Liam Payne explores the importance of a political programme to overcome the fragmentation produced by recent defeats for the left

In the current political climate, the scope for meaningful political action from the left seems rather bleak. The forward march of the Corbyn years has dissipated into anger, resentments, apathy, and a retreat into wishful thinking by believing the left is playing some sort of canny long game by surrendering at every turn.

To try and chart a way forward, it can often help to look back.

In the 1920s and again in the 1970s, the left within the labour movement coalesced around political programmes which put forward their alternative values, analysis, aims and objectives for the labour movement and wider society.

Such programmes allowed the left a competitive political vision, separate and often antagonistic to those offered by the official labour movement leaderships. Staking out this distinct ideological territory became a pole of attraction for the disparate British left, creating debate and a level of coordination that would otherwise have struggled to occur.  

A modern-day equivalent of such a left political programme could act in a similar manner for the fragmented coalition that rallied around Corbyn and the Labour Party he led.

Socialism in their time

Formulated by the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in the late 1920s, Socialism in Our Time was a political programme that grew out of the work of the ILP’s Living Wage Committee and in direct response to the experience of the first Labour government of the middle of that decade.

Intended to be an alternative to both the tepid ‘Labourism’ taking shape under the Labour leadership of Ramsay MacDonald and Philip Snowden, and the revolutionary aims of the recently founded Communist Party of Great Britain, this ‘third alternative’ aimed, according to ILP leader James Maxton:

“at securing political power by the ordinary political machine, aims at developing industrial power by strengthening of the trades unions and at increasing economic power by strengthening the cooperative movement. It aims at coordinating and convincing their movements as they have never been combined before.”

Driving the creation of such a programme was an analysis of contemporary capitalism which came to two defining conclusions. Firstly, that the endemic unemployment and concomitant crushing poverty that defined the 1920s was due to a lack of demand in the British economy. According to Socialism in Our Time, the central means of combating this was to introduce a living income for all citizens, through both wages and welfare benefits.

The second conclusion was that the debates between a Labour leadership favouring traditional capitalist free trade and a Tory hierarchy moving towards protectionist policies were entirely inadequate. Only the planned control of imports and exports would suit the climate that rapidly expanded domestic demand would create. Planned controls would allow a socialist government to exercise some measure of control as to what kind of economic activity this demand was canalised towards.

Nationalisation of key utilities such as the railways, alongside tight regulation of major industries such as textiles, also formed a clear component of the programme. The spectre of inflation was met head-on through the analysis that the economic slack caused by the general depression of the decade allowed ample room for demand to pick up without causing uncontrollable levels of inflation.

The Bank of England was also to be nationalised for this purpose to control supplies of credit. Bulk purchasing of raw materials for the planned increase in production would again help to avoid inflationary pressures.

These proscriptions were based largely on the economic theories of leading ILP member John Wheatley. The political aim of them was to arrive at socialism through an ‘era of prosperity’. The programme advocated in Socialism in Our Time was to be the first steps, and the major aspect was the ‘national control of wealth’.

According to Wheatley, to fully socialise the means of production, distribution and exchange would take decades through the democratic system. These would be decades of extreme impoverishment and struggle whilst the process was being fought for. By socialising income and creating sustained economic demand, the transition to socialism could proceed much more smoothly and with far greater support.

Seen as the think tank of the labour movement, the ILP’s programme was a clear-eyed proposal of an alternative economic and political strategy ready for use by a coordinated and educated labour movement intent on securing real political, industrial and economic power and wielding this for the transformation of Britain on the road to socialism.

The alternative strategy

Like the genesis of the earlier Socialism in Our Time, the formulation of the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES) by the Labour left grew out of the profound disenchantment generated by the Labour governments of the 1960s.

Growing rank and file militancy in the trade unions combined with an influx of new members into moribund local Labour parties created the groundswell of support for a radical left alternative to the tepid ‘Labourism’ of the hegemonic right. Over time this militant membership formed itself into organisations and started to use the institutional power this allowed to push for the creation and adoption as Party policy of their alternative political programme.

Intellectually, the AES drew on the work of theorists such as Michael Barratt-Brown, Francis Cripps, the Conference of Socialist Economists and Stuart Holland – whose 1975 book The Socialist Challenge is perhaps the best distillation of the intellectual arguments for an alternative programme at that time. These were given political muscle by the forward march of the left at the grassroots and through parliamentary stalwarts such as Tony Benn, Judith Hart and Eric Heffer. As the AES developed, it also gained support from the Communist Party, which was particularly influential in certain trade unions at the time.

The AES was given programmatical format in various publications from the Labour Party: explicitly in Labour’s Programme of 1973, 1976 and 1982, and forming the backbone of the Party’s two election manifestos in 1974. The TUC published many articles in support of the AES and contributed its own entire publication to its interpretation of the programme – Economic Planning and Industrial Democracy.

In his study Economic Strategy and the Labour Party, Mark Wickham-Jones identifies seven distinct aspects to the AES: reflation; public ownership; control of the financial sector; planning agreements; industrial democracy; price and import controls; and Britain’s relationship with the then European Community. These aspects were no linear progression but would need to be pursued simultaneously for the programme to have any chance of success in the face of the predictable hostility it would face.

Some of these aspects of the AES can also be found in the earlier Socialism in Our Time. Reflation was a standard ‘Labourist’ proscription since the 1930s, although it had been a radical proposal when first championed by the ILP – creating increased economic demand through targeted state expenditure, favouring social spending and higher wages for the working class. Public ownership was again a common call from the Labour Party of the past. However, the AES went much further than just the public ownership of utilities and natural monopolies such as the railways.

To challenge the emergence and unaccountable power of multinational corporations and capital, the champions of the AES called for the next Labour government to take the leading private enterprises in each sector of the British economy into public ownership. The number given was usually 25 leading enterprises. This would allow the democratic state to challenge the highly influential price-setting position of these enterprises, which was choking the competitiveness of industry and leading to inflationary pressures, and shift production from pure profit-seeking to social needs. These new public enterprises would be joined by equity stakes in other leading companies in each sector, all being controlled by a National Enterprise Board (NEB).

The power of finance was to be curtailed through the proposed creation of an alternative state-owned National Investment Bank. In 1976 the Party published the policy document Banking and Finance, which called for the outright nationalisation of the big four clearing banks, seven significant insurance providers and one merchant bank, stating: “There is no substitute for public ownership when it comes to engineering a radical change in attitudes to investment priorities.”

These new state-owned and controlled levers of finance could be used to provide the investment necessary for the realisation of the AES.

Outside of the directly nationalised leading private enterprises, the left proposed to exercise control over the rest of the private sector by enacting planning agreements with the remaining large enterprises. These would be legally binding agreements, requiring these companies to pursue policies that facilitated the advance of the AES. Incentives would be offered for compliance, but if this was still not forthcoming, the NEB would have the power to nationalise recalcitrant companies.

Alongside the AES, the call for industrial democracy was a galvanising force on the labour movement left in Britain at this time. This was a crucial bridge between the militancy at the trade union base, the recent election of avowedly socialist leaders of some of the major unions – Jack Jones at the TGWU and Hugh Scanlon at the AEU – and the insurgent Labour left. The Institute for Workers Control(IWC), and leading protagonists such as Ken Coates and Tony Topham, played a crucial role in the intellectual formation of – and campaigns for – the AES.

This proposal was in essence to broaden the scope of trade unions’ – and through them, workers’ – collective bargaining. Rather than being simply a case of bargaining over wages and, increasingly in the 60s and 70s, working terms and conditions, the AES and the IWC pushed for workers’ participation and eventual control over things such as investment decisions, production choices and so on.

The aim was to challenge the prerogative of management to manage, shifting this power to those who actually do the work. This had the potential to remove a powerful barrier to the success of the alternative programme – the animosity and recalcitrance of the bosses at enterprise level.

Similar to the earlier programme of the left, the spectre of inflation was often thrown up as a challenge to the efficacy of the AES. Once again, import controls were proposed as an effective way to curb both inflation and the perpetual balance of payments crises that had been afflicting Britain for decades. Planned imports would allow the new demand in the domestic economy to be channelled into domestic industry and services, which as usual had the slack to incorporate this uptick and could mitigate the flow of this demand out of Britain in the form of the import of goods and services from abroad – restraining the balance of payments dilemma.

Alongside import controls, price controls were considered a key policy tool to mitigate any inflationary fall-out of the early stages of the AES. These were also a key part of what became known as the ‘Social Contract’ negotiated by the trade unions and Labour Party while in opposition. In return for wage restraint on behalf of the unions – accepted as a secondary contributor to inflation when desperately chasing the primary cause of profit-seeking price-setting by private enterprise, especially the multinationals – a Labour government would institute controls on key prices, rents, bonuses and dividends to curb this primary issue.

In the event of Labour’s two election victories of 1974, the unions, led by left-winger Jack Jones, kept to their side of the bargain for the first years of the new government. For their part, the Labour government did control some key prices and housing rents early in their term, but these soon dissipated – bonuses and dividends were of course left well alone.

To have the sovereignty for an elected government to carry out the AES in Britain, the left was highly aware of the fact that the power of the then European Community (EC) would need to be challenged. However, there was no uniform position on what form this challenge should take. The 1973 programme was highly critical of the EC but called instead for a position of ‘remain and reform’.

Leading left intellectuals such as Stuart Holland could glean some benefit of EC membership for the AES at this time. However, by 1977 he had decisively changed his position, stating that the potential of the left’s programme was ‘substantially handicapped’ by EC membership. Labour’s 1980 conference and 1982 programme averred that Labour would lead Britain out of the EC once in government. The 1982 programme stated: “The single most important advantage of withdrawal will be the ability of the next Labour government to determine its own economic and industrial policies.”

The Alternative Economic Strategy marks a high point of the British left. It was a central component of a period of serious social upheaval, led by the working class. The coordination between the different elements of the labour movement left, including the Communist Party, was the catalyst for an alternative socialist political programme having the confidence to take such a breadth of analysis and to having the power to make the AES the dominant programme of the Labour Party for the best part of a decade.

An alternative strategy for our time

Ultimately, neither Socialism in Our Time nor the Alternative Economic Strategy were tested by the exigencies of controlling state power – something that dismisses them in the eyes of the politics-as-a-blood-sport mob. However, as has hopefully been shown in this article, these programmes were vitally important in rallying the left at the time and provided a focus and purpose for political engagement and education that would have been hard to adequately create otherwise.

A political programme of the left is something that could act in a similar way in the current conjuncture.

The first key step is the coordination of the left still remaining within the orbit of the Labour Party. Such a coordinated bloc would provide the basis not only of formulating the beginnings of an alternative programme, but also a means to effectively counteract the trigger-happy right in their moment of vindictive triumphalism. This coordination can then progressively be extended to left factions within the trade unions, cooperative movement and beyond.

A modern political programme could go through various stages as it is formulated. An immediate programmatic platform – similar to the famous Black Panther Party ten-point programme – can act as a foundation. It should state in clearcut terms the values, analysis, aims and objectives of the left. This, in time, could broaden out into an intermediate programme, putting specific policy flesh on the foundational bones. A longer-term, rolling programme can apply a more in-depth approach – bringing in discussion on tactics and strategy for the social and political power that would be necessary to implement such an alternative.

Any process of programmatic formulation would have to be the subject of vigorous internal democratic debate amongst a coordinated left. History shows that such an effort can bring many advantages and opportunities – especially potent when these seem in very short supply at present.

Liam Payne is a Labour Party and Campaign for Socialism member based in Edinburgh.

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