‘Organising Talent and Disciplined Steadiness’: the German SPD as a Model for the British Labour Party in the 1920s?

Abstract

In comparative Labour history there is a long tradition of adhering to a typology of labour movements which distinguishes south-western European, ‘Latin’ labour movements (France, Spain, Italy) from north-eastern European labour movements (Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, east and south-east Europe) and invokes a third category: Anglo-American labour movements. The British Labour Party is usually subsumed under this latter category, whereas the German SPD is regarded as the spiritual leader of the second. Insofar as these comparisons explicitly deal with the time before the First World War, their argument is indeed a strong one. After all, the SPD was the largest socialist party in the world before 1914, at a time when the Labour Party did not even allow individual membership. At least in its organisational strongholds, the SPD resembled a social movement providing for its members almost ‘from cradle to grave’. The Labour Party, by contrast, is often portrayed as a trade union interest group in parliament with no other purpose than electoral representation. Where the Labour Party avoided any ideological commitment before 1914, the SPD had at least theoretically adopted Marxism as its ideological bedrock after 1890.