There was still no Party office. The Communist Club provided only a room for meeting, and the addresses for communications were members’ own addresses: literature orders to Watts, requests for information to Fitzgerald. In 1905 the more frequent use of a room was obtained at la Caledonian Road; a year later there was another room at 28 Cursitor Street; the next year, the Executive met at 22 Great James Street.
The first premises rented for the Party’s exclusive use were at 10 Sandland Street, Bedford Row, in 1909. They were two rooms above a corner junk-shop, up two flights of rickety stairs. One felt, said a veteran member forty-five years later in the Socialist Standard, that one was entering ‘the heart of deep red revolution’. One room had a desk and a chair and a pile of unsold Standards. The paper was delivered in large flat sheets every month; when the word of its arrival came, members would go and spend evenings or Saturday afternoons folding the copies and arguing economics while they did so.
The other room had a long table and a number of chairs. Here Fitzgerald gave his classes on Marxism and history and on Tuesday nights the Executive Committee met. R. M. Fox has described the scene at one of the meetings in the crowded little room:
‘The war-horses pranced . . . Anderson, his pale face gleaming, flung back his mane of hair and pounded chairs and table. Neumann wore his square-cut frock coat, which he usually reserved for Paris Commune celebrations. He began with Teutonic gravity, but soon worked himself into red-faced incoherence. Fitzgerald, owlish and grim, shot out his fists and nailed his points, with a deep throaty roar.
It should have been a great night. The issue to me was a very momentous one. I saw the lights of the room casting gesticulating shadows on the blinds. The orators thundered on till well after midnight, arguing, pleading, insulting, threatening, asserting. Down in the street passers-by stood looking up at the windows curiously, wondering when the disputants in the brawl would come to blows. ’
In those years, the character of the Party became more firmly established. There was a discipline which softened for nobody: a
member had to conform or go. Each year there were the one or two cases of members weakening towards prohibited doctrines or organizations and their inevitable expulsion (Fox was expelled for sending an appreciative letter to a radical paper). It worked in the reverse ways too, of course. Some decided they would rather go than conform, while some demanded procedures still more authoritarian and resigned in anger with the Party’s laxity. The vital test of this kind of discipline came in 1906, when an entire branch was expelled for . . . for what ? Searching the records, it is hard to say.
The Islington dispute, as it was afterwards called, began as a clumsy attempt to re-orientate the Party towards the SLP and industrial unionism. After approaching the Party Executive for a statement of the differences between the two organizations, a man named Morris formed a branch of the Socialist Party at Bexley Heath in Kent; from this branch came almost at once an item for the agenda of the forthcoming Easter Conference demanding the union of the SLP and the SPGB. In spite of the Executive’s objections the Conference discussed the item. The industrial unionists lost the day, but there was agreement to re-open the question of the trade unions in a special meeting and a poll of the Party.
Immediately after the Conference, the Islington branch questioned the legality of what had taken place. The SLP proposal, being in conflict with the Hostility Clause of the Principles, never should have been admitted to the Conference; the discussion of trade unions, arising as it did from the invalid item, was out of order; the EC — the Executive — must ignore the Conference and make Bexley Heath withdraw its demand. The Executive Committee submitted the question to a referendum, obtained confirmation by a majority of one that the Conference had been wrong, and there would have let the matter rest.
But Islington came back. The Bexley Heath branch must be made to expunge the criminal resolution from its books. But that would be falsifying the records, said the EC. No matter, insisted the Islington members: there is a greater stain on the Party’s purity that must be erased. We can do nothing more, replied the EC. Then, said Islington, the Executive has failed in its duty as the custodian of socialist principle. As a protest the branch would stop all activity until some action was taken and the EC was removed.
A Delegate Meeting in July considered the case. Too many pistols were being held at heads for a reconciliation now and, from the point of view of the discipline the Party desired, both sides were in the right. So the Islington branch was expelled (and, as if to prove that
Islington were right, the Bexley Heath branch too). One of the Islington members was Lehane, the Party Secretary; another, George Bazin, remained a supporter all his life but was never readmitted to membership because he was unwilling to make an act of contrition for 1906. Islington made two parting sallies with pamphlets called Rocks Ahead and Another Political Wreck, but they found no sympathy. A strong precedent had been established: there was to be no nonsense from anyone.
The membership at the time of the Party’s entry to Sandland Street was perhaps 250. There were eighteen branches, thirteen of them in London; one was the Central Branch for scattered members, united only by posted reports, and the others were at Burnley, Manchester, Nottingham and Watford. The zeal and purposefulness were tremendous, however. Every branch held propaganda lectures in the winter and outdoor meetings in the summer. At the height of the season about two dozen speakers would be holding forty or fifty meetings a week in the London area. Thus, the Party’s reputation grew out of proportion to its size; it had to be noticed. In the labour move¬ment it acquired nicknames which were variants on the initials by which it became known: Simon Pure’s Genuine Brand or, a reference to the belief in democratic methods for the revolution, the Small Party of Good Boys.
With great social issues in the air, challenges to public debate were eagerly thrown and often accepted. The least willing organizations were the SDF and other Labour groups, who knew the SPGB well enough to realize there was little to be gained. Liberals, Conservatives, Anti-Socialist Unionists and others were more than willing to debate, however. Some debates were held from rostrums in the parks, but for the more important ones there was always a hall. Party members would travel anywhere to hear Anderson or Fitz browbeating an opponent. There was a great vicarious thrill in the sight of a Member of Parliament or some other public figure, seen as a representative of the mighty master class, quailing before the socialist truth: a lion thrown to the Christians and being torn.
Nor is there any doubt that Fitzgerald and Anderson, as well as others of their time and after in the Socialist Party, were brilliant debaters. To their ability as speakers was added a mental discipline in which facts and figures were the supreme arbiters of all questions. Fitzgerald went everywhere with a bag of books strapped to his cycle; he prepared assiduously for debates, took the platform with a pile of books and papers, quoted endlessly. In 1908 he debated with Lawler Wilson of the Anti-Socialist Union, who himself was demolishing
opponents with statistics and quotations. Fitzgerald spent weeks studying the sources of Wilson’s case. Confronted with them on the
night, he flung the books on the table one after another. The figures, the instances, the so-called facts did not exist, he trumpeted; and he was right.
Two of Fitzgerald’s debates, with A. H. Richardson, MP, and Samuel Samuels, were published as pamphlets under the titles The Liberal Party and The Conservative Party, and there were packed halls to hear the sturdy bricklayer against such men as de Tunzelmann,
E. N. da C. Andrade, and R. C. K. Ensor, on subjects like ‘The Validity of Marx’s Theoretic System’. In 1910 a wide new field for debate was opened by the publication of Socialism and Religion. Here for the first time, a socialist organization declared itself an atheist one. True, there was a widespread feeling that the churches, in particular the Church of England, were in the pockets of the capitalist class; but that was a different thing from unqualified opposition to all religious belief and practices. The influence of Christian Socialism was a strong one in the labour movement, and the principle ‘Religion is a private affair’ had general acceptance.
Socialism and Religion was a thin, grey-covered pamphlet of no more than fourteen thousand words. It was written by F.C.Watts but, like all the pamphlets the Party produced, it was signed in the name of the Executive Committee: the argument was the Party’s, not Watts’s.
The opening section was headed THE NEED FOR FRANKNESS, and accused radical parties of suppressing the case against religion for fear of alienating supporters. Applying the Marxist principle, Watts analyzed religious belief as a social product — ‘the reflex of tribal life’. In fact, the theory of the origin of religion was taken from Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology, which was highly esteemed in the SPGB.
But the more important matter was in the parts of the pamphlet headed THE SOCIALIST PHILOSOPHY. ‘Under its multi-farious forms’, wrote Watts, ‘the modern mission of religion is to cloak the hideousness and injustice of social conditions and keep the - exploited meek and submissive.’ He revealed that the SPGB would allow nobody in its ranks with a religious belief. ‘No man can be consistently both a Socialist and a Christian. It must be either the
Socialist or the religious principle that is supreme, for the attempt to
couple them equally betrays charlatanism or lack of thought.’ Finally, in the world of common ownership there would be no religion: ‘Socialism, both as a philosophy and as a form of society, is the anti-thesis of religion.’
Socialism and Religion was a best-seller among political
pamphlets for nearly twenty years. While the irreligionists and freethinkers delighted in it, churchmen held up and quoted it as living proof of the terrors of socialism. In 1914 a Roman Catholic Congress in Belfast heard a paper based on the iniquity displayed in it. ‘The poisoned breath of Socialism’ was the lecturer’s phrase, and he could hardly have needed to appeal ‘that it shall never be allowed to establish a foothold within the fair hills of holy Ireland’.12 And a few years later an American bishop named William Montgomery Brown, DD, a convert to the Russian Revolution, reprinted and expanded it in a booklet, Communism and Christianism; he was tried for heresy by an ecclesiastical court, and described himself afterwards as ‘Episcopus in Partibus Bolshevikium et Infidelium’.
So clergymen and Christian Socialists were added to the list of debating opponents. With the additional publicity and excitement afforded by Socialism and Religion, the debates, the antagonisms fostered as the new Labour Party gathered strength, the Party thrived in Sandland Street. The nearby coffee-shop proprietor, Sammy Quelch, joined and became the Party Secretary, thus providing an extension for discussions and a daytime service (notes were pinned to the office door indicating where the Secretary could be found). More pamphlets were published. The first one, besides the translations of Kautsky and a reprint of Morris’s Art, Labour and Socialism, had been The Manifesto of the Socialist Party of Great Britain-, in 1911 appeared Socialism, an exposition by Jacomb of the economic and historical laws on which the case for revolution rested.
One other publication of the time failed to find success. At the Executive Committee one night Hans Neumann stood on the table in his tail-coat and sang the revolutionary song he had composed: The World for the Workers. It was advertized in the Socialist Standard as a ‘four-part song — S, A, T, B — complete with pianoforte accompani¬ment and Tonic-Solfa setting’. Underlying its performance was the hope that it might oust The Red Flag and The Internationale, but it did not catch on even in the Party itself. Not many people wrote for copies, and it died in a year or two despite the renderings by the Paddington Branch Choir at meetings and social gatherings. Its words were:
You toilers of the world, arise !
To bravely speed the day,
When all your forces organize
King Capital to slay.
And from the master class you ’II wrest
The powers of the State,
Which, wielded in your interest,
Your class emancipate.
There sounds above the class war din The battle cry we use:
Unite ! You have a world to win,
Your chains alone to lose.
Your lot in life is darkest gloom;
You sow and others reap.
And want and mis’ry are your doom,
While idlers treasures heap.
Why have they riches, you distress ?
Though you all wealth have wrought ?
It is because the few possess
The earth while you have nought.
There sounds, etc.
While you an idle class maintain For pittances you’ll toil.
To own your products you must gain Possession of the soil
And of all means the workers need To found the Commonwealth,
And thus enable all to lead Full lives of peace and health.
There sounds, etc.
Arise ! the message to proclaim,
The message full of cheer:
That Labour’s freedom is your aim,
That brighter days are near.
To men exhausted by the fray,
To women in despair,
To children wanting food and play,
To all the message bear.
There sounds, etc.
Meanwhile, clouds were gathering again over the question of the day-to-day issues. The Liberals were pressing for an extension of male suffrage, and the suffragette clamour growing louder. The SPGB was derisive: what the working class needed was socialism, not votes. An
editorial in the Standard pointed out that the seven million votes available at that time were more than enough to accomplish the social revolution, anyway. As for the female suffrage movement, it was simply a conspiracy by idle propertied women to gain further privileges at the expense of working-class women.
There were the National Insurance Act, a cynical provision for death by slow starvation, the Education Acts, legislation to create slave-minds, and innumerable other proposals for social reform which were, in the Party’s eyes, at best mere futile hopes and at worst manoeuvres by the conscienceless, rapacious ruling class. The question was if there was anything the Party would ever favour or support. No, said many; but Fitzgerald, Watts and others, militant against reformism as everyone, were more considered in their judgement. To declare wholesale opposition for the past was to discredit the growth and operation of state power and democratic right that had brought the socialist movement to maturity. To be committed to it for the future would be to deny the possibility of further gain — to deny, indeed, what Marx had always insisted: that men make history.
Fitzgerald, in particular, held that the growth of the socialist movement and its rise to parliament would alarm the capitalist class into conceding almost anything asked. The first socialists in parliament would probably be a minority, and they would have to vote on measures affecting the working class one way or another. Were they to assume all legislation to be bad, per se ? Of course not, said Fitzgerald. Policies of reform were opposed because they implied acceptance of the capitalist system and sought only to patch it up; individual reforms must be judged for their worth to the working class at large. Thus the argument grew, until someone decided to test the feeling of the Party.
It had been emphasized continually since 1904 that the Socialist Party stood alone. The more zealously its members dedicated themselves to the revolution, the broader did the streams of reform and palliation grow. At the beginning it was assumed that the continental Marxist parties in the Second International shared with the Party the inheritance of the true socialist tradition, and one of the immediate concerns after the Inaugural Meeting was to be represented at the Amsterdam Congress of the International in August. Rather surprisingly, H. M. Hyndman helped to obtain credentials; there was a hurried scraping-up of money to pay the fares, and Jack Kent and Alex Pearson went to the Congress as delegates. On their return they told the tale of reformism rampant. The Socialist Standard reported:
‘Our delegates thereto found such organizations as the
Independent Labour Party, the Labour Representation Committee, the Social Democratic Federation, and the Fabian Society claiming and obtaining admission as Socialist Organizations. Thus were seen the defenders of capitalism, the upholders of Child-slavery, the friends of Compromise and Reform, and the catspaw of the Bourgeois reaction generally masquerading as Revolutionists, prostituting the name and null of Socialism, and confusing the workers of questions of vital importance. ’
The International was written off by the Party. And so, one after another, were the great figures of Marxist thought. In 1906 August Bebel, one of the intellectual heroes of German Social-Democracy, sent a telegram to Reynolds' News applauding the Liberal victory in the elections; after a severe correspondence, the SPGB disowned him as a socialist. Kautsky, too. The Party translated the first three parts of his work for publication but, on learning the contents of the fourth, refused to have any more to do with it. Early Socialist
Standards regularly contained translations of writings and speeches by Guesde, Herve and other leaders of continental socialism, but they became fewer and fewer. The position in which the Party felt itself by 1910 was summed up by Neumann in the Standard: ‘It is a sad reflection that, except the SPGB, every body that contained the germ of Socialist existence has been swallowed up by . . . compromise and confusion.’
Without a doubt, the belief that the Party now carried the flag
alone reflected a remarkable integrity, most of all in those whose
abilities would have brought them to the fore anywhere. Nor is there any doubt, however, that for some it was its own satisfaction. To be against everyone and everything, and to see one’s differences in terms of a superior understanding of society, gave a tang and fervour to life for many men. What distinguished these revolutionists from other loads of ‘characters’ was the seriousness with which they practised mu unconventionality and assailed the world around them. Rebels and bohemians were confused emotionalists; only scientific socialism showed morality, respectability and conventional learning as despicable props of the capitalist system.
It was hard to tell the Party members anything, the more so as they regarded all knowledge other than their own as the lies of capitalism. Sick, they knew the system was responsible and not the germs; sent to hospital, they told the doctors everything, including that the doctors were lackeys hired by the master class to patch up the workers to keep the profit-mills rolling. The normal day-to-day
observances of going to work, paying the rent, getting married, were pernicious dictates of the property system to its slaves. There was always a strong anti-marriage faction in the Party, with Bebel’s Woman in the Past, Present and Future and Engels’s Origin of the Family to show the economic basis of monogamy; in 1906 the Standard had a front-page article headed THE CASE FOR FREE LOVE. And if a socialist’s marriage collapsed because he had neglected his wife and terrified his children with the Cause, it proved the case that capitalism made married happiness impossible.
In 1955 a member wrote to Forum recalling the socialists who used to confuse clean fingernails with capitalist riches’. If it was an exaggeration, it was not too much so. Among these fundamentalists there was, for example, one who would have no furniture because (he said) the capitalists sent bailiffs to take such things away from working people, and so his family used orange-boxes instead. And when another member bought a new suit, his comrades gathered round and altered it. The trouser-legs were long, they said, and they cut some pieces off; the jacket needed taking in, and they took it in until it was in rags. Aping the bourgeoisie with a new suit was asking for trouble.
One was either class-conscious or not, and class-consciousness allowed no room for compromising with the ways of the capitalist world. Landlords and commercialists, as shareholders in the system, were obvious prey. The members were always ready to help one another to decamp from houses where they had accumulated arrears of rent, and the speculative builders offering rent-free trials of new houses were a godsend; some men are reputed to have lived long spells, a week or two at a time, in innumerable new-built houses under this facility. On the other hand, the exploitation of one’s own class was beneath contempt. The worst of all crimes was to pilfer Party funds; there was no alternative to expulsion, and the system was no excuse at all.
This was not all the membership, of course. It was not Fitzgerald, Watts, Kent, or any of several others who were the fountainheads of SPGB knowledge; indeed, the crude and paranoiac attitudes were largely half-assimilated scraps of teachings which were more rational. Nevertheless it was characteristic of a section, and the conviction that the Party would approve of nothing whatever in the capitalist world would have been taken for granted but for the known dissent of an important few. It was impossible to hold up Fitzgerald as a heretic.
And so, to force a statement to be made, a group of members arranged for one to write as a casual enquirer for the Party’s attitude to reforms. The question appeared in the Socialist Standard for February, 1910. It was signed by ‘W.B. (Upton Park)’ and asked:
‘What would be the attitude of a member of the SPGB if elected to Parliament, and how would he maintain a principle of “No compromise” ?’
The reply, which was approved by the Executive Committee,
did not go into the expected details. It said:
‘By compromise, we understand “political trading”. . , The Socialist Member of Parliament (while in a minority, of course), would advance the interests of the working class by caustic and enlightening criticism of capitalism in all its manifestations — political, industrial, educational, etc. He would take every opportunity that offered to use this higher and well-heard platform as a means of spreading Socialist understanding. His presence, backed, as it must needs be, by a wide-awake electorate (suggestive of more to come and the threatened “end of all”) would in all probability evoke the initiation, by one or other of the capitalist parties, of measures that may conceivably contain some small advantage for the working class. Now, intellectual vitality requires the continual absorption and digestion of new facts as they occur. So with Socialism and proletarian politics. The SPGB is always ready to consider new facts and phases when these present themselves, and therefore the question of whether Socialist representatives should support any such measures in Parliament, is one that we do not, January 1910, pretend to answer. We can only say as to this, that as we progress and new situations arise, our membership, ever guided by the revolutionary principle of NO COMPROMISE, by our general under¬standing of Socialism and the greatest interest of the working class, its emancipation, will DEMOCRATICALLY direct the action of its representatives. Each new situation will have to be faced and Socialist action be decided on the merits of the case. Meanwhile we may not claim rank with the Pope or Old Moore, and it should be understood that there is room for differences of opinion upon a matter that, at the present stage, is only of secondary importance. Our work today is to teach our fellow toilers their position and show them the indisputable steps they must take to win freedom. ’
The question had, in fact, been too artfully put. The Party had made some ventures in the electoral field and had a handful of votes each time; even the magnetic Anderson polled only 143 in Tottenham.
As a hypothesis referring to the day when a socialist sat in Parliament,
it directed attention away from the matter with which it was principally concerned. The group for whom ‘W.B.’ had written aired their case at the Easter Conference, to find the Conference supporting not the argument that the Party might accept reforms but the argument that ‘new facts and phases’ could always arise. However, the
Conference discussions prepared the ground. The ‘W.B.’ group, styling themselves a ‘Provisional Committee’, sent out an Open Letter to the Members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain demanding the revocation of the February statement.
The Open Letter claimed that all legislation was solely for the smoother operation of capitalism. Two main types of measures had been instanced at the Conference as being of interest to the Party.
The first, improvements in working conditions and wages, was held by the Provisional Committee to be ‘unquestionably detrimental to our only object, viz., Socialism, which demands the most speedy abolition of wage slavery of the working class’. The second, the protection of working-class life and limb, was ‘sufficiently sentimental as to attract a number of class-unconscious workers of the emotional type who for the purpose of the Social Revolution would only represent a most dangerous element of the working class’. Any other view could have only one effect — to ‘tend to efface the bitter hostility against the capitalist class required from the working class to finally vanquish their most deadly enemy’.
The Executive’s reply bore the unmistakable stamp of Fitzgerald. It was lucid and forceful (the epithets — ‘fatuity’,
‘ignorance’, ‘utterly stupid’ — were his as well). ‘The veriest tyro in economic history’, it said, ‘is aware that legislation has practically from its origin “played a part in determining the conditions of wage-slave labour”. Hundreds of instances, from Thomas Wolsey to Asquith, might be given, but the matter is too obvious to require them.’ Not only was there history; there were also the unanswerable dicta of Marx in Value, Price and Profit:
‘Such being the tendency of things in this system, is this saying that the working class ought to renounce their resistance against the encroachments of capital, and abandon their attempts at making the best of the occasional chance for their temporary improvement ? If they did, they would be degraded to one level mass of broken wretches past salvation . . . By cowardly giving way in their every-day conflict with capital they would certainly disqualify themselves for the initiation of any larger movement. ’
The most telling point of all, however, was one which put the whole presumption of the SPGB in perspective. On the subject of saving life and limb, the reply said: ‘Yet the declaration of principles shows that the Party is the expression of the material interest of the working class. Further, the attainment of Socialism is dependent on the preservation of the workers in general.’
Had the membership — or even the Provisional Committee —
pursued the real implication of this, the Socialist Party might have had different history. Fitzgerald was saying that the consideration of the working class’s interests preceded the interests of the Party, could precede even the effort to establish socialism. It was seen only in the limited context of resolving a dispute, however. The Provisional Committee saw the implication, of course, but overdramatized it to the point of distortion. There were verbal brawls at outdoor meetings where the Committee and its supporters tried to embarass speakers with questions about reform, and the Party’s attitude hardened behind the EC. One member of the Committee, a schoolteacher named Augustus Snellgrove, announced his disillusionment with parliamentary socialism and left the Party altogether.
Discredited, the Provisional Committee issued the final reiteration of its case and its parting accusations of ill-will, confusion and political turpitude in August 1911, and the resignations of its members followed in the next few weeks. A few, including Snellgrove, re-joined after intervals that were not too long. The leader of the group, Harry Martin, never did. He took to his own platform, from which he went on speaking for the revolution against all compromise and against all legislation. Almost until he died in 1951 he was a well-known figure
south and central London — an erect, white-bearded man in his eighties, flailing the system from his little box.
The Executive’s replies to ‘W.B.’ and the Provisional Committee were held to have defined the Party’s attitude to reforms, but were implicated slightly by Fitzgerald’s having written in his personal stand-point. For him the welfare of the working class was paramount, and it is doubtful if the rest of the membership would have accepted that view if it in turn had been put to the test.
The conclusion from it all was that the Party would consider measures of reform on their merits. The Provisional Committee had denied, of course, that merits could possibly exist. But what was the standard of merit to be ? Here, Fitzgerald’s ‘preservation of the workers in general’ made the point to which the Party was to stick: that reforms would be judged in relation to the achievement of the socialist revolution. The patching of grievances was outside this scope; and as time went by the Party was able to point out that there were more than enough people making that their concern if it was needed.
The controversy of 1910-11 was an abstracted one. The SPGB never supported legislation or thought of doing so, but for raising the matter to a point of principle the men in the Provisional Committee ' were discomfited and forced to leave. On one hand, nothing had changed; on the other, more was laid down to the body of statement
and elucidation to which the Party would always refer. And to passers by in Brixton forty years later, there was Harry Martin’s cry from his lonely platform: ‘No compromise !’
Comments