The figure most symbolic of the SPGB in its halcyon years, in all its arrogance and hostility against the system, was Clifford Groves. For ten years he was its General Secretary and its most merciless debater the kindly side of his nature as a man was relegated when he faced the world for the Party.
In the late nineteen-forties he was taken, not suddenly but by a slow and dreadful process, by a mysterious illness. It proved to be a disease of the brain. He did not die for another ten years; half-blind, holding hard to consciousness, he continued to come to every Party function. He denied, indeed, that he was sick. To enquirers he would bawl: ‘You think I’m ill, don’t you ? I’m not: I’m fine. I feel fine. No¬thing the matter with me.’ In those years, as socialism struggled to retain its identity, the members watched Groves sadly. Falling headlong as he walked and rising to announce that he was fine, shouting assertions which were no longer reasoned convictions but part of his personality the world’s first socialist candidate, a dozen years that seemed an age before.
What became most patent, as the nineteen-fifties passed, was the change in the Party itself. Its own teaching that all were the products of a social environment which altered was being exemplified: the knowledge hungry, class-conscious working man who represented socialism was now almost extinguished as a social type. The incident and drama of meetings had gone, and the speakers too. The Party’s classes in socialist education had died out because no-one attended them. They had been, it is true, largely associated with members’ desire to become speakers; but branch-room lectures too had lost their place.
There was a great deal of inward-turning. After the Turner controversy ended in 1955 an attempt was made to preserve Forum as a theoretical and educational journal for the membership. It continued for another two years; Coster contributed a series of ten articles on ‘Marxism and Literature’, Wilmott some shorter series on economics and Marxist theory. What the membership as a whole wanted was to be rid of Forum, however. It was ended eventually because it ran at a loss (the condition of its existence from the outset had been that it did not
consume Party funds). But underlying that was a certainty on many members’ part that this kind of thing meant the chasing of intellectual will-o’-the-wisps, and trouble for the Party.
Small groups and individual members repeatedly, but half¬heartedly, raised questions as to whether the SPGB should not do . . . what ? In the second half of the nineteen-fifties, radical movements were taking overtly non-political forms in which people gathered round a particular sentiment or protest. Apart from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament there were the Anti-Apartheid and Colonial Freedom movements, and tenants’ and consumers’ associations. Though these were obviously liberal and left-wing in character, their strength was that they attracted for single objectives numbers of people who would not ordinarily have joined political parties. It was quite widely prophesied that this was the form agitation would take in future, making left-wing politics obsolete.
Thus, one branch pressed the party to show sympathy for the Movement for Colonial Freedom. Another brought up the matter of 1910, the argument over social reform, to see if some door had not been left open. There were members who thought the SPGB could not afford to take no notice of the Nuclear Disarmament campaign. And a member named Mays argued a case about the Rent Act: asking if it were really true, as the Party contended, that rents were of no consequence in the working class. All these were rebuffed with little or no discussion. The obduracy was not merely the Party’s traditional resistance to reform-ist suggestions. It felt itself under pressure as perhaps it had never been before: weakened numerically, assailed and asked to compromise from within. To give way at any point might mean complete surrender.
The largest and most vigorous branch of the Party was at Hackney in East London. It had a strong body of younger members, preoccupied with the phenomena of an altered social environment. Possibly change was more palpable in East London. Suburbia had not altered much in twenty-five years, but the teeming working-class areas backed upon by the railway line from Liverpool Street were transformed month by month. The East Londoners had grown up in districts dominated by squalid housing and the direst poverty, then found themselves in the world of high-rise flats and electric amenities; but where traditions of working-class radicalism as well as working-class culture remained.
They came to discussions and lectures on the psychological as well as the economic impact of modern times, and sought continually to assess assumptions and attitudes. Apart from the routine weekly meetings in a room in the Town Hall members were together almost illicitly. Daily too: some found their way into Bill Read’s cafe, where
Bill himself laid down contention to all the customers in his great sandpaper voice. They sat arguing over Existentialism and Galbraith’s Affluent Society in Wilmott’s flat, sitting by the windows looking into the horse-chestnut foliage of Victoria Park while they talked. A dozen met every week in Freddie James’s house in a condemned street, the buildings still inhabited but shored-up awaiting demolition (‘the street of absolute surplus-value’, someone called it).
In the Party’s state of mind, the suspicion that these member* wanted to re-direct it was too strong. There was one more election campaign in 1959, and the choice of Bethnal Green — the Hackney district — was forced on the EC by the unavailability of any other constituent. It turned out to be easily the most successful campaign the Party had had. Nearly nine hundred people voted for the SPGB. The feeling that it was all somehow suspect remained, however. There was something approaching anger when the candidate’s name appeared as ‘Jack Read' on all the literature and posters — not because the members knew him as Bill, but because of the tradition which demanded that he be depersonalized as J. (or W.) Read. Someone toured the constituency mutilating the posters so that only the first letter of ‘Jack’ remained (the member thought to have been responsible was christened ‘Ack-ack’).
At the eve-of-poll meeting pointed questions were asked about the Hackney view of reforms. Moreover, Hackney was represented on the Executive itself by three or four members, continually expressing criticism and demands for re-orientation.
It was Wilmott who took up questions of Party theory continually in the second half of the ’fifties. Now middle-aged, and mellowed a little from the brash young Cockney of pre-war days, he was immensely popular among the members — he, Hardy and Coster invariably topped the vote in the annual election for the EC. The first of his Forum writings in 1955 was a series of articles analyzing Evans’s gradualism and refuting its claims about production. It was followed by another series called ‘Do we Need the Dialectic ? ’ in which he cut to shreds the mystical absolutist elements surrounding Marxism; and a third series, ‘Notes on Crises’. At the same time he contributed articles to the Socialist Standard reviewing John Strachey’s Contemporary Capitalism, the reconsideration of his own Nature of Capitalist Crisis. The earlier book had a tremendous impact on the left movement in the ’thirties; Wilmott’s criticism of it and its successor remain valuable analyses of theories which still animate the left today.
The dispute over whether crises worsened and Wilmott’s Notes, led to the setting-up of a study group to investigate these questions. The group, consisting of Hardy, Wilmott, Coster, Young and a Birmingham
member, Cook — the intention was to include all shades of opinion on the matters involved — was to consider why depression and mass unemployment had not recurred since the war. The Executive Commit¬tee, already irritable, was not disposed to support a long discursive investigation and pressed repeatedly for a quick report. In the end an incomplete statement was produced by Hardy alone, in which various theories of crisis were examined and some explanations briefly given.
The document remains an important one, but with the sense of a lost opportunity for which the other members of the group were to blame us much as the Executive.
One other production of the time may be mentioned. In 1959 the SPGB published a pamphlet called Schools Today, reviewing the education system and proposals to reorganize it. Again, the EC was querulous. Was this the Party’s concern ? did reformism loiter stealthily somewhere ? By the time it was published ill-feelings galore centred on the pamphlet. It sold out completely in a quite short time, and had con¬siderable influence on left-wing enthusiasts for the new scheme of comprehensive schools: it forecast accurately their failure and the problems which would arise from them.
Wilmott’s final contribution was a series of articles, developed from the publication for the first time in English of Marx’s early philo¬sophical writings, on the theory of alienation. In these he contended that Marxism was a form of humanism: socialism meant not the furtherance of economic self-interest, but the translation into social institutions of realizable human ideals. He developed the theme further lu lectures taking up the idea of the affluent society and speaking of the human condition in other than economic terms: acquisitiveness, spreading through society now at all levels, was raising vast new problems of relationships and values.
There was no denial of the Party in any of this. The proposal that Marxism was a humanism was taken for its value as a possible reply to opponents (though fifteen years later the Socialist Standard was to say it had heard enough about alienation). Nevertheless, the underlying purpose was plain. If capitalism was — as it seemed — able to solve material problems after all, the SPGB must find a tack other than what Wilmott called ‘tuck-shop socialism’. But the fact was, too, that the majority of the Party were not interested in theoretical argument. Introspection had gone on too long.
In 1958 the Hackney branch pressed for an investigation of the scope and intention of the Socialist Standard. The Standard remained the vital spot in the SPGB; its editors were responsible through emphasis and editing for the general tenor of all that was said. While the Hackney
members had in mind some alteration of the tone in which the Party spoke, their proposal was supported and carried by the Conference for several different reasons. Some members were concerned simply about the falling circulation, others about the unattractiveness of the Standard. It had indeed become drab; the print was depressing and slipshod, the presentation lustreless. Others had grievances about rejected articles, or felt that the editors had been there too long. One faction wanted the paper to seek popular appeal with flashy devices and short, slick articles, another wished for the opposite, for more solid expositions of Marxist teaching.
From these and other points of view, the Party was highly amenable to the idea. An investigating committee was set up, with seven members: Hardy represented the Editorial Committee, and the others, including three from Hackney, were a selection of writers and others with interests in the Standard’s future. The conflicts which might have been expected did not materialize, and the committee produced a detailed plan for the revitalizing of the paper. Its typography was to be made as good as that of the most modern publications. It was to extend its scope from what Turner called ‘political politics’ to social and cultural life in general; it would review books, films, the theatre and television. The feature articles were to be ordered from writers according to the nature of the territory in which they lay (until now the supply of articles had been more or less haphazard: the editors waited to see what came in). Even the treasured Edwardian terminology — the title-page still said ‘Official Organ of the Socialist Party of Great Britain' — was to go.
The Party accepted the scheme with various misgivings. The report had made itself unpopular by denigrating door-to-door canvassing at which some branches had toiled for years, and the EC was hardening visibly against the Hackney influence. The investigating committee had proposed that the Editorial Committee be reorganized and enlarged, and both Wilmott and Coster stood for it in its new form. The latter, in fact, did not wish to serve; he accepted nomination only because he felt obliged to do so, having been a trainee for the Editorial Committee for several years. The Executive would not have Wilmott, and the back¬bone of the Committee was unchanged: Hardy, McClatchie, and its secretary for twenty-seven years, Phyllis Howard. There was one important addition, however. The layout of the Standard was taken from the printers’ hands and became the regular work of a member named Lionel Selwyn. If most of the other proposed changes did not take effect, this one achieved a great deal. Selwyn made the Standard visually outstanding for the next few years, and most members felt that on this account alone the investigation had been worthwhile.
In the next twelve months, most of the Hackney members left. First Wilmott and then Coster resigned, and a little later almost the entire branch — they were to become known in Party legend as ‘the Hackney thirteen’ — resigned. There was in fact no unanimity in the resignations. Wilmott had become despondent with the Party, unable to find in it the stimulus which his personality required (a few years later he entered the Labour Party and became an education organizer for it). Coster had written some articles for the Socialist Leader and The Freethinker, and was told it was forbidden for members to write in other organizations’ papers. The ‘thirteen’, undoubtedly affected by the secessions of these two principal figures in their branch, voiced a collective rejection of the SPGB. The final departure was that of Bill Read: he remained for a time, arguing a case with the Party, until he was expelled.
The Hackney thirteen remained together for a time. On resign¬ation they had published a statement to the Party that they would seek ‘new principles of socialism’. For a year or so they continued to meet for discussion, making occasional contacts with left-wing groups to exchange ideas. The new principles did not emerge, however, and by 1962 the meetings had ceased. The thirteen were by no means the first to consider improving on the Party. Some of Turner’s supporters formed themselves into a ‘Society for Social Integration’ which was still meeting as a small discussion group several years later. As regards the development of a movement, however, there was really no way open. The search for a creed between revolution and reform has been the left-wing philosopher’s stone.
The episode undoubtedly owed much to the frustrations the Party was experiencing; and added to them. The Party had lost its strongest branch, two of its principal writers and speakers, and several other able people. For at least some of the members none of that mattered: those who had gone were renegades, unsound and unsocialistic, and the Party was better off without them. Others were not so certain. In the weeks preceding Coster’s resignation he was visited or written to by member after member, not concurring in his offence against the Party but seeking somehow to retain him in it. And for others still, the loss was felt as a body blow.
Despite the proud insistence that they could do without anyone, the Party was now at the lowest ebb of its existence. It had money and premises, but its resources in membership and vigour had shrivelled. The numbers remained at about six hundred, but a larger proportion of the membership than ever before was inactive. The premises at Clapham had not helped the situation. Almost any suburban
district would have presented the same difficulty for a small member¬ship spread widely over Greater London. The offices in central London had been accessible from all quarters, and Great Dover Street was close enough to the City to make no difference. Clapham, however, was well out among the south-western suburbs. Though activity might not have been much greater at any address, for many members it represented ninety minutes’ travelling by public transport; attendance at committee meetings or lectures there meant inconvenient journeys and late nights. Nor were there attractions to over-ride the difficulties. The Party now lacked speakers sufficiently colourful for even the members to be anxious to come: the promise of excitement had gone.
Groves was dead. His end was even more tragic than expect¬ation had known. A few months earlier his wife, worn out with caring for him and earning for them both, suddenly died. It was discovered then that Groves was almost helpless, unable to do the simplest things for himself; he was taken to hospital for the short remainder of his life. What was most pathetic of all in Groves’s last years was the loss of all his strength and arrogance. The overbearing, contemptuous ‘Two-Shirt’ trying clumsily to hobnob for companionship, for words from anyone, was a sad, sad sight. One of the members, a gentle and kindly man named Mark Miller, was a barber and used to go and shave Groves every few days. Once he had to wait until the doctor finished an examination. Turning, the doctor said briskly: ‘There ! Now you can carry on as you wish.’ ‘If I did as I wish,’ said Mark sorrowfully, ‘I’d cut his throat and end his misery.’
Nearly all the speakers who had occupied the centre of the Party stage had gone in a few years. Turner and Cash had rejected its Principles. Lestor was dead: he had gone on speaking until he was eighty, and died from a stroke. Waters had become a trade-union official and took little part now. Joyce Millen had dropped out of activity and Lisa Bryan died suddenly, a young woman still. The horde of young speakers of the late nineteen-forties had fallen away entirely. Lawler had left, angry with the Party for not going far enough: Wilmott, Coster and Read had gone last of all.
But underlying every loss was what had become known as ‘political apathy’, dragging against all the Party’s efforts. The small number of speakers remaining battled against it gamely. In Hyde Park on Sundays Harry Young declared and joked; elsewhere, at rare opportunities, Cyril May and Harry Baldwin — he had once been Lawler’s protege — put the socialist case against capitalism as it had always been. Not long ago a member said to me: ‘I joined in 1960, when the Party was at its lowest ebb.’ The members followed the rallies of
Nuclear Disarmament and Anti-Apartheid, offering the Socialist Standard and the pamphlets on war and race. Otherwise, there seemed little doing.
Other organizations approached the SPGB from time to time with a view to rapprochement in the face of the common problem — the ILP was persistent in doing so. The Party was as firm in its hostility as ever. Indeed, it laid the blame for ‘political apathy’ almost wholly on the other parties. By confusionism, by gathering support for mistaken theories, they had caused the working class to become disillusioned and so to turn away from the hope of a new society. Had they not side-tracked from socialism, it would have come long ago. I showed an old member some photographs from the SPGB of his youth. Staring at them, he said: ‘They’ve all gone ... all gone. Alex and Fitz, they’ve gone: and Tony, he’s gone too. All finished, it is.’ And then, looking up, he said angrily: ‘It was the reform parties that did it — the reformists ! If it hadn’t been for them, everything would have been different.’
Before the story changes now, it is time perhaps to talk about what kinds of people they were and are. Accounts and instances of social types have been given, and pictures of individuals who stood out: what of the socialist man in the street ? Psychological studies of fascists and communists were described by Eysenck in The Psychology of Politics, and in 1962 a research psychologist published a study of anarchist personality (in issue no.12 of the magazine Anarchy). He found his subjects to be of above-average intelligence, disposed to neuroticism, and specially able to tolerate ‘conditions of ambiguity in interpersonal relations’. His sample were all volunteers, and he remarked that he was ‘thankful that none of the weird and pathological creatures who haunt and disrupt public meetings presented themselves to me’: indicating that there was another kind of anarchist altogether.
I could not say any of these things about the people in the SPGB. One of the Party’s claims was always that they seldom left it. In view of the dissensions and the steep fall in membership that I have talked about, that may seem absurd. However, it is true in two senses. First, the leavers often re-join. If they do not they are likely to remain supporters — jaundiced or pessimistic, sceptical that socialism can ever happen, but convinced that in the long run the Party is more right than anyone else. And second, the SPGB has never had the continual high turnover of members which is to be found in left-wing groups and parties generally. Through its most difficult years it retained a substant¬ial core; many were irritatingly inactive but would remain members till they died, others carried on with their work regardless.
Severity of argument and judgement has remained the Party’s
characteristic, of course. Fox’s description of an EC meeting in 1910 could still hold good at times today. It reminds also of Hazlitt on certain discussions he knew: ‘But when a set of adepts, of illuminati, get about a question, it is worth while to hear them talk. They may snarl and quarrel over it, like dogs; but they pick it bare to the bone, they masticate it thoroughly.’ ‘Conditions of ambiguity’ were not tolerated. I recall on the Executive once saying I had changed my mind about something (it was the case of a member offending against the Party, and I had been induced to consider a special point of view). One elderly member said scornfully: ‘Ha ! a dose of second thoughts ! ’; others conveyed that I was trying to waste their time.
Some members have been renowned for this sort of thing. But under the rigorousness there was an intensely warm camaraderie and a high degree of personal stability. Openness was an important part of the SPGB tradition. There were no private meetings: even the most scurrilous linenwashing was kept visible (opponents commonly attended sessions of the Executive and debates among members at the heights of controversies). Reports and financial accounts were freely available. In discussion and propaganda one was expected to say what one meant, and this frankness had to be seen in the conduct of members in all respects. The Party rarely had conspirators. The worst condemnation of someone was that he was ‘unreliable’; which meant not simply that he did not fulfil duties and appointments, but that what he said was open to doubt.
One view of those who make up ‘extreme’ minorities is that they are misfits. That is probably true of a proportion of anarchists; the individualist doctrine has an obvious kind of appeal, and several anarchists have told me their beliefs amount to a rationale for rejection of and by society. I am not here entering into discussion of what is implied by ‘misfit’. All organizations outside the ‘establishment’ ones are bound to attract some lonely and maladjusted people seeking acceptance by a group, though I would think the religious sects had the lion’s share of them. Without doubt the SPGB got a certain number. But the great majority of members for the lifetime I have known them have come under Ambridge’s description, ‘decent working men and women animated by and single-minded over a special concern in the world. Certainly if there had not been stability the SPGB would not have survived the decade of apathy as it did.
What makes a person a revolutionary socialist ? Leaving aside those for whom it is family or otherwise personal connection, it can be any of a number of things. Anger over what is experienced and seen, the chief impulse to the nineteenth-century socialists, has never ceased
to be one strong factor. A man I know well tells his story succinctly thus: ‘My father died, and I saw my mother struggling to bring us up; and by the time I met old Allsopp I was only too ready for what he had to tell me.’ There have always been many who began in other parties and were roused by some compromise or absence of democratic practice. Others have no bitter experience to testify to, but say they found it common sense; the problems were plain to see, and the other solutions did not work.
There is also, however, the question of a life-style. People will enter a movement not automatically through conviction, but when they see the likelihood of general affinity. The differences among radical groups are often largely those of group personality, integral or culti¬vated (Orwell’s famous attack on the fad-ridden left of the ’thirties was directed at the ILP and the middle-class Communists). The SPGB’s con-tent, in this respect, has been good fellowship and no nonsense, and undoubtedly it is self-handicapped by offering nothing else. Disapproving of vogues, allowing no opportunity for personal ambition, rejecting the activist sentiment that something must be done about practically every¬thing, it presents few of the gratifications for which politically-motivated people look. Its life-style would appeal most, in fact, to ordinary people without such motivations; who are, in case it is forgotten, the vast majority.
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