The Historical Place of the SPGB
1 June 1980, Opening remarks of Steve Coleman – The Socialist Party of Great Britain
Steve Coleman 
Well some of you will have heard what Herbert Butterfield criticised as the, what he called, the Whig interpretation of history and it has he asserted I quote ‘often been an obstruction to historical understanding because it has taken, been taken to mean the study of the past with direct and perpetual reference to the present, through this system of immediate reference to the present day, historical personages can easily and irresistibly classed into the men who furthered progress and the men who tried to hinder it so that a handy rule of thumb exists by which the historian can select and reject and make his points of emphasis.’
Now what Herbert Butterfield is rightly condemning is the approach to history which sees all of the events of the past as part of an inevitable process leading to the present. Now I shall have more to say about historical inevitability in the next lecture but it will do to point out now that any historian can only perceive the past in terms of the present is not only a bad historian in that his bias towards the present distorts his feel for the atmosphere of the past but worse than that he is a fundamentally conservative historian because he allows past social developments to suggest to him an inevitable and inescapable path to the present.
Now the Marxist conception of history is not a theory of inevitable determinism according to a grand pattern of material development although if you listen long enough to some vulgar Marxists you will think that it is. The history of all societies is the history of class struggle as Marx said and the outcome of class struggle is clearly not susceptible to dogmatic prediction. History is the story of people making choices. Sometimes they make what can be retrospectively seen as the wrong choice from the point of view of their own material class interest. The anarchists who helped bring the Bolsheviks to power in 1917 and were then thrown into prison. The german Jews who supported Hitler in the hope that their support would make him rethink his anti-semitism, the freedom seeking women who fought for the Ayatollah in Iran. They make have been unforgivably stupid in having supported movements that were against their own interests but the role of the historian is not to judge stupidity in which case he would have to be making moral judgments all the time about what people are up to but it is to examine what has happened and to try to explain why.
So the two approaches to history conflict and on the one side the Whig interpretation judges where we have been from the point of view of where we are now. And on the other the Marxist theory is more concerned with the dynamics of struggle and with how this changes things much more than with the contingent outcomes of those struggles. Now what you might well ask has any of this got to do with the historical place of the Socialist Party of Great Britain? Well in fact there is an important connection because I would argue that the history of the organisation of the working class has suffered from what I have described and Butterfield described as Whig history writing. What I mean is that historians of the labour movement have traditionally divided political trends within the working class into those which are right and those which are wrong, practical or impractical, possibilist or impossibilist and the right thinking practical possible movements were those which became popular. And those which remained relatively unpopular are left to what Lenin described as the dustbin of history.
Now according to this theoretical Whiggism the reformist, Methodist, trade unionist ILP, that’s the Independent Labour party, was destined to flourish whereas the revolutionary secularist politically minded Social Democratic Federation was bound to fail. The Labour party would inevitably succeed, it would inevitably catch on. The Socialist Party of Great Britain inevitably wouldn’t. Marxism, it is dogmatically asserted, by these Whig historians was alien to the thought of British workers as if inhabitants of the British Isles somehow evolved from the apes with a built in adversity to the labour theory of value.
Now this process whereby unpopular trends are ignored is clearly dangerous and also dishonest. It partly stems from what somebody at Reading University, perhaps known to party members, has called the size fallacy, as he says in one of his papers and I quote ‘the historian of ideas does not judge the worth or interest of the theories of Plato by the number of Athenian votes he was able to muster nor those of Rousseau by his following among the Genovese. The criteria are not those of th market place where the huckster with the loudest voice attracts the most attention.’ The size fallacy is part of the cause then, of movements which are unpopular which are not large and do not gain widespread support, being ignored.
But another reason I contend has been a conscious effort on the part of some historians who support the popular abuse of the term socialism especially those who identify with the Communist party to ignore reference to ideas and organisations which don’t fit in to their comfortable and conservative beliefs about socialism. The way in which the Socialist Party of Great Britain has been ignored by historians must have involved some very strenuous manoeuvres on the part of a number of writers.
G. D. H. Cole for instance, the leading theoretician of the Fabian Society and one of the first able British labour historians mentions the Socialist party only once in his history of socialist thought. He mentions that is was formed as the result of a breakaway from the Social Democratic Federation which was led, led - a term he must have known to be inappropriate in the case of the party, by somebody called Fitzgerald. However a few pages earlier he mentions another Fitzgerald who led another breakaway from the SDF, only this time a right wing breakaway. No indication is given either in the text of the book or in the index that the two Fitzgeralds are different men. And to add insult to injury, in his one reference to the party, Cole says that it was formed in 1903 instead of 1904 but maybe that is just one example that can be raised.
So to look at another, Walter Kendall in his ‘The Revolutionary Movement in Britain: 1900 to 1921’, this contains one disparaging reference to the SPGB, in the whole of a book dealing specifically with Marxist revolutionary ideas in Britain between 1900 and 1921. Now you might wonder what else he found to put in the book, but the one reference to the SPGB is as ‘a party unwilling to enter the political fray even to the extent of adopting a program of palliatives retaining its political virginity only at the cost of failing to reproduce anything at all.’ Now the fact that Kendall was a member of the Labour party may or may not have coloured his historical analysis.
Another person Henry Pelling the Oxford liberal academic, he has managed to studiously managed to stay clear of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in all of his writings even when he has landed bang on top of it, he has made a point of moving elsewhere. But probably one of the most athletic feats of intellectual dishonesty surrounds the character of somebody who was a party member, T. A. Jackson who was an early member of the party and a member of the one of the first executive committees of the SPGB. Now Jackson’s awful poverty forced him to accept an offer from the ILP to be a paid speaker on their platform. His letter of resignation from the Socialist Party of Great Britain is a reminder of the indignity that poverty can sometimes bring. Despite still agreeing with the party wrote Jackson he would go and I quote ‘bleed the swines ‘til I am expelled.’ That is referring to the ILP. In fact Jackson was not expelled from the ILP but left in the 1920s to join the newly formed Communist party. He became a leading speaker and theorist of the Communist party and later in life he wrote his autobiography called Solo Trumpet. In it he manages to exclude mention of his SPGB membership, his association with the men who gave him his early ideas on Marxism or his reason for becoming reformist.
So it is significant also that Jackson’s daughter who was in the party married the famous Communist party historian A. L. Morton. Yet when Morton wrote the entry for T. A. Jackson in the dictionary of labour biographies published two years ago, no mention of the SPGB appears. So again here we see a case of conscious dishonesty in relation to mention of the party.
It is noteworthy that the only historian who has ever written a serious account of the Socialist Party of Great Britain was Chūshichi Tsuzuki who came from Japan. The reason for this is that Tsuzuki was relatively unbiased by the prejudices of British labour historians and he saw the Socialist Party of Great Britain for what it actually is – a very important aspect of working class politics in Britain and a tradition in its own right.
Now I now, or at least in a moment, want to turn to my own account of the tradition of which the Socialist Party of Great Britain is a part. But first let me briefly summarise the conventional story of the mainstream populist possibilist movement. Now you will remember that in the last talk I took the story up to the 1850s. Chartism had collapsed and the workers were without any political objectives at all. The New Model Unions had turned trade unionism into the reserve of the labour aristocracy and strikes were very infrequent. The capitalist class instead of beating down protest with sticks were bribing the workers into submission with reforms and the result of all this was a widespread acquiescence on the part of the working class to the capitalist system.
It was for this reason that the formation of the International Working Mens Association in 1864 which Marx was a prominent participant was largely disregarded by British workers. It is true that some trade union leaders were on the executive committee of the First International such as Howell, Applegarth, Hodger and Crimer. But they were mainly interested in it as a means of defeating international blacklegging rather than a political force for socialism. Incidentally and I won’t go into it but as a force against international blacklegging the First International was very successful, a very successful international trade union movement of the like which I think many people would agree hasn’t been seen since.  But at its formation, Marx together with Weston, the famed citizen Weston of Value, Price and Profit incidentally and Le Lubez of France were put on a subcommittee, so it is interesting that Marx was on a subcommittee of the EC with Weston, to draw up some rules for the International, the preamble to the rules were drafted by Marx and I quote from them ‘that the emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves. That the emancipation of the working classes means not a struggle for class privileges and monopolies but for equal rights and duties and the abolition of all class rule.’
Now most workers however radical or even socialist they claim to be did not accept Marx’s statement that socialism means the abolition of classes as such. That is what he says in the preamble. And I think that puts the debate about the dictatorship of the proletariat into some perspective. He says it is not to do with class privileges or monopolies but it is to do with the abolition of all class rule as such. But the majority of workers saw the gaining of concessions by the working class as being what socialism is about and from 1864 to the present day, those who have called themselves socialist have traditionally accepted the one thing which every dot and comma of Marx’s writings repudiates and that is reformism. They have accepted the belief that socialism is not a system of society in which every social characteristic of capitalism is overturned.
But that socialism is a trend within capitalism leading towards greater concessions for the working class. In the 1880s came what is called by historians the socialist revival, liberals, Fabians, trade union leaders all convinced that the wages system was right and inevitable began to devise programs telling the capitalist class of Britain how to run the profit system. Then came the emergence of what labour historians have called the new unionism. In the late 1880s the unions became militant but what was the nature of this militancy? They began to strike for more pay, they demonstrated to protest about the unemployed. They drew up political objectives, they even broke down the railings in Hyde Park and established it as a speaking place for which we’re eternally grateful. And there was plenty of movement within the working class. But if you stop to consider were it was going you see that the militancy was fairly hollow. The victory of the match girls, the gas workers, the famous victory of the dockers in 1889 was followed by a period of unprecedented harshness from the employers. The dockers were all but destroyed as a union, certainly the stevedores, the lockouts that began to appear in many part of British industry, the use of police in order to break up picket lines throughout the early 1890s – this is a result of the new unionism and trade unions had not gained much strength after the late 1880s, contrary to the popular belief.
The traditional story of the 1890s concentrates on two things. Firstly the efforts of the unions to free them from legal shackles and secondly the increasingly realisation that an independent working class party was needed which culminated in the formation of the Labour party in 1906. Now for the sake of brevity and if anyone wants to develop this they can later on in the discussion, I won’t go into either of these processes, except to say that the Labour party was never set up as a socialist organisation. From the start it rejected Marx, rejected materialism, it rejected the need for revolution. And an account of the birth of the Labour party is given in the first article in the Socialist Standard series called ‘Against the Left’ which I think was published in August 1978.
Now having pointed out that there are two traditions of labour history to be considered, the possibilist and the impossibilist, I now wish to turn to the origin and meaning of the political theory of impossibilism of which the SPGB plays a crucial role. Now I have got to say at the outset about this two things. One is that I might go on for a bit of a long time in which case people can shout stop when they wish me to because I am going to refer to the text of a paper that I read at a seminar recently and therefore it is a bit long. The other thing that I am going to do is, you’ve got to appreciate, this is something I’ve been working on pretty well full-time for just about over a year now, so I’m, if I get a bit boring or complex you can tell me to move on. That having been said, I now want to look at the origin and meaning of the political theory of impossibilism.
Well Marx was the first to point out that his theory could not be divorced from political practice. The problem is that even while he lived Marx’s theory meant different things at different times to different people. But Marx who was said to have discovered the theory of class exploitation at the point of production and who advocated the abolition of the wages system as a revolutionary watchword of the working class was the opponent of a social system which like all systems could only be changed by removing all and not some of its features. This then was the revolutionary Marx.
Then there was the Marx of the First International who seemed in many ways to allow himself to be motivated or at least involved in economistic demands. And then there was the Marx who opposed Bakunin who seemed at least from some of the arguments he was putting against Bakunin to be a statist. And of course the Marx who advised the European workers to support the war against Russia because it would be a good thing for political democracy. There is also the Marx who if certain scholars are to be believed, spoke through the mouth of Engels so the two minds combined to become one Marx-Engels. Now it is not my intention to contemplate which conflicting brand of Marxism was most genuinely held by Marx in the deepest corners of his mind. But to point out that there does exist a conflict of attitudes in Marx’s political actions which make it futile to suggest that Marxism is simply that which Marx said or did.
This conflict is represented by his theory which concerned a critique of a system and his practice which was sometimes applied to the abolition of the system as such and at other times had different objectives such as reshaping the system in a way that was likely to ameliorate the suffering of the working class or a section of the working class.
The former approach has been referred to by its opponents as Marxist purity or dogmatism. Although it seems to me to be the basis of Marx’s claim to being a scientific socialist. The conflict between purity or scientificity and practicability seems to have underlined most major theoretical disputes within the Marxist movement so that you get Bernstein versus Marx, Lenin versus Martov, Marxists within the British Labour party versus those outside of it. And it was this conflict of attitudes to the theory of socialism which led to the split in the Social Democratic Federation at the turn of the century. In 1884 the Democratic Federation committed itself to the objective of socialism, it then became the Social Democratic Federation. Previous to that it had been an organisation comprising radicals and people who supported Irish independence as well as some who were influenced by Marx. But it became a socialist organisation and in so doing it adopted a Marxist theory of class struggle, the belief in the need to dispossess the capitalist class and for the subsequent creation of a system of common ownership of the means of wealth production. Although it also spoke about the common ownership of the system of exchange.
The Social Democratic Federation combined its advocacy of this theory with a number of moral and economic justifications of it which were not Marxist but their overall position comprised a synthesis of the lessons of Marxian political economy and also the rigour of English logic which its leaders had picked up in the English public school system. Now having found a theory, how were they to fulfil their political objective? And the root of the possibilist-impossibilist conflict lies in the answer to that question. Some members of the SDF argued that the logical completeness of their position would have to be sacrificed for the sake of winning workers to the cause. So palliatives were advocated, friendly links with trade unions were developed, election campaigns took place with the inevitable advocacy of something now rather than something when the objective conditions are ripe.
Now those who had joined the SDF as radicals and had not been influenced by Marxist theory and those who were won to the SDF by the kind of tactics I have mentioned were happy to sacrifice theory for the sake of growth. But those who joined the SDF primarily because they were impressed by the inherent logicality of the its revolutionary proposition saw the sacrifice of theory as little short of what they called reformist compromise.
Now that these two types of revolutionary socialists were clearly identifiable, can be seen from the description of the SDFs membership contained in Guy Aldred’s letter of application to the SPGB in November 1906. Very few people I suppose know that Guy Aldred actually did apply to join the SPGB and it is something he kept very quiet about in later life. But he said this and it was a very interesting point which I think sums up what was going on in the SDF. He said ‘I have got about a good deal in amongst its rank and file during my membership and I was surprised to find two distinct sets of feelings existing amongst its members. On the one hand there were the frankly revolutionary spirits, good earnest and sincere comrades, on the other tame revisionist and mere social reformers. This being so, the organisation as such could have no policy and hence could not be class conscious.’
Now the French socialist movement had begun its split over the same division of attitudes in 1881 when Paul Brousse led the opposition to the group represented by Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue in the Federation of Socialist Workers of France. Rejecting the Guesdeist notion that the sole political objective of the working class should be the conquest of state power for the purpose of establishing socialism, Brousse advocated a program of immediate reforms and this policy became known as possibilism. The Belgian socialist party adopted the same program and it openly described itself as a possibilist party.
The split which began to emerge in the SDF in 1900 was not simply the result of one section accusing the other being impossibilist. That is a mistaken idea. On the contrary it was a case of one section accusing the other one of possibilism and the latter retaliating by dismissing their original stance as impossibilism. Now that is an important difference between the standard explanation of what happened and what actually did happen.
The move towards revisionism in the SDF was the consequence of political frustration. By 1901 H. M. Hyndman, the founder of the SDF and its first Marxist advocate had become tired of waiting for the revolution and retired from the federation. It should be pointed out that Hyndman was a man who was a considerable property owner, he had been educated at Eton and then at Oxford. He had come, had stumbled upon Marxist ideas, been rather discourteous to Marx in having printed a book copying a number of the ideas from Volume 1 of Capital and then not acknowledging any mention of Marx in the book and this annoyed Marx intensely and the two of them fell out. And he just got tired about the working class not facing up to the views that he saw as being absolutely logical. His letter of resignation from the SDF is revealing so I will quote it.
‘One, after so long a period of work on the executive, I wish to look at matters from the outside.
Two, I fail to detect among the English workers that class consciousness and that class antagonism without which no good whatever can be done. Even the members of the SDF leave very much to be desired in this respect. As one of the highly educated well-to-do class myself, I am quite astounded at the ignorance and apathy of my country-men and I am deeply discouraged at the result of our long and continued propaganda.
Three, under existing conditions our only hope lies in successful political action, yet the majority of our organisation seems wholly destitute of political aptitude.
Four, I fear I have done all the good I can do in the detailed work of the organisation. When the workers at large or member of the Social Democratic Federation rouse themselves in earnest and show a determination to deal effectively with the dangerous situation around us, I shall be glad to make common cause with them in a vigourous attempt to relieve our country from the corrupt incapable government by gang which now oppresses and degrades us and to help to the best of my ability in the establishment of a co-operative commonwealth of organised socialism.
Until then I remain yours fraternally,
H. M. Hyndman.’
So it was a case of must try harder. In point two Hyndman reflects upon the inadequacy of the working class ideas. In point three he derides their political aptitude and in point four he offers his future services but only if the members of the SDF and the working class as a whole will show more determination.
The possibilists within the SDF responded to this cry of desperation by favouring more theoretical compromise. Their opponents who were not particularly bothered about the fluctuating enthusiasm of members of the highly educated well-to-do class like Hyndman responded by sticking more rigidly than ever to the logic of their principles.
Now the focus for the possibilist-impossibilist conflict came in 1900 with the establishment of the Labour representation committee which as most of you will know was the committee set up by the trade union movement comprising members of the SDF, the Fabian society, the ILP and also a majority of trade unionists to decide on the formation of a general working class labour party. Now it is true that few people in the SDF who were not to become impossibilists were much in favour of close unity with the Labour representation committee. Only the Northern textile workers who joined the SDF via trade unionism were very optimistic about the prospect of the Labour representation committee leading to the formation of a principled socialist party. Most members of the SDF including the leadership believed that it would be tactically unwise to sacrifice the independence of the Federation for the sake of building a mass labour party.
But the impossibilists went further in their opposition to the Labour representation committee claiming that trade union and parliamentary activity should be treated with great caution by socialists. Basing their case on the Marxist theory that in capitalist society workers are inevitably exploited as well as a vague adherence to Lassalle’s iron law of wages which was in fact repudiated by Marx in Value, Price and Profit but was only first published in English in 1898 and had possibly not been read by many of the impossibilists of the time. The impossibilists argued that socialists should keep their distance from those who merely sought to affect the rate of exploitation. Instead of desiring higher of fairer wages the impossibilists urged trade unionists to campaign for the abolition of the wages system. The two aims were not however mutually exclusive and of course after the formation of the SPGB in 1904 the impossibilists modified their contempt for the limitation of what Marx had referred to as the industrial struggle.
Nevertheless they rejected absolutely the notion that a socialist party could be made up of men and women whose main concerns were with trade union wage bargaining and legislation. The possibilists on the other hand favoured closer association with the unions believing that if socialists started out by supporting the trade unionists and their immediate demands, the trade unionists would end up supporting socialism. That was the idea. In fact an Accrington delegate to the SDF’s Birmingham conference in 1901 suggested that it was the Federations task to I quote ‘permeate and capture trade unions.’
Now on the issue of parliamentary activity the impossibilists were quite opposed to the LRC’s idea of sending Labour MPs to the House of Commons in order to ameliorate working class conditions under capitalism and on this I would refer anyone to an editorial entitled ‘The Futility of Reform’ published in the October 1904 issue of the Socialist Standard. It provides a very clear expression of the earliest view of the party on reforms. I think I’ll read a bit of it, its not getting too long is it? First these are the sort of points they were making.
First of all they said ‘any blue book dealing with any phase of working class life will show instances innumerable of the neglect of the local…’ incidentally I will stop myself in the middle and say you will notice as I read it that a lot of these editorials were written by F. C. Watts who was on the first editorial committee of the Standard. F. C. Watts seemed to spend his time translating other socialist writers from French and you will notice a lot of French constructions in his writing like ‘instances innumerable’, he always seemed to put the adjective after the noun because he was so used to translating things, anyway but he says, ‘will show instances innumerable of the neglect of the local government board or of the borough councils or of the county councils in applying the laws already in existence. Housing Acts and Public Health Acts and Acts for the Prevention of Women returning to work after too early a period of after childbirth and Factory and Workshop Acts are not efficiently carried out while powers vested in the government bodies are hardly ever exercised. We have to point out further that sometimes a reform asked for by the working class can be granted to them without any serious danger to the capitalist class. In such cases they make graceful concessions and the working class are usually asked to hail the party granting such a concession as their truest friend. Another case is sometimes the measure is passed while benefiting certain individual worker proves disastrous to another larger section’ and then they cite the Workmen’s Compensation Act which I won’t go into. ‘We are therefore forced to the conclusion that the trying to secure measures for the palliation of the evils of the existing class society is useless.’
‘The men in control of the legislative, administrative and the judicial machinery of the community can always dodge any such partial attacks on their position, can always find loopholes to escape from any concession appearing to endanger their position. The only thing that will secure the alleviation of our misery and our wage slavery is the propagation of the principles of socialism and the building up a class conscious socialist party prepared to wrest at the earliest possible moment the whole powers of government from the hands of those who at present control them.’
‘When a strong socialist party is organised then the capitalists will be only to ready to offer and to give each and all of those palliatives as a sop to the growing socialist forces in the country. We have therefore to recognise all the time that it is only possible to secure any real benefit for the people when the people themselves become class conscious. When behind the socialists in parliament and on other bodies there stands a solid phalanx of men clear in their knowledge of socialism and clear in their knowledge that the only way to secure the socialist commonwealth of the future is to depend upon the efforts of themselves and those who have the same class conscious opinions. Therefore we have no palliative program. The only palliative we shall ever secure is the socialist society of the future gained by fighting uncompromisingly at all times and in every season.’
A very interesting editorial and of course you will notice there have been changes in the party position on this matter since 1906 when that was written. But on the other hand it was a very solid basis at a time when they didn’t have Labour governments to point to to show the futility of reformism. It was on the matter of the use of parliament to secure reforms versus the use of parliament for the purposes of social revolution that the possibilists and the impossibilists were compelled to stand on opposite sides within the SDF.
Now the two sides were hardly equal. On the one side were at the most three or four hundred impossibilists who urged the Federation not to seek progress at the expense of compromise. Directly opposing them was the majority of the Federations membership of approximately nine thousand. There were the Lancashire trade unionists who favoured a broader less theoretically based movement, there were most of the leaders of the SDF who favoured some kind of unity with the Independent Labour party, there was somebody who had a great influence among a number of members at the time of the possibilist-impossibilist split, a Russian Jewish émigré who joined the SDF in 1895 called Theodore Rothstein, later to become a prominent member of the Communist party. And he was criticising it for what he called its fossilised academism and you can find the article in the theoretical journal of the SDF called ‘Social Democrat’ in Volume 4 1900.
In defence of their anti impossibilism, they could quote the words of Frederick Engels whose distaste for what he saw as their dogmatic purity of groups like the SDF was well known. In 1891 he wrote to Sorge of the British Marxists that and I quote ‘people who pass as orthodox Marxists have turned their ideas of movement into a fixed dogma to be learned by heart and appear as pure sects.’ The alternative to the clear theoretical principles which Engels disparaged as ‘fixed dogma’ were the politically pragmatic socially democratic parties which were emerging in Europe in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and into which the SDF was eventually to be absorbed, which was to grow out of this, the Second International, and all of the consequences of reformism and the setbacks for the socialist movement.
So by the turn of the century there were clear signs that the SDF was ready for theoretical compromise and the surprising thing is not that one section of the Federation revolted, but the ease with which they established the established theory was changed in order to dismiss the non-compromisers as impossibilists.
Now I want to go on to look at what actually happened and how the Socialist Party of Great Britain originated. According to W. S. German writing in ‘the Socialist’ in December 1906 I quote ‘the Birmingham SDF conference in 1901 was practically the starting point of the movement dubbed impossibilist by H. Quelch.’ Now German was a London impossibilist who joined the Socialist Labour Party in 1903, the Socialist Labour Party were the Scottish impossibilists who broke away from the SDF a year earlier than the SPGB and were very much influenced by syndicalist ideas. Now whilst German might be correct in stating that the first overt expression of impossibilist dissent was at the Birmingham conference in 1901 there are sources that show that a loosely organised impossibilist group had been existence for some time before 1901.
They are firstly the minutes of the Finsbury park branch of the Social Democratic Federation which show that from the late 1890s onwards at least one branch of the Federation was very unhappy with certain unprincipled actions being taken by the executive committee. The minutes of the other impossibilist dominated branches may well indicate that they had similar views and were passing similar resolutions in protest at the same time but so far I haven’t been able to trace any of these. Nevertheless Finsbury Park branch minutes do demonstrate that there was a branch that was consistently attacking reformist compromise with the SDF as early as the mind 1890s.
But there is another clue that shows the impossibilists were very much organised in the London area. This is the minutes of an organisation called the North London Socialist club which was founded in the mid 1890s. Now the minutes were recently discovered I might say by very devout scholar in the records department of Islington Central Library. The minutes show many of the men who were later to become prominent as impossibilists were playing leading roles in the North London socialist club for some years before 1901. An influential figure at the club was one of the members of the Finsbury park branch who a terrible thorn in the side of the SDFs EC and he was a man who was either appropriately or inappropriately called Percy Freedberg. He was until mid 1902 the leading London impossibilist. Now it is probable to me that the club was used as a place were like minded members of London branches could meet and discuss their dissatisfaction about changes in SDF policies. This source also provides another hitherto unknown fact which is that it had previously been believed that the ideas of the American Daniel De Leon were introduced to the London impossibilists after they had made contact with Scottish impossibilists group but the minutes of the North London socialist club disclose that the London men had been ordering copies of DeLeonist literature from the Socialist Labor Party in America from the mid 1890s onwards.
Such literature was certainly not acceptable within the official activity of the SDF, it would have been banned, in fact on several occasions the EC of the SDF passed resolutions saying that DeLeonist literature must not be bought by the SDF branches and it seems therefore that for some time before the impossibilist split there was a group of members who were attempting to examine new socialist ideas and different conceptions of Marxism.
In fact De Leon’s ideas which were of more effect on the principles of the SLP than they were ever to have on the SPGB but the fact was that they were being considered and this shows that a process of theoretical reinterpretation was taking place. An additional indication of this is the fact that Jack Fitzgerald a young London impossibilist was organising classes in Marxian economics for the benefit of SDF members who were unacquainted with Marx’s Capital. These were started in 1901. The leaders of the Federation certainly could not have liked the idea of this young Irishmen in his early twenties recently having come in to the Social Democratic Federation spreading around the ideas of Marx which they were importing from the Kerr publishers in America which previously had never been accepted within the SDF, the works of Marx were banned within the SDF as being what Hyndman considered far too difficult and theoretically clumsy for English workers to ever consider. And here was this young new member of the SDF, coming in, running lectures, criticising the old SDF economic program and putting forward the ideas of Marx.
And so the minutes of the Finsbury Park branch, the minutes of the North London socialist club and the economics classes of Fitzgerald all show that the London impossibilist movement had started before 1901. But at the Birmingham conference in 1901, three Scottish impossibilists, Mattheson, Yates and Cotton attacked the leaders of the SDF and they attacked them for two reasons. Firstly the leaders of the SDF who had been delegates at the Second International had supported the Kautsky resolution rather than the more principled resolution of Guesde the French impossibilist. What was all this about? Well the Kautsky resolution was about whether socialists ought to go into parliament or not and Guesde part moved a resolution claiming a resolution that they should not, Kautsky moved a resolution saying they should not except in cases of emergency	which the impossibilists say as being quite, they say it quite correctly as being a bit of a swindle. 
Worse still the Federation delegates had attacked Lafargue for his speech opposing Alexander Millerand’s acceptance of the post of Minister of Commerce and Industry in the Waldeck-Rousseau government. And you can quite well understand them wanting to complain about it, here was a man who was supposed to be a leader of the French Socialist party accepting a post of Minister of Commerce and industry in a government that had just been elected in France. And of course they, when Lafargue got up and said this was a bit of bloody cheek, they said, the Federations delegates told him off about it. The second thing was that the SDFs journal Justice had advised workers to vote for the Liberal candidates in elections in Battersea, Bermondsey and Northampton and so the impossibilists made clear their distaste for this kind of compromise and they insisted that no socialist should take a post in the capitalist government and that socialists should never urge workers to vote for the Liberal party. The majority of delegates to the conference couldn’t care too much about this change in principle, they were more concerned with growth than direction and the protests of the impossibilists had very little impact.
After the Birmingham conference, the impossibilists began to organise both in London and in Scotland. The means of organising impossibilist agitation had developed independently and in different ways in the two centres. I quote from Fitzgerald’s article on the subject in the Standard, he says ‘in Scotland it appears to have been organised and its supporters worked in a regular faction. In London however no systematic course was followed.’ In the next two years the pattern of the Scottish impossibilists organising themselves and favouring separation from the SDF and the Londoners tending to be less organised and less inclined to secede was to continue.
Indeed after the Scottish impossibilists formed the Socialist Labour party in 1903, they abused the Londoners for their lack of defiance. Now it is true that the London impossibilists were less willing to break away from the Federation than their Scottish comrades and its nevertheless I would suggest that the London members being much closer to the leadership and the mass of the Federation than were those who were hundreds of miles away from the sources of organisational power. So I think it was location rather than greater intensity of principle which led the Scottish impossibilists to contemplate revolt before the Londoners. The two groups first joined ranks at the Blackburn conference in 1902, I hope this isn’t excessive detail for anyone. At the conference in Blackburn the Scottish nominated for the executive committee the most prominent London impossibilist Percy Freedburg and it was in Blackburn according to German in his article that, and I quote ‘the officials and leaders of the SDF saw that the movement which was called impossibilist, an unholy Scotch current, by them, bade fare to capture the SDF in as much as it had spread to the provinces and London.’
It is interesting that Germans articles then suggests that it started in Scotland, I would suggest that might not have been right. But after the conference friendly relations were established between the Scottish and London impossibilists. According to Fitzgerald they were united to secure I quote ‘the adoption of an uncompromising policy by the SDF. Freedburg was chosen to act as correspondent between the two groups.’ Another similarity as with a contemporary member by the same name.
Now Germans claim that the officials and leaders of the SDF became worried after Blackburn seems to be justified by their subsequent actions. The first move they made was against a man called Geese, yes Geese, he was a London impossibilist speaker who was removed from the official lecture list appointing speakers for outdoor meetings and presumably because he was making dissident statements from the SDF platform. He responded by resigning from the Federation. Now if Geese was, yes Geese very odd name actually but I checked with all kinds of party members including Hardy to see if he ever knew this speaker called Geese and what he was saying but I have yet to discover it but I am working on it, but if he was prosecuted for criticising the SDF in public the next expulsion, that of Freedburg was for merely expressing dissent internally. Freedburg’s complaint was that the report of the Blackburn conference which appeared in Justice contained some inaccuracies and left out some very important items of business.
In short the report omitted reference to impossibilist criticism which had been raised at the Blackburn conference, in particular, criticism of the man who all of the impossibilists collectively despised and that was George Lansbury for very good reasons. What Freedburg then did was that he wrote a letter of correction to Justice but it was refused publication. He then submitted his letter for publication in the New York Weekly People which was the journal of the American DeLeonist Socialist Labor Party. Now he must have been aware that this was the newspaper which the impossibilists especially in Scotland, were very sympathetic to. And when the publication of the letter was brought to the attention of the executive committee of the SDF, Freedburg was expelled for writing these letters of dissent in an opponents journal.
Now it is questionable whether the Weekly People could be regarded as an opponents journal, and even if it could, there existed no provision in the Federation’s rules that could prevent a member from writing letters to it. In other words their rules were different from those of the SPGB.
Now Freedburg’s branch Finsbury Park refused to accept the right of the executive to expel one of its members without the right of the appeal to the membership as a whole. The branch refused to accept the expulsion and the EC, glad of the opportunity to deal with one of the more notable dissident branches dissolved the Finsbury park branch.
At the same time the EC was dealing with the impossibilists in Scotland and it secured the expulsion of one W. MacGregor on what appears to be a very spurious charge. Then in 1903 came the Shoreditch conference which took place at a time when the impossibilists were in a very militant mood. Freedburg had become so militant that he had emigrated to Spain before the conference took place. He later incidentally joined the Socialist Labor Party and he left poor old Jack Fitzgerald to have to prepare the case and act as an advocate for the Finsbury park branch which was a bit bad after he had caused all the trouble and pissing off to Spain.
Shortly before the conference Edinburgh branch, that is of the SDF of course sent an ultimatum to the EC threatening to withdraw from the Federation unless the conference abandoned the compromising policy which had been developing within the SDF.
On April 8th 1903 the day before the commencement of the Shoreditch conference the first official meeting of London impossibilists took place at the Hope Coffee tavern in Finsbury park, it is not still there. The meeting was attended by fifteen SDF members, all but one of whom expressed dissent towards Federation policy. According to W. S. German’s account of the meeting and he was its secretary they considered the Edinburgh ultimatum in order to decide whether the London impossibilists would support it at conference.
It was finally decided by nine members out of fifteen that secession would be premature and that the best course would be to hold a joint meeting of London and Scottish impossibilists when the latter arrived down for the conference. At the conference two severe blows were cast against the impossibilists.
First, an active impossibilist Yates of Leith branch, was expelled for writing an article critical of the SDF in the journal published by the Scottish district council of the SDF called the Socialist. And secondly the expulsion of Freedburg and his branch of Finsbury park was upheld. The joint meeting of London and Scottish impossibilists took place at the Cock and Hoop Tavern, Mile End Road on evening of Sunday 11th April 1903. And this was the first and last occasion that the two groups were to formally meet. There were two accounts of what happened at the meeting, one coming from German who subsequently joined the SLP and the other coming from Fitzgerald who subsequently joined the SPGB so which one you want to believe will have to depend on your own bias.
German suggests that the meeting favoured the formation of a new party and set up a London committee comprising German, Hunter, Egarth, Fitzgerland and Sims. When in May 1903 the Scottish impossibilists sent down a draft of a manifesto for the committee to endorse or amend and German suggests the London committee decided not to endorse it and to have nothing to do with the new Scottish party. According to Fitzgerland’s account which I am inclined to believe less I think, at the April 11th meeting, Yates, the chief spokesman for the Scottish group announced that the Scottish had for some time been preparing for the organisation of a new party and that the London impossibilists were invited to join it. Fitzgerald claims that the London members were outraged at having not been told about this for all the time that it had been plotted by the Scottish. And that they were so outraged at not having been informed of the Scottish plans earlier that they refused to have anything to do with the new party.
Well whichever one of the men’s memories serve them best, the outcome of it is certain. In May 1903 the majority of the Scottish impossibilists left the SDF and formed the SLP. A few London impossibilists joined them, they did actually have on branch going in London at the time, but most stayed in the SDF. Neither German’s nor Fitzgerald’s account of the division between the two groups of the impossibilists tell the full story because there were real political differences separating the Scottish and London impossibilists. The SLP was committed to a form of DeLeonist industrial syndicalism which had little appeal to the men who were to form the SPGB, I should say the men an the women because surprisingly enough there were some.
By the summer of 1903 the London impossibilists were more isolated than ever before. The growth of compromise had certainly not been halted by secession of the Scots. In January 1903 Quelch stood as SDF candidate in the Dewsbury by-election and received one thousand five hundred and ninety seven votes with the help of the local branch of the Independent Labour party. Hyndman was once again back in operation and the impossibilists could not forgive the arrogance of the leadership which had ousted Freedburg and his branch. And above all, the SDF was emphasising its minimum reform program, its palliatives more than ever. The London impossibilists remained because they felt that there was nowhere else to go, it was the only socialist organisation. But they had no intention of accommodating themselves to direction in which the Federation was going.
So at the 1904 conference, held at St James Hall Burnley a resolution was carried which called upon the London impossibilists to apologise for engaging in disruptive tactics and supported a group which left the party. The five branches which voted against the resolution, Battersea, Peckham and Dulwich, Wood Green, Central West Ham and Watford were all in areas where the SPGB branches were to be formed within the next couple of years. Having carried such a general resolution, Quelch then made a speech specifying the two London impossibilists who were the most offensive to the leadership, the ones he really wanted to get his claws into, and they were Jack Fitzgerald and H. J. Hawkins. H. J. Hawkins incidentally was a member of the London Trades Councils,  but they particularly objected to him because he carried a bit of weight. At the end of Quelch’s attack Dan Irving the delegate for Burnley branch who was later incidentally to become a Labour MP moved that the two dissidents should be expelled from the party and this was carried in the manner of a Stalinist congress by sixty one votes to eight.
It wasn’t coincidental that the two men selected for expulsion were both candidates for the executive committee which was due to be elected at the conference, they couldn’t stand as a result of their expulsion. It was later disclosed by Jack Kent the only impossibilist member of the 1904 executive committee that Hyndman and Quelch had been plotting to manipulate the delegations to the Burnley conference so as to ensure the expulsion of the two impossibilists who could have been serious rivals to them for seats on the EC.
In May 1904 a protest committee of eighty eight members and ex-members of the SDF was formed. It published the statement expressing the case of the dissidents and I’d like to quote from that statement because not many people have seen it. This is the statement of the protest committee which was still within the SDF against the SDF. It says ‘whilst based upon sound principles, the SDF at the commencement of its existence lay down no corresponding policy which would consistently give effect to those principles. Consequently members, branches and the EC each formulated their own lines of action with the consequence that contemporaneously with the growth of what was then described as new trade unionism, an attempt was made to permeate and capture the trade union movement, which at that period, as now was distinctly hostile to any action based upon the recognition of the class struggle. In 1897 this policy received the official sanction of the SDF. As a result of this endeavour to capture the trade union movement which is definite neither in principle nor in policy, trade unionism has managed to capture many of the prominent members of the SDF who becoming salaried servants of these organisations have been compelled to preach the doctrine of trade unionism in place of social democracy as the means whereby which the workers should secure their economic freedom,’ I should say that social democracy at that time was synonymous with what we would call revolutionary socialism. It was a term describing Marx’s idea of socialism. ‘As another illustration of our lack of definite policy we find that at one conference a policy of voting Tory was adopted in order to smash the Liberal party whilst at a later period, we would urge the workers to smash the Liberals, were in our turn urging the workers to support certain Liberal candidates because they were opposed to the war in South Africa and in favour of certain peddling reforms at home. Yet these candidates were distinctly hostile to our fundamental principles. Further we now have the question of the Labour Representation Committee from which the SDF withdrew because of essential differences of principle, yet while withdrawing nationally, we find that local branches with consent and the recommendation of the EC are working with local committees affiliated to the LRC and pushing forward candidatures of men who are not socialists.’
I found that a very clear explanation of their grievances. Other grievances are also mentioned, the undemocratic powers of the executive committee, the ownership and control of the Federation’s press by a company which the membership did not control and the expulsion of members in an undemocratic manner.
The stated aim of the protest committee was to establish I quote ‘a class conscious organisation imbued with the true democratic spirit backed by a definitely avowed and unmistakable social democratic policy.’ Whether this might be established inside or outside the SDF remained unsaid at that time probably because they hadn’t made up their mind. Protesting within the SDF didn’t turn out to be useful. Two more impossibilists were expelled for complaining. They were Martin Killich and Neumann of Peckham branch. On the 15th May 1904, the protest committee organised a meeting in Battersea, the meeting resolved that it was necessary to form a new socialist party. A provisional committee was elected and was instructed to organise. The chairman for those of you who are interested in details was Robert Elrich and Ceila Hahn was the secretary. A hundred and forty three men and women voted for a resolution that we hereby declare our membership and thus form the new party, the constitution of which it shall be the business of this meeting to formulate. 
The chairman then read out a letter from the Newcastle-upon-Tyne socialist society whose secretary T. Kerr expressed his I quote ‘sympathy with your comrades in the action that they’d been compelled to take’. The letter according to the extremely detailed minutes of the inaugural meeting was met with loud applause. The meeting then proceeded to discuss three important matters. First of all, the name for the new party then the declaration of principles which the provisional committee had drawn up and then the rules as proposed by the provisional committee. I’m not going to deal with the rules that were laid down at the first conference although it is something I go into here but it is of interest in itself, its rather lengthy but I will go into the name and the Declaration of Principles.
The provisional committee proposed that the name of the new party should be The Socialist Party of Great Britain but Neumann and Blanstein moved an amendment that it should be called the ‘Social Democratic Party’, this was lost, Martin and Neumann suggested that the name should be the ‘Social Democratic Party of Great Britain’, this was lost, and McEntee and Hutchins suggested it should be called ‘The Socialist Party of Great Britain and Ireland’ and this had only six votes in its favour, it was overwhelmingly lost, and so it was finally decided by a vote of ninety one votes to three, the provisional committee’s original suggestion should be adopted and the name of the new party should be the ‘Socialist Party of Great Britain’. I can’t think of anything significant about that except of course that it marked a swift dismissal of Irish separatism right from the very start of the party.
The real business of the inaugural meeting was to agree on a set of political principles for the Socialist party. Now it was one thing to have advocated purity of principles within an unpure movement but it was a much more testing task to define some principles which were scientific and uncompromising and still politically realistic. And on a motion of Hawkins and Martin, it was unanimously agreed that the object of the party should be what the object is actually at the moment. And it was then moved by Fitzgerald and E. Allen that the declaration of principles should be what the declaration of principles actually are. Only one amendment was moved to the declaration of principles incidentally, there was actually an amendment to the declaration of principles moved by Martin and Aubrey which was that the word ‘hostile’ should be deleted and ‘opposed’ substituted, that’s of course in clause seven and that itself is interesting that right from the start there was a bit of an argument about that. The amendment was overwhelmingly lost and the meeting then formally adopted the declaration of principles with what the minutes calls unanimity and enthusiasm. So that’s really what I want to say on that point, I can of course say a few more things about the declaration of principles if there is a bit of time.
When Henry Quelch, one of the leaders of the SDF used the term ‘impossibilism’ to describe the ideas of the men and women who would form the Socialist Party of Great Britain and the Socialist Labour Party, he might have meant any or all of three different things.
He may have simply been pointing to the fact that they were not possibilists, that is to say they rejected the strategy of the French faction behind Paul Brousse, this then is to see impossibilism as a tactical position.
Alternatively, the impossibilist tag may have arisen from the fact that they argued that it was impossible to improve the capitalist system in the interests of the working class. This was a theoretical rather than a tactical position and it was not as historically unjustified as it may seem.
And thirdly it may have arisen from the belief of the possibilists that the impossibilists vision of socialism was an image of utopia, the establishment of which wouldn’t be within the reach of predictable possibility. And this critique of impossibilism involves a theory about the possibilities of human social adaptability particularly in relation to the capacity of the working class to independently transcend a politically submissive consciousness which was later to become popular as an integral feature of Leninism.
Now implicit in these definitions of impossibilism are grounds for attack, firstly by the mainstream left which can deride the tactical purity of impossibilism, secondly by liberal progressives accusing impossibilists of failing to recognise the immense possibilities of social change within the capitalist system and thirdly the conservatives in a curious ideological alliance with the Leninists who accuse impossibilists of dreaming of a revolution which is an illusory vision leaving out of the account the true nature of man. Now any political theory which can conflict with so many areas of the ideological spectrum certainly deserves to be considered on its own terms.
So in the remaining few minutes I want to consider some questions that arise from the declaration of principles adopted by the SPGB in 1904. The D of P as you know gives us eight clauses which fit neatly into four pairs each of which provides an answer to the questions which socialist theorists have often asked but very rarely answered with anything like the clarity of the D of P.
First of all, what is the nature of the present system of society, is there an alternative to present social system, how can this alternative be achieved and what is the role of a party aiming to achieve the new system and coming to that, what is the role of the working class? And these are the four pairs if you look at the D of P you’ll see that these provide answers to.
So the first two clauses are the D of P making clear that impossibilist critique of the system was an Orthodox Marxist one. It argued that the means of wealth production are the monopoly of the capital owning class, that wealth is produced by the working class and that therefore there is an inevitable conflict and so on. Now no Marxist then or now would disagree with that conception of the class struggle but there were people who described themselves as socialists who did disagree with it. These were the possibilists.
Writing in the Labour leader in September 1904, Keir Hardie made the claim that the Independent Labour Party’s socialist principles were above suspicion. Although its leading advocates rarely if ever used such terms as ‘class war’ and ‘class consciousness.’ Justifying this he said I quote ‘the object of socialism is the removal of causes which produce this antagonism so that the human interest may at all times be the dominant one. The enlightened capitalist will be as anxious to bring this about as the enlightened workman. Both stand to gain from the change.’ But two points need to be emphasised here, the first is that the conflict is not necessarily a class one and the second is that the propertyless proletariat, to borrow William Morris’ phrase, is not a class at all. Now that’s what Keir Hardie was saying.
This was significant because the impossibilists were shifting the basis of socialism from that of class struggle to what they called the human interest and it cannot be overemphasised this was a shift away from Marxism which marked a new step, a new change, a revolution in socialist theory. This major alteration in the very motive of socialist activity was intended to remove socialism from the unattractive terrain of materialism and to somehow elevate it as they would have seen it to the field of morality. Despite the SDF’s secular position as opposed to the Methodism of the Independent Labour party, Hyndman and his fellow SDF leaders were affected by more than a few preconceived moral beliefs. It is not coincidental that Belfort Bax’s exposition of the Federation’s case for socialism was entitled ‘The Religion of Socialism’. The basis of impossibilism like German Marxism was decidedly amoral. The men and women who were impossibilists were socialists primarily because of their social poverty. They weren’t Eton educated capitalists who thought that they knew what was good for the working class as was Hyndman nor were morally inspired evangelists seeking socialism as a secular religion. So those who’d formed the SPGB saw it in their material interest.
The reason for the divergence of the two attitudes to socialism can be plotted well before the emergence of impossibilism. It was based upon the very different intellectual traditions of English romanticism and German materialism. The romantic revolt as it has been called could be and has been very easily accommodated within the Anglicised non-Marxist socialist movement. Marx’s materialism with its preoccupation with scientific causation was too amoral to gain popular approval from English middle class philanthropists and too political revolution to appeal to the gradualist sentiments of the working class leaders who shaped the ideas of the English trade unions. The fact that the ILP was openly Christian in its ethics and the SPGB was frankly anti religious in its materialist analysis explains much about the accommodation of the one and the popular rejection of the other. So if you offer a worker a paradise beyond the grave you’re a Methodist and if you offer him a paradise on earth you immediately become impossibilist.
Then to move on to the second pair of clauses, three and four. The possibilist conception of socialism based as it was upon a theory of moral improvement could be viewed as a trend rather than as a revolution that has definite political outcome. Better housing or health provisions for instance were viewed by the possibilists as being steps in the right direction or more socialism. The impossibilists on the other hand suggested an alternative system of society which would be the negation of the capitalist system. In seeing capitalism and socialism  as mutually exclusive phenomena the impossibilists didn’t accept that there could be elements of the latter in the former system, they rejected therefore the very basis of reformism. Clause three of the D of P states that the class struggle can be abolished only by the emancipation of the working class and that this can only be achieved by establishing the common ownership of the means of production etc. And that the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex. Now the impossibilist vision of socialism was logically coherent insofar as it described the antithesis of class society. The impossibilists idea of socialism would be a system without classes because all wealth would be owned in common, there would be no wages system and there would be no production for profit, each would give according to his ability and each would take according to his needs, there would be no state. And to many of its opponents, such an idea was a utopian vision, they called themselves socialists but when you presented socialist ideas to them they saw it as a utopian position, but the impossibilists were not seeking a utopia. There was not a single characteristic of socialism in the impossibilists vision which can’t be found to have been expressed by Marx. It wasn’t that the SPGB had invented a new idealistic impossibilistic definition of the socialist objective but rather than by the turn of the twentieth century the mainstream labour movement was rapidly abandoning its commitment to social revolution which was soon to be disparaging labelled as maximalism and began to concern itself primarily with policies designed to obtain the best deal for the capitalist system.
The report of the speech made by Ramsay MacDonald in 1896 provides an indication of how those who were devoted to pursuit of the new social order were becoming dismissed by then as impossibilist. MacDonald according to the speech appealed for socialists more frequently ‘to put themselves in the position of the man in the street who is on the whole sympathetic but doesn’t want to follow out economic complexities. We can talk socialism seriously to him and we’ll likely disgust him. We may gas sentimentalities to him and we may capture another member who will only be one more impossibilist in our movement. We may show him what we can do now, show him we are as interested as he is in doing the smaller things that lie at our feet and he will become a valuable supporter’ And by the smaller things MacDonald was clearly referring to a minimum reform program.
So the impossibilists rejection of reformism was in the end their main reason for breaking with the SDF and it has been pointed out that the impossibilists rejected the political compromise of supporting capitalist governments which offered apparently progressive reforms. So this is where they broke with the possibilists. It was because they wanted to rationally keep to the point of view that you cannot impose one system upon another one while it is still here that they couldn’t possibly be accepted by the possibilists outside of the SPGB.
The enlightenment going back to the eighteenth century had done much to change men’s ideas about the behaviour of man and the reasons for it. It was the realisation by rationalists that human beings had considerable control over their social destinies which gave rise to the theory which has become known as scientific socialism. Now post enlightenment thinkers had to consider a question about the nature of man, they had to consider an ontological question which is what is the nature of man. Were there certain fixed behavioural patterns or were human beings free to act as they wished within the confines of biological possibility? Or to put the question in philosophical terms, which is how it was actually put and this is because it was traditionally answered by philosophers and not natural scientists; ‘Does consciousness determine being or does being determine consciousness?’ Now in his 1844 Paris Manuscripts, Marx defines human nature as being the sum total of man’s biological characteristics and this was in contradistinction to the Hegelian humanists who had argued that the progress of mankind was a development towards an idealised human nature.
Now if Marx turned Hegel on his head to show that social being determines consciousness, the possibilists in their turn turned Marx on his head to argue that social being could only be improved by gradually and almost imperceptibly bringing consciousness to the people by means of personal and social moral improvement. So the politically conscious possibilist saw his role as being to help create a desirable ideal even if that ideal can’t be perceived by those who will benefit from it. The impossibilists saw themselves as having no such separate identity from the rest of the working class. To them consciousness was a process of recognising the nature of social reality and the individuals relationship to it. And this would be assisted by ceaseless socialist propaganda, analysing and criticising the capitalist system.
If the impossibilists idea of how consciousness could be raised was in many ways naïve and I think that is something we can consider, in that it underestimated forces which lead people to believe that social reality is social inevitability, and this I think we will come to in the next talk, the possibilist method was politically sinister as in any doctrine which allows the sanctity of its objective to override the process of its realisation.
Now there are also two other theoretical features to be found in clause four which are just worth briefly noting. Firstly it is stated that the socialist revolution is intended to end the class struggle not to intensify it or reverse the status of classes within it. And this is in line with Marx’s conception of socialist revolution as expressed in the Communist Manifesto. The finality of the impossibilist conception of socialist revolution, the impression shared with Marx that the negation of capitalism will mark the climax of social evolution was added to by the impossibilists great respect for the sociological writing of Herbert Spencer, I add sociological writing so as not to offend certain people who may not like his biological writings for good reasons. His works were even sold at outdoor meetings organised by the SPGB in the early days. Although quite why selling volumes one, two and three of Spencer’s Principles of Sociology at outdoor meetings in Finsbury Park was expected to make members is beyond me. Nevertheless one wit has commented that the Socialist Party of Great Britain got its theory of history from Marx and Spencer.
The SPGB’s materialism was essentially organicist. In 1911, a Frenchman who I can only imagine, if it sounds like it looks was called Charles Rappoport wrote an article called ‘Fatalism and historic necessity’. This was translated by F. C. Watts and was published in the Socialist Standard as an expression of the materialist conception of history. I think I would be forgiven by members for suggesting it was a lot of rubbish! And it is well worth considering what he said and the organicist view of history that early party members seem to have had, at least some of them, he said ‘a society is not transformed by the force of the word or by strokes of will . It is necessary that all the forces of the past and present collaborate therein. Already Saint Simon, the true precursor of Marx, had clearly shown that the elements of the new system accumulate during centuries, and prepare themselves within the framework of ancient systems. according to him, the capitalist class has taken seven or eight centuries to become the dominant force in society.

Isolated men, or small minorities, may, from time to time, indulge their gentle fantasies. They may dream of transformations in the twinkling of an eye. In the name of the “right of abortion” they may apply the forceps of “direct action” to the body social in order to bring the new society into the world before its time. But society as a whole – an entire class – only gives itself such aims as are in the domain of the realisable and possible. And when the time comes it shrinks from no necessary means. Evolution does not exclude revolution, any more than the gradual transformation of the earth excludes cataclysms.’
(https://www.marxists.org/archive/rappoport/1911/fatalism.htm)
As a matter of fact it’s not a load of rubbish, I am thinking of another quotation I might have read, it’s very good. A second feature of clause four which can also be seen I suppose as a mark of the broad mindedness of the men who wrote the declaration of principles. It was at least broad minded, whether they were right is another question is that their conception of social freedoms was explicitly anti racist and what I suppose these days would be called anti sexist. There must have been more than a few people who felt secure in labelling as impossibilist a party of men and women who envisaged a socialist society in which men and women and blacks and whites would stand in social equality. After all Belfort Bax who E. P. Thompson has described as the only one early Marxist apart from William Morris to have a really great understanding of the historical method of Marxism was an outspoken believer in the inherent inferiority of women. And Engels whose attitude to women would not have survived the puritanical feminism of the modern left is on record as holding some views which were unmistakeably racialist.
So to move on even more briefly in the last ten seconds to the remaining clauses and the third pair of clauses five and six. Having said what capitalism is all about and what socialism means the impossibilists then had to construct a path from one to the other. Although the implementation in clauses of the D of P were to be the main cause of Leninist criticisms of impossibilism from the 1920s onwards, the conception of a constitutional revolution wasn’t a cause of contention in 1904, nobody really disagreed with it. Most socialists still accepted the view of the later Marx that socialism could be established by the working class making use of its democratic power such as the vote in order to gain control of the state machine.
The Socialist Party of Great Britain did not believe in the need for vanguards or leaderships because they held the view which I’ve already mentioned that all men and women were capable of an equal political perception of the problems facing them and of the socialist alternative. And if that seems close to anarchist theory then clause six redresses the balance because it states that the working class must consciously and politically organise to gain control of the machinery of government including the armed forces of the nation. That the state has to be converted from the instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation. And clause six endorses the classical Marxist definition of the state.
The final two clauses then of the Declaration of Principles concern the role of the Socialist Party and the role of the working class. Firstly all parties are said to express class interests, secondly as the SPGB recognised only two main classes those parties which don’t stand for the social interests of the working class must logically stand for the interests of the capitalists. Thirdly the workers party has to be hostile to every other party whether allegedly labour or avowedly capitalist. And finally the SPGB urges the working class to muster under its banner to use the party as a vehicle for creating socialism.
Now the long term effect of self imposed political isolation caused by the first three of the above mentioned principles was the principle reason for the SPGB’s widespread unpopularity from 1904 to this day. It is usual for political groups with similar sounding objectives to show some kind of mutual respect for one another. The open expression of uncompromising hostility towards other groups serve to cut the link between the SPGB and the traditional British labour movement. The suggestion that all parties either represent one class or the other was at variance with the possibilists increasing attachment to classless politics.
It wasn’t however a conspiratorial notion of political allegiances, the early SPGB regarded a number of people outside of its ranks quite correctly I think as independent socialists and it even regarded, again correctly, the SDF as such, it regarded the SDF as a socialist organisation and wasn’t afraid to say they saw elements of socialist theory within its program. Its quarrel with the socialists who wouldn’t join the impossibilist party was not primarily with their objectives but with their strategies. If the tactics were wrong the SPGB concluded that the objective would be lost. Therefore those who wanted socialism but didn’t serve the cause were considered to be as much worthy of hostility from the impossibilists as those who actively opposed socialism and many of the columns of the early issues of the Socialist Standard were filled with ferocious attacks upon bogus socialists and labour bleeders, a term that was coined by T. A. Jackson before he became one.
The cold logic which compelled the SPGB to be hostile to the roots in which it grew were a little too cold for some members who found discomfort in attacking the Tories, the ILP and the SDF as all standing for the interests of one class. As I’ve mentioned at the inaugural meeting some impossibilists preferred ‘opposition’ to ‘hostility’ but linguistic moderation offered no escape from political isolation. The charge of sectarianism then is very easy to make against so uncompromising a theory but the impossibilists commitment to a democratic means to their end and the call in clause eight for workers to join the socialist party, a call which was incidentally matched by a very impressive record of propaganda activity on a scale much greater than the SPGB’s numerical size refutes the impression that the impossibilists were concerned with raising sectarian criticism rather than engaging in activity.
There was however a marked contrast between Marx’s advice to communists in his Manifesto and the final pair of clauses of the D of P. Marx had urged workers not to form parties in opposition to other working class organisation and not to recognise any separate identity for themselves and not to set up principles of their own with which to shape and mould the proletarian movement. Those are Marx’s words in the Communist Manifesto of 1847. This of course wasn’t the end of Marx’s theory of the party and if you want to see what else he had to say about it you can look at John Molyneux’s Marxism and the Party, for instance between 1847 and 1850 when Marx was associated with the Communist League he was in favour of joining parties, between 1850 and 1864 he seems to have become disillusioned with political activity, between 1864 and 1872 he favoured it again. After that he changed his mind and thought that it wasn’t worthwhile so he had a lot of changes during his time and of course then Engels went on later on to support the Social Democratic parties of Europe.
But by 1904 Marx’s theories had been adopted by a party which was composed of the members of the working class. It was quite different from the situation two decades earlier when Engels had sneered at the middle class intellectuals of the Socialist League of William Morris for expounding pure Marxist theory which the workers couldn’t comprehend. Here were workers who clearly understood the power of theory, they’d understood Marx. So you couldn’t go along to them and say don’t put these ideas to the working class, they won’t understand them, these were members of the working class. Engels and his friends who’d been saying this were not.
Impossibilism was indeed a victory of theory over the expediencies of everyday practice. To say that the impossibilists were committed to a principled fundamentalism is not to judge them but to describe them. But should commitment to theory override the expediencies of practice? Was Marxist theory in need of revision in the early years of the twentieth century? Is it right to say that the possibilist conception of socialism and socialist activity was bound to replace the impossibilist theory because it was more ‘realistic’?
These are questions which I can’t answer now because they require a separate consideration of the history of impossibilist practice between 1904 and the present day, but what can be asserted is that impossibilism did represent a serious political movement and still does, it did pose a serious challenge to the development of the modern social democratic labour movement and still does. It was a continuity of earlier Marxist ideas and continues to be and for those reasons it deserves investigation. In the next talk in three weeks time for those who decide to come, what I want to consider is whether the inevitability that was built into the conception of the Socialist Party of Great Britain argument that socialism must replace capitalism is something that we can now look forward to as being historically inevitable, either in our own time or the distant future.