Representation Committee to represent organised labour in Parlia-
ment. Only in 1918 did the LRC become the Labour Party, allow
individual members, and adopt a socialist statement of objectives in
clause 4 of its constitution – apparently in an attempt to appeal for
middle-class intellectual support (McKibbin, 1983: 97).
Clause 4 of the Labour Party’s 1918 constitution stated that the
objective of the party was:to secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their
industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be
possible upon the basis of common ownership of the means of
production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system
of popular administration and control of each industry or service.There were many subsequent attempts to drop this statement by
leaders of the party because it was interpreted as identifying the party
too closely with the idea of nationalisation, though the phrases
‘common ownership’ and ‘best obtainable’ were surely meant to
allow for at least co-operative and municipal ownership and possibly
more flexible interpretation still.
For many years Labourism might have been defined in terms of a
Fabian strategy to bring about the collective management of the
economy through a reliance on the power of the collective might of
the organised working class. As George Bernard Shaw put it in
Fabian Tract 13(1891) socialism was a doctrine of ‘gradualist Collec-
tivism brought about by a strategy of resolute constitutionalism’.
The ‘revisionists’ who have now succeeded in dropping the old clause
4 have argued that socialism is to be found more in a commitment to
egalitarian and libertarian values than in specific measures to achieve
these at any particular time. In Tony Blair’s words ‘the old-style
collectivism of several decades ago’ is no longer radicalism but ‘the
neo-conservatism of the left’ (Blair, 1994: 7). A similar debate has
taken place within many continental European socialist (and, still
more, former communist) parties.
Most writers on socialism have agreed that it is about a com-
mitment to equality, but there has been little consensus about the
nature of that commitment (Vincent, 1992: 101–104). Generally
speaking, however, democratic socialists have agreed on: emphasising
equality of rights for all; rejecting the legitimacy of extremist98 IDEOLOGIES