West London Branch Meeting (5/12)

Tuesday, 5 December
 8:00pm
Committee Room, 
Chiswick Town Hall, 
Heathfield Terrace, 
London W4 4JN

The Socialist Party of Great Britain, more popularly known as the SPGB even though, despite Militant, it now prefers Socialist Party is the longest surviving political party in Britain calling itself socialist. The Socialist Party has always regarded itself as being in the Marxist tradition, fully subscribing to the labour theory of value and the materialist conception of history. 

The Socialist Party is not the socialist "party" that Marx (or even our Declaration of Principles) envisages, ie the working class as a whole organised politically for socialism. That will come later. At the moment, we can be described as only a socialist propaganda or socialist education organisation and can't be anything else (and nor would it try to be, at the moment). Possibly, we might be the embryo of the future mass "socialist party" or a contributing element. But who cares? As long as such a party does eventually emerges. At some stage, for whatever reason, socialist consciousness will reach a "critical mass", at which point it will just snowball and carry people along with it. It may even come about without people actually giving it the label of socialism.

The Socialist Party has never been so arrogant as to claim that we're the only socialists and that anybody not in it is not a socialist. There are socialists outside the Socialist Party, and some of them are organised in different groups. That doesn't mean that we are not opposed to the organisations they have formed, but we are not opposed to them because we think they represent some section of the capitalist class. We are opposed to them because we disagree with what they are proposing the working class should do to get socialism -- and of course, the opposite is the case too: they're opposed to what we propose. Nearly all the others who stand for a class-free, state-free, money-free, wage-free society are anti-parliamentary. 

For ourselves, using the existing historically-evolved mechanism of political democracy (the ballot box and parliament) is the best and safest way for a socialist-minded working class majority to get to socialism. For them, it's anathema. For us, some of the alternatives they suggest (armed insurrection or a general strike) are anathema. We all present our respective proposals for working-class action to get socialism and, while criticising each other's proposals, not challenging each other's socialist credentials.

Clause 7 of our principles does commit our organisation to "there can only be one socialist party" in any country in the sense of only one party aiming at the winning of control of political power by the working class to establish socialism. How could there be more than one socialist party in any country trying to win political power for socialism? It just doesn't make sense. When more and more people are coming to want socialism, a mass socialist movement will emerge to dwarf all the small groups and grouplets that exist today. If this situation were to arise then unity and fusion would be the order of the day.