If these were difficult years, more were to come. From 1955 to 1965 the Party struggled: not now with opponents or renegades, but with diminishing returns in a world where old beliefs disintegrated and there was no desire for anything to take their place. The problem was to be not securing a hearing in some clamour, but the silence. If adjust¬ments might have been made, the three years’ controversy had taken away the possibility. The SPGB emerged from its conflict convinced as never before that it must not only hold to its Principles, but resist the suggestion that anything was or could be different. Indeed, it had not done with controversy; but the one which was to arise next came from a member’s conviction that the key to progress was the prognostication of greater terrors to come from the capitalist system.
Meanwhile, it had lost members. From the peak of 1,100 reached in 1949 the number had fallen to the six hundreds by the end of 1955. The people who had flocked in during the war and its aftermath quickly dropped away. Besides the relatively small number who resigned in frank disagreement, many more left in the years of content ion. The great majority were ‘lapsed’ — written off for unpaid subscriptions — which meant, in effect, that all contact had been lost. It was often claimed that they were driven out by despair at the havoc the dissidents caused (the dissidents having, of course, an alternative version of their own). The likelihood for very many is that they had joined in a flush of wartime and post-war enthusiasm, and it simply had not lasted, But there must have been many, too, who could not reconcile the beliefs they had professed with what was happening in the nineteen- fifties.
For — and this underlay in a large measure the search for new images of socialism — the world since the war had not turned out as the Party had said it would. It had not turned out as anybody thought. Not only had the great depression not come and full employment been maintained, but the lives of the mass people had been in many ways remarkably altered. Real wages had risen steadily, supplemented throughout industry as a whole by regular overtime and bonus earnings, there were more people employed than ever before, and every other household was brought the income of not one person but two.
The commonplace sights of the poverty-ridden years before 1939 had vanished. A whole new generation had never seen a dole queue, could not imagine demoralized men sitting playing cards on town pavements. But, more significantly still, the half-starved and ragged children who were the most common and most potent symbols of dereliction had gone. Was it really true that, not twenty years before, one had seen children without shoes, children misshapen by rickets, eight-year-olds grotesque in voluminous cut-down adult clothes, in one’s own town ? The streets, the rows of little grey-brick terrace houses honeycombing every city and suburb, had taken on different appear¬ances. Hardly anywhere was there the nakedness of utter destitution — uncurtained windows and unshaded lights helplessly exposing unfurn¬ished rooms with people in them; instead, there were hints of the suburban and ‘contemporary’ everywhere.
But it was not just the disappearance of the awfulness of poverty. What gave the greatest sense of change, of a departure from all that was taken for granted in the past, was the diffusion of former luxuries. By the middle nineteen-fifties not only television sets but electric washing-machines, refrigerators, radiograms and cars were virtually part of working-class life. The working man’s home had become, for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, a pleasant place. Before the war, carpets and decent furniture belonged only to people with jobs, and good ones at that. (I recall in 1938 an appalling, crowded junk-shop in Bethnal Green, with the legend on the window: ‘You Find the Girl, We’ll Supply the Home’.)
Evans had argued that the new living standards were breaking clown social inequalities. In fact, the apparent inroads caused only a re-alignment and new definitions of superior and inferior groupings, but in the consumer boom of the ’fifties it looked as if barriers were being broken down. In the past a visit to a theatre or a meal in a restaurant bad been a rare treat: hundreds of thousands had never experienced cither in their lives. Now, such things were increasingly commonplace. Holidays, too: the holiday camps, the cheap tours abroad, were encroachments on a domain which had belonged almost exclusively to the well-to-do.
Some idea of the change can be gained from copies of socialist papers from bygone years, in their commentaries on the privileges of the rich. For instance, in 1913 F. C. Watts had written a front-pager for the Socialist Standard on the road-traffic problem: ‘The Pace That Kills’.
The article was an indictment of motor-cars, and it viewed them simply as the latest style in gilded carriages for the wealthy to use without regard for the safety of social inferiors:
‘Besides being the capitalist’s instrument of profit, the motor is now his chief toy — or at least it runs his “blonde” or his “brune” very close for pride of place in that connection — and to the arrogance engend¬ered by the possession of the most powerful and speedy thing on the road is added the arrogance of wealth and class. ’
It would have been impossible to conceive of, forty years later, small back streets lined with cars, and city traffic able to go no faster than the horse traffic of 1913 through sheer congestion.
Had the Party felt itself able to recognize what was happening, and attempt to deal with it on its own terms, it is unlikely that so many of its members would have felt perplexed and despondent in the nineteen fifties. If there had been hopes of flexibility, the controversies killed them. Urged by Turner to discard the standpoint of exploited class, by Evans to become identified with ‘society’s incipient socialism’, the members dug in their heels. Capitalism was incapable of allowing im¬provement. Nothing had altered, nothing was going to alter until the revolution came. As for full employment, it could not last much longer. Some maintained even that conditions, despite appearances, had worsened. The theory, attributed without complete justification to Marx, of ‘increasing misery’ (Evans called it ‘Communist claptrap’) was held to be a law of capitalism. The reasonable explanation given by Marx was of poverty as a relative situation:
‘A house may be large or small; so long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But let a palace arise beside the little house, and it now shrinks from a little house to a hut. ’
This was conveyed in the Socialist Standard in the nineteen- fifties. Though wages had increased, the mass of values produced had increased still more; thus, the workers’ share of the total product had decreased, and tended to go on doing so all the time. Poverty was the shrinking relative proportion — however great it might be in itself — of the growing volume of wealth produced.
For some this argument did not go far enough, however. A section of the Party was prepared to assert that, in any terms, the con¬dition of the working class had worsened, and the idea that there had been improvement was an opiate myth put out by the capitalist class and the major political parties. Harry Young stated this case in a Forum article called ‘Are the Workers Better Off ?’:
‘Every one of these so-called “improvements” of the workers is an investment by the capitalists to increase workers’ efficiency. So far from making their lives easier they make them work harder than ever before — for less . . .
The patent medicine advertisements show that occupational diseases like indigestion, constipation, ‘tiredness’, influenza and cancer are universal and increasing . . .
The holidays are paid for, to recreate the exhausted worker for more work for the employer. The so-called education, for the great majority, is training for paid work.
The State distribution of milk to the children of the workers is the clearest evidence that their parents have neither the means nor opportunity of supplying their own offspring with the greatest need regularly themselves. Workers’ children today are larger and heavier than their grandfathers were. So are cattle and sheep, pigs, eggs and tomatoes; and for the same reason — they are more valuable that way. The workers DO live longer lives today of— more years of grinding poverty. ’
In a tactful response, Hardy called this ‘overstatement to the point of being more wrong than right’ and gently chided it with a varia¬tion on a verse of W.S.Gilbert’s:
Is Death a boon ?
If so it must befall
That Death whene ’er he call
Can’t call too soon !
The matter raised was of importance to the socialist movement. Young contended that for working-class conditions to have improved was fatal to the socialist cause. It was a point which Turner, defending the thesis that ideas alone cause change, had put to the Executive Committee: did the Party actually rely on bad conditions for making racialists of people ? The Executive replied that it was not so, that socialist propaganda did not depend on misery. Nevertheless, there were undoubtedly many members who were of that frame of mind. Articles in the Standard showed it; selecting an evil, describing it at its worst, and reiterating that this and more like it were in store for the working class while capitalism lasted. It cannot have occurred to the writers that they were doing the gravest disservice to the Party. For the good socialist analysis of former years they were substituting dogged assertion; for science, something not far removed from sympathetic magic in which the incantation hoped to produce the fact.
In fact, changed social conditions had not missed the members’ own circumstances or those of the Party. Even the unemployables had work. Old James, the man who had made a lifetime’s study of the public assistance system, found a job when he was sixty (and a few years later complained to me that his neighbour, out of work six months, was ‘a parasite on the community’). The surviving lunch-hour meeting places
became uncertain because few members were free now to fetch plat¬forms and reserve places in the daytime — in the past there had been any number of unemployed men at the ready. In 1954 two companion party members came on a visit from America. More exchange visits, even representation at one another’s conferences, followed. The trips were made at the members’ own expense; if it was true that only a few could afford these costly journeys, it still marked an astonishing departure from the situation of pre-war days.
But the chronic, depressing problem was the lack of any public response. The difficulty was shared by every radical organization — most of all those which talked of socialism. The Labour government had fallen almost as cataclysmically as it had come; the Labour leader, Gaitskell, was in 1957 to declare its traditional programme ‘a vote-loser’ and the old policies of the Socialist International ‘neither relevant nor practical today’. The ILP, its representation in Parliament gone, had lost most of its remaining leader-figures one after another to the Labour Party (indeed, one major function of the left minorities appeared to have been simply the training of leaders for Labour). The Common Wealth organization had become a tiny sect, and the other little bodies which had swelled the militant chorus against the injustices of capitalism were in obscurity.
Curiously enough, the SPGB avoided playing on what might have seemed the natural theme, the hydrogen bomb. The radical groups had universally grasped the coat-tails of the ban-the-bomb movement, and the Party was sensibly critical of the kinds of support it found acceptable. More than this, however, it would not concur that the bomb men¬aced the future of the human race. A front-page article by Coster in the Standard pointed out that the world could be devastated just as well by non-nuclear weapons, as H. G. Wells had envisaged in Things to Come twenty years before; the problem was war, not its potential tools. In another article called ‘Should We Despair ? ’ McClatchie argued that destruction on such a scale could not be envisaged by the capitalist class themselves.
The kind of image some members wanted was indicated when in 1953 the turbulent Lawler brought forward what he claimed was proof that, as a law of capitalism, crises and wars become progressively worse. Here was an argument for socialism based on the demonstrated certainty of horrors to come; if the post-war depression was a long time starting, it would make up for the delay by exceeding in unemployment and desti¬tution any previous crisis. A number of the Party accepted the idea with alacrity, and it was not challenged except in private argument until Lawler confronted the Editorial Committee of the Standard with it. Would they or would they not, he asked, publish the statement that wars
and crises grew worse, and be committed to it as an item of Party policy ?
Ten years earlier there might have been no argument. The Editorial Committee itself had predicted the great depression to come, and the assertion of worsening results of the ‘contradictions of capitalism’ had often been made by writers in the Standard (as it had been in the 1945 Election Address). However, the failure of their own prediction had made the editors wary. Hardy pointed out the difficulties connected with the question. What were the standards of judgement to be, for instance ? In wars, the numbers of deaths were not related solely to the scope and intensity of the fighting: hundreds of thousands who had died from wounds in nineteenth-century wars would have been saved by modern medical attention. As for crises, their history and the history of economists’ theories about them — including those of Marx and Engels — showed that, despite everything the Party had said in the past, they were unpredictable.
Lawler battled on. He circularized his case to the branches, and buttonholed members in the street to pour out evidences of the growth of disaster under capitalism. He chased Hardy everywhere. One of his rather extraordinary tactics was, in the middle of an argument as to the duration of trade cycles, to challenge his opponent to some test of physical prowess — usually a race. He tried Turner once, outside the Conference hall: ‘I’ll race you round Red Lion Square’, he bawled.
Turner, twenty years older, superbly fit and full of vitality, won hand¬somely and was sitting in his car convulsed with laughter while Lawler panted on to the finish. He tried Hardy too: near midnight, he demanded that their point be settled by a race round Clapham Common, but Hardy, thirty years older, sedate and greying, would have nothing to do with it.
Unable to make headway, Lawler left the Party. The Turner con¬troversy over, the catastrophic argument was pursued by the Birmingham branch. In 1956 they brought to the Party Conference a resolution which proposed that wars and crises must grow worse as capitalism continued. Though it was rejected by a large majority, the discussion made clear that a considerable section of the Party was in sympathy with the under¬lying idea. The delegates accepted the facts and figures disproving the specific contention, but the majority of those who spoke affirmed belief in a tendency for things to worsen. Sooner or later, they all said, the working class would find itself faced with ‘the realities of capitalism’.
What the controversy emphasized was the Party members’ con¬sciousness of the lack of a point of departure. Lawler had said repeatedly: If we can’t prove that wars and slumps will get worse, where’s the case for socialism ? Where’s the point ?’ If assertions about worsening
conditions were not supportable, the kernel of the socialist case had always been the existence of miseries directly attributable to the capitalist system. Socialism dealt first and foremost with material interests capitalism had brought want and insecurity to millions, socialism would mean (as Wilmott said ironically) two dinners on every one plate. A decade, or sixteen years if the war were included, undisturbed by depression and living standards generally rising had been thought impossible in the socialist conception of capitalism. If the members could explain it, they had still to find a way to deal with it.
The decline in membership and activity had brought financial problems to the Party. Its expenditure rose sharply when in 1951 it left Rugby Chambers for Clapham. The premises it took as its Head Office, at 52 Clapham High Street, comprised a shop with three floors above it. The shop itself was a long, high room, able to accommodate not only the Executive Committee meetings but seventy or eighty people at lectures, without including the balcony created by the removal of a wall. There was a canteen, and room for offices and committees in plenty.
The Party was still on the crest of its wave in 1951, and the expectation had been that growth would continue and the Clapham shop become an industrious centre of socialist activity.
But it had been bought, not rented (the Conference was obliged to affirm that year that in its opinion no socialist principle was violated by owning or sub-letting). And as controversy and shrinkage set in, the upkeep of the building steadily drained the Party’s waning income. The rates and the bills for electricity demanded large sums. There were the continual requirements of maintenance, with fresh things always arising. The big meeting-room was never warm in winter, and successive attempt to solve the problem used money to little or no purpose. By 1955 expenditure was much in excess of income, and there seemed little that could be done about it.
The Party’s income was made up by members’ dues, collections at meetings, donations, and any profit from the sales of literature. Each member paid sixpence a week (until 1953 it was only threepence); two- thirds of this went to the Head Office. Had every one of, say, seven hundred members paid his dues regularly the income would have been only six hundred pounds a year from this source, but in fact more than a third was never obtained. A large proportion of every branch’s membership was inactive, and the dues were rarely paid by numbers on the books. The donations came chiefly either as gifts of surplus funds by branches, or were sent by sympathizers and members (sometimes as a conscience- salve for non-participation otherwise in the Party’s affairs).
As the membership dropped, then, so did the income. The sales of
the Socialist Standard were fast dropping, too. Here again there was
no income other than that produced by actual purchases. Other minority papers had special devices for making good the inevitable financial losses. The ILP controlled a printing works, bought in its more prosperous times, which now subsidized the party paper. The editor of another journal wrote to his well-to-do subscribers each year asking them for specific amounts to meet his estimate of the loss. The Standard, except in its good years in the ’thirties, always subtracted from the Party’s general fund. By 1955 it was taking about £250 a year, without the varying sums spent on advertizing it.
The Party was saved from an extreme predicament (one section of the membership saw nothing else but to sell the newly-acquired Head Office) by old Mrs Hollingshead. I went to see her in Edinburgh, and told her we needed several hundred pounds to pay the bills: she gave a thousand. Agnes Hollingshead was one of the most remarkable of people. At this time, she was ninety-two. She had run a commercial college in Calgary for several years, came to Britain in the nineteen-thirties and set up again in Edinburgh. After her husband’s death early in the war her sole wish became to amass a small fortune and leave it to the Party. She continued working until she died — her only concession to age was to give up classes and take individual pupils instead. On the day I arrived she was taking a girl of seventeen or so, dictating shorthand and correct¬ing exercises with briskness and authority.
Besides having the school, she let out the rooms in her house to families: they paid only modest rents, but reading the Socialist Standard was a condition of tenancy. Her teaching-room was a huge room at the front of the house, and she lived in the kitchen at the back with a cat named Karl Marx. A tiny, dignified woman, she had an indomitable zest for living. She attributed her age and her fine teeth to ‘plain living and high thinking’ and to vegetarianism, and confided to me that she was worried by shortness of breath when she walked up the steep hill by her house: ‘I’ll go to the man at the nature-cure clinic,’ she said, ‘because it isn’t natural to be puffing like that.’ She died at ninety-six, and left nearly four thousand pounds to the SPGB.
The Standard was not in danger of extinction, but it was made solvent once more by the gift. To reduce the deficit its price had been raised from fourpence to sixpence, and a shoddy-looking newsprint taken into use. The real problem, however, was the falling circulation. Between three and four thousand were being printed of each issue, and the Executive Committee reviewed the position every month before ordering. Outdoor meetings no longer provided a natural avenue of sale, and the numbers were sustained only by groups of members who devoted almost
all their spare time to selling the paper at front doors. Here again was the difficulty to which the Party could find no answer. The days of meeting over, it was said that the future of socialist propaganda lay in the printed word now: but how were people to be brought to it ?
The Party still contested elections whenever it could afford to do so. There was a strong faction which opposed these repeated efforts as being wholesale waste of the money the Party desperately needed; experience and necessity had brought down the expense of a campaign sub¬stantially since 1945, but each candidature still cost about five hundred pounds. Nevertheless, there was always a majority at Conferences to carry the motion that the SPGB should contest the next General Election. In 1950 there were two candidates — McClatchie at Paddington North, and Young at East Ham South. The vote at Paddington diminished even further to 192, and the East Ham candidate won 256.
One more try was made at Paddington in December 1953, when the Member of Parliament for the constituency resigned. The Party candidate this time was Waters. From the point of view of drawing attention to the Party, this campaign was the most successful of all. The by- election had been staged in somewhat dramatic circumstances, and the seat was a marginal one. What took the newspapers’ fancy was the entry into this tight contest of a candidate who asked people not to vote for him unless they understood socialism. Under the heading ‘Sir Galahad joins in a political joust’ the Daily Mail described Waters as ‘stepping down from his red London bus to ride a dialectical white horse’ The Daily Herald wrote: ‘A MYSTERY OF THE BY-ELECTION IS - what goes on behind the billposted windows of No. 63, Elgin-avenue ? ' And the Express described at length, with some amazement, the crowded Metropolitan Theatre meeting and the performance of Turner who could, it seemed, answer every conceivable question.
But Waters got only 242 votes, and there was not another Party candidate until 1959. It would be hard to assess the true value of the votes cast for the SPGB in these elections. Certainly there was always immense interest in its meetings at Paddington — possibly word had gone round that its speakers at any rate were great stuff: consistently, they drew bigger audiences than the candidates for whom the thousand voted. It is certain also that some part of each handful of votes came from people who had voted incorrectly, or despite all the Party’s insistence had not grasped that the Socialist Party was not the Labour Party. Likewise, sad though it is in a democracy, there are always frivolous voters (a well-known professional footballer said to me once: ‘I vote Conservative because my mate votes Labour — but if I say I’ll be Labour then he votes Conservative instead.’) On the other hand, any
minority remains a discouraging prospect even to its sympathizers, and one may surmise that many who were drawn to the socialist case never¬theless voted, as a matter of pragmatism, for the apparent lesser of capitalist evils. The simplest view of the Paddington campaigns is the one which the Party itself took, after 1945: that the votes conveyed nothing at all, and the SPGB was only doing what it must.
Comments