The Liberal Conservative coalition government, self-consciously progressive in orientation, while appropriating Labour’s language of mutual and cooperative practice, raises a fundamental question as to what distinctive gifts Labour can now bring to the party. Beyond saying, ‘it’s not fair’, what resources does Labour have to explain the financial crash and its electoral failure, particularly in England? Out of what materials can Labour fashion a compelling vision of the type of country we wish to work for, or an effective orientation for assured political action?
Labour is a paradoxical tradition, far richer than its present impoverished mix of economic utilitarianism and political liberalism. The Labour tradition is not best understood as the living embodiment of the liberal/communitarian debate, or as a variant of the European Marxist/Social Democratic tension. Labour is robustly national and international, conservative and reforming, christian and secular, republican and monarchical, democratic and elitist, radical and traditional; and it is most transformative and effective when it defies the status quo in the name of ancient as well as modern values.
Labour values are not abstract universal values such as ‘freedom’ or ‘equality’. Distinctive labour values are rooted in relationships, in practices that strengthen an ethical life. Practices like reciprocity, which gives substantive form to freedom and equality in an active relationship of give and take; or mutuality, where we share the benefits and burdens of association. And then, if trust is established, solidarity, where we actively share our fate with other people. These are the forms of the labour movement, the mutual societies, the co-operatives and the unions. The movement was built on relationships of trust and mutual improvement that were forged between people through common action. They were transformative of the life and conditions of working people. The Labour tradition was rooted in a politics of the Common Good; it was a democratic movement that sought its rightful place in the life of the nation. The Labour tradition has never been straightforwardly progressive – and that is not a defect which we are on the verge of overcoming, but a tremendous strength that will offer the basis of renewal.
This type of political tradition is to be distinguished from matters of philosophy. Philosophical arguments, like policy proposals, aspire to be universal, coherent and reasonable. Such demands may be useful at the final stages of a policy review when specific recommendations have to be ordered, but remain unsuited to either political action or ethics. Historical continuity, democracy, the necessity of extemporised action and leadership – all these render politics contingent, comparative and paradoxical in form. Machiavelli remains a surer guide than Kant in these matters.
Ideas are not ultimate and singular in politics, but contested and related. The English nation, above all, is deeply synthetic in form, constituted by periodic waves of immigration, whose descendants generated an unprecedented form of common law, a common language and an inheritance of a commonwealth. Its political parties and movements have been stubbornly synthetic too – a matter of blending folk and academic concerns through a politics of interests. Political movements which are rooted in the lives and experiences of people bring together new constellations of existing political matter, previously disconnected parts of political life. What to philosophers seems an incoherence can be a source of vitality and strength to a political tradition that contests with others for democratic power over its vision of the Common Good.
Meet the family
Two ancient political traditions came together in the labour movement; one could almost call them ancestors. The first is Aristotelian, and brings with it the notion of the Good Life and the Common Good. This carried into the political life of the nation the importance of politics, of virtue understood as a pursuit of compromise, a middle way between extremes, and of the integrity of family life and citizenship.
The founders of the labour movement understood the logic of capitalism as based upon the maximisation of returns on investment, and the threat this posed to their lives, livelihoods and environment, but they did not embrace class war, and clung stubbornly to an idea of a common life with their rulers and exploiters. The Labour idea of the person – in which the plural institutions of public and private life have a vital effect on the flourishing of the individual, and are inseparable from it – is explicitly Aristotelian. This is an important root of the conservatism in the Labour tradition; it is concerned with the preservation of status, limits on the market, an attachment to place that starts with the common sense of people rather than with external values, and a strong commitment to a common life. This is directly linked to the self-consciously Aristotelian Tudor statecraft tradition of the sixteenth century, which engaged with the balance of interests within the realm, pioneered endowment to promote the sciences and commerce, developed apprenticeships and slowed enclosures.
The second ancestral tradition within which Labour was embedded is that which resisted the effects of the Norman Conquest, and actively pursued the idea of the balance of power within the Ancient Constitution and the ‘rights of freeborn Englishmen’. It was on the basis of the violation of customary practice that they resisted the subsequent enclosures and assertion of Royal Prerogative in the name of Parliament, and defended the liberties threatened by the domination of one institution or person alone. Within three weeks of the Norman Conquest, more than half the land in England was owned by eleven Norman aristocrats, and it has been pretty much uphill ever since. Labour takes its place within a far longer national tradition of resistance, which values a legal and a democratic order, which is both reforming and traditional, in simultaneous motion. In its invocation of Parliamentary Socialism, or the National Commonwealth – whichever way it chose to describe itself in its first fifty years – Labour acknowledged its attachment to the language and sensibility of the politics of the Common Good, and commitment to a central role for the inherited institutions of governance that represented the interests of what used to be known as ‘the commons’, the House of Commons not being the least of those.
The early theorists of Labour economics, Therwell and Blatchford, had a commitment to natural law, in which there were prescribed limits as to how a person could be treated by political authority, and by economic ones too. In England, in particular, these natural laws were assumed to have existed in this country before the Conquest; so they were not abstract, but embedded in the political history of the nation. Democracy and common law were used as ways to constrain the domination of the monarchy. Parliament was vital in this, as was the Church. This sensibility found Labour form in what Marx called the ‘utopian socialism’ of Blatchford and Morris, and in the ‘guild socialism’ of Cole, Hobson and Penty.
We now move from the ancestors to the grandparents of the labour movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Catholic Church and the nonconformist Protestant Churches provided two of its grandparents. These churches were associational forms of religious solidarity, severed from state power and concerned with preserving a status for the person that was not solely defined by money or power. Aristotelianism flowed predominantly through the Catholic Church, and the rights of freeborn Englishmen through the protestant congregations of the South and the Midlands; and they came together in the Labour Movement.
The London Dock strike of 1899 is a classic expression of the labour movement in action, built on the assumption that only organised people could resist exploitation. It was based on an alliance between Irish and local workers, brokered by the Catholic and Methodist churches. The local Labour Representation Committees were the new institutions within which the previously unrelated forces met, and within which leaders were elected, strategy discussed and actions planned.
It is here that the third grandparent of the labour movement makes its appearance – the ‘labour aristocracy’ of skilled workers who had lost their status and small holders who had lost their land. These drew upon customary practice as a means of defying managerial prerogative. Their courage during the strike was remarkable. To disrupt trade was viewed as unpatriotic and seditious, as the British Empire was a maritime emporium with London at its hub, and the force of the navy and army as well as the police was threatened against the strikers. The laws of the maritime economy, freely contractual, were held to apply to the port, which was excluded from territorial legislation. But the strikers built a successful political coalition with the aim of winning stable employment and wages – a great founding achievement of Labour politics. Cardinal Newman, accompanied by the Salvation Army Band, led the striking dockers on their march, making it very difficult for the employers to use force or depict them as an undisciplined rabble.
The sheer ferocity of the market storm within which Labour was born in the nineteenth century, and the scale of the dispossession of property, status and assets that was generated by the creation of the first ever free market in labour and land, as well as the simultaneous enclosure of the common lands, the criminalisation of association, the scrapping of apprenticeships, and the eviction and proletarianisation of the peasantry, meant that the only port in the storm was the security that people found in each other. Labour as a radical tradition was crafted by both workers’ and Christian institutions as they confronted the hostility of both an exclusivist state and an avaricious market. They called their ideology socialism and their party Labour.
Over the past decade, working with the Living Wage campaign within London Citizens has given me a better understanding of radical traditionalism. The campaign began during a retreat on the theme of family life by faith group leaders, overwhelmingly Catholic and non-conformist, but also including Muslims, Anglicans and a trade unionist. What came out in the conversation was a concern at lack of time with children or parents, and about the need to work two jobs to make ends meet, as well as a recognition of the demoralisation that welfare brings; and what emerged from this was a concept of a Living Wage, enough for a family of four to live on at a basic level. Committed to work as a value, yet challenging the prevailing market distribution as hostile to the living of a good life, the idea of the Living Wage brought the two together. And it has been faith communities, overwhelmingly Catholic and non-conformist, not trade unions, that have devised and pushed the living wage campaign. Here we can begin to understand the importance of grandparents in the development of their grandchildren.
Returning to our genealogy, let us move from the grandparents to the parents of the Labour Party, and the specific circumstances of its birth. Labour was the child of a cross-class marriage between a decent working-class ‘Dad’ and an educated middle-class ‘Mum’. The Dad in this schema was constituted by the trade unions, the Co-operative Movement, and the building societies and mutuals which were built by the working class out of the materials available to hand. Their concern was to build the relationships and institutions necessary to confront market power, and their language was exclusive and associational. Brothers, Comrades. On the Mum’s side were the Fabian Society, Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation, the Anglican Church (which alone among the churches finds itself on this side of the family), the strong tradition of ruling-class public service, and the architects, scientists and writers who were deeply connected to the development of the labour movement and developed ambitious plans for government.
In philosophical terms we have a Dad of Aristotelian, Common Good and traditional descent, and a Mum from the Platonic, progressive and radical line. For the Mum, the overwhelming concern, the categorical imperative, was with the ‘poorest and most vulnerable in our society’, and the use of scientific method and techniques to alleviate their condition. For the Dad, the focus was on the big
warning of what would happen if you didn’t have friends, if you didn’t organise, if you didn’t build a movement with others to protect yourself from degradation, drunkenness and irresponsibility. The irresponsible were the people who didn’t pay their subs, didn’t turn up for meetings, crossed picket lines and got pissed on the money they earned.
The problem in the marriage was clear from the start. The Mum had all the advantages of class – resources, eloquence, confidence and science – and none of the experience of hardship. There was a lack of reciprocity as the years went by and Labour moved towards government. The Mum was much better suited to the demands of the modern world, capable of understanding the big picture, developing technical, complex policies, and managing change. The trade unions only had the power to disrupt, as there was no democracy in corporate governance, no capacity to pursue a common good within the firm in which power was shared, and therefore no possibility of internal promotion and responsibility without crossing picket lines. While growing in status to be a full partner in the political governance of the nation, in the economy Labour remained excluded and subordinate.
This shift in power in the relationship is clearly seen in Labour’s attitude to the governance of the firm and the economy. Nationalisation, and its direction by state appointed experts, was but one form of the social ownership that was discussed by the labour movement for three decades before 1945. For most of the time before that, co-operative firms, worker and passenger owned railways, mutualised waterways and worker-run mines were Party policy. This was all but abandoned by the time Attlee became prime minister. The Dad had no power at work, and no power at home either, as the party became increasingly dominated by middle-class policy technocrats. The marriage, you could say, became increasingly abusive, which is why it is necessary now for the grandparents to step in and play a more active role in nurturing the well-being of the child by rebuilding love and reciprocity between the parents. This will require a commitment to renewing cross-class organisation within the party, and common action for the Common Good throughout the movement. The Living Wage could be a good place to start.
The source of Labour’s continued vitality lies in learning to cherish neglected aspects of its tradition, those for which reciprocity, association and organisation are fundamental aspects of building a common life between antagonistic or previously disconnected forces. This part of the radical tradition is as committed to the preservation of meaning and status as it is to democratic egalitarian change, and seeks to pursue both. It offers tremendous resources and possibilities to the Labour tradition as it seeks to renew its sense of political relevance in political circumstances that threaten its rationality and purpose. Such a renewal requires, and has always required, an organised resistance to the logic of finance capitalism, and a strengthening of the democratic institutions of self-government.
Revising revisionism
The resources for renewal lie within the tradition itself, but this requires an understanding of participating in a lived tradition, in which we identify with its defeats and victories, successes and failures, as it has engaged with its adversaries through time. And this is directly related to the rationality of the tradition itself. Revisionism is a wonderful thing, but it becomes impoverished when it is understood as a constancy of ends pursued through a variety of means. Eduard Bernstein, the founder of German revisionism in the early twentieth century, said that the movement was everything and the ends were nothing. Fifty years later, Anthony Crosland, for reasons I have never fully understood, but with enormous consequences for the Labour tradition here, argued that revisionism was the opposite – that the ends were everything and the movement was nothing. Both these positions are unhelpful.
With the domination of Crosland inspired revisionism, equality of rights and outcome became the end, and this was decisive in moving Labour from being a tradition concerned with the Common Good in this country, as part of the country’s history, to became a progressive, left of centre, social democratic party. In the same way that Labour’s response to globalisation after 1992 was a move from specific vocational skills to general transferable skills, philosophically it moved to general transferable concepts – such as justice and fairness – that would apply in any country, society and terrain, rather than develop the specific language from within the political traditions of our own country. It was a move from the Common Good to progressivism, from organisation to mobilisation, from democracy to rights, from self-management to scientific management.
The management of change to pursue our ends thus became our creed for almost the whole second half of the twentieth century. Setting aside that he was still required to sign the cheques to keep the mortgage payments going and the business afloat, the Dad might as well have left home. The gamble on state power and perpetual and real Labour government had failed, and the role of the trade unions within the economy had remained one of inferiority, hostility and impotence. Mutual self-help was antagonistic to universal welfare, and the labour movement itself had no purpose beyond winning elections. But the estranged relationship between unions and party was a crucial reason why they were not very good at doing that.
We can best make sense of this revisionist moment when we consider that Crosland directly questioned three fundamental assumptions of the Labour tradition. The first concerned capitalism. The tradition was built upon the assumption that capitalism was an exploitative and inefficient system of economic organisation, prone to speculative bubbles and recession. A Labour political economy would be different and superior. The second assumption followed from this. It held that there was an ethical problem with unreformed capitalism, in that it exerted pressure to turn human beings and their natural environment into commodities. This threatened the very possibility of living a life proper for a human being, and of people associating democratically to protect each other from a common threat. That was the meaning and form of the labour movement. The third assumption concerned the capacity of scientific knowledge and managerial expertise to exercise a progressive control of capitalism, so that its excesses could be tamed and its general direction allied to more progressive human ends. Technical know-how was thus one of the prime means through which the dangers of capitalism could be tamed. This could be achieved through state control of vital utilities, planning, effective demand management, and a weather eye being kept on the dynamics of boom and bust, with the appropriate Whitehall levers ready to pull at the right time.
British Labour revisionism, encapsulated in Crosland’s Future of Socialism, was founded on the claim that the first two of these assumptions had been ‘falsified’ by historical experience. And Labour’s response to the challenges to its sanity posed by this alleged falsification was fateful, and is what creates the conditions in which we now find ourselves. The uncritical rejection of the first assumption was decisive. Capitalism was understood by Crosland as a singular system based upon price-setting markets in the factors of production. It either worked, or it didn’t. The historical reality was that it did, thereby providing unprecedented degrees of prosperity to unheard of numbers of people, transforming the conditions of daily life and the opportunities that they enjoyed. Not only was capitalism more efficient, it was, in fact, more moral than planned economies. It allowed greater freedom and diversity while promoting a challenge to existing hierarchies and sensibilities.
So the first two assumptions were held to be false by revisionist social democracy as it developed in Britain. That’s a pretty big crisis of identity in itself. When a fundamental aspect of identity, in this case the Labour political economy, is thrown into question and found to be based upon assumptions that are considered wrong, it is worse than an epistemological crisis: it is a threat to the capacity to act at all. That is fatal for a political party.
The way that Labour reconstructed its identity and retained its sanity was to hang onto half of the third assumption, concerning scientific management in pursuit of progressive ends, and transfer them to the state. This is the idea that the state, guided by correct method and modern management, can achieve a more equal and free society in which all can share in the prosperity of the nation through redistributive taxation, effective public sector administration and a progressive orientation. Justice, in this schema, is the primary end of politics, and fairness is the operative value.
A good society
Tradition in such a schema is an impediment to justice, understood in terms of equality of opportunity and treatment. Tradition becomes irrational, a defiance of necessary change that needs to be overcome, and in some cases broken, by modern management. Flexibility becomes a workforce virtue. On such a view the idea that tradition could be more reasonable than modernism is almost inconceivable. Tradition is synonymous with conservatism, an inability to adjust to new circumstances and an acceptance of prejudice. If it is the case that inherited associations, institutions and practices are an impediment to efficiency and justice, and transferable and not specific skills are the best way to intervene in the market logic of globalisation, what results is the biggest paradox of all: that contemporary socialism has no effective category of the social.
As far as I am aware, social democracy – in party, union or think tank – has no plans for extending democracy in the social life of the nation. Put another way, social democracy has become neither social nor democratic. This is the land that Labour has vacated and is now being filled by the Conservative’s ‘Big Society’. The Conservative tradition does have a conception of the social – Burke is an important thinker – and though this was lost under Thatcherism it has been robustly reclaimed by Cameron. In response Labour needs to develop the idea of a Good Society as its rival, and such a society would be made from relationships built on reciprocity, mutuality and solidarity, all the way up and all the way down, in politics and within the economy.
The tragedy for the Labour tradition is that the modernists eventually reached the limits of their rationality, in terms of their unique embrace of both market and the state; while those seen as traditionalists are incapable of criticising the state, extending social democracy or having a plausible critique of finance capital. The financial crash and the deficit that it generated will form the political battleground for the next five years. In this contest Labour has to reassert its historical understanding as superior to its rivals, and its predictions for the future as more assured, so that it may act reasonably and effectively in the present.
Meanwhile, the organisational base of the labour movement has been hollowed out. And while these changes are going on, the universal welfare state, once the greatest achievement of cross-class solidarity, is being dismantled in the name of progressive ends – targeting the poorest and most vulnerable for favourable treatment. The integrity of family life and the upholding of a Common Good is the strongest way of responding to this, but this approach does not sit comfortably with progressive arguments.
The labour movement emerged as part of the national history of Britain: it is unique in the elements of existing matter that it combined in itself, in the institutional forms that it took, based upon mutuality, co-operation and solidarity, and in the distinctive moral and political traditions that gave it language and understanding. Asserting a resistance to markets without claiming ultimate powers
for a sovereign state, the form it took was federal and corporatist. The big rupture with the dominant Labour narrative presented here came with the victory of 1945, which was the trigger for its long-term decline. It could be said that this was when, in the name of abstract justice, the movement was sacrificed. The democratic responsibility and practice that formed the labour movement, and that had built up over a hundred years, was severed from the idea of the Common Good and left without a role. This has intensified over the last fifty years. The trade unions became antagonistic forces within the economy, nationalisation placed managerial prerogative as the fundamental principle of organisation, and universal benefit replaced mutual responsibility as the basic principle of welfare.
The labour tradition, alone in our country, resisted the domination of the poor by the rich, asserted the necessity of the liberties of expression, religion and association, and made strong claims for democratic authority to defy the status quo. It did this within a democratic politics of the common good. It might be a good idea to do it again.
This column was first published by Soundings Journal
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This is an extremely lucid, thoughtful and intelligent analysis of how Labour has reached its present position — back in opposition and bereft of ideas. The key ideals of cooperation, mutuality, reciprocity and solidarity will remain absent from Labour’s policy agenda and will remain remote from the lived experience of the masses in British society until the Party finds the courage to face and strive to implement the two most fundamental changes without which these ideals will remain mere rhetoric, namely employees’ participation in decision-making through representation on company boards, and employees’ joint or collective ownership of at least a minimal proportion of the shares in the firms for which they work. Lord Glasman is quite right to point out the advantages of Capitalism for ordinary workers, and it is true that State Socialism (especially in the Soviet Bloc) all too often degenerated into rule of the economy by Party-nominated bureaucrats with little or no economic expertise, imagination or entrepreneurial flair. Only employee participation and shared ownership schemes bridge the gulf between the the employer and the employed, because only in these ways are both groups brought into a relationship of interdependence in which their respective ‘goods’ are merged into one common good, namely the success of their enterprise. Such policies would also have much appeal to the middle class and would thus widen Labour’s electoral appeal as the Party of economic inclusiveness.
Of course many companies already reward individual employees with shares, but this only succeeds (as perhaps it is intended to do) in dividing employees into two groups: those who identify with the success of their firm, and those who are mere instruments to be used for the enrichment of others. This is the very opposite of solidarity! Only employees’ collective ownership of a percentage of the shares can bind them together in a relationship of mutual responsibility with in-built incentives to strive for the good of all, and only when labour and capital are co-owners can their respective interests be brought into harmony. This would be the single most radical paradigm shift of all: it would render the old dichotomy between Capitalism and Socialism redundant, would potentially overcome the conflict between labour and capital, and would empower employees in a way that no other practical measure could ever do. As I have said previously in Social Europe Journal, the mechanism to bring this about is extraordinarily simple : it only requires a supplementary issue of shares in each company, reducing the existing shares to 90% and assigning the ‘new’ 10% to the employees collectively in the name of a specially created Employees’ Association in each firm. To offset any real or perceived devaluing of the other shares, there should be a reduction in company tax for each company making this change, so that ultimately the entire operation is eventually cost-neutral to a company. Beyond their initial 10% collective shareholding, each Employees’ Association should be free to purchase further shares for its members in the normal way on the open market. If shares are held in the name of an Employees’ Assocation, there should be no effect whatsoever on employee mobility, or on dismissal or redundancy (where necessary); employees would simply become members of the Association of whichever company they happened to work for.
Lord Glasman also drew attention to the valuable contribution that cooperatives have made to the lived experience of mutuality and the Common Good. It should be a very strong and prominent feature of Labour’s programme for the future actively to support and encourage cooperatives in all sectors of the economy. Likewise unions, — ideally amalgamated into strong industrial unions, as in Germany — could once more recreate an ethos of solidarity and mutuality by buying shares in the key industries in which their members work and by incorporating some of the key functions and providing some of the valuable services formerly associated with Friendly Societies.
Lord Glasmans analysis of Labour’s history, identity and development deserves serious consideration and thoughtful discussion by all members of the Party and all who value the Common Good and the Good Society. If Labour uses its time in opposition to engage in such a reappraisal of its identity, ideals, principles and values, the Party can find its way forward to a new role as the true advocate of the common interests of the British people.
This is so true and well expounded I almost wish I’d written it myself. The irony of Labour always seems to lay in the translation of such a diverse doctrine into any commonly appreciated practice, without one view undermining another so far that the whole is made vulnerable, and is eventually brought down by easy outside opposition.