A brush with the fascists (2004)

From the June 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Fascism was dead. Officially, it was dead. It had happened in the war, when the fascist countries had been occupied and their leaders, like Hitler and Mussolini, were killed. True, Franco was still alive and so was Stalin who was not called a fascist but was possibly worse than all the others put together. So, although there was some confusion about who was a fascist and who was not, the fact was that it was dead. Oswald Mosley and his wife had been interned in England because they were fascists and after the exposure of the barbarities of Nazi Germany no one in their right mind would ever again describe  themselves as a fascist. Now we could all settle down with a Labour government in a fascist-free world.

But the brave new post-war world had hardly blinked its way into life when uneasy memories were stirred by the arrival of some new political organisations, in different parts of London and the rest of the country, with a membership drawn from Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. In the western part of London there was the Union for British Freedom, led by Victor Burgess (whose swarthy complexion had not, apparently, excluded him from a white supremacist organisation). In the East End of London there was the British League of Ex-Servicemen, led by Jeffrey Hamm (who had been interned in the Falkland Islands). In Derby there was the Sons of St. George, in Bristol the British Workers Party of National Unity, in Manchester the Imperial Defence League.

All these groups claimed they had sprung into existence in response to a spontaneous, irresistible demand by the British people but it did not take a deductive genius to work out that there was some common ground between them – and a disreputable past. They were all aggressively nationalistic, all stridently warning of the urgent need for a defence of something called British racial purity against the encroachment of lesser, polluting, devitalising breeds. If some heckler asked what the speaker had done in the war (an obsessively common question at outdoor meetings in those days) the response would be a long lament about how unnecessary the war had been and how much better off Germany and Britain would be if they had been allies against the alien hordes. This was then developed into an attack on  World Jewry, who had conspired to bring the war about by setting the British people against their blood brothers and sisters in Germany. This argument (if it can be called that) was bolstered by the fascists  grouped around the platform joyously chanting about “. . . Asiatic, Mongolian, atheistic, communism . . .” The air trembled with the threat of violence.

43 Group

One victim of the fascist technique of emphasising their point with violence was the playwright Harold Pinter, who was an active anti-fascist. In the Observer of 6 January 2002 Pinter related his experience of being beaten up by fascists at a street corner meeting in the late 1940s. His article gave the impression that the fascists were alone in using violence as a tactic. However, he wrote that among the crowd there were “some Jews, led by ex-servicemen.” This description fits the 43 Group, whose aim in life was to disrupt, or if possible break up, fascist meetings and in the process deal out some physical punishment to the fascists. Membership of the 43 Group seemed to be reserved to those who met certain criteria. First, to be Jewish; second, to be an ex-serviceman; third, to be thickset and powerful and have a face which looked as if it had been hewed out of a rock face. In places like Ridley Road in the East End violence at fascist meetings was routine. Mosley’s son Nicholas remembered going to one in 1946 or 1947: a man on top of a van shouting like some revivalist prayer meeting; a man charging at the restraining policemen; a paper seller kicked and punched by a crowd: “It was all, once more, quite like a crowd at a present-day football match”.

Late in 1947 I had the opportunity of sampling some violence at a street corner meeting but not at the hands of the fascists. It happened one autumn evening near Trebovir Road, a side street off the Earl’s Court Road. This was a good place for an outdoor meeting as there was unfailingly a large, vibrant crowd possessed of some lurid political theories. By a kind of informal arrangement various political parties – including the Socialist Party and the UBF – held meetings on different evenings. Our meetings there on a Thursday were thrilling and scary and mostly hugely satisfying. On Wednesday evenings, if we had nothing better to do, we might go along to listen to the hysterical ramblings of the UBF’s Burgess and observe the 43 Group’s frantic efforts to bring the whole thing to a chaotic end. We made a point of silently listening to it all; we knew that the more disorder there was the better the fascists’ chance of recruiting members. (In the early 1960s the membership of the Union Movement went up to some 1,500, for some of which they credited the violence from their opponents).

Debate

One evening we left the UBF meeting early and mooched along the Earls Court Road looking for a coffee. We soon became aware that we were being followed and when we turned round we saw there a bunch of 43 Group members who were obviously not intent on wishing us a good evening. Like Pinter, we were cornered by a bunch of thugs whose pleasure it was to beat us up, except that they were not called fascists but operated on the assumption that anyone who did not heckle and scream at the fascists must be a fascist themselves and so deserved a bashing. We managed to avoid physical damage by gently informing our intending assailants that we were members of the Socialist Party, which was due to debate with the UBF at the Kensington Town Hall in a couple of weeks. Why didn’t they come along – they might learn something about effective techniques of opposing obnoxious ideas? It would have been a bit difficult, after that, for the 43 Groupers to attack us, although one or two were still clearly in favour of giving us a good hiding anyway. So we went for our coffee and spent a useful hour or so discussing the details of organising that debate.

And the debate was all we had promised them, on the pavement that evening. An audience of 650 crammed into the biggest meeting hall at the Kensington Town Hall, with another 200 or so turned away outside. The UBF had suggested that they supply some stewards to keep out “undesirables” but naturally we declined their offer of “help” and told them that all meetings of the Socialist Party were open to all members of the working class. Even fascists were welcome – they might learn something about socialism and about the benefits of a democratic meeting. We did not expect any trouble, although the 43 Group were there in force; they seemed to get all the excitement they wanted in the ruthless shredding of the UBF case by the socialist speaker. Raven Thomson, an ex-communist, represented the UBF (although he was not actually a member of it); he had the reputation of a fascist intellectual and in the BUF he had been one of Mosley’s right hand men. He can be seen in a photograph, taken before political uniforms were banned, strutting behind Mosley reviewing a Blackshirt parade, looking ridiculous in his black uniform with his cap at a rakish angle as if it had been knocked sideways.

The Alternative

We could not claim that it was as a consequence of their verbal mauling in the debate but soon afterwards there was a perceptible change in the fascists’ style of propaganda. A note of triumphant promise crept into their relentless harangues about the insidious influence of world Jewry. Have hope, they advised us: The Alternative is on the way. By that time anyone who took any interest in them knew that The Alternative was a book by Mosley, his manifesto which was supposed to carry the fascists into resplendent power. For some reason the book was greeted in some quarters as a serious contribution to political thought when it was no more than another attempt to unravel – or in this case to batter into shape – the chaos of capitalism. Mosley declared that fascism was dead – outdated, lost in the ashes of the war. The way forward now was a union in which Europe would become a nation, using (he did not say “exploiting”) Africa as if it were its estate in trusteeship “on behalf of white civilization and not on behalf of a nominal stability of Barbarism”.

Africa would provide the raw materials for a Euro-Africa closed economic system. But to operate this vast estate without the atrocities and repressions imposed in the past it would be necessary for a new type of man – a Thought Deed Man – to evolve. This would happen through “breeding, selection and environment” supplemented by training. This crackpot idea was presented in impenetrably pompous verbiage about “the union of intellect and will . . . we must give robustness to the intellect and reflection to the will . . .The future is with the Thought Deed Man because, without him, the future will not be. He is the hope of the peoples of the world”. It did not take a particularly cynical mind to unravel the fact that the person Mosley had in mind as the world’s first Thought Deed Man, all intellect and will and hope, was himself.

Union Movement

In 1948 the various fascist movements dissolved themselves into the Union Movement and launched what they fictionalised as a spontaneous drive to persuade a modest Mosley to emerge from retirement and lead the nation to glory. After a predictable show of reluctance he began eagerly speaking at Union Movement meetings and parades and demonstrations. In the early 1950s the first immigrants arrived from the West Indies and Asia, sucked over by British industries keen to undermine working class bargaining power in the days of ‘full employment’. The immigrants, easy fodder for racist paranoia, overtook  the Jews as targets for fascist mythologising and invective. Mosley’s son Nicholas remembers him speaking in the street from the top of a van, roaring about black gangs keeping teenage white English girls prisoner in attics where they were repeatedly raped. After satisfying their animalistic sexual appetites black men were supposed to prefer to dine on tinned pet food; a Mosley supporter was actually embarrassed to hear him tell another meeting that “Lassie (a popular dog food at the time) is for dogs, Kit-E-Kat is for wogs”.

Presumably convinced that this kind of mindless abuse would be popular enough to register in votes, Mosley stood for North Kensington in the 1959 general election. He claimed – another myth – that in doing this he was yielding to the irresistible demands of the people there when it was obvious that he was intent on exploiting the passions aroused in the previous year’s race riots in Notting Hill. Encouraged by his canvassers coming in night after night with stories about a massive upsurge of support for him, Mosley assumed he had victory in the bag and his supporters fantasised about the Union Movement sweeping the country. It was not quite like that when the votes were counted because Mosley, with just 2,821 out of a total of 39,912, was bottom of the poll and lost his deposit. It was, he said later, the biggest shock of his life and after the count, instead of rallying his supporters with a defiant, inspiring speech he went quickly to his car and was whisked away into the night. In 1966 he stood again, for Shoreditch, where the result was even worse for him; he polled 1,600 votes – 4.6 per cent of the total. After that he lost interest in being the Thought Deed Man, the implacable struggler against a powerful enemy. He withdrew from politics, to live in a succession of opulent houses, ending his days in a Paris mansion where he died in 1980.

BNP

Of all the words in the lexicon of politics fascism is among the most ill-defined and inappropriately used. If it has any meaning it is in the supremely escapist notion that there is a quick-fix remedy for capitalism’s shortcomings. It is also a nasty fix – the idea that political democracy is a feeble, useless way of running affairs and instead we should surrender to the dictates of strong men – the Führer, Il Duce, the Thought Deed Man. Parallel to that is the myth of national or racial supremacy, in whose baleful name so many atrocities and so much repression have been committed. If fascism is anything it is the very stuff of disillusionment, the response of workers who have tried other parties and other methods of running capitalism and have decided that, as each of them have failed, it is the democratic process which is at fault. That is what happened in post-1918 Germany and it is no coincidence that at present, with the Blair government exposed in all its helpless cynicism and the other parties promising nothing better, the BNP are winning council seats in places like Burnley and Kirklees. To complicate the lexicology further, the professed opponents of fascism are very often indistinguishable from the fascists themselves. If we hadn’t known it before then, that fact would have been brought home to us, that wintry evening on the pavement in the Earl’s Court Road.

Ivan

                                                                                                                             

Northern Ireland: Our first election campaign (2004)

From the June 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

It was the early Sixties. Things were looking good in Northern Ireland. The province was as near to an economic boom as it ever gets; there had not been any serious sectarian rioting since 1935 and an IRA campaign that had commenced on the Border in 1956 was petering to an inglorious end with a statement from that organisation admitting the lack of support it had received from the Catholic nationalists of the north.

The World Socialist Party of Ireland had offices at Donegall Street in Belfast. There we spent a few late nights debating whether or not we should embark on our first electoral campaign. Money was an  important consideration: £25 deposit – which, of course, we expected to lose; election addresses, 10,000 with the equivalent of 4 pages in each, around £65; posters, say, £35. The estimates were a  headache for a small group. We probably needed over £200. And then there was the work: delivering the  Election address, putting up the posters, holding two or three open air meetings every night for some  sixteen nights.

There was the big consideration, too. The main core of our small membership lived in the widespread Belfast 15 area which constituted the constituency of Duncairn. It was the only constituency we were in a position to contest. Traditionally, it was a fiercely loyalist area, revered by Unionists because it was the  power base of Lord Carson who led the fight against Irish Home Rule with an illegal army (the UVF)  pledged to make war if necessary on Britain in order to stay British.

On the credit side there were all those meetings, those posters, the very comprehensive Election Address. Had to be worth it. We sat at our map of the constituency, marking out the sites for our meetings. Nowhere near pubs on Saturday evenings. First meeting of each evening at the hot spots, last meetings in the posher places where bigotry, like family skeletons, is usually well concealed.

The Loyalists would associate us with the Republicans because Republicans often showed their ignorance of socialism by claiming to be socialists. That could be dodgy. There were two small Catholic enclaves in the constituency and there would not be any Catholic candidate. The danger here was twofold: the priests might speak out about “atheistic communists” or we might earn support because the Catholics, like the Protestants, might associate us with Republicanism.

On the first evening of our campaign we left our offices, which were marginally outside the constituency. We had a minibus, festooned with posters and with the single speaker of our crackling public address system affixed to the top. Our first meeting was to be at Adam Street, in a hard-line loyalist area, but to get there we had to pass through part of the Dock constituency, a tough nationalist area represented by Mr Gerry Fitt (now Lord Something-or-Other) where a mob attacked our van in the mistaken belief that we  were bent on frustrating Mr Fitt’s anxious political ambitions.

The pitch we had selected at Adam Street was at a corner outside a Brethren Mission Hall. But there was a surprise or us there: the authorities had an audience-in-waiting for us. There was an open backed lorry  (they were called “tenders”) fitted to accommodate fourteen or fifteen armed policemen, as well as two police cars and a cop motorcyclist.

Hardly had our meeting started when an irate ‘Brethren’ came out of the hall and shouted up to the speaker about the noise of our loudspeaker. His aggressive manner gave the distinct impression that he’d prefer a ruction to an apology, indeed, he seemed nonplussed when our speaker apologised, made a reference to a clap of thunder and agreed to move our vehicle further down the street. People stood at their doors, obviously not best pleased but there was no active hostility and, when we dealt with the single question that was put to us, about “communism” in Russia, there was even a mild flurry of interest.

After our last meeting, we were packing up to start distributing our Election Address. As we were  removing our banners from the vehicle, the officer in charge of the police approached to confirm that the  meetings were finished for that evening. Laughingly, he referred to the incident at the Mission Hall and then told us that, within his experience of Northern Ireland elections, our behaviour was unique. We seemed, he thought, anxious to avoid trouble. We emphasised our educational role – and mentioned the integrity of our skulls.

Our revolutionary fervour might have been cooled the following evening for the armed force of the Crown was reduced to a single cop on a motorcycle. In the light of subsequent events, it would be wrong to mention this cop’s name, suffice to say that he seemed at pains to remain aloof and unfriendly towards us.

On the third or fourth evening of our campaign, we held a meeting in a housing estate called Mount Vernon – now a hotbed of militant loyalist paramilitarism where a dog with a Catholic name could become seriously dead. Even back in those more peaceful times, we were somewhat apprehensive, strategically planning our meeting place at a spot from which escape could most easily be facilitated.

In the event, we had no trouble. A few people came out of their houses and flats to listen and, when we came to questions, the meeting lapsed into a question and answer session between one man and our speaker. None of us read any significance into the fact that the persistent questioner was frequently exchanging words with the motorcycle cop who had a one hundred per cent enforced attendance record at all our previous election meetings.

That evening, after we had concluded the last of our meetings, the cop approached one of our members and asked him if we had any literature additional to our Election Address. Whether by virtue of his personality or the nature of his job, the policeman seemed a man of few words but he became quite animated as he told us that he and his wife had discussed the contents of our Election Address the previous night. He didn’t think we would ever get it – Socialism, that is – but, “Jasus! wouldn’t it be great if we did!”

“It was me, you know, who was getting that fella to ask the questions at Mount Vernon”, he instructed us. “You understand that I daren’t openly . . .” Indeed, we understood.

After that we had a very friendly cop accompanying us each evening. He wasn’t an especially garrulous individual but he did talk occasionally and seemed to include himself in our activities when he said “we” – he even got to appreciate our shared sense of raucous humour.

There were three other candidates in the field, representing the Unionist Party, the Labour Party and a Paisley sponsored ‘Protestant Action’ candidate. The counting of votes took place in the magnificence of Belfast City Hall. Worth recording were the words of the Labour candidate, a decent man called Bob Stewart. He enquired about how we thought we “had done” and when we said we had no expectations of retrieving our deposit, he said, “I dunno; your Election Address was the finest piece of socialist documentation I have ever read”. When asked why he had stood in public opposition to us he opinioned that “I don’t think it’s your time yet”. Not too clever perhaps but, as we said, a decent man.

Then there was the highpoint of the evening: we got 824 votes and saved our deposit. We exited the august portals of the City Hall as though we were walking on air – wondering what it would be like after that first fateful election.

But there was another surprise for us. As we approached our van, illegally parked in May Street, there was a motorcycle cop in attendance. “Well . . .?” It had nothing to do with parking and the cop was well off his beat. He was genuinely interested in how our vote had gone and he told us that our total included the votes of himself and his wife.

Sometime later, one of our members had taken his kids to a public park on a Sunday morning. There were very few people about and, of course, in Belfast at that time Authority deemed that their remorseless God would be gravely offended by children playing on Sunday so officialdom locked the swings in the playground. But religious ingenuity had not devised a means of locking the slides so the few children there were presented with an occasion for sin.

Anyway, the motorcycle cop, now in mufti, arrived with his two children and while the kids sinned together on the unapproved slides, their fathers talked. He’d been a cop for seventeen years . . . life was fashioned around the job, mortgage etc. had misgivings now but what could he do? Our member nodded sympathetically.

In the afterwards, some of us saw him from time to time; he remained a traffic cop until the early Seventies when he was shot dead by an IRA ‘freedom fighter’ who, presumably, had an aversion to traffic cops.

By then, of course, freedom fighting had created so much inter-community division and bitterness in Northern Ireland that there was no place within working class areas open to consideration of ideas outside the foul patterns of religious and political sectarianism.

Richard Montague

Long live the (electronic) revolution! (2004)

From the June 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Socialists have always been aware that if we want to influence the ways in which people think and act we must be able to talk to them. Communication is inseparable from politics. For thousands of years this involved oratory and conversational skills. Even into the last decades of the twentieth century, members of the Socialist Party have been expected to try to develop the ability to deliver talks either to groups of fellow workers at indoor meetings and/or in the cities from outdoor platforms. But one of the reasons that we now find it more difficult to attract workers to our indoor meetings is the fact that they consider the idea old-fashioned. And there are so many modern counter-attractions, such as TV.

Admittedly, these were not the only means of communication we had. Printed matter (which had been used for propaganda effectively from the mid seventeenth century) including handbills, advertisements in newspapers and magazines, was most important for putting forward the detailed case for a socialist revolution, once the initial talking was finished. Publishing our own journal and pamphlets was  considered essential by the founding members of the Party. It is still very important.

Mass communication

For the great majority of working class people in Britain, access to means of communication remained unchanged until the last decade of the twentieth century. They got their information, carefully edited, from the BBC and, latterly, the commercial broadcasters on radio and television; and they/we read slight  variations in the constant support of capitalist values and social structures from daily, evening and Sunday papers.

Telephone communication was just as limited. Even in the late 70s and early 80s the few users of mobile phones needed to carry a heavy suitcase full of electronic equipment in order to communicate  with a limited range of similar users, mainly corporate, without dependence upon telephone land lines. Monitoring all or any of these channels of communication was not only straightforward but fairly simple for governments uneasy or suspicious about what their subjects were talking about. The American listening stations in Britain at Goonhilly and Fylingdales were able to intercept and process all the messages both in Britain and on the Continent, to the great advantage of American military and business organisations.

The IT revolution

The switch to digital instead of analogue handling of signals, and the application of computing power to telecommunications constituted a technological revolution. The recording, processing and transmission of information was standardised and universalised, largely owing to the selfless generosity of many enthusiastic experts in the field who took no payment for their inventions. The microminiaturisation of circuits and transistors developed at an unprecedented rate, and is still continuing, although not quite so fast. This made not only personal and portable computers possible and increasingly affordable, but it made mobile telephones as small and light as they are likely to become, if we want to continue to hold them in our hands.

For communication purposes computers have, in the main, linked into existing, landline, telephone services (although radio links are becoming popular). Mobile phones grew out of the popularity of walkie-talkie and citizen’s band radio systems. Instead of needing the power of such radio transmitters and receivers, mobile phones were much more modest transceivers, depending upon a forest of aerials deployed across the land and connected to stations which routed and boosted signals to and from them, the whole lot being capable of connecting to the land-line telephone network as well. And this is the way  in which mobile phones and computer mail systems are starting to interact.

Although there are many large areas of the world where there are still no mobile phone systems and infrastructures, these are being colonised steadily because such phones obviate the need for much more expensive land-lines in sparsely populated or undeveloped areas. Millions have therefore been sold throughout the world.

There is an essential difference for users between the mobile and the land-line telephone – a call to a  mobile phone is a call to an individual person, rather than to a building or an organisation, and this alters the nature of the relationship or the type of message that is being sent. The facility to send brief text messages which wait to be accessed by the recipients has resulted in a snowstorm of texting in which individuals keep in contact at low expense, sometimes every few minutes. For organisational purposes, therefore, they are becoming invaluable. Protest demonstrations have been organised and co-ordinated with their aid, just as any two people are able to locate and find each other. On the other hand, advertisers have not been slow to recognise and employ this opportunity to send messages to hundreds or thousands of individuals.

The internet

In Britain and most other countries, communication by computer has been strongly encouraged by the decision of service providers to charge for messages to anywhere in the world at local call rates.  Although email systems will transmit highly complex information such as colour pictures, which take a disproportionate amount of time, the bulk of email traffic is plain text. This is treated as a simple system of numbers (the ASCII code) and is therefore extremely fast and economical. Not only brief conversational messages but also whole books can be transferred from one computer to another. They can then be printed out, if necessary, and as many times as necessary. Moreover, such emails can be despatched to many addresses at once, as we have found and utilised in the World Socialist Movement. In  consequence, we can now communicate with our comrades in Australasia or the Americas or Europe or Africa with virtually the same immediacy as we can with other socialists in Britain.

World-wide impact

Quick though socialists and many other organisations were to take advantage of the World Wide Web, industry and commerce were far quicker. Communication inside and between businesses has provided  a boost sufficiently great to have helped spur growth and delay another recession. It has also opened up an entirely new field for advertising and the sale of information.

Among the many areas affected in companies’ operations, one of the most significant has been the  facility to use cheap overseas labour without needing to move the workers. In the Indian subcontinent, for example, an increasing amount of clerical and telephone answering work is being done by English- speaking workers accepting far lower wages than capital needs to pay in the USA or Britain.

Another example of a qualitative difference occurring because of the quantitative difference of speed of communication is that factories in China now produce tailor-made wrought iron (mild steel, these days) gates and fences and garden furniture, based on drawings and dimensions sent by email, and ship   them to Britain for a fraction of the price they would cost to make here. Similar endeavours are being made by American firms to use labour in Mexico and South American countries rather than pay the higher domestic rates for the jobs. These and related developments are bringing increasing numbers of workers into a world working class, with English (American) as the lingua franca. This makes it possible for us not only to communicate with each other but to begin to organise together.

Towards democracy

One of the important facts about this burgeoning global electronic traffic is that no governmental or supra-governmental authority can prevent it or even regulate it to any considerable extent (as the struggle to prosecute paedophile rings indicates) without crippling legitimate commerce and information services. And the development of the World Wide Web means that when one electronic pathway is blocked another will be found for a message to get through. Even the eavesdropping efforts by the American government become helpless as the volume of mobile phone texting becomes a torrent of  billions. Known organisations and known individuals can always be targeted of course, but the great majority of people’s chatter is of no interest to those in power.

There is a great deal to learn in using electronic communication so that it serves the socialist movement’s democratic methods and objective. As we have already learnt to our cost, it is easy for   people to be abusive, tediously verbose, obscurely illiterate and seriously undemocratic with email. These faults, among others, at present vitiate the potential of the medium. But we are learning and this writer, for one, believes that it is essential that we do; and that we impress this upon all those workers who communicate with us. Oxford University would not have founded a Chair of Electronic Democracy if there were not a strong establishment belief that this is the medium of major communication and decision-making for the future. For the socialist movement to be left out of it because we are a hundred years old would be to agree to die of old age. As governments faced with falling turnouts at elections by disillusioned voters realise, this offers their greatest hope of renewed political interest and participation.

Such developments would direct the attention of socialists towards the propagation of socialist ideas via the internet, where an increasing proportion of the world’s thinking working class is going for its information and discussion.

As the numbers of participants grows greater for a socialist revolutionary change in the world’s dominant social system, it will be possible to chart and display its increasing strength. It will be possible to set up a worldwide proliferation of sites and forums in local languages and dialects so that workers will be able to assemble physically, if they consider it safe, in their own geographical areas. Above all, it will be possible to have world-wide discussion of the nature of socialist society; the means of achieving it in different parts of the world; the assistance needed by some areas from others; and the steps needed to establish the new social order in different parts of the world, bearing in mind the legacy left to us by this destructive and increasingly paranoid social order we know as capitalism. Speed the day!

Ron Cook

Editorial: A Century for Socialism (2004)

Editorial from the June 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Welcome to this special edition of the Socialist Standard, a commemorative issue marking one hundred years in the political life of the Socialist Party of Great Britain. When our Party was formed on 12th June 1904, in a hall in a little alley off Fetter Lane, Fleet Street, London, the founder members would rightly have viewed the possibility of our existence a century later in something of a negative light. The aim of the Socialist Party has always been ‘socialism and nothing but’ and the founder members conceived the Party as a mechanism through which socialist ideas could be rapidly spread and, potentially, through which the working class of wage and salary earners could come to political power. The subsequent creation of socialism would render the need for a socialist party redundant and so, one hundred years on, the very continued existence of the Socialist Party of Great Britain is indicative of the fact that the system of society the founder members were dedicated to overthrowing – capitalism – is still with us.

To this effect, today, ownership of the means of living (the factories, farms, offices, communication systems and so on) is still in the hands of a minority social class that can live a luxurious existence without having to work.Virtually all the useful work in society is being done by the majority, a class of people forced by economic compulsion to sell their working energies for a wage or a salary that is less in value than what they produce. It is a society characterised by extremes of wealth and poverty, by wars and chaos and by a meanness of spirit that undermines much that is decent about human beings. For the  last hundred years the Socialist Party has been waging a war of our own – against capitalism and for  socialism. We have waged a war too against all the political parties who have supported capitalism, including those that have done so while paying lip-service to socialism. The achievement of socialism has been our sole objective, because our understanding of capitalist society and its working has told us that it is a system capable of change over time but not change that can abolish its fundamental defects. Capitalism has altered over the last century, but not fundamentally so and all the problems associated with it in 1904 are still present today, with some new and unforeseen ones too.

Technological powers

In one sense, capitalism is the most successful social system that has ever existed in that the working class, through its collective efforts, has been able to develop the powers of production to previously undreamed-of heights, from putting a man on the moon to mapping the human genome. But these powers of production are wasted and distorted by a system that puts profit before needs as a matter of course and where collective effort is destabilised by competition and division. A society that can now send spaceships to Mars but which cannot adequately feed, clothe and house the world’s population despite the massive technological resources at its disposal is a society that is seriously and fundamentally flawed.

One hundred years ago the men and women who founded the Socialist Party came to a significant political conclusion, which is just as important now as it was then. This was that capitalism, through creating an interconnected world-wide division of labour and unparalleled leaps in productivity (whereby ten years in its lifespan is equal to one hundred years and more of previous  systems like feudalism), has created the conditions of potential abundance necessary for its own replacement and also a social class of wage and salary earners with the incentive to organise for this. What pioneers of the socialist movement like Marx, Engels and Morris envisaged as socialism or communism, had become a practical possibility and tinkering with an inherently defective system like capitalism a waste of time and energy in the light of it.

The founders of the Socialist Party recognised that the time was ripe for the working class to organise itself consciously and politically to democratically take control of the state machine in countries across the world, dispossessing the owning class of capitalists and socialising production on an international basis. In doing so the working class would consciously create a system where human activity would be carried out solely and directly to meet the needs and desires of the population, and where all the defining categories of capitalism had been abolished: production for profit, money, national frontiers, the class system and – as a result – the enforcer of class society itself, the state.

Reformism

At the time of our Party’s foundation other politicalactivists agreed that this type of society was possible and desirable, but disagreed about how it could be created. Due to what they took to be the backward intellectual development of the working class, they thought that  capitalism would need to be gradually transformed into socialism by a series of reform measures. They labelled the founder members of the Socialist Party and others who thought on similar lines ‘impossibilists’, people who were demanding the impossible when piecemeal and gradual reform was all that was realistic. This was the substance of our break in 1904 with our parent body, the Social Democratic Federation, and the basis for our criticism of other organisations of the time like the Independent Labour Party and the Fabian Society.

Organisations like the SDF that had a paper commitment to socialism were in practice swamped by people who were attracted by their reform programmes rather than their supposed commitment to abolishing capitalism. In these circumstances, those who viewed reforms as a stepping-stone to socialism were themselves swamped by people for whom reforms were simply an end in themselves, palliating the worst excesses of the system. The history of the Labour Party – formed out of the Labour Representation Committee in 1906 – is a case in point. More than any other organisation in Britain, the Labour Party developed as a body hoping to reform capitalism into something vaguely humane. Today, in 2004, the modern Labour Party stands as an organisation which has instead been turned by capitalism into something rather more than vaguely inhumane. From Keir Hardie and  Ramsay MacDonald onwards it has steadily drifted towards where it is today – a party which has abandoned any hope of seriously changing society for the better but which now markets itself as the most efficient managerial team for British Capitalism PLC instead.

Over decades, millions of workers the world over have invested their hopes in so-called ‘practical’, ‘possibilist’ organisations like the Labour Party, hoping against hope that they would be able to neuter the market economy when, in reality, the market economy has successfully neutered them. As such, the damage these organisations have done the socialist movement is colossal. That they turned out to be the real ‘impossibilists’ – demanding an unattainable humanised capitalism – is one of the greatest tragedies of the last century, made all the greater because it was so utterly predictable.

Vanguard politics

Unfortunately for the socialist movement, the reformist distraction has not been the only one, however. Another political tendency emerged, principally out of the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia in 1917, claiming that they had found another route to socialism. However sincere some of their number may have been at the outset – and whatever their laudable success at curtailing Russia’s part in the First World War – Lenin’s Bolsheviks proved to be a political tendency that set the clock back for socialism at least as much as reformism did. In claiming that socialism could be created by a political minority without the will and participation of the majority of the population, and through their wilful confusion of socialism with nationalisation and state-run capitalism generally (a type of opportunism also shared – over time – by the reformists), they shamelessly distorted the socialist political programme.

The Socialist Party was the first organisation in Britain (and possibly the world) to foresee the disastrous state capitalist outcome of the Bolshevik takeover but we gained no satisfaction in doing so. Even now, years after the collapse of the Kremlin’s empire, the association of socialist and communist ideas with state capitalism, minority action and political dictatorship is one of the greatest barriers to socialist understanding. Today, both reformism and Bolshevik-style vanguardism stand discredited. As ostensible attempts to create socialism they didn’t just fail, they were positively injurious to the one strategy that could have brought about a better society during the last century. The modern far left – by combining the two elements together in an unfortunate mix – have opted for the worst of both worlds and rightly are politically marginalized because of it.

Looking forwards

From our standpoint in 2004, the Socialist Party of Great Britain and our companion parties abroad in the World Socialist Movement regard our situation with both pride and sadness. Sadness because two political currents we warned against most vehemently – reformism and vanguardism – succeeded in derailing the socialist project so spectacularly, but pride because of the part we have played in keeping the alternative vision alive.

The political positions of the Socialist Party were not handed down on tablets of stone in 1904. With the Object and Declaration of Principles as our guide we have developed our own analysis and political viewpoints as the last hundred years have worn on. Occasionally we may have made mistakes, but we are confident that our record over the last century stands for itself – of propagating the case for real socialism, in exposing the promises and trickery of the reformists and the vanguardists, in opposing the senseless butchery of the working class in two world wars and countless others, and in presenting a clear analysis of capitalism in language readily understandable to those whose interest lies in socialism.

In the pages of this special issue you will read about the remarkable men and women who have been members of our Party over the last hundred years and about the political input they have had to make. Without doubt, their contribution has been an immense one and we pay public tribute to them for it, but there is a lot more work still to be done.

Capitalism today stands as a social system that bears with it little by way of a positive perspective for humanity. In the major industrial centres of the system, significant rises in productivity coupled with trade union action by workers to win a half-decent share of the gains, have led to rising purchasing power for many. But capitalism and insecurity continue to go hand in hand and in the so-called ‘Third World’ millions starve every year while literally billions now live in disgusting conditions with no hope in sight for them. Everywhere on the planet capitalism has spread its malignant influence: creating a society where everything (and everyone) can be bought and sold, where an ‘every man for himself’ culture leads to escalating brutality, crime and violence and where the social codes built up during the system’s formative years have been undermined by a rampant drive to commercialisation, fostered by a distorted and ruthless individualism. In 2004, nationalism, political gangsterism, religious fundamentalism and terrorist atrocities are the order of the day in a system that neither knows or cares where it is heading.

In the first edition of the Socialist Standard we called upon our readership to “help speed the time when we shall herald in for ourselves and for our children, a brighter, a happier, and a nobler society than any the world has yet witnessed”. One hundred years later we are still here, and make the same plea, with the same force and urgency. No matter how inconvenient it may be for our political opponents, we are not going away until our job is done.

That day will come when the working class has seen through the lies and false promises that have proved such a distraction this last one hundred years. And it will come when the supposedly incredible idea of creating a world without wars and worries, money and markets is accepted as not only necessary for the sake of humanity, but recognised for being just as realisable as other once ‘impossible’ projects are today . . . like a man on the moon,or a spaceship to Mars.

On the stump (2004)

From the June 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

A Short History of SPGB Outdoor Speaking

When the name of the Socialist Party is mentioned something that springs to mind for many is outdoor public speaking. For much of its political life the SPGB has relied on outdoor meetings for a key part of its propaganda against the capitalist system, these acting as crucial aids to recruitment alongside the Socialist Standard, leaflets, pamphlets, indoor meetings and debates. Indeed, the proportion of Party members citing outdoor meetings as the means by which they first came into contact with the Party was significant until the 1950s when this form of propaganda went into something of a decline.

During the first few years of the Party’s existence propaganda was mostly indoor, outside speaking only being undertaken in the summer months. In these early years the Party was almost entirely confined to   London and its environs, with only Manchester in the provinces holding regular meetings, and from early 1908 a year round London outdoor rota (the “Lecture List”) was established. A range of stations were used across the capital increasing to no less than 22 sites on Sundays during the summer of 1914, before the outbreak of war. Street corners, especially outside pubs, were the favourite locations. Few of these sites were used exclusively by the Party and some had been in continuous use since the 1880s.

Sunday’s best

Sunday was the most important day for outdoor meetings, although on most other nights a Party speaker would be on the stump somewhere in the capital. The pre-war Sunday meeting was an integral part of working class life. Typically the father would be evicted from the house while the Sunday meal was  prepared. Since the pubs were closed he drifted around the streets looking for anything to entertain him,  which is what the street meeting typically did. After his meal he might visit the local during the afternoon  for some liquid refreshment. Afterwards speakers would again be on hand. The typical starting times of the street meeting were therefore 11.30 a.m. and 7.30 p.m. Meetings in public parks were usually held in  the afternoon (3.30 or 4 pm), for a rather more ‘refined’ clientele taking their Sunday afternoon stroll.

Sammy Cash

The outdoor Party meeting was managed by the local branch whose ‘turf’ the site was on and the duty of host (meeting chairman) was highly competed for. In March, 1908, for example, a dispute arose over the  ‘ownership’ of the Clapham Common meeting. Both Battersea and the short-lived Clapham branch  claimed the meeting and tempers frayed so much that five Battersea members went so far as to hand in  their resignations.

The big names of the era, most notably Jack Fitzgerald and Alex Anderson – whose  main stamping grounds were Battersea and Tottenham respectively – featured prominently amongst the  speakers but there was a wide range of others, many now forgotten (as with the membership generally there was a  high degree of turnover during these years). It was by no means uncommon for a speaker to do two  ‘shifts’, though three talks in one day would have been very rare even for Anderson.

While no record exists of what exactly was said at outdoor meetings during this era it can be safely assumed from accounts of the time that the speechmaking was heavy on rhetoric, working perhaps just as much on an emotional as an intellectual level, and was most likely lengthy and littered with stock quotations from key texts on political theory and Marxian economics. The real importance of such meetings lay not just in the speech itself but in the small groups of young workers that gathered afterwards to argue points raised. In this way outdoor speaking acted as a valuable spur to working class intellectual self- development.

Harry Young

All this came to an end with the outbreak of the First World War. Within a short time outdoor meetings stopped as a result of harassment by pro-war ‘jingoes’. The last Party listing published during this period (December 1914) sarcastically noted that “Owing to various circumstances, including the peculiarly British sense of fair play of our opponents, the Party’s Lecture List is considerably curtailed this month.” The following month outdoor meetings ceased altogether.

In the summer of 1919 regular outdoor meetings resumed in London, although with a much lower level  of activity than before the war. In August of that year there were just six Sunday stations. Only four of these  proved to be of any long-term use: Clapham Common, Finsbury Park, Victoria Park, and West Green  Corner in Tottenham. During the mid-1920s these were the only locations in the capital operated by the  Party but towards the end of the decade a modest revival occurred with a few pre-war venues, such as  Prince of Wales, Harrow Road, and several new sites, such as Beresford Square, Woolwich, coming into use. It was not until after the 1929 crash though that more widespread outdoor activity returned. The early  1930s saw a multitude of sites brought into use, the most important being the Cock Hotel at East Ham,  Whipps Cross at Leyton and Brockwell Park. A peak was reached during this period in July 1935 with  twelve Sunday stations in use and a further four on a Saturday.

Interestingly, the latter part of the 1930s  saw something of a decrease in regular outdoor meetings. To some extent this was due to increasing  motor traffic, which rendered certain street locations unusable but was also due to a relative (though  temporary) shortage of outdoor speakers, this in part resulting from the introduction of more stringent  requirements for those wishing to take the platform on behalf of the Party (the introduction of the so-called ‘New Speakers Test’). At this time the Party increasingly moved its attention to propaganda in parks, the focus being on five open spaces: Brockwell Park, Clapham  Common, Finsbury Park, Hyde Park and Victoria Park.

Of these Hyde Park was king. For the SPGB the rise of Hyde Park was rapid as although meetings had  briefly been held here in pre-war days and in the late 1920s these had not always been a huge success, and so it was not until 1937 that Speakers’ Corner again entered the Party’s itinerary. Hyde Park became fertile ground and by the summer of 1939 three ‘shifts’ were operating on a Sunday.

Prolific

The most prolific speakers of this era were Bob Ambridge, the idiosyncratic Sammy Cash, Solomon Goldstein (remembered by those in the Party as a particularly able exponent of Marxian economics), Clifford Groves, Sid Rubin and the grizzled old Canadian orator Charlie Lestor – all of them hugely  capable outdoor speakers, though Tony Turner, with his deep rasping voice and thunderous delivery,  was the most remarkable of all. Turner’s greatest moment was on the day war broke out, when in Hyde  Park he took and held a crowd of ten thousand or more as he railed against the impending imperialist  slaughter.

Bob Ambridge

The outbreak of the Second World War – in contrast to 1914 – did not bring an end to outdoor  propaganda, even if for a time it was severely curtailed as a result of the ‘blackout’ and the Blitz. Until mid-war the parks continued to be the main venues, though as the war progressed street meetings  resumed their importance. A big explosion of meetings then came after the end of the war and by 1949 the SPGB was holding over a thousand outdoor meetings a year. During this period regular Sunday  meetings in London were held at:

Beresford Square, Woolwich

Clapham Common

Cock Hotel, East Ham

East Street, Walworth

Finsbury Park

Heron Court, Richmond

Hyde Park

Islip Street, Kentish Town

Regents Park

Warren Street station

West Green Corner, Tottenham

A further eight sites, including the long-lived Jolly Butchers Hill venue, were used on Saturday with  several others – such as Trebovir Road, Earl’s Court – used on week-nights. The most productive was  always Hyde Park: these meetings alone accounted for over 10 percent of the Party’s new members  during the 1940s. Most of the orators who learnt to ply their trade in the Party during the 1930s continued  to be active, Turner remaining a star turn, along with Wilmott, Dawe and a band of other speakers who  had joined in the years before the war and who brought with them a characteristic platform style distinguished by quick-wittedness, aggression and self-confidence.

An important innovation around this time was the popular weekday lunchtime meetings at Tower Hill, Finsbury Pavement and Lincoln’s Inn Fields, with the latter being perhaps the most rewarding in terms of new members. Outdoor speaking was a notable feature of the election campaigns during the immediate  post-war era too. For the 1945 Paddington election, meetings were held every night outside the Prince of  Wales, Harrow Road, and most nights at a selection of venues throughout the area, supplementing the  big indoor meetings at the Metropolitan Theatre.

But if the 1940s saw continuous and rapid expansion in the SPGB outdoor speaking scene, the 1950s  saw just as speedy a decline, especially in London, though Glasgow and some other provincial venues  bucked the trend for longer. One by one the old haunts were shut down until by the end of the decade just four Sunday venues remained in the capital: Hyde Park, East Street in Walworth, Beresford Square in Woolwich and Clapham Common. In addition two Saturday stations, Rushcroft Road in Brixton and  Castle Street, Kingston, were retained.

Steve Coleman

These last few outdoor speaking venues took a surprising time to die off and it was not until 1967 that the SPGB held its last regular street meeting in London. This left occasional meetings at Earl’s Court, the  regular weekday City meetings – such as those at Tower Hill – which lasted until 1979, and Hyde Park,  where Harry Young, Steve Coleman and others habitually mounted the Party platform on Sundays and which still sees regular if ad hoc use today.

Outside London

Outside the capital SPGB outdoor meetings have been a feature at a large number of venues in towns  and cities across the UK – with a peak in the 30s and 40s. Glasgow was a city where the Party’s outdoor  speaking activities were significant from the 1920s onwards, and they continued to flourish much later than in London, especially in The Barrows, West Regent Street, Blythswood Street and Exchange Square. Glasgow branch produced many fine outdoor orators but Alec Shaw was truly outstanding.

Other regular provincial venues included Edinburgh (where The Mound was a regular venue into the 1990s), Bristol, Birmingham, Nottingham, Sheffield, Southend and even Welwyn Garden City for a time. A number of cities in the Midlands and the North including Coventry and Bradford saw periodic SPGB  outdoor speaking activity, with many others seeing flying visits from Party speakers trying to drum-up  interest. In the North of England though, only Manchester proved to be really consistent territory for  speakers on the outdoor platform, with Baritz, Maertens and others regularly holding forth at Stevenson Square and Platt Fields.

Looking back, the reasons for the sad decline of street-corner meetings are not hard to find. It is no surprise that the start of the fall-off in these in the early 1950s, especially in London, coincides almost  exactly with the removal of petrol rationing and in one sense street meetings during and immediately  after the Second World War were a revival of a form already under sentence of death: as has been indicated they had been noticeably curtailed in favour of both indoor meetings and meetings in parks  even in the late 1930s.

The decline of park meetings though is perhaps more complex. Local authority pressure to ‘tidy up’ the open spaces may well have been one reason and the related decline of street meetings another, as  people simply got out of the habit of listening to – and interacting with – outdoor orators on a daily or  weekly basis. In terms of entertainment, competition from radio, and later television, was obviously another factor, as was – most crucially of all – the role of passive receiver of information foisted upon the working class by the entire apparatus of the modern mass media.

Keith Scholey

The "University of the Working Class" (2004)

From the June 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

Opponents of socialism have periodically attempted to undermine the plausibility of the socialist case by pointing out that some of the pioneers of the socialist movement were not people driven to become revolutionaries through an assessment of their own class interest.

Although this argument is of little real import, Engels, William Morris and even Marx have received this kind of treatment, being portrayed – rightly or wrongly – as having been brought up in ‘well-to do’ families with a privileged education to match.

This is not a charge that could ever seriously be laid at the door of the men and women who founded the Socialist Party of Great Britain. When the founder members broke away from the Social Democratic Federation in 1904 they were in most respects representative of the rank-and-file of that organisation. Unlike the SDF's figurehead, the wealthy old Etonian, Henry Hyndman, the founder members had  occupations and formal education typical of the working class of the time.  A large number were skilled manual workers, including the core of the Party's most prolific speakers and writers. Jack Fitzgerald, for instance, was a bricklayer who went on to teach others his trade, Jacomb was a printer who – up until the early 1920s – designed and laid-out the Socialist Standard , Watts was a wood carver, while Anderson was a house painter. There were others though, of whom T.A. (‘Tommy’) Jackson was the most notable example, who drifted from job to job and into and out of employment, something typically not unrelated to their uncompromising advocacy of Marxian socialism.

What made these revolutionaries extraordinary was not just their implacable opposition to the poverty and iniquity of capitalism but their attitude to knowledge and to critical analysis. They had the keenest of senses that knowledge was power – or at least potentially so. Having no university education they were largely self-taught, prime examples of what has sometimes been called the working class 'autodidactic' tradition.

Macintyre in his A Proletarian Science commented on how members of the SDF, SLP and SPGB were at the forefront of this tradition and of how – through engagement with classic texts on politics, economics, philosophy and anthropology – they searched for an understanding of the grim society around them:

“It is noticeable that the intellectual development of our working-class activists began as a process of individual discovery . . . And in which ever direction their interests lay, these autodidacts exhibited a characteristic intellectual tone: they were great respectors of fact and intellectual authority; earnest, even reverential, in their treatment of the text; and they brooked no short-cuts in the search for  knowledge. Alongside this deference to literary authority, one must put the fact that it remained their education, for they defined both the purpose and the boundaries of their intellectual exploration and the books they read assumed significance in this light.” (pp.70-71)

Not only did these autodidacts treat their own education with great seriousness and dedication, so, in the same manner, did they seek to transmit this knowledge to others. From the outset the Party spent much time in the training and education of its members, with classes on history, political philosophy and – above all – Marxian economics.

Indeed, Fitzgerald was to claim that a key element in his own expulsion from the SDF had been that he had organised economics classes that had been conducted by workingmen like himself rather than by the Federation's leadership. Fitzgerald was among a handful of early members who had attended classes on Marxian economics conducted by Marx's son-in-law, Edward Aveling, a man who had been part of an earlier ‘impossibilist’ revolt against the reformism of the SDF when the ill-fated Socialist League was founded in the 1880s. Attendance at such education classes and immersion in relevant texts was considered a vital part of the education of socialist activists, and we reproduce an example of a typical Party education syllabus after this article.

The autodidactic tradition was still visible in the SPGB long after its foundation. As the Party expanded over time so new waves of self-educated workers joined who honed their knowledge of society, together with their ability to dissect concepts and theories, in the Party's education classes. Some of these members were as good examples of the self-educated working class polymath that it is possible to find. Adolf Kohn, who was to become a mainstay of the Party as both speaker and writer until the Second World War, fed his thirst for knowledge (and that of other members) by setting up his own bookselling business, importing socialist classics from abroad that were otherwise unavailable to members, such as those published by the Charles H. Kerr company in Chicago.

Moses Baritz, from Manchester, a fearsome Party speaker and one of its most colourful characters, travelled across the world spreading the socialist message to other English-speaking countries in North America and the southern hemisphere, becoming a recognised expert on classical music, eventually broadcasting on BBC radio and writing for the Manchester Guardian.

Other autodidacts in the Party had their lifetime pursuit of knowledge immortalised by the capitalist press: Gilbert McClatchie (‘Gilmac’) had an impoverished early upbringing in Ireland before emigrating to Britain and taking a job as a book-keeper among other things, being best known for his knowledgeable historical and philosophical articles in the Socialist Standard and his writing of Party pamphlets; on his death he was recognised by the Times for his contribution to political thought. No less an autodidact was Ted Kersley, who spent part of his childhood in an orphanage and had little by way of any formal education, but became an expert art dealer, featuring in one of the finest radio broadcasts of its kind called “The Art Trade Runner”. He received the same accolade from the Times as Gilmac, though on this occasion his decades of activity as an SPGB propagandist went curiously unmentioned.

In most respects this autodidactic tradition was just as apparent among the large number of new members attracted to the Party in the ‘hungry thirties’, and then the period during and just after the Second World War, as it had been among the founder members. The ebullient tyros who joined the Party at this time were less likely to be in gainful employment than the Party's founders because of the effects of the depression, but their thirst for knowledge was no less. When not scratching around trying to eke out a living many spent their time productively elsewhere – in libraries, education classes or anywhere else that was warm, cheap and lent itself to mental stimulation. In writing of autodidact and one-time SPGB member Harold Walsby, the sociologist Peter Sheppard described this phenomenon well enough:

“Until about the middle of [the twentieth] century alternative arenas [to the universities] did exist, sometimes if perhaps briefly eclipsing the universities in brilliance. Probably the most enduring was that provided by the little nonconformist groups of the extreme Left - anarchists, dissident Marxists and others who were energetically active from about 1880 until the rise of the New Left in the 1950s, a movement that was, or soon became, firmly located in the universities. In the 1930s and 1940s, anti- Establishment politics was located in meeting-halls, in and around the outdoor speaking-grounds, and in cafes such as those of the side streets of Soho . . . A world in which brilliant, down-at-heel intellectuals and Bohemians mingled with prostitutes and petty crooks, and which fostered complex and passionate debate and nurtured polemical powers, [a climate which] sprang into being for a short but heady time”. (www.gwiep.net/site/pshwit.html)

Until the 1940s very few Party members had the opportunity to attend university (disparagingly described by some in the SPGB as capitalism’s “education factories”). Frank Evans, who had an economics degree and Hardy, who was something of a protégé of Professor Edwin Cannan at the London School of Economics before eventually becoming chief research officer for the Post Office workers’ union, were notable exceptions. A handful of members after the Second World War attended the London School of Economics and other Higher Education institutions – mainly as mature students – but from the 1960s and 70s onwards the situation began to change more noticeably. Technical progress under capitalism and the growth of productivity associated with it led to a decline in the number of unskilled and semi-skilled workers demanded by the system and a commensurate growth in the demand for workers with highly developed technical skills, such as engineers, scientists and researchers. Parallel with this went the growth of the administrative apparatus of capitalism – the civil service, local government, the health service and of course, the education system needed to produce such workers, all needing developed specialist talents but also the type of transferable skills supposedly provided by a university education.

The expansion of Higher Education necessitated by these developments led to a change in the composition of the Party’s members that was entirely reflective of the wider changes in capitalist society. Even then, those with a developed educational background have typically become socialists despite their formal education rather than because of it and many are those who claim to have learnt more of worth about society inside the SPGB than outside it.

Perhaps today, the specialisation that characterised the knowledge of earlier Party members is not as pronounced as it was in the days when the Party would wheel out a Fitzgerald, Hardy or Goldstein to lock horns with aspirant politicians or pious academics on the finer points of economic theory. Now, the knowledge of members is probably more eclectic than it was, the product of wider reading and some advancements in knowledge associated with the growth of disciplines like computer studies and

environmental science that were previously unheard of. But the underlying Marxist education of members has still been largely the product of the desire of individual men and women to make sense of the world around them, seeking out a holistic and coherent worldview which is absent from university curricula. In this, the Party, with its reliance on formal definitions, the application of logic, and its evaluation of world events over a century, still has an important part to play as a repository of knowledge, experience and analysis of capitalism. This is why, no doubt, more than one sage has commented that the SPGB has been “the university of the working class” in this respect, perhaps now – at least almost as much – as then.

DAP

Socialism on one planet (2004)

From the June 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

The science fiction writer Ken MacLeod indicated that he had once voted for the Socialist Party. So we  asked him why. The two books referred to at the end, in which he brings in the SPGB, are “The Stone Canal” and “The Cassini Division”.

I had considered myself a socialist for a dozen years before I understood what socialism was, and why on earth anyone should possibly want it. Oddly enough, that wasn’t for lack of opportunity. When I was a student in the early 1970s I took vacation work as a street-sweeper, and used to spend most of my lunchtimes in the reading room of the Greenock public library.  My first encounter with Marxist ideas had come via the International Socialists (the SWP’s more evolved ancestors) and my head was full of a notion of revolution and socialism that was much more excited about process – workers’ councils, workers’ control, general strike, insurrection – than product. Nothing quite so thrilling was on offer in that reading room, but Tribune and the Morning Star and the Socialist Standard were.   For want of anything else I devoured them all. 

When I read the Socialist Standard, however, all I could see was that it advocated a parliamentary road to socialism, and addressed itself to “the workers of this country” at that. Parliamentary socialism? You mean, like Labour? Socialism in one country? You mean, like the Communists? Nobody was there to tell me otherwise, and I didn’t read enough to learn better. The Declaration of Principles struck me as some quaint, gaslit precursor of The British Road to Socialism.

This was a stupid mistake, but hey – I was a left-wing student. What do you expect? As some wag has said: “The experience of every country has shown that the left-wing intelligentsia, solely by its own efforts, can raise itself only to a vanguardist level of consciousness.”

For me, the idea of a classless, moneyless, (etc-less) society was something for the far future, after we’d waded through centuries of workers’ states and workers’ control. These centuries didn’t seem terribly attractive, but they were a sight better than the common ruin of the contending classes, so I reckoned we’d just have to thole it until the automation came on line.

Then, in the 1980s in another library, I came across a little book called Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, edited by Rubel and Crump. At the time I (like the rest of the pack) was obsessed with ‘market’ socialism, so I wasn’t hoping for much from it. Actually, it was like finding the map. Perhaps it was because I was now a wage-slave myself, and living in a council flat, travelling to work on the Underground, working for London Electricity, and shopping at the Coop – I knew very well that reforms could ameliorate, but not abolish, that condition. For the first time I could imagine it abolished, and what an emancipation that could be. At last I understood what the SPGB was on about. At last I understood what socialism was and why anyone would actually want it on its merits, and soon; instead of as something better than a nuclear war, and eventually.

Here is what I understood that case to be. From space you can see no borders. We, and previous generations, have built up a productive capacity that is more than sufficient to feed, clothe, shelter, educate and amuse everyone on the planet. The only barrier to its use for that purpose is that it exists as capital. The only basis for its continuing existence as capital is our continuing acceptance of capitalist  and state property rights. From below, at the sharp end, in the worker’s-eye view, these look as obsolete and obscene as property rights in people. Without those rights, capital would just be machinery, that we all together already operate and improve upon every day, every minute, collectively and globally. The only way in which these rights can be permanently abolished is consciously, politically, collectively and globally, at one fell swoop. Not on the same day all over the world of course, but in the space of a few years, in one historical moment. And why not? Slavery and feudalism were in the end abolished, with a stroke of the pen followed if necessary by a stroke of the sword.

Why should we not think, then, of the abolition of capitalism? We can’t reform it out of existence. Long experience, as well as theory and common sense, tell us this.

Neither ‘socialist’ governments nor ‘communist’ regimes have ever brought society a day nearer socialism or communism. There are many reasons why not, but the basic reason is simple. Production for exchange can’t be gradually reformed into production directly for use. Nor, in a world where almost everything is produced as part of a global division of labour, can it be abolished locally in one community, or one country, or one continent. It’s all or nothing.

Closely related to that reason is another. A society of conscious and voluntary co-operation can’t be established unconsciously or unwillingly. It can’t be imposed from above or from outside or from behind our backs. Many will agree, if pressed, that the world cooperative commonwealth can be thus established eventually, but not now. In the meantime, they want something else: a society called socialism which retains wages, price, and profit but keeps them in the hands of the state and the state, they hope, in the hands of the workers, which all too often means the hands of the workers’ party, which all too often means in the hands of the correct leaders of the workers’ party. They want that, or they want steps in that direction. The cooperative commonwealth itself is, they insist, for the distant future.

Why not now? We don’t need to wait for capitalism to increase productive capacity to the point where the co-operative commonwealth is possible, because it’s already done so, and it’s already the greatest barrier to the use and expansion of the productive capacity that exists. Why then should we vote for reforming governments to manage it, or ‘progressive’ regimes to develop it further? Especially when these reforming governments and these ‘progressive’ regimes waste so much of production, and so many of us, in war and slump.

We have to make up our minds, once and for all, that we want rid of this system, for good and all. Let those who want to keep it reform it and improve it and expand it. It’s their job while it lasts. The job of those who want to end it is to give such people not a vote, not a gun, not a penny, not a person, not an inch, not an ounce of support. No political contender who is not a wage slavery abolitionist, nobody who  advocates in word and deed anything less than, and anything other than, the speedy end of this system, and the consequent emancipation of the working class, deserves another minute of our time. To everyone who claims to want such an end eventually, but advocates something other or something less in the meantime, we can say we’ve lived already a long time in that meantime, and we’re still no nearer.

All it would take to do away with this system and establish the world co-operative commonwealth is for most people in the world to agree to do it. It’s no news that most people don’t. The number who understand and want the commonwealth is tiny. The only revolutionary action worth the name is working  to increase that number. Nothing more is needed, and nothing less will do.

So, yes, I’ve understood it. I’ve even voted for it, once. And I’ve put the SPGB, and the co-operative commonwealth, in a couple of books. So why am I not in the Socialist Party? One reason is that I don’t entirely understand how non-market socialism could work. And while I agree that the Party’s conception of socialism is the same as that of Marx and Engels, I can’t really square its conception of how to get there with what seem to me their well-founded views on history and politics. But I wish it well.

Ken MacLeod