Socialist Political Economy in Britain and the United States since 1945
The post-Second World War period posed new and qualitatively different challenges for socialism and socialist theorists. In Britain, with the Labour Party winning a decisive victory in the 1945 General Election, there was the particular and pressing one of translating social democratic ideas into practice.
Specifically, this concentrated the minds of policymakers on just what was meant by socialist planning and whether this involved simply macroeconomic management or if it was something that necessitated a level of state intervention that significantly circumscribed, if it did not altogether supplant, the market. Either way there was at least a consensus on the need to take the “commanding heights” of the economy into public ownership, even if it was not always agreed exactly what the commanding heights encompassed.At an ideological level, though, there was the profound challenge for the Left posed by the unparalleled prosperity that characterised the 1950s and 1960s. This was the golden age of post-war capitalism; a period of affluence that transformed the material circumstances of a substantial proportion of the populations of both Britain and the United States. The challenge for socialist theorists was to reconcile this rejuvenated capitalism that was delivering a generalised material prosperity with the view that such an economic system was inherently flawed and lacked the capacity to effect a significant material transformation in people’s lives.
Tony Crosland’s (1918-1977) The Future of Socialism (1956) represented one such response, challenging Fabian and other views that the road to a socialist society lay through a further extension of public ownership and state control of economic activity. Moreover, he celebrated the affluence which characterised the post-war period, seeing it as opening up possibilities for individual self-fulfilment and egalitarian social expenditure which socialists should embrace.
In effect Crosland saw a Keynesian social democratic capitalism as having gone some considerable way to eliminating the impoverishment and instability that had previously characterised the capitalist system, thereby allowing socialists to concentrate on other issues; issues that might involve increased social expenditure but also those of a less material nature. Thus he envisaged “sociological and cultural issues” coming “increasingly to the forefront as traditional economic problems recede” (Crosland 1956: 128-9).Crosland challenged too the efficacy of a redistributive fiscal strategy as a means of promoting social equality, believing that “the classless society cannot be reached simply by more redistribution of wealth” (Crosland 1956: 124). Rather what was necessary was the elimination of what he saw as the profoundly divisive social effects of occupational prestige, accent, vocabulary and differing “lifestyles”. These would remain largely untouched by redistribution but would respond to expedients such as the introduction of the greater egalitarianism of American management practices, the widening of educational opportunity and the greater uniformity of lifestyles likely to emerge in the wake of the rising tide of contemporary affluence.
However others, such as Michael Harrington (1928-1989) in the United States (The Other America, Poverty in the United States, 1963) and Peter Townsend (1928-2009) in Britain (Poverty in the United Kingdom, A Survey of Household Resources and Living Standards, 1979) took a different view of things. Affluence there might be but poverty was still the experience of a significant proportion of the British and American populations; consumer durable consumption might rise inexorably but public squalor frequently proceeded pari passu with such private affluence.
Moreover, in the case of Britain, while there might be economic progress, the nation was nonetheless experiencing the golden age of capitalism as one of relative decline, with an economy, for many writers, characterised by manifest waste and inefficiency.
Further, although Britain might now possess a mixed economy, the power of the capitalist class remained unbroken.As to the undiminished power of the capitalist class, John Strachey’s Contemporary capitalism (1956) argued the case for a further extension of public ownership. The advances that had been made since the war were the product of a democratic polity establishing its authority over an anarchic and self-interested concentration of private economic power. To ensure that these gains were retained; to ensure that macroeconomic stability and the momentum of socialist progress was sustained, the economic powerbase of democracy had to be extended. For Strachey, given the power still wielded by the capitalist class, there had arisen a “state of antagonistic balance” between “democracy and last stage capitalism”; one that must be resolved in favour of the former by a continued transference of economic power to the state (Strachey 1953: 17).
Richard Crossman (1907-74), in Labour and the Affluent Society (1960), similarly argued the need for an extension of public ownership as the basis for more effective economic planning and questioned the proportion of the national product that was going to private consumption rather than public investment. For Crossman it was the contemporary predilection for consumerist indulgence that had skewed resources away from the investment necessary to sustain high rates of economic growth and it was this that explained Britain’s relative economic underperformance. He therefore looked to “a socialist programme” that would “involve transferring gigantic powers, which are now dispersed amongst the oligopolists, to the central government and the planning authorities” and, more generally, considered that socialists should refuse in any way to come to terms with the affluent society (Crossman 1960: 23).
Such socialist fundamentalism was to acquire greater currency and purchase within the Labour Party in the period of economic turbulence that characterised the 1970s and early 1980s.
In policy terms this took the form of the so-called “Alternative Economic Strategy” (AES), the central aim of which was to effect a “fundamental shift in the balance of power in favour of working people and their families” (Labour Party 1982: 4); something that in turn would require, as Stuart Holland (b. 1940) saw it, “a substantial addition [to the public sector] of companies from the present private sector... spread across leading firms throughout the different sectors of industry... For the range of tasks suggested some twenty-five of our largest manufacturers would be required” (Holland 1979: 159).For adherents to the AES, Keynesian social democracy had failed to deliver what its proponents had anticipated. Macroeconomic management, together with enhanced social expenditure in the context of a mixed economy, had run into the sands. This was so because the power of governments to pursue saw a strategy was diminishing in line with the increasing power of transnational capital. As Stuart Holland, one of those whose work gave theoretical underpinning to the AES, put it:
[R]ecent acceleration in the trend to monopoly and multi-national capital has eroded Keynesian economic policies and undermined the sovereignty of the capitalist nation state. The trend has resulted in a new mesoeconomic power between conventional macroeconomics and microeconomics. In compromising Keynesian economic management, the new economic power has compromised the gradualism of Keynesian social democracy. (Holland 1975: 9)
In terms of the values it inculcated, the behaviour it encouraged and the aspirations it engendered, critical concern with the emergence of an affluent society was even more strongly articulated in the United States. J.K. Galbraith’s (1908-2006) coruscating eponymous critique highlighted the dangers of a society that privileged private over public consumption; private affluence and public squalor being seen as a necessary consequence of a marketing industry expanding exponentially in terms of expenditure and sophistication in the decades that followed the end of the Second World War.
So, courtesy of that industry, “we view the production of some of the most frivolous goods with pride” and “we regard the production of some of the most significant and civilizing services with regret” (Galbraith 1958 [1962]: 115-16). The result of this hedonistic materialism was, in particular, underfunded public services; with all that that meant in terms of social fragmentation and material deprivation for a significant minority of the population.Galbraith’s critique of affluence also resonated with that emanating from the New Left in Britain and the United States in this period. Though, to a greater extent or lesser extent, this also had as a common core the work of Frankfurt School writers such as Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979) whose One Dimensional Man (1964 [1972]) and Eros and Civilization (1955) had a profound impact on New Left thinking. For Marcuse contemporary capitalism was characterised by the creation of false needs by those who had an interest in the repression of liberty. “Such needs have a societal content and function which are determined by external powers over which the individual has no control; they continue to be what they were from the beginning, products of a society whose dominant interest demands repression” (Marcuse 1964 [1972]: 19). Ideally individuals should be able to distinguish the true from the false but could do so only if they were truly “free to give their own answer”. However, “as long as they are kept incapable of
being autonomous, as long as they are indoctrinated and manipulated down to their very instincts, their answer to this question cannot be taken to be their own” (Marcuse 1964 [1972]: 20). The possibility of a rational, autonomous consumer was therefore vitiated by the very nature of capitalist society.
Moreover, for Marcuse, “free choice among a wide variety of goods and services does not signify freedom if these goods and services sustain social controls over a life of toil and fear, that is if they sustain alienation” (Marcuse 1964 [1972]: 21).
So not only did the malleability of consumers mean their decisions were a consequence of a false consciousness; those decisions resulted in consumption the nature of which reinforced the existing forces making for social control; geared as they were to “the kind of consumption that soothe[s] and prolong[s] stupefaction” (Marcuse 1964 [1972]: 20). Domination, the denial of the possibility of human liberation, paradoxically therefore took the form of affluence and the putative freedom of consumer choice that came with it.In the 1960s and 1970s the New Left in Britain echoed at least some of the substance and sentiments of this. Thus writers such as Stuart Hall (1932-2014), Raymond Williams (1921-1988), Richard Hoggart (1918-2014) and other contributors to the New Left Review focused on the extent to which a consumerist society was eroding working class communal values and an appetite for radical social change. Here the threat was not that “working-class people take hold of the new goods, washing machines, television and the rest” (Hoggart and Williams 1960: 28). For Hoggart and Williams, this was neither “necessarily regrettable or reprehensible”. The danger was rather “the type of persuasion which accompanies these sales, since its assumptions are shallower than many of those people already have” (Hoggart and Williams 1960: 28). In terms of values and culture Williams’s concern was therefore with what people were being persuaded to buy into, rather than with what they actually bought; namely, into a set of vapid aspirations that precluded or substituted for the ideals of fellowship, solidarity and that rounded development of human beings which social democracy should embrace.
As to the United States, there were also those who, if more in a radical, anti-capitalist than socialist tradition, expressed similar concerns about the impact of consumerism, both on society but also on the environment. Thus the work of late-twentieth-century American writers, such as Daniel Bell (1919-2011), Christopher Lasch (1932-1994), Robert Bellah (1927-2013) and Rachel Carson (1907-1964), underpinned an ethical critique of a consumer society characterised by self-indulgent, self-gratifying, self-regarding and self-seeking behaviour that fuelled a rampant egoism or, in Lasch’s formulation, a compelling “narcissism”; a narcissism which threatened to undermine the possibility of sustaining those social and civic sensibilities which made possible a tolerant, democratic and relatively equitable society. Juxtaposed with this critique of late-twentieth-century consumerism went a concomitant aspiration for a more socially responsible, socially cohesive, moral and environmentally sensitive consumption. In this vein were Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism (1979), Bell’s Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Bellah’s The Broken Covenant (1975).