The New Left's economic model: the challenge to Labour Party orthodoxy.

Wickham-Jones, Mark

Writing in The Guardian in 1987 about a retrospective conference, the Oxford scholar Brian Harrison reported that one member of the audience had pointed out that 'The New Left has never succeeded even in providing a coherent sketch of the socialist society that would compare in stature with Crosland's The Future of Socialism' (Harrison, 1987, 18). The point was reinforced with a photograph of Crosland accompanying the article and a strapline reading 'The New Left, outside the Labour Party, has nothing to offer compared with Anthony Crosland's sketch of a socialist society.' The proceedings of the same event published a comment by Lawrence Daly (1989), titled 'A miner's Bible', as part of its conference scrapbook. Talking about the New Left pamphlet, A Socialist Wages Plan (Alexander and Hughes, 1959), Daly, who had been General Secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers between 1968 and 1984, argued: 'It seemed to be everything I believed in. I was very much against mineworkers, or indeed any other workers, being paid purely on the basis of market forces.' He continued, 'Because I was so impressed by A Socialist Wages Plan, it became for a while my Bible as an activist in the coal mines.'

It is easy to see why the first view of the New Left has become so prevalent. In part, it is a reflection of the cultural, historical and foreign policy concerns articulated by its leading figures during the late 1950s: Stuart Hall, John Saville, E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams spoke directly to such themes. The development of a comprehensive programme was also inhibited by disagreements amongst its leading figures over the movement's connection to Labour politics. In any case, the New Left was remarkably successful in speaking to a number of distinct and original issues at this time such as, for example, the relevance of sociological categories for reformist analyses and the extent of youthful disaffection with conventional politics. (The development of a network of clubs and coffee houses such as the Partisan in London assisted in the latter area). Given the circumstances in which the New Left emerged, the influence of the Soviet invasion of Hungary and the British incursion into Suez (both in 1956), it was to be expected that considerable attention would also be given over to foreign policy issues. At the time further consideration was granted to the United Kingdom's independent nuclear deterrent, an orientation that is equally unsurprising given the nature of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the accompanying crisis that engulfed Labour politics during this period. Of course, the relative affluence of the 1950s created uncertainties for left-wingers (see the discussion in Davis, 2012): how should they respond to apparent material prosperity? What issues should they focus upon? The definitive texts about the New Left (Chun, 1993; Kenny, 1995) have not neglected economic issues of the kind raised by A Socialist Wages Plan (the latter in particular devotes a chapter to such topics). But, given the considerations just noted, it is predictable that the focus of their attention has been on other matters. Indeed, an examination of contemporary discussions of the New Left, for example in the pages of The Guardian or The Times would lead to pretty much a straightforward conclusion. The New Left appeared to give little attention to economic issues and as such failed to develop a coherent model of social democracy.

By contrast, the revisionists within (and surrounding) the Labour Party offered an apparently strong and robust account of the reformist project. Tony Crosland's 1956 The Future of Socialism seemed, of course, the epitome of such an approach. Many commentators and participants concluded that this 540 page tome, published in October 1956 and weighing in at nearly two pounds, developed a complete analysis of British society (and its economy) as well as of the normative goals that should guide social democrats (for a critical discussion see Wickham-Jones, 2007). In it, long-held articles of faith for left-wing politics, most obviously nationalisation, were rejected as ineffective, irrelevant, and unpopular. In place of public ownership, Keynesian demand management and, at the level of the firm, a new managerial stratum would provide the basis for progressive policies. With regard to the latter, as a result of the managerial revolution that had separated ownership from control, a new layer of business executives would forsake profit maximisation in favour of other objectives. Power was dispersed throughout society: to government, to voters, to unions, and to managers, as well as, residually and insignificantly, to owners of capital. Firms could be taxed to generate a surplus to fund the social and welfare services that were required in the pursuit of equality (the defining goal of social democracy). It was not just nationalisation that Crosland jettisoned: he was lukewarm about planning and about any arrangement promoting industrial democracy. He suggested that there was no need to adopt an incomes policy or plan any growth in wages. Governments could rely, he claimed, on 'the sense and moderation of the unions' in this area (Crosland, 1956, 461).

The New Left challenge to revisionism

Against Crosland's model, the New Left sometimes looked disconnected and disorganised. To be sure, its members might adopt positions on particular topics but there was not much that might be considered as an all-inclusive programme. There was certainly no single volume either to challenge or to rival The Future of Socialism. However, whether such a failure means that the New Left did not articulate an economic model is less manifest. Many of the economic arguments deployed within the New Left are consistent, both with each other and in the challenge that they make towards revisionist doctrine. Many anticipate the concerns raised in later debates on the left during the 1970s and so helped shape the emergence of Labour's Alternative Economic Strategy (Wickham-Jones, 1996, 82). Such material tends to be found on that side of the New Left that was more supportive of Labour as a viable reformist agency; those who developed these points were more likely to be 'younger' members and, with the exception of Ken Alexander and John Hughes, to write for Universities and Left Review (ULR) rather than The New Reasoner.

Members of the New Left challenged Crosland across a range of issues. In one initiative, members of the New Left refuted Crosland's argument about the separation of ownership from control in modern capitalism. Based on painstaking research at Companies House in London, and drawing theoretical inspiration from the work of the American sociologist C. Wright Mills, they argued in the pamphlet The Insiders that, in contrast to the framework set out in The Future of Socialism, share owners and managers were part of an interlocking network (Hall et al., 1958). As a response to Labour's 1957 policy document, Industry and Society (a publication heavily influenced by revisionist thought), the authors of The Insiders made a number of claims. Significant, concentrated private shareholding remained. In any case there were strong links between shareholders and managers, many of whom owned equity in the firms in which they worked as well as in other private corporations. Together, shareholders and managers formed an interlocking network with multiple connections: 'Top managers, top directors, top shareholders, closely interlocked, are all, equally, the beneficiaries of the power, profits and prestige of the giant corporations' (Hall et al., 1958, ii). Personal wealth and power stemmed from the success of the business; in turn that meant that wealth and power were intimately related to profit, effectively the driver of the system. The Insiders argued: 'The salaries and perquisites of the managers and executives are merely new concealed forms of capital appreciation' (Hall et al., 1958, 31). The pamphlet piled on the criticisms of Crosland and of Industry and Society: oligopolistic firms faced little competition and could increase prices, thus generating inflation. They could pressure governments into making concessions on policy. Michael Barratt Brown (1958, 1959) followed up the analysis developed in The Insiders about the corporate networks and elites underpinning British capitalism with a series of papers in ULR entitled 'The Controllers'. Fifty years on The Insiders provides a powerful portrait of the elite character of British politics. It does not seem, however, to have had much impact at the time. The press did not pick up on it--there was no reference at all to it in The Guardian - and it does not seem to have generated much wider discussion.

The New Left also identified a structural imperative that shaped the capitalist economy. In an early issue of New Left Review, Charles Taylor argued that there were limits to the extent that Keynesian welfarism could be funded via a tax on profits: 'the motor of the system is after all profit, the private accumulation of capital. If we impose very heavy taxes, we are siphoning off the fuel from this motor. We cannot expect it to drive on regardless' (Taylor, 1960, 11). In the early 1960s, academic discussion about the nature of the firm raised the possibility that efficient capital markets meant firms had to maximise profits in order to sustain dividends and so avoid hostile takeovers, an essentially neoclassical proposition (see the later discussion in Singh, 1975). The New Left did not articulate such an argument explicitly; though in a talk at the Universities and Left Review Club in London in March 1958, the trade unionist Clive Jenkins (1958) argued that 'takeovers in US underline that managers can be displaced'. He claimed that in such circumstances profit maximisation remained central as companies 'search for the greatest returns'. Accordingly, 'prestige for managers [was] absolutely related to profitability and eventually to dividends.' The issue is notable because in The Future of Socialism, Crosland identified differences between capital markets in the United Kingdom and those found elsewhere in Europe countries. In many of the latter, especially in Germany--with 'the bare shadow of a free capital market'--alternative arrangements had developed to generate capital for investment (Crosland, 1956, 431). Having made the distinction about the nature of capital markets, Crosland did not follow it up. In a brief passage on takeovers, he did not discuss the impact of hostile bids on profit maximisation (Crosland, 1956, 354-7).

New Left authors accepted Crosland's claim that the British experience of nationalisation had been unsuccessful. However, they did not reject it as a policy intervention. Rather they indicated that it needed to be reworked and reformulated with a different structure and clearer criteria. When The Guardian accused the New Left of lacking originality, Stuart Hall complained: 'The unpopularity of nationalisation has to do with the form of public ownership to which the Labour Party has been committed since the Morrison era' (Hall, 1959, 4). It was 'bureaucratic and anonymous'; it suffocated the desire 'to participate directly' in the workplace. Moreover, the monopolistic nature of the economy and power of large private corporations meant public ownership remained relevant as a policy intervention. John Hughes (1960) argued that large firms were inegalitarian, inefficient--they exploited their monopolistic status within the economy--and inflationary--they did not face price competition. Hughes claimed that the concentration of large firms in the economy led to stagnation. In such a context there was a straightforward case for public ownership. It provided a means to control private firms whose production needed to be planned and stable and whose prices should be competitive. A central focus was the steel industry, whose nationalisation was the most contentious intervention undertaken by the 1945-51 Labour government, one that was subsequently reversed by the Conservatives. Hughes (1957) argued that renationalisation would make the industry accountable; help coordinate planning across the economy; and meet longer term goals. New Left authors also made the case for import restrictions and exchange controls. In order to plan national output, firms should discuss investment proposals with the government. Other contributors indicated the possibilities of workers' control, albeit in a slightly abstract manner (and an area that the Institute for Workers' Control developed much more fully a decade or so later). The authors of The Insiders argued: 'Public ownership must be seen in the context of the original socialist goal of industrial democracy' (Hall et al., 1958, 25).

It may be in the area of wages policy that the New Left offered its most distinctive contribution to the discussion of economic strategy (see Wickham-Jones, 2013). In the spring of 1959, Ken Alexander and John Hughes published A Socialist Wages Plan, the document that Lawrence Daly referred to so glowingly above. At the time the prevalent attitude within Labour, as articulated by Crosland, rejected incomes policies. By contrast, Alexander and Hughes argued inflation was as problematic to a social democratic economy as it was to a laissez-faire one. They suggested that wages be planned as part of an overall strategy including increased social spending and price controls. Such measures would ensure growth but were also linked, implicitly, to more radical interventions including public ownership. A national wages council would be founded to provide a forum to discuss settlements and to develop norms. Such an approach would, they claimed, offer a stable increase in real wages over time as well as helping to erode differentials and reduce sectionalism within the labour movement. It could also offer something more radical: Alexander and Hughes talked about pushing the limits of reform within capitalism.

As an attempt to generate wider public discussion on the issue the initiative was unsuccessful. There was virtually no press discussion of the pamphlet either in the general media (such as The Guardian) or in specifically trade union publications. However, a Socialist Wages Plan caused some controversy within the labour movement because after its election in 1964 the Labour government under Harold Wilson did implement an incomes policy as a central aspect of its economic strategy. Quite what relationship there might be between the two initiatives, though, is by no means obvious. Alexander and Hughes continued to lobby for the kind of programme they had put together in the pamphlet, most commonly in the pages of the Tribune newspaper. For the first few years of the Labour government they hoped that a radical version might emerge: 'for the past seven years we have been arguing that if the trade unions are to advance working class interests and extend social control over the economic system, they must develop coherent policies over the whole field of economic and social affairs, and that incomes policy is an issue around which this can best be done' (Alexander and Hughes, 1965, 6). They got some general support from surprising quarters. In notes on the subject, Ken Coates argued 'an increasing number of people are turning to the problem of details of the kind of plan upon which an incomes policy could be based ... It must be part of an overall strategy of advance towards social control of the economy' (1965, 5). Others, however, scholars and political campaigners alike, on the right as well as the left of the labour movement, were brutally critical of the Alexander-Hughes plan, arguing that it was economically flawed and would undermine the traditional roles and responsibilities of trade unions. Manifestly, it was an issue which did not command consensus across the left.

The New Left's grassroots

Lawrence Daly's enthusiastic endorsement of the wages plan, noted above, is interesting because he was a leading figure in the Fife Socialist League (see Thompson, 1978), the closest that the New Left came to developing a working class orientated political grassroots movements (one in marked contrast to its network of clubs). Having left the Communist Party in 1956, Daly was elected to Fife County Council in 1958 and stood against Labour in the 1959 general election with the enthusiastic support of John Saville and Edward Thompson, who campaigned for him and helped raised funds to finance his campaign. (Ken Alexander, based in Aberdeen, was resolutely opposed to Daly's interventions). Despite Daly's reference to Alexander and Hughes as 'a miner's Bible', the Fife Socialist League did not promote such a policy, making, as far as I can see, no direct reference to the subject. Of course, it may be unreasonable to expect such a relatively localised political body to develop a stance on national matters. However, the League did campaign heavily on a unilateralist platform. It received almost no coverage in the national press.

The New Left struggled to develop sustained support among active trade unionists. The publication of a specifically industrial bulletin followed a conference on the subject in early 1959 (Chun, 1993, 84). John Saville told Daly that he was 'more than ever persuaded that there are a lot of very good militants who can be brought into a loose grouping for general industrial and political meetings' (1959). A school discussing the wages policy was planned but it is not clear if it ever took place. A meeting in Manchester in September 1960 concluded that the development of some sort of network of the industrial wing of the New Left alongside the launch of an industrial journal was a priority. In Saville's words: 'The long term success of our work will depend on the quality of our thinking on industrial issues' (1959).

Just as the development of an organisational structure concerning economic and industrial issues proved difficult, so too, after the launch of New Left Review, did the articulation and publication of economic material in the journal. As editor, Stuart Hall mapped out an ambitious agenda on the subject for issues two, three and four. Hall pronounced: 'This debate is going to be a crucial one in the labour movement', yet noted that 'it is being conducted in the vaguest generalities' (Hall, 1960a). Few of the articles he proposed ever made it into print, though some of the alternative material that did come out, such as Charles Taylor's piece, did cover economic themes. It is interesting that Hall emphasised that he wanted a 'human dimension to the whole discussion' (1960b). At around the same time that Hall put together his proposals, another member of the editorial team told Lawrence Daly that they were having 'a hard time to find sufficiently solid material on the problems of this country' (Butt, no date). Later issues of the journal edited by Hall had even less economic material. By the summer of 1961, the New Left was struggling to sustain any momentum and most of its plans regarding economic and industrial matters fizzled out. A year or so later, as the first New Left came to an end, Thompson (1962) complained to Daly that it had 'failed even to form an industrial committee' (alongside other texts on this subject, see Hamilton, 2011).

Crosland's response to the New Left

In a 1962 published collection, Anthony Crosland directly targeted the New Left as The Conservative Enemy, albeit alongside the more obviously old-fashioned Old Left and the Conservative Party. He challenged Charles Taylor's notion that there were limits to the extent that profits might be taxed by the state, pointing out that other countries successfully set corporation taxes at a higher level. Look at Sweden, Crosland said: progressive taxation and welfare spending to promote equality have been combined with growth. Interestingly, Crosland criticised Richard Crossman for making much the same claim as had Taylor, though the former had written privately to Labour's chief revisionist on the subject after reading The Future of Socialism (see Wickham-Jones, 2007). The discussion of taxation is also significant given that Crosland seems to have modified his position in the early 1970s. By then, Stuart Holland had challenged the revisionist model, arguing that the state failed to tax monopolistic firms which under-reported and hid large profits. In Socialism Now, Crosland (1974, 29) responded by citing data deployed by Andrew Glyn and Bob Sutcliffe in their essentially neo-Ricardian account of the British economic crisis (a position developed along similar lines to that developed theoretically by Taylor). The share of profits in national product, Crosland claimed, had fallen as a result of state interventions.

In his most sustained assault on the New Left, Crosland devoted a chapter of The Conservative Enemy to taking on The Insiders and Barratt Brown's 'The Controllers'. For the most part, he argued, shareholders were weak, passive and ineffectual (with dispersed holdings). Part-time external directors with no expertise played no role. He continued to claim that power was dispersed throughout society. Any constraint owners offered to managers of a firm had to be balanced against the checks provided by the government, the trade unions, and public opinion. Crosland accused the New Left of 'a complete inability to understand who actually wields power in British society today' (Crosland, 1962, 81). He conceded that hostile takeovers raised issues but went on to suggest that 'such contests, for all the publicity which they attract, are comparatively rare' (Crosland, 1962, 68). There was effectively a convention prohibiting such initiatives: 'businessmen regard a proxy contest as an insolent, if not immoral, invasion of their management prerogatives' (Crosland, 1962, 68). By and large dividends reflected a 'conventional' level. They need not be maximised. Crosland asserted, 'An efficient company which generates a steady increase in earnings per share can pursue a conservative dividend policy and yet be invulnerable to takeovers; for asset values will not get out of line with share values' (Crosland, 1962, 84). In such circumstances, a sense of social responsibility was an important motivating factor for company managers.

Reviewing the volume, Barratt Brown restated the case made in The Insiders and 'The Controllers' about the class and elite identity of management in the United Kingdom. He argued that with competitive capital markets, firms needed to maximise profits. If they did not, share prices would be depressed and they would be a target for takeovers: 'If it is true that any company will be taken over unless it keeps up its profits, then the drive to maximise profits has to continue' (Barratt Brown, 1963, 27). Barratt Brown's proposition is one of the earliest statements on this subject from the left, though interestingly, in an article for The Observer in March 1962, Roy Jenkins linked ICI's hostile bid for Courtaulds to a dividend cut that had depressed the former's share price, making it a target for predatory takeover (Jenkins, 1962a). Jenkins argued that the dividend cut had been unnecessary on financial grounds. In successfully staving off the bid, Courtaulds responded by raising the interim dividend. Jenkins concluded that Courtaulds emerged from the battle 'committed up to the hilt to giving shareholders every penny that they could reasonably lay their hands on' (Jenkins, 1962b, 6). Crosland's claims about the character of British capitalism would, in retrospect, look to be at odds with arguments set out much later by Will Hutton (whose 1995 volume The State We're In covers similar ground to much of the analysis charted by the New Left). Hutton noted: 'On average, there have been 40 contested takeovers a year in London since the war; in Germany there have been four altogether' (Hutton, 1995b, 14). Add in the threat of a hostile takeover, and British firms do not appear to enjoy the kind of protection from predators that Crosland claimed for them.

Crosland did not engage with the kind of claims made by the New Left either about nationalisation or about wages policy. Moreover, the tone of the engagement was tetchy and bad-tempered. He cited the New Left's anger and inaccuracy: they were 'naive and sloppy' (Crosland, 1962, 69). They displayed a 'masochistic inferiority complex' (Crosland, 1962, 81). Crossman, highlighting that phrase, accused Crosland of picking fights (Crossman, 1962, 24). In an interview in 1994 John Hughes suggested to me that the New Left 'didn't take Crosland's ideas seriously at all' and that 'there was no real reaction from Crosland': it was not an especially productive debate.

Conclusions

Taken together, the New Left, in its analysis of British capitalism's corporate and elitist nature; the case it made for nationalisation; and its articulation of a wages policy, offered a coherent social democratic model. On each of these issues they provided a significant challenge to Crosland's revisionism. Fifty years or so after the demise of the 'first' New Left, of course, the current policy relevance of its economic arguments are by no means straightforward, unsurprisingly given the changes undergone by the British economy as well as by society more generally. We can with care, however, derive some conclusions, both about the New Left's policies and, more broadly, about the way in which it articulated such arguments. Debates about the class structure and the networks underlying capitalism in the United Kingdom remain pertinent to reformism as do concerns about the structural nature of capital markets. By contrast, nationalisation no longer seems to be part of the social democratic agenda - other than in extremis - and, given the decentralisation of wage bargaining and decline of trade union membership, pay policy strategies no longer appear central to reformist economics. That said, issues of wage growth, competitiveness, and differentials do remain: by the late 1980s similar ideas to those floated by Alexander and Hughes had pretty much become part of social democratic orthodoxy, though their addition to the left-wing policy armoury owed little if anything to the New Left (see Wickham-Jones, 2013). Such measures were of course pursued in Sweden, while social pacts became an important institutional feature of some social democratic programmes elsewhere.

For all the apparent relevance of the New Left's economic material, such arguments did not have much impact on the broader labour movement. There are, I think, a number of reasons for this failure. Whilst the New Left developed a coherent challenge to Croslandite revisionism, arguably they were less effective in making such points public and generating debate. The Insiders received scant attention in the media. Reviewing Dennis Potter's volume The Glittering Coffin, Anthony Howard complained in The Guardian that 'the principal weakness of the New Left [was] - its tendency to conduct every one of its arguments and discussions within its own gold-fish bowl' (Howard, 1960). It is striking that nearly all of the reviews of Crosland's The Conservative Enemy do not even refer to, let alone discuss, his assault on the New Left. Barratt Brown, unsurprisingly, engaged directly with it. But most reviewers simply discussed the extent to which Crosland had revised the model mapped out in The Future of Socialism. The matters raised by the New Left were largely ignored.

The New Left failed to coordinate its arguments. It did not develop an overarching narrative that offered a wider perspective on economic matters, preferring for the most part to pick away at aspects of the revisionist model. It also failed to challenge the norms and conventions of the British labour movement. Both left and right objected to its wages policy on the grounds that it undermined the traditional role of trade unionists: in effect the plan came up against the norm of free collective bargaining to which the vast majority of the labour movement, Lawrence Daly notwithstanding, remained utterly committed. Space precludes a discussion as to whether the New Left might have paid more attention to such conventions and how it might have negotiated them. But, as an aside, it is worth noting that by the 1990s many leading trade unionists in the United Kingdom appeared less wedded to particular customs and informal rules, developing a more theoretical perspective on economic issues (I am thinking here, for example, of the discussions surrounding the development of a national economic assessment articulated by John Edmonds in the late 1980s and early 1990s).

As noted above, the New Left's relationship with the trade unions remained uncertain and undeveloped. There is a striking remark in Clive Jenkins' autobiography in this regard. In 1960 Jenkins launched Trade Union Affairs, a beautifully and stylishly produced journal by the standards of the day. Similar to The New Reasoner in format and aimed in part at an American market, it ran for around five numbers between 1960 and 1962. It might be expected that Jenkins, who had contributed to The Insiders and spoken at New Left meetings, would act as a contact point between the New Left and the unions. Yet the journal never offered any sort of engagement with the themes raised by the New Left, publishing just one article--by John Hughes on the rise of trade union militancy--from someone within its ranks. Jenkins is blunt: 'I did not want pieces by academics' (1990, 73).

When the first New Left came together once again as a political force in the late 1960s, with the May Day Manifesto, first in the form of a pamphlet, and subsequently in a Penguin special, it took care this time to offer a direct overall narrative about economic issues (Williams, 1968; see also Michael Rustin's article in this issue of Renewal). Edward Thompson (1967) told Daly that there was 'an overall connected analysis'. Interestingly, Ken Alexander and John Hughes did not contribute to the manifesto. Thompson's comments in this regard are telling. He acknowledged that 'it is of course weak in economic (esp. applied) areas, one reason being practical (the economists who offered help all let us down except for Michael BB [Barratt Brown] whose material was mainly on imperialism), the other theoretical--we found ourselves unable to accept the kind of gradualist policies advocated now by John Hughes (and Ken?)'. Thompson continued, 'That is with such a weak political movement and weak socialist consciousness, the old argument of A Socialist Wages Plan etc seems to me (at least for now) lost.' With the benefit of hindsight, it is by no means obvious that Thompson and his colleagues came up with anything to replace it.

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An earlier version of this paper was given at the conference on 'The Labour Party and the British New Left' in June 2012: my thanks to the participants on that occasion, including Robin Archer and Paul Nowak, and the members of the Political Studies Association Labour Movements Group.

Mark Wickham-Jones is Professor of Political Science at the University of Bristol.