Where is the Left ? .
By MAURICE EDELMAN, M.P.
[Mr. Edelman, who is Labour M.P. for Coventry North, urges his party to secure the support of the middle classes—if it can.]
IN Continental Assemblies the problem of finding the Left is an easy one. The Left is where it sits. And as the eye travels around the hemicycle from left to right, it passes from the far left of the Communist benches through the left centre of Social Democracy and the Liberal Middle, to the extreme right of crypto- Fascism. At home, we take our places in Parliament in a rather more arbitrary manner. ToRography _is no clear guide to policy. Indeed, since the General Election, some voices in the Labour Party have been suggesting that not even the familiar division of Govern- ment to the right of the Speaker and Opposition to his left repre- sents what had been supposed to be the case since 1945—the confrontation of a Left-wing Government by a Right-wing Opposition.
The critics charge the Labour leadership with having abandoned its Socialist programme of radical change in favour of a mild liberalism, a coalescence of Labour's Right Wing and the Tory Left Wing. In four and a half years of power, the Labour Party, they say, has become conservative. It has lost the revolutionary challenge which inspired young men and women in the thirties. Instead, the Tory Party rallies the youth to subvert the Labour order, and the universities move to the Right. Unless Labour resolutely follows a Left-wing policy, the soul of the movement will perish and the party will forfeit the adherence of the millions on whom it depends for its ParliamentarY authority.
These critics are not to be confused with the Communists- and their associates who, for the last five years, have fought a frustrated campaign against the Labour Party, their disappointments all the more bitter because their hopes of sharing in Labour's 1945 triumph had not been so high. Their most' painful defeat took place early in the last Parliament when Morrison called the Communist Party a party of the Right. Indeed, if Socialism on the Left means the use of the nation's resources in conditions of economic and social justice, Soviet Communism and its dependent parties, half-slave, half-despot, seeking to establish a new form of privilege, is its clear antithesis The post-election critics of the Labour Government's empirical Socialism allege that the party has moved away from its original position as a party of the working-class, seeking on ethical as well as economic grounds a revolutionary change in the relations of power between the classes. No one in the Labour Party disputes the need for an ultimately fundamental transformation of the social and economic structure of the country. In that sense Keir Hardie's Socialist preaching is as valid for the party today as it was fifty years ago. But in the last fifty years there have been great changes in what Marx called "the conditions of production." These changes have affected the means by which Keir Hardie as well as Marx anticipated that the Socialist society would be established. And the resolution of the Bradford Conference in 1893—" To secura the collective and communal ownership of all the means of production, distribution and exchange "—though it still appears in some form in the Labour Party's constitution, no longer aptly expresses the object of Socialism or the means by which the Labour Party hopes to achieve it. The present debate in the Labour Party is between, on the one hand, the Old Believers and the neo-Leftists, who cling to the 1893 formula without taking note of the half century that is past ; and on the other the pragmatists, who believe that despite the unchanging moral purpose of Socialism, its instruments must be fitted to the conditions of the times.
In the late 1930s two myths began their decline. The Russian Revolution, which had fascinated two generations of Socialists with its theme of liberation, was seen to have yielded to an autocratic Bonapartism, devoid of humanitarian impulse. At the same time the Mandan theory of the class-struggle between a vast dispossessed proletariat and a small capitalist class was seen to be a gross over-
simplification. In countries like Britain the class of manual worker was, in fact, shrinking. New techniques of production swelled the class of middle-class technicians. New types of industrial organi- sation were replacing the capitalist, small or large, by managers and administrators. Time had demonstrated what abstract reasoning could not entirely rebut—that Marxism was not a scientific doctrine with infallible conclusions, and that Marx himself was a fallible teacher, not a prophet.
Consciously or unconsciously, the Labour movement was stirred by the Russian Revolution and the Marxian analysis. But for the last few years it has sought to find new solutions for its Socialist problems, and to return to its older inspirations. Since 1945 the Labour Government has been engaged in an empirical definition of Socialism. It has, for example, discovered what does work and what doesn't work in nationalisation—just as, in opposition, it had discovered what does work and what doesn't work in the free- enterprise system. It has discovered that certain key controls— of prices, for example—and the reinforcement of trade-union authority by Governmental support, are able to defend the con- sumer and wage-earner in a way which Marx had not thought possible. It has discovered that a revolution by consent is possible, despite the forebodings of earlier Socialist thinkers. And it has discovered that in the present "conditions of production." a Socialist society is only possible if it has the support of the working middle class.
The ill-considered references by one or two Labour Ministers to the middle classes should not cloud our recognition that Labour came to power in 1945 by means of a spontaneous coalition of the manual workers and the working middle classes. One of the Labour Government's gravest neglects in the last five years was in not making the manager, the technician, the teacher, the doctor and professional men generally feel that they were performing a service of high value in the reconstruction of Britain. Instead, for five years the most vocal of the party's idealogues persisted in what the late Tom Wintringham called "the proletarian fallacy" —a fallacy which even today is found in the columns of Tribune. The fallacy is based on the assumption that 100 per cent. or almost 100 per cent, of manual workers can be persuaded to vote Lakour ; Labour would then have a majority and be able to build the Socialist State. From the narrowest electoral point of view it is almost impossible—it has never happened before in a democracy— for 100 per cent, of any one class to be persuaded by a combination of doctrine and felicitous material circumstances to vote for any one party. But even if it were possible, it would show a serious lack of appreciation of the complexity of the nation's problems, the worth of the industrious middle-class and the technical instru- ments which a Socialist society must' employ, if the middle classes were not invited to join with the Labour Party, both electorally and in the formulation of Socialist policy.
Imperceptibly in the last few years a new middle class has arisen, derived in great measure from the working classes. More scholar-, ships and greater opportunities of university education has created a middle-class generation whose parents are working-class. Never, indeed, has the link between the classes been more direct. But this new middle class is politically lonely. The trade unions have not yet interested themselves sufficiently either in management or in training for management. In the Labour Party there are still too many who regard the new middle class with the suspicion with which many miners used to regard one of their number who look a manager's certificate—the suspicion that he had deserted to the other side. But unless, as some of Labour's leading spokesmen have already urged, the party rapidly forms a Grand Alliance of the manual worker and the technical middle classes, it is quite certain that Labour will not win the next election. It is only in such an alliance that a modern Left can fulfil its purposes.
Here then is the great argument that now goes on in the Labour Party. The Old Believers, clinging to their true faith, tend to spurn the modernisers. But the Party as a whole will do well to remember that the original Old Believers were voluntary eunuchs Impotence is too high a price for petrified orthodoxy.
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