Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

British Labour's turn to socialism in 1931

2009; Routledge; Volume: 14; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13569310902925691

1469-9613

John Callaghan,

Political and Economic history of UK and US

Abstract The article examines Labour's turn to socialism in 1931. While the events of that year have been examined in meticulous detail in the existing academic literature Labour's turn to socialism has not. I seek to explain that turn to socialism with reference to the Soviet Union and to suggest that even before the Five Year Plans a fund of goodwill and emotional investment was there to be drawn upon by the Soviet state. The crisis of 1931 allowed these dispositions to come to the fore, providing a glimpse of sentiments that the Labour leadership would normally have no interest in encouraging. Thus, the crisis provides a window on socialist convictions and draws attention to the significance of the Soviet state for non-Communist socialist activists, a significance which is apt to be lost in both contemporary memoirs of the left and academic accounts of the ‘Soviet complex’ which focus on left-wing intellectuals. Notes 1. G. Orwell, ‘Rejected Review’, piece 2435, in P. Davison (Ed.), Complete Works, Vol. 16 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1998), pp. 122–123; H. Laski, Faith, Reason and Civilization (London: Gollancz, 1943). 2. See J. Callaghan, ‘The British Left and the Unfinished Revolution: Perceptions of the Soviet Union in the 1950s’, Contemporary British History, 15(3), Autumn 2001. 3. Dwight MacDonald, editorial, Politics, November 1944. See Davison, op. cit., Ref. 1, Vol. 16, piece 2518. 4. On this see the analysis of evidence from opinion surveys in P. M. H. Bell, John Bull and the Bear: British Public Opinion, Foreign Policy and the Soviet Union, 1941–1945 (London: Edward Arnold, 1990), pp. 90–91. 5. M. Cole, The General Election of 1945 and After (London: Fabian Research Series, No 102, October 1945), p. 24. 6. World News and Views, 26(5) (2 February 1946), p. 36. 7. Hans-Peter Schwarz, Konrad Adenauer: Volume 1: From the German Empire to the Federal Republic, 1876–1952 (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1995), pp. 33 and 336. 8. L. Woolf, Barbarians at the Gate (London: Gollancz, 1939), pp. 172–173. Woolf wrote the preface to this book just after the Hitler–Stalin pact was announced. It did not, he said, affect any of the judgements made in it. 9. G. D. H. Cole, in the introduction to Planned Socialism: The Plan du Travail of the Belgian Labour Party, drawn up and explained by Henri de Man, translated and edited by G. D. H. Cole (London: New Fabian Research Bureau, pamphlet 25, December 1935), p. 5. 10. Most recently represented by D. Howell, MacDonald's Party: Labour Identities and Crisis 1922–1931 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); P. Williamson, National Crisis and National Government: British Politics, the Economy and Empire, 1926–1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); and A. Thorpe, The British General Election of 1931 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) which refers to the left swing in the party on pp. 127–128 and 137 but offers no explanation of it. There is no mention of the Soviet Union in the index to either Williamson or Howell, though Williamson's text acknowledges the attraction of the Soviet model on pp. 461–462. 11. R. Aron, ‘The future of secular religions’, in his The Dawn of Universal History: Selected Essays for a Witness of the Twentieth Century, tr. Barbara Bray, ed. Yair Reiner (New York: Basic Books, 2002), p. 183. 12. M. Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory: A Conceptual Approach (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 417–418. 13. B. Jones, The Russia Complex: the British Labour Party and the Soviet Union (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1977), p. 9. 14. See J. Callaghan, Socialism in Britain since 1884 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 94–96. 15. Quoted in Jones, op. cit., Ref. 13, p. 6. 16. K. Morgan, Labour Legends and Russian Gold (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2006), p. 10. 17. See Freeden, op. cit., Ref. 12. 18. Morgan, op. cit., Ref. 16, pp. 14–19. 19. See for example R. McKibbin, The Evolution of the Labour Party (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974). 20. See J. Callaghan, ‘Ross McKibbin: class cultures, the trade unions and the Labour Party’, in J. Callaghan, S. Fielding, S. Ludlam (Eds), Interpreting the Labour Party: Approaches to Labour Politics and History (Manchester: Manchester University Pres, 2003), pp. 116–133. 21. W. Knox, James Maxton (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), p. 83. 22. Labour Party, Labour's Call to Action: The Nation's Opportunity (London: Labour Party, 1929). 23. A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914–45 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 429. 24. E. Feuchtwanger, From Weimar to Hitler: Germany, 1918–33 (London: Macmillan, second edition 1995), pp. 216–217. 25. Quoted by R. Skidelsky, Politicians and the Slump (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1971), p. 270. 26. Susan Lawrence, quoted in T. Cliff and D. Gluckstein, The Labour Party: A Marxist Analysis (London: Bookmarks, 1988), p. 153. 27. Quoted in the Daily Herald, 8 August 1931. 28. Daily Herald 25 August 1931 and 12 September 1931. The Bank of England's failed attempt to raise an additional loan of £80 million in New York was known to arise from the Federal Reserve's judgement that the Government should first demonstrate its commitment to the recommendations of the May Report, which included cuts in unemployment benefit. 29. See Labour Party Annual Conference Report 1931 (henceforth, LPACR), (London: Labour Party, 1931), p. 5. 30. Arthur Hayday's presidential address, TUC Annual Report (London: TUC, 1931). 31. J. M. Kenworthy, LPACR 1931, p. 193. 32. Kenworthy, LPACR 1931, p. 156. 33. Morrison, LPACR 1931, p. 177. On Morrison's equivocation in relation to the National Government see Thorpe, op. cit., Ref. 10, pp. 92 and 130. 34. Including H. Morrison, An Easy Outline of Modern Socialism (London: Labour Party, 1932) in which Morrison stressed the need for socialism, now defined as ‘a state of society in which the land and the means of producing and distributing wealth would be owned collectively by the public…’, p. 6. 35. R. M. Bassett, Nineteen Thirty-One: Political Crisis (London: Macmillan, 1958), p. 173. 36. R. Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes: The Economist as Saviour, 1920–37 (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 347–349, 373–374. 37. LPACR 1931, op. cit., Ref. 29, p. 5. 38. R. McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), see especially the essays on ‘Class and conventional wisdom’ and ‘The “social psychology” of unemployment in inter-war Britain’; see also the same author's Classes and Culture: England 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). 39. Glynn, S. and Booth A., Modern Britain (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 117. 40. Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, Vol. 256, column 79, 8 September 1930. 41. LPACR 1931, op. cit., Ref. 29, p. 188. 42. See J. Callaghan, Socialism in Britain (London: Blackwell, 1990), pp. 120–136. 43. G. D. H. Cole, The Next Ten Years in British Social and Economic Policy (London: Macmillan, 1929), p. 63. 44. Cole, The Next Ten Years in British Social and Economic Policy (London: Macmillan, 1929), p. 7. 45. Cole, The Next Ten Years in British Social and Economic Policy (London: Macmillan, 1929), p. 16. 46. Quoted in Cliff and Gluckstein, op. cit., Ref. 26, p. 154. 47. LPACR 1931, op. cit., Ref. 29, p. 176. 48. LPACR 1931, Ref. 29, p. 177 49. LPACR 1931, Ref. 29, p. 244. 50. LPACR 1931, Ref. 29, p. 190. 51. LPACR 1931, Ref. 29, p. 178. 52. As reported in the Daily Herald, 3 October, 1931. 53. Daily Herald, Ref. 29, p. 244. 54. Bassett, op. cit., Ref. 35, p. 293. 55. Bassett, Ref. 35, pp. 217–218. For Labour's electoral prospects since 1930 see Thorpe, op. cit., Ref. 10, pp. 8–9, 46. 56. LPACR 1931, op. cit., Ref. 29, p. 158. Daily Herald, editorial of 26 October 1931. 57. Quoted in the Daily Herald, 11 September, 1931. 58. G. B. Shaw (Ed.) Fabian Essays in Socialism (London: 1889). 59. Daily Herald, 11 September 1931. 60. Daily Herald, 6 October 1931. 61. Quoted in A. Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin: Trade Union Leader (London: Heinemann, 1960), p. 503. 62. R. Samuel, ‘The cult of planning’, New Socialist, 34, January 1986. 63. Daily Herald, 7 October 1931 and 11 September 1931. 64. Taylor, op cit., Ref. 23, pp. 429–430. 65. Williamson, op. cit., Ref. 10, pp. 378–379 and 380. 66. S. H. Beer, Modern British Politics (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), Chapter 5, pp. 126–153 and his ‘The comparative method and British politics’, Comparative Politics, 1, 1 October 1968, pp. 19–36. 67. B. Pimlott, Labour and the Left in the 1930s (London: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 17. 68. G. Orwell, ‘Inside the whale’, 1940, Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, Vol. 1 (Harmondsworth, Penguin Books, 1970) p. 553. 69. On the export-led Swedish economic recovery see H. W. Arndt, Economic Lessons of the 1930s (London: Oxford University Press, 1944); D. Winch ‘Labour politics and economics in the inter-war period: the Swedish comparison’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History, 20, (1970), pp. 8–10; and the contemporaneous comments of G. D. H. Cole and Hugh Gaitskell in M. Cole and C. Smith (Eds), Democratic Sweden (London: Routledge, 1938), who examine trade and banking, respectively. 70. Taylor, op. cit., Ref. 23, p. 430. 71. Bassett, op. cit., Ref. 35, p. 350. Attlee was among those who supported the call for an Emergency Powers Act, which Stafford Cripps put forward at the 1933 Labour conference, to be implemented when Labour next came to power. 72. See M. Newman, Harold Laski: A Political Biography (London: Macmillan, 1993). 73. D. Caute, The Fellow-travellers: The Intellectual Friends of Communism (London: Yale, revised edition, 1988), p. 172. See also S. Samuels, ‘The Left book club’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1(2) (1966), pp. 65–86, p. 68; and J. Lewis, The Left Book Club: An Historical Record (London: Gollancz, 1970). 74. Bassett, op. cit., Ref. 35, pp. 203, 333. 75. M. Cowling, The Impact of Hitler (London: Cambridge University Press 1975), p. 23. 76. F. Williams, Ernest Bevin: Portrait of a Great Englishman (London: Hutchinson, 1952), p. 172. 77. Daily Herald, 2 November 1931. 78. Taylor, op. cit., Ref. 23, p. 431. 79. See D. Caute, op. cit., Ref. 73, passim; T. Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals 1944–56 (Berkeley, CA: University of California, 1992); F. Furet, The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century (London: University of Chicago, 1999), especially pp. 479–505. 80. See B. Jones, op. cit., Ref. 13. 81. Former Communists, such as Doris Lessing and Claude Roy, now remember a deep unease or an inner detachment from their publicly expressed views, though there was no evidence of these doubts at the time. See D. Lessing, Walking in the Dark: Volume 2 of My Autobiography, 1949–62 (London: Flamingo, 1998), p. 52; Claude Roy, Nous (Paris: Gallimard, 1972), p. 388. Jennie Lee admitted in her memoirs that she and Nye Bevan expected during the war that the Communist dictatorship would ‘mellow into a parliamentary democracy’, But it is easy to show that they continued to think so throughout the 1950s. See Callaghan, op. cit., Ref. 2 and J. Lee, My Life with Nye (London: Cape, 1980), p. 86. 82. D. Kertzer, Politics and Symbols: the Italian Communist Party and the Fall of Communism (Yale University Press, 1996). 83. C. Hatier, ‘The Liberal message of Raymond Aron’, European Journal of Political Theory, 2(4) (2003), p. 445. 84. A. Koestler, The Yogi and the Commissar: And Other Essays (London: Cape, 1945), p. 102. 85. Bullock, op. cit., Ref. 61, p. 503. 86. Tribune, editorial, 23 October 1959.