Alternatives to State-Socialism in Britain poses crucial and challenging questions about actors, organizations, and forms used to build a more equal society in the twentieth century. It addresses issues that go beyond Britain and the field of labour and social history and, as such, could attract the interest of a broad audience. The chapters are all well-crafted, documented, and enjoyable to read, and have been assembled in a coherent manner by the editors.
Ackers and Reid's introduction immediately sets the aim of the book – to vindicate the existence of a liberal-pluralist “living political tradition that values associational forms of life above the state” (p. 2) vis-à-vis the state-centred tradition common to both twentieth-century Marxist labour historians and social democrats. In this tradition, the state has always been considered the most important tool to defend the interests of a supposedly unified working class in pursuing socialism (either reformist or revolutionary). Against this view, the editors argue that in Britain there has always been a considerable distance between the imagined revolutionary proletarians collectively organized as a class, united by the sharing of common conditions of exploitation, and the highly fragmented, culturally diverse, locally based everyday life reality of the majority of working people, moderate in their values. In their introduction, Ackers and Reid thus make a case for the “rehabilitation” of the liberal-pluralist tradition. They look at its influence on the postwar system of industrial relations in Britain, where people like Hugh Clegg and Alan Flanders defended the independence and voluntarism of trade unions vis-à-vis the regulatory intervention of the state in collective bargaining and industrial relations. Similarly, they stress the importance of mutual society, producers’ and consumers’ cooperatives, non-conformist religious groups, and utopian socialists’ associations in promoting, through educational and libertarian experiences, socialist ideals and practices at the local level.
The chapters following the introduction fit well with the “rehabilitation” of the liberal-pluralist tradition thesis in the short twentieth century (1918 to 1979). Part one focuses on associations. Richard Whiting writes about the continuing tensions within trade unions between individual rights and collective obligations: between the freedom individuals enjoy in joining trade unions and the coercive methods used to build the collective force that, as powerful organizations, trade unions need. Rachel Vorberg-Rugh and Angela Whitecross look at the politics of the cooperative movement through the history of the Cooperative Party and its relationship with the Labour Party, highlighting how the voluntary civil society approach of the Cooperative Party represented a living voice against the statist-dominant views adopted by the Labour Party in the postwar government. Exploring the sphere of working-class-women activism at the local level, Ruth Davidson assesses how women activists have contributed to the social emancipation and full citizenship of rights for women through voluntary organizations focusing on health, education, and welfare. Andy Veil focuses on another important civil society group in Britain: the Protestant non-conformists (such as Quakers, Methodists, and Evangelists) and their educational and social services in working-class communities, particularly through adult schools. He traces the history of these movements and the presence and influence they had in political parties, trade unions, governments, and the business sector – all organizations that had quite a few non-conformist members.
Part two, “Other Leaders”, includes three social biographies of employers (Edward Cadbury) and trade unionists (Walter Citrine and Frank Chapple), who promoted and implemented industrial relations practices oriented to alternative, more cooperative ways of understanding relations between labour and capital. John Kimberley looks at the social activism of Edward Cadbury. In the community of Bournville, where the Cadbury factories were based, Cadbury established social relations between the company and the community that went well beyond common forms of paternalism, expressing a deeper sense of equality, binding, and permanence – a “covenant” relationship, as the author terms it. James Moher rediscovers the influence of Walter Citrine, former TUC general secretary and president of the IFTU, on the consolidation of a reformist independent and cooperative trade unionism in between the world wars and during World War II in particular, and the effect this had on the Labour Party and on the social reforms of 1945–1951. Calum Aikman closes Part two by considering another trade union figure, Frank Chapple, and explores his revisionist thoughts in relation to the role of unions in politics and society.
Part three, “Other Intellectuals”, uses again the biographic lens to explore the legacy of a variety of anti-statist, socialist, and anarchist streams of thought in the contributions of committed intellectuals. David Goodway looks at the prolific Labour intellectual G.D.H. Cole and his Guild Socialism, which rescued William Morris and part of the anarchist tradition from state centralism and bureaucracy, advocating a full, small-scale, diffused participatory democracy. Stephen Meredith focuses on Michael Young, who, although contributing to the Labour victory of 1945 by preparing the manifesto for the election, later distanced himself from the state-centred dominant perspective, and instead supported the construction of small productive and service-oriented organizations based on communitarian, cooperative principles within the network of the extended family unit. Finally, Stuart White explores the alternative to the state-paternalist welfare of the postwar period proposed during the 1970s and 1980s by five important left-wing activists and thinkers (Colin Ward, Sheila Rowbotham, Stuart Hall, Paul Hirst, and Hillary Wainwright). Here, again, emerges the need to decentralize and simultaneously empower the recipient of the public service, making the state responsible for the collection of resources and the provision of free basic services through taxation but emphasizing the role of groups of users in deciding how to use the same resources.
The anti-statist, decentralized, participatory, cooperative, and community-based forms of society and wealth redistribution that this book aims to rediscover is an important addition to the field of labour history, and to leftist politics (both reformist and radical) more in general. I agree with the point made by the editors about the state-socialist-centred perspective of British Labour historiography and the consequences of this approach for a more nuanced understanding of the working classes in terms of their daily life and as subjects of social change. In my own research, I have been critical of certain deterministic old-style Marxist perspectives about the working class as revolutionary subject and about workers’ forms of organization and resistance within capitalism. I think there is an absolute need in contemporary and historical studies on labour to emphasize the importance of other working classes (beyond the industrial as revolutionary subject), to paraphrase the editors of this book, and of other organizations, going beyond what I would call trade union fetishism.
However, I am less inclined to agree with the social liberal positions that the editors adopt in their conceptualization of the market economy and in the way they interpret relations existing between the market, the state, and civil society. The editors explicitly argue that there are “genuine benefits markets may bring wherever we need to know what goods and services people really want” (p. 333). The market economy can, to a certain extent, be efficient in producing and distributing commodities – however, at a cost often hidden from view – but these do not necessarily correspond to what people want or need. Our needs are constantly recreated by the market, which is increasingly profiling and monitoring our lives through the use of social media, in search of new consumers, and of the standardization of our consumption. We cannot consider the market as neutral; there is clearly an increasing tendency to marketization of our lives, which has direct consequences for our social values. Without considering this, the question the editors pose at the end of the book, “what should the balance be between three sectors of society: the market economy, the state and civil society?” (p. 329), does not make any sense.
While it is important to think about this balance in the design of any political project aiming to create more just and equal societies, we cannot deny that neo-liberal capitalism is individualizing and commodifying life, and with this many of the values of social solidarity and alternative socioeconomic practices that can possibly emerge from the civil society are commodified. The cooperative movements, the experiences of self-management and workers’ control, the alternative education-, libertarian-, and community-based social projects, which have historically emerged across the world as non-market social solidarity responses to the deficiencies of the market, have all – to different extents – been marginalized as viable alternatives. In a future economic system, the promotion of individuals’ entrepreneurship aimed at social achievements can be positive. But the free market produces distortions with consequences on individuals and civil society that are self-evidently negative: poverty, unequal income distribution and opportunities, social improvements linked to class belonging, deterioration of working conditions, and exploitation of migrants. These negative effects are genetically linked to the development of market economies, making state regulatory action difficult and with only short-term benefits. On the final page of the book, the editors advocate a mixed economy and a free society in which civil society can play an important role, arguing that we need to get “beyond the inhibiting assumptions that either the state or the market holds the answer to all social problems” (p. 334). I basically agree with this and with the overall idea of decentralizing the solutions of social problems and the management of social needs to relatively small groups of directly participating individuals and beneficiaries. This certainly requires a different way of thinking about state action and the relationship between this and society, thus imposing certain limits on the state. However, I also think that, especially in contemporary economic contexts highly dominated by supranational financial institutions, the functioning of the markets imposes limits to the sustainability of social values and to the overall democratic life of societies. We have to acknowledge this if we really want to think about a free society: “an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all”, as Marx said in the Communist Manifesto.
