Socialist Studies

what will you say?

Hopefully, he'll ask "Will you donate your fairly valuable socialist archive material to HO at No. 52 before you all die off?"

And they'll most likely say no, hostile as they are to the SPGB.

jondwhite

I often ask 'what class struggle happens outside the party?'

Often the reply is merely workers organised economically to struggle for higher wages. Once I was answered 'none, ideally' which left me a bit dumbfounded.

WOW

jondwhite,
By all means advertise this 'summer school' if you must, but I'm perplexed as to why you think anyone on this site would be remotely interested in discussing the nature, origins or present function of this tiny sect split from the spgb many years back without you providing some more extensive background information and some political, social and/or psychological reasons to justify your very thin request? Perhaps best left to the spgb forums since the 'socialist studies' website does not provide any similar means of discussion either internal or external.

jondwhite,
Well now that's better, though we really are now in the territory of sect and religious behaviour and the results of turning some half decent analysis into dogma, perhaps in part a result of the members disconnect from the everyday experience of class struggle in it's widest sense - something you hinted at earlier. Of course that group is not in any shape or form 'a party' and seems to have shrunk to little more than an inward looking discussion circle. As I have said before in other related discussions on this site political groups often have a time limited useful function which unfortunately they fail to recognise until it is too late.

jondwhite

Twenty five years of existence formed from the biggest ever split in a hundred years from their predecessor, with some members activity going back before most here were born, around three hundred monthly meetings, both recorded and at speakers corner, a hundred quarterly journal issues, around fifteen pamphlets, all by no more than twenty people, with almost zero turnover (either joiners or leavers), claiming adherence to principles in wording over a hundred years old, hostile to all other political parties, and virtually no mention of them anywhere outside of their own press.

I had to read that out loud to my partner. Particularly that last bit made a huge impression.

Sadly, Socialist Studies may well be only a mirror image of many other small, insignificant political groups ...and for even some one-time influential political parties - i myself mourn the death of the Socialist Labor Party and for those with a Labour Party heritage, who now remembers the ILP - even the Co-operative Party outlived them.

i think there is a lot of truth in SpikeyMike's comment

As I have said before in other related discussions on this site political groups often have a time limited useful function which unfortunately they fail to recognise until it is too late.

We have all watched organisations grow moribund and wither. We all have been members of such groups that failed to blossom the way we had intended.

But if i recall Thompson's history of the IWW right, they were reduced to just 90 members in the 50s/60s but clawed their way back to half-respectable numbers because the political conditions and activities of the 60s reflected some of their core principles and was recognised as such.

Not that i hold out such hopes for Socialist Studies. But as for their principles, well, i still have the tiniest teeniest bit of optimism that the future might stumble over them and pick them up and re-focused and apply them as what occurred with the Wobblies.

We should all remember, we ourselves are growing older, frailer and younger comrades and activists are becoming less...we may suffer the same fate, and die before we see the re-emergence and resurgence of the Thin Red Line....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Studies_(1989)#Relations_with_the_Socialist_Party_of_Great_Britain

Much of the material published by Socialist Studies is highly critical, and often outright contemptuous, of the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which it refers to as the "Clapham-based Socialist Party" or the "Socialist Party of Clapham". The group variously claims that the SPGB is anarchist,[1][12] reformist,[12] capitalist,[12][19] fascist,[30] Stalinist,[31] Trotskyist,[31] undemocratic,[12] and democracy fetishist.[12] According to Socialist Studies, the Socialist Party of Great Britain colludes with the Electoral Commission to "prevent Socialists [from] carrying out political propaganda on the web", and does this because its own propaganda is not being read as widely as that of Socialist Studies.[19] Socialist Studies also claims that the SPGB has a secret de facto leadership of "godfathers",[31] who conspire to suppress socialist ideas and to destroy Socialist Studies.[19][25]

jondwhite,
I will probably kick myself for asking this but since you were so keen to go to their 'summer school' and ask such searching questions how about a report back - how many attended, who were they, what were your questions and the answers (and are they still slagging off the real spgb and 'hostile' to everyone else within the broad libcom milieu) ?