Thomas Bell, born on this day in 1882, was a Scottish socialist politician, trade unionist, and a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. He said: "The Communist Party is nothing if it is not a party of realism".
Bell also worked as an editor for the Communist Party's magazine "Communist Review" and co-founded the Socialist Labour Party.
Thomas Bell was born in Parkhead, Glasgow to an irregularly employed stonemason and a mother who worked at home spinning cotton and silk. While working at a bottling shop, Bell became interested in atheism and labor politics, reading rationalist works by Ernst Haeckel and Thomas Huxley, as well as texts on evolution by Charles Darwin.
Bell joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP) in 1900, but would participate in more radical parties as his politics matured, including the Marxist Social Democratic Party and, later, the Socialist Labour Party.
In 1919, Bell was elected President of the Associated Ironmoulders, Secretary of the SLP and editor of its newspaper, "The Socialist". He sat on a unity committee, intending to negotiate for a single communist party with leaders of the British Socialist Party, Workers Socialist Federation and other socialist groups, but their proposals were repudiated by the SLP.
Resigning as Secretary, Bell helped found the Communist Unity Group, which became an original constituent of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB).
"The theory of getting a Labour government in order to get communism is as stilted as the Kautskyan idea that Russia should go through period of capitalist development under the democratic bourgeois institutions in preference to the Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' dictatorship."
- Thomas Bell
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