The old man was wrong, as many others were. It is hard to say when the socialist movement began to live again; perhaps the resurgence was beginning then, unnoticed. Nor is it any easier to put one’s finger on an immediate cause or stimulus. In a longer historical view, however, one may see the emergence not from any special event but from society itself of a new generation of revolutionists. There had been a gap between the passing of the 1904 generation and that of the ’thirties; the nineteen-fifties were a longer, more enervating wait while the next generation appeared.
Thus from 1960 on, the SPGB moved slowly forward again. Fresh members began to come in. The day of the self-educated man and the back-street boy from the Communists was over. The new revolutionary was nurtured in the Welfare State and a long time at school, his thought formed by the sociology of the red-brick university His world has been also one in which the traditional value-structures of society — religion, family, communal sentiment — have lost their influence. So has the coercive power of destitution, which made for abjection far more than ever for revolt. The Welfare State revolutionary, indeed, is keenly conscious of having had ‘opportunities’ which put him at the state’s disposal to the same degree as they offered better living standards as his prize.
Much of the new recruitment owed to modest campaigns of advertizing. Throughout the Party’s history, advertisement had been thought of chiefly in relation to meetings — posters and classified announcements, seeking to bring audiences to the speakers. There had always been an envious hankering for large-scale advertising, a feeling that with the same resources socialism could be as widely known as Sunlight Soap. In the nineteen-fifties money had been spent on advertisements in the display-frames in tube trains and buses, but there was no perceptible return.
The first systematic advertising, beginning in 1958, was small notices for items in the Socialist Standard in selected magazines where they would be most likely to be of interest: articles on education advertized in teachers’ papers, and so on. They brought enough replies to be
encouraging, and in the next few years the policy was extended. Brief statements of the SPGB outlook were put regularly in papers like the New Statesman and the Guardian, and for this purpose the slogan ‘One World’ was adopted. A steady trickle of replies resulted. For the first time, the committee which drafted and placed advertisements found itself engaged in correspondence and question-answering from enquirers.
Most important of all was the fact that the enquiries and pro¬spective members came largely from outside London, in areas where the Party’s existence had never been more than sporadic and secondary. Old provincial branches gained fresh life from young people entering them, and new ones began to appear. It would be wrong to suppose, however, that this growth could have been obtained before had the Party adopted the method earlier. The advertisements’ vital function was meeting the mood of many young people, possibly products of CND and the Committee of 100, seeking more fundamental explanations and solutions than the popular limited causes offered. CND won its huge following by refusing to deal in political factions, but it produced a strong element which saw only too clearly that the political questions had to be asked.
By the late ’sixties, the provincial branches were a strong force. One was conscious of ironies here and there. In Edinburgh, Agnes Hollingshead and another veteran named David Lamond had toiled for decades to strike some interest; a few years after both their deaths a large branch of young people sprang to life. Likewise a branch in Bolton — fifteen years earlier I argued a Sunday away with a half¬interested middle-aged man in a front room there, unsuccessfully. In unlikely industrial cities one found the letters ‘SPGB’ painted on walls (or a more cryptic admonition taken from an article by David Steele about the moneyless society in Oz ‘Smash Cash !’). Once I came on them, several feet high, on the rock face over a pass in the Pennines.
Something might be said at this point about the unfortunate Party offshoot in Ireland. There were always contacts and hopes; for many years socialism was argued at countless public meetings in Dublin by a glorious, rumbustious, thick-brogued man named Mick Cullen. The first formation of a party there did not take place until the beginning of the nineteen-fifties. It was little more than a branch in Dublin, and was quickly extinguished by some of the principals’ coming to England. A few years later activity began again, this time in Belfast. The Dublin group revived, and early in 1959 I went there and spoke at meetings in both cities and attended the foundation of the World Socialist Party of Ireland. The secretary and guiding spirit was a man of extraordinary
competence as well as well as enthusiasm, Richard Montague. One of my recollections is of sitting in a basement room in Dublin among comrades and Guinness bottles at three in the morning, and the hush as he sang ‘The Red Flag’ in a magnificent, passionate voice.
A paper was published and two or three more branches started. Then the armed conflicts began in Northern Ireland. The Belfast head¬quarters was damaged, and meetings made impossible; for the last five years the Irish party has existed only in name and whatever personal contact remains possible. Montague sent occasional articles on the con¬flict to the Socialist Standard, and a future historian would do well to read them not only for their analysis but for their evocation of the atmosphere. He also wrote a novel based on the Belfast fighting, which was unaccountably rejected by a popular publisher after being accepted and paid for.
While provincial branches rose in the SPGB the London member ship remained curiously static and unrevived. Some long-established branches died out altogether, or incorporated themselves with others.
On the whole, London was firmly in the hands of Party tradition, and conflicts grew up between the provinces and centre in precisely those terms. Impatient for the Party to keep pace with the agitating left, the provincials began to regard the London branches as backwoodsmen whose wisdom was non sequitur and self-protecting.
The conflicts were, in the main, over administration. Where victories were won and ground gained, they were of the sort which appears to outside eyes as trivial; but in each case an edifice of prece¬dent and belief was in the balance. The most noteworthy was, in 1969, the abolition of the rule which had existed since 1906 that only mem¬bers might sign an election candidate’s nomination. This had always limited Party candidatures, without any other consideration, to con-stituencies where at least ten members lived. In most branch districts, where the members were likely to be scattered in a wide area round their centre, candidature was impossible.
The proposal was resisted in the terms of the general argument that only fully-conscious socialist votes were acceptable to the Party. The abolitionists replied that no compromise was involved: people could — and no doubt would — nominate Party candidates, perhaps from a belief that minorities should have a chance, without intending to vote for them. Contention raged for months, until the final arbiter in the form of a poll of the membership was called for. Its decision was clear- cut: Party candidates need not be nominated only by members. One Executive member, indignant, demanded that branches be asked if they were willing also for members to nominate opponent candidates (one
branch answered with an affirmative). Other members talked of resign¬ing, and the Executive laid down conditions for the application of the decision. However, it remained: in the eyes of those who sought it, a fetter had been broken.
Principle was invoked again in an argument over whether the Party might place surplus funds, when it had them, on deposit at the bank. How minor and beyond debate it may seem ! yet to many members the issues were grave and crucial. The SPGB had never had a deposit account, just as it had never owned property before 1951. If the latter was a necessity for premises, the idea of letting money earn interest — small as the amounts were likely to be — carried overtones of selling-out to the capitalist system. To the would-be depositors this was no argument at all; moreover, in an inflationary economy, the alternative was to let Party money be eroded by the system. So the motion was carried, and the funds were put into deposit.
The Party was perpetually vigilant against compromise over money. In 1969 and 1970 a well-to-do member, the ebullient L. E. Weidberg, took whole-pages of magazines to advertize the SPGB and the Socialist Standard. He wrote the advertisements in a lively style and paid for them himself; a burst of enquiries resulted. A section of the membership was furious. The principle arguably involved was one to which the Party had always adhered: it would not accept money ‘with strings’ from anyone. If a donation was offered for a pamphlet to be produced, or to foster an activity favoured by the donor, the answer was unvaryingly that all moneys went into the general funds to be used as the Party thought fit. The aim, derived like other SPGB traditions and rules from what had been seen to happen elsewhere, was to ensure that no individual should gain a means to exercise control.
It was contended that Weidberg was doing what was thus unacceptable: in effect, donating large sums earmarked for newspaper advertizing. The opposite view was that this was stretching things and that Weidberg’s offence, if he had committed one, was having chosen not to consult the Executive Committee. The affair faded out, but left its reminder that everything mattered to the Party (as well as its aggrieved persons).
Where arguments arose over socialist teaching, they reflected the knowledge which many of the new generation had. There was, for instance, a feeling that the case over Russia was too unspecific and inferential. The Party still spoke of the Russian capitalist class on assumption that captains of industry lurked half-concealed there. A special piece of evidence, prized by members in debate and argument was the Russia Today Society’s Soviet Millionaires, but that had been
published in the nineteen-forties. What was put forward now by one or two branches was the proposition that capitalism in modern Russia was characterized not by individual ownership and enterprise, but by something best described as a ‘class monopoly’. Though there was disagreement, the Party made the discussion an interesting and fruitful one. The class-monopoly phrase was favoured and established itself in the Socialist Standard; but the disputants’ search for documentation brought forth material about the extent of private enterprise in Russia too.
There was repeated discussion of the Party’s name and the phraseology of the Declaration of Principles. These were not new sub¬jects. Soon after the war, the American companion party, the Workers’ Socialist Party, had changed its name to the World Socialist Party of the United States. It had been done simply to end confusion with a different group, and the new name aimed to retain the same initials. However, it caught the fancy of many of the SPGB: ‘world’ seemed much more expressive of the Party’s objective than ‘Great Britain’. The Irish party quickly adopted the ‘world’ prefix. The agenda for Easter Conferences began regularly to include the putting-forward of the idea that the Party should make a similar change, and that — eventually — the various companion parties should all become branches of a World Socialist Party.
With this was linked a desire to alter the wording of the Principles. Their language appeared excessively formal and, it was argued, formidable to the common man: could not the same statements be made in simple and appealing language ? However, a lifetime’s con¬cern with the importance of correct definition made the Party chary of these proposals. And it proved curiously true that a re-rendering with the same sense was not possible — advocates of change frequently tried it, to have their versions pulled to pieces. The slightly pejorative term ‘lawyers’ language’ was to the point. Like a legal document, the Principles irritated by the heavy meticulousness of their language, but the form was necessary if flaws were not to be found.
The opportunities for proselytizing activity remained frustratingly narrow. It is easy for the uninvolved to sneer at or deplore forms which minorities’ propaganda is forced to take — words painted on walls, fly-posting, the duplicated leaflets, the patient man on the corner with his papers for sale. The large organizations can buy (and accordingly are given) the dignified facilities. To a small one, a puny amount of publicity can be critically expensive, and the principal means for it are closed anyway; the rare chance of a minute with a television interviewer in an election is wildly exciting. Though this has always been true, in the ’sixties the expense and the inaccessibility were higher than ever
before; and the enthusiasm of members could no longer be fed by hearing their convictions given public voice in impressive oratory.
The difference was illustrated in the General Election of 1970, when a meeting was held in a small public hall in London. An older member who had re-joined, a speaker from the Turner years, stood on the platform and gave twenty vivid minutes. The young members were caught and intrigued. Said one: ‘If that was what the Party was about, years ago, no wonder it was bigger than it is now.’ But it was hardly more than a flashback. The audience that night was forty or fifty. Had Turner, Anderson, Fitzgerald, Lestor, Groves all returned, there would have been no crowds for them to work their spells upon. In the view of some hard-headed members the function of public speaking could not be seen more highly than as directing people to the printed words where the socialist message now mainly lay. However, the field opened more than might have been expected. By 1975 meetings had acquired fresh interest, and there were even debates with well-known politicians.
And the Party continued to grow again: slowly, but that was customary. Its habits had changed in many ways. The weekly Executive Committee meetings were no longer attended by crowds of members.
In the past, for as long as one remembered there had always been an audience on Tuesday nights — at Rugby Chambers and in the early years at Clapham it was often barely possible to get in the room or see through the smoke, with the chairman continually appealing for quiet. Now, the EC met by itself, with perhaps a single member sitting listen¬ing, and the offices were almost empty: ‘We just let them get on with it,’ said someone in vague explanation.
Likewise, the social getting-together which had been a constant feature of Party life diminished. Up to the ’sixties, an integral part of the Conference every Easter was the ‘reunion and dance’. It was an occasion when members who had not otherwise been near the Party turned up, confident of meeting old friends: in the hall, a band and refreshments, the women in party dresses, veteran members nimble in the veleta and newer ones dashing at the quickstep, and the camaraderie spilling into the pubs nearby. And among members all the year there was continual cafe-going after meetings, calling at one another’s homes for talk and friendship — and, no doubt, the putting of heads together over Party affairs. One group of East London members combined two passions by going regularly to a greyhound-racing stadium together, it was said to be the only track in England where historical inevitability was discussed as the dogs went round.
By the end of the ’sixties, relatively little of that was to be seen. The Easter function died abruptly, and other socials became infrequent
small-scale events. Visiting and fireside conferring, too: the little circles as they faded away were not replaced. Many members had gone to live
away from London, coming in for meetings but not now providing open
houses; while to the new generation mobilized or at-home sociality was not part of the pattern of life. The Party remained remarkably sociable, however. In The British Political Fringe George Thayer said the SPGB was ‘the least clandestine and most friendly’ of all the groups he met, and that is true today. At any branch a casual unknown visitor is received with remarkable warmth (the majority of left-wing groups are, in my experience, as amiably forthcoming as Trappist monks). When¬ever the Party had offices allowing it there were always tea and food in the past, and a generous canteen is maintained at Clapham now.
There were minor but significant changes which many of the younger people would have found hard to credit. The speakers in their heyday made an haut monde in the Party. More than half-conscious that they were expected to perform before the members, they displayed temperament — there could be great jealousy over attractive meetings as well as, sitting at cafe tables, ‘words of learned length and thund’ring sound’. Two or three years ago a member wrote to me: ‘Was Tony Turner really “a comrade” of mine ? I could hardly believe it. If the decrease in the Party’s use of public speaking has lessened that gap between members, perhaps it is a price we should be prepared to pay.’
Likewise the Editorial Committee, now with the more limited and utilitarian name ‘Socialist Standard Production Committee’, was no longer the authoritative body of whom a member once wrote in Forum: ‘To question its decisions is somewhat on a par with a Roman Catholic setting a booby trap for the Pope.’ It had become, indeed, a common-or garden committee, subjected like other committees to a certain querul¬ousness from the EC and the more lynx-eyed members. Nor was there great zeal, or a feeling of electness, over seeking to serve on the Executive itself. Formerly the annual election had always a long list of candidates, and the result approached being a popularity poll (chiefly, again, in the speakers’ minds). At the end of 1971, insufficient members stood to fill the fourteen seats and the Party had to be asked to nomin¬ate more.
Hardy and McClatchie finally retired from editing the Socialist Standard in the mid-sixties. Apart from Ralph Critchfield, who had assisted them since 1959, there was no ready successor; but there were younger writers willing to serve. The mood was good, and it was two or three years before it darkened. At first the EC was magnanimous, making allowances for inexperience. The Standard seemed deficient in substance, failing to deal in depth; Hardy complained that, compiling the index, he could not find what some articles were about.
This was the fringe of the matter, however. One of the left-wing causes of the day was the squatter movement. It was begun in 1968 by anarchists as a venture in direct action, and became a general focus for demands for housing reform. In the spring of 1969 the Standard pub¬lished an article on the agitation that said: ‘We support the squatters.’
To the Party, it was an alarming declaration. What did ‘support’ mean ? Perhaps to some it stood merely for approval; but others saw it as imply¬ing willingness to give positive aid to reformists.
The Executive Committee prepared a statement of the Party’s attitude to reforms, and it was circulated to the membership. Its main points were, first, that the SPGB did not advocate reforms; second, that words like ‘support’ were so consequential as to ask for trouble; and third, that where a specific matter was being considered what had to be seen was the reform measure in detail, not the broad statement of intent. The last was a telling point. Throughout the history of social reform, the spirit of the demand has more often than not been van¬quished by the letter of its translation into practice, and reformers have found themselves responsible for all kinds of things they did not intend.
But further statements appeared. To their anger and embarrass¬ment, the members read in the Standard that they were supporting political strikes and the anarchist doctrine of ‘smashing the state’, and expressing attitudes they wanted nothing to do with; and these were no accidents, but the intention of the editors. The problem created was twofold. First, whatever appeared in the Standard had a special invul¬nerability. It was the Party’s voice; once published, a statement remained on record unless deliberately retracted. And second, these aberrations went with a falling-off, conspicuous for some time, in the Standard’s quality. There was, indeed, a loss of confidence in the Standard for the first time in nearly seventy years. Contributors withdrew, and members spoke of reluctance to sell it.
The faction which was now visible was of young members, mostly with university backgrounds (''that was never any damned good’, said the others). The central aim appeared to be to take the Party away from its concern with political machinery, towards direct action and the doctrine that industrial struggles made for revolutionary consciousness in the workers. This was the strongest theme of the ‘new left’ which had sprung up since 1960; and without doubt the group in the Party eyed the new organizations, wanting the SPGB to be seen in the struggles as well. Similarly, it was proposed to associate with socio political movements, in particular the students’ organization and Women’s Liberation.
That the matter did not make a dramatic controversy like those of the past was due to three or four factors. It was diffuse, moving from question to question rather than creating a pitched battle over a single major issue. The revisionists themselves were cagey, looking for procedural and psychological advantages. Executive members like Baldwin and D’Arcy who opposed their tendency were characterized as fundamentalists who held the Party back. The branch to which most of them belonged deluged the EC with technical complaints; three or four obtained places on it, their effect being to create divisions in voting that continually robbed decisions of authority. They took to the Conference ambiguous proposals which most members would not have sought to deny but whose adoption, in other contexts, meant the gaining of ground. In the background, astonishingly, was the influence of the Party’s old adversary the Social Science Association; and one cannot help but wonder at the strangeness of its people’s obsession with disturbing the SPGB alone.
The vital factor, however, was the Standard. In 1972 its editorship changed. The new editors worked closely with the EC, making their objectives known. Former contributors returned, and the Party’s position was stated with vigour. Its appearance improved; confidence flooded back. The members were re-animated, feeling that their time was being wasted by the revisionists when there were meetings to be staged and, once more, a paper they were proud of to be sold. The faction made its last sorties. A duplicated magazine called Libertarian Communism was produced, setting forth alternative views to the SPGB’s, and a leaflet headed ‘Where We Stand’ was circulated to the membership. A group in Scotland distributed leaflets implying Party support for the National Union of Students, among other things. Charges were brought against nine members, who were all expelled at, the end of 1974. Two or three others resigned in sympathy, but the conclusion was without anger or trauma.
What the hearings of the charges revealed, in fact, was how much the dissension was only talk. The members who had contended against the Party’s views wanted only to discuss continually. One, a young woman who had joined Women’s Liberation, explained that she did no more than talk in other people’s front rooms. The activism they urged did not mean participation but the passing of resolutions of approval and the issuing of leaflets of advice; the Party was right to despise it. Nevertheless, the Socialist Standard had for the only time printed the contrary of what the Party believed. Had the times not been promising and an up-grade continuing, the damage might have been more severe and longer-lasting.
The SPGB was getting into full stride as it had not for years. As the economic crisis of the ’seventies approached, it took up again the prognostications of a ‘death agony’ for capitalism. A new generation of the left had rediscovered Marx’s ‘law of the falling tendency of the rate of profit’ to expound how the system must shortly grind to a halt. Still better armed than it had been before, the Party attacked this revival of the theory of collapse.
At the same time, it analyzed the monetary inflation which was now accelerating and becoming the outstanding problem of the time. Hardy had been studying the effects of Keynesian theories for several years, from time to time giving lectures on both its misapplication and its fallacies. Articles in the Standard now showed, first, the absurdity of attributing inflation to wage increases — wages were prices them¬selves, subject to the same causes and influences as other prices — and second, the mechanism to which ‘an excess issue of an inconvertible paper currency’ was due, and its results.
It is worth remarking on the number of occasions the SPGB made early and correct diagnoses before, as far as I know, anyone else thought of them. Its statements on Russia from the outset (a collection of them was published in 1948 with the title Russia Since 1917); its view of the Welfare State as a means of controlling and apportioning wages; its prediction of the outcome from comprehensive schools. It is the fate of minorities not to be noticed, of course — the monetarist school of political economists rose to prominence in the ’seventies, arguing over inflation what the Party had said for some time previously.
More than seventy years old, the SPGB is vigorous and well, then. Possibly it will never in its lifetime be free from inner controversies and the tendency must always be for some section to see a link which should be changed. Older and younger elements may and do pull in different directions: one sees at the Conference today, often, how the ‘ayes’ are the cavalier-haired, lean-faced young men and the girls in patched jeans from the provinces, the ‘noes’ the men with sober suits and tidy greying hair from the London branches. But underlying the arguments and dissensions, the identity of purpose is as strong as the founders’ in 1904 when they drew up their Principles to be a permanent guide. The young people’s impatience arises from urgency, from their conviction that the new society can and must be brought about soon The older ones hold the conviction with equal passion, tempered for them by having seen too many things go wrong. Heavy and deliberate as the precision is, its logic is that of the horseshoe nail in the nursery rhyme. With every nail secured and every shoe in place, the battle can and shall be won.
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