England, Our England: The Dilemmas of “Revisionist” Social Democracy

“A SPECTER is haunting Europe,” mocked Anthony Crosland in an attack on the traditional Left of the British Labour party nearly ten years ago, “the specter of revisionism.” Crosland was the leading theorist on the right wing of the party, and his boast seemed well-founded. All over Western Europe, the traditional Marxist Left was on the defensive. Socialist parties were abandoning their old belief in the class war and the expropriation of the property owner. Revisionism was in the ascendant in Holland, West Germany, and Scandinavia. Even in Britain, where Hugh Gaitskell failed to persuade his party to repudiate its formal commitment to wholesale public ownership, the Left was emotionally and intellectually on the defensive. The revisionists had the self-confidence and the elan, as well as the arguments. They recognized that it would be a long and difficult task to convert the rest of the labor movement, but they had little doubt they would do so in the end or that, having done so, they would gradually reshape British society in the image of reformist social democracy.

Ten years later, Crosland’s mockery has a hollow ring. In terms of political power, the revisionist analysis has been triumph...