Parliamentary Socialism Revisited

The years which followed the end of the second world war were notably deficient in critical socialist writing. The radicalism of the war years, which had produced the massive swing to the Labour Party in the general election of July 1945, weakened steadily after about 1948, and this for several reasons. One was the revival of the Conservative Party and their success in exploiting the middle class dislike of austerity produced by rationing and the continuation of wartime controls; another was the failure of the Labour government to develop further its own radical programme; and a third was the marked complacency which was beginning to be exhibited, notably by the intellectuals of the Fabian Society, about what had been achieved in terms of social change. The background was the rapidly worsening international situation and the hardening of attitudes between the western powers and the Soviet Union. Stalinism inside Russia was exhibiting the intellectual stupidities of Lysenko and Zhdanov, and outside its national boundaries, the brutalities and terror of the regimes on its western borders were provoking vigorous anti-Soviet reactions. The complexities of the Cold War, which involve a recognition of the major responsibilities of Britain and the United States for much of the deterioration of international relations, were greatly simplified and were to be subsumed beneath a widespread anti-communism and anti-Sovietism that led to the hysteria of McCarthyism in the United States and a pervasive Cold War mentality in western Europe: much colder in countries like Britain than is commonly appreciated