A couple of years ago I tried to do justice to my thoughts on the subject, It’s Hilary Wainwright’s essay on David Marquand in the book in his memory Making Social Democrats – essays for David Marquand ed J Nuttall and H Schattle (2018) which persuaded me to put pen to paper this time
There are many examples which indicate the phenomenon of a socially and environmentally purposeful trade unionism. The most widely known of these examples is that of the LucasAerospace shop stewards’ alternative plan for socially useful production in the 1970s. This was the result of workers in Lucas Aerospace factories in eleven different places responding to corporate rationalisations (the outcome of accountants’ calculations) with proposals driven by social needs—needs shaped by workers’ sense of being citizens as well as workers. (Workplace trade unionism was a good deal stronger than it is now.)
More recent, though less developed, examples include the partially successful defence of jobs at Harland and Wolff shipyard in Belfast, and also the resistance to job losses at Rolls Royce in 2022.Moreover, such organising isn’t just limited to manufacturing production jobs. Academics and education staff have also been organising in pursuit of ‘green bargaining’ to influence the university as a site of education production and economic justice for workers from the bottom up.
This move amongst a minority of workplace trade union organisations beyond the narrow limits of traditional collective bargaining (normally concerned only with wages and conditions) reinforces Marquand’s rejection of individualism. It also indicates a limitation in his implicit notion of agency, which, in his prescriptions (in contrast to his contemporary history), tends to be focussed exclusively on political parties. This publicly purposeful trade unionism could be understood as a move away from the individualist ethic of traditional trade unionism which could be described as ‘sectional’ or ‘particularistic’, concerned narrowly with the interests of the unions’ individual members, vital though these are. The workers and their organisations at Airbus, Lucas Aerospace, Rolls Royce and elsewhere all attempted, with varying degrees of success, to extend collective bargaining for public benefit.
In doing so, they were both deepening the public dialogue around the shared, public problem of climate change—taking it beyond electoral politics. More specifically, theywere challenging production priorities driven by private profit andacting as a force (and potential ally of a republican government) to socialise production.
After Marquand who represents the centre of the left, it was time to move to the harder end of the spectrum – people like Leo Panatch and Colin Leys who produced some 5 years ago Searching for Socialism – the project of the labour new left from Benn to Corbyn (2020)
Each of the three great economic crises of the last century – the 1930s, the 1970s and the decade after 2008 – precipitated a crisis in the Labour Party. Each time, the crisis posed fundamental questions of ideology, organisation and unity, and ended up by propelling into the leadership a radical socialist MP from the party’s left wing. In each instance this produced a sharp reaction aimed at blocking whatever potential the crisis had for taking the party in a new democratic-socialist direction. And in each case Britain’s relationship with Europe played an important role.
The first instance was in 1931, at the onset of the Great Depression, after the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald had formed a ‘National Government’ in order to impose massive cuts in social expenditure on the unemployed and the working poor. In the ensuing general election, the Labour Party, although it won 30 per cent of the vote, was reduced from 287 MPs to 52. In the wake of this, the radical socialist and pacifist George Lansbury was elected leader, and party policy took a sharp turn to the left.
Yet, despite massive street demonstrations by the unemployed, most of the remaining Labour MPs were opposed to any except purely parliamentary measures, leaving Lansbury feeling, as he wrote, ‘absolutely helpless’ in face of the imposition of ever more draconian austerity. In 1935, after the party conference endorsed military rearmament in response to developments in Europe and the Soviet Union, Lansbury resigned.
His successor, Clement Attlee, put the party in the hands of ‘a much more professional team’, but ‘also a much more “responsible” one’, as Ralph Miliband wrote in Parliamentary Socialism. This was the team that would later carry through Labour’s major post-war reforms, while leaving unchallenged the capitalist economy, the inherited structures of the state and the country’s place in the new American empire.
In the 1970s, as the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and Jim Callaghan responded to a new economic crisis by abandoning the Keynesian welfare state and restraining union militancy, a new Labour left emerged that was determined to democratise and radicalise the party; and soon after the party’s defeat by Margaret Thatcher in 1979, Michael Foot, whose political formation was rooted in the Lansbury years, was precipitated into the leadership. But in the interest of party unity Foot allied himself with the centre-right of the parliamentary party against the Labour new left and its most prominent spokesman, Tony Benn, reasserting the party’s commitment to traditional parliamentarism. This did not prevent a second heavy defeat, by Thatcher in 1983. Nor did the ruthless repression of Labour’s new left by Foot’s successor, Neil Kinnock, prevent two further electoral defeats. Instead it paved the way for ‘New Labour’, and the embrace of neoliberalism under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Throughout these years, too, the issue of Britain’s relationship with Europe was a constant complicating dimension of the party’s internal divisions. The contradictions of New Labour in government, culminating in the financial crisis of 2007–08, first propelled ‘Red Ed’ Miliband to the leadership. But when he, like Foot, gave top priority to securing the unity of the parliamentary party, leading yet again to electoral defeat in 2015, the crisis finally led to the election as leader – this time by the whole membership of the party – of Jeremy Corbyn. His election, the surge in membership that accompanied it, and the support he received from the trade unions finally brought the project of the Labour new left to the top of the party’s governmental agenda. The question now was whether the cycle of resistance and neutralisation would once again be repeated, or whether the Labour Party could after all become the agent of democratic-socialist advance in the UK.
Jeremy Corbyn and his most senior colleagues had been formed in the previous attempt to make this happen, in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In “The End of Parliamentary Socialism: From New Left to New Labour,” Leo Panitch and Colin Leys (1997) published in 2000, we traced the record of that attempt, and its ultimate defeat by the combined forces of its opponents inside and outside the party. Our conclusion was that ‘the route to socialism does not lie through the Labour Party’. This did not make us despondent. While accepting that ‘the first reaction to disillusionment … is fatalism, in the face of what are presented as global forces beyond anyone’s control’, we thought that this ood would ‘sooner or later change to resentment and anger, and a rediscovered will to act, to which a new socialist project must respond’. We did not foresee how soon, in reality, this would happen, in the reaction against the inequality, militarism and economic failure of the neoliberal project; nor that events would again propel a socialist into the leadership of the Labour Party and reopen the question of whether the party could yet be transformed into one capable of leading the socialist transition that the surge of activists into its ranks called for.
Although the enthusiasm behind the Corbyn leadership and the achievements of its first years were impressive, the obstacles the Labour new left project faced were if anything greater than ever. By early 2019 it was clear that its prospects of success had been severely whittled down, so that its eventual defeat in December was not a surprise. The country’s relation with Europe played an even more critical role in this than in the past, but the continuities with what had blocked the Labour new left project since the 1970s, above all the fierce obstruction from within the parliamentary party and from the media, were once again evident in every aspect of the events which culminated in defeat in the December 2019 election.
We have therefore condensed the previous book into the first five chapters of this one. The six chapters that follow cover the last twenty years. For help in researching them, we are extremely grateful to all those people inside the party, at every level, from whose knowledge and insights we have learned so much, for the generous time and help they have given us. In all of our work on the project of the Labour new left, we have tried to point to its huge importance while at the same attempting to analyse as clearly as possible the obstacles to realising its potential. But, in whatever form, the drive for democratic socialism will continue. This book is intended as a contribution and a tribute to the purpose and vision of those who, in wanting the Labour Party to become a genuinely democratic socialist agent of transformation, have done so much to recover the capacity to think ambitiously about social change.
