The SPGB’s contribution to the political literature of the great depression was a thin white pamphlet called Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse. It dealt with the idea, spread widely in the nineteen-twenties by the Communist Party and the ILP, that the capitalist system was nearing breakdown. Tracing the history of this belief, the pamphlet proved its fallacy and, consequently, the hopelessness of policies based upon it. Recurrent crises were among the inevitabilities of capitalism, and the system would survive them until the working class put an end to it.
Read today, Why Capitalism Will Not Collapse appears as a remarkable analysis of depression politics. It had no influence simply because it was not published until 1932, when the crisis was over. In the first surge of left-wing excitement in 1929 it might have commanded attention on a large scale, but in the ’thirties it was unsaleable. The theory of collapse lost its ground because of economic recovery, not disproof. It may seem to have been less a theory than a hopeful assertion of the way things would go, but its origins were the serious attempts of nineteenth-century economists to find patterns in the recurrence of crises. The arch-prophet of the cataclysm had been H. M. Hyndman, whose Commercial Crises of the Nineteenth Century remains an import¬ant source of data which militate curiously against Hyndman’s own theories.
The failure of the pamphlet as a selling item meant nothing to the Party; its value was judged by its correctness, and correct it undoubtedly was. It had been the first pamphlet on a specific question, as distinct from general principles, since Socialism and Religion, and it made plain the hardening in the Party argument. An element of frust¬rated anger is not hard to see in this. The road to the new society had lengthened and became overgrown sadly since 1904. The working class in many thousands had been shown its errors of thinking, but persisted in them. Very well: the working class must have the rigours of capital¬ism, and if the rigours were harsh — it served them right for not accepting socialism. Indeed, half-consciously the Party was now seeing the working class as its adversary: socialism was unattained not because of the capitalists but because of the obtuse, uncaring proletariat. The
attitude was made explicit at the outbreak of war in 1939 when, asked by a branch to reprint the 1914 anti-war manifesto, the Socialist Standard editors refused. The address had said ‘Having no quarrel with the working class of any country’, and that, said the editors, was no longer an acceptable sentiment: the Party did have a quarrel, a big one, with working people.
However belligerent and intolerant the earlier members had been, their attitude never excluded sympathy for the class in which their revolt was rooted. The 1910 pronouncements on reform had held working-class interests to be paramount. But what must be kept in mind is that the Party’s first generation were, for all their deliberateness, young men in a hurry who believed socialism was not far away.
In 1954 an old member remarked that it had been expected long ago. Now, in the ’thirties, there was only toil against odds; and whom had they to blame ?
To speak of anger may convey that the Socialist Party was only sombre in the nineteen-thirties. From one point of view it was, but the thirties were also the most colourful years in its history. They were years of excitement in the whole left-wing movement. There was the swift rise of Nazism, the question of democracy posed by jack-boots and pogroms; war preparation with terrifying new weapons, and the wave of pacifist reaction; the marches and street brawling promoted by Communists and Fascists in Britain; the Spanish Civil War; the harrow¬ing unemployment problems; slums, abdication, Japanese goods, dole and means test, a score of rallying points and causes.
The political warfare of the ’thirties was acrimonious and often violent. The SPGB was in the fray solely to prove to all contestants that they were wrong. In these years, the Party found itself with a new type of member. Often he (or she) was an ex-Communist or ILP-er seeking better weapons in the battle of words; most characteristically he was a back-street boy with nimble wits and tongue, with ample respect for learning but none at all for persons. Thus came in Wilmott, Turner, Benjamin, Dawe, a whole bunch who carried with them the real flavour of the nineteen-thirties.
The Party was not altogether gratified by this infusion of fresh blood. Because times had changed, the new members did not seem the right kind; many of them were, to put it simply, far too much like hobbledehoys. Turner and Wilmott both came from Walworth, near the offices the Party had taken in 1927, and more than one of the older men lamented this apparent outcome of moving to a rowdy working- class district. For these socialists of the ’thirties offended, above every-thing, the puritanism which ran through the Party (as it did the entire
labour movement). Their impudence and amorality were not serious, considered demonstrations against property such as the members had always practised, but seemed to illustrate only the worst things said at all times about younger generations.
Such kinds of good repute as the Party had valued were thrown to the winds now. SPGB-ers traditionally were vociferous at other parties’ meetings, but the spectacle of Turner and Wilmott chased down the road by angry Conservatives for the names they had called a peer of the realm was something new. So was the address of Dawe to the reverend bishop who jostled him — ‘Clumsy pot-bellied bleeding old ponce !’ — before he ran too. The ultimate dialectic not uncommonly was physical force. ‘Let’s have a walk and discuss this problem’, said one speaker to his questioner; just past the street-lamp, before a word was spoken, he kicked him horribly and left the luckless man doubled- up on the kerb.
It is fair to say that all this was part of political life in the years between the depression and 1939. The British Union of Fascists organised violence, but they had no monopoly of it. In fact, a great deal of the hooliganism which became a social problem after the war existed before it, given an outlet and a degree of sanctity by association with lofty causes. I saw in 1938, in the local headquarters of the Young Communist League, an understairs cupboard which was full of improvised weapons for carrying under jerseys and in trouser-legs to demonstrations and marches: bread-knives, door-knobs on sticks, iron bars and much else. I knew several school friends who were attracted to the Fascists, the YCL and other ‘militant’ organizations partly by this sort of thing and partly by the rumour of sexual opportunities.
Outdoor politics was not for timid spirits. A good deal of the violence came from the side of authority, too. Unemployed demonstrations as well as political ones were dispersed with often gratuitous brutality by the police. Nor were there public protests and enquiries.
It was only what the demonstrators expected. For one thing, they had read again and again in the abundant left-wing literature of the day the stories of Peterloo, the Paris Commune and Bloody Sunday; for another, most people in poor districts lived near enough to climates of wrongdoing to know the police were not gentle.
The SPGB members did not carry weapons or join in demon¬strations likely to lead to head-breaking (they were, apart from anything else, barred by their Hostility Clause from doing so). Nor did they seek to break up others’ meetings, which was a principal activity of the Communists. It is worth mentioning that the Communists’ policy in this direction was not concerned only with Fascists: an order in 1931
instructed that Labour Party meetings were to be broken up wherever possible. 21 The SPGB’s point was that nothing was gained except by logical persuasion. Nevertheless, most of the members who came in during the depression years had served apprenticeships elsewhere, and it was impossible to be in this world without being of it too.
The new members knew that they were deprecated on social ind moral grounds, and responded vigorously. They turned the Party axiom of ‘two classes in society’ into a gibe that there were two classes In the Party; they put it about that no-one was allowed in a certain branch who had not twenty-six stamps on his insurance card.22
One member, Clifford Groves, who had an extraordinary overbearing manner was nicknamed ‘Two-Shirt Groves’ by them — only the possession of a second shirt could have made a man so haughty, they claimed. Even the ciders of the Party found it hard to deal with them, since Benjamin or Wilmott could fire six insulting wisecracks while one crushing epigram in the old tradition was being composed.
All the same, the Party had little choice but to acknowledge the abilities with which it was now endowed. For years it had lacked the real mob orator it had to have; now there were crowds round its platforms again, listening to Wilmott and Turner. Both in their twenties,
they were outstanding speakers. The former, an illegitimate son of a well-known political figure of the pre-1914 era, had been in the Communist Party and an organizer for the NUWM, and had been chosen from innumerable young speakers to share the plinth at Trafalgar Square with A. J. Cook for a mass unemployed meeting. Less single-minded than Turner, he never dedicated himself to success as a speaker and gave his crackling brilliance chiefly to the study and exposition of Marxist theory in economics, history and philosophy as time went by. Turner,
on the other hand, had but one aim — to become an orator.
It was Turner who filled the space which had been empty since the great days of Anderson. In later years members often tried to compare them and to estimate which was the better speaker. It was like the attempt to compare Jack Johnson with Joe Louis: each belonged to a different era, his skills reflecting the accomplishments and tempo of his time. Anderson might have been called old-fashioned in the Thirties, Turner without doubt would have been thought brash and vulgar in 1904. Their common element, however, was the prophetic passion of their reverence for the Party’s Principles. For both of them, the doctrine of scientific socialism was the truth absolute; there was nothing else to know.
There is no reservation in these estimates of Turner’s or Anderson’s stature as an orator. Far from being merely large fish in the
little pond of minority political tub-thumping, they may well have been the two greatest orators of the twentieth century. Disinterested hearers said so, many times. About 1948 I talked to a man who thought he had heard every famous speaker since 1900: he mentioned Lloyd George, De Leon, Horatio Bottomley, Cook, Maxton, Churchill. He did not even know Turner’s name, but he described the man he had listened to one Sunday in Hyde Park — ‘Short, Mongolian-looking, with a husky voice . . . my word, that man was an orator ! ’
The Party’s offices were full of activity in these years. In 1919, rooms had been taken at Mount Pleasant, near the GPO sorting office.
It was always assumed that the head office must be in Central London and when in 1927 Fitzgerald brought forward the possibility of moving to Southwark it was disfavoured at once for that reason. Fitzgerald’s response was a characteristic one; with a map and compasses on the Executive table, he showed by measurement that the Elephant and Castle was the true centre of Greater London. The premises into which the Party moved soon afterwards were an old three-storey house at 42 Great Dover Street, a little way over London Bridge.
It was the best place the Party had had. Pamphlets and bills were displayed in the downstairs window. There was a tiny basement kitchen where a woman member cooked meals and made tea, and rooms for literature sorting and committee meetings. The main room was the big one on the first floor, where Executive meetings, lectures and even socials were held. There was an impression of zestfulness and bounding activity that is confirmed by looking at the issues of the Socialist Standard for these years. Meetings, debates and lectures were more numerous than at any other time in the Party’s history. Here were class¬es in economics, classes in political theory, classes for would-be speakers and writers. The Party’s reputation as a teaching body revived and was enhanced.
Each month now a long list of outdoor meetings and speakers appeared in the Standard. The number of aspirant speakers led to the revival of the old idea of a test. The plan adopted was to give recognit¬ion to a certain number of well-established speakers, and to require the others — and all new speakers in future — to answer an oral examination in socialist knowledge before they were admitted to the list. Members who had not passed were allowed to speak from Party platforms now only ‘under supervision’ — i.e. when a qualified speaker was there to cover up mistakes. It was called the New Speakers’ Test to distinguish it from the ‘old’ test, which still remained as a more searching one to be applied to speakers charged with error.
One of the more curious cases under this rule concerned a
middle-aged speaker from East London. He was one of the half-wilful unemployed, living poorly on public assistance but no worse than he might have done in a badly paid job. For perhaps twelve years he had hardly worked at all, and he developed his own theory about it. He found that there were people in Wales, the Black Country and elsewhere who had had no work for even longer; there were instances of men in these depressed areas who had left school, grown to manhood and married on the dole, had never worked at all. How, he asked, could these people — and he — be among the working class ? Marx had spoken of a submerged tenth’: obviously this was it. In capitalist society there were not two classes but three.
Private ‘theories’ of this kind were, in the SPGB’s tradition, ‘thrashed out’ by presentation for discussion on branch lecture nights. The process was usually one of brow beating the theorist, so that he either left the Party or kept his views to himself in future. This speaker took an unusual course: he complained to the Executive of an uncomradely member who had shouted ‘That’s a lie !’ at every sentence. The Investigation of the complaint led to another, of the speaker’s contentions. An examining committee was set on him, and he was suspended from appearing on the platform sine die, or until he retracted. In fact he never did: nearly twenty years later he was ready to argue the existence of an unrecognized class in the social structure.
A greater furore than this, however, was the application to join the party of Charles Lestor. He was, undoubtedly, one of the most remarkable men ever seen in the socialist movement. Short and leathery, with a leonine head crowned by a great shock of white hair, he was like the Redskin chief of a schoolboy’s dream. His face was tanned, his nose strong and aquiline, his eyes deep-set, his jaw muscular from a lifetime’s public speaking. He had an immense, resonant voice, and when he waved his right hand as he talked one saw the stump of a lost index finger. And Charlie breathed as well as looked adventure. Behind him was a long career as a travelling orator, when he came to London from Canada in 1934. He talked of the Yukon, of cattle-drives and fist-fights, of men who came straight from the pages of Robert Service and Jack London.
Charlie had only to begin, ‘When I was in Vancouver’ — or Alaska, or ’Frisco, or almost anywhere in the North American continent In have eager listeners. Sometimes his stories were too good to be true, but often they were too incredible to be untrue. He had killed an Indian in a fight in jail, and when he came out he had to fight the Indian’s father before his tribe; he had been in Boston when Sacco and Vanzetti were executed; he had spoken at strikers’ meetings with guns
trained all round him. The asides to his yarns were romances in them¬selves. ‘I went in this saloon with T-Bone Slim. He was a speaker. They called him that because he’d get on the platform and shout to the crowd: “Who gets everything the workers produce ? Who gets the T- bone steaks ?”’
Charlie was over sixty when he came to London. His reputation in North America was considerable. A spot in one Canadian city where he had spoken for hours at a time was called ‘Lestor’s Corner’ thirty years later. In 1959 Jim Graham, then chairman of the ILP, told me he had been converted to Marxism as a young man by hearing Lestor speak in Canada. The fact remained that Charlie had rarely, if ever, stood for the teaching which was the SPGB’s. He had been in the old Socialist Party of Canada, which the Party disowned for its attitude to the Chinese immigrant question, and in the IWW; rumour said that he had been a Communist for a time as well. In and out of organizations, he had always spoken principally for himself — leaflets heralding his lectures and meetings in the USA and Canada announced ‘Charles Lestor, the Greatest Living Exponent of Marxian Socialism’. His last few years in Canada had been spent as editor and general manager of the One-Big-Union Bulletin, an IWW paper.
Thus, when Charlie applied for membership of the SPGB, the Executive was not sure what to do. They sent to the new Socialist Party of Canada, asking whether or not they should let him join. The Canadians replied promptly and without euphemism. Lestor, they said, was a man of great ability and a fine speaker; he was also over-individualistic and unreliable from the point of view of Party discipline, and they could not recommend his being allowed to join. Rather surprisingly, the EC did allow Charlie Lestor in. There was a spectacular debate, of course (always on these occasions members flocked to the head office to listen to the EC’s thunderous wrangling). Moses Baritz pounded the table and roared that this man was a spy from a counter-revolutionary camp. Charlie did not contest the allegation, probably because he was the only man in the room besides Baritz to whom it might have appealed; to his dying day he believed strongly that capitalism was pro¬tected by an army of conspirators and secret agents everywhere.
Though the Party repudiated belief in the conspiratorial nature of capitalism, it was tolerated in members so long as it created no issues. Charlie Lestor was a mine of anecdotes and proofs of conspiracy. Unsophisticated members would sit wide-eyed while he described how, at noon on a certain day, ‘A piece of paper fluttered down from the summit of the Empire State Building — it was the signal they wished, one thinks, they knew what the signal had been for. He would
Hold
hold up an imaginary bank-note while he talked about ‘the great money trick’, glowering under his great bushy eyebrows and implying a terrible significance to the words unnoticed and uncomprehended by almost everyone but he: ‘I promise to pay . . . only a promise, you see !’ Had Lestor’s political reputation been made in Britain and not Canada, the SPGB almost certainly would have refused to have him. One reason why none of the intellectuals who were attracted by the idea of revolution in the ’thirties came to the Party was simply that the Party made clear that it did not want them. Close to the time of Lestor’s entry, J. Middleton Murry was impressed by one of the Party’s pamphlets and wrote saying: ‘It seems to me that I ought to join.’ The answer was a swingeing attack on him in the Socialist Standard. There was more than an element of head-hunting in the Party’s collection of public personalities rebuffed and ‘exposed’. The great delight of public debates was the affirmation to members that the cleverest men were fools lacking socialist logic. What the Party felt to be the supreme compliment to itself was the verdict of Fitzgerald’s old opponent, Lawler Wilson, in his book The Menace of Socialism:
‘What is most remarkable and disquieting about this dangerous organization is that the members are unquestionably higher-grade working. men of great intelligence, respectability and energy. They are, as a whole, the best-informed socialists in the country, and would make incomparable soldiers, or desperate barricadists. As revolutionaries, they deserve no mercy; as men, they command respect. ’
The activity of the Party in the nineteen-thirties was out of proportion to its size. The numbers remained at between three and four hundred. Though many new members came in, the increase was constantly offset by loss and defection. Some died, some became inactive through age or circumstances (in some instances men lapsed when they fell unemployed, too proud — although the rules expressly allowed it — to ask to have subscriptions waived). And there was always the gentle flow away of people who, usually after short terms of membership, found the Party unacceptable. Nevertheless, these years were full of promise. Meetings were held all over London as they had not been for years, with crowds taking notice of colourful speakers. The Socialist Standard's circulation grew until, with 7,000 copies printed a month, it was actually paying for itself.
This development, which lasted for two or three years before the outbreak of war in 1939, indicates the height which Party activity reached. Few political party papers have ever paid their way — generally their support has come either from organizations’ funds or from donations. The Standard from its inception was always the chief consumer of
the Party’s funds. In the early years advertisements were permitted, but (though the only ones which appeared were for Jacomb Brothers, printers) a decision against them was made for fear the Party should be compromised. At intervals there were suggestions of soliciting advertisements for sociological books, but they were always rejected on the ground that anything not published by the Party was inevitably in some degree against the Party.
The increase in sales was largely a consequence of holding more and bigger meetings, of course; literature had always to be on sale where there was an audience or the hope of getting one. There was, however, an initiation of more far-sighted policies in the business management of the Standard. Its printing had passed from the hands of Jacomb, and from the beginning of the ’thirties it had good paper and a well-designed professional appearance. This, incidentally, was in spite of the strongly- voiced opinion of a section, never absent from the Party, that appear¬ance good or bad was irrelevant and all that mattered was the message proclaimed. A successful effort to build a strong body of regular postal subscribers was made for the first time, to provide a firm basis of known sales.
One other factor which helped promote the circulation of the Standard at this time was the activity of a number of ‘free lance’ literature sellers. These were members who were allowed supplies at an agreed wholesale rate from the Party office, and sold to benefit them¬selves as well as the Cause. A few of the free-lances were highly success¬ful. They attended the meetings of every organization, stood at railway stations and in markets, pressed copies at compromised ‘trade’ prices on newsagents, and pursued innumerable small avenues which normal methods of distribution could never have reached.
Despite their usefulness, the free-lance sellers were always regarded as ‘a worry’ by the Party because they had to be given credit. The few was not so much of financial loss — obviously any loss of the kind would be only the same as if the papers had not been sold at all — as of damage to a strong tradition which demanded absolute honesty within the organization. Members’ standards of behaviour towards society at large were their own business, but anyone who bilked the Party funds of a halfpenny deserved and usually got immediate expulsion. It happened very rarely, particularly when one considers that in times of general destitution the custody of a collection from a meeting or a few shillings’ literature takings would have tempted almost any working man, When it did happen, no excuse was taken. The member who fished postal orders with a wire from the letter-box, though a known klepto-maniac, and though restitution was made, was expelled and not allowed
to re-join until many years later.
The standard imposed was a hard-headed, practical one, and presents a strange anomaly against everything else the Party did. All criminality in society was interpreted with a rigid economic determinism by the Party. Everything from mass murder to petty larceny was claimed to be an inevitable outcome of social conditions, usually of nothing other than poverty. The criminal was hardly more able to control his destiny than the victim. As long as private property existed there would be crime, and when socialism was established there would be none. Articles in the Standard and lectures made the point, and applied in identical analysis to every problem of human behaviour. The analysis was completely abandoned when a crime was committed against the Party. What was said then was, in effect, that the long view was one thing but an immediate problem must be met on immediate terms.
What is strange is that this reasoning was isolated. Not only did the Party not dream of applying it otherwise, but fiercely rebutted it as the mainspring of other organizations’ attempts to improve daily social conditions. No doubt the Party would have said that in cases of theft it had to protect its own interests: but this was precisely how other groups saw their struggles for concessions. Here, in fact, the whole question of what was meant by ‘interests’ arose. It was never considered at this level because men who stole the Party’s money were usually un-liked and undesirable, condemned in any case by their own personalities; but the unanswered question remains. The founders had seen the move¬ment for a new society as the necessary outcome of the pursuit of working-class interests, but the Party had avoided considering what the Interests were — save that the working class had no rightful concern except to support the Party.
The conflict between the SPGB’s social analysis and its judgements on its members existed largely because it had become preoccupied with its own problem. What was discussed perennially in speech and printed article was the failure of the mass to come to the SPGB. Measures for social betterment were condemned after argument apparently over their worth to the working class, but the real condemnation was that they did nothing to help the Party’s problem. Similarly, the contempt for social amusements and public amenities was resentment of things which distracted the workers’ attention. ‘They sleep in slums and piddle in palaces’, sneered the members. The underlying thought was that if cinemas, the radio, football matches and cheap books were not there, the working class might be drawn to the serious consideration which the Party offered.
Most of the three or four hundred members were still in the
Greater London area. The branches in provincial cities were usually small groups depending chiefly on a single keen member in each. Some¬times the member was an exiled Londoner — as, for example, Eric Boden in Sheffield — capable of holding meetings and initiating other activities on his own account with the confidence of the EC. At other times, however, he was an enthusiastic convert in whom hope rather than confidence resided. One such was a man named Edmund Howarth who after several years’ zealous work on the Party’s behalf in north¬east England was suddenly revealed by an informing letter to be a Buddhist as well. Howarth maintained stoutly in correspondence with the EC that Buddhism was compatible with scientific socialism, but the Party saw the episode as the kind of mistake that could happen when not enough was known about a man.
The only provincial areas in the ’thirties where the branches were more than one-man bands were Manchester and Glasgow. From the days of Moses Baritz’s arrival there had always been a nucleus in Manchester. A talented ex-Communist named Maertens became a member, providing the branch with a strong speaker and the dominant personality which most branches required. Manchester held indoor and outdoor meetings rivalling those of London, and a series of visits by some of the best London speakers promoted interest in the Party. Reynolds made a strong impression when he lectured and debated there, and a series of outdoor meetings by Turner in Platt Fields and Stevenson Square an even stronger one. For several years Manchester offered the hope of a Party centre in the north.
Glasgow similarly had its group which found new life in the years leading to the second world war — among the enthusiasts were, curiously, a number of bookmakers. A great deal was done from London to foster development in these and other places. Turner and other speakers travelled all over Britain to harangue the crowds which could be obtained easily in the squares and open spaces. Often it was done at little or no cost to the Party. The provincials were more than pleased to give whatever hospitality they could, and there were several known opportunities for travelling cheaply or free by public transport (there was, for example, a special arrangement by which one could go from London to Glasgow in comfort for a penny: I have done it myself). Indeed, where expense was unavoidable there was usually carping and often insinuation that the speaker was robbing the Party.
An account of the Party’s structure and activities at this time would be incomplete without mention of the four ‘companion parties’. When its faith in the older foreign Marxist parties disappeared, the SPGB looked forward to the growth of a new International of
organizations which would adopt its Declaration of Principles. In the nineteen-twenties tiny parties were formed in other English-speaking countries: the Workers’ Socialist Party of the USA; the Socialist Party of Canada, and the Socialist Parties of Australia and New Zealand. The first was, of course, the fruit of the work of Baritz and Kohn. Seamen who had come under the SPGB’s influence had something to do with in formation of the Australian party, and old-time Marxists of the pre- 1914 generation played a part in Canada. In the main, however, the parties in the Dominion countries owed their existence to emigrant Britons. None of the companion parties numbered more than a handful in two or three branches, but the American and Canadian members published together a magazine called The Western Socialist, ‘Journal of Scientific Socialism in the Western Hemisphere’.
Comments