About Socialist Standard

Socialist Standard

The Socialist Standard is a monthly socialist magazine published in London, England, by the Socialist Party of Great Britain (SPGB). It has been published without interruption since September 1904, which makes it one of the oldest socialist journals in Britain still in existence — by its publisher's account, the oldest. Written in a simple, direct style, it carries socialist advocacy and Marxian analysis of current events, particularly those affecting the United Kingdom, and it remains the journal of a small party whose principles have not changed since the magazine's first issue. Its website is worldsocialism.org/spgb/socialist-standard/, and its ISSN is 0037-8259.

Continuity is the Socialist Standard's defining feature. The party that publishes it was founded in June 1904 by dissidents from the Social Democratic Federation who had become dissatisfied with that organisation's increasingly reformist policies and undemocratic practices. Three months later they produced their journal, and the magazine has met its monthly deadline ever since — through two world wars, censorship and the collapse of almost every other socialist publication founded in its era.

Founding in 1904

On Sunday 12 June 1904 a meeting was held at Printers' Hall, Bartlett's Passage, Fetter Lane, London. It had been called by a provisional committee of ten and was attended by some 140 people, who formed the Socialist Party of Great Britain. The founders were determined to uphold socialist principles and to work without diversion for a clearly defined socialist objective: a new society based on common ownership, democratic control and production solely for use. In September 1904 the founder members produced the first issue of the Socialist Standard, edited by Robert Elrick, the magazine's first editor. Its editorial explained that, having inaugurated the party, the founders found it indispensable to have a journal in which their views might be expressed.

The first issue carried the party's Declaration of Principles, which has been reprinted in the magazine ever since. Its key provision is clause 7, the famous "hostility clause", which states in substance that since all political parties are expressions of class interests, and the interest of the working class is diametrically opposed to the interests of all sections of the master class, the party which seeks working-class emancipation must be hostile to every other political party. That clause fixed the party's — and the magazine's — permanent stance: no alliances, no reforms, no support for any other party, only the case for socialism itself.

Editorial character

The Socialist Standard is written deliberately in a simple, direct style, intended to put Marxian analysis within the reach of ordinary readers. Its contents mix socialist advocacy with analysis of current events, especially British ones, and it has also carried translations of continental writers; some of its articles have been republished as party pamphlets. The party published a stream of pamphlets alongside the journal in its early years, including its 1905 manifesto and editions of Karl Kautsky and William Morris, but the monthly magazine has always been its central publication.

The magazine's consistency is its editorial signature. It has applied, in its publisher's words, a consistent socialist analysis to events and trends as they unfolded across more than a century, setting each in the same perspective: that capitalism is incapable of meaningful reform, and that the basis of the exploitation of the working class is the wages and money system. The SPGB maintains that it is not a left-wing organisation, and that the Socialist Standard is not a left-wing journal — "left-wing", it contends, having become merely an umbrella label for protest groups demanding amendments and reforms to capitalism. The magazine is associated internationally with the World Socialist Movement, the companion parties that share the SPGB's principles.

The First World War and Russia

The magazine's principles were tested immediately by the First World War. Under the Defence of the Realm Act 1914, the Socialist Standard was placed on a secret list of papers and magazines banned for export, because it called on workers to refuse to fight for their countries and instead to join the class war. In 1915 it published an article by a member of the Bolshevik party calling for a socialist solution to the war. But in 1918 the paper voiced the first of the SPGB's doubts about the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia — the beginning of the party's settled position that Russia had not established socialism, a position the magazine defended against the newly founded Communist movement, whose supporters, in the SPGB's later judgement, spread what it called a blight over the movement for socialism.

Edgar Hardcastle and the interwar years

In the 1920s Edgar Hardcastle began contributing to the magazine, the start of a long association that led eventually to an editorship of more than thirty years; Gilbert McLatchie was another of its long-serving former editors. Under such hands the journal maintained its monthly witness through the depression years. In the 1930s it drew on reports from Spain to produce articles on the looming menace of aerial warfare, applying its analysis of capitalism and war to the approach of a new conflict.

An editorial marking thirty years of publication in November 1934 observed that the first number had appeared in September 1904 and that the paper had appeared regularly every month since, advocating the same policy and aiming at the same objective — and that it was by then the only paper left of those founded in 1904 claiming to represent the interests of the working class, the organisations behind its contemporaries having themselves disappeared.

The Second World War

During the Second World War the SPGB again opposed the war, and the Socialist Standard again had to reckon with the censor. It evaded censorship largely by producing a series of articles on the Peloponnesian War and similar ancient conflicts as a cover for the party's opposition to the current one — an expedient that allowed its anti-war argument to be made in classical dress. The device has become one of the best-known episodes in the magazine's history, illustrating both its editors' ingenuity and the pressures under which a dissenting journal operated in wartime Britain.

Post-war decades

After 1945 the Socialist Standard continued on its established course while the world changed around it. It maintained its analysis of the Cold War, of the Labour governments, of decolonisation and of Britain's long post-war decline, always from the same standpoint: that none of these events altered the fundamental case against the wages system. The limited political impact and growth of the party in these decades was the price of what its critics called "impossibilism" — its refusal to entertain popular but, in its view, illusory positions, such as supporting national causes, endorsing reform programmes or believing that socialism had been established in Russia.

Yet the facts of survival told their own story. Assessments of the party's early history have noted that, whatever might have happened had it taken a more popular course, the Socialist Standard has continued monthly publication without interruption from September 1904 to the present day, making it the oldest socialist journal in Britain still in existence, and the Socialist Party of Great Britain remains an active political movement long after the organisations that once dwarfed it have vanished.

The centenary and the magazine today

In September 2004 the Socialist Standard reached its hundredth year. The centenary editorial recalled the founders who had produced the first issue and looked back on a remarkable record of monthly issues over a hundred years, the magazine having met its monthly deadline without fail, and having kept alive the hope of a world of peace, well-being and happiness based on common ownership. The magazine's archive is now published online through the party's website, where issues are organised by decade from the 1900s to the present, articles can be read in full, and readers can subscribe, order free trial copies or submit articles and letters.

The Socialist Standard continues to be published monthly from London by the Socialist Party of Great Britain, from the party's head office in Clapham, in the same format of advocacy and analysis, and still carrying the Declaration of Principles of 1904. Its party describes its record as one of "sane and sound pronouncement", pursued without diversion for more than 120 years.

Legacy

The Socialist Standard's importance is not influence in the usual sense — its party has always been small and its doctrine deliberately unaccommodating — but endurance and consistency. Founded in 1904 alongside a party formed in protest against reformism, banned from export in one war and driven to classical allegory in the next, it has outlived every rival claimant to its tradition. As a complete, unbroken monthly record of a single, unchanging socialist argument applied to the events of three centuries, it is a unique artefact of British political publishing, and it is still being published.