V S Anand and F A Ridley 1970
Source: Pamphlet published in 1970 by the Medusa Press, 32 Paul Street, London EC2. The many typographical errors in the original text have been corrected. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.
For Ellis S Hillman
With the coming of socialism universally, the struggle for existence disappears. Then in a certain sense mankind will come out of the animal kingdom, and will for the first time attain conditions that are truly human. – Frederick Engels
In the ensuing pages we present to a generation to whom he is fast becoming merely a name, the portrait of one of the most colourful figures ever thrown up by the British labour movement. Or perhaps we should say, annexed by that movement. James Maxton was actually a good deal more than the ‘beloved rebel’, as his official biographer styled him. For he represented, particularly in his later years, after the break between the Independent Labour Party and the Labour Party (1932), the nearest approach to the leader of an indigenous socialist movement in Britain since the era of Chartism. Had the political evolution of the ‘Hungry Thirties’ in Great Britain taken a slightly different course, James Maxton, as the acknowledged leader of militant socialism in Britain, might have played a more spectacular role. As things turned out, he is remembered today, if at all, as perhaps the last, and certainly as one of the most eloquent and colourful figures, produced by what we may term the ‘heroic age’ of socialism in Britain.
That age is surely over. The age of colourful agitators has now given way to the more drab, though no doubt equally indispensable, age of the administrators and the technocrats.
Accordingly, we present the portrait of a rebel, of James Maxton, as one of the Clydeside Tribunes. We present the figure in the context of his age; an age in which he was one of the most eloquent spokesmen.
His biographer Gilbert MacAlister has well said, ‘Maxton was the conscience of British labour movement'; and the express function of the conscience, apart from making ‘cowards of us all’, is surely to move others to action. This indispensable task was fulfilled for the British labour movement for a generation more by James Maxton than by anybody else. His capacities in this and in other respects are sufficient to assure him a permanent place in the annals of the labour movement in Britain.
James Maxton was born in 1885 in Pollokshaw, today a southern suburb of Glasgow, of Scottish middle-class parents. His romantic appearance stemmed greatly from this; and, together with the rolling Scottish lilt that made his oratory so irresistible, it helps to explain much in his personal character and in his political career.
A Scotland uneasily united with its traditional enemy and southern neighbour, England, has represented throughout the industrial epoch the spearhead of radicalism in the British Isles. In the slums of Glasgow and Edinburgh, in the filthy dens and foul hovels of the Gorbals and Cannongate, the prevailing squalor began, towards the end of the nineteenth century, to be transformed by the logic – a logic which three centuries of the Calvinist theology had made second nature for Scotsmen since the time of John Knox – into modern secular theories of social protest and revolt. First radicalism, then socialism, not excluding its extreme manifestations in Marxism and similar philosophies of continental origin, made their disturbing appearances. Socialism, both in its appeal to Scottish logic and as a practical protest against a poverty which made the slums of Glasgow rival those of Marseilles as the worst in Europe, combined to foster the spirit of revolt. One can even suggest that the organised British labour movement was born in Scotland at the turn of the century.
It was a Scotsman, James Keir Hardie, an ex-miner, reared in poverty from his youth, who founded the British Labour Party, and made socialism a living issue in British politics. It was another Scot, James Ramsay MacDonald, who became the first Labour Prime Minister of Great Britain in 1924.
The Scots, unlike the English, are essentially a democratic people. Three centuries of the ‘democratic theocracy’ of Calvinism, as a Scottish historian has termed it, has taught Scotsmen to be so. The Scots are a people who believe in the equality of man: they have made a ploughman, Robert Burns, their national hero and god. In this, they are unlike the English, who have great respect for their betters. The doctrine of social equality, inherent in socialism, comes to Scotland from the highest sources: it is taught on divine authority in the Shorter Catechism of the Calvinist Presbyterian Church, and has been illustrated in practice by the democratic organisation of the Scottish Church, which, centuries before the Russian Revolution of 1917, embodied in its Presbyterian organisation the leading features of what since 1917 we have learnt to call the Soviet system.
Keir Hardie and the ILP: The Labour Party, however, represents the political conclusion rather than the beginning of the organisation of labour upon a professedly socialist basis. It came into existence as the culmination of a whole series of small groupings and sects: the ILP, SLP, BSP, SDF and so on; in a brief essay like this, we must refer the reader to more voluminous sources to cast light on these matters. One, however, the ILP, still exists in the year 1970, and must be mentioned in more detail. Its spectacular career and chequered fortunes are inseparable from our ‘portrait of a rebel’, it is both personal propaganda and the political career of James Maxton that we shall seek to present. For the Independent Labour Party was for forty years (1893 – 1932) the avowedly ‘extremist left’ of the organised British labour movement. Even more to this point of view, the ILP was the party with which both the personal and political career of James Maxton were inseparably associated for over forty years (1904–46). If socialism was the political philosophy of which James Maxton was one of the most eloquent advocates, the ILP, no less, was the organisation in which exclusively this life-long propaganda was conducted.
Had the ILP perished stillborn, like so many polysyllabic contemporaries, Maxton’s dramatic personality and irresistible oratorical charm would have found some other outlet. As it is, to seek to present even the briefest assessment of the character and propaganda of James Maxton apart from the party which he led for so long – would surely be to present Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark himself. The Independent Labour Party, the ILP, was not a specifically Scottish, but an all-British party. As such, it was founded at Bradford at a special delegates conference held in 1893. At this conference, at which Keir Hardie and George Bernard Shaw were present, it was finally decided to found an ‘Independent Labour Party’ in order to represent organised labour upon the political field. The founders of the ILP did not, of course, intend to establish a party ‘independent’ of the Labour Party, which did not exist at that time. The term ‘Independent Labour Party’ implied a Labour Party ‘independent’ of the then bourgeois Tory and Liberal Parties, both of whom, in particular Gladstone’s Liberal Party, were seeking and actually receiving the votes of a large section of the politically-interested British workers. In fact, the ILP was originally created with the aim of becoming the mass party of the British working class, independent of both Tories and Liberals. The ILP, however, never succeeded in occupying this role, which was filled by the Labour Party at the turn of the century.
ILP and the Labour Party: It would take us beyond the scope of this modest essay to seek to enquire why it was that the ILP, despite all its energy and devotion, not to mention many talented personalities whom it enlisted in its service, failed in its major objective of becoming the mass party of the British workers. Nonetheless, one may mention as a contributory cause its uncompromisingly socialist policy and its refusal to truck with what it regarded as merely reformist ideas. The success of the Labour Party, of course, has been due to a whole succession of social and political compromises which have ended by fully integrating it into the framework of the bourgeois state and bourgeois society.
Keir Hardie, from the start the leader and the inspirator of the ILP, and both his English and the Scottish colleagues, were socialists to a man. At the start the ILP received expert advice from the greatest living socialist thinker, Frederick Engels, but the ILP never became a one hundred per cent Marxist party.
Thus British socialists succeeded in forming an ‘Independent Labour Party’ that was henceforth to carry on a vigorous campaign in all parts of the United Kingdom with such signal success that its influence soon became out of all proportions to its comparatively small number. With the turn of the century, labour agitation multiplied upon every hand. The ILP, recognising its failure to become the mass party of the British workers, applied for affiliation to the new Labour Party, a party beginning in 1900 under the title of the ‘Labour Representation Committee’ and backed by the trade unions. As the left wing of the new Labour Party, in which the then leaders of the ILP Keir Hardie and Ramsay MacDonald soon assumed leadership, the ILP continued its nationwide propaganda on behalf of socialism. It represented the militant spearhead as well as the propaganda arm of socialism.
In Scotland, their efforts met with conspicuous success from the start; and it was in Glasgow – ‘the most dangerous city’ in the British Empire, as a contemporary Tory journalist described the Clyde metropolis – that in 1904 the ILP received its most eloquent recruit, a student of Glasgow University, James Maxton.
The ILP had always drawn a substantial section of its membership from the more idealistic section of what an orthodox Marxist would probably describe as the petty bourgeois. With his flowing hair, usually uncut, lean aesthetic appearance, Maxton never looked at all like a typical proletarian; or for that matter like a typical bourgeois either. In fact he never looked at all anyone but ‘Jimmy’ Maxton.
Maxton in his youth pursued the normal scholastic career of his class, without either exemplary success or conspicuous failure. It was at Glasgow University that he first became interested in politics as a Tory; in which capacity he debated with the local Fabian Society, one of whose members, Walter Elliot, was to become a Tory cabinet minister. On finally quitting the ranks of Toryism, which he did while still at the university in 1904, Maxton did not join the Fabians. Their brand of one-step-at-a-time socialism was, in any case, hardly suited to his ardent temperament. Nor did his Scottish logic respond to their ‘biological’ theory of ‘inevitability of gradualness’, as taught by the archpriest of Fabianism, Sydney Webb.
In the course of his later propaganda, Maxton often brilliantly refuted this Fabian analogy between political and biological progress, particularly dear to Maxton’s former colleague and later political chief James Ramsay MacDonald. As was no doubt inevitable under the circumstances, when Maxton did make the leap for socialism in 1904, he joined the ILP, then 11 years old and in the full flush of its propaganda activity as the ultra-socialist ‘left’ of the then nascent labour movement.
James Maxton was to remain in the ILP for the rest of his life, and it is with the ILP that his name and fame were and are inevitably linked, both in his own lifetime and in the eyes of posterity. In every respect, both personal and political, there was complete congruity between Maxton and the ILP. Not only did the political programme, Socialism In Our Time, and not in some remote paradise of Fabian ‘planners’, appeal to Maxton’s ardent temperament, but also he was himself both personally and politically a typical socialist of the ILP vintage, a vintage that he himself was so largely to mould. In that vintage, a revolution and reform were not antagonistic objectives, as in the more doctrinaire groups (SPGB, SLP, etc) on the extreme left. Since the ILP never allowed itself to obscure or finally to eliminate the final objective of the party summarised as the international cooperative commonwealth of socialism.
Towards the Cooperative Commonwealth: Similarly, in his own personal approach, James Maxton shared and continued to share for the rest of his active political career what we may perhaps term both the scientific and the ethical approach. In his repeated controversies with the right-wing Labour protagonists of ‘gradualness’, Maxton brilliantly refuted their superficial analogies between human progress and that of the animal kingdom, with arguments that were essentially revolutionary and even Marxist in character. But perhaps the main and most urgent driving force behind his impassioned agitation was ethical rather than directly scientific in character. In this respect, Maxton personally and the ILP in general perhaps derived essentially their fundamental philosophy from William Morris rather than from Karl Marx. From the Morris of News From Nowhere and The Dream Of John Ball inspiring example of the cooperative commonwealth realised through concrete human cooperation rather than through scientific analysis. This empirical approach to social evolution, and even the socialism propounded by the Englishman Morris, had perhaps a more direct appeal to an essentially empirical people like the English than had the theories so widely adopted upon the European continent under the inspiration of Karl Marx and his disciples.
Maxton and in general the ILP were ‘Marxists’ in the general sense that they accepted the fundamental social theories advanced by the master of continental socialism. But it would be true to affirm that the main driving force behind that practical agitation came rather from the sources indigenous to these islands; from William Morris and from Robert Burns (particularly of course in Scotland), and farther back, from the long pre-Marxist English and Scottish revolutionary tradition that extends from Magna Carta (1215) in England and the ‘Declaration of Arbroath’ in Scotland (1320), by such egalitarian movements as the Levellers of the Commonwealth and the Chartists of the early industrial era. The same can probably also be said for James Maxton himself.
James Maxton and the ILP: But we anticipate. When Maxton first joined the ILP in 1904, all this lay in the future. A democratic party like the ILP had no ‘favourite sons'; he who would be in it, must be of it. Such a one must prove his worth in practice, which as far as the ILP was concerned meant chiefly political propaganda. The time was very propitious for this kind of work. At that time, near the end of a long era of Tory aristocratic rule (the then Prime Minister, AJ Balfour, was a scion of the noble House of Cecil), the country was approaching the election of 1906 which returned the Liberal government with the biggest majority of modern times; creating incidentally the Parliamentary Labour Party on route.
After this date, the then leaders of the ILP, Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald, etc, mostly became MPs (Hardie had already been one since 1891), and more and more of their time was taken by the parliamentary business of the House of Commons. But the ILP still remained primarily a party of agitators, propaganda remained their life-sap. In this field, their new recruit, who had taken up school-teaching for a profession after graduation, soon made his mark and no common mark either. For James Maxton was the ideal agitator, both physically, politically and psychologically. His appearance, his intonation, his oratory, and last, his sincerity and whole-hearted devotion to the socialist cause, made him perhaps the outstanding agitator in what was probably the greatest generation of agitators this island has known.
Maxton became, whether in Parliament or outside it, an agitator, a propagandist of socialism. And what an agitator! Keir Hardie may have given an even more dynamic personality and impassioned sincerity to the labour movement which he did so much to create and inspire; Ramsay MacDonald in his prime, with his ‘organ voice’ and princely bearing, may have surpassed Maxton in sheer oratorical powers. Philip Snowden, with his razor-edged tongue, probably surpassed Maxton as the parliamentary debater, and there were not a few self-taught Marxist scholars (Walton Newbold and Fred Casey, etc.) who were Maxton’s superiors in learning and industry. But nowhere was there that unique combination of romantic aestheticism, rolling eloquence, and inspired sincerity. There was, and there remained for the rest of his life, only one ‘Jimmy’ Maxton. Naturally the arrival of such an outstanding recruit did not go unnoticed. Soon Maxton was spending his leisure in propaganda trips all over, first Scotland, then as his fame grew, over the whole of Great Britain. He soon became a recognised ‘emperor of the soap-box’ throughout the length and the breadth of the land. His gift of eloquence was backed by a caustic wit. He himself in later days used to tell how when apparently ‘stumped’ for an answer by a knowledgeable heckler (there are many such, in Scotland particularly), he blandly assured his audience that he was indeed impaled upon the ‘horns of dilemma’, but that he felt so comfortable in that position that he proposed to stay there indefinitely. His gifts met their natural reward, generally with the public at large, specifically with his own party, the ILP, now expanding rapidly after 1906, along with the rapid growth of the labour movement in general. Socialist propaganda was ‘in the air’, and here was a master propagandist in both appearance and in reality. ‘Jimmy’ Maxton was elected to the Scottish Divisional Council of the ILP, the vanguard of the ILP. Then in 1912, as an already nationally known figure, Maxton was elected to the National Administrative Council of the party, the supreme authority of the ILP in Great Britain. Maxton was already known as one of the most eloquent and quite the most colourful of the younger leaders of the British labour movement.
War and Revolution: The ILP opposed the first Anglo-German war (1914–18) upon the grounds since abundantly justified by subsequent historical research that it was only superficially an ideological war fought to preserve ‘Western “democracy” against Prussian militarism’. The real factors notably arose from the then political rivalry upon a world scale between the by now declining British Empire and its rival, the rising imperialism in Germany. In so doing, the ILP was only continuing its prewar policy which had always opposed militarism and imperialism both British and any other. James Maxton himself fully concurred with this view, and along with other spokesmen of the British left such as John Maclean, Emmanuel Shinwell, Willy Gallagher, conducted active propaganda for a negotiated peace and for a speedy end to hostilities.
In reply, the British government displayed its ‘tolerance’ by imprisoning its most outspoken and influential critics. Among these, Maxton did six months in Glasgow jail. However, the ILP continued its anti-war propaganda and welcomed with enthusiasm the outbreak of the Russian Revolution (March–November 1917), the first successful socialist revolution in history. Glasgow, the spiritual headquarters of the ILP, was the first city in Britain officially to recognise the Russian Bolshevik regime.
So great was the enthusiasm aroused by this titanic event that at the end of the war, the ILP even opened negotiations with the new Communist International founded by Lenin in 1918 in order to expand the Russian Revolution upon the world scale. These negotiations, however, eventually broke down on account of the doctrinaire insistence of the Comintern that an armed insurrection on the Russian model was the only road to socialism.
The ILP, however, in which a strong pacifist element has always been present, rejected this condition, and, in return, were fiercely denounced by the Bolsheviks, by Trotsky in particular in his famous pamphlet Where Is Britain Going?. Rather ironically, the present-day Communist Parties including the British one in The British Road To Socialism, have now apparently accepted a line identical to that then put forward by the ILP.
With the end of the first Anglo – German War, Great Britain and, along with it, the British labour movement found itself confronted by an entirely changed situation in both the political, economic and psychological fields. The Liberal Party, the traditional British party of the left, virtually collapsed overnight, and its place as the official opposition and in time alternative government was then taken by the Labour Party. Simultaneously, Britain lost her former Victorian monopoly as the headquarters of the industrial revolution; a change reflected in a spectacular growth of poverty and of mass unemployment. The ‘Hungry Thirties’ were just round the corner.
An early result of this cataclysmic change was the advent of the first Labour government in 1924 (January to October). Another result was the rapid growth in membership of Labour’s avowedly socialist left, the ILP, which around 1924 obtained its maximum numerical strength of some 30,000.
Another and very spectacular result was the election in 1922 in ‘Red Glasgow’ of an entire group of the ILP members: Maxton, Wheatley and others soon to be nationally famous as the ‘Clydeside group’. Maxton himself was elected for the Bridgeton division of Glasgow, for which he continued to sit for the rest of his life. This group soon made itself ‘infamous’ by its outspoken attacks upon the then Tory government; an attack that brought a note of reality into ‘the best social club’ in London, as the House of Commons under Tory rule has been often described. Maxton’s own oratory soon established him as the undisputed parliamentary spokesman of the ‘Clydeside group’, and in time even Tory MPs referred to him as the universally recognised ‘biggest draw in the House of Commons’.
Maxton used to tell an amusing story of those early parliamentary days. On one occasion after delivering a fierce attack on the callous indifference of the Tory government to the suffering of the unemployed, he was accosted in the lobby by the minister concerned: ‘Surely, Jimmy’, he protested, ‘you did not really mean all those dreadful things that you just have been saying about me. Come to the bar and have a drink!’ Maxton often used to cite this anecdote as a revealing comment upon the unreality that characterised the proceedings of a still predominantly bourgeois Parliament to the harsh realities outside Westminster. Meanwhile, Labour, along with its Clydeside contingent, was making itself felt in that select rendezvous with the British governing classes before Keir Hardie had first arrived in his cloth cap to introduce proletarian realities. The first proof that, if we may so, paraphrase the Latin tag, ‘the Clyde had flowed into the Thames’, was to be found in the substitution of Scottish ILP leader and self-proclaimed Socialist Leader James Ramsay MacDonald as leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party. The change was due largely to Maxton and his Clydeside colleagues. It was a change that they lived to regret. But at that time, MacDonald remained the leader of the Labour Party right down to 1931, when the ILP was on the eve of breaking away. For it was under the at least titular leadership of this ‘magnificent imitation described MacDonald’ that the final breach between the ILP and the Labour Party came to a head.
Labour Party at the Crossroad: The two years between 1924 and 1926, the years that witnessed the first Labour government and the General Strike (26ndash;12 May 1926), may be said to have marked the decisive turning-point both generally in the world outlook and practical policy of the British labour movement, and specifically, for the political fortunes of the ILP and of its outstanding representative, James Maxton. For the first Labour government did not perform the miracle of socialist transformation that their more ardent supporters in the ILP in particular had expected from them. Instead, it soon became evident that it would need a microscope, and a pretty powerful one, to find any major difference between the Labour government of MacDonald and any average capitalist administration. To add to the disappointment of the ILP, this was a predominantly ILP government, since both the Prime Minister MacDonald himself and his chief lieutenants Philip Snowden and Clydesider John Wheatley had all won their initial spurs in the ILP. When as a result of that fabrication, the so-called Zinoviev Letter (October 1924), the Labour government ignominiously concluded its inglorious career, it left unanswered questions for future discussion throughout the labour movement.
The first and the most urgent of these questions was soon summarily answered in a negative. Put briefly, it was: since the Labour Party even in power was unable or unwilling to make any substantial progress towards socialism by constitutional parliamentary means, was any alternative and quicker route available? A general strike, say, as advocated by the continental syndicalists? Or as the Communist Party (founded in Britain in 1920) then advocated, an armed insurrection on the Russian model? An armed insurrection in England was eloquently advocated by Trotsky in his book Where Is Britain Going?, translated during the General Strike. Incidentally, in this fiery polemic, the famous Russian revolutionary poured scorn upon the ILP for refusing to accept the inevitability of an armed insurrection in Britain.
In May 1926, the long-advocated General Strike occurred but collapsed in 11 days; proving surely that solidarity without adequate leadership and preparation, both of which were conspicuously lacking in May 1926, is not sufficient. As for the armed insurrection, it remained on paper – and upon Russian paper at that!
Successive failures of Parliament during the first Labour government; a failure to be even more glaringly repeated by Ramsay MacDonald’s second administration between May 1929 and August 1931; and an even more summary failure of extra-parliamentary socialism, in the General Strike in 1926, left a huge question mark hanging over the entire British left.
James Maxton, by now the acknowledged leader of the ILP, of which he had been elected Chairman in 1925, and as the outstanding personality of the British left, spent the remaining 20 years of his life trying to find a definitive answer to this urgent question: how to find a viable British road to socialism? Had he succeeded in finding one, he would have gone down in history; he would have ranked in that selected band who have succeeded in changing the face of universal history, in a band which includes Robespierre and Lenin.
That he did not do so can scarcely be blamed or ascribed to any individual failure upon his part. As an observer of human affairs long since noted: ‘There is a tide in the affairs of men, that, taken at the flood, lead on to fortune.’ Or as a radical contemporary of Maxton himself – George Clemenceau – summarised the same thought with Gallic conciseness: ‘There are no great men; since men are only as great as circumstances permit them to be.’ Between 1926 and Maxton’s death in 1946, he and the ILP wandered in the political wilderness. True, Lenin and his Bolshevik Party had also wandered in the wilderness for a decade till its final victory in 1917. But in their case, omnipotent ‘circumstances’ eventually favoured them; the Shakespearian ‘tide’ came their way at last. But James Maxton and the ILP had no such luck.
For this reason, the critical historian has no option but to pronounce Maxton as an ultimate failure, a brilliant and attractive failure, but a failure all the same. Thus, we present ‘the portrait of a rebel'; but a rebel who never came off. However, the failures of life and in politics in particular are often more interesting than the successes. James Maxton conspicuously confirmed this adage. As he had already noted at the start of his career, he was to remain upon the horns of the dilemma indefinitely, in fact for the rest of his life.
On the Horns of a Dilemma: The last 20 years of Maxton’s life (1926 – 46) were exclusively devoted to the increasingly uphill task of trying to revive the declining fortunes of British socialism; inside the Labour Party up to 1932; afterwards outside, and in open opposition to the mass Labour Party from which the ILP disaffiliated in 1932. During the first period inside the Labour Party, Maxton made several attempts to galvanise the labour movement into some semblance of socialist militancy and to arrest the growing drift towards the policy of reformism and compromise with imperialism. His most publicised effort in this direction is to be found in the ‘Maxton-Cook Manifesto’ (1928) entitled A Case for a Socialist Revival, which he wrote with the then militant miners’ General Secretary A.J. Cook (one of the most remarkable men ever to be produced by the British trade-union movement). Their campaign, prolific in eloquence, ultimately produced little. Ramsay MacDonald, who had now quitted the ILP and the Parliamentary Labour Party, continued to move steadily towards the right, towards permanent respectability as custodian of the British Empire. This drift towards the right was conducted with sublime disregard of the fact that the term ‘His Majesty’ in Great Britain, ever since Charles Stuart had lost his head in 1649, has been merely a convenient synonym for the British bourgeoisie and for the capitalist state.
This fact was abundantly proved by the second Labour regime of MacDonald between 1929 and 1931. It was ‘the last straw which broke the camel’s back’: the ‘camel’ being in this case British socialism in general and the ILP in particular. For this time, unlike 1924, it was not merely that the Labour government did nothing at all to realise socialism in a concrete way: to be sure, even the Fabian Bernard Shaw, that staunch champion of parliamentary ‘gradualness’, had to admit that a government exclusively composed of Tory bankers and their stockbrokers would not have acted differently from the Labour government in any essential way. But this time ‘circumstances’ took a hand, a decisive one at that, by implementing a world slump in 1929, a world-wide depression that compelled the Labour government to come to the rescue of capitalism by drastic measures, without any ‘gradualness’ at all! When in the autumn of 1931, the miserable pittances of the fast-increasing army of unemployed had to be slashed by a Labour government in order to keep the banks solvent, there was obviously no place for a socialist party like the ILP in this ignominious scheme. In 1932, the special delegate conference of the ILP voted decisively to disaffiliate from the Labour Party. Henceforth, James Maxton, now and for the remainder of his life, was the undisputed leader of His Majesty’s ‘disloyal’ and socialist opposition.
This decisive move eventually turned out to be a decisive political failure, since Maxton and the ILP remained in the political void for the rest of his life. The ILP itself survived both the split in 1932 and Maxton’s own death in 1946, and still exists as a propaganda organisation. Its political future today now appears to be dependent upon a future political revival of socialism. In view of the apparent elements of disintegration at present at work in the Labour Party, such a revival appears to be increasingly possible. In such an event, the long experience accumulated by the ILP should be of great value to such a socialist revival, towards the achievement of which the ILP may still make an outstanding contribution.
In view of its ultimate failure, this ‘breakaway’ of the ILP from the Labour Party aroused much scornful criticism both at the time and subsequently. Actually, all that Maxton & Co. did in 1932 was to claim for the ILP the political role for which it had been originally founded as ‘the Independent Labour Party’: ‘independent’, we repeat, not of the Labour Party, which did not exist yet in 1893 when the ILP was founded, but of the bourgeois Liberal and Tory Parties. Now in 1932, under Maxton as under Keir Hardie, the ILP again claimed to be the authentic political representative and mass party of the both British socialism and of the British workers, ‘independent’ of the Labour Party as well as of the orthodox bourgeois parties.
Nor was such a claim inherently absurd, as its Labour Party critics reiterated in chorus, any more than Keir Hardie’s claim had been absurd in 1893. Since the 1929 – 31 Labour administration of Ramsay MacDonald had finally betrayed the hopes of the workers, and its most important leaders MacDonald, Snowden and Thomas had actually gone over to the Tories, it was quite reasonable to expect that the British workers, or at least a good many of them, would turn towards the ILP, the more so since the ILP had not only done none of the these things, but had consistently forewarned the workers of the imminence of such a betrayal.
Unfortunately for Maxton and for his colleagues in the ILP, hard Caledonian logic is not the strong point of the British working class. The working class is a conservative class. It again proved this fact in 1931; since even when the workers’ own Labour Party blatantly betrayed them, the British workers remained too conservative to vote for the Conservatives – or for the ILP!
By so doing, they deprived the ILP of any chance of putting into effect its declared policy of ‘socialism in our time'; and incidentally they denied to James Maxton personally any chance of proving himself in the world historical role of a Scottish ‘Lenin’. Though perhaps Maxton was a genius perhaps unequal to the onerous task of leading the first authentic socialist government in Britain. Maxton had been in opposition too long to discharge such a role effectively; he was too much ‘agin’ the government probably to make a successful head of a government himself. It is true that he once wrote a book entitled If I Were a Dictator; but it is difficult to imagine ‘Jimmy’ Maxton as a successful dictator. Dictators pre-eminently require ruthlessness, and ‘Jimmy’ was the mildest of men who would not hurt the proverbial fly. It is difficult to imagine him declaring that ‘heads will roll’, still more ordering defaulting capitalists wholesale to the guillotine!
The final years of Maxton’s life were spent in the political wilderness. Naturally, he adorned this as he adorned all phases of his career with elegance and eloquence. He continued to lead the ILP up to his death in 1946 through all the chequered vicissitudes between Munich and the end of the Second World War. The ILP opposed the Second World War for fundamentally the same reasons that it had opposed the First World War: because fundamentally they regarded it as an imperialist war. Naturally they did not approve of Hitler. But they found it difficult to believe that a government led by Winston Churchill, that arch-reactionary who had fought every progressive cause in his lifetime, from England to India, could be relied upon to lead a democratic crusade. Hitler would never have actually come to power in the first place but for the active support of the Western capitalism, including Britain capitalism, and incidentally Winston Churchill, who publicly expressed the hope that if Britain ever found herself in a similar predicament to Germany in 1933, she would find a British ‘Hitler’ to lead her! Had the British Tory government intervened against Hitler when he first came into power in the early 1930s, they could have eliminated the Nazi menace without difficulty and probably even without bloodshed. Maxton’s own parliamentary speeches throughout the successive crises between Munich and the end of the Second World War were often gems of eloquence and of his own unique charm.
Last Years: James Maxton survived the war and lived long enough to witness the advent of the first majority government of the Labour Party, the Attlee administration, elected in July 1945 with an overwhelming majority. In one of his last parliamentary speeches, Maxton wished them more luck than their predecessors had enjoyed. Would we be wrong in detecting here a note of Swiftian irony, ‘that showed by one satiric touch, no party needed it so much'? Maxton did not live long enough to witness the rapid disintegration of the British Empire which began on the morrow of the Second World War with the independence of India in 1947. Had he survived to witness this epoch-making transformation, Maxton would have undoubtedly hailed with enthusiasm the liberation of India and subsequently of Britain’s Asiatic and African colonies. Ever since its foundation in 1893, the ILP had fought strenuously against imperialism in all its forms, and naturally, since ‘charity begins at home’, against the most powerful empire of the day: the British Empire. Maxton himself had fought for this objective for a generation.
James Maxton died on 23 July 1946, and a huge crowd turned out in Glasgow for the passing of the funeral cortege of a great man, a great Scot and a great socialist: a deserved tribute to a unique personality and a lifelong fighter for political, social and economic emancipation. In so doing, they also honoured the end of a great epoch, the ‘heroic’ age of British socialism, of which James Maxton was perhaps the last outstanding representative.
‘The Beloved Rebel’: In the foregoing pages, we have treated the career of James Maxton primarily as a political figure representing a particular epoch, and a special phase in the evolution of British socialism and the British labour movement. This is, at least in our submission, the only way in which a great man, and perhaps in particular a great socialist, can and ought to be treated by anyone who does not subscribe, as we certainly do not so subscribe, to what is sometimes termed ‘the great man theory of history’, as illustrated say by Maxton’s own countryman Thomas Carlyle. Unlike Carlyle, socialists do not interpret history as solely the work of an outstanding individual. But Maxton was also a major participant in the eventful political struggle that marked his era, that eventful era which marked the emergence of socialism as a world force, and, along with it, the dramatic appearance of a new class in universal history, the proletariat or the working class. ‘Jimmy’ Maxton’s powerful propaganda played no mean part in arousing the latent political consciousness of the working class and thus in introducing a new and dynamic force on to the stage of world history, in that century which has been so aptly referred to as ‘the century of the common man’.
It has been perhaps Maxton’s misfortune that his biographers have been so charmed by his personality and romantic appearance as generally to do much less than justice to his undoubted political importance in and for his age in general and in particular for the socialist movement. Even if we were to accept the harsh judgement – ascribed to one of Maxton’s political contemporaries, Lloyd George – to the effect that he was ‘an orator and nothing more’ – presumably a free translation of ‘Vox et Preaterea Nihil’ [1] – yet it should not be forgotten that Maxton’s age was still the pre-television era of the spoken word, the rostrum and of the now often unjustly denigrated ‘soap-box’; as also that the socialist movement in Britain and elsewhere was still in the propaganda phase of its activity. In such an age, Maxton, that Prince of Propagandists, exercised a correspondingly great influence, one that stamped him as a creative force in moulding his contemporary historical progress. For we must not forget that criticism at the right time and place can also be a creative force. As an orator, as an acknowledged master of ‘the harlot of the arts’, it is difficult to compare ‘Jimmy’ Maxton to his contemporaries since his oratory was of such an intimately personal character, and was so inseparably bound up with, and depended upon, his striking personality and unique delivery. It was said of his countryman James Ramsay MacDonald that he had only to enter a room for everyone to turn around and look at him. The same could no doubt be said about Maxton. Not the least part of ‘Jimmy’ Maxton’s political as well as personal make-up lay in that extraordinary charm that endeared him to men of all parties, friend or foe alike; and that made him, despite the uncompromising character of his socialist opinion, the most popular and sought-after member of the House of Commons. His popularity vied with his eloquence.
To be sure, the descriptive phrase given to him by his official biographer John MacNair, ‘the beloved rebel’, adequately refers to this permanent constituent of an altogether unique character.
James Maxton was a highly intelligent man, widely read, and far from being merely the eloquent demagogue that he is sometime represented as being. All who took part in the discussions in which he participated were confirmed that he left little for his colleagues to add. Maxton was not, it is true, a particular original or profound thinker or scholar; and like most natural orators, did not display the same facility for the written as for the spoken word. Unlike his socialist contemporaries Lenin and Trotsky, Maxton cannot be said to have added anything of special significance to the vast corpus of socialist theory: to be sure, the primarily empirical and pragmatic British socialist movement, unlike its continental contemporaries, has never specialised in socialist theory, or even set much store by or paid much respect to the theoretical tradition. Maxton’s own perhaps most ambitious publication, his study of Lenin, was naturally interesting as the considered opinion of one famous socialist about another and still more famous one, but adds little to either our personal or political understanding of the great Russian revolutionary.
In any case, Lenin’s highly ideological approach to the entire problem of socialism and social evolution was quite foreign to Maxton’s own largely ethical and empirical approach. In general, as we have already noted, he, like the ILP, owed more to indigenous British socialist tradition, whether personified by William Morris in England or by Keir Hardie in Scotland.
The Conscience of the British Labour Movement: If, however, James Maxton was scarcely an intellectual giant, he was certainly a man of outstanding moral calibre: as the years wore on, they brought him fame, first national, then international in character. In his last years, ‘Jimmy’ Maxton was probably the most famous of living Scotsmen: in public estimation perhaps his only equal was that Scottish monarch of the music hall, Sir Harry Lauder. Though some critical minds, more perceptive to the more enduring values of the human condition, might rank Hugh MacDiarmid (CM Grieve) the greatest of Scottish poets since Burns himself, as Maxton’s superior in a permanent sense.
Sir Harry Lauder, perhaps Maxton’s best-known countryman and equally famous contemporary, used to adjure his audience with one of his most famous songs, ‘to keep right on to the end of the road’. James Maxton just did that. As one of his biographers has justly remarked, he ‘was the conscience of the British labour movement’. His personal genius was primarily moral, and he remained an incorruptible champion, the stern and unbending champion of socialism in his time. This most famous Scotsman was also the most modest in his personal relations, but remained adamant where and when the integrity of his socialist principles was concerned. To personal wealth and to ephemeral honours that appeal to a smaller man, he remained entirely indifferent, and presented to his contemporaries the face of one in whom, as with his predecessor Keir Hardie, the prophet always coexisted with the politician. James Maxton’s whole life was unswervingly devoted, not to personal aggrandisement, but to eventual attainment of the international cooperative commonwealth. Perhaps the finest as well as the fittest tribute that can be paid to James Maxton is that he lived consistently as the citizen of that commonwealth, a commonwealth still to seek. We are of the opinion that James Maxton also would have regarded this as the finest and fittest tribute that posterity could pay him.
In the foregoing pages we have sought to present the character and career of James Maxton, both as an important figure in the evolution of the British socialist movement and as in his personal character, the individual realisation of a citizen of the still future cooperative commonwealth. However, before terminating our assessment of the personal and political career of ‘Jimmy’ Maxton, there is still yet another additional factor to consider: the nature of the contribution made by Maxton and by the ILP under his leadership during the generation in which it was operative.
Continental and British Socialism: In approaching the problem raised by the initial appearance and growth of socialism in this island, one has to note in the first instance the sharp distinction between the contemporary growth of socialism upon the European continent and that which evolved more or less spontaneously in Great Britain. Upon the European continent, socialism, and this applies particularly to the German socialism, was primarily a highly theoretical and abstract affair that stemmed directly from the teachings of the individual master endowed with the special talent for social investigation and its discussion. British socialism, contrarily, stemmed primarily from the practical reactions of the British workers to the remorseless exploitation to which the individual industrial workers were subjected. A class drawn at the time of the industrial revolution from the expropriated peasantry of the medieval times. In its nineteenth-century heyday, British capitalism indulged in ruthless repression, and the labour movement arose directly out of this repression and was but little affected by abstract theory. Continental socialism, contrarily, can be neatly assorted under conventional labels derived from the names and teachings of exponents of socialism, facile princepes [2] of course, Karl Marx. In the nineteenth century, by such men as Proudhon, Blanqui, Bakunin, Kropotkin; in our own age, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao Tse Tung, Che Guevara. All these various continental socialist schools, both past and present, were highly abstract and theoretical in their approach; and were consequently marked by strong insistence upon doctrinal purity and equally by sharp divergence in their positive assessment of the nature of the coming socialist society. All, however, were marked by a firm conviction that socialism was something capable of being precisely defined. All of them also were marked by deep respect for the intellectual tradition of the socialist theory; a trait particularly notable in the various schools often at loggerheads with each other that professed to derive from Karl Marx.
Origin of British Socialism: Nothing similar to this is to be found in the course of the evolution of British socialism, at least as a mass movement. Since here there are no quasi-inspired masters, no canonical socialist scriptures like Das Kapital (1867) or The Communist Manifesto (1848), despite the rather ironic fact that both these epoch-making works were actually written in Britain. Perhaps still more ironically, though Karl Marx spent most of his working life in the library of the British Museum, yet there is probably no other advanced industrial land where the ideas of the brilliant author of Das Kapital have had so little influence as in Britain. In point of fact, socialist theory in Britain has been generally conspicuous by its absence! That weighty saying of Lenin, re-echoed in all continental socialist schools, ‘without socialist theory there can be no socialist practice’, strikes no echo in British socialist tradition. Here pragmatism and a purely empirical approach represents the virtually unvarying rule. While as for theory, the British approach, in socialism as elsewhere, is aptly and accurately summarised in that typically British proverb, ‘an ounce of practice is worth a ton of theory’. Incidentally, a most un-Marxist remark calculated to make the great theoretical master of continental socialism turn over sharply in his Highgate tomb.
It is no accident that the most influential ‘theory’ in the modern British labour movement is the unformulated but nonetheless effective contention of the Fabian Society: their confident assertion that the only valid theory for the British labour movement is that all theory is irrelevant, if not completely useless.
When construed in its original sense, socialism in Britain is pre-industrial in its origin. As a German historian, Edward Bernstein, first effectively demonstrated, it actually originated in what would nowadays be termed the ‘left-wing’ religious sects in Cromwell’s army during the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century. That spectacular military event was also a bona-fide social revolution, a predominantly bourgeois revolution against feudalism, clericalism and absolute monarchy. This revolution threw up the ‘left wing’ in the course of its political advocacy, of ‘the Levellers’ and ‘the Diggers’, and in the egalitarian theory of Gerard Winstanley. For Winstanley’s brand of utopian socialism may perhaps be best described as advocating a species of agrarian socialism in a still predominantly agricultural England. In this restricted sense of the term, Winstanley may perhaps be described as the first English socialist.
But the Stuart Restoration in 1660 and the completion of the bourgeois revolution in 1689 put a stop to this idealistic evolution. In England, radicalism lay dormant until the end of the eighteenth century, when the French Revolution produced fresh social upheavals. This wave of unrest culminated in the Chartist movement (1837–50). Chartism marked the first mass labour movement anywhere during the capitalist epoch. It was during this period, incidentally, that the descriptive term ‘socialist’ first made its appearance. However, as a political theory, the advocacy of socialism was mainly confined to Karl Marx and his fellow continental refugees after the failure of the European revolution of 1848. It was not until the 1880s that the continental socialism became acclimatised upon the British soil. The birth of James Maxton in 1885 was almost contemporary with the dawn of a new era in British politics: ‘the century of the common man’ was just round the corner.
Socialism and the British Labour Movement: The 1880s that witnessed both the death of Karl Marx and the birth of James Maxton (1883 and 1885) saw, as already noted, the birth also of many usually [3] labour groups, notably the SDF (Social Democratic Federation), founded by H.M. Hyndman; the SLP (Socialist Labour Party), founded by the American Marxist Daniel De Leon, a still more rigidly Marxist group; and, most rigid of all, the still existing SPGB (Socialist Party of Great Britain). As also the non-Marxist: the Fabian Society (1884), presently to be followed by the ILP (Independent Labour Party) in 1893. As also noted, the ILP marked the first, though ultimately unsuccessful, attempt to create a mass Labour Party ‘independent’ of the bourgeois Tory and Liberal Parties who then alternatively held the monopoly of the ‘corridors of power’ in the British Parliament and state. However, the explicitly socialist programme of the ILP, defined as ‘the socialisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange’ – that is, of land and capital, and consequent total expropriation of the owners of land and capital – was too advanced for the non-socialist working class at the turn of this century. Their concrete aspirations took a practical shape, the ‘Labour Representative Committee’ (1900), destined to form the eventual nucleus of the modern Labour Party. The Parliamentary Labour Party was subsequently created in 1906 on the morrow of the sweeping Liberal victory at the general election of that year. The Labour Party then made its modest entry into politics as an auxiliary of the Liberal Party and government.
Labour Versus Socialism: Down to 1918, as noted above, the Labour Party was a purely federal organisation without individual membership. It consisted of affiliated trade unions and of a number of affiliated autonomous left-wing groups, of which the ILP and the Fabian Society were the most important. The Marxist SDF held aloof, and eventually became the most implacable critic of the reformist Labour Party: a role in which they have been followed, and even surpassed, by their successors, the even more rigid SPGB, founded as a breakaway from the SDF in 1904, the ‘Plymouth Brethren’, as they have been aptly described, of the British labour movement. Since the formation of the Labour Party in 1906, a continuous war of attrition has been in invisible but effective progress within the heterogeneous ranks of the Labour Party between what we may perhaps term its ‘socialist’ and ‘labour’ constituents. Broadly speaking, the socialist ILP versus the more or less explicitly non-socialist trade unions, both bodies simultaneously affiliated to the Labour Party. Again speaking in general terms, the ILP stood for the entirely collectivist social order, but one which (unlike the later Communist Parties after the Russian Revolution of 1917) was to be run on democratic lines, since the ‘one-party state’ was a later discovery of the Bolsheviks, or perhaps the result of purely local Russian circumstances. But at any rate it never formed any part of ILP political philosophy.
Conversely, the trade unions were reformist by their very nature as an economic bargaining organisation competitive under capitalism, besides being mostly non-socialist. Their individual membership had but little desire for a complete socialist takeover by the working class. Their more modest ambitions were confined to a continual demand for social reforms leading to eventual social security, to be paid for ultimately by the capitalists out of their surplus profits, thus leaving the foundations of capitalism intact.
Lenin on Trade Unionism: This trade-union mental attitude, not only in Britain but universally, was trenchantly defined by Lenin during his period, when that master realist noted that the trade-union mentality is only concerned with day-to-day struggles; whereas to become a bona fide socialist, some species of philosophy with regard to society as a whole is a primary necessity. Nowhere, we add, was this dictum of the great Russian socialist more relevant than in Britain! From 1900, the date of the Labour Representation Committee, to 1932, when the ILP finally disaffiliated from the Labour Party, a continual struggle for existence and for political supremacy within the federal ranks of the Labour Party raged between these two rival and obviously incompatible conceptions of the role and destiny of the British labour movement. When in 1918, towards the end of the First World War, the Labour Party established individual membership, the ILP as an affiliated party really became superfluous.
The Rejoicing Third: At the time, as usually happens, the ultimate issues did not appear at all clear to the actual participants in the struggle. Particularly since the Labour Party as a whole, however reformist in practice, still continues to describe itself as a socialist party. However, from the formation of the first Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald in 1924, down to the present regime of Harold Wilson in 1970, the Labour Party has moved steadily to the right. Or more accurately to the right-centre. In the generation-long conflict for the ‘soul’ of the Labour Party between the socialist ILP and other affiliated socialists, and the reformist trade unions, the final victory lay with the ‘centrist’ Fabian Society; socialist in name but reformist in substance. Today in 1970, the Labour government, and Britain under its guidance, is moving with ever accelerating speed towards that sub-species of ‘planned’ state capitalism that the Fabians have always passed off as genuine socialism. The Fabian Britain of today is coming more and more to look like a state-capitalist regime, equally remote alike from the idealistic socialism of the ILP and from the ‘free’ bargaining of the trade unions. In fact, perhaps the most conspicuous feature of the present-day Labour Party is that it is apparently breaking away definitely from its trade-union origins. Since state capitalism of the Fabian type has equally little use either for egalitarian socialism as represented in the past pre-eminently in Britain by the ILP, or for the ‘free’ bargaining, undeterred by government restraint, traditional in the trade-union movement. In a technocracy, such as Britain is fast becoming, there is no place for equality, while the present ‘Labour’ version of the ‘corporate state’ has equally no time or place either for ‘free’ bargaining or for trade-union movements independent of the state. The near head-on clash between the Labour government under Harold Wilson and Barbara Castle and the trade-union movement appears to indicate the end of the historical trade-union movement and perhaps, eventually, of the Labour Party itself.
A Balance Sheet: When we look back in retrospect over the political and economic evolution of the British labour movement since its recognisable beginnings in the 1880s, it becomes possible, so to speak, to draw up an objective balance sheet of its activities. By and large, the Labour Party can be pronounced to have been a highly successful reformist party, but a complete failure as a revolutionary movement aiming ultimately at the creation of an essentially new and higher social system than is competitive capitalism: the egalitarian cooperative commonwealth as envisaged by the great nineteenth-century British socialists from Robert Owen to William Morris. From the purely reformist standpoint, no one at all acquainted with what ‘the good old times’ were really like for the mass of the British people in the heyday of capitalism could possibly deny that the present regime, with its social services and its ‘welfare’ state, is vastly superior. Since no one in their senses could deny that the mass of the British people, the working class, is vastly more comfortable materially and socially secure than it was in, say, the heyday of Victorian capitalism and of the old British Empire ‘upon which the Sun never set’, ‘and in which wages never rose’, an England so luridly described by Jack London in his People of the Abyss.
In sociology as in elsewhere, values are comparative. As and when judged by such a standard, the Labour Britain in 1970 is undoubtedly superior to, say, the Victorian laissez-faire capitalism in 1870 when, as Fredrick Engels phrased it, ‘the Darwinian struggle for existence was transferred from nature to society with redoubled violence. Whosoever falls is remorselessly cast aside.’
But while this is incontestable so, it still remains true that the reforms for which the labour movement is mainly responsible are reforms in degree and not in kind: the cooperative commonwealth is still to seek, and international socialism seems very much at a discount at the present moment. Summarised briefly, an objective and thorough balance-sheet of the British labour movement throughout the past century impels us to the conclusion that the success of the labour movement as a reforming movement is in directly inverse proportion to its equally undoubted failure as a socialist movement. That is, as a movement aiming at universally egalitarian socialism, at the classless new social order, radically different from any form of class society, and one that aims to ‘cast the kingdoms old into another mould’. Here, the contrast is sharp and complete.
Towards a Socialist Revival: Under the concrete circumstances which confront us today, it is clear that while ‘we are all socialist now’ in the reformist sense of the term, yet notwithstanding this free egalitarian socialism in its old integral sense is still to seek. Since such an idealistic and classless social order without rich or poor is as foreign to the current Fabian technocracy as it was to the jungle society of Victorian capitalism. Socialism, the cooperative commonwealth, is still round the corner, as far as the Western world including Britain is concerned. How far such an ideal conception has actually been realised already in the self-styled ‘communist’ East; and if so, how far such a social order, conceived under conditions that were often radically different from those that existed in the industrial West, can serve as a practical working model for Western socialism is a moot point that lies outside the compass of this small work.
Real socialism implies not only action, but equally thought. Without socialist theory, and without ultimately a socialist movement to embody that theory and to translate it into effective action, there never will be an integrated international socialist society, as imagined, for example, scientifically in the Communist Manifesto and imaginatively in William Morris’ News From Nowhere. A society that includes economic democracy, without which political democracy is merely a convenient fig-leaf for the rule of money. Since as Anatole France once so aptly remarked about bourgeois democracy, ‘in all countries, money rules, but in democracy nothing else does’. Today Britain stands at the social crossroads; the old labour movement has ended in a Fabian blind alley; the times surely seem ripe for a socialist revival. For the revival of the march towards the ideal, towards to the international cooperative commonwealth.
The Relevance of James Maxton: Under the circumstances suggested above, there is surely no more need to apologise for the appearance of this small work celebrating the past phase in the evolution of the socialist movement and an individual Scottish socialist now dead these twenty-odd years, who was perhaps its most brilliant and certainly its most colourful embodiment. We stand today upon the threshold of a new era; as well, or so hope, of a new socialist movement that will take up again, and at a higher point in social evolution, that legacy of which in Great Britain James Maxton and the ILP represented the most vigorous and consistent manifestation. It is, we believe, in no way irrelevant to recall today by the now historic memory of a man and of a movement of the past generation; since ‘Jimmy’ Maxton and his heroic band of ILP pioneers were never more relevant than today, or will be, we may surely hope, for the coming generation. A generation that may well embody a triumphant resumption of the historic march towards the socialist commonwealth.
Unlike his continental predecessors Marx and Kropotkin, Maxton was no theorist. But he was the most integrated as well as perhaps the most influential socialist of his era. In his own day and generation, he and the movement that he led represented the ideal perhaps better than any contemporary man or institution. In devoting this small work to the name and fame of this man and movement, we do so accordingly not only as an historic epoch already passed, but as a guide to the future, and as a forecast for the eventual attainment of the socialist idea.
At the time that this small work goes to press, its fundamental thesis is sharply underlined by the recent defeat of the Labour Party in the general election. A former member of Mr Wilson’s outgoing government has stated: ‘Labour lost the election because it had become the party of status quo and had lost its initial vision.’
At such a time the left urgently requires a new ideal and a new dynamic. Such an ideal can only be provided by the revival of idealistic socialism.
The Labour Party must realise in future that it is a labour movement and must make it clear by words and action to its potential supporters that, if and when returned to power, it will not again merely administer capitalism and pursue policies which have their roots ultimately in Tory philosophy.
1. Vox et Preaterea Nihil – A voice and nothing more – MIA.
2. Facile princepes – Easily the first – MIA.
3. The text is completely garbled at this point; judging by some subsequent comments, it is possible that the authors were referring to the sectarian and doctrinaire nature of the left-wing groups which they are introducing.