Pat Devine interview, 6 October 2017.
Geoff: [00:00:03] the idea is to try and capture
something about the movement from below all its strengths and weaknesses in
what I see as the key years between us of late 60s and mid-eighties, a time
when there were certain possibilities and we lost them so the world was shaped
by '85 in a way that essentially we still have today though there's an
interesting conversation about to what extent neoliberalism is beginning to
have run its course with Corbyn and so on. And a lot of what was done at that
time needs to be rescued. Unless we have a beautiful surprise waiting for us in
the police files - it is worth remembering. E P Thompson's great work would be
much weaker without the police and court records. . It's also worth pointing
out that there was much work done by Bill Williams when he ran the Manchester
Studies department from the 70s but he was focusing on the pre-war years. They
interviewed huge numbers of people. Having said which little of that work to my
knowledge has been properly used. It sits in Ashton public library, seven
hundred tapes and more. That's another story, Manchester before the war.
Pat: [00:02:17] Is this the Bill who wrote history
of the Jewish community?
Pat: [00:02:21] Yes, interestingly, Bill not being
Jewish himself.
Pat: [00:02:24] Exactly.
Geoff: [00:02:49] Anyhow the point is that this work
was being done but I've yet to discover anybody who I feel is covering the same
field that I'm covering and of course one of the strengths of doing this work
here is that Ruth and Edie collected stuff, still collecting stuff in the 70s
and 80s contemporary stuff.
[00:03:35] One of things they didn't cover.
Yeah. And there have been certain movements very alert to their own history.
The gay movement has really worked on its history. It's very uneven picture.
I've got my own SWP view of the world, certain biases, prejudices or whatever
they've built into my view. I'm trying to be as universalist, as open, as
possible, aware of the fact that so much has been going on in this city while I
was active I was unaware. It's a humbling experience to find this. I think one
of the strengths of Thompson's book is he doesn't try to decide who are his favorites.
He famously tells the story of Joanna Southcott and her followers and gives
them a voice.
[00:04:51] The project as a whole is
completely unfinishable.
Pat: [00:04:53]
Geoff: [00:04:53] There's no way it can be done. I
regret that I didn't start it years earlier. But then all is life like that and
my memory is getting worse. I have to write it all down. I'm keen in talking to
you about is your view of how the world has changed as much as your memories of
particular events. I thought the best way to do this was to put down a list of
events if only to make sure that we don't spend the whole day on the
prehistory. I'm aware you were born into a political family, quite a
substantial family, and nobody sadly nobody has written the story of your
father.
Pat: [00:05:51] That's right. There are snippets
of it. His time in America has been written, an undergraduate or graduate
dissertation on his period in the States.
Geoff: [00:06:11] But the point I would make is that
there has been a lot of interest in the transatlantic, seeing the transatlantic
as centre stage. Black politics and its interaction across the Atlantic, for
example Black Power. Your father has deported.
Pat: [00:06:48] Yes.
Geoff: [00:06:48] So was Claudia Jones. These were
substantial figures. It's the way they make a political contribution with a
much wider view of the world than those of us who are home grown. And I think
that that in itself it is something worth studying.
Pat: [00:07:14] My daughter told me that two women
have written the history of Labour Party in Manchester over a recent period
which is about to be published.
Geoff: [00:07:40] Yes, Kath Fry and her daughter.
Kath wrote a very readable memoir, a lot of it online.
Pat: [00:08:15] Apparently it's going to be
published under their joint names.
Geoff: [00:08:19] That is very good news because it
fills a gap.
Geoff: [00:09:18] I'm keen on getting to the 70s and
the bigger picture. I don't propose to do a full transcript. There may well be
things I want to come back to. At the moment I'm trying to write a history of
antiracism in Manchester so I will probably feed in relevant questions, hoping
not to disrupt the narrative. I'm also slightly critical of 'history from
below' because you've got to have history as class struggle the 'other side'.
Pat: [00:10:18]
[00:10:18] Some of it's not a problem. We can
write about what Heath and Co were doing but we have to recognise there's an
intermediary layer. Do Philip Dingle and George Ogden mean anything as names? The
two town clerks.
Pat: [00:10:37] George Ogden rings a bell.
Geoff: [00:10:40] these people were the Sir
Humphreys of Manchester very discreet. It's very hard to find stuff out about
them.
Pat: [00:10:47] Predecessors of Bernstein?
Geoff: [00:10:51] Exactly and with a very similar
relationship to the leader of the Labour group, a man called Bob Thomas. Does
that ring a bell with the name?
Pat: [00:11:01] No.
Geoff: [00:11:01] Again beautifully discreet. A
smart operator. They basically operated like Leese but only not with the same
media profile.
Geoff: [00:11:21] Where do start? Your early life.
Pat: [00:11:25] Well that's easy enough. There's a
book called 'Children of the Revolution' which interviewed a lot of people
including me. And gave an account Of their early life. That's where I gave
quite a detailed account. Edited by Phil Cohen, it gives my parents background.
Born into a communist family, joined the YCL at 14. Politically active all my
adult and late childhood life, in different ways. I arrived at Oxford in 1957 a
year after 1956 when the whole of the CP Oxford branch resigned. My task was to
rebuild a CP branch which I did, up to a point. I was active in the
CP in South Essex where we lived and was on the district committee. ... And
indeed on the secretariat which was the equivalent of the political committee.
I acted as my father's agent when he stood as a Communist candidate in the
first Greater London Council election in what became the borough of Redbridge.
Spent two years after leaving university as a trainee businessman in one of the
firms that was run by party members but not politically affiliated to the
party, with the purpose being East West trade at the time when there was the
boycott and it was thought that an Oxford graduate would pass as and become a
businessman with the right connections and approach. I did that for a couple of
years and was told that at the end that if I was to continue along this path
then I couldn't be active publicly politically which was prompted by one of the
directors being in the audience when an Aldermaston march went by
which, of course, I was on. So I decided that that wasn't the life for me. So
then I was a schoolteacher for three years and that's where I was mainly active
in the South Essex district. And then came to Manchester, to the university
where I've been ever since. I came to Manchester in '65, first of all as a
research associate in the economics department. Then as assistant lecturer,
lecturer, senior lecturer. Couldn't quite make 40 years, spent thirty nine
years in the Economics Department. And then during that period I was active in
the CP branch of the university, in the North West district committee of the
party. And again for many years on the secretariat. Also, active in the AUT,
became president of the Manchester university branch for several years
including during the period of the miners’ strike. And. Then. Since the CP
disbanded in '91, I've not belonged to any political party. I have I think
moved fairly steadily towards the green. At the time the disbandment of the CP
in '91. .... we set up two things. One was called the Red Green Study Group
which still exists which was like a think tank. Or a would be think tank - it
didn't have any money And the other was intended to be a more activist group
went through several mergers and is now called the Alliance for Green socialism
of which I'm still a member, a sleeping member. But I do run the red green
study group. I'm the convener and we published a small booklet, 'What on earth
is to be done?' So that's basically my life story.
Geoff: [00:20:46] Why did you stay in Manchester?
Pat: [00:20:47] We settled here in 1965. The
university was a very congenial place for somebody like me to be in at the
time. I wouldn't say that now. But at the time it was, as was the department.
So we had lots and lots of departmental battles over the curriculum, the sorts
of things that the Post-Crash Economics Society is arguing now. Not got much
further than we did but got a lot more publicity. They've done really good work
publishing books and so on. And I was active in the party. The kids grew up
here, this is where I live. I've long thought of myself as a Mancunian rather
than as a southerner.
Pat: [00:22:08] Starting with the work, economic
departments sometimes have a notorious reputation for being strict
marginalists, very hostile to anybody who challenges their free market
philosophy.
Pat: [00:22:25] Well but is that's how it is now.
That's not how it was when I started. When I started the dominant macroeconomic
position was Keynesian.... it wasn't really until the advent of neo-liberalism
that there was a counter-revolution ... and various resurrections of the
neoclassical view of the macro economic world were developed and still dominate
so for quite a long period after I arrived in '65, the economics department was
almost 50 50 split between the then main stream which was neoclassical
microeconomics and Keynesian macroeconomics. Then. We nearly got changes in the
first year but never quite made it and that grouping consisted of quite a few
members of the CP, for a while a member of IS, and then a number of, as it
were, Keynesian institutionalists, if you like, radical Keynesians, who weren't
socialists or anything like that, medium centre liberals. So it was quite a
congenial place to work. And also it meant that you had arguments which were
quite stimulating. Also in those days the university was a place where the
Faculty of economic and social sciences school [had] a senior common room. You
meet people from all these other departments. You know it was an interesting
hybrid place. That gradually changed over the years Yes. Now I think there's
nobody left in the department, perhaps just one person.
Geoff: [00:26:18] the whole culture a senior common
room...
Pat: [00:26:20]...has just
gone. We used to o go off for lunch in the senior common room where you'd meet
people from all sorts of different departments. Nobody ever does that.
Geoff: [00:26:33] There was an intellectual
stimulation.
Pat: [00:26:34] There was, absolutely. It
completely doesn't exist Most people don't even have lunch other than in their
office, sandwiches and so forth. So it's completely different. So you know that
was a good place to work.
Geoff: [00:26:53] As I understand it, the Communist
presence at Manchester university had a number of elements. Mick Costello was
elected president of the student union just before you arrived, then there is
the academic milieu you've mentioned already. ... And the context is that
Manchester is a city with a substantial Communist membership.
Pat: [00:27:25] Oh indeed. And history. .. the
1945 Pan African congress where half the subsequent prime ministers of also the
independent African countries all gathered.
Geoff: [00:27:46] Your father was there as an
observer... Sticking with the university ... the fight against apartheid ... by
the end of the 60s there is a move to try and get the university to disinvest.
Pat: [00:28:50] Indeed, which I was part of. The
university, as a result of pressure in the direction of democratising decision
making, there was a charter revision at some stage in the 60s or early 70s,
maybe mid 70s which established a general assembly which consisted of all the
academic members of staff. It had an annual meeting, a constitution and a
quorum and so on. At the first, and the one and only, meeting of the general
assembly which was quorate [May 1973] we decided to move a resolution calling
for the university to disinvest, boycott anything to do with South Africa which
I proposed and one of the professors of sociology who was, I think, from South Africa
or Rhodesia [Clyde Mitchell] along with Peter Worsley, the other professor of
sociology who had been in the CP but remained on the left. And it was carried
overwhelmingly. Of course it didn't mean the university paid any attention to
it but nevertheless it was part of the pressure and the campaign.
Geoff: [00:30:52] The students do occupy the council
chamber.
Pat: [00:31:41] We were quite heavily involved in
that. The student I remember the most was the president of the union Dave Winn,
who's still around, who I know. There was the occupation and members of staff
established with the students who were involved in the occupation something
called the Critical Forum which involved members of staff including myself,
David Purdy, Norman Geras and others giving classes or talks to the occupying
students and in the same period though not exactly coincidental there was the
Arblaster affair. He had a temporary assistant lecturer And he came out, I
think he joined the students in the occupation as a result of which at the end
of his fixed term contract he wasn't reappointed, a bit like the temporary
lecturer who was involved with the students in setting up the Post-Crash
Economics Society whose contract wasn't renewed and he put forward a proposal
for a course on crash bubbles, a heterodox view of the 2007-8 crash which the
department refused to allow him to give as part of the curriculum. So he gave
it anyway in his spare time. So the Arblaster affair saw huge protests on the
grounds that the failure to renew his contract was a form of denial of academic
freedom. He got another job in Sheffield where he stayed for the rest of his
career...
Pat: [00:36:31] ...But there was at the time a
division of opinion among the academic members of the party as to which union
you should support. The majority were in favour of working within the AUT but
at that time it wasn't really seen as a proper union, it was seen as more of a
staff association. Laurie Sapper was the general secretary. Quite a number of
people, particularly people at Lancaster, in the party joined ASTMS as a proper
union and so there was that tension.
Geoff: [00:37:18] You come to Manchester '65. You've
got a history of being someone who can be given responsibility for things. The
party really has two elements to it. Hobsbawm in his reflections on the party
looks back says that it was the industrial work was actually where it was most
successful.
Pat: [00:37:59] Yes.
Geoff: [00:38:00] The contrast being with the
electoral work. It's something which mystifies me. there's a certain heroism in
the electoral work because the results get weaker. There are always counter
indications, moments where somebody pulls something off. Henry Suss, stands
eight times gets elected the ninth. I don't know how many other examples there
are across the country.
Pat: [00:38:37] John Peck was one in Nottingham.
When the party disbanded, he joined the Greens.
Geoff: [00:38:57] These are exceptions.
Pat: [00:38:58] Undoubtedly except parts of
Scotland and South Wales
Geoff: [00:40:01] .... What's your take on the
electioneering, that focus? It was what the British Road to Socialism said you
should be doing.
Pat: [00:40:12] Yes. In 1945 the party stood a
number of parliamentary candidates including in Preston where my father stood
and he got about 10,000 votes. .... And then in the first Greater London
Council election my dad stood as the party candidate in Redbridge and got about
three or four thousand votes. In general, the electoral achievements of the
party were minimal.
Geoff: [00:41:24] I'd rather put it as
underwhelming.
Pat: [00:41:24] Underwhelming, I'll settle for
that.
Geoff: [00:41:36] The commitment to the strategy
never seemed to have really wavered.
Pat: [00:41:40] No, it didn't.
Geoff: [00:41:42] Do you remember debates on it?
Pat: [00:41:45] Well. I think it was the same
sorts of debates as one comes across or came across in the Labour Party. I
think our argument was you should only stand where that had been consistent
work in the local community leading up to it rather than just put a candidate
because there's an election. So they had to have some grounding, some roots in
the locality, in the ward or the constituency. That of course is how the
Liberals/Lib Dems established themselves because that's what they did and still
do, usually in a very opportunistic way.
Geoff: [00:42:40] I wouldn't want to make too much
of that parallel. The calibre, the quality of the CP cadre so often had fought
at work, taken on victimisation, campaigned locally on any number of issues and
you look at your average Lib Dem councillor, they can't put them in the same
category.
Pat: [00:43:14] They do go along to local
campaigns to save the local park or whatever it is, there's a sort of Venn
diagram overlap there.
Geoff: [00:43:26] I want to come to the late 60s.
before we do, my reading of the history post '45 is that the Cold War is
something which, though it was different in the States from here, nevertheless
the actual pressure of the Cold War is something that is rather hard to
understand these days. For all the hostility towards the left I've experienced
in my lifetime, nothing gets close. My feeling is that the early 50s were the
worst years, the Korean War.
Pat: [00:44:22] Yes, I think that's correct. We
used to have a public pitch during the Korean War where you did meet a lot of
hostility. My only experience of this was during National Service in the RAF.
Everybody was perfectly reasonable but it was clear you didn't get very far. I
applied for pilot training and language school, Russian and Chinese and all the
rest. I didn't get anywhere and ended up as a clerk and it soon became clear
that if you had been in the YCL and presumably was on the books. So you'd get
through to the last stage and presumably that's when they vetted you. You
didn't get any further. So you soon realised that you along with other comrades
tended to be posted to medical related basis with nothing to do with active
service.
Geoff: [00:45:55] Far away from the frontline.
Pat: [00:45:57] As far away from the front line as
possible and, whenever you arrived at a new base, you were always interviewed
by the medical officer and by the education officer. I got used to this, it was
very amusing, the education officer would never look at the file beforehand,
they would started leafing through [the file] and say 'Ah, I see you were at
Oxford'. I'd say 'Yes', 'Why didn't you apply for a commission. I'd say 'Why
don't you read on a bit.' Followed by 'Oh I see.' . It was real
in that sense. A friend of mine, a member of our Red Green study group, he was
in the building trade for a long time, blacklisted. But it obviously wasn't
anything like it was in the States.
Geoff: [00:47:11] I think, by the way, you were on
the blacklist held by the Economic League, I'll get you a copy. ... This
blacklisting was not applied with the viciousness it was in the US.
Nevertheless it was there and my impression is that it was incredibly difficult
all the way through the '50s [especially] with the crisis of '56, after which
you rebuild the Oxford branch, '57 and '58. By '65, even being careful with the
figures, the pre-'56 membership has been restored.
Pat: [00:49:34] That's right.
Geoff: [00:49:34] And Manchester is definitely up
there.
Pat: [00:49:36] And that went on in the '70s
indeed.
Geoff: [00:49:39] And the decline doesn't really
come in till the '70s. And there are points in the '70s when the numbers pick
up a bit.
Pat: [00:49:48] Yes there are it yeah.
Geoff: [00:49:50] Having said that I as a young
student in '68 I'm not attracted to the CP, I get asked by a few people but the
Trotskyists are far more attractive. I think that's true for us '68-ers ass a
group. You come here in '65. CND has had an honorable record in Manchester.
Dick Nettleton who was one of those who leaves in '56 but is still a very
friendly individual, he's not a sectarian.
Pat: [00:50:28] CND office in Tib Street.
Geoff: [00:50:30] Indeed a lot of people have fond
memories of that. It was a clearly a vibrant CND that Manchester had. By '65
Vietnam is beginning to rise as an issue. Frank Allaun resigns as a
parliamentary private secretary from over Wilson's refusal to stand up to Johnson
and Vietnam increasingly becomes an important campaign.
Pat: [00:51:03] Although Wilson did keep Britain
out.
Geoff: [00:51:05] No troops. I'm interested in Frank
Allaun, a very principled figure, never joins the Communist Party.
Pat: [00:51:30] But he's very close.
Geoff: [00:51:31] Very close. More of a pacifist.
this up. My question is 'What are your memories of being active around the
Vietnam issue?
Pat: [00:51:49] We used to go down to my mum's who
lived still in London for Christmas for many years and there was a vigil
outside the American embassy, Christmas Day morning, leaving the kids in the
charge of my mum. I wasn't actually in Grosvenor Square.
Geoff: [00:53:36] The existence of an organised left
in Manchester with a thousand members, a weekly bulletin going out saying 'this
is what we're doing'. The IS/SWP never gets more than a few hundred members, we
never have that sort of social weight.
Pat: [00:53:56] I think that's true.
Geoff: [00:53:59] And if you look at the situation
today, you know you can count up unbelievable numbers of different groupings
and different initiatives. So the actual total is quite respectable both if you
actually say how much of this is organised in any kind of central sense, it's
very limited.
Pat: [00:54:22] In demos nowadays which is all I
can really go on I mean, the SWP still has the dominant presence.... We always
felt, rightly or wrongly, particularly in CND demos that when they were small
the SWP presence was very large, when they were big it was swamped.
Geoff: [00:55:27] No indeed. If we go back to the
'60s so you get this. Vietnam was an issue. You're intervening and so forth.
Then comes the next big crisis for the Communist Party with is Czechoslovakia,
socialism with a human face and then the invasion on 21st of August. The
leadership is fairly clear that they are not going to support the invasion.
Pat: [00:56:15] Well that was the big difference
between '56 and '68, not just the British Communist Party, but Western
communist party more generally didn't support '68. Whereas they did support
'56.
Pat Devine interview part 2
Geoff: [00:00:28] For me, 1976 is the year where
everything in the modern world is shaped because effectively neoliberalism
starts with the Callaghan government. And I want to know how it looked from
where you were.
Pat: [00:00:43] I think I have a somewhat
different perspective, not that I don't agree. For me the 70s was a decisive
decade. First of all, the influence of the Communist Party, insofar as it had
influence, was primarily through the industrial comrades and that presence in
the trade union movement and also in the shop stewards movement which weren't
necessarily the same. However, the second thing is that the way the party was
organised the principal focus was on branches in place of work rather than in
localities. So it was only people who didn't have a branch at work who were in
local branches. So I wasn't in the local branch here, I was in the university
branch. Now what that did was to, as it were, institutionalise separation
between the industrial workers and the rest. This strength in the trade union
and shop stewards movement was reflected not just locally but it was also
reflected nationally where there was an industrial organiser Mick Costello,
[much earlier president of the student union in Manchester]. And there were the
advisory groups within each industry. So it was almost like a separate
structure. And in the 70s in particular over the struggles that you referred
to, what became the sort of Eurocommunist group within the CP of which I was a
member identified as a problem in the party that its industrial work basically
suffered from economism and it was not political, it was economistic ... to do
with trade union matters ... it didn't spill over into wider political
perspectives. So when you say that's the moment when the British Road might
have been realised, we saw it rather differently. What we saw was that - and of
course as you obviously know the Eurocommunist group was heavily influenced by
particularly the Italians CP at the time and through that obviously Gramsci.
And so in sort of a schematic form we saw the 70s as a Gramscian organic crisis
i.e. the ruling class couldn't go on ruling in the same way but the working
class was unable to take over and replace it. And the issue then of Gramsci's
views of about how in order to bring about change because after all, remember,
he developed his theory in an attempt to explain why the revolutions in the
West had not succeeded the way that the revolutions in the east or the
revolution in Russia had, was to do with the strength of civil society, trench
warfare, wars of position, historic blocs and all that. So our view was that
what was needed in the 70s was a recognition that there was a crisis. It wasn't
just working class living standards were being screwed. It was that the country
could not go on in the way that it was. When inflation reaches 25 percent in
'75 and there's a squeeze on profits, Glyn & Sutcliffe's book, what we saw
was the alternative was, if you like, going back to Kalecki's article in 1944:
full employment is dysfunctional for capitalism because it changes the balance
of power. So he predicted that if you had full employment post-war - which
everybody expected you would have and you did have for many years - this would
create a crisis for capitalism as indeed it did.
Pat: [00:06:49] Now we had these huge arguments. I
was a member of the party's economic committee for a long, long time but we had
these furious arguments on the committee in the '70s precisely over inflation,
the social contract and so on. So I wrote an article for Marxism Today called
'Inflation and Marxist theory' arguing that change in the balance
of power in the labour market was what resulted in the wage-price spiral
because at the same time as you had a much stronger trade union movement and
greater strength of the working class in the labour market and inside the
enterprises, you also had an oligopolistic structure within what was
essentially a national economy and therefore they were able to push up prices
to compensate for the increase in wages. So you had a wage-price spiral along
with a profits squeeze and with change in the share of labour and capital in
the national income. We argued that there were only two responses to this. One
was some sort of incomes policy and the other was the re-creation of mass
unemployment. But instead of the Callaghan view of prices and incomes policy
our argument was that a deal should be proposed and to some extent the Bullock
report on industrial democracy which appeared [January 1977], it proposed, if
you like, industrial democracy, more worker representation in the decision
making of enterprises, encroachment on managerial powers as the deal. And the
argument was 'Well, if what you're saying is that money wages should only
increase at the rate of productivity, if you're not going to have inflation,
assuming you take the share between capital and labour as given, then workers
have to be involved in the decision-making which results in the changes in
productivity, investment strategy so on and so forth. So it was a bit like the
Meidner plan in Sweden, only a different form. The plan there was that each
year a portion of shares should be handed out to the workforce and that's when
the ruling class in Sweden rebelled. Up until then they were perfectly happy
but they weren't happy with the encroachments on managerial prerogatives.
Geoff: [00:10:24] Or their ownership.
Pat: [00:10:26] Well that's exactly and that's the
form it took. So what we argued was that if you're going to pursue a hegemonic
policy, you have to recognise there's a national crisis, you have to come up
with a strategy for dealing with it rather than deny the causes or one of the
causes, one of the inputs, into what's creating this crisis. Now that is not
what happened. And the party - Bert Ramelson was the key figure at the time -
the party systematically took this ridiculous view, same as the monetarists,
that inflation was due to increased money supply and had nothing to do with
wage increases - tell me another. So we had these furious arguments in the
economic committee, chaired by Ramelson. He was also industrial organiser. He
was chair because, apart from anything else, I think he was a tough character.
A lovely man, I really liked him and he really enjoyed an argument. He wasn't
dogmatic or anything, he really loved an argument. But what he didn't want was
it to go outside the economic committee and into the wider party.
Geoff: [00:11:57] He didn't like your article.
Pat: [00:11:59] No of course. I know that.
Absolutely not. And it took me a big struggle to get it published. James
Klugman was the editor at the time. And then David Purdy, by then having left
IS and joined the CP, published a two-part article later in Marxism Today which
basically put forward the case for, if you like, a strategic, socialist incomes
policy. So that, in a sense, is how we saw it: that it was the economism and
the dominance of the industrial wing of the party which precluded a hegemonic
strategy being developed to deal with the genuine crisis confronting
capitalism, confronting therefore society in the 70s and, of course, the rest
is history. I mean we lost and mass unemployment was created and neoliberalism
did come in. So that's how I perceive the thing.
Geoff: [00:13:30] One of the arguments is that the
Labour left failed all the way along the line, that at no point did it stand up
and put a coherent, cogent challenge. You developed a position at the time
challenging Ramelson but, given that the context was a party committed to an
alliance with the Labour left, in order to win the argument then wouldn't it
have been important to get the idea through [to the Labour left]. The idea of
an alternative economic strategy was fairly widespread.
Pat: [00:14:20] It was fairly widespread.
Geoff: [00:14:22] And there were all kinds of people
looking at it and working on it. My question is to what extent did you feel
that you were able to win support for the argument. ... do you remember, even
locally, having discussions, debates with people who could be broadly described
as the Labour left?
Pat: [00:15:19] I'm not I'm not sure about that.
There's a sense in which the Labour left was basically also economistic in its
approach, certainly the Labour left in the trade union movement was, and if
not, the Labour left was never really dominant in the Labour party ... except
possibly today. ...
Geoff: [00:17:13] ....Clearly a question of just
exactly how do we understand this transformation, these battles, these defeats.
This is a moment of very significant change. That's not an issue. The post-war
settlement, the welfare consensus, all of these things finish in these years
Pat: [00:17:37] Yes, the fact that they finish is
clear. The question is: Why do they finish? What could have been done? From my
perspective which is basically a Gramscian perspective, ... when the organic
crisis came in the 70s... the right had been conducting an extremely effective
war of position since the Mont Pelerin Society. They had their think tank, the
Institute of Economic Affairs, the Adam Smith Institute, totally
misrepresenting Adam Smith, but never mind, whereas the left didn't have any of
that. The left didn't fight a war of position whereas the right did, the right
was better prepared. The left really wasn't prepared at all whereas the right
knew what it wanted and there was a counter-revolution across the board. We've
not mentioned one of the aspects that led to their success was that the welfare
state in the post-war settlement, for all its wonderful success, was
paternalistic. And as the desire for more control over people's lives
developed, that was able to be tapped into by the right to say 'Well look here,
we want to give more control over your lives.' The nanny state and all that you
know.
Pat: [00:21:03] N
Geoff: [00:22:50] There was the issue of paternalism
Pat: [00:29:22] I can't remember where the story
comes from.... When you had the slum clearances and the building of the new
estates. It might just be anecdotal. Somebody who was involved in this, if you
like, social engineering was asked 'What about people who lived there? What did
they think about it.' The answer was, 'Well when you're draining a swamp you
don't ask the frogs.' The national health service, nationalized industries, all
in some senses ... were structured top down and that has been changing. In the
70s in the CP, the two big arguments, one was about incomes policy, the other
was ... The British Road to Socialism when it started had, if you like, an
incipient, without actually realising it, pre-Gramscian perspective with its
concept of the anti-monopoly alliance. That continued up until the 77 Congress
of the party that party argued in favour of the broad democratic alliance. The
hardliners as we used to think of them, sometimes referred to as the tankies,
were in favour of retaining the anti-monopoly alliance. That change from the
anti-monopoly alliance to the broad democratic alliance represented a
significant change in perspective. And, if you like, the centre, the people who
were holding the party together, in 77 they aligned with us against the
hardliners which is why it got through. But what happened was that at that
congress it was decided that the whole democratic structure of the party needed
examining. So it set up what was called an inner-party democracy commission
which reported to the 79 Congress. And each district appointed a representative
on this national inner-party democracy commission. And I was put on from the
North West District and there were several members nominated by the national
leadership and we came up with .. we decided to not to call it a minority
report but we decided to call it the alternative proposals, which were for a
radical restructuring and essentially abandoning what had become, if you like,
a calcified concept, a hard structure of so-called democratic centralism. In
some interpretations of democratic centralism all it means is if a democratic
decision is made then you expect people to carry it out whether they agree with
it or not. It seems to me in the case of a strike a perfectly reasonable
position to adopt. But it had much more connotations than that. So at that
stage what happened was that the centre this time allied with the old guard and
defeated us. That's when I think we began to think that there was no point, the
party's day was over. It took another 10 years for it to disappear. In those 10
years there were contradictory developments. On the one hand there was the
flourishing of Marxism Today, edited by Martin Jacques, and on the other hand
there were the huge battles with the hardliners who took control of the Morning
Star and separated it off from the party. But coming back to the 70s, and it
continued I think for some time into the 80s, funnily enough after 1968 and the
'evenements', there was a huge revival of the party which you've referred to
and this was largely because of an influx from what we used to call the new
social movements which were precisely the women's movement, the anti-racist
movement, it was not then anything like as much as it subsequently became, but
the gay liberation movement and so on. And a cultural turn as well. So that
gave the 70s a really exciting feel to them.
Geoff: [00:35:50] Yes that's very interesting, I
hadn't thought of it from that point of view. In my experience in Natfhe over
many years, the ability to recognise that people who are campaigning on an
issue you support are potentially people who can play a leading role generally.
They are people who got involved in something but actually they want to change
the world, they don't just want their own issue to be the beginning and end of
everything. And it's that ability to look at what's happening in the world
rather than carrying on because that's what you've always done in the way in
which economism very often operated.
Pat: [00:36:37] Exactly. But also economism was,
if you like, a trade union problem. Identity politics was a problem of quite a
number of activists in the social movements.
Geoff: [00:36:54] And we're still struggling with
it.
Pat: [00:36:55] Perhaps less so than before
because I think class is now re-emerging.
Geoff: [00:37:01] Yes that is the political
challenge of our time. But what I get from what you're saying is that these
issues which were about political strategy, about relating to new social
movements, this is in the context of the Thatcherite offensive.
Pat: [00:37:26] Well, most of it happened in the
70s. And then it continued in the 80s. but by then it was too late.
Geoff: [00:37:40] So we stick with the 70s and we're
talking here about the years up to the so-called Winter of Discontent, 79. One
of the things that we have in Manchester, which is something I get involved
with, is the rise of hard right, the fascists, the National Front. The one
thing the Communist Party indisputably was always good at was anti-fascism.
Pat: [00:38:17] Absolutely
Geoff: [00:38:20] The fight against Webster coming
to Manchester for his march in October 77, the Anti Nazi League is founded
November 77. The carnivals [in 78] are the big events that nominate. And at
some point I meet Mick Murray who is the organiser. We get on very well. A
little caginess but we enjoy each other's company. And he says 'We've been told
we're in with you.' I say 'Fine.' But I'm a bit humbled now having read so much
to find that in 62 4,000 people challenge Mosley's last attempt to march in
Manchester in Belle Vue. He doesn't ever come back. This is a time the left
isn't doing much about racism. There is the Commonwealth Immigration bill going
through and there are relatively small protests which are mainly done by
immigrant organizations. The left is weak to be honest. Harry McShane writes
quite a savage article criticising the left at this point, contrasting what's
going on in the States with what's not going on here. And then the National
Front, the fascists begin to gather strength and there comes a point where even
the labour hierarchy realise that this is a threat to their vote. But that's
not for many years, not until the mid-70s and that's really why they are
willing to be part of the ANL because they can see an election coming and they
want to see off the Front. But the fact is that it is a huge movement.
Everybody is wearing the badges.
Pat: [00:40:36] It became very trendy to be
associated with it.
Geoff: [00:40:39] And talk about being hegemonic.
Pat: [00:40:42] Absolutely, in a way, on a small
scale that was then.
Geoff: [00:40:45] It was cool to be anti-racist.
Pat: [00:40:47] Absolutely.
Geoff: [00:40:50] In terms of marginalizing the
fascists, making them feel that they can hardly open their mouths, let alone
turn up and march. It was one of those moments where you feel you got something
right. My question to you is what are your recollections of this challenge from
the hard right. The fact that we have in the 70s something which we thought we
defeated in the 30s and 40s and it re-emerges and it's re-emerged subsequently,
a real force today, albeit not so much here.
Pat: [00:41:32] Well of course one of my family
histories is that my dad was centrally involved in the Cable St organisation.
The party nationally had organised a demonstration which happened to be on the
same day as Mosley's march. And the local branches in Hackney were arguing that
we've had to support what was already developing in the Jewish community and
more widely in some of the trade union groups a resistance to this march and
the national party took some convincing that instead of going ahead with their
planned demo in Trafalgar Square, or whatever it was, and my dad was quite
involved in that sort of negotiation between the locals. I think he was one of
the London District organisers. So I wasn't ever involved directly in any of
the organisations associated with the anti-fascism in the period we're talking
about. But obviously went on the marches and protests. Mick Murray and I knew
each other really quite well....Trevor Marshall, he was one of the members of
the CP academic staff branch at the university. [The three of us] walked together
on Skye. And he was a very good friend of Bob Cole. Mick was the Manchester
area secretary and Bob was the Manchester area organiser of the party and Bob
got involved much later in life, very recently, in Dignity in Dying and Mick
supported him...
Pat: [00:47:26] When the going is hard, which it
has been in the neoliberal period, inevitably people find ways of doing what
they can, usually locally. And unless that is somehow brought together, again
in Gramscian terms, in a sort of historic block, it comes and goes. And the key
issue of political strategy for the left is how to bring about that diversity
in unity. I don't think we're there yet. That, for example, is the way I think
Momentum and the Corbyn supporters need to go at the moment. And they are talking
about Momentum becoming a movement...
Geoff: [00:49:26] ... in terms of that break from
paternalism, you've got to have a strategy. Whether you use Gramscian terms or
not, you have to have a thought about how you are going to move to a point where
the working class is a hegemonic class and that has to deal with all its
diversity.
Pat: [00:49:55] I don't know that we've ever been
there, even in 45. I was very influenced by a book by Paul Addison The Road to
1945, written after the event, looking back. Because after all there was cross
party agreement on the welfare state during the period even of the Macmillan
government up to the 60s. Iron and steel went backwards and forwards. But,
apart from that, the basic pillars of the welfare state weren't really
challenged. Of course, Bevan had to stuff the doctors' mouths with gold to get
them to come on board. But you know once they came on board [it was settled]
and it was basically in order to save capitalism. But as a result of that in
order to do so - that's why the other side came on board - there had to be the
pressure from below, the struggles, the 1930s, 'Never again', the wartime
experience and so on. The Italian Communist Party at its height came out of the
war, having been involved in the resistance, as in France, Unita had its
festivals, it had its social clubs, it was part of the fabric of people's
lives.
Geoff: [00:51:38] It was but the Cold War position
was that it was excluded.
Pat: [00:51:47] Indeed and explicitly so.
Geoff: [00:51:50] And systematically. It was able to
provide a home which was an incredibly fertile in every aspect of culture, a
richness there but there is a question when it makes a historic compromise, it
is a disaster. That's the high point, the historic compromise is really saying
we're not strong enough to take power because the right will sabotage us and
therefore we've got to leave them there. And actually it's a rubbish deal.
People don't move forward from that point....
Pat: [00:54:30] One thing we haven't discussed
which I think is absolutely central and we obviously can't do it now. Probably
in the late 70s, having gone through various stages in my thinking about the
Soviet Union, the first stage was as you've authoritarian capitalism and
bourgeois democratic capitalism, so maybe you can have authoritarian socialism
as they have in the Soviet Union. But then I came to the conclusion that you
can't really have socialism without democracy. And so I decided that the Soviet
Union couldn't be regarded as a socialist country.
Geoff: [00:55:35] Doesn't that make you a Trot?
Pat: [00:55:44] Well I don't know because at least
the orthodox Trots, unlike the IS/SWP, regarded the Soviet Union as a sort of
failed workers state. The idea of 'Neither Washington nor Moscow but
international socialism' and the idea that the Soviet Union was a state
capitalist country I think was wrong. I still think it's wrong. But in my book
on democratic planning I argued, not that it's got very far but I still think
it's correct, that what emerged in the Soviet Union was not socialism not
capitalism but an alternative social formation, an alternative mode of
production which Marx hadn't envisaged but which did have certain continuities
with the Asiatic mode of production that he mentions from time to time. So it
was a sort of mode of production sui generis which I argued in the book - it
turned out quite wrongly -an alternative road to socialism through capitalism
It turned out not to be the case, an alternative to capitalism.
But I've thought quite a lot about this over the last maybe ten years. The
bitter internal struggles in the CP towards the end, in the 80s and to a lesser
extent in the 70s but it got really nasty in the 80s, I think were because, on
our side anyway, we thought that if only we had the right strategy it could
make a difference. But I increasingly think that was wrong. And I think that
the whole project emerging from the Bolshevik revolution which the communist
movement, historically speaking, is inseparably bound up with... I suppose I
think the early Marx rather than the late Marx was right and you can only have
a socialist revolution, a successful transformation based upon the most highly
developed capitalist countries by which I don't only mean as is usually
interpreted in terms of the forces of production, the means of production,
productivity, but I think, again I suppose influenced indirectly Gramsci's
analysis, but also most highly developed in terms of civil society, the
experience of people organising and running things for themselves and so on. So
rather than try to create that from above it has to come out of what's already
gone before below. And so in a sense, you could argue that the whole communist
era, the short twentieth century, as Hobsbawm puts it, turns out to have been
about a blind alley and it was like endless historical periods attempts at
making a better society.
