“groups have never thirsted after truth,” said Freud. “They demand illusions, and cannot do without them. They constantly give what is unreal precedence over what is real.” If Labour’s electoral losses are seen as the sharp death of an illusion that had gripped a decade—an illusion that electoral success must reward patience and zeal and devotion, and that the nation must surely set socialist logic against capitalist myth—then the General Election of 1959 provides as good a starting-point as any for the analysis of apathy.
But we deceive ourselves dangerously once more if we think that political failure is the only motive which should prompt a search for a “new dynamic”. That way lie the temptations and enticements of Mr. Crosland and Mr. Jenkins and the other sirens of revisionism. If the search for truth in a new social situation is once accepted as merely a means to a 1965 election victory, we shall again be lost in the myths of the collective unconscious and corrupted by the search for an easy route to power.
The need to restate socialist truths on the basis of up-to-date analysis, is, of course, an end in itself. Indeed, there is a considerable acceptance of the view that our present troubles beset us because we lost sight of the urgency of the need for constant reappraisal of a rapidly-changing society between 1945 and 1951. We have good excuses for our intellectual stagnation. It was our misfortune that a Labour government’s economic policies, restricting conspicuous consumption and establishing a social minimum, inhibited the crystallisation of the new economic and social pattern so comprehensively and vividly described by Ralph Samuel and Stuart Hall. Nor could we know until 1951 how far British capitalism was ready to accept Keynsian doctrine to make its system more workable and more acceptable.