The Fallacies of Mr. Crossman
By ROY-JENKINS, MP IN his recent Fabian pamphlet, Labour in the Affluent Society, Mr. Crossman sets out to denounce the 'revisionists' and to provide an intellectual justification for those forces in the Labour movement which are most resistant to change. He has two main arguments. The first is that the swinging pendulum of politics has always been something of a myth; at least since 1884, he claims, the Left has secured only a slender share of power. Mr. Crossman's deduc- tion from this is that the 1959 result gave the Labour Party nothing to worry about, that it should now accept its main role as being that of a fighting opposition and not concern itself with the date of the return to power.
His second theme is that the stability of our present prosperity is grossly exaggerated. Capi- talism has escaped from the old crisis of unem- ployment and under-consumption only to plunge into a new crisis of over-consumption and hope- less inferiority to the Russian rate of growth. The results of this he sees in apocalyptic terms. It will mean economic disaster for Britain and certain defeat for the West in the Cold War. These consequences can be avoided only by the Labour Party clinging resolutely to a policy of large-scale nationalisation. Such a policy, he proclaims, so far from being out of date, is therefore the hope of the Sixties and Seventies.
The pamphlet is written with verve, as is almost everything which Mr. Crossman pro- duces. To say that it is brilliantly argued, as many of the newspapers have done, seems to me a good deal more doubtful. Certainly if by brilliance of argument is meant a sinewy struc- ture of logic and a hard, accurate use of words, Mr. Crossman is far from deserving the acco- lade. This is not surprising, for he has not been concerned to be logical or to follow where his intellect led him. He has seen a situation in which a sick and declining Labour Party desperately needed diagnosis and remedial treat- ment, and he has rushed in to attack the phy- sicians and encourage the prejudices of the already complacent patient.
The result is a pamphlet in which every argu- ment starts with its conclusion and then tries to batter the facts into supporting shape. Some- times all that is required is a quick sleight of the intellectual hand, but sometimes more brutal methods are necessary. At one point his new- found passion for semi-permanent opposition leads him to argue not only that Left-wing governments should be infrequent but that they should also be as short as possible. Look at the uselessness of Attlee after 1950 and Asquith after 19101 he shouts, pointing to what he regards as the only two worth-while Left-wing govern- ments of the past hundred years; and it requires a quick jerk on one's memory to recall that, with only a single exception, every important Asquith reform was carried through after and not before 1910. `Unfacts' are sometimes more useful than facts.
Mr. Crossman's use of language is also more prejudicial than precise. At one stage his argu- ment leads him near to advocating a more effective American defence policy. Instantly recognising the dangers of this precipice he changes direction by hUrriedly writing: 'As a Socialist, I do not myself believe that, by accepting Russian dominance in nuclear weapons, the. Americans subject themselves to any very acute military risks.' What does Mr. Crossman imagine that 'as a Socialist' adds to this sentence? It does not even make sense. If he had written 'as an optimist' or 'as a pacifist' or 'an ostrich' or 'a Russophile' or 'a flat- earther' or 'a nuclear physicist' there might have been some purpose to it. But what has Mr. Crossman's self-proclaimed Socialism got to do with his judgment of military risks? Does he mean that no Socialist could ever believe in a Soviet threat or care about it if he believed in it'? Of course not. All that he has done, in this extraordinary self-revelatory piece of writing, is to show that he now uses the word 'Socialist' whenever he wishes to stimulate his own prejudices and confirm those of others.
Are . Mr. Crossman's arguments better than his methods? First, there is his view that the Labour Party should reconcile itself to a long period out of office and concentrate not on be- coming the Government but on being an effec- tive Opposition. Throughout the Sixties and Seventies, he says, the Labour Party leadership should refuse to come to terms with our rela- tively prosperous society, deliberately incur unpopularity and constantly preach the message that salvation can come only when 'public enter- prise dominates the whole economy.' Apart from the faintly ludicrous nature of the thought that Mr. Crossman himself could preach the same message throughout two decades, how far does such an approach make sense?
In the first place, it is not very obviously com- patible with a theory of crisis so deep-seated that the whole future of Britain and the West is endangered by a continuance of present policies. If this is hanging over us the willing acceptance of continuing Conservative govern- ment would seem not merely quixotic but posi- tively insane. Mr. Crossman's reply to this would probably be to assert that an effective opposition can often exercise great influence—though even he could hardly argue its ability to achieve his own objective of the dominance of public enterprise.
Here we come up against the central fallacy of this part of his argument. The choice between looking like an alternative government and being an effective opposition is, of course, a false on It is easy to be neither and possible to be both, but almost unheard-of to be one without the other. The opposition's power over the govern- ment is an almost direct function of the threat which the former offers to the latter's continued existence. Let the opposition party once abdicate from the desire to replace the government and it immediately destroys its own power. It becomes little more than a collection of private Members of Parliament—and not even one which the government has to propitiate. This leads on to Mr. Crossman's misappraisal of the working of the British party system over the past hundred years. It is true, as he says, that really powerful Left-wing administrations have occurred little more than once a generation. But there have been changes of government much more frequently than that, and the simple fact that they have occurred, and that the Conserva- tives have never quite known what was going to be a powerful government and what was not, has both helped to curb the power of the Right and to preserve the vigour of the Left. For a government steadily to improve its position at three well-spaced general elections is something quite new to the pattern of British politics; and for Mr. Crossman to pretend that it is not, and to ignore all the evidence about the socio- logical reasons for the long-term erosion of the Labour vote, is deliberately to lend his intellect to the cause of obscurantism.
Mr. Crossman's second thesis is perhaps a little more plausible than his first. Soviet growth is indeed disturbingly faster than that of Britain and the United States—although probably not than that of the Six countries of the European Economic Community. Whether this issue will have quite such dramatic results as Mr. Cross- man chooses to imagine is more open to ques- tion. He demands that everything must be sub- ordinated to underpinning our economic strength for the ideological struggle. His excitement about the economic cold war exceeds that of any Pentagon general about the military cold war. He uses parallels with Churchill and, the late Thirties. He talks about 'guilty men' and looks back with horror at the Fifties as another example of the 'years of the locusts.' But if the locusts were busy, their mastication, it must be said, was encouraged by no one more than Mr. Crossman. His message for the Sixties is to com- pete at all costs with the Russians, but his message for the Fifties was almost precisely the reverse: `The test of communism,' he wrote in New Fabian Essays, 'is the statistical success of each Five Year Plan, and the size and strength of the Russian Empire. The test of socialism is the extent to which it shapes a people's institu- tions to the moral standards of freedom—even at the cost of a lower standard of living or the surrender of an empire.'
The fact that Mr. Crossman is now so scornful of his previous approach does not mean, of course, that his diagnosis cannot be right this time. But even if it is, there is not the slightest reason to suppose that his conclusions folloW from it. Certainly Mr. Crossman himself makes no attempt to argue closely that the evils of the 'affluent society' and perils of an inadequate rate of growth can only be ended by large- scale nationalisation—or even that they would be likely to be ended by it. He does little more than rest himself upon the assumption that because Russia has both more nationalisation and a faster rate of growth than this country the two must necessarily have a causal relation- ship.
In this assumption Mr. Crossman sharply parts company with the Democratic Harvard professors, for whose intellectual assets, to judge from his title and from a wealth of other evi- * THE BIG DECISION, PRIVATE INDULGENCE OR NATIONAL POWER, By Arthur Schlesinger, Jnr. Returning to Mr. Crossman, we are left with two major questions unanswered. First, is it really the role of the Labour Party not to civilise and extend our present modest prosperity but to subordinate everything to the economic cold war? Second, even if the answer to the first question were yes; what is the evidence that Soviet public ownership as opposed to rigid Soviet control over the allocation of resources determines the faster rate of growth—and is not the experience of the fast-growing, high- investment Western European countries more relevant to our own problems?
Mr. Crossman's attempt to provide an up-to- date justification for the more out-of-date prejudices of some of his readers has been ingeni- ous. But his anti-Communist lifeline does little more than make one feel the inverted force, as applied to his own outlook, of another of the passages from his contribution to New Fabian Essays. 'Indeed the appeal of the communist philosophy,' he then wrote, 'has always been to the disillusioned intelligentsia. It offers them the power of which they are deprived, and a theory to justify its ruthless use; and it provides them with a scientific philosophy which satisfies their religious cravings while permitting them to feel modern and up-to-date.' dence, he and his associates have recently tried to make a determined take-over bid. Certainly Professor Galbraith has never shown the slightest interest in dogmatic nationalisation. Equally clearly Professor Schlesinger, who has just produced a pamphlet* ostensibly on the same theme as Mr. Crossman's, is miles away from him in outlook and conclusions: Professor ' Schlesinger is concerned with the Soviet threat, and also with the misuse of resources which flows from the excessive elevation of advertise- ment-stimulated private consumption. Like everyone in the Labour Party, he recoils from the prospect of -.public squalor in the midst of private affluence.' But it does not occur to him that there cannot be improvement without cataclysm. 'All that is involved,' he writes, 'is a marginal shift of resources—say, some £10-12 billion a year more' (about 21 per cent. of the US national income) `to be employed for public purposes. Such a shift in resources can easily be achieved within the framework of our present economic and political order.' This is the tone of the whole pamphlet, as of the whole Galbraith- Schlesinger approach. It is the tone of writers who, unlike Mr. Crossman, are anxious to achieve results and not merely provide a rationale for persistent defeat.
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