The Socialist Party of Great Britain was founded in June, 1904. Those who formed it had been members of H. M. Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation, and to understand all that animated them it is necessary to look first at that organization and why it failed.
The new programme aimed at "The Establishment of a Free Condition of Society, with Equal Social Rights for All, and the Complete Emancipation of Labour", and simultaneously a series of "measures called for to palliate the evils of our existing society . . . for immediate adoption". It was from this point that considerations of expediency were posed, more and more often, against those of Socialism. For the new society automatically became the long-term, deferred, objective and "something for now" the effective one not only in propaganda but in tactics too; the Federation became prepared to ally itself anywhere, anyhow, for its temporary ends.
The hard core of revolutionary socialists remained in the SDF, but by the end of the century a serious division of aims was plain. With the growth of the ILP and the formation in 1900 of the Labour Representation Committee, Hyndman and the other leaders were eager for broadening the Federation's outlook to include all "sympathizers who were against social injustice". The report in the Labour Annual of the 1897 SDF Conference referred to "an informal conference . . . between several members of the SDF and the ILP, and certain recommendations for amalgamation drawn up for submission to the two Executives".
Despite being thus let down, the Londoners continued their campaign within the SDF. The controversy was brought to its crisis at the 1904 Conference at Burnley. The Executive sought and obtained summary expulsions and the power to deal with more Impossibilists in this way. Plans to manipulate the Conference leaked out. A post-conference meeting to discuss the expulsions was held at Shoreditch Town Hall, and the critics now formed a Protest Committee and issued a leaflet setting forth fully their disagreements with SDF policy.
The statement was signed by 88 members and ex-members, and demanded a political party pledged to Socialism alone. The class struggle must be the guiding principle, and compromise — either by alliance or by seeking the reform of capitalism — rejected unconditionally. And no less important was the re-framing of the organization itself to keep control out of the hands of elites and cliques and vest it in the entire membership.
Within the SDF the cause was lost, and only more expulsions followed. On 15th May a meeting of the Protest Committee's supporters took place at Battersea, and the decision was made. A new party should be formed, entirely independent, based on clear-cut principles and devoted to the establishment of Socialism. A "Provisional Committee" was charged with making arrangement for its formal inception. On Sunday afternoon, 12th June 1904, the Inaugural Meeting was held in the Printers' Hall, Bartlett's Passage, off Fetter Lane, Fleet Street.
The Standard and the Platform
A hundred and forty-two people gave in their names at the meeting in 1904. Three names were afterwards found to have been false. The last of the hundred and thirty-nine founders,
Tom King, died — still a member — in 1971. Of the others, a few were to become notables in movements to which they now vowed hostility:
Hicks a Labour Minister,
McEntee a Lord,
T. A. Jackson an
eminence grise of the Communist Party,
Jack Kent the Conservative Mayor of Acton.
The Object and Declaration of Principles drawn up by the Provisional Committee and adopted by the Inaugural Meeting have never been altered. Nor has their status been that of a “historic document” preserved but not pursued; today as in 1904 they are the Party’s directing force. Their intention was to define capitalism and what Socialists must do, for as long as capitalism lasted. It was understood too that propaganda for Socialism must depend first and foremost on the knowledge and exposition of Marxian economics. The working class must be shown the mechanics of exploitation from which the only release was the abolition of capitalism.
The Party had no money and no premises. The Provisional Committee had met in one another’s houses (several times, in a bedroom), and for the first Executive Committee meetings Hans Neumann arranged a room on alternate Saturdays at the old Communist Club in Charlotte Street, off Tottenham Court Road. While a committee went into ways and means for a Party newspaper, a makeshift list of acceptable pamphlets was published — Marx, Engels, Morris, Kautsky, Aveling, one or two others and Liebknecht’s
No Compromise !
The
Socialist Standard first came out in September, 1904. The printer and the only advertiser (advertisements were afterwards stopped) was
A. E. Jacomb. He had a little printing-shop in Stratford under the name “Jacomb Brothers”, and as a member he was determined that no-one but he should print the
Socialist Standard. The estimate of £7.10s.6d. for 3,000 copies was made simply by undercutting all the other estimates. Jacomb never sent in his bill, and from time to time the Executive Committee was obliged to set up sub-committees to discover or assess how much was owed to him.
Apart from publications, the backbone of propaganda was outdoor addresses — indeed, except for occasional meetings in hired halls, they were the only means available. In 1904 the sects and parties vied with one another in the streets and parks, and the Socialist Party flung itself enthusiastically into the fray. There were several organizations with such names as the Anti-Socialist Union, the Liberty and Property Defence League, and the Middle Class Defence Organisation, called “the societies whose purpose it is to combat Socialism”. In a short time, with twenty speakers holding forty or fifty meetings a week, the Party’s reputation grew out of proportion to its size. It demanded, and had, to be noticed.
Trade Unions and Religion
One of the major questions for the Party at its foundation was that of the trade unions. The LRC was in existence, to become the Labour Party in 1906. Ideas of syndicalism, embraced by the other Impossibilists who formed the SLP, were in the air. In 1906 a clumsy attempt to reconcile the Party with the SLP led — albeit indirectly — to “the Islington dispute” in which a whole Branch was expelled (one of them was the Party secretary
Con Lehane, who later became a leader of Irish nationalism).
After a series of meetings and discussions, the Party’s attitude was formulated by the Easter Conference of 1905. Its decision ran:
Whereas the Trade Unions, while being essentially economic organizations, are nevertheless taking political action either to safeguard their economic existence or for ether purposes, and
Whereas any basis of working-class political action other than that laid down in the Declaration of Principles of the Socialist Party of Great Britain must lead the workers into the bog of confusion and disappointment, be it therefore
Resolved that this Conference of the Socialist Party of Great Britain recommends that all members of the Party be instructed to actively oppose all action of the Unions that is not based on the Principles of this Party.
This attitude was amplified in the Party’s first pamphlet Manifesto, published in June 1905. The economic function of the unions was recognized and “any action on their part upon sound lines should be heartily supported”; their participation in “practical politics” under Labour leaders was “criminal folly”. This has remained the Party’s standpoint, and it has been justified again and again over seventy years.
With great social issues in the air the Party had many public debates with Conservative, Liberal and Labour politicians. It was constantly under pressure to support reform demands for “special cases” — women’s (and men’s) suffrage, education, pensions. In 1910 new ground was broken with the publication of Socialism and Religion. In it, the Party unequivocally declared itself to be against religion and unaccepting of the principle “Religion is a private affair”. Socialism and Religion was a best-seller among political pamphlets for nearly twenty years, while churchmen and capitalist politicians held it up as living proof of the terrors of Socialism.
It was revealed that the Party would accept no-one with a religious belief in its ranks. In fact from the beginning all applicants for membership were questioned, and this has always remained the practice — no casual enrolments for numbers’ sake, but convinced Socialists only. Likewise in election campaigns (the Party first contested municipal elections in 1906) every effort has been made to repel impulsive votes and secure only firmly Socialist ones. It can be added too that from an early stage speakers for the Party have been subject to a rigorous test in economics, history and political theory; it has been reflected in a high reputation for SPGB speakers.
The first headquarters rented for the Party’s exclusive use, after a series of meeting-rooms, were at 10 Sandland Street, Bedford Row, in 1909: two rooms above a corner junk-shop, which were left for a place in Grays Inn Road in 1912. The membership slowly crept up to about 200 by the outbreak of war in 1914. The hammering-out of policies in the first ten years had its price, and the memory of the SDF made for an extra sensitivity: members were often too readily convinced that a decision of which they disapproved was the first step to compromise and confusion. However, in 1914 the Party was tested — and not found wanting.
War and Revolution
On the outbreak of war the Socialist Party published on the front of the Standard its uncompromising statement “declaring that no interests are at stake justifying the shedding of a single drop of working-class blood”, and ending:
Having no quarrel with the working class of any country, we extend to our fellow workers of all lands the expression of our goodwill and Socialist fraternity, and pledge ourselves to work for the overthrow of capitalism and the triumph of Socialism.
No other organization took such a stand. With a few exceptions, the labour leaders zealously supported the war and gave their services to recruiting — Hyndman and co. included. Individual members of the ILP were pacifists but the party leader, Keir Hardie, declared for “the national interest” and recruitment.
Plans had to be shelved (it had been intended to have a member employed full-time speaking and organizing); but this was the lesser inconvenience. The major ones were the disruption of meetings and the victimization of members, and the Party decided in January 1915 to close down meetings before there was more serious trouble under the Defence of the Realm regulations. The Socialist Standard continued to come out, but public libraries refused to have it and the War Office forbade its being sent abroad.
The membership was dispersed. Many went to prison as conscientious objectors, others joined the “flying corps” — the brotherhood of men on the run. One or two made for Ireland, and Adolph Kohn and
Moses Baritz for America. Kohn lay low, sending occasional articles to the
Standard, but Baritz was incapable of self-effacement and was imprisoned as an agitator when America entered the war. The Party administration was carried on largely by women members; but all kept in touch as best they could and there were even surreptitious reunions. When the war ended, much of the building of the ten years after 1904 had been shattered. Money and offices were gone. The Party knew as never before that it stood alone, and as the errant members reassembled there was a sense not of defeat but of fresh vigour and resolve.
The war had contained one other remarkable vindication of the Socialist case. The Russian Revolution took place in 1917. The Party had a slight, sympathetic contact with the Bolsheviks. In March 1915 the
Socialist Standard had on its front page a statement headed
A Russian Challenge in which the Russian party condemned the war and the “monstrous crime against Socialism” of the labour leaders who had entered war governments. Every left-wing paper refused to publish this declaration before it was received by the SPGB; ironically, the same “left” was soon to adulate the Bolsheviks in power while the Socialist Party made a critical analysis with a different conclusion.
From the outset, the Party maintained that Socialism had not been established in Russia. The formation of the Communist Party in 1920 was only a return to old and futile theories: assorted radicals and the rumps of the BSP (the former SDF) and SLP embracing the armed insurrection and conspiracy prescribed by the Third International. It took forty years for savants to discover that the Bolsheviks had transformed a vast backward country into a highly centralized capitalist state. The Socialist Party said so, against all other voices, from 1917 onward.
Times of Crisis
Having no illusions of over-toppling capitalism by coups or confrontations, the Party was not disillusioned by the failures of Labour governments, the outcome of the General Strike, or the perfidy of Ramsay MacDonald. The hardest blows it had to bear in the nineteen-twenties were the early deaths, within four years of each other, of two men who meant much to it:
Alex Anderson and
Jack Fitzgerald. Anderson was a magnificent orator, Fitzgerald was outstanding as theorist, debater and writer. Both were working men. In any of capitalism’s big battalions they would have been national celebrities but they gave their lives to Socialism instead. Had they not died prematurely their lives and influence would have continued up to and after the second world war. Yet the loss proved the soundness of the Party’s repudiation of leadership; because it depended on no special person, the work went on unaltered.
The strongest political delusion of the ’twenties and the Depression years was the belief that the capitalist system was about to break down. (It was not new:
Hyndman had been a perpetual prophet of collapse.) All the left shared it, urging that a militant push or two would bring the allegedly crumbling structure down in ruins. The Socialist Party analyzed the theory and showed its fallacies in a pamphlet called
Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse. Mistaken ideas are usually exciting ones but that does not make them less damaging in the end. We were right; the others were not only wrong but, as so often, disillusioned.
As from 1904, the Party showed a small but steady growth. In the mid-thirties its membership was about 350, with a huge activity for its size. Outdoor meetings were prolific and lectures numerous, and there were frequent public debates with well-known politicians —
Harold Macmillan,
Michael Stewart,
Barbara Wootton and many others. In 1929 the Party moved to headquarters at Great Dover Street, Southwark, where it remained until the building was bombed in 1941. Plans were made for what it had always been sought to do, the putting up of a Socialist parliamentary candidate for the first time.
As well as depression, unemployment and hunger-marches, the nineteen-thirties were the years of the rise of Nazism and the Spanish Civil War. Fresh questions were posed to the Party about whether we should fight “for democracy”, or to demolish a foreign government which was persecuting Jews. On the other hand, the fear of a war with terrifying new weapons — in particular, the use of the aeroplane — was so intense that we were also urged to forgo our independence and join with organizations which hoped to prevent it.
Inevitably there were controversies on these matters in the Party, and a few members were lost; but our independence was not given up for any alliance, or reason found for proposing to support another war of capitalism. The questions which to many people then were over-riding and exceptional have been answered by subsequent history. What is noteworthy in retrospect is that the loudest clamour to “defend democracy” and fight dictatorship came from the Communists — whose own favoured regime in Russia had now become as tyrannical as any in the world.
Another War, and Hard Labour
In the 1939-45 war hysteria was not widespread as in 1914-18; the common working-class feeling was of having been led into it by governments which were cynical or incompetent, or both. Conditions for opponents of the war were less severe, though that is not to say they were comfortable. After some initial difficulties the Party was able to hold regular propaganda meetings indoors and outdoors. The only department which was hamstrung was literature. The Government’s Defence Regulations introduced in May 1940 were directed specifically against printed matter, and the Party decided — wisely, as was shown by what happened to other publications — to with-hold from sale its 1936 pamphlet
War and the Working Class and to refrain from anti-war material in the
Socialist Standard.
Nevertheless, a policy of vigorous opposition to the war was laid down and pursued. At the same time, the Party made itself more difficult to join: applicants had to have two sponsors and were questioned even more carefully. The reason was that at such a time numbers of people who were not Socialists would have joined the Party for its anti-war policy. The harm in admitting one or two vague well-meaning people might seem small, but enough of them would drown the Socialist object in other intentions. We had to see that it did not happen.
As the war progressed the Party had to deal also with the plans and promises for a brave new capitalist world when it was over:
Federal Union, now forgotten, and the
Beveridge Plan which outlined welfare legislation — pamphlets were published and meetings and debates held on both. When Russia became Britain’s ally and was depicted for war propaganda purposes as a holy land of freedom, the Socialist attitude to Russia had to be stated fresh. (One result was that in 1943 the Communists’
Daily Worker named the venue of the Party Conference and hinted that loyal Britons could do worse than smash up the proceedings.)
The end of the war in 1945 brought the long- awaited parliamentary candidature, and the result of the General Election was the Labour Party in power with a majority of 180 seats. The Labour promise was of a new order severed from the miseries of the past, made in the name of “socialism”. The Socialist Party knew this to be a muddled misnomer for a mixture of ill-conceived reforms and attempts to apply Keynesian economic theory, but it knew also the immense damage done and about to be done.
Unable to control capitalism, the Labour Party conveyed to millions that Socialism was a mess. While everything the SPGB had said about reform, nationalization and “economic planning” was borne out, disenchantment over them redounded against the Socialist movement.
Nevertheless, activity remained at a high level. In 1948 the Labour Government, abandoning promises of plenty, told the population to tighten its belts with posters crying “We Work or Want”. The Socialist Party matched them with its own posters nationwide stating the facts of capitalism: “We SOMETIMES
Work, We ALWAYS Want”. The membership rose to 1,000 in 1947 and 1,100 in 1948. Another pamphlet in a fresh field, The Racial Problem, was published. The Party’s headquarters at this time were at Rugby Chambers, Holborn, and in 1951 it left there for the present head office at Clapham.
Yet within a short time unforeseen and unprecedented difficulties appeared. As the Party approached its fiftieth year the meetings which throughout that time had been its life-blood vanished almost into thin air, through a conjunction of social circumstances. The swift spread of television, nailing three quarters of the population to their armchairs every night; the regulation of shop hours, clearing busy streets after six o’clock; the growth of traffic, making it impossible to assemble round platforms at road junctions and street corners — these and other factors meant that suddenly audiences were no longer to be had, in or out of doors.
Other problems resulted. The sale of the Socialist Standard had always been largely a by-product of meetings. Now, forced into dependence on the printed world, simultaneously the main avenue for distributing it was closed. For several years a few Branches — Ealing, Islington, Hackney, Camberwell — sustained the circulation by door-to-door selling in the London area. The situation also drew attention to the shutting-out of minorities from the mass media: Socialism could not have its voice heard in television, the newspapers, the so-called “means of communication”.
From CND to the Seventies
The political movement which arose while the Party coped with changed circumstances was one claiming to be apolitical, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. As before the war, Socialists were urged that the importance of the subject relegated everything else: the survival of mankind was at stake. The reply could only be that the problem was war itself, not its weapons, and in turn the economic system in which the danger of war is always latent. Moreover, it had been possible for seers a generation before (H. G. Wells, for instance) to envisage the world devastated with pre-nuclear weapons. Indeed, CND disintegrated as its supporters realized a single issue could not be isolated from the rest of society’s causes and effects — which was what the Socialist Party said at the beginning.
It was argued, in other fields, that capitalism had changed. The full employment which had lasted since the war, the absence of a major depression, the possession by working people of cars and cocktail cabinets, were seen by many as evidence that the old problems had gone. In a few more years they reasserted themselves, however. The Party has never failed to consider and analyze whatever proposals and theories are advanced, but has never found reason to alter its case that capitalism is incapable of favouring the world’s population and that only Socialism will end the problems.
In fact the scene now resembles the pre-war one. There are unemployment, widespread poverty and industrial discontent, and capitalism — everywhere else besides in Britain — lurching from crisis to crisis beyond control. As an inevitable accompaniment, left-wing groups call for militancy and bring out again the theories with which their predecessors fell down: direct action, infiltration of the Labour Party, the collapse of capitalism.
Seventy years with an object unattained may look like failure. We claim success in many ways. First and foremost, the Socialist Party is alive and well. That surely merits attention. During our lifetime innumerable people and organizations have been going to show us quicker ways to Socialism, or render it unnecessary by reforms. Where are they now ? Extinct, or negligible.
At various times in seventy years the Party could surely have made a splash and gained a bigger membership by becoming Russophile, or whipping-up industrial agitation, or advocating attractive reforms. By not doing these we have irritated many people; but we are still here because we have not been wrong. There is a sad side to that question, too. Most of those who wanted our support for immediate campaigns have said they agreed with us but could not wait for Socialism — yet if they had come in with us instead of wasting efforts elsewhere, we should have had Socialism long ago.
So the work for Socialism goes on. As always, we have our problems. We still need avenues for distribution of the Socialist Standard. For every member we have several sympathizers — if only they would make the effort and join! We always need money. But the enthusiasm and optimism of our several hundred members are as bright and keen as were those of the founders in 1904. We do not think of ourselves as carrying on an old struggle, because it is a new one all the time. If the Socialist Party had not existed for the past seventy years, it would be necessary to start it today.
Robert Barltrop
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