British impossibilism and the IWW: A debate without history
Adam Buick
Platypus Review 185 | April 2026
THE “IMPOSSIBILIST REVOLT” in the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) at the turn of the last century led to the formation of two new political parties — the Socialist Labour Party of Great Britain (SLP-GB) in 1903 and the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) in 1904. In the period up until the outbreak of the First World War, both parties were roughly the same size — each with no more than three hundred members. Yet labor historians have concentrated on the history and theories of the SLP-GB to the almost complete neglect of those of the SPGB, and worse, relegated the latter to a sneering footnote.
For example, writers of the Communist Party of Great Britain[1] (CPGB), A. L. Morton and G. Tate, claimed that, “In 1905, another split took place in the S.D.F., when part of the membership, this time mainly centred in London, formed the Socialist Party of Great Britain, a body so sectarian that it adjured both politics and trade union action.”[2] They didn’t even get the Party’s founding date right and must have simply copied what G. D. H. Cole had written in his Working Class Politics without verifying its accuracy. Cole too had claimed the SPGB regarded trade-union action as futile.[3]
Walter Kendall, in his pioneering work on the origins of the CPGB, praised the SLP-GB paper The Socialist for providing “the highest level of Marxist literature in Great Britain,” while dismissing the SPGB for being “unwilling to enter the political fray even to the extent of adopting a programme of ‘palliatives.’”[4] He seemed unaware that the SLP-GB also had no such program and clearly not having read the articles on the materialist conception of history and on Marxian economics in the Socialist Standard, the SPGB’s monthly paper.
The most recent addition to this literature, Tony Collins’s Raising the Red Flag, accuses the SPGB of pursuing a “grim messianic parliamentary reformism” for wanting the working class to win political control to use as the “means of emancipation.”[5] Such polemics may have their place in partisan political publications but not in works that aspire to be serious history. Here accuracy based on tracking down and examining available sources is what counts, however inconvenient for the political views of the historian. In Collins’s case, it makes him a bad historian. The views of the SPGB were no less relevant to Marxism in this period — if only in terms of the numbers who held them — than those of the SLP-GB, John Maclean, and Sylvia Pankhurst, all of whom he examines in detail. It led to him missing the fact that five of the people mentioned in his book either became or had been members of the SPGB (Jack Fitzgerald, E. J. B. Allen, T. A. Jackson, Valentine McEntee, and George Hicks), which at least showed that the SPGB was a part of the Marxist scene at the time.[6]
No one who researched what the SPGB had actually said at the time could have concluded that the SPGB was anti-trade union or pro-reform.
The main reason the labor historians have neglected the SPGB is that, when the bulk of the SLP-GB joined the CPGB upon its formation in 1921, the SLP-GB had a place in research on the origins of that party. The SPGB had no such place. Not only that, it still existed and was critical of the politics of the labor historians interested in the origins of the CPGB. These historians included not just members and sympathizers of the CPGB but also Trotskyists and supporters of the Labour Party. They couldn’t objectively study the political theory and history of the SPGB, as that would be to give some credibility to a political opponent. It could even be argued that if the SPGB suffered the fate of the rump SLP-GB — the members who refused to join the CPGB — and died out, labor historians would have treated it as one of the organizations that applied and spread Marxist ideas in Britain up to the First World War, alongside the SLP-GB and the SDF (or, as it became after the breakaways, the Social Democratic Party and then the British Socialist Party).
It is telling that the first article to treat the pre-1914 SPGB as worth studying came from outside Britain. In 1956, a historian from Japan, Chushichi Tsuzuki, published “The Origins of the S.L.P. and the S.P.G.B.,”[7] using the actual bound volumes of the SPGB’s monthly journal as a primary source, which few have done since. Labor historians have no excuse for not doing this now since all the articles from the Socialist Standard before 1914 have been online for four years.[8]
Impossibilism
The word “impossibilist” was coined by Harry Quelch — a leader of the SDF and editor of its newspaper Justice — to describe those of its members who criticised its “possibilism,” or the reformist pursuit of measures considered “possible” to achieve under capitalism. At the turn of the century, the view that this was what socialists should concentrate on was expressed within the international Social Democrat movement itself by Eduard Bernstein and other Marxist “revisionists.” Both the SLP-GB and the SPGB accepted the term “impossibilist” but preferred to describe themselves as “revolutionary” or “anti-revisionist” socialists.
The impossibilist criticism of the existing non-socialist unions was not based on any general theory that capitalism had reached a new stage where it could no longer concede wage increases or improvements in working conditions. Rather, it was that these trade unions did not seek to abolish capitalism. This was also the mainstream Social Democrat position, as expressed, for instance, by Kautsky, who argued that “it is absolutely necessary that the Trade-Unions be dominated by the spirit of Socialism. . . . no working-class organisation, no working-class movement can completely accomplish its aims unless it is permeated by the spirit of Socialism.”[9]
Similarly, the rejection of campaigning for social reforms — a key, even defining, feature of “impossibilism” — was not linked to any theory that capitalism had reached a stage where reforms were no longer possible. It was based, rather, on pragmatic political consequences: for a socialist party that risked becoming absorbed in the pursuit of reforms rather than socialism, and for the working class, which would be encouraged to assume that capitalism could be reformed to benefit it.
It could be said, however, that this position assumed the achievement of certain foundational reforms of benefit to the working class; for instance, a wide enough franchise, basic factory laws, and free public education. Nevertheless, the impossibilists, both SPGB and SLP-GB, did not regard these reforms as amounting to a change in the way the capitalist economic system worked, but a change only in its political superstructure — they were even measures that facilitated capitalism’s economic functioning.
The impossibilist position on reforms differs from that of Marx, who assumed that a movement rooted in trade unions and trade-union demands would develop more or less spontaneously into an explicit movement for socialism, and from that of Rosa Luxemburg, who argued that the struggle for reforms was “the only means of engaging in the proletarian class war and working in the direction of the final goal — the conquest of political power and the suppression of wage labour.”[10] It might be concluded that history has not borne out either of these positions.
Sword and shield
The SLP-GB was formed after the expulsion of some impossibilists at the 1903 SDF Conference, and at the SPGB 1904 Conference. Both parties were similar in that they had been influenced by the position of the Socialist Labor Party of America (SLP-A) and its main theoretician, Daniel De Leon. The SLP-A had dropped its minimum program of immediate demands in 1896. The SLP-GB initially had such a program, but dropped it in 1906. The SPGB never had one.
The SLP-A stood for socialism as the common ownership of the means and instruments of wealth production by society as a whole, to be administered by an “industrial government” based on industries, not geographical districts. It held that to achieve socialism, the working class would have to organize both politically and economically. It was particularly opposed to the existing trade unions which it called “pure and simple” unions because they accepted capitalism and the wages system. It denounced them as obstacles to the growth of socialist consciousness and their leaders as “labor fakirs” and “labor lieutenants of the capitalist class.” Instead, it supported the Socialist Trade and Labor Alliance (STLA) as a revolutionary socialist union. Its newspaper The Weekly People, along with the pamphlets of Marx and other socialist writers it published, were widely read by the dissidents within the SDF.
De Leon held that both political and economic action were needed to end capitalism and bring in socialism. He had a degree in law and liked to use the legal metaphor of the “sword” and the “shield.”[11] At the time that both parties were founded, De Leon regarded political action as the sword and economic action as the shield.[12] In other words, that political action was more important.
Despite their organizational separation, the SLP-GB and the SPGB pursued identical forms of activity, both having drawn from De Leon’s conception of socialist politics. They published monthly journals (The Socialist and the Socialist Standard respectively), held street meetings, gave indoor lectures, ran education classes and debated opponents — all with the aim of persuading their fellow workers to become socialists and to organize into a political party whose objective was the establishment of a society based on the common ownership and democratic control of the means of production and distribution by society as a whole.
Both parties defined socialism in the same way and both advocated that the working class should use the ballot box to win control of the state. So why wasn’t there a single impossibilist party? In theory, there could have been, but personal accusations and recriminations proved to be serious obstacles. One difference which initially seemed minor but which was to grow into a major disagreement, was over what De Leon called the “burning question” of trade unionism.
Political action
When they were founded, both the SLP-GB and SPGB sought to model themselves on the SLP-A and, reflecting the American party’s position at the time, both prioritized political action to dispossess the capitalist class and establish socialism.
An article in the June 1905 issue of The Socialist, declared that “the Socialist Labour Party, which, when voted into political power shall declare the land and tools of production the common property of the people, to be used by, and for the benefit of the whole people, the class, the citizens of the Socialist Republic.” Another in the same issue wrote of the Party “entering the struggle for the conquest of the legislative machinery.” Applicants to join were asked to sign that they agreed with a number of statements, the first three of which were:
(1) Is the fact plain to you, that under the present economic system there are of necessity two antagonistic classes, and consequently, an irrepressible class struggle? (2) Is the further fact plain to you that at every stage of this struggle all the political powers have heretofore been held and used by the capitalist class to establish, maintain and extend its economic domination over the wage-working class? (3) Is it, therefore, plain to you that the economic emancipation of labour must be achieved by the working people themselves, politically united into a party of their own class against all the political parties of capitalism?[13]
The declaration of principles of the SPGB that applicants were required to endorse also set out that “the economic emancipation” of the working class was to be achieved by them taking political action to conquer “the legislative machinery” and using it to make “the land and tools of production the common property of the people.” Clause 6 declared, “That as the machinery of government, including the armed forces of the nation, exists only to conserve the monopoly by the capitalist class of the wealth taken from the workers, the working class must organise consciously and politically for the conquest of the powers of government, national and local, in order that this machinery, including these forces, may be converted from an instrument of oppression into the agent of emancipation and the overthrow of privilege, aristocratic and plutocratic.”[14] Both parties were keen to enter the field of political action by putting up candidates. However, they only had enough resources to contest local elections, the SLP-GB more frequently than the SPGB.
Trade unions
Both parties also wanted to emulate the SLP-A by having a socialist trade union to endorse. In its report to its 1905 Conference the SLP-GB’s executive committee stated that it “will have to seriously consider whether the time is ripe for the formation of a Socialist Union based on the lines of the STLA and ALU, which have performed such yeoman service to the American Labour. That such an organisation will have to be formed sooner or later is inevitable. The only question is to decide whether our political movement is sufficiently strong to enter upon the task of forming it.”[15] The Party’s constitution and rules, amended at the same conference, laid down that, “No official of a trade union or any other organisation supporting or affiliated with any other political party shall be eligible for membership of the party.” One of the duties of the Party’s executive committee was “the formation of Socialist Trade Unions.”[16] The former was interpreted as meaning that no member of the SLP-GB should be an official (even an unpaid branch officer or committee member) of a “pure and simple” trade union. The formation of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in America in June 1905 presented the Party with a “socialist trade union” to endorse and promote.
Meanwhile, the SPGB, at its Inaugural Meeting in June 1904, instructed its executive committee to convene a special meeting of members as soon as possible “to discuss and determine the attitude of the Party towards trade unions,” even though the outcome might seem to have been pre-empted by the passage on trade unionism in their June 1905 manifesto:
The basis of the action of the trade unions must be a clear recognition of the position of the workers under capitalism, and the class struggle necessarily arising therefrom: in other words, they must adopt the Socialist position, if they are going to justify their existence at all. Does this mean that the existing trade unions are to be smashed? That will depend upon the unions themselves. All actions of the unions in support of capitalism or tending to side-track the workers from the only path that can lead to their emancipation, should be strongly opposed; but on the other hand, trade unions being a necessity under capitalism, any action on their part upon sound lines should be heartily supported.[17]
It soon became clear, however, that there was a division of opinion on the matter. One motion at the special meeting proposed that the SPGB “recommends its members to join the unions in their respective trades in order that by the spread of socialist enlightenment the members of the working class organised in Trade Unions may be enabled to prosecute the class struggle with the efficiency which results alone from clearly defined class-conscious action.”[18] Another proposed that members be “advised to form Socialist groups inside their unions for the purpose of common counsel and joint action to counteract any abandonment of working-class interests and to educate their fellow members in the principles of the class-struggle.”[19] A third proposed that members “in Trade Unions shall simply use their position therein to reiterate the Socialist position, but shall in no case accept any official position where their actions would be controlled by the Trade Unions instead of by Socialist convictions.”[20]
There was in fact no prospect of the SPGB adopting an anti-trade-union position as many of its members were active trade unionists and office-holders, particularly in the Operative Bricklayers Society.
The matter wasn’t resolved till 1906, by which time the discussion had been enlarged to involve whether the IWW was a revolutionary workers’ union. The finally agreed SPGB position was summarized in a 1907 resolution:
the S P G.B. holds that Trade Unionism is a necessity under capitalism, to prevent the workers being continuously driven to sell their labour power below its value. . . . the S.P.G.B. holds that Trade Unionism is necessary for the establishment of Socialism. . . . the S.P.G.B. holds that the form of organisation must have a class basis as first principle and the trade sub-division as the chief detail of organisation; other sub-divisions, either geographical or economic, to be arranged as circumstances demand. . . . the S.P.G.B. urges forward the propaganda of the economic position laid down in conjunction with its political propaganda both inside and outside the present unions with the object of establishing the Socialist Trade Union required for this work.[21]
In other words, the SPGB accepted that the workers would have to be organized economically as well as politically for socialism at some point. In the meantime socialists could — and even should — join the existing unions, if only to try to ensure that they and their fellow workers were not paid less than the value of their labor-power; SPGB members were allowed to hold office within them. This contrasted with the SLP-GB position of uncompromising opposition to the existing trade unions (though it accepted that its members could join them if they had to) and support for the formation of revolutionary trade unions to rival them, a policy later known as “dual unionism.”
The SLP-GB regarded the SPGB’s practice of joining and working within the existing unions as akin to socialists working within reformist political parties, denouncing it as “boring from within” and advancing this as a reason why there could be no unity between the two impossibilist parties.[22]
If the labor historians had bothered to consult the original material they would have discovered that, far from opposing trade unionism, at the time the SPGB was being accused of failing to oppose it.
The IWW
At the end of June 1905, various groups met in Chicago to establish the Industrial Workers of the World. Among those present was Daniel De Leon. Its preamble began:
The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life. Between these two classes a struggle must go on until all the toilers come together on the political, as well as on the industrial field, and take and hold that which they produce by their labor through an economic organization of the working class, without affiliation with any political party.[23]
De Leon was so impressed that he finally reversed his earlier opinion that it was political action that was the sword and economic action the shield.[24] He now said economic action — to “take and hold” the means of production by means of a “general lock-out” of the capitalist class — was the sword, and political action relegated to winning control of the state to ensure it could not obstruct the prosecution of economic action.
The formation of the IWW changed the nature of the debate between the two impossibilist parties in Britain. It was no longer about when a hypothetical “socialist trade union” should be formed or how it should be organized, but whether one had now been formed and whether it should be supported. It also changed the vocabulary used. Up till then, in Britain, the word “trade union” was synonymous with “economic organization” and didn’t imply organization by craft, or “trade.” Thus, both the SLP-GB and the SPGB had talked about the need for a “socialist trade union.” But the IWW was set up on the basis of organizing workers by industry and not by “trade”; its preamble denounced “trade unions” as divisive. From this point on, the SLP-GB embraced “industrial unionism,” what De Leon called “socialist industrial unionism.” The SPGB stayed with the broader term “economic organization.”
In Britain the formation of the IWW was met with enthusiasm by the SLP-GB and by some members of the SPGB. With the support of the SLP-GB, the “Advocates of Industrial Unionism” was set up to campaign for an organization like the IWW to be formed in Britain. Through this and on its own, the SLP-GB set about vigorously campaigning for industrial unionism.
The SPGB was not impressed by the IWW and objected that — just like the “trade” unions it opposed — the IWW was based on the principle of organizing workers who were not explicitly socialist. So, despite its commitment to waging the class struggle, it could not be regarded as socialist. The IWW was in effect a “pure and simple” industrial (as opposed to trade) union.[25] Some members and sympathisers of the SLP-GB were not impressed either and made the same point.[26]
The SPGB held that organizing workers by industry was also divisive.[27] But, above all, the SPGB was opposed to the proposal to try to “take and hold” the means of production without first wresting control of the state from capitalist hands through political action. Without doing so would be disastrous.[28] The SPGB insisted that, to take over the means of production, the working class should first, as William Morris once put it, “get at the butt end of the machine gun and the rifle”[29] by winning political control via the ballot box which would give them control of the armed forces.
The SLP-GB interpreted the SPGB’s rejection of industrial unionism as a rejection of any economic organization by the working class and so accused the SPGB of being merely a “pure and simple” socialist party, as it was put in a 1908 debate in Manchester. The SPGB representative replied that the Party accepted the necessity of economic organization, but not in the form of separate industrial unions: workers were already socially organized in that they collectively carried out all the productive and administrative labor that kept society running, and would continue to do so after political action had withdrawn state support for capitalist ownership and taken the armed forces out of capitalist control: “The workers are already organised socially, and when they get a majority in Parliament, the changed conditions will already have brought about the necessary economic machinery to adapt itself to circumstances.”[30]
Slippery slope
In making economic action more important than political action, the SLP-GB was on a slippery slope. In the first instance, it meant concentrating just as much on campaigning for industrial unionism as on campaigning for socialism. Then it meant campaigning more for industrial unionism than for socialism. Finally, it meant arguing that campaigning for industrial unionism was campaigning for socialism on the grounds that, if the workers were organized in one big industrial union, this would more or less automatically reflect itself on the political field.[31]
In March 1906, E. J. B. Allen, a founding member of the SPGB who had defected to the SLP-GB, addressed a meeting of the Battersea Branch of the Operative Bricklayers Society in London at their invitation. Several branch members that were also in the SPGB were present. One of them asked Allen to explain the “contradiction” in the IWW’s preamble, its claim that it favored both industrial and political action (as it still then did) while also declaring that it would “take and hold” the means of production “without affiliation with any political party.” Allen described his reply as follows: “I said I failed to see a contradiction, the actual ‘taking and holding’ would be without affiliation, as the political movement would have had to have done its work by destroying capitalist political power before they could ‘take and hold.’”[32]
Allen also said that “the I.W.W. demanded the political unity of the workers as being the only possible way for effective action, and considered economic unity would bring that about.” This point was stated even more explicitly in an SLP-GB leaflet on “Industrial Unionism” reprinted in the same issue of The Socialist: “Industrial Unionism, based as it is on the fact of the class struggle, promotes the Political Unity of Labour by achieving Labour’s Industrial Unity.”[33]
By 1908 the SLP-GB was arguing that:
The Industrial Unions will constitute a body of men and women at once intensely practical and uncompromisingly revolutionary. . . . And when it forms its own political party and moves into the political field, as it surely will, in that act superseding or absorbing the Socialist Labour Party and all other socialist or labour parties . . . When, in the fullness of its strength, it is able through its political ambassadors to demand the surrender of the capitalist class, it will be in a position to enforce its demands by its organised might, and, in place of the strikes of former days, institute the General Lock-Out of the capitalist class.[34]
This reversed the earlier position put by E. J. B. Allen at the Battersea meeting in March 1906, that the industrial union would “take and hold” the means of production after winning political control. Now the argument was that it would do this and then send elected members of the legislature as “ambassadors” to take political control and demand the “surrender” of the capitalist class.
In the meantime, Allen too had moved on. Along with some other SLP-GB members he concluded that political action was unnecessary and that all that was required to overthrow capitalism was industrial action to “take and hold” the means of production. By 1907, the IWW itself had deleted any reference to political action and, by so doing, came out as a quasi-syndicalist organization.
Eventually, the SLP-GB argued that even non-revolutionary industrial unionism paved the way for socialism:
the mistake of the S.P.G.B. is that it does not recognise that the desired Labour Unity can only flow from a mechanism reflecting that of a system of modern co-operative production — the I.W.W. It is necessary for the workers to hold their embryonic industrially administrative councils ere capitalism goes down as it was for the rising capitalist class to hold its embryonic political assemblies, parliaments, and committees before the downfall of feudalism.[35]
This echoed the view expressed by James Connolly — a founder member of the SLP-GB and a member of the SLP-A — in a 1908 talk given in New York on “The Future of Labour,” in which he argued that, just as the capitalist class had built up its economic strength before it was able to win political control, so the working class had to do the same by first building up its economic strength by organizing in industrial unions. Hence his view that “the fight for the conquest of the political state is not the battle, it is only the echo of the battle,” and the conclusion that “the conquest of political power by the working class waits upon the conquest of economic power.”[36] In publishing the talk, the editor of The Socialist at the time had written diplomatically that “we may not necessarily agree right away with all its details.”[37] Three years later the SLP-GB had come to agree with Connolly’s view.
By then, The Socialist was edited by George Harvey, a miner from Durham and a member of the Plebs’ League involved in the 1909 Ruskin College student revolt. He came to the conclusion that the rule banning SLP-GB members from becoming an official of a non-socialist trade union was a hindrance to furthering the cause of “socialist industrial unionism,” arguing the case for this in a letter for the March 1912 issue of The Socialist. The rule was subsequently repealed, and in 1913 Harvey was elected an official of the Durham Miners Association, as checkweighman at a colliery in Durham. Things had moved a full circle for the SLP-GB: from denouncing the SPGB for “boring from within” the existing trade unions, to ultimately pursuing that very course.
Meanwhile the SPGB stuck to the original “impossibilist” view that socialist activity should be aimed at directly encouraging the working class to win political control in order to end capitalism rather than seeking “possible” improvements within the system. This will have been one reason why it did not join in founding the CPGB, surviving throughout the rest of the 20th century and to this day — providing a non-Leninist interpretation of Marxism and an embarrassment to Left-wing labour historians. |P
Adam Buick is a member of the Socialist Party of Great Britain and regular contributor to its journal the Socialist Standard, since 1962; and co-author of State Capitalism: The Wages System Under New Management (1986).
[1] Founded in 1920 and dissolved in 1991.
[2] A. L. Morton and George Tate, The British Labour Movement, 1770-1920: A History (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1956), 218n [emphasis added].
[3] G. D. H. Cole, British Working Class Politics, 1832-1914 (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1941), 177.
[4] Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900-21: The Origins of British Communism (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969), 21.
[5] Tony Collins, Raising the Red Flag: Marxism, Labourism, and the Roots of British Communism, 1884–1921 (Chicago: Haymarket, 2024), 31. See also Efraim Carlebach, “Marxism or radical Fabianism? An interview with Tony Collins on the precursors to the CPGB,” in this issue of the Platypus Review.
[6] For my full review see “Bolshevising the Red Flag,” Socialist Standard 1451 (July 2025), <https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/2020s/2025/no-1451-july-2025/book-reviews-collins-mitchell-joyce/>.
[7] Chushichi Tsuzuki, “The ‘Impossibilist Revolt’ in Britain: The Origins of the S.L.P. and the S.P.G.B.,” International Review of Social History 1, no. 3 (December 1956): 377–97, <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020859000000729>.
[8] The Socialist Standard archive is available at <https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/standard-archives/>.
[9] Significantly, a translation of this was published in a 1906 issue of the Socialist Standard: “Karl Kautsky on Socialism and Trade Unionism,” Socialist Standard 26 (November 1906), <https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1900s/1906/no-26-november-1906/karl-kautsky-on-socialism-and-trade-unionism/>.
[10] Rosa Luxemburg, “Introduction,” in Reform or Revolution (1900, 1908), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/intro.htm>.
[11] See Melanie Morris, “8.5 The Sword and Shield Doctrine,” in Business Law I – Interactive (Branchburg: Raritan Valley Community College, 2024), <https://rvcc.pressbooks.pub/businesslaw131interactive/chapter/8-5-the-sword-and-shield-doctrine/>: “The sword and shield doctrine is a legal principle that pertains to the use of a contract’s terms as both a sword to enforce the contract and a shield to defend against claims under the contract.”
[12] See Daniel De Leon, “What Means This Strike?” (February 11, 1898), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/deleon/works/1898/980211.htm>: “The trade organization is impotent if built and conducted upon the impotent lines of ignorance and corruption. The trade organization is NOT impotent if built and conducted upon the lines of knowledge and honesty; if it understands the issue and steps into the arena fully equipped, not with the shield of the trade union only, but also with the sword of the Socialist ballot.”
[13] The Socialist (August 1906).
[14] Socialist Party of Great Britain, “Our Object and Declaration of Principles” (1904), <https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/our-object-and-declaration-principles/>.
[15] The Socialist (June 1905). ALU stands for the American Labor Union.
[16] The Socialist (August 1906).
[17] Socialist Party of Great Britain, Manifesto of the Socialist Party of Great Britain (1905), <https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlet/manifesto-socialist-party-great-britain-june-12th-1905/>.
[18] Gilbert McClatchie [Gilmac], “Notes on Party History: The Trade Union Question,” Socialist Standard 599 (July 1954), <https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1954/1950s/no-599-july-1954/notes-party-history-trade-union-question/>.
[19] Ibid.
[20] Ibid. For the SPGB debates on trade unionism, see also Gilbert McClatchie, “Notes on Party History: The Islington Dispute,” Socialist Standard 600 (August 1954), <https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1954/1950s/no-600-august-1954/notes-party-history-islington-dispute/>. Original sources: “The Socialist Party and Trade Unionism (I),” Socialist Standard 23 (July 1906), <https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1900s/1906/no-23-july-1906/the-socialist-party-and-trade-unionism-2/>; “The Socialist Party and Trade Unionism (II),” Socialist Standard 24 (August 1906), <https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1900s/1906/no-23-august-1906/the-socialist-party-and-trade-unionism/>; “The Socialist Party and Trade Unionism (III),” Socialist Standard 25 (September 1906), <https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1900s/1906/no-24-september-1906/the-socialist-party-and-trade-unionism-continued/>; “The Socialist Party and Trade Unionism (IV),” Socialist Standard 30 (February 1907), <https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1900s/1907/no-30-february-1907/the-socialist-party-and-trade-unionism-3/>.
[21] Jack Fitzgerald, “The Socialist Party and Trade Unionism,” Socialist Standard (February 1907), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/fitzgerald/1907/trade_unionism.htm>.
[22] The Socialist (March 1906): “The S.L.P. of Great Britain convinced of the futility of permeation, is necessarily hostile to all parties and individuals advocating a contrary policy. We are prepared to admit in many cases the honesty and singleness of purposes of many of our adversaries, but we cannot join hands with them until we have fought out our difference and come to a common agreement.”
[23] Vincent St. John, “The Original I. W. W. Preamble,” in The I. W. W.: Its History, Structure, and Methods (Chicago: IWW Publishing Bureau, 1917), <https://archive.iww.org/about/official/StJohn/2/>. Note that at its 1907 Convention the preamble was amended to make it more explicitly anti-capitalist by adding the following : “Instead of the conservative motto, ‘A fair day’s wages for a fair day's work,’ we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, ‘Abolition of the wage system.’ It is the historic mission of the working class to do away with capitalism. The army of production must be organized, not only for the every-day struggle with the capitalists, but also to carry on production when capitalism shall have been overthrown. By organizing industrially we are forming the structure of the new society within the shell of the old.” At the same time it deleted all reference to political action. De Leon opposed it and left to form a rival IWW. In Britain the SLP-GB set up the “Industrial Workers of Great Britain” as its “revolutionary union.”
[24] See Mike Lepore, “A Short Review of the Life and Work of Daniel De Leon” (1993, 1996), <http://www.deleonism.org/deleon.htm>. As Lepore, a present-day De Leonist, puts it, “De Leon here [his “Reform or Revolution?” (1896)] described the political party as the ‘sword’ and the industrial union as the ‘shield’ of labor, a viewpoint which was to be exactly reversed by De Leon in 1904. After 1904, his position was that the socialist transformation of society must be performed principally by the industrial organization, but with the assistance of a political party.”
[25] To make this point in debates with the SLP-GB and with other industrial unionists, SPGB representative Jack Fitzgerald (who was a branch committee member of the Operative Bricklayers Society) quoted from the proceedings of the meeting that set up the IWW. As in the debate with the SLP-GB in August 1906 on the question “Is the Industrial Workers of the World worthy the support of the working class?” See “Debate on Industrial Unionism,” Socialist Standard 26 (October 1906), <https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1900s/1906/no-26-october-1906/debate-on-industrial-unionism/>: “It had been claimed for the I.W.W. that it was a Socialist union. Like the craft unions just referred to, the I.W.W. did not call itself Socialist, nor did its members exhibit any clearer understanding of Socialist aims than the ‘pure and simple’ unionists they condemned. The I.W.W. was not, in fact, a Socialist union at all.” See also “Debate on Industrial Unionism (continued),” Socialist Standard, no. 27 (November 1906), <https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/1900s/1906/no-26-november-1906/debate-on-industrial-unionism-continued/>.
[26] See The Socialist (October 1906). At a meeting in Glasgow in August 1906 to introduce the Advocates of Industrial Unionism, R. Gibson was reported as saying in the discussion that “the I.W.W has no political test, and no member is allowed to talk politics at the meetings. Is not that the same thing as the old pure and simple cry of ‘no politics in the union? Another point is the Industrial Worker. It publishes some of the worst kind of tripe. I have here a copy which shows that the I.W.W. upholds the wages system.”
[27] Jack Fitzgerald, in “Debate on Industrial Unionism,” Socialist Standard (October–November 1906), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/fitzgerald/1906/iww_debate.htm>: “Although the I.W.W. was represented to be a single union it already showed a strong tendency to simulate the craft unions in its devolution into thirteen sub-divisions, quite regardless of the original seven-division ‘wheel’ described by Haggerty. Thus the I.W.W. had obviously not themselves realised the class form of industrial organisation. He (Fitzgerald) was in favour of industrial organisation on a class basis, as opposed to the sectional basis, of the I.W.W.”
[28] Ibid.: “How was it possible to overthrow the Capitalist system, and ‘take and hold’ the means of existence, merely by industrial organisation? The seizure of land by the unemployed at West Ham afforded a miniature illustration of what would happen on a vast scale if the absurd attempt were made. In the one case the police and fire-hose sufficed to compel the unemployed to relinquish their hold on an acre of land: in the event of a greater attempt by Industrial Unionists they would be confronted by all the armed forces at the command of the dominant class.”
[29] Wat Tyler, “A Socialist Poet on Bombs and Anarchism: An Interview with William Morris,” Justice (January 27, 1894), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1894/tyler.htm>.
[30] The Socialist (August 1908). As the SLP-GB speaker put it, “The S.L.P. did not oppose the position of the S.P.G.B. on the political field, as for anything we knew to the contrary, their posture on the political side was correct. It was when they relied on the political weapon alone that we opposed them. They asked the workers to vote for their candidates, and they would, by means of a parliamentary majority, do the rest.” See also Jack Fitzgerald, “Is the S.P.G.B the Party of the Working Class? (Debate with S.L.P.),” Socialist Standard (April 1907), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/fitzgerald/1907/slp_debate.htm>; Jack Fitzgerald, “An ‘Industrialist’ Rout,” Socialist Standard (July 1909), <https://www.marxists.org/archive/fitzgerald/1909/industrial_unionist.htm>.
[31] For a useful study of the evolution of the SLP-GB over this period, see Raymond Challinor, “SLP Internal Developments, 1907-1914,” in The Origins of British Bolshevism (London: Croom Helm, 1977), <https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/challinor/1977/british-bolshevism/ch05.htm>.
[32] The Socialist (July 1906) [emphasis added].
[33] “Industrial Unionism,” The Socialist (July 1906).
[34] “The Socialist Labour Party: Its Aims and Methods,” The Socialist (April 1908).
[35] “Socialist Unity,” The Socialist (November 1911).
[36] Originally published in The Socialist (June 1908). By this time Connolly left the SLP-A and was an organizer for the IWW. He later revised the text — deleting references to the IWW and adding an appeal to join the Socialist Party of America — for inclusion in his pamphlet Socialism Made Easy (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1909), <https://www.marxist.net/ireland/connolly/socialism/>.
[37] The Socialist (June 1908).
