Author Archives: Paul Anderson

NOTES ON THE LABOUR LEFT

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Solidarity, spring 1984

George is 36. He works for Hackney council as a welfare rights adviser. Before that he had a job with the Labour Research Department; and before that he was doing a doctoral degree (in urban sociology) at the LSE. He did his first degree at the University of Essex. It was there he met his wife. Sue, who is now a teacher. At the time, he was in the International Marxist Group and she was an anarchist. They used to argue about Kronstadt before making love, and were involved in a lot of demonstrations and sit-ins.
Things quietened down a bit when they moved to London in 1971: but George stayed with the IMG for another five years, still convinced that the British revolution was imminent. Sue continued to see herself as an anarchist, but mixed increasingly in women’s movement circles. She enjoyed the consciousness-raising. In 1976 George resigned from the IMG over what he considered a deviationist turn from the class. He was unattached for a while, then joined the Labour Party when he and Sue moved out of their housing association place in Stoke Newington and into a flat in Islington which Sue had bought with some money from her grandmother.
Inside the Labour Party, George made swift progress. He soon found himself on the General Management Committee of the constituency party, and within two years lie was membership secretary. He became a stalwart of the Campaign for Labour Party Democracy; as a delegate at conference he made many an impassioned plea for constitutional reform. After the election defeat of May 1979 his efforts redoubled. He was heavily involved in the manoeuvring behind the scenes at the 1981 constitutional conference at Wembley, spent long hours on the Benn deputy leadership campaign, and worked hard for a Labour victory in the 1981 GLC elections. (He had been approached about the possibility of standing for a GLC seat but he decided against it).
Meanwhile, Sue was beginning to feel isolated in her feminist group. She started going to Big Flame meetings but that didn’t seem to make much difference. Next she got interested in the Communist Party, but they seemed slightly old-fashioned. And then, after the Beyond the Fragments conference in Leeds, she swallowed her pride and joined George in the Labour Party. Somewhat to her surprise she took to it like a duck to water; the women she met through it were just her sort of person. There were even a couple of teachers with whom she set up a “Women in education” discussion group.
And so to the present. Despite the poor showing of the Labour party in the 1983 general election, George and Sue are happier than they have been for a long time. They have active social lives with their political friends; they know everybody worth knowing in the 1ittle world of GLC committees and north London “radical socialist boroughs”. At home they spend their leisure hours reading Marxism Today and London Labour Briefing, or relaxing in front of Channel Four. They feel that they are doing their bit in the struggle for socialism – indeed, they feel they are leading the struggle for socialism. Of course, there is still a long way to go. After all; the vicious lies of the Evening Standard might just result in Ken and the comrades being defeated in 1985, to say nothing of the threats to abolish the GLC in the Tory manifesto. But until then everything is on course for the New Jerusalem.
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As you may have gathered, George and Sue are fictional characters. Any resemblance to real people and events in their story is not, however, entirely coincidental. George and Sue are typical members of the social group that now dominates the left political agenda in Britain. They are highly educated people, radicalised in their student days, whose main hobby for more than a decade has been politics. They began their political careers on the far left outside the Labour Party, but with the passage of time more or less willingly joined its left wing. And they are reliant upon the welfare bureaucracies – within which they occupy high-status managerial, professional or semi-professional positions – for employment.
What are we to make of them? There are some who see the growing predominance of people like George and Sue within the Labour Party (and to a lesser extent the trade unions) as indicative of nothing more than the shift from blue-collar to white-collar employment in the British economy. That such a shift has occurred is certainly true; anyone who sees the modern working-class as composed mainly of horny-handed manual workers needs new spectacles.
But it is not particularly relevant here. The Georges and Sues are formally white-collar workers, insofar as they sell their labour power for a wage and have no other significant source of income. They are, however, no ordinary white-collar workers. Unlike the average clerk or typist they are order-givers rather than order-takers. Their jobs often have professional or semi-professional career structures, in that entry is restricted to those deemed to hold relevant qualifications, and their job security is much greater than for most workers. Their culture, too, is not that of most workers: people like George and Sue are in certain crucial respects members of the middle class.
And yet they are members of the Labour Party – traditionally the party of the working class. They are, moreover, in positions of power within the Labour Party: in many local LPs people like George and Sue hold all the key posts. What is more, they have reached such positions of power not as a result of working class deference in the face of apparent expertise – as the middle-class socialists of a previous era did – but by gaining majorities at the “grass roots” of the Labour Party, often against the wishes of working-class members, and often in an extremely manipulative way.
It is not how the people like George and Sue did all this that is really at issue. The membership of the Labour Party has been declining steadily for years: in Glasgow, for example, it is estimated that there are now only 50 or 60 paid up members in each constituency (outside one with a Labour club), most of whom are inactive. The reasons for this decline are varied. On one hand, since the late 1950s television broadcasts have replaced door-knocking canvassing as the main means of electoral campaigning, local Labour parties have increasingly lost touch with the people they once would have recruited as the need for a mass campaigning party has receded. This tendency has been particularly marked in “safe” Labour areas.
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More importantly, working class commitment to Labour has steadily disintegrated since 1945. The traditional working-class community that formed the social base for Labour’s support has been dispersed, by consumerism, by rehousing (ironically, often initiated by Labour politicians), and the changing character of work. Finally, many once staunch Labour Party members have been irrevocably alienated by their experience of Labour in office. The stultifying bureaucracy of the welfare state, the corrupt machine politics of Labour town halls, the stark capitalist reality of having the state as an employer, wage control – all have encouraged the flight of the working class from the Labour Party.
The results of this decline in Labour Party membership are obvious: it became very easy for a small number of people to take over a local LP, particularly if they were adept at political manipulation and were prepared to put a lot of work into committees. And that is precisely what the Georges and Sues have done -with the unintended and ironic effect of further alienating working-class Labour members. Why, though, have they done it?
If you ask them, their answer will be simple: they have taken over the Labour Party because they believe passionately in the desirability of “socialist policies”. And indeed there is no reason to doubt the sincerity of their commitment to what they see as socialism. But what the new middle-class left sees as socialism is not just a heady ideal. If you look at the content of their ideology and practice, you find it very much in tune with their economic self-interest.
This becomes particularly apparent in areas where the new middle class left have come to control local government. “Socialist policies” in such areas have been characterised by the creation of a multitude of committees and grant-aided autonomous bodies which are supposed to monitor and control the police, work against racial and sexual discrimination, encourage the development of co­operatives , stimulate “people’s culture”, attempt to decentralise the functions of local government, and so forth. This is not the place to attempt a full-blown critique of such innovations; it suffices to say that the majority have failed even in their limited (and in many ways unsocialist) avowed aims, largely because they have not had the support of ordinary people. What they have succeeded in doing is providing highly paid employment for scores of middle-class leftists. One does not have to be a cynic to suggest that the main beneficiaries of “socialist policies” in local government have been those employed to manage their implementation, and that the middle-class left’s pursuit of “socialist policies” is at root a pursuit of class interests that have little to do with the class interests of the majority of ordinary people.
As yet, however, only a small – though growing – number of the Georges and Sues are employed in the jobs created by left local government. Far more work in the more traditional welfare state, as social workers, teachers, college lecturers, administrators, and so on. Unsurprisingly, with their jobs under threat from central government cuts, they have campaigned vigorously against attempts to prune the welfare state.
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Up to a point, of course, there is no conflict between their defence of welfare expenditure and the interests of the wider population. Cuts in the welfare budget mean cuts in services for ordinary people, as well as fewer jobs for social workers, teachers and administrators. Nevertheless, there is no necessary link between preserving welfare expenditure and preserving services: much welfare expenditure acts only to sustain a parasitic bureaucracy. What is more, the “services” provided by the welfare state are in many cases as much means of social control as they are beneficial to ordinary people.
Yet we hear no substantive criticism of welfarism from the new middle-class left. Rather, they give us the uncritical “fight the cuts” slogans, and a vision of the future in which the welfare state takes control of every aspect of our everyday lives. Once again, it does not seem cynical to suggest that we are witnessing the pursuit of a class interest under the banner of “socialism” that has nothing to do with the interests of the working class. The generation of 1968 has, it seems, grown up to be part of the problem rather than part of the solution.

STAYING ALIVE IS NOT ENOUGH

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Solidarity leader, spring 1983

“0ne, two, three, four, we don’t want a nuclear war!”, chant the CND marchers, expressing a sentiment shared by every sane human being. “Two, three, four, five, we just want to stay alive!”

There is no doubt that being alive is generally better than being dead. But there are limits to the desirability of “just staying alive”. It isn’t necessary to be an admirer of heroic martyrdom to think that death fighting for liberation might have been preferable to submitting to the barbarity of the Nazi concentration camps or Pol Pot’s Cambodia; but if there is a choice between merely “staying alive” and something more, to opt for the former shows a depressing lack of audacity.

Yet just staying alive is the desire of a large part of the CND marchers. For them there is nothing better on the horizon; the horror of nuclear war looms so large in their imaginations that all concern for the content of future life has been eclipsed by fear for the very existence of a future life. Political thought has been replaced by an almost animal lust for self-preservation.

It is of course dangerous to interpret a movement through only one of its slogans. All the same, the blinding effects of fear are all too noticeable in the resurgent peace movement – nowhere more so than in the attitude of much of that movement to the Soviet Union. Here the problem is not so much that of outright pro-Sovietism; the overt Stalinist and Trotskyist defenders of the “workers’ bomb” are a dying breed exercising little direct influence. Many of their excuses for Soviet militarism have, however, survived their decline. The peace movement is riddled with people who claim, more or less sincerely, that the USSR is the innocent, encircled victim of Yankee imperialism, that Russia is justified in arming because of the vast number of Soviet deaths in the second world war, or that the Russians are just keeping pace in the arms race.

Such claims are naive and dangerous. They ignore the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the crushing of the free workers’ movement and dissident opinion inside the USSR, and the tentacles of Soviet military aid in the Third World. They overlook the massive build-up of conventional arms in the last decade. The suffering of the Russian people in the last war is no more valid an excuse for these activities of their rulers than the Holocaust is an excuse for systematic racial discrimination and expansionism by the state of Israel.

Yet much of the peace movement remains soft on the Soviet Union. Last year a quarter of a million people turned out on the spring CND demonstration in Hyde Park; a week later a demonstration called to mark six months of martial law in Poland drew only 2,000 to Trafalgar Square, most of them Polish emigrés. Not that demonstrating is any paradigm of political activity; but the point should be clear.

There are some in the peace movement who are not completely blind to the nature of the USSR. Edward Thompson and others around European Nuclear Disarmament have made a point of emphasising the responsibility of both sides in the arms race, calling for the formation of independent peace movements both sides of the Iron Curtain. But END too have been the victims of wishful thinking – hoping that the political system of the Eastern bloc could allow an independent, reformist, pressure-group type peace movement to exist in competition with the state-run official peace committees. They have not grasped that any admission of pluralism by the Soviet-bloc states undermines the institutional and ideological foundations of those states’ power – that, in short, the eastern-bloc states cannot be politically liberalised.

MAKING A FRESH START

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Solidarity leader, autumn 1982

“Without the development of revolutionary theory there can be no development of revolutionary practice.” Cornelius Castoriadis, Socialisme ou Barbarie, 1949
Solidarity was formed in 1959 and the group developed its perspectives for the most part during the 1960s. Probably the greatest single influence on this development was the work of the French thinker Cornelius Castoriadias (who also wrote as Paul Cardan) which appeared in the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie between 1949 and 1965.
Over the years Solidarity published a significant selection of Castoriadis’ and other S ou B texts in a series or pamphlets, and these, far more than the programmatic statements As We See It and As We Don’t See It, came to characterise the group’s orientation towards the world.
In many respects Castoriadis’ S ou B writings have stood the test of time very well; they certainly demand the continued attention of all those concerned with socialist theory and practice. Much has changed since the S ou B period, however, both in society at large and in the realm of ideas, and, unsurprisingly, certain aspects of Castoriadis’  ideas are beginning to show their age.
This is perhaps most notable in the economic analysis put forward in the essay “Modern Capitalism and Revolution”, published as a Solidarity book. Written in 1959, at the height of the unprecedentedly sustained economic boom that followed the second world war, it presents us with both a continuingly relevant critique of the scientistic categories of classical Marxist political economy and a projection of trends within modern capitalism that has been somewhat overtaken by events.
Specifically, it seems from the vantage point of 1982 that “Modern Capitalism and Revolution” over-estimates the stability of the western ruling class’s success in “controlling the general level of economic activity” and “preventing major crises of the classical type”. Today almost every national economy in the industrialised west is gripped by a profound and prolonged recession. Unemployment has risen to levels inconceivable twenty, fifteen or even ten years ago, industrial output is stagnating and the Keynesian consensus that lay behind government policies in the boom years appears to be in tatters. Quite obviously, these changed conditions demand that Castoriadis’ account be brought up to date and significantly revised.
Castoriadis’ economic projections are not the only parts of his S ou B work to have become problematic with the passing of time: there are also difficulties to be faced in his rejection of Marxism as a whole and in his espousal of a councilist paradigm of revolutionary practice. When Castoriadis asked in 1964: “Where since 1923 (when Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness was published) has anything been produced which has advanced Marxism?”, he was taking a stance which, though provocative (since it effectively dismissed the work of such writers as Gramsci, Korsch, Pannekoek, Marcuse and Sartre), was certainly defensible (since whatever good had come from Reich, Gramsci et al had been almost totally submerged in the appalling idiocies of Marxist orthodoxy). In other words, it was possible in 1964 to take “Marxism” to mean Marx-Engels-Kautsky-Lenin-Trotsky-Stalin thought.
Today such an identification is less easy. The submerged unofficial Marxist tradition has been rediscovered, and there has been a dramatic growth of new Marxist theory, at least some of which cannot be dismissed with a casual gesture. Of course, the rediscovery of the unorthodox Marxists of the past has led to much sterile fetishisation of sacred texts, and most new Marxist theory has been execrable – particularly in Britain, where the Althusserian poison administered in massive doses by New Left Review paralysed the minds (though not unfortunately the writing hands) of a large section of the left intelligentsia for more than a decade. Moreover, any advances in Marxist theory have been effectively ignored by the majority of the activist Marxist left, who remain imprisoned by a conceptual framework that is beneath contempt.
Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that it is now far more difficult to argue an informed rejection of the content of Marxism than it was twenty years ago. For such a critique to be rigourous, it would have to contend not only with the dire orthodoxy Castoriadis so efficiently laid to waste, but also with the far more sophisticated work of both the unorthodox Marxists of old and such contemporary theorists as Habermas, Lefebvre, Gorz, Thompson, the Italian autonomists and the many Marxist feminists.
This is not to claim that a critique of Marxism going beyond an assault on vulgar Marxism is impossible. Nor is it to deny the contributions made by Castoriadis to such a project, particularly in his post-S ou B writings. Neither is it to argue that a rejection of the Marxist label on grounds other than a critique of the content of self-professed Marxists’ work cannot be justified; a strong case can be made for refusing the mantle of Marxism because its assumption serves to reinforce the faith of the crudest Leninist in the fundamental correctness of his or her idiotic and dangerous beliefs. All the same, the fact remains that many of the developments in Marxist theory over the past two decades deserve our critical attention: one of the tasks of this new series of Solidaritymagazine will be to attempt to assess their worth.
If developments in the realm of ideas have been massive since S ou B, so too have changes in oppositional social practice. The developing general tendencies of the latter – towards the adoption of new forms of workplace struggle in the face of the changing character of work and the continued degeneration of traditional working-class organisations, and towards the opening up of new areas of contestation outside the conventional limits of the class struggle – were grasped by S ou B with a remarkable prescience. Perhaps unsurprisingly  S ou B had, however, little to say on the possibility of this “new movement” being integrated and effectively neutralised by adapting capitalism. And today, when workers’ self-management (albeit in a hideously distorted form) is advocated by every established political party, the youth revolt has become the passive consumption of the products of the entertainment industry, and feminism is as much the ideology of the upwardly mobile career woman as it is the basis for a genuinely oppositional movement, this silence is clearly inadequate.
Moreover, Castoriadis and S ou B retained a vision of a post-revolutionary society run by workers’ councils, the usefulness of which has been seriously brought into question by precisely the growth of contestation outside the sphere of production which they predicted. Workers’ councils are perhaps a crucially necessary part of any self-managed socialist society: but to consider them as the organisational basis of such a society – as Castoriadis and with him Solidarity have tended to suggest – is to fall prey to the productivist illusion that characterises so much crude Marxist theory and practice.
The increasingly apparent outdatedness of certain parts of our inherited worldview does not in itself justify our beginning a new series of Solidarity magazine. Indeed it could be – and has been – used as an argument for disbanding it. Quite obviously we believe the obsolescence of certain elements of our thinking is less a cause for despair than an invigorating challenge. But why?
Well, firstly and most importantly, we do not think that those of our ideas made questionable by the passage of time are anything like the totality of our perspective, nor do we see them as the foundations of our politics. Although our critique of existing society and of traditional programmes for changing it needs to be further developed, it remains essentially sound enough to set as a springboard for such development.

There is not the space here to elaborate upon this assertion. We can only state our convictions that the current world recession does not invalidate our critique of classical Marxist crisis theory; that the sophistication of some modern Marxism cannot relegitimate the tired old platitudes of Marxist orthodoxy; that the fate of the new social movements does not necessitate a retreat from our emphasis on contestation outside the traditional politico-economic sphere; that the inappropriateness of councilism to modern conditions does not undermine either our critique of the tendencies towards bureaucratisation deeply embedded in the theory and practice of traditional working class organisations and parties of the left, or our emphasis on self-activity in struggle.

Secondly, we believe that whatever development is required is well within our capacity. This is not to pre-empt the necessary process of discussion: we have no magic formulae up our sleeves, nor would we wish to have. It is, however, to state that, unlike too many on the British libertarian left, we are not afraid of critical thinking.
This said, abstract theory is by no means all we plan to publish. At present there is no British periodical that habitually carries detailed and accurate critical reports of actual struggles – a situation which stems largely from the left’s quite innocent (though harmful) preoccupation with forcing the complexities of real life into simplistic and outmoded interpretative frameworks, but which is also the product of a predilection for tactical distortions of reality. We aim to do all we can to rectify this state of affairs, by publishing in-depth second-hand accounts and first-hand testimonies of contemporary social conflicts, in industry and elsewhere.
Our older readers will recognise our twin priorities of interrogating radical social theory and investigating the practice of oppositional social movements as being very much those of the old Solidarity for Workers’ Power journal published by London Solidarity from 1959 to 1977, when Solidarity fused with the group Social Revolution. It must be emphasised that the similarity of objectives does not mean that we are motivated by some escapist nostalgia for the ‘good old days’. Even though Solidarity for Workers’ Power was a more incisive publication than its successor Solidarity for Social Revolution, it was hardly perfect even in its time and its time has now passed. We are prepared to learn from our history, but we have no desire to use it as an emotional crutch.

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CLASS AND IDEOLOGY

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Solidarity, summer 1981

Review of Marxism and Class Theory: A bourgeois critique by Frank Parkin (Tavistock, £4.95); Urban Politics by Peter Saunders (Pelican, £2.95); and The Dominant Ideology Thesisby Nicholas Abercrombie, Bryan Turner and Stephen Hill (Allen and Unwin, £12.50)

Frank Parkin is one of Britain’s foremost stratification theorists, and readers of Solidarity might be familiar with his Class Inequality and Political Order, which is available as a mass-market paperback. Marxism and Class Theory is a more abstract work, but it just as readable and far more provocative. “Given what now passes for Marxist theory,” he says in his introduction, “almost any imaginable bourgeois alternative seems preferable” – and this remark sets the tone for what follows. Parkin takes an almost sadistic delight in demolishing the attempts of even “sophisticated” Marxists such as Poulantzas, Barran and Wright to deal with the realities of the class structure in modern capitalist societies.
Marxist class theory, for all the changes it has undergone in the hands of the academic Marxists who sprang to prominence in the sixties higher education boom, has proved itself unable to cope with phenomena such as the growth of white-collar employment, the shift to managerial control of enterprises, the expansion of the state sector or the importance of ethnic changes in society, says Parkin.
As a result, Parkin believes it should be abandoned. He puts forward an alternative that draws heavily on the sociology of Max Weber. Class, for Parkin, is a matter of “social closure” or “the monopolisation of specific, usually economic opportunities” so as to exclude outsiders: it is based on power rather than “relationship to the means of production” as Marxists would have it. 
There is not the space here to go into details, but it seems to me that Parkin’s schema, although flowing from a social democratic perspective that claims trade unions and polit­ical parties to be agents pure and simple of the working class in the class struggle – they’re not – could form the nucleus of a radical alternative to the Marx­ist orthodoxy the left has been flogging for so many years.
One aspect of stratification that Parkin does not discuss at length is housing, although there is nothing in his approach to rule out its application in this area. Here it’s worth turning to another new sociological work, Peter Saunders’s Urban Politics, the first half of which is  a useful summary of recent thinking on the relationship between housing and class, the latter being conceived of in traditional Marxist terms. 
This is an important topic for the left, because it brings up the thorny problem of how community struggles stand next to workplace struggles, something Solidarity has had little to say about lately. Saunders’ politics are too concerned with the need for leadership to inspire many readers of Solidarity, but his book is a good starting point in spite of the rather long empirical study that occupies its second half.
Finally, on a different but related subject that has received scant attention of late, there is The Dominant Ideology Thesis by Abercrombie, Turner and Hill, unfortunately ridiculously overpriced at £12.50 in hardback. After noting the similarity of the cases put forward for the existence of a dominant ideology by certain Marxists (Gramsci, Althusser and Habermas) and various bourgeois sociolog­ists, the  authors argue that “ideology” is hardly the major tool of social control it has been claimed to be.
What social theorists have identified as the dominant ideology of modern capitalism is in fact incoherent and contradictory, and (most important­ly) remains largely uninternalised by subordinate groups in society, even though the methods of ideological transmission developed under modern capitalism are potentially  far more efficient than ever before, It is not ideology but the “dull compulsion of economic relations”, backed up by the threat of state violence, which keeps society in check, according to Aber­crombie et al, and to claim otherwise is to drift dangerously close towards disregarding the degree to which conflict does exist in our society.
I’m unsure about their analysis on certain points – nationalism, for example, would seem to be quite important as a “dominant ideology”, as would certain ideas about sexual roles. But The Dominant Ideology Thesis does a good demolition job on what is now orthodoxy. The issue is, moreover, of the greatest importance for the libertarian left. The all-pervading influence of the dominant ideology has been dragged up time and again, from Kautsky to the Situationists, as justification for the direction of political activity by elites with “correct” political ideas. Any ammunition against them is more than welcome.

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BREAKING MOULDS

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Solidarity leader, summer 1981

Ninety-eighty-one has undoubtedly witnessed some dramatic changes on the British party-political scene. On one hand, the Conservative party has shown itself more openly divided than at any time since the war, and on the other, the long-running feud between the right and left of the Labour party has finally resulted in a significant right-wing faction abandoning Labour to form a new party which, in alliance with the Liberals, has been making spectacular advances in the opinion polls.
It is doubtful that all this will have any radical effect on the type of economic policies we can expect to suffer for the next decade. The Labour Party, the SDP-Liberal Alliance and the Tory “wets” are all committed to some form of Keynesian fiscal expansion backed up by wage controls , and although there exist a number of disagreements on the precise form such a policy should take (such as the differences over the EEC, stat­utory incomes control , nationalisation and protectionism) , we can almost certainly look forward to the prospect of a turn to revitalised versions of the sorts of programmes unsuccessfully pursued by governments in the 1970s, whoever takes power after the next general election.
In an important sense, therefore, the realignment of British party politics is little more than cosmetic: on the assumption that the present Conservative government either performs a U-turn or loses office (through an electoral defeat or, improbably, as a result of parliamentary defections), the economic policy die seems well and truly cast. How successful this “new Keynesianism” will be is, of course, another question. There are good reasons to doubt that one of its variants will solve the problems of capitalism. In particular, much depends on the response of the working class to new conditions. What is important here, however, is the similarity of the so-called alternatives put forward by the various parties that stand a chance of succeeding the present Tory government.
Nevertheless, to dismiss the changes on the party-political front simply as a superficial gloss on what is fundamentally a growing consensus among the potential managers of capit­alism would be mistaken.
The realign­ment of British politics might not reflect any significant breaking of the mould in policy terms, but it most certainly does stem from deeply important changes in the relationship between the ways people perceive their positions in the class structure and the party political preferences they express in elections.
Since the war, people who consider themselves as working-class have identified less and less with “their” Labour party at election time. At the same time those who see themselves as middle-class have weakened in their allegiance to the Conservatives. These tendencies have resulted in the steady decline of electoral support for the Conserv­ative and Labour parties: the percent­age of the electorate who voted Labour or Conservative fell from 80 per cent in 1951 to only 60 per cent in 1979, partly because of a long-term growth in abstention (which in fact had reached its zenith in October 1974) and part­ly because of an increase in the percentage of voters backing minor parties.
Simultaneously, there has been a change in the social composition of party membership, particularly that of the Labour party at constituen­cy level. The picture of a Labour party composed of polytechnic lecturers so often put before us by the media is a caricature, but the trend towards an activist grass roots increasingly dominated by those popular usage would define as “middle-class”  is undeniable.
This trend is at once both instrumental in perpetuating the decline of identification with Labour on the part of those who consider themselves working-class and the result of such a decline. What is important here, however, is not the minute workings of the embourgeoisement process going on in local Labour parties but the very fact that it is happening. Labour, long since having ceased to be for the working class, is now less and less of it.
Some people have yet to realise this: one thinks at once of those sincere souls who, while critical of Labour’s programme and organisation, nevertheless join up “to talk to the workers”, oblivious to the fact that the status of the Labour Party as a “mass party” has for a long time been extremely questionable. Others are, however, much shrewder. It is no coincidence that the academics who first charted the development of a disjunction between the ways people saw themselves in class terms, and the way they participated in party politics as voters or activists, are now advising the embryo Social Democratic party. For the SDP is essentially the attempt of a tempor­arily defeated political elite to exploit the weakening identification of class and party in the collective political consciousness for the sake of gaining power.
What is more, the “Gang of Four” played their hand at a singularly opportune moment. By splitting from Labour when it was in opposition to the most unpopular Tory government of modern times, the Social Democrats can now count not only upon their apparent novelty, their democratic rhetoric and the disaffection of many Labour voters, but also on a cadre of ex-Conservative-voting “political virgins”. In alliance with the Liberals, the SDP stand a fair chance of at least holding the balance of power in parliament by 1984.
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