Books

Pessimists of the will

Ferdinand Mount

Capitalist Democracy in Britain Ralph Miliband (Oxford £2.95)

Ralph Miliband has been in and for the New Left, man and boy. Now nearer the doyen than the enfant terrible of that

movement, he remains what he has always been, one of its most solid citizens. Indeed, there is not much competition in the solidity

department; there is only a relatively small area of terra firma in the New Left between

the trendies and the thugs, between the vapid and the violent, both hungry for thrills, neither particularly eager to make sense of the present or to think about the future. Professor Miliband, late of the LSE and Leeds, now of Brandeis, approaches both these tasks soberly and seriously; and because of these qualities, although he is not an exciting writer, what he says is of the greatest interest. It is also stated clearly. Except for the occasional 'hegemony' or `petty bourgeoisie', the book is remarkably free from Marxist jargon, so that there can be no misunderstanding what he means.

And what he means is something both startling and familiar. True, every now and then, Professor Miliband's command of bourgeois idiom lapses: Bonar Law delivers a speech at 'Blenheim Castle'; we are told that under a conservative authoritarian regime, we would still have 'Derby Day at Ascot', and a classic legal opinion of Lord Atkin is attributed to 'Lord Atkins'. But apart from these items (doubtless put out by Peter Simple's Dutt-Pauker Azerbaijani news agency), Miliband describes a Britain which is instantly recognisable to most con- servatives — but to few old-fashioned Marxists.

He sets out to answer a question: what is the explanation of the 'high measure of social and political stability in Britain'? Even to ask this question is to move away from those Marxists who write or rewrite recent British history as a sequence of aborted revolutions and close shaves for the ruling classes. Miliband is emphatic: 'In Britain there has been no crisis of the regime in this century ..., the fears ex- pressed in high places in 1919 were not justified. Labour had no wish (or capacity) to provoke a major crisis. Nor was there such a crisis in 1926, or at any time thereafter. It is in fact not too much to say that there has been no crisis of the regime in Britain since 1688, which is a long time.' A long line of Establishment panickers, from the Duke of Wellington and Lord Salisbury down to Lord Radcliffe and Lord Hailsham, are thus soundly told off by a Marxist pro-

fessor; the British people never were `ungovernable'.

On the contrary, even those who might `be thought to have least to gain out of the present system of government have been most securely attached to it. By far the most important institution in the British political system is the House of Commons .... ' The system did admit, as Macaulay said it did, of 'peaceable and legal remedies', and `from its beginnings, English working-class politics had a strong constitutional and parliamentary bias and was consciously educated in an ancient tradition of demands for democratic representation within a system already in being.'

All this is miles from the conventional Marxist picture of parliament as a trivial sham. Of course, capitalists are still wicked and still grinding the faces of the poor. Miliband's cast-list of villains is resolutely old-fashioned — tycoons, politicians, generals, chief constables, church leaders. But the grinding has to be done, as it were, through legitimate mills. There are rules of democratic conduct or at any case of decen- cy, and these are, again contrary to Marxist myth, very often observed: 'It is a fun- damental principle of the British constitu- tional and political system that the military and the police are subordinate to the government of the day, whatever its political complexion may be. Broadly speaking, this has in fact been so'. And although judges, like generals and chief constables, tend to be of conservative disposition (with a small 'c'), they 'have

been mostly independent of the government and other pressures; and they have at least striven to be impartial.' Even the Left is not ultimately deprived of recourse to the, the law might often be.

courts, however unjust the application 01 Nor does Miliband try to minimise these facts. On the contrary he repeats several times that 'these are not small matters', and they make it possible to change society.

`Governments in capitalist democracies are vulnerable to pressure from below'. Despite all the indoctrination in favour of the status quo, 'there is in a country like Britain, and in all capitalist democracies, a rich diversity of sources for the dissemina- tion of ideas, and a rich diversity of ideas as well, for which it is not difficult to find ei,x,- pression'. And,' what's more, manY of t' capitalists' brainwashing agencies can also be the 'terrain of counter-hegemoni he iam endeavours and struggles'; in plain Engli schools and churches can just as well be used for stirring it up as for teaching the poor to be content with their lot. In fact' Professor Miliband's description of the British liberal tradition is worthy of G Will. Trevelyan, Rudyard Kipling or Sir Rees-Mogg. This may be an unfamiliar ver- sion of 'the Glory of the Garden', but it n8 nice to see a Marxist pair of secateurs doing the pruning. If all this is true of Britain, then it is scarcely surprising that the parties of the working class should have remained ') tahreian`insurrectionary firmly constitutionalist and parliaMeT cannot succeed without substantial p001,,lar copnrcolujedcets, isema phatically Miliband

conditions of capitalist democracY',.

fantasy; it support; and `no such popular support in insurrectionary purposes is to be had in Socialism in this country can be achieve only by means of a parliamentary mat utt .: and that is very unlikely, for even if Laboinsii

profoundly, even passionately socia Ito won an election on a far-reaching

programme, it would be very unlikely if carry out that programme, because 'many , not most of the people who would occupy the senior positions in a Labour govern; ment, and who would generally domin.ai.te it, do not believe in the basic items of fact socialist left's programme and are in ,t'to these items'. oppose ad- It is this lack of belief which Miliband s vances as theprincipal reason for Labour 1 failure to prevent its marked etee to was was decline since 1951. But his book a published in hardback in 1982, be published general election in which Labour's Yaiist gramme was more far-reaching and serialise me than in previous years; and that progr'aiti was generally held to be one of the 01,_ reasons for the party's most catastrophic performance performance yet. TY °P.

Why, in a country which offers eve .._.

portunity for putting over the soda; message, does the message fail ten for through to so many people? It is taken4ud granted that capitalist democracy is a eP;ty,

Thing; its consequences pov.ces, deprivation, declining public soli

unemployment — are taken as read, and referred to only in passing. Yet if such is the reality, surely it would take more than,the habitual bias of the mass media to prevent People from seeing it For all his criticism of elthsm Miliband is in the end thrown back, like all neo-Marxists, on the elitist belief that people are very easily bamboozled. priP-drip-drip goes the propaganda from Lord Hartwell and Lord Rothermere and Mr Murdoch and Sir Kenneth Newman and Lord Weinstock and Lord Sieff, Lord Sainsbury and the Archbisho of Canter- bury and L p

ord Tom-Cobleigh, and between them they gradually wear a hole in the head of the Proletariat.

The excuse that 'it was all got up by the ,trlass media' is in fact so weak that Mill- °and does not really push it with much zest. His whole drift has been in the other direc- tion, that there were genuine reasons why the British working class might quite sen- sibly opt for legal, parliamentary methods and for a gradual evolutionary pace of t_ercest ereforest,pr

fi He himself feels and expresses the

impatience with the Fabian dominance of the Labour Party and its anti-communist witch-hunting; but he is candid about the reasons why the 'insurrec- tio

henary project' has remained a fantasy re,

,The position of the Far Left is not nearly as weak as Miliband makes out in this book. It is well dug in all over the place: in fashionable publishing houses, university ,ePartments and other groups in search of a forceful, single explanation of the world; and it continues to. attract people who hope t° Make a career out of socialism. The Labour Party remains the alternative government; until or unless it is replaced by the Alliance, it will still have more than a sP°rtin8 chance of gaining power and Posing a programme of at least reddish r,so,cial,ism. The internal collapse of the ,":"rtY's Fabian wing and its wholesale defec- ;ton, to the Dies have cleared the way for a ,aetlon whic unscarred by the failure of '1:(1)cialisin in practice and is trammelled only ti5: the need not to offend the voters. Even

S braking powers of the Civil Qervtee, aided by the Tory press and

con judges, might be 11.41* to stop or even slow down a deter- ibnaled and united Labour government, seen as Miliband rightly suggests, the PteM is responsive to electoral success. future he is also right in suggesting that a demt,u, Te Labour government would be fikely to muster the necessary unity and th.termination to go the whole hog — but IS would ministers h s would knowe that, red- t ooded socialism would be highly un- nooPular. It is genuine democratic pressure, 0°,1 the lack of it, which stands in the way k„.' teal socialism. And Professor Miliband ,-'1°Ws it, and comes quite close to admit- ,ing it.

jui.E.,u',t the neo-Marxist rationale can carry ,14eetual honesty only so far. It has to ay down the fact that 'capitalist,

democracy is perfectly capable of permit- ting a country to travel a long way towards socialism, if that is the prevailing mood. Miliband laughs out of court the Attlee government's pretensions to socialism; this laugh sounds false and brittle to me. After all, the socialising of health, welfare, fuel and public transport was surely not bad going for the first five years; nor will it do to claim that the Morrisonian corporation is `not really socialist'; practice has demon- strated that 1945-style nationalisation is just as pro-producer and anti-consumer as the most idealistic type of workers' control. As for taxation, you could scarcely ask for much more levelling down than top income tax rates of 83 and 98 per cent and baroquely penal death duties; if these taxes had not been whittled away subsequently — most notably by Denis Healey's emascula- tion oftapital Transfer Tax — they would have had precisely the effect they were in- tended to, of strangling the rentier. It is rather unfair to blame Earl Attlee KG, OM; in retrospect, he surely appears the most ravenous of wolves in ermine clothing, quietly liquidating the idle rich while polite- ly inquiring how Middlesex were getting on at Trent Bridge.

The neo-Marxist line is that capitalist democracy permits the capitalists to 'ab- sorb' popular discontent and to 'manage' and 'manipulate' the working class by what Marcuse called 'repressive tolerance'. All this is the purest fudge, cooked up out of desperation. It is also anti-Marxist. For it is of the essence of Marxism that the 'con- tradictions' of capitalism are ineradicable; they are bound to sharpen and fester until, one day, they explode (the mixing of metaphors is part of the trade). That day cannot be predicted by some neat mathematical formula; nor can the precise outcome of the explosion be predicted. Here lies the scope for the ingenious and determined revolutionary. But historical materialism teaches that capitalism is ultimately unmanageable; it has its day and then it dies, either in its bed or by violent means, but it dies. This, alas, is not what Professor Mili- band and his colleagues seem to be sug- gesting. They have lost the optimism of the will; they seem dazzled by the success of their opponents. 'One of the most notable features of capitalist democracy is precisely how resilient it is, and how great is the capacity of the political system to absorb crisis, conflict and dislocation.' It is only a short step from this acknowledgement of success to acknowledging the reasons for it: that capitalist democracy is the only system which seriously tries to combine liberty and ac- commodate change, however painfully and tranquillity, the only system which can ac- hardest of all to ac— knot wh ilse d gweo would d t hbee the imperfectly, and

system which does have a gradual, if jerky and again imperfect, tendency in the direc- tion of equality, whereas all despotisms, whether authoritarian or totalitarian, have a tendency to create and fossilise their own systems of caste or class.

Two years on from the hardback publica- tion of Professor Miliband's book, its cen- tral thesis seems less plausible than ever. For the government is even less inclined now than it was in 1979 to rule in collabora- tion with the TUC; `tripartism' of the sort chronicled with such approval by Keith Middlemas, a Tory lamp-post much leaned on by Miliband, is quite out of fashion; I rather doubt whether that collaboration was ever as crucial as it was supposed to be, except for the amour-propre of the TUC leaders.

If he wrote a postscript today, Miliband might perhaps argue that the government has now moved towards his 'conservative authoritarianism', relying more on the forces of law and order than on collabora- tion with the class enemy. Yet he himself wisely points out the dangers of exag- gerating any such trend and of neglecting the forces in British life which make the coming of the 'strong State' less likely.

The problem was always there at the heart of Marxism, but for years, for nearly a century in fact, it lay hidden. What pur- ported to be a dynamic explanation of history was in reality a petrifying one, in both senses of the word. It turned to stone and lost its magic powers of explanation and interpretation. History flowed on, gradually eroding the rock formations on its left bank into strange and fantastical shapes, eventually leaving them high and dry.