Recent Tapes Library additions (1975)

Party News from the March 1975 issue of the Socialist Standard 

Blogger's Note:

An audio recording of Harry Young's meeting on Rosa Luxemburg is available on the SPGB website.

I wonder if any of the other meetings listed above are in the party archive?

SPGB Meetings (1966)

Party News from the November 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1964)

Party News from the October 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1966)

 Party News from the October 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1976)

Party News from the July 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1964)

Party News from the July 1964 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1976)

Party News from the June 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1966)

Party News from the March 1966 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Meetings (1972)

Party News from the December 1972 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Lectures and Special Meetings (1971)

Party News from the December 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard 

SPGB Meetings (1978)

Party News from the November 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

SPGB Lectures and Special Meetings (1971)

Party News from the November 1971 issue of the Socialist Standard

Blogger's Note:

• The first two issue of the Swedish Socialist journal can be read at the following link.
• Mention of Harry Baldwin doing a meeting on the Oz magazine reminds me that David Ramsay Steele's article, 'Smash Cash', appeared in issue number 17 of Oz magazine in 1968.

Delegate Meeting (1951)

Party News from the October 1951 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Delegate Meeting which was held on Saturday and Sunday, September 1st and 2nd, was adjourned, as a considerable amount of work was still to be dealt with. It was agreed by the Delegates that the Executive Committee should consider the advisability of holding a Meeting of Party Members to further discuss Parliamentary activity, and it has been decided to hold the adjourned Delegate Meeting and the Party meeting on Saturday and Sunday, October 6th and 7th. Unfortunately Conway Hall is not available but the Holborn Hall, Grays Inn Road, has been booked.

The resumed Delegate meeting will be held on Saturday afternoon, 6th, from 2 p.m., in the Small Holborn Hall, and Sunday morning 11 a.m., 7th October, in the large Holborn Hall. The Meeting of Party Members will be held in the large Hall from 2 p.m. on the Sunday afternoon. Branches and Members have already been advised, but this is an additional reminder.

Bloomsbury Branch has commenced its weekly discussion meetings after branch business on Thursdays at the North Room, Conway Hall. The subjects being dealt with during October are 11th, Development of Political Thought—H. Young; 18th, Painting—C. Devereux; Oct. 25th and November 1st—Housing. October 4th meeting will be held in the Small Conway Hall—E. Hardy will speak on "High Prices and No Prices.” This meeting commences at 7.30 p.m.

Phyllis Howard

SPGB Meetings (1978)

Party News from the August 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Saturdays evenings at No. 52 (1970)

Party News from the January 1970 issue of the Socialist Standard

Strikes: An unchanging pattern (1977)

From the September 1977 issue of the Socialist Standard

Many people seem to think that strikes and similar disturbances are caused by laziness, intransigence, stupidity, a willingness to be led, greed, resentment, a want of foresight—in short, for moral failings on the part of employers and their employees, chiefly the latter.

This is odd—because all sorts of people have been involved under different circumstances and at different times—miners, civil servants, policemen, bank clerks, doctors, school teachers, shop assistants. Have they all suffered from lack of fibre? It is even more odd that the pattern does not change, repeated again and again since the early days of capitalism, and well recorded. Recently Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South has been reprinted (Penguin 1976). Much of the central part of this book is concerned with the strike in a northern manufacturing town in the mid-1850s. Although it is not the main theme of the novel, and though Mrs. Gaskell was sympathetic to the workers both in her narrative and in real life, religious and individual issues were more important to her—as they usually were in nineteenth-century novels. Her account, though fictional, is clearly based on her own experience and closely observed.

She describes the—by now—familiar features — workers goaded to strike, the struggle to maintain a standard of living, union leaders trying to keep the issues clear and to hold the reins, some strikers —against their union’s advice — trying to force the issue by direct confrontation, collision with the police, broken heads, the threat of prison, attempts to make the closure total, employment of foreign labour (in this case, Irish).

When scientists find in circumstances which are varying a constant pattern they assume an underlying cause. In this case we do not have to carry out research to discover what it is. Discord is at the base of capitalism. A worker will try to sell his labour-power for the best price and in the best possible market. His standard of living depends on it, and with his standards his way of life itself. He cannot live out of society. There are always blandishments to induce him to spend his money—even, in fact to owe it. The capitalist, on the other hand, his employer, seeks to buy labour-power as cheaply as possible—profits depend on it. These are the seeds of struggle. There is bound to be contention. When it leads to strikes or other conflict then—since capitalism hasn’t changed—they are likely to run to type. It has nothing to do with moral dereliction. It has everything to do with the economic and unavoidable nature of capitalism.

C. Devereaux

Romantic revolutionary (1979)

Book Review from the April 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

William Morris. The Marxist Dreamer. Paul Meier. 2 Vols. Harvester Press 1978.

Two works have recently been published, both written to show that William Morris was a follower of Marx. One. by E.P. Thompson, William Morris, From Romantic to Revolutionary, was issued in a revised edition with a useful postscript in 1977. The other is the work under review. William Morris’s socialism is no news to the SPGB. A lecture which he gave in Oxford in 1883, later reprinted as Art under Plutocracy, was published by the SPGB in 1907, apart from two paragraphs, and reprinted with a long introduction in 1962. The carefully chosen title which the pamphlet was given — Art, Labour & Socialism — shows how clearly Morris's message was understood.

Paul Meier’s book was originally published in France in 1972 with a more appropriate title — The Utopian Thought of William Morris. The author deals first with the influence of religion and of William Morris’s bourgeoise background; and for the greater part of volume I with the influence of various writers and thinkers, including the Utopian socialists — Saint- Simon, Fourier, Louis Blanc, Owen, and Henry George. The longest section, however, is very properly devoted to Ruskin, because his ideas concerning social problems, especially those of poverty in a rich world, the meaning of work, the significance of art, profoundly impressed the young Morris. Meier shows that Morris’s study of Marx not only quickened his understanding of these issues, and gave to Ruskin’s vague idealism real purpose and meaning, but made Morris a revolutionary socialist, which Ruskin failed to become.

Meier offers convincing evidence that Morris knew Marx’s Capital and understood it. Morris’s own alleged statement often quoted, ‘To speak quite frankly, I do not know what Marx’s Theory of Value is,

and I’m damned if I want to know', comes from Bruce Glasier’s William Morris and the Early Days of the Socialist Movement, published in 1921, long after the event. Meier examines it at length, and concludes that Glasier’s memory was perverse and at fault; and even if Morris said this in the heat of the moment, there is nothing else in his writing, nor in what was said about him by others, to warrant the charge. He quotes Cobden-Sanderson, who inherited Morris’s copy of volume I of Capital . . . ‘before it came to me’, he says, ‘it had been worn to loose sections by his own constant study of it’. Probably, Meier thinks, Morris was diffident when it came to economics, where he was not on his own ground; concealing, as he often did, a greater knowledge than he cared to admit.

Much of the book is taken up with what, according to the author, is Marx’s theory of the “Two Stages of Socialism’, and his attempt to prove that Morris accepted this. He pursues the argument into the pages of News from Nowhere, probably taking that work rather too literally. Marx, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme of 1875 spoke of the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, a phrase he used on other occasions. Engels, at the same time, explained clearly what he meant — the workers will take over the state power in the revolution, and, having captured it, will use it to hold down their adversaries, the capitalist class. There would be, therefore, a transitional period before complete ‘‘freedom’’ was established —that is, socialism proper; when the state, having served its purpose in the revolution, will fade out of existence. Meier apparently takes this to mean, and argues that Morris means, that socialism cannot be established at once, immediately after a revolution, and that there will be a period during which some kind of control and state intervention will be necessary. Concerning this, what Marx and Engels had in mind early in life can be debated. Later Engels certainly came round to the view that the majority must understand and accept the meaning and responsibility of socialism before the conquest of power. Even in 1881 he had moved towards this concept. In his 1891 introduction to Wage Labour and Capital he wrote — ‘A new social order is possible, in which the class differences of to-day will have disappeared, and in which — perhaps after a short transition period   — which, though somewhat deficient in other respects — will in any case be very useful morally — there will be the means of life, of the enjoyment of life, and of the development and of the activity of all bodily and mental faculties . . .’ (my italics). Morris, by a ‘transition’ period, appears at different times to mean different things: a period before the revolution when the workers have gained concessions and capitalism has been modified — which, unless such a change was likely to bring socialism nearer, he deprecated; a period of armed struggle; ‘State Socialism’ — though, as Meier admits, he uses this expression in more than one way; a period after the revolution when the mess and remnants of capitalism are being cleared away. The truth is that Morris was not consistent, and that Meier gives him credit for greater consistency than he displays.

In support of his case Meier at all times quotes widely from Morris, though he is not always careful to ensure that his quotations are of approximately similar date. He is apt, too, to curtail them when it suits him; and in context they sometimes have a different ring. Happily, for the most part, he relies on readily available sources. It is unfortunate that he is so concerned to fit Morris into a strait-jacket with ‘Two Stages of Socialism’; but this remains, none the less, a valuable work. It covers an immense ground. It contains much that is new. It is scholarly, and, in general, fair in its presentation. It disposes of, once and for all, some of the myths about Morris— that he understood neither history nor Marx; that his socialism was an aberration, and that towards the end of his life he abandoned it altogether. Above all, the work, in spite of these reservations, places Morris clearly in the stream of Marxist thought and it shows how this informs his philosophy of art and of work. It is highly readable — often movingly so. Sadly, the price (£28.50! !!) puts it beyond the pocket of most workers. It is hoped that a cheaper edition is on the way.

C. Devereaux

Obituary: Nancy Kersley (1978)

Obituary from the August 1978 issue of the Socialist Standard

Old members will be sorry to hear of the death of Nancy Kersley, on June 19th, about two months before her 90th birthday. Although her activity was of a different kind from that of her late husband Ted, she was, in her quiet and unassuming way, deeply attached to the Party and its work. Comrades who knew them will remember how hospitable their home was, and how readily they were welcomed, with something, more often than not, to eat and drink. Her roots were in the working-class movement. Her father and her grandfather, going back to Chartist days, had both been active. Before the first world war she employed in the clothing trade, and, while still in her teens, became a Trade Union organiser. Nancy had been crippled for some time with arthritis — though no-one could have borne it with less complaint or more cheerfully — but her sight and hearing remained excellent, and her mental powers were unimpaired. Only a week before her death she was discussing an article in the Socialist Standard, every issue of which she looked forward to and read. Shortly before she died she said — uncharacteristically — that she felt very tired; a few days later the end came quite peacefully and without pain.

CD

Obituary: E. C. Kersley (1976)

Obituary from the May 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Ted Kersley died on March 18th after a short acute illness. He was in his 88th year. A number of members and ex-members of the party attended his funeral at Harlow cemetery on a grey and chilly afternoon, March 25th.

His career was remarkable. He had little formal education, and spent some of his early years in an orphanage. Before he was twelve years old he was at work, supplementing the meagre family income. A conscientious objector on Socialist grounds when war broke out in 1914, he was rejected and sent into the army. In France he owed his life to his wits, employment as a regimental cook, and a relative disregard for military obligations and procedure. After his discharge he became a dealer and "runner" in the art trade. A tribute to him and his achievement in this filed appeared in The Times of March 31st. Perhaps the most glowing acknowledgment of all those he was accorded must be that in the late Sir Arthur Elton's edition of Klingender's Art and the Industrial Revolution.

He joined the Party in 1910, and must therefore have been the oldest surviving member of that vintage. We do not remember him as the holder of long office, as a public speaker or writer — though no-one who heard them will forget his inimitable lectures on his chosen subject illustrated with original material. But there will be few of his time who do not remember him. He was always around — when something was to be done, to take the chair, to put up notices, at elections, at public meetings. In later years after an illness he lost his old energy, but his interest never wavered. He took a generous view of the Party's case — though he suffered no dilution or attrition — because he brought a many-sided attitude to it. Controversy never rankled with him, though he could be vehement in disagreement. One can say of Ted that the Party, its principles, its Marxism informed all his activities. Yet he was one of those for whom the party's views was not merely a statement touching capitalism, its cause and cure, but more profoundly on his life a philosophy and purpose. Many will recall the radio programme "The Art Trade Runner" which was widely regarded as a classic of broadcasting. In it, Ted insisted on declaring himself a lifelong revolutionary Socialist. The Times obituary contained no reference to his Socialism, showing that if some aspects of a man's life are recognizable by the Establishment others are not.

We share our regrets at his passing with Nancy his wife, who participated in the hard work and struggles of earlier days, and is still a member of the Party.

C.D.