class and the local state

Class and the local state by David Byrne

Clarts could get in here all right. He pointed out that heads of contracting firms were always unnaturally keen to get elected as city councillors. They claimed it was because they were so public spirited and anxious to serve, and so they might be. But it was also somewhat convenient for them as business men that their public service gave them a necessary preview, and a vote, on how the public funds were going to be spent. For of course much of the money went on construction work which their firms carried out. They competed with one another for each job by putting in rival estimates, certainly. But at different times one another judged which of these estimates was acceptable. In fact, if they had not been such public-spirited men, they might easily have made a profit out of their public work (Jack Common, l?ze Ampersand, 1975, 289).

This paper is an attempt to contribute to the task identified by John Foster in his recent review of Castells by way of Wohl when he said:

To comprehend the asymmetry of the city’s relationship t o state power one has to go outside the ‘urban politics’ conceived in some formal and segmented relationship t o the capitalist mode of production. Instead it becomes necessary to reconstruct the practical balance of interests within the capitalist class and the internal dynamics of what was necessary to maintain class control, of liberalization and the labour aristocracy (1979, 112).

Indeed I want to add to the task as defined by Foster. Not only is it necessary to explore and reconstruct ‘what was necessary to maintain class control’. Recon- struction has also to include the antagonistic element, the political self-activity of the working class and the effects of that activity. If we are dealing with the reproduction of the relations of production, then at the very least we are dealing with a situation in which: there is no reproduction of social relations without a certain production of those relations. There is no purely repetitive process (Lefebvre, 1976,

Put another way this paper is about class conflict and the state and it puts class conflict first. It is an attempt to contribute to analysis of the local state in Britain from a perspective based upon an assertion of the historically autunomous role of the working class. It is an attempt at formulating an account of the political character of the crisis in reproduction which we are now experiencing. In Harry Cleaver’s words it casts the working class not as ‘a spectator to the global waltz of capital’s autonomous self-activating development’ but rather sees ‘the working class ... as being within capital yet capable of autonomous power to disrupt the accumulation

11).

62 Class and the local state

process and thus break out of capital’ (1979, 28, 62). Thus it rejects the capital- logic accounts now emerging as an effort to close the gap between structural and instrumental theories of the state precisely because, despite ritualistic assertions that, ‘The starting point for a socialist theory of the state must be class struggle’, such accounts see ‘class struggle (as) informed and bounded by the exigencies of capital accumulation’ (Holloway and Picciotto, 1977, 77, 92). This paper is then both an historically grounded attempt to ‘explain the social mechanisms which actually generate a class policy that is compatible with the needs of the system’. (Gold et al, 1975, 36) and an attempt at an account of the development of ‘social mechanisms’ (an unfortunate term for what I am on about as we shall see) which generate class policy and action that is ultimately and irreconcilably incompatible with the needs of the system. It is about class consciousness and the local state.

My position is that these sorts of issues can only be resolved by historical considerations. I orginally began the train of thought which led to the production of this paper when I read the book that introduced the term ‘local state’ into general discourse. At that time I was involved in the collective evaluation of the work of the North Tyneside Community Development Project and stimulated as I was by Cockburn’s (1977) discussion I remained dissatisfied because there seemed to me to be a crucial lacuna in her account of the technocratic functionalist local state which she described so well. In our work we had been forced to consider the actual historical process of the development of the local state and the role of the working class in relation to this. Such considerations generated very different conclusions from those that follow from the structuralism which provided an explanatory framework for Cockburn’s discussion (although the actual conclusions Cockburn came to in programmatic terms were very similar to ours). I have therefore taken the case of development of the local state in Gateshead, the large northeastern industrial town in which I live, and have sought to elaborate the history of that development in relation to conscious class action. It should be noted that this history is not only an illustration for my arguments. In an experienced sense it is the source of them.

Before I begin the historical account there are two conceptual tools I intend to employ which require some exposition. These are the idea of ‘class ideology’ as due to Jakubowski (1976), and the position on ‘mass democracy; developed by Anderson (1977) in his reflections on the work of Gramsci. Perhaps it would be more proper to say that I intend to employ the concept of ‘class ideology’ against Anderson’s position on mass democracy. Jakubowski wrote in Danzig in 1936 and wrote in explicit relation to the work of Korsch and Lukacs. He was concerned with understanding the character of class consciousness as he found it and coined the term ‘class ideology’ to describe ‘the real consciousness of individual members of the proletariat’ (1 976,117), and distinguished it from ‘a correct proletarian class consciousness (which) must reach the conclusion that in fighting for and exercising political power, the proletariat can remove the foundations of human self-alienation and in so doing dissolve itself as a class . . . This developed form of proletarian class consciousness is . . . not an actual consciousness but an imputed one, a consciousness which the proletariat would have if it were capable of fully comprehending its sit-

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uation’(1976, 116-17). For Jakubowski ‘class ideology’ and ‘correct proletarian class-consciousness’ are

not independent. Rather he sees the former as being composed of ‘utopian, subjectiv- ist consciousness (which) seeks to lift the future directly into the present (and) fat- alistic, reformist consciousness (which) sees present reality as everlasting. The two ideologies complement each other and are produced alongside each other by the working class. One is expressed by the trade unions and reformist parties. The other is expressed by anarchism. Both ideologies are a result of the quite contradictory situation of the proletariat, the contradiction between their day-to-day struggles within the framework of capitalism and their struggle for the overthrow of the whole capitalist order. This contradiction is at the root of the whole existence of the proletariat: in a real sense the proletariat is both a constituent part of capitalism and its negation, it removal’ (1976, 120).

Jakubowski saw marxism as the synthesis of both conceptions. ‘Marxism does not regard evolution and revolution as opposites. The revolution is a moment in evolution A quantitative growth in the struggles of the proletariat turns into a qualitatively new type of struggle. As long as it recognizes this, marxist theoly approaches very closely the ideoZogv of the proletariat, since it is nothing but the fusion, at a higher stage, of both the above mentioned tendencies of that ideology’ (1 976, 120).

It seems to me that this focus on the actual content of working-class consciousness is entirely well tounded, but that attention must always be paid to the actual historical location of that consciousness. Gateshead is not Danzig. By that truism I mean that in Britain (and quite explicitly, not in Northern Ireland)’, when we deal with the local state and class consciousness we are dealing with a working class which has organized its practical and active consciousness (and this is also true for those who have regarded themselves as revolutionaries), around a transcendental programme of reformist change. What I am talking about here is a class ideology of radical reformism, a class commitment in the confext of m s s democracy, i.e. in a situation in which the working class have achieved full democratic rights, to a fundamental transformation of capitalism through reformist parliamentary activity at both the local and the national level. This is not the same thing as capital logic reformism d la Bernstein in which the development of capitalism into socialism is seen as an inevitable product of the system’s own logic. Neither is it the same as Rosa Luxem- burg’s assertion of a capital-logic theory of crisis. Rather it is what Rosa Luxem- burg did as opposed to said. The class has wanted socialist forms and institutions.

In an earlier version of this paper I attempted to develop the argument on the basis of a com- parison between Belfast and Tyneside, two locales with a similar productive base but with wide- ly divergent political histories. For the sake of brevity I have omitted this in the final version, but Belfast does provide a fascinating illustration of the problems for state action in reproduction when there was no elimination of the urban bourgeoisie. Indeed in relation to the politics of Belfast, if not of Northern Ireland as a whole, the actual hegemonic status of Unionism was most seriously threatened by working-class action against the urban bourgeois dominated Guardians in the 1930s, and in the 1940s the Stormont Government had to create a special substitutional state form, the Northern Ireland Housing Trust, in order to meet working-class demands for housing reform on the British model.


Its programme has been well described by E.P. Thompson, who is clearly draw- ing on Dorothy Thompson’s position in her 1957-58 debate with Saville, when he says:

. . . while one form which opposition to capitalism takes is in direct economic antagon- ism - resistance to exploitation whether as producer or consumer - another form is, exactly, resistance to capitalism’s innate tendency to reduce all human relationships to economic definitions. The two are interrelated, of course; but it is by no means certain which may prove to be, in the end, more revolutionary. I have suggested that one way of reading the working-class movement during the Industrial Revolution is as a movement of resistance to the annunciation of economic man. The romantic critique is another kind of resistance, with revolutionary implications. The more recent long struggle to attain hum- ane welfare services is part of the same profoundly anti-capitalist impulse, even if advanced capitalisms have exhibited great flexibility in assimilating its pressures (1978, 85) .

Radical reformist class ideology has had a fluid consistency over time. In general during the period under consideration it has consisted of a desire to challenge the bourgeois social order through parliamentary mechanisms directed in the main at the reproductive sphere but also (and of considerable importance in Gateshead) at changes in production, notably nationalization of the pits and very recently the development of mass campaigns for workers’ control of production in the engineer- ing industry. However my focus is not just on working-class ideology. The account of conscious social conflict is incomplete without a recognition of the reality of bourgeois class ideology. I want to come back to this in somewhat more detail after the presentation of the historical case study, but let me note here that while I agree with Jakubowski that from the bourgeois standpoint: ‘A correct consciousness, i.e. the recognition and breaking-up of reification, is obviously not possible’ (1976, 109), nonetheless the absence of non-reified understanding is not the same thing as the absence of a working consciousness, a self-consciousness as a class in dealing with the dilemma posed by the fact that, ‘even before the bourgeoisie can fulfil its own revolutionary tasks, it grows conservative in the face of the proletariat’ (1976, 109).

Block (1977) has presented a logically impeccable account of the absence of ruling-class consciousness, or at least an account which is impeccable if one accepts the premises of structuralist marxism. He advances the notion of a division oflab- our between the capitalist class and the managers of the state apparatus and reduces bourgeois consciousness to: ‘Business confidence . . . rooted in the narrow self- interest of the individual capitalist who is worried about profit’ (1977, 16). My position is quite contrary, but I mention Block’s account here because of its apparent descriptive relevance to the actual development of administrative forms in the local state in Britain, the development precisely of ‘corporate management’. As we shall see the contemporary situation accords at least in terms of surface appearances with Block’s assertion that the ruling class does not rule. I am going to argue that the apparent character is the contemporary capitalist tactic in response to autonomous working-class political pressure and is far from unconscious in its origins.

The argument is based on a consideration of the role of mass democracy in relation to the local state. Here I am not referring to the content of policies as enacted

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in reality, the areas which Cockburn so rightly recognizes as the contradictory resolution of a continuing process of class struggle in the form of a welfare state (1977, 55). Rather I mean the complex of politics and administration which is the mechanism for determining policy and enacting it. The difference is not precise but there seems to me to be some use in distinguishing the explicit political process from both its method of enactment and its ultimate consequences. The experience of consequences is of course crucial in contributing to the formation of class consciou- ness in relation to reproduction but that is the passive aspect of what is going on. What I want to focus on is the active part of class politics in the political process itself. Anderson has identified ‘the peculiarity of the historical consent won from the masses within modern capitalist social formations . . . The novelty of this consent is that it takes the fundamental form of belief by the masses that they exercise an ultimate self-determination within the existing social order’ (1977, 30). The period I am concerned with documenting is one in which that consent was established, developed and is now in question in relation to crisis. The course of this sequence seems to me to be due to the real unity of two aspects of the basis for consent which Anderson explicitly separates in a passage which is as suggestive for its error on this point as for its accuracy on the origins of the crisis in relation to ‘consumer’ expectations:

The steady rise in the standard of living of the working class for twenty five years after the second world war, in the leading imperialist countries, has been a critical element in the political stability of metropolitan capitalism. Yet the material component of popular assent to it, the subject of traditional polemics over the effects of reformism, is inherently unstable and volatile, since it tends to create a constant progression of expectations, which no national capitalist economy can totally ensure, even during long waves of international boom, let alone phases of recession; its very ‘dynamism’ is thus potentially destabilizing and capable of provoking crises when growth fluctuates or stalls. By contrast, the juridico-political component of consent induced by the parliamentary state is much more stable: the capitalist polity is not subject to the same conjunctural vicissitudes. The historical occasions on which it has been actively questioned by working-class struggles have been infinitely fewer in the west. In other words, the ideology of bourgeois democracy is far more potent than that of any welfare reformism and forms the permanent syntax of the consensus instilled by the capitalist state (Anderson, 1977, 29).

It is my contention that ‘radical reformism’ as the operating class ideology of the British working class has been concerned with the unity of ‘material gain’ and acqu- isition of political power. The second has been sought as a means to the first. In- deed ‘material’ is the wrong word to use in relation to gain. Clearly a great part of the gain has been material, but the separation of the material from the cultural, the amount from the desire for anti-capitalist form, seems to me a fruitless process. What we need to do is to recognize the existence of both elements and to relate them to the class’s actual involvement at the local level with parliamentarianism. What concerns us is the development from bourgeois democracy (i.e. democracy for the bourgeoisie) to mass democracy and the development of mass democracy towards corporatism. In my view the history of Cateshead illustrates this very well.


I Gateshead, local government and the working class, or soap city blues’

Gateshead’s ‘local state’ in the form of local government has a long history, but in itsmcdern form it dates from the establishment of a municipal corportation in 1835. Apart from some involvement in municipal trading ventures its most important functions in the early years related to sanitary matters. The other principle element in the ‘local state’ was the Board of Guardians which covered the Borough of Gates- head and the Gateshead Poor Law Union, both of which are of some significance in a review of the relationship between classes and the local state, is important. Gates- head Borough was urban industrial. The surrounding areas were made up of mining villages. The area covered by the Gateshead Union corresponded very closely to that of the Gateshead Metropolitan District Authority created by local government reorganization in 1974. The focus of this article will be on the Borough although some attention will be paid to the activities of the Guardians.

Thus the locality under consideration is an urban industrial town whose population grew during the nineteenth century from 8500 to 110 000 and was to continue to grow to 125 000 by 1921. After that the population of the Borough area decl- ined to around 100 000 in 1971 which decline was in the main due to population relocation in overspill developments in the areas which are now part of the reorgan- ized authority. This latter now has a population of approximately 220 000. The general demographic pattern of the whole area has been one of massive growth until the 1920s with very slow growth and considerable outmigration thereafter. The orig- inal growth was of course largely due to massive inmigration.

In Figure 1 I have attempted to describe, very crudely, the phases in the development of class politics in relation to the local state which has managed much of the ‘reproduction of capitalist social relations’ in this area during this period.

Figure 1 Gateshead

Phases in the development of the political content of the local state in

~~ ~~~ ~~~

1835- 1890 Bourgeois democracy-direct domination of the local state by the capitalist class. General tendency for the urban capitalist fraction to predominate towards the end of the period.

1890- 1945 Conflict between urban capitalists organized as ratepayers and radical reformist labourism centring on housing and poor relief. Reformist liberalism functions as the political repre- sentative of industrial capital in relation to the local state, but ceases to have any real presence after 1920.

1945- 1980 Apparent dominance by reformist labourism. Development of corporatist state form. Emerg- ing political and fiscal crisis.

a Gateshead is called ‘soap city’ by facetious residents of other parts of Tyneside because during the last war Lord Haw Haw announced that the Luftwaffe intended to flatten it with bars of soap, bombs being unnecessary in a town that was held together by the dirt.

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Some of the terms in this scheme require clarification before I proceed to an account and analysis of each of the phases. By domination I mean not so much continued possession ofcouncil majorities, although Gateshead has always had a Labour council majority since 1945. One part of urban Tyneside, Tynemouth County Borough covering North Shields, never had a Labour majority council in its history, and yet even in this area the politics of the local state were dominated by reformist labourism in the period 1945-74 (see North Tyneside CDP, 1977). What I am talking about is the ‘political culture’ of the local state, the general content of class politics in relation to policy and administration, during this period in this sort of area. The ‘corporatist state form’ which I see as developing during this period of apparent labourist dominance is not a replacement of ultimate capitalist domination by some variant of managerial revolution. Rather I am referring to the replacement of direct instrumental control exercised through bourgeois politicians by a corporate, managerial system of administration operating in the interests of capitalism. It is this which gives the appearance of the rule class not ruling. I am going to argue that this appearance is just that, appearance, that it represents the contemporary capitalist tactic in response to autonomous working-class pressure in the politics of reproduction, and that it is far from unconscious in its origin^.^ The term substitution is used to refer to the replacement of local by national state administration, the process of delocalization of control over Poor Relief between 1926 and 1948. The term ‘urban capitalist’ is used to describe a distinctive bourgeois fraction involved in capital accumulation through the production and realization of urban development. This group will be described in somewhat more detail in relation to the historical discussion below.

The first elected representatives in Gateshead’s reformed municipal administration were drawn from the local gentry and industrial bourgeoisie. However, in Nov- ember 1858, a Ratepayers Association was formed in the town. As Manders puts it:

The new organization was formed by Benjamin Idle, a cheesemonger, Thomas Crozier and John Blagburn, butchers, and George Lucas, a railway agent, the sort of men who were to replace the industrialists on the council from the 1870s. Shopkeepers, tradesmen and property owners dominated the council until after the first world war, increasing from three in a council of 24 (1870) to 17 in a council of 40 (1890). Such men were rate conscious to the exclusion of all else, for example in their long resistance to any form of municipal workingclass housing. Many councillors, Robert and William Affleck and Lancelot

Panitch (1980, 173) has defined corporatism as: ‘a political structure within advanced capitalism which integrates organized socioeconomic groups through a system of reprpsentation and cooperative mutual interaction at the leadership Iwel and mobilization and social control at the mass level. Seen in this way corporatism is understood as an actual political structure, not an ideology’. The labour movement, i.e. Labour Party and trade union official structure, in Gates- head can be considered as an organized socioeconomic group in this sense. The typical tripart- ite form of corporatist mechanisms is to be found in relation to regional rather than local state institutions, but I would still assert that these local state forms can be described as corporatist. Corporate management in local government is essentially the imposition of cooptive mechanisms for a political leadership onto a formally democratic structure. The congruence of ‘corporatism’ and ‘corporate management’ is proper politics as well as etymology.


Penman, for example, were in any case deeply involved in the ownership of houses in the borough.(Manders, 1973,48)!

McCord (1 978) has written about ‘ratepayers and social policy’ in the northeast in this period. He describes a situation in which there was a mass electoral pressure against high rates and clearly sees this as a consequence of labour aristocracy resentment at paying to benefit the residuum. Indeed his scenario suggests a schema of alliances over urban issues in places like Gateshead which looks like this: urban capitalist + aristocracy of labour vs. poor + social reformers.

There is something to such a scenario but only in a very limited and momentary sense. The key to understanding what happened lies in an analysis of the struggles over the 1890 Housing of the Working Classes Act. I have written elsewhere about this dispute in North Shields (North Tyneside CDP, 1977; 1979). We find remarkable parallels in Gateshead, or perhaps I should say we find a coordinated parallel in Gateshead. It was not until May 1897 that Gateshead Council discussed adoption of part 111 of the 1890 Act (which permitted local authority provision of housing). Tynemouth CBC which covered the North Shields area did not get round to a similar discussion until 1902! At the Gateshead meeting Councillors Gillies and Quinn, who were labour (the small 1 is deliberate), proposed adoption. The issue was body- swerved to a special committee appointed to look into the matter. In October 1899 it reported back to the full council and recommended that: ‘Having regard to the provision of cheap dwelling house accommodation in the Borough, also to the am- ple lodging house accommodation, it is not necessary to adopt part iii of the Hous- ing of the Working Classes Act (1890)’ (Gateshead Council Minutes, 4th October 1899). The defeat for nascent Labour was in large part due to the revival of the Ratepayers Association in 1893 because: ‘It was felt that the labour party was ob- taining too strong a hold in the council, and that public business, instead of being discussed in a practical way, without prejudice or party colouring, was dealt with from a labour point of view’ (Manders, 1973, quoting Newcastle Daily Journal, 2 November 1893).

It is important to realize the extent of political organization of the two antagonistic classes (or class and class fraction). Not only were the urban bourgeoisie able to use the Ratepayer’s Association as a front, they had the specific United Property Owner’s Association covering the whole of Tyneside and chaired by Alderman Hindmarsh of Gateshead (See Newcastle Evening Chronicle, 6 May 1896). Labour had a matching specific body, the Durham Land and Labour Committee, an off- shoot of the nationally based Land Nationalization Society. On 2 September 1899 this body (later to be the Northumberland and Durham Land and Labour Commit- tee and affiliated to the National Housing Reform Council) organized a large deleg- ate meeting at Coxhoe. As the Gateshead Guardian and Press reported: ‘According

Anyone writing about Gateshead has to express indebtedness to Mander’s account of the town’s history. His book is, however, distinctly acritical in terms of analysis of the political background to the issues he discusses, perhaps because it was written by a serving local government officer and characteristically ‘depoliticizes’.

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to the promoters of today’s meeting local authorities are to be urged to use vigor- ously the powers they possess under the Act of 1890 for the Better Housing of the Working Classes and by this means bring good houses at low rents’ (2 September, 1899). The Newcastle Daily Chronicle of 26 August 1899 had described this programme as ‘crying for the moon’. However despite its vigorous denunciation of the ‘socialists’ the Gateshead Guardian was decidely ambivalent about which fraction of the bourgeoisie it was supporting. At the time of the debate in the council in Oct- ober 1899 the paper, which in September had called for the abolition of the Build- ing Acts and Bye-Laws in order that ‘the State Fetters be removed from the hands of the builders’ , quoted extensively from the speech of Dr. Abraham in the council: ‘I know it to be a most difficult matter to convince a body of gentlemen, number- ing among them not a few who are interested in some of the property concerned’ Gateshead Guardian 14 October 1899). By January the paper was firmly on the side of Abraham, who was a prominent social reformer:

It is remarkable how some of the property owners who have seats in the council look ask- ance at any suggestions in the direction of remedying such an evil. One would think they had some interest in prolonging this undesirable state of things. One of the best things that could happen to the council would be for all the property holding councillors and Alder- men to be cleared out for a couple of years. During the period some good could be done and the nuisance of overcrowding and unhealthy dwellings removed. Alderman Hindmarsh draws largely upon his imagination when he describes Gateshead as a health resort (Gafes- head Guardian 20 January 1900).

The line up of the social reformers in Gateshead is important for any understanding of this period. The leading lights were Robert Spence Watson, prominent local solicitor, radical Liberal and president of the National Liberal Federation from 1881 to 1901 and Canon Moore Ede, Rector of Gateshead from 1881 to 1901, Professor of History at Durham College of Science (now Newcastle University), Guardian (along with Spence Watson’s wife, Elizabeth, who was a leading political figure in her own right and later a prominent legalist suffragette), and chairman of the local School Board. Abraham was an associate of these two on social reform and the Irish question, but was an imperialist at the time of the Boer War and in fact led a mob to demonstrate outside Spence Watson’s house because of the latter’s opposition to the war. On a Tyneside level these figures were associated with both the Cowens and indeed Spence Watson was a massively influential figure in national Liberal politics and crucial in the development of the change of direction in national Liberalism associated with the adoption of the Newcastle programme. The role of the Church of England was important (although the Spence Wat- sons belonged to the extremely important Quaker bourgeoisie in the northeast). The major theme of diocesan conferences around this period was the housing problem and it was at one of these’that Dr H.E. Armstrong, the Medical Officer of Health for Newcastle, expressed the eugenic and social imperialist case for reform in his paper ‘The supposed deterioration and decrease in our population in relation to overcrowding in houses’ (Proceedings of Newcastle Diocesan Conference, October 1904). Essentially his argument was a particular version of the national debate in- itiated by the aftermath of the Boer War and stimulated by the appalling physical


condition of volunteers from the industrial working classes. This kind of position was also expressed in the national debate surrounding at-

empts to extend housing legislation in this period. Thus in the debate in the Com- mons in 1908 on the Housing and Town Planning Bill, John Burns, president of the Local Government Board, specifically cited the problem of overcrowding in Gates- head (which at 34% of households overcrowded was the worst in England and Wales), Coventry and some other towns as being due to their prosperity and cons- equent sudden inrush of population (Hansard, 12 May 1908). The problems this posed for industrial production and order were very much recognized.

The class key to the background of these developments is provided by Spence Watson. His industrial location was as a member of the Richardson/Merz/Watson family connection (see Benwell CDP, 1978, family tree 13) and as a crucial organ- izer of the electrical industry on Tyneside, being a founding director of the Swan Electric Light company and the Newcastle Electric Supply Co. This meant that he was in on public utilities, power generating machinery and the foundation of Swan Edison, the world’s largest manufacturer of light bulbs. His role in the affairs of the local state can be directly equated with his crucially important role in industrial ar- bitration. Although Spence Watson largely left Gateshead to his wife, herself a member of the Richardson family of industrialists, he provides the connecting link with industrial capital.

Thus the situation in the 1900s can be described in terms of three significant forces: 1 The ‘urban bourgeoisie’ - landlords and their agents using a ratepayer argument against the provision of housing by the local state 2 The ‘Liberal bourgeoisie’ - professional and industrial representing both nationally and locally the attempt to incorporate and defuse labour’s political initiative 3 The emerging labour movement organized around the Municipal Reform Associat- ion.

At this point I would like to give a summary of subsequent developments in advance of discussion. In Gateshead the urban bourgeoisie were able to stand off their challengers until 1919 and even in the postwar period Alderman Penman, a very large local landlord, made a last ditch stand against the provision of council housing. However Labour was now strongly represented on the council, having a majority for the first time in 1923, and succeeded in building 2360 dwellings by 1936. The last direct effort made by the urban bourgeoisie to reverse these changes was in the 1930s when they regained control of the authority and in 1936 handed over control of all local authority housing to the North Eastern Housing Association created by the Conservative government under the Special Areas legislation specifically to relieve unemployment in the construction industry in the region and incidentally as a useful little device for the sort of games Gateshead’s urban bourgeoisie tried to get up to.

I wanted to interpolate that rush over 30 years in advance of the analysis necess- itated by the line up in the previous paragraph because it helps in understanding the historical process under discussion. There were three positions in the 1900s: lib-

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eral reformism (whch should perhaps have a small 1 since it was represented in the Conservative party, although not in the northeast), self-interested intransigence, and ‘socialism’. All operated at the level of the local state. By the 1930s the first had re- treated to the purely national arena, at least so far as towns like Gateshead were concerned. The reasons for that retreat have a lot to do with the relationship between socialism and liberal reformism in the local state and elsewhere between 1900 and 1926. Benwell CDP in their discussion of the role of Spence Watson emphasize his success in incorporating. The ambiguity of his position is recognized but they conclude that: ‘Objectively, therefore, the role of Liberals like Spence Watson was a reformist one, which while bringing some gains to the working class was primarily directed at stabilizing the relationship between employer and employed’ (Benwell CDP, 1978,41).

I am inclined to think that the outcome was much more complex. The general necessity for the national bourgeoisie with an industrial base to represent the system as a whole meant that they were supporters of social reform in a period of competitive imperialisms and an emergent working class. What happened in places like Gateshead was that the liberal reformers’ endorsement of the political action of the emergent labour movement let that movement onto the scene as the key rival of the urban bourgeoisie. There is notably little evidence from this period that this relationship actually led to a watering down of programmes in relation to the local state (although the same is not true in relation to other areas of political activity). What happened is that the formal class leadership was ceded to socialists by the liberal reformers. I am deliberately asserting a class-autonomy account of this relationship as a corrective to the ‘bourgeois dominance’ model which tends to predominate. Nonetheless the association between liberal reform and socialism in Britain in these years was clearly of crucial importance in providing the socialists with a parliamentary conception of action, the contradictory source of the potential for the subsequent incorporation of labour within the developing corporatist state form. It is important to note that it was formal class leadership which was ceded. The relationship remained immanent.

Who and what were these socialists? In Gateshead they were trade unionists and ‘small intellectuals’ and in function they were a cultural revolution. Their major forms of activity were cultural-ideological. They had their own newspaper, club, discussion groups, dramatic troup, choir, band and socialist Sunday school. They were particularly keen on the plays of George Bernard Shaw which they performed regularly. They contributed to the massive amount of local socialist debate and paid particular attention to the housing question through the agency of the Northumber- land and Durham Land and Labour Committee. Henry Pelling has stated that: ‘It was humdrum work, this task of sustaining constant pressure on the authorities to exercise the limited municipal powers afforded them by non-socialist governments’ (1954, 196) and that: ‘the pressure for social reform from the working class was politically negligible in the years before the first world war’ (1979, 16).

Gateshead evidence shows him to be wrong on both counts. Far from being ‘humdrum’ and therefore unimportant, the actual pressure was for the development


of a socialist alternative to existing arrangements in reproduction. Demands did not stop at ‘exercise your powers’ although such demands were useful transitional political tactics. What happened in Gateshead and in other places like it, especially Clydeside, was that the British working-class political project of radical reformism was put together. The politics were for socialism in reproduction, but at this time, if not later, there was an industrial analogue. Here the class ideology was syndical- ism and the tactic was the general strike. Some leading syndicalist theorists were especially hostile to the pursuit of social reforms. However at the local level many syndicalist militants in their non-industrial politics were enthusiastic proponents of radical reform. The key link between reproductive and productive politics was provided by the attempt to achieve local socialist control over the operation of the Poor Law Guardians. Gateshead Guardians included representatives from the highly revolutionary villages of High Spen and Chopwell (where Engels Tce leads to Lenin Tce, Marx Tce, Morris Ave, and Keir Hardy Cottages). There was considerable dispute between the Ratepayers and Labours over control of the Guardians (see Mand- ers, 1973, 235) but by 1925 Labour was sufficiently dominant to pay out relief to strikers’ families in the long strike by Chopwell miners against the Consett Iron Company which lasted from July 1925 until the outbreak of the General Strike in May 1926 and continued as that long hang on of the Durham miners until the end of the year. During the strike Gateshead employed single miners as relieving officers and enforced the workhouse on blacklegs (see Ryan, 1976). Things did not go quite so far as in neighbouring Chester-le-Street where the Guardians were eventually pro- rogued by the Minister of Health but the Poor Law, of all things, was used to sup- port insurrectionary strike activity.

The fact that things did not ‘go so far’ in Gateshead as in Chester-le-Street is important. In the mining villages which made up the Chester Union there was no effective bourgeois representation in the local democratic process. The Chester Guard- ians were all respectable Labour men and women but they were exposed to the direct pressure of an especially homogeneous working class without any democratically based counter pressure of any significance at the local level. In the urban part of the Gateshead Union, and especially in Gateshead CB, there was the counter pressure of the ‘Moderates’ who were perhaps personified by the local solicitor (and urban bourgeois) Thomas Magnay, the town’s National Liberal MP from 193 1 until 1945. As we have already seen this group was sufficiently powerful in 1936 to attempt to depoliticize council housing by assigning its management to the North Eastern Housing Association. The role of such groups (see also the Independents in North Shields, North Tyneside CDP, 1977) was crucially important during this period. I would describe the general course of development thus: given the delocalization of capital and withdrawal of the productive capitalist class from direct local political involvement (see Benwell CDP, 1975: North Tyneside CDP, 1978), there was a political vacuum at the level of the local state which was generally filled by the urban bourgeoisie. In an increasingly mass democratic system bourgeois interests had to be directly represented. To a very considerable extent this task fell to the urban bourgeoisie. Their ‘reward’ for this in the 1930s related to their role in

David Byrne 73

the developing system of owner-occupation, principally as exchange professionals (see Community Development Project, 1976). I have documented this process fairly fully for North Tyneside (Byrne, 1980). The same thing was going on in Gateshead at the same time. In the 1930s in the political context represented nationally by the victory of the National Government, the local urban bourgeoisie reemerged to man- age the crisis at the local level. In this they were very successful but in Gateshead (and this is unusual; in most places they survive), they were swept from the stage as an effective political alternative in 1945 never to return. Since that date Gateshead has always had a Labour council, which is the major reason why it so well illustrates the process of corporate incorporation.

It is perhaps useful at this point to specify developments in relatively abstract terms before looking at the emergence of corporatism post 1945. What happened between 1890 and 1945 was a process of political struggle in the social factory, to use the favoured expression of the autonomists, or in the sphere of reproduction, to use Cockburn’s. Thus contrary to Cockburn’s assertion (1977, chapter 6), we are by no means dealing with a ‘new terrain’ for class struggle when we look at the politics of reproduction in relation to the local state in urban working-class areas in Britain, but rather with a terrain where class struggle, explicitly informed by socialist pers- pectives, has been a continuing activity over the past hundred odd years. Far from dealing with Pelling’s mundane (and thereby unimportant) this class struggle has dealt with the fundamental politics of everyday life. Radical reformism presented socialist models in theory and in practice which operated in crucial areas of working- class reproduction. Of course all this practice was reformist, although those who drafted the programme between 1900 and 1926 were often revolutionary socialists in terms of personal commitment. Of course the model for action continually led to contradictions in practice; indeed the remainder of the historical account of Gates- head will be devoted in large part to cataloguing the development of those contradictions. Nonetheless what happened was a cultural revolution which effectively displaced reformist liberalism as the class ideology of the bulk (certainly never of all) of the working class in places like Gateshead. In practical terms in such extremely working-class locales it also swamped out ‘ratepayerism’, although the continuing general survival of that perspective has been of considerable importance as a base for ‘New Right’ politics in the present crisis. What I want to emphasize here is that the project developed as ‘reformist labourism’ contributes to crisis because, as Gorz puts it:

. . . partial victories won in this way, if they improve living conditions, will not thereby re- inforce capitalism. On the contrary: the public expropriation of real estate, the socializa- tion of housing construction, free medicine, the nationalization of the pharmaceutical industry, public cleansing and transportation services, an increase in collective facilities, regional development planning (elaborated and executed under the control of local assemblies and financed by local funds), and the social control of aU these sectors which are neces- sarily outside the criteria of profit, these things weaken and counteract the capitalist system from within. Their mere functioning as social services requires a constant struggle against the capitalist system itself, since they cannot be kept working without a form of social control over the whole process of capitalist accumulation and the latter’s subordin- ation to a democratically determined scale of priorities reflecting the scale of needs (Gorz, 1964,97).


That is the origin of the present crisis which is so often described as the fiscal crisis of the local state. The history of Gateshead since 1945 illustrates the development of this crisis the articulation of capitalist response, and the need to develop a new project to get beyond reformist labourism.

I1 Soap city blues - part 2

In Figure 1 I suggested that the period 1890- 1945 was one of class struggle around the local state in which the instrumental control of the urban bourgeoisie was con- tinuously under challenge from an emergent reformist Labour party. In 1945 the Labour party came out all the way and that date can be used precisely to indicate the point of change in the character of the local state. The change was occasioned by political culture and operated at that level and also in terms of the extensiveness of the local state, The welfare reforms of 1944-51 saw a change in the range of functions of the local state. It lost its last residual income maintenance powers and local control over the municipal hospitals. At the same time its activities were extended by the breakup of the Poor Law creating inter alia the complex of welfare service departments. Education also acquired a political contingency in the aftermath of the 1944 Act although the implications of this were not to develop until the mid 1960s and then only partially in relation to the comprehensive reorganization of secondary education. Housing and urban development remained the central area for political dispute but post 1956 these disputes had a new character.

Until 1956, that is from 1945 until the end of the Macmillan housing drive, the postwar local state in urban industrial areas in Britain was the central agent in re- forming the urban structure by a programme of mass high quality housing construction. I do not wish to imply that the period was one of uninterrupted progress, but its general character was such as to make reformist labourism the operating ideology of the local state. However, while this proved adequate in accommodating the advanced character of working-class pressure after 1945 it, of course, created contradictions. It seems to me that these contradictions fall into two general sets. The first has to do with the problems occasioned by the ‘decommodification’ of urban space, or put another way, by the restricted capacity of capital to accumulate in terms of urban housing and general urban development up to 1956. The shift in Conservative housing policy which asserted the central role of owner-occupation and the residual role of council housing, the attempt to resurrect the private landlord through the 1957 Rent Act, and the shift in public sector construction style to the benefit of the large construction firms were all part of the process of trying to recapitalize urban space.

At the level of administraticn these developments had two manifestations. The first was that of the creation of an urban planning profession with an ideology which suited it very well for the task of serving capital without itself being capitalist. Thus many of the slum clearances of the 1960s replicated similar exercises in the nineteenth century in being motivated by the objective of profitable development

DavidByrne 75

of inner-city sites. (For a late example see Byrne and Davis, 1976.) Typically these were presented as planning exercises and justified by ‘professional criteria’ which were not amenable to democratic control. More direct instrumentalism survived through the mechanisms of corruption and of semi-secret bourgeois-official links, with masonic lodges being particularly important in relation to British local government.

It was in relation to the other problem, that of political control, that the ‘structural process’ of corporate management emerged. There are first class descriptions of the character of corporate management in Cockburn (1 977) and Bennington (1 974), and Bennington reminds us of the role of the local state in relation to the accumulation rationales of capital, which is a theme to which I shall return. The point I want to make here is that we must see the emergence of the technocratic functionalist local state as a historically specific response, generalized spatially by the Baines report and the 1974 reorganization of local government, on the part of the UK national state which had the objective of coping with the problem posed by reformist labourist control of the local government of working-class areas. Above all else the object of corporate managerialism was to conceal the political character of the activities of the local state and to ‘depoliticize’ its activities.

The necessity for this arose from the character of executive action in UK local government. Rule by committee has meant rule by elected representatives. Inst- rumental control was adequate while there was actual bourgeois dominance in terms of the membership of these committees. It was not adequate when labourism achieved more or less hegemonical status in many working-class areas. I use the der- ivative of hegemony advisedly. Events post 1945 were a cultural revolution of sorts, a cultural revolution whose effects are only now being challenged in relation to central elements of the welfare state. Labourism is not revolutionary consciousness but the cultural content is deeply contradictory to capitalist social relations, especially and indeed fundamentally in the context of crisis. In these terms the ‘division of labour’ implicit in corporate managerialism can be considered to constitute a counter attack at the level of political culture.

This account can be extended. Increasingly a function of the local state is the management of local populations who have been rendered ‘peripheral’ (see Fried- man, 1977) by capitalist development. These groups can be considered to represent a contemporary form of the stagnant reserve army of labour and are a potentially destabilizing force in late capitalism. Ghettoized through housing policy, managed personally through social work, accultured through education, maintained by Sup plementary Benefits, they are the objects of the local state and the local agencies of the national state. At the 1978 CSE conference Cockburn made an important ver- bal contribution when she pointed out the hostility of these groups to the state. A contemporary division within the working class is between those who still have a labourist conception of reform and those who have become merely managed objects. The function of corporatist internal structure and political culture in terms of the local state with regard to this latter group is considerable. They are defined out of the political community and represented through corporatist mechanisms as


problems. Thus for a significant section of the working class Anderson’s ‘ultimate self-determination’ is far from being an article of political faith.

The postwar history of Gateshead provides us with a clear illustration of these developments. The actual physical fabric of the whole area was reconstructed during this period. In the area of Gateshead CBC, which had a population of about 100 000 people at this time, 10 686 new council dwellings were built between 1945 and 1970. In what is now defined as the inner area of the enlarged Gateshead Met- ropolitan Borough 13 984 dwellings were slum cleared between 1955 and 1975. Much of the housing constructed was high quality on suburban estates, although not all the suburban estates are of high quality. However, much of the 1960s public sector construction was in the form of flats which has had considerable implications for the development of housing management policy in relation to those inner-city populations who are increasingly being defined as peripheral or problems. In general in the 1950s and 1960s Gateshead’s reproductive facilities were reconstructed very much in accord with the programme of reformist labourism. This was also an important period for the recapitalization of urban space. Gateshead provides some important examples here involving shopping centre development and office construction, although the bulk of this was carried out in the immediately adjacent regional capital of Newcastle. There is also a very clear illustration of the corrupt form of instrumentalism in operation in the connection between Alderman Andrew Cunning- ham and Poulson over housing contracts in Felling which is now part of Gateshead MBC area.

However, I want to concentrate on ‘corporatism’ in the period since 1974 and local government reorganization and to illustrate developments by reference to the ‘inner city’ problem and initiatives in response to it. Despite this post 1974 emph- asis it is important to realize that corporatist forms did not appear for the first time with local government reorganization. They already had a forty year history in the northeast of England and had involved the formally democratic local state in their operation from the beginning. Panitch in his discussion of corporatism (1980) has emphasized the importance of the incorporation of leaders of labour movements in a ‘personal capacity’ in non-democratic political institutions and. processes. This ap- plies with equal force in Britain to the cooption of the local elected representatives from the local state and began in the fundamental area of the reconstruction of the productive base through institutions concerned with regional policy and developed in relation to the Special Areas legislation of the 1930s. Thus Gateshead contains one of Britain’s largest and oldest Government Trading Estates at the Team Valley which is run by a typical corporatist body, the English Industrial Estates Corpor- ation.

It is important to recognize that although the Labour reforms of the 1945-51 period, introduction of a National Health Service, commitment to public sector housing and so on, corresponded closely with Gorz’s shopping list of radical reforms cited above, the actual form of administration was in many instances corporatist rather than democratic and for elements of the Health Service and Income Maintenance actually included the replacement of local democratic control by corp-

DavidByrne 77

oratist administrative mechnisms. Thus to an ever increasing degree since 1945 the radical reformist programme of Labour has operated in Gateshead in relation to corporatism in key areas of production and reproduction.

The actual political atmosphere this generates has been brilliantly described in what is essentially ethnographic work by Dennis (1970, 1972), Davies (1974) and most recently Green (1980), the group who sometimes refer to themselves as the northeastern school of political sociology. Their descriptions stand for Gateshead. However, in my view, this group has always failed to produce an acceptable account of why the situation is as they describe it. Green scarcely attempts such an account and Davies and Dennis rely on the conception of ‘professional ideology’. I prefer to consider the actual role of the local state in relation to production and reproduction, the actual requirements imposed upon it by its place in the capitalist system as a whole. These structural requirements are not met by processes arising out of no- where. My structuralism is very much tempered by a recognition of the conscious class activity in political process undertaken by the bourgeoisie. Nonetheless in immediately contemporary circumstances an apparent division of labour is the actual mechanism employed.

I want to illustrate this by returning to the theme of the local state as the man- ager of the ‘peripheral’. The subject matter of this paper has been only half of the story in that the focus has been upon the role of the local state in the politics of reproduction. It is one of the characteristics of the present crisis that the distinctions among civil society, the economic sphere and the state are collapsing. Certainly the inner-city problem in Gateshead owes its ultimate origin to Gateshead’s becoming (the process is still going on) an ‘outpost of capital’ rather than a central location for industrial capitalist production. Thus the local state is concerned not just with the traditional areas of reproduction in relation to this fundamental change, but is also involved with the process of industrial restructuring itself. In other words the divisions between the reproductive function of the local state and the productive sphere are also collapsing.

On reflection I feel that we must recognize this process as a basal change with the most profound implications for superstructural political activity. I make no ap- ology for using such an old fashioned deterministic vocabulary. Reformist labourism and the ‘radical reformist’ class ideology which gave rise to it emerged when places like Gateshead were central t o industrial capitalism. The profound and fundamental changes in their economic base which are now occurring, the actual process of being ‘peripheralized’, have enormous political significance and massive implications for state activity and class response. Clearly the inner-city problem in Gates- head is a product of these changes. The response has been a corporate one, largely because ‘radical reformism’ seems incapable of generating a programmatic alternative. I want to return to the problem of and for class politics in the conclusion to this piece. First let me describe how corporatism has worked out in relation. to this issue.

Gateshead MBC was the first local authority in England and Wales to acquire a Comprehensive Community Project (CCP). CCPs were the successor to CDPs (Com-


munity Development Projects) and were dreamed up by the Home Office as a managerial alternative to the political activism model adopted by at least some of the CDPs (see Gilding the ghetto, CDP, 1977). The Gateshead CCP was established in 1977 with the following specific objective: ‘. . . to redirect the major policies arzd programmes of central and local government and other agencies to those most in need’ (Gateshead CCP, 1977,3). It is important t o see that this objective was explicitly seen in terms of the reallocation of existing budgets. The project was described in terms of four characteristics thus: it focused explicitly on problems of depriva- tion in Gateshead; involved a new form of partnership between central and local government; was ‘comprehensive’ (i.e. corporate) in coverage; and was concerned with actual policy changes. As the initial report put it:

The keystone of the CCP is that it involves working with and through the existing framework of public institutions concerned with Gateshead, not only to improve their services to the deprived but also to stimulate investment by the private sector in industry, in com- merce, and in housing (Gateshead CCP, 1977,4).

The CCP was firmly located within the corporate management structure of the authority and closely related to the central civil service. The Team Leader reported to a working group composed entirely of officers drawn from the local authority, central civil service and Area Health Authority. The Steering Group was composed of the Chief Executives of Gateshead and Tyne Wear County and chaired by the chairman of the Northern Economic Planning Board, the regional coordinating body for central government activity. The Members Group of elected district and county councillors and chaired by a central government minister was largely a cos- metic addition.

Gateshead CCP was rapidly assimilated into the next stage for the resolution of the ‘urban crisis’ when in 1978 the team was given the task of coordinating Gates- head’s contribution to the Newcastle/Gateshead Inner City Partnership. The actual strategies devised by the CCP and the Partnership are essentially the same so I will postpone discussion of them until after a delineation of the administrative structure of the Partnership. This involved officers of the two district councils, the county council, the two Area Health Authorities and the central civil service. There is a partnership committee composed of ministers, councillors, the chairman of the AHAs and central and local officials. There is a ‘Members Steering Group’ composed of a Minister and the leaders of the two metropolitan district authorities and there is an officer group composed of the local authority chief executives, senior civil servants and officers of the AHA, which is chaired by the Regional Director of the Department of the Environment and to which the Inner Area Coordinator re- ports. Both the CCP and the partnership have involved joint officer-member committee structures. Thus the Inter-Authority working groups which deal with specific areas, e.g. economic development, housing, health and personal social services etc., are composed of elected councillors, LA officers, civil servants and representatives of relevant statutory bodies i.e. AHA and the police. Strategies are devised within this corporate structure. There is no sense in which a class based political prog-

DavidByrne 79

ramme is developed for implementation by officers. Rather corporate management has assimilated the political process to itself.

This results in strategies which are directly contributory to the restructuring of capitalist production and accumulation in the area. The CCP/Partnership exercise has produced some very dubious proposals for housing management but the clearest illustration of its effects is in economic policy. As early as 1978 the CCP team were preaching the virtues of ‘small firms’ development strategy as the basis for the economic regeneration of Gateshead. The Partnership Draft Strategv (known as the Daft Strategy by local labour movement and community activists) of August 1979 weigh- ed in with a ‘free zone’ proposal. This has borne fruit in the designation of a river- side zone as an ‘enterprise zone’ in 1980. In other words three Labour local authorities have adopted a programme for production which depends on the abandonment of planning controls and the encouragement of a small firms sector. Local trade unionists who are deeply hostile to all this describe it as the Noddy economic strategy. It is of course a typical mechanism for the disorganization and peripheraliza- tion of previously central workers.

I could, perhaps should, and doubtless in the near future will, say a great deal more about this particular phase in the politics of the local state in Gateshead. I am of course deeply involved in the political battle against these developments but the experiences of that battle and of the problems encountered in it lead me on to the brief conclusion to this piece which has to be:

111 Radical reformism-a class ideology in crisis

To use the Gramscian terminology, the historical developments described in the preceding section can be seen as a ‘war of position’ between capitalism and the bourgeoisie on the one hand and the working class on the other, with the disputed ground being the reproductive activities of the local state. From 1890 to the 1960s in general, and with important exceptions and reservations, the working class was on the cultural offensive. I t made and consolidated ground. Now things are very different. The crisis is for practical purposes, i.e. purposes of practice, a political one. It is true that there is a very deep contradiction in the corporatist strategy for the resolution of the crisis which is represented by the abandonment of democratic process as a mechanism for the effective political assimilation of the working class. This is now virtually complete for the ‘peripheral’ groups and is biting very deeply into previously central fractions of the workmg class as they themselves become peripheralized through the restructuring of capitalist production in Gateshead and places like it. The real problem is that the labour movement seems to have used up the potential of ‘radical reformism’, or perhaps it is that ‘radical reformism’ is an inef- fective strategy when capitalist production has so changed the position of these British working-class areas. Indeed if any side has broken through into a ‘war of movement’ it is capitalist rather than working class.

Certainly much of the radical reformist project is still relevant. Democratic


contral and hostility to the commodity form are fundamental and transformational parts of any socialist project. Equally they are not enough. The only hopeful sign on Tyneside is the revival of the cultural (in the widest sense) organizations of the working class and the socialist movement and the associated attempts at the refor- mation of the class’s political project. It was of course to be expected that the small amount of partnership funds which were allocated through funding of ‘voluntary bodies’ in this sort of direction, i.e. to the Trades Union Studies Unit and the New- castle Trades Council Centre for the Unemployed, should be withdrawn with the return of a Conservative government and the appointment of the former Tory leader of Leeds City Council as the responsible minister for partnership activities. Things are ‘ongoing’ but the purpose of this paper has been to suggest a basis for analysis as a contribution to that going on. I hope that we can report on Gateshead’s ‘urban praxis’ in due course. From where we are now the only way is up!

TV References

Anderson, P. 1977: The antinomies of Antonio Gramsci. New Left Review 100,

Bennington, J. 1974: Local government becomes big business. London CDP. Benwell CDP 1978: The making of a ruling class. Benwell. Block, F. 1977: The ruling class does not rule. Socialist Revolution Part 7. Byrne, D. 1980: The decline in the standard of interwar council housing in North

Shields. In Melling J., editor, Housing, social policy and the state, London: Croom Helm.

Byrne, D. and Davis R. 1976: The saga of Ropery Banks. In Byrne, D., editor, Some housing and town planning issues in North Shields, N. Shields: North Tyneside CDP.

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Cleaver, H. 1979: Reading Capital politically. Brighton: Harvester Press. Cockburn, C. 1977: The local state. London: Pluto Press. Common, J . 1975: Kiddars Luck and the Ampersand. (first published 1951 and

Davies, J. G. 1974: The evangelistic bureaucrat. London: Tavistock. Dennis, N. 1970: People and planning. London: Faber.

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Gorz, A. 1964: Strategy for labor. Boston: Beacon Press. Green, D. C. 1980- Power and party in an English city. London: Allen and Unwin. Holloway, J. and Picciotto, S. 1977: Capital, crisis and the state. Capital and Ci‘ass

Jakobowski, F. 1976: Lefebvre, H. 1976: The survival of capitalism. London: Allison and Busby. Manders, F. 1973: A history of Gateshead. Gateshead CBC. McCord, N. 1978: Ratepayers and social policy. In Thane, P., editor, Origins of soc-

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Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Ce document est bas6 sur un compte-rendu du developpement historique du contenu de l’administration locale d Gateshead dans le nordest de l’Angleterre. I1 se concentre sur la polit-

ique de 1’6tat local et le conflit entre, d’une part, cette fraction de la bourgeoisie qui tirait son revenu des operations de ddveloppement urbain et en particulier de la construction et location de logements et, d’autre part, la classe ouvriere o r g a d e en un parti travailliste rkformiste. Le changement effectif de position en une forme d’administration Btatique au niveau local, c’est- i d i r e le changement d’un contrale instrumental par une fraction de la bourgeoisie en une gestion apparemment corporatiste par des administrateurs skparks de la veritable bourgeoisie, s’explique par un changement de position d propos de la longue lutte des classes 51 l’intdrieur de l’dtat local lui-mi?me et il son sujet. Le concept-cld employd ici est celui ‘d’iddologie de class’et la conscience politique rdeUe de la classe ouvri6re est identifide comme ‘rdformiste radicale’, c’est-ddire comme se souciant de la transformation des relations sociales capitalistes sur le plan reproductif en utilisant des institutions Btatiques ddmocratiques de masse. Distinction est faite entre les apparentes phases dhocratiques bourgeoises et dhocratiques de masse en politique capitaliste, et la transition de l’une B l’autre est d6fmie comme Btant une phase de processus de la lutte politique des classes. Le ddveloppement de la gestion ‘structuraliste’ par opposition au contrble instrumental est ddcrit comme dtant la phase pdnultieme de ce processus, et la situation contemporaine est identifike comme Btant une crise au niveau politique engendrbe par la contradiction entre le contrble ddmocratique de l’dtat local dans le capitalisme contemporain. Au sein de ces schdmas, la politique rdformiste radicale de la classe ouvri6re est identifide comme facteur autonome cause de la crise dans son ensemble.

Diese Arbeit geht von einem Uberblick uber die historische Entwicklung des Inhafts der lokalen Venvaltung in Gateshead im Nordosten Englands aus. Im Mittelpunkt steht die Politik des Lokalstaates, gesehen als Konflkt zwischen dem Teil des Biirgertums, der sein Einkommen aus dem ProzeD der Stadtentwicklung und insbesondere aus dem Bau und der Vermietung von Woh- nungen bezogen hat, einerseits und der in einer reformistischen Labour-Partei organisierten Arbeiterklasse. Die tatsachliche Verschiebung in der Form der lokalen Staatsverwaltung von


direkter instrumenteller KontroUe durch einen Teil der Bourgeoisie zu einer anscheinend korperschaftlichen Venvaltung durch von der Bourgeoisie selbst getrennte Administratoren wird als eine Positionsverschiebung im Rahmen des seit langer Zeit gegebenen Klassenkonflikts innerhalb und um den Lokalstaat selbst betrachtet. Als organisatorisches Schliisselkonzept wird die ‘Klassenideologie’ angewandt, und das tatsachliche politische Bewdsein der Arbeiterklasse wird als “radikal reformistisch” bezeichnet, d.h., es befaDt sich mit der Umwandlung kapital- istischer Gesellschaftsbeziehungen in der reproduktiven Sphiire durch die Venvendung massen- demokiatischer Staatseinrichtungen. Es wird unterschieden zwischen der biirgerlich-demokrat- ischen und der massendemokratischen Phase der kapitalistischen Politik, und der Ubergang von einer zur anderen wird als Phase im Prozel3 des politischen Klassenkampfs lokalisiert. Die Ent- wicklung einer ‘strukturalistischen’ Venvaltung im Gegensatz zu einer instrumentellen Lenkung wird als vorletzte Phase in diesem Prozel3 beschrieben. Die deneitige Situation wird als eine Krise auf politischer Ebene bezeichnet, die durch den Widerspruch zwischen der demokratis- chen Lenkung der Lokalvenvaltung und der reproduktiven Rolle der Lokalvenvaltung im zeit- genossischen Kapitalismus bewirkt wird. Im Rahmen dieses Schemas wird die radikall reformistische Politik der Arbeiterklasse als selbststandiger Faktor bei der Verursachung der Kdse insgesamt identifiziert.

Esta ponencia estd basada en una relacidn del desarrollo histdrico del contenido de la administracidn local en Gateshead, en el noreste de Inglaterra. El enfoque se dirige a la polltica del estado local en ttrminos de un conflicto entre la fraccidn de la burguesla que obtenla sus ingresos de 10s procesos del desarrollo urbano y especialmente de la construccidn y alquiler de viviendas, y del otro lado la clase trabajadora organizada en un partido laboral reformador. El cambio actual en la forma de administracidn local, es decir, de un control instrumental directo por una fraccidn burguesa a una administracidn corporatista aparente por administradores sep- arados de la burguesla en sl , se explica como un cambio posicional en tirminos del conflicto de clases de larga duracidn, dentro y alrededor del estado local en sl. Un concept0 de organizacidn clave que se emplea es el de ‘ideologla de clases’, y la conciencia polltica actual de la clase trabajadora se identifica como ‘reformadora radical’, o sea, dedicada a la transformacidn de relac- iones sociales capitalistas en la esfera reproductora a travis del us0 de instituciones estatales democrdticas de masas. Se hace la distincidn entre las fases aparentes democrdtica-burguesa y democrdtica de masas en la polltica capitalista y la transicidn de la una a la otra se localiza como una fase en el proceso de la lucha polltica entre clases. El desarrollo de la administracidn ‘estructuralista’ en oposicidn a1 control instrumental se describe como la fase pendltima en este

proceso, y la situacidn actual se identifica como una crisis al nivel politico, engendrada por la contradiccidn entre control democrdtico del estado local y el papel reproductor del estado local en el capitalismo actual. Dentro de este esquema, la polltica reformadora radical de la clase trabajadora se identifica como un factor autdnomo causante de la crisis total.

class and the local state

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