ABSTRACT

In February 1977 Anthony Crosland, Foreign Secretary in James Callaghan’s Government, died suddenly of a stroke at the early age of 58. He had been successively Secretary of State for Education, President of the Board of Trade, Environment Secretary and finally Foreign Secretary in the Labour Governments of the 1960s and 1970s. However, he was also the pre-eminent Labour political and social theorist of the post-war world and indeed had published a book, Socialism Now,1 on the prospects for socialism under a Labour Government just before Labour came back to power in the 1974 election. He was, however, much better known for his path-breaking book The Future of Socialism,2 which had first been published in 1956. This book defended a revisionist form of social democracy against the Marxist left. It argued that in the post-war world capitalism had fundamentally been changed, that nationalisation or the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange articulated in Clause 4 of the Labour Party’s constitution should be seen as a means to socialist goals and not an end in itself. The basic socialist goal was the creation of a more equal society embodying social justice in the distribution of resources, and opportunities. These basic goals could be achieved by means other than nationalisation and planning. They could indeed be achieved by the use of Keynesian demand management and the political will to improve the position of the worst off. He put the point pithily in a Fabian Pamphlet on Social Democracy in Europe,3 where he argues that the fundamental aim of socialism was to improve the relative position of the worst-off members of society while maintaining the absolute position of the better off. Growth was the way to achieve these goals. The absolute position of the better off had to be maintained in order to produce the political coalition necessary to vote the Labour Party into office. It is true, of course, to say that the Labour Party at this time had not had its Bad Godesberg moment as the SPD in Germany had in 1959, which led the SPD to turn its back explicitly on a Marxist analysis of society and to adopt a revisionist stand. Indeed when Hugh Gaitskell as the then leader of the Party had tried to change Clause 4 following the 1959 election defeat he had been unsuccessful. Nevertheless it was the revisionist position that triumphed in practice and the Labour Governments of the 1960s and 1970s more or less until Crosland’s death adopted broadly speaking a revisionist approach while at the

same time not explicitly repudiating elements in its own ideological formation. So, for example, by 1968 even such a quintessentially figure of the left as Michael Foot accepted what can be called the revisionist/Croslandite position as the way forward for Labour.