Modified Capitalism, Modified Marxism, Modified Imperialism, 1956–63

Abstract

In most important respects Strachey’s view of the nature of contemporary capitalism, the extent to which it could be modified and his belief that modification must lead on ultimately to a socialist transformation of society, did not alter fundamentally after 1956. The modification of capitalism was to be effected in a variety of ways. The inherent instability of capitalism was to be rectified by maintaining aggregate demand at a level sufficient to ensure full employment using both a redistributive fiscal policy and state expenditure. Further, and in contrast to Crosland, Strachey continued to insist on the need for the extension of public ownership. Thus in 1958 we find Strachey writing that ‘it [was] only as and when capitalism is progressively modified and social ownership encroaches increasingly on private ownership that a sufficiently equitable distribution of income can be achieved.¹ It should also be noted that while this was written in 1958 Strachey allowed the piece which contained these views to be published in 1961 without amendment. Also in The Great Awakening, a series of five lectures delivered in Singapore in the spring of 1961, Strachey once again emphasised the need for ‘modifying capitalism in the socialist direction’ if economic stability and economic progress were to be guaranteed.² It is difficult, therefore, to agree with Newman that by the publication of The End of Empire (1959), Strachey had ‘a more complacent attitude to the capitalist economy’.³

I think the relations of production, as Marx would have called them, must be increasingly socialistic to meet the technical way we see things.

J. Strachey to Frank Kermode, 26 June 1963

We had better be very careful about calling Marxism unscientific. So it may be, but it is not nearly so unscientific as an incoherent jumble of social prejudices without any guiding hypothesis … and that is only too often the only possession of the critics of Marxism.

J. Strachey, The Strangled Cry, 1962