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THE UNIVERSITY of HULL Social Democratic Politics in Britain 1881

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THE UNIVERSITY of HULL Social Democratic Politics in Britain 1881 THE UNIVERSITY OF HULL Social Democratic Politics in Britain 1881-1911 The Marxism of the Social Democratic Federation being a Thesis submitted for the Degree of PhD in the University of Hull by Graham Johnson, B.A.(Hons) September 1988 PREFACE This study does not purport to be a history of the Social Democratic Federation or a history of socialist ideas in Britain. There already exists the foundations of the former in the works of Lee and Archbold and Tsuzuki; there are also numerous studies of the nature of British socialism, but there is no adequate large scale treatment of the socialism of Britain's leading exponent of Social Democracy before the First World War. 1 A perceptive and analytical article which set out to characterise the Federation's politics was included in the second volume of the Briggs and Saville Essays in 2 Labour History in 1971. The three volumes under this title became formative works in the emergent discipline of labour history. 3 Many of the themes taken up in these essays became starting points for the further study and investigation of political parties, trade unions, and the lives of labour pioneers, but little has been written which follows through the insights of Henry Collins' analysis of the marxism of the SDF. The original idea for this work emerged from a reading of Stuart Macintyre's A Proletarian Science which is a study of the British Communist Party's marxism in the years 1917 to 1933. 4 Macintyre takes seriously the ideology of the leaders of the party, particularly those working class autodidacts who he suggests dominated the party's intellectual circles at the time. He also compares their ideas, analyses and political practice ii with that of the mainstream labour establishment, which he calls 'labour socialism'. On reflection it seemed clear that most of the people and ideas analysed by Macintyre were in some form the direct descendants of the pre-1914 Social Democratic tradition, yet with the exception of Collins, no-one has treat their pronouncements with the respect shown by A Macintyre to those coming after them. At first the themes of his book suggested themselves as the key areas for a study of the SDF. It soon became apparent however, that to ask the same questions and consider the same themes was anachronistic. The dialectic for instance, although not entirely absent from the thoughts of SDF members, did not have the central place it did among later marxists. A study of historical materialism, although important, was inadequate without a consideration of the centrality of religion. Given that the organisation was the first of its kind, its emergence out of the radical environment of the 1870s, and the effects of this on their politics required study. The organisation's development and growth at a time of intense imperial competition and rivalry necessitated studying their analyses of the issues involved and their responses to imperial ideology and Government policy. Finally the absence of the revolutionary example of the Soviet Union, so important to later socialists, meant that their concept of revolution, the role of the state and their own relationship to each of these needed to be considered in a different light, as did their views on the types of reforms and political actions possible this side of the revolutionary change to which they aspired. iii The latter points are particularly important given the way historians have tended to approach the SDF with spectacles tinted by the experience of the Soviet Union and the nature of post-1917 revolutionary politics and ideology. The ideas of SDF members will be presented in the context of the decades through which they lived, and their responses related to the experiences they had to undergo. Their views may seem naive in retrospect, their actions may be construed as 'wrong' in the light of late twentieth century political knowledge, but they did not have the advantage of hindsight or the experience of bolshevism to act as a beacon. Theirs was a different world in which Lenin was a relatively insignificant, diffident character who shared the office of Harry Quelch for a short spell during his London exile, but who was largely unknown outside the offices of the Twentieth Century Press where Quelch worked as managing director. The wranglings of the Russian Social Democrats were very much offstage and likely to be regarded as the rantings of the exiled and dispossessed, patronisingly accepted because, after all, they had suffered deprivations British socialists could only imagine. More relevant were the intrigues of the German Social Democrats, but access to their debates was limited and only filtered through to the British slowly and in a piecemeal fashion, although not without important repercussions. It is to these individuals, shaped by the the British environment, isolated by the parochialism of British culture, fascinated by the international movement to whose debates they had such limited access, that we will turn as we ask iv 'What made Britain's Social Democrats tick?' It has long been known that the SDF gave particular prominence to political theory. Henry Collins made a point of this when he referred to their lack of theoretical alertness, which he considered strange in a party so committed to theoretical discipline. 5 Despite this, little emphasis has been given by historians to the nature of their political theory, and little consideration to the pronouncements and debates of their leading thinkers and analysts. Too often the SDF is written off as narrow and dogmatic, and the views of those who left the organisation for the less theoretically rigorous pastures of the Independent Labour Party, or those of the more empirical and mainstream Fabian Society, are accepted as adequate characterisations of the organisation's theory and of the inadequacies and follies of their political practice. In more modern historical works there is occasionally a willingness to concede that the SDF's position was more subtle, but there is no evidence presented to suggest why 6 this was so or in what way it was true. More often the SDF is studied as part of a process variously described as the origins, advent, emergence Or rise of the Labour Party. 7 Consequently they are studied in depth in the 1880s and then abandoned in the 1890s for the more fruitful ILP. One of the results is that historians generalise about the politics of the SDF from the experiences of the 1880s only. This adds to the picture of the SDF as limited and theoretically ill-informed. While other socialists are found adjusting to their times and trying to adapt to developments in V political theory, the poor old SDF is left trapped in the 1880s as if stranded in a broken-down time machine. A further aim of this work will be to help transport them into the 1890s and 1900s. The study finishes in the year 1911. There are several reasons for this choice of year. It marked a turning point in a number of areas, and to do full justice to the changes, themes, and theoretical debates of the years between 1911 and 1914 would have required another thesis length work. 1911 saw the important transformation of the SDF into the British Socialist Party. Although most historians have tended to to present this as merely a change of name pointing out that the leadership, the staff, and the newspaper remained substantially the same, there was nevertheless a genuine attempt at change which would have required detailed analysis in a study finishing in 1914. 1911 was also a turning point in the history of British trade unionism and industrial relations, arguably more significant in its effects on the long term history of the labour 8 movement than the events of 1889. These changes had their impact on the BSP and there was much renewed discussion and debate on the role of trade unionism, many of the new recruits to the BSP being syndicalist in inspiration. Moreover, the build up to the war and the responses to its outbreak would have required a thoroughgoing analysis of international relations and BSP 9 responses to them. The view taken here is that even if the BSP was in essence the same as the old SDF, the world inhabited by its members was changing rapidly and thus 1911 forms an appropriate place to finish a study, vi the aim of which is to characterise the politics of the SDF. The account is divided thematically. In the first chapter the roots of the SDF in the radical environment of the early 1880s are considered. This is followed by a study of what for many members was the distinguishing feature of their politics: their understanding of economic theory. The next two chapters will be concerned with the broad area of historical materialism; the first premise of a materialist position being a rejection of religion, the SDF's ambiguity in this area is the theme of the first of these chapters, the second is a study of SDF accounts of historical development and the nature of historical causation. Theories of imperialism and responses to the imperial policies of the British Government form the subject matter of the fifth chapter. There is an assessment of the importance of the 'class war' to SDF politics, and finally its understanding of the nature of the British state and theories of the transition from capitalism to socialism, along with the strategies developed to help the process along. Anyone studying the SDF cannot help but be swamped by the enormous quantity of source materials: biographies, correspondence, memoirs, pamphlets, newspapers, journals and other journalistic work produced by members, as well as the historical accounts of those who lived through the period and modern historical works.
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