Libertarian Communism (journal)

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Libertarian Communism was a socialist journal founded and produced in part by members of the Socialist Party of Great Britain.

[edit] History

During the 1960s the Socialist Party of Great Britain was enthused by a healthy influx of new recruits initially politicised by the CND marches, Vietnam and the May Events of 1968 and who sought to make a more genuinely revolutionary stand than those of their generation who joined the so-called ‘new left’. The boost to Party membership and activity at this time was considerable.

Influenced by the prevailing political climate, some members who joined in this period wanted to change the emphasis of the Party’s propaganda efforts towards taking a more positive attitude to industrial struggles, claimants unions and tenants associations but also to women's liberation and squatting, arguing that the Party had developed a somewhat idealist conception of how socialist consciousness arises, being divorced from the day-to-day struggles of workers. To this effect fifteen activists from the ‘sixties generation’ signed a mini-manifesto in 1973 entitled “Where We Stand” which was circulated inside the Party. Although these ‘rebels’ in the Party were never a homogenous group, many more long-standing and traditional Party members felt uncomfortable with their line of argument.

One particular group of these activists published an internal discussion bulletin, which, in 1974, converted itself into an externally-oriented journal called Libertarian Communism. This was produced with the aid of non-members and supported the idea of workers' councils. It openly attacked as ‘Kautskyite’ the Party’s traditional conception of the socialist revolution being facilitated through ‘bourgeois’ democracy and parliament. At the same time another group of younger members, based mainly in Aberdeen and Edinburgh, was keen that the Party express support for such things as higher student grants (on the grounds that the Socialist Party was always prepared to support demands for higher wages) but the arguments of this group found no more favour with the majority in the Party than those put by the group around Libertarian Communism. Indeed, both of these groups were to be charged and then expelled for issuing literature that contradicted official Party policy.

Some—though certainly not all—of the members who came into dispute with the Party during this period appeared to be genuinely swept along with the activism and student radicalism of the time and developed some reformist viewpoints which were unlikely to be palatable to the membership of a genuinely revolutionary organisation. Members whose disagreements with the Party were less serious and fundamental stayed in, working for the creation of what they hoped would be a more tolerant, and in their view, less ‘sectarian’ organisation.

The prominent activists of the time who were either expelled or left of their own volition typically became involved in single-issue campaigns or the radical feminist movement. However, one network of former members—those based around Libertarian Communism, who were critical of the Party’s revolutionary strategy and attracted by ‘council communist’ ideas—created an organisation called Social Revolution, which later joined the Solidarity group. Some years later a number of these activists were also involved in the foundation of the Wildcat council communist group and one of its successors, Subversion.