Labour’s statism has always avoided popular democratic mobilization

Evidence

It would be easy to believe that Labourism has been trapped by the statist dilemma only recently and inadvertently. In fact, “Labourism,” or Labour socialism, has been marked from its origins by its Fabian-collectivist inheritance. The expansion of the state machine, under the management of state servants and experts, has often been defined in this tradition as synonymous with socialism itself. Labour has been willing to use this state to reform conditions for working people, provided this did not bite too deeply into the “logic” of capitalist accumulation. But it has refused like the plague the mobilization of democratic power at the popular level. This has always been the site on which Labour has been brought back from the brink into its deep reverence for “constitutionalism.” Nothing, indeed, so rattles the equanimity of Labour leaders as the spectacle of the popular classes on the move under their own steam, outside the range of “responsible” guidance and leadership. The fact is that “statism” is not foreign to the trajectory of Labour socialism: it is intrinsic to it. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1117

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the common-left assumption that state expansion was socialism’s advance; Hall argues Labour’s state-centrism has always been the mechanism constraining working-class self-mobilization.
• XREF: Links to debate over Fabianism and bureaucratic socialism; resonates with critiques of social democracy as ‘state over people’ across Labour and other left parties. — connects to: Anti-statism now undermines defence of public institutions like the NHS — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2236