Everyone in the Labour Party reads or, to use Michel de Certeau’s evocative phrase, traverses the vast body of Labour, socialist and social democrat Scripture “like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it” ourselves. A large community of half a million people, we’ve created our own reading lists, from which we derive our perceived shared values.
We’ve mythologised certain episodes in the history of the Labour Party, reading into sometimes important, sometimes minor events a relevance to present day disputes. Some concepts, the creation of the NHS, an idea derived more from the Liberal universalism of Beveridge than the early work of the Labour founders, has been, by and large, successfully appropriated into the Labour mythology. Others, such as nuclear deterrence, have sat uneasily in Labour manifestos, with the thin cover of multilateralism covering a tension with other values.
We’ve mythologised certain frankly mediocre figures, with very little original to say, as intellectual titans. We’ve read into their legacy values that we share, that we’ve developed in the process of our own reading of socialists and social democrats of the past, when we’ve discovered words and ideas we would have liked them to say and express.
The most common of these interpretative mythologies has read into the Labour Party the idea that it seeks to achieve “socialism” in the UK. The term has become so diffuse as to encompass New Labour managerialism and Bennite left nationalism and green Keynesianism and soft left social democracy — followers of each strand would all argue their interpretation is correct, of course. We use the prism of the socialism of either the utopians of the nineteenth century or the Marxists or the Bolsheviks or the Mensheviks.
It is none of those. The socialism of the Labour Party is a constantly evolving discourse. The Labour Party as a project is heavily engaged in reimagining and rewriting the idea of socialism. Not many would go as far as what Herbert Morrison claim and say “socialism is what a Labour Government does”, but from Tony Crosland to the authors of the 2019 manifesto, Labour figures have reinterpreted what socialism is to suit the present day.
Each subset of the Labour Party has conducted their own reading of Labour and socialist history and discourse, with Labour leaders past and present relying on the confusion of the Labour membership about their own ideas to claim a clarity of values where none exists. When the 2017 manifesto committed to ending free movement and maintained austerity-era punitive welfare cuts, the membership read into those pledges their own politics. Labour would of course reverse the cuts, of course it would be pro-migrant — when nothing in the manifesto or the statements from the frontbench should have led us to believe it.
Factions create their own readings of events to suit particular narratives, with the figure of Attlee uncomfortably appropriated by those who claim their intellectual descent from both Bevan and from Bevin. Harold Wilson is currently being read as a middle ground figure, almost a soft left icon, which he would struggle to recognise.
This is the result of reading the totality of the Labour Party through the small subset of values we perceive the rest of the Party espouses. In a way, this is a necessary illusion. As Harari notes, no social group of more than 50 can exist without creating a mythology shared, however imperfectly, by all members of the group. We are lucky enough that the volume of output from the Labour Party has been large and can read and produce new relevance to situations which would never claim to have application in the current case. We are lucky enough to have a Party derived from varied and, in some cases, mutually contradictory strains of thinking. Building individual mythoi from those strains is something we all engage in on a daily basis but something we have not consciously done in an organized manner since Crosland — whom I disagree with through my own reading.
We all, effectively, have engaged in a hermeneutics of the Labour Party. Socialist and social democrat authors, the history of the Labour Party and the discourses within the Labour Party will all be employed in a utilitarian project of whatever the next electoral incarnation of the Party will be.
Our contradictory readings of those scriptures will need to be reconciled and debated, but given the arch-teleological thrust of that reading — towards an electoral project — we need to formulate the rules of that specifically teleological hermeneutic, what in biblical studies would be called a special hermeutics of the Labour Party. Or to those more orthodox-inclined, a unified programme of revisionism, just as each previous ideological experiment in the Labour Party has been a programme of revisionism.
What better time for that than when we’re all reading in lockdown.