Abstract
The decade after 1945 saw a substantial improvement in the living standards of the greater part of the British population. Full or near full employment prevailed for most of the period, real wages rose and the range and volume of consumer goods upon which to spend that rising income increased markedly. The regional distribution of this post-war prosperity may have been uneven and unemployment blackspots still existed, particularly in the Celtic periphery, but the rapid growth in the volume of world trade went far to revive those traditional export industries whose stagnation and decline had been at the root of the inter-war depression. A social mode of production which, in that period, had manifestly lost its dynamism; which had been characterised by enormous material waste, human impoverishment and macroeconomic instability; a mode of production which had, in short, displayed many of those characteristics which Marxists had traditionally predicted would distinguish capitalism’s death throes, emerged seemingly transformed and rejuvenated from the crucible of the Second World War. Once again capitalism evinced that capacity to expand the productive forces available to mankind which Marx had assumed was exclusive to the system’s nascent phase. Capitalist man had never had it so good and it seemed, courtesy of Keynes and Beveridge, he was destined to have it even better.
Without him one cannot even be wrong: one cannot enter the discussion. But with him one can still be very wrong. He is the beginning.
The Abbé on Marx in J. Strachey, The Frontiers, 1952
He is particularly tough with the devotees (of whom we have many in the Labour Party) of the doctrine of no abstract principles like Socialism but make-it-up-as-you-go-along.
Ian Mikardo on Strachey’s Contemporary Capitalism, Tribune, 13 July 1956
Marxism is a marvellously flexible method. That is what it should be: what it has become in the hands of the communists is a cast iron system.
J. Strachey, Contemporary Capitalism, 1956
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Notes
R. Crossman, ‘Socialist values in a changing civilisation’, Fabian Tract, 286, 1950, 11.
Socialist Union, Twentieth Century Socialism, the economy of to-morrow, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1956, p. 151.
M. Cole and R. Crossman, ‘Introduction’, New Fabian Essays, London, Turnstile Press, 1952, p. xi.
S. Haseler, The Gaitskellites, revisionism in the British Labour Party, 1951–64, London, Macmillan, 1969, pp. 81–2;
see also S. Haseler, The Death of British Democracy, a study, London, Eleb, 1976, pp. 43, 135, for similar contentions.
K. Middlemas, Power, Competition and the State, Britain in search of balance, 1940–61, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1986, p. 330;
J. Hinton, A History of the British Labour Movement, Thetford, Wheatsheaf, 1983, p. 183; G. Foote also seems to suggest a similarity of intent on the part of Strachey and Crosland, as regards their 1956 texts, see The Political Thought of the Labour Party, 2nd edn, Beckenham, Croom Helm, 1986, p. 210.
C. A. R. Crosland, The Future of Socialism, London, Cape, 1967, p. 42.
The seminal texts here are A. Berle and A. Means, The Modern Cor poration and Private Property, New York, Commercial Clearing House, 1932
J. Burnham. The Managerial Revolution, what is happening in the world, New York, Day, 1941.
J. Strachey, Contemporary Capitalism, London, Gollancz, 1956, p. 235.
J. Strachey, Contemporary Capitalism, p. 239; J. Strachey, ‘Marxism revisited IV’, New Statesman, 23 May 1953, 603.
J. Strachey, ‘The Ministry of Fair Shares’, New Statesman, 29 December 1951, 751.
G. D. H. Cole, Socialist Economics, London, Gollancz, 1950, p. 89.
A. Bevan, ‘Democratic values’, Fabian Tract, 282, London, 1950, p. 14.
K. Coates, Labour in Power?, London, Longman, 1986, p. 177.
K. O. Morgan, Labour in Power, 1945–51, Oxford, Clarendon, 1984, p. 57.
R. Hinden, ‘Review of Contemporary Capitalism’, Socialist Commentary, September 1956, 28.
A. Bevan, In Place of Fear, London, Heinemann, 1952.
J. Strachey, ‘Has capitalism changed?’ in S. Tsuru (ed.), Has Capitalism Changed? Tokyo, Iwanami Shoten, 1961, p. 69. The article was written in 1958.
J. Strachey, ‘The new revisionist’, New Statesman, 6 October 1956, 398. For Strachey its other sin was its parochialism ’because it casts no glance outside our cosy shores at the great, fierce, un-Fabianised world beyond’, ibid.
I. M. D. Little, ‘Anthony Crosland’, in The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economic Thought (eds), J. Eatwell, M. Milgate and P. Newman, 4 Vols, London, Macmillan, 1987, Vol. 1, p. 726; see also
D. Lipsey, ‘Crosland’s socialism’ in D. Lipsey (ed.), The Socialist Agenda, Crosland’s Legacy, London, Cape, 1981, p. 21, who accuses Crosland of ’a certain over-optimism’ in The Future of Socialism.
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© 1993 Noel Thompson
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Thompson, N. (1993). Contemporary Capitalism, 1945–56. In: John Strachey. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230377486_10
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