INCE Labour returned to power the political landscape has changed dramatically. Two factors have been the main cause of this. Firstly, the economic crisis of November; second, the Government’s already long, and growing, series of mistakes in the field of foreign and colonial policy. According to some current political superstitions — not unknown even on the Left — thee events are unrelated. One occurred in the inscrutable limbo where only experts dare set foot; it was a question of “economics”, and worse still of the economics of international! finance. Remoteness of another kind surrounds the second fact: the distance of marginal lands like British Guiana, Aden, Ascension Island, and the Malay Peninsula. Such remoteness, and the unrelatedness of the two problems, are an optical illusion. They are parts of one reality. This reality is the air we breathe, the basic condition of British life, the substance of all the political and ideological upheavals of recent times, the true historical cause of the Labour Party’s return to power last October. Only the long mutilation of our eyes and brains by this climate makes what is next the skin appear as distant and mysterious. The same mutilation renders the word describing the reality foreign and suspect: imperialism. The term that touches the heart of all our problems appears as abstract and arbitrary, the invention of cranks. What was the real significance of the sterling crisis in November? Another level of our alienation persuades us that the past is always innocuous. We know that we are the most conservative nation in existence, we feel the past up to our cars like a bath of tepid water. Politely, nowadays, everyone acknowledges it was
time we got out of it. It occurs to
few that we might be three-quarters
drowned already, and have to rup-
ture ourselves in order to escape.
Thus, we led world imperialism for
two centuries, drawing sustenance
from remote countries for our Indus-
trial Revolution and then erecting
on this foundation a global system of
economic domination. The British
ruling class reacted to this easy dom-
ination by turning definitively away
from its own Industrial Revolut:on:
the industrial accumulation of capi-
tal had become much slower and
more difficult in the face of foreign
competition, and at the same time
the possibilities of rapid accumula-
tion through financial mechanisms
had multiplated enormously. From
being the great producer of wealth,
Britain became the great manipula-
tor of the symbol of wealth, money.
The gentlemanly money - lender
eclipsed the self-made manufacturer.
The City and its comp!ex of institu-
tions for the financing of overseas
trade and investment displaced the
industrial North. The Pound sterling
replaced the railway engine as the
national fetish-object. The way had
been found to make money reproduce
itself without end. The secret of this
magic lay in the labour of hordes of
men in far-away land3, and its corol-
lary was the decline of the British
industrial economy. But what did
these facts matter, to the high-
priests of the Pound in London, or
to the ruling elite and the nation
blinded by the sorcery? Out of this
possession, the final form of British
imperial power, there arose a
chronic disequilibrium of the British
economy: the sacrifice of industrial
capital to financial capital became a
way of life. Now, under the utterly
different conditions of the nineteen-
sixties, it has become a way of death.
The permanent,’ distortion of the
economy produced by imperialism is
like a gigantic hump on the back of
the nation, cramping every move-
ment; can such a deformity really
be exorcised by the genteel exhorta-
tions on the theme of “backward-
ness”, “inefficiency”, ‘“modernisa-
tion”, and so on, filling the news-
papers?
The November crisis showed the
size and violence of the operation
required. It did so, partly, because
a Labour government was now in
power, determined to solve Britain’s
economic problem. Against the force
of this determination — as opposed
to Conservative collusion in the
reign of finance-capital — the anat-
omy of the problem stood out.
Given the relative backwardness of
many industrial sectors, and the con-
sequent increasing demand for for-
eign products (as well as the more
traditional imports of food and raw
materials), any considerable move-
ment of economic growth is liable
to lead to a flood of imports. Given
the permanent burden constituted by
foreign military-political expenditure,
this flood provokes a crisis in the
national balance of payments, Such
a crisis threatens a forced reduction
in the standard of living, if prolonged.
But it also threatens, much more
immediately and dramatically, all
the structures and interests of finan-
cial capital built up and consolidated
in the imperialist era. These are
oriented primarily towards foreign
dealing; they depend upon the con-
tinued use of the pound sterling in
international exchange, and there-
fore upon the stable value of ster-
ling in relation to all other currencies.
Since a devaluation of sterling would
almost inevitably result from an un-
resolved payments deficit, the latter
is a kind of time-bomb menacing the
foundations of the City. Up till now,
this consideration has governed all
reactions to these economic crises.
In the mystique inherited from im-
perialism, the great weakness of the
THE WEEK — March 4, 1965
MENACE
modern British economy is apprehended as its peculiar strength, the “virtue to be defended above all others,. at any cost. Part of the cost has always been — economic growth itself, which beyond a certain point precipitated the balance of payments crises. It had to be put a stop to, to preserve the pound-fetish. When — as even the most ignorant City office boy realises — the real preservation of the sterling currency can only depend in the long run upon the reanimation of the productive economy. - That is, upon growth, and the more successful affirmation of British capitalism on the international market. Such was the incredible contradiction bequeathed by imperialism. All attempts to foster economic growth produced a slowing-down of growth and stagnation; each atempt to “save the pound” in reality weakened the pound; reality had to be sacrificed more and more savagely for the sake of the symbol, which itself grew weaker with each act of sacrifice. Labour was resolved ‘to ‘break away from this vicious circle. The . logic of its programme and its new ideological stance rendered it, in effect, the champion of industrial capital; its task was the righting of this historical disequilibrium between industrial and financial capital which had turned into a stranglehold on all economic development (and hence, also, upon the social reforms Labour wanted to bring about). Its new, harder “radicalism” was in part the reflection of this objective, radical exigency — an exigency voiced, in different ways, by nearly every shade of opinion. In the conditions of nascent crisis inherited from the Home government, Labour’s first steps revealed two things: first — and far more nakedly than ever before -—— the great force and true character of the vicious spiral; second, Labour’s lack of any aggressive strategy towards