‘Affluence’ and the Left in Britain, c.1958–1974

Abstract

Abstract Accounts of British politics in the 1950s and 1960s have treated ‘affluence’ as a socio-economic condition to which political thinkers and actors responded, with greater or lesser success. This overlooks the contemporary significance of ‘affluence’, which is better understood as a conceptual field in which many of the Left’s crucial ideological and strategic battles were fought during the 1960s. Whereas historical usage has broadly followed Labour revisionists’ sense of ‘affluence’ as a determinate socio-economic condition, at least three critical usages were developed in opposition to this, which contested both its specific detail and its conception of a prior socio-economic reality to which it was the task of politics to respond. These were synthesised into a shared Labour critique of the Conservative Government in the early 1960s, before being gradually turned against the Wilson administrations by their critics on the left. In particular, two major interventions—the ‘rediscovery of poverty’ (1965), and the ‘Affluent Worker’ study (1968–9)—restored a material referent to these critical accounts of ‘affluence’, but in a more equivocal sense than historical usage has assumed. These critiques helped to influence a broader reorientation of Labour politics after 1970, which accorded greater salience to redistribution and the interests of workers. Simultaneously, they may have helped to fix the meaning of ‘affluence’ in the usage of historians, as a result of which its significance for contemporaries and its influence upon the course of Labour politics have hitherto been incompletely understood.