British Socialist Party

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The British Socialist Party (BSP) was a socialist party active in Great Britain between 1911 and 1920 and affiliated to the Labor Party since 1916 . Initially composed very heterogeneously in terms of personnel and programs, in the last years of its existence it pursued a political approach that is basically comparable to the conceptions of the German left and the Bolsheviks, based on the structural dominance of the left wing of the party . Numerous subsequent leadership cadres of the Communist Party of Great Britain , founded in 1920, were already involved in the BSP (including William Gallacher , Albert Inkpin and Harry Pollitt ).

background

The BSP came into being in the face of contradicting trends in the British labor movement in the decade before the beginning of the First World War . On the one hand, as in parallel only in Russia , unrest and restlessness among wage earners took on a considerable extent not seen since the days of the Chartists . For the first time ever, mass strikes covered entire branches of industry, including mining, the textile industry and the railways. On average, the unions gained around 500,000 new members each year. These structural shifts (along with the disputes over Ireland ) led to a latent crisis in the traditional political system. On the other hand, the systemic integration of the parliamentary representation of this movement - the Labor Party - achieved a new quality that many activists decidedly rejected. The unconditional support by the Labor MPs for the social reform legislation of the Asquith government, which, according to its political intention, was directed against the upswing of the labor movement, and the associated social-pacifist concept - Arthur Henderson introduced a bill in 1911 which provided for a general ban on strikes if they were not Announced 30 days in advance - made the Labor Party a mere "wing" or "radical appendage" of the Liberal Party in the eyes of many observers .

development

Beginnings

The BSP, which was launched in Manchester on September 30, 1911 in response to the Labor crisis, was, from an organizational- historical perspective, a re-establishment of the Social Democratic Federation (which had already been renamed the Social Democratic Party in 1908 ) to include left-wing associations and circles that had previously stood apart. . The new party, however, also joined notable sections of the left wing of the Independent Labor Party . At the time of its founding, the BSP united almost all currents and groups that criticized Labor reformism - in very different ways. Only the small parties (the Socialist Labor Party and the Socialist Party of Great Britain ) that emerged a decade earlier as part of the Impossibilist Revolt and the syndicalist groups in the trade unions were left out. Initially, the BSP had around 35,000 members.

In the prewar period, the left wing of the party, arguing fundamentally in a Marxist way , represented between a third and a slim majority of those entitled to vote at the annual conferences and in the executive committee. Zelda Kahan , Theodore Rothstein , John Maclean and the Inkpin brothers emerged as its spokesmen and activists . The Scottish and London party groups offered the strongest support to the leftist currents.

However, until 1915, the BSP was shaped by functionaries from Henry M. Hyndman's environment . The Hyndman group ( Henry W. Lee , Harry Quelch , Victor Fisher , Will Thorne, and others) took a very specific political approach that amalgamated left and right elements. While within the labor movement she continued to pursue the old SDF course of strict political and organizational demarcation from the Labor Party and the reformist trade unions, she advocated foreign policy in a complete reversal of the premises of this attitude, which the BSP Marxists fought as "ultra-left" and "sectarian" a radical nationalist program that was particularly noticeable because of its decidedly “anti-German” thrust. Hyndman, who for decades had blamed British trade unions for blinding ideals of harmony and a lack of revolutionary vigor (and continued to do so), publicly since 1909 took the view that the British ruling class - unlike the German bourgeoisie - played a progressive role and therefore a potential cooperation partner; the British upper class is an "anti-imperialist bourgeoisie" oriented towards free trade . On the basis of this assumption, Hyndman and his supporters pleaded for the further expansion of the global political influence of Great Britain and above all for the further promotion of armaments at sea. After several defeats in the votes at party conferences and in the Executive Committee, Hyndman declared himself ready in 1913 to stop the public propagation of his views.

First World War and post-war period

The beginning of the war in August 1914 immediately revealed the unbridgeable distance between the party currents. The Hyndman group pushed through war-affirming resolutions in the executive committee of the BSP, celebrated Britain's entry into the war in the party newspaper Justice, and expressly supported the British Army’s volunteer campaign; the official government motivation for participating in the war - initially the protection of neutral or "small nations" and especially Belgium , later the "defense of freedom and democracy" - was accepted by Hyndman. British socialists should - so he and his supporters argued - support the war effort, since the elimination of “ Prussian militarism” would lead to a social revolution in Germany and, by the way, socialism in their own country through the organizational changes in the economic structure in “8 weeks of war "Would advance faster than in" 30 years of propaganda ". Such statements met with strong rejection from numerous party groups. One of the first statements of this opposition current to speak was a letter from John Maclean to the editors of the ILP newspaper Forward , famous for its signal effect ; In the letter, Maclean countered Ernest Belfort Bax's request to "hate the Prussian military and bureaucratic state system" with the position: "Our first task is to hate the British capitalist system".

Hyndman's attempt to denigrate left spokesmen as “cosmopolitan foreigners” and “German-Russian-Polish Jews” could not prevent the party leadership from falling on the defensive at the end of 1914 and being forced to convene an extraordinary, regionally separate meeting To agree to party conference. At the beginning of February 1915, the same rejected the draft resolution of the Hyndman wing by 96 against 41 votes (although the left's draft also fell through with 82 against 66 votes). With 67 votes to 50, the delegates approved an address of solidarity to Karl Liebknecht , who had voted against the war credits in the Reichstag on December 2, 1914 and was thereby also known in Great Britain. The newly elected nine-member executive committee now consisted of only four people from the Hyndman circle. The assertion immediately spread in the bourgeois press by Hyndman and Adolphe Smith-Headingley that the war opponents were “pro-German” or “traitors” bought with German money was sharply rejected by the Executive Committee. Admittedly, the right initially refused to leave the BSP and thus forced a factional struggle that lasted until 1916, crippling the whole party and which was sometimes violent - for example, the prominent leftist Albert Inkpin was killed in July 1915 on the sidelines of an event of the Victor Fisher, the Socialist National Defense Committee, was beaten up in London's Queen's Hall . Such political and personal self-dismantling led to the collapse of the positions of the right wing of the party, which at the next party conference (April 23/24, 1916 in Salford ) only gathered nine delegates - with 80 votes against - behind its draft resolution and only put one shop steward on the executive committee could. Hyndman left the BSP after this debacle and founded the National Socialist Party in June 1916 . He was also able to persuade a narrow majority of the Justice shareholders to remove the sheet from the BSP. The Call , previously a parliamentary group sheet of the left wing , became the new central organ .

John Maclean in court, spring 1918

Even before these developments - in January 1916 - the new leadership majority, with the intention of breaking the sect-like isolation of the BSP, pushed through the affiliation to the Labor Party , which had been decided in 1914 but had been delayed for a long time . The party initially adopted this stance of relative rapprochement with the reformist majority of the labor movement internationally, where it was initially skeptical of the political and organizational initiatives of the Bolsheviks ( Zimmerwald Movement ) that had resulted from the irreparable collapse of the Second International . Nevertheless, in its programmatic declarations since the summer of 1916, the BSP also envisaged a revolutionary end to the war and turned against the more or less openly pronounced standstill policy of the Labor leadership. In the final years of the war, the British judiciary increased its crackdown on BSP activists, several of them - including John Maclean - being sentenced to prison terms or deported overseas. Politically, the BSP was able to benefit little from the left-wing development of the British labor movement that began at the turn of 1916/17. A real influence on the shop steward movement - and with it the longed for direct anchoring in the factories - the party did not succeed; Conversely, however, the Labor leadership succeeded in 1918 in retaining its supporters with a new party program that for the first time formulated a socialist objective.

With the departure of the Hyndman wing and the forced, often fatal, military service of many BSP members, their number fell to less than 10,000 by 1919. Nevertheless, between 1918 and 1920, BSP activists played a key role in building the Hands-Off Russia movement , for whose coordination a committee formed in September 1919 on the BSP initiative was responsible. A membership survey carried out in the spring of 1919 had meanwhile shown that of the 102 basic organizations of Party 98, 98 were in favor of leaving the Second International and joining the Communist International founded in March of the same year . In the months that followed, the BSP leadership tried to involve as many revolutionary groups as possible in the formation of a new communist party. As a result, the BSP went on July 31/1. In the Communist Party of Great Britain on August 1920 ; Albert Inkpin became the first general secretary of the CPGB, with Arthur MacManus ( Socialist Labor Party or Communist Unity Group ) as chairman .

See also

literature

  • Bünger, Siegfried, The Socialist Anti-War Movement in Great Britain 1914-1917 , Berlin 1967
  • Klugmann, James, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Vol. 1: Formation and Early Years, 1919-1924 , London 1968

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Subok, LI (et al.), The History of the Second International, Volume 2, Moscow 1983, pp. 192f. A classic overall view of this epoch is Dangerfield, George, The Strange Death of Liberal England, London 1936. According to Eric Hobsbawm, these were "actually the only years in which the stable and at the same time flexible adjustment mechanism of British politics ceased to function and the power of its nakedness Bones to be seen, bared by the tissue that normally covers them. (...) Those were the years when violence was in the English air (...). " See Hobsbawm, Eric J., Industry and Empire. British economic history since 1750, Volume 2, 5th edition Frankfurt am Main 1977, p. 29.
  2. ↑ See Bünger, Siegfried, The Socialist Anti-War Movement in Great Britain 1914–1917, Berlin 1967, p. 16.
  3. ↑ See Miliband, Ralph, Parliamentary Socialism. A Study in the Politics of Labor, London 1961, p. 22.
  4. ↑ Schumacher, Horst (et al.), History of the international labor movement in data, Berlin 1986, p. 132.
  5. ^ See Bünger, Anti-War Movement, p. 15 and Rothstein, Theodore, Contributions to the History of the Workers' Movement in England, Vienna 1929, p. 362.
  6. ↑ On this complex see Tsuzuki, Chushichi, The "Impossibilist Revolt" in Britain, in: International Review of Social History, 1956, pp. 377-397.
  7. ↑ See Röder, Karl-Heinz (Ed.), The political system of Great Britain. From the English bourgeois revolution to the present, Cologne 1982, p. 402.
  8. ↑ See Subok, Internationale, pp. 199f. and Bünger, Anti-War Movement, p. 39.
  9. ↑ On the work of BSP in Scotland - and in general on the phenomenon of "Red Clydeside" - see overall Gallacher, William, Revolt on the Clyde, London 1949.
  10. ↑ See Bünger, Anti-War Movement, p. 15.
  11. ↑ See Subok, Internationale, p. 200.
  12. ↑ See Bünger, Anti-War Movement, p. 39.
  13. ↑ See Bünger, Antikriegsbewegung, p. 39 and Subok, Internationale, p. 200.
  14. ^ See Bünger, Anti-War Movement, pp. 21, 25f., 37.
  15. ↑ See Bünger, Anti-War Movement, p. 37.
  16. ↑ See Bünger, Anti-War Movement, p. 38.
  17. ^ See Bünger, Anti-War Movement, pp. 39f., 55.
  18. ↑ See Bünger, Anti-War Movement, pp. 56f.
  19. ↑ See Bünger, Anti-War Movement, p. 57.
  20. ↑ See Bünger, Anti-War Movement, pp. 57f.
  21. ^ See Bünger, Anti-War Movement, p. 105. Fisher was subsequently excluded from the BSP.
  22. ↑ See Bünger, Anti-War Movement, pp. 110ff.
  23. ↑ See Bünger, Anti-War Movement, p. 116.
  24. ↑ See Bünger, Anti-War Movement, p. 116.
  25. ↑ See Bünger, Anti-War Movement, p. 107ff.
  26. ↑ In Rothstein's view, the BSP was never more than a "propagandistic organization without the slightest direct influence on the working class." See Rothstein, Contributions, p. 362.
  27. ↑ See Bünger, Anti-War Movement, pp. 106f.
  28. ↑ See Bünger, Anti-War Movement, pp. 125, 190.
  29. ^ See Bünger, Anti-War Movement, p. 197.
  30. ↑ See Truchanowski, WG, Recent History of England 1917–1951, Berlin 1962, p. 52.
  31. ↑ See Bünger, Siegfried, Kaeselitz, Hella, Geschichte Great Britain from 1918 to the Present, Berlin 1989, p. 27.
  32. ↑ See Truchanowski, Geschichte, p. 52.