16.06.2004

100 years of solitude

Phil Hamilton reviews the SPGB's website.

While most leftists in Britain were coming to grips with 'super Thursday's' poor election results for Respect, June 12 marked the centennial milestone for the Socialist Party of Great Britain. As the country's oldest Marxist group, it has long been regarded by the rest of the left as a political fossil. This is partly because of the propagandist character of SPGB activity, and its steadfast belief that a socialist party should be confined to abstract campaigning for socialism. It believes the pursuit of class struggles for gains that can be won under capitalism is an unnecessary distraction from propagating the socialist solution. Unsurprisingly this divorcing of socialism from the everyday existence of the working class has won the SPGB few friends over the last 100 years.

The SPGB's website (not to be confused with http://spgb.org.uk - the site of a splinter group of the same name) is a small and simplistic affair carried by the World Socialist Movement, the party's 'international'. It hosts a Socialist Standard archive complete back to 1998, though there is a link to various "highlights" dating from 1910. The navigation panel carries links to the WSM's discussion forum, a quick introduction and statement of principles, a list of pamphlets (sadly these are not as yet online), conference resolutions, the party rulebook and a myriad of other curios.

However, pride of place goes to the anniversary special of the Socialist Standard. Available in plain text and pdf, the issue is packed with anecdotes from the party's history, as well as a recapitulation of its main shibboleths (which is a recurring feature of every issue). Its 'A century for socialism' editorial sets out the main stall. It starts with an overview of contemporary capitalism as a system which remains fundamentally the same as that which confronted the SPGB's founders. It makes a number of correct points, such as: "A society that can now send spaceships to Mars but which cannot adequately feed, clothe and house the world's population despite the massive technological resources at its disposal …. is seriously and fundamentally flawed."

The most interesting parts of the editorial address reformism and 'vanguardism'. The former was the issue over which it split from the Social Democratic Federation. For the SPGB, a strategy that requires fighting for reforms will only attract people interested in giving capitalism a human face. This leads increasingly, the argument goes, to the progression from a paper commitment to socialism through to a situation in which reforms become an end in themselves, and from there to a problematic merely concerned with managing capitalism. The Labour Party is used here to illustrate the point - it set out to "reform capitalism into something vaguely humane". Now, almost a century on Labour has been "turned by capitalism into something rather more than vaguely inhumane".

The commentary on 'vanguard politics' argues that the Bolsheviks provided a socialist strategy as counterproductive as reformism. Apparently, Leninists engage in a "wilful confusion of socialism with nationalisation and state-run capitalism", while believing "socialism could be created by a political minority without the will and participation of the majority of the population". While this may apply to the economistic and voluntaristic practices of some Leninists (including Lenin himself at times, but especially Stalinism), this critique really misses the mark. The SPGB's belief that the SWP, SP, CPGB, etc think that socialism can be established in Britain against the will of the majority and without mass workers' democracy is wishful thinking. In common with every other left group, this is symptomatic of the need to differentiate the SPGB from the rest rather than an honest attempt to grapple with the actual positions of its opponents.

The 'Movement or monument?' article lists what the SPGB takes to be its contributions to "revolutionary theory and practice". Most of which are pretty uncontroversial such as the inevitability of capitalism's crises, the international and majoritarian nature of socialist revolution, and the need for full and open democracy within the socialist movement (something widely preached but not practised by the left at large). Some are distinctly barking, such as the belief that "there can be nothing progressive about wars in the modern world" because ultimately they all boil down to "competitive struggle between sections of the owning class". Presumably then Palestinians should not bother resisting Israel's genocidal occupation if the only result will be to line the pockets of Arafat and friends.

But such positions are to be expected when socialism is separated from the real class struggle in the here and now.