Colin Tudge argues that the upcoming by-election in Makerfield has implications that resonate far beyond the confines of a Manchester suburb
The by-election to be held in Makerfield, Manchester, on June 18 is a blip in the history of politics – but is much more significant than it may seem.
If Andy Burnham wins for Labour then he could become PM. If he does, and if he does not lose his way, as politicians so often seem to do, then he could steer Britain back towards true socialism, which was last seen, or at least glimpsed, in the days of Harold Wilson’s first government in the late 1960s. And socialism, I suggest — when properly conceived and acted upon — is necessary, if we, humanity, are to survive in a tolerable form for more than a few more decades.
But if Robert Kenyon wins for Reform then this could lead to the premiership of the deeply shallow, racist, self-seeking Nigel Farage and thus into a new Dark Age which, with the world now so precariously poised, could well prove terminal, a steady slide into entropy. Farage’s role model in the White House has already shown us what could be in store.
Many will baulk at the word “socialism”, for no idea in the history of the world has been more sadly misrepresented or misconstrued, or of late, more assiduously avoided. To Labour itself, under Blair and Brown, drawn in as they both were by the siren call of Mrs Thatcher, the word was taboo. People on the political Right tend commonly to equate socialism with Stalinesque authoritarianism as brought to the west’s attention not least by George Orwell, then from closer at hand by Boris Pasternak and Alexandre Solzhenitsyn. The message seems to be: “Do as the state tells you or else; eat up your gritty if not weevilly black bread and be grateful, and then get back down the salt-mine”.
On the Web, socialism is defined primarily in economic terms, specifically as an exercise in state ownership, as in this from Wikipedia:
“…an economic and political philosophy … characterised by social ownership of the means of production, as opposed to private ownership”
Or this, from Meriam-Webster, “America’s most trusted dictionary”:
“Any of various egalitarian economic and political theories or movements advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods”
All this is very Marxist. Marx was of course a moralist before he was an economist, a radical social reformer who, together with his friend and benefactor Friedrich Engels, was appalled by the injustices perpetrated by early 19th century industrialisation and capitalism. But then, as A N Wilson observed in God’s Funeral (1999), so was everybody:
“The sheer injustice and ugliness of early 19th century capitalism was obvious to everyone. The desire to put it right was universal – on the part of the capitalists themselves, as well as of radicals …; of benign Tories of Peel colouring, of Whigs and of liberals”
And as Wilson further commented in The Victorians (2005):
“What shocked the early Victorians was the disparity between rich and poor; the visible unfairness of it all …. And the question could be asked, were such gross and obvious unfairnesses avoidable by acts of charity, or were the unfairness and competitiveness ineradicable ingredients in the capitalist success story in which that society was caught up?”
Marx in the manner of a proto-scientist analysed and reduced the whole sad mess to a “class war” between the “bourgeoisie” who owned the factories and the mills and the mines, and the people who worked in them – the “proletariat”. The former exploited the latter as ruthlessly as they could get away with. To counteract this, he reasoned, the workers themselves must own the means of production. Emphatically, worker ownership need not imply Stalinesque cross-the-board state ownership — but that is what ensued in Stalin’s USSR and Mao’s China.
Yet there is a quite different way of defining socialism – not in economic terms but in moral and indeed in spiritual terms. The acknowledged founder of Britain’s Labour Party was the Lanarkshire coal miner Keir Hardie; and in his best-known work of 1907, From Serfdom to Socialism, he wrote:
“To the Socialist the community represents a huge family organisation in which the strong should employ their gifts in promoting the weal of all, instead of using their strength for their own personal aggrandizement”
Elsewhere he said:
“I claim for socialism that it is the embodiment of Christianity in our industrial system”
Christianity was the only religion that most Brits recognised in Hardie’s day, but he might just as well have cited Islam or Judaism or Buddhism or Hinduism or Sikhism – at least when each is properly construed. Clement Attlee, Labour’s best and most effective PM, whose cabinet steered us through the very tricky waters of the post-war years from 1945-51, said much the same:
“Socialists are not concerned solely with material things. They do not think of human beings as a herd to be fed and watered… They think of them as individuals cooperating to make a fine collective life”
Quoted by Lisa Nandy in All In: How We Build a Country That Works (2022)
Attlee did not claim to be a Christian although he came from a Christian family. But you do not have to subscribe to the theology to embrace the ethos — and the whole socialist ethos was beautifully summarised by the much loved and admired Bill Shankly, who managed Liverpool FC through some of its greatest years, from 1959 to 1974:
“The socialism I believe in is everyone working for each other, everyone having a share of the rewards. It’s the way I see football, the way I see life”
Who could reasonably be repelled by such sentiments, rooted as they are in the principles of compassion and justice? Who – apart from psychopaths and self-seeking mountebanks – could find them threatening?
And these, I suggest, are the ideas that Labour should have stressed and stressed again from the word go (starting with Keir Hardie). For as Harold Wilson put the matter in a campaign speech in 1961:
“The Labour Party is a moral crusade or it is nothing”
Of course, in a complex modern society – or indeed in any society – crusades cannot happen without a strong economic base. As I have commented many a time and oft:
“The economy is the medium and the matrix through which we seek to translate our aspirations into action (or are prevented from doing so)”
In practice, indeed, it seems that all big ideas that demand action must first be squeezed through the bottleneck of the prevailing economic theory. So indeed the economy is crucial, just as Marx emphasised. What we can or can’t do in the end is determined by the economy. And in practice for the most part this means how much money there is in the kitty and who gets their hands on it and calls the shots. Yet the economy must always be seen only as a pragmatic device: a means to an end, not as an end in itself. The economy must serve the morality – not the other way round.
And the end must of course be practical – notably, making sure there is Good Food for Everyone Forever (just to plug the title of one of my books), without cruelty or exploitation, or wrecking the natural world. But the reasons for wanting everyone to be well fed, and to live lives of fulfilment, and to take good care of our fellow creatures, as Clement Attlee said, are not purely or even primarily materialist. They are moral and spiritual. One of the greatest economists of all time, John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) certainly did not claim to be a socialist but he summarised Attlee’s attitude perfectly. For, he said, in a well-construed society —
“ … the economic problem will take the back seat where it belongs … and the arena of heart and head will be occupied where it belongs, or reoccupied by our real problems, the problems of life and human relations, of creation, and of behaviour and religion”
Quoted by Archie Mackenzie, Faith in Diplomacy, Caux Books, 2002, p 200.
Nye Bevan, a key member of Attlee’s cabinet was an out-and-out socialist, and he favoured public ownership. Indeed he promoted and in effect founded the NHS (and his wife and fellow MP Jenny Lee was the principal driving force behind the Open University). But Bevan certainly did not advocate wall-to-wall state ownership, as the usually admirable Wikipedia and Meriam-Webster tell is the key feature of socialism. As he wrote in his own “personal manifesto” In Place of Fear, published in 1952:
“A mixed economy is what most people of the West prefer. The victory of Socialism need not be universal to be decisive … It is neither prudent, nor does it accord with our conception of the future, that all forms of private property should live under perpetual threat. In almost all types of human society different forms of property have lived side by side”
The Green Party’s new leader, Zack Polanski, has been winning hearts and minds not by dwelling on the needs and rights of the natural world, which ostensibly is the Greens’ main concern, but by expressing the socialist sentiments expressed by Hardie and Attlee. And after 14 years of neoliberal Toryism he has found himself pushing against an open door.
But there is more to socialism (properly construed) than being nice to people. With the world in its present state, on the brink of Apocalypse, even though Trump and Farage and apparently even Blair are in denial, the socialist or socialistic ethos, applied to governance and the economy, has become vital.
The absolute importance of Keir Hardie / Attlee/ Bill Shankly-style socialism
The essence of socialism as outlined above is cooperativeness: people working together for the wellbeing of all. Cynics and bad biologists are wont to argue that this is “unnatural”, and therefore “unrealistic”. They cite or at least feel the resonance of Herbert Spencer’s summary of Darwin’s idea of natural selection:
“Survival of the fittest”
— and they take fittest to mean toughest. Life is conceived as one long punch-up from conception to the grave. We all have to fight our corner as vigorously and ruthlessly as necessary. Either that, or go under. This ultra-competitiveness is said to lead to excellence and to “efficiency”: only the most superior beings survive – the weaklings go to the wall; and whatever is in any way dysfunctional is cast off. This mentality underlies the modern economy, the offshoot of capitalism known as neoliberalism.
Many people who consider themselves to be socialist or communist rail against capitalism, as indeed did Marx. But, I suggest, the enemy is not capitalism per se. Capitalism, like the economy as a whole, should be seen primarily as a pragmatic device: a series of mechanisms that enable us to handle money adroitly. It need not be deployed, as now, as a way of making the rich richer. As the Nobelist Paul Krugman observed in The New York Times on January 10, 2011:
“ … welfare-state capitalism — a market economy with its rough edges smoothed by a strong safety net — has produced the most decent societies ever known”
This, I suggest, is the essence of Social Democracy: essentially capitalist economic mechanisms in the service of moral, social aims – which seems to me at least roughly what Nye Bevan was getting at, as quoted above. Neoliberalism, however, is capitalism with its moral and social constraints and ambitions stripped away. As a matter of policy, all our actions – life itself – is to be guided by and subject to “the market”. All producers and traders are enjoined or obliged to compete for market share and for profit; and this is supposed to lead to excellence and efficiency, and efficiency is taken to be all-important. So the market itself becomes the arbiter of morality. Whatever people will buy, or can be persuaded to buy, and is therefore potentially profitable, is held to be good; and whatever is not profitable is bad. And everything is up for sale. (How long before we see, say, Amazon York Minster?)
I have heard neoliberals argue at length that the neoliberal approach to life is OK because it is “natural”: the way nature works. As Tennyson famously wrote In Memoriam in 1850,
“Nature red in tooth and claw”
But there are at least three answers to this. The first, as moral philosophers of all stripes have pointed out – there is no good reason to assume that what happens in nature is necessarily good. Wild creatures are not moral philosophers. Indeed, many moralists of all stripes have argued that the point of morality is to “rise above” nature.
Secondly, and far more cogently, “fittest” in “survival of the fittest” does not mean toughest and most aggressive. It means “most apt” or “most appropriate”: fit as in “fit for purpose”. The purpose, I suggest, or at least the sine qua non, is to stay alive. And the more we study nature the more it becomes obvious that the most universally effective survival tactic is not to compete – or not at least to compete by bashing your neighbours – but to cooperate. Indeed, it is a key theme of this website that life itself may properly be seen as a giant exercise in cooperativeness, starting (more or less) with the coalition of nucleotides with amino acids that led eventually to the universal dialogue of nucleic acids and proteins.
Many biologists have argued thus, among the first of whom was the Russian polymath Peter Kropotkin (1842-1921), a great admirer of Darwin, who wrote in Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution in 1902:
“In the long run the practice of solidarity proves much more advantageous to the species than the development of individuals endowed with predatory inclinations”
And
“Don’t compete! — competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!”
As Kropotkin points out, although Darwin in The Origin of Species in 1859 stressed the role of competition in natural selection and hence in driving evolution he also recognised the importance of cooperation.
Thirdly, at least in human beings and other intelligent animals, the necessary cooperativeness is underpinned by true concern for the wellbeing of others. Adam Smith, commonly seen as “the father of modern capitalism” was, like Marx, a moralist before he was an economist, and in his first ever book, Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759 he wrote:
“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it”
And in his most famous book, The Wealth of Nations (1776) he wrote:
“The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular order or society”
The pleasure of seeing happiness in others springs from compassion, which Christians commonly equate with love. Adam Smith was of course a capitalist. But the sentiments espoused by the neoliberals of the Adam Smith Institute in Great Smith Street in London, or by Nigel Farage of Reform, or Robert Lowe of Restore, or Kemi Badenoch on the Right of the Conservative Party, or of course by Donald Trump and his cronies and disciples in the White House are a very long way from Smith’s.
So what can we conclude?
Personally, I find the idea of a society rooted in compassion and mutual aid far more attractive than one driven by the perceived need to compete for material wealth and dominance. So, I am sure, would most people, if given the option. Even more to the point, I suggest that if we, humanity, seriously aspire to survive on this Earth in a tolerable form beyond the next few decades, then an economy and a Zeitgeist rooted in cooperation and compassion is the only option. A world driven by competition for material gain and dominance simply is not viable. It is visibly destructive and wasteful, and at this stage in the world’s history we cannot afford to be wasteful. It is this competition for wealth and dominance that lies behind the wars in the Middle East and Ukraine and to conflict and inequality in general the world over, and leads societies to develop the wrong technologies, and to wreck the natural world. Cooperativeness rooted in compassion is the essence of socialism, properly construed; and all-out competition is the defining feature of the prevailing, neoliberal form of capitalism.
I do not suggest that Andy Burnham, the Labour candidate, in Makerfield, is the new Messiah; or indeed that Robert Kenyon, the Reform candidate, is the devil made flesh. I do suggest that Burnham represents a worldview which, if true to its own principles and intelligently applied, could help us to create are world that is not only kinder and generally more agreeable but could also enable humanity and at least the bulk of our fellow creatures to live in harmony or thereabouts for aeons to come. Kenyon, by contrast, represents attitudes and modi operandi that are very obviously destructive and seem bound to hasten our already headlong descent into oblivion. Truly, there’s a lot at stake.
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