[Those who have joined the socialist movement since…]

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Those who have joined the socialist movement since the early 1960s may have been surprised at the extravagant praise heaped on Labour Cabinet Minister Charles Anthony Raven Crosland after his death on 19th February.

The praise came from the capitalist press, the Tory leaders and various other dedicated opponents of the working class movement, its organisations and its aims.

It would be wrong, however, to underestimate the importance Crosland, his large contribution to social democratic betrayal and the genuine sense of loss felt by the bourgeoisie at the demise of such a capabe and constant represena dedicated supporter of capitalist exploitation, of imperialism, and of the bourgeois legal and political system.

This much can of course be said of any Labour leader. What was different about Crosland was that he tried to give theoretical gloss -of a sort - to his role.

Crosland was born in 1918 into a prosperous family of civil servants. He attended a public school and Oxford University.

JENKINS

There, just beföre the war, he developed with Roy Jenkins that special brand of agressive rightwing reformism that comes out in different generations of Oxford students.

It Conclard and lanting Labour Club, at that time dominated by the Stalinists, and set up a so-called 'Democratic Socialist Club?

Jenkins continued to take a close and personal interest in such student affairs, helping to build a big Gaitskellite group in the early bUs, and thus training future generations in the kind of back-stairs manoeuvring so essential for the success of a reformist politician.

Events in recent months at Newham North East (reported elsewhere in this issue) show that this particular breed is still being churned out at Oxford University.

Crosland's role in all this was somewhat different.

Not for him the rough and tumble of behind the scenes wheeling and dealing. He was a 'Prince Runert' in such matters - pursuing his own defeat.

He thus became the intellectual of the gang, giving a much needed 'theoretical' gloss to the sordid dealing and carefully calculated This is why all the obituaries to Crosland in the capitalist press have made so much of his book The Future of Socialism, which came out in 1956.

His publishers described it as "monumental' and it was certainly a bible of the extreme right within the Labour movement for at least a decade after it came out.

It is interesting to notice however, that the book is never nowadavs quoted. even br it S MOST Crosland The reasons for this are obvious to anyone who takes the trouble to look at it now - its theoretical structure is utterly threadbare, its political diagnosis is irrelevant, and its entire set of predictions about society are completely discredited.

In fact The Future of Socialism is a crude and now utterly falsified anti-Marxist tract, a product of a capitalist boom that was expected to last forever, where all the ideological baggage of the extreme right goes side by side with an overweening faith in the future of capitalism.

Crosland's book talks of 'the declining importance of economic problems when the capitalist busi-