Tristram Hunt, the historian and Labour MP, has written a brilliant rebuttal to my piece in the Telegraph last week, in which I said that capitalism is hardwired in Britain’s DNA. Socialism,
he says, is also hardwired into our country’s mindset. Writing for Comment Is
Free, he says:
Britain gave birth to the Industrial Revolution: we were, as Napoleon so rightly declared, a nation of shopkeepers. But were we really a nation of budding socialists too? A fascinating insight is provided by Hunt himself, in his excellent biography of poor old Friedrich Engels and his mixed success trying to stir up revolution in England’s green and pleasant. In the 1880s he had some hope, when the political elite started to use the word. Even the Chancellor, William Harcourt, declared that ‘we are all socialists now.’‘There is another story of Britishness a long way from the template of Cameron and the Spectator. It is a tradition of redistribution, intervention and socialism equally as compelling as Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” (which, one should remember, was a satirical attack on laissez-faire morality, drawn from Shakespeare’s Macbeth)… [the] British strand of social criticism continued into the 19th century with the Owenites, the co-operative movement and Joseph Chamberlain’s new liberalism. All of this before we even think about Marx, Engels and the Labour party. For socialism was only ever one part of a broader tradition of British distaste for free-market fundamentalism.’
But there was one major problem with socialism: the pesky British working class. ‘On no account whatever allow yourself to be bamboozled into believing that a real proletarian movement is afoot here,’ Engels wrote to a friend in 1883 (one of the many invaluable quotes in Hunt’s book). He had joined the newspaper the Labour Standard, and expected his words to be devoured by a working class who had nothing to lose but their chains. ‘I tried, through the Standard for which I wrote leading articles, to pick up the thread of the old chartist movement and disseminate our ideas to see if they could evoke some response.’ The result? ‘Absolutely nothing.’ He blamed the fruits of empire (that is to say, the benefits of the first wave of globalisation): these Brits were so busy trading with the world, doing capitalism brilliantly, that they had no time for revolution. In those days, the state was tiny: the ‘free market fundamentalism’ that Hunt complains of was making Britain into a world superpower, and ranking British workers amongst the best-paid in the world.
Poor old Engels. Here was a paradox: socialism was an ideology about the masses, which portrayed the ruling class as the exploiters. And yet the ruling class seemed to like this creed more than the oiks. Hunt’s book quotes Beatrice Webb explaining this saying that the upper class’ embrace of socialism could be explained by guilt, or as she put it ‘a consciousness of sin’. ‘Socialism has not only become acceptable but has actually donned evening dress and lounges lazily on drawing-room causes,’ Hunt also quotes Engels as saying. Plus ça change.
There was the odd rally, but overall class war didn’t take off in Britain because the British working class were too busy with what the socialists were by then calling ‘capitalism’ (and what the majority, then called, and now call, ‘everyday life’ or ‘making a living’). Engels’ own hope, that ‘the whole machinery of state’ would be put ‘where it belongs: into the museum of antiquity, by the side of the spinning-wheel and the bronze axe’ (a quote not, alas, in Hunt’s biography) was to be the very opposite of what socialism did. It ended up transferring power from one elite to another.
To say that capitalism is British is hardly controversial. It’s not an ideology. The word is used, nowadays, to refer to whatever is not happening in the government sphere: there are as many types of capitalism as there are countries. Adam Smith wasn’t saying what ought to happen, simply describing what he saw around him, what the Brits were doing anyway. The Wealth of Nations is, in effect, a work of economic anthropology. To paraphrase Herbert Morrison, British capitalism is what the British public does — when the government isn’t bossing them around. Britain has a socialist tradition, too. But as Engels found out to his frustration, our modern history has been the triumph of shopping over politics.
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