William Morris

A Revolutionary Socialist
by Adam Buick

At the beginning of his socialist activity William Morris was a strong opponent of socialists involving themselves in election and parliamentary
activities. By the end of his life, however, he had become convinced that his earlier attitude was mistaken and that socialists should fight for 'palliatives', or reforms, as well as for political power for socialism. Morris's period of opposition to parliamentary activity corresponds more or less with his membership of the Socialist League from 1884-1890.

Morris's views on the problem of reform and revolution can be gathered from the articles he wrote for the official organ of the Socialist League, Commonweal, from his books and published lectures, from his private
letters, from his lecture notes and occasional articles in other journals. The most reliable statements of his views are to be found in his published articles, especially his reply to a correspondent on 'Socialism and Politics', in an official statement on parliamentary activity he drew up for the League in 1888, in the last article he wrote for the Commonweal 'Where are We Now' in 1890 and in an article he wrote in 1894 for the Labour Prophet 'What is our Present Business as Socialists?' A lecture he gave in]uly 1887 on 'The Policy of Abstention' also gives his views. 1

The early socialists in Britain thought that capitalist rule would have to be overthrown by violent insurrection along the lines of the Paris Commune of 1871. They also tended to think that this clash, or Revolution with a capital R, would come quickly. The Paris Commune, a fully democratic regime in which the working class took part, was mercilessly crushed after two months by the forces at the service of the French government at Versailles. From this socialists drew the conclusion, understandable in the circumstances of the time, that the capitalist class would defend their privileges by all means and that their rule could only be overthrown by violent action.

Morris shared this belief that the overthrow would be violent and was not very far off. He argued that the coming uprising would not be successful unless there were present at the time a strong and determined body of socialists. If, by some chance, capitalist rule were to collapse and socialists were to find themselves in possession of political power before they had had time to make adequate preparations and without the full backing of the workers, then the experience of the Paris Commune would be repeated: the counter-revolution would triumph and capitalist rule would be restored. At all costs this had to be avoided.

A strong and determined body of socialists was a prime necessity for the success of the uprising. What the socialists of Britain must do was to devote all their resources to creating such a body of socialists. This is what Morris meant by 'Education for Revolution' . Socialists must prepare for the imminent uprising by 'making socialists'. This basic outlook was shared by all those who left the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in 1884 to set up the Socialist League. All of them, however, did not go as far as Morris in opposing parliamentary activity.

But the League never did have a reform programme. Until the anarchists took over, it pursued the policy of simply putting over propaganda for socialism, written and spoken.

This assumption that the rule of the capitalist class would have to be overthrown by violence was the basis of Morris's anti-parliamentary arguments. From it he concluded that parliamentary activity would be futile and a waste of time which could better be spent in making socialists. Parliament was an institution whose purpose was to preserve the domination of the capitalist class. This class would never allow it to
be used to overthrow their rule. Even if socialists should, by some means, obtain a majority in parliament this might give them the power to make laws but it would not give them the power to enforce them or to end capitalist rule. For in this event the capitalist class, if they had let the socialists get this far in the first place, would resist the will of the parliamentary majority with violence. So that in the end would come the violent clash in which the number and determination of the socialists would be decisive. The time and energy spent in electing members to parliament would have been wasted. Worse, in fact, for the parliamentary majority would have been elected by the votes of non-socialists gathered by various vote-catching devices. Support gained by such means would be useless in any violent clash with the capitalist class and its supporters; the counter-revolution would triumph with little difficulty.

Morris also argued that reforms tended to reduce the discontent of the workers and so make them less ready to act against capitalist rule. Indeed the capitalist class would support reforms precisely with this end in view. For socialists to press for reforms in Parliament would be to help the capitalist class prolong their rule by delaying the workers' uprising. Any socialists allowed into Parliament would be used for this purpose. They would allow the capitalist class to assess in what ways the workers were discontented and what should be done to reduce such discontent. Further, they would also be helping to erect a barrier against their own aim since all reforms, including State-capitalism, tended to create a group of better-off workers with a stake in capitalism who would side with the capitalists in any clash with the rest of the workers.

Morris further drew attention to the dangerous effects which a reform programme could have on a socialist party. Contesting elections and working through Parliament necessarily involved compromising socialist principles. At elections the socialist candidate would water down his socialism and use various 'immediate demands' as bait to catch votes and get elected. In Parliament the bargaining needed to get a bill passed would again involve the party in compromise. A socialist party used to compromise would be unable to act in the necessary uncompromising way when the violent clash came.

However, Morris was not opposed to reforms as such. What he was opposed to was the policy of trying to use Parliament to get reforms. This he thought would weaken the socialist movement through compromising its principles. Any improvements that might be possible within capitalism would come more easily as a result of the capitalists' fear of an uncompromising socialist movement outside Parliament. At times, it is true, Morris did give the impression that he was opposed to improvements, whatever the means used to get them, just because they made the workers less discontented.

A further consideration was always present in Morris's arguments. He often made the simple point that at the time there were so few socialists that they could not be effective even as a parliamentary, reform party until they had built up their strength. As he put it, 'The making of Socialists must be a preliminary to the settling of the question: What are Socialists to do ?'. So even from the parliamentary point of view the situation demanded a policy of 'making socialists'. Morris still insisted on this after he had himselfcome to support a policy of using Parliament to get reforms.

There was also an element of irrational prejudice against 'party politics' in Morris's attitude. He once described Parliament as 'that degraded and degrading twaddle-shop'. He hated the intrigue and dishonesty involved in politics; to him it was a dirty game of which he wanted no part. This comes out clearly in his private letters where he says in effect that parliamentary activity may well be necessary but that he for one will have no part of it.

Since Morris did not believe that it was possible to use Parliament to get control of political power, what form did he expect the change-over to take? It is interesting to note that his idea was very similar to that of the French Syndicalists of a later period and of other anti-parliamentarists: The workers combine together into a nation-wide Workers' Federation which the government tries to suppress. Law and order begin to break down so that the workers are forced to take over many of the administrative functions of the State themselves. To do this they form 'workmen's committees'. A General Strike is called leading to a civil war in which most of the regular army go over to the workers. 2

Morris thought that the workers might be able to use Parliament in some way during the course of the Revolution. Not to get political power, of course, since this was not possible nor to get reforms but at least to pass various laws. This would put the onus of rebellion on the privileged classes and so give the workers the additional prestige that comes from legality. The capitalists rather than the workers would be the 'rebels'. Morris also believed that before 'full Socialism' or Communism would be established society would pass through a transitional stage of State capitalism, introduced partly by the capitalists themselves before and partly by the socialists after the capture of political power. Although he regarded this stage as necessary Morris dreaded it and always opposed identifying it with socialism.

After Morris left the Socialist League in 1890 he did some re-thinking. In particular he reconsidered his earlier assumption that the overthrow of capitalist rule could only be violent. He began to argue that it was possible for the working class to win political power through the ballot-box and overcame his objections to socialists using Parliament to get reforms. The most important factors influencing his change of mind on these questions must have been his experience of the growing workers' movement as well as his own experience as a socialist propagandist.

In 1882 there were only a handful of socialists. Ten years later many of the younger and more active trade unionists professed to have socialist ideas. The unskilled workers were organising in the New Unions. Moves were afoot to set up a workers' party independent of both the Liberals and the Conservatives. In other words, the working class was slowly advancing in organisation and in understanding. Morris also, like Marx and Engels had had to do previously, revised his earlier optimistic views as to when the Revolution would take place.

Taken together these changes brought Morris's position nearer to that of Engels (who had criticised his anti-parliamentarism). Morris, like Engels, came to base his estimate of what socialists should do on what the working class was doing.

To Morris it seemed that the working class was choosing the peaceful way to socialism through the ballot-box. He remained opposed to any policy of compromise but no longer believed that for socialists to go into Parliament necessarily involved compromise. Parliament could be used to get political power peaceably. The uncompromising struggle for socialism could go on inside Parliament as well as outside. Reforms could still not be got by compromise, by assuming a community of interest between masters and men, but by a struggle based on the recognition that the workers could only improve their position at the expense of the capitalists. Morris argued that socialists should support such struggles· for objectives less than socialism, not merely because they brought improvements but also because they rrained the workers in joint action for a common end and so prepared them to act for socialism.

To make the socialists of Britain more effective, Morris suggested a united socialist party to be formed by a federation of existing 'socialist' bodies like the Fabian Society and the SDF. The test for membership of this party should be professed agreement with the aim of socialism. This party would have a parliamentary reform programme and would support the struggles of the workers. But its main task would be to 'make socialists', to carry on a persistent propaganda for socialism. This scheme never got off the ground except for the issuing in 1893 of the Manifesto of English Socialists.

At the end of his life, then, Morris had reached a position on the problem of reform and revolution-and indeed on socialist tactics generally-very similar to that later elaborated by European Social Democracy 3 ; that the struggle for reforms prepared the working class for the struggle for political power; th'lt the way to get reforms was by means of the class struggle; that a socialist party should have a reform programme.

MORRIS'S CONTRIBUTION TO THE REFORM-REVOLUTION DEBATE

Morris himself of course was not the originator of all the arguments he employed. Most of them were basically of anarchist origin. The anarchists of the time had as their immediate aim an insurrection against the State. Their attitude to reforms and Parliament followed from this. They opposed electoral and trade union activity because it diverted the workers' attention from the need for an immediate uprising. They opposed reforms because they lessened discontent and so made the workers less prepared to revolt. And, finally, they opposed Parliament as a part of the State they were aiming to destroy.

Morris was not an anarchist; he did not advocate an immediate uprising although, at that time, he could see no way to end capitalist rule except by violence. Where Morris differed from the anarchists was in arguing that no insurrection against capitalist rule could succeed unless workers themselves were prepared to act for socialism. So for Morris the most important task facing socialists was to rouse such a readiness amongst the workers, to make them genuine revolutionary socialists. This was why he opposed the anarchists in the Socialist League who called for an immediate insurrection or at least for immediate acts of defiance of the State. It was precisely this insistence on the necessity of a socialist working class-and for socialists to work to create it-that distinguishes Morris's arguments on reforms and Parliament from those of the anarchists and gives them a peculiar significance of their own. For Morris was opposed to socialists taking part in Parliament and yet was not an anarchist.

If Morris's arguments were similar to those of the anarchists this was because he shared their belief that capitalist rule would have to be overthrown by an insurrection. When Morris came to abandon this belief in the inevitability of insurrection then with it went the larger part of his case against a socialist party having a reform programme. Morris then came to believe that the growing socialist movement (as he thought) would be able to use the ballot box and Parliament to win political power. Naturally a socialist party, in the course of its uncompromising struggle for socialism, should also press for reforms inside Parliament. Morris still recognised that there were dangers in election and Parliamentary activity but expected that the mass of socialist workers outside Parliament would be able to control their delegates inside. For although Morris changed his views on insurrection he never changed those on the necessity of making socialists: socialism could not be set up until the workers wanted it and knew how to run it.

Morris was the first to point out the dangers to a socialist party of trying to get elected to Parliament on a reform programme. People would vote for the reforms rather than for socialism so that the socialist members would have no mandate for socialism and would be forced to compromise. Fighting on a reform programme would lead to 'the error of moving earth and sea to fill the ballot boxes with Socialist votes which will not represent Socialist men'. As socialism is impossible without 'Socialist men', socialists elected to Parliament by such means would be of no use as a force for socialism. They would not be in Parliament as delegates of a socialist working class outside and would be restricted in what they could do by the non-socialist views of those who had voted for them. What was imponant was to create a desire for socialism amongst the workers. This done, the workers would know what to do to realise their desire. Socialists should be making more socialists by
persistent propaganda rather than trying to get reforms. A socialist party should thus not have a reform programme in addition to its aim of socialism.

This is Morris's main contribution to the reform-revolution discussion in the sense that it was a point, whatever weight is given to it, that had not been made before.

AN INFANTILE DISORDER?

Engels, who had supported those who broke with the SDF in 1884 to set up the Socialist League, was opposed to the anti-parliamentarism which soon became the policy of the League and backed those who wanted it to have a reform programme. In a letter of May 12, 1886 he complained that
'the League is passing more and more into the hands of the Anarchists ... Bax and Morris are strongly under the influence of the Anarchists'. 4 The question of parliamentary activity was discussed at the 1887 and 1888 Conferences of the League. After the 1887 Conference Engels wrote in another letter
'As to the League, if it upholds the resolution of the last Conference, I do
not see how anyone can remain a member who intends using the present
political machinery as a means of propaganda and action' (June 23).
and
'Of all the various Socialist groups in England, what is now the "opposition" in the League, was the only one with which so far I could
thoroughly sympathize' (July 26).'

This 'opposition', which favoured parliamentary action, left the League soon after the 1888 Conference which re-affirmed the League's position on the question.

Engels was still pursuing the aims which he and Marx had set themselves in the International Working Men's Association in the 1860s and 1870's: the formation of independent workers' parties in Britain and elsewhere. With this aim in view Engels felt that the Socialists in Britain should not cut themselves off from any moves in this direction by remaining a mere propagandist group and refusing to have anything to do with reforms or Parliament. He regarded the League's anti-parliamentarism as a case of the 'infantile disorders' he had learnt was a stage all socialist movements went through at the start.

This criticism was to a certain extent valid: much of Morris's early argument against parliamentary activity and for just making socialists was based on an inadequate grasp of the process of social change. This policy did, as Engels expected, cut off the Socialist League from the 'growing movement for a workers' party and led also in the end to its capture by the anarchists.

Nevertheless Morris's early policy of making socialists could be said to have been right but for the wrong reasons. In a sense Engels was correct in arguing that the appearance of a workers' party in Britain would be a step forward as the working class would learn to act on the political field independently of their masters. But this party did not, as he had expected, evolve into a socialist party but remained a Labour Party committed to the administration and reform of capitalism rather than to revolutionary socialism.

This would, as it were, rehabilitate Morris. If he erred, he erred on the right side. For his policy of making socialists can be justified on strict Marxian grounds. All a small socialist party can do is to put over the case for socialism as strongly and as often as possible, to fight confusion and compromise, and to admit only genuine socialists to its ranks in preparation for the time when social development will have made the working class socialist. Such a party should not try to be a reform party at the same time.

MORRIS'S REPUTATION AND INFLUENCE

Although the task of toning down Morris's socialism for the benefit of his wealthy admirers began almost as soon as he was dead, in Marxian circles his reputation as a 'revolutionary socialist' survived. His 'News From Nowhere' which leaves no doubt as to where he stood on this issue had a very wide circulation. It was quickly translated into German (by the wife of the pioneer German socialist, Wilhelm Liebknecht) and distributed by the Social Democratic Party.

At the end of his life Morris's political position was more or less that of the SDF and it was this organisation which first kept alive his reputation. The Twentieth Century Press which was at the service, if not under the democratic control of the SDF, reprinted a number of Morris's writings: some of the pamphlets he had written for the Socialist League, an article How I became a Socialist. The anarchists too reprinted some of the Socialist League pamphlets. Besides these pamphlets, articles and lectures Morris's books Signs of Change and Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome (written with Belfort Bax) were also available. So that at the turn of the century, when the reform-revolution problem was re-opened, socialists could have had access to a fair number of Morris's socialist works. After the turn of the century yet more of his works became available. In 1903 the Fabian Society published a lecture of his on Communism. In 1907 the Socialist Party of Great Britain, which had broken away from the SDF in 1904, brought out another lecture 'Art under Plutocracy' as a pamphlet entitled Art, Labour and Socialism. In 1913 the Charles H. Kerr Publishing Co. in Chicago which specialised in popular editions of
Marxist works reprinted Socialism: Its Growth and Outcome.

In Britain the SDF first became the Social Democratic Party and then the British Socialist Party. After the first world war most of the members of the SDF went into the Communist Party of Great Britain. Here the reputation of Morris was kept up by those who knew, especially R. Page Arnott.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain still survives today and in 1962 reprinted Art, Labour and Socialism. The Socialist Party is interesting in that those who drew up its declaration of principles in 1904 must have had amongst the documents in front of them The Manifesto of the Socialist League which had been partly drafted by Morris. A comparison of the wording of certain passages makes this clear.

In America the Socialist Labour Party there still keeps alive the reputation of William Morris. With regard to America, it is interesting to note that as far back as 1907 R. R. La Monte, then a member of the Socialist Party of America, was surprised to read that Morris was not a 'scientific socialist'. He wrote in a footnote in his book Socialism, Positive and Negative:
'The other day [chanced upon a pamphlet by one Oscar Lovell Triggs of
Chicago. It bore the title, "William Morris, Craftsman, Writer and Social
Reformer". In turning over its pages I was somewhat startled to read " 'scientific' socialism he never understood or advocated". And again further on my eyes fell on this gem: "it is apparent that Morris's 'socialism' is poetic and not scientific socialism" '.6
Well might La Monte be startled-even in 1907.

It has been established that Morris was known as a 'revolutionary socialist' in Marxian circles, but was his contribution to the discussion of the problem of reform and revolution also known? This seems much less likely especially as the sources-articles in Commonweal, unpublished lectures and private letters-would not have been available to socialists at this time. To this must be added the fact that when he died Morris no longer held anti-parliamentary views.

It thus seems reasonable to conclude that when the discussion was re-opened at the turn of the century it was under the influence of Daniel De Leon's views in the Socialist Labor Party of America rather than of Morris's earlier views. Even so some of the terminology, for instance 'palliative', was common to both discussions.

J. Fitzgerald, a founder member of the Socialist Party ofGreat Britain, did refer to Morris in a discussion of socialist tactics at a meeting in March 1905. He was quoted as saying:
'... they had been told by some worthy people, even by a man of the stamp of Morris, that the soldiers would fraternise with the people'.7

However this is probably a reference to a passage at the end of the chapter 'How the Change Came' in News from Nowhere and cannot be taken as evidence that Morris's early views on tactics were still known. Morris in fact left the problem unsolved. He believed that using Parliament necessarily involved fighting for reforms. This was why when he was opposed to parliamentary action he was also opposed to a reform programme and why when later he supported parliamentary action he also supported a reform programme. The solution was in fact proposed by the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904 when they pointed out that using the vote and Parliament to get socialism did not entail having a reform programme. A socialist party could contest elections on a straight socialist programme and only seek votes for this programme; in this way could a socialist party avoid the danger, which Morris foresaw, of attracting non-socialist support and being forced into compromise, finally ceasing to be a socialist party altogether.

NOTES
1 References are, respectively, Commonweal July 1885, June 9 1888 and
November 15 1890, and Labour Prophet January 1894. The lecture is given in
William Morris, Artist, Writer. Socialist, supplementary volume Il, 1936.
2 This is the picture in chapter XVII of News from Nowhere entitled 'How the
Change Came'.
3 E. P. Thompson argued otherwise in the first (1955) edition of his William
Morris Romantic to Revolutionary: that Morris's position was more or less that
of Lenin; that he favoured a highly disciplined vanguard parry ready to takeover
and lead the workers' struggle. 'Were William Morris alive today', wrote
Thompson in 1955 in an obvious reference to the Communist Party, 'he would
not look far to find the parry of his choice'. This is highly questionable, to say the
least. Quite apart from the fact that the system in Russia is obviously the State
Socialism (or State capitalism) for which Morris cared so little, Morris rejected
the idea of 'leadership'. In all his socialist writings the emphasis is on the
understanding and determination of the workers rather than on their leaders (or
so-called leaders, as Morris preferred to call them). This was the crux of his case
against Parliamemarism and later what he relied on to prevent 'the personal fads
and vanities of leaders' from standing in 'the way of real business'.
4 Engles to W. Liebknecht, Page Arnot, William Morris, The Man and The
Myth, p. 37.
5 Engels to J. L. Mahon, E. P. Thompson, From Romantic to Revolutionary,
appendix.
6 R. R. La Monte, Socialism, Positive and Negative, pp. 122-3.
7 Paris Commune meeting, Socialist Standard, April 1905.

The Myth of the Transitional Society

Critique has recently published the translation of an article by Ernest Mandel, in which he develops his now familiar theme that, in the course of social evolution, there intervenes – and must intervene – between capitalism and socialism a transitional "society" with its own social base, relations of production, etc.[i] This is a point of view worth discussing but, despite the Marxist terminology in which it is expressed, it is in fact not a view held by Marx himself. As the present article will try to demonstrate, Marx did indeed speak of a "political transition period" between capitalism and socialism but never of a "transitional society". What, then, did Marx mean when he spoke of this "transition period"? Contrary to what is generally supposed (largely as a result of decades of Stalinist and Trotskyist propaganda), for Marx this period was not that between the establishment of the common ownership of the means of production and the time when the principle "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" could be implemented. Rather it is the period during which the working class would be using state power to bring the means of production into common ownership.

In other words, the transition period is a political form between the capture of political power by the working class within capitalist society and the eventual establishment of socialism, a period during which the working class has replaced the capitalist class as the ruling class, i.e. as the controller of state power. The end of this transition period is the establishment of a classless society based on the common ownership and democratic control by the whole of society of the means of production, with the consequent disappearance of the coercive state, of the system of working for wages, of the production of goods for sale on a market with a view to profit, indeed, of buying and selling, money and the market altogether. That for Marx the "transition period" was the period after the capture of political power by the working class and before the actual establishment of the common ownership of the means of production is clear both from his early and his later writings. In 1852 he wrote to his friend Weydemeyer in America that one of the things he had proved was that "the dictatorship of the proletariat" (as he called the period of working class control of state power [ii]) "only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society"[iii](emphasis added).
Engels summarizes his own and Marx's view in 1873 as follows:

"The views of German scientific socialism on the necessity of political action by the proletariat and of its dictatorship as the transition to the abolition of classes and with them of the state. . ."[iv] (emphasis added).

The transition period, then, is the period up to the establishment of the common ownership of the means of production. Again, in 1875 in his private notes on the Gotha Programme adopted by the unity congress of the German Social Democrats Marx wrote:

"Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."[v]

Marx, we can note here, used the words "socialist" and "communist" interchangeably to refer to future classless society (if anything, he preferred the word "communist", but we shall follow Engels' later usage and employ the word "socialism" to describe future classless society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production). The idea that "socialism" and "communism" were two successive phases of post-capitalist society is not to be found in Marx, but derives from Lenin. Thus, when Marx writes, in the above quote, of "communist society", he means precisely the same as when he wrote of "classless society" in 1852.

It is true that Marx realised that, had socialism been established in his day, it would not have proved possible to implement immediately, or even for some years, the principle "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs", i.e. free access for all to consumer goods and services according to individual need. In the early years of socialism, established at this time, there would inevitably have had to have been some restrictions on access to consumer goods and services, some form of, if you like, "rationing" (if this word's association with the war- time and post-war ration cards is forgotten, for although full free access according to need would not have been possible in 1875, the amount allocated for consumption could have been considerably higher than the workers were then getting under capitalism). Marx suggested as one such possible method so-called labour-time vouchers. It is important to realise that this was only a suggestion and, moreover, one open to serious objections. But Marx's point was that, for some period of time, some method of rationing consumption would be necessary. He referred to the period of socialism during which this would be so, as "the first phase of communist society", as compared with a "higher phase" in which free access to consumer goods and services could be implemented. Note that Marx is talking of different phases of the same society, society "based on the common ownership of the means of production"[vi], i.e. a classless, stateless society with no wages or monetary system (Marx made it clear that the "labour-time vouchers" were not money, "no more `money' than a ticket for the theatre" as he put it in Capital [vii]). No doubt one could speak of a transitions from the "first" to a "higher" phase of socialism, but the fact remains that Marx did not employ the concept of "transition period" in this sense. For him, as we have explained, it was the transition from capitalism to socialism and not from one phase of socialism to another.

How long did Marx expect this political transition period to last?
His opinion on this question changed over the period of his political life. In 1848, he clearly felt it would have to last quite some years. Thirty years later, he and Engels thought it could be considerably shorter, as a result of the tremendous development of modern industry in the intervening period.
The Communist Manifesto of 1848 speaks of the working class capturing political power and using "its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all instruments of production in the hands of the state, i.e. of the proletariat organised as the ruling class; and to increase the total of productive forces as rapidly as possible" (emphasis added).

Marx and Engels go on to list various immediate measures which they and the other members of the Communist League felt the working class should take on coming to power, in order to make "despotic inroads on the rights of property".

They conclude:

"When, in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared, and all production has been concentrated in the hands of a vast association of the whole nation, the public power will lose its political character".[viii] (emphasis added)

Clearly, in 1848, Marx and Engels expected the transition period to the establishment of common ownership and the consequent abolition of classes and the state to be fairly long. Engels, in his draft for the manifesto which was not used but was later published under the title Principles of Communism {and which is always a useful gloss on the Manifesto), stated this explicitly. Answering the question, "Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?", he wrote:

"No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity".[ix]

It was not until later, after the wave of revolutionary enthusiasm of 1848 had ebbed, that Marx and Engels worked out the full implications of this. They had been saying, in effect, that the establishment of socialism was not possible in 1848. Engels, in 1895, in an introduction to some articles Marx had written, in 1850, on French politics, openly stated this:

"History has proved us, and all who thought like us, wrong. It has made it clear that the state of economic development at that time was not, by a long way, ripe for the elimination of capitalist production."[x]

Engels was clearly correct on this point. Capitalism, as Fritz Sternberg has pointed out, was then dominant only in one country:

"When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote `The Manifesto of the Communist Party', – that is to say, about the middle of the nineteenth century – capitalism was dominant only in England; the United States was still a colonial country, in which the agricultural population far outnumbered the industrial; in Europe, the beginnings of capitalism were confined to the west – in Germany, for instance, pre-capitalist forms of production were still dominant; Russia and Japan were still feudal states; and there were relatively few points on the Asiatic coastline which were in contact with those occidental countries in which capitalist development had begun.
To say that, at that time, perhaps 10 per cent of the world's population were engaged in capitalist production is probably an optimistic estimate."[xi]

If socialism wasn't possible in 1848, this raises the interesting question (clearly relevant for later attempts to establish "socialism" in a single, backward country):
What would the working class, or rather a determined group of Communists, have been able to do in the unlikely event of them having gained control of political power at that time? Surely, only to develop capitalism. In fact, the measures listed at the end of Section II ("Proletarians and Communists") of the Manifesto, and referred to above, could accurately be described as being of a state-capitalist nature. Many of them have since been implemented in openly capitalist countries (progressive income tax, state bank, nationalisation of railways, free education, prohibition of child labour, etc.), thus indicating that there was nothing inherently anti-capitalist about them. Neither Marx nor Engels went quite so far as to repudiate these measures, or to state that the Communists of 1848 were wrong to have imagined that they could even capture political power, let alone establish socialism at that time. But this is what Engels wrote in 1872 of these measures:

". . . no special stress is laid on the revolutionary measures proposed at the end of Section II. That passage would, in many respects, be very differently worded today. . . this programme has in some details become antiquated."[xii]

Also, writing in 1850, Engels discussed the fate of Thomas Munzer, as the leader of a communistic party coming to power before conditions were ripe for establishment of a communistic society. This passage is worth quoting extensively:

"The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government at a time when society is not yet ripe for the domination of the class he represents and for the measures which that domination implies. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the degree of antagonism between the various classes, and upon the level of development of the material means of existence, of the conditions of production and commerce upon which class contradictions always repose. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not upon him or the stage of development of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound to the doctrines and demands hitherto propounded which, again, do not proceed, from the class relations of the moment, or from the more or less accidental level of production and commerce, but from his more or less penetrating insight into the general result of the social and political movement. Thus, he necessarily finds himself in a unsolvable dilemma. What he can do contradicts all his previous actions and principles, and the immediate interests of his party and what he ought to do cannot be done. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whose domination the movement is then ripe. In the interest of the movement he is compelled to advance the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with talk and promises, and with the assertion that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. He who is put into this awkward position is irrevocably lost."[xiii]

Marx himself had written something similar in October 1847 (a few months before he and Engels wrote the Manifesto) :

"If the proletariat destroys the political rule of the bourgeoisie, that will only be a temporary victory, only an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution itself, as in 1794, so long as in the course of history, in its `movement', the material conditions are not yet created which make necessary the abolition of the bourgeois mode of production and thus the definitive overthrow of bourgeois political rule."[xiv] (Marx's emphasis)

Is it too much to say that, had Marx and Engels and the others in the Communist League come to control political power in 1848, that, not being able to establish socialism, they would have been "irrevocably lost", in that they would have had no alternative but to develop capitalism (even if in the form of a state capitalism)?

In any event, this situation never arose, nor was it even a remote possibility. In exile in London, Marx and Engels soon realised the futility of communists plotting to seize political power in the immediate future, and turned to concentrating on the long, hard task of preparing the working class to organise itself to capture political power. After 1848, modern industry made great advances. In 1847, Engels had written of the means of production not being available in sufficient quantity to permit the immediate, or even rapid, establishment of socialism. A quarter of a century later, in 1872, he was writing :

"...it is precisely this industrial revolution which has raised the productive power of human labour to such a high level that – for the first time in the history of mankind – the possibility exists, given a rational division of labour among all, of producing not only enough for the plentiful consumption of all members of society and for an abundant reserve fund, but also of leaving each individual sufficient leisure so that what is really worth preserving in historically inherited culture – science, art, forms of intercourse – may not only be preserved but converted from a monopoly of the ruling class into the common property of the whole of society, and may be further developed."[xv]

And six years later, in that part of Anti-Dühring later published as the immensely popular pamphlet Socialism, Utopian and Scientific :

"The possibility of securing for every member of society, by means of socialized production, an existence not only fully sufficient materially, and becoming day by day more full, but an existence guaranteeing to all the free development and exercise of their physical and mental faculties – this possibility is now for the first time here, but it is here." [xvi](Engels' emphasis)

In other words, it was Engels' opinion that by the 1870's, contrary to the situation in 1848, "the state of economic development was . . . ripe for the elimination of capitalist production". While he might not have answered the question, "Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke?" with a `yes', he would certainly have answered that it could be abolished (i.e. common ownership, and a classless society established) fairly rapidly. The principle is clear here: for Marx and Engels, the higher the level of development of the means of production, the shorter the political transition period needed to make them the common property of society as a whole.
Engels was exaggerating when he wrote in 1872 that the means of production could then have provided "enough for the plentiful consumption of all members of society and for an abundant reserve fund". Certainly, they could have provided enough to completely eliminate material poverty and to raise the consumption of all well above the level they had to endure under capitalism, but it would not really have been possible to implement the principle of "from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs". Engels, or course, recognised this, and it was precisely Marx's point as well in his notes on the Gotha Programme about the inevitability of some limitations on free consumption in the "first phase" of socialism.

Having discussed the question of how long Marx and Engels expected the political transition period between capitalism and socialism to last, we can now ask, how long did they think the transition (as one might want to call it) between the "first" and "higher" phases of socialism itself would take. This is something they don't seem to have discussed, but it is clear that the same principle applies: the higher the level of development of the means of production, the shorter the period.
One thing is clear, though, that the development of the means of production during this period would be on the basis of the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production, and the consequent abolition of the market, money, buying and selling, wages, profits, etc, The "first phase of communist society", like the higher phase, would be a non-market society in which production would be consciously planned to satisfy human needs. What would be produced would be useful things, for direct allocation to democratically-decided social uses (individual consumption, collective consumption, expansion of productive resources, reserves, etc.). What Marx called "commodity-production", the production of goods for sale on a market, would not exist; indeed could not exist without the society ceasing to be socialist.
Marx repeatedly made it clear that socialism, in both its phases, was a non-market, production-solely-and-directly-for-use society. The Communist Manifesto specifically speaks of "the Communistic abolition of buying and selling", and of the abolition not only of capital (wealth used to produce other wealth with a view to profit), but of wage labour, too.[xvii]
In Volume I of Capital Marx speaks of "directly associated labour, a form of production that is entirely inconsistent with the production of commodities ...", [xviii] and, in Volume II, of things being different "if production were collective and no longer possessed the form of commodity production. ..". Also, in Volume II, Marx, in comparing how socialism and capitalism would deal with a particular problem, twice states that there would be no money to complicate matters in socialism: "If we conceive society as being not capitalistic but communistic, there would be no money-capital at all in the first place. ..", and, "in the case of socialized production the money- capital is eliminated".[xix] In other words, in socialism the production and distribution of wealth is solely a question of organisation and planning.

It is precisely Mandel who is the most influential and able opponent of Marx (and the others who have agreed with him, notably Bordiga) on this point about the entirely non-market nature of the "first" phase of socialism. In his essay Economics of the Transition Period, Mandel notes that:

"Immediately following the victory of the October Revolution, and especially in the period of War Communism, the Communist theoreticians saw the construction of a socialist economy primarily in terms of an immediate and general disappearance of the market and monetary economy."

Significantly, he does not question why this should have been, since this would have led him to have to admit that, on this point, the Bolshevik thinkers were in the Marxist tradition.
Mandel goes on to state that in Russia it soon appeared that "maintaining money and market relations was best suited to maximising economic growth and to the best defense of the interests of the workers as consumers" and to conclude by formulating the following general law:

"The survival of market and monetary categories thus proves inevitable during the period of transition from capitalism to socialism."[xx]

(Actually, what the experience of Russia under so-called "War Communism" proved was that isolated Russia was ripe at that time only for some form of capitalism – with its "market and monetary categories" – and not for socialism). Mandel accepts socialism as a world-wide, classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society (to define it somewhat negatively). As he wrote in The Inconsistencies of State Capitalism :

"Socialism means a classless society. It therefore presupposes not only the suppression of private property of the means of production, henceforth managed in a planned way by the associated producers themselves, but it also calls for a level of development of the productive forces which makes possible the withering away of commodity production, of money, and of the state."

and,

"The working class ... is not capable of building a socialist society in a single country, not even the USA (not to speak of Britain or Western Europe)."

All that can be established in the immediate future, says Mandel, is a third society neither capitalist nor socialist, which will have the aim of developing the means of production to the level where world socialism becomes possible as a society of abundance: a "transitional society" between capitalism and socialism, with its own social structure and economic laws different from those both of capitalism and of socialism. Mandel describes this so-called transitional society of his as follows:

"nationalisation of all the means of production under workers' control, democratically planned economy, but still with commodity production of consumer goods, with the survival of money, with foreign trade, and with a workers' army as long as the threat of strong bourgeois states subsists."[xxi]

This "transitional society", like capitalism but unlike socialism, can be established on a national scale. In fact, says Mandel, it should be the immediate aim of each national working class (thus rejecting the Marxist view that the working class of all countries should be aiming at a more or less simultaneous world socialist revolution).

If Marx had really subscribed to this view, that there was another system of society –lasting for a whole "epoch" – between capitalism and socialism, it is curious, to say the least, that he never mentioned it. Nowhere, in fact, does Marx speak of any "transitional society" in between capitalism and socialism, or, to use some of the phrases employed by Mandel, "the epoch of transition from capitalism to socialism", "a transitional-economy", "the society in transition
from capitalism to socialism". He certainly spoke of a "political transition period" and of "a period of revolutionary transformation" between capitalism and socialism but, as we have seen, this was merely the period during which the working class would use its control of state power to establish the common ownership of the means of production, a relatively short political transition period, which would be shorter the higher the development of the means of production was at the time the working class won control of political power, and certainly not lasting an "epoch".
Mandel tries to justify his position by identifying his "transitional society" with Marx's "first phase of communist society" (despite the fact that the phrase "first phase of communist society" obviously means what is says: the first phase of communist, not some other, different, society).

Marx, we have seen, did recognise the inevitability of some limitations on free consumption in the early stages of socialism (had it been established in the 1870's), and did mention "labour-time vouchers" as one possible method of doing this. Mandel claims that whether these labour-time vouchers or money is used in these circumstances, is just a matter of choice. Money, he argues, is better because it allows workers, as consumers, more freedom of choice than would labour-time vouchers, or some system of physical rationing. But, this is based on a complete misunderstanding of the Marxian theory of money. For Marx money was not a thing but a social relation, an economic category which existed on the basis of certain social relations between the producers, specifically, an exchange economy, reflecting the fact that production was not yet socialised but carried out by isolated individual producers – and later the fact that, despite socialized production, there was still private or sectional appropriation. He pointed out that "labour-time vouchers" were not money; they were simply pieces of paper entitling a person to draw so much from the stock of goods set aside for individual consumption. They did not circulate, nor did they reflect a relationship of private property. As Marx put it, in a passage in his notes on the Gotha Programme, – a passage incidentally quoted by Mandel in the Critique article – "within the co-operative society based on the common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products."[xxii]

We do not want to defend the "labour-time voucher" system. Even for Marx's day, it was inappropriate, suffering from numerous anomalies, only some of which Marx himself recognised. We would subscribe to the view that Marx's criticism of schemes to introduce "labour- money" under capitalism, applies to some extent also to the scheme for "labour-time vouchers" in the early stages of socialism.[xxiii] But it is clear that Marx did not regard the use of money (a commodity that has come to be universally exchangeable with all other commodities) as an alternative form of rationing in the "first phase of communist society". In fact, he would have regarded this as an absurd, contradictory proposal. We can imagine him lambasting Mandel in the same terms as he lambasted Proudhon for similar inanities!

Let us now return to the question of how long, after the establishment of socialism, some restrictions on free consumption would have to continue. Today, looking back, we can say that, had world socialism been established in the 1870's, it might have taken about a generation before full free access to consumer goods and services, according to individual needs, could have been implemented. This estimate is based on the fact that it was by around 1900 that the effects of the so-called second industrial revolution – the application to production of the electric motor and the internal combustion engine – were beginning to be felt. Marx and Engels, remember, were judging the possibilities of socialism on the basis only of the first industrial revolution (the application to production of the steam engine). Marx, who died in 1883, never saw either an electric motor or an internal combustion engine. But of course every advance in technology made his case for socialism even more relevant.
By about 1900, thanks to this second industrial revolution,capitalism became the predominant world system. By "predominant" we don't mean that capitalism existed all over the world, but merely that all the people of the world, even if they lived under pre-capitalist conditions, were decisively affected by the workings of world capitalism, 1900 marks, if you like, capitalism becoming a world system – a fact which some Marxist writers have described as its becoming "imperialist". 1914, with the outbreak of the first world war in the history of mankind, was a bloody confirmation of this. To quote Sternberg again:

"Capitalist development had taken several hundred years to arrive at a stage at which perhaps 10 per cent of the world's population produced along capitalist lines, but within the two-thirds of a century which followed – approximately from the middle of the nineteenth century up to the outbreak of the first world war – capitalism became the dominant form of production not merely in one country, England, but all over the world, until perhaps between 25 and 30 per cent of the world's population were producing along capitalist lines, whilst in Great Britain, the United States, Germany and Western Europe in general, capitalism held practically a monopoly of production. At the same time capitalist development had made considerable progress in Russia and Japan, although the remnants of feudalism still existed, whilst in the other Asiatic countries the pre-capitalist forms of production had been definitely undermined."[xxiv]

We can, in fact, place the end of capitalism's role in history – to create the material basis for a world socialist society of abundance – at this time. By 1900, capitalism had completely outlived its usefulness. From then on only the immediate establishment of world socialism has been "progressive". From then on, in fact, world socialism – given, of course, the development of a majority socialist movement amongst the working class in the industrialised parts of the world – could have been established "at one stroke" by a more or less world socialist revolution.

Since 1900, the working class has still, it is true, needed to organise itself to capture political power in all the various states of the world, and, in this sense, a "political transition period" during which the working class uses state power to establish the common ownership of the means of production, is still necessary. However, since this period would be so short as to be negligible, the concept of a transition period has become outdated.

Similarly, though in the first few years of socialism, as the mess left by capitalism is cleared up, some restrictions on full free consumption may still be necessary, world socialist society could now move rapidly (i.e. in well under a decade at the most) to implementing free access to consumer goods and services according to individual need as the principle of distribution. To sum up, the concept of a "transition period", lasting some years, between capitalism and socialism is today an obsolete 19th century concept, while the ideal of a "transitional society" between capitalism and socialism, as proposed by Mandel, was never to be found in Marx in the first place.
Adam Buick , Critique 5, 1975

[i] Ernest Mandel, `Ten Theses on the Social and Economic Laws Governing the Society Transitional between Capitalism and Socialism', Critique 3.
[ii] As is clearly shown by Hal Draper in his detailed study of the occasions Marx and Engels used this, and similar, phrases. See Draper's "Marx and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat", New
Politics, Vol. I, No.4, Summer 1962.
[iii] Marx to J. Weydemeyer, March 5,1852. Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. II, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1958.p.452
[iv] F. Engels, "The Housing Question", in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. I; FLPH, Moscow, 1958, p.613.
[v] Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971, p.26.
[vi] Ibid, p.16.
[vii] Karl Marx, Capital Vol I. I, FLPH, Moscow, 1961, p.94.
[viii] Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, FLPH, Moscow, 1954, pp.80-81.
[ix] F. Engels, Principles of Communism, Pluto Press, London, n.d., p.13. [x] F. Engels, "Introduction" to "The Class Struggles in France 1848 to 1850", Selected Works, Vol. I, p.125.
[xi] Fritz Sternberg, Capitalism and Socialism on Trial, Gollancz, London, 1951, p.19.
[xii] F. Engels. "Preface" to the German Edition of 1872 of Manifesto of the Communist Party, p.10.
[xiii] F. Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, Lawrence and Wishart, 1969, p.115.
[xiv] Karl Marx, "The Moralizing Critique and the Critical Moral", quoted in Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, Ed. T. B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel, Penguin Books, 1963, p.244.
[xv] F. Engels, "The Housing Question", in Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 1, pp.564-565.
[xvi] F. Engels, Anti-Dühring, FLPH, Moscow, 1959, pp. 389-390.
[xvii] Marx and Engels, The Manifesto of the Communist Party, pp.72-73.
[xviii] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, p .94.
[xix] Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. II, FLPH, Moscow, 1957, p.451, p.315 and p.358.
[xx] Ernest Mandel, "Economics of the Transition Period", in Key Problems of the Transition Period, Pathfinder Press, New York, 1970, pp.38-40. Originally published in Fifty Years of World Revolution (1917-1967): An International Symposium, ed. by Ernest Mandel, Merit
Publishers, New York, 1968.
[xxi] The Inconsistencies of State Capitalism, International Marxist Group. London, 1969, pp.17-18.
[xxii] Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, quoted by Mandel in a footnote on p.13 of Critique 3.
[xxiii] See "La Période de Transition (deuxième partie)", Révolution lnternationale 8, Paris, March-April 1974. See also "Labour-Time Vouchers", Socialist Standard, London, May, 1971, and "Marx's Conception of Socialism", Socialist Standard, December. 1973.
[xxiv] Fritz Sternberg, op. cit., p. 19.

Mensheviks

Thought i provide some links to those very much misrepresented Mensheviks .



First , of course , is Martov's The State and the Socialist Revolution .



A short Socialist Standard biography of him here . "Socialism, he argued, could only be achieved by a politically conscious working class. It is the experience of workers under capitalism which drives them to understand the need for Socialism and this process is enhanced by the degree of democracy which they have won for themselves. Dictatorial power wielded by a vanguard minority, no matter how sincere its intentions, can never act as a substitute. That way the workers remain a subject class and the dictators, having acquired a taste for power, consolidate their own rule.This then is Martov’s value to Socialist theory."



A 1940 Socialist Standard review of "State and the Socialist Revolution" here .

And here is an article by Adam Buick on the role of soviets in Russia and Martov's viewpoint

There is an online download of a talk by Steve Coleman on the ideas of Martov that can be found here

Historical analysis of the Menshevik role in post - October Russia can be read here - The Menshevik's Political Comeback Spring 1918 by Vladimir Brovkin

The role of the soviets in Russia's bourgeois revolution: the point of view of Julius Martov
This article originally appeared in the French political journal, Economies et societes, cahiers de l'ISMEA, Paris, serie S, Number 18, April-May 1976 issue. It first appeared on the internet for the first time here but to widen its circulation i am re-posting in full once more .

The basic principle defended by Marx throughout his forty years of socialist activity can be summed up in the clause of the General Rules of the First International that "the emancipation of the working class must be conquered by the working classes themselves". This is a rejection of the view that socialism can be introduced for the working class or that the working class can be led to socialism by some enlightened minority.

Those who set themselves up as leaders of the working class fall into two groups. First, there are the parliamentary reformists who tell the workers: "vote for us and we will introduce socialism for you". And then there are the various "vanguards" who see themselves leading the workers in a violent assault on the capitalist state. Both groups, despite being bitter antagonists, share a common standpoint: a denial that the majority of workers are capable of understanding and of organising themselves, without leaders, in order to achieve it.

But to deny this is to in effect deny that socialism can be established. For socialism, as a fully democratic society based on the common ownership of the means of production(1), demands, in order to function, the voluntary co-operation and conscious participation of the immense majority of the population. It is a society which simply cannot be established by a minority, however enlightened, determined or benevolent. Leaders, whether reformist parliamentarians or insurrectionist vanguards, cannot establish socialism; all they can and have established is some form of state capitalism.

During and after the first world war a number of working class thinkers and militants (such as Luxemburg, Gorter and Pannekoek) came to recognise that the traditional Social Democratic policy of seeking to win a parliamentary majority on an electoral programme of reforms of capitalism could never lead to socialism but only to state capitalism. They re-asserted that only the working class, socialist-minded and democratically-organised, could establish socialism. However, under the impact of the events of November 1917 in Russia, they imagined that the form of working class organisation to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism has been found in the workers' "soviets" or councils that had come into being after the overthrow of the Tsar in March 1917.

It is understandable, and perhaps excusable, that in the early days of the "soviet regime" people outside of Russia should have been mistaken about its nature. War-time censorship and the lies of the capitalist press, together with the exaggerations of some of its supporters, meant that little accurate information about what was happening in Russia was available. On the face of it, in November 1917 the Congress of Soviets, a body of working class delegates from all over Russia, had deposed the capitalist Provisional Government and itself taken control of governmental power; capitalist rule had been overthrown and a socialist regime established - at least this is what appeared to have happened.

But those who had some knowledge of Marx's theory of social development ought to have quickly had some doubts. Without denying that capitalist political rule had been overthrown or that power had passed into the hands of people calling themselves socialists, they could have questioned whether the outcome could be socialism. Quite apart from the fact that socialism could only have been established as a world system, neither the economic nor the political conditions for a socialist revolution existed in Russia in 1917. Russia was an industrially backward country, with an overwhelmingly peasant population engaged in individual, rather than socialised, production. The workers and peasants of Russia certainly were discontented, but wanted "Peace, Bread and Land" (as the slogans put it) rather than socialism properly-understood.

To be fair, those who supported the Bolshevik coup d'etat because they believed it to have been a soviet or workers' council revolution did eventually - by about 1921 - come to recognise the real nature of the Bolshevik regime as a minority dictatorship forced by economic circumstances to continue the development of capitalism in Russia. But these "Left Communists" (or "Council Communists" as some of them later called themselves) still continued to believe in workers' councils as the form of working class organisation for establishing socialism.

One man, however, was not taken in by "sovietism": Julius Martov. Martov was one of the second generation of Russian Social Democrats who, at the turn of the century, worked to build up the Social Democratic movement inside Russia. With Plekhanov, Lenin and others he was one of the editors of the journal Iskra which had been launched in 1900 to counter the nebulous theories of "economism". When, however, the Iskra group, together with the rest of Russian Social Democracy, split over the organisation question Martov was amongst the minority (or "Mensheviks", from the Russian word for minority) who opposed Lenin's proposal for a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries which was supported by a majority (or "Bolsheviks"). Martov favoured the traditional Social Democratic idea of a mass, open - and, let it be admitted, reformist - workers' party. Unlike most Mensheviks, however, Martov was an opponent of the first world war, being a member of the small group of "Internationalists" who took up a working-class position on this issue. He was a respected writer (even by Lenin) on Marx and socialist theory and, indeed, it was because of his criticism of the Bolshevik regime from a Marxian point of view that he was forced into exile in 1922, where he died a year later.

Some of the articles he wrote in the period 1919-23 were published in English translation in 1939 under the title The State and the Socialist Revolution (2). Reading these articles it is easy to see why he was such an embarrassment to the Bolshevik government. Not for one moment was he taken in by their claims that the "soviet regime" represented the "dictatorship of the proletariat" as envisaged by Marx (3). For him, it was a cover for the dictatorship, albeit revolutionary, of the Bolshevik Party.

It is instructive to see why the Bolsheviks were, for a few years, advocates of workers' councils. The "constitutional' basis for their seizure of power in November 1917 had been a decision of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets to depose the Provisional Government of Kerensky and set up instead a "Provisional Workers and Peasants Government". Thus the Bolsheviks popularised the slogan, in the rest of Europe as well as in Russia, of "all power to the soviets" (i.e., workers' councils). After they had dissolved the Constituent Assembly in January 1918 they were forced, in order to justify this action, to step up their propaganda in favour of the soviets as an alternative to parliament. The election of a Constituent Assembly, which would decide the future constitution of Russia, had long been a demand of all Russian revolutionaries, including the Bolsheviks. Elections, even though held after the Bolsheviks take-over of power, gave the Bolsheviks only a quarter of the seats, a majority going to the peasant party, the Social Revolutionaries. Lenin gave a number of reasons why the Assembly had had to be dissolved such as out-of-date electoral lists and a split in the Social Revolutionary party between the presentation of candidates and the election. But all these could have been remedied by fresh elections. This the Bolsheviks wished to avoid since they were fully aware that the result would be more or less the same. They determined to hold on to power, while still wishing to be regarded as democrats. Hence Lenin proclaimed that the soviet system was a higher form of democracy than the "bourgeois" parliamentary system.

Martov knew this to be hypocrisy. Lenin favoured the soviet rather than the parliamentary system because he knew that he could get a majority under the former but not the latter - a sure sign, we may add, that the soviet system was not more representative or democratic than the election of a central assembly by universal, direct, equal and secret ballot.

The reason for this was that the soviets - the soviets as they really existed in revolutionary Russia as opposed to the ideal workers' councils of Left Communist theory - as loose makeshift bodies were easily manipulable by a well-organised group such as were the professional revolutionaries of the Bolshevik Party under Lenin's leadership. Indeed it could be said that it was precisely because they were the best-organised and disciplined group that the Bolsheviks finally emerged as the government of revolutionary Russia following the collapse of the Tsarist regime - and they came to power by successfully manipulating the soviets.

The soviet system served the Bolsheviks' purpose because elections to the All-Russia Congress of Soviets were neither universal nor direct nor secret. The Congress was composed of delegates from local soviets who were in their turn delegates from local factories. Its members were thus only indirectly elected. Urban areas were over-represented. There were no set procedures for the election of the delegates to the local soviets; in most cases they would have been chosen by a show of hands at a general assembly of the workforce of a factory, with all the drawbacks of this method of election.

We mention these points not to defend parliamentary democracy but to show how the soviet system was far from being the highest form of political democracy.

It is of course a reasonable point to say that in a revolutionary situation such as existed in Russia in 1917 democratic perfection was not to be expected. The soviets were only makeshift representative organisations which had come into being precisely because working class opinion had been denied expression under the Tsarist regime. They thus played a useful role, filling a void until such time as a more permanent, and structured, system of representation could be set up. To praise their makeshift, unstructured character as being a sign of their ultra-democratic nature is to make a virtue out of necessity and to forget that this made not just for flexibility but also meant that it was easier for a determined minority to manipulate them.

A second argument put forward by the Bolsheviks in favour of the soviet system was that it gave power to the more determined revolutionary elements in Russia whereas to have let power pass into the hands of a parliamentary government responsible to a Constituent Assembly elected by universal suffrage would have led to a slowing-down of the revolutionary process. This is undoubtedly true, but it shows clearly that the Russian revolution was essentially a bourgeois rather than a socialist revolution.

The socialist revolution can only be a revolution carried out consciously by the immense working-class majority acting in their own interests. In these circumstances any system of representation - whether soviets or parliament - would give a majority for the revolution. This is not necessarily the case during a bourgeois revolution, however, where the revolutionaries can find themselves impeded by the lack of revolutionary will of the masses. Martov describes a typical bourgeois revolution thus:

"The role of active factor in the overturn belonged to minorities of the social classes in whose interest the revolution developed. These minorities exploited the confused discontent and the sporadic explosions of anger arising among scattered and socially inconsistent elements within the revolutionary class. They guided the latter in the destruction of the old social forms. In certain cases, the active leader minorities had to use the power of their concentrated energy in order to shatter the inertia of the elements they tried to wield for revolutionary purposes. Therefore, these active leader minorities sometimes made efforts - often successful efforts - to repress the passive resistance of the manipulated elements, when the latter refused to move forward toward the broadening and deepening of the revolution. The dictatorship of an active revolutionary minority, a dictatorship that tended to be terrorist, was the normal coming-to-a-head of the situation in which the old social order had confined the popular mass, now called on by the revolutionaries to forge their own destiny". (The State and the Socialist Revolution, p. 16).

That an enlightened minority of revolutionists were justified in ignoring the views of the unenlightened majority in order to carry through the revolution was an idea that had first made its appearance, in the form of Jacobinism, during the French bourgeois revolution. It was inherited by utopian Communists such as Buonarotti, Weitling and Blanqui. And it was, as Martov points out, an element in Bolshevik thinking too.

The Bolsheviks supported the soviet system because it enabled them, as a determined revolutionary minority, to come to power:

"The 'soviet regime' becomes the means of bringing into power and maintaining in power a revolutionary minority which claims to defend the interests of a majority, though the latter has not recognised these interests as its own, though this majority has not attached itself sufficiently to these interests to defend them with all its energy and determination." (p. 19).

This, Martov goes on, applied equally to the partisans of the soviet idea (workers' councils) outside of Russia. They too saw workers' councils as a short-cut to power, as a means of by-passing the need to have majority socialist understanding amongst the working class before trying to overthrow capitalism:

"The mystery of the 'soviet regime' is now deciphered. We see now how an organism that is supposedly created by the specific peculiarities of a labor movement corresponding to the highest development of capitalism is revealed to be, at the same time, suitable to the needs of countries knowing neither large capitalist production, nor a powerful bourgeoisie, nor a proletariat that has evolved through the experiences of the class struggle.

"In other words, in the advanced countries, the proletariat resorts, we are told, to the soviet form of the dictatorship as soon as its elan toward the social revolution strikes against the impossibility of realizing its power in any other way than through the dictatorship of a minority, a minority within the proletariat itself.

"The thesis of the 'finally discovered form', the thesis of the political form that, belonging to the specific circumstances of the imperialist phase of capitalism, is said to be the only form that can realize the social enfranchisement of the proletariat, constitutes the historically necessary illusion by whose effect the revolutionary section of the proletariat renounces its belief in its ability to draw behind it the majority of the population of the country and resuscitates the idea of the minority dictatorship of the Jacobins in the very form used by the bourgeois revolution of the 18th century. Must we recall here that this revolutionary method has been repudiated by the working class to the extent that it has freed itself from its heritage of petty-bourgeois revolutionism?" (p. 21-22).

The view that a revolutionary minority could and should establish its dictatorship in order to try to introduce socialism is of course a denial of the basic principle upheld by Marx that "the emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself". That this view should be popular amongst revolutionaries in Russia was no coincidence. For, as we have seen, the Russian revolution - as the process of overthrowing, root and branch, the Tsarist social order - was essentially bourgeois. The soviets had a role to play in this bourgeois revolution: to allow the determined revolutionary minority to come to power. After noting how in July 1917, when the Congress of Soviets was dominated by the vacillating Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries, Lenin had thought of abandoning the slogan "all power to the soviets" in favour of an open demand for "all power to the Bolshevik Party", Martov goes on:

"The consequent course of the Russian revolution cured Lenin of his passing 'lack of faith'. The soviets fulfilled the role expected of them. The rising tide of bourgeois revolutionary enthusiasm set in motion the worker and peasant masses, washing away their 'meanness'. Lifted by the wave, the Bolsheviks possessed themselves of the government apparatus. Then the role of the insurrectionary element came to an end. The Moor had accomplished his task. The State that came into power with the aid of the 'Power of the Soviets' became the 'Soviet Power'. The Communist minority incorporated into this State made itself secure, once for always, against a possible return of the spirit of 'meanness'" (p. 28).

The coming to power of the Bolsheviks did not represent, as they themselves believed, progress from Russia's bourgeois revolution to its "proletarian revolution". It was, says Martov, echoing what Marx had said about the so-called Reign of Terror in France in 1794, "a point in the process of the bourgeois revolution itself". Commenting on the passage in Marx's 1847 article in which this phrase occurred (4), Martov says:

"One might say that Marx wrote this specially for the benefit of those people who consider the simple fact of a fortuitous conquest of power by the democratic small bourgeoisie and the proletariat as proof of the maturity of society for the socialist revolution. But it may also be said that he wrote this specially for the benefit of those socialists who believe that never in the course of a revolution that is bourgeois in its objectives can there occur a possibility permitting the political power to escape from the hands of the bourgeoisie and pass to the democratic masses. One may say that Marx wrote this also for the benefit of those socialists who consider utopian the mere idea of such a displacement of power and who do not realize that this phenomenon is 'only a point in the process of the bourgeois revolution itself', that it is a factor assuring, under certain conditions, the most complete and radical suppression of the obstacles rising in the way of this bourgeois revolution" (p. 59-60).

It only remains to add that, unlike in 1794 in France where the determined minority were replaced by the traditional bourgeoisie after having done their dirty work for them, in Russia the determined minority remained in power and that it was from amongst their ranks that evolved the ruling and exploiting class of the capitalist Russia they had no alternative but to develop.

So, from a bourgeois revolutionary point of view, the Bolsheviks were justified in maintaining their minority dictatorship. Where they were wrong was in imagining, and propagating amongst the workers of the rest of Europe, that this had something to do with "socialism". Their sympathisers in the West, including the Left and Council Communists, were equally mistaken in imagining that the soviets (or workers' councils), which had served as a cover for the Bolshevik minority to come to power, were the form of working class organisation for socialism in advanced capitalist countries.

Certainly, workers' councils or something akin to them, as workplace organisations of the workers, are bound to arise in the course of the socialist revolution. But to claim that they are the only possible form of working class self-organisation is to go too far, is in fact to make a fetish of a mere organisational form. What is important in working class self-organisation, however, is not the form but the principle.

The principles of democratic self-organisation - which are in fact democratic principles generally - can be applied, given a sufficient democratic consciousness, to any working class organisation, including even organisation to contest elections and to control central parliaments and local councils. There is no reason whatsoever in theory why a workers' socialist political party could not be organised on the same basis as has been proposed by Left Communists for workers' councils: no leadership and so no division into leaders and led; the candidates, including those elected, just like the delegates to the ideal workers' council, could be subject to continual control and, if need be, instantly recalled; they could be strictly mandated to fight for socialism and not to pursue reforms of capitalism. In other words, there is no necessary connexion between the principle of democratic working class self-organisation and organisation at the place of work. As stated, what is important is not the form of organisation but the democratic - and socialist - consciousness of the working class. This can express itself in a great variety of organisational forms, including a mass political party. Indeed, this was the form Marx himself expected it to take.

Martov, whose writings are unfortunately not generally known, must be given credit for having demystified a little the idea of workers' councils by showing the essentially bourgeois revolutionary role that the soviets played in Russia in 1917.

Adam Buick

(1) Common ownership is not the same as State ownership. Since the State is a feature only of class societies State ownership is a form of sectional or class monopoly of the means of production. In socialism the State is replaced by the democratic administration of social affairs, including production which would be directed solely to satisfying human needs, with the resulting disappearance of production for sale, profits, wages, money, banks and all the other paraphernalia of buying and selling.

(2) The State and the Socialist Revolution, translated by Integer, International Review, New York, 1939. Integer gives as the source of the articles translated:
"The first two sections of this book, The Ideology of Sovietism and The Conquest of the State, were written early in 1919. They form a compact whole and should be read as such. The first essay appeared serially in the periodical Mysl of Kharkov. The introductory section of the second was first published in the issues of July 8 and September 1, 1921, of the Sozialisticheski Vestnik (Berlin). The remainder of the second essay appeared for the first time in Mirovoi Bolshevism (World Bolshevism), Berlin, 1923, from the text of which the entire present translation was made. The final section, entitled Marx and the Problem of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was first published in 1918 in the Workers International of Moscow, edited by Martov".

(3) For Marx the "dictatorship of the proletariat" was the political form of the period during which the working class would be transforming capitalism into socialism. He advocated that it take the form of a fully democratised State controlled by the working class. See H. Draper 'Marx and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat', New Politics, Vol. I, Number 4, Summer 1962.

(4) "Die moralisierende Kritik und die kritische Moral". A recent English translation of the passage in question reads:
"If the proletariat destroys the political rule of the bourgeoisie, this will only be a temporary victory, only an element in the service of the bourgeois revolution itself, as in 1974, so long as in the course of history, in its movement', the material conditions are not yet created which make necessary the abolition of the bourgeois mode of production and thus the definitive overthrow of bourgeois political rule" (Karl Marx, Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy, edited by T. B. Bottomore and Maximilien Rubel, Penguin Books, London, 1963, p. 244).

Further reading:
Review of Martov's 'The State and the Socialist Revolution' that originally appeared in the Socialist Standard in 1940.

Martov: a Russian Social-Democrat (A review of Israel Getzler's biography of Julius Martov that first appeared in the November 1967 issue of the Socialist Standard.)

A New web-site

Socialists For Free Access Just an exercise in web design but some of the articles may be of interest and some have been posted here or elsewhere so no real surprises but good to have them all on one site for easy reference

Anglo-Marxism - The SPGB

The SPGB

The Socialist Party of Great Britain, more popularly known as the SPGB even though, despite Militant, it now prefers Socialist Party is it by far the longest surviving political party in Britain calling itself socialist.

Anglo-Marxism

If the SPGB has survived for this length of time it must have been because it filled some need, or at least some niche, in working-class politics in Britain. But what need? The SPGB has been described as being in the tradition of what Eric Hobsbawn once called "Anglo-Marxism". This would be a Marxism that arose in English-speaking countries, with their well-established conditions of political democracy, and which not only envisaged the working class making some use of existing political institutions to win control of political power but which also emphasised that the main task of a socialist political organisation was in preparation for this "education", or "making Socialists" as one prominent Anglo-Marxist William Morris used to put it. Besides the SPGB, it would cover the Social Democratic Federation, the Socialist League, the De Leonist Socialist Labor Party of America, the Socialist Party of America and the Socialist Party of Canada.

The SPGB was one of the products of what Chushichi Tsuzuki, in an article that appeared in the International Review of Social History in 1956, called the "impossibilist revolt" in the SDF (the other product was the Socialist Labour Party of Great Britain, founded in Scotland the year before at a meeting chaired by James Connolly and which regarded itself as the exact equivalent in Britain of the SLP of America).

The "impossibilists", as they were dubbed by the leadership of the SDF, were dissatisfied with two things in particular. The domination of the SDF by a clique around H.M. Hyndman who had founded the organisation twenty years previously, and which reflected its lack of internal democracy; and its opportunist concentration on trying to obtain certain reforms of capitalism as supposed "stepping stones" to socialism. Significantly, these were the same two issues over which William Morris and others had broken away from the SDF at the end of 1884 to form the Socialist League.

The SPGB’s inaugural meeting was attended by some 140 people, mainly members and expelled members of the SDF’s London branches. While the SLP could boast of having its inaugural meeting chaired by James Connolly and attended by Tom Bell and Arthur McManus, two future leaders of the early British Communist Party, and by one future Labour MP (Neil Mclean), present at the SPGB’s were two future Labour MPs (Valentine McEntee, who ended up in the House of Lords, and George Hicks, who as the leader of the building workers’ union, had been TUC chairman in 1927), another early Communist Party leader, journalist and writer (T.A. Jackson), as well as a Irish Republican activist (Con Lehane, also known Con O’Lehane and Con O’Lyhane) and a syndicalist pamphleteer who worked with Tom Mann (E.J.B. Allen, whose pamphlets still feature on anarchist websites and anthologies). Whatever else this may or may not indicate and whatever the SPGB thought of their subsequent political trajectory (which wasn’t much of course), this at least shows that the meeting that took place a hundred years ago to found the SPGB was not one that had no relevance to general political developments in England - and Ireland, since both McEntee and Lehane (the SPGB’s first General Secretary and a fluent Irish speaker) had previously been members of the Irish Socialist Republican Party which James Connolly took the lead in forming in 1896 as the equivalent in Ireland of the SDF in Britain.

Although the term "Anglo-Marxist" is not entirely inappropriate, the SPGB was also influenced by Continental Marxism, by (of course) the German Social Democratic Party and its main theorist, Karl Kautsky (three of the SPGB’s first four pamphlets were translations of parts of Kautsky Erfurt Programme, the fourth was by William Morris). But also, perhaps not so obviously, by the French "Guesdists", as the Marxists in France were known after Jules Guesde who had been instrumental in setting up the Parti Ouvrier Français in 1880 (and whose declaration of principles was drafted in Marx’s study). A number of articles translated from Guesdists appeared in the pre-WWI issues of the SPGB’s journal, which is still going, the Socialist Standard.

Except on reforms and on patriotism, the SPGB and the Guesdists’ Parti Socialiste de France (as the POF had become in 1902 before merging in 1905 into a united Social Democratic party in France, and after which the SPGB was probably named in preference to "Social Democratic Party", the other possible name discussed at the inaugural meeting) shared a number of key positions, in particular on the imperative need for the working class to gain control of political power before trying to dispossess the capitalist class (the "political expropriation of the bourgeoisie must precede its economic expropriation", as the Guesdists used to put it). This led both the Guesdists and the SPGB to be quite opposed to anarchist and syndicalist "direct action", and talk of "taking and holding" the means of production by industrial action alone, as counter-productive not to say suicidal. This distinguished both groups from most of the other anti-revisionists, in the "intransigent Marxist" tendency within international Social Democracy with which the early SPGB identified itself, such as Rosa Luxemburg and Anton Pannekoek who did try to incorporate the "mass strike" into socialist tactics. Despite this, "Red Rosa" received a favourable mention in the Socialist Standard in 1907 which translated and published part of her speech at one of her trials.

"Peaceably if we may"

A distinguishing feature of the SPGB, as compared to the various Leninist parties and groups that have existed in Britain since 1918, has been its typically Anglo-Marxist insistence on the existence, as a precondition for socialism, of a working class imbued with socialist understanding ("You can’t have socialism without socialists") and that, once a sufficient majority of workers have acquired such understanding, they can, and should, use existing elective political institutions to win control of political power with the sole purpose of abolishing capitalism and ushering in socialism.

This position has been caricatured by the SPGB’s Leninist opponents as meaning that the SPGB has been committed to a mere pacific, constitutional, parliamentary road to socialism, and has led to it being dubbed the "Small Party of Good Boys". Actually, the position of the founder-members of the SPGB was the same as Marx’s as outlined by Engels in his preface to the English edition of Capital in 1886, i.e. that, although in Britain the working class might well be able to win control of political power "entirely by peaceful and legal means", it would most probably have to use this to suppress a "pro-slavery rebellion" since the capitalist class could be expected to resist their expropriation.

In other words, the socialist revolution - as a complete change in the basis of society - would be legal and constitutional but not necessarily entirely peaceful. In fact, the early members of the SPGB didn’t think that in practice it would be peaceful but that the working class would have to use the state to overcome capitalist resistance. After all, 1904 was only 33 years after the bloody suppression of the Paris Commune, the anniversary of whose proclamation the SPGB used to celebrate every 18 March until WWI. Today, SPGB members are more inclined to discount the possibility of a violent capitalist opposition to their legal expropriation, but it is not a pacifist organisation, the old Chartist slogan "peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must" still being its official policy.

This rejection of insurrection and civil war as a means of winning political power will probably have been a factor in the SPGB’s continual existence. The working class in Britain, though it has never advanced much if at all beyond a trade unionist and reformist consciousness, has at least understood the importance of the vote and has never seen the idea of a violent insurrection to seize power other than as, to be frank, completely bonkers. Thus, there has been a place for a revolutionary socialist party that agreed with this position and based its policy on it, a place the SPGB has filled.

Ironically, in contrast to the SPGB (which only contests elections on the "maximum programme" of socialism and nothing else, i.e. without any programme of vote-catching reforms to capitalism), when Trotskyist organisations contest elections as they have increasingly from the 1970s on, it has been the SPGB that has had to accuse them of "electoral opportunism" for entering in full into the electoral game of putting themselves forward as a group offering to implement reforms of capitalism (some manifestly impossible) for workers if only workers would elect their candidates.

Against reformism, but not reforms

This refusal to advocate reforms has been the other distinguishing feature of the SPGB, though one that has been less understood by other working-class militants and by the working class generally. Actually, the SPGB is not opposed to reforms as such - how could a party composed of workers and committed to the working-class interest be opposed to any measure that improved, however marginally and temporarily, conditions for workers - but to reformism in the sense of a policy of actively seeking reforms.

The SPGB’s policy is not to advocate any reform, but to advocate only socialism. As a corollary of this, it has also always refused to work with any other political party or group but, on the contrary, has expressed "hostility" (as Clause 8 of its declaration of principles puts it) to all other political parties. This has earned it a reputation for "sectarianism" but, in its terms, this position is only logical: the only basis for co-operating with some other party would be in a campaign for some reform but campaigning for reforms as such is precisely a policy that the SPGB rejects. The SPGB in fact argues, as did William Morris in his Socialist League days, that if it’s reforms you want the best way to get them is to go for revolution as, faced with a strong movement demanding socialism, the capitalist class will offer all sorts of reforms in a (futile) bid to buy off this movement.

It is also the official SPGB policy that a minority of Socialists MPs might vote, under certain circumstances, for reform measures proposed by other parties. This policy was adopted in 1911 at a time when many, including SPGB members, thought that socialism was a not too distant likelihood and that the situation of what a minority of Socialist MPs should do was therefore a live issue, not the academic one that the SPGB members had later to reluctantly admit that it was. Today, this position only has symbolic significance in showing that the SPGB is not opposed to reforms as such, a policy that has been challenged from time to time from within the SPGB by those who were and which led to small breakaways in 1911 and again in 1991.

Trade union action on sound lines

Nor is the SPGB opposed to trade unionism, as is sometimes imagined in Trotskyist circles. Many of the early members of the SPGB were active members of craft unions in the London area, such as the Operative Bricklayers Society. Indeed, the SPGB’s rulebook was clearly based on that of a small craft union and its practice of allowing any member to attend meetings of its executive committee was also that of a pre-WWI bus workers’ union (a practice which survives in the SPGB to this day, and in fact applies to any member of the public).

When the SPGB was founded one big issue concerning militant workers was whether or not to replace the "trade" unions by "industrial" unions and how (internal reform or forming a separate union?). The IWW ("Industrial Workers of the World") was to be founded a year later in Chicago committed to anti-trade-union industrial unionism, and the other impossibilist breakaway from the SDF - the SLP - was soon to embrace the "socialist industrial unionism" of its elder brother in America. SPGB members were not immune to such ideas and a motion was proposed at its first annual conference to set up a "socialist union", in opposition to the existing trade unions, as soon as SPGB membership had attained 5000. This motion was not carried (but even if it had been would still not be operative since SPGB membership has never exceed 1200) and, in the end, the SPGB adopted the policy, which still applies, of its members’ participating in the existing unions and supporting any action of theirs on sound lines (opposition to employers as the class enemy, solidarity with other workers, officials subject to democratic control, non-affiliation to the Labour Party, etc.).

Thus, the SPGB avoided the mistake of the American SLP - and of the CPGB during the "Third Period" after 1929 - of "dual unionism", i.e. of trying to form "revolutionary" unions to rival the existing "reformist" unions, though some SPGB members were involved, on an individual basis, in breakaway unions from TGWU on the buses and in the docks in the 1930s and 1940s (other SPGB members remained in the TGWU).

As a result of these early controversies and of practical common sense, the SPGB officially stands for workers organising both economically (to keep production going during the period of social reorganisation) and politically for socialism and so is not a "pure and simple" parliamentarist party, even by its own standards.

Marxism not Leninism

The SPGB has always regarded itself as being in the Marxist tradition, fully subscribing to the labour theory of value and the materialist conception of history. Right up to the 1950s it used to organise education classes in these subjects - very much in the tradition of Stuart McIntyre’s "proletarian science". Besides the words of Marx and Engels, the SPGB encouraged its members to read others by Kautsky, Plekhanov, Dietzgen and Lafargue and even, later, works by Bolsheviks such Stekloff’s History of the First International, Lozovsky’s Marx and the Trade Unions and Bogdanov’s A Short Course of Economic Science.

This does not mean, as has sometimes been claimed, that the SPGB’s Marxism can be dismissed as that of the Second International, if only because the SPGB, after attending the 1904 Amsterdam Congress as an affiliated organisation, did not renew its affiliation and by 1910 had completely written off the Second International as of any use to the cause of socialism. So August 1914 came as no surprise to it, as it did to Lenin.

On the other hand, the SPGB never became Leninist. In fact it has always regarded Leninism - as the doctrine embodied in particular in Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? and State and Revolution - as a deviation from and a distortion of Marxism. Despite this, at the time, the SPGB expressed a certain admiration for Lenin for the Bolsheviks’ policy of trying to stop the war on the Eastern Front and for his having understood, as against the "Leftwing Communists", that, in the circumstances of an isolated and backward Russia, socialism was out of the question and that therefore Russia could not avoid having to pass through capitalism, even if in the form of a State capitalism (see Lenin’s speech in 1918 and again in 1921 when the NEP, which explicitly recognised this, was adopted ; see the article from the July 1920 Socialist Standard ). It has to be said, however, that today most SPGB members take a less indulgent attitude towards Lenin, seeing him as an architect of the state capitalist regime in Russia that survived until 1991 ("Lenin led to Stalin").

It was the SPGB - and not Tony Cliff, as the old IS Group and the SWP claimed - that pioneered in Britain the description of the former USSR as state capitalist. This was more on empirical than theoretical grounds: the SPGB simply continued to describe Russia’s economy as state capitalist as Lenin had done, even after Lenin’s successors, Trotsky as much as Stalin, came to describe it as some sort of "Workers State". The evidence produced for this was the continued existence of the wages system, commodity production, and state bondholders. The latter illustrated what was perhaps a weakness in the SPGB’s original position, of pointing to evidence of the existence of features of private capitalism to argue that Russia was state capitalism.
Credit for developing the theory that a privileged, exploiting class could exist without legal private property rights vested in its individual members, i.e. that it could own and exploit collectively as a class, and that this was actually the case in the USSR, can indeed go to Trotskyist and Trotskyoid dissidents such as Bruno Rizzi, Max Schachtman, James Burnham and Raya Dunayevskaya. Like Cliff, the SPGB was happy to take this on board, though rejecting the view embraced by Cliff that Russia only became capitalist in 1928. In the SPGB’s view, the Russian economy had never ceased to be capitalist, with any change that might have taken place in 1928 being political rather than economic (which of course, ironically is also the orthodix Trotskyist position).

Socialism Today

Obviously conditions - and the perspectives of SPGB members - are rather different today from what they were a hundred years ago. Then, the early members (mainly young men in their thirties) clearly expected to see the cause of socialism make rapid progress and emphasised the determinist elements in Marxism that enabled them to see socialism as inevitable. Today, SPGB members (even those in their thirties) are much less sanguine about the inevitably of socialism, regarding it more as a desirable possibility. This of course makes it depend more on human will and humans (workers) making a conscious choice to establish it.

Some might see this as making socialism a "moral" issue rather than an inevitable working-class reaction to capitalist conditions (and from time to time some SPGB members have explicitly argued this), but it is not easy for members of an organisation that has found itself having to campaign for a hundred years for socialism without it happening - implying, as this does, that its early members (as well as Marx) were wrong or at least wildly over-optimistic - to sustain a belief in the inevitability of socialism

A hundred years ago, socialism, however vaguely understood, was seen by millions of workers all over the world as "the hope of humanity". Today, thanks in large measure to what happened in Russia, millions of workers perceive socialism as something that has been tried and failed. So, today, the SPGB has a much harder time "making Socialists". Nevertheless, Socialism - as the common ownership and democratic control of productive resources, with production solely for use not profit, and distribution on the principle of "from each their ability, to each their needs" - still retains for millions some of its original connection with equality and democracy and still remains, despite current popular opinion, the Hope of Humanity.

To mark its centenary, the SPGB published a book, entitled Socialism or Your Money Back (a more or less clever pun on the SPGB’s position that socialism necessarily involves the disappearance of money), a collection of 70 articles from the Socialist Standard over the period 1904-2004 on key events and trends in the 20th century.

Adam Buick - New Interventions, Volume 12, No 1, Spring 2005

The Socialist Party of Great Britain Centenary, London, June 2004.

Over the weekend of 12/13 June 2004 the Socialist Party of Great Britain marked a hundred years of political activity. A political and social event on the Saturday evening – a hundred years to the day since it was formed – in Regents College in Regents Park, London, was attended by some 150 members and sympathizers. On the Sunday those who had come from outside London for the event visited parts of the City of London and Clerkenwell associated with the SPGB, such as the site of the old Printers’ Hall, Bartlett’s Passage, off Fetter Lane, where the founding meeting had taken place. Most of the party’s successive head offices were situated in that area before the party moved in 1951 to its present offices in South London. Also visited were places of general working-class historical interest such as Farringdon Hall where the Labour Representation Committee was formed and the house where Keir Hardie lived next door to the one-time head office of the now defunct ILP.

From a historical-studies point of view, being a still extant political party has not been an advantage. Most labour historians have their own – leftwing – political views which are opposed to those held by the SPGB. If the SPGB had gone out of existence, this would not present a problem, but the fact that it has continued as an active political organization and has never been bashful about expressing its opposition to the political views held by most labour historians – whether they be Labour Party, Communist Party, or Trotskyist – has made an objective approach difficult.

This may explain why the first objective study of the origins of the SPGB – the first even to get the date of its formation correct (for years labour historians just repeated G. D. H. Cole’s error of putting this as 1905 [1], whereas the real date could easily have been verified)– was written by somebody not involved in working-class politics in Britain: Chushichi Tsuzuki from Japan, whose ‘The Impossibilist Revolt in Britain’ appeared in the International Review of Social History in 1956. The other historical studies have in fact been written by SPGB members and so could be open to the charge of being biased in an opposite direction [2].

The SPGB, however, provides an interesting subject for purely historical study. For instance, among the 140 or so participants at the inaugural meeting of 12 June 1904 were one who subsequently became a Labour MP and member of the House of Lords (Valentine McEntee), another a future President of the Trades Union Congress, Labour MP and junior minister (George Hicks), another an Irish Republican activist (Con Lehane). Also present were T. A. Jackson, who went on to be a leading Communist Party journalist and writer, E. J. B. Allen, who became a syndicalist pamphleteer and whose pamphlets are still quoted in anarchist anthologies and websites, and, last and perhaps least, Jack Kent, who, as a member of the Social Democratic Federation’s executive committee, was the most prominent SDF member to go over to the SPGB and who ended up as a Tory county councillor and mayor of Acton in London. In other words, here were gathered people whose subsequent trajectory could serve to illustrate the various trends of working-class political thinking in the fifty or so years that followed.

Also present of course were those who were to stay in the SPGB and contribute to the elaboration of its distinct political position, such as Jack Fitzgerald, Alex Anderson, F. C. Watts, A. E. Jacomb and Hans Neumann. These were all able thinkers and writers – and interesting persons in their own right – but the SPGB, as a matter of political principle, actively opposed leaders and leadership in favour of collective, democratic decision-making, and would in fact have fiercely protested had Fitzgerald been described as its leader (even if this was the perception of its political rivals at the time).

Although the SPGB put a distinctive view of the same problems discussed at the same time by ‘names’ such as Kautsky, Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky, James Connolly and John MacLean, whose views are still studied, the fact that its views cannot be identified as the work of a single individual has probably also contributed to the SPGB’s being neglected. Nevertheless, there has been some movement on this since the 1980s, with discussions of the SPGB’s position on the welfare state, ecology, and state capitalism in Russia, even if these have been by non labour historians [3].

McEntee and Lehane (a fluent Irish-speaker who was the SPGB’s first General Secretary and who later called himself O’Lehane and O’Lyhane) were both former members of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, which Connolly had been instrumental in setting up as the equivalent in Ireland of the SDF. So too would other SPGB founder members have been, yet nobody has done any research on this connection. Nor has any research been done on placing the formation of the SPGB in 1904 in a wider international context.

Hans Neumann, who was a German working in London in a travel agency, kept in touch with what was going on in the German Social Democratic Party and translated the first three parts of Kautsky’s Erfurt Programme which the SPGB published as pamphlets in 1906 and 1908. Watts, a wood carver, was a fluent French-speaker and kept in touch with trends in the French labour movement, particularly the ‘Guesdists’ some of whose positions the SPGB shared (a number of translations from the Guesdist paper Le Socialisme appeared in the SPGB organ, Socialist Standard, before the first World War). The SPGB was, and saw itself as, part of the more general anti-revisionist, intransigently Marxist trend within the international Social Democratic movement. The cross-fertilization of ideas with English-speaking ‘intransigent Marxists’ on the other side of the Atlantic – Daniel De Leon and the Socialist Labor Party in the US and the British Columbia-based Socialist Party of Canada – is fairly obvious, but no comparative study has been done between the views of the SPGB and those of similar groups on the Continent, perhaps because, unlike them, the SPGB did not go over to the Communist Party after 1917 and so does not have a place as they do (and as does the Socialist Labour Party, the other product of the ‘impossibilist revolt’ within the SDF) in the pre-history of some Communist Party.

As a political organization that has survived with a basically similar policy for a number of generations, the SPGB has also been the object of study by sociologists. One of these, perhaps following the lead of the Communist Party historians A. L. Morton and Eric Hobsbawm (the former described the SPGB as ‘a tiny sect, mainly concerned with echoing propaganda hostile to the Soviet Union’ [4] and the latter called it a ‘conventicle’ [5]), likened it to a religious sect. The other study, based on recorded interviews with members and ex-members carried out in the 1960s (which still exist and might interest oral historians), looked as if it might be more innovative but was never completed [6].

Having been in continual existence for a hundred years has its upside, however. The SPGB library has a collection of books, journals and pamphlets, inherited on the death of members, which reflect the reading of Marxist-oriented working-class activists – Stuart Macintyre’s ‘proletarian science’. They range over the whole period, from issues of Justice, the SLP's The Socialist and the International Socialist Review, and books by Herbert Spencer, Edward Aveling and Belfort Bax from the pre-WWI period, through Labour, ILP, Communist Party and Plebs League publications of the 1920s and 1930s and copies of now largely-forgotten ‘left-of-Communist’ journals such as the American International Review, Guy Aldred’s The Word, and Left, to post-war Trotskyist material. There is also material on the socialist movement in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. These are in the process of being properly catalogued and can be consulted on the spot (52 Clapham High Street, London SW4) by fixing an appointment with the party’s archives department. As a matter of political principle the SPGB holds no secret meetings, all its meetings including those of its executive committee being open to the public. This means that all its internal records (except for the current membership list) are open to public consultation...

Adam Buick - History Workshop Journal No 50 of Spring 2005

1 G. D. H. Cole, Working Class Politics 1832-1914, 1941, p. 177.

2 Robert Barltrop, The Monument, 1976; Stephen Coleman, ‘Impossibilism’, in Non-Market Socialism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, ed. M. Rubel and J. Crump, 1987; David A. Perrin, The Socialist Party of Great Britain: Economics, Politics and Britain’s Oldest Socialist Party, 2000.

3 John Clarke, Allan Cochrane and Carol Smart, Ideologies of Welfare: From Dreams to Disillusion, 1987, pp. 110-4; David Pepper, Eco-socialism: From Deep Ecology to Social Justice, 1997; Neil Fernandez, Capitalism and Class Struggle in the USSR: a Marxist Theory, 1997, pp. 45-8.

4 A. L. Morton and G. Tate, The British Labour Movement 1770-1920, 1956, p. 218. The year the SPGB was formed is erroneously given as 1905.

5 Eric Hobsbawm, Labouring Men, 1965, p. 231. Hobsbawm erroneously put the date of the SPGB’s formation as 1906.

6 R. Kenneth Jones, ‘The Organization and Structure of a Secular Value-oriented Sect: the Socialist Party of Great Britain’ in Ideological Groups: Similarities of Structure and Organization, 1984; P. J. Rollings, ‘The Maintenance of an Idea-system: the Case of the Socialist Party of Great Britain’, Paper read to a seminar at the Politics Department of the University of Reading, February 1968.