John Strachey, who died last week, will undoubtedly be remembered by most of the people who ever cared for him as a renegade. The Guardian, in its obituary, spoke of him as 'a rather lonely figure in British politics,' The author of the "The Coming Struggle for Power" could not easily fit into the social life of a parliamentary group who could only interpret that slogan as a commentary upon their own raterace: While those for whom it had onee been summons to a crusade found it impossible to forget the sight of him as Minister of War, plasterad across the front pages of all the newspapers in a picture of a charade purporting to be a guerilla-hunt of Malayan communists.
After his fall from office he bisied himself with a saries of taska which came to make this symbol, if anything, inadequate. It was Strachey who rushed to Gaitskell's help during the unilateralist battles with the pamphlet "Scrap all the H-bombs", which, in the best tradition of newspeak argued the case for the scapping of none of the H=bombs, ern His literary output since the war has had the conscious intention of providing a rationale for the right-wing of the Labour Party, aimed at appeasing the consciences of people: whose political formation took place in the thirties, Tho End of — and Contemporary Capitalism, his two principal works of economic analysis, are directed essentially at the mt trossing of Croslandite politics by a more systematic "Marxist' prop, Both books are full of a smugness which at first sight seems to represent a eharp break with the fervour of the thirties, in tho theoretical argument of which Strachey played such a key role,
When one re-reads the Strachey of the thirtics one realises that these works are not at all out of keeping with the earlier ones. Strachey's preoccupation with the so-called 'Law of inoreasing misory' in his later work, his utopian moralism in the 'The Bnd of Empire", his concern for differentials for administrators, all betray a manipulative paternalism which is shot through his thinking in Left Book Club days as well.
tIf wo come to the conclusion that catastrophic crises aro accidental to capitalism, then we shall certainly work for their gradual elimination by appropriate roforms. For who would be so mad as to recommend the scrapping of the system itself if the catastrophe which it is briging on = us were reucdiable?' he said in "The Nature cf Capitalist Crisis" page 19. Of course, in the thirties this was an intelligible response. But it is the response not of one who is outraged by the inhumanity of capitalist relationships as such, but of one whoes basic crituria: is administrative, and who is moved to protest more against inofficionoy in the abstract than against the specific exploitative inhumanity of capitaliany It is scarcely surprising that such a man could enthusiastically endorse the verdicts of Moscow triala, and write pages of rosy reports on Stalin's Russia. For was it not efficient?
To cope with this question it is necessary to ask ‘afficiont for what?! In terms of awakening and developing human powers, Stalin's regimes was monstrously wasteful’ It is this waste which is the continual crime of capitalism, whatever forms its crises may take from age to age. On this is grounded the constantly renewed movement towards socialiams Neither Strachey the Marxist, nor Strachey the reformist, understood tnzs at all.
With Stachey's death there goes the last romnant of the English utilitarian traditions
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