'The Decline of Working-Class Politics' by Barry Hindess. MacGibbon & Kee.
Barry Hindess has written a very important and relevant book; its importance and relevance not being substantially diminished by the essential faultiness of his analysis. He is basically trying to grasp what changes have occurred in the Labour Party since the early '50s, what caused them and what are the political consequences. Hindess sees this period as being one when the working class lost control over the Labour Party. Thus, Atlee's cabinets from 1945 to 50 contained roughly 50% of ministers from working-class backgrounds. The Wilson cabinet after the October 1969 reshuffle contained exactly 0.0% Rather more significant is the evidence from the survey of the Liverpool Labour Party that Hindess carried out in the mid and late '60s. In the early 1950s the ward Parties in middle class areas were smaller and exerted less influence than the wards in the working-class areas. By the time of his survey the position was reversed. The membership of the middle-class wards averaged 142, whilst the average in the working-class areas was down to 86. In some cases the ward Parties in working-class areas had disintegrated altogether. The general decline in L.P. membership since 1963 therefore was emphasised in its effects by a steeper decline in working-class areas. When the working-class wards are considered on their own, it is discovered that these areas have a professional/managerial sector that is 5.3% of the whole population. However, this sector provides 50% of the ward L.P. officials. Unskilled workers constitute 25% of the population and provide 0% of the ward L.P. officials. These combined tendencies led to a shift of power towards the wards in middle-class areas that was reflected in the local council and in the Labour Group. The net result of this process, according to Hindess, was a transformation of the L.P. from a workers' organisation:
'In many respects it seems reasonable to claim that Britain now possesses two major, and one minor, middle-class parties.'
How does Hindess explain the causes of this process? Contemporary capitalism has centralised itself and has limited the scope of local politics. The emergence of massive national and international companies, state intervention and welfarism has provided a relatively stable basis for consensus politics. Party politics are now a discussion about the techniques of applying national initiatives in which an inevitably elitist professionalism dominates. In other words, the legs have been cut off the old breed of charismatic Labour local activists who got slates put back on your roof. This tendency reinforces and is reinforced by the drift to middle-class control of the local Labour Parties.' The wards in middle-class areas relate to national politics, whereas the wards in working-class areas discuss in terms of ward or city politics. A further differentiation emerges when the topics discussed are analysed. A ward in a middle-class area deals with issues such as foreign policy, immigration and the national economy, but 50% of policy discussions in working-class area wards deal with local housing. These interests are increasingly defined as 'non-political,' As a result, working-class members drift away, the predominance of the middle-class and the middle-class concept of politics is strengthened and the vicious circle continues.
The political consequences of this change Hindess considers to be very far-reaching:
'It is difficult ... to use class consciousness as an explanation of Labour voting or of more active support - except perhaps in terms of traditional allegiance.'
This means that many workers no longer see any sense in voting for Labour or voting at all. It also explains both the steady decline in percentage votes cast in urban working-class districts and the extreme volability in recent years of voting intentions. Hindess argues that considerable numbers of workers are moving out of the sphere of formal Party politics. This is expressed by the emergence of tenants' associations in working-class areas that carry out functions that previously the L.P. would have done on a local level. Such extra-political activities as community associations, the squatters, town-planning groups, environmental protection, Shelter and protests against the siting of airports will eventually explicitly reject orthodox politics. A new era in British politics will begin.
It is important to analyse these arguments carefully, especially since most of them contain at least an element of truth. The views of Hindess on the changing sociological base of L.P. membership is probably correct. It is not possible to argue that what is true of Liverpool is necessarily true of the rest of England, Scotland and Wales, but the thesis does correspond with what facts are known. The causation of this process is more complicated than Hindess supposes. Certainly, the L.P. has attempted to change its traditional role and to supplant the Tory Party as the 'natural' ruling party that is more sensitive and responsive to the needs of neo-capitalism. Hindess attempts to focus the contradictions inherent in this stance in one major field - that of housing. But the haemorage of L.P. members owed just as much to Vietnam and even more to the anti-union policies of the Labour government. This is not a minor point but exposes a crucial methodological error in the approach of Hindess. Bourgeois sociology has a decided preference to deal with the worker as a consumer rather than as a producer, and for very obvious reasons. In the early '60s, Michael Young wrote a pamphlet The Chipped White Cups of Dover that the Fabian Society refused to publish. His thesis was that traditional politics were on their way out and would be replaced by grass-roots organisation dedicated to consumer research and protection. Hindess has succeeded in resurrecting, admittedly with a left bias, consumerism. Marxists, however, remain unconvinced that Which, Shelter or the Foulness Protection Society offer the dynamic to replace capitalism. Our analysis begins at the point of production. Hindess has written a book on the L.P. that scarcely mentions the unions, and this leads to a series of errors.
The L.P., from the point of view of leadership, programme and social function, is bourgeois party. It has a dual nature in that it possesses an organisational link with the trade-unions. This link, particularly at a. m.c. level, has been weakened but still remains. As long as this connexion exists the possibility of workers formulating their political ideas within a L.P. context remains. The L.P. cannot, in spite of certain surface similarities at this moment in time, be equated with an irrelevant shell like the French socialist Party or a bourgeois party pure and simple like the American Democratic Party. A small number of advanced worker militants have rejected Labourism, and have gone beyond it, but the majority (unfortunately) of workers who do not vote have retreated to a helpless and privatised apathy that fails to recognise any possibility of political change. The transcending of Labourism will not be by erosion or consumerism, but requires a conscious political fight and the intervention of revolutionaries. This however is another story and the book that already indicated that line of struggle and precisely identifies the changing nature of the L.P. has yet to be written.
A. Jenkins