On Living in an Old Country by Patrick Wright & Andrzej Krauze

Author:Patrick Wright & Andrzej Krauze
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-08-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Labour Movement and the ‘National Past’

While the labour movement faces problems negotiating the loaded interpretation of the past which is instituted within the public field of meaning, there are also serious difficulties of a different sort bearing on the apparently unequivocal presence of the ‘national past.’ In order to clarify this second area it will help to introduce a fourth past–present alignment, and this one might as well be called the marching proletariat alignment. This axis, according to which historical development is imagined as a slow but continuous process of struggle through which the working class ‘wins’ the present, has played a key part in organising the understanding and use (both analytical and also gestural in the use of slogans) that the labour movement has made of history.

This, of course, is the Forward March of Labour, and as we know it is a procession which has been experiencing some difficulties lately. Many of the marchers seem to have scattered from the road, some of them have definitely defected to the other side, and there have also been serious problems with what limited ‘winning’ of the present has taken place. While the post-war years have indeed seen some realisation of egalitarian and democratic ideas, an overwhelming greyness has also crept over the picture—the bureaucracy, the waiting lists, the destruction of communities and traditional forms of self-understanding, the reduction of ideas of change, social responsibility, emancipation and development to the pallid state practices of ‘nationalisation’ and ‘planning,’ the political principles of democracy caricatured in the pragmatic bargaining which has gone on between the most powerful partners in the corporatist arrangement. If an earlier time saw the making of the working class, the events of the post-war years have lent great strength to those interests which now benefit from its unmaking.

Recent Labour governments have indeed been greatly disappointing, but it still seems to me that socialist claims in relation to the ‘national past’ or to historical development face a prior problem which is of a fairly formal kind. Because socialism does not conceive of historical development as a process which is in any full sense achieved or accomplished in the present as we know it, it cannot work up an easy public presence for its sense of history. Socialism is so evidently not present (except through its mistakes or by negative ascription from its opponents as bureaucracy, union intransigence, East Europe and so forth) and its relation to the present remains one of critical challenge. It still exists, in other words, as an idea, and as one which is increasingly difficult to define in traditional class terms. Recent events (including Remembrance Day 1981) suggest that socialism cannot match Conservative claims to the ‘national past’ and tradition. The Conservative interests have an easy time in this area, resting their case not so much on any idea as on the overwhelming presence of the ‘national past’—its traditions, monuments and institutions. It is a relation of identity rather than critical challenge that is assumed here;

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