Andrew Gamble: Britain in Decline, Papermac, 1981, £4.95
The appearance of Andrew Gamble's book Britain in Decline is welcome from a number of points of view. It provides a summary of a vast amount of material concerned with the political analysis of British society, the history of its capitalism, and the perspectives which flow from it. As a source of data on Britain's economic decline and other related questions it is extremely useful.
The second key strength, a refreshing contrast to many contributions and allowing problems to be posed in a realistic way, is that it stresses throughout that the crisis of British capitalism can only be understood in terms of international development; in the fact that Britain was the first great capitalist power and the first developed economy and society. Within that context the discussion of such issues as the dominance of banking capital over industry, the defeat of the 'social imperialist' strategy of Joseph Chamberlain and others to revive British industry, the question of why the British ruling class fought German imperialism in two world wars but capitulated without struggle before the United States, are given their due central importance.
Thirdly the book correctly insists on the peculiarly 'unfinished' character of the bourgeois revolution in Britain in the political sphere. That is, to put it in slightly more precise terms than Gamble uses, that despite the fact that the British bourgeoisie achieved an overwhelming development of the capitalist economy it failed from the mid-19th century onwards to bring about the necessary changes in the political structures and class relation of forces, both inside the ruling class and between the ruling class and the working class, that could have maintained this development. Hence from the mid-19th century onwards commenced the long history of relative decline of British capitalism which is so familiar.
All the points are correct and important, although not all are original to Gamble, and pondering on their significance will go far towards orienting revolutionaries correctly in the dimensions of the present political crisis in Britain. They mark the book out as one of the most useful recent contributions to an analysis of British society and well worth reading.
Finally the book is significant because unlike many others on the subject it does not treat the British ruling class as homogeneous but understands that it has differences of interest within it. Given the tradition within Marxism in Britain, as opposed to that of the 'classical Marxism' of Marx to Trotsky, not to analyse the British ruling class at all this is a welcome emphasis. The type of quasi-mystical rhetoric engaged in by the British left concerning 'the class' (by which is meant the working class) is in direct contrast to Lenin's point that: 'Tactics must be based on a sober and strictly objective appraisal of all the class forces in a particular state (and of the states that surround it, and of all states the world over)', and that, 'science...demands that account be taken of all forces, groups, parties, classes and masses operating in a given country.' Re-establishing serious debate concerning not only the British working class but also the British ruling class is a very necessary step forward for Marxism in Britain. Gamble's and other contributions should therefore help considerably raise the theoretical level of discussion.
Despite these important strengths, however, the book suffers from some major flaws which considerably reduce the force of its arguments. These almost all arise because at various points Gamble succumbs to the temptation to substitute various sorts of eclectic categories for Marxist ones.
The British state
The first major problem in Gamble's argument concerns the reasons why it was Britain which became the world's first imperialist power. Given that it was its initial success which, as Gamble himself correctly stresses, which laid the basis and set the terms of later decline, this is clearly a fundamental question. Unfortunately, rather than providing an answer in terms of social relations, Gamble lays too much emphasis on geography: the fact that Britain is an island and, therefore, allegedly a secure base of operations. This, however, is not by any means the most fundamental point as becomes obvious when two historical facts are taken into account.
First, prior to the Norman invasion of 1066, England, far from being strong, constituted a sort of large forested swamp which successive waves of Romans, Scots, Picts, Saxons, Vikings, and Normans had no trouble in conquering or invading with far more primitive levels of technology than existed later. Furthermore it is evidently equally technically difficult to cross the Channel one way as the other and therefore geographic causes cannot possibly explain why from the 'Middle Ages' onwards it was always the English who periodically invaded France and continental Europe and not the other way round.
Secondly, the world's first bourgeois revolution occurred in Holland. Despite its position on the mainland of Europe, the greatest military power of the day, Spain, proved incapable of crushing Holland militarily. The extraordinary strength and resistance of Holland was due precisely to its social relations — the fact that it was a capitalist power. The Dutch were finally defeated, and their [illegible] English state [carried through] the capitalist revolution culminating in [illegible]. What was it, then, about Britain's social relations which allowed this superiority to develop? From 1066 onwards England possessed, in relative terms, an extremely centralised and powerful feudal society of a unified character — with a relative absence of problems of internal customs barriers and decentralised political power which hindered capitalism elsewhere. This, coupled with the trade in wool to the developing capitalism of the Low Countries, aided monetarisation of the economy and an extremely early dissolution of feudal landed property relations. The creation of capitalist property in land, which meant that the civil war of 1642-49 was fought out between two groups of landowners both of which were essentially already based on capitalist property, was the core of the whole future development of British society.
It explains the apparently confused and opaque character of the civil war itself, which related far more to the political role of the monarchic state and its attempt to create a 'feudal absolutism' than to any antagonism based on different modes of production. It also accounts for the otherwise inexplicable and anomalous fact that well into the 19th century no group in British society, including the industrialists, could compete in wealth and power with the landed aristocracy. It is a curious but decisive historical fact that the first great industrial power in the world was built, and for almost its entire history politically dominated, by a landed, and not industrial, capitalist class.
The development of this landed capitalist class into the domination of the Conservative Party, and its long interrelation with banking capital in the City of London as against industrial capital explains much of the subsequent post-mid 19th century development of British capitalism. The apparently 'irrational' and 'stupid' economic policies pursued by the bourgeoisie, up to and including the present Thatcher government are inexplicable outside this context. These policies [illegible] the inability of British industrial capital economically, and above all politically, to dominate the country — a failure which culminated with the collapse of the Liberal Party in 1916 amid the strains of the First World War. [illegible] the current crisis of British capitalism, the errors in Gamble's historical analysis lead to considerable problems when he turns to look at contemporary political problems and the means to tackle them; indeed it is the section on current strategy which is the weakest of his book.
The present political crisis in Britain is the product of an enormous accumulation of historical contradictions: no other state in the world has such an unbroken continuity as the English/British. To understand what is happening in British politics today it is impossible without grasping that the Tory Party, and above all its Thatcherite wing, does not represent the decisive forces of the British domestic industrial bourgeoisie who, on the contrary, are represented by Heath, The Liberals and the SDP.
The political implications and consequences are also clear. The present Heathite wing inside the Tory Party is generally referred to as 'wet' — as though it were somehow more restrained and less anti-working class in its policies than Thatcher. Foot, Kinnock and Co call on it to oppose the 'unreasonableness' of Thatcher. Such a view is radically false. The Heath wing inside the Tory Party simply reflects the fact that the peculiar historical formation of the Tory Party means that the relation of forces within it is significantly different to that inside the ruling class as a whole. In fact Thatcher's policies are, in the present relation of forces, against the interests of the most decisive sections of the bourgeoisie. The opposition of Heath to Thatcher within the Tory Party is simply based on an attempt to shift the relation of forces inside the ruling class in favour of an alternative which is economically more rational for the bourgeoisie. Its policies, based on a massive increase of the rate of profit through incomes policy and cuts in real wages, are just as completely against the interests of the working class as Thatcher. Far from being 'wet' it in fact represents decisive and dangerous sectors of the ruling class.
The SDP-Liberal Alliance fits in the same framework. Its economic policy is identical to that of Heath. The SDP however simply represents another political strategy — one performing a twin role with Heath. The more sane elements of the ruling class are well aware that the British working class will never be won to support of the Conservative Party — for a hundred and forty years 'the Tories' have represented for the mass working class movement the enemy. Hatred of the Tory Party is far deeper in the working class than either positive support for the Labour Party or any commitment to socialism. While the Heath wing of the Tory Party may be economically correct for the ruling class, politically it has no hope of confronting the working class as the experience of the Heath government of 1970-74 conclusively demonstrated.
The role of the SDP is precisely to fill the gap between the massive working class distrust and hate of the Tory Party and the much smaller section which actually positively supports Labour. By splitting the Labour Party and reducing it to a party with no perspective of forming a government, the SDP has the project of politically breaking up the traditional historical perspectives of the working class and opening the door for 'Heathite' economic policies to be presented as the 'only practical alternative to Thatcherism'.
Seen from the point of view of the objective relation of forces this policy is in fact hopelessly doomed. The idea, which in reality is the content of the theorisations of 'sophisticated' Eurocommunist wings of the Communist Party and not a few on the Labour left, that it is possible to have some sort of 'Popular Front' to relaunch British capitalism is absurd. The rejuvenation of domestic capitalist industry was already impossible by the middle of the nineteenth century and has zero chance of success today.
The danger of the situation however lies precisely in the orientation of the Labour bureaucracy. The de facto line of Foot, Kinnock, Healey and the union leadership of 'uniting everyone against Thatcher' is in fact one of total disaster. It is precisely aiming for an alliance with the key sections of the ruling class — not any policy of struggle against capitalism. Its realisation, in a Labour-SDP government following the introduction of proportional representation which is its logical embodiment, is in fact the only coherence of the present orientation of Foot. This would be the greatest disaster to strike the labour movement since 1931. Clarifying the real nature and social bases of the various political forces in Britain is vital in clarifying political strategy and this involves an understanding of their history. Gamble's theoretical eclecticism prevents the full strategic implications being drawn out of the material he himself assembles.
Alternative economic strategy
It would be possible to give many further examples from Britain in Decline of failure to formulate theoretical problems clearly and therefore to draw clear political conclusions from them. At one point, for example, Gamble puts forward the curious idea that it might have been an historical strategy for the ruling class to aim for 'the creation of a new order in which all individual workers could participate as full members — free sellers of labour power, sovereign consumers, and potential capitalists — (which) could have provided the basis for an attempt to abolish the working class as a class, offering the opportunity to rise as compensation for the inequalities of the market' (p.82). This strategy was apparently rejected by the ruling class.
It is difficult to know what is meant by a passage such as this. One assumes Gamble does not mean that it is literally possible for the bourgeoisie to achieve the 'abolition of the working class as a class' — a capitalism without a proletariat would indeed have been one of the most curious 'strategies' existing in history! Presumably it indicates that the ruling class might have adopted some sort of strategy of political hegemony based on presenting Britain as a radically democratic type of society (on the model later adopted by the American ruling class). In reality however such a perspective was totally excluded. As Mike Davis has correctly pointed out in a major article in New Left Review (issue 123), political forms of domination used by the US ruling class were based on the existence of a very large layer of small capitalist farmers who had an interest in democracy but also very clearly in keeping it within bourgeois limits. In Britain, however, by the middle of the nineteenth century, or even earlier, neither small farmers nor even a classic petit-bourgeoisie existed as a force of any significance.
Britain was already a massively proletarian country and any radical extension of democratic rights and democratic ideology would merely have reinforced the struggles of the working class. As I have argued in a previous article in International (Vol 6 No 1), it was precisely fear of the proletariat which determined the policy of the British ruling class from the mid-nineteenth century onwards and dominated its political, and economic, strategy. The British ruling class had no serious alternatives to the ones it embarked on.
This also explains the apparent paradox, which Gamble dwells on at length, concerning the adoption by the British ruling class of the policy of free trade from the mid-1840s onwards. Why, asks Gamble, did the British ruling class not pursue a policy similar to that of Germany and the United States of building up its industry behind high tariff barriers? In reality, in addition to the conjunctural estimation by the British ruling class during the 1840s that it could outcompete any other state, the choice was in fact dictated by the internal relation of forces. To develop British industry further required either cheap food, to keep down the cost of labour, or a massive assault on the living conditions of the working class — something too politically dangerous in the then social relation of forces. For exactly the same reasons, abandonment of free trade was too dangerous to embark on later. Joseph Chamberlain's 'social imperialism' was defeated not simply by an internal relation of forces within the ruling class but by the fact, mercilessly used by the Liberals in [their] great electoral victory of 1906, that a protective tariff system would have meant [dearer] food. An attempt to adopt the German [system] would have resulted in a British equivalent [of] the German revolution of 1918/19 in an unfavourable social relation of forces.
The German and American tariff system only made sense with German and American rates of exploitation. And these were too dangerous for the British ruling class to attempt to adopt. This point is also of some importance today as it underlies the debate, also discussed by Gamble in some detail, concerning import quotas. Gamble attempts to draw from his correct insistence that the development of the British economy can only be understood in its international context some basis for the ideas of the Alternative Economic Strategy (AES). But to argue for import quotas on the grounds that 'the main source of British economic decline was the nature of the links that have bound the British economy to the world economy' (p.206) is to miss the point completely.
It is absolutely obvious that any socialist government in Britain would have to take control of trade, movement of capital etc. There is no possibility of a planned economy otherwise. But the decisive element in relaunching expansion is control of investment, not control of trade. Without control and development of investment, all that the imposition of import controls means is a collapsing domestic siege economy — a perfect scenario for right-wing backlash and takeover with the left discredited for years. But the taking of control of investment out of the hands of the capitalists, their right to dispose of and dominate their assets, means in practice, no matter what the formalities, their expropriation — with the violent consequences they will resort to in order to attempt to prevent this.
This is in fact the contradiction at the centre of the Alternative Economic Strategy and why Gamble is quite incorrect to give it credibility by stating that although there is an alternative economic strategy, there is no political force capable of imposing it (p.227). In reality the AES is itself totally internally incoherent. Any attempt to implement it will result either in economic chaos and a massive right wing advance against a demoralised working class or an absolutely violent central confrontation with the ruling class over the very existence of capitalism — something which takes us far beyond the bounds of the AES. Such a latter development has to be prepared through a totally different type of political strategy than the advocates of the AES propose.
The origins of the particular development of British capitalism lie in its insertion in the international economy. But the solution to the problems of Britain does not lie in the field of economics but that of politics. Altering the nature of the links between Britain and the world economy will not solve anything. It is necessary to destroy the state power of the capitalist class and use a new state power to reshape the whole economy — including its relations to the international economy. The AES is only of relevance to that insofar as an attempt to implement it might, against the will of its proponents, be the occasion for a head-on confrontation with the political power of the capitalist class. But that will be a result not of the correctness of the AES but of its radical incoherence. It is in fact an economistic blind alley.
Anderson v Thompson
Many of the weaknesses of Gamble's argumentation can be traced back to one rather extraordinary weakness in a book of this type. By far the most important debate which has taken place on the development of English history, that between Perry Anderson in his 'Origins of the Present Crisis' and E P Thompson in his 'Peculiarities of the English' is scarcely dealt with — Anderson's essay does not even find its way into the bibliography although his later Arguments Within English Marxism does. Given that Anderson's 1964 article is by far the most important analysis of English history, and the crisis of British capitalism written since Trotsky's Where is Britain Going? this absence very considerably weakens the book as a summary of existing work.
Thompson's contribution to this debate, with its false perspective on English society but its unquestionable status as the most authoritative and coherent codification of the assumptions of British Labourism, has been republished in his Poverty of Theory. But for a systematic study of the origins of the present crisis of British capitalism, it is necessary to plough through library vaults for 15 year old copies of New Left Review to find Anderson's article and important contemporary essays by Tom Nairn. (A volume bringing these together is long promised, and overdue, from New Left Books.) Nearly twenty years after they were written the theoretical idiom and some of the concepts of the Anderson/Nairn articles need to be altered as well as certain of their conclusions. But they remain the most outstanding contribution to the analysis of the development of British society since the era of 'classical Marxism' and one which, with the crisis in Labour and Conservative parties, are more relevant than ever.
While Gamble's book does move forward the frontiers of analysis or strategic debate, it is well worth reading and among the most serious contributions to recent writing on the British crisis.