Cruddas’s Labour

In A Century of Labour (2024), the retiring Labour MP for London’s east-end constituency of Dagenham and Rainham, Jon Cruddas, attempts to explain the origins of Labour’s current crisis by charting differing visions of justice across a century of party history. As Cruddas explains, “the question this book seeks to contribute towards is how do we apply an intellectual coherence to Labour in its shape-shifting quality?”

A Century of Labour offers a history of the party centered around three conceptions of justice. First, a legalistic tendency focused on rights; second, an ethical strain constructed around the subjective transformation of the person within a conception of the common good; and last, a technocratic tradition concerned with a utilitarian redistribution of material goods.

Cruddas, of working-class Irish Catholic origin, has long been considered a leading if somewhat heterodox intellectual in the Labour Party, influenced by an infusion of religious and pre-Marxist socialist thought. As Cruddas writes, “Socialist change was not simply political and economic — the machinery of socialism, as [William] Morris called it — but [a case] of heightened consciousness.” Indeed, the pessimistic philosophy of John Gray, a regular columnist for the increasingly postliberal New Statesman magazine, and the communitarian thought of Michael Sandel, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor, all of whom deal with the human qua human, appear just as frequently in A Century of Labour’s footnotes as formally economistic Marxist and socialist texts.

After finishing a PhD in Marxist value theory — a strand of Marxology concerned with the thorny question of how commodities in modern societies take on a value that can be measured in quantitative terms — and industrial economics, Cruddas climbed his way up the party ranks. There he served as a link between the Blair administration and the trade unions, which had developed deep hostility and suspicion of one another in the 2000s. From 2001 when he began his tenure as an MP, he played an active part in defeating the far-right British National Party. From this confrontation, he learned first-hand how the politics of resentment played out in the absence of social democracy and participatory politics.

Consequently, Cruddas became an increasingly prominent critic of Blairism. In a 2006 research paper for the soft-left Labour think tank Compass, Cruddas wrote scathingly about the breaking down of ties between Labour Party elites, civil society, and the membership. “If,” he argued, “the recent emptying-out of the party teaches us anything, it is that a style of politics in which leaders define themselves against the very strands of opinion and organisations that provide their bedrock has proved so ill-advised as often to look almost suicidal.”

After the shocks of the 2008 global recession, Labour’s defeat in the 2010 election, and the rise of the right-populist UK Independence Party as an electoral power, Cruddas began to associate with a loose association of MPs, journalists, and academics who came together under the label “Blue Labour.” These figures embraced the leadership of Ed Miliband, who represented Britain’s opposition between 2010–15 and inspired controversy from sections of the Left.

Many have criticized the Blue Labour phenomenon as a simplistic ploy to win over working-class voters with concessions to a mythic demotic social conservatism. Yet for Cruddas and others, Blue Labour represented a socialist tradition going back to the early formation of left-wing parties, including Labour, in the late nineteenth century, under radical forms of egalitarian nonconformist Christianity.

In A Century of Labour, Cruddas describes his embrace of Blue Labour less as a call to jingoistic patriotism and more as an attempt to stake out an alternative to the dominant strands on both the left and right of the party. The approach of Blue Labour was, he tells us, focused “on community organizing, civic renewal, and rebuilding working-class industrial and political representation — reminiscent of ethical socialist traditions.” That is, it was an attempt to fill a political void created by decades of neoliberalism.

That Blue Labour was, Cruddas argues, misunderstood by sections of the Left only betrays the fact that the complexity of the party is often lost, even on its supporters. A large part of the project of A Century of Labour is an attempt to point out “mutant strain[s] of British socialism,” found in sidelined theories of industrial democracy and guild socialism. For Cruddas, exogenous shocks — like World War I, the 1929 Great Depression, World War II, the decline of the empire and European economic power as a whole, and the rise of natural resource competition in the 1970s — would only increase utilitarian and liberal tendencies in a statist Labour Party, while sidelining questions of mass mobilization and the common good found in early sects like the Independent Labour Party (ILP).

The Beginnings

Cruddas locates the beginnings of a distinctly British labor movement in the nineteenth century and the UK’s early, precedent-setting industrialization. According to A Century of Labour, this premature historical starting point would create a socialist movement outside of continental European norms. The peculiarity of British political culture was that “mass unionism had emerged before any political party of labour.”

For Cruddas, the fact that workplace activism preceded formal party structures and bureaucracies led to the British socialist movement developing in an incredibly protean manner. Absent the discipline of an ideologically coherent  party, churches, clubs, and organizations, each with their own intellectual traditions and sociological makeup, came to inform the development of the Labour Party. It is clearly this early period of sometimes fractious, sometimes conciliatory looseness that Cruddas admires above other more staid epochs in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Cruddas values the internal diversity of the Victorian and Edwardian labor movement, which was free from the constraints of electoral politics. This bottom-up socialism was able to build its base in “recreational activities, sports events, scouts, music and much more.” The cost of embracing the electoral path to socialism was that it made possible the rise of a gradualist technocratic strain within the Labour Party that was often hostile to attempts to build the capacity of workers.

As the Labour Party formed and increased its hold on parliament, from two MPs in 1900 to 191 in 1923, the influence of religious, ethical, and Marxist elements in the party slowly reduced in favor of liberalism and Fabianism, a gradualist variant of socialism which saw the new society as emerging out of capitalism’s tendency towards a more rational organization of society. Where the old variants of Labour politics persisted, they did so in a muted form, tempered to the demands of the electoral cycle.

This transformation of the party, in which liberal and utilitarian traditions overtook ethical and Marxist ones, was crystalized under the leadership of Labour’s first prime minister. MacDonald first became party leader in 1911 and left the office in disgrace in 1935, after forming a national unity government with the Tories and adopting conservative solutions to the economic crisis of the 1930s. As Cruddas argues, Labour had already pivoted toward a politics of respectability by the 1920s, seeking to win over middle-class Liberal Party voters while abandoning its nonconformist Christian and radical traditions rooted in the ILP.

MacDonald was fatally constrained by both minority governments in parliament and the shock of the 1929 Great Depression, which forced his hand into collaboration with the British state and the Conservative Party over spending cuts. Contained by both the continuity of the conservative British establishment and a crisis in global capitalism, MacDonald, despite his commitment to “a vein of emotional, utopian socialism,” was forced to govern within the parameters created by outside forces such as the trinity of the city, the treasury, and the Bank of England, which were dogmatically committed to austerity and the gold standard. Cruddas makes a convincing case that Labour, then as now, was fatally pulled between the pragmatism needed to govern the British state and the idealism required to transcend it. 

Labour’s first majority and the establishment of an extensive welfare state in 1945 are rightly viewed in A Century of Labour as moments deserving of celebration and critique. For Cruddas, in one sense, Clement Attlee’s victory over Winston Churchill in 1945 represented the cresting of a long wave. “For the first time in Labour’s history, the three traditions of justice had creatively aligned,” writes Cruddas triumphantly.

However, Atlee’s reforms included “no attempt to embrace industrial democracy despite the history of guild socialism.” Nor did his government seek to overhaul Britain’s antidemocratic electoral system. Instead, Labour was thoroughly “wedded to the constitutional status quo.” Nevertheless, A Century of Labour makes the case that Attlee, now seen as the figurehead of historical attempts at technocratic management and Whitehall centralization, was once a socialist of a more utopian stripe. Yet to wield power across a much larger Labour Party, an even larger electorate, and a recalcitrant British state, Attlee and his colleagues would have to bury the movement’s utopian strains. As Cruddas states, “Attlee succeeded where the ILP could not because his political passions were consciously locked down within a ribcage of tradition.” The Labour Party would ultimately reach a compact with the British state and technocratic management to deliver high living standards, nationalization of leading industries, the foundation of the National Health Service, and the universalization of previously sectional benefits.

Liberal Reform

If Attlee’s administration was defined by a rhetoric of ethical rejuvenation while being dominated by utilitarian strains of Fabianism and technocratic Whitehall management, Harold Wilson’s tenure from 1964 to 1970 and then again from 1974 to 1976 was characterized, instead, by a rhetorical commitment to technologically driven economistic growth. Yet the “white heat of technology” would not be his defining legacy. In contrast, Cruddas remembers Labour’s second majority government as a force in the liberal, rights-based, reforming tradition: overturning capital punishment, laws against homosexuality, and restrictions on divorce and abortion, under the guidance of cabinet minister Roy Jenkins.

For Cruddas, the Wilson years represent the triumph of a legalistic liberal conception of justice over and above ethical and economistic traditions. By A Century of Labour’s account, this discrepancy between social and economic reforms was the result of increasingly constrained circumstances geopolitically, which stymied the ability of the British state to induce growth and redistribute its proceeds.

According to Cruddas, the economic crises caused by the OPEC-led energy shock would undermine Britain’s economic aims. Withdrawal from the east of Suez in 1971 was the culmination of a decades-long process of decline. “Productivity growth began to lag. . . . Comparative decline within Europe began in the 1950s, becoming entrenched by the 1960s.”

Under these straightened conditions, legalistic liberal reform became an easier alternative than redistribution, let alone the associational ethical socialism of the early 1900s. Predictably, Labour’s socially liberal reforms would be accompanied by economically liberal cuts in response to the economic situation. In effect, as Cruddas argues, earlier centralizations during the Attlee years around nationalization and redistribution would deprive the party of a means of going on the offensive by mobilizing workers against businesses facing a crisis of profitability. Instead, having abandoned faith in socialism via popular mobilization, the Labour Party created circumstances that opened the door for the Right to deal with economic malaise through privatization and crushing unions — measures that sought to restore competitiveness to Britain’s economy at the cost of equality.

Ultimately, A Century of Labour argues that Labour was unable to rid itself of a vision of socialism that was fundamentally dependent not on state-led or collective growth, but on the vagaries of global price signals. As stagflation reared its head in the 1970s, the vision of socialism which the postwar Labour Party had consolidated itself around became increasingly implausible. “Once Keynesianism had been rejected . . . it was difficult to see a party strategy beyond managed austerity.” Further, Cruddas claims that Labour’s failure to institute worker self-governance and build sources of power outside the state, in addition to Wilson’s capitulation to austerity, created exploitable weaknesses for the reelected Conservative Party. Thatcher and her cadres of monetarist MPs would exploit this centralization for their own ends over more than a decade, radically changing the landscape of British politics.

The Great Transformation

After Thatcher’s election, Labour engaged in a long process of political withdrawal and infighting, culminating in the victory of its right-wing factions and setting the stage for Tony Blair. This embrace of the ideology of Thatcher was not, Cruddas insists, preordained. In the early 1990s, even Blair possessed a strong critique of the liberal atomization of the Thatcher years. However, the momentum of the 1990s economic boom and globalization would sweep away these concerns with communal and collective politics.

Instead, Blair embraced the ideology of the Third Way, which assumed that the working class was no longer the central figure in politics and that one could only win electoral victory by rejecting the ideology of socialism. Blair’s chancellor, Gordon Brown, a former student radical, would follow suit, granting the Bank of England monetary independence and trading his idealistic socialism for economic liberalism.

Cruddas sees the Corbyn era as a direct response to Blair’s embrace of liberal legalism, party centralization, and interventionist human rights discourse. Labour’s former leader rode on the back of a millennial generation, defined by the “New, New Left,” a movement characterized by start-ups like Novara Media that he sees as rejecting “both technocratic social democracy and neoliberalism” and by an older utilitarian redistributionist cohort keen on statist traditions found in the thought of Aneurin Bevan and later Tony Benn.

While Cruddas is critical of Corbyn’s political ability and stances on foreign policy throughout A Century of Labour, he concedes that “Corbyn offered moral clarity in his diagnosis of modern capitalism and through his long-standing commitment to peace and justice. He alone was the change candidate.”

Cruddas makes the case that in 2019, just as the majority of the population was losing its last shreds of faith in the capacity of the British establishment, authority, and the state, the Corbyn project offered a centralizing technocratic state-led vision of socialist reform. Yet again, A Century of Labour proposes that the party’s ethical and moral strains were overtaken by the admittedly declining allure of the British state’s distributive capacity.

Instead of building a participatory mass movement or resurrecting associational life, the Corbyn movement offered a “traditional left utilitarian[ism that had] little to say about constitutional and electoral reform, citizenship and civic virtue.” Fundamentally, Corbyn, challenged by a Blairite rump and a hostile media apparatus, did not have the ability, time, or room to maneuver the party and electorate towards a sustainable belief in the possibility of escaping dominant neoliberal domestic and geopolitical trends.

What Next?

While the book is critical of Corbyn, A Century of Labour is equally scathing in its condemnation of his successor, Keir Starmer, and his numerous U-turns, political ambiguity, and the continued centralization of the party apparatus under his watch. Despite conceding the efficacy of some of Starmer’s industrial strategy and green growth plans, Cruddas ultimately sees the Labour Party as incapable of solving oncoming global and national crises.

While Cruddas is critical of Starmer, he rejects the Corbynite characterization of the current shadow cabinet as a Blairite restoration: “New Labour it is not,” he insists. Instead, A Century of Labour, despite reservations about Starmer’s character, understands the current Labour Party as representative of a technocratic conservative social democracy: “[he is] re-establishing a more traditional role for his party. In this respect, it implies a significant Wilsonian re-evaluation of Labour’s purpose, with the rehabilitation of an active state-led growth agenda.”

In effect, Cruddas’s A Century of Labour confronts a “chicken and egg” problem: acknowledging the codependence of the state and associational life, while remaining unclear which should be prioritized in the current constrained moment. Throughout the book, he advances a trenchant critique of the top-down focus of the Labour Party and its reliance on technocratic elites. Much of this criticism is well taken, especially insofar as it applies to the Labour Party in the years prior to and immediately after World War II.

During that period, Labour was a party that undermined mass support for intervention in the Spanish Civil War, supported a conservative wing of the trade union bureaucracy that opposed the 1927 general strike, was often dogmatically committed to anti-Bolshevism, and escalated Cold War brinkmanship by allowing the Americans to station bombs in Britain to better target the Soviets. Undeniably, during these years and the decades immediately after WWII, Labour often opposed internal democracy and suppressed the emergence of popular forces within it.

However, the present is not like the past. We now live in an era of mass political demobilization and the shrinking power and capacity of accountable states, which in part explains the top-down strategy advanced by the Left on both sides of the Atlantic. Both tendencies have seen their aim as that of reviving associational life through the state without the mass movements that gave rise to socialism and social democracy in the early twentieth century. The efforts during the Corbyn years to seize control of the party structure and enact a transformation of it from the top by mobilizing members should therefore be viewed more sympathetically by Cruddas and others quick to cast aspersions on Labour’s former leader. Undoubtedly, Corbyn’s efforts failed, but they were the most sustained attempt in a generation to reshape the Labour Party in a way that might allow ethical and associational forms of justice the same room as liberal and utilitarian conceptions. Where the Left goes now, however, is anybody’s guess.