ABSTRACT
If in the interwar period socialist political economists were forced to grapple with the consequences of economic depression and the limitations it imposed upon socialist advance, in the two decades after 1945 they had to confront the theoretical and practical difficulties posed by the growing material prosperity and rapidly rising living standards of Western industrial nations. As one writer put it, ‘the capitalist system having accepted and digested the implications of Keynesianism and the reforms of the Attlee administrations has once again proved that it can operate efficiently’.1 If in the 1930s the Labour Party had to come to terms with being in the political wilderness and the business of finding a way out, in the immediate postwar period it had to cope with its conquest of political power and its success in implementing a significant part of the programme it had presented to the electorate in 1945. As Richard Crossman wrote in 1950, ‘All that talk about “capturing the bastions of capitalism” and then nobody resisted . . . Those who manned the defences of Jericho could not have been more surprised than those socialists who saw the walls of capitalism tumble down after a short blast on the Fabian trumpet.’2 Or, as Crosland saw it, the things the Webbs had cared for had all been done. In the light of all this, in view of the altered economic and political circumstances they confronted, many socialist thinkers believed it imperative that they rethink and revise the political economy to which they adhered. In particular they considered it necessary to reassess the changed and changing nature of British capitalism, for only then would it be possible to consider what had been achieved and what, for the future, might prove feasible and effective lines of socialist advance.
