Independent Labor Party
The Independent Labor Party ( ILP ) was a socialist party in the United Kingdom . It was founded in 1893, making it the second socialist party in Great Britain after the Social Democratic Federation . When the Labor Party was founded in 1906, she became a member, but left the party in 1932. In 1975 the ILP dissolved.
founding
In 1881 the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) was founded. It was an attempt to free the British workforce from their attachment to radicalism and to introduce them to Marxist ideas. The SDF had only marginal success, however; the Liberals remained the most important force in the political representation of British workers. To make matters worse, the SDF put its stance in the foreground and called the commitment to socialism as a basic requirement for its politics. In the British working class, however, socialism had only a weak basis, in stark contrast to Germany . The trade union was by far the most important form of organization of the workers and trade union interests were for a long time represented by the liberals, who also brought some trade unionists into parliament and based their power on the encouragement of the workers. But here too the degree of organization of the workers in the trade unions remained low. In addition, British workers, who primarily based their class consciousness on economic grounds, often harbored a distrust of the mostly bourgeois socialists, such as those organized in the small Fabian Society . For them, pragmatic and anti-socialist trade unionists who also came from the working class were more credible. Because of its often sectarian policies, the SDF failed to win over this majority of workers.
Another attempt to establish a political body for workers was the Colne Valley Labor Union , which was founded in 1891 by 20 men in the area between Huddersfield and Oldham in the northern industrial area of England. It was supposed to represent the interests of workers in a region in which small-scale industry prevailed and unions were poorly developed. The organization was to be built out of local Labor clubs that workers over the age of 16 could join for a small fee, but Colne Valley was barely able to gain a foothold in the workforce. At the end of 1891, the organization tried to set up Tom Mann, who had become extremely popular in the London dockworkers strike of 1889, for the upcoming general election, but this refused, so that Colne Valley was without its own candidate and the attempt to establish its own parliamentary workers' representation failed again.
The founding of the ILP was supposed to end this situation. It was formed as an explicit workers' party that had a socialist agenda, but was also intended to appeal to workers who were interested in pure union issues. It was thus part of the emerging New Unionism at the end of the 19th century , which was also based on the noticeable departure of the liberals from the interests of the workers.
In January 1893, 120 delegates gathered in Bradford to form the new party. Among them were popular representatives of the British left such as Keir Hardie , Ben Tillett , Robert Blatchford and the Fabier George Bernard Shaw . The founding assembly was the last part of a series of (failed) attempts to found an independent form of organization of the labor movement, as expressed for example in the Colne Valley Labor Union, which became part of the ILP. Long discussions took place before the founding phase, which focused on regional differences and the needs of smaller organizations that were involved in the formation of the ILP. The character of the ILP was correspondingly different in the British regions: Yorkshire had a more socialist party, west of the Pennines a more chauvinistic to authoritarian working class ("Tory Workers") was to be addressed, and the Scottish ILP was characterized differently.
The ILP fitted into the political and social system of the United Kingdom. She did not pursue a revolutionary policy and instead relied on parliamentarism . Its central organ , the Labor Leader , wrote as early as 1895 of the "great human tragedy" and "dark shadow" that would cause a revolution in Europe. The British historian Ross McKibbin described parliamentarism as a functional connection to the belief in the crown as the guardian of societal, classless rules and moral values, to which the ILP in liberal and democratic Great Britain also submitted.
In retrospect, Keir Hardie also saw these special characteristics of the ILP as beneficial. In 1913 he countered the charge that the ILP had never developed its own theory of socialism, that that was precisely where its strength lay, since it opposed the dogmatism that was emerging in the socialist organizations. The dogmatic groups - such as the SDF - as well as the intellectual Fabier would hardly have reached people in this way, so Hardie. In fact, this strategy initially appeared to be quite successful. As early as 1895, a third of the delegates to the Trade Union Congress (TUC), the umbrella organization of British trade unions, were members of the ILP. The Marxist historian Siegfried Bünger also explained the rise of reformist ideas in the labor movement as a weakness of its “left” wing, which he basically identified with the SDF. However, this was arrested in a dogmatic interpretation of Marxism and had ignored its humanistic elements. Thus, under the heading of “ethical socialism”, as also represented by the ILP, a large gap could be filled. The ideological catchphrase of the Trotskyist International Socialist Tendency , Tony Cliff and his son Donny Gluckstein, described the ILP as the birth of a progressive movement and contrasted it with the Labor Party, which was a bureaucratic maneuver of the TUC.
From joining the Labor Party to the First World War
The ILP was one of the driving forces behind the formation of the Labor Representation Committee (LRC). When, in the last years of the 19th century, the labor movement parted from radicalism out of disappointment with the course of the liberals, the plan arose to found an election platform for trade unionists and socialists. The liberals barely represented the interests of the workers. With the development of capitalism and the aggravation of the social question connected with it, the interests of the bourgeoisie and the working class diverged more and more . The Liberals now represented the interests of entrepreneurs more than those of employees. While they still ran trade unionists under their flag, this was increasingly recognized as a means of drawing votes from the workforce. In 1899 the Social Democratic Federation, the bourgeois-socialist think tank Fabian Society, the ILP and many unions decided to found the LRC. In the general election of 1900 , however, the LRC moved into parliament with only two members, so the traditional ties to the Liberals could not be broken. From the electoral alliance, a new party was formed in 1906, the Labor Party , in which the ILP played a major role. Immediately after it was founded, it joined it and assumed a kind of mediator role between the strongly diverging interests of the often anti-socialist trade unionists and the socialists. Keir Hardie , chairman of the ILP, also became the first chairman of the Labor Party.
It was precisely in the period of the great imperialist wars and crises and the Labor Unrest in the years before the outbreak of World War I that the ILP achieved great influence within the Labor Party. The party repeatedly demonstrated its strong influence at the Labor Party Conventions. In particular, motions and resolutions by the ILP that emphasized internationalism, called for disarmament and against anti-German policies such as those that were decisive during Foreign Minister Edward Gray's tenure , met with great, mostly unanimous, approval at the Labor Party conferences.
However, initial conflicts arose between members of the ILP and Labor Party politics. In 1911 and 1912 a number of "deviants" appeared who joined forces with members of the recently disbanded Social Democratic Party to form the new British Socialist Party (BSP). The background to this and similar foundations was a wave of strike movements, which provoked an extremely fierce resistance from the state by British standards. Many socialists wanted to take advantage of this momentum, which was strongly accompanied by syndicalism , to bring about more radical changes. However, the BSP remained a short episode, as it broke up on the war question as early as 1914.
Government Participation and the Communism Debate
After the end of the world war, the labor movement in Europe was divided. The question of support for the war course of the governments since 1914 led in many socialist parties to a separation of war advocates and opponents. As a result, communist parties emerged in many places after 1918 . The Socialist International, which got into a severe existential crisis in 1914 , was reorganized in 1918, but at the beginning of 1919 was confronted with the call for a third, Communist International from Moscow to be founded. In the following years, a debate broke out in the ILP about the party's relationship to this alliance of communist parties under the de facto leadership of the Russian Bolsheviks. In 1920 the ILP left the Socialist International as a consequence of the majority war course of the European Social Democrats in 1914. The party leadership, including the decided opponent of 1914 Ramsay MacDonald, refused entry into the Comintern. As a result, factions were formed as well as a clear rejection from Moscow, for example of the more pacifist and reform-oriented positions of the ILP. Nevertheless, the Comintern continued to campaign for the revolutionary sections of the ILP and their organization in a communist party. At the party congress in 1921, an application for the ILP to join the Comintern was finally rejected by a large majority. From then on the ILP found itself in a position between the social democratic and communist currents. Their position was comparable to that of the left-wing socialists in Germany and Austria.
In the general election of 1922, the Labor Party made big gains. Many of the new parliamentarians came from the ILP. The party achieved similarly good results in the new elections of 1923. After the necessary majority could not be achieved there, elections were held again in 1924, which ended with the first government with Labor participation in a coalition with the reunified liberals. Ramsay MacDonald became their prime minister. MacDonald concentrated primarily on foreign policy, the area where the government ultimately failed.
Leaving the Labor Party and World War II
At the party congress of 1931 there was serious discussion for the first time about leaving the Labor Party, a proposal that ultimately failed to find a majority. Nevertheless, the ILP candidates, who ran for the general election of 1931, decided to appear more autonomously and to emphasize their independence from the Labor Party. As a result, the ILP candidates were denied support by the umbrella party. As a result, only five ILP representatives were elected to parliament, but they formed a parliamentary group that was independent of the Labor Party. In 1932, a party congress finally decided to leave the Labor Party. This step had drastic consequences for the party structure. In the following years the ILP lost 75 percent of its members. On the one hand, the ILP now had a clear left-wing socialist profile and was also a member of the London office , an association of left-wing socialist parties; on the other hand, this was not enough to persuade members to continue, so that a majority on the one hand from the Labor Party, on the other hand from the Communist Party and the growing Trotskyist groups.
In the mid-1930s, the ILP also became the target of de-Christian activities by individual Trotskyist groups who saw the growing left-wing socialist parties in Europe as an alternative between reformist social democracy and Stalinist-dominated communism.
literature
- Martin Pugh : Speak for Britain! A New History of the Labor Party . London 2011
- John Howell: British Workers and the Independent Labor Party . 1888-1906, Manchester 1983
- Henry Pelling: Origins of the Labor Party . Oxford 1965
- Ross MacKibbin: Why was there no Marxism in Britain? In: EHR 99 (1984) and in ders. The Ideologies of Class. Social Relations in Britain, 1880-1950, Oxford 1990
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Pugh 2011, p. 41 f.
- ↑ Pugh 2011, p. 37
- ↑ Howell 1983, pp. 283 f.
- ^ Labor Leader, January 26, 1895
- ^ Ross McKibbin, Why was there no Marxism in Britain ?, p. 20
- ↑ James Keir Hardie, After Twenty Years: All about the ILP, London 1913, pp. 6 ff.
- ↑ Ina Hermes, Against Imperialism and War. Unions and the Second International, Cologne 1979, p. 22
- ^ Siegfried Bünger, The Socialist Anti-War Movement in Great Britain 1914-1917, Berlin 1967, p. 16.
- ↑ Tony Cliff, Donny Gluckstein, The Labor Party. A Marxist History, London 1988, p. 24.
- ↑ cf. Douglas J. Newton, British Labor and European Socialism and the Struggle for Peace 1889-1914, Oxford 1985, p. 297 ff.