William Wilberforce was no saint (2007)

From the May 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

If you believe all the eulogies to him recently for pushing through the Act of Parliament 200 years ago banning slave trading in the British Empire you might be surprised that he’s not called Saint William. But for that he’d have to have been a Catholic whereas he was an evangelical Christian of the Anglican persuasion. He was a founder of a “Society for the Suppression of Vice and Encouragement of Religion” which specialised in prosecuting people for enjoying themselves on the Sabbath. He supported “the rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate” as the natural order of things and preached to the poor that:

  “their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand of God; that it is their part faithfully to discharge its duties and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that the present state of things is very short; that the objects, about which worldly men conflict so eagerly, are not worth the contest”.

In other words, pie in the sky when you die. And

 “Remember that we are all fallen creatures, born in sin, and naturally depraved. Christianity recognizes no innocence or goodness of heart” (both quoted by E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class).

A nasty piece of work, then. But there’s worse. He was a King-and-Country Tory who encouraged mobs to burn effigies of Tom Paine and other “Jacobins”, i.e., sympathisers with the democratic pretensions of the French Revolution. He was also instrumental in the passing of the Combination Acts of 1799 and 1800 under which the Tolpuddle Martyrs were later sentenced to transportation to Botany Bay.

A. L. Morton says of him in A People’s History of England:

  “When the industrial discontent was crossed with political Jacobinism the ruling class was terrified into more drastic action, and the result was the Combination Laws of 1799 and 1800. These laws were the work of Pitt and his sanctimonious friend Wilberforce, whose well known sympathy for the negro slave never prevented him from being the foremost apologist and champion of every act of tyranny in England, from the employment of Oliver the Spy or illegal detention of poor prisoners in Cold Bath Fields gaol to the Peterloo massacre and the suspension of habeas corpus”.

Yes, he was opposed to chattel slavery. From a capitalist point of view, this was an outmoded and inefficient method of labour exploitation. They wanted the only form of slavery to be wage slavery. To which Wilberforce had no objection whatsoever.

(from the Socialist Party’s blogsite at socialismoryourmoneyback.blogspot.com/)

Morris as a Socialist Thinker (1968)

Book Review from the August 1968 issue of the Socialist Standard

Three Works by William Morris. (Lawrence and Wishart. 10s. 6d.)

This paperback contains two of Morris’ important Socialist writings, both novels. A Dream of John Ball, applying the materialist conception of history, shows how an attempt at the time of the Peasants’ Revolt to establish a socialist society was doomed to failure. The establishment of Socialism had to be “the change beyond the change". In other words, society had first to pass through the capitalist stage before Socialism became possible. Morris also well describes the horrors involved in the change from feudalism to capitalism (obviously based on a reading of Marx).

News from Nowhere is a genuine Utopian novel insofar as Utopia is the Greek for “no-place". It is an account of what human relationships could be like (not necessarily what they would be like) in the future moneyless, classless society of Socialism. Morris is not concerned here with the technical basis of such a society and so scarcely mentions machines. This has been taken to mean that he was anti-machine. That Morris was against the use of machinery is a myth. Certainly he attacked the abuse of machinery in capitalist society with production geared to the market to make profits for the capitalists and machinery used to speed-up work and bore and degrade its operators. Morris knew that in a Socialist society, with production for human need, machinery would be used properly as its use would be under the democratic control of the community.

The third work is Morris' narrative poem on the Paris Commune.

Unfortunately, there is an introduction by that well-known second-rate Communist Party historian, A. L. Morton. He sees the electrification policy of state-capitalist Russia as the implementation of News from Nowhere. He denounces Morris’ concern about the dangers of a Socialist organisation attracting non-socialist support and his suggestions for overcoming it as “sectarian" and “rigid anti-parliamentarianism" (not true, Morris always stood for political action). But you don’t have to read the introduction.

Adam Buick

About Robert Owen (1971)

Book Review from the May 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Life and Ideas of Robert Owen, by A. L. Morton, Lawrence and Wishart. 12s.6d.

Report to the County of Lanark. A New View of Society by Robert Owen introduced by V.A.C. Gattrell. Pelican. 7s.

The co-operative movement in Britain looks to Robert Owen as its founding father. Readers of Marx and Engels have met him as a “utopian socialist”. Gattrell thinks he was more of a Tory philanthropist.

In any event Owen was a remarkable man. Born in Newtown in Wales in 1771 he became a successful millowner first in Manchester and then in New Lanark. At New Lanark he pursued what today would be called an “enlightened labour management policy”, providing welfare services and better working and living conditions for his workers. As a result productivity and profits increased. But what struck Owen as the lesson of New Lanark was that “man is the creature of circumstances” and that “human nature . . .  is without exception universally plastic”. People’s characters could, in other words, be moulded for them. From this premise followed quite logically his attack on all existing religions and on individualism as well as his views on crime and punishment, education, sex, marriage and divorce. It led him, whatever Gattrell says, towards socialist conclusions.

It is quite true that Owen was opposed to working class industrial and political struggle and appealed rather to the powers-that-be. But this was quite consistent with his crude materialism for he was asking the kings, governments, churches and Tory philanthropists to become those who would remould the environment. His model communist communities were also, from his point of view, a way of educating the educators, training grounds for those who would change other people’s environment for the better.

The absurdity of Gattrell's suggestion can be seen merely by reading the works he introduces. From them Owen appears as a rationalist and supporter of science and industry who was concerned about the effects of capitalist individualism on human behaviour and happiness. Morton’s selections include passages from Owen on religion and the family (as well as on spiritualism and phrenology which he fell for in his old age) which can leave no one in any doubt that Owen was no Tory sympathiser.

Adam Buick

Revolutionary Art & Socialism (1974)

Book Reviews from the January 1974 issue of the Socialist Standard

William Morris. His Life, Work and Friends by Philip Henderson. Penguin. 90p.

Political Writings of William Morris ed. by A. L. Morton. Lawrence and Wishart. £1.

William Morris was a Victorian poet and designer and it is as such that he is probably best known to the general public. But for the last ten or so years in his life he was also a revolutionary socialist and pioneer Marxist in Britain. He was born in 1834, the son of wealthy capitalist parents and as a result enjoyed an independent income all his life. Not that he chose not to work. Far from it. He interested himself, and tried his hand at, nearly every craft from dyeing to printing (setting up a business to sell the products of such crafts to the "swinish rich”), a living proof of the proposition that men will choose to work even if they are not forced to.

Work was always central to Morris’ whole outlook, even before he became a Socialist. While at Oxford in the 1850’s he became involved with a group of romantic artists known as the pre-Raphaelites because they reckoned that painting had degenerated after the Middle Ages with Raphael, the first Reformation painter. Morris, naturally, tried his hand at painting but became more famous as a poet. The general tenor of the pre-Raphaelite criticism was that mediaeval society was better for "art” than the industrial society which followed it. However “art” was not used in the sense just of paintings, sculptures, etc. but was defined by John Ruskin as the expression of man’s pleasure in his labour. Morris wholeheartedly endorsed this definition of art, with its implication that men would spontaneously produce beautiful things — things of everyday use, not mere decorations — if they enjoyed their work. This product of enjoyable work Morris called “popular art”. It was a recognition that capitalism denied most men pleasure in their work that led him to become a socialist in 1883, not long before he reached the age of 50.

Before that he had been on the Radical wing of the Liberal Party, first taking an active part in politics in the agitation against war with Russia following Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria in 1876. Morris became the treasurer of the Eastern Question Association and wrote a manifesto on its behalf addressed "To the Workingmen of England”, thus showing that even at this time Morris relied on the working class to carry out his political ideas. In the 1880 election he worked for the return of Gladstone, but soon became disillusioned with the new Liberal government. He made contact with various trade unionists and working-class political organisations and in 1883 joined the Democratic Federation. This was an association of working-class radical clubs formed in 1881.

Soon after Morris joined, it changed its name to the Social Democratic Federation, proclaiming Socialism as its aim and Marxism as its theory, though in fact it never did outlive its radical-Liberal origins as it continued to advocate also the same reforms of capitalism it always had. Morris set about studying Marx, reading Capital where, understandably in view of his background, he preferred the historical parts on the rise of modern capitalist industry and its effect on the working class rather than the abstract economic theory. Nevertheless there can be no doubt at all that Morris did master sufficient of Marx’s ideas — on history and society as well as economics — to be regarded as a Marxian socialist. A reading of Morton’s selection of his political writings will confirm this 

Hyndman, the man who had been largely instrumental in founding the Democratic Federation, was an authoritarian and tried to run the SDF as his personal organisation. This led to discontent and eventually, at the very end of 1884, to a split in which Morris, somewhat reluctantly, became the key figure in the breakaway Socialist League. Unlike the SDF, the Socialist League had no programme of reforms, which it regarded as mere palliatives; it saw its task as simply to “make Socialists”, as William Morris put it, thus in many aspects anticipating the policy of the Socialist Party of Great Britain when it was founded twenty years later as another breakaway from the reform-mongering SDF.

William Morris found himself as the main theorist of the anti-reform, make-socialists policy of the Socialist League. At times this brought him to the verge of an anti-parliamentary position since he thought that to enter parliament would be to become bogged down in reformist politics, but he never did deny that in the course of the socialist revolution the working class would have to capture political power including parliament. This refusal to advocate the use of parliament to get reforms upset a group, including Marx’s daughter Eleanor, who in the end broke away from the Socialist League. This left Morris at the mercy of the real anti-parliamentarians and anarchists, who eventually came to dominate the League with their advocacy of violence and bomb-throwing. In 1890 Morris and the Hammersmith branch seceded, carrying on independent socialist activity as the Hammersmith Socialist Society.

During these six years Morris was a real Socialist activist. Besides being editor of Commonweal, the League’s journal, he spoke indoors and outdoors up and down the country. A number of these talks (including some while he was still in the SDF) are reprinted in Morton’s book. They can leave no doubt as to Morris’ socialist understanding:

   Our business, I repeat, is the making of Socialists, i.e., convincing people that Socialism is good for them and is possible. When we have enough people of that way of thinking, they will find out what action is necessary for putting their principles into practice. Until we have that mass of opinion, action for a general change that will benefit the whole people is impossible ("Where Are We Now?”, 1890, p. 226).
   Intelligence enough to conceive, courage enough to will, power enough to compel. If our ideas of a new Society are anything more than a dream, these three qualities must animate the due effective majority of the working people; and then, I say, the thing will be done ("Communism", 1893, p. 229).

Part of Morris’ first public profession of his socialist views, a lecture delivered at University College Oxford in November 1884, was republished by the SPGB in 1907 and again in 1962, under the title Art, Labour and Socialism. This, like many of his earlier lectures, was addressed to his fellow-members of the bourgeois middle class rather than to the working class, but it still makes good reading (though, in this writer’s opinion, two of his other lectures, whose titles Useful Work versus Useless Toil and How We Live and How We Might Live speak for themselves, are better). Morris’ message was that enjoyable work should be available to all men and women but that capitalism denies such “popular art” to the propertyless working class and that only Socialism, a classless society of equals, can provide it. Morris also wrote two books, in the form of utopian romances, which are again good socialist — and Marxist — propaganda: A Dream of John Ball (a brilliant application of the materialist conception of history to the Peasants Revolt of 1381) and of course News from Nowhere.

Towards the end of his life, it must be pointed out, Morris modified his attitude to the use of parliament to try to get reforms and become reconciled to the SDF, though he never rejoined it. But he still insisted that such action must only be a means to the end of creating a determined Socialist majority, which alone could establish Socialism. He died in 1896.

Henderson’s biography is now reprinted as a paperback. Readable enough, it shows little sympathy for Morris’ socialist views, criticising him for supposed inconsistency in being a Socialist and art-lover. This perhaps is because Henderson accepts the myth that Russia is socialist. But, surely, Russia is the “state socialism” — or, as we would say today, state capitalism — Morris always disliked. He certainly would not have regarded Russia as socialist.

Adam Buick

As others see us (1966)

From the January 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

Working class history, or Labour History at it has come to be known, has had something of a boom in recent years especially as to the origins of the Labour Party, a period during which the Socialist Party also came into existence. Yet in this boom literature references to the Socialist Party, other than footnotes as to its formation, arc surprisingly sparse. There is hardly any discussion as to why those who founded our party felt obliged to leave the Social Democratic Federation. It is always a temptation for small groups like ourselves to see behind such things a "conspiracy of silence" so we must be wary of drawing any rash conclusions.

Yet this consideration alone does not seem adequate to explain the lack of any serious study of the Socialist Party by British Labour historians. Most of those who go into this field do so because they have political leanings in this direction; most are members of the Labour Party and a not inconsiderable minority arc associated with the so-called Communist Party. Nearly all of them must be aware of the Socialist Party and of its criticisms of these two parties which are at the same time criticisms of their own political positions. Here perhaps we can find the source of the unorganised, but still very real, bias against the Socialist Party in this quarter, a bias which becomes obvious when they do condescend to mention us. It is more than an accident that the only historian so far to have done a scholarly study of our party comes not from Britain but from Japan.

Max Beer and G. D. H. Cole were pioneers in this field of Labour history and it is interesting to compare what they said with later writers. Beer wrote in 1919 that the members of the Socialist Party “with much perseverance and self-sacrifice have been disseminating Marx's views on economics and political class warfare". The Socialist Party, he wrote, “was very active in spreading Marxist theories and it opposed all other political parties, whether they were calling themselves Socialist or Labour. It emphasised the importance of proletarian political action on strictly revolutionary lines". Cole wrote dial in the eyes of the Socialist Party 

political action as practised by the other Socialist bodies was mere reformism, but it was also of the opinion that Trade Union action was doomed to futility as long as the capitalist system remained in being. Strictly revolutionary political action alone would help the workers and the only activity that was justifiable under existing conditions was the persistent education of the working class for its revolutionary task.

Compare these honest and more or less correct attempts to explain our views with the following offered by the "communist" historians. Morton and Tate, in their The British Labour Movement. 1770-1920 (1956):

In I905 another split took place in the SDF, when part of the membership this time mainly centred in London formed the Socialist Party of Great Britain, a body so sectarian that it adjured both politics and trade union action, believing that socialism would come when everyone was converted. Fifty years later it was still a tiny sect, mainly concerned with echoing propaganda hostile to the Soviet Union.

This view of us as a socialist sect trying to convert the world to a particular brand of socialism has been deliberately fostered by the so-called Communist Party. One of the first to refer to the Socialist Party as a sect was the leading "communist" Tom Bell in his autobiography Pioneering Days (1941). Hobsbawm provides a variation on the same theme in his Labouring Men (1965) where the Socialist Party is a “conventicle". T. A. Jackson in his autobiography Solo Trumpet (1953), refused to mention the Socialist Party by name despite his being one of the original members. But the mysterious “Imperialist" group he mentions be was associated with was in fact the Socialist Party.

The one scholarly examination of the founding of the Socialist Party is by C. Tsuzuki in an article, “The Impossibiist Revolt in Britain", in the International Review of Social History (1956). Those who left the SDF to form the Socialist Labour Party and the Socialist Party were called Impossiblists because they were said to have held that any improvement of the lot of the working class under capitalism was “impossible". Tsuzuki's article is mainly historical but does to a certain extent discuss the issues involved. He also mentions that the Socialist Party still exists As he wrote in another of his works, H. M. Hyndman and British Socialism (1961), the Socialist Party "refused to accept any programme of palliatives and was thus in the strictest tense 'impossiblist'—as indeed it remains today". Tsuzuki, unlike Morton, Tate and Hobsbawm, at least tries to keep his own views and the facts apart. No asides about “sects" and “conventicles" appear in his writings.

Unfortunately the view of the Socialist Party as a sect out to convert the world has spread from “communist" books to other fields. Thus H. G. Nicolas in The British General Election of 1950 (1951) at which we contested two seats wrote:

Less sullied even than the ILP by the contamination of practical politics was the “SPGB”—the Socialist Party of Great Britain. This was a group of non-violent Marxists, who preached an undiluted gospel of class struggle and poured an equal contempt on every other party, including Labour and the Communists . . . Their propaganda had the austere purity of perfectionism, offering, as they truly said, no vote-catching promises Their candidates had the self-effacing devotion of members of a monastic order.

and again J. P. M. Millar in The Nature of Politics (1962):

Small parties, and parties in their early stages of growth, are often lofty in their aims and united in purpose. Some remain so; these we may call sectarian or interest parties, maintaining a narrow but consistent concern, from which they are not deflected by electoral considerations The Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) and its associated parties in other countries provide a clear example. Such parties put doctrinal considerations above all others They insist that the gospel must not be diluted by considering other peoples opinions. They are not daunted by smallness and ineffectiveness, arguing either that everyone will come round to their views in the end. or that mankind is, in general, too stupid to see what is good for it. In this they are very much akin to minor Christian sects.

The view of the Socialist Party as a sect persists to such an extent that it is worth looking into the matter in more detail. In the early days of the socialist movement the phrase “socialist sect" was used to refer to groups of Utopian socialists like the followers of Saint Simon and Robert Owen. These groups did resemble religious sects in that they set out to convert people to their ideal system; they had no understanding of the social world and tended to ignore politics and the struggle of the working class. What Marx did was to turn the theory of socialism from such Utopianism into a science: socialism was the next stage in the evolution of human society and would be realised as a result of the struggle of the working class to free itself from wage-slavery. The Socialist Party has always accepted Marxian, or scientific, socialism so that it is only by distortion that we can be likened to the old Utopian socialist sects. Wc do not “adjure politics and trade union action" as Morton and Tate claim. On the contrary we hold that all such actions should be based on a recognition of the class struggle. Wc argue that at the present time all that socialists can do is to help the working class come to see that only through socialism can their social problems be solved or, as G. D. H. Cole put our position, the only activity that is justifiable under existing conditions is "the persistent education of the working class for its revolutionary task".

“Sectarian" is a "communist" swear word. Lenin held that the function of a party of socialists was to try to lead the working class; to take up any demand that happened to be popular and to try to win power with the support of such discontented workers. This view, though quite at variance with the view of scientific socialism that the workers must free themselves, does provide a new definition of “sectarian", namely a group of socialists who stand aside from the so-called day-to-day struggle and thus give up all chance of using popular discontent to get political power. Since we have never had this as our aim, considering ourselves not as a “vanguard" but rather as an instrument which the working class can use, this reproach is pointless. We are not Leninists or Bolsheviks and it doesn't matter to us if we are criticized for not acting as such! The term "sectarian" is a red-herring and a convenient excuse for not considering the real issue: can capitalism be made to benefit the working class?

As an organisation which contests elections we qualify as a minor political party and so are subject to study from this angle too In the Political Quarterly (July-Sept., 1962) Nicolas Harman discusses the Socialist Party in an article, "Minor Political Parties in Britain". This article, though a genuine attempt to examine our views, still misunderstands them. For some reason, perhaps because of his own views, Harman tries to express our aim not in terms of the abolition of capitalism and the establishment of socialism but rather of "the dissolution of the State" which gives our views an anarchist slant. Thus Harman says we argue that the Russian revolution was not a socialist revolution because “it preserved the structure of the State in the form of state capitalism".

Again, "all leadership leads to dictatorship; only by persuasion and education can the abolition of the State he brought about". The Socialist Party, he says, "continues its uncompromising path, not advocating any reforms short of the establishment of socialism by persuasion of a majority of the people". George Thayer in his very superficial book, The British Political Fringe (1965), also puts over our views as if we think that socialism will come purely because of our educational efforts. The Socialist Party, he writes. believes that

only through the education of the working classes will pure Marxist Socialism be achieved. It does not imply that capitalism and the parliamentary system can he reformed. Capitalism must be destroyed, it believes. but only when the working classes have a "conscious understanding and desire for Socialism". At that time, capitalism will peacefully disappear and Socialism will take its place . . . They keep on struggling . . . secure in the belief that when their brand of Socialism arrives they will have properly educated the working classes not only to accept its arrival but to welcome it as well.

Both Harman and Thayer misunderstand our position and make us out to hold views which would justly lay us open to the charge of being a mere sect—that we are out to convert the world to our “brand of Socialism". Perhaps some of our activities might suggest, to a superficial observer, such an interpretation. Still those who fancy themselves fit to write books should take the trouble to go beyond mere appearances. They have no real excuse for misunderstanding us especially as they arc given literature to read which clearly explains the theory behind our practice. As Marxists, wc accept the validity of historical materialism and do not subscribe to any facile theory of social change.

Before summing up, we must mention the not unfriendly reference to us in A Faith to Fight For (1964) by Eric Deakins. The author, a member of the Labour Party, does discuss our view that "socialism will only come about when the workers recognise that it is in their economic interest to create a Socialist society”. What is important about this book is that it represents a breakthrough: our views are actually discussed in a.serious book on politics. Wc can only hope that Deakins has set a precedent.

Adam Buick

Dreaming of the future (2014)

Book Review from the February 2014 issue of the Socialist Standard

Poor Man's Heaven: The Land of Cokaygne and Other Utopian Visions by Omasius Gorgut, Past Tense, 2012. 134 pages.

The Land of Cokaygne was a Middle English poem, the word 'Cokaygne' from Old French 'cocaigne', probably meaning ’cake’. Thomas Aquinas had emphasised hierarchy, private property and class divisions as the natural order of human society. Eden was lost, entry to heaven restricted by Church teaching, therefore Cokaygne was a land of no work, free access, common ownership, peace, happiness, and social justice. Cokaygne was a utopia for the serf offering relief from labour and the struggle for food in a hostile natural world where a bad season might mean absolute famine. Peasants looked to a lost communist golden age. 

AL Morton saw Cokaygne as 'arising from lower class self-awareness in terms of class conflict'. Gorgut sees the Peasant's Revolt as 'serfs … becoming aware of their servitude.' John Ball preached 'have your reward both on earth and in heaven. For I say that earth and heaven are not two but one, when Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman? From the beginning all men were created equal by nature.' Gorgut writes 'a land with no lords, no clergy, no serfs, but equality under God and the king, confirm that many of the poor believed a Return to Eden was achievable in this life.'

Millenarianism was rife but what was coming to an end was not the world but a mode of economic production, i.e. feudalism. With the rise of capitalism moralising enters into the world of Cokaygne reflecting bourgeois protestant morality evident in the Pieter Bruegel the Elder painting The Land of Cockaigne with its portrayal of gluttony and sloth.

German peasant leader Thomas Müntzer attempted to establish Cokaygne declaring 'All property should be held in common’, and in the English Revolution Digger Gerrard Winstanley wrote of the 'the Earth as a Common Treasury'. Gorgut writes of America 'elevating the New World to Cockaygne-like stature' with the community of Merry Mount, Massachusetts where 'settlers, runaway slaves and servants and native Americans lived together communally, brewing excellent beere and dancing around an 60 foot maypole. This attempt to blend old world carnival fun with practical race-mixing and egalitarianism was denounced by puritan pilgrims who feared and hated everything wild and free.'

American hobo songs of the early twentieth century such as The Big Rock Candy Mountain, and Poor Man's Heaven evoked Cokaygne. They still found resonance in the 1980s when The Big Rock Candy Mountain was sung by Tom Waits in the 'hobo' film Ironweed, Rudy Wurlitzer made the film Candy Mountain, and the Indie band The Motorcycle Boy sang their own lyrics to Big Rock Candy Mountain: 'dancing with the working man, looking for the big rock candy mountain.'

Gorgut closes his book with a quote from Hal Rammel: 'Liberated from the everyday, we dream of the world's limitless possibilities, the pleasures of life, and the bountiful earth, one day free for all.' 

Steve Clayton