The Story of the Socialist Party of Great Britain

attitude was made explicit at the outbreak of war in 1939 when, asked by a branch to reprint the 1914 anti-war manifesto, the Socialist Standard editors refused. The address had said ‘Having no quarrel with the working class of any country’, and that, said the editors, was no longer an acceptable sentiment: the Party did have a quarrel, a big one, with working people. However belligerent and intolerant the earlier members had been, their attitude never excluded sympathy for the class in which their revolt was rooted. The 1910 pronouncements on reform had held working-class interests to be paramount. But what must be kept in mind is that

The SPGB’s contribution to the political literature of the great depression was a thin white pamphlet called Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse. It dealt with the idea, spread widely in the nineteen-twenties by the Communist Party and the ILP, that the

but political groups seldom do; and the Socialist Party would be conscious eventually that correctness had given it, at least, survival.

capitalist system was nearing breakdown. Tracing the history of this belief, the pamphlet proved its fallacy and, consequently, the hopelessness of policies based upon it. Recurrent crises were among the inevitabilities of capitalism, and the system would survive them until the working class put an end to it. Read today, Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse appears as a remarkable analysis of depression politics. It had no influence simply because it was not published until 1932, when the crisis was over. In the first surge of left-wing excitement in 1929 it might have commanded attention on a large scale, but in the ’thirties it was unsaleable. The theory of collapse lost its ground because of economic recovery, not disproof. It may seem to have been less a theory than a hopeful assertion of the way things would go, but its origins were the serious attempts of nineteenth-century economists to find patterns in the recurrence of crises. The arch-prophet of the cataclysm had been H. M. Hyndman, whose Commercial Crises of the Nineteenth Century remains an important source of data which militate curiously against Hyndman’s own theories. The failure of the pamphlet as a selling item meant nothing to the Party; its value was judged by its correctness, and correct it undoubtedly was. It had been the first pamphlet on a specific question, as distinct from general principles, since Socialism and Religion, and it made plain the hardening in the Party argument. An element of frustrated anger is not hard to see in this. The road to the new society had lengthened and became overgrown sadly since 1904. The working class in many thousands had been shown its errors of thinking, but persisted in them. Very well: the working class must have the rigours of capitalism, and if the rigours were harsh — it served them right for not accepting socialism. Indeed, half-consciously the Party was now seeing the working class as its adversary: socialism was unattained not because of the capitalists but because of the obtuse, uncaring proletariat. The I am glad we live in a society enough for SU' glorious" nonsense to be freely promulgated, though obviously that is cause for rejoicing, but that what truly warms the heart is the glimpse its existence gives of the richness, variety and eccentricity that make up our extraordinary nation. The SPGB was originally a fragment of the cosmic dust resulting from the ‘ big bang of Marxism in the nineteenth century. The proliferation of socialist, utopian and millen- arian sects around the end of Victoria’s reign was largely the result of the passionate intensity with which almost every individual in them maintained that there was but one true faith and that he alone held it; the SPGB originated with a group expelled from Hyndman’s Social Democratic Federation for always been desperately poor, because advertising is a filthy capitalist habit, despite the fact tharat the time they took the decision they had only ever had one advertiser, and he was the Party member who printed the Party journal at ruinous cost to his little printing business, which he wanted to see survive solely so that he could- go on producing it for his comrades; and one member, hardly exceptional among nis fellows, ‘ would have no furniture because (he said) capitalists sent bailiffs to take such things away from working people, and so his family used orange boxes instead.’ It is not difficult to guess what this Impossibilism has led to, again ONE of the nicest things I know about Britain is that organisations by BERNARD LEVIN and again, throughout the Party’s history : a succession of atrocious purges and heresy hunts, of a mediaeval intolerance and ferocity, within the ranks of the Elect. Again and again, their best men have been thrown out for daring to suggest the tiniest variation in the interpretation of Holy Writ; whole Branches (sometimes amounting to a substantial .proportion of the entire membership, which has rarely been more than a few' hundred) have been expelled; and every time there was a vote on an expulsion, those who had voted against it were themselves forthwith expelled, followed by any who had voted against their expulsion. Until very recent times, the SPGB’s story has been largely- composed of some marvellously colourful figures; there was Moses Baritz, for instance, who, barred from a meeting of a rival organisation, ‘ climbed on the roof with a clarinet, poked it in:: a ventilator shaft, and blew piercing unbearable obbligatos into the hall until they A: him in.’ And there was Tony Turner, whom I heard speak many times, and who was certainly the greatest soapboxer I can remember (he once spoke, in Hyde Park, from early morning until late at night, without a break). The author is himself a lifelong member, though he left the Party for some years, and may well be expelled for heresy because of this book; it is v.-ritten with an htnttty