100 Years of the Socialist Party of Great Britain (2004)

From the July 2004 issue of the News From Nowhere newsletter

We would like to congratulate the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) on its 100th anniversary. The SPGB is the founding party of the World Socialist Movement of which both the SPC and WSPUS are members. It is not only a party of revolutionaries, but a party of working class intellectuals.

Formed by workers in London, the SPGB’s Principles sprang from the strands of Marxism closest to Marx. At its founding, a number of its most active members had studied Marxism under the tutelage of Marx’s daughter, Eleanor and her partner, Edward Aveling. Early issues of the Socialist Standard magazine contained interviews with Marx’s son-in- law, Paul Lafargue. Also influential was the work of William Morris and the Socialist League (which Eleanor Marx also participated in.) It is from Morris’ famous socialist utopian novel, News From Nowhere, from that book this newsletter takes its name.

But it was the founders of the SPGB, who gave the working class its most concise and liberatory vision of socialism. Building on the Socialist League’s work, they continued the socialist ideal that socialism will be not an continuation of capitalism, but a fundamentally different society. From Aveling, etc, they took a fundamental understanding of Marx’s critique of capitalism and expanded upon it to analyze new developments in the growth of capitalism.

And their analysis has been eerily correct. The SPGB was the first political grouping to understand the capitalist nature of the Bolshevik revolution. They critiqued Keynesian economics as it was developing in the 1930s, with the SPGBs main economics writer a post office worker. Again, the SPGB critiqued the development of the Labour Party’s Welfare State in post-world war 2 era. Arguing from a perspective of the liberation of the working class, rather than a political strategy, the SPGB explained why each of these methods of capitalism to control workers rebellion would fail. And in every case the SPGB’s analysis was correct.

That the SPGB has continued intact for 100 years, without major splits, without leaders, and democratically intact is another case in its favor. In this day of thuggish leftist parties and the bazillions of splits who each form their own 44th international, it is inspirational that a working class party of some size has done its work for a century. Who else can claim this?

F.N. Brill (WSP)