Mark Jenkins: Bevanism — Labour's High Tide, Spokesman Books, £4.95 paperback
As the title suggests, Mark Jenkins sets out in this book to show that the Bevanite left of the Labour Party in the fifties was a milestone in Labour's history. He makes large claims for the Bevanites, as the 'broadest, most popular Labour current this century.'
In the process of trying to prove his claims, Jenkins has amassed a wealth of information about the Bevanite movement, from its origins under the 1945-51 Labour government until the breakup of the Bevanite parliamentary group in 1955. It is a tremendously useful source of information on the recent history of the labour movement.
Having said that, the book is far from perfect. It certainly isn't aimed at a popular [illegible] 67 pages of closing notes [illegible] the ranks [of] Labour and trade union members.
Mark Jenkins spent a considerable part of his political life in Gerry Healy's Workers' Revolutionary Party and its predecessors and this has marked not just his politics but also his writing style, which in places sounds like the most inane Healyite polemics masquerading as 'dialectics'. Despite these obstacles the book is very interesting and puts forward a novel thesis on Bevanism.
The Bevanite movement began to emerge under the Labour government with the formation of 'Keep Left' and the publication of two pamphlets, 'Keep Left' (1947) and 'Keeping Left' (1950). The central theme of the Keep Left group, and subsequently of the whole Bevanite movement was simple. They argued that the landslide Labour victory of 1945 had given the party the momentum and the majority necessary to begin to implement real socialist policies. Rail, gas, coal, electricity, iron and steel and the Bank of England were all nationalised. The Welfare State was inaugurated, most clearly by the establishment of the National Health Service.
The Bevanites lobbied within the Parliamentary Labour Party for the continuation of these policies and deepening of the reform programme. They were arguing against the tide, as the majority of the PLP and trade union leaders began to opt for 'consolidation' of the existing gains before any further advance.
The second strand of the debate revolved around international policy and armaments. The majority of the PLP held firmly to the policy of re-armament to meet the 'communist menace' and the creation of a Western Alliance. While the Bevanites accepted the need for limited re-armament they were unhappy with the massive schemes advanced by the Labour government (which proved so impractical that even Churchill was forced to scale them down!) Similarly they partially accepted the idea of the 'red menace' but thought that US aggression and hysterical war anti-communism went too far, instead arguing for moves towards detente with the Soviets.
Jenkins adds a great deal of detail to one general positions, especially in relation to the shades of opinion among the left and how these positions evolved in the rapidly changing international situation. The broad outlines of the debate have been well documented, much more briefly in Ralph Miliband's Parliamentary Socialism and David Coates' The Labour Party and the Struggle for Socialism.
Jenkins makes useful points about what he sees as the Bevanites' key political weakness, their failure to find a real 'third way' between the twin evils of Soviet Stalinism and US imperialism. Many on the left were certainly drawn into both the pro-Soviet and pro-American trap that the icy blast of the developing Cold War encouraged.
But he fails to draw out the real link between this failure of the left to adopt a real internationalist foreign policy and its domestic policy. It simply proposed 'more of the same', a continuation of the early reformist push of the 1945-51 government. He denounces the Bevanites for failing to see the need for revolutionary action to overthrow Stalinism in Eastern Europe but fails to criticise their lack of understanding of the need to overthrow British capitalism through similar revolutionary means.
This inconsistency clearly comes from Jenkins' myopic fascination with the need to give Bevanism its 'full historic credit'. In this endeavour he launches attacks on other Labour historians, particularly David Coates, for failing to understand Bevanism and underestimating its real strengths.
In glossing over weaknesses of Bevanite policies, Jenkins also attempts to revamp the Bevanites' organisation and tactics. David Coates among others has shown that the Bevanites were first and foremost a parliamentary grouping. They had massive support in the constituency parties and the trade unions, as both Coates and Miliband accept, but they were very poorly organised when compared with, for example, the inter-war Labour left, especially the ILP. Michael Foot's authoritative (and adulatory) biography of Nye Bevan confirms the essentially parliamentary nature of Bevanite organisation.
The Bevanites had strong support in the CLPs to be sure, but they never organised it even there. They had a fine propaganda machine directed at the mass of LP members, at the time numbering more than a million. Through various left publications, pamphlets, the imaginative 'Brains Trusts' meetings, the Bevanite parliamentarians (and a small group of intellectual backers) spoke to thousands.
But this propaganda machine was very much a one way street and the rank and file had no channel, except the well-controlled party machine, to respond to the leaders of the left movement. This helps to explain why Bevanism disintegrated so easily when the parliamentarians finally abandoned their supporters and made peace with their erstwhile enemies in this period.
The most powerful force inside the labour movement against the Bevanite left was undoubtedly the trade union block vote. The right-wing trade union barons could neutralise the whole of the Bevanites' CLP support with a wave of a hand. While some unions were slowly won to the left's cause, it was too little and too late to prevent the eventual destruction of Bevanism.
While David Howell has recorded in British Social Democracy that the Bevanites made 'no attempt... to organise the left within key unions' and that they relied on 'spontaneous union democracy', Jenkins repeatedly asserts the sufficiency, if not the splendour of Bevanite organisation.
Of particular interest to revolutionary Marxists is the chapter dealing with the Socialist Fellowship and the emergence of the newspaper Socialist Outlook in the vacuum left by the traditional Labour left towards the end of the Labour government. Socialist Outlook and the group around it were heavily influenced by a tiny handful of Trotskyists. This chapter is a useful, if infuriatingly incomplete, summary of the emergence, evolution and eventual dissolution of this tendency.
Many of today's young radicals in the Labour Party look to the 1945-51 Labour government and the subsequent Bevanite movement for inspiration in today's fight. Certainly there is much to be learned from this period, but Mark Jenkins draws the wrong conclusions. Bevanism was important, certainly. It has also been underestimated, and Jenkins' book has done much to correct that. While Bevanism was certainly broad and unquestionably popular, in its politics and its organisation it was far weaker than the previous Labour lefts of the 1920s and 1930s. In that sense, it is no better or worse than previous leftward moves by sections of our movement, it is simply different. Jenkins castigates those who idealise the left of the thirties, only to commit the same crime about the fifties.