The tramway depot was built on land that had been my great-grandfather’s brickfield. Its railway-Gothic offices, irrelevantly head-and- shoulders up from the neat new terraces of houses, stood upon the duck pond. The trams themselves — the ‘light railways’ — began ceremonially in 1904. They ran on roads which still in part were leafy lanes. One route led them clanging and whining past the grey, graceful house where William Morris had lived in his youth, down to within sight of the old ferry where fugitives from the Plague had been shouted back.
This was one small town, its face changing and its ears ringing in the suburban revolution. Its population doubled in a decade, again in the next, and doubled yet again in twenty years. The long sloping road, the track from the mediaeval village to the common land by the river, became the High Street: public baths, Carnegie library, theatre of varieties; pubs and penny bazaar, a shopping centre on the fronts of the lines of old brick cottages, while the common and the farms vanished under blocks of uniform bay-windowed houses.
A dormitory suburb at the turn of the century; a working-class suburb. Not a hive of working-class resentment, however, but a respectable district mildly split between Conservatives and Liberals, and most inhabitants keenly conscious of self-improvement, of having moved along the railway line out of East London. The influence of the rich nineteenth century families was still felt, though most of them had left and their big houses stood derelict and destined for factories or flats, their domain to be commemorated only in the names of streets. When great-grandfather profited finally from the sale of his fields for town develop¬ment, he had reached the peak for which he had striven: he dropped ‘brickmaker’ and called himself ‘gentleman’.
Yet changes, even in so small a world, must bring changes of ideas too. In 1892 Chapman Cohen, a young convert from the Jewish faith to atheism, debated the free thought case with a vicar in the new Workmen’s Hall. A teacher’s accusation of civic corruption brought acrimony to the local party rivalries. The boy selling papers at the station was to be made a lord by twentieth-century politics; and in the station itself a workman’s refusal to pay the trade unions’ new Political Levy led to a test case and
judgement which affected the future of the nascent Labour movement.1
All this was close at hand, yet it was everywhere: in one’s own town, but in every other person’s town too. Fresh growth in profusion it was, on the great tree which had risen from the Industrial Revolution. The repellent twisted bole remained, but its stark uncompromising off¬shoots now became part of a complex of intergrowing stems and branches, spreading wider and rising towards the sky. Technical change: the petrol engine and the electric motor starting new industries and new amenities. Sanitary change: baths, drains, wash-houses, vaccination. Schooling for all, newspapers for all, and early announcements of soap powder with uncommon detergent properties.
Most of all, however, this was the age of social awareness. The ‘social conscience’, the remorse of the rich for what the rich had done, had been at work for a generation already. But now there was a new response, a conviction among the poor that the scheme of things which had grown and was still growing all round them could be altered con¬siderably, perhaps entirely. The conviction was quick-spreading; if not among the poorest and most degraded, then among working people who knew degradation and poverty by sight and touch.
In simple determinist language, it was ‘the system’ which pro¬duced the movement against the system: nineteenth-century capitalism ripening the seed of its own decay. Indeed, it is impossible to read the history of the last century without seeing the inevitability of this out¬come. For the age of the tramcar and the board-school was still the age of deprivation, of the Two Englands; the England through which the suburban railway ran was dingy, squalid and want-ridden. What was perhaps — there are no statistics to give precision — the most terrible and enervating of all trade depressions went on sporadically from 1873 to 1889.
Resentment and protest, suppressed or sublimated for seventy years, took developed and organized form. Many elements went to the making of a movement. The belief in the state’s powers had grown (the true significance of the Chartist movement lay in the perception by its leaders — or some of them, at any rate — of central government as a scarcely-wakened giant.) The last quarter of the nineteenth century saw the upsurge of state-consciousness, of awareness that through parliament almost anything might be attained. Its most vital aspect for rebels and reformers was the line now clearly drawn to make a new phase in every struggle. The aged Frederick Engels in 1894 put down what was growing as the great aim of a movement: ‘the conquest of political power by the proletariat as the means towards a new organization of society.’
At what point does a stream, gathering from innumerable
tributary streams and rivulets, become a river ? Which rivulet, or what gradient or crack, is the force that makes the difference, giving volume and momentum to make the insignificant the dynamic ? The origins of the socialist movement are no easier to find. True, it came from the system, was in the first and last analysis formed in the formation of capitalism in the antagonism of interests between possessors and dispossessed. Nevertheless a hundred factors, great and minute, went to the delineation of a conscious end and conscious means.
The concept of freedom for its own sake, on which the laissez-faire capitalist had ridden to power, was one. So was the doctrine of Self Help, the inspiration of the night schools and Mutual Improvement societies from which the leaders of the new trade unions sprang. Samuel Smiles may have spoken for the little bourgeoisie, but his words affirmed the hope of thousands of thoughtful working men when he proclaimed ‘that man can triumph over circumstances and subject them to his will; that knowledge is no exclusive inheritance of the rich and leisured classes but may be attained by all. . .’
Then the Owen experiments in what today would be called perhaps libertarianism, perhaps ‘progressive management’; the successful co-operative societies; knowledge of the existence in America of post-Fourier Utopian colonies, in Europe of fierce revolutionary struggles. The crushing blows at the authority of religious fundamentalism dealt by Darwin and Wallace and Lyell; the franchise, and the need to persuade (however simply) every voter that his interests lay this way or that. The whole concept of progress, of man moving forward and improving the world day by day. Humanitarianism; the new unions, examples of what education and organization could do; ethics and economics, hunger and satisfaction, the cumulation of thoughts, ideals, anger and analysis — all these helped to shape a movement.
And each of them was a product of the first hundred years of capitalism. The supreme, systematic indictment, Marx’s Capital, was written when the forces were at their strongest, yet it is common to read that Marx s work had little influence in England. Shaw’s biographer, Hesketh Pearson, relates how the young G.B.S. attended the Democratic Federation, was told that without reading Capital he had no right to discuss, went to the British Museum and read it in French, and returned to
discover that he and H.M.Hyndman were the only ones who had done so.
But the influence of Marx’s ideas was far wider than the relatively small circle of actual readers (even today, when Marx is talked and written about more than ever before, there are probably not a hundred people in Britain who have read the three volumes of Capital). In fact, Hyndman made known the theory of value when it was accessible only
in French and German, and countless adherents gained their under¬standing of it through him — later, through the written aids provided by Aveling and Kautsky.2 One of the prime concerns of the organizations founded in the name of revolution in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was to see translated and published all possible works of Marx, Engels and their associates: sufficient testimony to the influence they themselves felt to have been strongest.
The final conditioning factor, nevertheless, was the growth of the state itself to the point where it was unmistakably the seat of power in capitalism. To Matthew Arnold it was ‘the nation in its collective and corporate capacity controlling as government the full swing of its members in the name of the higher reason of all’; to the revolutionist ‘the executive committee of the ruling class’, holding the sanction for all ownership and all control. Thus the organization to change society must now be a parliamentary party, with an eventual majority and electoral mandate as its aim.
Hyndman’s Democratic Federation was the first socialist organ¬ization to exist in these terms. That is not to overlook the old Inter¬national Workingmen’s Association, in which Marx himself had been the dominant figure. It was, however, an association and not a political party as such; its aim was to foster and stabilize the body of revolution¬ary thought, and its main interest lay outside Britain. The Federation — or rather, Hyndman — was alienated from Marx by the curious half-slight with which Hyndman prefaced England For All:
‘For the ideas and much of the matter contained in Chapters II and III I am indebted to the work of a great thinker and original writer, which will, I trust, shortly be made accessible to the majority of my countrymen. ’3
In other respects, too, the Democratic Federation’s start in 1881 was unfortunate. Almost inevitably, it drew strong but immensely varied support. For all Hyndman’s concern with Marxism, the member¬ship contained the conflicting outlooks of freethinkers, single-taxers (Progress and Poverty was published only the year before), militant working men and well-to-do radicals — among the latter Shaw, Frank Harris, William Morris, Walter Crane, William Archer and Annie Besant. After many dissensions Morris broke away to form his Socialist League, which ran for six years before — despite the support of Engels, Eleanor Marx and her husband Aveling, and other notables of the international movement — it collapsed to die unnoticed.
Morris set forth his vision of socialism in News From Nowhere. To see it as a cloudy utopia is to ignore its relation to socialist thought. It was a vision, of course, but it included a great deal of what all
socialists believed they would bring to actuality in the not-distant future. The moneyless society was clearly envisaged, was socialism logically considered: so was the society without government — Engels had said the state would ‘wither away’, Saint-Simon eighty years before had coined ‘administration of things’. Indeed, the fatal weakness of the League was the repugnance it showed for the idea of political power — all too quickly, it dissolved in the hands of anarchists.
The medieval yearning of News From Nowhere did not represent only Morris’s enthusiasm, but was a half-explicit part of the great vision of a new society. Production for use had a precedent in the Middle Ages that was readily pointed out. Medieval workmanship remaining in old churches and old furniture provided the standard against which nineteenth-century ugliness was judged. In one way and another this thought was present in almost all movements of reaction or protest against industrial society, from Gothicism onwards. For the socialist, the enslavement of the working class had begun with land enclosure; the common was stolen from the goose, and the revolution would restore the common and the way of life that had surrounded it. Even the celebration of May Day as rebels’ day alluded heavily to the thought of a golden age of uncommercial revelry.
While the League rose and fell, the Democratic Federation became the Social Democratic Federation and regrouped its forces. It joined with and largely took over the policies of the Labour Emancipation League, and it was from this point that considerations of expediency were posed, more and more often, against those of socialism. The new programme was a dual one. It aimed still at ‘The Establishment of a Free Condition of Society based on the Principles of Political Equality, with Equal Social Rights for All, and the Complete Emancipation of Labour’, and simultaneously a series of ‘measures called for to palliate the evils
of our existing society . . . for immediate adoption’.
Social revolution or social reform ? Alarmed by the phrases about complete emancipation and a free condition, the Liberal-Radical support dropped away sharply. It would have been hard for those people to learn that the phrases had been made hollow, or to foresee that with¬in a year or two they would have, unsolicited, the support of the SDF.
For the new society automatically became the long-term objective, and ‘something for now’ the short-term one. The immediate demands, because they were immediate, required attention all the time not merely in propaganda but in tactics too, and the Federation became prepared to ally itself anywhere, anyhow, for its temporary ends.
Nevertheless, the hard core of revolutionary socialists remained in the SDF. Its stated object was still the overthrow of capitalism, and
the new society was still talked over at its meetings. That could not be said for any of the other organizations professing socialism that had come into being by the nineties. The Fabian Society was the ultimate association of the well-to-do, committed entirely to beneficent reform; the Independent Labour Party concerned to secure trade union repre¬sentation and, again, reform the system. The fundamental issue was the class struggle. While the Fabians and the ILP denied it,4 its prosecution remained the vital principle of the SDF, and even the scurviest expedient was seen in terms of possible gain by the working class from the masters.
It should be understood that these movements were still minor¬ities. The SDF had twenty thousand members in the nineties; only one person in several hundreds of the population. There was coherent organ¬ization, but it was not without the need for secrecy. Men could and did lose their jobs if their socialism leaked out. In my great-grandfather’s growing town the brushmaker who hung the SDF’s Justice in his window lost his custom, partly from malice and partly from fear that through the door lay a monstrous, red-eyed revolutionist.
On such conditions, the Social Democratic Federation remained more or less united for several years. By the end of the century, however, a new and serious division had appeared. With the growth of the ILP and the approach to the formation in 1900 of the Labour Representation Committee, the Federation had been drawn farther still from the funda¬mentals of socialism. The prospect of unity among the various organ¬izations was continually raised, and here again the SDF hinted at willing¬ness to sacrifice the independent principles it still held. Hyndman and th( other leaders were eager for unity and for broadening the Federation’s outlook to include all ‘sympathizers who were against social injustice’. The report in the Labour Annual of the 1897 SDF Conference refers to ‘an informal conference . . . between several members of the SDF and ILP, and certain recommendations for amalgamation drawn up for submission to the two Executives’.
Hyndman himself was an autocrat in the SDF. The quarrel in 1884 with Morris had involved the question of personal domination, and his contributions to discussions in The Social Democrat (the Federation’s ‘theoretical’ magazine — Justice was the propagandist paper) suggest patronage, even megalomania. Though Marx’s epithet ‘arch-Conservative’ was hardly fair, since Hyndman contributed a good deal to socialist theory in The Evolution of Revolution and the attack on orthodox economics which was published in The Economics of Socialism, there is no doubt that under his influence the organization moved increasingly along paths of compromise and away from the ideal of the new society.
By 1902 a small, determined body of dissidents was pressing for
A return to simple socialist teaching, to independent political action based on class-consciousness and the excision of reformism. Quelch, the editor of Justice, was quick to call this group ‘Impossibilists’, but they continued to gain ground and press their case in the correspondence columns of Justice. There were two main groups, one in London and the other in Scotland.5 The leader of the London faction was a young member named Jack Fitzgerald, and in 1903 he was corresponding with the Scottish group with a view to presenting the ‘Impossibilist’ case at the next SDF Conference when the Scots announced that they had acted on their own account. They had broken away from the SDF and formed the Socialist Labour Party, in imitation of the American party of the same name.
By his own account in 1905, Fitzgerald and the other dissidents in England might easily have joined the new party. However, there was a natural resentment at not being consulted: ‘those who formed the SLP had not kept faith’. A member named McGregor wrote alleging double dealings and undemocratic practices in the new party, and Fitzgerald and the others decided to continue their campaign to put the SDF straight. There was another factor. For obvious reasons the belief in the power of the English parliament was least strong in Scotland, and the SLP followed its American forebear in leaning heavily towards industrial unionism as the means to social revolution. The English socialists, though they were anything but certain of the role trade unions might play in the assault on capitalism, were conditioned to see political power as supreme.
There was, of course, the question of Fitzgerald himself. The initiative in the ‘Impossibilist’ group had been his. He had conducted classes to teach the economics of revolution. Though his political theory condemned all leadership, he had a band of devoted followers. The picture of him that emerges from reminiscences and minute-books is of a dynamic, relentless man, to whom superior knowledge was a bludgeon. He was; and remained until his death — the king-pin of the Impossibilists. The formation of a party before he was ready meant the snatching- away of the initiative, and it is hard to believe that he was prepared then to walk in someone else’s shadow, even in pursuit of political truth.
The controversy within the SDF was brought to a head at the 1904 conference at Burnley. The critics had gone on trying to convert others to their view. There had been some expulsions in London, and impatient declarations by Hyndman, Quelch and Lee. On the first day of the conference there was warm discussion of the ‘Impossibilist’ proposal, and the second day had barely opened when Herbert Burrows, an Executive member, sought urgency to move that the critics of
Federation policy be called upon to apologize and pledge themselves to criticize no more. The motion was carried; six members were asked to apologize then and there, and all refused. Finally two of them, Fitzgerald and H.J.Hawkins, were summarily expelled and left the conference. Making the most of its advantage, the Executive asked for and was granted power for the next three years to expel members or branches for failing to toe the Federation line.
That was far from the end of the matter. The expelled members had both been candidates for election to the next year’s Executive Committee, and there were grounds for thinking that the conference delegation had been partially arranged to conceal the true balance of opinion in the SDF. Three weeks later a meeting of London members to discuss the expulsions was held at Shoreditch Town Hall, and Jack Kent,6 a former member of the Executive who was in the confidence of Hyndman and Quelch, gave an account of tea-table plans to manipulate the conference. Hours of angry discussion followed until a vote was taken. The meeting supported the expulsions by 119 to 83.
Conscious of having gained a moral victory, the critics now formed a Protest Committee and issued a leaflet setting forth fully their disagreements with SDF policy. It was signed by 88 members and ex¬-members, and demanded a political party pledged to socialism alone, to the realization of the great vision of the moneyless society. The class war must be the guiding principle, and compromise, either by alliance or by demands for the reform of capitalism, was unthinkable. No less important was the re-framing of the organization itself to keep power out of the hands of elites and cliques, and vest it in the entire membership.
Within the SDF the cause was lost, and only more expulsions followed. On 15 May a meeting of the Protest Committee’s supporters was held at Battersea, and the decision was made. A new party should be formed, entirely independent, based on clear-cut principles and devoted to the establishment of socialism. A ‘Provisional Committee’ was charged with making arrangements for its formal inception. On Sunday afternoon, 12 June 1904, the Inaugural Meeting was held in the Printers’ Hall, Bartlett’s Passage, off Fetter Lane, Fleet Street. The Socialist Party of Great Britain was founded.
In the same summer, the trams began to run.
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