Introduction

That the Labour Party emerged in 1900 from the coalescence of trade unions, socialist societies and the Independent Labour Party explains much about the political economy that it subsequently articulated. For the new economic order that the Party sought to construct was one informed by that rich diversity of aspirations and ideals which one would expect from a Party compounded of such disparate elements. From the outset Labour was a party upon whose thinking differing political economies left their imprint. For the early Labour Party, far removed from the reality of political power, this was something that posed few problems. Taking the intellectual influences cited by, and evident in, the writing of party members, there was clearly a place for Morris in both his Marxian and Ruskinian mode; for aesthetic and spiritual as well as more narrowly material aspirations – the soul of man was to be cared for as well as his labouring body; a place for Tawney and the moral economy of Christian socialism as well as the soulless and technocratic materialism of the Webbs; for a crude pseudo-Marxian conception of the working class as mere mediators of historical forces making for the creation of socialism, as well as one which saw them as the active and conscious agent of historical progress. There was a place for those, such as the guild socialists, who looked to the decentralization of economic power through the workers’ control of industries and enterprises, as well as those, such as the Fabians, who had little truck with notions of workplace autonomy and industrial democracy. Sometimes the workers were conceived of as the passive beneficiaries of a technocratic organization of economic life and sometimes as active shapers of their own material future. For some thinkers they were to wield power but for others merely elect or appoint those who wielded it on their behalf. For some they were to acquire power politically, for others by way of industrial conflict and the erosion of managerial prerogatives.