Socialism and a Labour Government

By ONE of the commonest arguments used by Gaitskell's clique against the Labour Party majurity is that the policies of large-scale nationalization and unilateral renunciation of the H-bomb will make it impossible to win a general election. They try to pose as the hard-headed leaders, telling the airy-fairy, old-fashioned socialist idealists that power is the important thing. "Have all the radical policies you like, they say, but unless you get into power they are just a dream."

In the first place, it should not he forgotten that we have already lost an election with Gaitskell's policy! Secondly, the Ebbw Vale by-election showed that the electorate will vote for a socialist candidate on these issues. How much bigger would the majority have been if we had had a party leadership united on the majority policy put forward by Michael Foot instead of the "leaders ' using their position to sabotage the movement?

But there are more important arguments than these. When Gaitskell, Healey, Crosland, Brown and the others talk about power they mean something different from the Marxists. They do not mean working-class power against the capitalists, but power for the Labour and trade union officialdom to administer capitalism in a more reasonable and ' moral' way. This is possible, they say, because capitalism has already changed into something else (Crosland), or will inevitably do so. Crosland says, for instance, *Capitalism. is forced to give birth to a new society: first, because the political pressures against it are so strong as to make its position untenable; secondly, because the capitalist class has lost the will to resist of its confident heyday; thirdly, because in any case the absolute power of private property has had to give way, under the impact of technical change, to managerial control."

• INEVITABILITY OF GRADUALISM By ' political pressures' Crosland means the Parliamentary activity of people like himself. In his picture of the transition to socialism there is no room for the political and industrial action of the working class. Capitalism changes almost naturally. It is strange that people like Crosland constantly attack Marxism tor its "determinism, and yet it is they, the Kight-wingers. who condemn the ordinary people to a passive role in history. Marxism says it is the masses who make history: for the Fabians, the people are only pawns in the game played by the ruling class and its paid superBRIAN The last of the series of articles analyzing the past and present role of the Right wing in the Labour Movement visors. Marxists see their task as bringing scientific consciousness and the will to power into the working-class movement: Fabianism lulls the working class to sleep with a lullaby of gradual and inevitable reform.

Once again, Crosland and his friends only express in more high-sounding terms the direct interests of the employing class, of international capital. If the preservation of international capitalism requires a safe military base in Britain, France and West Germany, then of course it is important for them to prevent any possibility of the major opposition party being committed to the overthrow of private enterprise. And so pro-NATO policies go along with the attempt to rescind Clause Four. If capital is to have freedom of movement from one country to another, to play off motor-car workers in one country against those in another, then of course nationalization of engineering is a demand that must be rejected. And so Gaitskell and Crosland must try and break conference discipline, to be free to carry out capitalist policies more effectively.

In all the NATO countries, the Right-wing Labourites are driving to destroy the working-class character of their parties. In Britain they have received a major setback at Scarborough, and Gaitskell is fighting a desperate rearguard battle on behalf of capitalism in order to have a 'safe ' alternative government available for the next election. Because they are impelled by the objective historical needs of the enemy class, he and his friends are capable of any manoeuvre, any combination. They receive the 100 per cent. support of the capitalist press in their campaign. There will be no compromise.

In return, the Left must fight for a Labour government on a socialist programme. The Scarborough decisions are the basis for this, with the nationalization of the armaments industries as first priority. That is a programme which is utterly incompatible with Crosland's and Gaitskell's idea of a reformed capitalism. It will have to depend on the dispossession of the capitalists by the organized working class itself, forming its workers' councils and committees as the basis of a new state, the working-class state that will abolish class society.

Crosland is after something that sounds similar, but is 'in fact very different. In New Fabian Essays he says, The purpose of Socialism is quite simply to eradicate this sense of class, and to create in its place SPEIAIRICIE Reader a sense of common interest and equal status.? As we have seen, Crosland, one of Gaitskell's apostles, thinks capitalist society no longer exists, and so ideas about class are only a hangover from the bad old days: it is only the sense of class, not class divisions themselves, that he wants to abolish.

Naturally, such a different task requires also different methods, and Crosland thinks that Parliamentarians working within the capitalist state will be able to do this 'Public Relations' job. While he is absolutely wrong about the path to socialism, there is a basis of fact in what Crosland proposes. His theory in fact summarizes exactly what he and his friends are doing! They sell modern capitalism to the people; they channel the energies and activities of the Labour movement to making the capitalist system work; they help to nationalize and organize those industries which are unprofitable and are needed as efficient, cheap services by those remaining in private ownership; they collaborate in welfare services, conciliation machinery, productivity councils, the NATO Parliamentarians' conference, all in order to try and swing the working class accepting the capitalist system.

POLITICAL CONFIDENCE TRICKSTERS This, then, is the meaning of the ' theoretical ' work of Crosland, Jay, Healey and the rest of Gaitskell's top supporters. The gradual, peaceful path to socialism they describe is an illusory dream, arising out of their own role in society. Modern capitalism, requiring larger-scale state intervention, industrial arbitration, indoctrination of all kinds, a show of democracy to hide a growing bureaucracy and concentration of wealth and power, needs a caste of officials, public relations men, social and political confidence tricksters who parade as moral saviours— humanizing private industry', as Crosland put it. -It is this new middle caste, servile to monopoly. capitalism and the international military machine of imperialism, that is the social basis of Crosland and Gaitskell. The Scarborough decisions are the starting point of a process that will free the British working. class of these agents of the enemy; that process will end in a Labour government in which the working class willrule, and not, as before, the salvage experts of the middle class and the | bureaucracy, time-servers of capitalism.