The “inevitability of gradualism” and the historical role of the british labour party: fabianism, corporativism and welfare after 1945

Abstract

Post-war Britain is known for the emergence of the Labour Party to office and the building up of the Welfare State since 1945. This specific british conjuncture led to the development of corporatist structures, such as tripartite bodies, building a mode of regulation suitable to the regime of accumulation of that time. This paper will seek to establish how the rise of the Labour party has had a key role on the maintenance and development of British capitalism, not just for its foundation linked to the trade unions, but also due to the ideology it delivered to its rank and file. The concept of History underlying modern socialdemocracy places the working classes and its struggle at a secondary position, countering to it an imaginated class harmony which ignores the wide range of conflicting interests that characterize a developed capitalist society. It is precisely due to this belief that Labour acquired a key role in supporting the hegemony under the Welfare State, as it seeks to neutralize the working class militancy by controlling trade unions and gearing their demands, leading to significant contradictions at the core of the labour movement. However, this kind of protagonism held by the post-war socialdemocracy does not entail a breaking point within the principles of labourism, but just the culmination of this development, bringing to the political scene, new and major contradictions to the bourgueois domination in Great-Britain.