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‘The new Messiah of my life’: Anthony Crosland's reading of Lucien Laurat's Marxism and Democracy (1940)

2012; Routledge; Volume: 17; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13569317.2012.676863

1469-9613

Catherine Ellis,

French Historical and Cultural Studies

Abstract This article explores Anthony Crosland's rejection of Marxism in the early 1940s through his reading of Lucien Laurat's Marxism and Democracy (1940). In correspondence with his friend Philip Williams, Crosland commented in unusual depth on Laurat's book. Using this correspondence alongside other contemporary writing, this article argues that Laurat's ideas helped Crosland untangle his own early thoughts on the relationship between Marxism and democratic socialism and establish the limitations of Marxist analysis for contemporary conditions. These themes contributed to an interpretation of modern capitalism that became central to Crosland's post-war writing and the emergence of ‘revisionist’ socialism in Britain. Furthermore, the Left Book Club's translation of Laurat's book and continued parallels between Crosland's and Laurat's analyses in the 1950s open the possibility of greater connections between continental European and ‘revisionist’ British socialism. Acknowledgements Research for this article was supported by the Association of Commonwealth Universities in the United Kingdom and Ryerson University. I thank Lord Plant of Highfield, Susan Crosland and Elizabeth Al Qadhi for access to private collections of books and papers. I am also grateful to anonymous referees, Matthew Ellis and participants in the Southern Ontario Modern British History Seminar for comments on earlier versions of the work. Notes 1. Nuffield College Library, Oxford (hereafter NCL), Williams Papers, 5/1, Williams to Crosland, June 1940. 2. British Library of Political and Economic Science, London (hereafter BLPES), Crosland Papers, 3/26/i, Crosland to Williams, ‘Begun Feb. 19th [1941]’. David Reisman's study dates this letter ‘19 February 1942’ but the original letter does not include a year and 1941 is more likely in the context of other correspondence with Williams. Jefferys' biography of Crosland also dates the letter to 1941. See David Reisman, Crosland's Future: Opportunity and Outcome (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 205, n. 36; Kevin Jefferys, Anthony Crosland: A New Biography (London: Politico's, 2000), p. 234, note 9. 3. BLPES, Crosland Papers, 3/26/i, Crosland to Williams, ‘Begun Feb. 19th [1941]’; Susan Crosland, Tony Crosland (London: Jonathan Cape, 1982), p. 18. 4. Crosland, BLPES, Crosland Papers, 3/26/i, Crosland to Williams, ‘Begun Feb. 19th [1941]’; Susan Crosland, p. 11; Reisman, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 12. 5. Andrew Thorpe, ‘Introduction’, in Paul Corthorn and Jonathan Davis (Eds) The Labour Party and the Wider World (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2008), p. 2. 6. Peter Clarke, ‘The social democratic theory of the class struggle’, in Jay Winter (Ed.) The Working Class in Modern British History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 7; Stephen Brooke, Labour's War: The Labour Party during the Second World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 270–273. 7. Clarke, Peter Clarke, p. 18; see also Jose Harris, ‘Labour's social and political thought’, in Duncan Tanner et al. (Eds) Labour's First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 12, 34–35; David Howell, MacDonald's Party: Labour Identities and Crisis, 1922–1931 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 380–403. Ross McKibbin points to more structural and cultural reasons for the failure of Marxism to take hold in the British working class: Ross McKibbin, ‘Why was there no Marxism in Great Britain?’ in Ross McKibbin (Ed.) The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain 1880–1950 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), pp. 1–41. 8. Richard Toye, The Labour Party and the Planned Economy, 1931–1951 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press for the Royal Historical Society, 2003), pp. 11–13; John Shepherd, George Lansbury: At the Heart of Old Labour (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 29, 34–38; Marc Stears, ‘Guild socialism and ideological diversity on the British left, 1914–1926’, Journal of Political Ideologies 3(3) (1998), pp. 289–305. 9. R. H. Tawney, Equality (London: George Allen & Unwin, [1931] 1964), p. 49. 10. Toye, op. cit., Ref. 8, pp. 46–64; E. F. M. Durbin, The Politics of Democratic Socialism (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1940), especially Parts III and V; Elizabeth Durbin, New Jerusalems: The Labour Party and the Economics of Democratic Socialism (London: Routledge, 1985), Chapter 8; Labour Party Annual Conference Report, 1937. 11. Howell, op. cit., Ref. 7, pp. 226–228; Paul Ward, ‘Preparing for the People's War: Labour and patriotism in the 1930s’, Labour History Review, 67(2) (2002), pp. 174–176. On British Marxism in the interwar period, see Stuart Macintyre, A Proletarian Science: Marxism in Britain, 1917–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 12. Even in the mid-1990s, Tony Blair felt it necessary to insist that the party had ‘never been Marxist’. Dick Pels, ‘Socialism between fact and value: From Tony Blair to Hendrik de Man and Back’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 7(3) (2002), p. 282; John Callaghan, ‘British Labour's turn to socialism in 1931’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 14(2) (2009), pp. 115, 129–130; Geoffrey Foote, The Labour Party's Political Thought: A History (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1986), p. 24; John Callaghan, ‘The Left and the “unfinished revolution”: Bevanites and Soviet Russia in the 1950s’, Contemporary British History, 15(3) (2001), pp. 63–82. 13. Brooke, op. cit., Ref. 6, p. 273. 14. Studies of Crosland's thought include Jefferys, op.cit., Ref. 2; David Reisman, Anthony Crosland: The Mixed Economy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997); Reisman, op.cit., Ref. 2; Raymond Plant, ‘Social democracy’, in David Marquand and Anthony Seldon (Eds) The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain (London: Fontana Press, 1996), pp. 165–194. 15. Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour People: Leaders and Lieutenants (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 34. Jackson's study contains virtually no non-British references. Ben Jackson, Equality and the British Left: A Study in Progressive Political Thought, 1900–64 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), especially Chapter 4. 16. Callaghan, op. cit., Ref. 12 (2009), pp. 115–132; Jonathan Davis, ‘Labour's political thought: the Soviet influence in the interwar years’, in Corthorn and Davis (Eds) op.cit., Ref. 5, pp. 64–85; Stephen Brooke, ‘Atlantic crossing? American views of capitalism and British socialist thought, 1932–1960’, Twentieth Century British History, 2 (1991), pp. 111–117. 17. Toye, op. cit., Ref. 8, pp. 56–61, 69; Daniel Ritschel, The Politics of Planning: The Debate on Economic Planning in Britain in the 1930s (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), Chapter 7; Elizabeth Durbin, New Jerusalems: The Labour Party and the Economics of Democratic Socialism (London: Routledge, 1985), pp. 171–174, 257–258; Jacques Leruez, Economic Planning and Politics in Britain, trans. Martin Harrison (London: Martin Robinson, 1975), pp. 4–6; Callaghan, op. cit., Ref. 12 (2001), pp. 63–82. 18. For example, Mark Wickham-Jones, ‘Missed opportunities: British social democracy and the Rehn Model, 1951–1964’, in H. Milner and E. Wadensjö (Eds), Gösta Rehn, the Swedish model and labour market policies (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), pp. 284–292; Glen O'Hara, ‘“This is what growth does”: British views of the European economies in the prosperous “Golden Age” of 1951–73’, Journal of Contemporary History, 44 (2009), pp. 697–718; Michael Kenny, The First New Left: British Intellectuals After Stalin (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1995), passim; Radhika Desai, Intellectuals and Socialism: ‘Social Democrats’ and the Labour Party (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1994), Chapter 2; Harvey J. Kaye, The British Marxist Historians: An Introductory Analysis (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), passim; Bryan D. Palmer, ‘Reasoning rebellion: E. P. Thompson, British Marxist historians, and the making of dissident political mobilization’, Labour/Le Travail, 50 (2002), available at http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/llt/50/palmer.html. 19. Davis, op. cit., Ref. 16, p. 64. 20. G. D. H. Cole, ‘Introduction’, in Henri de Man (Ed.), Planned Socialism: The Plan du Travail of the Belgian Labour Party, trans. and ed. G. D. H. Cole (London: New Fabian Research Bureau and Victor Gollancz, 1935), p. 5. 21. Stefan Berger, ‘Herbert Morrison's London Labour Party in the interwar years and the SDP: Problems of transferring German socialist practices to Britain’, European Review of History—Revue européenne d'Histoire, 12(2) (2005), pp. 291–306; Margaret I. (Postgate) Cole and Charles Smith (Eds), Democratic Sweden: A Volume of Studies Prepared by Members of the New Fabian Research Bureau (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, [1939] 1970). 22. Ruth Dudley Edwards, Victor Gollancz: A Biography (London: Victor Gollancz, 1987), pp. 228–238, 257; Stuart Samuels, ‘The Left Book Club’, Journal of Contemporary History, 1(2) (1966), pp. 67–69; Gordon Barrick Neavill, ‘Victor Gollancz and the Left Book Club’, Library Quarterly, 41(3) (1971), p. 205. 23. Available at http://www.gla.ac.uk/services/specialcollections/collectionsa-z/leftbookclub/ (accessed 18 August 2011). 24. Lucien Laurat, Marxism and Democracy, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (London: Victor Gollancz/Left Book Club, 1940), pp. 7, 15; Branko Lazitch and Milorad Drachkovitch (Eds), Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1986), pp. 397–398; Georges Lefranc, ‘Le courant planiste dans le mouvement ouvrier français de 1933 à 1936’, Le Mouvement social, 54 (1966), p. 72; Angel Pino, ‘Lucien Laurat et la «formation scientifique» des militants’, Les Dossiers des sciences de l'éducation, 16 (2006), pp. 104–106. 25. Lucien Laurat, ‘Mémoires d'un planiste’, Les Etudes sociales et syndicales, 120 (septembre 1965), p. 20; Gerd-Rainer Horn, European Socialists Respond to Fascism: Ideology, Activism and Contingency in the 1930s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 86; Richard F. Kuisel, Capitalism and the State in Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 108–109. 26. Laurat outlined his ideas in Economie planée contre économie enchaînée (1932)—A Planned Economy or an Economy in Chains; Laurat, Lucien Laurat, p. 20. 27. Laurat, Lucien Laurat, pp. 22–23; John Garraty, ‘Unemployment during the great depression’, Labor History, 17(2) (1976), pp. 139–140; Lefranc, op. cit., Ref. 24, pp. 84, 87. On the relationship of de Man's ideas to Marxism and ethical socialism, see Pels, op. cit., Ref. 12, pp. 285–286. 28. Laurat, Lucien Laurat, p. 20. 29. Although including the word ‘democracy’ in the translated title might have been reassuring to some English readers, Laurat's original title could be literally, and more accurately, translated as Has Marxism Failed? From the Marxism of Marx to the Marxism of Today. 30. Crosland, op. cit., Ref. 3, pp. 11–12; Jefferys, op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. 5–10. 31. BLPES, Crosland Papers, 3/26/i, Crosland to Williams, 5 July 1940. 32. Jefferys, op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. 24–26. 33. BLPES, Crosland Papers, 3/26/i, Crosland to Williams, 5 July 1940; Crosland, Tony Crosland, op. cit., Ref. 3, p. 13. 34. NCL, Williams Papers, 5/1, Williams to Crosland, June 1940. 35. BLPES, Crosland Papers, 3/26/i, Crosland to Williams, 19 January [1941]. 36. BLPES, Crosland Papers, 3/26/i, Crosland to Williams, ‘Begun Feb. 19th [1941]’; E. F. M. Durbin, op. cit., Ref. 10, Part III. 37. BLPES, Crosland Papers, 3/26/i, Crosland to Williams, 19 January [1941]. 38. NCL, Williams Papers, 5/1, Williams to Crosland, 2 February 1941. 39. Laurat, op. cit., Ref. 24, p. 40. 40. Laurat, Laurat, p. 42. 41. Laurat, Laurat, p. 106. 42. Laurat, Laurat, p. 154. 43. Laurat, Laurat, pp. 46, 36–37. 44. Laurat, Laurat, p. 141. 45. BLPES, Crosland Papers, 3/26/i, Crosland to Williams, ‘Begun Feb. 19th [1941]’. 46. BLPES, Crosland Papers, 3/26/i, Crosland to Williams, ‘Begun Feb. 19th [1941]’. Crosland quoted from Laurat, op. cit., Ref. 24, p. 207 [Crosland's emphasis]. 47. BLPES, Crosland Papers, 3/26/i, Crosland to Williams, 19 January [1941]; Reisman, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 25. 48. Laurat, op. cit., Ref. 24, p. 182 [original italics]. 49. Laurat, Laurat, pp. 184–185. 50. Laurat, Laurat, pp. 192–193. 51. Laurat, Laurat, p. 193. 52. Laurat, Laurat, pp. 230–231. 53. Laurat, Laurat, p. 214. 54. Laurat, Laurat, pp. 225, 220, 232. 55. For a list of Laurat's publications, see Pino, op. cit., Ref. 24, p. 113. 56. Laurat is not mentioned in Crosland's post-war publications and his works were not among the collection of Crosland's books kept by his widow, who told the author that she had kept virtually all of her late husband's academic book collection. Author's interview with Susan Crosland at Adderbury, Oxon, 5 June 1995. 57. Reisman, op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. 6, 16. 58. BLPES, Crosland Papers, 13/38, Anthony Crosland, ‘Is this Socialism?’ Fabian Autumn Lecture [n.d., November 1951]. 59. Laurat, op. cit., Ref. 24, pp. 182–184; Crosland, BLPES, Crosland Papers, pp. 6–7. 60. Crosland, BLPES, Crosland Papers, p. 7; Laurat, ibid., p. 231. 61. Lucien Laurat, Problèmes actuels du Socialisme (Paris: Les Iles d'Or, 1955), pp. 111, 122–123. Translations from this work are the author's own. 62. Crosland, op. cit., Ref. 58, p. 7. 63. Laurat, op. cit., Ref. 24, p. 191. 64. Laurat, Laurat, p. 193; Crosland, op. cit., Ref. 58, p. 10. Crosland still employed the term ‘statism’ in New Fabian Essays (1952) but rejected the entire naming endeavour in The Future of Socialism. The themes of New Fabian Essays and ‘Is this Socialism’ were in part echoes of Crosland's paper at the Fabian Society Oxford conference on ‘Problems Ahead’ in October 1950, entitled ‘The Nature of Capitalist Crisis (if there is one)’. 65. C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism (New York: Schocken Books, [1956] 1967), pp. 53–57; David Reisman, ‘Crosland's Future: The missing chapter on Burnham's Managerial Revolution’, Research in the History of Economic Thought and Methodology, archival supplement 6 (1997), pp. 207–227; Catherine Ellis, ‘“Letting it slip”: The Labour Party and the “Mystical Halo” of nationalization, 1951–1964’, Contemporary British History, 26, 1 (2012), pp. 52–56. 66. Jacques Leruez, Economic Planning and Politics in Britain, trans. Martin Harrison (London: Martin Robinson, 1975), pp. 42, 86–89; Robert Gildea, France Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 97–99. 67. Laurat, op. cit., Ref. 61, pp. 141–143. 68. James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, [1941] 1945). 69. E. F. M. Durbin, op. cit., Ref. 10, pp. 125–128. 70. R. H. S. Crossman, Socialist Values in a Changing Civilisation, Fabian Tract No. 286 (London: Fabian Society, 1951), p. 12. 71. R. H. S. Crossman, ‘Towards a Philosophy of Socialism’, in R. H. S. Crossman (Ed.), New Fabian Essays (London: Dent, [1952] 1970), pp. 12, 27; R. H. S. Crossman, ‘Planning for Freedom’ (1956), in R. H. S. Crossman (Ed.) Planning for Freedom (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1965), p. 65; R. H. S. Crossman, Socialism and the New Despotism, Fabian Tract no. 298 (London: Fabian Society, 1956), pp. 1, 5. The Labour Left was often ambivalent towards the Soviet Union as a model in the 1950s. For contrasting recent views, see Anthony Arblaster, ‘The Old Left’, in Raymond Plant et al. (Eds), The Struggle for Labour's Soul: Understanding Labour's Political Thought Since 1945 (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 10–14; Callaghan, op. cit., Ref. 12 (2001). 72. For example, Crosland, op. cit., Ref. 65, pp. 127, 130; Lawrence Black, ‘“The bitterest enemies of communism”: Labour revisionists, Atlanticism and the Cold War’, Contemporary British History, 15 (2001), p. 29. 73. Crosland, For example, Crosland Neither the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin nor the newer Deutsche Nationalbibliothek catalogues include a German translation of any works by Crosland; likewise, there are no French translations in the catalogue of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (online catalogues accessed 20 October 2010). 74. On the utopian image of post-war Scandinavian welfare states that appealed to socialists such as Crosland, see Mary Hilson, The Nordic Model: Scandinavia Since 1945 (London: Reaktion Books, 2008), pp. 87–115. 75. Private Collection, John Strachey Papers, Box 20, correspondence between Strachey, Philip and Hilary Rubinstein, July 1957. Several of Strachey's books were published in French, including The End of Empire (1959): John Strachey, La Fin de l'impérialisme, trad. L. M. Mitchell (Paris: R. Laffont, 1961). 76. Kenny, op. cit., Ref. 18, p. 185. New Left Review frequently featured articles by continental European contributors, in contrast to British ‘revisionist’ journals such as Socialist Commentary. 77. C. A. R. Crosland, ‘Socialism now’, in Dick Leonard (Ed.) Socialism Now (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974), p. 43, quoted in Reisman, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 202; see also Nicholas Ellison, Egalitarian Thought and Labour Politics: Retreating Visions (London: LSE/Routledge, 1994), p. 194. 78. BLPES, Crosland Papers, 16/1, Notebook entry 2 April 1946. 79. Crosland, op. cit., Ref. 65, pp. 2–3. 80. ‘La différence essentielle réside dans la structure même du capitalisme contemporain, qui n'a plus rien de commun avec celle de l'époque de Marx’. Laurat, op. cit., Ref. 61, p. 93. 81. Author's interview with Mrs. S. Crosland at Adderbury, Oxon., 5 June 1995. Crosland read particularly voraciously during his military training. He told Williams in February 1941 that he had much more time to read in army camps than at Oxford, and he had completed some 45 books in the previous three and a half months at an officers' camp in Barmouth, North Wales. BLPES, Crosland Papers, 3/26/i, Crosland to Williams, ‘Begun Feb. 19th [1941]’. 82. Kevin Jefferys' biography and David Reisman's comprehensive analysis of Crosland's thought pass only briefly over Laurat, while Ben Jackson makes no reference to Laurat in his recent discussion of Marxism in British social democratic thought in the 1930s; Jefferys, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 14; Reisman, op. cit., Ref. 2, pp. 11–13, 21–23; Jackson, op.cit., Ref. 15, pp. 93–111. 83. BLPES, Crosland Papers, 3/26/i, Crosland to Williams, ‘Begun Feb. 19th [1941]’. 84. Reisman, op. cit., Ref. 2, p. 6.