The enterprise state

Abstract

The second strategy to be discussed is the alternative economic strategy of the Left in the Labour movement. Like the free economy strategy this was not a single strategy. Many variants existed and many different groups on the Left contributed to it. There is considerable ambiguity surrounding the alternative economic strategy because it drew on two different traditions of political economy — national political economy and the socialist critique of political economy. The free economy strategy fits into a tradition of liberal political economy that stretches back through the nineteenth century. But the immediate precursors of the alternative economic strategy with its concern for the national economy and making the state an ‘enterprise state’, devoted to raising industrial output and social wealth, were the alternative strategies of Joseph Chamberlain and the Social Imperialists, and Oswald Mosley and the Fascists. Neither movement at the time attracted significant support from the organised Labour movement. But just as the programme of Margaret Thatcher is not that of Richard Cobden, so the alternative economic strategy is different from these predecessors.