This has been a personal account, and must finish as one. I left the Socialist Party in 1960. Eventually I returned; in between, I saw other kinds of politics and considered what socialism was.
The sense of being free, of not being obliged or committed, having no meetings to attend and no reports to write, was strange after so many years. Lisa Bryan asked me on the telephone how I should occupy my time. I said I would read, do historical research, and dig the garden. She giggled: ‘Can’t imagine you doing those for long.’ Bob Reynolds, with whom I had always kept in touch, said fiercely: ‘Bah ! you can’t think in organizations ! ’
I had plenty of contact with members and ex-members, but all we talked about when we were together was the Party. I did not want that. When you left something you left it, you did not hang on its doorstep, I thought. I had seen several who left, even in strong disa¬greement, and then could not stay away but came to socials and meetings almost as often as when they were members. I could vote or even speak for some other party if I wanted to. ‘What do you think of the Labour Party ? ’ asked one of my neighbours. ‘Not much,’ I said.
In fact I moved away from London, out of reach — without an effort, at any rate — of contact and participation, not long afterwards. Before doing so, I attended ILP meetings; a parliamentary candidature for CND was offered to me; and I had talked with several leaders of the emerging new left. They were all quite unlike that I had expected. Inside an organization one receives impressions of its rivals; these were all false. The CND candidature, so far from being an effort by earnest unpolitical people on behalf of humanity, turned out to be part of a complicated manoeuvre to dish the local council over political matters. The ILP, which I had assailed furiously in public debate, was practically dead: a handful of people, most of them middle-class and elderly, in a rambling bureaucratic structure.
The left-wing movement was only beginning to form. Many of the new groups were led by ex-Communists who had seceded after the Communist Party’s embarrassments and conflicts over Hungary; as CND created protest-hungry factions of young people they gathered
their own militant circles round them. In 1960, however, they were generals without armies, and I met (usually, was approached by) seven or eight with their theories and plans.
Again, I was surprised, by the old-fashionedness of not only the theories but the attitudes accompanying them. In introspective periods in the SPGB, the suspicion that we were behind the times would be voiced; our opponents never failed to say so. One expected, therefore, to find policies and imagery which reflected the claim and fitted the contemporary scene. They did not. I found myself sitting listening to men whose thinking was dominated by the concept of the collarless, downtrodden-but-defiant proletarian. I was told that subjects like Trotsky’s permanent revolution theory, Stalinism, and the rate of surplus-value were what ‘the chap at the factory bench’ talked about. People who say this kind of thing have never been in factories in their lives, of course; on one or two occasions I said so.
In one sense that idealized picture of the factory worker is a supplement to crudely-held doctrines of societal laws. The ‘historic mission’ of the working class being posited, a missionary character must be shown. But in 1960 (and after) it was supposed to exemplify modem thinking. Marx’s theory of value is based on a model of the productive process. Indirect workers — factory clerks, transport workers and tech¬nicians — might appear as accessories in the process; but exploitation and class struggle became obscure in the large numbers of occupations outside the immediate sphere of manufacture.
Reasoning thus, the leaders of the new left-wing groups concent¬rated their propaganda on industrial workers virtually to the exclusion of all others. An American attempt to re-orientate left-wing theory, Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom, identified the impulse to revolution entirely with production workers. I found none of this interesting or even plausible. The ILP members’ version incorporated paternalistic sentiments: the working class must have what was good for it. When it was suggested that I give a lecture, my proposal was greeted diffidently; the members themselves would appreciate hearing this, but something different was needed for the workers.
For the next two or three years I took no part, and was occupied with work, domestic life and reading. I wrote and received a lot of letters. The local library supplied new novels – I had read hardly any for years. Many were highly praised and had great significance attributed to them in reviews, but almost none remained in my mind. On television, there was the new generation of satirists mocking everything in social and political life. A old left-wing man wrote to me on the snags of country life: he had lived in a village and knew how it was for
a radical, necessarily living at odds with all the conformists round him. I replied that I was getting on well with my neighbours and wished to continue doing so.
At the beginning of 1964 I was asked if I would stand for the local council. Though the whole area was predominantly Tory, there was a strong tradition in favour of independent representation. Village life was then in a transition which now has been almost completed.
With fewer and fewer people employed in agriculture, the cottages were being bought by well-to-do townspeople who wanted the old and picturesque preserved alongside modern amenities; the villagers themselves were being herded into little council-house estates. Most of them had some idea that I held unorthodox views. I accepted, was elected, and remained a councillor for six years.
Most of the council — all its meetings were held in the daytime were farmers and business or professional people, or retired ones. It was well-conducted and amiable, with few disputes; the majority, despite their ‘independent’ labels, were Conservatives and there was no political division. After I had spoken a few times, an elderly man took me aside and said: ‘I think we’ve something in common. I’ve been a socialist all my life — in the Labour Party.’ I said I was not Labour. ‘Ah well,’ he said, ‘as long as you’re not a member of the SPGB.’ Startled, I extended the conversation. He told me he was a retired insurance agent; he had been a conscientious objector in the 1914-18 war, and as a young man in Manchester had known Moses Baritz and the old crowd there. We often sat together after that, and when I refused to take part in a Civil Defence scheme he supported and joined me.
I sat on the planning and public health committees, and the committee which allocated tenancies of council houses; I was the council’s delegate to a regional body for the furtherance of the arts, which never met during the years I was there. A lot of the work was local welfare, dealing with individuals’ problems. People came to the door who needed housing, had difficulties over Social Security, were troubled by nuisances, required help from the council services. As time went by it was plain that my not being in the Conservative Association meant doors closed to me and a disadvantage to many who wanted favours done. That was where the reciprocations and benefits lay; and I have no doubt that the position is the same in Labour councils.
When it became known that I had no party affiliation, I was approached by both Conservative and Labour officials talking about parliamentary candidatures. After I had rejected them I thought about matters. I wrote down what were my beliefs, the things accepted and unacceptable: the list was not much different from what it had always
been. I wanted to take part in political life again, propagate the ideas I held, do some speaking and writing if possible. The prospect of going back to the Party after cutting away completely seemed doubtful, how¬ever. I sent someone a letter about nothing in particular, seeking to re establish contact so that I might say: ‘Oh, I’ve been thinking about re joining’; he did not reply.
By this time, in fact, I was out of touch with my former assoc¬iations. I did not know what was happening in the SPGB, or how the new left had fared. Looking for some avenue, one day I saw a copy of the anarchists’ Freedom. It had one or two names I knew — old adver¬saries, but likeable ones. I wrote to them, and was invited to give a talk to the London Anarchist Group. Then it was as I had always known it: a small group of mostly rather reserved people. In a few months the anarchist idea of direct action was suddenly to become infectious; through being there at the time I was to see a good deal of it, and of other left-wing groups who joined in.
My London neighbour’s question might be asked at this point: what about the Labour Party ? I knew people in it and, I suppose, might have had a career in it. There were two insuperable objections as far as I was concerned. One was that I simply did not agree with the Labour Party. In government it acted like the Conservatives, and out of government paraded aims which were only too clearly either futile or specious. There was a school of thought in the left which acknowledged this but saw permanent hope in the Labour rank-and-file who, however misled, sustained a conviction for socialism.
I did not believe that either. Among people of my own gener¬ation and older, there might have been something to be said for it. I had Labour friends who were not unlike the members of the SPGB except that they stopped short of logical conclusions. Indeed, the early Labour leaders — Hardie, the Webbs and the rest — knew and talked about socialism, but were compromised in policies designed to win mass support on varied grounds. There was, and is, nothing of this to be seen now. When I am among Labour people I find chiefly smart-alec, well- heeled men concerned only with management and viability, among whom any talk of a new society is dismissed as utopian.
Thus, I spent nearly three years in the heterogeneous ‘libertarian’ movement of the mid-nineteen-sixties. The rise to popularity of direct action was not unconnected with what I have been saying about the Labour Party. There was a common sentiment that parliament could no longer be considered as a means to radical change. Political rebels were eaten whole by party machinery: the workers must be told to seize whatever else came to hand. For the same reasons the general determination
was to steer clear of structured — ‘bureaucratic’ — organization. Many of the groups I attended had no formal membership, and their activities were spur-of-the-moment arrangements by twos and threes.
This ‘do-it-yourself’ association appeared flexible in contrast with the procedures of the SPGB, where members could be frustrated because their suggestions were not adopted or because delays in action seemed almost to outlive the need for it. In fact, it usually meant there being a caucus of close associates who arranged and executed things with very little participation by the rest. In two good-sized activist groups I attended the principals continually complained of all they had to do, but offers of help caused only embarrassment: the difficulties of admitting somebody else were actually greater than those of being short-handed. Most of the splits and quarrels were over caucus-making and resentment at not knowing what was being arranged.
Paradoxically, the informality made integration in libertarian groups hard to achieve. Their turnover of people who came and drifted away was very high. The basic feeling was an unsociable one — too busy with important projects to notice individuals; indeed, I often heard conversations interrupted with ‘This isn’t a social club’. The only group I came across that showed cordiality was the Syndicalist Workers’ Federation (it held cheery socials above a pub at King’s Cross), and it was also the only one which resembled the SPGB in having a declared programme and structure. The non-social groups harangued a great deal about alienation, how people were estranged from themselves and one another by the system, and did not seem to think there was anything odd.
This was the heyday of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations. Besides them I witnessed, knew the participants in and heard the talk about the direct-action exploits of the time: the occupation of the Greek Embassy in 1967, and the squatter movement. They roused excitement, of course; they were skilfully but arbitrarily planned, with no anticipation of — and wholesale confusion over — the outcomes. In whatever venture, the fundamental justification was unrest for its own sake: ‘People are changed by struggle.’ It is not true in most cases.
People brought into situations framed by somebody else are going to be simply followers, comprehending and even knowing little of what the issues are. When it is true, is the direction of the change predictable ?
But I heard nothing from the demonstrators and action groups of the supremely important thing: the vision of a society where all things for men should be, in Morris’s words, ‘better than well’. The phrase ‘alternative society’ was to be found in the hippy papers, International Times and Oz and the rest, and for them it meant creating
one’s own cocoon within capitalism. In 1967 I spoke about it in a talk to an anarchist group, and the responses were blank; finally a man said he was not interested in society and embraced anarchism as a damn- them-all philosophy. The view of the industrial militants was not so very different. Talking to a man well-known in the factory-ferment circles,
I referred to the mass of ordinary people in everyday jobs. He said: ‘I’m not interested in ordinary people, or everyday jobs. I’m only interested in industrial workers.
Feelings of affinity or even sympathy for most of what I saw and heard were hard to find. I spoke occasionally at meetings and wrote a few articles, but both were hard going; I was lacking conviction. I wrote to several of the people I had met in the libertarian movement, putting my viewpoint to them. The answers (I still have them) were not without interest. The anarchists replied mostly that if I were thinking of co-operation, consistency and social or personal responsibility, I obviously had no idea what anarchism was about. The others, the more purposeful politicos, said they found my criticisms absolutely correct: the trouble was, they were too steeped in activity to stop and put anything right.
In the summer of 1969 I realized where I should be. I had wasted nine years. I was still a councillor: ‘one of the council’s “characters”;’ the Treasurer said. I sent for a copy of the Socialist Standard — I had seen it only two or three times since 1960 — and looked for where branch meetings were being held. The one I picked was a branch which had not existed when I left, and I did not know who would be there. On a Friday evening when they had a lecture on Parliament, I walked in.
I had no idea what my reception would be. There were two or three men who knew me, and they quickly passed the word round.
I took no part in the discussion, but afterwards we went in the pub downstairs. They were immensely friendly. We were jammed in a corner of the saloon, shouting at one another above the music. A young woman threaded her way to me and said: ‘You are the first person from “the old days” I’ve met ! ’ I asked them about this and that member. Waters was dead; someone I knew well had left; Gilmac still going strong at eighty-odd; Harry Young — no chicken either — spouting in the Park on Sundays: good lord !
I went there each week. It was possible to note changes of which the members themselves might have been unaware. In a recent election campaign the candidates had been advertized with their first names, apparently as a matter of course; I remembered the indignation over Jack Read. I went to Clapham one Tuesday night. The EC was arguing
as always but in a room no longer packed with listeners. Sammy Highams — dear, irascible old Sammy — came and shook hands and talked. The Head Office had been handsomely decorated and better appointed; but where was the canteen darts-board at which Hardy and McClatchie used to play ? One or two younger people asked me to their homes, and I saw that the shelves of books of my generation were replaced by hi-fi equipment.
It was not all easy and welcoming, however. I knew the members were looking warily, wondering what my intentions were. To the young ones I was nobody at all; some of the older ones would recall, without doubt, that the ’sixties had been a time of struggle against odds and 1 had been elsewhere. Before anything happened, bona fides had to be established. My term on the council had still some months to go, and it occurred to me that the period would be an appropriate one for attending meetings, getting to know people again and letting them know me. 1 acted thus. When the council term expired I did not stand again, and applied to join the Party. The Executive argued, disagreed, and admitted me. Harry Baldwin took the sternest view, and would not vote for my application. Afterwards he invited me to the fish-and-chip cafe across the road. ‘My objections were entirely procedural,’ he said. ‘There was nothing personal in them at all.’ We sat laughing and talking happily until midnight.
What is there to be said for persistent membership of a small party whose electoral returns are absurdly small; whose influence is restricted; and which will not change its mind ? Above everything else, the SPGB remains the only custodian of the vision of socialism. There is no other group or party which speaks in such terms today. Others claimed it was their objective in the past, but left it in abeyance while immediate tasks were attempted, or saw it as being in some degree hypothetical: ‘a beautiful picture’, as a Labour man said to me once,
‘of what we hope the world may some day be like for the human race.’ The Socialist Party has seen it for seventy years as the attainable purpose to which all struggles against the oppressions and inequality of a class-based society must be directed. Indeed, it is impossible to see how the struggles can have coherence unless such a purpose exists.
Nor is it possible to rationalize the struggle, to say it involves some more than others, that these are exploited and those are not. There are degrees of conspicuousness but the state of our society can best be summarized, I think, by saying that most people are, and feel themselves to be, victims. The pressures and penalties of existence in the modern capitalist system are intense; and they are penalties not for what is consciously chosen, but for ways of life which are forced like strait-
jackets on people. At its superficial level, there is the common feeling of being sold short at every turn — conned by mass-communications, extorted by commerce, lied to by politicians, treated like dirt by bureaucrats.
The ‘never-had-it-so-good’ era, which promised to make the need for social change redundant, faded away abruptly. On one hand the Welfare State has failed keep up, except in proliferating bureau¬cracy; on another, there is the disparate poverty, the occupations and sets of circumstances in which ends can’t be met. People have ceased to point out that an unemployed man with a family can get twenty-five pounds a week in social security payments, because it is seen more and more often that wages for innumerable workers are no better. The measures taken by the Labour governments of recent years show the extent to which the Labour Party has fallen away from the humanism which, even if only in talk, once characterized it. Previous Labour governments had unemployment and economic crises, but they apolo¬gized and tried to excuse themselves; contemporary ones have made known from the outset that their way out of crisis will be at the expense of the working class.
The means by which depression and destitution were said to be being overcome in the ’fifties have rebounded. Credit and hire-purchase, the agencies through which working people were ‘improving their standards’, provide not only private millstones but instruments for the regulation of domestic consumption and the direction of labour. An increase in the statutory deposit for certain classes of goods has the automatic effect of making them unpurchasable even on hire-purchase for the time, and so reducing production in — say — furniture factories to make part of their labour-force redundant and available for work elsewhere.
Likewise in the nineteen-fifties it was widely said that social barriers were disappearing. The fact that rich and poor read the same newspapers and watched the same television programmes was held to be the sign of an equalization of culture; working-class access to domestic comforts and leisure-time enjoyments, the beginning of the end of private privilege. (This was part of Frank Evans’s argument in ‘The Nature of the Socialist Revolution’.) What has emerged has been the drawing of fresh lines. Recent books renewing the study of middle- class life all speak of the preoccupation with schooling, and actual fear of the hooligan children in the comprehensive school and the council- house estate.
The apparent social inroads have only set up more divisions. A package holiday abroad may be a pleasurable change, but its social
status is on a level with a trip to Brighton. The proletarian stigmata are not permitted to be erased. The phrase ‘permissive society’ for certain phenomena in recent times is a give-away as to the sort of society we are really living in. As apparent barriers have broken down, restrictive laws have been steadily extended: permission is given, but under super¬vision and on the condition of instant withdrawal when thought necessary.
That is all workaday and domestic living. What of the great issues and questions for humanity ? The keynote of the nineteen- fifties’ apathy was struck by Jimmy Porter in John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger: ‘There aren’t any good, brave causes any more.’ There was, of course, the hydrogen bomb; it has now receded in people’s consciousness, the Vietnam war perhaps taken as a confirmation that the powers would simply never dare to use it. Vietnam itself was a fertile source of indignation and protest from mixed motives: humane compassion, dismay at the cynicism of governments, anti-Americanism and desire for the Communists to win were all present in the rallies and the fights round Grosvenor Square.
The Socialist Standard was probably the only paper to remark, at the height of anti-nuclear feeling, what was the truly terrifying thing about the hydrogen bomb: that the world could be scourged and devast¬ated by weapons of war without it. Less than twenty years later there is a still more terrifying thought, as evidence has accumulated of the effects of everyday pollution of the environment — the world can be equally scourged without war at all. There is, too, at this moment the immediate likelihood of a world-wide economic crisis on the scale of 1929 against whose onset the political and economic wisdom of capitalism is powerless.
What can be done about any or all of these things ? They are not even problems in the sense of housing, or traffic, or the care of the old, where the hope that legislation can mitigate may be mistaken but is understandable; they are part of the condition of humanity now.
Of course there are protests and demands. The protests, however, tend to be a matter of affirming self-respect and decent feelings more than anything else: I have stood up and testified, runs the sentiment, so what is happening today is not my fault. Some time ago a Labour MP spoke to me of having given up the Vietnam crusade: ‘What can you do about Vietnam ? Nothing ! ’
It depends on what you want to do. Hopes for social reform are usually fragmentary or one-eyed; they concern themselves with a single outstanding evil, or are limited to a belief (for example) that people must be made better before the world will change much. More¬
over, the ‘good, brave causes’ can and do dissolve in bitterness. I know too many men in their fifties and sixties who crusaded and fought, and live now in uncomprehending disappointment at what went wrong.
Quite recently I listened to an old friend, sitting by the fireplace in his front room. He told me how unhappy he had become; he had never let his wife know, but sometimes he thought of suicide. ‘Do you know what it was ? ’ he said. ‘The Russian revolution — we all hoped for everything from it.’
If it is possible to find an umbrella covering all aspirations for a humane society, the nearest idea is that of choice. It is only in this context that the word ‘freedom’ makes sense: freedom to choose. The objection to authority and coercion is precisely that they deny choice and impose someone else’s. Racialism and war are ultimates in the repudiation of choice; born on the wrong side, one forfeits the right to participation in society or even to live. Poverty denies choice; not only in the sense that if one is poor there is going to be bread-and-scrape, but in reference to work, housing, education, leisure activities and personal relationships.
Indeed, it is by looking at a single aspect like housing that one sees what lack of choice can mean. Sexual fulfilment depends far more on bricks-and-mortar environment than on permissiveness. The minimum requirements are privacy, hot water, warmth and not being tired; one could add further desirabilia like a comfortable bed and nice surround¬ings. Given the perfect partner and the most liberal frame of mind, it is not possible to have the best from this area of life in a cold room where the neighbours or the children can hear everything and the washing facilities are inadequate. Good housing and amenities are essentials of freedom. At the same time, good housing is also that which is appropriate to one’s needs. Most people’s housing needs vary con¬siderably at different stages of their lives. A well-to-do person is able to buy mobility. For the majority, however, the house obtained accord¬ing to means is likely to remain the home more or less permanently, regardless of its suitability.
The inference might be that what one has to do, then, is attack social evils and seek to extend areas of choice for everyone as far as possible. Paradoxically, it is virtually impossible to do that in a basically unfree society. I have mentioned housing and mobility. If an estate is built to rehouse poor people in a pleasant area, everyone who can afford it in the neighbourhood will promptly move away, making the estate automatically a colony of inferiors. The main dilemma of the Welfare State is that, however it was conceived as a national effort transcending individual status, it has never been seen as anything but sectional
— a tax, more or less, on the well-to-do and a bounty to the poor.
Nor is it more feasible to try to legislate against a problem like pollution. There are, of course, partial approaches to it. But if alter¬native techniques for all contaminatory industrial processes were found, the criterion is not going to be human wellbeing but ‘viability’ —- how much will it cost ? There is nothing intelligible to say of such a pro¬blem except that it is inseparable from production for profit. Though popular awareness of it is recent, it is simply the development of what has been going on throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
If one adds to it the other chronic problems of the modern world — the crisis-producing imbalances of production which are part of the nature of capitalism, the international rivalries and tensions and the dreadful consequences when tension breaks — these alone press a majestic case for a fundamental alteration in society. When is added the failure of capitalism to house, feed, educate or make happy vast numbers of people, or to give any degree of choice, the case becomes overwhelm¬ing.
The argument for socialism is that the problems will cease to exist and freedom of choice be given, only on the terms of common ownership of all the means of living. Production for use means production unconfined by the market as to either distribution or cost. On one hand there would be free access to the wealth of society; on the other, cost and competition would not oppose themselves to human wellbeing. The material fears of loss of work, housing or status that largely underlie racialism would disappear with every other kind of superiority-distinction. So would the pressures which continually crush the quality of personal life. Indeed , if common ownership is seen as the means and not the end, socialism appears not simply as the solution but as many thousands of solutions: the facility from which progress, in the true sense, may begin.
The movement for social change has got to be a democratic one and not a cabal. The objection to arbitrary private decision is not just an ethical one. It is part of the argument against direct action as well as against despotism, that unless people know and give their will to what is happening, they are being treated as subjects. There has to be con¬sciousness, and there has to be acknowledgement of the fact that the ultimate directive power over us all is still with Parliament. The growth of a movement in these terms is inevitably tedious, lacking the stimu¬lation of popular rallying-calls; but its urgency is no less.
The diagnosis made by the socialists of 1904 remains true. In the face of the condition of society today, socialism is the only solution. Correctness is no guarantee of success, and the Socialist Party’s refusal
to be drawn away has made it an unattractive minority; and that in turn has led to the introspections on which I may appear to have been hard because I know them so well. Certainly if people are to listen to socialism it must continually seek relevance in its language and imagery. Perhaps the failing is that socialism appears always as a distant prospect. It is wrong to see or present it so, because the need for social change is more pressing than most of us think. But one never knows the immediate future. The socialist movement is again finding its type of crusader as it did sixty, forty, thirty years ago. If the objective is hard to see, the journey has still to be made. For, as William Morris wrote in his Dream of John Ball:
But while I pondered these things and how men fight and lose the battle and the thing they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat and, when it comes, turns out to be not what they meant — and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name. ’
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