British Socialist Party
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British Socialist Party
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|---|---|
| Founded | 1911 |
| Dissolved | 1920 |
| Preceded by | Social Democratic Party |
| Succeeded by | Communist Party of Great Britain |
| Newspaper | Justice; The Call |
| Ideology |
Socialism Communism |
| Political position | Far-left |
The British Socialist Party (BSP) was a Marxist political organisation established in Great Britain in 1911. Following a protracted period of factional struggle, in 1916 the party's anti-war forces gained decisive control of the party and saw the defection of its pro-war Right Wing. After the victory of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia at the end of 1917 and the termination of World War I the following year, the BSP emerged as an explicitly revolutionary socialist organisation. It negotiated with other radical groups in an effort to establish a unified communist organisation, an effort which culminated in August 1920 with the establishment of the Communist Party of Great Britain. The youth organisation the Young Socialist League was affiliated with the party.
The founding conference which established the British Socialist Party was called by the Social Democratic Party (SDP), a group best remembered to history by its pre-1908 moniker, the Social Democratic Federation (SDF). The old SDF had long sought the unity of the British Left, having originally begun negotiations on the topic with the Independent Labour Party (ILP) not long after the formation of the latter in 1893. The ILP had long been unwilling to merge forces with a doctrinaire Marxist organization such as the SDF, however, and unity negotiations had reached an impasse. Finally, as the decade of the 1910s dawned, there seemed to be some interest in the topic among the of the ILP, and the 1910 Annual Conference of the SDF/SDP had decided to try again in earnest.
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