title: Marxism–Leninism–Maoism

text:
Marxism–Leninism–Maoism (MLM) is a political philosophy that synthesizes and builds upon Marxism–Leninism and Maoism. Its proponents refer to Marxism–Leninism–Maoism as Maoism and Maoism as Mao Zedong Thought (MZT) or Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought. Marxism–Leninism–Maoism was first formalized by the Shining Path in 1982 although Marxism-Leninism-Maoism was proclaimed as a central tenet of the North Kalimantan Communist Party in 1969.

The synthesis of Marxism–Leninism–Maoism did not occur during the life of Mao Zedong. From the 1960s, groups that called themselves Maoist or which upheld Maoism were not unified around a common understanding of Maoism and had instead their own particular interpretations of the political, philosophical, economical and military works of Mao; these disorganized ideological trends comprised, and still comprise, Mao Zedong Thought. Adherents of Marxism–Leninism–Maoism claim it to be a unified, coherent higher stage of Marxism and that it was not synthesized until the 1980s through the experience of the people's war waged by the Shining Path in Peru. This led the Shining Path to posit Marxism–Leninism–Maoism as the newest development of Marxism.

Marxism–Leninism–Maoism has grown and developed significantly, serving as an animating force of revolutionary movements in countries such as Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, India, Nepal and the Philippines. It has also led to efforts being undertaken towards the constitution or reconstitution of communist parties in countries such as Austria, France, Germany, Sweden and the United States. There are several non-party Maoist organizations in many countries, such as  in Norway and the Red Guards in the United States.

Components

New Democracy

The theory of New Democracy holds that the national-bourgeois in semi-feudal and semi-colonial countries has a dual character in that although it is an exploitative capitalist force, it can also but not always side with the proletariat against colonialism, imperialism and the comprador-bourgeoisie (whose existence is due to imperialism).

Much like the New Economic Policy in Russia, New Democracy is conceived of as a necessary (but temporary) stage for the long-term development of socialism, or in this case for the construction and consolidation of socialism in the first place. It holds that the national-bourgeois in the New Democratic stage must always be firmly under the command of the proletariat and they must be firmly dispensed with as soon as the national situation allows (in other words, when the contradiction between feudalism and the masses is no longer the primary contradiction of the nation, or when the bourgeois-democratic revolution is at a sufficiently advanced stage) for an outright dictatorship of the proletariat.

Mass line

Building on the theory of the vanguard party by Vladimir Lenin, the theory of the mass line outlines a strategy for the revolutionary leadership of the masses, consolidation of the dictatorship of the proletariat and strengthening of the party and for the building of socialism. The mass line can be summarized by the phrase "from the masses, to the masses". It has three components or stages:
 Gathering the diverse ideas of the masses.
 Processing or concentrating these ideas from the perspective of revolutionary Marxism, in light of the long-term, ultimate interests of the masses (which the masses themselves may sometimes only dimly perceive) and in light of a scientific analysis of the objective situation.
 Returning these concentrated ideas to the masses in the form of a political line which will actually advance the mass struggle toward revolution.

These three steps should be applied over and over again, reiteratively uplifting practice and knowledge to higher and higher stages.

Law of contradiction

Marxist–Leninist–Maoists uphold Mao Zedong's philosophical works, particularly his work on dialectics in On Contradiction and on epistemology in On Practice.

Protracted people's war

People's war is strategy for revolution which holds the following tenets:
 Any attempt to begin fighting with the bourgeoisie on its own terms, using the same tactics and strategies as they do would be crushed (Marxist–Leninist–Maoists cite that apart from the October Revolution every single revolutionary attempt that immediately used conventional warfare was crushed by the bourgeoisie).
 It cannot be predicted when the objective conditions for revolution will exist. Thus the subjective conditions—i.e. class consciousness—must be built long in advance.
 Seizure of state power generally does not happen in one fell swoop. A situation of dual power through the course of protracted people's war arises when the proletarian vanguard controls sections of the country at the same time as the bourgeoisie.
 The party cannot possibly hope to lead the proletariat in a seizure of power if it itself has no military experience. Thus military experience—i.e. experience gained through actually fighting, even if on a limited scale—must be gained long in advance of a seizure of power. In addition to being a necessary development towards the dictatorship of the proletariat, dual power is invaluable in providing this military experience (along with civil knowledge, fuel for propaganda efforts, material aid for the party and the expansion and improvement of the mass line).

In a joint document released in 1998, several Marxist–Leninist–Maoist communist parties affirmed the difference between the specific strategic line of protracted people's war and the more general and universally applicable people's war. Protracted people's war is identified as being a specific application of the concept of people's war to countries with a large population or majority of peasantry and involving encircling the cities from base areas of communist control in the countryside.

The issue of applying people's war to fully industrialized first world nations is the subject of much debate. Many Marxist–Leninist–Maoist organizations such as the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement have put forward that much of a hypothetical people's war in the First World would take place in urban areas.

Cultural Revolution
Marxist–Leninist–Maoists draw heavily from the experiences and lessons of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution which sought to eradicate the bourgeois that arose within the vanguard party itself and to transform all aspects of the social superstructure. The catchphrase "class struggle continues, and is intensified, under socialism" is frequently used.

Marxist–Leninist–Maoists hold the primacy of the relations of production over the productive forces, criticize Joseph Stalin's line that bourgeois influence under an advanced stage of socialism is primarily due to external forces (to the almost complete exclusion of internal forces) and strongly reaffirm the base-superstructure dialectic (that the conscious transformation of the base on its own is not enough, but the superstructure must also be consciously transformed).

Differences from Mao Zedong Thought
The three most notable differences between Marxism–Leninism–Maoism and Mao Zedong Thought are the following:
 Marxism–Leninism–Maoism is considered to be a higher stage of Marxism–Leninism by it's followers, much like Marxism–Leninism is considered a higher stage of Marxism. However, Mao Zedong Thought is considered to just be Marxism–Leninism applied to the particularities of the Chinese Revolution.
 Marxism–Leninism–Maoism is considered to be universally applicable whilst aspects of Mao Zedong Thought are generally not.
 Marxism–Leninism–Maoism completely rejects the Three Worlds Theory of Mao Zedong Thought, considering it part of the right-wards turn in the Communist Party of China led by Deng Xiaoping near the end of Chairman Mao's life and a deviation from Marxist–Leninist theories of imperialism. Marxism–Leninism–Maoism–Gonzalo Thought only rejects Deng's application.

International influence
Perhaps the most notable international was the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement (RIM). RIM was founded in 1984 and included such organizations as the Shining Path and the then-Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), eventually known as the Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist). Today, the RIM appears to be defunct or near defunct. The magazine associated with the RIM, A World to Win, has not published an issue since 2006, though A World to Win News Service still publishes regularly on the Internet. In addition, many of the one-time RIM organizations have become increasingly critical of each other and this has resulted in many public splits.

India

The Communist Party of India (Maoist) is a Marxist–Leninist–Maoist political party which aims to overthrow the government of India. It was founded on 21 September 2004 through the merger of the Communist Party of India (Marxist–Leninist) People's War and the Maoist Communist Centre of India. The merger was announced to the public on 14 October the same year. In the merger, a provisional central committee was constituted, with the erstwhile people's war leader Muppala Lakshmana Rao (alias Ganapathi) as the general secretary. It is currently proscribed as a terrorist organization by the Indian government.

Manipur
The Kangleipak Communist Party has claimed that Manipur was annexed by the Union of India under the guise of Manipur Merger Agreement of 1949. According to this Marxist–Leninist–Maoist group, the merger of Manipur with the Union of India was in blatant contradiction of relevant international law as the then king of Manipur no longer had the authority to sign the agreement following the establishment of a democratically elected government. According to the group's chairman Ibungo Ngangom, "the then king signed the merger instrument only under duress, or more precisely, at gunpoint and so the so-called Manipur merger agreement was null and void from the very beginning". The group is currently at war with the government India and its express primary goal is not only to have Manipur secede from India, but also to bring about a communist state in Manipur through the scientific socialism of Karl Marx.

Latin America
Many significant Marxist–Leninist–Maoist groups exist across Latin America, including the Communist Party of Brazil (Red Fraction), the Communist Party of Chile (Red Fraction), the Communist Party of Ecuador–Red Sun, the Maoist Organization for the Reconstitution of the Communist Party of Colombia and the Revolutionary Nucleus for the Reconstitution of the Communist Party of Mexico.

Peru

The Shining Path is a guerrilla insurgent organization in Peru. It was founded in 1968 by Abimael Guzmán. The Shining Path suffered a setback after the capture of Guzmán and much of the party leadership in 1992 as well as a takeover of the Main Regional Committee, the greater part of the People's Liberation Army and the liquidation of the main Base Areas. Nonetheless, the Shining Path continues to exist in the VRAEM area of Peru and continues to carry out military actions. This party is not to be confused with Militarized Communist Party of Peru, or the Peruvian Communist Party; of which it is unaffiliated.

Nepal
The Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), a national communist party with a revolutionary background, is a follower of Marxism–Leninism–Maoism. However, the party has also developed its own guiding thought known as Marxism–Leninism–Maoism–Prachanda Path which was developed taking Nepal's political, sociological and geographical constraints into consideration.

The Communist Party of Nepal is another Marxist–Leninist–Maoist party in Nepal. It claims that the UCPN(M) is a revisionist organization and is continuing the people's war against the UCPN(M) government.

Philippines
In the Philippines, the Communist Party of the Philippines and its New People's Army has been raging since 1968. Its strength peaked during the dictatorial rule of Ferdinand Marcos and was the main bulk to overthrow the dictatorship due to its killings. However, it only resurfaced during the Second Great Rectification Movement. It maintains nearly 100 active guerrilla fronts throughout the Philippines today and is considered by the military as the main threat to national security.

United States
The Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP) was previously a Marxist–Leninist–Maoist political party in the United States. The RCP participated in the founding conference of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement on 12 March 1984. The RCP signed the "Declaration of the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement" and supported the RIM's declaration "Long Live Marxism–Leninism–Maoism!" on 26 December 1993 which recognized "Marxism–Leninism–Maoism as the new, third and higher stage of Marxism". However, today the RCP uses the "New Synthesis of Communism" to describe its ideology, although they still call themselves Maoists. Because of this, the RCP has been accused of revisionism by several Marxist–Leninist–Maoist groups such as the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and the Revolutionary Communist Party of Canada.

The Red Guards was a Marxist–Leninist–Maoist collective of community organizers and mass workers founded in 2015.

References

Further reading

Anti-revisionism
Authoritarianism
Eponymous political ideologies
Marxist schools of thought
Maoism
Marxism
Marxism–Leninism
Shining Path
Types of socialism


title: Workers of the world, unite!

text:
The political slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" is one of the rallying cries from The Communist Manifesto (1848) by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (, literally , but soon popularised in English as "Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!"). A variation of this phrase ("Workers of all lands, unite") is also inscribed on Marx's tombstone. The essence of the slogan is that members of the working classes throughout the world should cooperate to defeat capitalism and achieve victory in the class conflict.

Overview

Five years before The Communist Manifesto, this phrase appeared in the 1843 book The Workers' Union by Flora Tristan.

The International Workingmen's Association, described by Engels as "the first international movement of the working class" was persuaded by Engels to change its motto from the League of the Just's "all men are brothers" to "working men of all countries, unite!". It reflected Marx's and Engels' view of proletarian internationalism.

The phrase has overlapping meanings: first, that workers should unite in unions to better push for their demands such as workplace pay and conditions; secondly, that workers should see beyond their various craft unions and unite against the capitalist system; and thirdly, workers of different countries have more in common with each other than workers and employers of the same country.

The phrase was used by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in their publications and songs and was a mainstay on banners in May Day demonstrations. The IWW used it when opposing World War I in both the United States and Australia.

The slogan was the Soviet Union's state motto (Пролетарии всех стран, соединяйтесь!; Proletarii vsekh stran, soyedinyaytes'!) and it appeared in the State Emblem of the Soviet Union. It also appeared on 1919 Russian SFSR banknotes (in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Italian and Russian), on Soviet ruble coins from 1921 to 1934 and was the slogan of Soviet newspaper Pravda.

Some socialist and communist parties continue using it.

Variations
In the first Swedish translation of The Communist Manifesto, published in 1848, the translator Pehr Götrek substituted the slogan with Folkets röst, Guds röst! (i.e. Vox populi, vox Dei, or "The Voice of the People, the Voice of God"). However, later translations have included the original slogan.

The guiding motto of the 2nd Comintern congress in 1920, under Lenin's directive, was "Workers and oppressed peoples of all countries, unite!". This denoted the anti-colonialist agenda of the Comintern, and was seen as an attempt to unite racially-subjugated black people and the global proletariat in anti-imperialist struggle.

In other languages

This slogan was used by several socialist states and communist parties as their official motto.

Motto of the Soviet Union
In each Soviet republic, the same motto was used in the local language.

Motto of other countries

Motto of communist parties
The English phrase and its variants (the variant "All power to the workers" is used by some parties such as the Communist Party of Australia) are used by communist parties in the English-speaking world. The list below does not include the mottos of communist parties of the above countries or in languages listed above.

See also

 Communist society
 From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs
 Labour movement
 Proletarian internationalism
 Social patriotism
 World communism
 World revolution
 Emblem of the Soviet Union

Notes

References

External links

 Manifesto of the Communist Party by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Translated by  Samuel Moore in cooperation with Frederick Engels, 1888.
 Chapter 4 of The Communist Manifesto.
 Collection of Quotes by Karl Marx

1840s neologisms
Communism
Marxism
National mottos
Political catchphrases
Political quotes
Quotations from literature
Philosophical phrases
de:Liste geflügelter Worte/P#Proletarier aller Länder, vereinigt euch!


title: Socialist Unity (UK)

text:
Socialist Unity was a small socialist electoral coalition in the United Kingdom.  It was formed by the International Marxist Group (IMG) as a response to the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) standing candidates in elections.

Initially, in 1977, the IMG formed local groups, and then the national Socialist Unity grouping.  They suggested an alliance with the SWP, which was rejected.  The coalition attracted the support of the Workers League, Big Flame, the Marxist Worker group, and some independent socialists.  The Workers League, Marxist Worker and the remnants of the Libertarian Communist Group were absorbed by the IMG and Big Flame around this time.

The group stood six candidates in the 1979 UK general election, including Tariq Ali. None of the candidates secured a contested seat.  The coalition was dropped when the IMG decided to seek to influence the Labour Party instead.

References

Defunct Trotskyist organisations in the United Kingdom
International Marxist Group
Defunct political party alliances in the United Kingdom
Political parties established in 1977


title: Fifth International

text:
The phrase Fifth International refers to the efforts made by groups of socialists and communists to create a new workers' international.

Previous internationals

There have been several previous international workers' organisations, and the call for a Fifth International presupposes the recognition of four in particular, each of which regarded itself as the successor to the previous ones:
The "First International", known as the "International Workingmen's Association", founded in London in 1864.
The "Second International", founded in 1889 after the expulsion of anarchists from the First International, worked until its subsequent dissolution in 1916. The Second International was a direct ancestor of the Socialist International, an international organization of mainstream social democratic political parties.
The "Third International", known as the Communist International or "Comintern", founded by Vladimir Lenin in 1919 after the failure of the Second International at the start of World War I. The group was dissolved in 1943.
The "Fourth International", founded in 1938 by Leon Trotsky in opposition to Stalinism. Trotsky considered the Comintern to be irreformable and to have crossed over to counter-revolution under the control of a bureaucratic elite in the Soviet Union.

Although it still exists, the fragmentation of Trotskyism has resulted in the call for a fifth international.

Calls for a Fifth International
In November 1938, two months after the founding congress of the Fourth International, seven members of the Spanish Workers' Party of Marxist Unification on trial in Barcelona declared their support for a "fighting Fifth International". The Argentine Trotskyist  called for a Fifth International when he broke from Trotskyism in 1941. Another call for a Fifth International was made by Lyndon LaRouche after leaving the Spartacist League in 1965. Later, a "Fifth International of Communists" was founded in 1994 by several small former Trotskyist groups around the Movement for a Socialist Future.

League for the Fifth International

In 2003, the League for a Revolutionary Communist International called for the formation of the Fifth International "as soon as possible – not in the distant future but in the months and years ahead". The group became the League for the Fifth International (L5I), which as of 2010 has sections in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Pakistan, Sri Lanka (the Socialist Party of Sri Lanka), Sweden, the United Kingdom and the United States. The League for the Fifth International campaigns in the European Social Forum and the international labour movement for the formation of a new International. Splinter group the Communist Workers' Group in New Zealand also argues for a Fifth International.

Hugo Chávez
Hugo Chávez announced in 2007 that he would seek to create a new international: "2008 could be a good time to convoke a meeting of left parties in Latin America to organise a new international, an organisation of parties and movements of the left in Latin America and the Caribbean".

The League for the Fifth International critically supported the proposal.

In popular culture
Poet Allen Ginsberg mentions a Fifth International in "Footnote to Howl", the final part of his poem "Howl".

The card game Illuminati by Steve Jackson Games features the Fifth International as a "communist" and "conservative" group.

In the novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein while discussing the different political ideologies of Professor de la Paz, Wyoming Knott, and Manuel O'Kelly-Davis as they attempted to design a revolution that would work to free Luna from Luna Authority control. The character Wyoming Knott identified herself as a Fifth Internationalist but stated she was "no Marxist".

See also
International Communist Seminar
International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties
São Paulo Forum

References

International socialist organizations
Left-wing internationals
Proposed international organizations
Socialist organizations
Trotskyism


title: Marvin Thomson

text:
Marvin Thomson (January 26, 1923 – April 17, 1967) was an American cyclist. He competed in the tandem event at the 1948 Summer Olympics.

References

External links

1923 births
1967 deaths
American male cyclists
Olympic cyclists for the United States
Cyclists at the 1948 Summer Olympics
Cyclists from Chicago


title: Communist revolution

text:
A communist revolution is a proletarian revolution inspired by the ideas of Marxism that aims to replace capitalism with communism. Depending on the type of government, the term socialism can be used to indicate an intermediate stage between Capitalism and Communism (especially in Marxist-Leninist views). The idea that a proletarian revolution is needed is a cornerstone of Marxism; Marxists believe that the workers of the world must unite and free themselves from capitalist oppression to create a world run by and for the working class. Thus, in the Marxist view, proletarian revolutions need to happen in countries all over the world.

Theory
Leninism argues that a communist revolution must be led by a vanguard of "professional revolutionaries", men and women who are fully dedicated to the communist cause and who can then form the nucleus of the revolutionary movement. Some Marxists disagree with the idea of a vanguard as put forth by Lenin, especially left communists. Some who continue to consider themselves Marxist–Leninists also oppose the vanguard despite disagreeing with the majority of left communism. These critics insist that the entire working class—or at least a large part of it—must be deeply involved and equally committed to the socialist or communist cause in order for a proletarian revolution to be successful. To this end, they seek to build massive communist parties with very large memberships.

Communist revolutions and coups throughout history

The following is a list of successful and unsuccessful communist revolutions and coups throughout history. Among the lesser known revolutions, a number of borderline cases have been included which may or may not have been communist revolutions. The nature of unsuccessful revolutions is particularly contentious since one can only speculate as to the kinds of policies that would have been implemented by the revolutionaries had they achieved victory.

Successful
 1917: The October Revolution in the Russian Republic. It resulted in the creation of Soviet Russia, the predecessor of the Soviet Union. It also led to the Russian Civil War.
 1921: The Mongolian Revolution of 1921 defeated the Republic of China's Mongolian puppet state and created the Mongolian People's Republic.
 1944: The National Liberation Movement seizes power in Albania and creates the People's Socialist Republic of Albania.
 1944: Bulgarian coup d'état.
 1948: Czechoslovak coup d'état.
 1949: The Chinese Communist Revolution led the establishment of the People's Republic of China and fleeing of the Republic of China to Taiwan.
 1953-1959: The Cuban Revolution.
 1969: The Corrective Move in South Yemen.
 1969: The Somali coup d'état led to the formation of the Somali Democratic Republic.
 1972: Mathieu Kérékou leads a military coup in Benin, leading to the creation of the People's Republic of Benin.
 1978: The Saur Revolution leads to the establishment of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan and the start of the Afghan conflict.
 1979: The New Jewel Movement overthrow's Eric Gairy's government in Grenada, creating the People's Revolutionary Government.
 1979: The Nicaraguan Revolution sees the Sandinistas oust the Somoza government.
 1983: The Upper Voltan coup d'état led by Thomas Sankara and Blaise Compaoré. Upper Volta was renamed Burkina Faso. Blaise Compaoré led the 1987 Burkina Faso coup d'état, which killed Thomas Sankara and reversed his far-left policies.
 1996-2006: Nepalese Civil War.

Unsuccessful

 1915-1921: Jungle Movement of Gilan
 1918: Finnish Civil War
 1918: Red Week (Netherlands)
 1918: Luxembourg communist revolution
 1918: Aster Revolution
 1919: Bender Uprising
 1920: Georgian coup attempt
 1921: Proština rebellion
 1923: September Uprising
 1923: Hamburg Uprising
 1924: Tatarbunary Uprising
 1924: Estonian coup d'état attempt
 1935: Brazilian communist uprising
 1942-1954: Hukbalahap Rebellion
 1946-1951: Telangana Rebellion
 1948: Madiun Affair
 1948-1949: Jeju uprising
 1948-1960: Malayan Emergency
 1948-1989: Communist insurgency in Burma
 1960-1996: Guatemalan Civil War
 1962-1990: Communist insurgency in Sarawak
 1964-present: Colombian conflict
 1965-1983: Communist insurgency in Thailand
 1967-present: Naxalite–Maoist insurgency
 1968-1989: Communist insurgency in Malaysia
 1969-present: New People's Army rebellion
 1970: Teoponte Guerrilla
 1971: Sudanese coup d'état
 1971: JVP insurrection
 1972-1974: Araguaia Guerrilla War
 1972-present: Maoist insurgency in Turkey
 1979-1992: Salvadoran Civil War
 1980-present: Internal conflict in Peru
 1982: Amol uprising
 1987-1989: JVP insurrection

See also

 Class conflict
 Communist state
 Communist society
 Revolutionary socialism

Notes

References

Bibliography

 </ref>

Revolutions by type
20th-century revolutions


title: Lisp

text:
A lisp is a  speech impairment in which a person misarticulates sibilants (, , , , , , , ). These misarticulations often result in unclear speech.

Types
 A frontal lisp occurs when the tongue is placed anterior to the target. Interdental lisping is produced when the tip of the tongue protrudes between the front teeth and dentalized lisping is produced when the tip of the tongue just touches the front teeth.  The transcription in the International Phonetic Alphabet for interdental sibilants is  and  and for simple dental sibilants is  and . When a fronted lisp does not have a sibilant quality, due to placing the lack of a grooved articulation, the IPA transcription would be  or variants thereof.
 A  occurs when the  and  sounds are produced with air-flow over the sides of the tongue. It is also called "slushy ess" or a "slushy lisp" in part due to its wet, spitty sound. The symbols for these lateralised sounds in the extensions to the International Phonetic Alphabet for disordered speech are  and .
 A  occurs when part or the entire air stream is directed through the nasal cavity. The transcription for sibilants with nasal frication in the extensions to the IPA is  and ; simple nasal fricatives are  and .
 A strident lisp results in a high-frequency whistle or hissing sound caused by stream passing between the tongue and the hard surface. In the extensions to the IPA, whistled sibilants are transcribed  and .
 A palatal lisp is where the speaker attempts to make a sibilant while the middle of the tongue is in contact with the soft palate, or with a posterior articulation of the sibilant. The latter may be transcribed  and ,  and , or the like.

Causes
Successful treatments have shown that causes are functional rather than physical: that is, most lisps are caused by errors in tongue placement or density of the tongue within the mouth rather than caused by any injury or congenital or acquired deformity to the mouth. The most frequently discussed of these problems is tongue thrust in which the tongue protrudes beyond the front teeth. This protrusion affects speech as well as swallowing and can lead to lisping. Ankyloglossia or tongue tie can also be responsible for lisps in children — however, it is unclear whether these deficiencies are caused by the tongue tie itself or the muscle weakness following the correction of the tongue tie.  Overbites and underbites may also contribute to non lingual lisping. Temporary lisps can be caused by dental work, dental appliances such as dentures or retainers or by swollen or bruised tongues.

Treatment

Frenectomy
Lisps caused by tongue tie can be treated by a dentist or otolaryngologist (ENT) with a lingual frenectomy, or laser incision, which takes less than 10 to 15 minutes to complete.

Speech therapy
With an interdental lisp, the therapist teaches the student how to keep the tongue behind the two front incisors.

One popular method of correcting articulation or lisp disorders is to isolate sounds and work on correcting the sound in isolation. The basic sound, or phoneme, is selected as a target for treatment. Typically the position of the sound within a word is considered and targeted. The sound appears in the beginning of the word, middle, or end of the word (initial, medial, or final).

Take for example, correction of an "S" sound (lisp). Most likely, a speech language pathologist (SLP) would employ exercises to work on  Starting practice words would most likely consist of "S-initial" words such as "say, sun, soap, sip, sick, said, sail." According to this protocol, the SLP slowly increases the complexity of tasks (context of pronunciations) as the production of the sound improves. Examples of increased complexity could include saying words in phrases and sentences, saying longer multi syllabic words, or increasing the tempo of pronunciation.

Using this method, the SLP achieves success with their student by targeting a sound in a phonetically consistent manner. Phonetic consistency means that a target sound is isolated at the smallest possible level (phoneme, phone, or allophone) and that the context of production must be consistent. Consistency is critical, because factors such as the position within the word, grouping with other sounds (vowels or consonants), and the complexity all may affect production.

Another popular method for treating a lisp is using specially designed devices that go in the mouth to provide a tactile cue of exactly where the tongue should be positioned when saying the "S" sound. This tactile feedback has been shown to correct lisp errors twice as fast as traditional therapy.

Using either or both methods, the repetition of consistent contexts allows the student to align all the necessary processes required to properly produce language; language skills (ability to formulate correct sounds in the brain: What sounds do I need to make?), motor planning (voicing and jaw and tongue movements: How do I produce the sound?), and auditory processing (receptive feedback: Was the sound produced correctly? Do I need to correct?).

A student with an articulation or lisp disorder has a deficiency in one or more of these areas. To correct the deficiency, adjustments have to be made in one or more of these processes. The process to correct it is more often than not, trial and error. With so many factors, however, isolating the variables (the sound) is imperative to getting to the result faster.

A phonetically consistent treatment strategy means practicing the same thing over and over. What is practiced is consistent and does not change. The words might change, but the phoneme and its positioning is the same (say, sip, sill, soap, ...). Thus, successful correction of the disorder is found in manipulating or changing the other factors involved with speech production (tongue positioning, cerebral processing, etc.). Once a successful result (speech) is achieved, then consistent practice becomes essential to reinforcing correct productions.

When the difficult sound is mastered, the student will then learn to say the sound in syllables, then words, then phrases and then sentences. When a student can speak a whole sentence without lisping, attention is then focused on making correct sounds throughout natural conversation. Towards the end of the course of therapy, the student will be taught how to monitor his or her own speech, and how to correct as necessary. Speech therapy can sometimes fix the problem, but in some cases speech therapy fails to work.

See also
 Gay male speech
 Speech sound disorder

References

External links

 Beth Morrisey MLIS (25 September 2012) "Lisps", SpeechDisorder.co.uk
 Caroline Bowen (23 November 2011) "Lisping - When /s/ and /z/ are hard to say", speech-language-therapy dot com

Speech disorders
Specific developmental disorders

fr:Sigmatisme


title: Real socialism

text:
Real socialism, better known as actually existing socialism or developed socialism (), was an ideological catchphrase popularized during the Brezhnev era in the Eastern Bloc countries and the Soviet Union.

The term referred to the Soviet-type economic planning implemented by the Eastern Bloc at that particular time. From the 1960s onward, countries such as Poland, East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia began to argue that their policies represented what was realistically feasible given their level of productivity.

The concept of real socialism alluded to a future highly developed socialist system. The actual party claims of nomenclatory socialism began to acquire not only negative, but also sarcastic meanings. In later years and especially after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the term began to be remembered as only one thing, i.e. as a reference for Soviet-style socialism.{{#tag:ref|See definitions and descriptions of "real socialism" in the following:
 Kyu-Young Lee, "System Transformation in Poland since 1989:  A view on the transformation of the real-socialist system." Including List of References.  Graduate School of International Studies, Sogang University.
 Krzysztof Brzechczyn,  The Collapse of Real Socialism in Eastern Europe. Adam Mickiewicz University, Department of Philosophy. The Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies in History and Archaeology. Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 105–133
 Jacek Tittenbrun, The Collapse of 'Real Socialism` in Poland. Paul & Co Pub Consortium
 Robert W. Cox,  "Real socialism" in historical perspective. Pages 177–183. Google Docs. Retrieved November 3, 2011. See term: "actually existing socialism" in Rudolph Bahro's The Alternative in Eastern Europe, Note 3, p. 190.|group=note}}

Definition
After World War II, the terms "real socialism" or "really existing socialism" gradually became the predominating euphemisms used as self-description of the Eastern Bloc states' political and economical systems and their society models. De jure often referred to as "people's republics", these states were ruled by a communist party, some of which were ruled autocratically and had adapted a form of planned economy and propagated socialism and/or communism as their ideology. The term "real (-ly existing) socialism" was introduced to explain the obvious gap between the propagated ideological framework and the political and economical reality faced by these states' societies. As US Communist Party activist Irwin Silber put it in 1994,The term 'actually existing socialism’ is not (despite the quotation marks) a sarcasm; in fact, while obviously containing an implicit irony, the phrase itself was coined by Soviet Marxist-Leninists and was widely used by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and its supporters in polemics with those who postulated a model of socialism significantly different from the system developed in the Soviet Union. Its point was that various alternatives to the Soviet-derived model existed only in the minds of their advocates, while 'actual socialism' existed in the real world.

Leonid Brezhnev has defined the iconic“Developed Socialism”as the Soviet-style socialism, which he believes has successfully constructed socialism in the Soviet Union and reached Vladimir Lenin's transition stage from socialism to communism. Brezhnev emphasized the advanced technological developments in the USSR with full electrification of the country, the use of nuclear power in production, computer planning, as well as a highly mechanized agriculture. He believed that all social strata within the USSR were closer to each other than ever before due to the highly developed productive force in the country. Therefore, the dictatorship of the proletariat has, according to Brezhnev, moved towards a people's government. Brezhnev believed that all socialist countries would go through the same socialist development and social transformation of the Soviet model regardless of their national and material conditions.

The term was also taken up by some dissidents, such as Rudolf Bahro, who used it in a more critical way.

The role of the Sino-Soviet split
Another aspect of the term real socialism related to the Sino-Soviet split and other ideological disagreements between the Soviet Union and its satellite states on one side and the People's Republic of China and the followers of a more Maoist brand of communist ideology on the other. The Sino-inspired communist movement, which had grown so rapidly worldwide as a "radical left" alternative to Soviet ideas, had claimed that the Soviet Union was no longer socialist and had betrayed the revolution. To counter this claim of Marxist revisionism, the Soviets called their version "real socialism", implying that other models of socialism were unrealistic.

See also

Actually existing capitalism
Communist state
Marxism–Leninism
Moderately prosperous society
Primary stage of socialism
Soviet-type economic system
State capitalism
State socialism
Transition economy

 Notes

 References
 Citations

 Sources
 General

 Real socialism from A Dictionary of Sociology'', 1998, originally published by Oxford University Press.

Ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union
Socialism
Comecon
Economy of the Soviet Union
Soviet phraseology
Political economy


title: National Socialist Party (UK)

text:
The National Socialist Party was a small political party in the United Kingdom, founded in 1916. It originated as a minority group within the British Socialist Party who supported British participation in World War I; while historically linked with the Marxist left, the party broke with internationalism. It affiliated to the Labour Party and was eventually absorbed by it.

Origins
The National Socialist Party was founded by H.M. Hyndman and his followers after his defeat in the leadership elections of the British Socialist Party. They believed that it was desirable to support the United Kingdom in World War I against "Prussian militarism". Although maintaining that they were a Marxist party, after affiliation to the Labour Party in 1918, they renounced vanguardism and saw in the Russian Revolution only the danger that it might weaken the United Kingdom's war effort. The party was grouped around the newspaper Justice.

Three members of the party were elected to Parliament in the 1918 election; Dan Irving and Will Thorne were elected for the Labour Party, and Jack Jones under the National Socialist Party name.

Social Democratic Federation
In 1919, the group changed its name to the Social Democratic Federation, reverting to the name that the British Socialist Party had used. At one point eleven MPs were members, but after Hyndman died in 1921, the group gradually dissolved into the Labour Party. The party sponsored several candidates at each election until 1924, all of whom ran for Labour. After 1924, its MPs were instead sponsored by their local Labour Party. The party finally disbanded in 1939 due to a lack of funds, although some remaining members formed a "Social Democratic Fellowship".

Other prominent members included Henry W. Lee, Hunter Watts, John Stokes and Joseph Burgess.

Election results

1918 UK general election

By-elections, 1918-1922

1922 UK general election

1923 UK general election

1924 UK general election

References

Defunct social democratic parties in the United Kingdom
Political parties established in 1916
Political parties disestablished in 1941
Organisations associated with the Labour Party (UK)
History of the Labour Party (UK)
1916 establishments in the United Kingdom


title: Henry Hyndman

text:
Henry Mayers Hyndman (; 7 March 1842 – 20 November 1921) was an English writer, politician and socialist.

Originally a conservative, he was converted to socialism by Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto and launched Britain's first left-wing political party, the Democratic Federation, later known as the Social Democratic Federation, in 1881.

Although this body attracted radicals such as William Morris and George Lansbury, Hyndman was generally disliked as an authoritarian who could not unite his party. Nonetheless, Hyndman was the first author to popularise Marx's works in English.

Early life
The son of a wealthy businessman, Hyndman was born on 7 March 1842 in London. After being educated at home, he entered Trinity College, Cambridge. Hyndman later recalled:

I had the ordinary education of a well-to-do boy and young man. I read mathematics hard until I went to Cambridge, where I ought, of course, to have read them harder, and then I gave them up altogether and devoted myself to amusement and general literature. ... Trinity or, for that matter, any other college, is practically a hot-bed of reaction from the social point of view. The young men regard all who are not technically 'gentlemen' as 'cads,' just as the Athenians counted all who were not Greeks as barbarians.

I was a thorough-going Radical and Republican in those days—theoretically ... with a great admiration for John Stuart Mill, and later, I remember, I regarded John Morley as the coming man.

After his graduation in 1865, Hyndman studied law for two years before deciding to become a journalist. As a first-class cricketer, he represented Cambridge University, Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) and Sussex in thirteen matches as a right-handed batsman between 1864 and 1865.

In 1866, Hyndman reported on the Italian war with Austria for The Pall Mall Gazette. Hyndman was horrified by the reality of war and became violently ill after visiting the front line. Hyndman met the leaders of the Italian nationalist movement and was generally sympathetic to their cause.

In 1869, Hyndman toured the world, visiting the United States, Australia and several European countries. He continued to write for The Pall Mall Gazette, where he praised the British Empire and criticised those advocating for Irish Home Rule. Hyndman was also very opposed to politics of the United States.

Hyndman married Matilda Ware (c. 1846–1913) in 1876 and then Rosalind Travers (c. 1875–1923) in 1914.

Political career

Hyndman decided on a career in politics. Unable to find a party that he could fully support, he decided to stand as an independent for the constituency of Marylebone in the 1880 general election. Denounced as a Tory by William Ewart Gladstone, Hyndman gained very limited support from the electorate and withdrew from the contest, facing certain defeat.

Soon after the election, Hyndman read a novel based on the life of Ferdinand Lassalle. He became fascinated with Lassalle and decided to research this romantic hero who had been killed in a duel in 1864. Discovering that Lassalle had been a socialist, sometimes a friend and sometimes an adversary of Karl Marx, Hyndman read The Communist Manifesto. Although he had doubts about some of Marx's ideas, Hyndman was greatly impressed by his analysis of capitalism.

Hyndman was also greatly influenced by the book Progress and Poverty and the ideology of Henry George known today as Georgism.

Hyndman decided to form Britain's first socialist political party. The Social Democratic Federation (SDF) had its first meeting on 7 June 1881. Many socialists were concerned that in the past Hyndman had been opposed to socialist ideas, but Hyndman persuaded many that he had genuinely changed his views and those who eventually joined the SDF included William Morris and Karl Marx's daughter Eleanor Marx. However, Friedrich Engels, Marx's long-term collaborator, refused to support Hyndman's venture.

Hyndman wrote the first popularisation of the ideas of Karl Marx in the English language with England for All in 1881. The book was extremely successful, a fact that stoked Marx's antipathy, given the fact that he had failed to credit Marx by name in the introduction. The work was followed in 1883 by Socialism Made Plain which expounded the policies of what by then had been renamed as the SDF. They included a demand for universal suffrage and the nationalisation of the means of production and distribution. The SDF also published Justice, edited by the journalist Henry Hyde Champion.

Many members of the SDF questioned Hyndman's leadership qualities. He was extremely authoritarian and tried to restrict internal debate about party policy. At an SDF meeting on 27 December 1884, the executive voted by a majority of two (10–8) that it had no confidence in Hyndman. When he refused to resign, some members, including William Morris and Eleanor Marx, left the party, forming the Socialist League.

In the 1885 general election, Hyndman and Henry Hyde Champion, without consulting their colleagues, accepted £340 from the Conservatives to run parliamentary candidates in Hampstead and Kensington, the objective being to split the Liberal vote and therefore enable the Conservative candidate to win. This ploy failed and the two SDF's candidates won only a total of 59 votes. The story leaked out and the political reputation of both men suffered because they had accepted "Tory gold".

During the 1880s, Hyndman was a prominent member of the Irish National Land League and the Land League of Great Britain. He took part in the unemployed demonstrations of 1887 and was put on trial for his share in the West End Riots of 1886, but he was acquitted.

Hyndman was chairman at the International Socialist Congress held in London in 1896. He was pro-Boer during the second Boer War.

Hyndman continued to lead the SDF and took part in the negotiations to establish the Labour Representation Committee (LRC) in 1900. However, the SDF left the LRC when it became clear that it was deviating from the objectives he had set out. In 1911, he set up the British Socialist Party (BSP) when the SDF fused with a number of branches of the Independent Labour Party.

Political thought

Hyndman thought was influenced by John Stuart Mill and his protégé John Morley as well as Charles Dilke, Henry Fawcett and Giuseppe Mazzini, Karl Marx "erstwhile adversary" at the time of the First International. According to Hyndman, "Mazzini's greatness ... was obscured for younger socialists by his 'opposition to Marx in the early days of the 'International,' and his vigorous condemnation a little later of the Paris Commune", insisting that "'Mazzini's conception of the conduct of human life' had been 'a high and noble one'", praising the "No duties without rights" mention in the "General Rules" that Marx composed and passed as "a concession Marx made to Mazzini's followers within the organisation". Friedrich Engels, Marx's collaborator, "censured Hyndman's Mazzinian moralism" and also accused Hyndman of "jingo aspiration". Seamus Flaherty argues that "Hyndman's views on the beneficence of the 'great democracies of the English speaking peoples'" were inspired not by Benjamin Disraeli as historians such as Mark Bevir have argued, but rather by Dilke and Mill, whom Hyndman combined their ideas "on the unique character of 'the Angloe-Saxon race' with Mazzini's cosmopolitan patriotism, thus constructing a nationalism fully compatible with 'a good internationalism'.

In his two volume autobiography, Hyndman spoke at length about Mazzini, even comparing him to Marx. For Vladimir Lenin, "that Hyndman should do so was preposterous; more astonishing still was that Hyndman should admire Mazzini". However, Flaherty writes that "when situated within its proper context, Hyndman's 'intellectual republicanism', so far from being unintelligible, is predictable, insofar as it was characteristic of mid-Victorian liberalism. Lenin's view was anachronistic. Similarly anachronistic was Lenin's complaint that Hyndman 'very poorly understood in 1880 ... the difference between a bourgeois democratic and a socialist'. For the difference was, often, not clear-cut; many socialist, including Marx, accepted the representative state. The 'association between Marx and a 'Marxist' language of revolution' was, in the main, a twentieth-century invention, which Lenin in no small part helped to create. And Max himself, moreover, allayed Hyndman's fears about the necessity of revolution in England, stating that he considered 'an English revolution not necessary, but according to historic precedents—possible".

Controversy

Antisemitism

Hyndman was an antisemite, voicing antisemitic opinions with regard to the Second Boer War and blaming "Jewish bankers" and "imperialist Judaism" as the cause of the conflict. Hyndman charged "Beit, Barnato and their fellow-Jews" as aiming to create "an Anglo-Hebraic Empire in Africa stretching from Egypt to Cape Colony".

Hyndman believed Jews were central to "a sinister 'gold international' opposed to the 'red international' of socialism". Hyndman supported the antisemitic Viennese riots of 1885, arguing that they represented a blow against Jewish finance capital. Hyndman repeatedly denounced what he saw as the overwhelming power of "capitalist Jews on the London Press", believing that the "Semitic lords of the press" had created war in South Africa. Hyndman remained committed to conspiracies concerning Jews, remarking that "unless you said that they [Jews] were the most capable and brilliant people of the earth, you had the whole of their international agencies against you".

Such antisemitism disillusioned erstwhile supporters. Eleanor Marx wrote privately to Wilhelm Liebknecht that "Mr Hyndman whenever he could do with impunity has endeavoured to set English workmen against foreigners". Hyndman had previously attacked Eleanor Marx in antisemitic terms, noting that she had "inherited in her nose and mouth the Jewish type from Marx himself".

After the war
Hyndman upset members of the BSP by supporting the United Kingdom's involvement in World War I. The party split in two, with Hyndman forming a new National Socialist Party. Hyndman remained leader of the small party until his death from pneumonia on 20 November 1921.

Bibliography
 A Commune for London (1888)
 England For All
 The Bankruptcy of India
 Commercial Crisis of the Nineteenth Century (1892)
 Economics of Socialism (1890)
 The Record of an Adventurous Life
 The Future of Democracy (1915)
 The Awakening of Asia (1919)
 The Evolution of Revolution (1921)

See also
 History of the socialist movement in the United Kingdom

References

Further reading
 Flaherty, Seamus. "H. M. Hyndman and the Intellectual Origins of the Remaking of Socialism in Britain, 1878–1881." English Historical Review 134.569 (2019): 855–880.

External links

 Cricket Archive
 Henry Hyndman Internet Archive, Marxists Internet Archive.
 H. M. Hyndman, Commercial Crises of the Nineteenth Century (1892)

1842 births
1921 deaths
Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge
Antisemitism in England
British political party founders
British Socialist Party members
Cambridge University cricketers
English cricketers
English male journalists
English male non-fiction writers
English political writers
English socialists
Gentlemen of the South cricketers
India House
Marylebone Cricket Club cricketers
Social Democratic Federation members
Surrey Club cricketers
Sussex cricketers
Writers from London


title: Al Stiller

text:
Alfred William "Al" Stiller (August 26, 1923 – April 20, 2004) was an American cyclist. He competed in the tandem and team pursuit events at the 1948 Summer Olympics.

References

External links

1923 births
2004 deaths
American male cyclists
Olympic cyclists for the United States
Cyclists at the 1948 Summer Olympics
Cyclists from Chicago
American track cyclists


title: Social Democratic Federation

text:
The Social Democratic Federation (SDF) was established as Britain's first organised socialist political party by H. M. Hyndman, and had its first meeting on 7 June 1881.  Those joining the SDF included William Morris, George Lansbury, James Connolly and Eleanor Marx. However, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx's long-term collaborator, refused to support Hyndman's venture. Many of its early leading members had previously been active in the Manhood Suffrage League.

The SDF battled through defections of its right and left wings to other organisations in the first decade of the twentieth century before uniting with other radical groups in the Marxist British Socialist Party from 1911 until 1920.

Organizational history

Origins and early years

The British Marxist movement effectively began in 1880 when a businessman named Henry M. Hyndman read Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto in French translation while crossing to America. Upon his return to London, Hyndman sought out Marx, then an exile living not far from his home. Hyndman, who had run for parliament earlier that year, decided to start a new political organization which he called the Democratic Federation and in June called its foundation convention, consisting of an assortment of radical grouplets and individuals.

In preparation for the convention, Hyndman circulated among the delegates his book England for All, which paraphrased Marx's Capital without crediting the original author. Marx took great offence and broke off personal relations with his English epigone. Marx's distaste for Hyndman was shared by Friedrich Engels, who succeeded his close friend as his literary executor at Marx's death on 14 March 1883.

In 1884 the Democratic Federation was transformed into the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) when the group adopted an explicitly socialist platform. The Federation was strongly opposed to the Liberal Party which then claimed to represent the labour movement in parliament. The programme of the SDF was strongly progressive, calling for (amongst other measures) a 48-hour workweek, the abolition of child labour, compulsory and free and secular education, equality for women, and the nationalisation of the means of production, distribution, and exchange by a democratic state.

The party attracted to its banner a number of Britain's leading radicals, including William Morris, Edward Aveling and his partner Eleanor Marx, Karl's youngest daughter.

Henry Hyndman dominated the SDF from the beginning. One key to his personal authority lay in his purse, which paid the bulk of its administrative expenses, and its weekly newspaper, Justice, lost money despite a healthy circulation of about 3,500. Some in the Federation were unhappy, regarding Hyndman as domineering in personal relations and sectarian in political thinking. Hyndman's detractors considered him politically ambitious and lacking in principle, and their ill will and personal antipathy came to a climax at Christmas 1884.

The split of 1884

On 23 December 1884, a meeting of the Executive Council of the SDF was held at which Hyndman was attacked for several alleged offences: defaming a comrade in Edinburgh by calling him an "anarchist" without cause, corresponding in the name of the organisation without authority and in defiance of the Council's decisions, and withholding correspondence meant for the organisation as a whole. Hyndman was additionally accused of stirring up strife between members of the Council and fabricating a provincial branch from thin air so as to ready himself to wield undeserved voting authority at a future convention of the organisation.

Hyndman gathered his factional supporters for his defence, while his opponents, who included William Morris, Belfort Bax, Eleanor Marx, and Edward Aveling, mustered their own forces. After protracted debate, on 27 December a motion of censure on Hyndman was adopted, after which the majority of the Council, freshly victorious, promptly resigned from the SDF.

The individuals leaving the party formed a new organisation called the Socialist League, supported financially by William Morris, who particularly objected to Hyndman's rigid control of the party press and what he considered his excessive personal influence. They considered Hyndman opportunistic and obsessed with parliamentary politics to the detriment of trade union organisation. Hyndman retained the party publications Justice and To-Day and the 500 or so members of the SDF chose sides as one small organisation became two smaller ones. Friedrich Engels was jubilant about the split, declaring to Eduard Bernstein: "I have the satisfaction of having seen through the whole racket from the outset, correctly sized up all the people concerned, and foretold what the end would be."

Unfortunately for Engels' best laid plans, it was the Socialist League that wound up "shipwrecked" by the split, while the SDF emerged from the factional strife with Hyndman and his followers in tighter control than before.

The SDF in the 1880s

The defection of assorted and sundry anti-parliamentary members from the Social Democratic Federation, including a fair number of anarchists, to form the Socialist League in 1885 left the SDF a relatively more homogeneous unit than its new offshoot. While Hyndman and the SDF used scare tactics about some impending national catastrophe that would prove the catalyst for socialist revolution in the mid-1880s, his eyes remained on the parliamentary prize. In the general election of 1885 the SDF stood three candidates for office—subsidised by a £340 campaign contribution obtained by SDF leader Henry Hyde Champion from a Conservative Party agent named Maltman Barry. Despite this somewhat shady attempt of the Tories to split the opposition, the SDF fared extremely poorly, with John Burns receiving 598 votes in Nottingham while Jack Williams in Hampstead and John Fielding in Kensington netted a mere 27 and 32 votes, respectively. The SDF's foray into electoral politics had proven to be both controversial and wholly ineffective.

In the winter of 1885/86 the SDF made its first appreciable advance in the public eye. With economic depression sweeping the country, a demonstration was planned to be held in Trafalgar Square in February 1886 to agitate against free trade and in favour of protectionist trade policies, a move which many believed would lessen the unemployment problem in Great Britain. The SDF agitated for the "Right to Work" and made demands for the establishment of state-directed co-operative colonies on underutilised lands. The police forced the SDF-led demonstration out of the Square. John Burns led the protesters down Pall Mall en route to Hyde Park bearing a red flag. Along the way the marchers scuffled with jeering onlookers and a riot ensued, with smashed windows and fisticuffs. The party claimed a big boost in membership in the aftermath, with its official organ, Justice, selling 4,000 copies of each issue.

The next autumn a protest of socialists and radicals was called for Trafalgar Square for 13 November 1887. This time, still smarting from the riot of the previous January, political and police officials had committed a massive body of personnel to the Square, including some 4,000 constables, 300 mounted policemen, 300 soldiers from the Grenadier Guards, and 350 members of the Life Guards. This body of police and military forces used horses, batons, and rifle butts against an estimated 20,000 demonstrators out of the square, injuring hundreds and killing two in the process. Some 200 demonstrators were taken to the hospital, 150 of whom needed surgical treatment. Three hundred demonstrators were arrested and 112 police officers injured. This demonstration and its forcible suppression became known as "Bloody Sunday" to a generation.

The next week, 20 November 1887 the popular mood of protest continued to expand. Some 40,000 demonstrators turned out at Hyde Park to voice their outrage over the "Bloody Sunday" killings, while an additional large crowd gathered in Trafalgar Square. For a second straight week, mounted police charged the crowd, supported by volunteer "special constables. One demonstrator, Alfred Linnell, was crushed by the horses and died of his injuries 12 days later. A massive demonstration of 120,000 Londoners turned out for his funeral."

In the aftermath of these protests, the SDF assumed a place in the public imagination far beyond the role which the organisation's actual size and efficacy would ordinarily have merited. For some in the party itself, however, the futility of mass action to achieve positive results seemed clear. A renewed effort for working-class representation in parliament began to show itself. This trend was led by Keir Hardie, a Scot adhering to the intellectual tradition of ethical socialism rather than Marxism. Together with labour leaders Tom Mann, John Burns, and socialist activist Henry Hyde Champion, the movement to launch a Labour Party established outside of the existing two parties was begun in earnest.

When these ideas were rejected by the SDF at its 1888 Annual Conference in favour of a limitation of party support to candidates endorsing the notion of class war, these advocates of an ameliorative Labour Party set out on their own, abandoning the SDF to its own fate.

The SDF shatters

Many trade unionists who were members of the SDF felt that the Federation neglected trade union activities. This group believed that the SDF was obsessed with parliamentarian pursuits and should be instead more active in the industrial struggle. Hyndman disagreed, seeking a continued concentration on political activities. Hyndman's control of the party organisation and press proved pivotal and the SDF refused to change its politically-dominated strategy, causing Burns and Mann to leave the party in 1890.

At the turn of the century, the SDF optimistically claimed to have 96 branches with about 9,000 members. Many of these branches failed to pay their subscription to the organization, however, with the dues of a penny per member per month paid to the central office irregularly. One historian has estimated the actual strength of the organization in 1900 at approximately 50 functioning branches with an active membership of around 1,000.

Despite the weakness of its adult organisation, the SDF was instrumental in the development of the movement of Socialist Sunday Schools for children, institutions which taught socialist ideas and ethical principles to youngsters in competition with various denominations' Sunday schools.

During this interval the SDF experienced the atrophy of its ultra-parliamentary right wing to the Independent Labour Party (ILP). This party, led by Keir Hardie, was a big tent party of the left, more heavily influenced by Christian Socialism than by the atheistic Marxism of the SDF. The ILP also had the advantage of having Hardie as a member of the House of Commons after winning the West Ham South seat in the 1892 General Election. This enabled the ILP to argue that it was a more effective vehicle for change than the SDF. Prominent figures such as Henry Hyde Champion, Ben Tillett, Jim Connell and George Lansbury, all left the SDF for the ILP.

Initially, there was progress towards a unification of the SDF with its rivals of the parliamentarian left. On February 27, 1900, Hyndman and the SDF met with the ILP, the Fabian Society and trade union leaders at the Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street, London. After a debate the 129 delegates decided to pass Hardie's motion to establish "a distinct Labour group in Parliament, who shall have their own whips, and agree upon their policy, which must embrace a readiness to cooperate with any party which for the time being may be engaged in promoting legislation in the direct interests of labour."

To make this possible the Conference established a Labour Representation Committee (LRC). This committee included two members from the Social Democratic Federation and the Independent Labour Party, one member of the Fabian Society, and seven trade unionists. The LRC eventually evolved into the Labour Party. Despite the formal unification of forces, many members of the party were uncomfortable with the Marxism of the SDF and Hyndman had very little influence over the development of this political group, eventually leaving the alliance in 1907.

In addition to the loss of the party's right wing, the SDF experienced defections of some of its most radical members for different reasons. Hyndman's personalistic leadership and the policies of the organisation generated proved to be an ongoing inspiration for a river of internal criticism. One major source of contention surrounded the attitude of Hyndman and other party leaders towards the Boer War of 1899–1902. While the party adopted an anti-war stance, the rhetoric of the leadership seemed to these members to be far removed from a principled socialist opposition to the conflict, with Hyndman going so far as to declare in July 1901 that further anti-war agitation was "a waste of time and money." Charges of reformism and chauvinism were made by left wing members, who began publishing their oppositional criticism in the official organ of the Socialist Labor Party of America.

At the March 1902 annual conference of the SDF, held in Blackburn, the battle between the insurgent left wing and Hyndman's leadership group came to a head. A motion by the left wing to oppose continued unity negotiations with the ILP was roundly defeated, as were other motions to advance an explicitly radical programme, such as one proposal calling for establishment of socialist dual unions and another which would have banned SDF members from joining other political organisations. At the conclusion of the conference SDF editor Harry Quelch commented upon the acrimony which had ensued from the programmatic efforts of the left wing, threatening that the dissidents "must either fall into line or fall out altogether."

The 1903 annual conference, held 10–12 April at Shoreditch Town Hall, marked the final showdown. Before the proceedings began, George Yates was informed that he was to be expelled from the party for purportedly obstructing left unity, failing to sell Justice, and writing an editorial for The Socialist in which he declared that there was a "distinct tendency" of the SDF to alter their former revolutionary attitude in favour of "opportunist tactics of the worst kind." Delegates agreed to Yates' expulsion by a vote of 56 to 6, with the resolution further empowering the executive to expel, without the right of appeal, anybody endorsing Yates' views.

Those members of the left wing located in Scotland, who controlled the SDF apparatus there, could see little sense in remaining in the SDF further and they shortly left en bloc to launch the Socialist Labour Party, inaugurated at a conference held 7 June 1903. Others, tending to be based in London, left to form the  Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1904. The departing left wing particularly faulted the SDF's perceived failure to concentrate on work to radicalise the nation's trade unions, which was envisioned as being the key to the revolutionary transformation of society.

New traction for an old party

While the SDF stagnated and split during the first decade of the 20th century, the various failures of those who departed paved the way for new growth. Unhappiness with the Labour Party's performance in parliament, hampered as it was by electoral alliance with the Liberal Party, led to renewed calls for a reorganisation of socialist forces. In 1910, Victor Grayson named Hyndman, Robert Blatchford, and Keir Hardie as the political leaders most capable of forging a new alliance.

In 1911 this idea came to realisation when a Socialist Unity Conference was held, bringing together representatives of the SDF, the left wing of the ILP, the network of clubs associated with The Clarion newspaper, and various local socialist societies. Together these groups formed a new organisation, the British Socialist Party. Hyndman was a leading figure in the early party, but a growing party split over which position to take in the First World War saw him leave to form in 1916 a rival "defencist" National Socialist Party.

Social Democratic Federation reprised (1919–1939)

The Social Democratic Federation was also the name of a party led by Hyndman after 1919, when the National Socialist Party changed its name.  The group enjoyed some short-term success but gradually faded into the Labour Party, being wound up in 1939.

Conferences of the SDF

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Year
! Description
! City
! Dates
! Chair
! Delegates
! Proceedings
|-
! 1881
| align="center" | Annual Conference
| align="center" | London
| align="center" | 8 June
| H. M. Hyndman
| align="center" | N/A
| align="center" |
|-
! 1882
| align="center" | Annual Conference
| align="center" | London
| align="center" | 31 May
| H. M. Hyndman
| align="center" | 150
| align="center" |
|-
! 1883
| align="center" | Annual Conference
| align="center" | London
| align="center" | 16? May
| H. M. Hyndman
| align="center" |
| align="center" |
|-
! 1884
| align="center" | Annual Conference
| align="center" | London
| align="center" | 4 August
| H. M. Hyndman
| align="center" |
| align="center" |
|-
! 1885
| align="center" | Annual Conference
| align="center" | London
| align="center" | 3 August
|
| align="center" |
| align="center" |
|-
! 1886
| align="center" | Annual Conference
| align="center" | London
| align="center" | 2 August
| James F. Murray
| align="center" |
| align="center" |
|-
! 1887
| align="center" | Annual Conference
| align="center" | Manchester
| align="center" | 1 August
|
| align="center" |
| align="center" |
|-
! 1888
| align="center" | Annual Conference
| align="center" | London
| align="center" | 6 August
|
| align="center" | 26
| align="center" |
|-
! 1889
| align="center" | Annual Conference
| align="center" | Birmingham
| align="center" | 10 August
|
| align="center" | 20
| align="center" |
|-
! 1890
| align="center" | Annual Conference
| align="center" | London
| align="center" | 4 August
|
| align="center" | 26
| align="center" |
|-
! 1891
| align="center" | Annual Conference
| align="center" | Sheffield
| align="center" | 3 August
|
| align="center" | 23
| align="center" |
|-
! 1892
| align="center" | Annual Conference
| align="center" | London
| align="center" | 1 August
| Herbert Burrows
| align="center" | 33
| align="center" |
|-
! 1893
| align="center" | Annual Conference
| align="center" | Burnley
| align="center" | 6–7 August
|
| align="center" |
| align="center" |
|-
! 1894
| align="center" | Annual Conference
| align="center" | London
| align="center" | 5–6 August
| H. M. Hyndman
| align="center" |
| align="center" |
|-
! 1895
| align="center" | Annual Conference
| align="center" | Birmingham
| align="center" | 4–5 August
| E. Chatterton
| align="center" |
| align="center" |
|-
! 1896
| align="center" | Annual Conference
| align="center" | London
| align="center" | 2–3 August
| George Lansbury
| align="center" | 82
| align="center" |
|-
! 1897
| align="center" | 17th Annual Conference
| align="center" | Northampton
| align="center" | 1–2 August
| Frederick George Jones
| align="center" | 55
| align="center" | Report.
|-
! 1898
| align="center" | 18th Annual Conference
| align="center" | Edinburgh
| align="center" | 31 July-1 August
| John Leslie
| align="center" | 54
| align="center" |
|-
! 1899
| align="center" | 19th Annual Conference
| align="center" | Manchester
| align="center" | 6–7 August
| T. M. Purvis
| align="center" |
| align="center" |
|-
! 1900
| align="center" | 20th Annual Conference
| align="center" | London
| align="center" | 5–6 August
| Will Thorne
| align="center" | 60
| align="center" | Report.
|-
! 1901
| align="center" | 21st Annual Conference
| align="center" | Birmingham
| align="center" | 4–5 August
| Dan Irving
| align="center" | 59
| align="center" |
|-
! 1902
| align="center" | 22nd Annual Conference
| align="center" | Blackburn
| align="center" | 28–30 March
| F. J. Jones
| align="center" | 72
| align="center" |
|-
! 1903
| align="center" | 23rd Annual Conference
| align="center" | London
| align="center" | 11–12 April
| Joseph Frederick Green
| align="center" | 62
| align="center" | Report.
|-
! 1904
| align="center" | 24th Annual Conference
| align="center" | Burnley
| align="center" | 1–3 April
| Peter Walker
| align="center" | 68
| align="center" | Report.
|-
! 1905
| align="center" | 25th Annual Conference
| align="center" | Northampton
| align="center" | 21–23 April
| James Gribble
| align="center" | 56
| align="center" | Report.
|-
! 1906
| align="center" | 26th Annual Conference
| align="center" | Bradford
| align="center" | 13–15 April
| Edward Hartley
| align="center" | 83
| align="center" |
|-
! 1907
| align="center" | 27th Annual Conference
| align="center" | Carlisle
| align="center" | 29–31 March
| Ernest Lowthian
| align="center" | 140
| align="center" |
|-
! 1908
| align="center" | 29th Annual Conference
| align="center" | Manchester
| align="center" | 17–19 August
| John Moore
| align="center" | 149
| align="center" | Report.
|-
! 1909
| align="center" | 30th Annual Conference
| align="center" | Bristol
| align="center" | 9–11 April
| Harry Jarvis
| align="center" | 144
| align="center" |
|-
! 1910
| align="center" | 31st Annual Conference
| align="center" | London
| align="center" | 25–27 March
| H. M. Hyndman
| align="center" | 200
| align="center" |
|-
! 1911
| align="center" | 32nd Annual Conference
| align="center" | Coventry
| align="center" | 14–16 April
| Arthur Charles Bannington
| align="center" | 70
| align="center" |
|-
|}
Data from Kendall, The Revolutionary Movement in Britain, pp. 310–311; supplemented by published report titles, per WorldCat.

National election results

Notable members

See also
Social Democratic Federation election results
Justice, official organ of the SDF

Footnotes

External links

Justice Internet Archive at Marxists Internet Archive. Links to a large number of articles from Justice, 1884–1914. Retrieved 1 October 2009.

1881 establishments in the United Kingdom
1911 disestablishments in the United Kingdom
Political parties established in 1881
Political parties disestablished in 1911


title: Socialist Party of Great Britain

text:
The Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) is a socialist political party in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1904 as a split from the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), it advocates using the ballot box for revolutionary purposes and opposes both Leninism and reformism. It holds that countries which claimed to have established socialism had only established "state capitalism" and was one of the first to describe the Soviet Union as state capitalist. The party's political position has been described as a form of impossibilism.

History

Origins
The SPGB was founded in 1904 as a split from the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) to oppose the SDF's reformism and as part of a response to that organisation's domination by Henry Hyndman (which also led to the SPGB's aversion to leadership). This split was also partly a reaction to the SDF's involvement in the Labour Representation Committee, which went on to found the Labour Party. It mirrored the split that led to the foundation of the Socialist League, stemming from an ongoing dispute within the socialist movement over tactics and the question of reform or revolution. The founders of the SPGB considered themselves to be part of a wider impossibilist revolt within the Second International. When in 1903 most of SDF members in Scotland broke away to form the Socialist Labour Party without contacting their fellow impossibilists in London, those impossibilists chiefly in Battersea branch decided to break away and form their own organisation, which they did the following year. Unlike the Socialist League, the SPGB advocated the revolutionary use of the ballot box and parliament.

Breakaway groups

There have been some event-specific debates, such as over the party's precise attitude to the Spanish Civil War in 1936, to the Hungarian Uprising of 1956 and then to the movements for political democracy in the Soviet bloc states in the 1980s. On other far fewer occasions, small groups of party members, sometimes concerned by the party’s pace of growth (or lack of growth in some periods), have developed ideas which have challenged the party's basic core positions more clearly. Having initially agreed with the party's principles and analysis, they developed a political critique which challenged these positions at a more fundamental level. However, even in these instances only a handful of disputes have been so serious that they have led to organisational breakaways. The most notable of these are the Socialist Propaganda League, Harold Walsby's systematic ideology group, the Movement for Social Integration and the three groups which published Libertarian Communism, Spanner, and Socialist Studies.

Ideology

Revolution
The party maintains that it is a revolutionary party and that it is committed to class struggle as the means of achieving its ends. However, that does not mean that they mean violence or civil war—as they note in their pamphlet Socialist Principles Explained:

They maintain that the only way socialism will come about is for a majority of people on a worldwide basis to believe in the superiority of this alternative social system. They endorse the theory of impossibilism and favour achieving this objective through the use of elections via an uncompromising policy agenda for socialism, although in the current situation their main function is as a propaganda group to try to raise consciousness and "make socialists". In contrast to Leninists, they believe that it is possible to make the transition from capitalism to the complete abolition of the state immediately that the majority decide to do it.

Socialism

By conference resolution, the party's object must be printed on all literature it distributes as an indication of its importance. This object is the following:

Unlike similar formulations such as the Labour Party's original wording of Clause IV, it deliberately excludes the means of exchange. This highlights a central characteristic of the party as remaining advocates of socialism as a society in which the need for money is eliminated. As such, it rejects the argument that the economic calculation problem is a barrier to such a society. They claim this can be achieved through calculation in kind (i.e. technical planning based on real physical units of demand), a system of regulated stock control—much like that used in supermarkets—to ensure goods are replenished after they are taken and used by members of the community satisfying their self-defined needs and the principle of the law of the minimum. This was formally set out in the 1980s in their pamphlet Socialism as a Practical Alternative.

Marx
Although the SPGB claim to follow the philosopher Karl Marx's precepts, they claim to follow them simply because they are correct in their own right and not because Marx was a special individual, sometimes quoting his own contention that Je ne suis pas marxiste ("I am not a Marxist"). However, they do often challenge the use of the term Marxist in the media, specifically when used to describe guerrilla and terrorist movements that have nothing to do with what the SPGB considers to be working class socialist emancipation.

State capitalism
The party rejects the idea that "socialism has existed before and has failed", holding to the view that those countries which claimed to have established socialism had in fact merely established state capitalism. SPGB members argue that socialism cannot exist in one country, but only on a global scale and that socialism will come about only when a majority of people want it and are prepared to organise politically to establish it.

Contrary to popular misconception, the SPGB did not "denounce the Russian revolution as state capitalist within hours of hearing of it". They initially praised the Bolsheviks for pulling Russia out of the Great War, but warned that given the development of political consciousness in the largely ill-educated peasant based society, it could not be a socialist revolution, saying that "the franchise presents to the workers the way to their emancipation. Until the workers learn to use this instrument properly, they are not fit or ready for socialism". Their first reference to state capitalism was in fact a quote from Vladimir Lenin describing the state of affairs in Russia. The theory developed over time, emphasising the continued existence of wages and money in the Soviet Union to indicate that capitalism had not been abolished.

The major controversy within the party was over who constituted the capitalist class in Russia and the Eastern Bloc—with some taking the view that there were private capitalists and that capitalism in those countries was not distinct from its Western counterpart whereas others held that the state bureaucracy themselves were the capitalist class. This latter view won the day in a conference resolution in 1969:

Fascism
Unlike other left groups, the SPGB did not see fascism as a special threat to the working class. Rather than formulating it as the last refuge of capitalism organising to defend itself against the working class, the party’s writers and speakers tended to view it as a particular type of reform movement. The two specific characteristics identified were that it tended to be a form of national consolidation—unifying fragment nations such as Germany, Italy and Spain—and that it tended to have the mass support of the working class.

The party's theory made the working class the politically decisive class, therefore if the working class supported fascism, then fascism would prevail. Answers to letters in the Socialist Standard in the 1930s repeatedly made this point. Early writers noted what Benito Mussolini was able to do with the power of the state on his side, a part of a vindication of the SPGB's approach of the workers seizing control of the state. The SPGB therefore declined to join anti-fascist fronts or to make a particular issue of anti-fascism, arguing that the pro-socialist case was the necessary remedy for fascism.

Nationalism

The SPGB has consistently opposed nationalism of any sort throughout its history. The common argument used by SPGB members is that nationalism simply means favouring one set of rulers over another and that socialism is the only route to meaningful emancipation:

The SPGB extended this internationalism to a rejection of national liberation struggles as futile wastes of workers' lives while world capitalism remains unscathed. For instance, they condemned the Irish Easter Rising and the struggle for liberation in Ireland.

Democracy
Although the SPGB is committed to using the ballot box for making its proposed revolution, it does so on a class basis—i.e. its concern with democracy is limited to having sufficient prospects of enabling the working class to make its revolution. The party thus does not enter in discussion over proportional representation, reforms to Parliament, or the House of Lords, because there is enough means within the current system for the working class to assert its will.

Arguments such as these were used to oppose the suffragettes and further that the precise reform that they called for meant the extension of the existing franchise to women, along with the then-existing property qualifications. The SPGB argued this would increase the size and weight of the capitalist class vote without advantage to the working class.

Into the 1920s and 1930s, the party did begin to argue that it was essential for workers to have sufficient "elbow room" in which to organise for socialist revolution—and so they favoured workers struggling for democracy and basic liberties. However, they did this with the proviso that socialists should not align themselves with any pro-capitalist factions to that end.

In the 1980s, this principle was extended to supporting the struggle for democracy in Central and Eastern Europe and particular Solidarity's struggle in Poland. The group of members who would go on to form the Socialist Studies group opposed this stance as a capitulation to reformism.

It consistently argues against vanguardism and denies the possibility of reforming capitalism in the interests of the working class. It refuses to engage in direct action or to co-operate with political parties that do not agree with the ideas set out in its founding document, the Object and Declaration of Principles. The SPGB and its companion parties in other countries constitute the World Socialist Movement.

Trade unionism
Trade unionism was a significant issue in the early years of the party. Several people who became members sent letters to Justice, the journal of the Social Democratic Federation, attacking trade union leaders and bureaucracy for their compromising stance, a line of criticism echoed by other impossibilists such as Daniel De Leon.

At the second conference of the party, a resolution was passed forbidding members from holding office in trade unions—although this was overturned by the EC as ultra vires and contrary to the declaration of principles. E. J. B. Allen continued to write articles attacking trade unions and supporting De Leonist-style socialist industrial unions. Such arguments were ultimately rejected on the grounds that a socialist union would have a tiny number of members so long as socialists remained in a minority, but when socialists attained a majority all unions would become socialist unions by having socialists members.

The agreed position was then to work within trade unions, but to also accept that they had different interests to political parties and to not try and take them over. Later, disputes arose as to whether trade union struggle could result in positive gains for the working class, or whether their role was purely defensive—the former view being taken by some members of the Ashbourne Court Group.

In the 1980s, the issue of trade unionism was at the heart of the decision to support Solidarity in Poland in their party's literature. Likewise, during the miners' strike of 1984–1985, the party walked a line between supporting the miners whilst simultaneously suggesting that they would not and could not win: "It is our job as socialists, then, to stand with our fellow workers in their necessary battles to defend themselves, but to point out at all times that the real victory to be achieved is the abolition of the wages system".

War

Since its foundation, the SPGB has opposed every war–including World War I and World War II. In its early years party writers frequently would contrast the numbers of dead in wars with the numbers killed and maimed in industrial incidents (by way of trying to contrast the passions and efforts put into war with the lack of response to the conditions of capitalism). The party argues that wars in capitalism were fought in the interests of the capitalist class and–as with their case against nationalism–the workers did all the dying for no gain for themselves. Second, that while the press and politicians tried to call for strike moderation, the capitalists would continue the class war despite hostilities, forcing down wages and up consumer good prices. During both wars some members won conscientious objector status.

In 1914, the banner headline of the Socialist Standard invited workers to join up–for the class war–as the only way of bringing peace and security. The magazine was in a list of works banned from sending to the front line (i.e. wholly censored).

The party came close to express support for the Republican cause of the Spanish Civil War on grounds of supporting defence of democracy (some writers initially took Spain as an example of what could happen if the capitalists class tried to use force to overturn the result of a socialist electoral revolution). This led to a debate within the party and resulted in an official statement that fell short of supporting the pro-capitalist republican government, but offering general support to workers in their struggle for democracy.

A similar dispute arose over World War II, with some members arguing that it was a war fought between totalitarian and democratic governments while many writers in the Socialist Standard sought to prove it was another trade-based war bred by the conditions of capitalism that socialists ought to oppose. This latter view won out and the party laid out three criteria by which it would support a policy:
 Has the proposed action the purpose of achieving socialism and will it achieve that result?
 Has the proposed action the purpose of safeguarding democracy and will it achieve that result?
 Has the proposed action the purpose of achieving an improvement in the condition of the workers and will it have this result?

As a result of press censorship during that war the work could not publish articles directly critical of the war. Instead it ran articles discussing ancient history, including the Peloponnesian War, as veiled allegories of the contemporary conflict. The Socialist Standard noted that "while we deeply regret having to adopt this course, we cannot see any workable alternative to it".

Since the party opposed nationalism and national liberation struggles, it has persistently refused to take sides in such wars as the Vietnam War and did not support the various insurgency elements in the Iraq War.

Its stance is one of immediate peace between nations, irrespective of national borders or other such outcomes (constructs). Party speakers do emphasise that the SPGB is not a pacifist party as it would countenance force being used to defend a socialist revolution. It generally has a nuanced criticism of nuclear weapon opposition.

Constitution and structure

Membership

Membership of the Socialist Party of Great Britain has been conditional on acceptance of the Party's Object and Declaration of Principles. All applicants for membership are required to undertake a short written or verbal ‘test’ designed to enable them to demonstrate an understanding of – and agreement with – this Object and Principles and also of the Party's basic political positions not otherwise directly covered in the Declaration. There has been a sound reason for this as all members, once admitted, have full democratic rights and stand in basic equality to one another. This kind of political democracy can only work on the basis of agreement around fundamental principles and, according to the Party, there would be no point in a socialist organisation giving full democratic rights to those who, in any significant way, disagreed with the socialist case.

Executive
One of the reasons the party split from the SDF was over the issue of leadership. Since its establishment in 1904, the SPGB has existed without any leader. The party has a ten-person executive committee, which is elected annually by a ballot of the whole membership and is charged with the day-to-day administration of the organisation. Its decision-making powers are tightly restricted and all substantial decisions are taken at the Annual Conference held each year at Easter.

Current situation
The SPGB is vehemently anti-Leninist and protects its identity against the Socialist Party (SPEW), as the Trotskyist Militant group is now known. In propaganda and publicity material, the SPGB often styles itself as The Socialist Party whilst SPEW uses Socialist Party (without the definite article) and contests elections as Socialist Alternative.

The party was founded at an inaugural meeting of 142 members. In 2000, the party membership stood at around 500 (although there are some indications that the figure may now be lower). Around 150 members regularly take part in party elections and polls. As of 2022, the party's membership stood around 300.

In 2005, the party produced a film called Capitalism and Other Kids' Stuff.

As of 2022, the party was reported to have £2.6m in reserves: with a property worth £1,300,000, £800,000 in investment funds, and £400,000 in cash. The party spent £80,000 in 2021 on political activities, and £114,055 in 2022 for the same.

Elections
The SPGB has contested most general elections since 1945, contesting one to ten constituencies.  It has not yet obtained the post-1985: 5% of local votes threshold (nor pre-1985: 12.5%) to retain any political deposits. The party also occasionally fields candidates for European, Welsh and local elections.

Criticism
Detractors have been known to mockingly refer to the SPGB as "Simon Pure's Genuine Brand" or the "Small Party of Good Boys".

Debates

Debates

Debates between the SPGB and other groups helped to bring the party's case to an outside audience without the sometimes off-putting rhetoric of platform speaking, or the one-sidedness of educational talks. In the course of the debates with the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) in the late 1940s, Sammy Cash persuaded the RCP's Jock Haston that the Soviet Union was state capitalist. The idea was then relayed to Tony Cliff, whence (in a somewhat different form) it formed the genesis of the British Socialist Workers Party. Richard Headicar, a former Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament speaker, was won over after debating with the party.

See also
 List of Socialist Party of Great Britain members
 World Socialist Movement

Bibliography

Pamphlets

Further reading

Notes

References

External links

 The Socialist Party of Great Britain
 World Socialist Movement
 A brief introduction to the ideas of the Socialist Party in video format
 Socialism or Your Money Back
 Socialist Standard Past & Present
 Archive
 Photo of Socialist Party of Great Britain Members at Annual Conference at Fairfax Hall Harringay c1949

Political parties established in 1904