The purpose of this article is to examine the development of a branch of the British Labour Party by contrasting its activities before and after 1918. In so doing, it is hoped to illustrate the nature and extent of the influence of the Independent Labour Party (the I.L.P.), with especial reference to the position of the I.L.P. within the local branch of the Labour Party.

The internal conflicts of the socialist movement before 1914 grew out of the antagonism between orthodox Marxists and reformist Socialists, or were at least closely related to that antagonism, as for instance the conflict between the labor unions and the party leadership in Germany in 1905–6. This running battle of pre-war days, which set the scene for the splitting of the movement during the first World War, reached its most spectacular expression in Germany in Bebel's attack on the Revisionists at the Dresden party convention of 1903. But the conflict unfolded first in France, and it was in France rather than in Germany that the fundamental issues were posited most clearly. In 1882, nine years before Georg von Vollmar in his “Eldorado” addresses in Munich started the revolt of the German Revisionists and fourteen years before Eduard Bernstein in his “Evolutionary Socialism” published the first comprehensive exposition of Revisionist ideas, Paul Brousse broke with the Marxist leaders, Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue, whom he forced out of the Fédération des travailleurs socialistes de France, thus transforming the latter into a Possibilist party, whereas the expelled Marxists formed the Parti ouvrier. Even the debates at Dresden – and subsequently at the International Socialist Congress at Amsterdam – developed from a French issue – namely, the acceptance of a position in a liberal cabinet by the French reformist, Alexandre Millerand.

“The organization and the establishment of democracy in Christendom”, de Tocqueville wrote in 1835, “is the great political problem of the time.” Nowhere was the problem more urgent than in England, whose industrial towns were soon to be torn by intense class conflict. Yet England resolved the tensions of the 1830's and 1840's, and went on to build a tough and supple political democracy in a massively undemocratic society.

Le séjour de Karl Marx à Paris au lendemain de la Révolution de Février est bien connu. Expulsé par les autorités belges le 4 mars 1848, Marx, s'empressant d'accepter l'invitation de Ferdinand Flocon, s'établit à Paris avec sa famille. Ce séjour ne devait pas être de longue durée: au cours de la première quinzaine d'avril, Marx est parti pour Cologne où son rôle révolutionnaire d'éditeur de la Neue Rheinische Zeitung est notoire. Pendant cet interméde français Marx fonda la section parisienne de la Ligue des Communistes dont il devint le secrétaire; il dirigeait l'opposition des communistes allemands de Paris aux desseins de Born et Herwegh qui organisaient une légion allemande révolutionnaire.

„Mein Freund, Joh. Phil. Becker zu Biel, steht im Begriff gleich mir, ein Bürgerrecht im Kanton Bern nachzusuchen. Könnten Sie ihm dabei behilflich sein, so bitte ich Sie, es zu thun. Ich kenne keinen tüchtigeren Mann, an ihm wird der Kanton einen thätigen, kräftigen und hochherzigen Bürger gewinnen. Nach meiner Überzeugung wiegen alle Deutsche, die seit 3 Jahren Bürger in Bern geworden, diesen einen nicht auf.”

In an earlier article in these pages I examined the origins of the price-control legislation of the Jacobin phase of the French Revolution, suggesting that it ought, most properly, to be regarded not as a revolutionary innovation, but rather as the re-emergence in a new environment of an old and well-established tradition of popular action to fix fair market prices, and thus maintain living standards, by riot and demonstration. At the same time, and in passing, I indicated briefly that a similar tradition existed in 18th-century England, if anything more strongly marked and more widespread than in France itself. The present article will be concerned with a discussion of the significance of this English tradition.