CLEMENT ATTLEE:
LABOUR CARETAKER OF BRITISH CAPITALISM
By George Novack
Clement Attlee, Labour party leader who was prime minister from 1945 to 1951, has died at the age of eighty-four.
Caricature of Clement Attlee drawn in 1945 by the late Laura Gray, well-known cartoonist for The Militant.
He will be buried in Westminster Abbey. The services which Earl Attlee rendered to the possessing classes of England at a time of peril to their domination earned him this distinction.
Attlee found Marxism, the class struggle and the proletarian revolution repugnant to his refined sensibilities. These seemed to him utterly incompatible with British traditions and temperament.
He espoused instead a settlementhouse variety of Fabianism which championed philanthropic measures for the "deserving poor" under the aegis of the "Welfare State." This outlook dispensed triple blessings. It sedated the workers, relieved middle-class consciences; and helped the rich perpetuate the system of exploitation which generated poverty in the first place.
He and his similars borrowed the philosophy of gradualism from a superannuated Liberalism and carried it into the Labour party where it acted as a brake upon the growing power of organized labour. From the colorless character of his personality to his prostration before U.S. imperialism Attlee epitomized the conservative and conciliatory attitudes of the right-wing elements in the Labour party and unions.
Attlee boasted of his makeshift empiricism, his readiness to compromise principled issues, and his "fairness" toward all classes. He abhorred all forms of militant mass action and sought the gradual improvement of bourgeois society by purely parliamentary and peaceful means.
Attlee's background was far removed from the working men and women who made up the ranks of the Labour party. The son of a well-to-do lawyer, an Oxford graduate who was trained to follow his father's profession, he was swerved from this career by commiseration for the conditions of the inhabitants in London's East End. He did settlement work there for fourteen years.
This led him to question the basis of the economic system and Fabian propaganda converted him to a mild socialism. He joined the Independent Labour party which was instrumental in bringing the present Labour party into being.
Adhering to the principle of gradualism in all things, he mounted the Labour party hierarchy rung by rung. From 1919 to 1931 he served as Mayor of Stepney, in the House of Commons and in the two Mac- Donald governments. As one of the few Labour survivors left in the Commons after his predecessor as prime minister, Ramsay MacDonald, betrayed the party and formed a “National Government" in 1931, Attlee became deputy leader.
He was elevated to the top at a time of crisis and confusion within the party in 1935. "Clem" was looked upon as "the least common denominator" of the contending factions, a safe and sane choice to keep the ship afloat until a more capable pilot could be put at the heln.
The war intervened and, as deputy prime minister of the Coalition Government, he became Churchill's chief aide, especially entrusted with the task of keeping the workers in line. He took charge of the government when the Tory bulldog was i11 or absent. In that capacity he approved the atom-bombing of Japan
and never changed his mind about that atrocity.
After Germany's defeat in the spring of 1945, he and his associates were, much to their surprise, swept into office by an election landslide which gave Labour 390 seats to 195 for the Conservatives. This stunning victory offered the Labour leadership an unexampled opportunity to deal death blows to English capitalism which would considerably facilitate the transition to socialism. The possessing classes were on the ropes; the workers were ready for far-reaching measures; the middle classes were sympathetic to radical changes. Despite the material difficulties of the postwar years, no Social Democratic government in office ever had a more favorable political situation to show what its methods were worth.
Attlee was closer to MacDonald than to Cromwell. He was not the man for thoroughgoing actions or surgical procedures. Almost everything his government did at home and abroad was half-hearted.
His first administration did inaugurate numerous long-overdue reforms desired and welcomed by the working people. It established a free National Health Service, increased unemployment benefits, retirement and widows' pensions and workmen's compensation. These social welfare measures, which he regarded as his major achievement, won his regime whatever esteem it retained among the masses.
The crucial part of his domestic program, however, revolved around the nationalizations proposed in the Labour party platform. Attlee's government took over the Bank of England, the coal mines, cable and wireless services, public utilities (gas and electricity), rail, air and road transport, and later the steel plants.
These nationalizations did give the government certain levers of control over the national economy. However, the Fabians chose not to overstep the boundaries of capitalism and left the power of the private banks and monopolists intact. They also brought some benefits to the unionized workers in the nationalized sectors. They had greater security of employment, though this could be imperiled by rationalization; more regularized training and promotions; and some ways to check the more arbitrary decisions of an autocratic management.
In spite of their initial apprehensions and resistance, the principal beneficiaries of the limited nationalizations ironically turned out to be the profiteers against which they were directed. Less than twenty percent of British industry was transferred to public ownership. This was inadequate to vest effective centralized control of the commanding heights of the economy in government hands.
The most prosperous branches of the economy remained under private ownership. Generous compensation payments not only rescued the proprietors of the nationalized industries from bankruptcy but converted their former liabilities into large liquid capital assets. These funds became available for investment in the "growth sectors" of the economy where the highest returns could be raked in.
On top of that, the more efficient operation of the newly nationalized industries, with their subsidized services, lowered production costs and increased the profitability of the private sector.
Instead of placing the newly nationalized industries under the democratic control of the workers, Attlee's government turned over their operation in many cases to executives and monied men intimately linked with private enterprise. While still in office, the prime minister unblushingly reported that sixty out of the 131 persons on the central boards of the public corporations were also directors in private companies, twenty-three were knights, nine were lords, and three were generals.
The results of this hybrid "mixed economy," one-fourth public and threefourths private, disappointed the hopes of the workers as much as it reassured the capitalist class. After the initial charge of enthusiasm and energy, the Attlee government kept floundering and losing its popularity. It had reached a dead end when the Conservatives made their comeback in 1951.
The Attlee government was shamefully compliant to the interests of Anglo- American imperialism in the field of foreign affairs. Churchill had pugnaciously told Roosevelt that he had not taken office to preside over the liquidation of "His Majesty's Empire." But the economic decline of Great Britain, the growth of the dominions and the irrepressible upsurge of the subject nations necessitated a reorganization of London's imperial system.
Attlee and his Ministers undertook to supervise this inevitable readjustment to the changed relationship of forces on the world arena so that British capitalism could retreat in good order with the minimum losses. They accorded independence to India, Ceylon and Burma and withdrew British troops from Egypt and Palestine.
These moves did not prevent Attlee from extending into the postwar period London's military and diplomatic alliance with Washington which was directed not
only against the Soviet Union but against the advancing colonial revolution. As a junior partner in the cold war, Attlee's regime cooperated with the United States in devising and implementing the Truman Doctrine in the Mediterranean, policing the regions east of Suez, and supporting the Korean war. He set the pattern being pursued by Wilson in respect to Vietnam.
Despite a challenge from the Bevan-~ ite opposition, Attlee managed to keep his leadership until 1955 when he was replaced by Hugh Gaitskell. He crowned his political career by filling a seat in the House of Lords. He felt quite at home in that archaic body.
Attlee used the immense powers put at his disposal by the British working class, not to speed a decrepit capitalism to its grave, but to try and nurse it back to health. His successors are still at this job.
Attlee's services as physician to their sick system undoubtedly endeared him to the Anglo-American bourgeoisie. But the workers and socialists of Britain have no reason to be thankful for then.
CUBAN ART SHOW