Tony Benn - He Encouraged Us.

You've all heard it said. It is one of the leading cliches in politics: the older one gets, the wider one's waistband expands, and the more conservative one becomes. There are notable exceptions to such sad cases that affirm this dictum of aging reactionaries. One such prominent case was Tony Benn, who started out as a mainstream Labour politician of the social democratic post-war establishment, only move further to the Left as he passed through Parliament and more than one Labour cabinet. The only thing startling about the old man was that he was ever a banal centrist.

The praise now being showered on Tony Benn relegates him to the dull realm of acceptability. It was not so in the days when Benn posed a serious challenge to the Labour leadership and the prevailing Cold War consensus. The Murdoch gutter press went after him with characteristic fairness, they went through his bins, produced a bogus report on his mental well-being, and probably tapped his land-line. The hysterical press barons saw a dictator of the proletariat on the horizon, but they also saw a similar figure under their beds at night. Those days are long gone. The Soviet Union collapsed and with it the threat of democratic socialism evaporated. The death of socialism and the end of history were proclaimed. Only liberal capitalism was left standing, seemingly everywhere triumphant. A socialist like Benn could be praised for his integrity only because the game was over. The conservatives and liberals can now applaud him precisely because they think the battle is over and his ideas don't really work.

No longer a prospective dictator, we find Anthony Wedgewood can be lauded as a man of principle from the old-fashioned days of Clement Attlee and Nye Bevan. The exactitude of the principles if a another matter entirely, we're led to believe that the 'Old' Labour Party was for stripping away the wealth of the propertied classes. It just didn't work. It turned Britain into the Sick Man of Europe. Have no doubt about it, the Labour government of 1945 to 1951 established a welfare state and mixed economy which produced greater development, economic stability, and growth, than have been enjoyed since the post-war settlement was dismantled from 1975 onwards. As much a creature of the War (not to be confused with any mere wars) and the social democratic consensus of the 1950s and 60s Benn had the qualifications to speak for the anti-war movement and the socialist movement.

As a Labour politician who lived through the first Wilson administration which had sought to deliver significant rates of growth rather than address the distributional basis of the economy. The hope was that the growth would raise living standards for the working-class without really changing the class structure of Britain. Yet Wilson had come to power just as an economic boom was hurtling out of control. The government had to look to hold down wages and prices to get a grip on inflation. In the midst of this Tony Benn was made the Minister of Technology and would go on to chair the Industrial Reorganisation Committee. He spent the last years of the Wilson government picking winners and backing takeovers in the midst of the Jim Slater era of asset stripping and ram-raids on corporate structures.

History is full of ironies. It was the beginning of the deindustrialisation of Britain that would eventuate in the 1980s and 90s. The conditions of the post-war settlement which amounted to the grave crises of the 70s are what led the way for Thatcherism and later Blairism. Only for the new establishment to lead to the current crisis we're living with today. The vast swathe of Labour parliamentarians were on board with the new consensus by the 80s and many of them had been even before it had fully emerged from the womb of social democracy. It was the Callaghan government which had signed up for the IMF austerity programme, which Denis Healey later admitted was unnecessary and probably cost Labour the election. We can and should praise Benn for learning from this experience and having the fortitude to take the stances he did against the onslaught which was well underway by 1979.

The stagnation of the 1970s matched a political crisis within the establishment itself. The Conservative Party wasn't going to forget the humiliation of 1974 and was determined to inflict a historic defeat on the trade unions. Under these conditions Margaret Thatcher came to the foreground. Originally the candidate was going to be Keith Joseph, who had helped to spread the ideas of Milton Friedman. He argued the crisis was down to the decline of wealth-producing sectors of the economy and the growth of the public sector and government. It was tremendously popular in contrast to the perceived bungling of Ted Heath. In the end Joseph eliminated himself by giving a eugenicist speech on poor mothers and their children. This may have been the exuberance of the emerging consensus which would be consolidated under Thatcher. Few people saw what was coming.

The major ideological triumphs of the Thatcher regime can be rounded down to just two: the Falklands War and the Miners' Strike. Tony Benn was on the right side in both instances. He saw that the war was an unnecessary loss of life and should have been handled through the United Nations. It really was a battle between two bald men fought over a comb. Without the war the Thatcher government may have well paid the price for its vandalism and suffered a defeat in 1983. Instead the Conservatives benefited from the patriotic fervour whipped up for the war. It's possible that the subsequent battle over the mines would have not arisen had the tide been turned back at that point. Once the miners had been defeated in 1985 the Thatcherite era had well and truly consolidated its gains and could go on to further victories. The labour movement that had vanquished Heath was smashed.

Even in the face of such defeats Benn stood strong and kept to his principles. He maintained his position as MP for Chesterfield and condemned the pit closures which would toss so many onto the trash heap. He stood as a voice of working-class interests against the tidal wave of Thatcherism and its bid to dismantle the entire edifice of social democracy. He remained steadfast in his optimism, at a time when many despaired, and had good reason to do so. The arguments he put forward were rooted in common-sense and populist appeals to the moral collectivism of the people. He was not a Marxist, but a left-moralist. The influence of the Fabian tradition, with its gradualist approach, and fetish for reform, can be picked up here; but there's also a break with Fabian progressivism in Benn's shift to the Left. His faith in the democratic mechanism is not as lukewarm as some on the hard Left may like to claim. The welfare state was socialist development, but it wasn't the end itself. He wanted to see democracy extended to the economy, it was a syndicalist call for industrial democracy.

Epigones of Beria.

The late Alexander Cockburn noted that he was often "savaged as little better than an epigone of Beria" for settling on the figure of five or six million deaths in Stalin's Russia. It shouldn't have to be said that looking for an accurate picture of a monstrous series of crimes is not an act of exoneration. But in this society it would seem that the higher you go the better. Only the maximal estimates of Stalin's victims guarantee credibility. Expect nothing less from the enemies of the people!

Since the passing of Eric Hobsbawm in early October the BBC has made available the widely misquoted interview of Hobsbawm by Michael Ignatieff. It's around 11 minutes in that Ignatieff raises the matter of Stalin's liquidation of huge swathes of kulaks and dooming of millions of peasants in the 30s. The question asked is "If you had known that, would it have made a difference to you at that time?" Hobsbawm responds first by stating that it is an unanswerable academic question. In a retrospective answer, not a historical answer, Hobsbawm said "Probably not". He went on to explain his reasoning, that in a period of universalised mass-murder and mass-suffering the chance of a future at all would be worth supporting. The sacrifices in Russia were unnecessarily great and excessive by any measure and, in his eyes, only marginally worthwhile. The Soviet Union was not the beginning of the world revolution, but if it had been Hobsbawm says he isn't sure if the sacrifices would have been worthwhile.

In the next breathe Eric Hobsbawm asks "Do people now say we shouldn't have had WW2 because more people died in WW2 than in Stalin's terror?" At this point interviewer Ignatieff attempts a summary "So what that comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified." It was not posed as a question and Hobsbawn responds in the affirmative, to indicate that this is the view that could be taken. Yet the old man had made it clear, moments before, that he isn't sure if the terror would have been worth it with the advent of communism. He goes on to qualify his emphatic 'Yes' by explaining that this is what people thought about the World Wars. Even though in the end many would say that the First World War was an unnecessary bloodbath, the Second World War was worth fighting. Yet this is not how the Right likes to portray this conversation, as I quote in my last article on this:

According to Robert Conquest, Hobsbawm was asked by Ignatieff in 1994 "What (your view) comes down to is saying that had the radiant tomorrow actually been created, the loss of 15, 20 million people might have been justified?" Apparently Hobsbawm's only response was "Yes."

We have good reason to suspect the right-wing historian Conquest - a former British intelligence officer and virulent cold warrior - is out to push the worst line possible about the Marxist Left and not just the Soviet Union. It's a sure thing that Conquest wouldn't rebuke in phony moral outrage at someone who sees the slaughter of the Second World War as necessary to bring down the Third Reich. As Hobsbawm emphasises, it was not about the construction of a utopia - it was a case of "a world rather than no world" - at that time for the Communists who saw the world as crumbling at that time. Really it's because Conquest disagrees fundamentally with the ultimate aim, whereas the defeat of National Socialism merely means a return to liberal democratic capitalism. The notion of a "radiant tomorrow" was rhetoric in Hobsbawm's thinking, it was more about a better, more perfect and new world. It was a more upbeat view of the future tempered with the stark realism of the dire situation in the world.

At around 24 minutes in Eric Hobsbawm goes over his view of the estimates of deaths in the Soviet Union under Stalin. He insists that the people involved in the Communist International, in the 1930s, had no substantial knowledge of what was going on under Stalin with regard to human suffering. Hobsbawm makes the same statement about what the anti-Communist intellectuals claim to know about the Soviet Union. Hobsbawm goes on to add that the estimates - ranging from 3 to 14 million in the gulags alone - are speculative and indefensible because of the range of the figures alone. The blunt tool Ignatieff quickly inquired if the old man of British Communism was saying Stalin's crimes have been "exaggerated" and, without hesitation, the old man responded "No... I'm merely saying that nobody knows!" Hobsbawm concludes that the situation in the Soviet Union under Stalin was indefensible and inhuman. And yet the man is still lambasted by the Right as a lifelong apologist for Joseph Stalin's abattoir socialism.