Branch News (1963)

Party News from the October 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

In perfect weather, the warmest, sunniest day for many weeks the party held its first meeting in Trafalgar Square. Some had reservations as to the wisdom of such a meeting with our limited resources, but doubts were dispelled emphatically. Hundreds of people were in the well of the square listening to our speakers and many asked questions. Hundreds more were listening through the amplifiers which were at the National Gallery end of the Square. On the plinth of Nelson’s Column our platform was set , gaily decorated with banners (one—a really professional affair, large, bold, colourful—made for the occasion by our comrade Helen Rose).

Party members—old, young, new, long standing—were selling literature and fund collecting. The meeting was excellently conducted with a most attentive audience. Good questions were put to the speakers.

An attractive literature stand was well placed for all to see, and apart from sales members were in attendance to answer queries. A number of enquiries were made. Names and addresses were left for forwarding literature etc.

The collection amounted to £18, literature sales totalled over £13.

The success of the meeting was stimulating beyond measure. Not for a long time have so many members been seen together in such a happy and enthusiastic mood. The Committees and Party officials who were responsible for the arrangements must be well pleased with their work and are to be congratulated on one of the most exhilarating displays of Party propaganda.

This, the first rally of its kind held in London by the Party certainly won’t be the last.

October 5th and 6th (Saturday afternoon and all day Sunday) is the date of the 1963 Delegate Meeting which is being held at Head Office, 52, Clapham High Street, SW4. Monday October 21st at 8 pm Hampstead Town Hall. Please make a note of the date and come along with as many visitors as possible. Fuller details of the meeting elsewhere in this issue.

Glasgow Branch are keeping up their good work. Having rented a Branch room which is available all the week, members are busy decorating it in order that they can make the most of it, especially as they want to be well prepared for the next General Election campaign.

The EC had a gay post card from our comrade Grant (only just now back from America) who said at the time he was just off to the WSP Conference, had had 1½ hours tape recording for radio and had attended the Washington March (where he regretted that for this first time ever he was at a demonstration without Party literature). It is hoped that a full report of his trip will be ready for the next issue of the Socialist Standard.

Phyllis Howard

SPGB Meetings (1963)

Party News from the October 1963 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

'W. Walters' - speaking on the General Strike - at the Paddington and Marylebone Branch of the SPGB would have been a typo. That was Bill Waters.

SPGB Rally (1962)

Party News from the October 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

It is perhaps worthwhile to check out the editorial from the October 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard for more background on the purpose of this rally.

SPGB Meetings (1961)

Party News from the October 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Notes:

The advertised debate between CND's Richard Headicar and the SPGB's Melvin Harris was unfortunately derailed. Details of what happened are available at the following link.

As advertised above, Gilbert McClatchie's ('Gilmac') spoke on the subject of his recent political tour of the United States at the Paddington Branch of the SPGB on the 8th November 1961. He also wrote an article on his visit to the United States for the December 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard.

It's always worthwhile, where one can, to provide some background on the Socialist Party speakers from back in the day that populated the back pages of the Socialist Standard. It's a bit grim, but sometimes the best source of information for those members is their Socialist Standard obituaries. Linked to below are the obituaries for some of the speakers listed above in the October 1961 issue of the Standard.

• Ted Kersley
• Eddie Grant
• Gilbert McClatchie
• Johnny Edmonds
• Jack Law
• Richard Headicar

SPGB Meetings (1962)

Party News from the September 1962 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1965)

Party News from the March 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1961)

Party News from the February 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

There was a report of the April 'Demonstration for Socialism' rally in the June 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard. Harry Young and Cyril May were the speakers at the meeting, and they spoke to an audience of 400 people.

Cuban Background (1961)

From the January 1961 issue of the Socialist Standard

To anyone who follows the Latin American scene, so many aspects of Cuban politics seem familiar that there is a danger of failing to see just what distinguishes the Cuban question from the traditional turmoil in that part of the world.

When Spain’s colonies in the New World fought for independence a hundred and fifty years ago, their main source of inspiration was revolutionary France and the young United States. However, in one fundamentally important respect they fell short of the requirements of real social change; a unified and coherent class demanding the overthrow of the outmoded system on the strength of its mastery of the new productive and social forces.

As the present situation in the Congo shows, not all independence movements are the expression of a powerful embryo bourgeoisie, ready to effectively take the place of the former Imperialists on the backs of the local working-class and peasantry. The ousting of Spain from the Americas was due more to the weakness of Spain than to the strength of its colonies. The social vacuum, the rapid collapse into anarchy could not, in those days, become the concern of a United Nations Organisation acting as a broker and a policeman of international capital. The high-flown language of the constitutions drawn up by the South American disciples of Washington, Jefferson and even Tom Paine was not matched by the level of economic and class development in their respective regions. From Mexico in the north to Argentina in the south, the whole continent was to relapse into a state of autocracy where power rested with decadent, constantly feuding landowning interests.

At the turn of this century, the needs of European Industrialism led to the “Scramble for Africa”. Perhaps less spectacularly, and certainly without the formal annexation of territory as was the case in Africa, a similar process began in the Americas. The outcome of this process has, to a remarkable degree, run parallel to Afro-Asian developments. Britain, France, the USA and then Italy, Germany and Japan have, over the years, poured capital in and drained profits out. Vast rail networks were established. Soon hides and grain, meat and coffee, sugar and bananas, were flowing onto the world market.

The precious metals that had provided the funds for Spain’s “siglo de oro”, its century of supreme power and culture, were no longer of prime importance. Not silver from the mines of Potosí, but tin from neighbouring parts of Bolivia, was to become the source of immense wealth for the mighty foreign Corporations who were equally busy in their exploitation of copper and nitrates from Chile, petroleum from Venezuela, quebracho from Paraguay, and so on. Countries, most of them larger than any in Europe, were to become utterly dependent upon a single crop; here coffee, there bananas or sugar.

Guatemala, which in its time played the rôle of David to the American Goliath, is known as a banana republic. In Cuba, on whom the mantle has fallen, it is sugar that dominates. True, tobacco from these parts is justly famous throughout the world. In view of Cuba’s increasingly intimate relationship with the Russian Capitalist bloc we may yet witness the paradox of the Havana cigar as a status symbol of the Russian ruling class. We shall see bloated Commissars yet! Nevertheless, it is sugar that is Cuba’s economic life. As goes sugar so goes Cuba—boom or slump; it is the basis of its foreign trade which in this context means, overwhelmingly, trade with the USA. Fidel Castro now challenges the status quo.

As a “middle-class” Robin Hood, Fidel readily appealed to an American public weaned on the exploits of Davy Crocket. At the point where it became evident that in serving the needs of aspiring Cuban Capitalism the existing order of things would be upset, Castro fell from his pedestal. He was unmasked as the harbinger of “Communism” (read, Russian influence) in the Western Hemisphere. The bearded warrior of the mountains was romantic no longer.

The modern history of Cuba could be written around its relations with the United States. Of all the former Spanish colonies it was the last to break from the grip of the old country. It did so only to find itself a virtual colony of its erstwhile ally; to such an extent that there was an American governor at first, and US troops were not withdrawn from the island until eleven years after the signing of the peace treaty with Spain in 1898. US marines returned “to restore law and order” in 1920. The United States census of 1947 revealed that their industrial investments alone were only slightly less in Cuba than in Brazil; $64,000,000 as against $65,000,000 (Germán Arciniegas, The State of Latin America, p. 302). This figure later increased.

Trade Unions

Through this century, Cuban government has been a succession of “strongmen,” as Time magazine likes to call them, who have depended upon American patronage. Fractional alterations in US sugar tariffs in line with the protectionist demands of Hawaii or Porto Rico have had overnight repercussions on the Cuban economy. Laws passed by the US Senate actually reducing Cuba’s sugar quota, as in 1951, when the quota was varied in favour of Trujillo’s Dominican Republic, Peru and Porto Rico could mean and often did lead to gross economic instability. In working-class terms this means unemployment, destitution.

Out of bitter experience there grew in the 1930’s a significant labour movement. In a limited sphere, in the cigarette and cigar factories and the Havana docks, Spanish immigrants of the Anarcho-Syndicalist school had introduced the principles of trade-unionism at the turn of the century. In more recent times a far wider range of trades has become involved although at the price of Stalinist influence out-weighing that of the old Anarcho-Syndicalists who, for all their faults, did not compromise their class interests with the state requirements of a world power as do the so-called Communists. In fact, the Communists’ record in Cuba puts them in a rather curious position in relation to the current “togetherness” of their home and “mother” countries.

Batista, murderous and corrupt, Farouk to Castro’s Nasser, had been given Communist support in his early years of power (M. Poblete,  El movimiento obrero latinoamericano, p. 196). It was he who gave the Party legal recognition. Batista came to power first in October, 1940. In December of that year the second congress of the Communist-slanted Workers Federation of Cuba, T.U.C. of sorts, drew up a statement with which a Socialist could scarcely disagree.

“Cuban workers …. resolve to struggle against the Imperialist war, to expose its Imperialist character and the war-aims of both belligerents and to develop a nation-wide movement to ensure that our country keeps out of this criminal conflict“.

When “you know what” happened, new instructions were given out. The first resolution to be carried at the third: congress of the C.T.C. went as follows:

“The supreme task of the labour movement at the present time is to concentrate all its efforts and to use all its might towards the defeat of the Axis. Workers organised under the C.T.C. are willing to collaborate with all those in favour or national unity, that is to say, willing to subordinate any grievances that may arise within the country in their over-riding interest in destroying the foreign enemy. For the duration of the war, Cuban workers wish to avoid strikes and disputes likely to interfere with production.”

The congress called upon working-class youth to volunteer for service at the war-front.

C.P. just in time

Communist support for Castro’s guerrilla struggle came late but, like Russia’s entry into the war against Japan, in time. At this stage, however, it would be a mistake to regard Castro as a Caribbean Kadar, a mere puppet of the Eastern bloc. Like many a Nationalist before him he is attempting to play off one great power against another in the hope that advantages will accrue to the would-be elite he represents. It is the universal demand of the Latin American bourgeoisie to free their respective national economies from the preponderance of Anglo-American capital.

As early as 1926, in a polemic with Lozowsky, chief of the Profintern, Haya de la Torre, of Peru, pioneer student of the development processes of backward countries within the Imperialist orbit, denied the accusation by the Communists that he favoured unconditional support of Japan in the event of a war between that country and the U.S.A. Nevertheless, he considered it would be a valuable opportunity to take advantage of their rivalry (Haya de la Torre, El antimperialismo y el APRA, p. 101). A mightier rival appears on the scene and, one by one, the Latin American rulers see how to use their bargaining position to diversify their means of production and to intensify or quite often to initiate industrial development. Back in Havana from Prague just recently, a Castro man announced he had secured promises to establish thirty new industries by East European concerns. Of course, for a small power to attempt playing off the great powers involves considerable risks. It is sometimes swallowed up in the process.

The overthrow of the Batista clique with its record of gangsterism in the Chicago tradition, has been followed by a vigorous and forward-looking regime under a new dictator; what in Spanish is wryly called a “dictablanda” rather than a “dictadura”, a mild dictatorship whose authority is used towards social reorganisation rather than to feather the generalissimo’s private nest. Be that as it may, the massive programme of nationalising most Western owned utilities, agrarian reform meaning the breakup and redistribution amongst the rural population of the great estates (a retrograde step from the long term point of view), the attack upon widespread illiteracy add up to a really serious attempt on the part of Cuba to enter the Capitalist arena on a more equal footing.

“In Europe, Imperialism is the culmination of a series of developments within Capitalism and is characterised by the export of capital and the capturing of markets and sources of raw materials in the economically backward countries. However, what in Europe is (according to Haya de la Torre whom we are quoting) ‘the last phase of Capitalism’ is in Latin America the first. For us Indo-Americans, imported capital marks our first step in modern capitalist society” (Haya de la Torre, El antimperialismo y el APRA, p. 51).

Pending a dramatic awakening of working-class consciousness within the metropolitan powers, the repetition elsewhere of our own bitter experience seems inevitable, though tragically so. But this much, at least, we can say: that the Socialist, on the strength of his Marxian analysis, cannot be deluded into believing that this latter-day development of Capitalism, the most inhuman of all social systems, whether of the state-owned variety or not, is the first stage of our revolution; the beginnings of a society built democratically by a conscious, international working-class to serve human needs on the basis of common ownership of the means of living— Socialism. Would that it were!

Eddie Grant

SPGB Meetings (1986)

Party News from the November 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Notes:

So many meetings and, sadly, not enough space in the label section to list all the speakers featured. I even had to omit the branches from the label section this time around. Just not enough *cough* characters.

Despite all the meetings listed, it looks like only one of them is featured on the audio page of the SPGB website. The debate in Newcastle with Bill Etherington of the NUM — later a Labour MP — is available at the following link:

The crisis in Capitalism - What is the next step? 

Debate between Clifford Slapper (SPGB) and Bill Etherington (Gen. Sec. of Durham Mechanics, N.U.M.)

Venue: The Printers Pie, Newcastle upon Tyne 1986

I wonder if Harry Young's meeting in Chiswick under the title of 'A Socialist's trip to Siberia' covered the same ground as his article, 'Escape to Happiness (or drama on the Trans-Siberian Railway)', which appeared in the October 1986 issue of the Socialist Standard, and which generated some controversy at the time.

SPGB Meetings (1966)

Party News from the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1960)

Party News from the November 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Letter: Calling the Pot black (1996)

Letter to the Editors from the October 1996 issue of the Socialist Standard

Calling the Pot black

Dear Editors,

John Bissett's article in the August Socialist Standard was excellent. There was a curious parallel between the Ceausescu and the Pol Pot dictatorships at the time they were being given Western aid and tacit approval. Not only did the Queen dub the Rumanian ruler, Sir Nicolai but the British press was encouraged to spell his country as Romania so as to emphasise its historic link with Rome. Similarly newspapers began to spell Cambodia as Kampuchea as a sop to Pol Pot. This policy was quietly dropped when the scale of the Khmer Rouge massacres became more widely known. However, the public abhorrence of the Pol Pot regime has been insidiously used by defenders of the oppressive system operating in Vietnam founded by Ho Chi Minh. These people are loud in their condemnation of the Khmer Rouge but have maintained a fifty-year long silence with regard to Ho’s initial task on behalf of his masters in the Kremlin. That was to murder the entire leadership of Indo-China's substantial Trotskyist movement in the interregnum between the collapse of the WWII Japanese occupation and the re-establishment of French colonial rule.

Later, when the French were finally defeated at Dien Bien Phu, the Vietcong began their slow but sure mastery over the independent states that came into being in the wake of France losing her South-East Asian territories. American intervention in the Indo-Chinese civil war certainly introduced a massive increase in the technology of destruction but there was little they could teach the Vietcong by way of the cruel and treacherous methods of guerrilla warfare in which they eventually proved victorious.

Rivalry between Vietnamese and Cambodian nationalism goes back a long way. But a bone of contention which has been little commented upon by Western specialists on Asian affairs is the way Pol Pot claimed that his savage treatment of the population under his control was laying down the pre-conditions for a moneyless Communist society with no private property whatsoever. In my opinion these claims must have been a major irritant in Leninist circles where to be reminded of what their original aim was supposed to be was very uncomfortable indeed. Stalin sent people to Siberia for less!

Eddie Grant, 

London NW4

Bromley and Woodside Election Campaigns (1964)

Party News from the October 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1993)

Party News from the October 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1982)

Party News from the August 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1964)

Party News from the July 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1965)

Party News from the May 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Notes:

Sam Orner and Len Fenton were both longstanding members of the World Socialist Party of the United States, who were obviously paying a fraternal visit to the comrades in Britain. For more background on them both, their obituaries give some flavour of their contribution to the cause:

• Sam Orner (October 1973 Socialist Standard)
• Len Fenton (World Socialist Review #21)

A reasonable journey (2025)

From the March 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Richard Headicar describes how his socialist viewpoint on the world developed, and some of the people he met along the way.

Few, if any, of the guests at my 21st birthday party in 1954 would ever have imagined that their cheerful host – then a chauvinistic, Tory-supporting Christian monarchist – might someday become a member of the SPGB. Indeed, I would myself have dismissed such a proposition as utterly delusional. Yet while some may consider such a comprehensive transition remarkable, I simply regard it as nothing more than the consequence of a number of eminently reasonable decisions taken in the light of changing circumstances.

In fact, although I was blissfully unaware of it, the first seed of change had already been planted. It had been surreptitiously sown a week previously by Dr Donald Soper on my very first visit to Speakers’ Corner in London’s Hyde Park. Soper was one of three brilliant Methodist preachers who had held me spellbound from the age of 14 by their outstanding oratory (the others were Dr Leslie Weatherhead and Dr William Sangster, then the doyen of Westminster Central Hall and the grandmaster of the craft of homiletics). What Donald Soper said that day about the use of atomic bombs against Japan completely shocked me. He cast doubt upon the official version of events offered in justification: that doing so averted the need for an invasion, thereby saving millions of lives. So profound was my disbelief that I departed the park firmly resolved to prove him mistaken. Surely, I thought, governments – well, Western governments anyway – would never countenance such an extreme act without incontrovertible reasons. My shock was much greater, however, on discovering that not only was everything Soper said absolutely true, but there was so much more that he had omitted to say. For several years I became immersed in trying to learn all that I could about the real situation, following a trail from Gottingen (where research into nuclear physics had been carried out) to Los Alamos (in California where the first atomic bombs were developed) through to the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Needless to say, I had not the faintest notion of where this newly-acquired knowledge would lead me, never for a moment thinking that it would affect my political allegiance. Very soon, however, a series of events occurred that were to have a significant impact in that respect.

The first of these was the Suez crisis in 1956. Out of curiosity, I joined a march from Speakers’ Corner to Trafalgar Square where a massive anti-war rally was taking place. All I knew about Egypt was that it had pyramids and that according to headlines dominating the popular press, a scheming Egyptian politician named Nasser was causing trouble. Also that the British Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, seemed to be changing his mind every week about what he should do. But, once again, my political complacency was challenged when I learned of the dubious motives of the Western powers, centred on the protection of their substantial economic interests in the Middle East. One of the speakers that day was Anuerin Bevan, another compelling orator, and the passionate humanity of his words persuaded me that perhaps the Labour Party was the place to be in order to restore my faith in our political leaders…

Over the ensuing years, as a result of my ongoing investigations into the labyrinthine deceptions surrounding the manufacture and use of the first atomic bombs, I developed a particular concern regarding the rapid escalation of the arms race, especially in relation to nuclear weapons. My next reasonable step seemed only logical: on 7 February 1958, I attended the inaugural public meeting of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Appropriately enough, given my wavering but just about extant Methodist beliefs, the meeting was convened at Westminster Central Hall.

The promising news that over 70 Labour MPs had pledged their support to the cause provided precisely the nudge I needed to join the Labour Party. At its 1960 conference in Scarborough, a unilateralist motion proposed by Frank Cousins, the leader of the Transport and General Workers Union (T&GWU) succeeded in winning a narrow majority. It was countered immediately by Labour Party leader Hugh Gaitskell with his oft-quoted, highly emotional avowal to ‘fight and fight and fight again to save the party we love’. Amazingly, it was at this point in the Labour Party’s long history that a group of MPs came to the realisation that the use of the ‘block vote’ was ‘undemocratic’. This was something the left-wing minority had been pointing out for many years, but obviously such a belated recognition of their previously disregarded submission was in no way related to the fact that, on this occasion, it had worked against the Executive Committee. Bill Rodgers, aided and abetted by four other ‘moderate’ MPs – Dick Taverne, Anthony Crosland, Douglas Jay and Roy Jenkins – wasted little time in forming the Campaign for Democratic Socialism (CDS). These fervent supporters of democracy, however, appeared determined to devote most of their energy in a concerted effort to portray CND as a haven for ‘communists’.

A deliciously ironic confirmation that my initial optimism about the Labour Party might have been misplaced occurred on the publication of the Tory government’s 1961 Statement on the Defence Estimates about military budgets. Five Labour Party MPs, including future leader Michael Foot, had the whip withdrawn (basically, expelled) for voting against the government. I was not altogether surprised, therefore, when at Labour’s Blackpool conference, the combination of a dodgy ‘compromise’ proposal, more skulduggery and blatant vote fiddling, by which certain Unions were permitted to reverse their original mandate, ensured that the 1960 unilateralist resolution was duly overturned. In his excellent pamphlet Nuclear Disarmament and the Labour Party, Tony Southall comments ‘one important effect of the new events in 1960-1 was that a whole generation of CND activists shunned the party’.

So far as I was concerned, fully awakened at least to the routine misappropriation of the word ‘democracy’ in pursuit of political expediency, I left the Labour Party, never to return. It was a disappointment to me that so many of my unilateralist comrades chose to remain. By now thoroughly despairing of party politics and sadly disillusioned with the efficacy of ‘democracy’, I was increasingly drawn to the philosophy of anarchism. Nevertheless, I remained firmly wedded to the unilateralist cause while undergoing a number of shifts and slides in my personal evaluation of the official CND position. I found it too narrow and confining and much preferred the intellectually stimulating atmosphere of the divergent attitudes I encountered in the Committee of 100 direct action group. Although broadly supportive of CND’s work, it remained absolutely independent and welcomed other speakers who presented the anti-war case in varying styles and from an individual perspective.

For some time I had been running a platform every Saturday and Sunday at Speakers’ Corner centred around CND. I also participated regularly in acts of civil disobedience and eventually ended up in jail for protesting at the Soviet embassy. I was sentenced in October 1961, a day or so after the Labour Party’s infamous Blackpool conference. Coincidentally, I was due to take part in a much-anticipated debate with an eloquent SPGB representative, Melvin Harris, but was prevented from doing so at Her Majesty’s pleasure. I often wonder whether had I not been so inconsiderately detained, my SPGB membership would have been more expeditious? A much-missed friend and comrade, Edmund ‘Eddie’ Grant, relished relating his own version of my non-appearance, that I simply got cold feet at the last moment and deliberately chose prison as a means of avoiding the superior reasoning of the SPGB.

During the years I spent speaking in Hyde Park on behalf of CND, I’m afraid that I regarded the SPGB as an arrogant bunch who found it almost impossible to see merit in anyone but themselves. In relation to CND, although the SPGB’s criticism of it was correct, the unengaging, predominantly negative manner in which it was presented was decidedly counter-productive. Eddie Grant was one of only three members with whom I enjoyed regular dialogue in a friendly and non-judgemental manner then. Eddie, especially, was a welcome visitor to my platform and in his deceptively disarming way invariably raised thought-provoking questions.

An excellent example of Eddie’s method of patient, albeit politely persistent interpolation is the imaginative ruse he employed to breach my unyielding refusal to entertain the possibility of a society devoid of money or markets. The apparent immutability of both had been deeply ingrained in my psyche from a very early age. Following the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s pioneering book Silent Spring, Eddie had listened to me orating passionately on the disastrous effect on the environment resulting from military activity and developments. On the next occasion we met he presented me with a piece of paper on which he had copied a quote from William Morris:

‘Is there money to be gathered? Cut down the pleasant trees among the houses, pull down the ancient and venerable buildings for the money that a few square yards of London dirt will fetch; blacken rivers, hide the sun and poison the air with smoke or worse, and it’s nobody’s business to see it or mend it: that is all that modern commerce, the counting house forgetful of the workshop, will do for us herein’ (The Lesser Arts) .

He also recommended two books: Morris’s News From Nowhere and Robert Tressell’s The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. Unfortunately, my reading at the time continued to be dominated by the tedious and complex tomes concerned with weapons and ‘defence’ strategies. I was also becoming increasingly interested in the ideas propounded by various philosophers. Consequently, some 20 years elapsed before I finally read Robert Tressell’s heart-breaking but inspiring masterpiece and grasped that the rational implications of the William Morris quotation spoke of the necessity for a change far more fundamental than environmental intervention. It was only many years after I joined the SPGB that I finally got round to reading News From Nowhere, prior to a talk I gave at Fircroft on ‘The Stateless Society’. With Eddie very much in mind, I included the quote he had handed me all those years previously.

It was at Speakers’ Corner also that I met the Hungarian philosopher Alfred Reynolds (Reinhold), who was to prove by far the greatest influence in my life. He somehow managed to transform my thinking and attitudes without once telling me I was ‘wrong’ but instead patiently explaining his points of disagreement without once claiming they were ‘right’. Two areas in which he shared valuable insights were the danger of ‘group thinking’ and the ‘nature of truth’. He held much respect, even affinity, for the SPGB and claimed that at some point in the 1930s he was briefly a member, though for reasons that I recount in a brief biography I have just completed, it would have been under an assumed name that he joined.

In the mid-1980s, when I gave a talk for the Islington branch of the SPGB (prior to becoming a member myself), a telling contribution from Eddie Grant, challenging my rejection of the democratic process, removed the final obstacle to SPGB membership. I became a member of the Party in 1988 and Eddie’s lucid rebuttal of my contention that the right to vote was meaningless was instrumental in that decision. Given my many conversations with him during the preceding years, my protracted journey to membership should have been much shorter. Alas, I had been too preoccupied with saving the world from perceived nuclear annihilation to pay proper attention to his wise illuminations.

In the process of change, interspersed with landmark episodes, there are countless subtle and often subconscious influences too complex and personal to properly record, and some are perhaps destined to remain unfathomable. I frequently ponder upon my own readiness to take the reasonable steps that led me to my eventual destination.

Was I born with a predisposition to more readily embrace ‘logical’ development? How much importance should be given to the impact the Methodist preachers had and the early lessons they conveyed to me about listening, constructing and delivering an argument and the use of humour? Would I ever have moved on at all if I had not been confronted with those dramatic political events? How much does the chance of circumstance play? Meeting with such exceptional individuals as Eddie and Alfred was most assuredly not pre-ordained.

Are we simply the products of our personal, social and political environments? If this is so, why are we not ‘behaviourists’ like B F Skinner? Is becoming a socialist the result of a conscious choice, and what do we mean by this? If choice is assumed, can we ever be sure it is not merely the result of circumstance? In presenting the case for socialism, should more consideration than at present be given to the philosophical and psychological implications?

Richard Headicar

Blogger's Note:

Richard's obituary appeared in the same issue of the Socialist Standard.

Should we feel flattered? (1965)

From the November 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard

When, in 1904, the founders of our Party were attempting to formulate a clear and correct statement of Socialist principles upon which to base the new organization, they found an earlier declaration which had appeared in William Morris’s Commonweal of the greatest value as a starting point. From time to time during the intervening years it has been suggested that the continued prominence we give to this declaration, to which we steadfastly adhere, could lead to misunderstanding, so great, it is said have been the changes in the style of language since the beginning of the century. So it is with considerable interest and, we must admit, a certain degree of amusement that we have recently come across a curiously distorted version of our declaration of principles published in the August issue of "Africa and the World” which retains the period-style if little else.

NIGERIAN SOCIALIST MOVEMENT


(Incorporating “Forward with Nigeria Movement”)


DECLARATION OF PRINCIPLES

The Nigerian Socialist Movement holds:

1. That Nigerian society as at present constituted is oriented to capitalist form of social relations and the consequent exploitation and enslavement of the working class and the peasants whose labour produces the bulk of the wealth of the community.
2. That there is necessarily an antagonism of interests between the privileged, aristocratic and plutocratic class on the one hand and the working class and peasants on the other.
3. That this antagonism of interests manifests itself in Nigeria in mounting industrial disputes, but that tribalism confuses and divides the workers and peasants and is encouraged as a means of diverting them from a genuine struggle to obtain their rights.
4. That the antagonism of interests can only be abolished by the adoption of a truly socialist system where the workers and peasants are secured the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange.
5. That as all political parties are an expression of class interests and the interests of the workers and peasants are diametrically opposed to those of the privileged, aristocratic and plutocratic class, the workers and peasants must organise themselves in unity, with progressive and revolutionary intellectuals as a political force for the conquest of governmental powers—national and local—so that the machinery of government may be converted from an instrument of oppression and exploitation into an agency of emancipation and the abolition of all privilege whether aristocratic, plutocratic or economic.
6. That racialism, wherever it is practised is opposed to the universal principles of equality and social justice and therefore the Nigerian Socialist Movement considers the abolition of racialism and the economic and political exploitation of the people of Africa the most urgent problem facing the world today.
7. That in order to liquidate colonialism; to arrest the present tendency to neo-colonialism; to emancipate the people of Africa from all forms of exploitation; to restore the dignity of African culture and personality; and the promotion of world peace; a Socialist Union Government of Africa is a necessity now.
8. That the Nigerian Socialist Movement therefore enters the field of political action as a force representing the aspirations and yearnings of the workers, peasants, the progressive and revolutionary intellectuals and youth, calls upon the workers, ; peasants and the people of Nigeria to muster under its banner so as to bring a quick end to the system of exploitation and slavery; and that comfort, equality, true freedom and social justice may prevail in Nigeria, Africa, and the world as a whole.

Issued by The Political and Policy Bureau of the Nigerian Socialist Movement, 192 High Street, Stoke Newington, London, N16.

Were it not for the fact that this declaration of a London based group calling itself “The Nigerian Socialist Movement” follows our word order somewhat more closely, it might have been a mere adaptation of an earlier one which was put out in Nigeria by the Northern Elements Progressive Union. As it is, it looks very much as if it has been plagiarized direct from source. However, whatever were the circumstances in which this Nigerian group drew up its standpoint, we consider it necessary to deal with its tenets one by one.

(1) Their first error is to confine their analysis of society to Nigeria which is merely the successor state to the arbitrary contrived British colonial unit of the same name, Nigeria's problems are not unique. They are characteristic of formerly colonial Afro-Asian territories which are now emerging as distinctive capitalist entities. The fact that we are dealing here with an emerging capitalist state does presuppose the existence of remnants, at times quite substantial, of earlier social structures and this is indicated by the reference to the peasants. But with an economy so utterly geared to the world market (palm-oil, cocoa, tin and sides) capitalism has for some time had a predominating role in Nigeria and it is to the working class born of this development, and not to the peasantry, that the call for socialism is relevant and can be made meaningful. And even allowing for the difference in the level of capitalist development in Britain and Nigeria, it still remains true that wealth is entirely the product of the labour of those who produce but do not possess, not just the “bulk” of it.

(3) We can allow clause (2) to pass, but in clause (3) we must point out the dangerous lack of precision when reference is made to workers obtaining “rights.” We can readily agree that for workers to retain tribal loyalties, just like feudal or national loyalties, does stand in the way of their becoming aware of the international class character of their problems.

(4) By borrowing from the British Labour Party’s clause 4 the declaration descends into deep confusion and woolliness. Socialism does not mean the “equitable distribution of the fruits of the industry of the workers and peasants.” Having converted the means of production and distribution into the common property of society the working class will, by so doing, have emancipated itself and, indeed, the whole of mankind from the entire class system. There will no more be workers or peasants to have “fair shares” secured for them than there will be capitalists or landowners to deny them. Each member of a classless socialist society will have free access to the things that he or she considers he needs. These may well vary from person to person, just as in working according to his ability each man will be contributing differently.

(5) To state that political parties are but the expression of class interests is true enough, but if, by what follows, it becomes evident that what constitutes a social class is not understood such a statement is rendered meaningless. Who are the “progressive and revolutionary intellectuals” with whom the workers and peasants are exhorted to unite? If by intellectuals we are to understand people possessing a high degree of understanding then we say that it is only when the majority of workers become intellectuals, in the sense of attaining a basic understanding of the nature of capitalism, their position in it and the socialist solution, that they will be able to bring about the Socialist Revolution. Furthermore, the history of human development shows that our fellow workers do have the capacity to achieve this. If, on the other hand—and this is more likely the case by “intellectual” is meant a person possessing superior mental powers, an élite, a leadership, then it is evident that what is envisaged is a non class-conscious working class being led to its salvation by the chosen few, an idea proven by bitter experience to be quite erroneous. And in the context of a semi-feudal, semi-colonial society, just who are such “intellectuals” anyway? They are, almost without exception, the embryo capitalist class, those with the skills, techniques and ambitions of power who, upon the emergence of a locally governed state become its ruling class and who, far from abolishing privilege, entrench it upon the new capital and wage labour basis.

(6) Again in error racialism is seen as a problem in itself. Properly perceived, racialism is a noxious by-product of economic exploitation and competition. Consequently its disappearance is dependent upon the attainment of socialist understanding by working men and women of the entire human race and their acting upon it. Racialism, like war, poverty and other monstrous facets of present-day society, is an inescapable consequence of capitalism. It is, therefore; the abolition of the wages system itself which is the most urgent task facing workers throughout the world today.

(7/8) The problems of capitalism are world-wide. The socialist solution must, if it is to be a solution at all, be world-wide, too. There can be no national, regional or even continental solution, no Nigerian or British, West African or West European solutions. Human dignity requires an end to exploitation of man by man everywhere.

Eddie Grant

SPGB Meetings (1958)

Party News from the April 1958 issue of the Socialist Standard