SOCIALISM AND COLD WAR
703
between right-wingers and left-wingers, between administrators and
crusaders, between professional ex-Ministers and professional Oppo–
sitionists can be settled in the abstract. The only rational way to
settle it is to examine the kind of problems we shall face in the
1960's and to
ask
ourselves what kind of Labour Party will be cap–
able of dealing with them.
I believe that, in posing the problem in this way, I shall win
cordial assent from Mr. Crosland, Mr. Jay and Mr. Jenkins. Their
proposals for changing the image of the Labour Party and eradicat–
ing many of its radical traits are all based on certain assumptions
about the nature of the post-war world and the prospects of the
British economy in the next decade. Both in his book,
The Future of
Socialism/
and in the occasional writings which have succeeded it,
Mr. Crosland has consistently maintained the view that the inher–
ent contradictions in capitalism, which formed the central feature
of the old-fashioned Socialist analysis, are now outmoded myths,
since we have developed an economy so different from nineteenth–
century capitalism that it merits a new name. So he looks to the
United States as the model of the new, managed capitalism; in
which it is possible permanently to avoid mass unemployment and
to achieve a steady and satisfactory rate of economic expansion
without falling into inflation.
Of
course, each of these post-war
Af–
fluent Societies still shows grave imperfections-here too slow a "rate
of growth; here headlong growth alternating with indiscriminate
restriction; here injustice committed to a whole social group; here
an imbalance between the private and the public sector. But none
of these imperfections, in his view, is inherent in the system and
most or" them could be evened out by a sensible, moderate left-wing
Government, led by men who both understand the management of
modern capitalism and feel an urge to remove its injustices and in–
equalities. A Labour Government, in fact, once it can persuade the
electorate to give it an adequate majority, will, if Mr. Croslarid's
analysis proves correct, be able to plan and control the economy
without any radical change in its structure and, in particular, with–
out any drastic enlargement of the public sector.
Let me say at once that, if I agreed with this picture of our
post-war economies and accepted Mr. Crosland's optimistic predic–
tions about the way the world will move during the 1960's,' I should
