When, before Xmas, British Prime Minister Teresa May was clapped by the leaders of the remaining European Union countries, their relief came from two worries. First the EU rulers were applauding themselves for forcing the UK government to accept all of the main conditions that they had started the negotiations with, 17 months before. Second, they were backing May's role in herding her Tory cats and thereby preventing a new UK election and a possible Corbyn led Labour government.
After Xmas, Lord Adonis, one of Tony Blair's most scrupulous minions, left his government advisory post to sing the praises of Clement Attlee, the UK's Labour PM after WW2 who initiated the NHS and set up wide scale nationalisation of key industries. As Bob Dylan sang;
'For the times ... (and possible future posts) ... they are a'changing!'
Leading British journals (eg The Guardian Dec 30, Prospect Jan 2018 ) and websites are stacked with analyses of Corbyn's projected 'new nationalisations' and how to confront globalisation, especially how to grab tax from those big, Internet-based rascals! Meanwhile even Rupert Murdoch's 'Times' denounced the Tories for not dumping austerity and for refusing to open up a new investment boom.
Has Social Democracy, that had seemed to have withered on the vine across most of Europe, been revived in Britain? And if it has, can British Social Democracy seriously challenge and overcome the global monsters of our age?
Balance sheet
Tens of thousands of what used to be called the 'hard' or the 'far' left in the UK have joined Corbyn's Labour Party and the associated Momentum movement. No doubt they start with all sorts of different perspectives but most share the collective intention of achieving a Labour government that will at least carry out its 2017, Corbyn led, Manifesto.
Encouragingly, nobody (except Blair), least of all Corbyn, denies that British Social Democracy has a checkered past. Labour PMs, from Wilson to Blair, all saw the reduction of organised working class strength as critical to Labour's governmental success! It is not an accident that Corbyn turns instead to Attlee's role as his inspiration for the future of his would-be Labour Party. Attlee's government made tremendous advances in the interests of working class people, despite its war debts and pressure from the USA.
At a more general level the great scholar Thomas Pikkety (see 'Capital in the 21st Century') established a thorough, evidence-based case that the periods of achievements and advances by the western working classes, in terms of their standards of living, approximately coincided with historically narrow gaps between rich and poor and the advance and return to office of Social Democratic governments. The implications of Pikkety's research appears clear. It implies that in the case of the western working class's benefits, Social Democracy has sometimes proved to be a successful instrument in the 20th Century.
But not the whole story.
Narrowing the focus to the UK once more, it was the Tory grandee Boothby who made a comment in 1946 that suggests the Pikkety thesis may not be the complete picture. Referring to the British working class Boothby warned the post-war British Parliament that 'if we do not give them reform; they will give us revolution!'
Turning round Boothby's remarks, we can see something of the limits to Pikkerty's argument. Pikkerty's study of the history of the progress or otherwise of the western working class is not fully situated in its proper global context. For example the evolution of the British and the French working class advances have a deep relation to the Empires of both countries. Many of the struggles and upheavals and most significantly the battles for basic working class rights were 'exported' into the savage oppression of the colonies and the super exploitation of the colonial populations. Some central working class leaderships, particularly in the UK, saw the Empire as the source of their own 'privileges' and they were not wrong.
Continuing the inversion of Boothby's declaration, globally speaking it was the enormous 30 year wave of anti-colonial and socialist revolution, from Russia to China, from Czechoslovakia to Greece, expressed deeply in the most developed countries in the West as the victory over fascism in the European continent, that really set the context for the requirement of the rulers in the West to 'reform.' Revolution had forced the Boothby's of their time to accept Social Democratic reform.
Reform .. and revolution?
This is not to say that European and US working class people did not struggle and make sacrifices for their own advances in the 20th century. (Often against their own leaderships!) It is not to say either that without a global movement for revolutionary change no national or local shift, or substantial reform is possible. That would simply be a leftist version of the poisonous mantra that 'there is no alternative'. There are no eternal truths carved in stone. But it is to say that if the aim is a root and branch change in favour of the working class, essentially against the interests of the dominant class, then the ruling class will need to be dispossessed of their power as a class and certainly overwhelmed as the leading force in society. For the 'Social Democratic' reforms of there 20th century - whatever their real source and however compromised - are now now being purposefully dissolved across the western world.
And revolution? Clearly the experience of the western working class in developed countries is deeply different to the Russian or the Chinese experience. Many left academics and would-be theorists have tried to twist versions of Russian and Chinese revolutionary history into sets of universal norms that have inevitably ended up at the margins of mainstream, working class political life in the West. Much less has been made of the tremendous global impact of those great revolutionary struggles across the globe in setting the basis for those advances in the West. Equally, there is little point in abstract arguments counterposing the supposed merits of western 'reform' versus eastern 'revolution'. The history of the oppressed and their battles for change are at first a totality and should be studied in that sense in order to see what the upheavals against capitalist society have produced so far across all the continents.
Back to Corbyn
As described above, Corbyn's Labour Party leadership has established one benchmark in the sense that Labour's latest Manifesto has mainstream political significance. Large parts of the media are all over it. The Tory's contemptuous comments about the return to the 1980s has been largely ignored in both the electorate and the mainstream media debate.
The Manifesto is not the same as a worked through battle plan. There are also critical absences and unnecessary concessions in the document. Nevertheless the flag has been unfurled. The forces in society and, more difficult, the forces in and around the Labour Party, now need to be marshaled - in action.
This is the terrain in Britain, today, on which the working class and its allies could first win and then lead politics in a modern, developed western society. The day to day friction between the poor and the systems that command their lives are now surfacing above ground and into the light - in a clash of interests and alternative visions of society. We learn again who it is that is most concerned to 'offer' reforms and why - and then what is held in the other hand at the sign of any hesitation.
In this context we see that the world works in the opposite way to abstract theory. People en-mass open the fight for change. The content of society's political instruments rapidly changes around that battle; for or against. Reform can start as a demand of demonstrators and then can become a tool designed to stop their forward march. The movement for (serious) reform in reality can be revolutionary. If 'reform' is seized by society's rulers it can be its reverse. The argument about Corbyn's Labour Party cannot be conducted in such terms. In real life it will solve nothing and move no-one.
However, it would be equally absurd to imagine that convulsive movements for change in society will not break up and remodel the antiquated political instruments currently available, from rotting Parliaments and Parties to the urgent requirement by the people of a severe, practical examination of wealth and power. Change in society will inevitably and utterly change even Corbyn's Labour Party and, hopefully, the design and direction of his his Labour Government. And a tentative rebirth of British (and of Western) Social Democracy needs careful preparation, for if it happens it will mark the death of its traditional role in capitalism and the end of its traditional leadership. To survive it will need to become its opposite.
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