Marxism in Britain 1881-1920

[p029] Marxism in Britain 1881-1920 Brian Pearce The following survey is based on a feature given at a cadre school of the Socialist Labour League, the material for which was largely drawn from the writings of Ralph Fox, Allen Hutt, Eric Hobsbawm, Henry Pelling and others. THIS is not a history of the general Labour movement, nor even one of the broader socialist movement. There were many people besides the Marxists who thought of themselves as socialists and conducted important activities, and we can read about them in Cole and Postgate’s The Common People and other works. But the peculiar problems of developing a Marxist move- ment and leadership in Britain are not so easily approached, because the systematic study has not yet been completely made. Even our movement today is the linear descendant, the true heir, of the experiences of Marxists since the early 1880s. We have not come out of the blue; we developed from them and their ex- perience. The Communist Party itself was not imported ready made but was formed out of groups which had already existed for some time and had a rich past. Moscow fashioned the Communist Party, and Russian history, as well as British, is needed to explain what has happened to it; but the influence of Moscow did not operate in a vacuum or on a blank sheet. The material of the British Communist Party was already formed, and the process of Stalinization from 1924 onwards operated with certain peculiar features which can only be explained by the characteristics of the British Labour movement. Many of the trends which we can see in the movement today were with us 60 years ago and form part of the general tradition of the whole Labour movement. Three main periods may be discerned: (a) 1881 to the middle of the 1890s. (b) Middle 1890s to 1908. (c) 1908 to 1920. (a) This is a period of advance of Marxist influence, of optimism in Marxist circles. (b) A black period which is very important in ex- plaining what we face today, when an anti-Marxist 90 leadership fastened itself on the Labour movement, when hopes failed, reformism grew and Marxism was treated with discredit and contempt. (c) New period of advance, but far from a mech- anical repetition of the period before 1908, and great difficulties due to the failure of the first advance. (a) THE TURN TO MARXISM In the 1870s there was no Labour movement in the real sense in Britain, unlike Germany or France. The trade union movement was confined to the narrow aristocracy of the crafts, and not keen to dilute its privileged numbers by bringing more in. Politically the unions functioned as a tail to the Liberal Party; they saw success for their political aspirations in the success of the J iberal Party; they hoped for some social legis- lation from it, especially in the direction of protecting their funds and status but, deeper, they really believed that success for the industrial interests was success for them. This was expressed in the slogan ‘A fair day’s work for a fair day’s wage’. Great interest among trade union leaders in social climbing at this stage, and pressure on the Liberal Party to let more working men have seats in Parliament. Very few people thought about independent class politics and there was no socialist movement. However, the ideas were just kept alive in the Rose Street working men’s club in London where German social-democratic exiles met old Char- tists who retained their early socialist ideas. This circle was isolated and was significant only for what grew round it at a definite time; we can note how quite small groups can quickly produce big things if they are at the right place at the right time! In 1879 a much more severe trade depression set in than the short slumps of 1847, 1857 and 1866, and it laste? much longer. We can see now that this marked

[p030] MARXISM IN BRITAIN the end of the thirty years’ period in which British capitalists had had the unchallenged monopoly of the world market in manufactures—the ‘workshop of the world’ which had provided the material basis for the disappearance of the class-struggle ideas of the 1830s and 1840s, the loss of revolutionary content in the workers’ movements and their subordination to seeking relatively minor reforms. The end of expansion and the rise in unemployment came as a shock to everyone. There were arguments about whether charity corrupted, and reiteration of New Poor Law ideas. All this led to widespread questioning of established mid-Victorian ideas, and came at a time ’ when the needs of industry and the State were develop- ing public education and an intellectual middle class was increasing. With the puncturing of the accepted myth of thrift and progress, there was a new field for the old socialist ideas. Further, the actual success of the German Social-Democrat Party, which was estab- lished and thriving and contemptuous of Bismarck’s efforts to corrupt it or repress it, impressed advanced people here. Frederick Engels had some articles in 1881 in The Labour Standard, the organ of the London Trades Council (these have been reproduced in a small book published by Martin Lawrence), because James Mac- donald, the secretary, was impressed by Marxism. These articles drew the lesson of the depression and raised the question of an independent class party. Another force which attracted some key people to socialism was the turn of the Liberal Party towards imperialism. In 1881-82 a Liberal Coercion Act for Ireland out-Toried the Tories in harshness towards the Irish peasant struggle —regarded as ‘contrary to the Liberal tradition’. This annoyed both the Irish workers in this country and the Radical elements who thought of themselves as the Left wing of Liberalism. Again, there was the imperialist attack on Egypt in 1882, bombardment of Alexandria, forestalling of the French attempt to get control, and involvement in the dirty business of Egyptian rulers’ debts. The Social Democratic Federation is Founded Now at last a few people began to read Marx. Hyndman tried to popularize Marx’s ideas as an answer to the new reality. The Democratic Federation was founded in 1881 and quickly evolved from being a Left Radical to a Marxist body and, to copy Ger- many, openly adopted the name Social Democratic Federation in 1884. One principal job which it undertook was to cam- paign in defence of the oppressed Irish, and this was rather like defending the people of Kenya or Cyprus more recently; the same impression was made on the general public by the terrorism of the oppressed. Des- pite the unpopularity incurred among British workers it had a big success with Irish workers in Britain. Herein lay a source of weakness. The fortunate chance that it started off with this good campaigning appeal to one section of the working class gave the SDF the illusion that it had a much bigger mass following than was really the case. For in 1886 the Liberal Party split on the Irish question, and the declaration for Irish Home Rule took the Irish voters back into the Liberal camp, and actually raised antagonism in their minds against people who appeared by their independent class 1891-1920 politics to be weakening the Liberal vote in face of the Tories. Hyndman, it must be said, was always very dubious about the political possibilities of the great mass of British workers; he was, indeed, as a successful busi- ness man, contemptuous of them, impatient to get results and play a political role, and socially remote from workers’ lives. He thought British workers must inevitably remain stodgy and inert until some great catastrophe hit them. This explains both why he gave currency to the idea that Marxism teaches that there will be one final crisis into which capitalism will sink without hope of recovery (a completely non- Marxist and mechanistic idea), and his constant efforts to find some short cut to leadership of some particular militant section of the Labour movement. After the Irish, the SDF built its hopes on the unem- ployed movement. In the middle and later 1880s there were indeed large unemployed demonstrations all over the country, ending in big struggles in 1888-89. Engels was very cautious in evaluating the SDF. He welcomed it as a sign of the times but he warned the German social demorcrats not to be over-impressed or to expect too much.. The people who had turned to Marxism (e.g., Belfort Bax) were mostly of bourgeois origin; Bax was also of foreign origin. They needed first and foremost to find roots in the British working class. Hyndman tended to exaggerate his support and successes, hoping that this would bring in more people, for there was as yet no solid foundation under the SDF. Hence his opportunism. Note that the same people can be sectarian at one moment and opportunist at another, because they do not see reality clearly and therefore tend all the time to both sectarianism and opportunism. One trend comes predominantly to the top, but the other is always there latent. We shall see these two aspects of the SDF together, one or another uppermost, but both present, constantly through the whole period. For instance, steps were taken to start in a modest and realistic way a monthly journal to be called Today. Bax was to edit it, and it was advertised as a journal of scientific socialism, with the aim of becoming a weekly when it had a good enough basis. Engels thought this a reasonable possibility. However, Hyndman insisted on floating a weekly, Justice, which he could finance and control, right away. Catering for a limited reader- ship, they harmed each other by competing, and in the end Hyndman bought up Today. His money exag- gerated his influence. Engels thought that the real test of the SDF would come when the economic reaction of the working class to the unfavourable changes in their general pattern of life, due to the changes in British capitalism, were deeply felt; for instance the mechanization of engineering and loss of status by craftsmen, which would bring big new forces into battle. He conceived of a party to win the leadership of this movement, having already estab- lished itself and developed roots in the working class, with a cadre of theoretically developed people indepen- dent of Hyndman and his personal weaknesses. The SDF did not succeed in rising to this historic task. For instance, in 1884 it issued a manifesto on trade union- ism in which it took the position that trade unions were a useless diversion of effort from the main task, the struggle for power. This—just on the eve of the gigan- 91

[p031] LABOUR REVIEW tic battles of the working class for the ‘New Unionism’! So when a capable worker like Tom Mann found his way into the SDF he left it in search of something better. He could not find it on his own, and turned to syndicalism, which looked better that the SDF, which, as he said, ‘antagonized the trade unionists without drawing over any considerable percentage to socialism’. Hyndman showed his general characteristics pre- cisely in relation to trade unions—he suspected them because he could not control them. He ran the SDF in a bureaucratic way and took advantage of the inevit- able shortage of funds, a common problem at this stage. He tried to dominate its internal life, creating phony branches to influence conference decisions, and generally poisoned the political life around him. He displayed very marked British chauvinism just because he was contemptuous of the workers. When he published a popularization of Marxism, England for All, he did not mention any debt to Marx because, as he said, Englishmen would not be willing to learn from Germans. Engels was very annoyed on Marx’s behalf, no less because of the personal ambition, egotism and chauvinism which this betrayed. This also came out in 1884-85 when the public was very interested in the aggression in the Sudan—Justice defended the aggres- sion on the ground that it was bringing civilization to the natives! This antagonized Radical people who had been attracted by Marxist opposition to Liberal imperialism. There is also no doubt that Hyndman made arrange- ments with Tory party managers to split Liberal votes by putting up SDF candidates in parliamentary elec- tions. He got money in return, but few votes, and was quite genuinely puzzled at the wild indignation with which this kind of thing was received in the Radical movement. He did not see in this policy of manoeuvre a danger for a young organization. In general the Left wing of Liberalism would naturally and immediately reject anything that seemed connected with the Tories, and this helped to cut off the SDF from the workers trying to develop towards socialism from the Radical wing of Liberalism. Hyndman saw simply the ‘workers’ backwardness’ when they objected to his intrigues with Joseph Chamberlain. The Split in the SDF By 1885 a majority of the executive committee of the SDF, including Morris, Bax and Aveling, whom Engels and Eleanor Marx regarded as the only honest socialist intellectuals in Britain, though also as unpractical people, separated themselves from Hyndman and tried to start a movement free from Hyndmanism. Only about 500 of the 1,500 members of the SDF joined the Socialist League, partly because Hyndman had carefully ensured that the party paper Justice was his personal property and did not go with the split, and also because many of the rank and file regarded Hyndman as at least an efficient and businesslike indi- vidual, as indeed he was, who inspired workers with more confidence than artists and bookish people did. Aveling was a Bohemian to the extreme, irrespon- sible in his attitude both to money and women. Though of great intellectual ability he, like Hyndman in his way, helped to turn people away by his personal characteristics, which can play such a big role in a small movement. ‘In a sect everything turns to scandal- 92 October-November 1959 mongering’, remarked Engels. The Socialist League never extended its organization beyond London, but of course influenced individuals who were active in their own spheres in the provinces, for instance Tom Maguire in Leeds. But the SDF did get roots in Lan- cashire and Yorkshire and Engels saw this as a bad sign for the Socialist League. The Socialist League predominantly attracted cleri- cal workers and lumpen-proletarians. It had the advan- tage of being free of Hyndman, but it reacted too strongly from his ideas; it over-corrected his opportun- ism with sectarianism. For instance it repudiated parlia- mentarism entirely. Its internal organization was ultra- loose as a reaction against Hyndman’s centralization of the SDF round himself. Thirdly, the Socialist League turned away from the industrial struggle for immediate demands to emphasize street corner meetings and sale of papers. Its entire collective work was propaganda, though its. members as individuals took part in other activities. Morris had the idea that it should be a political club embracing all shades of socialist opinion, and without political discipline. It was therefore wide open, and when Kropotkin, the eminent Russian anarchist, came to Britain in 1886 and formed a group they entered the Socialist League and took it over, all the more easily because of the unprac- ticality of its leading membe:s, and paralysed it with an internal fight. So much so that in 1887 Engels wrote the Socialist League off and advised Eleanor Marx and Aveling to turn away from it. The SDF, having lost its adventitious basis among the Irish, tried to turn towards the unemployed, but because of its lack of realism it found contact with the lumpen- proletariat, not at all people of the kind of whom a stable socialist body can be built. It led a big demon- stration of the unemployed in Trafalgar Square in 1886, which ended with the windows of the clubs in St James’s being broken, but this in the long run did nothing to build the organization. Engels had in mind always the aim of building a theoretically trained grouping of people capable of establishing roots in the mass movement, so that when political developments in the masses of the people came there would be a Marxist leadership capable of battling against all comers to guide it. Eleanor and Aveling turned to the proletarian Left wing of Liberalism as expressed in the Radical working men’s clubs in the East End, and Eleanor especially began to work to build trade unions of the unskilled, the gasworkers and match girls. The East End clubs contained some of the most thoughtful working men and this gave Marxists some links with the industrial struggles which were beginning to develop. At the same time socialist immigrants into the USA were making considerable strides, and their successes made perhaps an even bigger impact in Britain than those of the German social democrats. Eleanor and Aveling found some contacts in the East End, and a basis in the fight for free speech. The police had begun to interfere with speakers at traditional open- air sites and it was necessary to find people prepared to go to jail, to organize support at meetings, raise funds, etc. This led to the Law and Liberty League for free speech, in which the ranks of the Socialist League and the SDF got a bit closer to the Radical working men. It called a mass meeting in Trafalgar Square in 1887, under the slogans of ‘Home Rule for Ireland

[p032] MARXISM IN BRITAIN and for London’. This was not the same as the unem- ployed demonstration of the previous year with which it is often confused; it was indeed a very different affair. Police and soldiers were called out to deal with it. A lot of people got hurt, two people were killed, and the workers, unprepared for that kind of struggle, were scattered. The two demonstrations got mixed up in people’s minds and the bad features of adventurism and stunt-mongering of the first one gave a bad taste to the second one; a sample of the harm done by adventurism. The Trafalgar Square ‘Bloody Sunday’ affair sharply sorted out the leading figures in the socialist groups. Engels, who was quite used to this sort of thing from his Continental experience of 1848, and Eleanor were not put off. But a lot of people who later had big names were scared off at that time. For instance, Ber- nard Shaw became convinced of the impossibility of the workers taking on the capitalist State, and his plays thereafter portray workers as feckless lumpen-prole- tarians mouthing revolutionary phrases (e.g. Doolittle in Pygmalion). Many others, each along his own road, drew away from the socialist movement. Ernest Rhys, the later editor of the Everyman Series of books, wrote the next day: “The Fabians for me’. The bourgeoisie sought to combat Marxist influence among the workers in three ways. First, by terror and repression, which had a big effect on inexperienced workers who were seeing their trade unions grow, and who wanted steady and reliable people to run them, and no legal upheavals. Secondly, by putting systematic pressure on the workers’ leaders with the aim of making them careerists. Thirdly, by injecting patriotic propag- anda, chauvinism, imperialist ideas into the workers. The withdrawal of Shaw and others left the whole ‘New Unionism’ field almost clear for the anti-Marxists. Eleanor did her best; she actually taught Will Thorne to read and write, and spared no effort on tasks how- ever humble which would help to give Marxism a basis in the real workers’ movement. But many of the small group of people round the SDF and Socialist League, having unrealistically over-estimated the revolutionary possibilities of the workers as they then were, turned -to the other extreme. Eleanor transformed the Law and Liberty League into the Eight Hours League, which caught public interest. The Socialist League had dis- appeared from the scene by now, and the SDF sabo- taged the Eight Hours’ League. In the May Day demon- stration of 1890, the officials of the London Trades Council conspired with Hyndman to exclude the Eight Hours’ League —so can sectarians and opportunists form a united front against Marxism. About this time the Marxists also had hopes in a man called H. H. Champion, who published a paper called the Labour Elector with the line of calling for an independent party of the working class. His money proved to come from Tory sources and his attacks on the Star, then a radical Liberal paper which gave the Marxists a chance in its columns, raised suspicions of him—after exposure he departed to Australia. All these events helped to make difficulties for, and to estrange the Marxists from, the more advanced layers of the working class turning to the New Unionism (organization of the unskilled, small benefits and big strikes). The basic difficulty was that the best Marxists were so few in number; the real movement developed largely outside contact with, let alone control by 1891-1920 Marxists. In short, Marxism was unable to build a cadre of revolutionaries before the big movement came. When the Independent Labour Party was founded in 1893 a few leading Marxists got positions in it, e.g., Aveling on its leading committee, but were isolated. The SDF put an ultimatum to it and withdrew. For all these reasons Marxism was now leaving a bad taste in the mouths of the people it wanted to approach, and Engels was very disgusted with its banner-bearers in Britain: in the USA also the Marxists remained as a German-American sect. Hyndman apparently had the idea that the SDF could never expect to hold people anyway, that it would be something that people went through; they would learn there a few ideas which they would later dis- seminate. He did not aim to build a solid revolutionary party. The ILP was easily the largest group in the field, and Engels noted with interest that it had real roots in the industrial north, especially in Bradford and Lanca- shire. The dominant intellectual forces were anti- ‘Marxist, repudiated the class struggle and sought con- stitutional methods. The positive side of this was a fear of adventures and a desire to exploit to the full the possibilities arising when in 1884 miners and agricul- tural workers were given votes. But it also opened the door to the middle-class do-gooders (especially middle- class women, teachers, etc.). Engels wanted the SDF and the ILP to fuse, but Hyndman would not. In addition, the nonconformist tradition in the provinces proved then, as it has proved since, to be a very tough obstacle to Marxist ideas, capable of being overcome only by experience in action of the need for these ideas. This tradition was skilfully exploited by ‘emotional’ socialists of the Keir Hardie stamp. (b) THE DIFFICULT PERIOD—1895-1908 Two heavy blows struck Marxism. First, Engels died in 1895. This robbed Marxism of an international! guid- ing centre and accumulation of experience. Until after the Revolution in Russia in 1917 there was no authori- tative international centre except that of German social democracy later centred around Kautsky, a weak vessel. Secondly, with the end of the depression, imperialism was sold to the British workers. Economic revival and the fall of unemployment was not on a basis of revival of British trade in manufactured con- sumer goods, the traditional Victorian exports, but of the rise of heavy industrial exports, railway materials and the like, which depended on foreign loans, conces- sions, colonization, heavy financing from groups joining banks to heavy industry, and the support of the British State and British arms. ‘Jobs follow the flag’, and an important section of workers actually could share per- sonally in the new flow of colonial wealth. For instance, how many of us know of whole families where there is a tradition of entering the forces as regulars and retir- ing with bits of pensions? The organized injection of jingoism into the working class was expressed by Cecil Rhodes among others—a parallel to the do-gooding of the Mayfair ladies in the East End. The Boy Scout movement and the Boys’ Brigade arose. In the absence of a tradition of genuine Marxist analysis of the preceding crisis the recovery completed the job of driving people away from Marxism, started 93

[p033] LABOUR REVIEW by the events of Bloody Sunday. Hyndman had preached a vulgarized conception of Marxism: that no recovery was possible and that the crisis would get worse and worse until capitalism slid into the abyss. When recovery came the Marxists often left politics or joined the Fabians. Just as prolonged depression had produced a crop of Marxists, so the recovery shook them, and just as later in 1945, the boom led a lot of people to revive their old ideas on the basis of their impressions, which in turn were overthrown by later changes. But by 1895 the Fabians had established themselves as a powerful and sinister force in the Labour move- ment, working against the idea of independent Labour representation and keeping the movement in tow behind the Liberals. Whatever they may say today this is a fact proved by recent investigations. Consequently the New Unions quickly became like the old unions, riddled with careerism and bureaucracy. The ILP was dominated by anti-Marxist Christian-socialist ideas. It is necessary to stress that there is no inevitable law of history that the British workers have got to be led by fakers. The way the fakers got control is clear, and in the struggle against Marxism they were substantially victorious. _ Too late, in 1897, the SDF accepted the idea of enter- ing the unions, but even then only some did so. In 1898 Eleanor Marx and Aveling died, she in tragic circum- stances and he of an incurable disease. Thus the original Marxist cadre was finished. The employers’ offensive against the New Unionism forced the trade union leaders to react. In the later 1890s the unions suffered some heavy defeats, and finally in the Taff Vale decision it looked as if the whole basis of their funds was gone. This forced the move to an independent working-class party, but it sought alliance with the ILP (Hyndman again abstaining) in a movement without Marxist aim in the Labour Repre- sentation Committee in 1900 and the Labour Party in 1906. The people who started it had no expectation or intention that it would ever become an independent movement big enough to challenge the Liberals, and the recent publication of the letters between Ramsay Mac- Donald and the Liberal leaders shows that the leaders were up to the neck in unprincipled bargaining to get a few seats for trade union leaders with Liberal support. Opportunism and the Decline of the SDF The SDF further disgraced itself by a silly appeal to the new king, Edward VII, and by appeals to the workers to vote Tory against the Liberals. Left sec- tarianism leads to tailism and tailism to opportunism. When in France, Millerand, a socialist, not only accepted a seat in a bourgeois government but also sat side by side with General Gallifet, who had been responsible for murdering many of the fighters for the Paris Com- mune in 1871, Hyndman defended Millerand. He went on to advocate the idea of a ‘Big Navy’ to fight the Germans. Naturally such ideas might make it easy to get votes from backward workers in Sheffield or Barrow, but they did not help to build a Marxist movement. The SDF suffered two important splits. First, in 1903 the Socialist Labour Party was formed, based mainly in Glasgow. It was composed of anti-politicals—work- ing-class trade union militants who recognized the cor- rupting effect of careerism in the movement and rejected 94 October-November 1959 both the use of parliamentary struggle ‘on principle’, and acceptance of any official jobs in the unions. They welcomed the ideas of De Leon from the USA, which stressed the need for replacing the bourgeois State with proletarian democratic organs of administration, workers’ councils, as well as the basic social character of the industrial struggle. In 1905 the Socialist Party of Great Britain broke off from the SDF. It was largely a London grouping, rejecting both industrial as well as political action, and was purely propagandist. The SDF was seriously weakened by these break- aways but it survived right through until the Com- munist Party was founded, when its main cadre entered the new party. How did it survive? Not merely thanks to Hyndman’s cash. Its members did carry the torch for Marxism as they saw it. They made regular party study of Marxist writings a duty, and this welded their small number of activists together. Lenin had many criticisms of the SDF, but when Harry Quelch died in 1913 Lenin wrote a very warm obituary of him. Quelch had been Hyndman’s right-hand man, but Lenin hailed ‘the great historical service which he and his friends have rendered’ in keeping up the propaganda for: Marxist ideas, despite their distortions of them. An attitude of the SDF which has survived and infected the movement is its contempt for the workers as too backward to be able to solve their own problems, expressed in the ‘superman’ idea—that there must be clever manipulators at the top. But it should be re- membered that Marxist literature then available at all in English was very limited. From America, the publi- cations of the Charles Kerr house in Chicago were an important contribution, as were International Socialist Review and the weekly People. Then there were publi- cations of the SLP, especially Historical Materialism and Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science, taken from Anti-Duhring. These helped to lay a solid > foundation of Marxist ideas pending the new develop- ments towards the end of the first decade of the twen- tieth century. The SDF influenced many leaders, John Burns, Will Thorne, Tom Mann, but the agents of capitalism like Cardinal Manning and A. J. Mundella got after them. The dockers’ leaders especially were smothered with personal attentions. Bourgeois Ideology in the Labour Movement In this period the lack of a sizable, stable Marxist cadre with roots in the Labour movement meant that there was no effective resistance in the New Unionism and the independent working-class political movement to the deliberate injection of bourgeois influence. We can list some of the more obvious forms this took: Jobs in the State machine for trade union officials, especially in the Labour Department of the Board of Trade. The prospect of getting into Parliament on bargains with Liberals. Fabian training through university extension classes and Ruskin College. A good example is Leeds Univer- sity, from where Fabian and other anti-Marxist influence has been exerted for fifty years. Do-gooders in the ILP without any ideology but good intentions. Jingoism. Fear of bloodshed arising from militant struggle—not

[p034] MARXISM IN BRITAIN of bloodshed from imperialist war. Opportunism and hope for sectional bargains and advantages. Touches of bourgeois terrorism. Nonconformist ideals, especially in the provincial industrial areas, of thrift and temperance, merging with ‘respectability’, received reinforcement from the Fabian idea that the progress of socialism is measured by the success of the personal careers of socialists. This made life difficult for those who were prepared to sacrifice and go to jail, because this itself was used to isolate them. But none of this was able to obliterate Marxism, and none of it was able to stave off the recovery in the period from 1908 to 1914 from the success of the employers’ counter-attacks on the unions from 1895 onwards. All this shows very clearly that a conscious Marxist leadership is very far from being an automatic or spontaneous product of the workers’ movement; Marxist ideas are not the direct product or reflection in the minds of the participants in the class struggle of their experiences. They have to be brought in from outside, from the whole of ‘bourgeois’ knowledge and science interpreted in the light of Marxist method. Weakening Marxism opened the way to bourgeois ideas. Lenin saw this«very clearly and said so in What Is To Be Done? Just after he had translated Webb’s /ndustrial Democracy into Russian. How could Lenin talk about Quelch and the SDF as he did in spite of all their opportunism, sectarianism, jingoism and the non-Boshevik internal régime of their organizations? Partly because he recognized the dogged and devoted propaganda for socialist ideas in their very difficult environment. Partly because, in any case, the effects of imperialism on the Labour movement only began about 1900 and were not immediately recognized or felt in the corrupting form they took later. The ques- tions were still differences between comrades, none of whom had any immediate prospect of getting into power either with the aid of the bourgeoisie or thanks to revo- lution. Especially on the war question all sorts of illusions were possible. Engels had always stressed the division of wars into progressive and reactionary. While a war between countries of about equal development such as France and Germany might be reactionary on both sides, a war between Germany and Russia in this period could be regarded as progressive on the Ger- man side. There was no difficulty about supporting the ‘progressive’ side as an orthodox Marxist. In any case no one had yet seen how a social-patriotic position opened the way to bourgeois infection; the wholesale corruption of Labour patriots was still to come. (c) THE YEARS OF STRUGGLE—1908-1920 In 1908 there was a short sharp crisis, a break in the imperialist expansion of British trade and employment. Moreover, the first Russian revolution had taken place in 1905-07 and it greatly impressed the world, and not only narrow circles, by its impact on and shaking of tsarism. Finally, throughout the period 1900 to 1914 the cost of living was rising, owing in part to the development of monopoly, in part to the unplanned and unconscious effects of exploitation of new gold supplies from South Africa and Australia working through the gold standard, so that more gold meant more money and credit and therefore a tendency to inflation. 1891-1920 Hence there was a new vast wave of industrial dis- putes, fought with great solidarity and stubbornness by the rank and file, who came sharply up against the entrenched bureaucratic leaders. The forms of struggle were already affected by cynicism about politics due to the weakness of the Labour Party in Parliament— never daring to put any pressure on the Liberals and bought off by the Trade Union Act of 1906, which safe- guarded for a while the all-important funds. But among the militants, anti-parliamentarism was the vogue, with rejection of all politics and emphasis on industrial struggle. The SDF was quite unable to penetrate these — new developments, but the groups which arose lived a life full of internal disputes and intellectual activity— any suggestion of banning factions would have been received with amazement. Tom Mann went to syndical- ism saying: ‘You get on with your politics and we'll get on with the real work.” Thus the very genuine and healthy desire to tap the mainsprings of spontaneous and creative mass action in industrial struggles and. to get away from the debilitating influence of reformist and Hyndman politics became in practice a short cut and an illusory one, because it did not lead to the building of a conscious leadership aiming at overthrow- ing the bourgeois State. A fetish was made of ‘the movement’, in which the rank and file and the bureau- crats are all lumped together; loyalty to the ‘movement’ easily becomes equated with acceptance of the bureau- cracy. Jack Tanner came from just this environment. Nevertheless these people did raise the important question of industrial unionism, of trade union amalga- mations to get rid of the barriers erected between crafts by sectional interests and self-seeking bureaucrats. The revolt at the trade unions’ Ruskin College in 1909 over the question of whether Marxism was to be taught along with other ideas, was an important event in the training of the new leading people. The Fabians. moved in and sacked the principal, Dennis Hird, so the Left-wing students broke away with great daring and set up on their own. Hence the Central Labour College, the Plebs League and the National Council of Labour Colleges. Most of them thereby forfeited the grants which their union executives had been making to keep them at Ruskin—in only one or two cases were the students allowed to keep the money. They tried at first to settle at Oxford and to keep themselves going by sharing the housework and getting lectures from sympathetic Oxford teachers. Then they set up the Central Labour College in Penywern Road in London. Theirs was a rather mechanical Marxism; they knew little of the dialectic and were rather inclined to think- ing that ‘the workers movement’ was going to do the job. This is understandable, since in the most petty- bourgeois of all working classes, the British, they had to insist over and over again on the historical task of the working class as a class, as against the Fabian concep- tions of class collaboration. The Leninist conception of a leadership consciously organized within the working class had not yet been developed in English or proved in experience. The best that they could insist on was the spontaneous movement of the masses. What they had seen of ‘leaderships’ had been the Lib.- Lab. trade union leaders, or Ramsay MacDonald or Hyndman; no wonder that at that stage of development, with a big trade union rank-and-file movement for 95

[p035] LABOUR REVIEW union amalgamations developing under them and driv- ing them forward against the bureaucrats of the craft unions, they took the path of underestimating discipline or organized leadership. This did severe damage to the Marxist cause a few years later when the Labour- College-trained people become either bureaucrats them- selves or NCLC tutors, with a vested interest in dis- guising the role of leadership, of pretending that what the bureaucrats impose on the masses of the people is what the masses themselves want, hiding the machina- _ tions by which the bureaucracy bases itself on the pene- tration of the movement by bourgeois ideas and cyni- cism, instead of fighting bourgeois ideas. . ' The term ‘Plebs’ itself comes from a pamphlet by Daniel De Leon, Two Pages from Roman History, in which De Leon makes some rather daring comparisons between the ancient plebs and the modern proletariat. But for the reasons given above the Plebs League, started to support the Labour College movement, to finance the College, to build local classes up and down the country and to organize a basis of Marxist ‘inde- pendent working-class education’, on the one hand doing a very important job of permeating the mass movement with Marxism and on the other, giving some- thing of a platform to semi-anarchist ideas and a number of curious fads. Formation of the British Socialist Party In the later 1900s there were great trade union battles for wage advances, and for trade union amalgamations to undermine the bureaucracies of the craft unions, though these struggles were distorted by the idea that ‘industrial unions’ as such could do the job, and had a non-political or anti-political flavour. The established TUC leaders were hostile, the Labour Party indifferent and involved in petty chicanery with the Liberals. The ranks of the ILP, however, were deeply involved and the industrial struggle itself provoked the development of a Left wing in the ILP. The important result was that in 1912 the Left wing of the ILP fused with the SDF and formed the British Socialist Party. The BSP then had about 40,000 members (the SLP numbered about 10,000). Despite great fluctuations of membership and all the other difficulties this new accession of working-class blood transformed the SDF, to the great annoyance of Hyndman and his immediate circle. Members actively and seriously discussed very impor- tant questions, and there was no effective prohibition of factions or internal papers and platforms. A sus- tained struggle took place inside the BSP against Hynd- man’s “Big Navy’ policy and his jingoism. This was drawn by Hyndman from his general approach and was especially aimed at catching working-class votes in Barrow and Sheffield, where employment depended, in the short run, on armaments orders—a typical sectional approach, contemptuous of the ultimate interests of the movement. But meanwhile in the Second International the neces- sary conclusions regarding the development of imperial- ism were being drawn, and Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg raised the question of a clear class opposition to im- perialist war. At the BSP congresses from 1912 to 1914 there was strong opposition to Hyndman. Zelda Kahan and Theodore Rothstein led it and were attacked by the Hyndmanites as ‘foreigners’ who knew nothing of ” 96 October-November 1959: British conditions. On the then very current question of votes for women. the movement also engaged in discussion, but here it _ allowed itself to be placed in a sectarian position which suited Right-wing parliamentarians like Ramsay Mac- Donald. Because the women’s suffrage movement was both in leadership and content largely a middle-class. or even upper-class movement of women who wanted careers and recognition in the bourgeois world, because it did not do much to reach down to the oppressed and exploited proletarian women of the East End or the industrial north, and allowing for the fact that some men even then had still not got the vote, socialists tended to take the view that this was ‘not a class ques- tion’. Thus a theoretically ‘correct’ position, that the women’s suffrage struggle merely diverted energy from the general struggle for socialism, was allowed in prac- tice to play into the hands of the Labour MPs who wanted their hands free to support the Liberals who did not want to give women the vote. George Lansbury was an honourable exception, and he got into a lot of trouble for being associated with the suffragettes. A parallel may be drawn here with the current Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. - On the question of the attitude of the BSP to the Labour Party, Hyndman opposed affiliation because he could see that the leadership would then slip com- pletely out of his control, and he used the usual sec- tarian arguments. Zelda Kahan pointed out the great Opportunities that were open and were being missed, given the then loose structure of the Labour Party, a federation with independence of propaganda and activity for the affiliated bodies. In May 1914 the BSP decided to seek affiliation to the Labour Party for the specific aim of facilitating its work for socialism among the trade unionists. Socialists and the War The outgreak of the war in 1914 at first fostered jingoism and confused the Left. Even the Basle resolu- tion, which was the best that the Left in the Second International had been able to get, did not make the attitude of the socialists clear, because it merely said “bring the war to a speedy conclusion’, leaving open the question whether this would be done by negotiation, by the victory of ‘one’s own side’ or by revolution. It was a formula actually drafted by Kautsky specifically to bridge the difference between the Left and Centre and the Right. Both in Britain and Germany the outbreak of the war caused confusion—to the BSP and to Karl Lieb- knecht. We find Liebknecht at the beginning of the war voting with the Reichstag fraction, ‘under discipline’, for the war credits. But experience quickly cleared a number of heads. The first war was not run by the Fabians; it took the bourgeoisie a year or two to realize that the Fabians had to be brought in to devise ration- ing schemes, controls and propaganda, and that the bourgeoisie could not expect to run a world war on the basis of ‘business as usual’. The first war imposed very serious burdens on the workers. The official trade union leaders were transformed overnight into recruiting agents and production chasers. Many people in the socialist movement saw which way this course would take them and, after at first supporting Hyndman’s original call for recruits to the army, changed their

[p036] MARXISM IN BRITAIN ‘position for the better. A great contribution came from the USA, long before many had heard of Lenin, in the book Socialism and War, by Louis Boudin. The BSP Left felt that this gave them a materialist explanation of what the war was about. They had always wanted to oppose the British bourgeoisie in war as in peace because that was their background; but, as later, they came up against the problem of ‘What alternative?’. The best answer they could find was peace by negotiation, and this brought them closer to the pacifists of the ILP and the Quakers. The whole Left movement was per- meated by the individual resistance idea, so that the opponents of war felt themselves pushed into the posi- tion of being conscientious objectors and going to jail. This had the very serious effect that many capable people were isolated from contact with the armed forces, and when movements of sailors and soldiers developed at the end of the war they found no ex- perienced political leadership; sailors turned to a wel- fare officer and soldiérs turned to—Horatio Bottomley. Even the BSP did not raise the question of revolu- tionary defeatism, but, like the SLP, their industrial militants found a big basis in industrial struggles, especially in Glasgow and Sheffield. This brought the socialists closer to the shop stewards’ movement and also drew syndicalist and non-political militants to think more about their political requirements. The Vanguard came out as the paper of the anti-war trend, followed in 1916 by The Call, and later in the same year the opponents of the war won a majority in the BSP and drove Hyndman and his circle out, to form his rapidly patriotic National Socialist Party, which, even though it took Justice with it, speedily faded away. The BSP, thus transformed, and still affiliated to the Labour Party without friction from that side, not merely opposed Labour Party policy—which the ILP often did, and did during the war as pacifists—but actually opposed the trade union leaders in their own organiza- tions on the whole question of the attitude of the work- ing class to the war. It proved a forcing house of revolutionary leaders in face of the united front of the trade union leaders and capitalist State—the position being wide open for the Left owing to the bigh cost of living. The rank-and-file trade union movement, in- cluding people up to district committee level like Murphy and Gallacher, had willynilly to take over the leadership of the rank and file against the top bureau- crats. Towards the end of the war the success of such works as Murphy’s pamphlets on workers’ councils, which expressed very widespread sentiments against the bureaucrats, spurred the latter into making all kinds of Left gestures and talking very ‘red’ to recover their position. Even so a lot of old Right-wingers were cleared out in bitter battles inside the unions (e.g., the Amalgamated Society of Engineers). Wide union amal- gamations were secured and the Triple Alliance of miners, railwaymen and transport workers was formed for mutual defence. Impact of the Russian Revolution A decisive stage was marked by the first Russian revolution of February-March 1917. This was widely welcomed, not only by the Left, who welcomed the workers’ and soldiers’ councils, but also by the patriots, 1891-1920 who did not expect that the Russian working class would be serious about pulling out of the imperialist war and expected a more strenuous war effort under a more respectable ‘democratic’ leadership. The details of what went on in Russia were not clear, but everyone recognized that here was somthing very important. Even the Labour Party bureaucracy, under the leader- ship of the Webbs and Henderson, adopted the socialist aim in their 1918 constitution (‘Securing for the workers by hand and brain the full product of their labour,) which has been such an embarrassment to them in sub- sequent years. But at the same time these shrewd mani- pulators took advantage of the demand for a tighter Labour Party organization to cut the ground from under the feet of the affiliated organizations. They in- troduced the category of individual membership on the model of the local electoral machines built for example by Henderson himself. The pressure from below was forcing the BSP and the ILP closer despite the secession of Left-wing branches, from the TLP in 1912. Meanwhile there had also been developments outside the Labour Party. In South Wales, the South Wales Socialist Society united the syndicalists of the former Miners’ Reform Movement (which had first raised the question.of nationalization in The Miners’ Next Step). The question ‘What is it really divides us?’ came up in the ‘Hands Off Russia’ move- ment. It was also raised by Sylvia Pankhurst’s Workers’ Socialist Federation and the East End paper, Workers’ Dreadnought. But it still took three years of prodding from Lenin and the Russian leaders to get them together in the ~ Communist Party. In these three years from 1917 to 1920 the Right wing obtained and used its chance to recover the leadership ‘and to head off the big growth of an industrial and political movement in the short post-war boom of full employment and inflation. Quite apart from personal difficulties..and conflicts among Left leaders, many of which went back. years into the past of small sects, the main political dif- ferences were on: Attitude to politics: The syndicalists in the Workers’ Committee movement had bent the stick back too far against politics by developing the theme that big amal- gamated unions would be able, by ‘encroaching control’ of managerial functions, to take over industry, and that struggle against the capitalist State would not in itself be a primary problem. Here also we can see the interest of the future trade union bosses in big unions, e.g., Jack Tanner. Attitude to Parliament: The long tradition of criticiz- ing the corrupting effect of Parliament itself on Labour MPs, and fear of reformist concessions to parliamentary roads to socialism, led to fear of and opposition on principle to participation in electoral and parliamentary forms of struggle. Attitude to the Labour Party: The antics of its leaders and the social patriots gave rise to disillusion- ment in the Labour Party and led to strong resistance to entering it in order to fight the reformists. In some cases there were local councillors who had got elected on their own ticket and did not want to be disturbed; and they gave the Communist Party trouble later on because they resisted its discipline. ©

[p037] LABOUR REVIEW The Birth of the Communist Party The Communist Party did not come into being until August 1920 (some Marxist groups did not come in until 1921). The period now opening, with the end of the post-war boom and the missing of the revolutionary boat, was one of demoralization and defeats. The mere declaration that there existed a Communist Party was even then only one step along the road towards a real Communist Party. It had 4,000 to 5,000 members to start with. The BSP contributed most of these, though the SLP contributed a majority of the leaders (Tom Bell, Arthur MacManus, J. R. Campbell). The BSP gave Inkpin, the first secretary and Pollitt; the Left wing of the ILP gave Murphy and Saklatvala. The BSP was not organized on a factory basis, and had a tra- dition of federalism, meaning that members of the executive committee tended to think of themselves as representing different localities and not as the leadership of the whole movement nationally. But the party was from the first, as it always has been since, largely work- ing-class in social composition, though still trained more for street corner propaganda than for campaigning in industry. . Most of the Marxist groupings, and certainly the best elements of them, converged in the Communist Party. But those which remained outside, while still claiming The ‘New Left’ The most important fact about the New Left is that it exists: When Cliff Slaughter opened up discussion on “The ‘New Left’ and the Working Class” he made important criticisms of the theories about our society which some writers in the New Reasoner and Universities and Left Review have advanced. But while I agree with almost everything that he wrote, I feel that he chose the wrong starting-point for discussion. For a Marxist the question must be: What does the existence of this grouping point to in the changing character of our political life? Slaughter too easily talks of ‘the petty- bourgeois intellectual’ and by so doing slides the New Left into a category which gives us no illumination as to the specific characteristics of this movement. And when one begins to look at the New Left carefully it is clear that the views with which Slaughter disagrees have also been challenged from within the New Left. John Saville has disagreed with Dorothy Thompson, and both Ralph Samuel and Edward Thompson have criticized Stuart Hall fairly trenchantly. What charac- terizes the New Left is not the holding of an agreed set of doctrines, but something more difficult to characterize, a frame of mind. Indeed it has more than once been argued on the New Left that it is among its merits that it is so open a movement, that it is not endangering itself by becoming constricted within some new orthodoxy. What it has created are two journals, both with far larger circulations than would have been thought possible a few yeas ago. Universities and Left Review for example has a circulation of between six and seven thousand. 98 Communication October-November 1959 to be Marxist, in some cases played a role later. Those members of the SLP who did not join the Communist Party dwindled into a little group in Scot- land which kept up the publication of certain basic pamphlets, e.g., Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science. John Maclean, a BSP member who had played an outstanding part in the anti-war struggle on the Clyde, had a fad about Scottish workers, whom he believed to be far in advance of and superior to English workers, and he kept outside the Communist Party and formed the Scottish Republican Socialist Party. The Plebs League, the Central Labour College and later the NCLC drew towards the trade union apparatus but did not succumb to it until the 1940s, largely be- cause such Labour and trade union leaders as Ellen Wilkinson, John Jagger and Coppock wanted the NCLC as a Left cover. Much pseudo-Marxist nonsense prevailed in this circle, but it remained free from the subsequent process of Stalinization of the Communist Party and discussed Trotsky’s writings with some pre- tence at objectivity. Some of those who, via the ILP, joined a group expelled from the Communist Party to form the first British Trotskyist organization in the 1930s had learnt their Marxism through the Plebs and Labour College movement. It has brought hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of young people into contact with socialist discussion. And it has provided, as Slaughter does not fail to recognize, important contributions to those discussions. How has all this been achieved? The answer comes, I think, from the meeting of two different groups. There are on the one hand the ex- Communists of 1956 and some like-minded people who abandoned Stalinism and have tried to rethink their socialism from the ground up. When they rebelled against the bureauc- racy of the Stalinist party machines and the mechanical determinism of Stalinist ideology they did so in the name of a conception of human nature which was authentically Marxist. And the tone of voice in which they spoke caught the ears of a whole generation of young people who had not as yet been caught and moulded into political shape “by the orthodoxies of our own society. The New Left finds its audience in the generation that marched to and from Aldermaston. What it has done is to provide leadership for and articulate expression of the feelings of an age-group that no one else has succeeded in influencing so strongly. Who are these young people and what is their mood? Certainly most of them are middle-class, students and ex- students, teachers, office-workers, journalists and so on. But they are people who could make an impressive contribution to the fight for socialism. And they are in many ways the group who are most nakedly exposed to the pressures of con- formism in our society. They do not normally meet working- class people very often. They are fed from all sides with the reports of what is happening to the workers brought back by * the middle-class sociological explorers from the proletarian jungle. What they do respond to sharply are the threats which

[p038] COMMUNICATION meet them in their own experience: the impact of the mass media, the debasement of values under capitalism, the appall- ing Official cynicism in face of the H-bomb. Their vitality is a sign of the inability of the official set-up to impose its orthodoxies, of the continual revolt of people against the patterns that the bureaucrats try to impose upon them. These young people are not impressed by the Labour Party or the Communist Party. What happened in Spain, in the Moscow Trials, in 1848 or 1905, these are things of which they have usually only the most fragmentary knowledge. They are generous and are attracted above all by the seriousness and integrity that mark so many on the New Left. But their think- ing is imprisoned by two contradictions which prevent growth in socialist thought beyond a certain point. The first of these concerns the relation between a capitalist economy and the variety of. social institutions within such an economy. The second concerns the problem of. socialist organization. So far as the first is concerned the contradiction arises from the fact that the New Left wants to stress both the all-pervasive cor- rupting influence of capitalism and the possibility of trans- forming institutions within capitalism. Thus there is no hesitancy on the part of writers on the New Left in rejecting classical reformism. Their analyses of advertising, of architec- ture, of films, of television and all our other cultural forms press towards the insight that it is the whole way of life which capitalism imposes which tends to the corruption of these things. If you are going to be effective, you are going to have to oppose not this or that feature of the system but the system itself. Yet there is also the strong emphasis, which Slaughter has criticized, on the possibility of building in the ‘here and now’. But anything built in the ‘here and now’ will be subject to all the pressures of the system. The trouble with this demand for building in the ‘here and now’ is its ambiguity. If this is offered as an alternative to building a working-class movement then it is doomed to frustration and failure. If on the other hand it is, as it could be, a way into the class-struggle then it is important and full of possibility. For clearly, trying to create forms of community or culture which are opposed to the values of capitalism will at once bring one into social conflict. And the danger is that one will fight a series of guerilla engagements on cultural questions which will dissipate socialist energy and lead nowhere. What one hopes is that opening up these questions will lead one to see the basic antagonism in our society at the point of production. There is a good deal of talk on the New Left about releasing the energies of people from the bonds of the system. There is a good deal of talk about the need for people to do things for themselves and not have them done tor them. But the key point in our society at which people begin to act and think for themselves is the point at which they react in their work. The spontaneity of rank-and-file movements in the unions—what has the New Left said or done about this? One suspects strongly that many of the readers of Universities and Left Review draw their picture of present-day working-class life almost entirely from Richard Hoggart. Hoggart’s analysis is open to criticism on many points. But the most crucial fact about it is that it pictures the worker entirely at leisure and not at all at work. And this is to miss both the point at which people are formed in their social activities most effectively, the only point at which one can begin to understand the relation of the capitalist system to people who live within it. So we in fact arrive at a situation in the thought of the New Left where two alternative roads open up. Without the insight that working-class action against capitalism is basic to the whole struggle (and ‘basic’ is not a strong enough word) the assertions that capitalism tends to corrupt our whole cultural and social life and that it is possible to build community under capitalism remain a bare contradiction liable to sterilize socialist thought. With that insight new ways into the class struggle are opened up. The danger that faces the New Left is a clear one. It is characteristic of our political system that it has built into it a place fora licensed radicalism, Provided the system is not itself menaced, opposition on this or that point is encouraged as a safety-valve and the critics are praised and patronized into place. Who are to be the licensed radicals of the 1960s? Classical reformism is no longer radical enough to need a licence. Building socialism in the ‘here and now’ could menace capitalism as little as reformism ever did. It. can be clothed in the Left vocabulary which reformism has abandoned. And it could be used to separate off the young radicals of the New Left from the working-class struggle. ' This danger is the more urgent because of present ten- dencies in the Labour movement. Whatever the outcome of the General Election a swing towards ‘Bevanism without Bevan’ is becoming increasingly probable. This will find an immediate point of contact with the New Left in, for example, opposition to NATO. The Communist Party leaders are working towards a new period of ‘Popular Frontism’. Those of vaguely left tendencies will feel themselves on the crest of a wave. The chief danger in all this will be that it will suggest false hopes of victory through parliament, through capturing the ‘machine’; it will distract attention from the rank-and-file industrial struggle. It will foster illusions of every kind about the ‘here and now’. Nonetheless the possibilities are quite as great as the dangers. For the New Left has so far shown a determined resistance to being incorporated as the radical wing of the Establishment. And the core of this resistance has been the extremely useful work done on where power lies in Britain today. The U. & L.R. pamphlet The Insiders and Michael Barratt-Brown’s essay on The Controllers are only the two most outstanding examples of information which the New Left has disseminated in such a way that a background has been provided which explains to those who feel alienated from the powers which make and threaten their lives why this is so. This makes it all the more urgent that Marxists should be prepared to make their contribution within the New Left. The very openness of the discussion makes it possible for Marxists to enter into a dialogue in which they will learn as well as teach. And if Marxists do not enter into this discussion the one necessary insight, that into the role of the working-class, will remain lacking. But if one is to do this effectively one must begin where people are. One cannot bring in the theory of working-class action from outside the discussion as a kind of magical cure-all; one has to begin with the problems that engage people on the New Left and show in detail how their: solution is impossible without an understanding of the cen- trality of that action. This is to say that if Marxists are to participate effectively in the New. Left, they must really participate. This is not everybody’s job; but there is no inconsistency for some of us in being both members of the Socialist Labour League and within the New Left. One additional fruit of this might be that it would assist in dissipating the personal misunderstandings that still too often interfere with political work. These have two sources. The struggles of the past twenty-five years bred into many people a polemical and sectarian style of approach and with all of us this is easier to see in others than in ourselves. But more than this Stalinism with its bureaucracy bred an intense suspicion of personal motives. And this has been carried over into a far too great openness to gossip and suspicion. I think that people on the New Left and in the League have only to meet properly and argue properly for this to be avoided. If Marxists will take such initiative as is open to them (and I am well aware what efforts many Marxists have already made in this direction) they could break through this particular mist. So far I have only dealt with the first of the two contradic- tions which I mentioned. The second arises because the New Left wishes both to assist in building socialism effectively and yet to remain outside the form of any type of organization which might lead to the actual capture of power. The roots of this lie in the repudiation and criticism of the bureaucracies both of social democracy and of communism. But this is

[p039] LABOUR REVIEW extended to a suspicion of any organized political work which could provide a revolutionary leadership. The attempt to work inside the Labour Party and the trade unions is apt. to be dismissed as ‘factionalism’ and for work outside them the loosest and most informal forms of organization are thought appropriate. How then is it expected to achieve socialism? The answer seems to be that the building up of a socialist consciousness through educational and other work will lead to - a permeation of society so that finally the capitalist integument bursts asunder. But in fact there is here a failure to measure up to the forces of the bureaucracies inside and outside the Labour movement. The most brilliant criticisms of the mass media are likely to reach the attention only of those already least susceptible to those media so long as the control of the media remains in the hands of those faithful to capitalism. How do your reach the rank and file of the Labour movement? By playing your part in it and above all at the point of indus- trial struggle where the rank and file are themselves responding to the pressures of capitalism. In other words you can only carry through any effective educational effort as part of the political and industrial struggle. There is also a confusion abroad about freedom of discussion. British Marxists today are likely to be under no illusions about the importance of completely open discussion; but at the same time they find in Marxism a hard core of theory which can guide them into common action, while they still disagree on a wide variety of topics. The danger of loose and informal methods of organization is that they cannot impinge upon the class struggle in any effective way. The Left Book Club is a misleading model here: it was only able to do the work it October-November 1959 did—whatever we think of that work—because of all the other organizations which were also at work, and especially because .of the Communist Party. Likewise the New Left can only hope to be effective if its discussions assist people in a kind of political activity which the New Left itself is unwilling to foster. Here again the role of Marxists is clear. Whether the discussions on the New Left serve action or not depends partly on whether we are willing to take part in them or not. Once again this is only a task for some comrades. But we could help to meet the need for a marriage between working-class spontaneity and adequate theory, on which the League has rightly laid so much stress, by utilizing the discussions on the New Left. The most paradoxical fact about the New Left is the way in which sometimes in New Left discussions the fight on cultural questions and the fight for political power are treated as if they were two quite separate matters. This is not the place to develop the thesis that the only way to overcome the cor- tuption of our culture is through the achievement of working- class power. But it is this thesis which Marxists must consistently develop in discussions on the New Left. And it is at this point that all the arguments which Slaughter develops become relevant and important. What I have tried to do is give a context to those arguments which would make it clear that the relationship of Marxists to the New Left ought not to be one merely negative and critical but one which is continu- ally looking for those points of growth in its theory that can lead on to common political action. ALASDAIR MACINTYRE Important Announcement @ A Tory government with a substantial parliamentary majority now faces the organized labour movement. @ The greatest single need of the hour is to raise the theoretical standards of all those who actively participate in the struggle for socialism. @ This need requires a Marxist theoretical magazine which circulates widely inside the labour movement. @ Labour Review is to be published early in the new year in a slightly altered format for a little over half the present price. @ it will appear regularly every two months. 100

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[p041] THE CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE—The World We Live In—The Two BATTLE Nations—Hard Times Ahead—Towards a Slump— The Growth of Unemployment and Short-Time FOR Working—The Hydrogen-Bomb and the Threat of War—Opp-ess ion in the Colonies—A System SOC ALI SM in Decay—The Socialist Solution—Class Struggle the Only Road to Socialism . By LABOUR AND LEADERSHIP—The Crisis of Leadership—The Labour Bureaucracy—Centrism— PETER FRYER The Communist Party . THE MARXIST MOVEMENT—What Is 190 pages: 3s. 6d. Marxism?—The Evolutinn of British Marxism— Marxists and the Labour Party—Marxists and the Published by the Trade Unions—Principles and Programme of the Socialist Labour Marxist Movement—The Marxist Press—Towards a League Revolutionary Working-Class Party The Weekly Journal of the Socialist Labour League jinn THE NEWSLETTER Editorial Board: Brian Arundel, Michael Banda, Brian Behan, Harry Finch, Gerry Healy, Tom Kemp, Peter Kerrigan, Brian Pearce, Cliff Slaughter, Jim Swan UHLUILUUIAUUAUUUITUHTLLITMMHI| «Subscription 5s. for 12 issues post free from 180 Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4 Printed by Plough Preas Ltd. (TU), r.o. 180 Clapham High St, London SW4

[p042] THE BATTLE FOR SOCIALISM By PETER FRYER 190 pages: 3s. 6d. Published by the Socialist Labour League CAPITALISM, SOCIALISM AND THE CLASS STRUGGLE—The World We Live In—The Two Nations—Hard Times Ahead—Towards a Slump The Growth of Unemployment and Short-Time Working—The Hydrogen-Bomb and the Threat of War—Opp-ess ion in the Colonies—A System in Decay—The Socialist Solution—Class Struggle the Only Road to Socialism LABOUR AND LEADERSHIP—The Crisis of Leadership—The Labour Bureaucracy—Centrism— The Communist Party THE MARXIST MOVEMENT—What Is Marxism?—The Evolution of British Marxism— Marxists and the Labour Party—Marxists and the Trade Unions—Principles and Programme of the Marxist Movement—The Marxist Press—Towards a Revolutionary Working-Class Party The Weekly Journal of the Socialist Labour League jij THE NEWSLETTER Editorial Board: Brian Arundel, Michael Banda, Brian Behan, Harry Finch, Gerry Healy, Tom Kemp, Peter Kerrigan, Brian Pearce, Cliff Slaughter, Jim Swan UNIULLUIUIHILLIINININNNN| Subscription 5s. for 12 issues post free from 180 Clapham High Street, London, S.W.4 Printed by Plough Press Ltd. (TU), r.o. 180 Clapham High St, London SW4