CHAPTER IV
THE LABOUR PARTY’S ADOPTION OF SOCIALISM
2. HISTORY OF THE ALLIANCE
Labour’s Struggle for Political Power, 1825-1832—Labour’s Alliance with Revolutionary Socialism, 1832-1842—Labour’s Renunciation of Socialism, 1842-1885—The Era of Constitutional State Socialism, 1885-1905—The New Syndicalist Revolutionary Ferment of 1905—The Socialist Societies—The Social Democratic Federation—The Communist Party—The Fabian Society—The Independent Labour Party—The Socialist Labour Party—The Socialist Party of Great Britain—The National Guilds League.
It is impossible to understand the present connection between the Labour Party and Socialism without some small acquaintance with the history of Labour’s attitude to Socialism in the past. That involves a retrospect of Trade Unionism. Up to 1825, anything in the nature of a Trade Union was rigorously suppressed by the Combination Laws, which, after considerable agitation, were repealed by the Acts 5 Geo. IV, 95 and 6 Geo. IV, 129. Although full freedom was not thereby secured for Trade Unions, yet for the first time the right of collective bargaining was recognized—a process of negotiation in course of which organizations of workmen could withhold their labour in order to secure the rates of wages or conditions of employment that they desired. As was naturally to be expected, this led to an increase in the number of Trade Unions and of their power. But fortune proved unkind. At the outset of their development there occurred the financial crash of 1825, which caused wholesale commercial ruin and widespread closing of works, reductions of wages and unemployment for the four or five years following, with continual strikes by way of resistance to wage reductions. The poverty and destitution of the working-classes as compared with the wealthier section of the community led to dissemination among the workers of revolutionary ideas, political and socialistic. One can read in the newspapers of the time, even as far back as 1829, familiar doctrines—that Labour is the only source of wealth—that the working-men are the support of the middle and upper classes, the nerves and soul of production, the foundation of the nation. From 1829, and particularly through the Chartist days of 1835-1842, the Trade Union movement which had previously concerned itself mainly in endeavouring to increase wages and improve conditions of employment, was actively associated with the middle classes in prosecuting revolutionary aims.
Labour’s Struggle for Political Power, 1825-1832
From 1829-32, the struggle swayed around the Reform Bill. Both Labour and the middle classes combined to regard the enactment of that measure as the opening of the door to social progress. Its failure to provide for universal manhood suffrage shattered the hopes of Labour. Revolution had for some time been whispered; a school of advanced Labour thought, when working out to its logical conclusion the theory that labour was the sole source of value, had evolved the doctrine of class-war.
Labour’s Alliance with Revolutionary Socialism, 1832-1842
Stung by disappointment through exclusion from the suffrage, organized Labour embraced these revolutionary doctrines, arrayed itself definitely against Parliamentary government, and insisted that the workers’ only hope of salvation lay in direct application against the community of their economic power. Robert Owen about that time was the leader of socialistic thought in this country, and Labour adopted and adapted certain parts of his policy as its official programme. Owen’s notion substantially was that the machinery of production should be owned not by the community, but by the particular section of workers who used it, and that the Trade Unions concerned in each industry should be transformed into national companies to carry on the trade. Profit-making and competition were to be eliminated. The labour of the miner, for example, would exchange on some time-basis with the labour of the agricultural labourer. One enthusiastic Owenite, William Benbow, elaborated the theory of the general strike as the means of enforcing the transfer of industries from the capitalists to the workers. This was the first official adoption by organized Labour in this country of socialistic conceptions. The movement, however, collapsed in 1834, and was succeeded by what is now known as Chartism. That term was at the time merely understood to mean democratic parliamentary reform, its immediate object being the conquest of political power, and its ulterior purposes, so far as organized Labour were concerned, were the establishment of communist colonies, the common ownership of land and of the means of production, social reform, democratic political organization, greater freedom for Trade Unions and improvement in wages and working conditions. There was thus a combination of mixed forces working indiscriminately for social reform, Trade Unionism and democratic parliamentary government. The dominant notion was to obtain parliamentary power which was thought a sufficient means to reform society, reorganize industry and purge the nation of every kind of social and industrial disorder. As is well known, there were two distinct parties in the Chartist movement, those who advocated physical force and those who confined their argument to moral suasion.
The year 1842 marks the culmination of Chartism and will be remembered as the year of the general strike in the North of England, and of the apparent imminence of a social revolt; but the collapse of the general strike and the repressive action of the government took, for the time being, all driving force out of the agitation. When times improved, and trade started to prosper, Chartism lost ground; the Trade Unions began to detach themselves from schemes of social revolution, and to make their immediate objective the improvement of the conditions of the workers in regard to wages and employment. Chartism continued as a political movement, with varying fortunes, up to the year 1849. What it achieved up to 1855 is thus summarized by Mr. Beer in Vol. II of his History of British Socialism, p. 190:
“After a desperate contest of thirty years’ duration, Chartism had come to an end. It had not been a struggle of a plebs for equal rights with the patriciate to spoliate and enslave other classes and nations, but a class-war aiming at the overthrow of the capitalist society and putting production, distribution, and exchange on a co-operative basis. The working-class was apparently defeated.
“Baffled and exhausted through erratic leadership, untold sacrifices, and want of proper mental munitions, they retired from the field of battle, bleeding and decimated, but little aware of the great results they had achieved. They only saw the shattered ideals and broken hopes that lay strewn on the long path they had been marching and counter-marching from 1825 to 1855, not knowing that it was from the wreckage and debris of those shattered ideals that the material was gathered for building and paving the road of social progress.
“The advance which Great Britain had made in those thirty years in social reform and democracy was enormous. The Chartist period witnessed the first real Factory Act (1833), the first mining law for the protection of child and female labour (1842), the Ten Hours’ Day (1847), the reduction of the newspaper stamp (1836), the Abolition of the Corn Laws (1846), the repeal of the Corresponding Acts (1846). It bequeathed to the working-classes the co-operative store and co-operative production, more successful trade unions, and international sentiments. It forced the thinking men of the nation to regard the Labour problem as a serious subject for investigation and discussion. Finally, it imbued the thinking portion of the working-class with the conviction that Liberalism must first do its work, before Labour could come into its own, both in the legislature and in the factory. In short, from the catastrophes of 1832, 1834, 1839, 1842 and 1848, the lesson emerged that the revolutionary policy of ‘all or nothing,’ of a sweeping triumph by one gigantic effort, of contempt for reform and of the supreme value of a total and radical subversion of the old order, were foredoomed to failure. The generation that succeeded Chartism went into Gladstone’s camp and refused to leave it either for the social Toryism of Benjamin Disraeli or for the social revolution of Karl Marx.”
Labour’s Renunciation of Socialism, 1842-1885
Onwards from the year 1842, although individual Trade Unionists and certain societies, which included no doubt members of the working-classes, continued to promote Socialism, the British Trade Unions advocated no scheme of Socialism as part of their official objects. They contented themselves with improving their organizations, increasing their members, making provision for friendly society benefits and of introducing methods of collective bargaining instead of class-war and of strikes. Mr. Beer again states the position at p. 195 of Vol. II, History of British Socialism:
“The twenty years following upon the collapse of Chartism formed the golden age of middle-class Liberalism. The glamour of its doctrines as set forth by Mill in his essay ‘On Liberty,’ the phenomenal growth of British trade and commerce, the unrivalled position of Great Britain as the workshop of the world, made British Liberalism the lodestar of all nations striving for freedom and wealth. Competition as the regulator of economic relations, free trade as the international bond of peace and goodwill, individual liberty as the sacred ideal of national politics, reigned supreme, and under their weight the entire formation of social revolutionary ideas of the past disappeared from view. The working-classes formed a part of triumphant Liberalism.
“Gladstone, surveying his hosts in 1866, appeared quite justified in telling his Conservative opponents that there was no use fighting against his social forces, ‘which move onwards in their might and majesty and which ... are marshalled on our side.’ He might have addressed the same eloquent words to the leaders of the International Working Men’s Association, who with Karl Marx at their head, were precisely at that time making a serious attempt to resuscitate Chartism and detach the masses from the Liberal Party. Socialism and independent Labour politics came to be regarded as exotic plants which could never flourish on British soil.
“The trade unions renounced all class-warfare and merely tried to use their new citizenship (1867) and their growing economic organization—the first trade union congress took place in 1869—with a view to influencing the distribution of the national wealth in their favour. Their aim and end was that of a plebs striving for equality with the possessing and ruling-classes. It was, despite some struggle for the legalization of trade unionism, a period of social peace, and it lasted till about 1880.”
This state of things continued in fact up to about 1885, and until that date Socialism formed really no part of official Trade Union principles.
The Era of Constitutional State Socialism, 1885-1905
Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb in their History of Trade Unionism, revised edition, 1920, p. 374, describe the principles of the Labour Party about 1885 as follows:
“Laissez faire then was the political and social creed of the Trade Union leaders of this time; up to 1885 they undoubtedly represented the views current among the rank and file; at that date all observers were agreed that the Trade Unions of Great Britain would furnish an impenetrable barrier against Socialist projects. Within a decade we find the whole trade union world permeated with collectivist ideas, and, as The Times recorded as early as 1893, the Socialist Party supreme in the Trades Union Congress. This revolution in opinion is the chief event of Trade Union history at the close of the nineteenth century.”
These two talented authors analyse the causes. They attribute it in great measure to the “new unionism” of 1889 which was itself largely the result of the wide circulation in Great Britain of Henry George’s Progress and Poverty during the years 1880-1882; the lecturing of the late Mr. H. M. Hyndman and Mr. William Morris and other disciples of Karl Marx; revelations of certain “well-intentioned if somewhat sentimental philanthropists” of their experiences in the sweated industries and slums of our great cities, as, for example, Mr. Charles Booth’s great work, Life and Labour in London; depression in trade; the great Dock Strike in 1889.
The attitude observed by the Trades Union Congress in regard to socialistic proposals is instructive. Up to 1887, at five successive conferences, amendments in favour of the nationalization of land had been continuously rejected; at the Swansea Conference in 1887, a resolution in no very definite terms was accepted in its favour. The extreme socialistic conception of the advanced Trade Unionist of the nineties was State Socialism to be secured by constitutional political action. The power of action was to be derived from every working-class Socialist becoming a member of his Trade Union, of his local Co-operative Society, of his borough council, urban or rural district or county council. This represented substantially the full socialistic creed of official Labour up to about the year 1905. Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Webb thus epitomize it:
“In short, there was from the collapse of Owenism and Chartism in the eighteen-thirties and -forties right down to 1900 practically no sign that the British Trade Unions ever thought of themselves otherwise than as organizations to secure an ever-improving standard of life by means of an ever-increasing control of the conditions under which they worked. They neither desired nor sought any participation in the management of the technical processes of industry (except in so far as these might affect the conditions of their employment or the selection of persons to be employed), whilst it never occurred to a Trade Union to claim any power over, or responsibility for, buying the raw materials or marketing the product.”—(History of Trade Unionism (1920), p. 653.)
The New Syndicalist Revolutionary Ferment of 1905
Between 1905 and 1910 new socialistic beliefs of a Syndicalist character began to be absorbed by sections of Trade Unionists, especially the miners and the engineers, who soon exhibited a spirit of revolt not only against the capitalistic system, but more especially against the limited aims of contemporary Trade Unionism. There commenced, and up to the beginning of the war, continued a definite struggle in the Labour movement between the constitutional Trade Unionists who held tight to their ideals of State Socialism, and the revolutionary industrial Unionists, led by James Connolly, and Tom Mann, who preached their doctrine of Syndicalism, advocating first the abolition of craft Unionism—the system under which all workmen of a particular craft, for example, engineers, are enrolled in their own craft Unions irrespective of the industries in which they work—and its replacement by industrial Unionism, that is to say, the enrolment in one Trade Union representing each industry of all men engaged in that industry irrespective of their particular craft or occupations, such as to a limited extent prevails in the railway, mining and transport industries; secondly, the appropriation of the means of production in each industry by the manual workers who would produce the output, charge the price and conduct the industry. Connolly, who was afterwards executed for complicity in the Irish Rebellion of 1916, came from the United States of America in 1905, and persuaded the Socialist Labour Party of Glasgow to link up forces with the American Industrial Workers of the World. Mann, who was recently the Secretary of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, brought the seeds of revolutionary Syndicalism from Paris and sowed them personally by means of a widespread campaign.
Without any doubt, the Socialist Labour Party, an organization not, however, affiliated to the Labour Party, has contributed more than any other agency to the spread of Syndicalism in England. It describes itself as “a revolutionary political organization seeking to build up a communist movement in this country.” It works “to sweep away the mass of debris which was once known as the parliament institutions,” Those who want to appreciate its activities in these directions ought to follow them in Dr. Miliukov’s Bolshevism—An International Danger, and I can personally vouch for and add to his testimony. The Socialist Labour Party was indubitably the power behind the revolutionary propaganda before the war among the miners and the railwaymen, and to some extent among the dockers, and it was responsible for many of the numerous “irritation strikes” in 1911-14 and for the Clyde strikes in 1916. Its disloyal action during the war, through the medium of the workers’ committees and shop steward organizations, is later described. The S.L.P. and the I.W.W. were the original founders of the “Hands Off Russia Committee.” Such has been the revolutionary ferment leavening English and Scottish Labour since 1905—to it we largely owe our present recurrent outbursts of industrial insurrectionism.
The Socialist Societies
There are, as previously explained, certain Socialist Societies definitely affiliated to the Labour Party; others are unofficially recognized, and there are yet others not recognized, either officially or unofficially, which comprise numerous persons who through their Trade Union or local organizations, or individually, are members of the Labour Party. These advocate brands of Socialism ranging from State Socialism to revolutionary Syndicalism.
The Social Democratic Federation
The Democratic Federation, founded in 1881 by the late Mr. H. M. Hyndman, mainly as a federation of Radical clubs, with a veiled socialistic programme embracing land nationalization, was the first attempt at a political Socialist organization. In 1889 it became the Social Democratic Federation, avowedly socialistic. Late in 1884 it split into the Socialist League, under Mr. William Morris, pledged to a revolutionary, anti-parliamentary programme; and the Social Democratic Federation, led by Mr. Hyndman. But, captured by anarchists, the Socialist League broke up, many of its leaders rejoining the Social Democratic Federation. The Federation was affiliated to the Labour Representation Committee on the formation of the latter in 1900, but soon withdrew, and in 1908 called itself the Social Democratic Party. It amalgamated in 1911 with a number of local Socialist bodies and changed its name to the British Socialist Party. In 1916 it was affiliated with the Labour Party. Later, in 1916, it declared against the war and pursued a disloyal policy. This attitude, mainly exhibited through its weekly newspaper, the Call, led to considerable secessions from the British Socialist Party, and to the foundation by the late Mr. H. M. Hyndman of the National Socialist Party with its weekly newspaper, Justice, which, while advocating the establishment of a Socialist Commonwealth on a democratic basis, actively supported the war. On July 31, 1920, the British Socialist Party merged its identity in the Communist Party, pledged to establish Sovietism and the dictatorship of the proletariate.
The Communist Party
On January 29 and 30, 1921, there assembled at Leeds a Communist Conference for the purposes of merging the various Communist bodies into one party. One hundred and seventy delegates took part representing the following bodies:—Communist Party of Great Britain; Communist Labour Party; Communist Party (British Section of Third International); Aberdeen Communist Group; Left Wing of Independent Labour Party; Industrial Communist Party; Jewish Socialist Party; Bolton Communist Group; Croydon Communist Group; Shop Stewards; South Wales Workers’ Committee.
Later on, April 23 and 24, 1921, another Communist Conference took place in Manchester to settle the constitution and the rules. The party was called the Communist Party of Great Britain, its ultimate purpose being the establishment of a Communistic Republic and its immediate end the abolition of the wage-system through a social revolution. As a means of furthering a social revolution the party urges the adoption by the workers of a Soviet or Workers’ Council system as it exists in Russia, and “for a weapon against the massing of the forces of capitalism” the use of “the dictatorship of the revolutionary masses,” This Party applied for affiliation to the Labour Party, but that was refused at the Brighton Conference in 1921 and again at Edinburgh in 1922. It is affiliated to the “Red” or Communist International of Moscow. The best account of the revolutionary organizations in this country is that contained in Dr. Shadwell’s Revolutionary Movement in Great Britain, Grant Richards, Ltd., 1921.
The Fabian Society
The well-known Fabian Society was founded in January 1884, and has been affiliated to the Labour Party from its inception. It aims at reorganizing society by emancipating land and industrial capital from individual or class ownership and vesting them in the State. It advocates transfer to the community of the administration of such industrial capital as can conveniently be managed socially. As a result of this transfer without compensation, “though not without such relief to expropriated individuals as may seem fit to the community,” rent and interest will be added to the reward of labour, and the idle class now living on the labour of others will necessarily disappear. The Society specially tries to influence local authorities so as to impart a socialistic tendency to their administration. The Fabian Research Department has conducted many valuable investigations into industrial questions; since October 1918, it has been known as the Labour Research Department; affiliation with it is open to Trade Unions, Socialist Societies, Co-operative Organizations, Trades Councils, Labour Parties and private individuals. Its object is to co-operate with the Labour, Socialist and Co-operative movements in supplying information upon all questions relating to labour, and it does so most effectively.
The Independent Labour Party
In 1893, the Independent Labour Party was formed. It owes its origin, as has been stated, to the energy of Mr. Keir Hardie. The “I.L.P.” was established “to secure the collective ownership of all the means of production, distribution and exchange,” and “independent labour representation on all legislative, governing and administrative bodies.” Its original constitution stated:
“That the object of that Party is to establish the Socialist State, when land and capital will be held by the community and used for the well-being of the community and when the exchange of commodities will be organized also by the community, so as to secure the highest possible standard of life for the individual. In giving effect to this object, it will work as part of the International Socialist Movement.”
The I.L.P. and its weekly paper, the Labour Leader, took up persistently a pacificist attitude throughout the war, especially in regard to compulsory military service. It is represented by four members in the present House of Commons.
The Socialist Labour Party
In 1903, the Socialist Labour Party was established in Glasgow—by secessionists from the Social Democratic Federation—on the lines of the revolutionary American Socialist Party led by Daniel de Leon. It is in close affiliation with the Industrial Workers of the World, and actively agitates to further the Syndicalist conception of industrial Unionism. All candidates for membership must subscribe to “class-war”—no Trade Union official is eligible. The Party propagates revolutionary political action, and also revolutionary industrial action of the extreme syndicalistic type. The Party has between thirty and forty branches throughout the country, owns the Socialist Labour Press, and publishes a monthly paper called the Socialist. Although the majority of its members are Trade Unionists, the party refuses to affiliate with the Labour Party. Throughout the recent conflict it carried out an implacable campaign against the war, and impeded in every possible way its successful prosecution.
The Socialist Party of Great Britain
In 1905, other extreme Socialists broke away from the Social Democratic Federation and formed the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Its declared object is to wage war against all other political parties, either “Labour or Capital.” It advocates the institution of the most extreme Marxian regime, by means of such revolutionary political action as will secure the “capture” of all the machinery of government whether national or local. It publishes monthly the Socialist Standard and is not affiliated to the Labour Party, though it comprises many Trade Unionists.
The National Guilds League
In 1915, the National Guilds League was founded to advocate the cause of Guild Socialism, which has been already described. There are two schools of thought, one which hopes to secure National Guildism by evolving industrial Unionism out of craft Unionism coupled with the Unions securing an ever-increasing control over industry; the other by militant or revolutionary tactics. The National Guilds League has a number of branches throughout the country.