Abstract
In his autobiography Point of Departure, James Cameron bestows on John Strachey the sobriquet of ‘the unlovable Socialist intellectual’.1 Yet with the exception of Harold Laski, who regularly topped the poll for the Labour Party’s National Executive, R. H. Tawney, Michael Foot and perhaps one or two others, intellectuals have been tolerated but rarely loved within the British Labour Movement. There have, nevertheless, been some periods when the intellectual has received a warmer welcome than others and certainly in the aftermath of the First World War ideas and the purveyors of ideas were seen as having an important contribution to make within the ranks of the Labour Party.2 For there existed then, on the part of key figures — Arthur Henderson, Ramsay MacDonald, Sidney Webb — a determination to turn Labour into a national party with a coherent and comprehensive domestic and international programme; a determination which implied not only an infusion of middle-class support but also a remedy for what Henderson in 1918 referred to as the Party’s ‘shortage of brains’.3 In this context middle-class intellectuals were at a premium.4
I conclude that in 1889 we knew our political economy and our political economy was sound.
Sidney Webb, Fabian Essays, 1920 reprint
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Notes
James Cameron, Point of Departure, Experiment in Biography, London, Grafton, 1986, p. 87.
After four years of war and two revolutions in Russia, socialist ideas counted for much more in labour politics than they had before and so did the advice and support of the men who formulated them’, J. M. Winter, Socialism and the Challenge of War, Ideas and Politics in Britain, 1912–18, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974, p. 274.
The new Labour Party Constitution of 1918 also facilitated this influx of intellectuals, see G. D. H. Cole, ‘Recent developments in the British Labour Movement’, American Economic Review, 8, 1918, 413.
Many progressive intellectuals turned hopefully to Labour because they thought the struggle for social democracy could better be conducted in a party whose liberalism was not tainted’, P. Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats, Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. 195.
On this point see also E. Wertheimer, Portrait of the Labour Party, London, 1929, p. 128.
H. Pelling, A Short History of the Labour Party, London, Macmillan, 1968, p. 42.
G. B. Shaw, Report on Fabian Policy, Fabian Tract 70, 1896, p. 11.
G. B. Shaw, ‘The economic basis of socialism’ in Fabian Essays, London, 1889.
See, for example, S. and B. Webb, A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth of Great Britain, London, 1920.
A. Besant, ‘Industry under socialism’, Fabian Essays, p. 192. For a fuller exposition and discussion of Fabian political economy see Noel Thompson, The Market and its Critics, Socialist Political Economy in Nineteenth Century Britain, London, Routledge, 1988.
E. Durbin, ‘Fabian socialism and economic science’, in B. Pimlott (ed.) Fabian Essays in Socialist Thought, London, Heinemann, 1984, p. 42.
W. H. Greenleaf, The British Political Tradition, Vol. 1, The Rise of Collectivism, London, Routledge, 1983, p. 140, It was… the Great War… and its aftermath that really familiarised people with the idea of planned action on a large scale to achieve given communal goals.’
D. H. Aldcroft, From Versailles to Wall Street, 1919–29, Harmondsworth, Pelican, 1987, p. 38.
See, for example, E. M. H. Lloyd, Experiments in State Control in. the War Office and the Ministry of Food, Oxford, Clarendon, 1920, and Stabilisation, An Economic Policy for Consumers and Producers, London, 1923.
S. Webb, Introduction to the Fabian Essays, London, 1920, p. i.
For a discussion of the influence of guild socialist ideas within the ILP see R. E. Dowse, Left in the Centre, the ILP, 1883–1940, London, Longman, 1966, pp. 67 ff.
S. T. Glass, The Responsible Society, the Ideas of the English Guild Socialists, London, Longman, 1966, p. 48.
After 1922–3, while guild socialism ‘still retained a place lin socialist thinking]… greater attention was paid to more immediate measures for dealing with unemployment’, A. Oldfield, ’The Independent Labour Party and planning, 1920–26’, International Review of Social History, 21, 1976, p. 11;
see also M. Beer, A History of British Socialism, London, Allen and Unwin, 1940, Vol. 2, p. 407.
See S. D. Macintyre, A Proletarian Science, Marxism in Britain, 1917–33, Cambridge University Press, 1980, p. 221.
See, for example, N. Ablett, Easy Outlines of Economics, Oxford, 1919
M. Starr, A Worker Looks at Economics, London, 1925
M. Dobb, The Development of Modern Capitalism, an Outline Course for Classes and Study Circles, London, 1922.
In typically Webbian terms Labour and the New Social Order pro claimed the end of the capitalist system and its replacement by a new, co-operative, planned, equitable, democratic, social order’, A. Booth and M. Pack, Employment, Capital and Employment Policy, Great Britain, 1918–39, Oxford, Blackwell, 1985, p. 8;
see also R. Miliband, Parliamentary Socialism, a Study in the Politics of Labour, London, Merlin, 1972, p. 62.
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© 1993 Noel Thompson
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Thompson, N. (1993). Political Economy and the Labour Party: the Post-war Period. In: John Strachey. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377486_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377486_1
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