Jeremy Corbyn is no interloper - he is part of Labour's DNA

First published 23 May 2016

In September 2015 a rank outsider, with minimal support from inside the Parliamentary Party, became Labour Party Leader. But he was elected with the support of almost 60% of the party membership.

Jeremy Corbyn first became a Member of Parliament in 1983 and was frequently in opposition to the leadership of his own party. His elevation to Leader in 2015 was widely regarded as a radical break from Labour's past, particularly from the era of Tony Blair's leadership from 1994 to 2007.

In contrast to a widespread view, I argue here that Corbyn's politics are - in most respects - more mainstream than reported. They are broadly in line with the original Labour Party, from its formation in 1900 (as the Labour Representation Committee) to at least 1945.

By contrast, from the election of the first majority Labour government in 1945 to the resignation of Ed Miliband from the leadership in 2015, Labour adjusted to the realities of gaining and retaining power, and became more moderate in much of its political rhetoric. A large section of the party abandoned its original socialist ideology, in substance if not in name, and these pragmatists dominated Labour during the post-war period. To retain credibility, they tried to alter the meaning of socialism to serve more moderate ends.

Corbyn's election as leader should be understood - in part - as a rehabilitation of typical Labour doctrines of the 1900-1945 period, and of Labour's aspiration for socialism as originally defined. Corbyn has Labour's DNA. But he has recombined Labour's original DNA with 'anti-imperialist' doctrines that became prominent, largely outside Labour, in the 1960s and 1970s.

I first summarise Labour Party ideology in the 1900-1945 period. I then show how Corbyn exhibits these earlier views, but in genetic recombination with an "anti-imperialist" politics of the 1960s and 1970s. I then briefly draw some tentative conclusions from this analysis.

For Owen and his followers, socialism meant the abolition of private property. As Owen argued in 1840, "virtue and happiness could never be attained’ in ‘any system in which private property was admitted". He aimed to secure ‘an equality of wealth and rank, by merging all private into public property’.

From the 1830s until the 1950s, socialism was almost universally defined in terms of the abolition of private property and some form of widespread common ownership.

In their Communist Manifesto of 1848, Marx and Engels echoed Owen and others and called for the "abolition of private property." In 1850 Marx declared: "Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it". In the Communist Manifesto and elsewhere, he and Engels proclaimed an economic order in which "capital is converted into common property, into the property of all members of society." They wanted the complete abolition of the ‘free selling and buying’ of commodities.

They welcomed efforts "to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state" and looked forward to a time when "all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation". Their version of socialism was particularly centralist, but they reflected the views of all socialists in looking for universal common ownership.

Cole’s vision of socialism was of an integrated, national system where "a single authority is responsible both for the planning of the social production as a whole and for the distribution of the incomes which will be used in buying it." Within this "single authority" he also sought devolved worker control. He wanted local autonomy of manufacturing, modelled on the medieval guild. But he was tragically unclear about how the two were to be reconciled.

These theorists ignored the problem of devolving genuine power within a national bureaucracy, without the creation of autonomous private enterprises. A major debate within the Labour Party concerned the desired structure and devolution of power within this national public framework.

Clause Four, Part Four of the Labour Party Constitution reflected a compromise between these different strands of thought. But all were united in their support of wholesale common ownership. Sidney Webb drafted these words and they were adopted by the Labour Party in 1918:

This provided for no exception: all production would be in common ownership and there would be no private sector. Although some Labour Party thinkers began to entertain the possibility of some private enterprise, resolute support for widespread common ownership prevailed.

After 1945, the position of many leading Labour Party members began to shift. First the realities of gaining and holding on to power - as a majority party for the first time - dramatized the political and practical unfeasibility of abolishing all private enterprise. Some nationalization was achieved, but a large private sector remained.
Second, with the outbreak of the Cold War in 1948 it was more difficult to sustain the naïve, rose-tinted views of the Soviet Union, although as Bill Jones shows in his book The Russia Complex, they were remarkably persistent.

Because of Gaitskell's failed attempt to change the wording of Clause Four, Corbyn's mentor Tony Benn switched his allegiance to Harold Wilson. Wilson had been a student of Cole at Oxford University. When he was Prime Minister, Wilson pragmatically retained the clause but tolerated a mixed economy.
 
In an interview in 2000, Benn favourably quoted Attlee: "If you look around the world, what are the problems? They’re all caused by the private ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange."

A tricky gene transplant might have been possible, but only if Labour had developed a thoroughgoing alternative to its pre-1945 socialism. The closest it came to this was Crosland's Future of Socialism, which commendably emphasized the goal of diminishing economic inequality, instead of common ownership.
From 1920 to 1968 the main socialist party outside Labour was the Communist Party of Great Britain. After 1968 they were competing in this narrow space with several feuding and splintering Trotskyist groups. It was Lenin, not Marx, who had made 'anti-imperialism' and national liberation a key motif of his Marxism. He was followed in this respect by Trotsky.Hence Leninism once again became visible on the far left. But this time it did not necessarily mean loyalty to the Soviet Union: it meant "solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles" in Cuba, Vietnam, Palestine and elsewhere.
Recent developments within the Labour Party - including the resurgence of its collectivist past - make a parliamentary majority in 2020 impossible, unless some unforeseen catastrophe hits the Conservative Party. A recent report from within the Labour Party states that unless radical action is taken, Labour's electoral prospects "remain very poor."
 
But this "DNA" analysis shows that the status of the Labour Party in Britain as the leader of a renewed and viable Left is now in doubt.

23 May 2016

Attlee, Clement R. (1937) The Labour Party in Perspective (London: Gollancz).

Blair, Tony (1994) Socialism, Fabian Pamphlet 565 (London: Fabian Society).

Cole, George D. H. (1920) Guild Socialism Re-Stated (London: Parsons).

Crosland, C. Anthony R. (1956) The Future of Socialism (London: Jonathan Cape).

Hodgson, Geoffrey M. (1999) Economics and Utopia: Why the Learning Economy is not the End of History (London and New York: Routledge).

Jones, Bill (1977) The Russia Complex: The British Labour Party and the Soviet Union (Manchester: University of Manchester Press).

Marx, Karl (1973) The Revolutions of 1848: Political Writings – Volume 1 (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

Owen, Robert (1991) A New View of Society and Other Writings (Harmondsworth: Penguin).

Webb, Sidney J. and Webb, Beatrice (1920) A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain (London: Longmans Green).