>>> nathan at newman.org 06/08/01 01:39PM >>>
NN: The Labor Party was established as essentially a caucus within the Liberal Party, much as the Progressive Caucus in the Dems now operates, although the latter has less of a formal electoral coalition.
MM: The Labour Party had as its founding constituents the ILP, the Fabian Society, the Social Democratic Federation, and the TUC. As soon as it was formed in 1900, it ran its own candidates in the general election (and every election thereafter). It was in no sense a "caucus" within the Liberal Party.
Well to quote Sassoon on the 1900 founding - "Yet the trade unionists who accepted the LRC were in the main at heart still Liberals not socialist. It was not until 1918 that a Labour Party was constituted on a solid national basis with an unambiguously socialist, though appropriately vague, indication of the final aim of the movement." (i.e Clause 4)
Early Labor candidates were run tactically in combination with the Liberals.
MM: France and the absence of socialism are red herrings. Are you seriously suggesting that the reforms implemented by the Attlee government were a bipartisan consensus, that Churchill would have done more or less the same thing?
Exactly the same thing? Probably not- a lot of it, probably, just as the French and German conservative parties did, just as the Tories did not dismantle most of the Attlee measures once they took back power, at least until Thatcherism came in full force.
NN: The Labour Party is probably the best support for exactly the point I was making, since the Labour Party had so much trouble building majoritarian status and only did so when it opened itself up for de facto internal alliances with sectors of capital.
MM: The argument has never been about whether Labour or Social-Democratic parties make alliances with capital. Of course they do. The argument is about whether there is a distinction between a party (like pre-Blair Labour) whose lifeblood is tied to the working class and its institutions, preeminently trade unions, and a party (like the Dems) who keep the labor vote as a captive constituency byt whose lifeblood is tied to sectors of capital.
As you note, Labour was left out of government for much of the post-war periods and when they came back after Attlee, the Labour governments were hardly sterling examples of socialism, just as the Labour government in the 1930s did very little that was socialist, probably being less radical than FDR's New Deal..
As I said, focusing on the working class side of the ledger misses the real difference between Europe and the US. The critical difference after WWII was that capital was far more powerful in the US. That was why policy diverged across the Atlantic.
-- Nathan Newman