Common Wealth was founded on 26 July 1942 in World War II by the alliance of two left-wing groups: the 1941 Committee – a think tank centred on Picture Post owner Edward G. Hulton and its 'star' writers J.B. Priestley and Spanish Civil War veteran Tom Wintringham;[1] and the neo-Christian Forward March movement led by Liberal Party Member of Parliament (MP) Sir Richard Acland, along with independents such as the industrialist and designer Robert Dudley Best[2] and former Liberals who believed that the party had no direction.

[1] Disagreeing with the electoral pact established with other parties in the wartime coalition, key figures in the 1941 Committee began sponsoring independent candidates in by-elections under the banner of the Nine Point Group.

It came to reject the State-dominated form of socialism adopted by Labour under the influence of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, aligning itself instead with co-operative, syndicalist and guild socialist traditions.

[3] Though the party was initially chaired by Priestley, he stepped down after just a few months, unable to reconcile himself with the politics of Acland – who as a sitting MP he viewed as exerting undue influence.

In his book The Forward March he had claimed that in Britain under a Forward March government: [it is] the community as a whole which must decide whether or not a man shall be employed upon our resources, and how and when and in what manner he shall work ...[the community will] run camps for shirkers on very tolerable conditions.Acland went on to say of these camps: [Hitler] has stumbled across (or has needed to make use of) a small part, or perhaps one should say one particular aspect of, what will ultimately be required of humanity.These differences, which led to Priestley stepping down from the leadership and his gradual withdrawal from the party (though he continued to support and endorse individual candidates), were a source of continued tension between former 1941 Committee and Nine Point Group members on one side and Forward Marchers and Christian Socialists on the other.

The war administration was an all-party coalition government incorporating the Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Parties, who agreed that their MP vacancies should be filled unopposed.

Common Wealth intervention allowed a radicalising electorate to return socialist candidates in Conservative seats: in Eddisbury, Skipton and Chelmsford.

For the remainder of its existence it became, de facto, a pressure group, its organisation evolving, and generally contracting, as old age took its toll of the leading figures.

[6] The tussle between Acland's didactic Anglican-rooted Christianism and Wintringham's syndicalist Marxism is in Socialism and Religion: Roads to Common Wealth.

[8] Common Wealth's later political philosophy was heavily influenced by a notion that a new mode of production, known as managerialism, was replacing the archetypal forms of capitalism.

Burnham (a former Trotskyist Marxist turned pioneering neoconservative) argued that the rise of a salaried managerial class, accompanied by the withdrawal of shareholders from active running of big businesses, was creating a split between the (legal) proprietors of organisations and a class of non-proprietorial professionals who were responsible for the day-to-day management of those organisations.

In essence, this critique suggested that: many features of the Labour Party's programme had not been approved by voters; this confirmed the theory that power, in "socialised" economies as much as market ones, was in the hands of a largely unaccountable managerial class, which served the owners of capital at arm's length; most private ownership was continuing; shares were being replaced by loan stock at inflated valuations, the interest on which was paid from the profits of state-run industries; ministers refused to answer questions in parliament on operational matters, meaning that the management of nationalised industries were not subject to meaningful democratic control; worker representation at board level was either token or non-existent and often justified by stereotyping that workers did not yet have the skills required (unconvincing in CW's view given the record of the co-operative movement, the trade unions, and the Labour Party itself), and; a growing cult of "experts" (i.e. technocracy) and a drift towards authoritarianism, as in oft-appointed ex-military officers running such industries.

Worker-controlled organisations were also promoted by CW, which publicised successful real-world examples, such as the chemical manufacturer Scott Bader Commonwealth.