The Socialist Labour Party was a socialist political party in the United Kingdom. It was established in 1903 as a splinter from the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) by James Connolly, Neil Maclean and SDF members impressed with the politics of the American socialist Daniel De Leon, a Marxist theoretician and leading figure of the Socialist Labor Party of America. After decades of existence, the group was finally disbanded in 1980.

Organisational history

Formation

The British Socialist Labour Party began as a faction of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) headed nationally by Henry Hyndman. A group of Scottish members of the organisation, led by an engineering worker named George Yates, strongly criticised the party leadership of the SDF for supporting the entry of conservative socialist Alexandre Millerand into the bourgeois French cabinet at the 1900 Congress of the Second International.James Klugmann, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain: Volume 1: Formation and Early Years, 1919-1924. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1968. Page 18. The group attacked the party leadership as reformist and began to publish their critique abroad in The Weekly People, edited by Daniel DeLeon, official organ of the Socialist Labor Party of America.Klugmann, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, vol. 1, pg. 18.

The tendency, initially known as the "Glasgow Socialist Society," took over publication of James Connolly's newspaper, The Socialist, in Scotland in 1902. A purge followed in the SDF at its 1903 Annual Conference, with the dissident radicals denounced as "Impossibilists" by the SDF leadership.

On 7 June 1903 the Socialist Labour Party was formally established at a meeting in Edinburgh, with the already extant monthly newspaper The Socialist declared its official organ.Walter Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, 1900-21: The Origins of British Communism. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969. Page 63. The party began with a membership of only about 80 individuals in 4 branches, all in Scotland—two in Edinburgh, one in Glasgow, and one in Falkirk.Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, pg. 63.John Callaghan echoes the view that the SLP started with about 80 of the SDF's 200 or so Scottish members. John Callaghan, Socialism in Britain Since 1884. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990; pg. 72.

Although deeply influenced by the Socialist Labor Party of America, members of the fledgling British organisation sought their intellectual independence from the start.Raymond Challinor, The Origins of British Bolshevism. London: Croom Helm, 1977; pg. 25. Whereas the American SLP strongly opposed advancing ameliorative "immediate demands," the new British organisation did not follow, instead initially choosing to adopt a programme of immediate demands matching those of the SDF from whence it sprung.The list of palliative demands was later dropped in accordance with the rather doctrinaire ideological tenets of the party. Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, pg. 68. Indeed, there was some discussion as to whether the new party should adopt an altogether different name so as to further delineate themselves from their American counterparts. Trade unionist Tom Bell, a delegate to the inaugural conference, later recalled:

"The question of the name of the new party required a little thought. We were anxious not to create the impression which the official SDF was trying to encourage, that we were only the tools of the American SLP. We thought of 'Republican Socialist Party,' etc., etc. It was Connolly who with characteristic directness proposed 'The Socialist Labour Party.' 'It doesn't matter what you call yourself,' he declared, 'you'll be dubbed the SLP anyway.' And the SLP we became."Thomas Bell, Pioneering Days, (1941); pp. 40-41. Quoted in Challinor, The Origins of British Bolshevism, pg. 25.

Radical Irish republican and trade union leader James Connolly attempted to play a vital role in the British SLP's formative days, energetically traveling back and forth across Scotland, addressing dozens of meetings on behalf of the organisation. His efforts were largely ineffectual, however, as no major influx of Scottish workers into the SLP's ranks was forthcoming.Challinor, The Origins of British Bolshevism, pg. 24. The party's development was further hampered by Connolly's departure to the United States in September 1903, exacerbated by the resignation of the editor of The Socialist, George Yates, that same month.Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, pp. 67-68. Still, the tiny group managed to persevere, with a young engineer named Neil Maclean serving as National Secretary.

As was the case with the American party of the same name, from which it drew inspiration, the Socialist Labour Party considered itself a highly principled and uncompromising organisation. The group refused to work in tandem with "reformists" such as those populating the SDF or the Independent Labour Party. The SLP instead focused on producing and distributing its own propaganda, leaflets, pamphlets, and papers calling for establishment of a bloc of industrial unions as a necessary first step to socialist revolution. The group insisted that its members should avoid taking part in unemployment demonstrations as these were "sentimental" and built false hopes in the viability of the existing system. Echoing the perspective of the American SLP, the majority of the Scottish SLP argued for the use of political action for propaganda and publicity purposes.

The SLP was a highly disciplined and centralised organization. Following the lead of its American counterpart, it mandated that its central press should be directly owned by the party. The party sought to enforce the ideological purity of its printed propaganda through a strict requirement that no branch be able to distribute any literature not previously approved by the SLP's Executive Committee.Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, pg. 68. The party saw the path to socialist revolution blocked by a conservative bureaucracy at the top of the established trade union movement, committed to a "pure and simple" policy of increasing wages and improving conditions in the shop rather than fighting for socialist organization of industry as a whole. Instead, the party sought to establish a network of explicitly socialist unions which would do battle with the so-called "labour fakirs" of the existing union movement. The organization never had sufficient numbers to carry its professed desires into action, however.

The Socialist Labour Party remained headquartered in Scotland, the location of an overwhelming percentage of its members, although it did establish some individual members and small section in Northern England, especially Yorkshire.Klugmann, History of the Communist Party of Great Britain, vol. 1, pp. 18-19. The organization was thus well-placed to play a leading role in the Red Clydeside movement. They had a great deal of influence on the Clyde Workers Committee, but failed to win it to socialism. Other members, such as J.T. "Jack" Murphy, were influential in the Sheffield Workers Committee and gradually abandoned the DeLeonist strategy of creating dual unions, coming to adopt the strategy of working within existing unions and "boring from within" in an effort to win them to their ideas.

The question of international affiliation

The new party determined to send a delegation to the 1904 Amsterdam Congress of the Second International and selected a group of five to represent the organisation there.This represented a comparatively massive percentage of the 200 individuals that the party claimed as its total membership at the time. See: Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, pp. 63, 68. Upon arriving, the SLP Scots were told by the credentials committee of the congress to submit their credentials for participation to the British delegation, a group which included the rival Social Democratic Federation. The SLP delegation refused and were excluded from the congress for the remainder of the proceedings. This experience served to heighten the suspicion of the party towards the International and the party remained henceforth unaffiliated.

Following the Congress, the leading figure of the American SLP, party editor Daniel DeLeon, paid his Scottish followers a visit en route home to America. A historian later recalled that "DeLeon's visit was no more than a moderate success. His speeches savoured more of the university lecture room than the socialist platform. He had none of the flowering rhetoric at that time deemed essential."Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, pp. 68-69

By July 1905 the party had established a total of nine branches, including groups at Oxford, Southampton, Birmingham, and London. The Oxford branch was particularly influential, with the party making inroads with the trade unionists enrolled at Ruskin College and the party's literature playing a role in the local strike movement as well as the establishment of the Central Labour College and Plebs League.Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, pg 69.

The SLP published a wide array of literature from the Marxist canon and emerged as the single most important distributor of Marxist literature in Great Britain. It has been noted that "there can have been scarcely a single person involved in the foundation of the Communist Party of Great Britain who was not, at some time, influenced by the SLP and its literature."Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, pg. 69.

The industrial unionism of the IWW

In 1905 in the United States there was established the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), a revolutionary industrial union which sought to organize workers across all industries as a prelude for the socialist transformation of the economy. American Socialist Labor Party theoretician Daniel DeLeon was among the radical leaders who joined together to establish the new organisation—a group which included Eugene V. Debs of the Socialist Party of America and William "Big Bill" Haywood of the Western Federation of Miners. Parallel attempts to establish the IWW organisation were made in Canada, Australia, Great Britain, and elsewhere.

The leadership of the Glasgow-based Socialist Labour Party was quick to follow the lead of DeLeon and the American SLP, giving hearty endorsement of the new IWW organisation. This decision came at the cost of nearly tearing the British SLP asunder, however. Socialist Labour Party activist Tom Bell, then a 24-year-old in charge of the party's literature department remembered in his autobiography about the 1905 decision to endorse the IWW:

"[The decision] was so sharp and radical, and so opposed to our traditional attitude towards the leaders of the trade unions and Socialist Party, as to cause a certain confusion in our midst.... There was resentment at...committing the party to such a change of policy without discussion.... We had fierce discussions in Glasgow on the question of policy and finally, with a majority group in our branch, I resigned from the party. We remained outside for nearly a year."Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, pg 70. Walter Kendall indicates that the cause of Bell's party separation from the party was actually his ill-considered decision to publish a lampoon called The Decadence of the SLP. He was readmitted at the April 1909 National Conference of the party. See: Kendall, pg. 338, fn. 35.