Alternatives to State‐Socialism in Britain: Other Worlds of Labour in the Twentieth Century, edited by Peter Ackers and Alastair J. Reid. Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2016, 374 pp., ISBN: 978‐3319341613, Price £66.99, hardback.

AuthorDave Lyddon
Published date01 December 2017
DOIhttp://doi.org/10.1111/bjir.12273
Date01 December 2017
British Journal of Industrial Relations doi: 10.1111/bjir.12273
55:4 December 2017 0007–1080 pp. 879–891
BOOK REVIEWS
Alternatives to State-Socialism in Britain: Other Worlds of Labour in the Twentieth
Century, edited by Peter Ackers and Alastair J. Reid. Palgrave Macmillan,
London, 2016, 374 pp., ISBN: 978-3319341613, Price £66.99, hardback.
Despite calling for ‘a really fresh approach to British labour history’ (p. 17), Peter
Ackers and Alastair Reidargue that the ‘liberal-pluralist approach’ (epitomized by the
‘intellectual tradition, from Cole and Laski, through Milne-Bailey, to Flanders and
Clegg’) ‘needs to be returned to its rightful place .. . displacing the current monopoly
position of state-socialist ideas and assumptions’ (pp. 10–11; added emphasis).
The intellectual positions of the editors are longstanding so there is no surprise
in their argument: Reid is a self-confessed ‘revisionist’ and anti-Marxist historian,
views shared by his co-editor, Ackers, a ‘neo-pluralist’ in his industrial relations
writings.
According to them, the main forms of ‘post-1956 state-socialist history’ in Britain
drew on Marxism and assumed that ‘the trend of twentieth-century history was
necessarily towards some form of state-socialism’ (p. 7). They counter this with two
strands of liberal pluralism: the ‘radical-utopian’ (identified initially with Cole and
then various post-1945 thinkers) and the ‘conservative-realist’ (Ackers term for the
Oxford School of Industrial Relations) (pp. 9–10). The editors divide their ‘other
worlds of labour’ into ‘other forms of association’ (civil society organizations), ‘other
leaders’ and ‘other intellectuals’.
The book covers broadly from 1918 to 1979, although several authors range well
beyond this. In the first part, Andy Vail’s chapter on Protestant Nonconformists is
mainly pre-1918 background on their influence through adult education, leisure and
youth work, before challenging ideas of long-term secularization. Rachael Vorberg-
Rugh and Angela Whitecross’s account of the Co-operative Party (founded 1917)
details the co-operative movement’s early political positions and the food crisis of
1914–1918. The Party’s fractious relationship with the Labour Party came to a
head during 1945–1951 when dierent visions of common ownership clashed. The
first four decades of the century form the focus of Ruth Davidson’s chapter on the
contribution of working-class women activists to ‘the development of local welfare
structures that were democratically managed and accountable’ (p. 110). Richard
Whiting’s discussion of trade unions in the 1960s–1980s concentrates on the closed
shop, ending with its legal undermining in the 1980s. But he neglects the ‘union
membership agreements’ of the late 1970s, a typical British compromise, where
existing non-unionists were often not forced to join a union though new employees
were.
The theme of unions as ‘voluntary associations’ continues in the second part with
chapters on the lives of Trades Union Congress (TUC) (1926–1946) general secretary
C
2017 John Wiley& Sons Ltd.

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