DAVID LIPSEY
129
"' .
unionists, eager only to ensure that the voice of the new industrial
working class was heard in Parliament. For the socialists, the high
point was the adoption in 1918, after the reorganization of the party,
of the party's constitution, with the commitment to the "public
ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange."
Their goal through the vicissitudes of fortune in the subsequent
sixty-four years had been to translate that commitment from aspira–
tion into reality.
In European terms there was, of course, nothing unusual in the
early part of the century about a party of the Left adopting a genu··
inely socialist, or even a Marxist, perspective. Bernstein, and revi–
sionism' s day, had yet properly to dawn. But Britain was unusual in
two respects. Elsewhere in Europe, the Left was split between two or
more parties, one of which was a Communist Party. But in Britain,
the Communist Party has never been a serious political force. So the
Marxist element was within the Labor Party.
Secondly, unlike many European socialist parties, when times
moved against the Marxists in the post-World War II years, the
British Labor Party never underwent a process of historical modern–
ization. The contrast is sharpest with the German SPD, which had
its own Marxist roots and original Marxist program. But in the
1950s these had become irrelevant and politically counterproduc–
tive, and were abandoned with the party's adoption of the revision–
ist
Bad Godesburg
program of 1959.
Much of the leadership of the British Labor Party, and certainly
Hugh Gaitskell, its leader from 1956 to 1962, would have liked to do
the same in the British context. In the aftermath of the party ' s 1959
election defeat, Gaitskell sought to abolish the commitment of the
party to universal public ownership-the debate on Clause Four in
the constitution. The party, still attracted by this symbol of its own
radical credentials, turned him down. In other words, it determined
once more to attempt to contain within itself two conflicting ideolo–
gies. And the decision was apparently vindicated when, despite its
divisions, it managed under Harold Wilson to sneak to a narrow vic–
tory in the 1964 general election.
As the sixties turned to the seventies and the seventies to the
eighties, a number of developments in Britain made this posture an
increasingly uncomfortable one . The first was, as in other industrial
societies, the decline in the proportion of manual workers and the
