Alternatives to State-Socialism in Britain: Other Worlds of Labour in the Twentieth Century

The contributors to Alternatives to State-Socialism in Britain, edited by Peter Ackers and Alastair J. Reid, offer a corrective to what they perceive as the Marxist-dominated narrative of labor history in Britain. The editors argue that in an effort to tell a story of progress from capitalism toward the goal of socialism, by which Marxist historians mean “state ownership and planning of all economic life,” (2) many aspects of working-class life in Britain have been exaggerated while others have been diminished, omitted, or ignored. For much of the twentieth century the traditions of pluralism in working-class life have been distorted or stunted by the Labour Party, academia, and the Left because of the emphasis in these quarters on the goal of state socialism and control of production. The editors propose that the time is right for a reevaluation, because the “state-socialist dream is now dead and gone” (2). Together,...