The Supposed Influence of Herbert Spencer
The Socialist Party of Great Britain works within an Object and Declaration of Principles. There are eight clauses. The first four principles describe capitalism and why it must be replaced, the remaining four principles set out who is going to take political action – the working class – and the political process they are going to take to achieve the socialist object.
Clause 4 is of particular importance. It states:
“That as in the order of social evolution the working class is the last class to achieve its freedom, the emancipation of the working class will involve the emancipation of all mankind without distinction of race or sex.”
There was a misguided view that Herbert Spencer had an influence on the Socialist Party of Great Britain in its formative years.
What such a view overlooks is that the founder members of the S.P.G.B. gained their experience in the Social Democratic Federation (formed out of the Democratic Federation in 1883) where the predominant influence was not Spencer but Marx.
G.B. Shaw, writing in 1889 (Fabian Essays p.186) noted the swing away from Spencer as a result of Hyndman’s popularisation of Marx in this country.
“The Democratic Federation and Mr. H. M. Hyndman appeared in the field. Numbers of young men, pupils of Mill, Spencer, Comte and Darwin, roused by Mr. Henry George’s Progress and Poverty, left aside evolution and free thought; took to insurrectionary economics; studies Karl Marx…”
Davis Thomson (England in the Nineteenth Century) – took a similar view of the declining influence of Spencer:
“Spencer’s main publication Man Versus the State (1884) and The Principles of Ethics (1891-3), belong to the last decades of the century and he remained an almost lone figure championing the most extreme doctrines of laissez-faire long after more serious thinkers had abandoned them” (Pelican edition p. 106).
It is true that some of the founder members were familiar with Spencer’s works but many of them were very widely read in history, economics, philosophy and politics and were familiar with the writings of Marx, Engels, Morris, Kautsky, Morgan etc.
It is only necessary to look at the articles written in the Socialist Standard in the early years to see the absence of any influence of Herbert Spencer; the articles show clearly what is in their minds – reforms, Marxian economics, the Materialist Conception of History, political experience in the S.D.F, gradualism, leadership, revisionism, trade unions and syndicalism. There were articles about Darwin (with no mention of Spencer), on Bernstein and Bebel but no article on Spencer.
The Party published or sold pamphlets by Marx, Kautsky and Morris but nothing by Spencer. Nor was any work by Spencer included in lists of recommended books.
When an article in the Socialist Standard made use of Spencer’s concept of society as an organism (Socialist Standard Dec. 1906), the writer, F.C. Watts, explained that this did not mean that “society must develop in the same way as the human body”. Society has its own “laws of development peculiar to it”, and the revolutionary socialist case is based on our analysis of society, its history and economics, in accordance with those laws.
There were quotations from Spencer along with quotations from Marx and Engels (and many others) in the pamphlet “Socialism and Religion” but these quotations were about his theories on ancestor worship, ethics etc.
The Idea of Social Evolution
The idea of social evolution was held by Spencer but he was only one among others, including Marx and Engel.
Sidney Webb in his “Socialism in England” (1890) had a section on the “The influence of the evolution hypothesis”, He made the point that the “statical” view of society held by the Utopians had been replaced by the idea of the evolution of society”. While acknowledging the influence of Comte, Darwin and Spencer – he also acknowledged the influence of Marx.
The term “new social order” was used in the Manifesto of English Socialists (1890) and the term “order of society” in S.D.F. publications.
The term “social evolution” was used in Fabian Essays (1889)
Founder members of the party will have been familiar with these works but the source from which they obtained their view of the evolution of society was Marx and Engels (and Morgan’s Ancient Society).
An article in the Socialist Standard, May 1905, quotes from Marx’s Critique of Political Economy:
“we may in wide outlines characterise the Asiatic, the antique, the feudal and the modern capitalistic methods of production as a series of progressive episodes in the evolution of society”.
Another source with which the founder members were familiar was Engels 1888 Preface to The Communist Manifesto, which anticipated the idea of “order of social evolution” in our Clause 4:
“the whole history of mankind (since the dissolution of primitive tribal society, holding land in common ownership) has been a history of class struggles, contests between exploited and exploiters, ruling and oppressed classes; that the history of these class struggles for a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class – the proletariat – cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class – the bourgeoisie –without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation, oppression, class-distinctions and class struggles”.
The concept of social evolution was described in the Socialist League Manifesto (1888):
“As chattel-slavery passed into serfdom, and serfdom into the so-called free labour system, so most surely will this latter pass into social order”.
In the notes which William Morris and Belfort Bax added to the Manifesto they used the term “social evolution”.
“…the economical change which we advocate…would not be stable unless accompanied by a corresponding revolution in ethics, which, however, is certain to accompany it, since the two things are inseparable elements of one whole, to wit, social evolution”.
The second part of our Clause 4, that socialism would involve the emancipation of all mankind, was inherent in Marx’s view of social evolution. It owed nothing to Spencer. In 1864 before Spencer had published anything and before Darwin’s Origin of Species Marx had written:-
“It follows from the relation between alienated labour and private property, that the emancipation of society from private property, from servitude, takes the political form of the emancipation of the working class, not in the sense that only the latter’s emancipation is involved, but because this emancipation includes the emancipation of humanity as a whole. For all human servitude is involved in the relation of the worker to production, and all the types of servitude are only modifications or consequences of this elation”. (Economic and Philosophical Documents).
Society as an Organism
With regard to the comparison of society to an organism, Spencer made this comparison in his Principles of Sociology which appeared in print from 1877 to 1896. Marx had already made the comparison ten years earlier in his Afterword to the first German edition of Capital (1876) where he wrote:
“Within the ruling classes themselves, a foreboding is dawning, that the present society is no solid crystal, but an organism capable of change, and is constantly changing”.
There are, in Capital at least two passages where Marx compares human social conditions with ideological conditions and to some extent establishes the limitations of such comparisons:-
“………the division of labour within the society brings into contact independent commodity-producers, who acknowledge no other authority but that of competition, of the coercion exerted by the pressure of their mutual interests; just as in the animal kingdom, the bellum omnium contra omnes more or less preserves the conditions of existence of every species”, (Capital vol 1, chapter XIV, page 391 in Kerr Edition).
In the second, also in Capital Vol. 1, Marx clearly recognised the limitations of the comparison:-
“We presuppose labour in the form that stamps it as exclusively human. A spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells. But what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in his imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labour process we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at the commencement “
(Capital vol. 1, ch VII, page 198 in the Kerr edition).
To conclude; Spencer had as much influence of the SPGB as any other bourgeois thinker of the time.
