Post by Stallit 2 de Halfo on May 2, 2008 19:46:35 GMT
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by JoeKeenan on Tue Feb 19, 2008 10:56 am
The first issue of the Second Series of Problems of Capitalism & Socialism was printed last week for the period February/March. This is the editorial.
The Left To Its Own Devices
The second world war was won by Britain’s allies; by America and, above all, by Russia. The British bourgeoisie contributed nothing of substance to the victory. Everything that British society achieved in the war years was achieved under working class leadership.
The British working class came through the General Strike and survived the Thirties under the leader ship of Ernest Bevin. During the war, while Churchill plotted military sideshows (that kept the war going by broadening it) and strutted in summits with the powers-that-be, Bevin exercised dictatorial power on the home front and organised the working class to win the peace.
The power that was built up by Bevin as leader of the Transport & General Workers’ Union and the driving force in the TUC was applied by him as Minister for everything fighting the war depended on (officially he was Minister for Labour and National Service) to establish political rights for the working class in a social economy of his own devising.
The interdependent and self-reinforcing system of social ownership, labour rights and welfare provision that underpinned working class power in post-war Britain was Bevin’s. Others may have thought the economics of it and others still may have sketched the legislative framework of it, but it was Bevin alone who built the welfare state.
That welfare state, which survived the attempts of Tory administrations to undermine it, is currently in the final stages of being dismantled by the left wing of the Labour Party which never reconciled itself to managing the economic relations it found itself living within and hated Bevin extravagantly for involving it so intimately with power and the responsibility for the use of power. When it finally captured the Labour Party in the nineties under Tony Blair the left set itself to disentangle itself from everything that caused it unease—industry and state involvement in industrial affairs and the remnants of working class economic power. The Labour Left is currently privatising what remains of the British economy and subsidising the Bourgeoisie mightily to (mis)manage it. The left which so hated Bevin has so completely had its revenge on him and the class which followed him.
The British working class would be immeasurably better off today if Bevin’s dictatorship had been of the vintage of the rights of man and subsequent revolutions. But it wasn’t. The closest analogy to Bevin’s use of dictatorial power is the classical one; that of Cincinnatus who in a time of military emergency was found plowing his fields and persuaded to take on dicatatorial power, then within sixteen days saved the state and retired back to his fields. Bevin established the working class in a power structure that ramified itself into its organised strengths and left the economic model to develop a political expression within the Labour Party.
It is by no means unreasonable that he should have expected the trade union movement to have block-voted the Labour Party into a routine of industrial common sense. Under Bevin’s direction the unions had acted to either prevent left-wing ideological adventures, or where they occurred anyway (the Ramsay MacDonald adventure) to pick up the pieces and reconstruct the movement. The unions might easily have structured their role as reality anchor into a dominant party position.
As things worked out, Bevin died in 1951 and the unions refused to take a syndicalist step too far for them. They enrolled their members as Labour Party voters but refused to represent them as power brokers in the daily cut and thrust of Party and parliamentary business. Politically, organised workers were Labour Party members. Economically, Labour Party members were trade unionists. And Political Economy then? That was something foreign. Something a bit syndicalist sounding, something with a touch of corporatism about it. Political Economy was unEnglish and that was an end of it. Which left the Political Economy within which Bevin had established working class power to the loosest of its own devices. Which is to say it unravelled.
It took little more than twenty years for the strong working class position which Bevin established to be undone by the British left.
www.atholbooks.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3
by JoeKeenan on Tue Feb 19, 2008 10:56 am
The first issue of the Second Series of Problems of Capitalism & Socialism was printed last week for the period February/March. This is the editorial.
The Left To Its Own Devices
The second world war was won by Britain’s allies; by America and, above all, by Russia. The British bourgeoisie contributed nothing of substance to the victory. Everything that British society achieved in the war years was achieved under working class leadership.
The British working class came through the General Strike and survived the Thirties under the leader ship of Ernest Bevin. During the war, while Churchill plotted military sideshows (that kept the war going by broadening it) and strutted in summits with the powers-that-be, Bevin exercised dictatorial power on the home front and organised the working class to win the peace.
The power that was built up by Bevin as leader of the Transport & General Workers’ Union and the driving force in the TUC was applied by him as Minister for everything fighting the war depended on (officially he was Minister for Labour and National Service) to establish political rights for the working class in a social economy of his own devising.
The interdependent and self-reinforcing system of social ownership, labour rights and welfare provision that underpinned working class power in post-war Britain was Bevin’s. Others may have thought the economics of it and others still may have sketched the legislative framework of it, but it was Bevin alone who built the welfare state.
That welfare state, which survived the attempts of Tory administrations to undermine it, is currently in the final stages of being dismantled by the left wing of the Labour Party which never reconciled itself to managing the economic relations it found itself living within and hated Bevin extravagantly for involving it so intimately with power and the responsibility for the use of power. When it finally captured the Labour Party in the nineties under Tony Blair the left set itself to disentangle itself from everything that caused it unease—industry and state involvement in industrial affairs and the remnants of working class economic power. The Labour Left is currently privatising what remains of the British economy and subsidising the Bourgeoisie mightily to (mis)manage it. The left which so hated Bevin has so completely had its revenge on him and the class which followed him.
The British working class would be immeasurably better off today if Bevin’s dictatorship had been of the vintage of the rights of man and subsequent revolutions. But it wasn’t. The closest analogy to Bevin’s use of dictatorial power is the classical one; that of Cincinnatus who in a time of military emergency was found plowing his fields and persuaded to take on dicatatorial power, then within sixteen days saved the state and retired back to his fields. Bevin established the working class in a power structure that ramified itself into its organised strengths and left the economic model to develop a political expression within the Labour Party.
It is by no means unreasonable that he should have expected the trade union movement to have block-voted the Labour Party into a routine of industrial common sense. Under Bevin’s direction the unions had acted to either prevent left-wing ideological adventures, or where they occurred anyway (the Ramsay MacDonald adventure) to pick up the pieces and reconstruct the movement. The unions might easily have structured their role as reality anchor into a dominant party position.
As things worked out, Bevin died in 1951 and the unions refused to take a syndicalist step too far for them. They enrolled their members as Labour Party voters but refused to represent them as power brokers in the daily cut and thrust of Party and parliamentary business. Politically, organised workers were Labour Party members. Economically, Labour Party members were trade unionists. And Political Economy then? That was something foreign. Something a bit syndicalist sounding, something with a touch of corporatism about it. Political Economy was unEnglish and that was an end of it. Which left the Political Economy within which Bevin had established working class power to the loosest of its own devices. Which is to say it unravelled.
It took little more than twenty years for the strong working class position which Bevin established to be undone by the British left.
www.atholbooks.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=3