Paul Anderson, review of Socialism in Britain by John Callaghan (Blackwell, £11.95), Tribune, 27 April 1990
John Callaghan's previous work includes one of the best critical studies of British Leninism, The Far Left in Britain, so perhaps it should be no surprise that the crucial event in Socialism in Britain, an overview of organised socialism since the 1880s, is the Russian revolution of 1917.
Before the Bolshevik seizure of state power, the running among British socialists was being made by proponents of a participatory democratic socialism with workers' control at its core, notably the guild socialists and syndicalists, "Leninism changed the radical socialist catechism," writes Callaghan. "Henceforward the focus of Marxist activity was party building for the purpose of smashing the bourgeois state, crudely understood as 'bodies of armed men'."
Meanwhile socialism rapidly came to mean the system of power in the USSR, which, it was noted, was perfectly compatible with the most barbarous practices developed in capitalist industry. "Now it was possible for British Marxists to argue that as long as the Bolshevik party-state existed these 'superficially capitalist' industrial forms were of no consequence." It was not until the sixties that the radical democratic themes of socialism in the 1910s were to reemerge. In the intervening half-century, the fortunes of the Communist Party ebbed, flowed and ebbed again, while the Labour left veered between wooing the CP and denouncing it as a tool of totalitarianism.
Callaghan picks his way through the complexities of the British left's relationship with the Soviet Union and its proxy with great skill and without making sweeping judgements. But it is clear that he believes British socialism to have been severely handicapped by its failure to conceive of any alternative to left management of capitalism other than bureaucratic command — a failure mirrored in the post-war years by the rapid collapse of left pressure on the Attlee government for a foreign policy that was neither Atlanticist (and Empire loyalist) nor pro-Moscow.
Callaghan's chapters on the sixties, seventies and eighties are the weakest in the book, largely because (despite his best efforts) he underpays the importance of social movements and overestimates the role of Leninists in -setting the left agenda.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to argue with his assessment of the contemporary Labour Party: "Although the Labour Party can still have its uses, the party is slow to adapt to changing values and ideas and can easily lose touch with its constituency. Labour's fixation with parliament and government has always functioned to the neglect of social struggles which form popular consciousness, and in the last 20 years in particular it has ceased to be the major source of the socialist, or indeed any other, radical vision."
This book, with its reminder of just how weak British socialism has been for most of its life, is a worthy supplement to Henry Pelling, G D H Cole, Ralph Miliband, James Hinton and the rest. It deserves a wide readership, not least because it buries once and for all the traditional Labour left illusion that socialism has mass support in Britain and has failed to make headway only because of the treacherous behaviour of Labour leaders.
