What is the’ democratic left’
Compass has styled itself as ‘direction for the democratic left’. There were other
descriptors we could have gone for; progressive, centre-left, social democratic or
democratic socialist. So why did we chose this one?
In part because we felt it was less loaded. Progressive is too weak as is centreleft. Defining and separating social democrats (especially given the SDP) from
democratic socialists is too problematic. So what does the ‘democratic left’ mean
and where does the term come from?
What follows are two takes on the term. The first is from David Purdy who was
once in the Communist Party but through its reform wing ended up in an
organisation called The Democratic Left. David worked on the Alternative
Economic Strategy in the 1970s and is working hard now on the Compass
manifesto. Paul Thompson is editor of the Labour journal Renewal and was the
Chair of the Labour Co-ordinating Committee – the soft left organising body.
Their articles show we come from a tradition, that we have a history that is both
inside and outside of Labour. Compass is in part an attempt to unite these
traditions into a force that can build on this history to create a more equal and
democratic future.
We are also pleased to publish a complementary article by Andrew Pearmain
called Gramsci and Us which explains the contemporary relevance of probably
the greatest socialist strategist ever, the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci.
Most of you reading these articles will be Labour Party members. Hopefully,
some of it will be new and interesting. What you will get from all three is a sense
of the way in which the democratic left inside and outside of Labour compliment
each other. Those outside think more expansively about issues such as politics
and culture. Those inside focus more on power and state politics. We can and
must learn from each other. It is a fusion that links Gramsci, Hobsbawm and Hall
to Cole, Tawney, Crosland, Kinnock and Cook.
The rejection of vanguard politics, the belief that a small elite can change the
world for the benefit of all, whether it be revolutionary Leninism or reformist
Labourism (often referred to as parliamentary Leninism) provides a common
platform for future thinking and activity around a new democratic left that
Compass is helping to shape.
More than anything Compass is the recognition that democracy and equality are
two sides of the same coin. We can’t have a democratic society that isn’t equal
because people give up on democracy if they are not equal citizens. It is no
coincidence that the high points of equality and democratic participation
2
coincided in Britain from the 1950s to the 1970s. Democracy is the means by
which people can mange their world by doing it together. The more liberal,
equal, green and solidaristic society we want to create is only possible through
democracy – there is no perfect society, we never arrive we just keep going on a
journey to extend democracy and embed equality. There can only be a left that is
democratic – this is our compass.
Neal Lawson
1. Between Labourism and Communism: Precursors of the Democratic Left
in Twentieth-Century Britain
Under the impact of the First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution, the
Second Socialist International, which had managed to maintain a fractious unity
since its foundation in 1889, split into two irreconcilable camps: one committed to
electoral-legislative politics within the framework of liberal democracy, the other
dedicated to defending the Soviet Union and promoting world revolution. Until the
collapse of communism in 1989-91, this schism became a basic reference point
for the whole of the left. No socialist or ‘labour’ party and no conception of
socialism – whether as a form of society wholly ‘beyond’ capitalism or as a
transforming presence within it – could avoid defining where it stood in relation to
social democracy and Soviet communism, just as in an earlier era Christians had
to choose between Catholicism and Protestantism.
This was just as true in Britain as in other countries, though the Communist Party
of Great Britain (CPGB) never posed a threat to the Labour Party’s electoral and
parliamentary predominance. Indeed in the 1920s, dutifully heeding Lenin’s
strictures against ‘infantile leftism’, the CP made repeated attempts to affiliate to
the Labour Party, each of which was firmly rebuffed. One barrier to left unity was
that the Labour Party was a broad church in which committed socialists who
aspired to build a classless society beyond capitalism were no more than an
influential minority. Another was that social democrats and communists
disagreed about the strategy for achieving socialism, the former favouring a
gradualist parliamentary road, the latter insisting on the necessity for a
revolutionary transfer of class power and the creation of a workers’ state.
Yet many socialists in both parties continued to believe that these were different
routes to the same ultimate goal and that, whether the transition was gradual and
seamless or involved a sharp – and possibly violent – break with the old order,
socialism could not be established without bringing the commanding heights of
the economy into public ownership, replacing the profit motive by production for
use and substituting central planning for market forces. More generally, both
dominant formations of the left were statist and party-centred: neither paid much
attention to the problem of rooting the process of social transformation in the
institutions and norms of civil society, bringing it closer to the relationships and
routines of everyday life. Thus, in principle, there was room for an alternative
political project combining the characteristic socialist commitment to equality and
3
human solidarity with the civic republican ideals of positive freedom and
democratic self-government.
Guild Socialism
The first attempt to create a form of self-managing socialism in Britain was the
Guild Socialist movement that sprang up during the later stages of the First
World War and flourished briefly until it was undermined by the collapse of the
post-war economic boom in 1921. Inspired by the example of soviets in Russia,
there were similar, equally volatile experiments in ‘council communism’
elsewhere in Europe during these years, including the factory councils movement
in Northern Italy, in which the future leaders of the Italian Communist Party,
Antonio Gramsci and Palmiro Togliatti, won their political spurs.
For the Guild Socialists, the really damning indictment of the capitalist system
was not that it subjected workers to material deprivation, but that it reduced them
to servitude. The unequal relationship between waged workers and the
organisations that employed them was a major obstacle to economic democracy.
And there was no reason to suppose that nationalisation and state socialism
would do anything to remove it. In advocating workers’ control, the Guilds sought
to transform the workforce – including its managerial, technical and white collar
strata – into an active body capable of taking responsibility for production and
investment, not just within each enterprise, but across the economy as a whole.
They envisaged that as impersonal market forces were gradually supplanted by
democratic social control, the pursuit of profit would give way to the satisfaction
of human need as chief aim of economic activity. This in turn, they believed,
would make it possible to reconcile the consumer’s interest in product quality with
the worker’s interest in job satisfaction.
The Guilds’ chief theorist, G.D.H. Cole (1917), argued that progress towards
economic democracy would be greatly accelerated if all citizens were paid a taxfinanced ‘social dividend’, pitched at subsistence level, adjusted to take account
of special needs such as disability, and distributed independently of people’s
other sources of income. The institution of a citizen’s income would, he believed,
make workers less dependent on the employing class, diminish the divisive
consequences of organisational hierarchy and, more generally, foster a spirit of
social solidarity. Likewise, the notion that a new distributive regime could not
suddenly displace the old, but would have to be introduced gradually, fitted in
well with the Guilds’ evolutionary strategy of ‘encroaching control’.
Guild Socialism was short-lived and contained much that was wildly
impracticable. Moreover, like the labour movement as a whole, it was genderbiased, focusing entirely on the male preserve of paid employment and paying no
attention at all to the unpaid work of women within the household. Nevertheless,
the Guilds produced ideas of lasting significance: the vision of economic
democracy, the concept of citizen’s income, the importance of the workplace as a
social institution and the distinction between useful work and useless toil. These
4
ideas disappeared into the political underground once the post-war conjuncture
passed away, and had to be rediscovered by later generations searching for a
flexible, decentralised, democratic, popular and vital form of socialism that would,
in Gramsci’s words, attend to the urgent problems of the present, while sowing
the seeds of the future.
The Popular Front
At its Seventh Congress in 1934, the Communist International (Comintern) gave
its approval to the strategy of the united popular front as an attempt to re-unite
the left and reach out beyond the industrial working class to the middle class and
the professions, in order to rally a broad popular alliance around the objectives of
defeating fascism, defending democracy and promoting social reform. The best
known cases were those of Republican Spain and France, where communists
and socialists joined forces with anti-fascist liberals, though in both countries the
resulting alliances were ultimately defeated. More successful instances of
popular mobilisation and alliance-building were the social bloc that sustained
Roosevelt’s New Deal in the US and the strategy pursued by the Swedish Social
Democrats who, after winning a watershed election in 1932 and forming a
coalition with the Agrarian Party, pioneered the use of deficit-financing to
overcome the prevailing economic depression and laid the foundations for what
was to become the world’s most advanced welfare state.
The main lesson to be drawn from these various episodes is that in a democratic
society with a complex social structure, entrenched civil liberties and competing
political parties, major shifts in the balance of power and the direction of policy
need to be backed not just by a majority, but by an overwhelming majority of
citizens, for measures which are passionately opposed by powerful minorities
can only be implemented if they enjoy extensive popular support that cuts across
the boundaries of party, class and cause. Even then, as the experience of the
post-war Labour government shows, once the foundations of a new political
settlement have been laid, a reforming government may stall, especially when its
conception of politics is rigidly electoralist and statist, its room for manoeuvre is
limited by military and foreign policy commitments, and the social bloc on which it
depends starts to disintegrate under the impact of conflicting sectional demands.
The New Left
The decades that followed the post-war settlement saw renewed efforts to devise
a left-wing alternative to Labourism and Leninism that was at once radical,
democratic and popular. What Michael Kenny (1995) calls the ‘first New Left’
emerged in response to the dramatic events of 1956: Khrushchev’s revelations at
the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU, the Suez imbroglio and the suppression of
the Hungarian uprising against Soviet domination. Hungary, in particular, was a
devastating blow for the CPGB. The party, whose membership was already 50
per cent down from its wartime peak of 60,000, lost a further third of its members,
5
including most of its leading intellectuals. Some of these regrouped around the
New Reasoner, a journal edited by Edward Thompson and John Saville, who set
out to develop a humanised and thoroughly English socialist politics, imbued with
home-grown traditions of radical democracy, freethinking communism and the
practical virtues of the self-taught and self-activating northern working class.
Other left-wing intellectuals, who leaned more towards the Labour Party and
were based in Oxbridge and London, reacted rather differently to the
international conjuncture. This group, which included Raymond Williams, Stuart
Hall and Mike Rustin, saw the turn of events as an opportunity not only to break
out of the frozen postures of Cold War politics by campaigning for nuclear
disarmament and positive neutrality, but to rethink the entire socialist project in
the light of post-war experience. Two developments in particular concerned
them: the record of socialist governments, both East and West; and the
emergence of an affluent, consumerist society in which class division, though still
a prime source of social inequality, was neither the sole nor even the main
source of social consciousness.
These issues were explored in the pages of Universities and Left Review (ULR),
a journal that anticipated the themes and ideas taken up by Marxism Today in
the 1980s. The Review covered much the same ground as Anthony Crosland’s
classic ‘revisionist’ text, The Future of Socialism, but its approach and
conclusions differed sharply from his: notably, as regards the significance of the
Keynesian revolution in economic policy, the separation of ownership and control
in the modern corporation, and the need to make the nationalised industries and
public services more democratic and accountable to their employees and users.
In Britain at this time, the work of Gramsci was little known: a representative and
decently translated selection of writings from his Prison Notebooks was not
published until 1971. Nevertheless, in retrospect it is clear that the terms in which
contributors to the Review sought to engage with the predicament of the British
left resembled the key concepts that Gramsci had developed as he struggled to
understand the rise of Italian fascism, the defeat of Italian communism and the
fate of the Russian Revolution: the distinction between state and civil society; the
role of hegemony or moral and intellectual leadership in winning and retaining
political power; the difference between a slow-moving war of position and a
volatile war of movement; and the conception of the revolutionary party as an
‘organic intellectual’ whose task is to integrate diverse and fragmented forms of
opposition to the prevailing social order into a cohesive social bloc.
If all this sounds heavily cerebral, it should be recalled that the first New Left was
a cultural and artistic movement as well as a forum for theoretical and political
debate. New Left clubs sprang up in most major British cities, providing a
meeting place for political activists, intellectuals, the cultural avant-garde and
popular musicians and entertainers. Indeed, in 1960 when the New Reasoner
and the ULR merged to form New Left Review (NLR) with Stuart Hall as editor, it
was envisaged that the new journal would become the organ of the clubs, voicing
their ideas and co-ordinating their activities. This hope was never realised, partly
because of personality clashes between leading participants, partly because of
underlying tensions among the diverse groupings which the journal was intended
6
to serve – which stretched from anarchist advocates of civil disobedience to
communist shop stewards schooled in the mores of workplace bargaining – and
partly because of the sheer difficulty of navigating a ‘third way’ between or
beyond the gravitational fields of labourism and communism.
For a while, NLR moved into the orbit of the Labour Party, sensing hegemonic
potential in Harold Wilson’s bid to apply the “white heat of the technological
revolution” to Britain’s antiquated polity and ailing economy. In Towards
Socialism, an anthology published in 1965 as the newly elected Labour
government was getting into its stride, Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn produced
a bold and original account of the peculiarities of British history, the pre-modern
nature of the British state and the anti-intellectual proclivities of the British labour
movement. But these attempts to engage with Labour’s political leadership were
abandoned after 1966, as the government, wrestling with Britain’s mounting
economic problems, embarked on a collision course with the trade unions.
The growing rift in the labour movement prompted a sharp response from
members of the first New Left, who revived the network of local discussion
groups and produced the May Day Manifesto. This was a spirited, but sober
statement which carried forward the movement’s earlier analysis of modern
capitalism and Cold War politics and outlined a democratic socialist alternative to
the policies of the Wilson government. The first version of the Manifesto, jointly
edited by Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson and Stuart Hall, appeared in
1967. A second, expanded version, edited by Williams alone, was published as a
Penguin Special in May 1968, just as French students and workers were taking
to the streets in a direct challenge to the government of General De Gaulle. Here,
the story of the ‘second’ New Left merges with that of the more general mutiny
against the post-war order that erupted in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with
mass protests against the war in Vietnam, near civil war in Northern Ireland,
industrial strife on a scale not seen since before the First World War, widespread
student revolt and the emergence of new social movements organised around
gender, sexuality, race and the environment.
As an attempt to rally the disparate forces of the left against the rightward drift of
the Labour government, the May Day Manifesto must be considered a failure. It
did manage to organise a National Convention which, despite fierce sectarian infighting, came out in support of the Vietnamese NLF and in opposition to the
proposals for trade union legislation contained in the government’s White Paper
In Place of Strife. But the standing Co-ordinating Commission set up by the
Convention, to which nearly all socialist groups sent representatives, fell apart as
the 1970 general election approached. Some groups argued that however bad
Labour had been, the Tories would be worse, while others wanted to run Left
Alliance candidates in opposition to the Labour Party. As Raymond Williams
(1979: 375) remarked drily, “A strategy of common activity could survive anything
except an election.”
7
The Final Years of British Communism
The CPGB was always much more than an outpost of Soviet communism. That it
survived at all after 1956 suggests as much and subsequent events confirmed
that despite its small size, the party was not only rooted in the traditions of the
British labour movement, but was also responsive to, albeit bewildered by the
new social movements. From 1964 to 1977, the party underwent an unexpected
renaissance and for a few turbulent years, as British capitalism foundered and
the post-war settlement collapsed, it came to play a minor, but significant role in
the British trade union movement and, to that extent, on the wider stage of British
politics. During these same years, it also served as a repository for the hopes
and energies of many radical students, feminists and intellectuals. The party thus
found itself hosting two antithetical political projects which Geoff Andrews (2004),
in his recent history of its final years, calls militant labourism and British
Gramscism, respectively.
From 1966 onwards, British capitalism began to show signs of deep dysfunction
as economic growth faltered, real take home pay stagnated, profits were
squeezed, inflation accelerated, unemployment rose and, despite the devaluation
and later depreciation of the pound, the balance of payments remained in
persistent deficit. This dismal performance was the result of two interacting
forces: the defensive strength of organised labour and the competitive weakness
and complacent insularity that were the legacy of Britain’s imperial past.
The most pressing economic problem was inflation. This was not so much
because of its narrowly economic consequences, though these were serious
enough once the rate at which prices were rising ceased to be low, steady and
tolerably predictable and became high, variable and worryingly uncertain. Rather,
the recurrent distributional conflicts that drove and were continually reactivated
by inflation threatened to destabilise society and provoke a right-wing backlash.
As the Swedish social democrats had warned in the 1940s and as subsequent
events confirmed, “inflation is the deadly enemy of socialism”. If the left and the
labour movement failed to acknowledge that trade unions were involved in
causing inflation and failed to take responsibility for controlling it, the only feasible
alternative was for government to abandon the commitment to full employment
that had formed the centrepiece of the post-war settlement, institute an oldfashioned deflationary purge and allow unemployment to rise to whatever level
was necessary, as Marx once put it, to “curb the pretensions of the working
class”.
The CPGB, whose industrial department orchestrated campaigns to defeat both
“anti-trade union” laws and successive incomes policies, maintained that these
policies were an attempt to force the working class to pay for the capitalist crisis.
This position was condemned as intellectually bankrupt and politically
irresponsible by a small group of economists on the party’s economic advisory
committee who advocated a “socialist social contract” in which pay restraint
would be traded off against structural reforms aimed at democratising economic
decision-making: within the enterprise as well as at the macro-economic level; in
8
private firms as well as in the public sector; and with respect to strategic issues,
such as corporate investment and product development, not just the day-to-day
management of the workplace. A democratic alternative economic strategy along
these lines offered a way of combining the creative energy of the new social
forces with the disciplined strength of the industrial working class in a hegemonic
bid to tackle Britain’s economic crisis and prefigure the socialist future.
Students, feminists and others who had imbibed the politics of Gramsci
welcomed this approach as a shining example of how to conduct the war of
position, which should be emulated throughout the party’s work. The party
leadership and most ‘industrial comrades’, however, wanted no truck with
‘capitalist’ incomes policies, insisting that trade union militancy was the royal road
to socialist consciousness – a proposition that would have outraged Lenin – and
disinterring the old syndicalist idea that, sooner or later, if the workers remained
united, refused to be co-opted by the state and screwed up social tensions to
breaking point, the capitalist system would be brought down and a new age
would dawn – a proposition that was blatantly at odds with the gradualist,
democratic logic of the party’s programme, The British Road to Socialism, and
had more in common with the views of its Trotskyist detractors.
Neither this specific controversy nor the wider ideological divide from which it
sprang was ever resolved. The fate of incomes policy – and, indeed, of traditional
social democracy – was sealed by the gradual decay of the Social Contract, the
catastrophic blows suffered by the Labour government in the winter of 1978-9,
the victory of the Conservatives at the subsequent general election and the neoliberal counter-revolution for which this paved the way. The fate of the party was
to remain deadlocked as the embattled camps waged an increasingly bitter and
costly civil war which culminated in a de facto division of the party’s remaining
assets: the Gramscians took control of Marxism Today; the party officials
retained control of a hollowed-out party apparatus; and the proponents of ‘class
politics’ held on to the Morning Star and the party’s declining industrial base. In
effect, the party was over long before the formal decision to disband was taken at
a special conference in 1991.
This is not quite the end of the story, however. In the final part of his book,
Andrews (op. cit.) reviews the death of militant labourism, with the defeat of the
miners’ strike in 1984, and contrasts it with the outstanding success of Marxism
Today which was transformed by its editor, Martin Jacques, from a rather worthy
and obscure theoretical journal, little read outside the CP, into the house
magazine of the British left, with a circulation of around 10,000 and a reputation
for cutting-edge analysis and debate that sometimes reverberated in mainstream
politics and the mass media. Apart from its fresh design and breezy style, the
appeal of Marxism Today lay in its twin central concerns: the historic decline of
the British left and the emergence of a neo-liberal new right in the form of
Thatcherism, which had succeeded where the left had failed in building a broad
popular alliance and was using its command over the state to push through a
programme of regressive modernisation. Though the magazine operated at arms’
length from the party, despite receiving a hefty subsidy, its themes and
9
arguments prompted a final attempt to replace the British Road to Socialism with
a programme that reflected the sweeping changes that were taking place in the
world economy and in the social structure and political landscape of Britain. The
result was The Manifesto for New Times, which performed the obsequies on
militant labourism, appraised Thatcherism as a hegemonic project and outlined a
Gramscian approach to the task of building a new, democratic left. Appearing in
1989, on the eve of the collapse of communism, this document became the
party’s swansong.
Conclusion
There is an obvious sense in which socialism, whether as a popular movement, a
form of society (real or imaginary) or an approach to public policy, was the chief
political casualty of the twentieth century. Whether there is a future for the
democratic left is another matter. Certainly, in each of the four historical episodes
reviewed above, the traditions of labourism and communism hampered efforts to
renew the visions and strategies of the left. Now that these traditions are dead or
dying, the democratic left may come into its own. This can only happen however,
if those who reject New Labour’s neo-liberalism, but have no desire to return to
the old religions are willing to learn from the past.
Socialists were mistaken in assuming that workers are fundamentally a
homogeneous class who share a common interest in improving their material
conditions under capitalism and, in the long run, are destined to become its
gravediggers. All but the most primitive human societies contain multiple,
intersecting social divisions and political behaviour is never pre-ordained. Far
from being inscribed in the social structure like parts in a play, social interests are
formed through social interaction over long periods of time and although, once
formed, minds are not easily changed, the possibility of change is ever present
as people acquire new experience and encounter new ideas.
The perpetual ‘battle for hearts and minds’ takes on particular importance in
democratic states where winning or retaining political power, whether in defence
of the status quo or in order to challenge it, depends not on the use or threat of
force – though the state’s monopoly of legal violence remains a factor in any
situation – but on the relative capacities of rival political actors to persuade or
induce sufficient numbers of people to support them. And while spin and
deception play some part in this process, the dark arts matter far less than the
interplay of ideas and policies. To be sure, the playing field is not level and
political outcomes are affected by structural bias, vested interest, institutional
inertia and unequal resources. But these are handicaps that opponents of
oppression and injustice have always had to contend with and are best
countered by seeking to extend and strengthen democratic institutions and
norms, not by resorting to coercion.
At any given time, then, those who wish to see a fairer, greener, happier, less
divided and more democratic society must find ways of rallying a broad alliance
10
of social and political forces around these objectives or, to be more precise,
around ideas and policies that encapsulate them. Here it is important to
distinguish between short-term policy programmes and long-term projects: the
former are tailored to the changing circumstances of day-to-day politics and
typically follow the electoral cycle; the latter seek to make sense of the past,
identify the problems facing society in the present and propose a general
strategy for tackling them, incorporating guidelines for developing policy and
deciding tactics. To be effective, any political formation needs both these things –
flexible policies and a firm project – but the latter is vital for two reasons: it
provides a sense of direction and purpose which is essential for maintaining
morale in the face of unavoidable compromises, setbacks and defeats; and it
serves to integrate diverse and potentially conflicting interests, values and views
into a cohesive social bloc. Of course, in the long run, history moves on, projects
have to be renewed and some of us, at any rate, will be dead. In the meantime,
to paraphrase Bernstein: the final goal is nothing, the project everything.
David Purdy
2. Labour’s Democratic Left
The democratic left, as David Purdy shows, has shown emerged from fault lines
within and between social democracy and communism. My focus is on the former
and takes its starting point from more recent events.
Where to start then? My view is that the most pertinent event to return to is
Labour’s landslide defeat in the 1983 general election. Up to that point the left of
the party had been relatively united. It had tried to come terms with Thatcherism,
but preferred to believe that the solution was to change the party’s leadership
and policies rather than come to terms with changes in society and culture. The
Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, supported by the vast majority of the left,
won a variety of measures designed to create a structure of mandates and
accountability (such as mandatory re-selection) that radicalised structures and
policy – leading, amongst other things, to the eventual SDP split.
The proof of the pudding, however, was not to everyone’s taste. A left wing
leader and manifesto managed 28% of the vote. The left split. Benn and his hard
left followers saw nothing wrong with the policies and were determined to carry
on their campaign to impose a Leninist structure on the party. The rest of us
came to our senses and the fault lines were on organisation and policy. Now
shorn of most of its more leftist components, the Labour Co-ordinating
Committee accepted much of the new forms of accountability, but increasingly
focused on the policy of one member, one vote and an outward looking,
campaigning mass party. With CLPD opposing OMOV and defending only the
rights of activists willing to dedicate their lives to revolutionary socialism and
attending endless meetings, the contrast was clear. A crucial turning point in the
ensuing civil war was the realisation by most Labour members that Militant really
was an entrist, anti-democratic party that deserved to be expelled.
11
From this crucible of a struggle against vanguardism, the term democratic left
began to be used within and beyond the LCC. However, the term also had an
ideological content. The left also divided on whether Thatcherism represented a
new political project that both reflected and created significant social change. For
large sections of the left, Thatcherism was business as usual and socialism did
not need to be rethought and revised. Amongst their lines in the sand were a
defence of nationalisation and state planning, and of what was dubbed ‘class
politics’. The LCC began to re-thing key policies after the 1983 debacle. It
argued that Labour was now massively out of touch with the electorate and
society. Socialism had to make a clearer pitch to the individual, to democratic
rights and the environment.
Whilst at this point it was more about ideology than policy, at least the politics of
this emerging democratic left became more coherent. Based on a Labour Activist
(the house journal of the LCC) that set out a wide-ranging ‘Strategy for the
Democratic Left’ which was debated and supported at the 1987 AGM. The
conference noted that the ‘Hard left had ‘no project for building a popular majority
in society’ and said that the ‘shallowness of their perspectives, gesture politics
and authoritarian methods have helped set back the socialist project’.
The new perspective argued that Labour’s approach to power in the past was
based on welfare state paternalism and corporatism, whilst the record of
previous Labour governments on issues of civil liberties was ‘scandalous’. The
left needed an approach to power based on an extension of democracy and
individual freedom, including citizenship rights, an extension of civil liberties and
equal opportunities. Policies on the extension of democracy and the
decentralisation of power drew from the more innovative practise of Labour
councils, such as neighbourhood offices and consumer-influenced services.
This may all sound mundane now, but it is difficult to grasp from 2006 just how
much as break such ideas were with existing left thinking. Together with other
Labour groups such as Clause Four and Chartist, an attempt was made to set
out a Third Road between Leninism and old-fashioned labourism. Whilst this was
many degrees to the left of later attempts to carve out a Third Way, it brought
together a number of key themes. In particular, it embraced the ‘firm belief in a
pluralist society with respect to parties, organisations in civil society and forms of
ownership’ and the need to ‘create forms of popular participation, extending
political, industrial and social citizenship’ (from Labour Activist).
There was an attempt to influence early policy reviews initiated under the
Kinnock leadership. LCC’s shadow groups did some innovative work, particularly
on the democratic agenda. Such thinking ran in parallel and in some senses
converged with what was emerging from within the reform wing of the
Communist Party and its journal Marxism Today. It was becoming clear that the
divide was wider than hard and soft left within labour. The new labels were
fundamentalist versus democratic left. Such a formulation was explicitly accepted
in the LCC ‘Strategy for the Democratic Left’ document. Each of the ‘wings’ had
its own battles to fight and were more likely to work together in new ‘broad lefts’
12
within trade unions than on general political terrains. But the ideological
commonality was unmistakeable – anti-vanguardism, a critique of statism in its
Leninist or labourist forms, and of the need to recognise a variety of social
divisions and identities that went beyond a simplistic ‘class politics’.
What had produced this ideological mix was not just a combination of Labour left
revisionists and Euro-Communists. The democratic left was influenced by a third
current that had its roots in the new left that emerged from the struggles and
social movements of the late 1960s and 70s. Turned off by their experiences in
or with the far left, many had joined Labour, but as genuine seekers for a
radicalised social democracy rather than as entrists. They added a much more
libertarian ideology and experience of community politics and building from below
into that mix.
This combination of democratic left ideas and experience was present in the
LCC, in the journal Renewal, and even more so today in Compass. Most of these
forces inside and outside Labour supported the Blair revolution, some more
sceptically than others. Labour had to change, we were prepared to be part of a
modernising coalition and Blair was the necessary catalyst. But given the origins
and ideology of the democratic left, the seeds of differences were always
present.
In 1993, LCC put out a pamphlet – Modernising Britain. – that has a now familiar
ring. Modernisation had become devalued by becoming a mere shorthand for
dumping supposedly unpopular policies. Real modernisation was about actually
changing things – a stakeholder economy, a new constitutional settlement,
electoral reform. Blair and New Labour were irredeemably scarred by the
wilderness years and saw Britain as an inherently conservative country. We also
discovered along the way, that New Labour’s commitment to a democratic
politics and organisation was decidedly skin-deep.
In sum, there is a growing need for a democratic left, one that is inside Labour,
but can reach out to wider social movements and campaigns, and one that has a
modernising left project. Compass is part of the history of the democratic left and
has the chance to make some history of its own.
Paul Thompson
References
Anderson, P. (ed.) (1965), Towards Socialism (London: Fontana/ New Left
Review)
Andrews, G. (2004), Endgames and New Times: The Final Years of British
Communism 1964-1991 (London: Lawrence and Wishart).
Cole, G.D.H. (1917), Self-Government in Industry (London: Hutchinson)
Crosland, A. (1956), The Future of Socialism (London: Cape)
Kenny, M. (1995), The First New Left: British Intellectuals After Stalin (London:
Lawrence and Wishart)
Williams, R. (1979) Politics and Letters (London: New Left Books)