Comment received from a

Comment received from a Socialist Standard reader:Dear Comrade,Please forgive an elderly anarchist, intervening1 in what you no doubt consider a private fight.Pace the SS editors, the story you relate was fairly well known before 1952; Guy Aldred certainly recounted it in a pamphlet. I am fairly certain that I had read it in something produced by the SPGB. & it was certainly in one of the more widely circulated Labour histories, (whether by GDH Cole or not I cannot now remember.) I came across it in the Socialist Leader (the then paper of the ILP) & I would think Bevan had mentioned it in Tribune, as also Gallacher in his auto-biography.Obviously you are right that the trade unions lacked a socialist consciousness, (after all even the Labour Left & the Stalinists argued from that.)  But your letter (& the SS editors) go on to make two assumptions, neither correct:(a). the IWW didn’t stress  the need for social change,& (b). the SPGB at that time did not believe in working in industrial unions.The IWW removed the political action clause because it believed that De Leon was forcing all members to join his particular party.  Incidentally the resistance came from people who were in the Left of the SPA. the anarchists – like Vincent St John – played no part in the split.SPGB members were active in the SLPGB-formed Advocates of Industrial Unionism, for a time forming the majority of its membership; in the USA, WSPUSA members were active in the IWW as late as the ’50s.  They didn’t then regard this as cutting off their legs.We do indeed have differences: but it would help if we each only talked of real differences, rather than inventing imaginary ones.fraternallyLaurens Otter