Socialist Party of Great Britain
|
The Socialist Party of Great Britain
|
|
|---|---|
 |
|
| Founded | 1904 |
| Headquarters | Clapham, London 51°27′50″N 0°7′58″W / 51.46389°N 0.13278°W |
| Newspaper | Socialist Standard |
| Ideology |
Socialism Marxism Impossibilism |
| Political position | Far-left |
| International affiliation | World Socialist Movement |
| Slogan | World Socialism |
| Website | |
| worldsocialism.org/spgb | |
The Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB) is a socialist political party in the United Kingdom. It advocates using the ballot box for revolutionary purposes, opposes reformism, and was one of the first to describe the Soviet Union as state capitalist.
The Socialist Party of Great Britain was founded in 1904 as a split from the Social Democratic Federation (SDF). It was formed to oppose the SDF’s reformism and as part of a response to that organisation's domination by H. M. 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, however, the SPGB advocated the revolutionary use of the ballot box and parliament.
Debates between the Socialist Party of Great Britain and other groups were of particular importance in bringing the party case to an outside audience without the sometimes off-putting rhetoric of platform speaking, or the one-sidedness of educational talks. A prime instance of this importance for the party is the case of Richard Headicar, a former Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament speaker, won over after debating with the party. Of rather wider historical importance were the debates with the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) in the late 1940s. In the course of these Sammy Cash persuaded the RCP’s Jock Haston of the view 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 today's Socialist Workers Party.
...
Wikipedia