Reformism

The rise and fall of Labour reformism

What’s Left? Labour Britain and the Socialist Tradition. By David Powell. Peter Owen. £22.50.

Socialists should know their history of the Labour Party, if only to be able to refute the claim that it was ever a socialist party and to demonstrate its failure to gradually transform capitalism into something better.

Powell’s book can serve as well as any as a source of the basic facts, especially as it is largely descriptive and devoid of any ideological perspective beyond "they’ve always been divided and that’s a bad thing" and perhaps a hint that the answer to the question "what’s left (of the original Labour Party)?" is "not a lot".

It was with some amusement that this socialist picked up a copy of the recent Fabian pamphlet The Case for Socialism. Published by an organisation that has never been committed to socialism, I wondered at what the contents might be. I didn't expect too much as the Fabian Society as now constituted has been described as "Blair's shock troops" and has been at the forefront of trying to "redefine" socialism. As I read I realised that what "redefinition" meant was the wholesale bastardisation of the term to justify a century of attempts by the Labour Party and its affiliates to tweak capitalism by use of the state.