The parliamentary system

Eric Hobsbawm

Parliamentary Cretinism?

Parliamentary Socialism,

by Ralph Miliband: G. Allen & Unwin, 35s.

of all parties the social-democratic ones have been by far the least successful. Conservative parties do not have to win or achieve anything, but need merely avoid being defeated, and this several of them have done with great skill. Liberal parties have had their day of glory in the 19th century, transforming the world in the image of the bourgeois. The very Tory and Labour parties in Britain testify to the completeness of this triumph. Communist parties have established socialism in large parts of the world, nationalist movements have liberated nations, even fascism has had its, fortunately temporary, triumph. Only the great bodies of the social-democratic movement, which have for long suggested the image of large, slow-moving and clumsy animals to cartoonists and commentators, have lumbered sadly, and entirely unsuccessfully, in pursuit of the new Jerusalem which almost all of them were founded or committed to achieve. They have not always been politically impotent; but what they have done, though admirable in its way, is not what they set out to do. The “welfare state” is not socialism, and indeed its foundation does not require a social-democratic party in office or even in existence.

The literature about social-democratic parties is therefore a set of variations on the theme of failure. Left-wing writers seek above all to explain what went wrong, right-wing ones, to argue that there has been no failure because the movement never tried to reach socialism in the first place and ought not to try; or because socialism never meant socialism anyway but only a little more warm-heartedness and equality all round. Ralph Miliband’s Parliamentary Socialism belongs to the first class. It is a lucid, sharply written and passionate investigation by a Labour Party socialist of the permanent weaknesses of his party. Moreover, it is very effective. Miliband’s main point, that “the leaders of the Labour Party have always rejected any kind of political action . . . which fell, or which appeared to them to fall, outside the framework and conventions of the parliamentary system”, is hardly to be denied, and the impotence and contemptibility to which this has reduced the British labour movement is plain to all.

Nor is it surprising. For it is part of the reality (as against the myth) of parliamentarism as of most other politics, that concessions are made to pressure and not to argument. To decide a priori that certain kinds of pressure including, as it happens, most of these long established as part of mass politics in parliamentary countries such as demonstrations, strikes and other forms of direct action, are out, is either silly or hypocritical. It is in any case as good a recipe for ineffectiveness as has yet been devised. The very misrepresentation of Miliband’s book by his critics demonstrates their embarrassment. He is dismissed with the faint praise that fox-hunters could expect from sophisticated foxes if these could write reviews. It is suggested that his proposal to turn the Labour Party into a gigantic Committee of 100, though creditable to the enthusiasm of youth, is quite unrealistic. So indeed it would be, if Miliband had suggested it. But in fact what he protests against is not that the Labour Party fails to devote itself entirely to direct action, but that it entirely excludes all forms of action except voting, debating and negotiating, including even the elementary militancy of industrial action. That is a very different and much more unanswerable point.

And yet one may ask whether a historical critique of the Labour Party in terms of what used to be called “parliamentary cretinism” is sufficient. It is admittedly true. As Miliband points out, not merely the Labour leadership, but also most of the Labour left “accept the categories of the parliamentary system” or in other words the assumption that the basic tasks of the labour movement is in practice modest reform rather than ambitious social change. And one might go further and say that this is true even of the bulk of the Labour rank-and-file, which for this reason has on balance accepted the right-wing leadership with few signs of rebellion. [1]

Moreover, it is also useful and indeed essential. The sad story of the Labour leadership, that sheep in sheep’s clothing devoting its energies to the demon stration that wolves are necessary if not actually beneficial, cannot be told often enough for the moral instruction of a movement which automatically sentimentalises a past about which it knows little. Indeed, Miliband’s critique is rather too moderate. He could well have made more of the low calibre and personal jealousy of so many Labour leaders, on which Beatrice Webb used to remark. He ought certainly to have pointed out even more clearly than he has done, that the Labour leadership has not merely been exclusively “parliamentarist”, but even within the limits of its reformist policies, grossly incompetent and torpid. Virtually all its ideas not merely for long-term programmes, but for short-term tactics of reforming action, have come from the left. Its most competent leaders have been those who learned the lesson of class confidence and enterprise in the marxist or syndicalist school of their youth, and had not quite forgotten it in their respectable middle age.

For after all lack of confidence in the power, or even the right, of Labour to run the country instead of and over the heads of the established ruling class is, with the damned modesty of the British worker’s demands which so shocks the visiting American or Australian, a fundamental weakness of the movement. It is not disguised by the eternal historical alibis for failure, from Macdonald’s “in office but not in power” to the present thesis that an affluent society is bound to vote Tory. The truth is that most Labour leaders still hold Sidney Webb’s view, quoted by Miliband (page 121 n) that “a strong socialist (opposition), very seldom in office . . . would be the likeliest instrument of progress.” Lack of confidence in their class and in their “right” to govern explains why the Attlee administration of 1945 within two years exhausted a vast reservoir of goodwill and enthusiasm and—an astonishing achievement—actually reversed the trend of half a century in which every election but one registered further progress for Labour. Conversely Roosevelt, who thought it perfectly natural for Democrats to govern as much as Republicans and acted accordingly, converted his party from the permanent minority of American politics to the permanent majority and has kept the instinctive loyalty of all the poorer, less privileged and more intelligent Americans in spite of a postwar affluence beyond the dreams of most British voters. The truth is that, when the limit of reforms acceptable to the Tories was reached after 1945, Attlee’s Labour Party simply did not know what to do with office, and waged the election campaigns of the 1950s as though it did not really want it for any purpose beyond that of providing its MPs with ministerial posts.

All this needs to be said. But if nothing else is said, the results of our analysis—as Miliband’s critics have noted with unconcealed pleasure—are entirely pessimistic. In terms of Miliband’s formulation of the problem there is no escape from his—overt or implied—conclusion that the Labour left is in general as “parliamentary” as the right, that it has not the slightest chance of capturing the leadership of the party, and that it has, unlike the Communists, not even an independent place in British politics outside the Labour Party. But in fact as Miliband knows and implies, there is more to be said than this even while remaining within the strict bounds of realism.

The first thing to be said is, that reformism is not the only content of the movement. The New Jerusalem may not in everyday practice affect the conduct of the Labour voter or even the militant more than that of the church patronage adviser of the prime minister, but it is there. The historic fact that virtually all social-democratic parties are also nominally socialist parties, and may even (like the Labour Party in 1959) bitterly and stubbornly resist any attempt to eliminate the hope of the new world from their official programmes, is not to be dismissed. A co-operative as opposed to an individualist social ideal belongs to the very constitution of the modern working-class, and capitalism cannot (except occasionally in the suicidal or murderous form of war or something like fascism) offer even a simulacrum of it. It can merely offer individual success and material comforts, and even these in strikingly uneven quantity and proportion. Moreover, in our times even the material inferiority of socialism looks like turning into a material superiority.

The second thing to be said is that this vague general aspiration towards a new (as against a more tolerable) society, is in Britain encapsulated in a massive, disciplined, immovable class consciousness which has hardly a parallel in countries of less old-established working-class tradition. (Nor should it be forgotten that this remains one of the few countries in which even the manual workers alone still form an absolute majority of the population). This has a great many weaknesses; but its strength lies in its virtual imperviousness. Forty years of anti-soviet propaganda, for instance (within and outside the movement) have left the reflex of sympathy for the “workers’ state”, born after 1917, largely untouched. It emerged in strength after two years of Nazi-Soviet pact in 1941, as after thirteen years of cold-war propaganda on the occasion of, say, the Gagarin visit. A generation of reading the overwhelmingly anti-labour Fleet Street press had no effect whatever on the labour vote. On the contrary: the class-consciousness of the British workers transformed the Daily Mirror into a labour-supporting paper. [2]

The third point to be made is that the British Labour Party is still, in spite of almost forty years of official efforts to the contrary, a united front of all working-class ideologies and not a pure reformist party purged of its left. It may owe this advantage to its late development. The great crisis of World War I and 1917, which drove the social-democratic left in much of Europe out of its bankrupt party into leftwing socialist or communist movements, in Britain drove workers out of a bankrupt Liberal into an increasingly “socialised” Labour Party. The trade unions are ideologically still almost comprehensive; but even the Labour Party contains large numbers of people, who, in most other European countries, would have long been outside it. What needs to be pointed out is not that the left wing bid for power within the Labour Party has so far failed, and is likely, in a sense, to fail always because even if successful the right wing would split the movement rather than accept it, but that in the British alone of all social-democratic parties, the left fights the right on comparable terms. [3]

The question is whether these assets of the left are growing or (as the right-wing Crosland, Abrams, etc. argue) wasting assets. Here Miliband himself gives an answer. In important respects they are growing assets. The strength of the Labour left in the past five years has been greater than before because of two developments: the unprecedented emergence of an anti-Transport House bloc vote among the unions, which are the main base of the party, and the emergence of general left-wing ferment which, as he rightly points out, is at least as strong as that of the ’30s, though, alas, immeasurably more confused. The nature of these developments—especially of the radicalisation within the unions—has led us both to over-rate and to underrate their strength. For union politics are, unlike Labour Party ones, quite non-parliamentarist, because unions, broadly speaking have to get results and these are achieved only by action and not by talk. The weakness of this position is that unions simply do not take certain things seriously; for instance Parliament, which few union leaders of standing have ever been willing to enter, or “political” resolutions. German rearmament or unilateralism are for most union conferences the chance for general declarations of faith in the good old causes, or tactical devices; but shadowy matters far less important than wage-freezes or other concrete issues. In 1960 they voted for unilateralism not because they were unilateralist, but because they were against the Gaitskellites; in 1961 they reversed their vote, not because they changed their mind on the H-bomb, but because, while anti-Gaitskellite, they did not wish to split the movement, a step which would seriously weaken the unions. We, whose perspectives are (rightly) less limited, naturally tend to overestimate—or rather misunderstand—the significance of either step. Conversely, the strength of union radicalisation cannot be measured by the political resolutions it sports, nor even—as Miliband suggests—by the greater confidence and bargaining strength of the year of full employment. Its background is the sharpening class antagonism of the year of affluence. The epoch of Jamaican villas and smoked salmon, of Peter Simple, and of Tory MPs baying for anti-union legislation, when the righ have once again the nerve to call for wage-freezes amid their own purchases of Rolls-Royces, is not a suitable one in which “that grand reconciliation between the Labour movement and contemporary capitalism which is the essence of revisionism” can be very successfully propagated even from the Labour front bench. In a word, working-class militancy in Britain survives for the same reason as strong Communist parties have survived the assaults of affluence, propaganda and crisis in France and Italy, and mass militancy has increased in Belgium: because labour knows that the rich concede only to fear and pressure. And it survives under left wing leadership, because there is no other.

Whether and how this resistance will develop, is another question. But it would be a pity if Miliband’s excellent book, which ought to be bought by every socialist, should leave the reader with an impression of deep pessimism which history—and especially recent history—does not warrant.

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[1] “They had found their voices” writes the excellent historian of labour in Sheffield about the 1930s “and they were concerned not so much to abolish crying injustices as to secure narrower advantages by the give-and-take of negotiation in which power no longer lay exclusively on one side”. S. Pollard, A History of Labour in Sheffield (1960).

[2] “The power of the movement,” wrote Beatrice Webb long ago “lies in the massive obstinacy of the rank and file . . . Whenever this massive feeling can be directed for or against any particular measure it becomes almost irresistible. Our English governing class would not dare overtly to defy it.”

[3] The Italian Socialist Party is as usual an exception.