I wrote the following about six months ago, shortly after my application for membership of the Socialist Party of Great Britain was accepted. I wrote it because a friend asked me what on earth I had done, and I stumbled and stuttered through a not-very-convincing answer. This was my more considered response. Until now I had only shared it on Facebook, but, on rereading, I found I was more proud of it than I expected to be.
When I first came across the Socialist Party of Great Britain in 1999, I had a not-unusual experience – not unusual if political memoirs are anything to go by, anyway. The experience was something like a flash of light. Previously insoluble mysteries – why doesn’t improved productivity lead to less work for the workers? Why don’t the political parties fulfil their promises or make any difference in the world? Why was working for an employer so boring and hateful? Why were people starving in a world of plenty? – suddenly made sense. The SPGB provided The Answer to so many of the problems that had tormented my young, adolescent mind. Now, my own frustrations, and social, political and economic questions, were no longer insoluble mysteries or technical problems requiring the help of experts. The problems weren’t puzzling aberrations, they were the logical consequence of social structure. Nor were they eternal aspects of the human condition, but historical novelties, subject to change. Before I found the SPGB, I would dream of utopia and rebellion and yet would feel humiliatingly powerless to answer the objections –that it was all impossible, it had all been tried and failed, that human nature militated against any change to any thing, ever. Now, armed with The Answer, I would still be laughed at and dismissed, but at least now I had logic and facts and history and science on my side. The laughter was no longer humiliating because it was the laughter of fools. I developed the evangelical zeal of the new convert – which nearly lost me many friends. But I almost didn’t care. For a time, the SPGB was my whole life. I dedicated all of my free time, and a fair chunk of my employer’s time too, to the cause. The Party was, without a smidgeon of exaggeration, the most important thing in my life. It was my everything.
But right from the start there was a seed of doubt in my mind. I was fully aware of just how dodgy and religious my conversion would seem to an outsider. Indeed, the caricatured process of ‘conversion’ I have described above is little different from what happens when social misfits are dragged into sinister cults. The presentation of simple answers to complex social and political problems is in fact a defining characteristic of the maddest cults and sects. Had I made a similar mistake? Understood literally, I always knew that this was definitely not so – the SPGB encourages critical and independent thinking, and insists on the importance of organising democratically and without any leaders at all, let alone dodgy charismatic and exploitative ones. But understood loosely and as a metaphor for the whole experience – had I made a similar silly mistake? The SPGB seemed to provide good answers, but were there better ones? Should I really be a Marxian and not a Freudian? An impossibilist and not a Trotskyist? Should I really be on the parliamentary road and not the anarchist one? The seeds of doubt started small, but were watered by my obsessive reading habit, and found fertile soil in my then restless, grasping, ambitious mind.
For a while, I found ways to explain away contradictions in my thinking and remain a member of the SPGB. Inevitably, however, the restless searching in the end led to a quest that took me away from my political home. I got excited by new possibilities and a rival theory, and left the Party under their spell. It hardly matters now which theory because, over the next half decade or so, I would change which one I believed as often as I changed my socks.
So, I was without a political home, adrift on the vast – indeed, infinite – ocean of human knowledge and possibilities. It wasn’t that I had no compass to steer by either; more that I had hundreds of compasses, all pointing in different directions. I would wander down the path prescribed by one, only to cast constant fretful glances at the others. I wandered and wandered but got nowhere. To make a long story short, I’ll cut to the end of this episode. I learnt many things and had many great experiences, but I wearied of wandering and sat down under a Bodhi tree and refused to budge until I had decided once and for all on a future direction. Travelling is OK when you’re young, but eventually you want to settle down. You need a home. And although I know most people live perfectly happily without one, I needed a political home. But where to go? Never mind all the compasses, in which direction did my own internal, moral compass point?
I had come a long way since I first knocked on the door of the Socialist Party. But I had always taken one thing with me, wherever I went, and however often I changed my mind. It was a truth. The truth is that there is a fundamental fact about the society we live, a truth that, once learned, you can never forget. It’s a truth that must be faced, and taught without fear of contradiction or ridicule, without fear of the consequences. That fact is that our society is a slave society. It is based on slave labour. Not the literal slavery of unfortunates in far-flung and god-forsaken parts of the planet – though that’s true enough, too, and quite bad enough to be going on with. But our own slavery – wage-slavery. The term ‘wage-slavery’ has been debased, and in most people’s minds these days means something like ‘badly paid work’. But in its original sense, it expressed the reality of capitalist employment from the point of view of those first exposed to it. We know this from history, but also from contemporary anthropology, when free people are first introduced to paid employment. (It takes a few centuries before a novel historical and social development comes to seem as natural as the weather.) The reality is that ‘free wage labour’ isn’t free, but a version of slavery. After all, the relationship between master and slave isn’t fundamentally altered when the master, instead of buying a worker once and for all, instead hires him by the hour, the day, the week or the month. The difference is an important one of course, for both sides. The master gets a better deal; the slave wins at least a modicum of control over who she sells her labour power to and the right to withdraw it. But still, it’s a far cry from the unachieved goal of liberal capitalist ideology – the free association of individuals.
Once you’ve realised the truth of this – and anyone who has experienced the dreary tyranny of the office and factory can surely not deny it – it’s just not possible to forget it. Like that poor guy in The Matrix film who wishes he’d chosen the blue pill, sometimes I desperately want to forget it. But the reality of the daily grind keeps the facts in view. And with them in view, a morally unavoidable question forces itself upon you. What is to be done?
I have found, through trial and error, that peace of mind is impossible until I have a provisional answer to that question. When I left the SPGB, I hooked up with an anarchist anti-war group. Then a Marxist reading group. And a discussion circle. Then an anthropology study group. Then I considered and attended the meetings of various environmentalist direct-action groups. These were all provisional answers to the question of what was to be done. But in my wanderings, I had learned some important things. My wandering in social theory and science had proved to my mind that what the SPGB has to say on these subjects is reasonable and not in contradiction with the state of knowledge. My wandering in politics had taught me that the SPGB’s teachings on democracy and its warnings about false hopes and reformism are true. My wanderings in the teachings of the world’s religions – what Marx called “the general theory of this world, its encyclopaedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d’honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification” – taught me additionally, and perhaps surprisingly, that the SPGB’s teachings are not without wisdom, and its position on what is to be done the wisest and most ethical of all lefty and anarchist groups, and all political parties.
All of this gradually dawned on me over the course of my years outside the party. But the gradual quantitative accumulation of this knowledge was crystallised into a qualitative leap back into membership when I went back to reread William Morris, and EP Thompson’s biography of the great man. William Morris was a 19th century capitalist, businessman and entrepreneur, and a great poet, writer, artist and craftsman. He was uniquely positioned, as an artist and a business man, to understand the causes of the ugly and depraved times we live in. He therefore threw himself into the first socialist organisations in this country and dedicated his life to the socialist cause. He became to my mind the greatest socialist thinker besides Marx. He was a genius and a hero. A few years after the death of William Morris, a group of 140 men and women got together to form a new socialist organisation. They weren’t capitalists, nor great poets and artists, but ordinary working class people with a determination to end modern slavery. The organisation they formed was the political heir of William Morris. It still exists today, and its future success is as urgent and desirable as ever. Its name is the Socialist Party of Great Britain, and I am very proud to be a member.
What is the SPGB?
Socialism on One Planet: http://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/jun04/socplanet.html
Anglo-Marxism: http://bataillesocialiste.wordpress.com/2005-anglo-marxism-the-spgb-buick/
“In a world dominated by cheap self-revelation and quack self-help, I suspect that Teach Us To Sit Still may be the real thing: a work of genuine consolation that shows the way out of the dark wood in which everyone, at some time or another, will inevitably find themselves lost.” Will Self
