Reformists never learn (1998)

Book Review from the March 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

The State to Come by Will Hutton. Vintage Press, 1997. £4.99.

Reformists never learn. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, Observer editor Will Hutton still claims that societies can shape capitalism “to meet their wider goals. Different ethical values apart from the market ethic must be protected . . . Human values need to be incorporated into the core of market processes . . . to produce a kinder, more tolerable society . . .” But if this is possible, why has it never happened up to now, at least not for any length of time?

The fact is that capitalism can’t be reshaped so as to put human values before market values. It has to put profits first and its economic mechanisms impose this on any government which may have other thoughts. Since 1973 it has been even worse for reformists. The end of the post-war boom and the period that has followed of slow growth, punctuated by recurring slumps, has meant that capitalist states have been in almost permanent fiscal crisis. They have not had the money to introduce any new social reforms and have been compelled to cut back on existing ones. The Blair government’s action against single mothers and their future plans against the sick and disabled is merely a continuation of this. They are acting as all governments of capitalism are forced to these days.

Hutton, who is a Labour supporter (this short book was written to urge people to vote Labour in the last election), is at the same time an open supporter of capitalism. He wants Britain to “develop its own specific capitalist model” and “to build a capitalist structure that can regulate itself better”. He realises that this is all that Labour aims at too but has his doubts as to whether it wants to go even that far. Labour, he says, “wishes to reshape British capitalism-a little” but the danger is that “Labour will find in office that it governs as a nicer group of Conservatives”. Whether Blair and his band of hypocrites (particularly the one who shopped his son to the police) are nicer than the other arrogant lot is a matter of opinion or remains to be seen but, in any event, is irrelevant in that it is not the personal attitudes of ministers that count but what the workings of the capitalist system forces them to do. It is capitalism that is the enemy and not the particular politicians who run it.

And capitalism can no more be reformed or reshaped so as to serve human rather than market values as Hutton deludedly imagines than a leopard can change its spots.

Adam Buick