The 1980s witnessed a fundamental restructuring of socialism as it had been understood and practised in Europe for decades. The various ideas which shaped twentieth-century left-wing ideology underwent a dramatic transformation in the face of significant new challenges, not least the rise and establishment of the New Right philosophy in the guise of Thatcherism in Britain and, more globally and in a Cold War context, Reaganism. Over time, this led to the victory of free markets and liberal democracy over social justice and social democracy. Globalisation began in the 1980s, and how the left dealt with it would define domestic and international politics for decades.
For the Labour Party, these changes were made all the more serious because of what was happening inside the Soviet Union, a country which had informed its political thought since the Russian revolutions and the Stalinist era, although for some this influence stretched into the Cold War years, continuing until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989.1 Neil Kinnock, who replaced Michael Foot as leader in 1983 after Labour's defeat in that year's general election, began to reform the party, and his changes coincided with those made by Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union. Gorbachev's reforms initially changed the structure of the Soviet economy, but ultimately altered the very basis of Soviet socialism. The views and approaches of both leaders encouraged different ways of thinking about their strands of socialism, and the word used by Gorbachev to describe this process of change was perestroika (restructuring). This applied as much to what Kinnock was doing to Labour's ideology as it did to Gorbachev's efforts in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), not least because reflecting upon the apparent success of Gorbachev's reforms encouraged a feeling of ‘if the Soviets can do it, then so can we’. Perestroika in the USSR reinforced the ideological perestroika in the Labour Party and helped to smooth the way for Kinnock's reforms as he challenged well-worn and comfortable ideological shibboleths. Alex Pravda and Peter Duncan correctly assert that the ‘ascendency of reform within the CPSU … accelerate[d] a trend … towards a more positive assessment of reformism within the Labour Party’.2
This chapter will consider the Kinnock era and the changes made to Labour's ideology by placing them within the wider context of Gorbachev's reforms, because as they developed, a convergence between Eastern and Western European versions of socialism became evident. This was most apparent as both parties accepted that market-based ideas would need to be a part of their economic policies – a realisation which set in most noticeably after 1987. Although Kinnock's restructuring process began before Gorbachev's, the general election defeat of 1987 was an important turning point which saw Kinnock reconsider further aspects of Labour's political thought as he reinterpreted socialism as the party understood it. And although Gorbachev's turn towards perestroika in the same year may have been coincidental, he too introduced a new form of socialism which allowed a convergence of democratic and Soviet socialism to begin. By the time that Margaret Thatcher resigned and the Soviet Union fell, Labour had accepted that the free market should play a greater part in its economic plans, had made the role of the individual a more central feature in its programme and had abandoned unilateralism; in the USSR, the Soviet economy had a private sector, Soviet citizens had the freedom to openly debate and discuss the nation's issues and Soviet socialism no longer had communism as its ultimate aim.
The changing international environment in the 1980s allowed for improved relations between Western European socialist/social democratic parties of the Second International and the CPSU of the Third International. When Kinnock met with Gorbachev in 1989, he sought to discuss what he referred to as a ‘Convergence of ideology’. The agenda for their meeting outlined ‘the idea of joint ideological discussions … with a view to increasing understanding between the outlooks of the Second and Third Internationals’.3 This took on an especially important meaning in that year, as a seminar was held in Moscow to mark the one hundredth anniversary of the formation of the Second International. The historian Ben Pimlott represented the Labour Party and he recalled that the ‘most significant thing’ about the seminar ‘is that it took place at all’. He suggested that it was ‘a sign of the times’ that this meeting ‘was deemed worthy of celebration by the Soviet Institute of Social Sciences and Institute of Marxism-Leninism’.4 The seminar came a year after the CPSU was invited, for the first time, to send representatives to a meeting of the Council of the Socialist International in Madrid. Aleksandr Veber and Aleksandr Zotov, Advisers with the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee, attended the meeting.5 Given the history of animosity between the two Internationals, these meetings should be seen as important moments in socialist relations.
The path of convergence was partly laid as Gorbachev's reforms ‘social-democratised Bolshevism’.6 Archie Brown argues that this meant that, by 1991, ‘the draft program which Gorbachev espoused and presented to the Central Committee had much more in common with social democracy than with anything remotely like traditional Soviet Communism’. He also notes that the ‘the sentiments expressed in his July 1991 speech would have been perfectly acceptable to the leadership of the British Labour Party, the German Social Democrats, or the French or Spanish Socialists’.7 This was a consequence of Gorbachev's ‘New Thinking’, not just in foreign policy but also in ideological, political and economic ideas, and his thinking ‘acquired a certain Social Democratic coloring’.8 It could therefore be argued that, had the Soviet Union not collapsed in 1991, then Gorbachev might have successfully ‘social-democratised’ the Russian republic and a new strand of socialism would have emerged, allowing for a very different set of left-wing ideas to develop in the 1990s.
The international impact of the New Right will also be considered in this chapter, as different socialist ideas were defined by early globalisation. In different ways, it encouraged Kinnock and Gorbachev to reconsider their ideological frameworks. In Britain, Thatcher created a new socio-economic and political environment which warranted an ideological response from Labour, and Kinnock's perestroika of the Labour Party was that response. As we shall see, the consolidation of the New Right also inspired changes in the communist left in Britain which emphasised the need for reform inside the USSR and facilitated the changes made by Gorbachev.
This international backdrop was important, as it tied Kinnock's reforms to the wider reappraisals of socialism that were taking place in the socialist movement. The global freeing of markets and deregulation of industries in capitalist and non-capitalist countries alike forced parties on the left to reconsider certain state-led assumptions. Kinnock's ideological restructuring should be considered within this context, as Labour was not only part of a wider internationalist movement, but also was influenced by its internationalism. This was as true in the 1980s as it was in the 1930s when Soviet socialism, social democracy in Sweden and the New Deal in Roosevelt's America all inspired Labour in different ways. Kinnock's restructuring of Labour tied in with the wind of change that was blowing through the socialist movement. For example, French socialists saw President François Mitterrand reverse his Keynesian economic policy to introduce a pro-monetarist tournant de la rigueur (austerity turn), and in China, Deng Xiaoping encouraged the Chinese Communist Party to open the country up to the outside world by adopting a more market-based approach to the country's economics. The market-forces approach also helped to define the discussions in the Labour Party and the Soviet Union, facilitating the convergence between democratic and Soviet socialism.
Both Labour and the CPSU showed that they had the capacity to change radically in the 1980s, even if the change came about slowly at times and within specific parameters. This ability to consider different paths and alternative visions allowed for the convergence of socialist ideas which took place in this decade. However, this convergence was not given time to develop within the old ideological environment as, by the end of 1989, the Berlin Wall had fallen and Eastern Europe had freed itself from the Kremlin's rule. This could have presented Kinnock with a chance to offer a renewed version of socialism, devoid of any Stalinist context. Instead, it acted as a reminder that socialism was being rejected by millions of citizens in the ‘People's Democracies’ who turned to capitalism for answers, and the left's challenge became even more complicated. But until this, and the collapse of the USSR two years later, there seemed to be a genuine possibility of the worlds of the Second and Third International, of democratic socialism and Soviet socialism, converging and creating a new ideological interpretation of socialism for the twenty-first century.
The transformation of socialism in its various forms throughout the 1980s was dramatic, given where Labour and the CPSU began the decade. They both claimed socialism as their ideological framework, although how this was interpreted differed greatly. For example, by the early 1980s the USSR's questionable grasp of the concept of socialism had gone through a new stage known as ‘Developed Socialism’, although Marxism-Leninism was still the official ideology. Unlike the Labour Party, the CPSU did not have to consider such things as changes of government or alternative political philosophies. Soviet leaders’ understanding of socialism was based on an interpretation of Marxism handed down to them by previous generations of class warriors. It allowed no democratic freedom for its citizens or party members, factions inside the party had been banned since 1921, the party's word was law and the leader's position was, on the whole, incontestable.
In contrast, Labour participated in elections in order to gain power, and it allowed different groups and factions to openly debate and discuss policy even if, at times, they argued fiercely and publicly for or against alternative viewpoints and proposals. In the Kinnock era, Labour was defined as a democratic socialist party, as this ensured that it could differentiate itself from revolutionary socialists (such as the Trotskyists of Militant or the Socialist Workers Party) and the pro-Soviets in the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB). Labour had a more values-led approach as opposed to following a rigid philosophy based on a specific set of ideas. It also had to contend with the social democrats who had left the party to form the Social Democratic Party (SDP), meaning that challenges from left and right helped to define Kinnock's thoughts on ideology in the 1980s. In 1985, he declared that ‘Democratic socialism is under attack from the right because it is socialism; from the ultra-left because it is democratic. That combined assault requires us to examine and re-examine truths which we have held to be self-evident, to look again at the variety and form of democratic socialism and our prescriptions for the future.’9
The broader parameters of the discussion about the nature of democratic socialism were reflected upon in the 1983 pamphlet Labour's Choices. This contained essays from the three candidates in the party's leadership election, and the left-winger Eric Heffer outlined here what democratic socialism had achieved by the early 1980s. It was ‘of great importance’, he said, ‘that we explain what we mean by democratic socialism, particularly in the British context. Democratic socialists were responsible for the creation of the welfare state. They have, through Labour governments, pushed forward the frontiers of socialism, creating a number of important socialist outposts such as the National Health Service.’ Listing other key aspects, including good living and working conditions, he concluded that democratic socialism ‘stands for a fundamental change in society’.10 He also noted the opportunities that were open for democratic socialism in Europe. These opportunities were greater than they had been for a long time, as some European communist parties were ‘developing democratic socialist positions and moving away from Soviet concepts and distancing themselves from Soviet policy’. This opened up the possibility of a socialist Europe which rejected both the ‘bureaucratic, totalitarian system of the Soviet Union and the unbridled “free” capitalist system of the USA’.11 For Heffer's leadership opponent, Neil Kinnock, ‘individual liberty and giving people greater control over their destiny’ was a key part of democratic socialism, and ‘individual freedom’ was ‘the objective past, present and future of democratic socialism’.12 Both views highlight the debates that shaped the discussions within the Labour Party in the 1980s, and the direction in which Kinnock began to take the party after he became leader.
There were similarities between Labour and the CPSU as well, particularly where the role of the state was concerned. The two shared a similar outlook on the power of the state, basing their ideas on the economy and social relations on the belief that the central control of nationalised industries – either in part or total – was the best way to deliver the services that people used and needed. In May 1980, Labour adopted the policy document Peace, Jobs, Freedom, which talked about extending nationalisation, and a state-led approach still characterised much of Labour's thinking in this period. However, Labour had always accepted that the private sector had a role to play in the national economy, and even at the high point of Labour's nationalisation programme it believed in a mixed economy and a role for the individual. In the USSR, a much more extreme version of state ownership meant that Soviet citizens could not engage, legally at least, in activities that would allow them to show any individual creativity outside of official boundaries. But, despite their differences on this issue, both parties believed, one way or another, that the state should be there to look after the people from cradle to grave.
Labour and the CPSU also shared concerns about nuclear issues, but again the two parties took up different positions. Despite the continuing Cold War, Labour saw the threat of nuclear weapons and the destruction they could bring as greater than the one posed by the Kremlin. It was committed to unilateralism and had close links with the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), and when Michael Foot went to Moscow in 1980 he explained to Leonid Brezhnev that the West's Cruise and Pershing missiles, and the Soviets’ SS-20s, were a great problem for Labour. The USSR had retained a massive stockpile of nuclear weapons, amassed during the arms race with the USA, although the SALT I treaty had seen positive negotiations between the two sides help to reduce the numbers of weapons on both sides. However, the end of détente, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the election of Ronald Reagan in the US, created an environment in which the world would come the closest it had come to a nuclear conflict since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. By 1983, the West appeared to be hardening its stance as Reagan pushed his Strategic Defence Initiative programme (popularly referred to as ‘Star Wars’) and labelled the USSR an ‘Evil Empire’.13 This was also the year when a Soviet Sukhoi SU-15 interceptor shot down Korean Airlines flight KAL 007 (killing all 269 on board) and when the NATO war game exercise, Operation Able Archer, appeared so real to the Kremlin that it feared the West was preparing a surprise first strike at Soviet positions in the East.
However, all this changed over the next few years. Mikhail Gorbachev identified nuclear war as one of the greatest threats to the world and took great steps to do something to reduce the possibility of a nuclear conflict. Prior to this, when Neil Kinnock visited the USSR in 1984, he discussed the issue with the CPSU General Secretary Konstantin Chernenko. Among those who accompanied Kinnock to Moscow were his Chief of Staff Charles Clarke, his press secretary Patricia Hewitt, and Labour's shadow foreign secretary Denis Healey who went with Foot three years earlier. Healey returned to the USSR in 1985 alongside George Robertson, Labour's frontbench spokesman on foreign affairs, to attend the Victory in Europe Day fortieth anniversary celebrations in Moscow.
Kinnock and his colleagues were greeted warmly when they met with the Soviets, and they were ‘taken very seriously’, according to Bowker and Shearman, as Labour was ‘courted to a much greater degree than hitherto’.14 The visit was covered in the main newspapers, and a photograph of Kinnock and Healey took centre stage on the front pages of Pravda, Izvestiya and Trud. The photo and article even relegated a similar story about Austria's Social Democratic Federal Chancellor Alfred Sinowatz (‘Fred Zinovats’), who was also visiting Moscow at this time, to a lower place on the pages of these papers.15 The newspapers carried articles that painted Labour–Soviet relations in a favourable light and, after the delegates returned, Lev Parshin in the Soviet Embassy in London sent Charles Clarke a press release which broadly reflected the content of the articles. It stated that the Politburo ‘fully approved the results of the talks between Konstantin Chernenko and Neil Kinnock … In so doing, it pointed out the considerable role played by the Labour Party in Britain's political life and the importance of contacts with the party for a positive development of Soviet–British relations.’16
The delegation sought to emphasise and explain ‘as clearly as possible the current position of the Labour Party, in particular seeking to remove any preconceptions that the Soviets may have about our commitment to NATO, our preparedness to increase Spending etc.’ and to ‘get the earliest possible indication of any flexibility that there may be in the Soviet positions’. This flexibility could have been referring to ideology, as Kinnock and Healey held a string of meetings with Boris Ponomarev from the International Department, and on the back of the official agenda Kinnock wrote: ‘Ponomarev visit of particular importance.’ This was possibly because he was involved in determining the ideological direction of the CPSU, having been close to chief ideologist Mikhail Suslov, one of Gorbachev's patrons. Kinnock's notes show Gorbachev was already on Labour's radar, as comments include ‘apparently Gorbachov [sic] is out of Moscow during this period’ and that ‘Gorbachev is the next most senior Party Secretary under Chernenko’. The delegation also scheduled a visit to the Institute of American Studies, where they would meet with Institute Head Georgy Arbatov. He was often involved in arms talks between the USSR and USA, and, more importantly here, he was influential in paving the way for Gorbachev's reforms and had ‘generally been associated with the less dogmatic “moderate” line in Soviet affairs’.17
Healey also met with Vadim Zagladin, a key member of the CPSU's International Department and Ponomarev's deputy. Healey was deeply impressed with Zagladin and found him ‘friendly, open and intelligent’.18 It is clear that meeting with Zagladin at this time was important for the Labour delegation, as he was a worldly-wise politician who travelled abroad and was friends with Western European socialist leaders such as François Mitterrand and Willy Brandt. According to the briefing notes given to Kinnock before the meeting, Zagladin had a ‘benign and scholarly manner’.19 Perhaps more importantly, though, he was an important influence on Mikhail Gorbachev and played a key part in the perestroika process. Considering the kind of people Kinnock and other delegates either hoped to meet or did indeed spend time with while they were in Moscow, it is fair to say that identifying like-minded reformers with whom they could discuss ideological questions was a central part of what they wanted to achieve there.
Kinnock and Healey discussed a range of issues when they met with Chernenko. The agenda included defence, human rights, Labour's attitudes to the European peace movement and CPSU–Labour relations. Given that the Cold War was heating up again, it is not surprising that defence and nuclear weapons issues were important parts of the talks. A ‘special emphasis’ was given to ‘considerations expressed by Konstantin Chernenko in connection with the Labour Party programme of defence and security issues’, as this ‘provides for building a defence system on a non-nuclear basis with the withdrawal of nuclear weapons of every type from Britain's territory’. It was declared that, should ‘such a programme be implemented, the USSR would commit itself not to use nuclear weapons against Britain and would be ready to reduce and scrap such a part of its medium-range missiles in the European part of the USSR, that would correspond to the number of nuclear missiles scrapped by the British side’.20
Ronald Reagan's Star Wars programme was also covered. Chernenko told Kinnock that ‘the problem of outer space is of paramount importance, it is one of the most urgent problems of our time’.21 Gorbachev brought this up again when he met with Kinnock and other key Labour figures, including Healey, Robertson and Robin Cook, in London in December, noting that ‘we attach great importance to the problem of the demilitarisation of outer space’. Gorbachev also mentioned that the Soviet position on unilateralism was clear. He said that ‘we do not demand that Great Britain should unilaterally reduce its nuclear forces regardless of whether the Soviet Union will respond or not’.22 Although Labour was still tied to the policy of unilateralism, the sentiment in this statement from the soon-to-be Soviet leader came to underpin Kinnock's future move away from his unilateralist stance. Over time, this allowed a convergence in foreign policy to develop. Bowker and Shearman note that ‘if one compares the Labour's Party programme for the 1987 election, Modern Britain in a Modern World, with many of Gorbachev's speeches on foreign affairs, the two parties share a number of complementary policy goals’.23 In some ways, these were a reaction to the ways in which Thatcherism and the New Right were reshaping the world.
The consolidation and growth of New Right politics laid the foundations of globalisation and encouraged both Labour and the CPSU to rethink their economic and ideological understanding of the world. For Kinnock, Thatcherism was one more factor which led to a wider questioning of the relevance of Labour's traditional class-orientated politics as it had been practised. Henry Pelling considered this in relation to the ‘modern’, more affluent, Wilson era, asking whether Labour's ‘class basis’ and ‘close ties with the unions’ made it ‘obsolete in new Britain’.24 This was as much an issue for Labour in the 1980s as it was the 1960s, although by then there were new concerns, as the former Labour MP Austen Mitchell points out. The political discussions were even more complex in the 1980s as Labour, which ‘had grown up in a world of class blocs’, had to cope with ‘the new consumer democracy of a pluralistic society’, and the ‘ “us versus them” politics was less important than a plethora of ‘single issues” ’.25 Kinnock acknowledged this as well as the consumerism of the new decade. In 1985 he wrote that Labour had to relate to and draw support from the modern working classes, which were both ‘increasingly fragmentary’ and enjoying ‘upward social mobility, increased expectations and extended horizons’.26
Kinnock recognised that British society was changing, and the working class adopted a different outlook as Thatcherism continued to tear down some of the central features of social democracy that Labour had built since 1945. Thatcherism in Britain, and neo-liberalism globally, was winning the political and economic argument (even if it did so with a case built on spin, propaganda and personal debt which would cause great problems in the future) and the left had to respond in an equally radical way. Some continued to fight using the old ideological tools, some used those tools to analyse the problem in new ways and some, like Kinnock's Labour, looked at the consumerism of the new era and tried to adapt the party's principles accordingly. This was not so much an abandoning of Labour's central beliefs (although it appeared like that to some on the left) but, rather, an acceptance that times were changing and that Labour had to change too in order to survive. Class was still important, but so too was a sense of being affluent and able to join in with the growth of consumerism. New interests and new values rivalled the old ones, and Labour had to find a way to appeal to a new generation of (possible) Labour voters while holding on to the old (actual) party supporters. Socialism could not therefore be dropped, as that could alienate those who had struggled for it in the past, but it had to be redefined, arguably to make it relevant in a more materialistic age.
Mikhail Gorbachev had similar issues to deal with in the USSR. Soviet society had changed considerably from the way it was in the early Brezhnev years. It had become more highly educated and more consumer orientated by the early 1980s, but there were now growing problems where delivering people's rising expectations was concerned. There were not enough of the types of jobs that this more educated population expected, and the economy was slowing down, which made it difficult to keep up with society's needs. The drift towards crisis in the USSR demanded a radical response, and Gorbachev was the politician to consider this seriously. He was from a different generation of Soviet leaders, taking over from the seventy-three-year-old Chernenko when he was a comparatively young fifty-four, and had a more global outlook, having travelled widely before he took over in the Kremlin. He visited Britain (where he addressed Parliament in 1984), Canada, Italy and Czechoslovakia, and he was a great admirer of the Czechoslovakian reformist communist leader Alexander Dubček, so much so that in 1987, when asked what the difference was between perestroika and the 1968 Prague Spring, Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman Gennady Gerasimov stated: ‘Nineteen years’.27 All of these experiences influenced his thinking and contributed to his reformist views.
Gorbachev's ascent to power was a turning point which facilitated a convergence of certain aspects of British and Soviet socialism, but in domestic politics where Kinnock was concerned, social issues and economic questions were driven by the new attitudes of the working class, which were, in the 1980s, partly a product of Thatcherism. The domestic challenges that Kinnock faced, together with the changes in the USSR appeared to heightened the need for change in the Labour Party.
This was not just true for Labour, though, as there was a serious difference of opinions in the communist movement as well, and this reflected the various strands of thought in the Kremlin. The Eurocommunists and the thinkers and writers in the Marxism Today group were examining different issues and exploring alternative ideas to those put forward by the (still pro-Soviet) Morning Star communists. The rebranding of Marxism Today made the break with the old Morning Star wing of British communism very clear, and this was partly based in what Charles Clarke calls Marxism Today's promotion of ‘diversity of thought’. In these new times, it ‘resisted unequivocally the centralised and conservative thinking which had dominated much of the left both in the Communist Party, which was Marxism Today's main concern, and in the wider labour movement, notably the trade unions and the Labour Party’. The ‘most important target’, according to Clarke, was the world communist movement, ‘riven as it was between the “Eurocommunism” of Italy and Spain and the hard-line Soviet version which controlled Russia and eastern Europe until the rise of Mikhail Gorbachev and the collapse of the Soviet empire’.28 These divisions were also noted by Mikhail Gorbachev's foreign policy advisor, Anatoly Chernyaev, from the CPSU's International Department, who said:
The Eurocommunists have absolutely defeated the faithful, i.e. the people faithful to us. This is a demonstration of the fact that in countries like England there is no need for a Communist Party; the Communist Movement has become obsolete … They do not need us, the CPSU … They see in us neither a model, nor an example, ideal, brother, trusted friend, not even someone who would save them from a nuclear catastrophe. Alas! Many Communist Parties are on this path.29
There was an acceptance that things were changing in the socialist and communist worlds, and also that, as the New Right consolidated its power and position, a more nuanced understanding of society, politics and economics was needed. This certainly did not need to mean a rejection of socialism as a philosophy, but as Thatcher's time in office lengthened and as Thatcherism entrenched itself further, it became clear that, for Labour, a different approach to socialism was needed. As Martin Westlake notes, Kinnock and the Labour Party discovered that ‘socialism was to prove a blunt and rusted weapon to wield against the dragon of Thatcherism, one which had the propensity to rebound upon the user, for as it was to evolve over the next thirteen years, Thatcherism became much more than a sequence of policy changes. It became, rather, a systemic change which completely altered the basic framework of any political analysis.’30
Colin Leys suggests that this was especially relevant after the 1987 election defeat, with the advent of Kinnock's Policy Review. He notes that by this time ‘what was at stake was how far the party should go in accepting the legacy of Thatcherism as a new “settlement”, as the Conservatives had accepted that of 1945–51’.31 Tudor Jones argues that the Policy Review formed a central part of the attempt to widen the party's appeal as it rejected polices recognised as being unpopular with voters – nationalisation, unilateralism and high taxation. It was ‘prompted by the electoral success of Thatcherism and by its impact on British politics, evident both in its reshaping of the political agenda and in the institutional and political changes that it had brought about’.32
José Harris widens the debate by considering this within the context of the rise of New Labour and of the party's being out of power for a very long time, as the more elections Labour lost, the more time it had to plan changes, implement reforms and alter the party in such ways as to make it a remarkably different entity by the time Kinnock resigned as leader in 1992. Harris asked how far the intellectual roots of New Labour were a ‘reflex to Thatcherism, the collapse of Soviet Communism and impatience with prolonged exclusion from office’.33 However, as our concern is assessing the role of the Soviet Union in the changes that took place in the Labour Party during the 1980s, this question can be modified slightly to focus less on the collapse of Soviet communism and more on the changes that were taking place in the Soviet Union itself during this period. Considering these, together with the backdrop of Thatcherism, allows for a more complete understanding of the forces which contributed to Kinnock's perestroika.
The convergence between Eastern and Western socialism gathered pace from 1987 onwards. It was in this year that Kinnock and Gorbachev turned their parties further towards the free market and accepted that market forces would need to be incorporated into their programmes in order for them to achieve their aims. Over the next few years, new strands of socialism emerged. Kinnock discussed affluent socialism and Gorbachev's ideas developed into Humane Democratic Socialism. These will be discussed so as to consider how two different socialist traditions drew closer as the forces of globalisation continued to grow. For Labour, the 1987 election defeat – its third successive loss to the Tories – forced it to rethink its ideological basis and the more modern society in which it was functioning. For the CPSU, the economic reforms that were central to Gorbachev's perestroika highlighted the USSR's turn towards the market.
In some ways, Kinnock's starting point was to consider how Labour should deal with the changing nature of its working-class support and the new desires of the wider population. The new consumerism of the 1980s raised important questions which needed urgent answers. It was at this time that the notion of affluent socialism was discussed by Kinnock, and he did so by raising a question asked by Ron Todd, the Transport and General Workers Union General Secretary. At the party's 1987 conference, Kinnock noted that Todd had asked what to say to a docker earning £400 a week with his own house, a new car, a microwave, video and ‘a small place in Marbella’. The answer was not ‘let me take you out of your misery, brother’. Kinnock said that Todd ‘was not suggesting that we trail in the wake of something called popular capitalism – he was facing a fundamental question for our party with admirable candour that I would recommend universally. It is a question which we must all face if we are going to have an effective response to the changes taking place in our society.’34 It was also ‘not really a very new question’, as Kinnock said that he had first faced it ‘after the 1959 election’.35
The idea of affluent workers and their relationship with the Labour Party led Kinnock to consider what this meant for Labour both in electoral and in ideological terms, and affluent socialism become a more central part of the discussions. Kinnock argued that democratic socialism had to be ‘as attractive, as beckoning and as useful to the relatively affluent and the relatively secure as it is to the less fortunate in our society who are frequently referred to … as our “natural vote” ’.36 He rejected the idea that there was ‘collision between affluence and socialism’, and recalled that he had been to see ‘an old socialist in Tredegar, Oliver Jones’, who said that there was no collision and that he had been ‘striving for both all my life … The point is … that if socialism has got to wait for want, then socialism will wait for a very long time. And it will be right for socialism to wait for a very long time: because if it needs misery to give it a majority, God forbid we have the misery.’37 The belief was that Labour could achieve power and could reconstruct society only when capitalism faltered had to end, not least because it was evident that this new strand of capitalism was not going to falter in the near future.
Kinnock had to adapt to the more consumer-orientated times of the 1980s, and the 1987 Policy Review was a central part of the process that saw Labour work out what to do next. It became clear that more market-based economics would need to play more of a role in Labour's thinking, although the details took time to be settled upon. Despite the obvious uneasy feelings that such an approach provoked, embracing a market philosophy was seen as a way to re-engage with the electorate and show voters that Labour once again had a credible economic vision. But this had to be done in a way that allowed the party to fulfil its core purpose. In 1988, Kinnock's Policy Review Group discussed ‘our vision and our values as democratic socialists’ and highlighted Labour's ‘belief in the potential and equal worth of individuals as well as the importance of strong communities and democracy’.38
By the late 1980s, democratic socialism meant ‘the attainment and development of that balance of markets and non-market forces which pursues the objectives of greater material well-being, greater equality and greater choice’. It would build on the idea that the ‘real choice is not between the unregulated market and the bureaucratic allocation of Soviet socialism – both are socially inefficient. Democratic socialists believe in the attainment and development of that balance of markets and non-market forces which pursues the objectives of greater material well-being, greater equality and greater choice’.39 Kinnock expanded on this idea in his speech to Labour members in Blackpool after he won the leadership battle against Tony Benn in 1988.
He addressed the fact that some saw adopting a market approach as giving into individualism and competition, and that once words like these were used, alongside competitiveness, it was ‘not long before we hear people in the movement saying that we are proposing “to run the capitalist economy better than the Tories” ’. He said that, while ‘the day may come when … this movement, is faced with a choice of socialist economies … until that day comes’ and that choice is presented, ‘the kind of economy that we will be faced with when we win the election will be a market economy. That is what we have to deal with and we will have to make it work better than the Tories do.’ The market economy would continue to exist for some time, but Labour would use it differently and have different priorities, such as funding the National Health Service. But there was ‘no “slide to the right” and ‘no “concession to Thatcherism” ’.40
Flexibility in the party's economic models became an important consideration. Kinnock believed that the ‘attainment of social efficiency … demands a flexible approach to forms of social ownership, and to the balance of market and non-markets organisation’, as one ‘particular form and one particular balance will not be appropriate for all time’. Economic structures should be able to ‘adapt to the changing needs of the economy and the community’.41 How much state intervention was desirable in the operation of markets was raised by the Policy Review Group. Markets were accepted as ‘an efficient means of guiding and restructuring production, and of enhancing the community of interest between producer and consumer. The market can be a powerful creative force, providing a competitive stimulus to innovation and to provision of variety and choice.’ However, ‘markets also impose very short-term pressures which result in the immediate waste or even destruction of resources and which seriously jeopardise long-run efficiency’. It was stated that ‘we must use markets boldly, opening up new avenues of competition where the very high levels of concentration and market control prevalent in Britain are limiting consumer choice and product innovation. Equally, we must design more efficient means of decisive intervention in the market place.’42 The type of mixed economy that Labour still believed in was being forced to change by events beyond its control, and it became clear that the market would be a more central part of Labour's economic programme.
The debates about what this turn to the market would mean continued long after Kinnock stopped being Labour leader, but it is clear that by the late 1980s many saw it as an important aspect of how Labour would approach economic questions. Eric Shaw notes that there was a ‘fulsome approval for the market’ by 1989, and Tudor Jones states that this ‘unambiguous acknowledgment of the merits of a market economy’ was ‘unprecedented in the history of the Labour Party’.43 Labour was not only dropping its commitment to renationalise old industries which had been privatised by the Tories, but also dropping its commitment to nationalisation as a whole. The economic changes fed into Kinnock's ideological reforms and they show how Labour began to understand and interpret the world in different ways, despite the fact that this meant it had to jettison what some regarded as the party's core beliefs.
A similar turn to the market was taking place at the same time in the USSR. Gorbachev found that a younger generation of Soviet citizens wanted more than just what the older generation had struggled for, and that their hopes went beyond achieving job security and subsidised housing, and the state defining their future. The consumerism of the Brezhnev years had raised expectations, but the economic problems associated with that era meant that a new approach was needed and Gorbachev thought about resolving the USSR's problems in different ways. The late Brezhnev era had seen an unofficial civil society take hold, with citizens organising political activity outside of the remits of the state. Gorbachev responded to this and identified various issues to focus on, largely based on universal ‘common human values’ and the interdependent nature of the world. It was ‘based on a recognition of the diversity of interests and goals of the world's different societies and of the international community as a whole’.44
Gorbachev made his ‘New Thinking’ and the idea of a ‘common European home’ a central part of his foreign policy. This was his way of dealing with what he saw as two great global problems – the environment (in the post-Chernobyl/acid rain era) and the nuclear threat. For Gorbachev, these crossed class and national barriers and warranted a collective response. Where his domestic policies were concerned, Gorbachev was moving the USSR towards more openness (glasnost’) in society and was beginning to inject a market-based approach into the planned economy.
The introduction of a new Law on State Enterprise (1987) and Law on Co-operatives (1988) allowed for more freedom in the economy and a reduction in the role of the state. The first law ensured that as long as enterprises fulfilled state orders, they could dispose of the remaining output as they saw fit. Gorbachev even talked about economic independence and profit-and-loss accounting. The second law allowed for private ownership of enterprises, and individual ownership was now allowed as he encouraged different forms of ownership. Gorbachev was pursuing a social democratic line and introducing a mixed economy into Soviet life for the first time since the 1920s. He was also turning Soviet socialism towards the Western European strand. The changes that he introduced meant that, when perestroika ended, Gorbachev's ‘political beliefs were closer to those of Eduard Bernstein … or of a German social democrat of more recent vintage, Willy Brandt, than to those of the founder of the Soviet state’.45 For Archie Brown, the changes in the USSR turned Gorbachev into a social democrat.46 For Mark Sandle, Gorbachev ‘social-democratised Bolshevism’ because the ‘core values’ of Humane Democratic Socialism ‘were those of humanism, democracy and freedom, symbolizing the triumph of ethical socialism over its scientific predecessor’.47
It was here that the parties of the Western European left played an important part in Gorbachev's thinking, as his ideological reforms fundamentally altered the nature of Soviet socialism to the point that the CPSU began to look like the socialist parties on the other side of the Berlin Wall. These were, in some ways, his model for change. At a time when he was looking to widen democratic engagement in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev enthusiastically declared to a Politburo meeting in April 1988 that 120 million people in Western Europe voted for these parties. This also meant that their support for perestroika was an important part of the process.48
He certainly received support from Kinnock, who wrote the introduction to the 1988 book Perestroika: Global Challenge, Our Common Future: A Statement by Mikhail Gorbachev. The Labour leader wrote that he was ‘not surprised by the direction’ that Gorbachev wanted to pursue, but ‘the pace and the audacity with which he has moved … has been unexpected’. Kinnock was fulsome in his praise for the Soviet leader's ‘ability’ and his ‘capacity to employ a breadth of vision and ambition’49 was not to be doubted. He also highlighted the possibilities which perestroika opened up between East and West, which included ‘co-operation rather than confrontation’ and ‘for welfare rather than warfare’.50 And when Kinnock met with Gorbachev in London a year later, he congratulated the Soviet leader on perestroika, which he called ‘an immense tribute’ to Gorbachev's socialism and to his imagination. The two leaders had ‘a very constructive and friendly meeting’ where they discussed a range of issues including the nuclear question, and Gorbachev ‘touched upon some ideological points’, making it ‘very clear that he considered that the right for people to make real choices was basic to his view of socialism in all of its applications’.51
The importance of giving people choice was not only a consideration of Gorbachev's. As Labour's Policy Review came to an end, Meet the Challenge, Make the Change declared that the ‘true purpose of socialism is the creation of a genuinely free society in which a more equal distribution of power and wealth extends the rights and choices of the whole community. That society offers more than the chance to take better advantage of traditional liberties.’52 Choice and the new role of the individual was a central part of Kinnock's Labour Party as both took on a new meaning in Thatcher's Britain. Kinnock recognised this and sought to reconcile it with his views on democratic socialism, just as Gorbachev was also moving his party further away from the state-led approach to socialism. Labour's affluent socialism may have been a little less pronounced than Gorbachev's Humane Democratic Socialism, but it was no less important, as it laid the foundations for the even greater changes made to the party's ideas by Tony Blair in the 1990s.
The course on which Gorbachev set the CPSU strengthened the hand of the reformers inside the Labour Party, as the Soviet Union's political system ‘appeared to have a distinctly “westernized” look’.53 His fundamental restructuring of Soviet socialism allowed Kinnock to identify with Gorbachev in a way that no other Labour leader had ever been able to identify with a Soviet leader, and this encouraged the reformers to continue along their chosen path. After all, if the General Secretary of the CPSU's reinterpretation of socialism could follow a more social democratic line and establish a mixed economy, then the Labour Party – which was already on this path – could further open itself up to new ways of thinking. This facilitated the convergence of ideas between the Western European and Moscow routes to socialism, and was a powerful driving force in Neil Kinnock's perestroika of the Labour Party.
Neil Kinnock had to deal with numerous pressures and almost irresistible forces in the 1980s, and these contributed to his reforms. The new socio-economic and political realities of the decade meant that change was necessary, and Thatcherism and globalisation encouraged Labour to rethink its understanding of socialism. Kinnock was aided in this process by the reformist mood evident in Mikhail Gorbachev's CPSU. As the USSR turned towards the free market, Kinnock's Labour also embraced market-based ideas more than ever, and both parties wrestled with ways to reconcile the role of the state and the role of the individual in the modern world.
Kinnock's changes coincided with Gorbachev's reforms, and the reconstruction of both leaders’ ideological frameworks allowed for a convergence of socialist ideas. This in turn created an environment where the Second and Third Internationals could come together in Moscow in a new spirit of comradeship. Of course, the troubled relationship of the past would take time to get over, but the reforms introduced by Kinnock and Gorbachev, in different ways, helped to initiate a new understanding on the left. This contributed to a realignment of Europe's reformist, ethical socialists – like those in the Labour Party – and the Moscow school of socialism, and the convergence of these two strands of socialism, given time, could have developed a coherent challenge to globalisation. That they did not have the time meant that this was a great missed opportunity for the left. The collapse of communism halted this realignment, and it became more difficult to convince people that they should turn to socialism just as millions across Eastern Europe were overthrowing the Kremlin-backed dictatorships which had posed as socialism for more than forty years.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union were greeted by many on the left as a new start for socialism, as they believed that it would be more popular now that it was free from any Stalinist connotations. However, this momentous change instead appeared to discredit the old ideology even more in the minds of many. The general mood seemed to be defined by an implied question: ‘why vote for socialism when half a continent is rejecting it?’ This facilitated the reformers’ rush to embrace the market even further and the post-communist socialist movement became something very different to what it was before 1989, being more concerned with the consumer society and market economics. While social justice and social democracy were not jettisoned completely, they had to sit alongside the pursuit of profit, which became a more central part of the Labour project than it had ever been. But the end of Soviet socialism and Labour's turn towards the individual and the market were consequences of the perestroika process of both Kinnock and Gorbachev and, more than a quarter of a century on, the left is still coming to terms with the legacies of both.
1 See Jonathan Davis ‘Labour's Political Thought: The Soviet Influence in the Interwar Years’, in Paul Corthorn and Jonathan Davis (eds), The Labour Party and the Wider World: Domestic Politics, Internationalism and Foreign Policy (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008); Jonathan Davis, ‘An Outsider Looks In: Walter Citrine's First Visit to the Soviet Union, 1925’, Revolutionary Russia 26 (2013), 147–63; Darren Lilleker, Against the Cold War: The History and Political Traditions of Pro-Sovietism in the British Labour Party, 1945–89 (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004); Andrew Williams, Labour and Russia: The Attitude of the Labour Party to the USSR, 1924–1934 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989).
2 Alex Pravda and Peter Duncan (eds), Soviet–British Relations since the 1970s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 235.
3 Kinnock Papers, KNNK 10/1/7 (File 1) Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College.
4 KNNK 10/1/7 (File 1), Ben Pimlott, correspondence with Mike Gapes, 8 June 1989.
5 Aleksandr Veber, ‘Perestroika and International Social Democracy’, in Breakthrough To Freedom. Perestroika: A Critical Analysis (Moscow: R. Valent, 2009), p. 100.
6 Mark Sandle, A Short History of Soviet Socialism (London: UCL Press, 1999), p. 418.
7 Archie Brown, ‘Gorbachev, Lenin, and the Break with Leninism’, Demokratizatsiya 15 (2007), 236. Mark Sandle elaborates on this in Sandle, ‘The Final Word: The Draft Party Programme of July/August 1991’, Europe–Asia Studies 48 (1996), 1131–50.
8 Veber, ‘Perestroika and International Social Democracy’, p. 99.
9 Neil Kinnock, The Future of Socialism (London: Fabian Society, 1985), p. 9, http://lib-161.lse.ac.uk/archives/fabian_tracts/509.pdf.
10 Roy Hattersley, Eric Heffer, Neil Kinnock and Peter Shore, Labour's Choices (London: Fabian Society, 1983), p. 7, http://digital.library.lse.ac.uk/objects/lse:qav749qag/read/single#page/1/mode/2up.
11 Hattersley et al., Labour's Choices, p. 7.
12 Kinnock, The Future of Socialism, p. 3.
13 Ronald Reagan, speech to the National Association of Evangelicals, 8 March 1983, http://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/reagan-evil-empire-speech-text/.
14 Mike Bowker and Peter Shearman, ‘The Soviet Union and the Left in Britain’, in Alex Pravda and Peter Duncan, Soviet–British Relations since the 1970s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 147–67, p. 151.
15 See ‘Priyem K. U. Chernenko N. Kinnoka’, in Pravda, Izvestiya and Trud, 27 November 1984, p. 1.
16 Press Release from Novosti News Agency, KNNK 10/1/7 (File 2).
17 KNNK 19/2/10.
18 Bowker and Shearman, ‘The Soviet Union and the Left in Britain’, p. 151.
19 KNNK, 19/2/10.
20 KNNK 10/1/7 (File 2), Neil Kinnock meeting with Konstantin Chernenko, 27 November 1984.
21 KNNK 10/1/7 (File 3), Neil Kinnock meeting with Konstantin Chernenko, 27 November 1984.
22 KNNK 10/1/7 (File 2), Neil Kinnock meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, 19 December 1984.
23 Bowker and Shearman, ‘The Soviet Union and the Left in Britain’, p. 152.
24 Henry Pelling, A Short History of the Labour Party (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1982), p. 120.
25 Austen Mitchell, ‘The Old Right’, in Matt Beech, Kevin Hickson and Raymond Plant (eds), The Struggle for Labour's Soul: Understanding Labour's Political Thought (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 261–7, p. 265. Mitchell includes in these ‘single issues’ feminism, unilateralism, ethnicity and greenism.
26 Kinnock, The Future of Socialism, p. 2.
27 Cited in Raymond L. Gartoff, The Great Transition: American–Soviet Relations and the End of the Cold War (Washington D.C.: The Brookings Institute, 1994), p. 575.
28 Charles Clarke, ‘Learning the Lessons of Marxism Today’, 20 December 2011, www.ippr.org/juncture/learning-the-lessons-of-marxism-today.
29 Anatoly Chernyaev, The Diary of Anatoly S. Chernyaev (Washington, D.C.: National Security Archive, 2006), p. 54 [22 May 1985], http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB192/Chernyaev_Diary_translation_1985.pdf.
30 Martin Westlake, Kinnock: The Authorised Biography (London: Little, Brown, 2001), p. 131.
31 Colin Leys, ‘The British Labour Party's Transition from Socialism to Capitalism’, Socialist Register 32 (1996), 1–26.
32 Tudor Jones, Remaking the Labour Party: From Gaitskell to Blair (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 120.
33 José Harris, ‘Labour's Political and Social Thought’, in Duncan Tanner, Pat Thane and Nick Tiratsoo (eds), Labour's First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 8–45, p. 38.
34 Neil Kinnock, Thorns and Roses: Speeches 1983–1991, ed. Peter Kellner (London: Hutchinson, 1992), p. 130.
35 Kinnock, Thorns and Roses, p. 132.
36 Kinnock, Thorns and Roses, p. 132.
37 Kinnock, Thorns and Roses, p. 132.
38 KNNK 2/2/14, Policy Review Group meeting 16 November 1988, p. 1.
39 Kinnock, Thorns and Roses, p. 5.
40 Neil Kinnock, ‘Leader's Speech’, Blackpool, 1988, www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=194.
41 KNNK 2/2/14, Kinnock, ‘Socialism and Production’, p. 5.
42 KNNK 2/2/14, Policy Review Group meeting, pp. 4–5.
43 Eric Shaw, The Labour Party since 1979: Crisis and Transformation (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 86; Jones, Remaking the Labour Party, p. 153.
44 W. Smirnov, cited in Sandle, Short History, p. 383.
45 Sandle, Short History, p. 237.
46 Archie Brown, ‘Did Gorbachev as General Secretary Become a Social Democrat?’, Europe–Asia Studies 65 (2013), 198–220.
47 Sandle, Short History, p. 418.
48 Brown, ‘Gorbachev, Lenin’, p. 242.
49 Neil Kinnock, ‘Introduction’, in Mikhail Gorbachev, Perestroika: Global Challenge, Our Common Future, edited by Ken Coates (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1988), pp. 7–13, p. 8.
50 Kinnock, ‘Introduction’, p. 12.
51 Neil Kinnock meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev, 6 April 1989, KNNK 10/1/7 (File 1).
52 Labour Party, Meet the Challenge, Make the Change: A New Agenda for Britain: Final Report of Labour's Policy Review for the 1990s (London: Labour Party, 1989), p. 55.
53 Sandle, Short History, p. 379.