History
The group that formed around Harold Walsby and his ideas was a breakaway from the Socialist Party of Great Britain. During the Second World War this group developed a fascination with perceived impediments to mass socialist consciousness among the working class. The theory they developed was expressed by Walsby himself in his 1947 book The Domain of Ideologies and those involved in the group set up an organisation to propagate their views called the Social Science Association, which existed from 1944 until 1956, attracting a number of new recruits during the ‘Turner Controversy’. It was later succeeded by the Walsby Society and the journal which emerged from it called Ideological Commentary.
From the 1980s onwards, George Walford, editor of Ideological Commentary and former secretary of the SSA, watered down some of the theory’s more obviously elitist elements and even left the SPGB money at the time of his death. He did this on the grounds that although in his view the Party would never help achieve socialism it did perform a valuable function by demonstrating through its application of critical analysis, logical thought and theory the limitations of other political groups that valued these less highly (a perspective which had informed Harold Walsby’s decision in 1950 to surreptitiously rejoin the Party through its postal branch and write articles for the Socialist Standard under the pseudonym "H.W.S.Bee").
Ideological Commentary survived until the death of Walford in 1994. As of 2007, barely a handful of systematic ideology's exponents remain.
Walsby, Walford and their group produced a large number of leaflets, pamphlets and other literature over time, a fair chunk of it dealing with the SPGB. The most readable expressions of systematic ideology are Walford’s book Beyond Politics, published in 1990, and the pamphlet Socialist Understanding, published ten years earlier.
Read more about this topic: Systematic Ideology
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