Political Commentary
BY CHARLES CURRAN IWANT to draw attention to a political portent. It is a new book called Twentieth Century Socialism* which has been produced by Socialist Union—the group of intellectuals whose most prominent member is Professor Arthur Lewis of Manchester University, and who are com- monly supposed to be Mr. Gaitskell's household troops. It is the first full-scale attempt to provide a new Socialist pro- gramme based on egalitarianism, and to exhibit its attractions in vote-getting terms.
The need for a new programme is indeed acute. For the lamps of Socialism are going out all over Britain. If they are to be lit again in Mr. Gaitskell's lifetime a fresh supply of gas must be found. The wells of theory have dried up; nobody any longer believes the founding fathers' forecasts that capitalism must crack under the weight of increasing misery. Worse, the well of tears has dried up too. Full bellies, it is feared, are here to stay. The only barefoot children left are inside Mr. Harold Wilson's head. Outside it, the Daily Herald advertisement manager deafens the capitalists with his unending boasts about the richness of his readers, their Monte Cristo spending-power, the width and depth of their capacity for consumer goods. Now that one household in five has a motor-car, and one in three a television set, is it any good going on telling the toilers to rise in their rags and nationalise the means of production, distribution and exchange?
Socialist Union replies : No good at all. Therefore it recom- mends the party to throw the classic formula overboard. As substitute, it offers (I quote from page 144) 'the repudiation of class, the demand for fair shares in the distribution of the good things of life, the longing for a society in which people, no longer divided by the barriers of privilege, can be conscious of their common humanity.' It says earlier (on page 29), 'What Socialists wish to avoid are the extravagant differences of income which divide people into classes unable to mix on equal terms. The nearer we come to a society in which income is not a barrier to a common mode of life, the nearer we approach fair shares.' (Responsibility for this prose must rest with the authors of the , book, who are named as Mr. Allan Flanders, Senior Lecturer in Industrial Relations at Oxford University, and Rita Hinden.) The question is, 'Why does Socialism need a new p'rogramme at all?'
It is needed because the classic formula has become electorally repugnant. Because the voters now realise that if you enact that formula in full, you get slavery. When the State owns everything, controls everything, decides every man's task, fixes every man's income, to say that it acts in the name of the people is a mockery. It is a juggernaut with a deaf driver. The authors of Socialist Union recognise this explicitly. Hence their alternative programme of classless equality. But they fail altogether to recognise that this alternative could not be achieved—much less maintained after it had been achieved—without a concentration of power just as vast, and just as repellent, as in the classic formula. I find this failure the most remarkable thing about their book.
To wipe out all class 'distinctions in Britain; to bring all privilege to an end; to turn us into an egalitarian society— do Mr. Flanders and his colleagues seriously suppose that this could be done without a gigantic exercise of inflexible authority? Once done, do they seriously suppose that it could be maintained for a single month unless inflexible authority stood guard over it with unsleeping vigilance? Apparently they do. I wonder in what sort of private world these intel- lectuals dwell, that they know so little of human behaviour and human appetites. They are like a bevy of well-meaning maiden aunts discussing trade barriers with the Messina brothers, and pondering the difficulties—grave, no doubt, but not insuperable—presented by exchange controls. There has been no such innocence since Eve answered the serpent.
Human beings, with their wide variations in capacity, talent, character, vitality, tend to differentiate always and all the time. In any civilised State there is necessarily a powerful and continuous drive away from uniformity. For civilfsation itself is differentiation. To suppose that this drive can exist without expressing itself in widespread economic and social disparities is mere naïveté. To suppose that it can be curbed without despotism is mere delusion. people, to achieve a superior status, to endow your wife and your children with privileges—this desire in one form or another, is probably the most powerful of all human appetites. It is as basic as the sexual instinct, of which indeed it is an extension. It is creative for a nation, as the sexual instinct is for an individual. It can be transmuted; the hereditary owner- ship of land can be replaced by mink coats and diamonds, or by titles and decorations, or by educational endowment policies. But it will endure so long as men are what they are. It will die only when the biologists breed a new kind of species. To suppose that it can be eradicated by anything short of Mustapha Mond's test-tubes must surely be the maddest dream that ever entered the head of a Socialist intellectual.
But the Socialist Union authors want to abolish it, and to turn all Britain into a sort of universal council estate, where everybody has more or less the same income, upbringing, habits; where everybody speaks with the same accent, goes to the same schools, eats the same brand of mousetrap cheese, repeats the same catch-phrases picked up from the same tele- vision comedian; where there are no idle rich, no leisured eccentrics, no privileged groups, no class distinctions; where it is merely mass-man, unlimited. It would be gross under- statement to call it the greatest boredom for the greatest number.
The innocence of all this turns into something uglier when you come to consider the electoral aspects of classless egali- tarianism. For in a Britain without poverty, who wants equality? Let us suppose—it is not a very large supposition— that our national standard of life rises to the point where the luxuries of 1956 are available to everybody. Would it be a hardship, or an injustice, if, while everybody had plenty. some people had more than plenty? If £3,000 a year, say, were the minimum income, would it be monstrous if sonic people had £30,000, or £300,000?
The egalitarians, apparently, think it would be monstrous. Ask them why, and they reply with that noble bromide 'social justice.' But this is merely a politician's periphrasis for 'envy.' Social Justice is a semantic fraud from the same stable as People's Democracy. It means that when everybody has' plenty it is right to hate people who have more. Even though the most dim-witted citizen, whose mental endowments barely enable him to mark a football coupon, enjoys a motor-car standard of life, egalitarianism will tell him to revolt at the polls because his car is a Morris, and other people have Bentleys. But why should he care?
Does anybody in Britain except a neurotic feel grief, or anger, or burning bitterness when he reflects that the United States is a richer country than ours? Does Mr. Flanders lie awake at night grinding his teeth because he is not as well- endowed as Miss Marilyn Monroe?
In the past the. Socialist movement has flourished by exploiting the wrongs of the poor. They were real and crying wrongs. Now they have disappeared. In order to keep the movement alive, the Left intellectuals want to use envy and jealousy as electoral substitutes for poverty and hardship. That seems to me the conclusion implicit in Twentieth Century' Socialism; and as a Tory I welcome it. For apart from the maladjusted voter, its electoral utility in contemporary Britain will be close to zero.
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