Career

Neumann had previously been very active in the Social Democratic Federation, being a public speaker for that party and secretary of its Chelsea & Fulham branch in 1897. Neumann was a well-known early Impossibilist, being a victim of the expulsions of April 1904 which led to the foundation of the Socialist Party of Great Britain in June. From 1904 to 1909 he was on the Executive Committee and from 1909 to 1911 was Treasurer.

Herbert Morrison described his encounters with Neumann in his 1960 autobiography as follows:

Neumann resigned on 12 September 1911.

He was presumably repatriated to Germany at the end of the war and is reputed to have died in the Spartacist uprising of January 1919.

Achievements

• He was interned because of his German origin during the First World War where he met Rudolf Frank, co-founder of the Bund Demokratischer Sozialisten, the Austrian counterpart to the SPGB.

Politics

A notable indoor and outdoor speaker for the SPGB (billed as Newman), he was also an enthusiastic writer for the Socialist Standard, translated foreign-language articles (including the pamphlets based on Kautsky’s Erfurter Programme) and was the author of the Party song (“The World for the Workers”). Along with Henry Martin, he had been a member of the Provisional Committee of 1911 which opposed notional Socialist MPs ever voting for reforms (the ‘World Bank of Upton Park affair’) and probably resigned on that issue.