Since our foundation in 1904, membership of the
Socialist Party of Great Britain has been conditional
on acceptance of the Party’s Object and Declaration
of Principles. All applicants for membership are required to
undertake a short written or verbal ‘test’ designed to
enable them to demonstrate an understanding of – and
agreement with – this Object and Principles and also of the
Party’s basic political positions not otherwise directly
covered in the Declaration. There has been a sound reason
for this as all members, once admitted, have full democratic
rights and stand in basic equality to one another. This kind
of political democracy can only work on the basis of
agreement around fundamental principles and there would
be no point in a socialist organisation giving full democratic
rights to those who, in any significant way, disagreed with
the socialist case. The outcome of that would be entirely predictable.
Naturally, in an organisation of critical thinkers that has endured for a
century, the existence of some disagreement is inevitable. Indeed, it
would be true to say that a fair number of internal debates and disagreements
have arisen in the Socialist Party concerning issues not covered by the
Declaration of Principles and not addressed in the initial membership test
– in other words, issues which are somewhat peripheral or incidental
rather than core and fundamental. These issues have included the Party’s exact
attitude to trade unionism, its view of capitalist economic crises, and – in more
recent years – whether something akin to law will exist in socialist society.
precise attitude to the Spanish Civil War in 1936, to the Hungarian Uprising in
1956 and then to the movements for political democracy in the Soviet-bloc states in the 1980s.
On other, far fewer, occasions, small groups of Party members, sometimes concerned by the Party’s pace of growth (or lack of growth in some periods) have developed ideas which have challenged the Party’s basic, core positions
more clearly. Having initially agreed with the Party’s principles and analysis they developed a political critique which challenged these positions at a more fundamental level. But even in these instances, only a handful of disputes
have been so serious that they have led to organisational breakaways, and for a political body that has seen thousands of members join over a century of activity, this is remarkable.
While sometimes damaging to the Party, these have always involved very small numbers of dissidents who have either left the organisation voluntarily or who have been expelled by a Party Poll. In each case they have
been more an instance of splintering than splitting. For the historical record, six splinters of the various kinds discussed above can be readily identified. They are
detailed below in chronological order.
The Socialist Propaganda League
The early dispute in the Socialist Party which led to the
formation of the tiny Socialist Propaganda League was the
product of the optimistic belief of the Party’s founder
members that the socialist revolution was near. A group of
members around Harry Martin and Augustus Snellgrove
wanted the Party to take a definitive stand on the attitude
socialist delegates elected to parliament or local councils
would take towards reform measures proposed by one or
more of the capitalist parties.
In February 1910 a letter from “W.B. (Upton Park)” was sent to the Socialist
Standard asking “What would be the attitude of a member of the SPGB if
elected to Parliament, and how would he maintain the principle of ‘No
Compromise’?” The perspective of this small group of members was that no
reform of capitalism could ever be supported by the party claiming to
represent working class interests as it was not the job of socialists to take part in the running of capitalism. Any attempt to do so would run counter to the famous ‘hostility clause’ of the Declaration of Principles. The Standard ’s reply on the matter,backed by the Party’s Executive Committee, stated that each issue would
have to be looked at on its merits and the course to be pursued decided
democratically. This did not satisfy the members who had raised the question,
who formed a ‘Provisional Committee’ aimed at overturning the position espoused in the Standard’s reply and who set their case out in an ‘Open Letter’ to Party members, arguing that socialists were required to oppose
measures introduced by capitalist parties on each and every occasion. This was again rebutted firmly by the EC who contended that it would be ridiculous for socialists, by way of example, to oppose a measure designed to stop a
war in which the working class was being butchered. Believing this approach to be a violation of the principle of ‘no compromise’ several members resigned over this issue during 1911, a small number going on to found the
Socialist Propaganda League. The SPL’s principal speaker and
writer was Harry Martin, Snellgrove having been one of
those from the Provisional Committee later to rejoin.
Though Martin was sympathetic to the Party in all other
respects, he continued to denounce the SPGB’s willingness
to engage in ‘political trading’ in pamphlets and on the
outdoor platform until his death in 1951. One of the SPL’s
pamphlets, From Slavery To Freedom, was critically reviewed
in the Socialist Standard in November 1932.
Harold Walsby and ‘Systematic Ideology’
The group that formed around Harold Walsby and his ideas
probably represents the most unusual breakaway from the
Socialist Party in its entire history. During the Second
World War this group developed a fascination with
perceived impediments to mass socialist consciousness
among the working class. The theory they developed was
expressed by Walsby himself in his 1947 book The Domain
of Ideologies and those involved in the group set up an
organisation to propagate their views called the Social
Science Association, which existed from 1944 until 1956,
attracting a number of new recruits during the ‘Turner
controversy’ (see below). It was later succeeded by the
Walsby Society and the journal which emerged from it
called Ideological Commentary. This survived until the death
of its editor (and the former secretary of the SSA), George
Walford, in 1994. Today, barely a handful of its exponents
still survive.
The theory of the group developed over time and was
re-christened ‘systematic ideology’ by Walford in 1976. Its
basic premise was that people’s assumptions and
identifications (the factors making up their ‘ideology’) are
not explicable in terms of material conditions in general
and their relationship to the means of production in
particular – and are never likely to be. Instead, there are
persistent and distinct ideological groups in society, cutting
across social classes and forming a series, with the largest
groups being most typically guided in their thoughts and
actions by a preference for family, authority, familiarity and
tradition. Politically, these preferences find predominant
expression in the ideas of the large number of so-called
‘non-politicals’ in society, and in Conservatism and then
Liberalism (the strength of these preferences gradually
weakening through the series).
As the series progresses further, the next, progressively
smaller, ideological groups seek to repress these
identifications and preferences in favour of dynamism, social
change, logical thought and the pursuit of theory as a guide
to decision-making, these being expressed politically in
Labourism, more overtly still in Communism and then, in an
ultimate and extreme form, in Anarchism (or ‘Anarchosocialism’,
the purist variety of it allegedly expounded by
the SPGB). The more an ideology represses the preferences
for family, tradition, etc in favour of social change, dynamism
and the pursuit of theory as a guide to action, the fewer in
number its adherents are likely to be, with anarchists (or
‘anarcho-socialists’) being the smallest of all. Those seeking
radical social change, so the theory contends, will always be
hampered and restrained by the enduring preferences of
the largest ideological groups.
Systematic ideology itself was rather hampered by the
fact that even if the ideological series it posits is a
historically accurate one (which is highly contentious in
itself), it has always been unable to adequately explain why
this should be so. More precisely, what it is that influences
some people and not others to gravitate through the series
towards an ideology such as that supposedly represented
by the Socialist Party? If some can do it but not others,
systematic ideology has yet to coherently articulate why.
Walsby’s early version of the theory was clearly
hierarchical (with those understanding the theory being the
smallest group of all, metaphorically positioned at the apex
of a pyramid, just above the Socialist Party) and it lent itself
to criticism on the grounds that it was merely a particularly
convoluted type of ‘human nature’ argument. This was
essentially the response outlined in the Socialist Standard’s
April 1949 review of Walsby’s book, called ‘The Domain of
Sterilities’. From the 1980s onwards, George Walford, an
inveterate attender at Socialist Party meetings and a logic chopper
extraordinaire, watered down some of the
theory’s more obviously elitist elements and even left the
SPGB money at the time of his death. He did this on the
grounds that although in his view the Party would never
help achieve socialism it did perform a valuable function by
demonstrating through its application of critical analysis,
logical thought and theory the limitations of other political
groups that valued these less highly (a perspective which
had informed Harold Walsby’s decision in 1950 to
surreptitiously rejoin the Party through its postal branch
and write articles for the Standard under the pseudonym
H.W.S.Bee).
Walsby, Walford and their group produced a large
number of leaflets, pamphlets and other literature over
time, a fair chunk of it dealing with the SPGB, even if a lot
of it was highly abstract and sometimes downright silly. The
most readable expressions of systematic ideology are
probably Walford’s book Beyond Politics, published in 1990,
and the pamphlet Socialist Understanding, published ten
years earlier.
The ‘Turner Controversy’
Throughout its history, the Socialist Party has been known
for the high calibre of its outdoor speakers and public
debaters and Tony Turner was one of the Party’s most
effective – indeed, many who heard him (both inside and
outside the Party) claimed he was the finest outdoor
orator of the twentieth century. When membership and
activity was at a peak in the period after the Second World
War, Turner began giving lectures for the Party on what
socialism would be like. The content of these lectures led
him to develop a position that caused enormous
controversy in the Party by the early-to-mid 1950s and
which was elaborated by Turner and his supporters in
articles in the Party’s internal discussion journal of the time,
Forum.
Three interlocking propositions underpinned the
‘Turnerite’ viewpoint:
(i) that the society of mass consumerism and
automated labour which capitalism had become had to
be swept away in its entirety if alienation was to be
abolished and a truly human community created. This
meant a return to pre-industrial methods of
production, on lines inspired by Tolstoy and William
Morris’s News From Nowhere.
(ii) that the creation of the new socialist society was
not simply in the interests of the working class but was
in the interests of the whole of humanity, irrespective of
class, a proposition they thought it essential for the
Party to recognise in its everyday propaganda, and
(iii) the means of creating the new peaceful and cooperative
society had to be entirely peaceful, indeed
pacifist (and in the view of some, possibly even gradual).
continued next column
This view was in direct contradiction to the Declaration of
Principles, which identifies socialism as being the product of
the class struggle and which states that the socialist
movement will organise for the capture of political power,
including power over the state’s coercive machinery, should
it need to be used against a recalcitrant anti-socialist
minority.
A series of acrimonious disputes between the
‘Turnerites’ and the majority of the Party culminated in a
Party Poll decision and then a resolution being carried at
the 1955 Party Conference to the effect that all members
not in agreement with the Declaration of Principles be
asked to resign. Turner, having survived a previous attempt
to expel him, promptly did so, along with a number of other
members including Joan Lestor (later to become a Labour
minister) and the psychologist John Rowan. Some of these
ex-members formed a short-lived Movement for Social
Integration, though, ironically enough, the impact the
dispute had on the Party as a whole was almost entirely
disruptive and negative. Indeed, it didn’t recover its vitality
for some years, until the wave of radicalisation that grew up
in the 1960s.
‘Libertarian Communism’
During the 1960s the Party was enthused by a healthy
influx of new recruits initially politicised by the CND
marches, Vietnam and the May Events of 1968 and who
sought to make a more genuinely revolutionary stand than
those of their generation who joined the so-called ‘new
left’. The boost to Party membership and activity at this
time was considerable.
Influenced by the prevailing political climate, some
members who joined in this period wanted to change the
emphasis of the Party’s propaganda efforts towards taking
a more positive attitude to industrial struggles, claimants
unions and tenants associations but also to women’s
liberation and squatting, arguing that the Party had
developed a somewhat idealist conception of how socialist
consciousness arises, being divorced from the day-to-day
struggles of workers. To this effect 15 activists from the
‘sixties generation’ signed a mini-manifesto in 1973 entitled
“Where We Stand” which was circulated inside the Party.
Although these ‘rebels’ in the Party were never a
homogenous group, many more long-standing and
traditional Party members felt uncomfortable with their
line of argument.
One particular group of these activists published an
internal discussion bulletin, which, in 1974, converted itself
into an externally-oriented journal called Libertarian
Communism. This was produced with the aid of nonmembers
and supported the idea of workers’ councils. It
openly attacked as ‘Kautskyite’ the Party’s traditional
conception of the socialist revolution being facilitated
through ‘bourgeois’ democracy and parliament. At the same
time another group of younger members, based mainly in
Aberdeen and Edinburgh, was keen that the Party express
support for such things as higher student grants (on the
grounds that the Socialist Party was always prepared to
support demands for higher wages) but the arguments of
this group found no more favour with the majority in the
Party than those put by the group around Libertarian
Communism. Indeed, both of these groups were to be
charged and then expelled for issuing literature that
contradicted official Party policy.
Some – though certainly not all – of the members who
came into dispute with the Party during this period
appeared to be genuinely swept along with the activism and
student radicalism of the time and developed some
reformist viewpoints which were unlikely to be palatable to
the membership of a genuinely revolutionary organisation.
Members whose disagreements with the Party were less
serious and fundamental stayed in, working for the creation
of what they hoped would be a more tolerant, and in their
view, less ‘sectarian’ organisation.
The prominent activists of the time who were either
expelled or left of their own volition typically became
involved in single-issue campaigns or the radical feminist
movement. However, one network of former members –
those based around Libertarian Communism, who were
critical of the Party’s revolutionary strategy and attracted
by ‘council communist’ ideas – created an organisation
called Social Revolution and others became involved in the
Solidarity group. Some years later a number of these
activists were also involved in the foundation of the Wildcat
council communist group and one of its successors,
Subversion.
The Guildford ‘Road To Socialism’
In October 1987 the Party’s Guildford Branch circulated a
discussion document around the Party which was to create
controversy. It arose from discussions within the Party as
to how socialist society could be organised to most
effectively solve the problems left by capitalism. The
document, entitled “The Road To Socialism”, questioned at
a fundamental level the Socialist Party’s established view of
how socialism is likely to come about, labelling it the “Big
Bang” theory of revolution. It argued that the Party needed
to develop “a more sophisticated multi-dimensional model
of socialist transformation which nevertheless incorporates
the more useful insights of the old theory”, but it was
precisely what was meant by “multi-dimensional” that was
to cause difficulties.
What Guildford had in mind was that the growing
socialist movement would have a profound economic
impact on the operation of capitalism before the
overthrow of the capitalist class and the formal
establishment of socialism. They claimed that socialists
would use their influence politically (through parliament
and local councils) to adjust patterns of state income and
expenditure in ‘socialistic’ directions, including the
provision of free services. Drawing inspiration from writers
like Andre Gorz, they also claimed that socialists would be
encouraging the growth of the non-monetary, voluntary
sector of the economy and should be instrumental in
developing support networks for co-operatives and LETS
schemes.
In short, Guildford’s vision was a gradualist one in which
the materialist conception of history as applied to the
coming of socialism was turned on its head: the economic
structure of society would be essentially transformed
before the socialist capture of political power, rather than
afterwards. In the Guildford scenario, the capturing of
political power would merely be a mopping-up exercise,
designed to dispense with the remaining capitalist areas of
the economy.
This critique of the Party’s revolutionary strategy was
vigorously rebutted in other circulars from branches and
members and at Party conference, the Guildford
perspective only receiving limited support from outside the
branch itself. While most members readily acknowledged
that the growth of the socialist movement would have
profound and perhaps unpredictable impacts, and while it
was the already established Party position that socialists
would be organised on the economic front as well as the
political front to ensure the smooth changeover of
production and distribution from capitalism to socialism,
this did not equate with seeking to mould capitalism into
socialism from within, in a gradual way. As the Party had
long attacked co-operatives and the idea that the state
could increasingly give away services for ‘free’, the
Guildford perspective made little headway and its critique
was largely dismissed as a caricature of the Party’s
conception of socialist revolution.
Nobody was expelled over the matter, though a small
number of members resigned. They published a journal
called Spanner for a time, so-called because it aimed to
‘span’ opinion across the non-market socialist sector of
political thought, and in recent years some have been
instrumental in founding the small World In Common
group.
The Socialist Studies Group
The most recent splinter from the SPGB occurred in 1991
when, following requests from six branches and after two
polls of the entire membership, two dozen members from the Party’s Camden and North West London branches
were expelled for persistently undemocratic behaviour. The expulsions occurred because the branches repeatedly refused to abide by Conference resolutions
stipulating that in most instances the Party should refer to
itself as “The Socialist Party” for publicity purposes. Being
more traditionally-minded than most, this group claimed
that to discourage use of the Party’s full name for publicity
purposes was to effectively take the Socialist Party of Great
Britain out of the field of political action altogether.
Underlying this particular issue, however, were others. The
majority of members of the two branches had long been
inclined to claim that the Party’s principles were being
diluted and that social democratic and reformist elements
had taken over the Party.
The group levied a long list of charges at the Party and
the majority of its membership. The Socialist Standard’s
qualified expression of support for the democratic
organisation of trade unionists and workers in Polish
Solidarity in 1981 was deemed evidence of reformism by
the group and to this end they also opposed a motion at
the 1990 Conference on the fall of the Russian empire
which had repeated a Party declaration from the Second
World War supporting the independent efforts of workers
everywhere struggling against dictatorship.
Over time, the group veered towards a fundamentalist
position whereby the Party’s historic distinction between
opposing all reformism (the political advocacy of reform
measures designed to win support), rather than all
proposed individual reforms per se, became completely
blurred. Indeed, echoing the 1910-11 controversy, the
group was later to explicitly state that socialist MPs in
parliament should even vote against reform measures that
are in the interests of the working class (Socialist Studies,
43).
In addition to their claims about ‘reformism’, the group
argued that the Party no longer sufficiently emphasised the
parliamentary aspect of the socialist revolution. It accused
the Party of falling into the hands of anarchists, contending
that it was not the established Party position that the state
would be abolished immediately upon the overthrow of
class society, but that the state would “gradually wither
away” instead.
Many Party members had mixed feelings about these
controversies, though a common reaction was that the
expelled group had seemed to replace political analysis
with knee-jerk sectarianism, possibly the product of a
mindset that can sometimes come with lifelong
membership of a fringe political movement. What made the
disagreements with this group – and their subsequent
expulsion – particularly difficult was that in Hardy, Harry
Young, Cyril May and other members it contained some of
the Party’s staunchest and most able writers, speakers and
activists from earlier periods, in some cases as early as the
inter-war years. The Party made an important judgment,
however, that no member or group of members could
consider themselves above Party democracy: for if that was
allowed to happen, the SPGB would no longer be a
democratic organisation and would cease to be socialist on
its own terms. If some of the other disagreements being
aired were possibly containable, deliberate and persistent
flouting of the Party’s democratic decisions was most
certainly not.
In June 1991, 16 members of the expelled group –
rather bizarrely it may be thought – ‘reconstituted’ the
SPGB on their exclusion from the Party. Their remaining
members, along with a handful of sympathisers, still publish
their journal Socialist Studies and occasional pamphlets.
These publications today give the unmistakable impression
of a small group of rather disgruntled ex-members
choosing to cast themselves in the mould of latter-day
Fitzgeralds and Andersons making a principled break with
an organisation beyond political redemption, when the true
comparison is more akin to the aforementioned “W.B of
Upton Park” and the Socialist Propaganda League.
DAP