Labour, Marxism & Starmer: Not the history man strikes again
The Attlee Government owed less to Marxist textbooks than it did to the famous Daily Mirror cartoon showing an allied solider holding out a sign reading ‘Victory and Peace in Europe’ Keir Starmer, the Road Ahead 2021.
Whether you think Keir Starmer is close to New Labour or not he certainly has one thing in common with the 1990s tendency, an apparent and perhaps deliberate ignorance of Labour Party history.
Starmer clearly thinks (in so far as the matter interests him at all) that Labour and Marxist thought are entirely unrelated.
In fact at the foundation conference of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900 one constituent was the Social Democratic Federation an organisation which styled itself as Marxist. It did not fully participate in the Party and had left by 2010. The better elements of it- those that didn’t back World War One- helped to form the Communist Party in 1920. The CPGB worked in part in the Labour Party and was not formally excluded until the late 1920s.
The Attlee Government commissioned Marxist academic Harold Laski to write an introduction to a new Labour Party edition of the Communist Manifesto on the 100th anniversary of its publication in 1948.
Harold Wilson opined that Labour owed more to Methodism than Marx and quite probably had a point but that didn’t mean it owed nothing. Well not at least until not the history man Starmer opined anyway.
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