Liam Payne draws some lessons for today from the labour movement in the 1930s.

When the Independent Labour Party (ILP) disaffiliated from the Labour Party in July 1932, the Labour left was rent asunder. Many socialists involved in Labour were also ILP members and decided to follow their party conference decision and leave the Labour Party. Others, inside and outside the ILP, decided to ‘stay and fight’. Within a month of the ILPs decision, these remnants of the current which had started the Labour Party formed the Socialist League.

Origins

In his study of the Labour left, A Party with Socialists in it, Simon Hannah describes this new organisation of the Labour left as “part think tank, part grassroots activist network, part left pressure group.” They set out to orient the Labour Party once again towards a socialist politics through publishing materials on socialist theory, policies and practice.

The ILP’s disaffiliation and the subsequent formation of the Socialist League came on the back of the disastrous second Labour government of 1929-31, led by Ramsay MacDonald. The League attracted many Labour members who would go on to make a name for themselves in the movement: people like Aneurin Bevan, Barbara Betts (later Castle), Michael Foot and Harold Laski. These Socialist League members further helped to found both the Left Book Club and the journal of the Labour left, Tribune. Hannah goes on to describe the depth of the challenge that the Socialist League represented to the labour movement establishment:

“The Socialist League in some ways represented the most advanced internal theoretical challenge to Labour’s gradualist approach, and certainly reached the most radical conclusions based on their research, analysis and lived experience. It sought to win the party to a transformative strategy, and in doing so transform the party itself.”

The new organisation began strongly, establishing 70 branches across Britain and having marked success at the Party conferences of 1933 and 1934. It soon joined forces with the Society for Socialist Inquiry and Propaganda and subsequently managed to replace arch- rightwinger Ernest Bevin as that organisation’s chairman. Adopting the prevailing empiricism of the British labour movement, the Socialist League sought to flip this rather conservative approach to socialism into irrefutable arguments for a transformative leftwing direction from the labour movement.

At its inception, the Socialist League aimed to use its organisation as an information and propaganda tool for their socialist message. The purpose was to educate and agitate the grassroots of the labour movement with leftwing theory and practice. In this vein, the League propagated around major flashpoints of the day, such as unemployment, the efficacy of socialist planning instead of market mechanisms, whether the Labour Party was an adequate vehicle for socialism, and the threats to any socialist programme taking effect – disappointingly, only threats external to the labour movement. They sought to “develop a healthy intellectual party culture”.

Aims

Unlike many in labour movement leadership positions, the Socialist League recognised the primacy of class struggle as the defining contradiction of the capitalist mode of production. Member-intellectuals like Harold Laski also recognised that Parliament and a parliamentary majority were insufficient mechanisms to ensure a socialist advance. Any socialist government would need to be protected and driven by an extra-parliamentary movement of dedicated activists: Laski had to retract a public statement he made to the effect that he believed the monarchy would sabotage any left Labour government.

In the usual Labour Party fashion, the Socialist League progressed its theoretical education and agitation into motions to the Party conference. Motions were proposed to abolish the House of Lords and to enact an ‘Emergency Powers Act’ at the beginning of a socialist Parliament – to take control of the country’s financial, industrial, and commercial structures, if necessary. In 1932, a Socialist League conference motion to nationalise the Joint Stock Banks in order to prevent the age-old establishment sabotage of capital flight, was passed.

In foreign affairs, the Socialist League adopted an anti-colonial position, again at odds with the movement leadership, pushing the Party conference into supporting a position of “socialisation and self-government” for India in 1933. They believed that the League of Nations was a supremely flawed attempt at generating world peace, due to its acceptance of the imperialism of its western creators. They only supported League of Nations positions that they felt would be of benefit to the working classes of the world.

The Socialist League’s analysis and proposals had one glaring weakness. They never reckoned with the establishment tendencies at home within the labour movement itself. They had no strategy for navigating the Party and trade union leaderships and bureaucracies, which were bastions of the non-socialist elements that had attached themselves to the labour movement. Establishing their organisation so shortly after the treachery of MacDonald in 1931, the League reduced this episode to one of timing – if the Labour Party could only force through its socialist measures early enough after winning power, they could avoid such catastrophes in future.

As Simon Hannah summarises: “While radical compared to the constitutionalism of the party and the conservatism of the trade union leaders, the League’s approach was still a parliamentary route, though one which accepted the importance of extra-parliamentary action. In effect, their socialist programme represented a series of laws that a left Labour government could implement, with their success guaranteed by the speed of the legislative agenda – hence the need for emergency powers within days of being elected – and the active support of the wider working-class movement.”

(Contemporary) Conclusions

Fast-forward to today and the lack of an organisation such as the Socialist League on the contemporary Labour left is obvious. There is an urgent need for a coordinated grassroots movement aiming to develop a healthy intellectual culture within the labour movement, by offering up socialist analysis and proposals for our times. The need to ally such an intellectual offering with strong links to leftwing movements operating outside of the strictures of Parliament and local government, is as clear as it was in the early 1930s.

With any routes to power within the Party – and thus Parliament – thoroughly blocked off by the vindictive and sociopathic Labour right, creating an alternative left culture within the Party’s grassroots, which then reaches outside to the unions and the extra-parliamentary left, would be a useful base for the remaining socialists in Labour to anchor themselves to, and would provide a proactive use of their energies and capabilities.

It has become increasingly and depressingly apparent that we cannot wait for any direction from ‘above’ in these matters. Stalwart left Labour MPs are in survival mode, and others that have associated themselves with the left are now dropping the red-clothing they donned to try and gain favour from a restive rank-and-file during the Corbyn years. In addition, a Scottish Labour MSP has been caught lying about a Scottish Palestine Solidarity Campaign protest at his constituency office, after his version of events were publicly corrected and rebuked by both Police Scotland and a broadsheet journalist who were in attendance. This protest was arranged because of the MSP’s shameful connections with BAE Systems, a major arms exporter to Israel. That this was from one of only four MSPs associated with the Campaign for Socialism in Scotland is thoroughly embarrassing for the Labour left in the arena of extra-parliamentary politics.

Clearly, such a movement must grow out of the remaining left members and organisations of the Labour Party rank-and-file – the lessons of the Socialist League can help in this endeavour.

Liam Payne is a Labour Party and Campaign for Socialism member based in Edinburgh.

Image: Aneurin Bevan. Creator: National Portrait Gallery London. PDM 1.0 DEED Public Domain-Market 1.0 Universal