No title

editorial LAST MONTH’S

SUMMER MANOEUVRES

aphorism was that when the Government’s Defence policy collapsed, it was the Opposition which was thrown into confusion. This is not as funny or as paradoxical as it sounds. From the rearmament of West Germany through to “Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent”, official Labour Party orthodoxy has been wedded to the Government’s line. When, at last, the pressure of economic events drove Britain into the divorce court over Blue Streak, it was therefore a simple manoeuvre for the Government to induce the Press to name Mr. Gaitskell as co-respondent. The point has been driven home more firmly by the new Draft Foreign and Defence Policy which the leadership has been “hammering through”. This latest Appeal to Western Solidarity (. . . “we must remain loyal supporters of NATO”) is done in the best Grand Manner: indeed, the leadership insists upon reaffirming the line of continuity down the years, by reminding us that “in the creation of it (NATO) under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, the Labour Government played a leading role.” This is the same paragraph in which the UN is quietly laid to rest (as being “divided and so unable to guarantee security”, and NATO commended in its place—“not only a military bulwark but a basis from which peaceful co-existence must be negotiated”. The lesson drawn from the break-up of the Summit, the disastrous probing flights, the Japanese enthusiasm at the thought of receiving President Eisenhower and the collapse of the Disarmament Conference, is that we are doing all-right and must goon as before. The Draft Policy is not the basis for a new course in Labour’s foreign policy: it is a document accommodated to the existing myths, and designed to protect the leadership. Where policy has changed—over the question of Britain’s capacity to be “an independent nuclear power”—it has moved towards unilateralism. Thus Mr. Gaitskell, who argued in March that, “The real case for our having our own independent nuclear weapons is fear of excessive dependence upon the United States”, must have set his seal to that sentence which recognises that “a country of our size cannot remain in any real sense of the word an ‘independent nuclear power’”. At the same time, the Labour Movement is invited to continue to place its trust in the corporate strategy of nuclear deterrence. Elsewhere, the Draft drifts into a radical tone, at the same time placing itself a million light-years away from the existing realities of military build-up and “preparedness”. Thus, on the question of Thor missiles, we have a complacent proposal—“We therefore continue to be opposed to the establishment of these missile

bases in Britain”: which we need only contrast with the report in the News Chronicle of December 18, 1959, which stated that “Britain’s force of 60 Thor rockets is ready for use. . . . Part of this force of American-built missiles will from now on be kept on permanent 15-minute alert, with H-bomb warheads fitted. . . . Two officers—one British, one American—sit at every firing site, with two identical firing keys in front of them. Only when both have turned their keys. . . .” The Draft Policy shows no understanding at all of the degree to which foreign policy in the last decade has been dictated by military and strategic considerations. On several questions, it remains vague, leaving room for precisely those policies which have driven us forward from one flash-point to the next. Thus the Draft is opposed to the manufacture of nuclear weapons by West Germany: it does not say that, since the Americans are now to be left to provide the deterrent, West Germany does not have to manufacture the weapons in order to become a nuclear power. It fails to remark that Britain, by pursuing the independent search for nuclear grandeur, provided a positive incitement to Germany and France to have weapons of their own. It seeks to prevent nuclear weapons falling into the hands of the West German army—but it does not say how we are to press our case against the military establishment which has always argued that, if there is to be a German army, it must be properly equipped. And it gives no sign of ever having heard the argument, deployed by NATO strategists themselves, that the only distinction between “tactical” nuclear weapons (which the West Germans already have) and “strategic” weapons is the use to which they are put. The Draft, in the same manner, gestures towards “a nuclear free zone”: it does not say whether it is prepared to offer a de-nuclearised, NATOfree West Germany in exchange for a disengaged zone in Central Europe, or—more crucially—how it proposes to force this policy through an alliance in which the West Germans, with a vested interest in a nuclear army, have the preponderant voice. In short, the Draft Statement accepts the argument that we can still defend ourselves by nuclear means—a statement which, in the literal meaning of the word, is military nonsense: and while it is full of “policy”, it contains no politics at all. Finally, where the Draft is “realistic” it is also, in Mr. Gaitskell’s own words, “immoral”: and where it is “positive”, it is also dishonest. Thus, after denouncing CND for three years as “immoral” because it was prepared to “shelter” behind the American nuclear shield, Mr. Gaitskell turns out to be the biggest shelterer of them all. And when it urges NATO to move forward to a “new” strategy based on conventional weapons, it

1

retains the important qualification, “without immediate reliance on nuclear weapons” (our italics). This means that it accepts—without wanting to do so in public—the well-established theory of the “escalator” effect, by which a “conventional” defence leads on, by stages, to a “tactical” war, and finally to first-strike nuclear weapons. The “conventional” strategy advocated, is, in short, a paper-trick, a postponement of the inevitable, and little else. This is not a Policy: it is an Apologia. The document holds out the same bleak prospects of broken conferences and dark nuclear crises. What Labour needs, however, is to disinter its foreign policy, which was buried at the time of the German Rearmament vote. We can only hope that it is this task which will occupy the Conference in October, and that only such time will be spent on this Draft to Revise it out of existence. The questions raised in the foregoing, together with the whole debate about common ownership and the “affluent” society, have eaten their way through into the heart of the movement during the past few months. They provide the political opportunity for a reversal of direction in the Labour Movement: and such is the

2

character of the debate which these issues have generated, that no affirmations of loyalty can lever them from the centre of the political stage. The basic orientation of policy, the question of the transition to a socialist society at home, and a foreign policy based on coexistence abroad, are before the Labour Movement now in a sharper form than they have been since the end of the Labour Government at the beginning of the decade. This—and not simply the question of which heads shall roll—is what should concern us, as we move through the summer manoeuvres to the October Conference. If the leadership is “in question”, it is because, having incarnated certain policies in themselves, they must now stand or fall by them. And if they fall, that will be, not a signal for the rapid closing of ranks, but the beginning of an offensive to remake policy and reshape the socialist movement in this country from the base. This issue of NLR has been wholly reshaped in the light of this continuing crisis in the movement. It deals with certain of the commanding heights of our society which will have to be scaled if we are to resume, in the coming months, that advance to socialist forms, institutions and ways of life so tragically postponed in the post-war period.

Comments On Revolution In NLR 3 we published the final Chapter from Out of Apathy, E. P. Thompson’s “Revolution”. This article discussed the new antagonisms bred by capitalism, and suggested that Britain was “overripe” for socialism: it also raised the question of the “transition to socialism” and the nature of revolution in modern society. We have asked four contributors to comment on the Chapter.

Charles Taylor

CHANGES OF QUALITY

Edward Thompson’s “Revolution” is an important beginning. It represents a way out of the stalemate of the Clause 4 debate in the Labour Movement. The debate between Left and Right has been one long agonising series of cross-purposes. The real difference is a total divergence of aim. The Left has focussed attention on the need for some kind of qualitative change of life and society. The Right, at its best, has been taken up with piecemeal improvements. This is not just to say that the Right was interested in changes of lesser scale. They were interested in changes of a different kind. The important point is that they were willing to accept certain basic features of the framework of our society, and with this as starting point, cast about for possible improvements. The Labour Right is fundamentally empiricist. It will not consider any change where it can not be argued for in terms of what people can obviously be seen to want. But if one bases a programme on what people are choosing at the moment, then one will never get to the point of discussing an important qualitative change in society as a whole. For what people choose, depends very much on the framework of the society in which they are living and the range of choices open to them. With this yardstick, one can see that it is a good idea to spend more on the schools, for instance—and it certainly is—but one cannot ever go on to consider the quality of what is taught in them, or the whole role of education in society. The present Labour leadership is so immured within its own empiricist assumptions, that it does not even understand what people are talking about when they raise questions of this latter kind. Their only reply is to ask for a detailed programme. But this, too, misses the point, because the really important changes cannot be effected simply by devising the right legislation. Left and Right pass each other by like ships in the night. What would an important qualitative change in society in a Socialist direction be like? There are three examples, which, I think, are among the most important, and which illustrate the points made in Edward Thompson’s article. A society qualitatively different from our present one would be one in which, for instance, the criterion of need was more important than that of profit; where the values of social solidarity replaced those of the Poor Law, and where control over the conditions of life was exercised by people rather than Forces. Much has been said recently about the criterion of

need as against profit. After the orgy of self-congratulation on the supposed achievements of the Labour Government, more and more people are beginning to realise the shocking conditions of many welfare services. But it is not a good enough answer just to say: let us spend more money on these things. The problem of priorities goes deeper. We shouldn’t have to live in a society where it is perpetually an uphill struggle to bring these services up to a decent standard, where increases in welfare are carefully and grudgingly scrutinised, but where money can be found, and plenty of it, for really “essential” things like bombs and rockets, advertising, packaging, speculative building, gadgetry, and so on. Why can’t we live in a society where full literacy is as urgently essential as “defence” is considered nowadays? But the pressures and the demands of a “free enterprise” economy are all the other way. So much so that it even cramps our imagination, and confines our aspirations. Why should we restrict our interest to the traditional forms of welfare? Why should we put up with a cultural apparatus so largely run for profit? Why should artists be employed by or dependent on speculators? Why shouldn’t we automate backbreaking or monotonous jobs? But these things don’t even come up for consideration. They appear wildly Utopian in the context of our present society; where it is a hard fight to get a decent wage for railwaymen, and to slow down pit closures, it seems irrelevant to speak of doing away with work at the coal-face. Yet this is the field in which the USSR is beginning to make progress; and even slow changes in our own society have played havoc with the tawdry excuse that certain levels of skill and creativity were fixed and unalterable. The second point may be put this way. What I have called a society based on the values of the Poor Law is a society whose concern is to see that those at the bottom do not fall below certain minimum levels. One of the central aims of the Labour tradition has been to attack this society and replace it by one based on the values of solidarity—that we should give the best equally to everyone. The Poor Law society holds out a safety net at the bottom because its premise is that we neither can nor should help each other to get to the top. Indeed, the Top in our society is something which, by definition, you only get to by liberal use of your elbows. This kind of society is therefore essentially one that breeds double standards: there must be a gap between what you get on the rungs of the ladder and what is

3

thrown to you in the safety net. This is one of the things the post-war Labour government meant seriously to attack; and in the Health Service for instance, they certainly made a beginning. But the trend to the double standard is endemic in our society. Professor Titmuss has shown in his pamphlet, The Irresponsible Society, something of how this works in the field of welfare. But it needs no research to see the double standard at work in education. We can see it at work, too, in the railways and the mines. We are rapidly moving toward a society in which workers in the advancing, prosperous industries can use their bargaining power to wrest concessions, while those in declining industries or areas take the rap, until they hit the comforting mesh of “the safety net”. Thirdly, we want a society in which people control, and not Forces. I say “Forces” because we live in an “irresponsible society”, in which major decisions that affect peoples lives appear to be taken not by the people themselves, nor even by some despotic authority on whom one could pin the blame. No one appears to decide that we are to have the “exploding metropolis”, with office blocks crowding in the centre and dormitory suburbs sprawling farther into the countryside. All one can say is that the ultimate results are in harmony with the demands of speculative profit. If one wants to look for someone to blame, one is invited to consider the impersonal “Forces of the Market”. It is time we recognised that these are questions which can be decided by us as a society; and, in a democratic society, must be decided by the people. Now a qualitative (revolutionary) change in society in any of these ways is something which we cannot even discuss as long as we will only talk in terms of piecemeal reform. It is not just a question of spending more on the schools, or giving more to pensioners; but of having a society where the energy and ingenuity of people will be devoted as a matter of course to meeting human needs rather than to selling, expanding markets, designing things—including bombs—for the sake of their rapid obsolescence. The trouble with piecemeal reform is not just that it is too small-scale, but that it never comes to grips even with problems of this range. It is easy to find out by a Gallup poll whether people think the pensions are too low, but not to discover whether they believe that people’s work should be more creative. For, in our society, the first is the kind of thing it makes sense to make a choice about, the second, like death and taxes, just happens. It is often said in reply that it would be “undemocratic” and “arrogant” to decide “what people want” for them. But this is a crude notion of “wanting”. Take university graduates, the people who have the most freedom and opportunity. What do they choose? They go through school, university, and then they take jobs in advertising, industry, the mass media, or the Foreign Office. Is there any proof that, by nature, they want to exercise their talents in these ways—not ways they want, but ways they prefer within a prescribed

4

range? That, rather than designing how to do away with coal-face working, they would prefer to find ways of expanding oil-markets; rather than designing new cities, they would prefer to build Shell buildings; rather than designing the communication channels which would help make a more genuinely democratic society, they would rather write advertising copy? Has anyone asked them? Will the Labour leadership ever ask them? The answer to this last question is clearly, “no”. For the moral vision of a young recruit into industry is not part of the hard data of “wants”, and cannot be taken into account by Gallup Poll. It is not one of Mr. Crosland’s “facts”. Instead, we must take existing preferences, and our main conclusion is then that entry into the existing range of jobs should be more competitive. Where the scale of opportunity is taken for granted, equality of opportunity is the only radical demand one can frame.

Means And Ends How do we get to a socialist society? The Left has often tended to oppose to the piecemeal reforms of the Right, the simple demand for large-scale institutional reforms. But size alone is not enough. When the Right counter-attack by saying that nationalisation is a means not an end, they have a powerful debating point. For usually people mean by “means” and “ends” two events, which can exist separately from one another, and where it is quite possible for the “end” to be achieved by some other “means”. But the relationship between common ownership and socialism is not of this kind. It is a relation between a set of institutions (“means”) and the human relations they embody (“ends”). But the quality of these relations is not something that could exist separately, up in the air, without a set of institutions to embody it. True, something similar in the way of values or quality of relations might be embodied in other institutions, but they would be lived in a significantly different way. Common ownership can be “just one of the means” to greater productivity, or equality of opportunity, or something like that, but it cannot be “just one means” to a socialist society. If someone kept insisting that, after all, Parliamentary institutions were “just a means” to democracy, or slavery “just a means” to oppression, we would be very suspicious indeed. But when this is said, we must go on to say that, just as we can have the institutions of democracy without democracy, so we can have the institutions of socialism without socialism. And this is the point where serious talk of the transition to socialism begins. The transition must not only be the radical changing of certain institutions, the abolition of some and the creation of others, but also the preparation of the kind of life, the building up of the kind of relations, which are going to give a socialist content to socialist institutions. I think that Edward Thompson’s “Revolution” has made an important new contribution here. The late-Marxist

tradition, which assumed that it makes no sense to speak of building socialism while capitalism still exists, has had a paralysing influence on the Left. It means that socialism starts with the “seizure of State power”, and that, prior to this, there is no point asking other questions about the transition to socialism. This view has obviously been a docile partner to the other late-Marxist dogma, that state power should be “seized” by a revolutionary élite. Curiously enough, this has brought about a strange similarity between orthodox communists and Right Social Democrats. Both have been focussed exclusively on the problems of political power, the one in order to create a communist state, the other in order to operate piecemeal reforms within the present political framework. Under social democratic leadership parties tend to become simply electoral machines; under Communism everything tends to be bent toward the seizure of power. We must get away from both these distorted views. The transition to socialism will not be accomplished by just “one more shuffle along the evolutionary path” as Edward Thompson puts it, (p.7). This is a rejection of “reformism”. But the “reformism” we reject is the idea that piecemeal reform which takes the framework of society for granted will ever make a qualitative change in society. What is not to be rejected is the belief that the positive effort of people to make socialist institutions is more than an activity of second-grade importance, an adjunct of the class-struggle. We cannot “rely exclusively on the explosive negatives of class antagonism” (p.8). Quite the contrary. Socialism requires far-reaching political and institutional change. But, at the same time, something recognisably like a socialist society can only come about

Peter Marris

APATHY: A CASE TO ANSWER

“Revolution” three or four times, trying to make out the serious ‘immediate policy’ advertised on the back cover of the New Left Review. But what remains in my mind is less a policy than a political allegory, a Pilgrim’s Progress through the 1960’s. The hero is the Aldermaston Generation: he is discovered, on the first page, smashing ikons—the craven images of Cold War, Affluent Capitalism, Defeatism and Piece-Meal Reform. Here he undergoes his first moral test. He discerns, across a gulf, two idolaters bowed in worship. They turn out to be Mr. Gaitskell and Mr. Crosland. Mr. Gaitskell is too ashamed to speak, but Mr. Crosland attempts to divert Aldermaston with a game of Happy Families, and a recitation of the Sermon on the Mount, Aldermaston scornfully stops

I READ

if at the time and well before the political changes are undertaken, there are, for instance, movements of workers demanding a say in the decisions which affect their lives, immediately perhaps on a local level, ultimately on the level of the whole industry; if there are movements of people demanding socialist policies in local government and so on. This means that we decisively reject the idea of the Revolution as a cataclysm, in which everything is destroyed to be re-built anew. Gone forever the nostalgia for 1917. And not only because a repetition of 1917 is impossible and absurd to contemplate in the present context, but because this is not the kind of socialist revolution we want. Which means that we cease to think in terms of the Great Crisis, which will do for the New Revolutionaries what war and dislocation did for the Bolsheviks. Gone too the secret hope of the Big Slump. If this is not too much of a travesty of what Edward Thompson is saying, then I think the example at the end of his article of how the change to socialism might come about, is ill-chosen. For it may have given the impression that he was replacing the crisis of the slump by the crisis of withdrawal from NATO. But this seems to me against the whole tenor of his article. If we accept this view, then the job of the New Left should be, in part, to help create the preconditions of socialism: movements and institutions of the kind mentioned above, which lie outside the political movement narrowly conceived; to help both by discussion and by pioneering in some of these fields. If we could fulfil this role, then we could give content to the slogan in the Editorial of the first number of ULR: “socialism at its widest stretch”.

his ears with a reading from William Morris, and goes on his way. As he searches for the Breakthrough, he meditates on the Webbs, Harold Laski, G. D. H. Cole, and the Transition to a Socialist Society. (He omits, a little shamefacedly, the constructive additions of Guild Socialists and Syndicalists, Leninism, Stalinism, and post-Keynesian evolutionary theory. But, after all, he is in a hurry to get somewhere.) His attention is soon diverted by Trotskyite Fundamentalists, who try to seduce him with a Cataclysmic Model. But Aldermaston spurns her, leaving her patrons to meditate on the interpenetration of opposites. At this point, his route becomes less clear: he narrowly escapes shuffling along the Evolutionary Path, where entries in a ledger disguise the insidious survival of the News of the World

5

and the Eton–Harrow match. But fortunately, though he cannot see his way through the foothills, the Commanding Heights are constantly before his eyes, especially the Historical Watershed—that pass through which he will descend into the Society of Equals. We do not know which giants he must overcome to reach that promised land, and which will die of discouragement when their companions fall. But he is ready for them all—NATO’s, the Monopolists, Sandhurst and the National Debt. Meanwhile he arms himself with research, discussion, journals, books. And when at last he enters into the Society of Equals, a choir of Levellers, Peterloo martyrs, Chartists and dockers will make the heavens resound with cries of “Saved!” Well, of course you can always make fun of a writer by mixing his metaphors. And “Revolution” is, besides, the least cogently argued of the three pieces which Edward Thompson contributes to Out of Apathy, and becomes much clearer in the context of the book it concludes. For all that, I think my caricature makes a serious point: rhetorical polemics are dangerously imprecise. They deal in abstractions so general that argument is lost in aspiration and invective, and what should be an immediate policy becomes a remote exercise in the manipulation of a private jargon. The initiated may understand what Edward Thompson intends: but he needs to convince, not the habitués of the Partisan, but the young Coventry motor worker, whose indifference to socialism is so well presented in the same issue of NLR in which “Revolution” appears. To persuade people out of apathy, you need to understand why they are apathetic, and what they are apathetic about—to meet their indifference on their own terms. But “Revolution” nowhere admits that there is a good case—as well as a defeatist case—against socialism. Even when, elsewhere in Out of Apathy, he analyses the roots of disillusionment, his sources are W. H. Auden and George Orwell, not the workers of Coventry.

Is Revolution Necessary? The case that Edward Thompson does not really answer has, I think, two arguments. The first is this: our Society has many shortcomings, but we do not need socialism to overcome them. If we want more hospitals and roads, schools and scientific laboratories, more generous pensions, a national theatre, what prevents us voting the taxation that will pay for them? Does a capitalist society really make it impossible for people to vote for such an allocation of the wealth they produce? Again, “Revolution” continually returns to the problems of the Cold War and nuclear disarmament: but unilateral disarmament is not a socialist policy, though socialists may support it. We made hydrogen bombs because we believed that the Russians threatened us out of an aggressive ideology: if now we believe, more and more, that they threaten us chiefly out of fear, and seek to disarm that fear, we are calculating a

6

risk, reinterpreting the motives underlying international tension—it is a problem apart from the viability of a capitalist society. Now you might argue that this ignores subtler influences against change: that the structure of private industrialism would collapse under the burden of taxation sufficient to sustain an adequate level of public spending, or that it could not adjust to the disbandment of the nuclear weapons industry. Or more simply, that vested interests are too powerful to allow it. But this remains to be proved. It seems more likely that the essential difficulty is to persuade the Labour Party and the electorate that these policies are right. Nor do I think that we are so bemused by advertisers that we would be incapable of such a choice, if it were put before us confidently and insistently.

Fellowship or Bureaucracy? So the first question to be answered, is whether the socialist revolution is necessary or even relevant to many of the problems on which Edward Thompson himself lays most emphasis. The second question is this: even if there are evils in our society which only socialism can cure, would it not cure them only at the cost of invoking other evils as bad? The ideal of common ownership is crucial to socialist theory, but would it mean, in practice, industrial fellowship, a rational distribution of our resources, production for use, or a stultifying managerial bureaucracy insensitive to the complaints of the public it served? In the first place, is not the phrase “common ownership” itself a glib evasion of the problems of industrial control? An industry is not like common land: we shall never be free to wander at will in the industries of a socialist society. We shall still have to pay for their products. And we shall have only an indirect and occasional control over their management. Whatever councils we may devise—of consumers, workers, local authorities, elected representatives—to direct or supervise industry, their control will be limited by the time they can give to master its affairs. We will have to leave the day to day running of any industry to its managers, and depend on them for the information on which to take decisions. And it will be virtually impossible to impose on them a decision which they unanimously reject. The managers of industry will largely control it: how then can we avoid the growth of an autonomous industrial bureaucracy? We have confused the problem of power in our society by thinking too much in terms of ownership. But the more ownership is dispersed, the less direct is its control—and socialism is the ultimate dispersion of ownership. Public ownership, therefore, does not mean public control, but only the residual rights to the assets of our economic life. The more comprehensively we seek to plan a rational distribution of our resources, the more we shall be committed to a consolidated hierarchy of authority, extending from those who draw

up the plan to those who carry it into effect on the shop floor. However democratically the master-planners are chosen, they will not be able to work unless they are free to take far-reaching decisions. The frequency, urgency and complexity of these decisions must prevent much consultation with the public: even on the broadcast of policy, our freedom to interfere will be limited by the decisions already taken on our behalf. Hence the authority of the managers will be great. How will they use it? Will they be altruistic enough not to use their power to secure also great wealth? Will their concern for our interests be confused by personal ambition—for promotion, the enlargement of the department they happen to control, publicity? At present the management of industry is neither uniform, nor promoted by the State; the Civil Service can act as a countervailing force. Will we be better off without these checks? How, then is the rational planning of our production to be reconciled with the ideal of an industrial democracy? Planning suggests centralised control, while industrial democracy suggests the dispersion of decisions to the workers in the factories themselves. How can a system be devised which will at once give greater authority to the national interest, and at the same time enable the factory worker to exercise more control over the enterprise which employs him? A rational redistribution of resources is likely to arouse great resentment in the workers who are thereby displaced. Public ownership cannot exorcise conflicts between local and national interests, between those who give orders and those who take them: at best, it could provide a more co-operative framework in which to solve them. But what will happen when co-operation breaks down? In a society where everyone is ultimately an employee of the State, must every strike become a general strike? The power of management will be supported by the whole resources of the nation.

much of our freedom are we willing to sacrifice, even for social justice? If socialism cannot solve these problems, the Society of Equals will be equal only in the opportunity to compete for power. For the rest, the rulers will enjoy a more far-reaching and unchallengeable authority. And the more equal the opportunities, the more people will compete to secure the prestige of superior positions. Those who fail will no longer be able to protect their self-esteem by an appeal to the unfairness of the system. This raises a general problem in the search for a classless society: people need to define their relationship to others in terms of power, to know where they stand. The less obvious the marks of status, the more anxiously trivial details are examined for their social indications. An extra foot of carpet in an office, the curtains in your neighbour’s window, become symbols in an endless search for reassurance against the fear of being looked down upon. What if equals are the most obsessive of all status-seekers? In the face of these awkward questions, socialists sometimes invoke the change of heart. Of course, they admit, a socialist system cannot in itself ensure the realisation of its ideals: but it will liberate all the altruism and fellowship inhibited by the acquisitive values of capitalism. There may, indeed, be some truth in this. But it is also true that if we became less selfish and loved each other more, socialism would be unnecessary. The moral fervour of the New Left seems at times to overspread the political issues into an attack on the universal moral weaknesses of mankind. But however closely morality and politics are related, they should not be confused. Socialism is a theory of how moral values should be applied to the problems of relationships of power: it is not itself a morality. If it can only succeed in a society which has abjured selfish motives, it begins to look less promising than the elaborate system of institutionalised conflicts by which, at present, we

What Price Freedom? I think it is doubts like these which make people fear socialism. They do not see the totalitarianism of Communist states as a fortuitous association of tyranny with socialist ideals, but as a necessary consequence of them. For though a Socialist Society could work a democratic constitution, this does not guarantee individual liberty. “In England”, a Spanish professor once remarked, “you do not have a democracy. A democracy is the dictatorship of the majority.” How does a society committed to planned co-operation avoid the authoritarianism of the group decision? Liberty is the right of individual action, for good or ill: already the complexity of our society confines it to narrow limits, continually more embarrassed by nonconformity. And surely, the more rationally we order our social relationships, the less we shall be able to accommodate the spontaneous disorder of human impulse? Socialism says alarmingly little about individual liberty, but the problem is crucial. How

7

reconcile our competing interests. The cost of aiming too high is frustration and hypocrisy—the strident assertion of unrealised ideals which drives people into cynicism. All these arguments, so I believe, present a serious challenge to socialist theory. But I believe too that we can find a solution to the problem they present, which would offer us, at least, a way of life freer, more vital, and fairer than we now enjoy. Somehow we must tease out of the infinite complexity of social relationships and human motives the best reconciliation of individualism and co-operation, equality and authority, order and diversity. If we invoke impartial justice to destroy

John Saville

APATHY INTO POLITICS

“REVOLUTION”, Edward Thompson wrote, “that the point of breakthrough is not a narrow political concept; it will entail a confrontation throughout society between two systems, two ways of life. In this confrontation, political consciousness will become heightened . . .” This is one of the most important formulations of Out of Apathy: but what, I wonder, does it mean to the Aldermaston generation, or the overwhelming majority of the Labour Party’s rank and file? Most members of the Labour Movement keep their party or trade union affiliation for election times or periods of crisis. We have, then, to consider how this “confrontation” may be brought about. Certainly it would be easier if Her Majesty’s Opposition began to oppose with the vigour that the Tories did between 1947 and 1951: or if the Labour Party outside Westminster began to talk, preach and practice socialist ideas between General Elections. But here I am concerned primarily with the confrontation in ideas. It is worth reminding ourselves of Gramsci’s criticisms of Bukharin, who only wanted “to attack the weakest people on their weakest points . . . in order to win easy verbal victories.” Gramsci continued,

IN

In political and military struggles it may be good tactics to break through at the point of least resistance. . . . On the ideological front, however, defeat of the auxiliaries and the minor followers has an almost negligible importance. . . . A new science achieves the proof of its efficacy and fertile vitality when it shows itself able to face the great champions of the opposing tendencies, when it resolves by itself the vital questions which they have posed and demonstrates incontrovertibly that such questions are false.

If we take this as our bench-mark, we have indeed a long way to go. Nevertheless, even in Britain—so averse to theory, so addicted to the philosophy of common sense—there is a considerable, if scattered, tradition on which to build. This is especially true of historical studies: for each generation looks afresh at its past history, and the elaboration of contemporary attitudes and values is as clearly seen in historical revaluation as in any other field of intellectual effort.

8

privilege, we must find a way to temper that justice with the informal and personal relationships which the rule of law excludes. The more rationally we plan our society, the more we must guard against a dictatorship of collective wisdom. We need to look beyond the weaknesses of our present society to the fundamental problems of all human societies. And we need to attack them, not as prophets crying in the wilderness, but as patient enquirers. The answers will not, maybe, take us very far along the road to Utopia, but we may make better progress than the old Fabian tortoise, and the Red Queen crying “faster, faster!” as she stamps the same worn Marxist ground.

The socialist historian, like the socialist intellectual in general, has two separate but closely related tasks; the first is to develop a wide ranging polemic, and the second is the enlargement and extension of knowledge in his own field. At the present moment, the greater need is for polemic, for in no other country are the mass of intellectuals so effectively assimilated within the liberal-conservative tradition. Of course, intellectual combativeness is not to be confused with shrill dogmatism. What is required is a continuing controversy in all fields, taking apart the judgments and values, ideas and facts of our society, explaining their meaning and relation to the whole. This is the intellectual “confrontation” which Edward Thompson is asking for. My second point concerns some aspects of the politics of what Ralph Miliband has called “the transition to the transition”: that is, the growth in socialist ideas, and their organisation, in ways that effectively influence the Labour Movement. Historically, the Left has evolved two different approaches. The Marxists have usually organised themselves into tightly controlled, disciplined organisations, mostly—though not always—set up as independent political parties (e.g. The Social Democratic Federation before 1914, the Communist Party since 1920, the Socialist Labour League). The Marxist groups have generally been small in number, more than often dominated by sectarian ideas, and they have nearly always exhibited a marked bitterness to all other Left groupings. Generally, their political influence has been limited, but their indirect or cumulative effect has been considerable. Moreover, they have shown a signal devotion and self-sacrifice to socialism. But none of them has succeeded in overcoming their political isolation from the broad stream of the Labour Movement for any considerable period of time. The second form adopted by the Left has been adapted to a more eclectic ideology, with a loose organisational framework, and no high degree of discipline. (The Independent Labour Party is an outstanding example of this kind; the Socialist League in the 1930’s, the

Bevanite and post-Bevanite Left in the 1950’s.) Only rarely has this Left been organisationally outside the Labour Party. Their socialism has been of the British empirical variety—warm, emotional, tenacious in opposition to injustice, untheoretical. (The Tribune collection, Tribune 21, illustrates admirably the strengths and weaknesses of this tradition.) But neither of these traditions has been able to come to terms with the post-war situation, and both have showed serious fluctuations in support: though their existence has ensured a more open and lively political response from the British Labour Movement than is the case with the French or German Socialist Parties. The CP has failed to win support because of its dogmatism and the rigidity of its support for the Soviet Union: the Labour Left because it failed to offer a vision of the future except in very generalised—and often pre-war—terms. In the period of full employment and rising living standards, no critique that used only prewar assumptions about socialism could be a viable one. Hence the need to reassess the means by which the Left can find ways of translating theory into practice, into political pressures and influences within the Labour Movement, now that some small start has been made in the refurnishing of socialist ideas on the Left. No one, I believe, can argue at this time for the tightly-knit organisation, independent of the Labour Party. Rather, this is the point to welcome all forms of Left activity calculated to revitalise the Left within the

Sol Encel IT WOULD,

Labour Movement. Such activities will, inevitably, take new organisational forms, sometimes wholly within the Labour Party, sometimes without, sometimes half-in half-out—(i.e. involving many Labour Party people and seeking to influence the Party, but not restricted to or limited by it). The anaemic condition of the Movement is enough proof that we cannot now restrict political activity to stereotyped forms or organisations. Left Clubs, discussion groups, ad hoc conferences and schools, marches, demonstrations and campaigns are all part of the attempt to raise the general level of activity and consciousness of our Movement. At the same time, a genuine forward move involves (a) the replacement of the present leadership of the Party and (b) the development of political forms which will enable the Left to grow within the Labour Movement. It would be wrong to consider that, for the coming period, the Labour Party could cease to be anything but a federation of differing political trends and tendencies. But the role of the Left is, naturally, of crucial importance within that federation. In order to achieve the marriage of the intellectual movement which is just beginning, with the political and industrial Left, we shall need a coming together of the dispersed Left groups in the country, in order to achieve a more powerful concentration of strength. For me, then, the conclusion of Out Of Apathy is into politics: the political definition and organisation of the ideas of the Left in the coming months.

FORWARD FROM MARXISM

I think, be a pity if Edward Thompson’s discussion of the possibility of social revolution were to be taken as the authentic voice of the New Left—as right-wing critics of Out of Apathy already seem to be doing. In attempting to avoid the danger of falling between the stools of reformist Fabianism, whose intellectual shoddiness he deplores, and cataclysmic Marxism, whose sterility he rejects, he has had little more success than his numerous predecessors in this difficult enterprise. Mr. Thompson clearly believes in revolution, but in condemning the “explosive negatives of class antagonism” he is cutting the ground from under his own feet. The only really plausible theory of social revolution is precisely the one that depends inextricably on class antagonism. Mr. Thompson is, of course, aware of this central difficulty, but the best he can do is the not very convincing device of a “breakthrough” which, once achieved, will generate its own dynamic. What, then, is to provide the dynamic for the breakthrough? Mr. Thompson is rightly concerned with the failure of socialist writers to deal adequately with the problems of the transition from capitalism to socialism. This

criticism can, I think, be extended beyond contemporary Labour thinking as expressed by Messrs. Strachey, Crosland, Crossman. Socialist theory in general has always suffered from a similar weakness, perhaps because of the relative absence of serious attempts to imagine the nature of the society to which the transition is to take place. In differing ways, this problem afflicts both Marxism and reformism, the latter because it is too ready to take the present social framework for granted, the former because it is interested too much in social revolution to the exclusion of social analysis. The great strength of Marxism lies not in its “scientific” character, its philosophic profundity, or its sociological accuracy, but rather in its apocalyptic quality. The Marxists, and not the Fabians, are the real descendants of the “utopian” socialists whom Marx and Engels were so sure they had superseded. The withering away of the state which is to take place in the postrevolutionary epoch depends on the elimination of the important social conflicts that make the state a necessity in all societies except those living under primitive communism. It is in the eradication of such conflicts,

9

and the destruction of the institutions which enshrine them, that there lies a moral justification for the violent seizure of power. The weakness of Mr. Thompson’s position is that his picture of “Revolution” involves the continued existence of the characteristic institutions of industrial society, which will simply be controlled by different people for different purposes, responsive to the “popular will”, whatever that may be. This picture lacks the simple strength and self-contained consistency to be found in the orthodox Marxist formula, and is no longer very different from the reformism to whose intellectual shoddiness he is so hostile. Moreover, while it has lost the inexorable straightforwardness of Marxism, it still involves two of the classic Marxist over-simplifications. The first is that of regarding the ownership of the means of production as the key to social justice (what Arthur Koestler once called “the doctrine of the unshaken foundations”), and the second is the fallacy that the working-class is fundamentally concerned with the question of private ownership. The experience of the Soviet Union cannot be said to endorse the first proposition, and that of Great Britain gives little support to the latter. This fundamental other-worldliness of Marxism is one of the reasons for its persistent neglect of practically all aspects of the world we live in, apart from a curious brand of teleological economics. Mr. Thompson has not, I think, been able to free himself from this attitude, though his article makes passing references to some sociological questions, and he does attack the orthodox denial of the value of all social reforms. However, it is necessary to go much further. Socialism originated as a protest against industrialisation, which can easily take other-worldly forms, but it also was, and remains, a movement for social and political equality in the here and now. Its chances of gaining a public hearing and of effecting positive changes in the structure of British society depend heavily on its continued activity and success in exposing the manifold and complex inequalities and injustices of our society; some of these, the result of capitalism; some inherent in all industrial communities; and some characteristic of Britain in particular. Until recently, Socialists have not been particularly concerned to distinguish between these distinct factors.

10

Yet the need to do so grows more important all the time. For more than two generations, industrial countries have been characterised by a steady increase in bureaucratisation and the steady growth of the managerial function both in industry and in government. Not only has the proportion of managerial personnel grown steadily within each sector, but bureaucratic management has become increasingly typical of more and more areas of organised human activity. The conflicts within these bureaucratic hierarchies, and the relationships between them, are central to the “affluent society” of today, and it is not necessary to accept C. Wright Mills’ exaggerated theory of the “power elite” to believe this. In particular, the relations between government and industry require the most searching and continuous examination. To leap to the defence of Clause Four is only the most elementary step. To some extent, all political groups nowadays recognise that there is a complex, plural relationship between public and private decisions on economic and social questions. It is the conclusions to be drawn from this that differ so sharply from one group to another, and it is not enough to condemn Mr. Gaitskell’s complacent acceptance of the “mixed economy” as a logical reason for abandoning Labour’s traditional policy on public ownership. Whether we like it or not, some kind of mixture is going to be with us for a long time. In such circumstances, it becomes of the utmost importance not only to press for the occupation of the “commanding heights”, but also to expose the ways in which the mixed economy makes the community vulnerable to manipulation in the interests of private profit, developing new forms of social inequality as well as fortifying old ones. It is this attack on the “new inequality” that is perhaps the most important task of the New Left. Professor Titmuss has already pointed in this direction, but similar points must be made more widely and more loudly. Finally, it is tremendously important to expose, as vigorously as possible, the sociological basis of Britain’s class-ridden society. Mr. Thompson’s catalogue of condemned institutions—the House of Lords, Sandhurst, the Stock Exchange, and the National Debt— has a curiously old-world ring. He should concentrate instead on the public schools, Oxford and Cambridge, and above all else, the eleven-plus examination.

IN HIS editorial in NLR 3 Stuart Hall wrote that although the Left had succeeded in fending off the attempt “to strangle the subject of common ownership” it had not been able to muster strength enough to set a socialist alternative before the Labour movement. On public ownership, the Left has to do two main things. It has to dissect critically the mixed economy we live in, and reveal its true face, in order to tear away the rightwing gloss on ‘statism’, ‘managerialism’, ‘affluence’. In addition, we have to extend our study of things as they are, and sharpen the presentation and communication of it. One part of this article attempts to take this vital job a bit further. Then there is the discussion of an immediate strategy and programme. The big break-through here, CND, has had little organic connection yet with a radical challenge to our economic and social fabric. The New Left has developed its views as to a new political strategy on the side of incomes and Trade Union action for instance, (Socialist Wages Plan by Hughes and Alexander), but this has hardly penetrated to the active trade unionists, with whom we have as yet too few links (nor did we write directly for them, in their language). So another part of this article suggests some lines of work on “strategy”, in the hope of developing a discussion that is most urgently needed. We have to work out a political strategy for the here and now, which will both challenge the main power groups who hold the “commanding heights” of British capitalism, their values, and their priorities; and go on to state and fight for the sort of socialist alternative that is built on existing problems and needs, and not just on wishfulfilment.

John Hughes

In Socialism for the 1960s (a Tribune pamphlet) I tried to dissect Mr. Gaitskell’s arguments on public ownership and Clause 4 in his Blackpool speech—for what they were worth, and I certainly won’t go over them again here. But the whole speech was built on question-begging and ambiguous phrasing, until the final monumental piece of ambiguity, “We have long ago come to accept a mixed economy, at least in some form”. Mr. Gaitskell still hasn’t told us which of the two sectors in the mixed economy should be dominant and why. This kind of ambiguity is seen at its worst in Mr. Crosland’s Fabian pamphlet Can Labour Win? Intellectually it is the shoddiest offering we have had from the Fabians for a long time, completely avoiding any examination of our society and economy. Its uneasy opportunism spells a fundamental acceptance of British capitalism which is inherent in Mr. Crosland’s views. He offers a list of “critical issues”, and then is himself moved to say of them, “It will not be easy for Labour to annex these . . . in as much as the Tories are becoming most adept at stepping smartly left”. What a comment! After a decade of Tory rule Mr. Crosland’s list of “critical issues” is such that they could be annexed by the Tories. Clearly, if a major and radical programme of economic and social change were not needed after a decade of Tory rule, the differences between the Labour Movement and its objectives and values, and those of the Tories and big business on the other hand must be marginal indeed. But does an examination of the face of British capitalism suggest such a conclusion? This we turn to next.

THE COMMANDING HEIGHTS

THE MIXED ECONOMY In Part 1 of this article, John Hughes depicts the contemporary landscape of power with its commanding heights. He attacks the popular myth that ownership is no longer relevant, and pinpoints the particular forms of social irresponsibility taken by private bureaucratic power in the economy.

One might call it, their commanding heights. We are looking at a network of power relations, and we want to understand what their main characteristics are, what policies (typically) they give rise to, and how these are implemented (through what institutions). This is not something that can be confined to economic analysis, since political strategy is vitally important to these power groups. It is not something that occurs simply in the “private” or “company” sector either, for these policies dominate the operation of the public sector too —and particularly the nationalised industries. Most of the economy, and particularly the industries characteristic of modern industrial technique, are dominated by giant firms. The National Institute has recently published a study, Concentration in British Industry, analysing material from the 1951 Census of Production. All the evidence of profit data, and takeovers and mergers, shows that concentration has gone further since. Nor does their method of measurement even touch on the ramifications of control stemming from large minority blocks of shareholding by one firm in another, or collusion and agreement explicit and implicit between firms. Still, their material shows that, of the trade groups they surveyed (219 of them), only trades accounting for slightly over one-fifth of total employment did not show an appreciable concentration of market power in the hands of a very few firms. In all the rest, the three largest firms accounted for at least one-third of employment in their trade group, and/or were at least sixteen times as big as the average sized firm among “the rest”. The power such concentration gives, reinforced as it is by agreements between firms and general acceptance of price leadership by the largest firms, gives them a considerable control over prices and profit margins. The larger of these giant firms straddle more than one trade group, are large and secure enough to raise capital easily from the stock exchange, and inter-connect with the big banks and insurance companies. (Of the growing body of literature on this, see particularly, The Insiders, the series on The Controllers in ULR by M. Barratt Brown, Peter Shore’s Chapter in Conviction, Tribune pamphlet Socialism For The Sixties and Professor Titmuss’s Fabian pamphlet, The Irresponsible Society). However, we are told that these giant companies are in fact strongholds of “managerialism”. The Labour Party’s policy document Industry and Society strove hard to convince us of this: “the world of the managers is not the world of the shareholders” . . . “apart from

12

providing small sums of additional capital the traditional functions of share-holders have virtually disappeared in the case of the large firms”. The fact that companies can function effectively and grow in the absence of private shareholders is taken as a general demonstration that ownership has become “irrelevant” (Industry and Society, p. 38). Even if this were so at present (which it is not), to justify the domination of the economy by the boards of the giant firms would require something more than a general whitewash of their performance. For if the giants are not accountable to their shareholders, why should they not be made accountable to the community? Why tolerate irresponsible concentrations of power? Industry and Society gave us platitudes (“these companies should conduct their affairs in a manner which coincides with the interests of the community” . . . this involves “a sense of responsibility to the nation”, p. 49) instead of proposals for control. “The Labour Party recognises that, under increasingly professional managements, large firms are as a whole serving the nation well” (Industry and Society, p. 48). After this, all the British Iron and Steel Federation had to do in its antinationalisation propaganda was to echo the phrase, “Steel is serving the nation well”. The truth of the matter is (a) there are very close links between ownership and control in the very largest firms, but this has important new characteristics; (b) the power wielded by the boards of the industrial giants, whether or not it is irresponsible in relation to control by large shareholders, certainly is irresponsible in relation to the community although dominating the community’s life and future; this power has been used in ways extremely damaging to the community economically, and when used politically, in ways extremely damaging to what democracy we retain; (c) the selfish interests of the industrial and finance oligarchy dominate the operation also of the nationalised industries.

Seats of Power On ownership, we are indebted to the new material collected by Professor Sargant Florence (The Times, August 11, 12, 1959). He points out that “take-over bids have given a rude shock” to the view that “no shareholders have now any power”. Highly concentrated shareholdings are well in evidence in the largest companies, but between 1936 and 1951, the percentage of shares concentrated in the hands of the

20 largest shareholders fell in 71 and rose in only 21 of the very largest companies. This process of falling concentration, as might be expected, was most in evidence in the companies whose capital was growing in this period. Still, many of these giants (capital £3 million or more in 1951) were clearly owner-dominated. Of the 92, 16 had a single shareholder holding 20 per cent or more of the shares. In a further 19 companies, the 20 largest shareholders held 30 per cent or more of the shares between them (in 8 of these an unusually large proportion of the ordinary shares were owned by the directors themselves). Sargant Florence emphasises that the presence of large shareholdings implies control motives, because if income were the main concern, risks would be spread; but “with the exception of the large insurance companies this risk spreading does not appear to occur” with the large shareholders. There are also relations between large shareholders—as he says “they often, literally, are relations”. Thus there are very strong links between large shareholdings and control. This link re-appears from a new direction. The argument of the managerialists is that the rentier spreads his risks and foregoes control. The insurance companies do this, but they have acquired such vast holdings of equity shares (picking up the bulk of new issues on the market), that their holdings become large enough to influence control, especially when they act together (as they do). In 1951, 44 insurance companies held £338 million of ordinary shares (which carry voting rights); in 1958, 45 insurance companies held £911 million of ordinary shares. Here, as in other cases, large shareholdings constitute ownership by companies. Direction does not become divorced from ownership, it becomes more inter-locked, while ownership may itself be corporate. In any case, managerial controlled, or owner controlled, one can detect no significant difference in their attitude towards profits and the way they discharge their “responsibilities” towards the community. So, ownership is relevant to control of the industrial giants. What forms does their irresponsible and antisocial behaviour take? I have examined this post-war “record” at length in Socialism For The 1960’s and I wish to avoid duplicating the argument of that pamphlet here. But it is essential to explode the myth that “large firms are . . . serving the nation well”. We need to know how the “commanding heights” behave. Let’s list some aspects of their performance. 1. They generate price inflation and a vast distribution of unearned income. On this, my favourite quote is from the National Provincial Bank Review (Aug. ’57) where the Finance Director of I.C.I. summed up their price policy under inflationary conditions thus: “The greater the rate of expansion in a particular industry and the more serious the inflation, the more the emphasis has to be placed on the provision of new equipment from internal sources and that can only mean from increased

selling prices of the present production”. (Our emphasis). Benevolent managerialism? The link between disproportionately great increases in profits (pushing up prices faster thereby) and the concentration of industrial power, is very clear. In 1949, the 100 largest firms secured 25 per cent of all profits made; in 1955, 31½ per cent of the total. Moreover, the industries which are most concentrated are the ones where profits per unit of output have increased most sharply in recent years. All the industries listed in Concentration In British Industry where employment (in the three largest firms) is more highly concentrated than elsewhere show bigger increases in profits per unit of output than less concentrated industries. Table 1. Monopoly and Profit Inflation Industry

219 trades (av.) Manufacturing (av.) Chemicals & Allied trades Metal manufacture Electrical engineering Vehicles Shipbuilding & engin. Drink & Tobacco Food

Degree of Concentration (%)*

% rise in profits per unit of output 1948–57

29%

29%

51% 39% 48% 41% 31% 36% 30%

66% 79%

} }

53% 34%

(Source: Evely & Little. Concentration in British Industry, p. 62. National Income Blue Book, 1959). * Percentage of employment in hands of three largest firms in each trade. It is only necessary to add that the inflationary increase in profits was most marked in and led into the periods of full capacity and strong inflationary pressure. That happened in 1950–51, in 1954–55, and it is happening again now. The profit flood, of course, generates unearned incomes in two directions; distributed profits (rising faster than wages) and capital gains. The main source of the latter is in the so-called “self-financing” of investment, but this process would be better called the “consumer-financing” or “community-financing” of additions to capital equipment. For the company sector as a whole, profits after tax and dividend distribution are still so vast that they are greater than expenditure on new investment and stock-building. The current consumer pays (out of his earned income if he is a worker), but the assets and the real wealth generated accrue to those lilies of the field who hold the equity. Last year, the value of shares quoted on the stock exchange rose, in anticipation of the profit flood of the early 1960’s, by £6,990 million. A tidy sum. And when capital gains are realised, tax free. This profit flood, in its turn is the main cause of a regime of high interest rates. The main borrower in our

13

system is—the public sector. The public sector must borrow from the people with the money. But the people with the money (including the insurance companies) are attracted towards investment in equities, lured on by the attraction of capital gains. So? So the public sector cannot borrow more money except by offering high interest rates. The burden of public debt (central and local government) interest payments skyrockets under such conditions—between 1951 and 1958 increasing by more than a third to £920 million p.a. (The other main force leading to high short-term interest rates stems from the policies imposed by another commanding height, the City institutions engaged in international finance, but there is no space for that here.) So it turns out that the council tenant’s rent charge and monopoly control of the commanding heights are closely linked. But has the Labour Party ever explained that? 2. The giant companies are quite as anti-social in their handling of their investment policies. Our economy lurches through the trade cycle in the old familiar way. Fortunately, the decline in employment tends to be less sharply felt than the decline in capital use. This is, of course, not much consolation for those who do suffer. For one thing, unemployment is regionally concentrated because of the anti-social approach to the location of new investment in the 1950’s. Further, the cycle of activity is particularly associated with the instability of company investment. In the upswing, with unused capacity, firms delay investment decisions until increasing sales, fuller capacity working, and higher profit margins, encourage a wave of expansion. We are going through this now. The rate of investment accelerates suddenly, just when the economy has fewer reserves of unused resources to draw upon. Export orders get delayed by lengthening order books, imports of machine tools, etc., increase. The balance of payments deteriorates. Prices advance—and the Trade Unions are blamed. One way of looking at this process is to tot up the waste of productive resources in the years of stagnation. At such times, the waste (in the sense of the useful goods and services that we could have had) is quite as high as in the 1930s. If we take the under-use of industrial capacity by 1958, we were foregoing about £2,000 million of potential production. Add to that the 8 per cent of national income (£1,600 million) diverted to a mythical “defence”. We have here a tremendous waste of resources, coupled with a semi-stagnating economy. 3. The giant companies determine the extreme inequality of “earned” incomes. They build and sustain a world of status, of conspicuous consumption, of the purchase of privilege. The salary structure itself has a 100–1 range. Tax erodes that somewhat, but business expenses, “top hat” pensions, and the like, push once again towards extremes of privilege. It is not necessary to labour the point; the consequences of

14

creating a hierarchical society, and the contrast with the conditions of the lower paid and those on “welfare” benefits—these are obvious enough. 4. There is no guarantee either of efficiency in production methods used, or adequate capacity to meet current or future needs of the economy. Not only did British shipbuilding take no part at all in the rapid growth of world capacity, so that we are now a net importer of new shipping (Britain’s share of world output of ships falling from 40 per cent in 1951 to less than 16 per cent on the latest figures). At the end of this period of rapid growth in capacity, the British industry is so backward that the New Scientist’s scientific editor can argue that the competitive position will steadily worsen unless there are radical changes: “Roughly twice as many man-hours are needed to build a ship in a British yard as in the modern foreign ones. Yet the process of building a ship is one which, because it is untouched by modern production methods, offers the greatest advantage from their application” (New Scientist, 21.5.1960). Untouched by modern production methods! And Mr. Margerison’s suggestions —mergers, and public money, “civil development contracts”. As for the repeated and calamitous failures of the steel industry in the 1950s, I have chronicled those elsewhere (cf. Plan for Steel Re-Nationalisation). What is interesting is that, although this was the one “commanding height” the Labour Party was committed to nationalise, the Labour Party neither undertook any study of the industry, nor even attempted any effective criticism of it. One story may suffice to show what might have been achieved. The Spectator, late in 1958, set up an “independent commission” to investigate the argument for and against steel nationalisation. This consisted of three people “independent” of the Labour movement or socialist views. However, they largely accepted the evidence presented for nationalisation and, solely on grounds of economic inadequacy (for we did not attempt to put forward a socialist argument against irresponsible power), concluded that the industry should have “as a permanent arrangement, a public as well as a private sector”. But neither before, then, nor later, did the Labour Party put before the public the case for steel nationalisation that turned The Spectator’s ploy into a defeat for the Iron and Steel Federation. 5. They mercilessly exploit the nationalised industries for their own direct economic interests. Here, again, the detailed case for arguing that, in our two sector economy, it is capitalist industry that dominates both sectors is to be found in Socialism for the 1960s. This argument will not be retraced here, but it is worth while pointing out the political exploitation of nationalisation by capital. Let’s look at it from the point of view of their commanding heights. There is, as Marx remarked, a

certain primitive communism about capital. Thus, they do not believe that it is right for nationalised industries to make surpluses at their expense. Over the last decade, the National Income figures show the nationalised industries failing to cover production costs and replacement of equipment by approximately £1,295,000,000. For this sum the nationalised industries must go—to the moneylender. Moreover, the big firms feel that lucrative public contracts should be shared out among the brethren. While the railways sink under a burden of capital debt and increased borrowings, lucrative contracts for diesels are shared out among the big electrical engineering firms, although it would be far more economic for the railways to operate only one standard type (and only have to hold a single range of spares, etc.) and its unit production cost could have been greatly reduced. Instead, “fair shares”; primitive communism among the giant firms.

Manufacturing Opinions The very difficulties in which they involve the nationalised industries, the very industries out of which they extort monopoly profits and from which they buy at artificially low prices—these become also a political prop to the system. The process is two-sided; projection of the image of a beneficent industrial capitalism, and sustained criticism of public sector industries. The press, that other “commanding height”, is their main instrument. What is new is that capital has come down openly into the political arena, using its massed resources to manufacture—public opinion. The newspapers after all are, commercially speaking, arrangements for selling advertisements rather than conveying facts. They are also, now, highly concentrated in ownership. But this is a dictatorship by capital all the same, using the method of manipulating “attitudes”, creating the “identifications” that panic Mr. Crosland, instead of overt force. The press does the other half of the job too—it projects an image of nationalisation that is wholly unfavourable. One gathers from the papers that only nationalised industries raise prices, and this is why other industries reluctantly follow; trade union wage claims in the public sector enable the workers-asconsumers to be turned against the organisations and demands of workers-as-producers because of the manner in which these claims are presented. The steady increase in the profits and rentier income extorted from the nationalised industries—about £500 million a year now—goes unremarked by the press readership. Instead, Mr. Cousins is the popular bogey (although for instance the London bus strike was over a claim that, fully granted, would have involved no more than £1 million a year). Mr. Crosland and the authors of Industry and Society see this process of dictatorship by the mass media at work, the harmful “identification” ingeniously developed, and retreat in dismay. The leaders of the Labour Party complain about the papers,

but they so rarely identify or challenge the power which lies behind the attitudes of the press.

The Labour Oligarchy The sketch of the organisation and economic and political behaviour of the “commanding heights” of our economy is far from complete. But it is enough to indicate why the right wing leadership of the Labour Party finds itself in disarray. They never did talk objectively and analytically about the system, but concocted myths of “statism”, and a reformed “welfare” capitalism instead. Now they hardly talk about the system at all, but base their views on what people think they are and what they think nationalisation is. Where did this subjective picture derive from, and does it conform with reality? There is no guarantee that the electorate is yet ready to swing towards a Labour Movement basing itself on a radical critique of our society and an alternative programme of socialist construction. But even Mr. Gaitskell cannot deny that they have swung away from a Labour Movement without such a critique and policy. Moreover, the Labour Movement can no longer secure unity around a platform of consolidation and minor reforms—the real world breaks in and will not allow it. This is not to deny the predominantly conservative bias of the Labour Party machine and much of the Trade Union hierarchy—but the real world breaks in, nevertheless. Can the workers in coal and public transport, or in shipbuilding, fail to see the need for radical change in their own interests? Can the trade union leaderships not see that the unions are being systematically weakened and isolated by the press treatment of them as the irresponsible power group in our society, as the agents of inflation and instability, as the threat to individual freedom? They see this, and fear it. The leadership try to alter the trade union “image” without attacking monopoly capitalism, but instead by doing what the press asks and turning on the workshop militants. That road only divides the movement against itself, while leaving press dictatorship as effective as ever. They have to move left. They have to challenge capitalism. The one telling point in Crosland’s pamphlet is the political effect of the attack on the trade unions; Gallup polls show that more people (43 per cent) think the trade unions have too much power than those who think that financiers and bankers have too much power. The press “images” of public ownership and of the trade unions overlap— the perpetuation and strengthening of the political and economic power of capital’s “commanding heights” requires a continuous struggle against the Labour Movement’s industrial strength and potentially socialist outlook. So, the Labour Movement is impelled to move towards a more radical challenge to the system than at any time since the war. A consolidationist platform has not worked the miracle electorally; but it certainly

15

has further weakened the institutions of the Labour Movement. The Labour Movement cannot know how quickly support would be gained for a challenging radical programme, because for more than a decade it has never tried, it has not made one onslaught on any of the “commanding heights”. Now it has to work out a new radical programme and strategy. This is where the discussion on public ownership must lead. So now we must begin to construct a new radical strategy. Drawing up socialist programmes can all too easily become an experiment in wish-fulfilment. In the process of arguing priorities too, one has to state principles;

and here too it is possible to engage in a discussion that is fruitless, because not pinned down in relation to existing organisations, institutions, social needs. Both Mr. Gaitskell at Blackpool and Mr. Crosland in Can Labour Win produce long lists of socialist principles in this way. The proposed change in the Party Constitution is another exercise of this kind. We have to proceed instead in two ways. We must build from the real needs and interests of people, the unsolved conflicts and contradictions in our society. In what we propose, in the way we raise issues, we have to remember the need to reach out and challenge “their” commanding heights.

UNMIXING THE MIXED ECONOMY In Part 2, John Hughes sketches a strategy for scaling the commanding heights. He highlights the particular responsibilities of the Trade Union movement, if the political outcome of the 1960s is to be different from that of the 1950s. Let’s take an example. Mr. Morgan Phillips is quoted in The Times (May 14, 1960) as explaining Labour local election losses thus: “Labour controlled authorities have been carrying the can for the Tory Government whose financial policies have imposed very heavy burdens upon them, leading to increases of rates and rent”. I am not pretending he is right; obviously this is not the whole story or we should expect Labour gains where the authorities were Tory controlled. But look at the question of the character and content of socialist work in local authorities. Rates and rents. We have explained in Part 1 why interest rates are high. Has every Labour councillor explained this to tenants and constituents? And how far did organised protest go? To change this, it would be necessary to subordinate the lending policy of banks and insurance companies to public authority, to force low interest rate loans for essential social investment. Has the Labour Party said this? Where, then, do we begin? Part of the obstacle to a new strategy comes from the failure of the Labour movement to appraise critically where the assumptions, methods, and objectives of post-war Labour policy (especially the Labour government) have led. To list these briefly:— 1. Morrisonian nationalisation, with its emphasis on selling as cheap as possible and its ignoring of the longer-range problems, including relations with nonnationalised industries, and social relations within nationalised industries. 2. The cult of “business efficiency” and Bigness, especially since it prepared the way for the whitewashing of “managerialism” in capitalist industry.

16

3. Power and control. The retreat from social accountability is all but complete. Confronted with an autocratic and irresponsible narrow oligarchy of “decisiontakers” the Labour Party is, if not innocent, then naked of proposals for social accountability in both public and private sectors. Yet this is a “democratic” socialist party! 4. Welfare policy. The edifice of welfare arrangements erected after the war included only one that was clearly socialist in character—“to each according to need”— and that was the Health Service. The socialist content of Labour’s welfare measures was always inadequate and is now extinguished, outside Health. Liberal self-help holds the field. Is this the welfare state “we all accept”? 5. Incomes policy. What shreds of policy Labour had were largely destroyed in its term of office. Wage “restraint” to meet short term needs (more exports, then more arms) became the philosophy. In 1959, Mr. Gaitskell could still ask for “restraint” so that a (hypothetical) Labour government could increase the rate of business investment as a first priority! “Restraint” for the worker was income foregone; for the rentier it was only income deferred. 6. Defence. Comment not required! In all these cases, most of the main assumptions and methods have been found wanting or have been abandoned. Yet little critical discussion has taken place. The result is, of course, damaging. For instance, the Labour policy statement Public Enterprise made a highly uncritical defence of nationalised industries as they are instead of a socialist criticism, which is what was needed. What do we put in the place of the main ideas of the Labour oligarchy in the post-war years?

Perhaps we ought to distinguish between the blueprint of what changes we give priority to, and the way in which we raise these questions in the Labour movement and with the “electorate”. However, it seems better to try to envisage how these demands will crop up, who will be formulating them, in what organisations. “Shopping lists” for public ownership extension are two a penny. What do we put in place of the old approach to nationalised industries, controls, business expertise, and welfare and incomes policies?

Nationalised Industries In the first place, one must seek initiative on the part of the trade unions directly involved, and the M.P.s most closely connected with them. The reader should not be in any doubt as to the criticism to be made of existing nationalisation. Politically, it makes sense to concentrate a great deal of attention on the purchases by nationalised industries from private firms and the profits arising at the expense of the community. We should demand, in the first place, far more information and direct accountability; and, as a general policy, that the nationalised industries should undertake more productive services themselves. For the future, we need to begin with public “take-over” of some of the biggest electrical engineering and civil engineering firms, where the bulk of order books are derived from the public sector. We need also to criticise the enormous and rapidly growing burden of capital charges imposed at present (£250 million p.a.). In its place, we should seek— where there are no substitutes—to confront capitalist industry (but not the individual consumer) with capitalist pricing. At the same time, the finance of continued borrowing should take place (a) by higher tax rates on unearned income and the lending of these sums to nationalised industries by the state at very low interest, (b) forced loans from banks and insurance companies at low interest rates. The Trade Unions in transport and fuel and power have a major responsibility for working out a detailed policy, based on social needs instead of oil company profits. It is extremely important to obtain much more joint discussion and unity of action among the major unions in nationalised industry. The triple alliance should return in a new guise. Within these industries, the Trade Unions should take the initiative in taking up the slack in the use of consultation. This alonewould impose on them the need for a rapid extension of their membership training and education. But they must go on to advocate radical improvements in public accountability and major experiments in industrial democracy. If there is not a major initiative on this front, how can a direct attack be made on the lack of social accountability of big business in the private sector? There is no single correct pattern for the structure and control of publicly owned industries or firms, but here is one possible approach which would make it easier to suggest proposals for control also over private industries not yet brought into the public sector.

Where public ownership and control cover most of an industry, the national executive board could be avoided as being far too cumbersome and centralised (except for special cases such as electricity generation). What could fill the place of the executive board would be an executive authority, operating in a more de-centralised fashion at the level of regional board or nationally based firms; these could throw up federal institutions where needed (e.g. research; staff training). At national level, then, strong Supervisory Boards, with a considerable representative element (including Trade Unions and consumer organisations), would function; these would publish periodic reports on the progress of firms supervised and the overall position of the industry, together with proposals for co-ordinated planning (which need not be unanimous) aimed at the responsible Minister. Either one could have M.P.s on such boards, or their reports could be subjects of parliamentary debate and question. We might then have more of the “searchlight” of published information the Webbs asked for, and less of the present “smokescreen”. The Minister would have power, as now, to issue general directives but it would be more difficult for him to evade parliamentary scrutiny The point here would be to secure accountability to Parliament, and at the same time to break up the overcentralised structure of present nationalisation. Within the regions, or firms, the clutter of “higher management levels” existing “above” the operating unit could then be considerably thinned out. It should not be assumed that operational management is irresponsible and needs close personal supervision, if only because it is only where operational management has scope and responsibility that there is some significant sphere of control over job environment and plant development for workers to participate in. For control over the unit, standard costing and measures of comparative performance (using operational research teams) is far better than tiers of “higher” administration. At plant level, as well as at the level of regional board or directorate of the state owned firm, we must begin to experiment in worker and Trade Union participation (they are not the same): both in terms of election to the boards, and in terms of workers’ control over hitherto “managerial” functions (welfare provision, supervisory appointments, safety regulation). Democratic participation and supervision must go at least as far as this in the public sector, if we are to make a real challenge to the autocracy and lack of social accountability in private industry. After all, the criticism levelled at the nationalised industries by men who work in them is not simply (as Mr. Crosland and Mr. Gaitskell would have us think) that they are inefficient, but—more important— that they are not sufficiently different from private enterprise, which is not the same thing. So that our task must be to ensure that productive relations within the nationalised industries are genuinely socialist in character, thereby clearly distinguishing socialist from capitalist forms of economic organisation: which is so

17

clearly what has not happened so far in nationalisation. And this is, indeed, one of the major “commanding heights”—the irresponsible oligarchy of decisionmakers in our economic life, and the hierarchical pattern of “command” in capitalist enterprise. The trade unions must not only say this; they must prepare for it. We don’t want a repetition of the old cry that there are no workers able to participate adequately in industry. The trade unions can go half way to their objective now if they will only build up adequate research departments scrutinising the conduct of their particular industry, and really large scale training of members.

The Private Sector There is both a general job to do here and a particular one. Obviously, it is necessary to get each major Union to probe the character of and weaknesses in the industrial structure of its trade groups. If the unions would only take the initiative in organising such critical examination, it would be a great step forward. We need a sustained criticism of the monopoly practices and policies, the profit margin and investment policies, the inefficiency and missed opportunities, of the major industries. The material is not impossible to come by; our boom-and-bust economy provides new raw material every day. Moreover, if the trade unions don’t take the initiative, the press will take the initiative against them. The big Federations can do a great deal here; it is a very long time since the N.F.B.T.O. or the Confed looked at the possibilities of extending public ownership and control in their industries. Yet in building, for instance, there is an urgent case for social ownership to be advanced, including the need for publicly owned civil engineering firms, and a major extension of local authority direct labour, particularly if the proposals for municipal housing that the Labour Party drew up were to go through. Here is a point where the case for social ownership goes hand in hand with the demands for expanding welfare. In engineering, the Confed has no excuse for delaying a detailed and continuous examination of aircraft, machine tools, shipbuilding—three sectors with serious weaknesses—and the biggest electrical engineering firms, as one of the key commanding heights. Besides this, it is the task of the Labour Party to develop an overall critique of irresponsible power and the way it is used. The most urgent need, in terms of economic affairs, is an attack on the boom-bust economy, and the refusal to use adequate controls over industrial investment, both as to location and timing, and over price advances and the enormous flood of profit increases. The minimum control over an inflation/ stagnation economy, would involve the use of building licences, with tax allowances (initial allowances, etc.) only for businesses that co-operate with the state over

18

both location and timing (an investment tax on the remainder). On prices and profit margins, they should advocate a revival and extension of monopoly control techniques (the Monopolies Commission was cut down heavily in size and scope in 1956), with Control Boards in basic supply industries (particularly chemicals, and building materials), and the use of higher tax rates on firms that increase their profit margins on capital (or their profits per unit of output). Labour can argue these things both in the national interest (price stability, the balance of payments) and in consumer interests. It is crucial that the public, for the first time since the war, should be treated to an “image” of big business and business power very far from that of “serving the nation well”. One of the most effective ways to raise the whole question of control over the private sector, is to develop a comprehensive programme for consumer protection. This is a crucial challenge to capitalism because it poses, not only the question of prices and profits, of standards and quality, and monopoly power; it raises, as a central matter, the exploitation of the consumer through persuasion, the damage done when, in place of objective information and advice, there stands high pressure salesmanship and manipulation. (I am still wedded to the idea of using BBC television for objective reporting on goods; such “anti-commercials” to be relayed in “natural breaks” in the programme. But see Raymond Williams’s article on Advertising in this issue). A frontal attack on “the hidden persuaders”, an exposure of their techniques, further strengthening of the law on misrepresentation of goods, and on the other hand official backing for objective reporting and consumer advice services—this is striking at the whole system of manipulation of people. It seems incredible, for example, that advertisements of the usual kind are treated as a legitimate business expense.

Consumer Goods and Distribution Consumer protection raises the question of the Co-operative Movement. That movement should have pressed upon it the urgent need for a policy aimed at challenging monopoly power in the consumer goods industries and distribution. The sooner co-operative multiples appear, the better. But besides this, the establishment of state owned multiples, working on a low margin basis, and selling good quality products should be contemplated. It comes as a shock to find that in 1957 the multiple shops selling household goods (i.e. furniture, electrical goods, hardware, etc.) added, on average, 56 per cent to their wholesale prices, retail costs alone accounting for 7s. 2d. in every £1 that consumers spent on household goods. An interesting sidelight on the hire-purchase boom. Soon after the War, a committee reported on the marketing of foodstuffs, only to have its conclusions pigeonholed. They envisaged, in fact, the same technique

of Supervisory Boards that has been argued for above. It is high time the proposals of the Lucas Committee (which U.S.D.A.W. used to support) were acted on: to be precise, they were, that Commodity Commissions should supervise the channels of distribution and processing of foodstuffs, and directly enter the field of processing or distribution if they were not satisfied with the performance of existing firms. The use of consumer protection as the approach to criticism and advocacy of control of capitalist business does not strike at many of the “commanding heights” very directly. Some of these lie far back from the field of individual consumption. So it cannot be the sole method of criticism. But it could effectively put capitalism on the defensive, if it is seriously undertaken.

Incomes And Welfare I take these two together, because if we are to rouse the social conscience of people about national minimum standards in welfare—or rather the lack of them—we cannot forget the role of the trade unions in this. Put it this way. In the 1950’s the increased income of the community was unevenly and inequitably distributed. We know who benefited most in this, but to a considerable extent it was the trade unions who were the scapegoats, and the rentier and profit groups who reaped the political benefit. Why? In the 1950’s the trade unions settled down with three-quarters of women employees unorganised and nearly half the men. The weakness is most apparent in those trades where workers can least of all defend themselves (e.g. Wage Council industries). The trade unions during this period were advancing claims sectionally; as one must expect in a market economy, the workers in a favoured market position secured the advantage, while the mass of ill-organised workers achieved very little. An examination of Wage Council rates show that. These (including the women, and many of the young workers) are politically and organisationally the least attached to the Labour Movement. The narrow sectionalism of trade union wage policy in the 1950’s, its loss of emphasis on the “living wage”, on “levelling up”, has served to alienate large groups of the workers who have enjoyed least “affluence”. The trade unions have to tackle wage and incomes policy at three different levels. Firstly they must join with the Labour Party in formulating and campaigning for a greatly improved system of social security (and not one financed regressively, with the proportionately biggest levy on those who can least afford it). Benefits need a more realistic subsistence base than Beveridge elaborated, an improvement factor to keep them in line with post-war increases in wage levels (after all, what is poverty? It is reduction of income below the social norm), and automatic adjustment to price rises.

Housing and rents form another aspect of the programme required. Secondly, they must join with the Labour Party in working out the main outlines of criticism of the Conservatives’ income and price policy, and of the type of policy a Labour government would pursue on re-distributive taxation, price controls, and the growth of the economy, to guarantee a steady and properly distributed increase in real incomes. Thirdly, they must work out a strategy of wage policy and economic demands now, which will help to convey to the public their ideas as to what income distribution is desirable. This will attract, instead of alienating, the less organised and less well-protected workers, and will secure wider unity within and between the Unions themselves. One would like to see the co-ordination of Trade Union action in Wage Council trades, with vigorous and extensive publicity as to wage levels and the lag in wage rises in the most backward. We need a concerted drive on women’s pay and conditions (this has to go with a thorough shake up of trade union organisation for women). We need a programme for young workers, including paid dayrelease and/or approved training for skill, an attack on employment in dead-end jobs, a close scrutiny of youth employment service work. Industrial demands should aim particularly at increased control over the length of the working week, and greatly improved redundancy provisions, including large compensation funds and rules as to the handling of redundancy and re-hiring. The boom, not the downswing, is the time to pay attention to this, At the same time, the Labour Movement itself must put forward demands for the economic policies that would maintain greater stability and improved real incomes. All this implies a most urgent need for greater co-ordination of wage policies, a realisation of the great political significance of the right claim advanced in the right way, and a striking improvement in the unions very inadequate communication with their own members and wholely inadequate ability (or apparent desire, often) to communicate with the general public. This transformation of the role and methods of work of the trade unions is probably the key to the whole situation. It is on this that the socialists in the trade unions must concentrate. This is the test of the ability and political sense of, say, Frank Cousins, or Alan Birch. The present boom is not only too good an opportunity to miss to use trade union strength to secure some re-distribution of income in the way of “levelling-up”. It is fraught with the danger that, as in the 1950’s, if the trade unions do not rise to the needs of the Labour Movement and challenge the economic consequences of British capitalism, it is they who will be pilloried as the agents of price inflation and economic difficulties. The economic conditions of the early 1960’s will be basically similar to those of the later 1950’s. It is the socialist forces in the trade unions who, above all, must see to it that the political outcome is different.

19

Duncan Macbeth analyses the use and misuse of the motor vehicle in an “affluent” society. He relates the “spontaneous chaos” of traffic and congestion to the collapse of planning and the abandonment of comprehensive development in our cities. The motor manufacturers, driven by the search for profits, call for “more roads”, but the problem cannot be solved within the competitive framework of a free enterprise economy.

20

THE MOTOR vehicle is one of the most useful tools, as well as one of the most fascinating toys, that man has ever invented. But used wastefully, selfishly and stupidly, as it is being used throughout capitalist society today, it is causing casualties on a military scale (nearly 80,000 people have been killed on British roads since the war), threatening to disrupt the cities and overrun the countryside, and destroying the most agreeable features of town life with its danger, noise, fumes and congestion. This may sound absurdly pessimistic, but that is only because the scale and complexity of the problems raised by universal car ownership are not widely understood. The motorist who is regularly caught in traffic jams on the way to his work or on a weekend outing naturally thinks that his problem will be solved if the bottlenecks on the road are removed, roads widened, flyovers introduced at intersections, or an entirely new motor road like M1 built to take the through traffic. There is, in general, no understanding of the fact that the motor vehicle has not only effected a revolution in our personal habits, but has made the entire system of streets and roads inherited from the past out-of-date and almost unworkable. The effects of this revolution are farreaching, and the problems it raises cannot be solved by simple remedies. Before we begin to discuss the nature of this revolution we must grasp the size of the problem, and attempt to forecast the future growth of motor traffic, on the assumption that present trends continue. If we assume (and it is, of course, a big assumption) that the standard of living of all sections of the community will rise far enough and rapidly enough to enable every adult who wants to do so to own a vehicle for personal transport, the potential demand is fantastic. The new town of Stevenage, for example, has adopted a standard, for the building of garages, of 1.25 cars per house. But in recent American developments 2 cars per house is normal, and 3 cars per house is not unknown. The volume of cars on the roads and the flow of traffic are both increasing at a rapidly accelerating rate. In 1946 there were only 3 million vehicles of all kinds on the roads, and fewer than 2 million private cars. Since then, the total number of vehicles registered in each year has been increasing at about 8.2 per cent compound per annum. At this rate the number doubles in 9 years, and trebles in 15. There are now some 8½ million vehicles in use, including more than 5 million cars. If present trends continue there could be 16 million vehicles in 1967 and 24 million (including 13½ million cars) in 1974. But even this would not bring us to the goal of a car per family, let alone a car per adult. Traffic volume has been increasing almost as fast as registrations, by about 7.4 per cent compound per annum. But congestion increases far faster than traffic. As the roads become more and more loaded beyond their capacity, so congestion can be expected to increase more rapidly still, and with it all the losses that congestion causes. The roads now carry far more goods

than the railways, and have become an integral part of the industrial equipment of the nation—conveyor belts along which flow raw materials, finished products and innumerable bits and pieces in process of manufacture or delivery. No manufacturer would ever tolerate within his works the degree of inefficiency that he does in the delivery of goods by road. There is a big element of exaggeration in the much-publicised figure of £500 million a year, which the road lobby likes to quote as the loss caused by congestion, because this figure includes losses in non-working time. But the real losses are not far short of £200 million a year, and are increasing.

The Profits-Jam The reason why the volume of traffic increases more slowly than the number of vehicles registered, and congestion more rapidly, is of course the inadequacy of the entire road system, which has never developed at a rate commensurate with the growth of the motor industry. There is evidence to show that, if the road system was considerably improved and if vehicles could move freely, traffic would increase more rapidly than the number of vehicles; partly because the building of new roads exclusively for motor vehicles generates new traffic, and partly because the degree of congestion has for long been so serious that it deters many motorists from using their cars as much as they would like to. In London, for example, only 7 per cent of the population working in the centre travel to work by car. The rest travels by public transport. But if there was no congestion on the roads, and if there were enough parking places at the other end, as many as 80 or 90 per cent might go to work by private car. Only six years ago Britain’s motor industry produced a million vehicles a year. Last year, production rose to a million and a half. By 1962–63, when the £160 million expansion programmes of the five major manufacturers (BMC, Ford, Rootes, General Motors (Vauxhall) and Standard-Triumph) have been completed, capacity will have risen to three million, and Britain will have in proportion to its population a much larger motor industry than the United States. This is a staggering prospect, even if one assumes that exports might rise from 600,000 to a million or even a million and a half vehicles a year. But this is not the end. The manufacturers’ investment is exceeded by the parallel investment in steel, tyres, parts and accessories, and the expansion programmes recently announced are only the first instalment of an even bigger programme, whose size is as yet undisclosed. There is no knowing whether it will be possible to sell three million vehicles at home and abroad in 1963, and each of the big five is in fact hoping to increase its share of the market at the expense of the other four. But the motor industry is so highly automated today that profits can only be made on the basis of a large output. If demand should fall

21

seriously below capacity, we can confidently expect the most strenuous pressure by the motor lobby for big reductions in purchase tax and petrol duty and relaxations in hire purchase controls. We can also anticipate far more vigorous propaganda for a big road building programme, for the motor manufacturers are at last becoming worried at the prospect that traffic congestion might begin to restrict sales. The prospect is that motor manufacturers’ singleminded pursuit of profit will divert a bigger and bigger proportion of the nation’s income and capital from more urgent needs. Because so much capital and employment is now tied up in motor manufacture, the Government has acquired a political interest in keeping it going at full blast, regardless of whether this investment could be better spent elsewhere, and regardless too of the Government’s own failure to expand the road system at anything approaching the rate at which the traffic on it is increasing. The vast expansion of the motor industry forms no part of any rational economic or transport plan. It involves a large and constantly growing importation of raw materials and fuel oil which, at the moment, may be paid for by exporting vehicles, but could in the long run prove an extravagant burden on the balance of payments. The government has never pretended that its road plans are designed in any way to solve the problems it is helping the motor manufacturers to create; and the motor manufacturers wash their hands of the problems too. They pay large sums to finance publicity campaigns for bigger and better roads, but contribute next to nothing to research—for which there is a crying need— into the problem of designing towns and cities, adapted to the use of the motor vehicle. It can easily be seen, therefore, that the crisis of congestion in the city streets (and in every town, large or small) is going to get very much worse. This article is not going to concentrate on the problem of the main roads connecting the towns and cities, because this presents no technical difficulties. Congestion on the main roads can undoubtedly be solved by building a motorway system, like the M1, and by widening or double-tracking the less important main roads. If the necessary finance and resources are allocated, such a system could be built within 20 or 30 years. It would not be cheap; and before deciding to build it full account would have to be taken of the impact on the railways, and the importance of organising road, rail and air as a single transport system. In 1957 the Road Research Laboratory estimated that, on the assumption that traffic would double in 10 years, it would cost £1,200 million to catch up with congestion in rural roads alone by 1967. Since then, construction costs have increased, and if it were decided to plan for the universal ownership of private motor cars, it would be necessary to think of traffic volumes four or five times heavier than they were in 1957, if not more. Before we declare that expenditure on this scale is impossible, we might recall that in Victorian times, when the

22

railway building boom was at its height, 350 miles of railway were built in Britain every year for 20 years, at a time when there were no mechanical aids and every ton of earth had to be shifted by hand. A national motorway system is as necessary today as a national railway system was 100 years ago.

Road-Relief? But of course the effect of building such a system would be to aggravate intensely the existing traffic congestion in towns and cities. A motorway system would by-pass all towns and cities, but it is a fallacy to suppose that a by-pass puts an end to the traffic problem. The larger the town, the smaller the proportion of traffic that can be diverted by a by-pass. In this country so few surveys have been made of the origin and destination of traffic, that all the plans for ring roads and by-passes are based on hunches, not on an analysis of the facts. In the United States it is calculated that, whereas in a town of less then 5,000 inhabitants nearly 60 per cent of the approaching traffic has no business there, this figure falls to 18 per cent in cities between 50,000 and 100,000 inhabitants and to 8 per cent in cities between 500,000 and one million inhabitants. There is a crying need for by-passes and for motor roads that will divert through traffic from small villages and towns, but it is a hoary fallacy to suppose that by-passes or ring roads will make much difference to traffic congestion in larger towns or cities. In the case of London, a survey made in 1948 showed that 85 per cent of the traffic entering a circle drawn 2½ miles from Charing Cross will stop inside it. The ring roads proposed in various London road plans would divert relatively little traffic from the centre, and by improving access to the centre (particularly if built in conjunction with motor roads radiating from London to the provincial centres) they would greatly aggravate traffic congestion. The basic fact that has to be grasped is that 80 per cent of all traffic originates in the larger towns and cities. The more elaborate the system of national motorways, by-passes and ring roads, the worse the congestion will become within the existing streets to which, in the end, the traffic has to make its way to reach its destination. So far as is known, the only scientific projections of future traffic movements in this country have been made in the preparation of the plan for the new town of Cumbernauld in Scotland. The calculations prove conclusively that even within a small town of 70,000 inhabitants, from which all through traffic will be diverted by double-track arterial roads circumventing the town, immense volumes of traffic will still be generated. Traffic flows were calculated in detail for every stretch of road and every intersection on the town’s hypothetical road plan, on the assumption that there would be 0.7 cars per family in 15 years time, and that 55 per cent of the working population would travel to

work by public transport or on foot. It was found that the peak hour traffic could only be carried by a full motorway system, involving flyovers and flyunders at road junctions, and as many as four traffic lanes in a single direction (one more than the M1, which has only three lanes) would be required at the most heavily loaded point. Moreover, to enable the motor traffic to circulate in safety, and to ensure safe and civilised conditions for pedestrians, a completely separate system of pedestrian paths is to traverse the whole town, passing under or over all the roads, except the development roads within the housing areas themselves. If a road plan of this kind, and such elaborate measures to segregate vehicles from pedestrians, are necessary in a small town, what kind of road system, and what measures of segregation are required to handle traffic in our existing cities, where car ownership can now be expected to reach 1 or more cars per family? While it is relatively easy to cater for the car on such a scale in a new town on a virgin site, to do so in an existing city presents the most difficult technical problems which are immensely aggravated by the private ownership of land, high land values, speculation, limitations on the powers and finance of the public authorities, and the concentration of capital in the hands of private developers. It is not possible to point to a single city within which anything approaching a complete solution to the traffic problem has been found. But the more one examines the solutions that have been suggested, the more obvious it becomes that it is impossible to plan cities on the assumption that the private car will become the normal method of personal transport.

Motorists Forever Victor Gruen, an American architect and planner, calculated recently that if the shaky public transport system in New York were bankrupted (as it may well be) and forced out of business (which is most unlikely), and if all the workers in New York City had to travel by private car, it would be necessary to demolish every building in downtown Manhattan, build nine levels of transportation space, and then construct new offices and other buildings on top. Victor Gruen also prepared, in 1957, a plan for Fort Worth, a city of 1,200,000 inhabitants in Texas. This was the first plan for any American city designed completely to solve the traffic problem in the downtown business area. He proposed to ring the centre with an elaborate motor road, and to turn the entire central area (about the size of the area bounded by Oxford Street, Park Lane, Piccadilly and Regent Street) into a pedestrian precinct. Six garages each for 10,000 cars would adjoin the ring road, and loop roads for buses would penetrate some distance into the pedestrian precinct. Underground roads, excavated beneath the

existing roads, would enable commercial vehicles to service the buildings. Pedestrians would be able to use travellators; there would be electric trolleys for the old and infirm. But Gruen’s plan, elaborate and expensive though it obviously is, and although it leaves the business centre as an island cut off from the rest of the city, was based on a significant assumption—that half the people now travelling to the centre by car would travel by bus. The American free enterprise system has, needless to say, killed this plan stone dead; but it was a brilliant and instructive exercise, designed primarily to rescue the business centre from strangulation by traffic congestion. The elaborate traffic studies and forecasts now being made by most American cities point to the same conclusions as were reached by Gruen—that the traffic problem is insoluble unless there is a major switch from private to public transport.

A Rapid Public Service The propagandists in our newspapers tend, in fact, to give a false picture of the motor car in America. We are constantly urged to admire the splendid new motorways all over America, and to go flat out to cater for the private car here. Christopher Brumer, a director of Shell and one of the leading propagandists for motor roads, even argues that motor roads have only failed to end congestion in the U.S. because there are not enough of them. Yet the truth is that, although the US is now spending £3,000 million a year (double our defence budget) on new and improved roads, the experts in the US are coming round to the view that the money is being poured into a bottomless pit. The Fortune survey, The Exploding Metropolis, showed that two-thirds of the motoring commuters in Washington, Los Angeles and San Francisco believed (in 1957) that the best solution to the traffic problem was to build a system of mass rapid transportation—or, as we would say, a fast public transport service. The French traffic engineer, J. Elkouby, has calculated that if the population working in the centre of a city of 5 million inhabitants were to travel to work by car the express roads between the centre and the residential areas would have to carry a tidal traffic of 500,000 vehicles per hour. To handle this traffic within the centre would require either a motorway system occupying 5/9 of the surface area, leaving 4/9 for buildings, parking and other uses, or a grid of one-way seven-lane streets occupying about one-third of the area of the centre. M. Elkouby therefore concludes that the ideal of the “man on four wheels” is unattainable, without a strict limitation on the density of development that would destroy the urban character of towns, and without a prohibitively costly urban motorway system. From this it follows, he says, that public transport remains an essential element of urban transport in a large town.

23

I have gone into these studies in detail because it is absolutely essential to understand the impossibility, whether measured in terms of finance, availability of space, architecture or town planning, to base plans for the future of the city upon the use of the private car as the normal means of transport. Once this fact has been grasped, the absurdity of nearly everything that is being done at the moment at once becomes evident. For if the aim is not to provide for the free flow of an unlimited number of cars, then some other aim must be set, and some means found to bring the future flow of traffic and the capacity of the road system into balance. Tacitly, the reluctance of the Ministry of Transport and the local authorities to invest thousands of millions in urban motorways is an admission that there is no limit to this process until one has reached the final motorway nightmare city described by Mr. Elkouby, where space has been largely consumed by roads and parking places. The government’s policy, of slowly adding to the motorway system and tinkering with the existing road system by increasing road widths and the capacity of intersections, give us the worst of both worlds. It throws money away on “improvements”—roundabouts, flyovers, double carriage-ways, widening—where a motorway is the only real solution and it fails to take the measures that would make it possible to provide a more limited but workable motorway system. The primary aim in planning is to create a satisfying environment for a fully civilised life—at home, at work, at recreation. Transport is a service industry; it exists to serve this environment, not to dominate and determine it. This is not to deny that transport has a profound influence on the form and structure of towns. It is to assert that we have to design, or redesign, towns in such a way that (1) a safe, civilised, beautiful environment is created for living and working in, and (2) the best possible use is made of every form of transport, to achieve the maximum degree of useful mobility for people and goods. One says useful mobility, because the movement of an immense number of vehicles may be evidence of prosperity and efficiency, but it can equally be evidence of appalling inefficiency. It is inordinately wasteful for cars or lorries or buses to be held up for minutes or hours in traffic jams. But it is even more wasteful for them to undertake unnecessary journeys. Traffic planning must begin with town planning, a study of the use of land, the location of houses, factories, offices, shops, facilities for recreation and entertainment, the generation of traffic by different kinds of use and different kinds of buildings. There is the most urgent need for immensely more information and research within this field. The speculator or the businessman who locates his offices in the centre of London may be doing the most profitable thing from his point of view, but his action may be throwing an intense strain on the transport system, which can only be relieved by expensive improvements (at public expense). One must ask, for example, whether it is good business to transport motor bodies half across the country for assembly.

24

Very little is known about the traffic-generating capacity of buildings of different kinds, although it is obvious that in town planning there should be a balance, not only between the volume of traffic and the capacity of the streets and garages, but also between the trafficgenerating capacity of buildings and the capacity of the streets and garages. Land values, the product of the private ownership and sale of land, have an immense influence on the use to which land is put. For 100 years the high land values at the centre of cities have produced two consequences: the rehousing of the working class (and of the middle class for that matter) on cheap land at the periphery of the city, from which cheap transport has brought them back to work near the centre; and an excessive concentration of commercial buildings at the centre, where land can only be profitably exploited if it is densely built up and let or sold at a high price. This evergrowing separation between workplaces and homes— the basic imbalance in the city structure—is the cause of the “rush hour”; and despite the rather feeble measures taken by the LCC to promote the outward movement of offices, the congestion at the rush hour in London continues to grow worse.

Living Suburbs The situation is similar in other large cities. To solve this problem is anything but easy, and it must take time. But there are one or two examples of what planning can do. The new housing estate to be built by the City of London Corporation in the Barbican is not only the most bold and imaginative solution of the traffic problem (over an area of 65 acres vehicles and pedestrians are to be completely separated on different levels) but it will house 10,000 people in the City. The demand for flats in central London proves that, while many families want gardens, many others want the convenience of a central location near their work and the amenities of a big city. The rents, however, are far beyond the level that working-class families can pay, because land values are so high. Until urban land is in public ownership, it will not be possible to determine the use of land solely by town planning criteria, and until this is done it is going to be uphill work trying to reduce the rush hour flood by locating workplaces and homes nearer to each other. A possible technical solution has been brilliantly demonstrated by the architects Gregory-Jones, Shankland, Chamberlin, Powell and Bon in a scheme to redevelop the Middlesex suburb of Boston Manor. This is today a dreary, low-density dormitory suburb thrown up near the Boston Manor station on the Central Line. The architects scheme for a “living suburb”, or as others have called it a “new town in the city”, was to bridge over the large railway sidings and the station, and on top of it to build a new regional centre, with offices, flats, shops, houses, facilities for

recreation and entertainment. Here, too, pedestrians and vehicles would be segregated on different levels.The higher residential densities, while providing a large proportion of houses with gardens or patios, would bring a large population within walking distance of the station or of the offices in which they might work. Instead of a flood of people leaving Boston Manor every morning to work in the west end or city, many of them would work in the suburb, and others would actually travel to Boston Manor to work, thus reversing the tidal rush hour flows. The Boston Manor scheme points to another basic imbalance in the cities. The weekend exodus to the country and seaside is really a desperate effort to escape from an intolerable environment. To spend several hours on Sundays sitting in traffic jams, in order to share a beach or a bit of grass on the roadside with thousands of other people, would be absurd if the cities themselves offered the kind of amenities that wealthy people seek, and secure, for themselves. The city itself must become largely self-sufficient for recreation of all kinds. If our cities were a pleasure to live in, instead of being noisy, nerve-wracking, congested, ugly places in the week, and deserts of closed offices and shopfronts at the weekend, we would have far less reason to go chasing the elusive countryside that very few motorists ever really reach. It is not enough, therefore, in attempting to plan a transport system, to estimate future traffic movements on the assumption that land use will remain as it is. In the long run, the biggest single contribution to traffic congestion will be made by the re-arrangement of the use of land, and the elimination of an enormous mass of wasteful, tiring and expensive travel. This will help to bring the volume of traffic within manageable limits. But there remain two other basic problems. The first is, how to distribute the traffic, while retaining freedom of choice so far as is possible, between the different channels that are available (public or private transport, rail or bus, monorail or taxi, hired car or scooter). The second is how to remove the basic conflict between the pedestrian and vehicle, so that the pedestrian ceases to be what Dr. Doxiades, the Greek planner, has called “a refugee in his own habitat”. The policy today, in fact, is to give priority to the demands of private transport, and, above all, of the private car. It will be possible in the future, when large areas of the cities have been replanned and are served by a comprehensive system of motorways, garages and segregation of vehicles from pedestrians, to use private cars in larger numbers without the dangers and annoyance they cause today. But this is bound to take a lot of time, and a lot of money. In the meantime, the interests of the majority, who travel by public transport, are being sacrificed to those of the minority, who travel by private transport. A survey taken in 1954 showed that, while private cars formed 37 per cent of all moving vehicles in central London, they only carried 18 per cent of the occupants, whereas

buses formed only 7 per cent of all moving vehicles but carried more than half the occupants. It would be hard to find clearer evidence of the inefficiency of the private car.

Must Transport Pay? While, therefore, long term plans are being prepared on the basis of elaborate surveys and research in every city for the solution of “the traffic problem”, it is already clear that the most urgent need is to make dramatic improvements in public transport. A tremendous noise is being made about the government’s failure to build new roads. But even more serious has been the total failure to provide in every city new channels of public transport, such as railways, over or under ground, or monorails, and to give clear priority on the roads to the public bus services. The Victoria tube, for example, is estimated to cost £55 million, but it would carry as many passengers as a 14-lane motorway, and would do little or no damage to buildings on the surface. In the short run, draconian action to enforce a complete ban on unauthorised street parking would dramatically cut the daily flow of private cars, and enable the buses to run reasonably well. But the root difficulty is the insistence, first by the Labour Government, and now by the Tories, that public transport must “pay”. This is the cause of the continuous rise in fares and the continuous switch from public to private transport. In fact public transport, like the sewers or the parks, is an essential public service. While a free transport service would encourage wasteful long-distance travel, and speed up the process of suburban dispersal, public transport should always be available cheaply enough to attract the bulk of the traffic. The alternative is to rely on the private car, and the cost of providing for unlimited private motoring would make the loss on public transport look insignificant. It is cheaper, in other words, to subsidise a book loss on public transport than to bear the extravagant costs of a transport system based on the most wasteful use of the private car. We should envisage a big extension of a cheap taxi service, a universal car hire service (with depots in every large garage), and a goods delivery service, so that the housewife who walks to the shops can find the goods waiting for her on her return. We might well find that new kinds of small vehicles could be designed specially for use in towns, to take less space than contemporary motor cars. The private car, in the future, will probably only be wanted by the man who uses it constantly every day. The rest of us will rely on public transport, but will be able to get whatever vehicle we want, whenever we want it, by telephoning or walking to the car hire depot or the taxi rank. The most difficult problem of all to solve is the liberation of the pedestrian from the motor vehicle, without preventing the motor vehicle from doing its job. Even when every possible measure has been taken to reduce the flow of traffic to manageable dimensions,

25

the volume of commercial traffic, buses, taxis, hire cars, private cars and smaller vehicles will be so great that, in the long run, nothing less than complete segregation of vehicles from pedestrians, often on different levels, will be tolerable in the busy parts of towns and in all newly developed urban areas. The typical street of today, lined by shops and offices, used indiscriminately by every kind of traffic, where pedestrians of every age take their lives in their hands every moment of the day, is a complete anachronism. Where a town has some streets of real architectural merit, or an area of real character or historical association, the conflict between the pedestrian and the vehicle can only be settled by compromise. The vehicle must be kept out for most of the time, being given limited rights of access at other times. The sooner this is done, the sooner our historic old county towns like York and Chester, where today one is deafened and harrowed by the traffic, will become worth living in or visiting again. But in most of our built-up areas there is really very little worth keeping. Unfortunately, piecemeal redevelopment on the old road lines is perpetuating the present system, and frustrating future redevelopment. We are replacing the buildings, but we are not renewing the towns.

Spontaneous Chaos? The answer can only be found by redeveloping very large areas—20, 30, 40 acres or more—at a time, because it is extraordinarily difficult to introduce such solutions as upper level walkways into existing streets, when small sites are being developed in isolation. The resources being squandered in each of the big cities today on piecemeal office building could, if concentrated on a single comprehensive development area, bring about a dramatic transformation in a very short time. But this is inconceivable within present limitations of legislation, finance, and land ownership—not to speak of the limited horizons within which planning is conceived today. The main conclusion to be drawn from this survey is that the traffic problem is not, as the Labour spokesmen in the House of Commons like to say, a non-party issue. It is not a problem to be solved merely by thinking up the brightest technical ideas, the latest in pink or tartan zones. The traffic problem is rooted in capitalist society itself, in national economic anarchy, in the manufacturers’ pursuit of profit, in the false gods of status and prestige, in the private ownership of land and the acquisitiveness of landowners and speculators. It is a symptom of a disease that is incurable without a radical operation. This article does not attempt to draw up a blueprint for the solution to the traffic problem: but it is worth setting down some general principles which should govern a socialist approach to the problem: 1. Transport is a service. New forms of transport require new planning and architectural solutions, but the primary aim is to create conditions for a fully

26

civilised life, using all forms of transport in the most efficient way, but not dominated by transport. 2. Without research into the problem and experiment in town planning, no solutions can be found. 3. The first priority must be given to the development of appropriate forms of cheap and efficient public transport. Public transport should be subsidised to the extent necessary to enable it to compete successfully with private transport. 4. Road, rail and air transport, public and private, must be studied and planned as a single transport system. 5. Transport must be subordinated in planning to regional and town planning. Only in this way can traffic be studied and controlled at its source, by the planned relocation of homes, workplaces, shops and recreation centres. 6. To relieve congestion at the centre, and ease the “rush hour”, “new towns” should be built in the suburbs of the cities, and more homes built, at low rents, in the centre. 7. The development plans of local authorities must be revised to incorporate long-term plans for motor roads reserved for motor traffic, with parking garages related to them. 8. The segregation of vehicles from pedestrians should be achieved by immediate measures restricting the access of vehicles to certain streets and areas; and, in the long run, by concentrating resources on major areas of comprehensive redevelopment. 9. Motor roads should only be built in towns as part of a plan for the comprehensive redevelopment of the areas through which they run. 10. In new housing areas, the principle of complete segregation of vehicles from pedestrians must be observed, and priority given in town planning to the interests of the pedestrian. 11. The trade unions directly concerned with the motor industry should begin to discuss ways in which the industry can develop in a planned way, and the skills and livelihood of their members protected, without damage to the interests of the rest of the community or the life of the city. 12. The solution of the traffic problem involves the planned reallocation of land and its use. This cannot be achieved so long as the use of land is dictated by the interests of private ownership and the speculators.

Raymond Williams

THE MAGIC SYSTEM

In his concluding Chapter to a collection of essays on Advertising and Society, to be published in the New Left Book series by Stevens early next year, Raymond Williams relates the “system of magic” to the attitudes and social thinking of a “consumer” society, and makes some proposals for its democratic control.

last hundred years advertising has developed from the simple announcements of shopkeepers and the persuasive arts of a few marginal dealers into a major part of capitalist business organisation. This is important enough, but the place of advertising in society goes far beyond this commercial context. It is increasingly the source of finance for a whole range of general communication, to the extent that in 1960 our majority television service and almost all our newspapers and periodicals could not exist without it. Further, in the last forty years and now at an increasing rate, it has passed the frontier of the selling of goods and services and has become involved with the teaching of social and personal values; it is also rapidly entering the world of politics. Advertising is also, in a sense, the official art of modern capitalist society: it is what we put up in our streets and use to fill up to half of our newspapers and magazines; and it commands the services of perhaps the largest organised body of writers and artists, with their attendant managers and advisers, in the whole society. Since this is the actual social status of advertising, we shall only understand it with any adequacy if we can develop a kind of total analysis in which the economic, social and cultural facts are visibly related. We may then also find, taking advertising as a major form of modern social communication, that we can understand our society itself in new ways. It is often said that our society is too materialist, and that advertising reflects this. We are in the phase of a relatively rapid distribution of what are called “consumer goods”, and advertising with its own emphasis on “bringing the good things of life” is taken as central for this reason. But it seems to me that in this respect our society is quite evidently not materialist enough, and that this, paradoxically, is the result of a failure in social meanings, values and ideals. It is impossible to look at modern advertising without realising that the material object being sold is never enough: this indeed is the crucial cultural quality of its modern forms. If we were sensibly materialist, in that part of our living in which we use things, we should find most advertising to be of an insane irrelevance. Beer would be enough for us, without the additional promise that in drinking it we show ourselves to be manly, young in heart, or neighbourly. A washing-machine would be a useful machine to wash clothes, rather than an indication that we are forward-looking or an object of envy to our

IN THE

neighbours. A new car would be simply a pleasant means of transport, without the spiritual aura of girls nine feet tall, a hotel canopy and a porter putting luggage in the boot with gloved hands. But if these associations sell beer, washing-machines and cars, as some of the evidence suggests, it is clear that we have a cultural pattern in which the objects are not enough but must be validated, if only in fantasy, by association with social and personal meanings which in a different cultural pattern might be more directly available. The short description of the pattern we have is magic: a highly organised and professional system of magical inducements and satisfactions, functionally very similar to magical systems in simpler societies, but rather strangely coexistent with a highly developed scientific technology. This contradiction is of the greatest importance in any analysis of modern capitalist society. The coming of large-scale industrial production necessarily raised critical problems of social organisation, which in many fields we are still only struggling to solve. In the production of goods for personal use, the critical problem posed by the factory of advanced machines was that of the organisation of the market. The modern factory requires not only smooth and steady distributive channels (without which it would suffocate under its own product) but also definite indications of demand without which the expensive processes of capitalisation and equipment would be too great a risk. The historical choice posed by the development of industrial production is between different forms of organisation and planning in the society to which it is central. In our own century, the choice has been and remains between some form of socialism and a new form of capitalism. In Britain, since the 1890s and with rapidly continuing emphasis, we have had the new capitalism, based on a series of devices for organising and ensuring the market. Modern advertising, taking on its distinctive features in just this economic phase, is one of the most important of these devices, and it is perfectly true to say that modern capitalism could not function without it. Yet the essence of capitalism is that the basic means of production are not socially but privately owned, and that decisions about production are therefore in the hands of a group occupying a minority position in the society and in no direct way responsible to it. Obviously, since the capitalist wishes to be successful, he is influenced, in his decisions about production, by what

27

other members of the society need. But he is influenced also by considerations of industrial convenience and likely profit, and his decisions tend to be a balance of these varying factors. The challenge of socialism, still very powerful elsewhere, but in Britain deeply confused by political immaturities and errors, is essentially that decisions about production should be in the hands of the society as a whole, in the sense that control of the means of production is made part of the general system of decision which the society as a whole creates. The conflict between capitalism and socialism is now commonly seen in terms of a competition in productive efficiency, and we need not doubt that much of our future history, on a world scale, will be determined by the results of this competition. Yet the conflict is really much deeper than this, and is also a conflict between different approaches to and forms of socialism. The fundamental choice that emerges, in the problems set to us by modern industrial production, is between man as consumer and man as user. The system of organised magic which is modern advertising is primarily important as a functional obscuring of this choice.

Consumer v. User The popularity of “consumer”, as a way of describing the ordinary member of modern capitalist society in a main part of his economic capacity, is very significant. The description is spreading very rapidly, and is now habitually used by people to whom it ought, logically, to be repugnant. It is not only that, at a simple level, “consumption” is a very strange description of our ordinary use of goods and services. This metaphor drawn from the stomach or the furnace is only partially relevant even to our use of things. Yet we say “consumer”, rather than “user”, because in the form of society we now have, and in the forms of thinking which it almost imperceptibly fosters, it is as consumers that the majority of people are seen. We are the market, which the system of industrial production has organised. We are the channels along which the product flows and disappears. In every aspect of social communication, and in every version of what we are as a community, the pressure of a system of industrial production is towards these impersonal forms. Yet it is by no means necessary that these versions should prevail, just because we use advanced productive techniques. It is simply that once these have entered a society, new questions of structure and purpose in social organisation are inevitably posed. One set of answers is the development of genuine democracy, in which the human needs of all the people in the society are taken as the central purpose of all social activity, so that politics is not a system of government but of self-government, and the systems of production and communication are rooted in the satisfaction of human needs and the development of human capacities. Another set of answers, of which we have had more experience, retains,

28

often in very subtle forms, a more limited social purpose. In the first phase, loyal subjects, as they were previously seen, become the labour market of industrial “hands”. Later, as the “hands” reject this version of themselves, and claim a higher human status, the emphasis is changed. Any real concession of higher status would mean the end of class-society and the coming of democracy. But intermediate concessions are possible, including material concessions. The “subjects” become the “electorate”, and “the mob” becomes “public opinion”.

Organising The Market Decision is still a function of the minority, but a new system of decision, in which the majority can be organised to this end, has to be devised. The majority are seen as “the masses”, whose opinion, as masses but not as real individuals, is a factor in the business of governing. In practical terms, this version can succeed for a long time, but it becomes increasingly difficult to state the purposes of the society, since there is a real gap between profession and fact. Moreover, as the governing minority changes in character, and increasingly rests for real power on a modern economic system, older social purposes become vestigial, and, whether expressed or implied, the maintenance of the economic system becomes the main factual purpose of all social activity. Politics and culture become deeply affected by this dominant pattern, and ways of thinking derived from the economic market—political parties considering how to sell themselves to the electorate, to create a favourable brand image; education being primarily organised in terms of a graded supply of labour; culture being organised and even evaluated in terms of commercial profit—become increasingly evident. Still, however, the purpose of the society has to be declared in terms that will command the effort of a majority of its people. It is here that the idea of the “consumer” has proved so useful. Since consumption is within its limits a satisfactory activity, it can be plausibly offered as a commanding social purpose. At the same time, its ambiguity is such that it ratifies the subjection of society to the operations of the existing economic system. An irresponsible economic system can supply the “consumption” market, whereas it could only meet the criterion of human use by becoming genuinely responsible: that is to say, shaped in its use of human labour and resources by general social decisions. The consumer asks for an adequate supply of personal “consumer goods” at a tolerable price: over the last ten years, this has been the primary aim of British government. But the user asks for more than this, necessarily. He asks for the satisfaction of human needs which consumption, as such, can never really supply. Since many of these needs are social—roads, hospitals, schools, quiet—they are not only not covered by the consumer ideal; they are even denied by it,

because consumption tends always to materialise as an individual activity. And to satisfy this range of needs would involve questioning the autonomy of the economic system, in its actual settling of priorities: this is where the consumption ideal is not only misleading, as a form of defence of the system, but ultimately destructive to the broad general purposes of the society. Advertising, as we now see it, operates to preserve the consumption ideal from the criticism inexorably made of it by experience. If the consumption of individual goods leaves whole areas of human need unsatisfied, the attempt is made, by magic, to associate this consumption with human desires to which it has no real reference. You do not only buy an object: you buy social respect, discrimination, health, beauty, success, power to control your environment. The magic obscures the real sources of general satisfaction because their discovery would involve radical change in the whole common way of life. We must observe, of course, that when a magical pattern has become established in a society it is capable of real if limited success. People will indeed look twice at you, upgrade you, respond to your displayed signals, if you have made the right purchases within a system of meanings to which you are all trained. Thus the fantasy seems to be validated, at a personal level, but only at the cost of preserving the general unreality which it obscures: the real failures of the society, which however are not easily traced to this pattern. It must not be assumed that magicians—in this case, advertising agents—disbelieve their own magic. They may have a limited professional cynicism about it, from knowing how some of the tricks are done. But fundamentally they are involved, with the rest of the society, in the confusion to which the magical gestures are a response. Magic is always an unsuccessful attempt to provide meanings and values, but it is always very difficult to distinguish magic from genuine knowledge and from art. The belief that high consumption is a high standard of living is a general belief of the society. The conversion of numerous objects into sources of sexual or presexual satisfaction is evidently not only a process in the minds of advertisers, but also a deep and general confusion in which much energy is locked. At one level, the advertisers are people using certain skills and knowledge, created by real art and science, against the public for commercial advantage. This hostile stance is rarely confessed in general propaganda for advertising, where the normal emphasis is the bland consumption ethic (‘Advertising brings you the good things of life’), but it is common in advertisers’ propaganda to their clients. ‘Hunt with the mind of the hunter’, one recent announcement begins, and another, under the heading ‘Getting any honey from the hive of industry?’, is rich in the language of attack: One of the most important weapons used in successful marketing is advertising. Commando Sales Limited, steeped to the nerve ends in the skills of unarmed combat, are ready to move into battle on any sales front at the crack of an accepted

estimate. These are the front line troops to call in when your own sales force is hopelessly outnumbered by the forces of sales resistance . . .

This is the world of feeling in which ‘impact’ has become the normal description of the effect of successful communication, and ‘impact’, like ‘consumer’, is now habitually used by people to whom it ought to be repugnant (what sort of person really wants to make an impact or create a ‘smash hit’, and what state is a society in when when this can be its normal cultural language?). It seems to me monstrous that human advances in psychology, sociology and communication should be used or thought of as powerful techniques against people, just as it is rotten to try to reduce the faculty of human choice to ‘sales resistance’. In these respects, the claim of advertising to be a service is not particularly plausible. But equally, much of this talk of weapons and impact is the jejune bravado of deeply confused men. It is the language of frustration rather than of power. Much advertising is not the cool creation of skilled professionals, but the confused creation of bad thinkers and artists. If we look at the petrol with the huge clenched fist, the cigarette against loneliness in the deserted street, the puppet facing death with a lifeinsurance policy (the modern protection, unlike the magical symbols painstakingly listed from earlier societies), or the man in the cradle which is an aeroplane, we are looking at attempts to express and resolve real human tensions which may be crude but which also involve deep feelings of a personal and social kind.

The Magic System The structural similarity between much advertising and much modern art is not simply copying by the advertisers. It is the result of comparable responses to the contemporary human condition, and the only distinction that matters is between the clarification achieved by some art and the displacement normal in both bad art and most advertising. The skilled magicians, the masters of the masses, must be seen as ultimately involved in the general weakness which they not only exploit but are exploited by. If the meanings and values generally operative in the society give no answers to, no means of negotiating problems of death, loneliness, frustration, the need for identity and respect, then the magical system must come, mixing its charms and expedients with reality in easily available forms, and binding the weakness to the condition which has created it. Advertising is then no longer merely a way of selling goods; it is a true part of the culture of a confused society. This analysis indicates the real measure of the problem, when, irritated or sickened or appalled by advertising, we ask what can be done. In the last few years, there has been a welcome revival of concern about advertising, and its status as a social issue is now an identifiable part of contemporary radicalism. Much

29

of this concern is expressed in terms of the need for ‘protection of the consumer’. It is true, as some recent studies have shown (notably the P.E.P. Consumer Protection and Enlightenment; Planning XXVI, No. 441), that action in this field is urgently necessary. The work of the Consumer Advisory Council, through its publication Shopper’s Guide, and of the Consumers’ Association, through Which?, has shown the great need for independent and skilled advice on quality and values, of a kind which cannot adequately be given by shopkeepers or by ordinary inspection and inquiry when buying, and which the large and often irrelevant and tendentious claims of advertising often work against. The Labour Party has made repeated proposals for a public advisory service of this kind, but seems now uncertain about its precise operation and extent. The Co-operative Party has proposed a Ministry of Consumer Welfare.

Nets And Ladders It is perhaps one of the ironies of the ‘mixed economy’ that on the one hand there should be a major form of communication about goods and services, with an annual budget exceeding £400 millions, and on the other hand, in a variety of small ways, minor forms attempting on meagre budgets the provision of really useful information. This contrast leads us to central questions about the real structure of our contemporary society, for the pattern is characteristic. In the ‘private’ or capitalist sector funds are adequate, and it is claimed that a public service is being performed, yet the operation is in fact on the system’s own terms. If advertising as now practised ensures convenient patterns of demand—the steady flow of consumption— that is enough for the system, because it ensures its continued success. Different values—the true ‘use’ values which in spite of their titles the Consumers’ associations try to create—have to exist in the margin, and cannot fundamentally alter the values of industry, but are there to be instanced, and perhaps congratulated, when the majority pattern is challenged as being against the public interest. It is like the “ladder and net” approach to social services: here you can be stimulated by an advertisement but saved by a comparative testing report—it is the system of checks and balances which is the British political genius. I think most people would support any proposal to help the admirable work of the present advisory services, and there is undoubtedly need for reform and legislation in the complicated field of trade markings and descriptions. A current Committee on Consumer Protection may produce a useful report on which developments of this kind could be based. Where legislation is possible, it is obviously desirable, and in view of continuing cases of shoddy and dangerous goods should be of the most stringent kind: the public interest, in these matters, really will have to come first.

30

But I think there is a danger that the Labour Party, which I believe to be the only probable channel for adequate reform in this field, will settle for much less than could or needs to be done. It would be easy for them, as part of their prevailing political attitude, to support or promise to initiate legislation, promise support and subsidies for advisory services of the existing kind, and then conclude that their duty is done. But surely we all know that when these measures had been taken, real advice and protection would still be marginal, and the flood of advertising would in the meantime also have risen. Can anything practical of a more radical kind be done? Two kinds of proposal are being currently considered. Briefly these are that there should be some kind of Watch Committee on advertising, and that in some form advertising should be taxed. The Watch Committee idea has much to recommend it. We have been hearing from the advertisers themselves that they have taken measures to exclude flagrantly undesirable advertising (this is true, within limits, in certain fields such as patent medicines), and that further reforms will be best carried out by the ‘industry itself’. But frankly we have been hearing this for too long: if advertising had kept to all the codes it has promulgated it would be now unrecognisable. In any case, you cannot reform a world of half-truths and magical suggestions by excluding certain specific lies. As things now stand, there does seem to be a case for some definite independent body exercising some measure of public supervision, in such matters as ITV observance of the Act which created it, and the tone and content of ordinary advertising. But, while this can do something, we must be careful not to assume that it would do very much. The Society for Checking the Abuses of Public Advertising was founded in 1892, and advertising has become socially much worse since that time. Even if the supersensitive “faddists” had some public status and power, their field would remain limited. We can support the Watch Committee as an interim measure, but only so far. Proposals for taxation would be taken very seriously by the present economic system. It would be perfectly possible to fix a percentage of the price (preferably the wholesale price) of a product, beyond which expenditure on advertising would not count for tax relief. Expenditure on advertising varies widely between different products, but the variation has no social relevance and a standard figure is justifiable. This proposal can be firmly supported. It is much better than an attempt to distinguish, for taxation purposes, between informative and persuasive advertising, which would be administratively cumbrous and perhaps impossible. One line would have to be drawn, as things now are, for in a precarious export situation it would be asking a lot of any government to discourage advertising in export markets. However, this line is administratively quite clear, and a reservation for such advertising could be allowed. The permissible maximum

percentage for tax relief is also a better proposal than a direct tax on issued advertisements, for it would tend to provide a basis for price-reductions whereas the direct tax might simply be absorbed in price-increases or failures to pass on real savings in cost. It is not an ideal solution, but it has the advantage that it could be quickly adopted by a Labour government, without waiting for other changes. Legislation to exclude political advertising on commercial accounts could be put through at the same time. Two other things need active consideration in the immediate shaping of Labour policy. First, the proposal for a full-scale inquiry into advertising should be firmly supported (a committee to press for this inquiry has headquarters at 49 Cresswell Place, London, SW10). Secondly, in a broader field, it is urgently necessary to formulate a general Labour policy on communications, for during the next few years there will be a determined attempt to bring a new television service and new broadcasting services into the sphere of dependence on advertising. However much ground we have already lost, with majority television and almost all the press already dependent in this way, we can always lose more, and it is vital that we should not do so. Pending more radical reorganisation, Labour must stand firmly by the public-service principle financed by licence-fees and any necessary income from general revenue.

A User’s Service A whole field of hard work is waiting, in all these ways, and anyone who feels the importance of the issues involved must take part in it. But it is necessary also to begin a kind of thinking which will take us beyond the series of immediate defensive measures. Labour has suffered repeatedly from its combination of enough measures to mobilise capitalism against it and not enough measures to have a chance in the subsequent conflict. It has suffered also from its historical Fabian pattern of reform at an official level, combining negative legislation with a series of rather remote positive services (best illustrated by the largely useless Consumers’ Councils in the nationalised industries). The basic fault, in this whole approach, is a failure to realise the true social context of democracy, and the true dynamics of communication. We must support the legislation and the bodies as they come, but the need is for some active breakthrough, which would take the struggle for an educated and participating democracy to the individuals and local communities on whom it must depend. I want to put forward a specific proposal of this kind, to give the necessary urgency and breadth to what otherwise might be a piecemeal effort. It is true that the values which advertising embodies are the inferior values of capitalism, and that the struggle against them must be part of the whole effort for socialism. But this effort itself will only succeed if it can enlist the vital forms and energies which the present

system denies. Millions of ordinary people now accept capitalism because it has become associated with the supply of goods they want: a supply which is really due to modern productive techniques. Instead of the persistent ambiguity about the morality of wanting material goods, we need to support this expansion, with a real assent, to the point where we can show that it is only the false priorities inherent in capitalism which prevents our supplementing the individual goods with the social goods of which we are now starved. We have to work to change the poor society of affluent consumers into the rich society of educated users. It is as a means to this that we must develop a real advisory service, which is a part of a whole programme of public education and participation.

Alternative Channels The existing advisory services, or any public system on their model, are likely to remain confined to the adequately-educated minority. The need is not for a new minority service, but for the creation of alternative channels of social communication. A public advisory service will be real when it has showrooms and information centres in every main shopping location. The premises of capitalism go up in every line of new shops, with incredible profusion: the lines of insurance offices, mammoth building societies, and so on. Can we not have an alternative, there, in everybody’s shopping street, where it will really count? At a national level, the existing patterns offer a model for expansion: collecting information, testing products, comparing services, investigating complaints. An independent public body, with adequate funds to provide this central organisation, is already, as it were, on the drawingboard. But we must then break the barriers imposed by capitalist forms of communications: reach the people whom advertising will reach, but whom an advisory service of any existing kind will not. It would be the duty of the British Quality Trust (as this national body might be called) to establish regional and local centres, with trained staff capable of passing on the collected information, receiving complaints, and initiating inquiries. Further, a series of exhibitions and displays, with full comparative information, would be held in these centres, ordinarily on a touring basis. As these centres became established, through active local contacts with schools, adult education services, and voluntary community organisations, they would be centres of intelligent choice and use of a new kind. The Quality Centre would first express and ultimately establish a range of values relevant to an advanced industrial society. The limited kind of evaluation embodied in the “best buy” judgments of the consumers’ associations would be extended to include “design” judgments (brilliantly pioneered by the Council of Industrial Design), and the whole programme, properly directed, could make an important contribution to the active

31

public discussion of that critical field between sociology and aesthetics which is already a growing point in our culture. It is true, of course, that while capitalism remained dominant, the inferior values which advertising exploits and promotes would continue to hold some sway. But, if the alternative is socialism, this, to be valuable, would have to be much more than a series of economic and administrative changes. Socialism will not come unless new forms of communication and social action are actively developed, and in any case it would not be worth having, in human terms, unless the economic and commercial autonomies of capitalism had been reclaimed by a practical humanism. The centres would be valuable in any society, not least in a socialist society, where there would be obvious dangers of rigidity and monotony from degrees of centralised planning and administration. Critical centres, rooted in real communities, would be as useful against these dangers as now against the confusion and magic of capitalism. Looking ahead, one could see the withering away of advertising in its present main forms, and its replacement by this kind of informative and critical service. Many of the people now working for hire in the agencies could bring their important skills back on to the side of the community. The real work to be done, in rooting out ugliness, shoddiness and silliness from their main place in industrial civilisation, would be a commanding and exciting human cause. It may be noted, finally, that broadcasting, television and the press could use this developed service. Indeed, BBC television might well be quickly empowered to

carry this kind of responsible information and criticism of goods and services, as the appropriate public answer to the kept men and women of ITV advertising. The financial crisis which would affect the press, if commercial advertising declined, might be similarly met by payment for publication of this service, which is a proper charge on industry. If this is to look some considerable way ahead, it is still not premature exploration. The profound weakness of contemporary British socialism, even where it is still an admirable ideal, is its failure to come to real terms with an open modern society. Neither nostalgia for preindustrial or pre-affluent society, nor the assumption of a primarily economic socialism which may one day arrive and redeem, can command enough relevant human energy to achieve even modest changes. Capitalism, in its present limited success, offers real satisfactions at a severe price, but the price will go on being paid until the practical alternative exists. We have identified advertising as part of this price, and seen its importance as a magical system proceeding from a limited social consciousness and designed to prevent its expansion. In criticising advertising, and in suggesting and discussing humane and rational alternatives, we are both clarifying the basis and detail of a magical system in which we are all to some extent involved, and seeking to build an area of reality in which a whole range of significant choices can be freely made. This work, here and now, and the work which can follow from it, is a stage in the only revolution that matters: the creation of social forms in which men can live and choose for themselves.

••••••••••••••••••••• Royden Harrison

RETREAT FROM INDUSTRIAL DEMOCRACY

“Were the working class as a whole imbued with the idea of control and endowed with the power that idea gives, nationalisation would no longer serve the capitalists’ ends . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . “The introduction of State management will be the signal for a long battle between bureaucracy and freedom”. G. D. H. Cole, Self Government in Industry, (1917). “One must be exceedingly careful not to ascribe to public ownership as such possibilities which really spring from a different political system which we have no intention of adopting”. Hugh Gaitskell, Socialism and Nationalisation, Fabian Tract 300 (1956) THE LABOUR Party is in favour of Industrial Democracy. Clause 4 of the Party Objects as adopted in 1918 called, not merely for common ownership of the means of

32

production, but for “the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service”. Finding that this statement needed to be “reaffirmed”, “amplified” and “clarified”, the National Executive on 16th March 1960 called upon all its reserves of lucidity and added that the Party “stands for democracy in industry, and” (“and”, mark you!) “for the right of the workers both in public and private sectors” (note it well!) “to full consultation in all the vital decisions of management, especially those affecting conditions of work”. Just as Lenin could remark in 1915 that “Absolutely everybody is in favour of peace in general including Kitchener, Joffre, Hindenburg and Nicholas the Bloody”; so it is3 true today that “absolutely everybody” is in favour of industrial democracy. At any rate this,

is true if the term is used, as it is by Mr. Hugh Clegg in his new book, A New Approach to Industrial Democracy, (Blackwell, 18/6d. 1960), to cover “any theory or scheme so long as it is based on a genuine concern for the rights of the workers in industry, particularly their right to a share in the control of industrial decisions” (p. 3).

In our society the workers are effectively deprived of all part in deciding what to produce, when, where and how. But, through collective bargaining, they do have a share in making those industrial decisions which are concerned with wages, hours and conditions of work. Thus, every employer who recognises trade unions and engages with them in collective bargaining through established negotiating machinery is, on this definition, taking part in industrial democracy. This is, indeed, the main thesis of Clegg’s book. Industrial democracy is less an objective still to be attained than an achievement which must be preserved at all costs.

The “New” Approach Clegg did not arrive at this conclusion painlessly. In his book he begins by reviewing earlier theories, before expounding the three principles which are central to his “new approach”. He then takes these principles with him on a Cook’s tour of Britain, France, Germany, Jugoslavia, Israel and the under-developed countries. Travel under such rushed conditions is not calculated to broaden the mind, and it is not surprising that he returns home a little more confused than he was when he set out. Whatever he learnt was not of sufficient weight to cause him to discard the three principles of industrial democracy with which he began his journey. These principles are (1) “that trade unions must be independent both of the state and of management”. (2) “that only the unions can represent the industrial interests of the workers”, (3) “that the ownership of industry is irrelevant to good industrial relations”. (p. 21). In this book there are two important respects in which Clegg is conducting a retreat from the position which he had taken up in short study, Industrial Democracy and Nationalisation (Blackwell, 1951). He has changed his attitude towards joint consultation and also towards public ownership and nationalisation. It will be convenient to consider the least significant of these two changes first. Nine years ago, Clegg expressed high hopes of joint consultation as a means of extending democracy in industry. These hopes he has now largely abandoned. He no longer believes that if management and workers have regular “get togethers” to discuss problems of safety, health, welfare and production, this will make a substantial contribution to a harmonious industrial society. Nor does he think that joint consultation can provide a way, additional to collective bargaining, by which the workers can increase the range of questions which they take a share in deciding.

Pessimism about the possibilities of consultation is the one issue raised by Clegg in which he may find himself at odds with “sound” Labour men and “enlightened” employers. Both groups have been accustomed to think of industrial democracy in terms of extending and improving the technique of consultation. Moreover, the fact that there is always a proliferation of consultative committees during war time and other periods of high or full employment suggests that they can supply, however imperfectly, a want that is strongly felt in such situations. Under full employment we don’t hear from management the vague, but arrogant, language employed by the engineering employers in 1922: “The employers have the right to manage their own establishments and the trade unions have the right to exercise their own functions” ( J. B. Jefferys, The Story Of The Engineers, p. 226). On the contrary, management becomes anxious to arouse the workers’ interest and even talks of developing worker participation in the taking of its decisions. Undoubtedly this is because full employment presents management with a new problem in maintaining the discipline and efficiency of its labour force. However, the very language in which the problem has to be discussed indicates that it cannot be resolved. For the root of the difficulty is how to reconcile the necessity of talking and thinking about a “labour force”, something which is economically indistinguishable from the other forces of production, and at the same time not to let it know that it is being so treated. In the absence of the pressures associated with a reserve army of labour, efficiency requires that men should acquire a positive interest in production. But how to give a man an interest in production when he has, in return for his wage, surrendered all control over the organisation of production? How to make a man feel that he is getting recognition and payment as a human being despite the fact that, so long as profit-making remains as the nerve of production, he can only be “the mortal tenement of so much labour power for which an efficient demand exists?” (G. D. H. Cole, Self-Government In Industry). It was with this intractable problem—of how to reconcile human relations with market relations—that joint consultation was intended to deal.

Joint Consultation Consultation has had its “successes”. It may reduce the number of disputes arising from inadequate “communications”. It may make the workers feel that an interest is being taken in them, and so contribute to increased productivity. But having an interest taken in you is a poor substitute for freedom. By and large, the workers are uninterested in consultation and dismiss it as a sham, since it leaves the traditional powers and prerogatives of management untouched. For a time, the champions of consultation may still argue that the

33

failure of their ideal can be explained away by the absence of the proper skills needed to make it work or by the prevalence of the wrong attitudes on both sides. But such considerations take us only a little way. Clegg believes that in Britain “private industry now makes much less of joint consultation than it did ten years ago” (p. 38). He may be right—although it is exceedingly difficult to get an adequate picture of just how much consultation there is in industry. If it is true that there has been a decline, it is probably because management is trusting increasingly to automatic machinery to control workers’ output. It may well be that the last word of capitalist managers on “human relations in industry” is not joint consultation, but—as one of them said—to try “increasingly to eliminate the influence of the human factor” (P. W. S. Andrews and E. Brunner in “Productivity and The Business Man”, Oxford Economic Papers, vol. 12, 1950). Clegg concedes that joint consultation has, on balance, been a failure. It no longer occupies a central place within his thinking on industrial democracy. One may share his conclusion without writing consultation off altogether. It may be a decided advantage that there is a statutory obligation imposed upon management in nationalised industries to establish consultative machinery. It may, as Clegg would allow, be a means of securing some immediate gains for labour. Further— and here we part company—it may be of considerable importance in helping to develop the demand for workers’ control. At first sight, Clegg’s disillusionment with consultation may appear a trivial matter, compared with his retreat from nationalisation and public ownership. But it is really interesting and important that one of the most erudite authorities on industrial relations, and a leading Fabian to boot, should be so ready to face the failure of consultation, just at the moment when the Labour Party is inscribing its faith in it on tables of stone. In the past, socialists have thought of industrial democracy in terms of some form or other of workers’ control. Dr. Pribicevic uses that term to mean: “the replacement of the capitalist industrial system by a new industrial order in which the industries of the country will be controlled (partly or completely) by associations of the workers employed in those industries”. (Shop Stewards’ Movement and Workers’ Control 1910–22, Blackwell, 1959).

Although there has been a wide variety of opinion about just how extensive this control should be and through what institutions it should best be exercised, there has been no disagreement hitherto among Socialists that the elimination of private ownership was a sine qua non, if ordinary people were to have the experience of taking part in the decisions which affect their own lives. Private ownership of the means of production appeared to be an insuperable obstacle to this. The mass of producers could not go on extending their demand to control their own working lives without coming into conflict with the principle of private property, since this principle

34

denied their right to control the material goods upon whose use and disposition their working lives depended. As a result of a visit to a conference organised under the auspices of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and long talks with Mr. Crosland, Clegg has come to the conclusion that this whole socialist tradition is fundamentally unsound and wrong-headed. He has discovered that ownership is absolutely irrelevant to industrial democracy. “Public ownership may have profound effects on the management of industry, but if the essence of democracy is opposition, then changes in management cannot be of primary importance to industrial democracy”. (p.29. His emphasis).

Here we are at the heart of Clegg’s argument and at the hub of his confusion—a confusion which vitiates the whole thesis of his book.

Essence of Democracy The “essence” of democracy is not opposition, but precisely “changes in management”. The distinguishing feature of democracy, whether in government or in industry, is that the governors or managers are accountable to the governed and can be replaced constitutionally by peaceful means. Experience suggests that the existence of an organised opposition in politics is indispensable if the electors are to be capable in practice, as well as in theory, of exercising their democratic right to retain or remove their leaders. But the essence of democracy—if one must use this sort of language—is to be found in that right of election and accountability, while the existence of opposition is important in so far as it is a means of making accountability effective. A moment’s reflection will show—at least to anyone who is not obsessed by cold war ideology—that there may be “opposition” without democracy and equally democracy without opposition. Democracy is not just the obverse of totalitarianism. There have been societies in which there have been a number of centres of power, a number of distinguishable elites in varying degrees of conflict with each other: but no one yet thought of calling such political systems democratic. Thus, in England before the first and second Reform Acts there was “opposition”, but as far as the mass of the people were concerned there was no democracy. Likewise, the absence of opposition is not necessarily the hall-mark of despotism. The historic nurseries of democratic ideals and practices—the town meeting,the dissenting chapel, the trade union lodge—knew no organised opposition. It is only when organisations become huge and their functions become increasingly complex; or where membership is compulsory and the members are not agreed about what is ultimately worth while; or where representation has ceased to be functional; it is only under a complex of such circumstances as these that primitive democratic practice

begins to break down, and anxiety grows about the real capacity of the members to change their leaders and exert effective influence over their policies. Thus in discussing the possibilities of workers’ control, we ought not to think in purely general terms about whether or not “an opposition would be necessary”. The answer might very well be that, at workshop level and where enterprises can enjoy a high degree of autonomy, the need for opposition—for a body to perform the traditional functions of the unions under capitalism— would be extremely limited. If the workers could establish sufficiently comprehensive powers of accountability and control within the enterprise, the functions of an opposition would, at this level, be limited to the occasional defence of individuals who have grievances against the collective. But where we are thinking about an industry in which there is need for a single unit of management, or where the workers would be exercising their control over the administration of policy rather than over policy itself, then there would be a clear need for a permanent opposition as a check upon the oligarchical tendencies which would appear within the single channel of popular control. In this passage there are two assumptions which Clegg would not accept; but before looking at them in more detail it is necessary to return for a moment to his views on the nature of democracy and the irrelevance of ownership to democracy in industry. For we must not lose sight of the fact that what Clegg is contending for is not that an opposition would be necessary in an industrial democracy, but that so long as an opposition exists in industry, then the system can properly be described as industrial democracy. He is engaged in a game of persuasive definition.

Industrial Parallels In his “Conclusions” Clegg states, “In all the stable democracies there is a system of industrial relations which can fairly be called the industrial

parallel of political democracy . . . . . . . . . It promotes the interests and protects the rights of workers in industry by means of collective bargaining . . . . . . . This could be called a system of industrial democracy by consent, or pressure group industrial democracy, or democracy through collective bargaining”. (p. 131. His emphasis). The expression “industrial parallel” is used here in a most misleading manner. The reader is being encouraged to conclude that, because there is in fact a correspondence or connection between political and industrial systems, they must be analogous to each other and have the same kind of structure. That Clegg is making such a mistake becomes abundantly apparent in what follows. He reminds us of the truism that we cannot literally talk about selfgovernment in any large organisation. Britain is said to be self-governing, but a few govern while the many are governed. “A democracy by consent, a pressure group democracy, cannot be self-governing in this sense. By the same

reasoning collective bargaining cannot be described as industrial self-government . . .”. (p. 133). Of course collective bargaining can’t be described as industrial self-government, but we don’t reach this conclusion “by the same reasoning” as we arrive at the conclusion that Britain can’t be self-governing. Ordinary people do habitually refer to Britain as self-governing. What they mean to convey by this is not usually that we are free from alien rule, or that we make all the laws ourselves; but that we have the opportunity of choosing the persons who take the most important political decisions. Nobody talks about industrial selfgovernment because in industry those who take many of the most important decisions are not chosen by anybody or are accountable only to a handful of property-owners. Surely it is a gross abuse of language to use the word “democratic” to describe our industrial system, when, in any other context, Clegg would not use the word to describe states or institutions within which the leaders are irremovable by the led.

Managerial Power When Clegg uses such arguments as these he rouses the suspicion that his conclusion, that “management is necessarily separate from the workers” (p. 132), must be dismissed as either a tautology (management is management and not labour) or a non sequitur. It is noteworthy that throughout his book, Clegg is almost wholly preoccupied with that part of the workers’ control tradition which looked to the direct assimilation of all the functions of management by the workers. His discussion of Guild Socialism is particularly inadequate and perfunctory. He does, of course, recognise that “workers may sometimes be allowed to choose their managers”. But his book is not about the circumstances which make this possible, but about demonstrating that this “does not make them into managers themselves” (p. 132). Naturally, despite his obsession with “opposition”, he does recognise that political democracy has in the electoral mechanism a machinery of sanction. But he argues that “sanctions are more important in politics than in industry” since “the powers of an employer or manager over the worker are less absolute than the powers of the state over the citizen” (p. 83). This is true, but it misses the point, since many workers are much more impressed and concerned with the powers of management than they are with those of the state. The average worker does not feel that he is continually being subjected to state power, but he is bothered by management daily and is concerned with what it is doing and what it intends to do. It is with him for eight hours a day. Moreover, it frequently exercises its powers over him, not as the State does through general rules binding on all, including those who make them, but in the shape of particular decisions. It is in the nature of the managerial

35

function to discriminate, but this discrimination is—and is frequently felt to be—arbitrary. Finally, there is a yet more fundamental reason for wishing to see democratic sanctions extended to industry. If class is determined by one’s position in the process of production, as Marxists contend, then this makes class differences turn on much more than mere differences of wealth or income. The possession of authority, the extent to which one gives orders or receives them, is of the highest relevance to distinctions of class and status. The working class spends its life taking orders and the higher classes spend their lives giving them. The intermediate groups, such as the professional men, regard their freedom from detailed supervision and direction as a badge of their high status; and where they find themselves being organised, they insist most strenuously on the principle of accountability. Since socialists are committed to the ideal of a classless society, they are thereby committed as much to diminishing and circumscribing differences of power as they are to those of wealth or income.

Chains of Command In a capitalist society it is “authority” or “independence” which underwrites the distinction between mental and physical labour and which sets up a seemingly unbridgeable gap between them. One is associated with the giving of commands—or with a relative exemption from them—while the other is constantly subjected to them. For the many there is little or no satisfaction in work (which they are not expected to regard as any more than mere drudgery), while, for the few, life has to be justified by “success”—where success means reducing all action to self-assertion, equating development with domination, and enhancing, at any hazard, one’s own “standing” and “status”. Once it is allowed that Clegg’s account of the “essence” of democracy is unsound, once it is agreed that this consists not of the existence of an “opposition” but of the power to replace peacefully the leaders whether of government or of management, his contention that ownership is irrelevant to industrial democracy falls to the ground. The other two “main elements” in the “New Approach” to Industrial Democracy need not detain us long. Clegg himself admits so many exceptions to them that they have all but died the death of a thousand qualifications by the end of the book. Take the principle that “trade unions must be independent both of the state and of management”. “Independence” cannot mean that the unions do not enter into agreements with management for which they must assume some responsibility. Indeed, it is one of the most important and distinctive features of our industrial scene that there are union leaders who seem prepared to go to almost any length to uphold the authority of joint negotiating machinery. And it is interesting to note that the more independent the leaders become in relation to

36

their own members, the less anxious they are to prove their independence of management. They seem to have the rule sancta sunt servanda inscribed upon their hearts. Mr. Harry Douglas, who can claim the distinction of being the leader of one of the most undemocratic trade unions in Britain, has asserted that “an employer who conceded a wage claim under a strike threat performed a criminal act which was both immoral and bad business” (Manchester Guardian, 6 January, 1955). This points the moral that the issue of independence ought not to be discussed in the abstract without reference to the sort of management and the kind of state involved. The reader of A New Approach to Industrial Democracy might be excused if he came to the conclusion that the entire “workers’ control” tradition in the British Labour Movement has always thought in terms of trade union control of industry. This was not the case. Discussing the continuing demand of the Post Office workers for control, G. D. H. Cole wrote: “Workers’ control of industry and trade union control of industry I insist, are not the same thing. I believe in the one but not in the other. I think democratic control must be developed inside the productive structure itself, and not by inserting people into it from outside. And I think the Staff Associations must be regarded as outside bodies because they will continue to be needed for the protection of the workers’ interests, and cannot double this function

with the assumption of responsibility to the public . . . . . ”. (J. M. Chalmers, I. Mikardo and G. D. H. Cole, Consultation or Joint Management, Fabian Tract 277).

Transition To Workers’ Control This distinction between workers’ control and trade union control brings us to Clegg’s principle that only the unions can represent the industrial interests of the workers. It is obvious that the truth of this proposition depends on the way in which the term “industrial interests of the workers” is defined. But it is extremely difficult, as Clegg’s own work shows, to find any definition which would not leave it in need of some qualification. And if it is allowed that the workers have a legitimate interest in the entire process of production, as well as in the distribution of the product of their labours, then there is no reason why these two distinguishable sets of interests should not be represented through two distinct pieces of democratic machinery. On the contrary, there is everything to be said for it. The real difficulty here is that in the period of transition to workers’ control, where control was still confined to the administration of policies shaped by capitalist management, there would be profound disadvantages in having two sets of leaders with claims upon the loyalty of the workers. That is why any attempt to develop the movement for workers’ control through transforming consultative into controlling committees would have to take place under the auspices of the unions. Only after the elimination of the profitmakers would the representatives on these committees hive-off.

It would be stupid to pretend that the concept of a socialist economy with workers’ control is a simple one, or that the strategy of the advance towards it does not present formidable difficulties. The tragedy of Clegg’s book is that, instead of dealing with these difficulties, he retreats before them. I have tried to show that social ownership is not irrelevant but indispensable to industrial democracy. It is, however, a necessary, without being a sufficient, condition. If we are to acquire a proper understanding of the problem, we must go back and examine the socialist tradition on workers’ control. This is sometimes referred to as if it had lapsed or as if it belonged exclusively to one short period in the past; but this is not the case. Unfortunately, Clegg does scant justice to this tradition; in fact he advises us to forget all about it and “return to a version of industrial democracy close to the beliefs of British nineteenth-century trade unionists and their radical friends” (p. 81). (Incidentally, this provides yet another interesting example of the current vogue in certain academic circles for the Lib-Lab era. It is also a little ungrateful, since Clegg’s one positive proposal is the adoption of the “collective contract” which was a Guild Socialist invention!) All socialists have hitherto affirmed that socialism was a condition of industrial democracy. Long after Herbert Morrison had decreed that the public corporation was the definitive form of socialist industry, Attlee was writing (1935) that “workers’ control” was “an essential part of the new order”. The trouble was that there was the greatest confusion about precisely what such terms as “control”, “participation” and “industrial democracy” really meant. Behind this confusion was the fact that there were real differences about how much industrial self-government mattered and about how far it could be reconciled with economic planning. Robert Dahl was quite correct when he wrote: “Socialist thought has long contained two potentially contradictory doctrines concerning the control or management of productive enterprises under a socialist regime. One of these is the idea of workers’ control: the concept that under socialism workers will no longer be merely passive victims of the productive process, but direct participants in the control of productive enterprises. The other is the idea of central control on behalf of the entire community: the concept that socialism will replace ‘the anarchy of production under capitalism with a central determination of the appropriate goals of economic activity”. (“Workers’ Control of Industry and The British Labour Party”, American Political Science Review, Vol. XLI, Oct. 1947).

The Stalinists had a short way with this dilemma. They discarded the dialectic in favour of syllogisms to the effect that if the workers control the state, and the state controls industry, then, ergo, there is workers’ control of industry. The Stalinists might appeal to the authority of Lenin in support of this style of argument, for he appeared to be using it himself when he skilfully broke up the movement for workers’ control on the Russian railways (see E. H. Carr’s account, A History of Soviet Russia, vol. II, 1952). However, there was at

least this excuse for Lenin’s duplicity; he exploited a rather different ambiguity. In a revolutionary situation “workers’ control” may refer to a revolutionary strategy (occupation of the factories by armed workers) as distinct from a form of industrial administration to be established after the capitalists have been expropriated. Lenin knew the difference—but only made it clear when it suited him. The Fabians can hardly claim to have a much better record than the Marxists when it comes to facing up honestly to this problem. For they too were centralisers, who yielded only partially and reluctantly to mass pressure for workers’ control and then withdrew their concessions once this pressure diminished. At heart, both Marxism and Fabianism regarded the demand for workers’ control as being utterly unrealistic, romantic and reactionary, something which ought to be dismissed as the product of small-scale industry or as a grandiose expression of preoccupation with petty craft privileges.

Nationalisation and Centralisation However, as G. D. H. Cole foresaw, nationalisation and centralism have to reach their nemesis. In Western as well as in Eastern Europe, the workers are learning through their own experience that it is a hoax to call control by a “worker’s State” or by a “democratic State”, workers’ or democratic control of industry. In Britain, the miners know that nationalisation has not transformed their working lives as they had hoped it would, and they are coming to see that it is not just because “the same old faces are still there”. The most perspicacious of them complain that nationalisation is like “working for a ghost”, while others ask—in the words of one Yorkshire miner—“Why is it that we must always work under management and never with it?” In some countries of Eastern Europe the workers are in revolt—sometimes abortively, as in Hungary, sometimes with a measure of success as in Jugoslavia and Poland— against “administrative socialism”. They are not demanding Clegg’s kind of “industrial democracy”, but are opposing to “Party” Communism something like what the old Dutch revolutionary, Anton Pannekock, called “Council Communism”. I believe that the demand for “workers’ control” is not at all “old hat”. Rather, historical experience, both at home and abroad, suggests that it is a demand which grows wherever there are high levels of employment combined with far-reaching state ownership and control of the economy. It is no accident that it is state employees, or those who look like becoming state employees, who are always in the van of the movement for workers’ control. Some of the evidence which supports this interpretation will be found in Branko Pribicevic’s The Shop Steward ’s Movement and Workers’ Control. If this interpretation is correct, then the boot is very much on the other foot as far as the State controllers are concerned. In the past they have gone in

37

for a good deal of surreptitious or shame-faced “historicism”. Even objective historians, such as Dahl, have been infected with this attitude, and have talked about the scale and inter-dependence of modern industry making the demand for workers’ control technologically obsolete. In consequence, they assert that “it was perhaps inevitable that the Fabian view should prevail over the Guild view in the Labour Movement”. But hugeness in industrial organisation may not be inevitable or even half as desirable on grounds of efficiency as some people imagine. Bigness may be in some measure the result of the requirements of market strategy in a capitalist economy and of consideration of power and prestige, rather than of technical factors. If this could be proved to be true, then the door would already be half-open to a way out of the socialist predicament which Dahl himself formulated so clearly.

Decentralised Pattern In the past, the Guild Socialists and others were, perhaps, too inclined to think in terms of one fairly uniform model of control which could be applied to all industries. As Cole admitted in his Foreword to Pribicevic’s book, “The Guild Socialists’ weakness was that they never faced the fundamental problem of power and of large scale organisation and planning”. They were certainly most hazy about the control of price and investment policy. But once the assumption of a uniform model is dropped and it is allowed that over large stretches of industry high levels of efficiency can be attained without industry-wide management, a new vision of a socialist economy begins to open up. Those industries which were of decisive importance for economic stability and growth would be owned and controlled centrally by the State. But all around them there would be state and co-operatively owned enterprises which were directly controlled by the workers themselves. Here the workers would elect their own Board of Directors which would appoint the managing director. The Board, in conjunction with the Director and the specialist managers, would determine policy. Enterprises could be linked through Chambers of Commerce which would supply research and other services, but would be subject to the operation of market forces. The trade unions would continue to exercise their function of negotiating basic wage rates

and protecting individual workers from arbitrary decisions. A more limited form of workers’ control would also be possible within the nationalised or public monopoly sector. Here it would take the form of some control over the administration of policy rather than over policy itself. Clegg denies that this distinction between policy and administration has any application to industrial management and even appears to have doubts about its applicability to government (119–120). It is certainly often far from easy in practice to say where one begins and the other ends, but it surely has some meaning nonetheless. For example, if the Coal Board decides that the ratio of small to large coal being produced is too great and decides as a matter of policy that it must be cut by a certain amount, there may be a number of ways in which that policy can be carried out, and the miners may have a great interest in which one of these ways is chosen. Without questioning that responsibility here must run from lower to higher management, the acquisition by the workers of the right to make certain appointments at national and other levels could have important and beneficial results. Within the present nationalised industries the workers have, of course, no powers of appointment. However, there is a kind of informal arrangement. Among the retired Admirals and unretired Directors of private companies who sit in legion on the national and regional boards of the nationalised industries, there are one or two men who are drawn from the Labour Movement and who enjoy a deserved popularity with the unions. Despite the unfavourable environment created by the policy of subordinating the public to the private sector, such men have managed to apply policy, on a limited number of occasions, in a much more enlightened way than would otherwise have been the case. This experience, limited though it is, suggests that it might be worth pressing for the workers to have a full and formal right to make a certain number of appointments. Such suggestions do little more than touch the fringe of the problem; despite this, they raise a host of questions which there is no room to discuss here. Yet it is certain that we badly need a “new approach” to industrial democracy. Certainly, it must be based on social ownership. With equal certainty, the future of social ownership depends, not on politically neutral arguments about “efficiency”, but on showing that only social ownership can—within the limits that are inherent in any co-operative organisation—allow men to run their lives in their own way.

•••••••••••••••••••••

38

Dorothy Thompson

FAREWELL TO THE WELFARE STATE

In the era of popular conservatism, the Labour movement has abandoned the revolutionary priorities of welfare and community provision, and neglected the growth of “double standards” in the “irresponsible society”.

WHEN THE tide rises, the whole ship goes up with it. There is no doubt that—throughout Western Europe at any rate—the combined forces of economic stability, the high level of employment, the consolidation in certain important sectors of working-class power and influence, have, in the last fifteen years, raised the overall living standards of all sections of the people. Fifteen years is a short time, and it is hardly surprising that many people have been overwhelmed by the speed of the change. The most striking thing, for the older generations, has been the apparent abolition of poverty. They can still remember times when a skilled man in full employment could barely manage to raise a family decently, when no job was secure, when working-class children had to turn down grammar school scholarships because their parents could not afford the clothes to send them to school. These things were the rule, not the exception, and the comparison with the position of the skilled worker and his family today needs no labouring. On the face of it, many of the ideas for which the Labour movement has been fighting for generations, have come to reality in modern Britain. It would be quite wrong to underestimate the effect of the Health Service, or of the work of some of the Labour Municipalities in providing social services of the very highest level. But the impetus has died down. In the Labour Movement itself there is a feeling that we are coming to the end of the demands which we can make of public funds—perhaps some slight improvements, say ten bob on the Old Age Pension, a tightening of controls on privately rented property, would be acceptable. But the overall policy of the Labour Party on social questions has not advanced since 1945—in fact, it has in many ways receded. Yet the 1945 programme was based on the Beveridge Report, issued during the most expensive war in history, and based on the experience of one of the most economically disastrous decades in modern times. The ship has risen, certainly, but it has taken up with it first, second and third-class passenger decks, and some pretty squalid bilges down below. It is time that the Labour Movement prepared itself for another attack on the unjust, unequal, and decadent social values which still govern our society. Two of the new Fabian series of tracts, issued under the general title of Socialism in the Sixties, provide the most useful material for the necessary re-examination of our social services, since the essays of Peter Townsend and Brian Abel-Smith in Conviction, and Professor

Titmuss’ Essays on the Welfare State. These are Audrey Harvey’s Casualties of the Welfare State and Professor Titmuss’ The Irresponsible Society. Professor Titmuss speaks of “the myth of the Welfare State”, and it is perhaps a good starting point for a new social policy to throw overboard this “simple, but crushingly cold and complacent phrase”. Both Townsend and Titmuss have made the point that the phrase is used to imply an achievement, and not an aim: “The last decade has . . . witnessed a demonstration of the effectiveness of the myth as a motive force in British political beliefs and behaviour. Chief among these has been the myth of the ‘Welfare State for the Working Classes’. This has had a number of consequences. Reinforced by the ideologies of enterprise and opportunity it has led to the assumption that most—if not all—of our social problems have been—or soon will be—solved. Those few that remain will, it is thought, be automatically remedied by rising incomes and minor adjustments of one kind or another. In short, it is coming to be assumed that there is little to divide the nation on home affairs except the dreary minutiae of social reform, the patronage of the arts, the parking of cars and the effectiveness of corporal punishment. . . .”

To paraphrase a famous formula, it could be said that the only way to end the Welfare State is to press for more welfare. Audrey Harvey shows, in her introduction and conclusions, a whole range of questions on which immediate and practical reform of existing provision could be envisaged. Because these are the conclusions of some one engaged in practical social work, they may appear superficially to constitute the “dreary minutiae of social reform”; but in fact, the sort of practical proposals which social workers must make now, do demand a reconsideration of the whole direction of our social policy, and draw us back again and again to the conflict between the concept of a society of equals and that of a society with equal opportunities. Professor Titmuss examines this contradiction in a broader way, by documenting the growth of inequality in our present society. If, which I doubt, any one who reads this still has the illusion that we are in some way drifting towards a more just and egalitarian order of things, this pamphlet will restore them to a sense of reality. Casualties of the Welfare State is the work of a social worker, whose personal experience has led her to the conclusion that the welfare state is riddled with gaps, and that, for the really poor, these gaps are all too easy to fall through. The improvements for which she asks are, in fact, by no means entirely administrative; they imply a change of approach and a change of funda-

39

mental values in the people employed in social work, as well as in the administrative approach of the authorities. Before writing this review, I asked a number of socialists in the West Riding, who are actively concerned in social work to read the pamphlet; they endorsed most of her conclusions, and went on to make other suggestions which could become part of a more detailed programme of demands by the Labour Movement for the real abolition of poverty, and for the relief of some of the real misery which exists to-day. The Beveridge Report was a bleak enough document. It was based on the attempt to establish a subsistence minimum of social security, and could not be accused of making extravagant or romantic demands on behalf of the working class. And yet, a number of the recommendations of the Report were never put into operation, and the effects of this are very evident now.

Beveridge Revisited Beveridge stipulated that the allowances and pensions payable under his scheme should be tied to the cost of living. This was never accepted, with the result that, in spite of periodic adjustments, they have always lagged behind general living costs. Beveridge also assumed that the work of the National Assistance Board would be temporary, whilst the scheme was getting into operation. In fact, one of the outstanding facts about our social security provisions is that the N.A.B. has become a built-in part of them. This position of the N.A.B. is of very great importance. In 1958, 68 per cent of the grants made by the Board were made to people in receipt of national insurance benefits. Dorothy Cole (New Reasoner, Spring 1959) has made some guesses as to the proportion of old age pensioners who are in receipt of assistance and of those who would qualify but have not applied. Fifty-four per cent of the Board’s grants in 1958 were to those in receipt of the Old Age Pension, and included about a quarter of the total number of pensioners. The fact is that the pension for a married couple falls short, by about 5s. a week, of the allowance estimated as necessary for subsistence by the N.A.B. and the Board is usually prepared to pay the rent in addition. So that those pensioners who do not receive the ‘supplement’ must either have private means or be living below the very stringent subsistence minimum of the N.A.B. Most other allowances—widows’ pensions, unemployment benefit and sickness allowances—also have to be supplemented and in every case, the applicant has to plead poverty, and to prove his plea. He must agree to being visited in his home, and to expect such visits all the time he is receiving assistance. Audrey Harvey says: “The price of application is . . . the surrender of personal privacy, and a strong deterrent is the fear that even when this price is paid, assistance may not be forthcoming. . . .”

The important position of the N.A.B., and the unique relationship which its officers have with the most needy

40

people in the community, raises the question of its personnel. As Mrs. Harvey points out, it is staffed by civil servants, drafted into the job, with no specialist training in social questions. Yet they must visit people in their homes, and on basis of their assessments must often, in marginal cases, make decisions and judgments involving complicated questions of personality and of living conditions. At best, they will have the reactions of sympathetic laymen. Few, indeed, lack sympathy for old age pensioners, or even for the chronic sick cases. But it is far more difficult to be unprejudiced in cases in which able-bodied people seem incapable of managing their own affairs. Under the pressure of time, and in the interests of departmental efficiency, people with individual problems can all too easily be labelled—and with labels that may affect their lives for many years. Many of the staff, too, have come over from the old Poor Law system, with its avowedly deterrent attitude to poverty. In the case of the family whose story she describes in detail, Mrs. Harvey later questioned some of the social workers who had had to deal with them. One of the most horrifying parts of the story is the prejudice and indifference which these people showed. Unfortunately, the general standard of social workers seems to be low in most parts of the country. Even such key workers as probation officers are often recruited by ‘direct entry’, and start on the job with almost no training.

Ministry of Social Security A second provision of the Beveridge Plan which has been ignored, was the setting up of a Ministry of Social Security. Whether this would have meant the humanising and simplifying of the various services we cannot tell, but it is clear from the experience of every one that one of the greatest gaps in the services is the lack of information, and the lack of a single source to which a person in need or trouble can apply. For the hospital case there is the almoner; for the person who has been brought into court there is the probation service; but for the ordinary citizen struggling with personal and social problems, there is often no one who can explain to him the services that are available, or who can help him to apply in the proper way to the proper authority. In some places the Citizens’ Advice Bureaux fulfil this function, in others a local councillor. But so much here may depend on local circumstances. For example, a magistrate was trying to get help for a family which had got badly into debt, and telephoned the local councillor for help. Unfortunately he was also the local coal merchant, to whom the family owed money, and so wasn’t inclined to be helpful. In the short run, some kind of co-ordination of services and information is long overdue, and an official of the local authority, located in a central place in the town, and available

outside normal working hours, could make sure that more advantage is taken of services which do exist. It is becoming a cliché on the Left to speak of the thousands, or even millions, who are still living in real poverty. Because most of us do not know such people, there is always a suspicion of doubt, or of sloganising, in such talk. But there are families with several children living on £8 a week, and there are families which are better off on assistance than when they were in work. This is not supposed to be possible, since the N.A.B. is instructed not to pay out allowances which would come up to the rate of the man’s working wage. But an example, perhaps an extreme one, will show that it can happen. A woman with ten children was deserted by her husband, who refused to support the family. She was therefore given assistance, which included the payment of the rent of a council house large enough for the family. Her income was more regular and better than it had ever been when her husband, who was on the lowest textile wage, was supporting the family. But the Board is not allowed to supplement full-time earnings, so that the family would never have reached that level with a wage-earner at home. Another family came to the notice of the authorities when the husband sold a television set he had bought on hire purchase, and the wife robbed the gas meter. Both were of low, though not subnormal intelligence. There were four children. The husband was sent to prison for three months, leaving the woman, who was put on probation, with heavy arrears of rent, and unpaid electricity and gas bills. The magistrate who took up the case was finally able to get a grant from a charitable organisation to pay the light bill, and get the electricity re-connected. When the husband came home, he resumed his job at a textile mill, his employers paid off the rent arrears, and agreed to pay his rent from his wages and to deduct 5s. a week to pay back the arrears. But since his total wage was £8 5s. 0d., the future for the family looks as bleak as the past. And for every such family that gets into serious trouble of this sort, there are very many more that drag along in continuous debt and sub-standard living conditions.

New Demands We need much more information about the way poor people actually live than we have. But even with our limited knowledge, we can draw some lessons for future action. An important point made by Professor Titmuss, is that, “many of us must now admit that we put too much faith in the 1940’s in the concept of universality as applied to social security”. He pleads for more inventiveness in the treatment of social problems; and it is from this point that most of us would start. A detailed examination of the problem of retirement pensions has already been made by Dorothy Cole

(op. cit.). But the sort of question which arises increasingly is not how to provide a scheme which will cover every one equally, but how to tackle the fact that the lowest paid workers, who have all their lives lived on or near the poverty line, arrive at retirement age with fewer goods, fewer resources of all kinds than their better paid neighbours. Should we not openly ask for privileged treatment for these people—for example a supplementary pension, granted permanently as of right, for those who have no other resources but the basic pension? And this to be, not the 5s. provided by the N.A.B., but an allowance of £1 or £2,—to be provided for from sources outside the pensions fund? Should we not look again at differential rent schemes, aimed at substantially subsidising large families on low wages, a subsidy to be taken from taxation and not from the housing fund? Should we not be asking for a far wider range of services for the old, and for the other hard-pressed people—the mothers of large families, widows, unmarried mothers and so on; services which would bring their standard of living more in line with the majority of us—free or cheap laundries, a great extension of child-minding and nursery provision, the payment of part-time wardens, such as already exist in some areas for old people, to help out with shopping, baby-minding, and other routine jobs which can become burdens at times of illness or worry.

Society Of Equals? Mr. Morgan Phillips is reported to be worried (Guardian 23.5.60) because references in the speeches of Labour politicians to old-age pensioners are ceasing to elicit the “warm response” with which they have hitherto never failed to be greeted. He sees in this the decline of “idealism” in the electorate. It could, of course, also mean that audiences are tired of giving a warm response to politicians whose idea of dealing with one of the major poverty problems in our affluent society consists in the promise of an extra ten bob a week on all pensions (which would anyway be halved in the case of the most needy, unless it was accompanied by an increase in the National Assistance minimum). There is very little in Labour’s programme (even including the revised pensions proposals, by which those who began to draw their pensions in 45 years after the beginning of the scheme would do so on a slightly better basis than is the case today) to suggest that we are to move out of the Welfare State towards the society of equals. I am not suggesting that a new assault on poverty and inequality would immediately re-enthuse the tired electorate, which has just voted with its feet against Labour in so many local elections. But a programme of specific social reforms is an essential part of the all-out attack which socialists know has to be mounted on the

41

ethics and practice of the present irresponsible oligarchy We need an immense amount of information, discussion and experiment to produce such a programme. In the working out of new forms of social service, and particularly of local controls and initiatives, a whole range of other problems may well come under review. There is not space here to do more than suggest, in a very general way, the sort of thing I mean. Women, for instance, in modern conditions often find that there is no place for them in the life of their communities other than as housewives. But the development of neighbourhood community services, employing part-time social workers, could well provide the sort of local, part-time work which a woman could combine with family responsibilities. The freeing of funds for training and paying part-time workers of all ages could lead to the development of a fuller life for those who take part in the services, as well as for those who benefit. There are many other spheres too—housing being amongst the most obvious—in which the investment of money, the development of research and the assessment of the experience of the post-war years could lead to a great improvement in the quality of life, not only

The Defence Burden:

These three tables, referred to in Michael Artis’ article on Defence Spending and the Economy, show th-e relation between increased Defence and employment in the American economy (Table 1), the percentages of the Gross National Product spent on arms (Table 2) and the profits made by some prominent firms in the “hardware” trade.

1. Manpower Statistics, USA. 1940–58*

1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958

Unemployment as a percentage total labour force

Unemployment in thousands

14.6 9.9 4.7 1.9 1.2 1.9 3.9 3.6 3.4 5.5 5.0 3.0 2.7 2.5 5.0 4.0 3.8 4.3 6.8

8,120 5,560 2,660 1,070 670 1,040 2,270 2,142 2,064 3,395 3,142 1,879 1,673 1,602 3,230 2,654 2,551 2,936 —

* From Stat. Abstract 1958, and OEEC Gen. Stats. Jan., 1960

42

of individuals but of communities. We have become far too shy in making demands on public funds for these things. How many urgent medical cases, or sexually overcrowded families could have been re-housed for the price of half a non-existent Blue Streak missile? And housed, not in sub-standard accommodation, which ought to have been demolished long ago, nor in bleak pre-war housing estates, many of which need as much drastic remodelling as the overcrowded city centres; but in decent estates, planned for family living, with safe foot-paths, play centres for children, neighbourhood accommodation for old people and for single people, with good schools, shops, theatres, health centres and clubs. Huge fortunes are being made by ‘private’ people—often directly or indirectly from the ‘public’ sector of the economy. It seems incredible that large sectors of the working-class movement are so caught up in the arguments and values of a capitalist society, that they hesitate to make the simple demand for this money to be channelled, by progressive taxation or by simple appropriation, into providing at least a minimum standard of civilised living for every member of society. 2. Defence as a percentage of GNP at constant (1954) prices,* but exc. civil defence. U.K. 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

U.S.

7.2 8.4 10.4 10.4 9.7 8.9 8.5 7.5 7.3

5.6 11.2 14.4 14.8 12.5 10.7 10.3 10.4 10.4

* OEEC Gen. Stats. Jan., 1960.

3. Total Profits and Dividends ($000) 1959* Company

Profits

Dividends

Rolls Royce Vickers Hawker-Siddeley de Havilland

8,722 14,418 21,589 2,263

Elliott Auto. English Electric Ferranti

1,363 11,534 3,117

1,218 2,816 1,755 ( from Hawker S. after merger) 263 1,925 154

* Reproduced by kind permission, from Labour Research, June, 1960.

Michael Artis

THE DEFENCE BURDEN

What role does defence spending play in a capitalist economy: what would be the costs and “disadvantages” of disarmament? These questions are discussed by Michael Artis in this second article in the series, WHAT’S WRONG WITH CAPITALISM? THE CHIEF aim of this article is to provide an assessment of the economic problems and opportunities which a disarmament agreement would present to Britain. Nevertheless, a good deal will be said, in the course of the analysis, of the role which defence production plays in the American economy, since both the possibility and the ultimate success of a disarmament agreement depend crucially on American reactions. Popular thinking on this subject is fraught with contradictions, of which one of the most acute is undoubtedly the conflict between the view that defence is a “burden” and a cause of inflation, and the view that production for defence is essential to the maintenance of full employment. The political implications of this second view have been noted in the local politics of California and the South of England alike; Clive Jenkins, in his recent study Jets and Jobs (published by UDC, 6d.) drew particular attention to an incident in the last General Election. He writes:

In Ian Mikardo’s General Election campaign in Reading an active Labour Party member took reprints from a piece I wrote for Tribune entitled Jobs and Bombs into the Aldermaston Atomic Weapon Centre, had it discussed in the Shop Stewards’ Committee and pinned to the notice board. The Labour candidate in the neighbouring constituency felt it necessary to produce a special leaflet for the atomic plant employees. Why? Because in teabreak discussions throughout the Centre, workers were arguing with anxiety about their employment prospects if bomb manufacture were suspended.

There are other, less obvious arguments about the role of defence production which will be encountered later, but it is sufficient at this stage to try to get a clearer view of its ‘Keynesian’ role. There are, immediately, two aspects to this role: the first might be called the “general” or national Keynesian role, where production for defence is a guarantor of full employment in the whole economy. The second is a more limited and localised role, where defence production, or the particular way in which it is carried on, is designed to bolster the fortunes of a declining industry or a particular depressed area. It is in this second aspect of its Keynesian role that defence production is usually recognised as having a function in maintaining employment, and it is at this level that the workers in the industries concerned currently assess the benefits of disarmament. Nonetheless, it is the fear that defence production in fact also occupies the ‘national’ Keynesian role that is most disturbing. There can be no doubt of course, that as things are, defence production must play some part in

the maintenance of full employment, but the crucial question is whether this form of public spending is integral or only marginal to the capitalist organisation of the economy. Can other forms of spending take over the employment roles performed by defence production, or are there specific features of the economy which make this difficult or unlikely? It is not difficult to show that in Great Britain production for defence has played a strong role in the second aspect of this Keynesian function. The high casualty rate of aircraft projects was due more to the contractingpolicy of ‘competitive development’ than to any waste factor inherent in the application of advanced scientific techniques. This policy of contracting, moreover, was specifically designed to postpone the agonies of contraction in the aircraft industry (see the Second Report of the Select Committee on Estimates, 1956). The government’s own factories, especially those engaged in the manufacture of conventional weapons, are generally sited on the fringes of industrial concentrations which are registered as depressed areas. This location is the result, again, of deliberate policy, with mixed motives of a strategic and political nature: the factories are conveniently placed from the point of view of access to industrial raw materials, and at the same time can help to relieve the problems of local unemployment. No doubt, with the advent of the new technology and the increase in production of nuclear weapons and missiles, the old pattern of locational concentration and industrial direction of defence orders is becoming dated, but certain areas such as Northern Ireland and Merseyside could suffer heavily from disarmament unless safeguards are introduced. The Keynesian role of defence production in the USA is a qualitatively different thing: local effects are still important, particularly in California, but it is the national or overall effects of defence production which are the most important. Manipulation of the defence production programme is a well-worn stabiliser of the economy. American economists are for the most part quite unambiguous about this: Alvin Hansen, for instance, in The American Economy stated categorically that “our military expenditures have not made us poor, they have put us to work”. This lesson was impressed upon the nation by the experience of the war and the immediately post-war years; it is worthwhile examining this period in some detail, since it includes a successful reconversion of the economy from defence production levels of massive size.

43

The employment series (Table 1) makes dramatic reading: re-armament partly solved the unemployment problem for America, and it was not until 1949 that the rate of unemployment again reached the 5 per cent mark. (This figure was long considered to be a synonym for full employment even by the most Keynesian American economists.) The success of this transition period, from 1945–1948, requires some explanation, especially in view of the fact that forecasts of 10 million unemployed in the post-war world were not uncommon among American economists at the end of the war. Three qualifications should be made to the apparent success of the transition as indicated by the unemployment series: first, the figures are known to underestimate the proportion of the population actually out of work, since they refer only to the insured population. Secondly, the occurrence of widespread and bitter strikes in 1946 may disguise the amount of unemployment that would have occurred had there been no disputes. Thirdly, the overall figures of unemployment disguise the fact that certain locations were particularly hard hit: the high concentration of defence industries in the West Coast states, coupled with the fact that these areas enjoyed no respite in production between VE and VJ day, produced very heavy unemployment figures. Fortunately, the West Coast was soon to have a boom of its own which absolved the government from the necessity for intervention.

Post-War Recovery Despite these qualifications, the achievement was quite startling and better than anyone had dared to hope. The conventional explanation for the success of the world’s post-war recovery relies upon the element of consumer demand, pent-up during the war years, and subsequently let loose to stimulate the economy so as to achieve new levels of production. The interesting point, however, is that the pent-up demands, whilst undoubtedly being a major factor in the recovery, could not have been so important in the USA, as, say, in this country. Indeed, it was the pride of American economists that throughout the war the production of consumer goods was maintained at a high level. The government refused to impose controls over labour; instead, a system of incentives and bonuses was used to increase production, and the necessary corollary was to make the bonus system genuine by providing consumption goods in ready quantities throughout. The particular factors which ensured the success of the transition from war to peace could be summarised as follows: the pent-up demands; the lag between VE and VJ day which allowed the government to experiment with its plans; the fact that the peak of war production was actually in 1943; foreign demand, bolstered by aid programmes; increased welfare expenditures; the existence of backlogs in investment; and prompt and generous policies in regard to the liquidation of stocks and the cancellation of contracts. Foreign demand was

44

especially important for the aircraft and shipping industries and for the agricultural sector. It is important to note how much of the programme was successful because it combined policies which were acceptable to business with those which were economically necessary. The policies of cancellation of contracts and lease of federally-owned industrial plants were extremely generous to business, and played an extremely important part in the recovery in the initial stages. Welfare expenditures were, by contrast, much less important in practice than had been intended, for the concessions to the business sector eventually proved to be incompatible with the completion of welfare programmes. Shortly after the Employment Act had been passed in 1946, business pressure succeeded in removing price control, and therewith any real attempt at planning the transition came to an end. The index of retail prices jumped 20 points immediately, and the costs of the raw materials with which to fulfil the housing programme soared; inflation became the immediate problem, and turned within two years into a threat of depression. It is not to be supposed that the reconversion period has left any tradition of planning in the American economy; as we have seen, the passing of the Employment Act was quickly followed by concessions to business which nearly wrecked the recovery. The purposes of the Act itself, which might have proved to be decisive in setting up some form of planning tradition, have been consistently frustrated. Under the Act a Council of Economic Advisers was set up, formally equipped to “promote maximum employment, production and purchasing power”, although at the time it was widely understood that it should concern itself primarily with recommendations for the maintenance, short- and long-term, of full employment. Unfortunately the Council was placed in an invidious position right from the start, having no clear constitutional position. It has neither the independence from the Administration to give its views the weight of academic opinion, nor a sufficiently close connexion with the Administration to have powerful backing from this quarter.

Stabilisers It is important, therefore, to see how defence production has come to be a stabiliser of the economy. There exists, in the American economy, no apparatus of controls approaching in complexity that which we have left (even HP is not under the control of the authorities in the USA). The “public sector” is not large enough to be used as a stabiliser, and other economic weapons are hedged around by political controls on their use. The tax system, which is supposed to provide a “built-in” stabiliser (in so far as tax payments automatically fall with a decrease in the national income and rise with an increase) is not capable of re-adjustment. The divorce between the Administration and the Legislature means that whilst

it would be easy to reduce taxes, it would not be easy to raise them. The corollary of this “rachet” effect is that taxes are in fact rarely reduced! (An outstanding exception was the 1949 tax cut, passed by a Republican Congress against the wishes of the Democratic Administration, which had a signal effect in putting the economy on a recovery-path out of the 1948 down turn.) Foreign aid, which is also a stabiliser to the economy, and particularly to farm incomes, is not a “policy variable” in the short run, nor are injections of welfare spending. At the same time the American economy is precariously balanced: the problem of affluence entails the further problem that a change of fashion, a “consumer rebellion” (such as that which resisted the automobile model change in 1958) can spark off a business recession which the authorities are powerless, in the short run, to prevent. It is in this way that defence spending has come to assume a crucial position in the American economy. At the same time as high levels of defence production act to some extent as a preventitive against business fluctuations, the absence of alternative economic instruments of control means that in the event of a down-turn, an adjustment of the defence programme is called in to save the situation. In the recessions of 1953–4 and 1958–9 re-adjustments of defence orders had a pronounced effect in checking the downward trend of the inventory cycle; in 1948–9, falls in defence production were partly responsibile for the initial down-turn, and only later did the impetus of the Korean War serve to step up the levels of defence spending. The American situation, then, in respect of the Keynesian role of defence production, may profitably be contrasted with the British. It seems only too evident that in the U.S.A. production for defence has been, both continuously and as a counter-cyclical agent, a crucial factor in the maintenance of full employment. As we have seen, the crucial character of this role is to be largely attributed to the absence of alternative economic stabilisers in the USA, but something must also be attributed to the sheer size of the defence budget. (Defence spending is shown as a proportion of GNP for the USA and the UK in Table 2.) A considerable change of the political climate may have to take place before any viable alternatives to defence spending are found to guarantee employment. The chief consolation is that even the less sympathetic economists now agree that the Cold War has built up a considerable back-log of necessary welfare spending, a large amount of it of a politically “neutral” type. In Britain the crucial character of defence spending does not exist; the commitment to the maintenance of full employment has been taken seriously enough to make defence, in most respects, a burden on, rather than a support to, the economy. Besides, there is in this country a live tradition of planning and a willingness to tackle the problem of the chronically overcrowded industries which has been continued by the Conservatives. Industries can be persuaded to move into depressed

areas, and projects commissioned to put idle shipyards to work; tax rebates are a conceivable way of meeting a recession and the authorities have control over many features of the economy, sufficient to make defence spending marginal to the working of the economy.

The Arms Trade? Defence production may, however, be considered to have a crucial role to play where the balance of payments is critical. The buoyancy of the Japanese economy, for instance, has been in a large part guaranteed by massive off-shore purchases of military equipment. The argument put forward in the case of Britain usually has two dimensions: in the first place it is claimed that the export of arms is promoted by defence spending, and that a comparable amount of exports would not derive from some other allocation of the resources tied up in the defence budget. The second dimension to the argument may be briefly stated as the claim that defence production creates the stimulus to produce civilian products, which, by the nature of the advanced technology which they employ, can provide a valuable export. The real weakness of the argument from the direct export of arms is the assumption that if the defence budget were devoted to some other sector, it could not be the cause of expanding the exports industry. To prove this assumption false, however, does involve taking a stand on the question of priorities; at the moment the real priority is consumption, and both the efficiency of the defence and the export industries has suffered as a result. In point of fact British arms have not been widely accepted equipment even for NATO (France has done better out of off-shore purchases from this source than we have), and it could certainly be argued that the pressure of our defence commitments has placed too heavy a demand on steel. The force of this point is the more substantial in view of the poor investment record of the steel companies. Thus our position is not in any way similar, from the balance of payments point of view, to the position of the re-arming Germany in the 1930’s, where re-armament was preferable to increased consumption, from the strictly balance of payments viewpoint. The second aspect of the argument, which we touched upon above, is in reality much more important and also rather more difficult to assess. A great deal has been said recently—in particular by Labour Party economists—of the need to encourage and maintain a high rate of growth of the economy. Indeed, the argument that what is wrong with Conservative Party economic policy is its emphasis on consumption at the expense of investment, has formed a mainstay of criticism from many economists on the Left (a variegated field, including Roy Jenkins, Harold Wilson, Andrew Shonfield and Thomas Balogh). The idea that our priorities should be re-ordered to cut down consumption

45

and increase investment has its political difficulties, and one writer (Balogh) has recently discovered a new source of investment, which will not involve making this difficult decision of priorities, in cutting the defence budget. It is, however, generally agreed that the rate of growth of an economy does not depend on the rate of investment alone, but on the movement of other variables, such as the rate of technological innovation. An increasing amount of attention is being paid to this latter factor nowadays, both in theoretical and applied economics; it is worth a great deal of consideration in the context of disarmament, for there is a real danger that a reduction in the defence programme could bring about a more than proportionate reduction in the quantity of research and development carried on.

Innovation And Research It is generally agreed that British firms are more reluctant to devote expenditure to research than are, say, American firms, and in many cases the small size of the British firm will militate against its capacity to undertake research programmes. In this situation, any extra incentive to innovate which can be supplied, and which cannot be provided by the profit motive, will turn out to be most important for us. It would not be too much to say that whereas the role of defence as guarantor of employment is most important in the USA, in our own case the dominant role is that of a stimulus to research and innovation. Defence production has made, in the long run, a contribution to growth and to balance of payments stability through its general effect on research. The most recent report of the DSIR stated that, in 1958, slightly less than half of the total expenditure by firms on research and development was in effect paid for by the government through defence contracts. In 1955 the figure was about two-thirds of the total. That the most intensive research is carried on in industries directly geared to the defence programme is borne out by the sample surveys of the FBI, the DSIR report and the 1959 Report on Scientific and Engineering Manpower. The aircraft industry, chemicals, and all types of electrical engineering head the list. Research has a way of “catching on”; under the stimulus of defence contracts, firms can come to see the benefits to be derived from the application of research to their production processes. The buoyancy of the electronics industry is in large part due to the fact that almost all the constitutent firms have done defence work at one time or another. Equally important, firms are able to use the results of research they undertake for the defence programme itself, and these results may have application to civilian products. The civil airliner is not the best example of this process, at any rate in this country, but the aero-engines which power the planes constitute a very good example of the coincidence of defence and civilian requirements. Where the government is

46

prepared to take upon itself the risks of innovation, the most conservative firms will become research-minded. The Second Report of the Select Committee on Estimates (1956) had no doubt, either, that the system of defence ordering actually reinforced the process by which the government accepts the risks in research. There are two further points to be made on this subject: one is that defence contracting can lead to the formation of combines of a large enough size to “carry” the necessary defence programmes (e.g., the consortia for building atomic power plants, the aircraft mergers, the cooperation of the major electronics firms). The second point concerns the fact that under defence pressures the research is given a definite point, and a programme can be co-ordinated, whilst studies show that in civilian fields research programmes are often less well defined and co-ordinated. On this question, then, it does seem that defence production itself stimulates, and provides a framework for, a volume of research and development activity much greater than would exist without it. The liberal economist’s answer to this has usually been to say that the scarcest resource eaten up by defence is in fact the supply of skilled manpower. There is no doubt that there have been times when this was true, but it is not very convincing now. In fact, if the Report on Scientific and Engineering Manpower is correct in its estimates, the supply and demand of scientists and engineers will be in balance by 1962, whilst a disarmament agreement would release 20,000 scientists and engineers. The Report’s definition of a scientist is a highly restrictive one, and includes only those with the highest qualifications, so the picture can probably be extended for lower grades of skilled workers. Thus, far from disarmament involving the release of scarce resources, it is possible that little or no re-adjustment will take place, and if it is true that defence production produces an incentive to research which is not induced by the profit motive, then in the long run our “scarce resources” will be in excess supply.

Scarce Resources? The pressure for extra manpower is of course, more heavily centred on some categories of skill than others, and it is naïve to think of a disarmament agreement releasing “scientists”, when in fact it would release men equipped with elaborately sub-divided skills belonging to various scientific disciplines, but whose skills are not easily interchangeable. The release of pressure for engineers (following the completion of the atomic station programme) has already resulted in some oversupply in this field. In the event of disarmament the electronics industry would undoubtedly be found to be over-expanded; the proximity of the electronics revolution in this country has been grossly exaggerated, and most of the advances that have been made are, in any

case, an offspring of the defence programme. A run-down of the defence programme will, then, mean elaborate re-training programmes, for it is a fallacy to think that scientific skills can be swopped at a moment’s notice. It would also be incumbent on the government to introduce large scale research programmes devoted to civil uses, in order to check the tendency for a disastrous slump in research work taking place. Space research, though its benefits must remain in doubt, could do a useful job in taking up the slack, as the shifts in manpower take place.

The “Hardware” Business It should be said, finally, that it is obvious that our research programme has been distorted by the impact of defence requirements: but considering the current disorder of priorities, something positive must be attributed to the defence programme as a means of getting research done. It is true that many of the industries concerned in the application of the new techniques have been over-glamourised, whilst the actual achievements (e.g., in aircraft, atomic power stations, etc.) have come to little; but it has been the less glamourised sectors of our economy which have benefited, and the export of aero-engines and air navigation equipments is an item of great importance. (Mr. Day in a recent article in the Political Quarterly caught himself in his own trap by looking only at the “glamour” industries for signs of successful application of techniques learnt in research for defence). The consideration of the new technology involved in modern weapons production leads naturally into the last aspect of the role of defence which we need to consider. The problem is to discover what it is about defence production which makes an expansion of this part of the “public sector” acceptable to the capitalist. One of the reasons is undoubtedly the fact that, under defence contracting, the government takes the risks of innovation, whilst firms are subsequently able to employ the patents they take out on defence work in producing goods for civilian markets. The nature of these goods, moreover, being of advanced technical design, successfully limits the degree of competition which they will encounter in world markets. Modern weapons technology itself carries certain implications about the form of contracting which serve to enhance the “vested interests” of the capitalists concerned in providing the weapons. An interesting article by Livingston in the Harvard Business Review ( July 1959) explores some of these implications: the crux of the matter is that the complexity of weapons systems is beyond the control of the Armed Forces themselves. Consequently the important task of designing and co-ordinating any weapons system is transferred out of the hands of the military authorities to a private concern, whose job it is then to allocate the prime and sub-contracts for the delivery of the

“hardware”. To perform this job satisfactorily, the co-ordinating firm must know the costs and capacity of all the rival contracting firms; which is to say that this system of contracting militates against competition, and, moreover, can only work properly in the absence of competition. The implications of increased concentration in production and manufacture for political pressuring are too well known to be stressed again here, but even if it can be assumed that a “capitalist conspiracy” against disarmament can be ruled out, increased concentration in defence production is clearly an important factor against successful disarmament. In Britain the tendency has been for most major contractors to cultivate civilian markets in other goods, and to diversify from their reliance on defence production as much as possible. A further boost to the vested interest in arms production derives from the mysterious way in which the cloak of secrecy surrounding defence operations is allowed to envelop the profits made by firms engaged in producing the equipment. Not even the Select Committee on Estimates could throw any light on this question, they reported: Your committee were somewhat surprised to learn that the Ministry of Supply not only had no figures but also seemed to have no clear idea of what profits were being made on contracts for military aircraft drawn up by them.

Apart from the level of technology, the very pace at which it advances in this field of production can provide an incentive to capitalist participation. The high rate of obsolescence ensures that the market will never be saturated; as soon as the demand for one type of missile is fulfilled it has become obsolete and the pressure is on for the production of more modern versions. Once under way it is not easy to call a project to a halt (see the history of the Blue Streak), and the notion of a fair rate of return to capital devoted to abortive projects is a nebulous one.

Permanent War Economy? There are very good reasons, then, why capitalists tolerate and accept a large public sector so long as it is confined to defence production, and correspondingly the traditional Marxist theory that vested interests will successfully inhibit any real attempt to reach a disarmament agreement gains in force. It does not follow from what we have said, however, that the producers actually are in a position to inhibit the political attempt to reach such an agreement, and Mr. Eisenhower has specifically stated that he would not allow the question of the economic effects to prevent him from pursuing the aim of disarmament. This is a poor substitute for showing a willingness to use the economic opportunities which disarmament presents to good purpose, but it must be accepted at least as a counter-weight to the theory of vested interests. Of course we have still to see it put to the test.

47

From what has been said it seems to follow that from the point of view of maintaining full employment, both in the short and the long term, the American situation will be the more difficult to handle. From the short term point of view, the accumulation of the backlog of welfare expenditure (referred to by Galbraith extensively in The Affluent Society) does provide a means of stabilising the position, and the character of the necessary expenditure is not such as to involve a radical transformation of the state (as might be called for in the event of the necessity for spreading public ownership in the USA). The pressure to see that such a programme is formulated would come from a large body of economists, and from the trade unions and workers immediately involved. It is significant that a disarmament agreement would involve the redundancy of many middle-class and salaried workers as well, and political pressure from these sources could be crucial in guiding the reconversion policies in the right direction. An obvious danger, in the American case, even supposing that some alternative economic stabiliser could be discovered to maintain national levels of employment, would be that the West Coast might encounter special difficulties as it did in the postwar years. In this case a clear requirement would be for government planning of a sort which might prove politically difficult to manage (i.e., the actual direction of industry). A basic necessity of any programme for disarmament would be that it should be staggered over a period of four or five years, and in this context welfare spending, foreign aid and tax reductions would all become “policy variables”. Increases in foreign aid would be a particularly attractive formula, for it could mean that the release of resources from defence commitments could benefit the underdeveloped nations.

Staggered Programme Capitalist objections to disarmament might be met, in the short run at any rate, by initiating programmes of space research, which have the particular advantage, from the capitalists’ point of view of defying the notion of “a fair rate of return”. Projects of this nature would be a cheap price to pay for disarmament, though it may be disheartening to have to countenance them. Assuming that the American economy can successfully overcome the problems of the transition (and it is very important that the American business sector should be sold the idea that it can), what are the implications for Britain? Here the first requisite would again be the adoption of a staggered programme of disarmament, which would allow experiments in solving the problems of regional and industrial dislocation to be made. For the job to be done properly, more precise ideas about regional planning are certainly desirable; it is absurd to decide that the automobile industry is the salvation of

48

Merseyside, and then to take the first opportunity, by raising HP terms, to kill the market for automobiles. The problem of regional dislocation is especially acute, since increased welfare spending and tax rebates cannot touch it; the reason for this is that the multiplier effect induced by such increases in spending would (and does) take place outside the depressed areas (further aggravating the “overemployment” problems of the West Midlands). The most modern weapons industries appear to be scattered over the South of England for the most part, and so far as unemployment in these industries occurs, it should be practicable to meet the problem in the form of increased welfare and/or reduced taxes. A particularly important part of the policies of transition must be to increase the amount spent on research and development, for reasons discussed above. The conclusion must be that the present government could do this job with the existing forms and tradition of planning, but that, at this level, the job would be badly done. Ideally, an increase in the public sector, plus a very much wider basis of planning would be called for, and these features cannot be expected from a Conservative government. The abolition of defence commitments, given a large makeweight research programme, could make the achievement of a high rate of growth possible in the long run, and in the short run could make the problem of priorities an easier one to tackle.

Converting To Peace Given the present degree of economic planning, there is no reason to think that reconversion is impossible for the British economy, nor that there could not be positive advantages on a large scale eventually to be reaped from the decision to disarm. The most that can be established in relation to the reaction of the American economy to disarmament is that the present politicoeconomic situation is probably not such as to inhibit the possibility of disarmament. On the success of reconversion, there is less reason to be optimistic. It is true that economists in America have seen the problems involved and are eager to promote their own panaceas, but it is not all at clear, in view of the official neglect of the problems, that reconversion can promptly be turned to advantage. It remains possible, of course, that the end of the Cold War would be a prelude to economic war; in this case the provision of aid and capital goods to the underdeveloped countries could be, for the United States, a solution, or a postponement of her own internal “problem of affluence”. It would therefore seem necessary for this country to press upon the United States the necessity for increased foreign aid, at the same time as we take steps to reduce our dependence on the American economy.

John Rex and Peter Worsley

CAMPAIGN FOR A FOREIGN POLICY

In the last decade, military propositions have taken precedence over political principle in foreign policy. Can the campaign for unilateral nuclear disarmament become, in the next few months, a campaign for a new foreign policy? And what would such a policy be? of the Summit has posed the question of nuclear weapons for us in a quite new way. Naturally, the H-bomb question will be faced in a new form, and with a particular urgency, at this year’s conference of the Labour Party. But the slogan of unilateralism is still full of ambiguity, and it is essential that a responsible Left should immediately initiate a debate about the wider perspective of a changed foreign policy which the issues of unilateralism and the Summit open up. Such a discussion is necessary, in the first place, simply for tactical reasons; for the leadership—its hand strengthened by the Summit collapse—has at its disposal a number of manoeuvres for maintaining the old policies in attenuated form. But much more than tactical considerations are involved in this discussion. Even if we did find the great Powers moving towards some sort of detente—and the post-Summit return to the cold war positions does not point that way—we should still be faced, as socialists, with a whole series of foreign policy dilemmas. If we could clarify our minds about some of these issues, the problems of what tactics to pursue in the Campaign and the Labour Party would more quickly solve themselves. Our demonstrations would no longer be isolated actions, but part of a conscious attempt to create a new international society. The present crisis in defence and foreign policy was, of course, precipitated in the first instance by the failure of the Ministry of Defence to provide Britain with an adequate means of delivery for her nuclear weapons. The most which they can now promise us is some sort of missile in 1965. Till then we must make do with Thor and the bombers. But Britain has been forced to abandon her attempt to maintain herself as a poor man’s nuclear Power, not because Mr. Macmillan has suddenly undergone any moral or political conversion; it is not a humane reaction against the ultimate horror of nuclear warfare which animates him. Even less is Britain’s change of tactic the result of any new appreciation that international political differences cannot be solved by the use of military force. The Cold War which generates the nuclear strategy is still with us in no uncertain form. And the right-wing leadership of the Labour Party is still enmeshed within the same basic assumptions. To them, the problem is merely one of finding a way out of this mess—a compromise formula, within the framework of a Cold War world dominated by militarised politics. Broadly speaking, the leadership divides into three schools on the way forward. Firstly, there are those who are still determined to stick to the idea of an independent

THE BREAKDOWN

deterrent for Britain at any cost. Secondly, there are those who are thinking in terms of a West European missile. And thirdly, there are those who urge that America alone should possess nuclear weapons and use these to guarantee the defence of their allies in NATO. Now in face of the simple facts about Blue Streak, one would have thought that the first position would no longer be seriously entertained. Even the present Minister of Defence seemed to have moved away from it when he made a very modest reference to the necessity of our making “an independent contribution to the deterrent”. But many Labour Party members are still mesmerised by the danger of going “naked into the conference chamber”, and therefore see no way out. Their point of view has been strengthened, undoubtedly, by Mr. Krushchev’s attitude at the Summit. Those who take this position have developed some weird and wonderful ideas about the way in which our membership of NATO can give some function to our independent deterrent, despite its apparent military ineffectiveness. Thus they argue that, if we were attacked, we could independently make a nuclear “gesture”, which, because of our membership of NATO, the Russians would interpret as a nuclear attack by the whole of NATO, and proceed to launch the third world war. Then, whether they liked it or not, the Americans would be in on our side, their massive nuclear reply having been “triggered” by our “gesture”. Such views are being seriously canvassed among Labour leaders (see Denis Healey’s The Race Against the H-bomb, p. 7), and may command considerable support amongst the old guard, for the simple reason that they do not involve the admission that the acceptance of NATO and the Bomb are in any way mistaken. Fortunately, however, there are others on the Right whose reputations have never been staked in this way, and, for them, the other two alternatives are more attractive. It is the second alternative, namely that of the European missile, which will probably receive most support during the agonising reappraisal which is going on at the time of writing. The main argument for it, no doubt, will be that only the united effort of Europe can command the necessary resources. But against this has to be set the colossal danger involved in giving a share in the control of nuclear weapons to irresponsible governments. Even the leadership can see that the intransigent, the power-mesmerised and the revanchists on our side of the Great Divide will be rubbing their hands at the prospect of being in a position either of

49

“bringing America in” or of using a “West European” Bomb as part of their own private aims (Adenauer with an eye on Poland’s western territories; de Gaulle with a lorgnette on Algeria). Equally, those elements within the Soviet group—particularly in Eastern Germany and China—which are reluctant to see any “slackening” in “vigilance” against the continuation of Dulles’ policies by the West—will find their positions strengthened. That there are such suspicions and hostilities (some with real foundation, others mainly paranoid) must be taken account of, and answered by specific hard proposals, in any foreign policy alternative designed to break through the thoughtbarrier of the Warsaw Pact/NATO view of the world. In the end, the “European missile” school falls back on the sort of argument which was used for bringing West Germany into NATO, namely, that responsible Powers may exercise some influence over irresponsible ones, and not the other way round. It is even possible that the attempt to put over the idea of the West European missile might be accompanied by a certain amount of demagogy about the need for “interdependence” and for European unity (compare, for example, Mr. Crosland’s pleas in this direction, in Encounter, March, 1960). No one should be deceived by this. There are important arguments for closer integration of Europe on all sorts of levels, and the Left has certainly been too tardy in recognising them (the common market and its implications, for example). But however strong these arguments may be, the sort of unity which begins with co-operation about nuclear weapons, within a framework of the two-bloc world, before there is any agreement about the aims of domestic and foreign policy, can only mean that the pace will be set in Europe by the most aggressive and irresponsible Powers.

Nuclear Alternatives Europe is indeed being reborn, but under the most inauspicious circumstances, with the prospect of its political stance being shaped by right-wing Demochristian leaderships, politically united in hostility towards the East, and economically united by the iron-coal-steel cartels beginning to emerge within the Common Market. Of the alternatives which the right-wing will consider, the third, viz., that which confines “Western” nuclear weapons to America, is immeasurably the most sensible. And it is possible to argue the adoption of this policy as a stage along the road to world nuclear disarmament. If nuclear weapons were confined to America and Russia, it would be possible to negotiate some sort of world convention preventing any other country from acquiring them in the future, whereas, at the moment, the existence of the British and French bombs constitutes an incitement to other countries to become “great” by getting theirs into production as soon as

50

possible. At least, if the bomb were confined to Russia and America, the situation would not be getting any worse. Some measure of increased American domination might well be considered a small price to pay, if it meant a halt to the spread of nuclear weapons, and a stage on the road towards real international disarmament negotiations. There is at least a way forward to peaceful co-existence here; and if the peoples of the NATO countries were to unite for peace, they could go on to force their leaders to accept the need for genuine disarmament negotiations. This, indeed, has been the bait which attracted what little serious and sincere support there was for the conception of the non-nuclear club.

The Dominant Partner It is open to serious attack, however, from three main, and by no means negligible, angles. Firstly, it would make America overwhelmingly the dominant partner in the alliance. As long as one’s vision is bounded by the absolute necessity of maintaining the alliance, no violent objection can be raised to the preeminence of the USA. But if one sees the Cold War as the greatest threat to world survival at all, one cannot be so blithe about going back to a USA–Soviet dominated state of peaceful world terror. Secondly, the USA would still be in a position to equip her allies with nuclear weapons, tactical or otherwise, and utilise their territory for launching sites, bases, or detection stations. Thirdly, after a month which has seen the U-2 flight, followed by a direct State Department lie, then a childish spasm of truculence by Mr. Herter, and an ambiguous guarantee by the President— and then of course, by Mr. Krushchev’s blundering diplomacy—one can only understand the claims of American leadership that they are acting with “responsibility” in a very Pickwickian sense! The demand that Britain get rid of the Bomb is still the first step in a series of steps that need to be taken to remove the threat of world annihilation. But the Campaign cannot base itself upon a self-righteous desire to absolve Britain from individual national responsibility for nuclear war. Unilateralism ought always to be seen and understood as the only strategic position which will permit Britain to act to prevent the general threat of nuclear war. That aim is as relevant now, after the collapse of Blue Streak and the failure at the Summit, as it ever was. Indeed, we have only to read Mr. Gaitskell’s contentious remarks—“We need the bomb”—to see how relevant unilateral disarmament is to the post-Summit situation. For what in fact Mr. Gaitskell offers us, as an alternative to nuclear disarmament, is a return to the Cold War policies of reliance upon the balance of nuclear terror—a policy so sterile and retrogressive (when one considers how

painfully we have been struggling, during the last few months, towards “coexistence”) that even he must see it as an open capitulation to the fixed positions of the Cold War. Nevertheless, Mr. Gaitskell has thrown his weight publicly behind the idea of an “interdependent” NATO deterrent, because he recognises the fact that, at the October Conference at Scarborough, the debate on defence must, inevitably, return to its source: the question of Britain’s participation in the nuclear alliance. “We believe that if Britain were to leave NATO, this would be profoundly dangerous to the peace of the world.” That is his position. Supporters of the Campaign, on the other hand, must argue that it is the tragic commitment of Britain to the nuclear alliance which has made us the prisoner of Cold War strategies and policies: that the aims of the Campaign cannot be achieved within the framework of a nucleararmed NATO. In fact, those who support the Campaign must go on to point out that the collapse of the Summit was due, at least in large measure, to the intransigent positions adopted by both nuclear alliances, both committed to the proposition that nuclear weapons are a legitimate means of defence. (Mr. Gaitskell shares this view still: . . .“Britain must have the means of defending herself”). We must then show how ineffective Britain proved to be at the Summit when she tried to act as an international broker, because she was firmly within the camp of one of the contending parties. Mr. Macmillan did what he could, under the circumstances, to save the situation— as no doubt a Labour Foreign Minister committed in the same way would do. But he was bound, in the end, to subscribe to and underwrite America’s irresponsible actions. Surely, then, it is clear that Britain’s unquestioning allegiance to NATO itself prevents her from performing any other role but that of the anxious junior partner in the nuclear firm. Is this as far as Labour’s imagination will stretch, in conceiving of a proper role for Britain, at this period in history, and in a world stiff with nuclear weapons? In the end, the Campaign must look beyond the Summit, and follow up its demand for unilateral renunciation with a foreign policy which will provide a framework for controlling existing danger-points, eroding present tensions and building up international co-operation for the positive development of the world in ways which will reduce the drives to war. Our special concern must be, in the first place, with that portion of the Cold War structure within which we find ourselves— NATO: but always within the overall strategy of what Britain could do to help break down the total framework of armed alliances. Of course, the argument will be that Britain ought to remain within NATO in order to “restrain” her less responsible allies. But this is an argument, based upon the suppressed propositions of national superiority, which are directly contradicted by the history of the Cold War itself. Over such crucial questions as the

rearming of West Germany, the French nuclear tests, the spread of tactical weapons to allies, Britain has been consistently overruled by her NATO allies. If she has exerted “restraint”, then it has been restraint of a peculiarly secret and ineffective kind. The last occasion on which Britain “restrained” a NATO ally was at the time of General MacArthur’s plan to assault the Chinese mainland directly: Britain was, at that time, not a nuclear power. Moreover, that is some time ago. Since then, Britain has been a party—however unwillingly—to every twist in the arms race, justified on strategic and military grounds. If we add to this, the disastrous history of recent international discussion, we begin to see the grim liabilities of the NATO alliance; indeed, of both alliances. Take the negotiations about German unity. At each successive stage of the negotiations, the Western ministers—blackmailed by their close ally, Dr. Adenauer—have been prepared to agree to a further conference, only after they had created a state of affairs which made negotiation useless. Thus the separate German currency, the independent West German State, and German rearmament were pushed through—with little or no “restraint” from Britain— immediately before conferences on the German question, so that at the conferences, the parties could only agree to disagree. In the same way, Mr. Krushchev has given, time and again, verbal assent to “reunification”, whilst in fact attempting to preserve the Soviet position in East Germany intact.

Balance of Blame The major achievement of the 1955 Summit Conference was to produce President Eisenhower’s “open skies” proposal, which was, in fact, an additional condition, so loose in character, that it destroyed the foundations of a real agreement which had been hammered out. The same sort of evasion was evident in America’s recent behaviour when the Russians agreed to an ending of controllable tests and a moratorium on underground tests: immediately, there was a retreat from positions previously taken up. Similarly, the Soviet Union clearly used a classic piece of American blundering—the U2 flights—as an excuse for breaking up a conference which the world relied upon to bring some long-awaited relief from the tensions of the Cold War. The point here is not to enter a blanket defence of either the Soviet or the Western positions. But it must be clear that, from the record at least, recent East– West negotiations have been concerned to perpetuate the status quo of the Cold War, to preserve the spheres of influence, and to maintain the balance of terror: and that Britain has been wholly imprisoned within this framework. And yet, it is perfectly clear, that the powers will not, of their own accord, make peace: they will have to be led or shoved towards it. And this

51

is what Britain could help to do—provided she freed herself, first, of a partisan commitment to one side of the nuclear fence. We come back, then, to the role of positive neutrality, which is the only position from which Britain can be in to exert pressure in the right direction. And unilateralism and the renunciation of NATO are the pre-conditions of a foreign policy based upon active neutrality.

Policy Of “Clean Hands”? The outlines of such a policy have always been implicit, often explicit, in the minds of Campaigners. But whereas two years’ ago it was legitimate enough to say that to raise the issue of dissolving the power-blocs would be to divide the Campaign, now, the Blue Streak fiasco and the Summit disaster make this the immediate issue of the day which has to be faced if we do not wish to find ourselves manoeuvred into defeat just at a time when new hope is springing up. To “contract out” as a purely negative action, as a symbol of moral disgust or to preserve purity, would be a gesture of pure dissociation, a policy of “clean hands”, leaving the power to blow up the world where it lay before. We cannot urge Britain to “pull out” merely in order to leave the initiative with Adenauer or de Gaulle, or an unshackled Washington or Moscow. The Campaign has never merely been a Campaign to get the Bomb off our soil. It would be ludicrous enough if Oxford had its own private campaign to get Brize Norton shut down, or Yorkshire its local battle against Driffield or Fylingdales. Can we be satisfied any longer with a state of affairs where the West German movement marches at Belsen, the Belgian at Antwerp, the British at Aldermaston, with no common understanding on a general strategy to challenge basic postulates and practices of the overall strategy which the bombwielders themselves agree upon, whatever else divides them? Is it enough to chase American bombers from French to British soil? Or from anyone’s soil or from anyone’s skies, into the sea-depths, where Polarisequipped submarines can do the same job? Or even back within the national boundaries, where the ICBM can take over? And what answer do we give to the hot problems of power at the trouble-spots here and now? Looking eastwards from Berlin, people fear new aggressions. Looking westwards and eastwards from Warsaw, people remember several hundred years of partition. The internationalisation of the campaign for life involves answering all these questions. In the tense unease that is euphemistically termed “co-existence”, a radical challenge to the prospect of another ten years of tension, alarums and ritual “disarmament” conferences is needed. Already, the outlines of some of the answers have been canvassed, and, fluctuating with the state of world tension, received sporadic attention from time to time. We have not been faced for some years now with direct attempts

52

by either side to strengthen its position by wholesale incursions on to the territory of the other side. The tactics of the middle-period Cold War have increasingly defined themselves in terms not of Korean Wars, Czech coups or “total liberation”. They have been, rather, policies of struggles for advantage on the margin, of trouble-spots on the border-lands, or of pressures through the manipulation of “foreign aid”, attempts to acquire “intelligence”, conquest by ideology and sensitivity over border encroachments: for bases and spheres of influence, rather than direct gobbling-up or assimilation. But we can be as surely plunged into the final war by Berlin blockades, or U-2’s, as by Korean and Vietnam Wars. The second Berlin crisis, which is now the most direct cause of international tension, is a matter of diplomatic bargaining, rather than territorial or military expansionism. The dispersal of tension at these points of friction must be considered the precondition of the removal of the immediate dangers of “war by incident”. It should be seen as part of a wider campaign for the creation of physical zones of disengagement. If Britain, unhampered by any commitment to the NATO bloc, were to use her moral leadership in disarming in this context, with the firm aim of creating such neutral areas, we would be beginning to turn back the tide. The implementation of the Rapacki Plan for a zone of disengagement running down Central Europe, and the demilitarization of Germany and Formosa, are obvious starting-points in such a policy. Such plans are not likely to mature without immense pressure from the peoples on their governments: and without leadership from within Europe itself. Therein lies Britain’s particular responsibility at this stage. We could develop a very strong response on both sides of the fence (whatever the degree of open expression permitted at present) as strong as that which created a neutral Austria out of the ashes of a Four-Power occupation. That is the basis of a real British foreign policy today. An end to the stalemate which wrecks and distorts the economies of all, and overshadows daily life with daily terrors, would be welcome to all—as welcome as it would have been to the people of Hungary in 1956 before the logic of the Cold War rolled into Budapest on caterpillar tracks.

The UNEF Model Such a policy demands, not Four-Power jeeps, but international forces and inspection teams which would take their model from UNEF in the Middle East rather than from occupied Berlin. It would seek inspiration in the role of India in Korea and Vietnam, or the all-too-brief explorations of Yugoslavia at the time of Suez. It could draw heavily on the contribution of the increasingly powerful uncommitted countries of Asia and Africa. It could provide the middle-sized

Powers with a new role of mediation and control, instead of attachment to one giant or the other. Canada’s limited essay in this direction is a small sample of the potential shifts that would be encouraged by such a development. For all its limitations, UNO offers at least one ready-made immediate organisational framework within which some of the first steps can be taken. Particularly now, when Summit and four-power negotiations have collapsed, there is every point in Britain returning to play a different role within the United Nations itself. In a period where Mr. Krushchev and President Eisenhower abandon the prospect of negotiations, Britain may find her real friends and allies among the worried delegations haunting the corridors of the UN building. The first steps must be to disengage the cogs of the two war-machines. From there, we have to hammer out positive steps for real co-operation under international auspices. There is enough to be done, and it can be done. Which powerful but disinterested European power is willing to provide inspection teams for a non-nuclear zone, throw open its Weapons Research Establishment and the details of its Defence. Budgets? Which European power is willing to encourage the anxieties of Japan, Pakistan and Norway about U-2 flights, by renouncing the American rights to use bases and airstrips for these purposes? Which European power is willing to man a UN force to make and keep Berlin an open city? Beyond these immediate problems, are the wider ones of world poverty. Is there anyone who can honestly say that there is nothing for Britain to do but send Mr. Macmillan to look anxious again at another doomed summit meeting?

Beyond The Power Systems For socialists, there is a special task. The collapse of “co-existence” demands that we make contact now with our comrades in other countries, to work out a common strategy which will bring the peoples into action to press these solutions on their governments. The signs are already there that the need for such cooperation is being realised in France and Italy, to name no other countries. Our aim must not, however, be simply to pull away from the struggle because it is unpleasant. That is not in fact a real political alternative for Britain—even if it were a desirable policy. But there is all the difference in the world between a Britain, stuffing her head in the sands of neutrality, and a Britain which is prepared to act as a force for active neutrality: a focus and a rallying-point beyond the power systems of East and West. If we accepted the latter alternative, then we should have, as an active principle of foreign policy, the dissolution of the arms race and the withering away of the armed alliances. Britain, that is to say, would have to act in order to bring together—around such issues of policy as a neutral Germany, a demilitarised zone guaranteed by

the United Nations, a ban on tests and manufacture —those countries in Europe which the cold war has arbitrarily divided into “camps”. She would seek to undermine the armed alliances on both sides of the Iron Curtain, by proposing to those European countries most exposed to the effects of nuclear warfare, measures for their collective security: genuine measures of “co-existence”. That is the kind of “lead”—in foreign policy terms, for which the Campaign has been asking. But if Britain were to take on such a role in foreign policy, then the question of the place of socialists in this Campaign ceases to be an abstract one. We have forgotten, perhaps too easily, the emergence after 1956, of indigenous oppositions in Communist countries, anxious to build bridges with socialists in the West on a range of issues, including the question of “co-existence” and the nuclear alliances. Indeed, it was the advance in this direction by the Hungarian Revolution (including Nagy’s proposals for Hungarian neutrality) which— given the “permanent” framework of the Cold War— brought the Soviet tanks back to Budapest. After the Twentieth Congress, Togliatti and the Italian Communists gave support to the principle of “different roads to socialism”: and the Yugoslav Draft Programme, supporting the policy of active neutrality, said: “Coexistence must not be passive, must not be entrenched in bloc positions; it must be active, it must aim to achieve comprehensive co-operation between peoples.” It involves “political, economic and cultural co-operation between countries with different social systems, whereby the sharp edges of the blocs will be blunted”. The same kind of thinking has developed, slowly, in the ranks of the Nenni Socialist Party, which holds, at the moment, the key to the protracted crisis of Christian Democrat government in Italy. It is, of course, very strong in France among the New Left groupings. In addition, there was the independent Polish initiative of the Rapacki Plan, now lost in the files of protracted NATO conferences about “massive deterrents”. There will be no real solution to the German problem—whatever we can do to alleviate tension in the meanwhile—until an all-German peoples’ movement begins, which cuts beneath the Ulbricht and Adenauer regimes, with their vested interest in the continuation of the Cold War. Yet who can doubt that, when such a movement does develop, it will grow out of opposition socialist groups in both East and West Germany. We cannot do much more, at this stage, than sketch the elements of a foreign policy. But the urgent task for the Campaign now, is to begin to think its problems through, from unilateralism to the nuclear alliances and active neutrality. The general aim must be to canalise popular protest against the nuclear dangers which our Government is committed to maintain. But for the British Campaign, a campaign against the Bomb is the point at which its responsibilities begin. Our task is to recognise these responsibilities, and to place the demand for unilateral renunciation in its proper strategic and political context.

53

notebook Neil Carmichael

Not Waiting For Lefty

IT IS always easy to see things as we want to see them and it is particularly tempting in this apathetic era to see a strike of apprentices as youth hardening itself in the cauldron of industrial strife. Tempting to think of them as the new generation challenging the old and prepared to question the false priorities of Capitalism. But these boys chose to sherik*, admittedly good naturedly, the CND loudspeaker van announcing Scotland’s Aldermaston. Was this, for them, merely another facet of the Adult World, the Adult World which for six years has been fruitlessly negotiating their wage claim? Looking at these young workers in their Strike Headquarters, anyone over 25 feels and looks elderly. They are organised, competent and quietly independent. They are taking no favours from anyone and treat all adult enquiries with cautious suspicion. It must not be forgotten that since the age of 15 these boys have been living in an adult world. Not for them the protracted adolescence of the undergraduate. Some are married; all have grown up in the hard school of working-class life where responsibility comes too early to our children. Middle class boys of a similar age are still in school blazers. For six years the adult Unions have been negotiating wage increases. In one week the boys had gone further and faster than their trained negotiators. The country suddenly discovered there were apprentice problems in industry. What brought them to this point? We can only wonder. An accumulation of pinpricks? The increasing loss of status in apprenticeship in face of the high wages of unskilled work? Apprentice wages are traditionally low but are now so low relatively that pride of craft no longer compensates. Dead end jobs of yesterday pay good wages today and often appear, in our superficially expanding society, to have as good a future. Girls looking for husbands no longer see, as their mothers did, “having a trade” as being a badge of a secure future. To many, hypnotised by Macmillan’s mirage of “You’ve never had it so good”, an apprenticeship may even seem unenterprising. Is it the position of a third year apprentice earning about £4 15s. in a society where the average teenager is estimated to spend £2 10s. weekly on personal expenditure? Or is it the real Scottish fear of unemployment that has precipitated this expression of solidarity? The one concept which has emerged as part of these boys’ political heritage is the necessity for solidarity. A small thing possibly in face of what many would like to

54

interpret from the struggle, but surely the first important lesson workers must always learn. Every left wing political group in Glasgow would like to have a finger in the pie, and indeed some of them have. To deny this would be naive. What is important, however, is the way internal organisation has been handled and responsibility accepted. The group which has learnt most is not the small “vanguard” in the committee but the less theoretically politically minded who have accepted this kind of responsibility for the first time. What influence have the political groups actually been able to use? It’s difficult, on the Clyde, to assess this. Few of the “black squad” will not have had some close contact with Socialist politics at some time in their lives. Fewer still will not have been on strike a number of times; and even the boys have inherited a militancy which has in the past shown that apprentices can go on strike. The shop steward has led many local strikes and been active in many national ones. When the boys finally walked out, they left the shops with the advice of the older rank and file man at the next machine. Most of this experience cannot be verbalised—it’s absorbed. Few could explain why the “black squad” never scabs. It’s accepted behaviour, and to these boys, normal. It’s not a far cry from the acceptance of local solidarity to the idea of national solidarity, and the precedent has been well established. The Boilermakers of the Clyde expect help from those on the Tyne, and so with the apprentices. It is depressing how out of touch the adult movement is by comparison. We have as many lessons to learn as have the boys, and only by trying to understand their feelings and attitudes can we begin to regain contact with what many adults smugly call ‘the lost generation’. But it’s not all gloom. The Young Socialists have been issuing a broadsheet which has achieved a little standing amongst a section of the strikers and a representative of the New Left Review or Tribune is treated as one who is more likely to be helpful than a reporter of the Daily Mail. If we keep before us the vital point that this strike is for more money and has no other end yet for the vast mass of the strikers, we will save ourselves a lot of disappointment when our political interpretations and wishful thinkings are not fulfilled: for the moment. * Sherik—to deride volubly, to boo and shout at (in Glasgow).

In The Notebook . . . the Apprentices’ Strike, the South Bank, Refugee Year, British shipbuilding, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, notes on Neither War Nor Peace and Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, prospects of the US economy.

Lawrence Burton

Shell Watches Over Us

THE PUBLIC outcry against Mr. Cotton’s plans to wreck the Piccadilly Site with a 170 ft. advertising hoardingcum-office block of monumental ugliness, has had some effect. The Minister has been obliged to reject the scheme: and the Report had some tart things to say about Mr. Cotton’s architect’s/architects’ (whichever it may be: for they have never to this day been identified) concept of pleasing architectural standards, and the ambiguous (to put it mildly) defence of comprehensive planning put forward by the LCC. However, lest we leap to the conclusion that the Conservatives are about to move sharply in the interest of the community at large against the excesses of private speculators and ugly prestige building, it is worth-while walking down from Piccadilly about 200 yards, to the South Bank. Standing on the river bank between County Hall and the railway, you might imagine that we are already very near Orwell’s 1984. Across the river, Minipax in Whitehall is now completed. On the south side the others will soon be ready—Minitru over there behind the Festival Hall, and towering over us all Miniluv (the new Shell building); all 30 storeys of it. Orwell thought they would be shining white pyramids; the Shell architects have been neither so atavistic nor so futuristic. They have stuck to their happy medium: slabs and squares. As the handout, for example, described them:

The Shell offices will be characteristic in their expression of a British contemporary architecture. They will be faced throughout in Portland Stone to which James Bone in his “The London Perambulator” paid tribute in his dedication:—“To the isle of Portland, the matrix of London’s grandeur”. Reliance is placed on mass and fenestration, and the drama, new to London, of a block of tower-like dimensions. But, as the Portland Stone weathers, so will become more distinct the rhythmic patterns of cut lines in the stonework relieving the inevitable austerity of manywindowed walls. The downstream building provides its own individual relief through the interest of the curvature of its main spine block, with its possibilities of delicate light and shade, and through the introduction of panels of grey-green slate in its framework of Portland Stone. The theme of this building is similar to that of the companion blocks upstream, but a theme with variations. For the downstream building has no dramatic contrasts of form such as are provided by the Upstream Tower.

It would be interesting to do a linguistic analysis of the coy style in which this is written. “The drama, new to London, of a block of tower-like dimensions”: this is, of course, an extravagant description of what is going to look like a bigger bash at the Cenotaph. More disturbing is the exuberance over announcing a skyscraper. Big things were a characteristic of early twentieth century technology, culminating in the twenties and thirties—the Queen Mary, the Empire State Building and so on. But in 1960, one has to have better reasons for skyscrapers, even for cosy 30 storey

skyscrapers like this one, than “variations on a theme”. Do we want skyscrapers in London? If so, do we want them on the South Bank? How many more are there going to be? Just one is going to look lonely; monologue perhaps, rather than drama. Drama was acted on this very site in 1951; how ironical that it should be on the Exhibition site that all this is happening! There is a picture of this Exhibition on page 244 of the Administrative County of London’s 1951 Development Plan: Analysis (published by the LCC at 30s. but now remaindered at 7s. 6d.). The caption reads: Part of the South Bank Area showing the Royal Festival Hall, and the new Embankment wall which are permanent contributions to the development of the area as a Government and Cultural Centre. The temporary Festival of Britain exhibition buildings can be seen at an advanced stage of construction. The permanent buildings in the next stages of development will include Government Offices, the National Theatre, an hotel, a riverside garden and a Science Centre.

None of these was carried out in the last decade. Instead we have the London offices of Shell. The section on the South Bank (CDA No. 4) is on pp. 274–282 of the Analysis. Like many sections of this book, it is much less precise than it appears at first sight, in spite of its parade of figures. The object in developing the area comprehensively, however, was two-fold; it “should be redeveloped as a whole for the purpose of dealing satisfactorily with conditions of bad layout and obsolete development and war damage and extensive areas of vacant land”. Also, “The Area is proposed as the southward extension of the central area of London”. Which “central area”? Chancery Lane? Piccadilly? Kensington Gore? In the paragraphs on Public Buildings the only fresh information is: “The exact building lines within the sites defined are all subject to detailed consideration. It is possible that open space strips may be provided along the York Road frontage. . . and on the frontage of site No. 518 adjoining the Waterloo Road/York Road roundabout”. However, it is clear that something imaginative was planned in 1951 and during the years after the dismantling of the Exhibition, there were a number of schemes put forward. The foundation stone of the National Theatre was laid, and then moved to another part of the site. No other stones have been added. Good ideas were put forward about the main line railway which crosses over the middle of the site; it was borne in mind that the engineers do not give Hungerford Bridge many more years of useful life. The deeper question, why should this area be chosen as a centre for, among other things, cultural life, does not seem to have been much debated. However, the LCC were partly committed to making it into an amenable place of sorts by their erection of the Festival Hall. We may yet have a theatre, and the rest—a garden, a Science centre, an hotel, but they are still paper plans. The Shell monolith, however, is all too real. It is a familiar story all over the country.

55

The immediate reasons why we have these gross office blocks on the South Bank, and not a science centre or a theatre, are quite simple within the framework of the Town and Country Planning Acts. Most town planners will affirm that they cannot do more than create the conditions for development; they cannot, in particular, develop sites themselves. This, by and large, is what has happened to the South Bank; no developer has come forward to undertake the plans indicated in 1951. In answer to the plea that this large open space should at least be left as a public park until something is decided finally about the whole area as a cultural centre, it is claimed that this type of inaction is unrealistic. No council which is a planning authority, not even a rich one like the LCC, can afford to go on losing the huge sums, about £½ million to £1 million a year, that it might collect in rates and ground-rents from this site when it is developed. Not only is the Government unlikely, to say the least, to provide the money to develop such areas comprehensively: but the whole drift of its policy has been such as to squeeze local authorities, including the LCC, to the point where the only thing they could do was to capitulate to the nearest private developer. The LCC has gone so far as to abandon almost entirely those “utopian” plans it had, at the end of the war, for substantial comprehensive development of areas in a planned way through public funds for the benefit of the ordinary citizen. Those belong, together with the “spirit of 1945” to “history”: Shell, and the private speculators have long since driven that kind of idealism from the temples of County Hall. No one—particularly the Labour majority in the LCC—seems particularly concerned. They have too much to do keeping the rebels in their own ranks from speaking out of turn.

David Caldwell

Cult of Violence

WE ARE living in a paradoxical situation. This is refugee year when the essence of such a cause should be peace and tolerance, and yet we are also living in the age of violence. It is all around us. We have it thrust at us from the screens of our television sets, we read about it in the paper-back novels and children’s comics abound with it, we are raised on a philosophy of respect for the man of action and a thinly-veiled contempt for the man of peace (or the coward, depending on how you look at it). The heroes of our comic stories are the six foot six mountains of muscle and bone, with limited vocabularies and handy left hooks. We hold on to an unwritten admiration for the man who will hit out in the face of opposition; indeed the bigger the opponent tackled, the greater is the hidden virtue of the action, and it is a way of life which we are daily handing on to our children.

56

Guns, knuckle dusters, knives, coshes—these are the every day items of life for the youngster reared on a diet of present day “culture”, and when we turn round and find to our horror that old ladies are being coshed in the street and that we have an unprecedented outbreak of crime, we howl and protest, in between impassioned shouts for the return of the birch, that things were not like this in our young days. Somewhere, something has gone wrong with our ideals. We have been forging steadily ahead in the production of the material things of life, and yet the sight of all those television aerials or cars has brought with it neither contentment nor security. The fact is that in this rush for the “good” things of life we have forgotten what it is we are supposed to do with them after we’ve attained them, so that the accumulation of them has become an end in itself for most of us. We have produced a disillusioned, discontented crowd of young people in search of something to believe in and if violence presents itself as a likely looking outlet for energy, then violence it will be. What had become of the common enemy? What had happened to this new world which was supposed to emerge from the labours of our parents? Who was it we were supposed to be helping? We soon saw the answer to that one was “Help yourself, Jack!” So the younger generation helped itself. The material things are here for the asking or the taking, but the ideals have been pushed further and further into the obscurity of “might have been.” The units of success are Pounds Sterling. No one says we have a common enemy now so a few of the livelier elements are finding the enemy for themselves. Painting swastikas was a good one—it seems to arouse some sort of reaction and perhaps a brawl or two. Not so long ago the raising of riot among the coloured populations of Notting Hill or Nottingham was always good for a laugh. In France the hooting of car horns and the chanting of slogans had a similar sort of effect. If you can’t find an enemy you can always divide yourselves into two groups and beat the daylights out of each other. There is a common enemy all right. There is an aim and object for which we can yet strive side by side. There is an alternative to this cult of violence. The enemy is not easy to define nor to recognise. He is a subtle mixture of intolerance, prejudice, poverty, ignorance, irrationality, hate, greed, and violence. He is to be found in the world’s detention centres and prison camps, he finds outlet in the hearts of the swastika daubers and the “nigger” baiters, he lurked in the voice of McCarthy and the icy soul of Stalin, his guiding hand can be recognised behind the fate of the refugees in Algeria or the faces of starving children in Korea, he performs his evil work beneath the concealing sheets of the Klu Klux Klan, he was abroad when innocent women and children were being shot in the streets of Cairo and Budapest—he is there all right and in a thousand and one places: intolerance and neglect for human life take the place of understanding and com-

passion. He has a share in it when hate takes the place of pity, when blood flows instead of tears and when the weak are being crushed under the foot of the strong. What we should be striving for with all the capabilities of our beings is the emergence of a world where the principles of equality of races or creeds are accepted as inviolate, where war as a method of settling dispute is condemned to the dust heap of history and where the good of the whole of humanity is held above national or personal glory. A world where the cry of the homeless child in Pakistan is given more attention than the ravings of a power mad demagogue, and where the saving of life in Africa is given priority over the manufacture of weapons of mass annihilation in America, and where the rights of the humblest of our people are protected against the powers of bureaucracy. These and a host of others all stem from that conviction in the oneness of humanity in the common struggle against the poverty and ignorance which threatens to destroy the world eventually. Is it human nature to want to fight and to destroy? Is it human nature to grab what you can for yourself and let the weakest of us take the hindmost? I should have thought that it was rather the law of the primitive jungle which we are trying through civilisation to pull away from. Every time that we resort to violence we are guilty of an attack on the principles of humanity, every time we encounter and fail to denounce it we are giving its already inflated morale yet another boost and every time we talk about “wog” or “sheeny” or “nigger” or “ahrab” we are adding one bit more to the mounting reservoir of hate and intolerance which can only be released by understanding and patience. It is no use for us only to search through our pockets in aid of the refugees we must search through the recesses of our hearts and minds to re-establish our determination never to let the violence which upset a world twice in half a century get the chance to add more thousands of souls to the already overflowing pool of human misery and evidence of man’s inhumanity to man. Wherever and whenever violence and war are glorified and held up to be it any way desirable, we are failing in this task, and this failure carries with it, in this day and age, untold and unimaginable hazards for our own and for future generations.

Nick Faith

Shipbuilding Up The Creek

LAST YEAR,

PEP produced a dispassionate and critical pamphlet about the deplorable state of British shipbuilding. The leaders of the industry reacted like cavalry generals who had just been told by Capt. Liddell Hart that the tank was here to stay: they refused to be driven into the Twentieth Century by a lot of loudmouthed metropolitan planners and college-boys. The Chairman of the Shipbuilding Advisory Council has since resigned because of the sheer inertia of the industry. The Unions have been noticeably reluctant to consider modernisation plans, partly through genuine fear of redundancy, partly because it could destroy the craft basis of the industry, so narrowly reflected in the union structure. If the Government insisted upon modernisation as a condition of financial help, the workers would stand to suffer considerable dislocation: the callous stupidity of labour relations in shipbuilding is reminiscent of the era of Uncle Tom’s Cabin rather than of Crossbow. Since the days when Jarrow was a symbol—not just another Redevelopment Town—the industry has not been prepared to expand. The attitude has been that it was idiotic to grow during a boom, only to be caught in the next slump with large, unprofitable capital commitments. The industry has therefore jogged along. In the meantime, because our yards were unable to cope with world demand, the Germans, Swedes and Japanese created strong, modern yards, quietly capturing the markets between them. Yet Swedish workers are better paid and have more security of employment than British ones. There may have been no demarcation disputes abroad— but then, there has been no managerial complacency, nor contempt for customers either. Then the recession came. The British yards, bellies stuffed with six year order-books, thought their theories would be justified: the over-ambitious Germans and Japanese would collapse, the “modest” British would ride out the storm. Instead customers started to cancel orders, and they got no new ones. When the squeeze came, the customers turned to the more modern and efficient yards abroad, where investment in new productive capacity had been made at the crucial time: by 1956, after all, the Germans and the Swedes were constructing ships as fast as the Japanese, and all of them twice as fast as Britain. Even British shipowners deserted the industry: like the customers of steel, they felt no allegiance to their suppliers for the years of delays and insults they had endured. A few of the more modern yards—especially in the North-East—have enough unprofitable orders to enable them to pay their overheads. Some of the big yards are busy with new passenger liners. But the middle-size yards, particularly on the Clyde, are in a desperate state. Nor is the situation entirely just. Three of the least

57

efficient firms (John Brown, Cammel Laird and Harland and Wolff) are strong enough to blackmail the Government to give them work, since their collapse would seriously worsen unemployment in key areas: the Clyde, Merseyside and Belfast. They are therefore subsidised, and smaller yards, which have tried to modernise, go to the wall. There are important lessons to be drawn from this record of failure. The dictum that “large firms are serving the nation well” does not bear any relation whatsoever to the shipbuilding industry. The industry has failed either to expand or to invest: and the blame falls squarely on both owners and management. Managerial ineptitude, however, has been matched by a failure of the Unions to take anything but a narrowly craft and sectional view of their industry. Yet Britain— even a socialist Britain—will always live by trade: the failure of the shipbuilding industry is at once a local and a national disaster. Some of the blame must be attributed to the Labour Government, which achieved in the post-war period just enough interference to disrupt, without ever having the power or foresight to plan for sustained growth over a long period: the two deadliest sins. Further, it is clear that we must think (for shipbuilding as for other industries) on regional lines: the rehabilitation of Clydeside as an industrial centre, not the rescue of certain inefficient component yards. The Unions may often be tied, through sectional interests, to retarding policies: but the workers in the yards are certainly aware that their own interests are not being served, in the long run, by working in an obsolescing and inefficient industry. Left to them, shipbuilding would have pulled itself up out of the slough years before. At the same time, even if the industry were nationalised, allowing workers’organisations in the yards a direct say in industrial policy, they should never be in a position, as the shipbuilding masters have been, to hold the whole economy up to ransom because of a gross lack of initiative.

Alan Sillitoe

What Comes On Monday?

AFTER TAKING a novel through eight drafts in almost as many years it is a great relief to have it published. The first real indication that its spell has been broken is when the six presentation copies arrive. You put them on a shelf and stand back to enjoy the view they make: the sensation is similar to that of throwing soil on the coffin of someone who has been only half a friend: he imposed on you a bit too much, though you couldn’t help liking him for it in a grudging sort of way. “Well,” you say, “that’s over: now for something new.” When I heard that Saturday Night And Sunday Morning was to be made into a film, and that I was

58

going to be asked to write the script, I felt I was in for a tough exercise in resurrection. Nevertheless I agreed to it, mainly because I wanted a hand in the kind of film it was going to be. I didn’t want Arthur Seaton—the main character—getting transmogrified into a young workman who turns out to be an honest-to-goodness British individualist—that is, one who triumphs in the end against and at the expense of a communist agitator or the trade unions. I didn’t want him to become a tough stereotype with, after all, a heart of moral gold which has in it a love of the monarchy and all that oldfashioned muck. Not that I imagined Woodfall Productions wanting to tamper in any way with what “ideological content” the story possessed. In any case Karel Reisz was to direct the film, and I knew, after seeing his We Are The Lambeth Boys that there was no danger of any of this twisting. In the novel, I’d wanted to show certain people as I thought them to be, not as I imagined other people wanted to see them. I had taken too long learning how to write to fall for that line. I found it very difficult to call back the mood in which I had written Saturday Night And Sunday Morning. It was almost impossible at first even to re-read the book, and this had to be done many times before the story fell into its 30 or 40 component parts and I could re-arrange the pieces into the tighter form of a film script. Many scenes from the book had to be dropped—since time was restricted to about 90 minutes and not 300. One or two short scenes were added in order to give filmic sense, and before this line of clear and simple progression came, the story had to be put through five drafts of synopsis and five of actual fulllength script. Owing to uncertainty as to when the shooting would begin, I found myself occupied with the script for nearly a year—and the gaps in between weren’t long enough for me to do much else but poems and short work. There were times, with another novel breathing over my shoulder, when I wished for a quick end to it, and even that I hadn’t started it. I also felt, and still feel strongly, that I don’t work at my best when collaborating with other people. Never having written a film script before, I had to have some help from Karel Reisz. Maybe the reason why the script went through so many drafts was because neither of us had been engaged on a feature film up to that time. The greatest difficulty was to simplify, to re-mould the episodic novel into some sort of order; and also to decide what to leave out. In the novel, for example, Arthur Seaton “carries on” with three women: in the film script, only two. Arthur’s collier-cousin Bert is given more prominence, and a friend of Doreen’s from the factory, whom I called Betty, is invented in order to show something of the world of Doreen. The army scene and the Christmas party have been dropped, though the tightness of family life, and the attitude of Arthur to conscription and military order, are brought out by other incidents. For reasons of censorship the “bringing it off” scene

of Brenda in the bath is not shown, but only referred to. It was also thought best, because of possible censorship complications, to make the attempted abortion fail. The only advantage of having it fail was that in the film the climax centres around a more complex situation than in the book. Nevertheless, it seems to me that censorship in the British film industry is in its own way as hidebound as that of Soviet Russia. There are three soliloquy scenes in the film, and I don’t know enough film history to say how unorthodox this is. The film opens, before the credits, on the first soliloquy, of Arthur Seaton at his lathe in the factory, turning off the last few cylinders of Friday night. His voice is heard, punctuated by his movements at the machine, meditating on attitudes to work and the people roundabout: Arthur’s Voice: Nine ’undred and fifty bleddy four. [He throws a completed component into his box] Nine ’undred and fifty-five. Another few more, and that’s the lot for a Friday. [Robboe the foreman reaches his lathe, hands him a wage packet. Arthur nods, glances at the total before slipping it into his overall pocket] Fourteen pounds three and tuppence for a thousand o’ these a day. No wonder I’ve allus got a bad back—though I’ll soon be done. I’ll lark about a bit then, go and talk to the women— or the viewers. No use working every minute God sends, that’s my motto. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. That’s one thing I’ve learned. [Glimpses Jack, the toolsetter, sharpening a blade at a carborundum wheel] Jack’s one that ain’t learned it. He wants to get on. [Sees Robboe giving Jack his wages] “Yes, Mr. Robboe.” “No, Mr. Robboe.” “I’ll do it as soon as I can, Mr. Robboe.” And look where it got Robboe. A dead-pan face and lot’s o’ worry. [Sees Fred, a coloured odd-job man collecting waste nearby] Fred’s all right: he’s one o’ them as knows how to spend his money—like me. Enjoys ’issen. [Two elderly men are still busy at their machines] Which is more than them two poor boggers know. They got ground down before the war and never got over it. I’d like to see anybody try to grind me down. That’d be the day. [Knocking-off light flashes on and off] What I want is a good time. All the rest is propaganda. The second soliloquy comes about half way through the film when Arthur is in his bedroom, after his fight with the two soldiers, and the third and final soliloquy is at the end, again in the factory. There was a certain amount of material in the book relevant to Arthur’s character that could only be used in this way. The most difficult thing of all was in deciding which way to end the film. In the book Arthur Seaton, the amoral, anarchic, sly, cunning, extrovert factory worker —to use but a few cliché-superlatives of the press—is about to get married to Doreen, but his inner cogitations while fishing on the canal bank show that the confused anarchy within him is by no means quelled at this prospect. In the film I tried to illustrate this in several ways. One—soon discarded—was a wedding scene at the registry office which is made into a travesty by Arthur’s larking about. But this wasn’t in character,

since it meant being cruel to the girl he was about to marry—as would any act of overt protest at this stage. It had to be more subtle; an acceptance of the life instinct in marriage, yet an obvious rejection of the double-faced society that really takes no account of him. Such complexities don’t make for easy filming. To show something of this I have Arthur meet Doreen on a hill behind a housing estate. Arthur reminisces about how, as a child and when no houses were there, he used to roam over the wild land on which they now stand, birdnesting and blackberrying. Doreen and Arthur then begin descending the hill towards the mass of new houses, in one of which they will live after they are married. Arthur picks up a stone and throws it towards them, a gesture which Doreen recognises and does not like. “You shouldn’t throw things like that,” she protests. “The trouble with you is you never think.” Arthur draws level with her, saying: “1 think enough, don’t bother. It wain’t be the last stone I’ll throw either. [Takes her arm] Come on, let’s get down.” The final scene is a soliloquy in the factory, with Arthur working at his lathe. He is just back from having a final set-to with Jack: Arthur’s Voice: Jack’s not all that bad. He’s a good bloke in some ways. Lets the factory do as it likes with him though. They’ve bossed all the guts out of him. If he had any to begin with. There’s thousands like him though: just love to be told what to do. I’ll never get like that. Anybody opens their trap too much to me, gets it shut for ’em. Me, I was born fighting. Like I told Bert: you’ve got to fight in this world. But there’s a bit of sweetness sometimes, and I know that much as well. These last scenes stamp Arthur as having changed from when we first saw him at the beginning of the film; yet they also show him to be basically the same person, to the extent that he is still going into the future as someone with a mind of his own, a mind that can’t be so easily got at as most people’s seem to be. It is also obvious that for him, life is just beginning. Monday morning lost its terrors a long time ago.

59

Alex Hamilton

Valete In The Jamaica Road

man come home with his rag out Fersday. We was all watching Telly but to me it was yesterday’s dinner: yeah, the sooner that lot pull the water up over them the sooner we’ll all be less miserable. I was only giving the family the benefit of my company until the time come round to jump on my trusty Beezer and whine down the caff with the boys. Then the old man comes in. He’s only kicked the dog before he’s got his coat off, even, and clipped my sister on the earhole so her ribbon’s fallen out of her hairdo. So we don’t need to be Einstein to know he’s his usual horrible self. The kids all scatter like they was in the street with the boys belting up towards them on their Super-Doops and Beezers, and he drops on the sofa like the milkie’s horse dying in harness. Then he roars to his feet like the old horse always has to, because it’s got through to that genius brain of his that Telly’s on and he wants to speak hisself. He reaches out to give it the dead knob. “Stack!” he yells at me. As soon as I look at him I know he’s meaning to walk down my throat with his boots on. “What’s got to you, Dad?” I says, “if it’s gardening hints for people with concrete yards save it till I leave home, will you? There’s Wagon Train coming up in a minute.” So of course he steps up and kills the show, with one flick of his wrist. Very big, the Television Aufority would of screamed for mercy if they could of saw it. “Stack”, he bawls, so loud the castor-oil plants begin jiving, “what’s this I bin hearing?” “Dunno,” I says, “but I bet the Noise Abatement Society’s worried.” My sister closes the window because until some geyser gives us half a bar for them, the family rows belong to us only. Some families got no taste, shout so they can hear it in Soufend, but we even got a bit of cardboard in summer where a windowpane’s gone. “Why have I got to be down the Docks when I hear it, Stack?” says the old man. “Perhaps they didn’t know your home address, not being in the ‘phone book,” I says. I don’t know what it is, but when he’s mad I can’t help needling him to make it worse. He’s not the worst, there’s some bloke, called the Devil, would get his name in lights over my old man’s, but he’s got the rest beat. “Stack,” he starts up again, “you’ve got it coming to you.” “Go on “ I says, “pull the other leg.” “Your muvver come down to see me while I was at my work, and that is something I don’t allow, not while I’m working,” he says. “Well,” I says, “who was it married her, then? Not me, I’m optimistic to say.”

THE OLD

60

“Made me a row in front of all my mates, crying and carrying on.” “That’s her privilege,” I tells him. “Not with me it ain’t,” he says, “but her story is that you want to leave home.” “That’s Reuter reporting then,” I says, in my City Desk voice, and the kids all put on their “didn’t I tell you” faces. “You can’t leave home, you’re still fifteen, and I know the law.” He thinks that’s an ace, but I let him play it cause I know his ace is a low card. “Alright Mr. Fabian, then” I says, “you should of looked in your teacup this morning cause you’ve got a visitor coming.” “Don’t think I want you here,” he replies, “it’s only your muvver being stupid like always.” “Leave Mum out of it, like you usually do.” “You can’t leave home, and that’s final.” “Why don’t you take a long run on a short pier?” “And you’ll sell that motor-bike, you hear me, Stack?” “I can’t sell it Mr. Amory your worship, honourable member for forty-one dockyard road, cause it don’t belong to me till I’ve made all the payments, and I’ll be an old man then and you’ll be dead.” So at that moment there’s a knock on the door which surprised me cause I told the coppers not to come until after Wagon Train’s finished. But I see it’s constable Bill Collins and his BOAC bag Peggy Hackett, probation officer. And BOAC, if you want to know, means bloomin’ ’orrible awful cow. She’s a right old tourist, Peggy, and she’s got two kids. They belong to a mob that act like kids, too. They’ve always got some new stupid rave, and they call theirselves the Jamaica Road Ravers and the kind of thing they think is top of the bill is—let me tell you this—to see who can do something longest, like stand on their heads until they faint, or jive all night, if that’s jiving what they do capering about like mice in a sputnik. I remember one of that lot always coming down the Caff with a bit of sticking plaster on his finger and he’s kept it there for months, and that’s his blinking rave, and the rest of their bunch say “Coo, he’s still got it on then, ain’t he marvellous?” I’d say they was all daft as a brush if I didn’t know that Peggy Hackett lived in their pocket. Another thing they do which shows you their age is ordering an ice-cake for a party, from out at Acton, and then they stick little cake-candles in it. Then they don’t munch, they only get some kid to shout “the cake’s melting” and then all the boys find some old boot and together they blow the candles out and off they go. That kind of thing makes me feel a bit out. Nobody wants a party with everybody dying of boredom and saying “Isn’t this a lovely old party old man?” and “I’m sorry you’ve been charmed, old fruit,” but any fair old bit I’ve known’s wanted a more sophisticated-type meeting-ground of the sexes than that. To make a long story a Macmillan type speech all I can add is that I wouldn’t have one of old Hackett’s kids with me in a knuckle. Anyway there’s Hackett, and there’s the copper,

Before now he’s brought me in for a dice-up between me on my Beezer and Flash Larkin on his Fanny-Bee. He had to wait for us both to come back because we both drifted over the ton, but the way I see it he would have had us on the Breathing Act anyway, so what should we have done—gone down on our knees and prayed? As soon as I took a good screw at who my champions was 1 thought “oh, blunt me spurs” and “Gadzooks!” It could of been worse: I could of had Dracula and the Mummy to help me, but there it was, I was lumbered. To cut a long story into spaghetti, old Hackett was fantastic. It’s the first time I’ve seen the old man knackered. She really told the old man to take gas. “Can he leave home?” she says. “No”, says the old man. “Will you look after him then?” “No,” says the old man. “Well, he can’t be destitute,” she says, “if that’s what you’re meaning to do a Court Order will be forthcoming.” The old man does his crunch, but she was the Rock of Ages. “He can get on out of it,” says the old man finally. “We gotta beat up some digs for you,” says Hackett to me. “But can I just bomb down the caff and see the boys?” I says. To cut a long story into a romance, I took my slim Jim down from its hook and we bombed down the caff for a jungle juice and five straws. There I introduced her to all the gang, except the two-stroke poppers of course. It was fantastic. One of these days, when I’m sixteen and get my licence, I’m going to get old Peggy Hackett up on my pillion in a dice-up and I’m going to show her what it’s all about. We’ll do a ton fifty.

Rex Winsbury

Come Back Africa

most impressive thing about Come Back Africa is that it was made at all. Lionel Rogosin, its creator, spent a year in South Africa simply getting to know the Africans, and after months of wrangling with suspicious white authorities, got permission to shoot a film, ostensibly praising apartheid, in the form of a musical. The script was written in a week, with the help of two African journalists working on Drum. The shooting took three months, and was done under constant white supervision. Every reel, once shot, had to be rushed out of the country by air, in a gigantic game of bluff. In a sense, Rogosin was also lucky in being free of the need for outside financial backing; this gave him an unusual degree of independence.

THE SECOND

But easily the most striking aspect of the film is the way that Rogosin has “got inside” the African, understood his personal and social problems, and presented him as a person with all the normal family aspirations. Zachariah, the central character (played by an office worker), is a Zulu migrant from the impoverished countryside, first to the gold mines and then to Johannesburg itself. He is presented with great sympathy and precision as an ordinary family man, who has all the worries and cares of an average head-of-household, caught in a social transition he does not fully understand. The reactions of Zachariah and his wife to the corrupting influence of the ‘big city slum’ environment on their children, are an exact echo of the complaints of many British mothers. The indictment of the racialist policies of the South African government comes, therefore, through the insidious eating away of normal family relationships, the degradation of human and family dignity that is entailed by the combination of poverty, overcrowding, and white oppression. In a way, the film might not be about Africans at all. It could as well be about any society caught up in an Industrial Revolution, involving the uprooting of a rural community and its heedless dumping in a workers’ slum. The breakdown of known patterns of living, the coarsening of human personality, the rise of a ‘Teddy Boy’ element—these are all familiar features of a situation repeated in many countries. But in South Africa, the pattern, though familiar, is made sharper, and therefore more repellent, by the addition of apartheid. This is why, with exceptions, the national critics have missed the point of Come Back Africa. Some saw it as an opportune propaganda document whose message was, and was intended to be, political. Others (e.g. C. A. Lejeune) said primly, “There must be a Counsel for the Defence, as well as a Counsel for the Prosecution”. As if Rogosin were a one-man fact-finding committee, who unfortunately forgot that other side of the case that all reasonable men know to be there, by definition. All this of course mistakes Rogosin’s object. The film is not a documentary, with statistics about the relative populations, wage rates and literacy of the blacks and whites. It is a deeply committed re-creation of what it is like to live in Johannesburg, if you are a normal, decent African, forced off the land to the urban slum. The level of observation is that of the individual African, his family and his immediate circle of friends. The political moral is there, unambiguous and stark; but it is there by implication. The other mistake has been to judge Come Back Africa purely as a feature film. For of course there could be no neatly laid out plot, embracing within its unreal logic every action in the film; partly, because the script and shooting were so hurried, partly because so much ‘musical’ material had to be shot. However skilfully it has been woven into the film, and however rich the material (it is in fact immensely enjoyable—the tin

61

whistle groups, particularly), there is inevitably a certain imbalance from the structural point of view. There is however one fault, over which Rogosin could have had some control. This is his inability to ‘stage a scene’, which seriously weakens the formal plan (such as it is) that he has given to the film. The technique of using a skeleton story around which to build an ‘actuality’ film, is repeated from Rogosin’s earlier film, On The Bowery. This dealt with the alcoholics and down and outs of ‘skid row’; in it, the arrival of a central character, his chance meetings and his eventual departure, were used as the formal excuse for the real heart of the film—the long, random shots of the row and its spiritual detainees. The least successful parts of On The Bowery were precisely the staged conversations and the set pieces. This fault is magnified in Come Back Africa. Partly this is because the white actors (amateurs also) are not such ‘naturals’ as the negro—though one should be grateful that there were some whites willing to take part; one at least of them is now said to be under arrest. But, with one exception, all the scenes of conflict between white and black have a contrived air that is dangerously near to the comic at points. The garage episode, in which Zachariah and his friend Eddy, the mechanic, are sacked for ‘subversive’ conversation, has a sad touch of Victorian melodrama. The exception is the white foreman of the road gang to which Zachariah goes for work. The chisel-like rasp of his voice, as he demanded to be called “Sir”, is not easily forgotten. The great things about the film are elsewhere—in the music, in the rambling conversations in the shebeen, the crowd scenes, the social life of Sophiatown, and the intense sympathy with which Zachariah and his wife are presented. There is a temptation on the Left to see the coloured person as a purely political problem (if in South Africa) or a purely social problem (if in Notting Hill). Too few know how the ordinary African actually thinks and feels, or what makes one African different from another. To this, Come Back Africa is a powerful antidote.

E. P. Thompson

Countermarching To Armageddon

the custard-pies started to fly around at the Summit, the preparations for the Countermarch were well in hand. The 100,000 Easter demonstrators had scarcely drifted away from Trafalgar Square before the Top People’s CND (Committee for Natopolitan Defence) was in session, getting everything ready for the deadline of mankind. It is a broad committee, recruited across party boundaries and embracing many shades of mental and moral disorder, in the best tradition of all the great gadarene movements of the past.

LONG BEFORE

62

The exact membership of the committee is secret, and Our Parliamentary Voyeur can only guess at their identity by the movement of cars, cheques, television cameras, and bouquets, and by analysing editorial motions. One guess is Mr. George Brown and Mr. Harold Watkinson (for the politicians), the editors of The Spectator and Encounter (for the public hector and the private spectre), Mr. Constantine Fitzgibbon (For D Foundation), and Sir Tom Williamson (for tissimo). Certainly, long before Caesar’s long-misunderstood death-bed formulation was explained, the countercontingents had formed up. The television boys had been given a four-minute warning. Mr. Anthony Hartley was washing his pen in bland lemon-juice and musty sulphur for a “Letter to an Aldermaston Marcher” (June Encounter), and Mr. Julius Gould (about whose existence there appears to be some doubt) was writing eagerly for the Observer a review panning Out of Apathy. As Mr. Krushchev was uttering his diplomatic innuendos in Paris (How did they go? “The Soviet Union wishes only for peace, but certain gentlemen should understand—as our shepherds say in Tashkent— any ram with a dirty arse will end up in the knacker’s yard. Let President Eisenhower look at the seat of his own trousers before he . . . (Standing ovation!) . . .” etc., etc.)—so the great Countermarch to Armageddon swung proudly out of Smith Square and 25 Haymarket. Every marcher wore proudly in his lapel the CND flash, signifying a cleft stick inside Our Global Dilemma. Prominent among the emblems held proudly aloft has been the great embroidered and tasselled banner of Mr. Gaitskell’s Bacon, saved (provisionally) by the NUGMW, and the lifelike imitation of a Shoy-Hoy up a pole (1), carried by Mr. R. H. S. Crossman. Some traditional banners were not in evidence this year; since Blue Streak is now In The Red it has been replaced by Blue Steel, Black Death, and Blue Murder. But there can be no doubt that the post-Summit morale of the marchers was higher than at any time since the crises of the Yalu River and Dien Bien Phu. The organisers of the march are confident that they will meet up with their Russian comrades, headed by Marshal Malinovsky, somewhere in the region of West Berlin in the autumn. Every great gadarene movement must have its theorist; and Professor Hugh Seton-Watson is to be congratulated on his industrious compilation of what must surely become the standard Natopolitan manual to the Cold War (Neither War Nor Peace, Methuen, 36s.). The author’s industry is matched by his command of tautology, repetition, sophism, and other devices calculated to deaden response, to conceal the premises of argument, and to induce the impression that whatever is tendentious is no more than commonplace fact. These methods are the more easily employed in that the author offers to compress contemporary world history, diplomacy, and political theory, into the scope

of 400-odd pages. This gives him the opportunity, not only to boil down all the evidence into a sort of viscous neutral-coloured glue, but to purify the residue of any elements which might detract from its Natopolitan efficacy. The Communists are the Baddies throughout the record—Goths and Saracens menacing the unity of “the West”. Thus the crisis of the Belgian monarchy in 1945: A compromise was made. Leopold abdicated and his son Baudouin became king. Thereafter democracy was assured, and the efforts of the communists . . . were frustrated (p. 32).

Democracy equals a compromised monarchy plus frustrated communists. Thus post-war France and Italy: By voting communist or Nenni socialist, between a quarter and a third of the French and Italian nations, including the great majority of the industrial working class, placed itself outside the political life of the nation (p. 35).

The professorial brass-hats are rapidly perfecting a science of syllogistics to keep up with the logistics of their cousins in the “hardware” line. Only occasionally does Professor Seton-Watson relax his grip upon question-begging commonplace and expose his assumptions to serious historical analysis. Perhaps an examination of one paragraph—where the professor discusses “totalitarianism” in the abstract— will illustrate the Method: “There is a connexion between the decline of religious belief and the rise of totalitarian ideologies. As we have seen, the intellectuals of the eighteenth century, especially in France, were in revolt against both State and Church, both King and God. Emancipation from religious belief brought the same exhilarating sense of freedom as the overthrow of a secular tyranny. Free from superstition, man, it was believed, could at last build a just society. Paradise could be built on this earth, human nature was perfectible and virtue could triumph over vice. It was necessary only to identify virtue and vice, and to elaborate the secular ideology that would take the place of the rejected religion. To the disciples of the ideology, truth was known and the road to the achievement of the reign of virtue was

1

clear. Those who opposed the onward march were benighted reactionaries or active apostles of vice: they must be exterminated. There was no need any more to worry about the next world: not God but the party leader knew the way to paradise. The Valhalla of Germanic man, purified by the annihilation of the Jewish race, and the classless society, built on the corpses of landowners, capitalists, kulaks, enemies of the people and conscious or unconscious agents of the world bourgeoisie, were glorious visions to fill the hearts of true believers.” (p. 224).

I must ask the reader to stay a few moments with this paragraph. If, as Professor Seton-Watson affirms earlier (p. 216), “the essence of totalitarianism is that its claims are total”, it would suggest that, where the claims of the priesthood or State Church reinforce those of the State, we are close to essential totalitarianism. The intellectuals of the Enlightenment, upon whom the professor wishes to father totalitarian doctrines, were in fact confronting exactly this alliance of powers. We are then offered an impressionistic caricature of the naïf illusions held by “the intellectuals of the eighteenth century, especially in France . . .” Which intellectuals? Where else? The introduction of even one name—let us say Rousseau— would at once reveal how specious is the caricature of their opinions. But at a certain point, what commences as a caricature of the views of identifiable intellectuals at the time of the French Revolution passes over into a smudged and pejorative passage, in which courageous men who were fighting for intellectual liberty and social justice against differing degrees of tyranny, are presented as intolerant tyrants. “Those who opposed the onward march were benighted reactionaries . . . they must be exterminated.” (Which intellectuals said this? No names offered). On the word “exterminated”, the passage jerks out of suppositious history into the current mode of academic Billingsgate. All pretence at any intellectual discipline or limitation of real context is abandoned. Nazism and Communism are thrown into bloodchilling montage, mountains of corpses are presented as the natural consequence of any “secular ideology” and as the centre-piece of the “glorious vision” of all “true

The Shoy-Hoy

A Shoy-Hoy is an old term for a scarecrow, and its political significance was first explained by William Cobbett: “The people want a reform of the parliament, and there has been for a long time . . . a little band, who have professed a desire to get parliamentary reform. They have made motions and speeches and divisions, with a view of keeping the hopes of the people alive, and have thereby been able to keep them quiet from time to time. They have never desired to succeed; because success would put an end to their hopes of emolument; but they have amused the people. The great body of the factions, knowing the reality of their views, have been highly diverted by their sham efforts, which have never interrupted them in the smallest degree in their enjoyment of the general plunder. Just as it happens with the birds and the shoy-hoys in the fields or gardens. At first, the birds take the shoy-hoy for a real man or woman; and, so long

as they do this, they abstain from their work of plunder; but after having for some time watched the shoy-hoy with their quick and piercing eyes, and perceived that it never moves hand or foot, they totally disregard it, and are no more obstructed by it than if it were a post. Just so it is with these political shoy-hoys; but, their demerits are not, like the field shoy-hoys, confined to the doing of no good; they do mischief . . . The agricultural . . . shoy-hoys deceive the depredating birds but a very short time; but they continue to deceive those who stick them up and rely upon them, who, instead of rousing in the morning, and sallying upon the depredators with powder and shot, trust to the miserable shoy-hoys, and thus lose their corn and their seeds. Just thus it is with the people, who are the dupes of all political shoy-hoys.” Twopenny Trash, 1 September 1830.

63

believers”; and—the imputation is—all this must be heaped upon the head of those intellectuals who risked their liberty confronting the Ancien Régime. More than this, extermination, Valhallas, annihilation, and corpses are attached by inference to all intellectuals antagonistic to religious superstition or harbouring the “illusions” of social progress towards a just society. God knows we all write rubbish sometimes, and even professors may be allowed to nod. What appals is not that this kind of stuff is allowed to pass as a lapse, but that it is exactly this kind of pseudo-historical sophistry which is acclaimed—within and without our Universities —as wisdom and evidence of academic distinction. “A brave, brilliant book,” says Desmond Donnelly, MP, in The Observer: “a notable work—one of the most thought-provoking to appear in this country since the war” agrees Mr. Anthony Hartley in The Spectator. I wonder how the future historian will distinguish— except by a greater urbanity in tone—between Natopolitan cold war apologetics and the apologetics of the other side. “Cold War is not a Western policy, but a state of affairs, and results from the basic Soviet attitude,” writes Seton-Watson. “The Soviet Union is in a permanent state of war, which may or may not become violent, with the West” (p. 256). Interchange the words “Soviet Union” and “Western imperialists” and this might be a textbook in Moscow or Peking. But even the urbanity sometimes breaks down. It is a tenable and respectable view, we are told, that the evacuation of Asia and Africa by Europeans will result in a “reversion to barbarism”; their place may be taken “by the goat, the monkey, and the jungle”. (Why not the elephant, the humming-bird, and the lotus? And why not?) “Black racialists” who “wish to exterminate white men simply because they are white men” seem to the professor to be multiplying in Africa, and black racialism “will, of course, be used whenever possible by communist propagandists . . . in the hope of establishing the Soviet empire in Africa.” (p. 459). Of course. Which communist propagandists, by the way? Brian and Sonia Bunting, at present jailed without charge for the crime of protesting against the extermination of black men by white men? Brian and Sonia, a salute! Beset with all these nightmares of Valhallas, corpses, and encroaching jungles, it is not surprising that Neither War nor Peace comes up pat with all the slogans needed for this year’s Armageddon March. Unilateralists are possessed by “religious masochism”. We must keep the Bomb, double our conventional forces, and strengthen our academic and military élites. This will keep the jungle out and the corpses at bay. The only puzzle that remains is how The Spectator managed to review this book as a true liberal critique. But then, if Diderot and Tom Paine were totalitarians, we might as well re-name the whole pack. There are two banners which I’m damned if we should let the Armageddon contingents carry off—“Europe”, and “the West”. Who gave them the right to speak in

64

the name of a Europe from which Prague, Budapest, Warsaw, Moscow and the majority of the French and Italian working-class have been exorcised? Or a “West” which has no place for the Western traditions of Marx and the Communards, Clydeside engineers and Hamburg dockers, Tom Mann and Jaurès, French maquis and Yugoslav partisans? The 100,000 Easter demonstrators have not disappeared into thin air, any more than those who packed the squares of Warsaw and Budapest in 1956. Neither Eisenhower nor Krushchev met at the Summit to speak for them, even though they had to take them into account. Their Europe is not Seton-Watson’s Europe, any more than it is Malinovsky’s. It is a Europe which already has an intellectual existence, but whose real existence is confused by frontiers, and arbitrary ideological and institutional demarcations. Sartre can talk across these frontiers to Lukacs and Jan Kott, but the workers of Tyneside cannot talk to the workers of Vienna or of Prague. If the Summit has a lesson, it is that we must awaken the real Europe, our Europe, once again. This other Europe was a reality in 1945—a reality felt by ordinary people from Cassino to Lidice and from South Wales to Stalingrad. It is dormant now but it has never been the same thing as the Europe of NATO and of the Common Market. First we must make it conscious of its own existence; then we must make it strong enough to fence the Armageddon marchers out. If they mean to meet at Berlin, then the Aldermaston marchers must get to Berlin first.

Jim Garst

Uncle Sam’s Leaden Age

1945, the American Left has been awaiting the “big bust”. When it came, the trade union movement would supposedly overthrow its moderate leadership and American politics would be transformed. When the economy was bailed out of its first post-war recession by the Korean “police action”, many on the Left said, “the capitalists depend on military adventure to do it. It’s still either depression or war.” The postKorean recession ended in 1954, and the economy started climbing again—with a built-in stabiliser in the form of defence contracts, but without a shooting war. By the beginning of the third post-war recession in 1957, Left analysts had become cautious in their predictions. And sure enough, the slump turned round in 1958, and in 1959, despite the long steel strike, most previous highs were topped. Though the Democrats and the trade unions see a new recession in the making for 1961, there is almost nowhere fear of a true crisis. The trick was worked, of course, by applying and

SINCE

improving on Keynes. The government established a full arsenal of national accounts and sensitive indicators. From month to month, quarter to quarter, the economic temperature is taken; monetary and (less frequently) fiscal policies are adjusted accordingly. When Eisenhower took over from Truman, the doubts were soon set at rest: budget deficits continued, set off against high taxes and tight credit. In Truman’s era, Fortune magazine announced the “permanent revolution.” Midway through Ike’s second term, Galbraith was able to proclaim the “affluent society”. Overriding the economic fluctuations, the changing party fortunes in White House and Congress, the unemployed and America’s own “submerged fifth”, is the system: it survives. Nonetheless, it is worth looking at some of the factors simmering beneath the more orthodox indices. They do not contradict conclusively the viability of the US economy. But they do tend in a common direction, and raise questions on the horizon of the nation’s economy and its politics. A significant introduction is provided by a study of business cycles conducted by Moses Abramovitz, professor of economics at Stanford University, and commented on in an interesting article by the Editors of Monthly Review (April, 1960). Abramovitz has detected “long swings” of economic fluctuation underlying the conventional boom-bust cycles. His method uncovers dominant long swings in rates of economic change, related to basic factors of “long-term decision and commitment” such as “the movement of people from country to country and place to place, the formation of households and the birth of children, the foundations of business, and the investment of capital in highly durable form”. Abramovitz’ data, carried up to about 1953, indicate that a long swing downward has been in progress since 1939. But, because of the built-in stabilisers, he believes, the US is “happily unlikely to experience (serious) depression. But this does not mean that we may not have a number of years in which unemployment rates are not higher than we would like to see them because our rate of growth is not as rapid as it needs to be in order to absorb the growth in the labour supply.” Here an examination of post-war unemployment, productivity, and prospective growth of the labour force, is illuminating. Average unemployment during 1949—the trough of the first post-war recession—was 5.5 per cent of the civilian labour force. By 1952, unemployment was down to 2.7 per cent. The 1953–54 recession touched bottom at 5 per cent unemployment for 1954, and by 1956 recovery had decreased this to 3.8 per cent. Unemployment in the third post-war recession bottomed at 6.8 per cent in 1958. Recovery during 1959 restored unemployment only to a level of 5.5 per cent—equalling the depth of the 1949–50 slump. In short, recovery has left an increasing percentage of residual unemployment. This pattern is associated with trends of increased

labour productivity resulting both from automation and from orthodox technological advance. Manufacturing production has consistently touched new highs in each recovery period. At the same time, in manufacturing, the number of workers not directly engaged in production approached and then exceeded the number of workers directly engaged. Net additions to the labour force have averaged less than one million a year in the past decade. But in the next five years this average will be at 1.25 million per year, and in the decade 1966–75, will mount to 1.5 million per year. Employees in the trade, service, financial and governmental sectors have shown continuous gains both as a proportion of the labour force and in absolute numbers. The implications seem clear: at some point, the trends of an increasing work force, increasing productivity, and the absorptive limits of the nonproduction sectors of the economy will converge, to produce a steeply increasing rate of unemployment. Accompanying these trends, Monthly Review points out that production capacity is already under-used. To take the central of many examples, steel production will probably run at something below 80 per cent of rated capacity this year, compared with long runs of 100 per cent or even above during the early 1950’s. Firms plan to spend a record $38 thousand million during 1960 on new plant and equipment, but this will increase capacity by only 5 per cent. Further, America is not short of investment funds, but more are going abroad. By 1959, domestic investment had increased 2.6 times, compared with 1946, to a total of $71.1 thousand million, while capital outflow had soared 5.2 times to $2.1 thousand million. The significant point is two-fold: America generates a tremendous capital surplus, but increasingly it is more attractive to place this abroad. Expenditures by the federal government play a significant role in keeping production at high levels and unemployment at tolerable ones. Since the Korean war, military expenditures have hovered at a mark just below half of total federal outlay. Though this is currently, at $41 thousand million, a mere 8 per cent of gross national product, it may well be within the crucial range of the proportion necessary to keep the whole system ticking. Recent shifts to missile production from aircraft have decreased employment attributable to the military budget. Any significant decrease in military spending resulting from disarmament agreements will further accelerate unemployment rates in the short-run, and, in view of the limitations of planning in the US economy, will create longer-term employment difficulties. What, then, is the prognosis for the American economy? It is certain that the business cycle will at some point turn down into a new recession. The commanding question will then be, within what range will it move? Will it be longer and deeper than previous post-war slumps? On evidence sketched above, there may be forces building up which will severely test the full

65

extent of the Keynesian defences. Much would then depend oh how fast and how far the Keynesian levers are pulled. They have plenty of play, since the Republicans have kept credit extremely tight, and the Democrats and the unions have argued throughout the Eisenhower period that the levers should have been pulled earlier and harder as each recession emerged. The admitted cost of this more aggressive policy would, of course, be inflation. Dr. Leon Keyserling, a leader of this school, maintains that modest inflation, within the limit of about 2 per cent per year, is a necessary cost for a satisfactory increase in growth rate, and well worth it. There is thus some significance in who is president as the economy begins its next decline. Beyond Keynes, there is the presence of Galbraith, and his policy of direct government intervention to shift private spending to the public sector, to meet America’s long list of needs for improved education, housing, roads, urban amenities, and health care. If the underlying trend in the economy is as menacing as some factors indicate, pressure may become strong enough to persuade a faltering Democratic or a baulky Republican administration that Galbraith must be accepted as well as Keynes. Starting from a different premise—the necessity of doing the same thing to compete internationally with Russia—R. H. S. Crossman predicts that within the next decade America (as well as Britain) will undertake a large-scale extension of planned economy. Whether the impetus is external or internal, or a combination, this could profoundly affect America’s economy and her politics if it happens. But, unless the administration of the day stonewalls all the way against the challenge, the American Left will still be waiting for the “bust” after the next recession.

Colin Falck

City Of The Disinherited

Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet consists of four novels — Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive and Clea —published by Faber (16s. each). WHEN THE Alexandria Quartet struck into our critical dovecote, the cry that went up was very confused indeed. Mr. Hilary Corke (May Encounter) has said that this tells us more about the contemporary state of the dovecote than about the Alexandria Quartet, but the hawklike mercilessness of his own attack is little help towards a sympathetic or critical understanding of either. Nevertheless the first sea-wall of criticism has been badly and in most places deservedly shaken, and this may be no bad occasion for another “first” appraisal. “The central topic of the book,” Durrell writes, “is an investigation of modern love”. This seems to me the best account that anyone has yet given of what the Alexandria

66

Quartet is about, and yet many people have written it off along with Durrell’s other prefatory remarks—“the soup-mix recipe of a continuum”, “a four-decker novel whose form is based on the relativity proposition”—as pretentious nonsense. They may be right, in fact, that the space-time talk adds very little, but this is because the essential idea is better suggested at the beginning of Balthazar, where Pursewarden (principal novelistwithin-the-novel and general repository for some of Durrell’s most striking intuitions) writes that “We live lives based upon selected fictions. Our view of reality is conditioned by our position in space and time—not by our personalities as we like to think. Thus every interpretation of reality is based upon a unique position. Two paces east or west and the whole picture is changed”. And the relevance of this to the whole subject and technical structure of the Quartet becomes clearer when Darley, the novelist-narrator, goes on to comment that, “Personality as something with fixed attributes is an illusion—but a necessary illusion if we are to love” (his italics). Sartre once wrote that “Character has no distinct existence except as an object of knowledge to other people”. Durrell’s quartet, like Sartre’s own (Les Chemins de la Liberté), is a fictional exploration of just this proposition. It is this that justifies the ‘sliding panel’ technique. Justine introduces most of the later characters and tells centrally of Darley’s love for Justine, the wife of his friend Nessim Hosnani, a rich Coptic businessman (though if she were simply this—or simply anything— the book would not be what it is: it is essential to it that almost none of the people are ‘characters’ in the familiar sense). When, in the second novel, the doctor Balthazar makes his interlinear comments on this story, Darley, still narrating, sees that he has been deceived and is forced to reinterpret everything from the beginning. The third novel centres on the British diplomat, Mountolive who has hitherto appeared only at the margin, and again confronts the earlier accounts with new knowledge that completely alters the picture, this time in an objective, third-person narrative. Only with Clea do we move forward in time. To see why the novel demands to be cast in this form it is worth noticing another of Durrell’s prefatory remarks: “it would be worth trying an experiment to see if we cannot discover a morphological form one might appropriately call ‘classical’—for our time”. The question, of course, is why ‘for our time’? What is essential to Durrell’s form, I think, is not the literalistic idea of three dimensions of space and one of time—as he himself suggests, the characters could go on being deployed and redeployed ad virtually infinitum, and the cryptic workpoints at the end of Clea suggest some alarming new worlds—but rather the whole shifting chiaroscuro of viewpoints, the seeming elusiveness of the ‘real’ truth, the sense of the wild and ceaseless interflowing of appearances which finds its only possible expression in a brilliantly overloaded poetic language. Durrell seems hardly to believe in facts at all. And it is

interesting that, for all the critical discord as to whether the Alexandria Quartet is a masterpiece or an appalling wreck (Mr. John Coleman: Spectator), two reactions have been almost universal: to credit Durrell with an unparalleled ‘sense of place’, with a magnificent poetic evocation of Alexandria, ‘the shining city of the disinherited’, but to insist that none of the characters is real, that there is no sense of interaction between them. (Is it an accident that just these points were commonly made of Nabokov’s Lolita?) Mountolive has been generally agreed to be the most satisfying of the four novels, because only here—it might be called a political novel—is there any continuous action, any crisis and resolution of the ‘traditional’ kind. This agreement in analysis but divergence of verdicts suggests that Durrell’s attempt to produce something classical for our time has at least produced a challenge to our critical standards. Durrell’s characters have been described as “sometimes almost unbearably complex, sometimes flat, like a masked chorus”, “fables”, and in various other ways as having, in fact, “no distinct existence”. These are standard enough critical comments, and it could be that in this case they are quite simply true. But one comparison seems to me to be strikingly relevant: they recall the almost identical remarks that greeted the novels of D. H. Lawrence at the time of their publication. F. R. Leavis quotes Middleton Murry’s review of Women in Love: “we can discern no individuality whatever in the denizens of Mr. Lawrence’s world. We should have thought that we should be able to distinguish between male and female, at least. But no! Remove the names, remove the sedulous catalogue of unnecessary clothing . . . and man and woman are as indistinguishable as octopods in an aquarium tank”. If we consider the other affinities between Durrell and Lawrence it may be that this comparison will not seem too fanciful, and if we ask what it was in Lawrence that laid him open to such incomprehension we may get a clearer perspective on Durrell: there is a sense, perhaps, in which Durrell takes over where Lawrence left off. Except that Lawrence did not leave off: it is Women in Love of which this may be true, not the later obsessive ‘solution’ of The Plumed Serpent. Central to Women in Love is, in Leavis’ words, “the question of the kind of success possible in marriage, and in life, for a pair that have cut themselves finally adrift. The society in which, if they had a place, their place would be, represents the civilisation that has been diagnosed in Gerald”. And it is for this reason that the deeper significances of the novel cannot be understood in the conventional terms of role-playing “characters”. Lawrence represents the crucial transition, from a society —and hence a novel—where purposes and values permeate the practical activities of life, to a situation where this identification has broken down, where emotions, no longer channelled into meaningful social interaction, develop an autonomous existence and significance which can provide the main current—and

the key to the understanding—of the novel. It is in this way that character, loosened away from any decisive social determinants, begins to lose its objectivity. The difference with Durrell’s total cosmopolitanism is that— with the exception of Mountolive (and perhaps Nessim)—all his characters have, like Ursula and Birkin, ‘cut themselves finally adrift’, they are all disinherited. And it is because of this that they can seem to drift endlessly in and out of a poetic mirage of philosophy, theology and the theory of art with an openness and complexity that surpasses that of Women in Love, but without that recurrent return to the rejected realities of an actual society that may appear to us necessary to the strength and structure of a novel. (The difference is mirrored in their language: Durrell’s need to transfix each moment and make it altogether self-sufficient places a heavy weight on his prose which Lawrence’s rarely feels.) Only in Mountolive do the roots seem to regain their grip; only for Mountolive himself does the mauvaise foi of an integrated social existence have any direct meaning. The writers and artists of Durrell’s Quartet, like the intellectual world of The Mandarins, or the religious community of Iris Murdoch’s The Bell, are all at one remove from social reality. In this, if not in the literal form itself, the Alexandria Quartet may indeed—for better or for worse—be ‘classical’ for our time. It is concerned, I think—as is perhaps all the great art, literature and philosophy of the twentieth century—with a world which has lost its meaning and where, in the anxiety of this meaninglessness, emotion and personal relationship have become consuming problems in their own right. V. S. Pritchett seems to me to indicate just this when he comments that the characters are not talking about love, but “only about Narcissism and desire”, and that “after the sexual act there is still unsatisfied desire. Exhausted romantics, they are looking over the sleeping lover’s shoulder”. Their love, he says, rarely grows beyond this first stage. But to recall Lawrence again: “it isn’t selfish at all”, says Birkin to Ursula, “Because I don’t know what I want of you. I deliver myself over to the unknown in coming to you . . .”, and later “What I want is a strange conjunction with you—not meeting and mingling—you are quite right—but an equilibrium, a pure balance of two single beings—as the stars balance each other”. Could it not be the point of Clea that on the other side of Narcissism and desire just such a relationship is finally achieved? “I wait, quite serene and happy” says Clea, “a real human being, an artist at last”. Why’ is it that the accident with the harpoon (which the critics have found so ludicrous) is the one pure stroke of utter fate in the whole book? “I have crossed the border and entered into the possession of my kingdom, thanks to the Hand”. The idea that it is the “delicate and beautiful steel contrivance” which has made Clea an artist is surely absurd. The preparedness to live from other centres than the will and intellect, perhaps what Paul Tillich has called

67

‘the courage to accept acceptance’, contrasts with Justine’s continuing attempts to find meaning in action. Durrell makes it impossible for us to believe that she will ever succeed, and it may be that this, implicit in the whole setting and nature of the novel, will lead us to accuse him of a certain kind of abdication. Ultimately this may be just. But Mr. Durrell chose to attempt ‘an investigation of modern love’: his truth is truth, be it of never so transient a social order. And whereof he cannot speak, thereof the critic should perhaps not always be ashamed to be silent.

left clubs Peter Gillman

Recreative Arts

WHEN IT was realised by Croydon NLR Club that the London New Left Club’s challenge to a game of soccer was to be taken seriously, there was much unexpected enthusiasm from a hitherto ostentatiously sport-despising faction of political dissenters. Consequently the match was arranged to be played in Croydon on Sunday, April 10; and in their first game the Croydon YCND and New Left confounded all expectations by beating the London New Left by five goals to four. The Croydon team was composed of players of apparently antithetical styles. Basic football skills—such as trapping and dribbling—were displayed by those players educated at grammar schools, whereas the public school clique scorned such proletarian refinements and employed for greater directness in their offensive and defensive methods. The London team appeared to display far greater cohesion and unity—possibly because they all wore shirts of the same colour. Playing with the hurricane at their backs in the first half, Croydon quickly turned the natural elements to their advantage. After a few London attacks had been rendered abortive, the large Croydon left-half ran through most of the London defence and served with a shot that went nowhere near the goalkeepet. “What a pity he doesn’t belong to N.D. or New Left” was someone’s irrelevant remark. The Croydon left-winger, in spite of being the unfittest man on the field, quickly scored two opportunist goals, at least one of which left the London goal-keeper feeling a wronged man. After the desperately-awaited half-time, Croydon set about consolidating their lead to five goals to nil. But after the Croydon goal-keeper had watched interestedly as the ball rolled past him into the goal and jumped desperately at a shot that was well over his head but which dipped under the bar, Croydon realised the advantage the wind had brought them in the first half. However, fighting hard uphill into the wind, they made several strong attacks, in one of which their left-winger finished a brilliant move by smashing the ball narrowly past the goal, and in another the centre-forward drove the ball confidently against the post. London quickly retaliated by scoring two more goals with gentle shots which the Croydon goal-keeper contemptuously ignored. In the last quarter of an hour London attacked strongly. The Croydon goalkeeper momentarily made himself the local hero by brilliantly diving for the ball at the feet of the London left-winger, who was then adjudged offside by the referee. After many alarms and diversions, the referee blew his

68

whistle for full-time, and the players were halfway off the pitch when the Croydon left-back was prompted by an over-developed social conscience to announce that the referee was five minutes early. However, the combined presence of 21 players in the Croydon penalty area failed to produce another goal, and Croydon trooped off the pitch the winners by five goals to four. Between bouts of coughing and wheezing in the changing rooms, it was generally agreed that the match had been enjoyable and worthwhile. It is refreshing that members of the New Left and Nuclear Disarmament Campaign should meet on such an unexpected plane; and it is hoped that such contacts will be renewed in similar sporting activities in the future.

Bruce Reid

The Croydon Club

New Left Club has now been in existence for about four months. It evolved from the spontaneous demands of those people within the Croydon YCND and the Croydon Young Socialists, who wished for some independent socialist body, in which topics of a wider scope could be discussed and acted upon. The Club both suffers and benefits from the youth of its membership (the average age is about 19). This makes it difficult to achieve much continuity of development, since many of the keenest members, both students and apprentices, are continually disappearing to study for examinations, and this autumn the exodus to the universities will leave a big gap in the ranks. Yet these difficulties are more than compensated by the general enthusiasm, and readiness to take part in activities such as public demonstration and canvassing. The Club runs by co-operation rather than administration, and although this has meant some lack of efficiency, it seems to bring more people into the circle of active membership. The whole Club, i.e. an active membership of about 50, meets twice monthly for speakers (recently: Local Co-op official, Gordon Redfern, Clancy Sigal), and discussion, and individual members at the moment run three study groups, each group consisting of about 12. The most successful of these has been the Housing Group, which is examining the Problems of the Homeless in Croydon. It has visited the Council Receiving Homes, and is trying to expose some of the very real suffering that still exists in the town. The second group, the Teenager in Croydon, is studying the Albemarle

THE CROYDON

and Crowther reports with special reference to local problems, and the third, the Literature and Politics group, is reconsidering the political literature of the 20th century. Relations with the Croydon Labour Party are in general very good; many members play an active part in the Party affairs. But the inevitable Right-wing clamour about “splinter-groups” developed into a harmful exchange of letters that helped only the Tories. The formation of the Club seems to have revitalised the Left in Croydon and to have made a particular contribution to the local CND, drawing attention to the wider aspects of unilateralism. The Club has recently attracted more older members, and it is hoped that they can give the group the experience and stability it needs, without imposing the patterns of the Old Left. The group is achieving a membership of wider experience and background, and with this it can look forward with confidence to the future.

Lawrence Daly Fife Socialist League THE DEFECTION of 10,000 members (30 per cent of the total) from the British Communist Party in 1956–58 is already described as “the revolt of the intellectuals”; sometimes by those same historians who claim that the intellectuals formed only a tiny minority of the CP’s membership! The contradiction is obvious. The bulk of the dissenters were industrial workers, though their dissent was more articulately expressed by those intellectuals (John Saville, E.P. Thompson, Christopher Hill, etc.) who were determined that the Party must abandon its blind loyalty to the Soviet leaders. In industrial West Fife the CP admitted a drop of 25 per cent in membership. Not the least of King Street’s crimes was the fact that most of them vowed “never again”, and disappeared from political life. Others believed that the CP’s betrayal of Socialist principles made the need for a genuine Socialist organisation all the more urgent. They looked at the Labour Party and, in West Fife at least, could not see any possibility of its being won for a Socialist programme. In most areas it was aged and declining. Young people would simply not join it. It was firmly in the grip of a Right Wing which supported NATO and the Bomb. Its MP, W. W. Hamilton, had drafted for it the only constituency party resolution on the 1954 Labour Party Conference agenda supporting German rearmament. Economy cuts were enforced by Labour-controlled local authorities to help Attlee’s increased armaments programme in 1951, and after. In these circumstances we decided that the formation of a Fife Socialist League was necessary to conduct analytical, educational and propaganda work, free from the restrictions imposed by the Labour and CP machines. The foundation meeting was held in February, 1957, but informal discussions and activities had been taking place since June, 1956. In December, 1956 we had organised a public meeting for Peter Fryer in the mining town of Lochgelly, and we sold his book, Hungarian Tragedy and his pamphlet, The CP and Hungary. In August, I and another ex-member had addressed a packed meeting of miners in Lochore on the reasons for our resignation. We had read, sold, and discussed the three issues of The Reasoner in 1956 and felt attracted by its ideas, more so than by P. Fryer’s subsequent Newsletter, which eventually became the open organ of the Trotskyist Socialist Labour League. In March, 1957, we adopted a League constitution which declared the building of democratic Socialism to be our basic aim. For next the twelve months we were very much pre-occupied with the continued crisis in the CP, using the New Reasoner and, to a lesser extent, The Newsletter, to develop our case. As the 1958 local elections approached, however, we began

to look seriously at the possibility of an electoral challenge to the Labour/Communist tradition in the heart of the West Fife coalfield. My own division, Ballingry, the largest in the county, seemed the natural choice. I had already been defeated twice by Labour, as a Communist candidate, in straight fights, but had obtained a big vote. We invited a number of workers and housewives, who had never belonged to any political party, to assist us and we received an encouraging response. We entered the fray to the jeers of both the Labour and Communist Parties. A new CP candidate was also standing. The Labour County Councillor jubilantly forecast an overwhelming victory, thinking that the Left vote was hopelessly split. The CP reached the same conclusion and accused us of giving the Right Wing a walkover. Opinion in the League was divided. The trained dialectitians cautiously forecast either a narrow defeat or (less likely) a narrow victory. The “inexperienced” new recruits declared that we would win comfortably. The result was astounding. The League got 1,085 votes, Labour 525, and the CP 197. The CP could console itself with the knowledge that it took the District Council seat from Labour by a narrow margin in a straight fight and that it had brought off the double in another village a few miles away. This demonstrated not only the depth of the workers’ disgust with the Labour Party but also their readiness to choose an alternative where Tory candidates could not reap the advantage from a split vote. Since May, 1958, the League has held a public meeting in Ballingry every six months, on Council Affairs, at which I report back and invite suggestions and criticism. Prior to the meeting we issue to every tenant a bulletin indicating some of the councillor’s work over the previous six months and spot-lighting problems that still require to be solved. We realized, of course, that nothing less than a total Socialist offensive on a national scale was needed if the future of the people of Fife was to be assured. We had fought the election on a policy which demanded unilateral nuclear disarmament, extended public ownership, and more democracy in local government. For this reason we felt it necessary to develop our association with those Socialists gathered around the New Reasoner. And for the same reason we decided to contest the West Fife constituency in the 1959 General Election. We had held pit-head meetings in protest against the Nagy execution in June, 1958, and felt no qualms about opposing the CP, which had held the seat from 1935 to 1950, and had been the only “Left” alternative to date. We appealed to our friends of the New Left to give us their assistance, and many of them did so, financially and otherwise. (Their reasons have been outlined by John Saville in New Reasoner No. 10). Others considered that in principle they could not support a fight against the Labour Party, especially since it might help the Tories. Many electors in West Fife had the same doubts, though a Tory victory in the constituency was virtually impossible as the anti-Tory vote was usually three to one. Swamped by its opponents numerically and financially, the League nevertheless fought with tremendous enthusiasm. Its members and its new friends, students, lecturers, etc., campaigned alongside each other in a spirit of mutual understanding and dedication. Against Toryism and the acquisitive society; against Gaitskellism and NATO; against King Street and mental servitude. We received a friendly reception from the electors. 4,886 of them overcame their “split vote” fear and supported the League. We displaced the CP, its vote in this one-time stronghold going down to 3,828. Despite Labour’s 25,000 votes, the Labour Party knew that only the presence of a Tory candidate prevented a much stronger expression of the West Fife people’s opposition to the MP and the policies he has supported. Since the election, Mr. Hamilton has announced his conversion to unilateralism, while reaffirming his constitutional loyalty to Mr. Gaitskell! Winds of change blow in strange corners. In December, 1959, the League adopted new rules raising

69

full membership fees to 6d. weekly and permitting associate membership for Socialists outside Fife at 10/- per year. Associates have no voting power but receive League publications free, are kept informed of activities, and can participate in all policy discussions by attendance at meetings or by correspondence. In February, 1960, the first number of The Socialist, the League’s monthly journal, appeared. In March a policy declaration was adopted which restated our support for unilateralism, public ownership, industrial democracy and self-government for Scotland in Scottish Affairs. Visiting speakers in recent months have dealt with The Mining Crisis (Ken Alexander), Scottish Self-Government (Hamish Henderson), Revolution (E. P. Thompson) and Unilateralism (Mervyn Jones). On Saturday, May 7,a League contingent participated in the all-Scottish unilateralist demonstration through the streets of Glasgow. We are selling New Left Review, New Left Pamphlets including Britain Without the Bomb, and other New Left literature. The recent municipal election results in West Fife emphasise the need for a rapid growth of the League. In militant Cowdenbeath, the “Independents” have taken control because the workers can no longer tolerate Labour Group bureaucracy. In Lochgelly, expelled Labour councillors topped the poll against official Labour candidates, in a split which arose over personalities rather than policies, but the expulsions were condemned as “dictatorship” by the voters. (These towns are just outside the West Fife constituency). In the smaller mining villages this trend may express itself next year in support of local CP candidates at the triennial County & District elections, or, in those villages where there has never been a “Communist” tradition, “Independents” will be encouraged to come forward. The League hopes to meet the situation with a number of candidates. During the summer months we aim to conduct Socialist propaganda throughout the area by leaflet and open-air meetings. We made a start recently with pit-head and street meetings on the Sharpeville massacre and the Boycott. We are, of course, acutely conscious of our weakness, in size, organisation, finance, and political clarity. But we are striving to overcome these difficulties and are confident of doing so, in discussion and action, together with our growing number of friends in the New Left. Our electoral support, so far, encourages us in the belief that we represent the future of the Socialist movement in Fife.

Harold Silver

Can the Clubs Grow?

THE RELATIONSHIP between ideas and men of ideas, on the one hand, and working-class and popular action on the other, has not been looked at very closely in post-war Britain. It should be becoming increasingly clear, however, that orthodox communist views, for example, of automatic working-class leadership of national liberation movements and the like, fall down when you look at the world that is with us. If we look no further than the liberation struggles in Latin America, the movement that brought down Syngman Rhee, and the dawn of democratic action in Turkey, we can see how far they have been student-stimulated, not working class-organised. On all important anti-colonialist issues, the British universities have, since the war, been in action long before the trade unions. Yet ideas and ideamongers have become increasingly suspect in the British Labour movement, and in starting from this point—of the relevance of ideas in general for crystallising working class action—I am neither “justifying” the incapable intellectual that Wesker gets at very justly in Roots, nor baiting workingclass organisations. I am merely stating the tragic situation of working-class and rank-and-file Labour suspicion of

70

ideas, at a time when every worthwhile political expression by the Labour movement (e.g. the Labour Party on apartheid and the AEU on nuclear disarmament) derives, initially, from sources outside the working class, outside the Labour Party. In examining, therefore, what the New Left is, what its impact could be, what causes a Left Club and what job it can do, we rightly use phraseology like “looking for the ‘break-back’ of New Left ideas in to the main channels”. The New Left is self-consciously a movement of ideas, which is both its strength and weakness. Its strength lies in the fact that its ideas are needed, its weakness in its amateur attempts to build the bridges that the “professionals” have failed to build before. The New Left has so far been essentially an “intellectual” movement, a fact which the roots of many of its members in the organisations of the Labour movement, and the sterling work done in it by many leading figures in the trade union movement, for example, do not disguise. By and large, the New Left understands this in a general sort of way; but it is the implications—in particular for the development of the New Left, and the Clubs especially—that I should like to examine. It is quite clear that the original stimulus behind the Clubs came in the main from the universities. The organisational basis for many of the Clubs has been, at least, laid by people not deeply involved in trade union or Labour Party organisation—people who could stand sufficiently far away from them to see the need both for new ideas and new forums in which to work them out. New Left organisations have been most successful where such a new basis for Left discussion has attracted trade union officials, Labour councillors and other sections of the organised Labour movement, as a result of the kind of platform arranged, and/or direct approaches to local figures to chair meetings and take part in discussions. In other words, an independent New Left discussion centre has established itself as a focal point, an interesting new source of strength. There are, of course, Left Clubs which have had somewhat different initial stimuli. Such groupings may have arisen out of CND or as by-products of other clubs (in the London area for example), but an examination of the New Left groups that exist would almost certainly show a strong “intellectual” and “professional” weighting at least in the early stages. A realisation of the limitation and weakness in this situation is part of the process towards cementing real, fruitful links with wider sections of the socialist movement, and experience—in Yorkshire for instance—has shown that, whatever the origins of a New Left group, it need not be long before the “feed-back” into the more established channels, and the composition of the group itself, alter markedly. But if there is any truth at all in this picture of the growing New Left as it is, the question of new break-throughs for the movement is going to loom largest in towns and whole areas where the kind of impetus that has so far built the New Left is either non-existent, weak or inarticulate. If we look carefully at the distribution of the New Left Review, the suspicion of “new thinking” even, or perhaps especially, on the Left of the Labour Party, and the loyalty of the Old Left to traditional, routine forms of self-expression, we must understand that the New Left has no automatic basis in non-University towns. There is going to be no automatic emergence of New Left groups in Barnsley and Huddersfield, Blackburn and Burnley. Here and there, an “accident” may provide a basis. There may be isolated readers of the Review in such towns who press sales; New Left speakers may be included in, and New Left supporters may actually run, an established organisation like a Fabian Society. Small groups of Review readers may organise discussion groups, new youth groupings may emerge, new organisations may be produced by fission in densely populated areas like the West Riding of Yorkshire. But as long as we are content with this process, the New Left as a movement is going to be excluded

from large industrial areas, where the Left Book Club, for instance, in the 30’s, for a variety of reasons, had a readier basis. After we have applauded the new centres of socialist discussion in London and Hull, Manchester and twenty other towns, we must look realistically at all these places where there is not only no such centre, but given the present trend, little likelihood of one. An important factor in these areas, by contrast with the Left Book Club days, is the resistance to radical re-thinking from both the Left of the Labour Party, and from the Communist Party. The Old Left’s immediate reaction to NLR is—“What is the point?” They see the value of “internal opposition” movements like Victory for Socialism and Tribune, but the point of a New independent Left does not get across without organised pressure. The Labour Left will not respond automatically to NLR because, generally speaking, the Labour Left does not read. It might be attracted to a meeting at which, let us say, Clive Jenkins or John Hughes was speaking; it might (if the situation presents itself) buy a cheap pamphlet by Clive Jenkins or John Hughes; it will not take out a subscription to NLR without a prior process of explaining the “point”. Even the Labour Left that is deeply committed to CND, for example, is quite likely strongly to distrust socialist discussion and assessment outside the Labour Party. I have heard a prominent Labour Party figure who, as an officer of CND, has month in month out attacked Labour policy, actually argue against the New Left on the grounds that its energies should be being expended inside the Labour Party. He could see no case at all for socialist discussion and activity in any new-fangled self-styled Left bodies. This kind of attitude is going to be one factor preventing any automatic development of Old Left into New. What, then, can the NLR and the organisations around it do in this situation? It seems to me that the various subcommittees of the NLR Editorial Board, the individual Left Clubs and their co-ordinating machinery should accept a new kind of responsibility here. The basis for this expansion of influence has begun to be laid in, for example, attempts to organise an inter-change of views on the industrial scene, via conference and bulletin. The Northern Committee of Clubs and NLR supporters, which already exists, could well plan what steps to take to bring the New Left to particular towns and areas. Where it is known that there is a nucleus of New Left supporters, the journal or an appropriate committee or geographically suitable Club could, from outside, help to arrange a public meeting, or specialist conferences and day schools. When a speaker arranges to appear on two New Left platforms in the same region, some attempt could be made to arrange a third meeting in a town where there is no Left Club. Clubs could arrange to visit bookshops and Labour agents in nearby towns, to try to introduce regular sales of the journal. This kind of “missionary” activity seems to me desirable and feasible, as long as the New Left, particularly the Clubs, are prepared to organise better co-ordinating machinery. The New Left has, I believe rightly, tried to avoid seing itself or being seen as a new political party, but I am sure that if it is serious about making its influence felt at the central points of British political life, it must be prepared to accept this degree of sustained organisation and activity. I don’t think it can be too strongly emphasised that the major development the New Left must now make is some kind of expansion into vital geographical areas as yet scarcely touched, and that the organising of discussion is at least as important as the promotion of sales of NLR in bringing about a qualitative change in the thinking and effectiveness of the Left in Britain.

letter to readers SINCE THE appearance of NLR 3, the first of the New Left Books, Out of Apathy, has been published by Stevens & Co. Although the cost is relatively high (15/-), we hope that readers of the journal will buy and discuss the book: several Left Clubs have already arranged launching meetings. If the series goes well, there is a chance that Stevens will put through paper-back editions, which will bring them within the price-range of most of our readers. The book has been—mistakenly—taken as a statement of New Left policy. It is, rather, an attempt to analyse in depth the conditions and circumstances of post-war political apathy, and to suggest—no more—points where a breach has been made in the wall of political indifference. Some of the later books in the series will fill out the analysis, and work through to concrete proposals and policies. It was not an auspicious moment to launch a book which took, as its starting point, the revival of capitalism and its values in Britain since the war, and the confining ideology of NATO and the Cold War. Well-bred critics will accept the revival of capitalism when it is souped up in sociological terms, but feel that a breach of good taste has been committed by anyone who discusses it in political terms. Moreover, the book appeared in the very fortnight when there had occurred a significant closing of ranks, in intellectual circles as well as political, around the well-tramped positions of the Cold War, following the Summit. It took one back to 1953 to have Mr. Gould, in The Observer, reminding us that ex-communists had been wrong before! He even went so far as to suggest that Edward Thompson had attributed the Cold War to Auden and Orwell—a truly significant feat (and David Marquand, in The Guardian, rebuked us for going back to the “conspiracy theory of history”): whereas Edward Thompson, on several occasions, made it plain that he was discussing a “drift of sensibility”, not a planned sell-out by the intellectuals, organised by the Pentagon. After all, there was a drift: Auden did revise his poem on Spain, and in a most unexpected and illuminating way. Simply because one rejects the concept that ideas are merely the reflection of the economic “base” doesn’t mean that there aren’t connections, all the way through, between the books that get written (and some that don’t) and the intellectual-political climate of the time. Auden’s lines— For the fears which made us respond To the medicine ad. and the brochure of winter cruises Have become invading batallions; And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb. didn’t just disappear by themselves.

*

*

*

Mr. Gould said in his review—quite rightly—that some of the points we made in Out of Apathy had been made by Prof. Titmuss in his Fabian pamphlet, The Irresponsible Society, One of the real points of breakthrough on the Left has been the convergence of different kinds of social criticism from different points of the political compass. The Irresponsible Society links the criticism of “double standards” in the welfare state with “the inherent illogicalities and contradictions in the managerial capitalist system as it is developing within the social structure of contemporary Britain” (strong

71

beer, one would have thought, for Mr. Gould). Both this pamphlet, and Audrey Harvey’s Casualties of the Welfare State are important political statements, quite different from the usual run of Fabian pamphlets. They are well worth buying, reading and —particularly for Left Clubs—organising some informal discussions around them with workers and specialists in the field of the welfare services. * * * Dorothy Thompson and Michael Kullmann were present at the important conference in April in Paris, which saw the fusion of several New Left groups into a new Party, the Parti Socialiste Unifié. This Party has drawn together the groups in the UGS, associated with Claude Bourdet and France Observateur, many of the supporters of Mendes France and the PSI, and many defectors from the Mollet Socialist Party, including André Philip. It has attracted support from groups of teachers, students, and industrial workers. The support for the PSU, its policies and the general growth of a New Left movement of opposition to De Gaulle will be analysed in another issue of NLR. But the coming together of these scattered forces of the Left in France is one of the most important and hopeful signs in recent months. Both Peter Worsley and John Rex were at Accra for the recent All Africa Peoples’ Conference on Positive Action for Peace and Security. This conference, initially suggested by the group from Direct Action who have been organising the attempt to enter the French testing area in the Sahara, was attended by delegates from throughout Africa. The conference discussed, among other subjects, the African protest against the testing of nuclear weapons in the Sahara, the Algerian War, and the recent events in South Africa. * * * Supporters of CND have been anxiously scanning the western skies for signs of a movement in the United States. In recent months the Committee For A Sane Nuclear Policy has been far more active than previously. More recently, there has been set up an organisation called Committees of Correspondence, which is to discuss and rally support among thoughtful American men and women for a policy of “total break with the policy of military deterrence”. Their statement of aims argues, as we have done, that “the maintenance of the policy of deterrence stimulates further build-up of the Soviet military establishment”. Committees of Correspondence is supported by many well-known American names, including Erich Fromm, Stuart Hughes, Sid Lens, A. J. Muste, David Riesman and Norman Whitney. Secretary, S. Rosen, 130 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Mass. We shall try to keep readers in touch with this important new development. The other piece of intriguing US news, is that there is to be a New Left Club in the Bay Area! * * * Following their post-Aldermaston Conference, the London Region of CND have set up five study groups, to counter the popular charge, levelled by unsympathisers, that CND never “thinks”. The Study Groups are on NATO And The Alliances, Economics of Disarmament, Education For Peace, NomViolent Resistance, and The Future Of CND As A Political Movement. They have also published two Discussion Pamphlets, NATO And The Alliances by Stuart Hall and Not East Not West by Michael Howard: and have promised others. There is an urgent need for active supporters of CND to develop their policies in these directions, and Left Clubs might consider organising similar study groups, together with local CND groups, in their own areas. Pamphlets (6d.), outline of Study Groups with booklists, and other information will be gladly provided by London Region, 5 Caledonian Road, London, N.I., for those interested. * * *

72

Far the nastiest bit of anti-CND propaganda is to be seen in Anthony Hartley’s “Letter To An Aldermaston Marcher” in the June Encounter. Mr. Hartley, who poses for this occasion as an ingenuous but willing onlooker, anxious to be convinced, stirs with a very long smearing-spoon indeed. He gets as deep down as the suggestion—archly conveyed— that “the devotion of such excellent men as Canon Collins, Dr. Donald Soper, and Mr. Sidney Silverman to any progressive struggle that happens to be going seems to me positively harmful to the individual causes they espouse”. But Mr. Hartley only touches rock bottom when he “discovers” that CND policy implies “the end of present British alignments: the end of NATO, the end of close connections with the USA, and the end of the Western Alliance in its present form”. (He might have added, with the same fabricated horror, “the end of a British nuclear deterrent”—except that the Defence Minister has recently attended to that one.) At that point, Mr. Hartley appears to recoil, as if someone had thrust him off the end of a terrible nightmare. “What is to succeed?. . .” . . . “What remains?” Isn’t CND “a little parochial”? It would seem better, as Tom Lehrer puts it, for us all to go together when we go! “Now that you are away from the intoxication of the skiffle groups, you might give this and other matters your consideration”. I wonder if Mr. Hartley would sleep more soundly if he knew that supporters of CND are, in fact, giving these matters their attention—and not necessarily ending up with his rhetorical Cold War answers either. * * * When the first Left Clubs Conference met last year, there were only six clubs functioning. The second Conference in May had 60 delegates, representing 30 clubs. The Conference spent Saturday discussing the political situation, particularly the crisis in the Labour Party and the New Left: and Sunday overhauling the inter-Club machinery of co-ordination. The Conference reflected a growth of strength, numerically and politically. The divisions were largely on questions of tactics and programme, rarely on policy. So that, with a real sense of unity—despite the very great differences in composition, programme and size of the Clubs—they were able to extend the range of co-operation between them for the future. Naturally, the Clubs remain autonomous, and any statements or policies put forward by the Committee will be permissive. But the delegates felt themselves sufficiently in agreement to decide (a) to ask the Committee to prepare a general statement of aims for the guidance of Clubs, (b) to publish a small bulletin, periodically, for the benefit of new Clubs and Club members, (c) to organise in their regions, special schools and conferences during the coming months. At the present moment, the Clubs will try to strengthen themselves by Regional organisation and liaison: the Scottish and Northern Regional Committees have begun to meet regularly, and Southern and Western Regional Committees will shortly begin to function. The Left Clubs Committee will, of course, continue to help new Clubs, prepare the bulletin, establish a list of speakers, and organise a Summer School in September. The Committee has a Secretariat of three, with three delegates elected from the Conference, and a Regional delegate from each part of the country: plus the Editor of NLR to maintain contact between the Clubs and the journal. New Clubs are forming at a very rapid rate, not only in expected places, but in many places referred to in Harold Silver’s piece in the Club Notebook in this issue. The age and political experience of the supporters of these Clubs vary enormously, but this is a source of liveliness and strength to them. It is quite clear that, after two or three years, the idea and approach of the New Left has taken root very widely in the country: and the Clubs are now more than able to take on responsibilities and provide their own leadership. *

*

*