the reactions of those desperate to preserve the power and privileges they have secured through the existing system.
This book’s incisive history of Labour illustrates that the party has been and can be at different moments in history a party of varying roles: in changing times promoting social reform or confidently advocating and launching a reformist programme and, when the political climate permits, promising realistic transformative change. Without being overly deterministic, the party’s role has naturally reflected the political environment in which it has operated, which in turn has influenced the internal balance of political forces within the party.
Nevertheless, contingency has played its part as well. By that I mean, for example, that sometimes it’s down to having the right people in the right place at the right time. After Labour was near fatally wounded by the defection of its charismatic leader Ramsay McDonald in the early 1930s, nobody could have predicted that the party would be in power in the following decade with a massive parliamentary majority under the quiet, almost bureaucratic leadership of Clement Attlee.
Clearly the brutal hardships imposed upon working people as a result of the economic crash in 1929 and the subsequent Great Depression, followed by the sacrifices endured in the Second World War, embedded in society an underlying, often unnoticed, but determined demand for change. The lessons learnt from the results of the bombastic ‘great man, great leader’ dependency syndrome that brought about Hitler and Mussolini also produced an appreciation of the need for a different type of leader. The result was an increasing acknowledgment that another kind of leadership could be just as effective as the great orator style. This was the quieter, everyday, getting-on-with-the-job style that Attlee portrayed.
Although possibly not fully recognised at the time, Attlee was the right person in the right place at the right time. So historical contingency played its part. Nevertheless, the conditions of the 1930s and the wartime years had also delivered up a Labour Party leadership and party membership that had been hewn out of the harsh and precarious political and economic conditions they had had to face for years in order to survive.
The Labour Party at that time set itself up firmly as a party of radical transformation. Many members of the post-war government advocated a programme that went beyond ameliorative reform, and in their articles, books and speeches they set out a vision of systemic change. If that government had survived longer and had been replenished by a new generation in power it may well have had the opportunity to demonstrate how radical transformation could be achieved.
The economic conditions largely determined that a serious opportunity for radical transformation would not fall to a Labour government again until 1997. By then, however, the character of the Labour leadership had changed significantly. Gone were most of those whose desire for transformative change had come from their experience of the harshness of our economic system. The experience of years of relative economic boom had largely eradicated from memory the inherent crisis-ridden nature of capitalism. ‘No more boom and bust’ became the mantra of economic policy analysis. Labour in government became avowedly and firmly a party of social reform – neither reformist nor transformative.
The crash of 2007–8 soon put paid to that. The whole organisation of our economy and society was thrown into question once again. At the bottom of a recession people are generally too busy trying to survive to challenge the system. It is usually when the solutions advocated by political leaders are demonstrably not working for them, and especially when they are told that everything is improving, that they take to demanding something different.
The history of Labour set out so stimulatingly in this book holds open the possibility that the party could move beyond social reform and become a genuinely transformative party once again. A party leadership under Jeremy Corbyn, and a mass membership shaped by the experience of the economic crash, the years of grinding austerity, and its resultant inequality and injustices, are taking their place in the history of the party.
Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour party has proved hugely controversial. No other Labour leader in history has been so denigrated and conspired against in such a short space of time. At times the intensity of the opposition was so intense it seemed like Labour was two parties rather than one. The renewal of old battles within the party – battles that most thought had been settled a generation ago – provides the opportunity for an account of the history of the Labour left. While there are many histories of the Labour Party, there is no history of the Labour left, beyond a few partial accounts focusing on specific periods. So the account offered here is ambitious – starting in 1893 and culminating with the general election of 2017. Given the constraints of space, there are many events that must be passed over or dealt with only briefly. Nevertheless, as the book is intended mainly for those who have been drawn into politics as a result of the Corbyn movement, it will introduce the major historical struggles of the left and explain what was at stake on each occasion.
Defining the left of the party can be a challenge. Labour has never been a socialist party, even if – in the words of Tony Benn – it has always had socialists in it. How does their ideology compare to the wider politics of Labourism? Is it defined by a commitment to nationalisation or to pacifism? Perhaps by the singing of the Red Flag? Perhaps it is simply more of a mood, an instinct rather than a consistent strategy? Certainly, historically, what has been considered ‘left’ is a moving target. What was deemed to be ‘right’ in the 1950s became left policy in the 1970s; and while Corbynism is far to the left of Tony Blair’s New Labour, it is not as economically radical as the Labour policy of the early 1970s. Understanding these shifts and the politics behind them is crucial to our understanding of the present.
What follows is a critical history – it examines what the left has done well and where and why it has failed. By and large, the history of the Labour left has been one of defeat. So writing an account of the left at the moment of its greatest influence may help shine a new light on old struggles. Given the nature of contemporary events, it is also a history that is being lived in relation to a future that is not yet determined. To provide a framework, this book will approach the dynamic at the core of the left–right division in terms of a struggle between transformative and integrative tendencies. It is an account of those who have fought for Labour to adopt a transformative agenda, through far-reaching economic, social, constitutional and political changes that challenge the existing power relations in society. Such people are on the left in as much as they conform to a general idea of what being on the political left means: being generally anti-capitalist and socialist-minded, seeking radical solutions to everyday problems. A variety of principles, tactics and strategies have flowed from their orientation to the Labour Party and Parliament as the primary vehicles for a radical, transformative agenda. Necessarily, this is also a history of their battle with the other, more dominant, tendency in the party: the integrative tendency typified by those who want to weld the Labour Party to already existing state and social structures for the purpose of incorporating the interests of the labour movement into the establishment. They take society as it is but want greater representation, believing that this in itself will ensure laws that create a better quality of society.
Because the transformative tendency has sought to alter the existing state, economic and social relations, this has inevitably led to a struggle over the nature of the Labour Party itself – over its programme, the role of its MPs, the extent of its extra-parliamentary activity and so on. We will see how the transformative agenda within Labour has played out and the ways in which integrative forces have tried to co-opt or limit oppositional voices. From Bevanism, the Bennite movement and Corbynism to Ernest Bevin, the Revisionists and Progress, Labour has seen several competing forces from both wings of the party. While the left has always been in a subordinate position, this book is also an account of how that can all change.
I have several people to thank for their contributions to this project: Andrew Berry, Liz Davies, Graham Bash, Andrew Fischer and Pete Firmin for their insights; Marc Wadsworth on Black sections; Neil Faulkner for his editorial help; and David Castle at Pluto. I must thank also Ruth, Steven and Edd for their comments and help. Also thank you to the many activists and Labour Party members I have chatted to – your views and ideas were often helpful. Any errors are of course entirely my own.